Morsi Urged to Retract Edict to Bypass Judges in Egypt


Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times


Protesters lit flares and denounced the edict of President Mohamed Morsi during clashes with riot police officers in front of the high court building in Cairo on Saturday. More Photos »







CAIRO — Egyptian judges rebelled Saturday against an edict by President Mohamed Morsi exempting his decrees from judicial review, denouncing it as an attack on judicial independence and calling for a judges’ strike.




The condemnation came from an array of organizations. The Supreme Council of the Judiciary, a top judicial body, called the decree “an unprecedented attack on judicial independence” and urged the president to rescind it. A major association of judges, the Judges Club, called for a strike by courts across Egypt. The leader of the national lawyers’ association endorsed the strike call.


A judicial strike would be the steepest escalation yet in a political struggle between the country’s new Islamist leaders and the institutions of the old authoritarian government over the drafting of a new constitution. Those tensions have flared since Mr. Morsi announced his decree on Thursday, saying he acted to prevent the courts from dissolving the Constitutional Assembly, as they had dissolved an earlier assembly and the Parliament.


He said his expanded powers, which he announced a day after he won international praise for brokering a cease-fire in Gaza, would last only until the new constitution was ratified.


The judges, all of whom were appointed by Egypt’s ousted strongman, Hosni Mubarak, joined political leaders in opposing the decree. Because the court dissolved the Parliament, the judiciary was the last check on his power, and critics called the decree a step toward autocracy.


State news media reported that judges and prosecutors had already declared a strike in Alexandria, and there were other news reports of planned walkouts in Qulubiya and Beheira, but those could not be confirmed.


There were small street protests outside the court building where the judges met. And a coalition of disparate opposition leaders, including the former United Nations diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei and three other former Egyptian presidential candidates, demanded the cancellation of the decree.


The strike call by the Judges Club, which has been led in recent years by a clique loyal to Mr. Mubarak and opposed to the Islamists, followed a vote at a more representative assembly of about 1,000 of the club’s members. They urged courts to suspend all activities except those vital to citizens, and it was unclear how individual courts might respond.


As the Judges Club met in the High Court building, the small crowd of protesters outside chanted that Egypt’s judges were “a red line.” When another group armed with the flares favored by hard-core soccer fans tried to force their way into the building, the police fired tear gas.


Inside, the Mubarak-appointed chief prosecutor, Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, declared to a crowd of cheering judges that he rejected Mr. Morsi’s attempt to fire him. He called the presidential decree “null and void” and warned of a “systematic campaign against the country’s institutions in general and the judiciary in particular.” Judges in the meeting chanted for the “fall of the regime,” reprising the signature rallying cry of the revolt last year against Mr. Mubarak, but this time against Mr. Morsi.


Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer, said he had filed one of several lawsuits asking the courts to attempt to overturn Mr. Morsi’s decree.


The coalition of opposition leaders, calling their group the National Salvation Front, declared that it would not negotiate with Mr. Morsi about resolving the crisis until he withdrew his decree. “We will not enter into a dialogue about anything while this constitutional declaration remains intact and in force,” said Amr Moussa, one of the leaders and Mr. Mubarak’s former foreign minister. “We demand that it be withdrawn, and then we can talk.”


What set off the battle was the year-end deadline for the Constitutional Assembly chosen last spring to draft a new constitution. There have been rumors that the Supreme Constitutional Court was poised to dissolve the assembly in a ruling next Sunday. Top courts had already dissolved both an earlier Constitutional Assembly and the Parliament. All three bodies were dominated by Islamists, who have prevailed in elections, and many of the top judges harbor deep fears of an Islamist takeover.


Kareem Fahim, Nevine Ramzy and Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.



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Television: Life Without Cable TV? Not Such a Tragedy



IN 2009 my husband and I dropped our cable carrier, feeling we were paying too much. Before we could find a new one, my husband was laid off, and we decided that our money was best spent on food and rent, especially when Netflix was streaming, and most shows were available online. We’d find a carrier when our future wasn’t so unpredictable.


I’m not being dramatic when I say this was devastating. Television has been the one stable thing throughout my life. It drowned out the sounds of my parents’ impending divorce; it muffled roommates’ romantic escapades. But, more important, it was a crucial tool of escape and catharsis, exactly what I needed when our financial future was at risk.


Our options narrowed from a world of entertainment to the whims of the few channels that would deign to come clearly through what are essentially newfangled rabbit ears: a high-definition digital antenna intended to capture the over-the-air signal, which was once how everyone watched TV. Sure, some shows were online, but in the beginning the number of commercials in them seemed prohibitive. We’d just come from a paradise of DVR fast-forwarding. Now we had to sit through the same ad over and over? We also had only one computer; with two writers in the family, it wasn’t available for TV watching.


