School Yoga Class Draws Religious Protest From Christians

T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times

Miriam Ruiz during a yoga class last week at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Encinitas, Calif. A few dozen parents are protesting that the program amounts to religious indoctrination. More Photos »

ENCINITAS, Calif. — By 9:30 a.m. at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School, tiny feet were shifting from downward dog pose to chair pose to warrior pose in surprisingly swift, accurate movements. A circle of 6- and 7-year-olds contorted their frames, making monkey noises and repeating confidence-boosting mantras.

Jackie Bergeron’s first-grade yoga class was in full swing.

“Inhale. Exhale. Peekaboo!” Ms. Bergeron said from the front of the class. “Now, warrior pose. I am strong! I am brave!”

Though the yoga class had a notably calming effect on the children, things were far from placid outside the gymnasium.

A small but vocal group of parents, spurred on by the head of a local conservative advocacy group, has likened these 30-minute yoga classes to religious indoctrination. They say the classes — part of a comprehensive program offered to all public school students in this affluent suburb north of San Diego — represent a violation of the First Amendment.

After the classes prompted discussion in local evangelical churches, parents said they were concerned that the exercises might nudge their children closer to ancient Hindu beliefs.

Mary Eady, the parent of a first grader, said the classes were rooted in the deeply religious practice of Ashtanga yoga, in which physical actions are inextricable from the spiritual beliefs underlying them.

“They’re not just teaching physical poses, they’re teaching children how to think and how to make decisions,” Ms. Eady said. “They’re teaching children how to meditate and how to look within for peace and for comfort. They’re using this as a tool for many things beyond just stretching.”

Ms. Eady and a few dozen other parents say a public school system should not be leading students down any particular religious path. Teaching children how to engage in spiritual exercises like meditation familiarizes young minds with certain religious viewpoints and practices, they say, and a public classroom is no place for that.

Underlying the controversy is the source of the program’s financing. The pilot project is supported by the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in memory of Krishna Pattabhi Jois, who is considered the father of Ashtanga yoga.

Dean Broyles, the president and chief counsel of the National Center for Law and Policy, a nonprofit law firm that champions religious freedom and traditional marriage, according to its Web site, has dug up quotes from Jois Foundation leaders, who talk about the inseparability of the physical act of yoga from a broader spiritual quest. Mr. Broyles argued that such quotes betrayed the group’s broader evangelistic purpose.

“There is a transparent promotion of Hindu religious beliefs and practices in the public schools through this Ashtanga yoga program,” he said.

“The analog would be if we substituted for this program a charismatic Christian praise and worship physical education program,” he said.

The battle over yoga in schools has been raging for years across the country but has typically focused on charter schools, which receive public financing but set their own curriculums.

The move by the Encinitas Union School District to mandate yoga classes for all students who do not opt out has elevated the discussion. And it has split an already divided community.

The district serves the liberal beach neighborhoods of Encinitas, including Leucadia, where Paul Ecke Central Elementary is, as well as more conservative inland communities. On the coast, bumper stickers reading “Keep Leucadia Funky” are borne proudly. Farther inland, cars are more likely to feature the Christian fish symbol, and large evangelical congregations play an important role in shaping local philosophy.

Opponents of the yoga classes have started an online petition to remove the course from the district’s curriculum. They have shown up at school board meetings to denounce the program, and Mr. Broyles has threatened to sue if the board does not address their concerns.

The district has stood firm. Tim Baird, the schools superintendent, has defended the yoga classes as merely another element of a broader program designed to promote children’s physical and mental well-being. The notion that yoga teachers have designs on converting tender young minds to Hinduism is incorrect, he said.

“That’s why we have an opt-out clause,” Mr. Baird said. “If your faith is such that you believe that simply by doing the gorilla pose, you’re invoking the Hindu gods, then by all means your child can be doing something else.”

Ms. Eady is not convinced.

“Yoga poses are representative of Hindu deities and Hindu stories about the actions and interactions of those deities with humans,” she said. “There’s content even in the movement, just as with baptism there’s content in the movement.”

Russell Case, a representative of the Jois Foundation, said the parents’ fears were misguided.

“They’re concerned that we’re putting our God before their God,” Mr. Case said. “They’re worried about competition. But we’re much closer to them than they think. We’re good Christians that just like to do yoga because it helps us to be better people.”

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Obama Walks a Fine Line With Egyptian President

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptians opposed to President Mohamed Morsi prayed in Tahrir Square, Cairo, on Friday. More Photos »

CAIRO — Tanks and barbed wire had surrounded Egypt’s presidential palace and crowds of protesters were swarming around last week when President Obama placed a call to President Mohamed Morsi.

Mr. Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood stood accused of  a sudden turn toward authoritarianism, as they fulminated about conspiracies, steamrollered over opponents, and sent their supporters into a confrontation with protesters the night before that call; the clash left seven people dead. But Mr. Obama did not reprimand Mr. Morsi, advisers to both leaders said.

Instead, a senior Obama administration official said, the American president sought to build on a growing rapport with his Egyptian counterpart, arguing to Mr. Morsi that it was in his own interest to offer his opposition compromises, in order to build trust in his government.

“These last two weeks have been concerning, of course, but we are still waiting to see,” said another senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid aggravating relations with Egypt. “One thing we can say for Morsi is he was elected, so he has some legitimacy.” He noted that Mr. Morsi was elected with 51 percent of the vote.

As Egyptians vote Saturday on