We quickly learned some lessons. Would “Mad Men” still run if we couldn’t watch it? (Yes.) Would people refrain from spoilers while “Breaking Bad” made its way to streaming? (No, they would not.) What was this “Walking Dead” everyone was talking about? (Still not sure, but apparently it’s a big deal.)


When the weather is right, we get most of the channels. Sometimes. CBS is the only network that shows up consistently and pristinely, and one day I’ll be old enough to enjoy its fare. There is also a channel that doesn’t seem to have a name but broadcasts reruns of “Three’s Company” or “Sanford and Son,” which is not so bad in the beggars/choosers category.


Yet what initially seemed like a torture we’d simply have to endure became a surprising reminder of the simple pleasures of simple TV.


Call it Slow TV. I had never stopped loving TV, but I had stopped appreciating it. Entire seasons of shows had piled up on the DVR, on the theory that they might be interesting someday. TV was everywhere now — on the phone, on the computer. It was on while I wrote, did taxes, folded laundry. It was background noise. When I really had to make choices about what to watch, and then pay attention with no rewind to fall back on, TV became absorbing again, an activity in itself, as it had been when I was younger. And I watched much less, if only for logistical reasons.


As it turns out, I unintentionally had become part of a growing group of Americans giving up wired cable and even televisions. Nielsen recently reported that TV set ownership has dropped to 96.7 percent of American households from 98.9 percent, and it isn’t because we’re reading more. Instead we’re cobbling together new ways of digesting programming. We watch on iPhones, computers, Rokus, other people’s HBO Go accounts, and yes, a digital antenna; one-size-fits-all TV is over.


Still, analog watching isn’t without its inconveniences. Even in the heady days of cable service, the DVR was overwhelmed by the choices on some nights. The answer should have been simple: Watch some shows online when the computer is available. But “Gossip Girl,” for instance, had so many unforwardable commercials on Hulu that it’s clear who the real demographic for those shows are: people who don’t yet believe that they have the right to not be advertised to for 30 minutes of a 60-minute show. When the ads became burdensome, the series had to do some mighty things to stay on the list. Blair’s marrying a prince, then leaving him for Chuck, simply didn’t qualify.


A return to as-it-happens TV is also a reminder of the annoyance of learning that there’s a rerun when you didn’t expect it. The monthlong wait for a new “Revenge,” which was delivering fresh installments in the fall but grew spotty as the season wore on, seemed interminable. There was the sinking realization that, sigh, this wasn’t a new one, or worse, that there was some kind of news or reality special in its place.


And in this online-watching, DVR-heavy, pause-happy culture, the phone always seemed to ring during pivotal scenes.


Worst of all was arranging my schedule around TV. There once was a time when no one would ask you to do anything on a Thursday night. “Seinfeld” was on! Now, with the timetable made so irrelevant by digital recording, it was hard to explain why a book club on Monday nights wouldn’t work. Not while “Smash” was still on the air, no sirree, Bob.


But slowly the advantages of Slow TV began to outweigh these problems. First, while swallowing a season whole is a lot of fun — as with Showtime’s “Homeland,” which I did because I got a press screener — some shows (and maybe even “Homeland”) benefit from a weeklong wait. The anxiety of a cliffhanger could have me reeling for days. It might be that these shows are best watched with breaks between episodes to build suspense. Think back to the six-week arc of Bobby Simone’s slow and awful death on “NYPD Blue” in 1998. That was six weeks of gloom in which you could get so enmeshed in a character’s fate that it began to affect your soul.


And there is nothing to make a person focus like knowing there’s no pause or repeat. Yes, a DVR can reduce an hourlong show to 40 minutes, but mostly it lets the show linger for hours, or days. Pausing to get something to eat or to remind your spouse about a bill isn’t how the writers want you to watch their work; it also isn’t how to get the most out of it. What is so interesting about Slow TV, in the end, is that the screen that we so often accuse of outsourcing our mindfulness became a source of actual mindfulness.


We have two computers at home now, one easily hooked up to the TV monitor. (Note to Netflix: Exactly when is the fifth season of “Mad Men” going to start streaming? Tick tock.) But I am still lost in the sweet haze of intimacy I have found again with television. So maybe we’ll keep ourselves cable free.


Or maybe not. We’re both gainfully employed now, and there are a million reasons to get cable again, along with a DVR. Maybe three years is long enough.


And God, I do miss “Gossip Girl.” I was flipping through the channels the other day, and Dan was kissing Blair. Dan and Blair! Can you imagine?


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Insurer’s Regulatory Win Benefits a Chinese Leader’s Family


Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times


Ping An, one of China’s largest financial services companies, is building a 115-story office tower in Shenzhen. The company is a $50 billion powerhouse now worth more than A.I.G., MetLife or Prudential.







SHENZHEN, China — The head of a financially troubled insurer was pushing Chinese officials to relax rules that required breaking up the company in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis.




The survival of Ping An Insurance was at stake, officials were told in the fall of 1999. Direct appeals were made to the vice premier at the time, Wen Jiabao, as well as the then-head of China’s central bank — two powerful officials with oversight of the industry.


“I humbly request that the vice premier lead and coordinate the matter from a higher level,” Ma Mingzhe, chairman of Ping An, implored in a letter to Mr. Wen that was reviewed by The New York Times.


Ping An was not broken up.


The successful outcome of the lobbying effort would prove monumental.


Ping An went on to become one of China’s largest financial services companies, a $50 billion powerhouse now worth more than A.I.G., MetLife or Prudential. And behind the scenes, shares in Ping An that would be worth billions of dollars once the company rebounded were acquired by relatives of Mr. Wen.


The Times reported last month that the relatives of Mr. Wen, who became prime minister in 2003, had grown extraordinarily wealthy during his leadership, acquiring stakes in tourist resorts, banks, jewelers, telecommunications companies and other business ventures.


The greatest source of wealth, by far, The Times investigation has found, came from the shares in Ping An bought about eight months after the insurer was granted a waiver to the requirement that big financial companies be broken up.


Long before most investors could buy Ping An stock, Taihong, a company that would soon be controlled by Mr. Wen’s relatives, acquired a large stake in Ping An from state-owned entities that held shares in the insurer, regulatory and corporate records show. And by all appearances, Taihong got a sweet deal. The shares were bought in December 2002 for one-quarter of the price that another big investor — the British bank HSBC Holdings — paid for its shares just two months earlier, according to interviews and public filings.


By June 2004, the shares held by the Wen relatives had already quadrupled in value, even before the company was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. And by 2007, the initial $65 million investment made by Taihong would be worth $3.7 billion.


Corporate records show that the relatives’ stake of that investment most likely peaked at $2.2 billion in late 2007, the last year in which Taihong’s shareholder records were publicly available. Because the company is no longer listed in Ping An’s public filings, it is unclear if the relatives continue to hold shares.


It is also not known whether Mr. Wen or the central bank chief at the time, Dai Xianglong, personally intervened on behalf of Ping An’s request for a waiver, or if Mr. Wen was even aware of the stakes held by his relatives.


But internal Ping An documents, government filings and interviews with bankers and former senior executives at Ping An indicate that both the vice premier’s office and the central bank were among the regulators involved in the Ping An waiver meetings and who had the authority to sign off on the waiver.


Only two large state-run financial institutions were granted similar waivers, filings show, while three of China’s big state-run insurance companies were forced to break up. Many of the country’s big banks complied with the breakup requirement — enforced after the financial crisis because of concerns about the stability of the financial system — by selling their assets in other institutions.


Ping An issued a statement to The Times saying the company strictly complies with rules and regulations, but does not know the backgrounds of all entities behind shareholders. The company also said “it is the legitimate right of shareholders to buy and sell shares between themselves.”


In Beijing, China’s foreign ministry did not return calls seeking comment for this article. Earlier, a Foreign Ministry spokesman sharply criticized the investigation by The Times into the finances of Mr. Wen’s relatives, saying it “smears China and has ulterior motives.”


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Protests Erupt After Egypt’s Leader Seizes New Power





CAIRO — Protests erupted across Egypt on Friday, as opponents of President Mohamed Morsi clashed with his supporters over a presidential edict that gave him unchecked authority and polarized an already divided nation while raising a specter, the president’s critics charged, of a return to autocracy.  








Maya Alleruzzo/Associated Press

Egyptian protesters chanted antigovernment slogans and waved a national flag in Tahrir Square on Friday.






In an echo of the uprising 22 months ago, thousands of protesters chanted for the downfall of Mr. Morsi’s government in Cairo, while others ransacked the offices of the president’s former party in Suez, Alexandria and other cities.


Mr. Morsi spoke to his supporters in front of the presidential palace here, imploring the public to trust his intentions as he cast himself as a protector of the revolution and a fledgling democracy.


In a speech that was by turns defensive and conciliatory, he ultimately gave no ground to the critics who now were describing him as a pharaoh, in another echo of the insult once reserved for the deposed president, Hosni Mubarak.


“God’s will and elections made me the captain of this ship,” Mr. Morsi said.


The battles that raged on Friday — over power, legitimacy and the mantle of the revolution — posed a sharp challenge not only to Mr. Morsi but also to his opponents, members of secular, leftist and liberal groups whose crippling divisions have stifled their agenda and left them unable to confront the more popular Islamist movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood.


The crisis over his power grab came just days after the Islamist leader won international praise for his pragmatism, including from the United States, for brokering a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel.


On Friday, the State Department expressed muted concern over Mr. Morsi’s decision. “One of the aspirations of the revolution was to ensure that power would not be overly concentrated in the hands of any one person or institution,” said the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.


She said, “The current constitutional vacuum in Egypt can only be resolved by the adoption of a constitution that includes checks and balances, and respects fundamental freedoms, individual rights and the rule of law consistent with Egypt’s international commitments.”


But the White House was notably silent after it had earlier this week extolled the emerging relationship between President Obama and Mr. Morsi and credited a series of telephone calls between the two men with helping to mediate the cease-fire in Gaza.


For Mr. Morsi, who seemed to be saying to the nation that it needed to surrender the last checks on his power in order to save democracy from Mubarak-era judges, the challenge was to convince Egyptians that the ends justified his means.


But even as he tried, thousands of protesters marched to condemn his decision. Clashes broke out between the president’s supporters and his critics, and near Tahrir Square, the riot police fired tear gas and bird shot as protesters hurled stones and set fires.


Since Thursday, when Mr. Morsi issued the decree, the president and his supporters have argued that he acted precisely to gain the power to address the complaints of his critics, including the families of protesters killed during the uprising and its aftermath.


By placing his decisions above judicial review, the decree enabled him to replace a public prosecutor who had failed to win convictions against senior officers implicated in the killings of protesters.


The president and his supporters also argued that the decree insulated the Constituent Assembly, which is drafting the constitution, from meddling by Mubarak-era judges.


Since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, courts have dissolved Parliament, kept a Mubarak loyalist as top prosecutor and disbanded the first Assembly.


But by ending legal appeals, the decree also removed a safety valve for critics who say the Islamist majority is dominating the drafting of the constitution.


Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo, and Helene Cooper from Washington.



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G.E. Looks to Industry for the Next Digital Disruption


SAN RAMON, Calif. — When Sharoda Paul finished a postdoctoral fellowship last year at the Palo Alto Research Center, she did what most of her peers do — considered a job at a big Silicon Valley company, in her case, Google. But instead, Ms. Paul, a 31-year-old expert in social computing, went to work for General Electric.


Ms. Paul is one of more than 250 engineers recruited in the last year and a half to G.E.’s new software center here, in the East Bay of San Francisco. The company plans to increase that work force of computer scientists and software developers to 400, and to invest $1 billion in the center by 2015. The buildup is part of G.E’s big bet on what it calls the “industrial Internet,” bringing digital intelligence to the physical world of industry as never before.


The concept of Internet-connected machines that collect data and communicate, often called the “Internet of Things,” has been around for years. Information technology companies, too, are pursuing this emerging field. I.B.M. has its “Smarter Planet” projects, while Cisco champions the “Internet of Everything.”


But G.E.’s effort, analysts say, shows that Internet-era technology is ready to sweep through the industrial economy much as the consumer Internet has transformed media, communications and advertising over the last decade.


In recent months, Ms. Paul has donned a hard hat and safety boots to study power plants. She has ridden on a rail locomotive and toured hospital wards. “Here, you get to work with things that touch people in so many ways,” she said. “That was a big draw.”


G.E. is the nation’s largest industrial company, a producer of aircraft engines, power plant turbines, rail locomotives and medical imaging equipment. It makes the heavy-duty machinery that transports people, heats homes and powers factories, and lets doctors diagnose life-threatening diseases.


G.E. resides in a different world from the consumer Internet. But the major technologies that animate Google and Facebook are also vital ingredients in the industrial Internet — tools from artificial intelligence, like machine-learning software, and vast streams of new data. In industry, the data flood comes mainly from smaller, more powerful and cheaper sensors on the equipment.


Smarter machines, for example, can alert their human handlers when they will need maintenance, before a breakdown. It is the equivalent of preventive and personalized care for equipment, with less downtime and more output.


“These technologies are really there now, in a way that is practical and economic,” said Mark M. Little, G.E.’s senior vice president for global research.


G.E.’s embrace of the industrial Internet is a long-term strategy. But if its optimism proves justified, the impact could be felt across the economy.


The outlook for technology-led economic growth is a subject of considerable debate. In a recent research paper, Robert J. Gordon, a prominent economist at Northwestern University, argues that the gains from computing and the Internet have petered out in the last eight years.


Since 2000, Mr. Gordon asserts, invention has focused mainly on consumer and communications technologies, including smartphones and tablet computers. Such devices, he writes, are “smaller, smarter and more capable, but do not fundamentally change labor productivity or the standard of living” in the way that electric lighting or the automobile did.


But others say such pessimism misses the next wave of technology. “The reason I think Bob Gordon is wrong is precisely because of the kind of thing G.E. is doing,” said Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at M.I.T.’s Center for Digital Business.


Today, G.E. is putting sensors on everything, be it a gas turbine or a hospital bed. The mission of the engineers in San Ramon is to design the software for gathering data, and the clever algorithms for sifting through it for cost savings and productivity gains. Across the industries it covers, G.E. estimates such efficiency opportunities at as much as $150 billion.


Some industrial Internet projects are already under way. First Wind, an owner and operator of 16 wind farms in America, is a G.E. customer for wind turbines. It has been experimenting with upgrades that add more sensors, controls and optimization software.


The new sensors measure temperature, wind speeds, location and pitch of the blades. They collect three to five times as much data as the sensors on turbines of a few years ago, said Paul Gaynor, chief executive of First Wind. The data is collected and analyzed by G.E. software, and the operation of each turbine can be tweaked for efficiency. For example, in very high winds, turbines across an entire farm are routinely shut down to prevent damage from rotating too fast. But more refined measurement of wind speeds might mean only a portion of the turbines need to be shut down. In wintry conditions, turbines can detect when they are icing up, and speed up or change pitch to knock off the ice.


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Inquiry Sought in Death in Ireland After Abortion Was Denied





DUBLIN — India’s ambassador here has agreed to ask Prime Minister Enda Kenny of Ireland for an independent inquiry into the death of an Indian-born woman last month after doctors refused to perform an abortion when she was having a miscarriage, the lawyer representing the woman’s husband said Thursday.




The lawyer, Gerard O’Donnell, also said crucial information was missing from the files he had received from the Irish Health Service Executive about the death of the woman, Savita Halappanavar, including any mention of her requests for an abortion after she learned that the fetus would not survive.


The death of Dr. Halappanavar, 31, a dentist who lived near Galway, has focused global attention on the Irish ban on abortion.


Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar, has refused to cooperate with an investigation being conducted by the Irish health agency. “I have seen the way my wife was treated in the hospital, so I have no confidence that the H.S.E. will do justice,” he said in an interview on Wednesday night on RTE, the state television broadcaster. “Basically, I don’t have any confidence in the H.S.E.”


In a tense debate in the Irish Parliament on Wednesday evening, Robert Dowds of the Labour Party said Dr. Halappanavar’s death had forced politicians “to confront an issue we have dodged for much too long,” partly because so many Irish women travel to Britain for abortions.


“The reality is that if Britain wasn’t on our doorstep, we would have had to introduce abortion legislation years ago to avoid women dying in back-street abortions,” he said.


After the debate, the Parliament voted 88 to 53 against a motion introduced by the opposition Sinn Fein party calling on the government to allow abortions when women’s lives are in danger and to protect doctors who perform such procedures.


The Irish president, Michael D. Higgins — who is restricted by the Constitution from getting involved in political matters — also made a rare foray into a political debate on Wednesday, saying any inquiry must meet the needs of the Halappanavar family as well as the government.


In 1992, the Irish Supreme Court interpreted the current law to mean that abortion should be allowed in circumstances where there was “a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother,” including the threat of suicide. But that ruling has never been codified into law.


“The current situation is like a sword of Damocles hanging over us,” Dr. Peter Boylan, of the Irish Institute of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told RTE last week. “If we do something with a good intention, but it turns out to be illegal, the consequences are extremely serious for medical practitioners.”


Dr. Ruth Cullen, who has campaigned against abortion, said that any legislation to codify the Supreme Court ruling would be tantamount to allowing abortion on demand and that Dr. Halappanavar’s death should not be used to make that change.


Dr. Halappanavar contracted a bacterial blood infection, septicemia, and died Oct. 28, a week after she was admitted to Galway University Hospital with severe back pains. She was 17 weeks pregnant but having a miscarriage and was told that the fetus — a girl — would not survive. Her husband said she asked several times for an abortion but was informed that under Irish law it would be illegal while there was a fetal heartbeat, because “this is a Catholic country.”


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Inquiry Sought in Death in Ireland After Abortion Was Denied





DUBLIN — India’s ambassador here has agreed to ask Prime Minister Enda Kenny of Ireland for an independent inquiry into the death of an Indian-born woman last month after doctors refused to perform an abortion when she was having a miscarriage, the lawyer representing the woman’s husband said Thursday.




The lawyer, Gerard O’Donnell, also said crucial information was missing from the files he had received from the Irish Health Service Executive about the death of the woman, Savita Halappanavar, including any mention of her requests for an abortion after she learned that the fetus would not survive.


The death of Dr. Halappanavar, 31, a dentist who lived near Galway, has focused global attention on the Irish ban on abortion.


Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar, has refused to cooperate with an investigation being conducted by the Irish health agency. “I have seen the way my wife was treated in the hospital, so I have no confidence that the H.S.E. will do justice,” he said in an interview on Wednesday night on RTE, the state television broadcaster. “Basically, I don’t have any confidence in the H.S.E.”


In a tense debate in the Irish Parliament on Wednesday evening, Robert Dowds of the Labour Party said Dr. Halappanavar’s death had forced politicians “to confront an issue we have dodged for much too long,” partly because so many Irish women travel to Britain for abortions.


“The reality is that if Britain wasn’t on our doorstep, we would have had to introduce abortion legislation years ago to avoid women dying in back-street abortions,” he said.


After the debate, the Parliament voted 88 to 53 against a motion introduced by the opposition Sinn Fein party calling on the government to allow abortions when women’s lives are in danger and to protect doctors who perform such procedures.


The Irish president, Michael D. Higgins — who is restricted by the Constitution from getting involved in political matters — also made a rare foray into a political debate on Wednesday, saying any inquiry must meet the needs of the Halappanavar family as well as the government.


In 1992, the Irish Supreme Court interpreted the current law to mean that abortion should be allowed in circumstances where there was “a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother,” including the threat of suicide. But that ruling has never been codified into law.


“The current situation is like a sword of Damocles hanging over us,” Dr. Peter Boylan, of the Irish Institute of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told RTE last week. “If we do something with a good intention, but it turns out to be illegal, the consequences are extremely serious for medical practitioners.”


Dr. Ruth Cullen, who has campaigned against abortion, said that any legislation to codify the Supreme Court ruling would be tantamount to allowing abortion on demand and that Dr. Halappanavar’s death should not be used to make that change.


Dr. Halappanavar contracted a bacterial blood infection, septicemia, and died Oct. 28, a week after she was admitted to Galway University Hospital with severe back pains. She was 17 weeks pregnant but having a miscarriage and was told that the fetus — a girl — would not survive. Her husband said she asked several times for an abortion but was informed that under Irish law it would be illegal while there was a fetal heartbeat, because “this is a Catholic country.”


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Rising Consumer Optimism Fuels an Annual Spree


Worries about the economy and fiscal austerity be damned. On Black Friday, consumers were ready to shop till they dropped. And some even did, dozing off on the furniture displays in department stores offering predawn deals.


Consumers have voiced increasing optimism in recent months as employment rises and their home values (finally) go up, or at least stabilize, even as government talks about taxes and spending remain at an impasse. Bargain hunters put that upbeat mood into action on Thursday night and the wee hours of Friday morning at department and discount stores around the country.


Shoppers stood in line Friday for the 7 a.m. opening of Sam’s Club in Eagan, Minn., enduring freezing temperatures and biting winds, and clinging to free Starbuck’s Holiday Blend coffee as they collected vouchers for laptops and big-screen TVs.


“I didn’t even want it,” Meshia Flood, 36, a student from nearby Eagan, told a worker standing near the exit, referring to the 40-inch Sanyo LED TV on her cart. She and her 13-year-old daughter had come for a 96-cent Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone, but did not snag one before they disappeared minutes after opening.


Hundreds to thousands of consumers lined up outside Sears, Target, Macy’s, Old Navy and other retailers offering time-sensitive deals. Some turned up Thursday night for newly extended hours that some merchants have been experimenting with.


Bryan Everett, Target’s senior vice president for stores, said that Target’s decision to open at 9 p.m. on Thursday rather than midnight meant that there were more families in the store, and that customers stayed longer.


“Usually, it’s just a parent with a child, or mom and dad, or just a single guest in the store,” he said. “This year, we were seeing four- to five-person families.”


As a result, he said, customers stayed longer, and there was more “cross shopping.” Usually the Black Friday shoppers make a beeline for the electronics and toys, he said, but this year in addition to the surge in big-screen LCD TVs, iPads, iPods and Xboxes “we saw a nice pattern of shopping in the apparel and home departments.” Children’s pajamas, blankets, sheet sets, pillows and scarves all did particularly well.


The official sales numbers will not be reported for a few days, but analysts are expecting a strong sales day, with results comparable with last year’s gain of about 3 percent, according to MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, which is a metric for total American retail sales across all payment forms, including cash and check. The earlier hours from a few select chains seem unlikely to increase the size of the spending pie, but they may reapportion it.


“Black Friday has always been and always will be about being first: first to open, first to price, first to offer that special item,” said Michael Brown, a partner in the retail practice of A. T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm.


He said the race to open earlier and earlier would probably continue in coming years, although there was some question about how early was too early. Some Midtown Manhattan stores that were open at midday on Thursday did not seem to get blockbuster traffic, at least compared with the postdinner doorbusters.


In addition to longer hours, stores also experimented with ways to slow the creep of online competitors onto their turf and prevent consumers from using brick-and-mortar locations as showrooms for the goods they planned to purchase online.


Best Buy, Target, Fry’s Electronics and Staples all agreed to match prices with at least some online competitors. Physical stores may also benefit from decisions by some states to force online retailers to pay sales taxes. That is chipping away at the pricing edge of some major companies like Amazon.com, according to Nelson Granados, an assistant professor at the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University.


Reporting was contributed by Christina Capecchi from Eagan, Minn.; Christopher Maag from Columbus, Ohio; Cindy Wolff from Memphis; and Rebecca Fairley Raney from Upland, Calif.



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With Cease-Fire Joy in Gaza, Palestinian Factions Revive Unity Pledges





GAZA — Palestinians erupted in triumphant celebrations here on Thursday, vowing new unity among rival factions and a renewed commitment to the tactic of resistance, while Israel’s leaders sought to soberly sell the achievements of their latest military operation to a domestic audience long skeptical of cease-fire deals like the one announced the night before.




After eight days of intense Israeli shelling from air and sea that killed 162 Gazans, including at least 30 militant commanders, and flattened many government buildings and private homes, people poured onto the bomb-blasted streets, beaming as they shopped and strolled under the shield of the cease-fire agreement reached Wednesday in Cairo. The place was awash in flags, not only the signature green of the ruling Hamas party but also the yellow, black and red of rivals Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a rainbow not visible here in years.


Despite the death and destruction, Hamas emerged emboldened, analysts said, not only because it had landed rockets near Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but also from the unprecedented visits and support by Arab and Muslim leaders, potentially resetting the balance of power and tone in Palestinian politics, as leaders from various factions declared the peace process dead.


“The blood of Jabari united the people of the nation on the choice of jihad and resistance,” Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister, declared in a televised speech, referring to the commander Ahmed al-Jabari, killed in an Israeli airstrike at the beginning of the operation last week. “Resistance is the shortest way to liberate Palestine.”


There were neither celebrations nor significant protests across the border in Israel, where people in southern cities passed the first day in more than a week without constant sirens signaling incoming rockets sending them to safe rooms. Instead, an uneasy, even grim calm set in. The military announced that an officer, Lt. Boris Yarmulnik, 28, had died from wounds sustained in a rocket attack the day before, bringing the death toll on the Israeli side to six, four of them civilians. The Israeli authorities announced several arrests, including of an Arab Israeli citizen, in a bus bombing in Tel Aviv on Wednesday that revived memories of the violence from the last Palestinian uprising.


But there was collective relief in Israel as thousands of army reservists, sent to the Gaza border ahead of a possible ground invasion, gradually began returning home. With national elections eight weeks away, Israeli politicians tried to showcase accomplishments without raising expectations.


“It could last nine months or it could last nine weeks,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said of the cease-fire. “When it does not last, we will know what to do. We see clearheadedly the possibility that we will have to do this again.”


And so it went on the day after the latest round in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What was widely heralded as a game changer by Palestinian politicians and independent analysts alike was viewed by Israeli officials and commentators as a maintenance mission that had succeeded in its stated goals: restoring quiet after months of intensifying rocket fire, and culling the weapons cache of Gaza’s armed groups.


Details of the cease-fire agreement announced Wednesday by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Egyptian foreign minister remained unclear. Both sides pledged to stop the violence, and Palestinians say Israel will loosen its restrictions on fishing off Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline and farming along its northern and eastern borders. But the critical question of whether the border crossings would be open wide for people and commerce was not fully addressed, with only a vague promise that discussions would ensue after 24 hours. The exact agenda, time, location and even participants in these discussions have not been announced.


At the same time, Mustafa Barghouti, a West Bank leader who has spent the past several days in Gaza, said the Palestinian factions had agreed to meet in Cairo for another round of unity talks in the next few days, as President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority prepares to take his case for observer-state status to the United Nations next week. Though Hamas and Fatah, the party Mr. Abbas leads, have signed four reconciliation agreements in the five years since Hamas took control of Gaza after winning elections here, Mr. Barghouti said this time was different.


“Hamas is stronger, of course, and Abbas is having to change his line because negotiations failed,” he said after appearing with Mr. Haniya at a rally. “This time Israel felt the heat of the Arab Spring, and Gaza was not isolated; the whole Arab world was here. The road is open for unity.”


First, though, Hamas faces an enormous rebuilding effort, with at least 10 of its government buildings — including the ministries of culture, education and interior; the prime minister’s headquarters; and police stations — now reduced to rubble littered with payroll sheets and property tax rolls. A spokesman said that the government kept most records on laptops, but the Abu Khadra, a huge complex of constituent services, is gone.


Dr. Hassan Khalaf, director of Al Shifa Hospital, which was not attacked, dismissed the worry. “We can gather under the sky under a tent,” he said. “They can come to my house.”


In Jerusalem, Dan Meridor, a senior minister of intelligence and atomic energy, told reporters that Israel had “used force in a very moderate and measured way.” He said the military had struck 10 times the number of targets compared with the previous government’s invasion of Gaza four years ago but killed far fewer people than during that invasion: slightly over 10 percent. One of the main military achievements, he said, was the destruction of most of the long-range Iranian Fajr-5 missiles in Gaza.


Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza, and Tamir Elterman from Sderot, Israel.



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The Shrewd Shopper Carries a Smartphone


Tim Gruber for The New York Times


From left, Tara Niebeling, Sarah Schmidt, Bridget Jewell and Erin Vande Steeg are members of the social media team at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.





Retailers are trying to lure shoppers away from the Internet, where they have increasingly been shopping to avoid Black Friday madness, and back to the stores. The bait is technological tools that will make shopping on the busiest day of the year a little more sane — and give shoppers an edge over their competition.


Those with smartphones in hand will get better planning tools, prices and parking spots. Walmart has a map that shows shoppers exactly where the top Black Friday specials can be found. A Mall of America Twitter feed gives advice on traffic and gifts, and the Macy’s app sends special deals for every five minutes a shopper stays in a store.


“The crazy mad rush to camp out and the crazy mad rush to hit the doorbusters have really made people think, ‘I’m just going to stay home on Black Friday,’ ” said Carey Rossi, editor in chief of ConsumerSearch.com, a review site. “This is going to invite some people back and say, ‘You know what? It doesn’t have to be that crazy.’ ”


Part of the retailers’ strategy is to slap back at online stores like Amazon.com, which last year used apps to pick off shoppers as they browsed in physical stores. But the stores are also recognizing that shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving need not require an overnight wait in line, a helmet and elbow pads. A smartphone gives shoppers enough of an edge.


“This takes away that frantic Black Friday anxiety,” said Lawrence Fong, co-founder of BuyVia, an app that sends people price alerts and promotions. “While there’s a sport to it, life’s a little too short.”


Denise Fouts, 45, who works repairing fire and water damage in Chandler, Ariz., was already using apps, including Shopkick, Target’s app and one called Black Friday, before Thanksgiving to prepare for Black Friday. “There still are going to be the crowds, but at least I already know ahead of time what I’m going specifically for,” Ms. Fouts said.


Last week, Macy’s released an update to its app with about 300 Black Friday specials and their location. In the Herald Square store, for instance, the $49.99 cashmere sweater specials will be in the Broadway side of the fifth-floor women’s department.


“With the speed that people are shopping with on Black Friday, they need to be really efficient about how they’re spending their time,” said Jennifer Kasper, group vice president for digital media at Macy’s.


When shoppers keep the app open, Macy’s will start sending special deals to the phone every five minutes. The deals are not advertised elsewhere.


Walmart has had an app for several years, but recently introduced an in-store mode, which shows things like the current circular or food tastings when a shopper is near a certain location. Twelve percent of Walmart’s mobile revenue now comes from when a person is inside a store.


For Black Friday, the app will have a map of each store, with the precise location of the top sale items — so planners can determine the best way to run. “The blitz items are not where you think they would be, because for traffic reasons, maybe the hot game console is in the lawn and garden center,” said Gibu Thomas, senior vice president for mobile and digital for Walmart Global eCommerce.


Target is also testing a way-finding feature on its app at stores that include some in Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles. If a shopper types in an item, the app will give its location.


Other app makers are betting that shoppers want apps that pull in information from many stores.


RedLaser, an eBay app, lets shoppers use their phones to compare prices and recently started using location data to give shoppers personalized promotions when they walk into stores, including items not on store shelves at Best Buy, for instance. RetailMeNot, which offers e-commerce coupons, now has offline coupons that will pop up on users’ cellphones when they step near 500 malls on Black Friday.


“Consumers are not going to download 40 different apps for 40 different stores,” said Cyriac Roeding, co-founder of Shopkick, a location-based app that gives shoppers points, redeemable for perks, when they walk into stores or scan certain items.


For Black Friday, Shopkick is publishing what it calls a little black book with the top doorbusters. Shoppers will earn extra points and rewards for shopping on Black Friday.


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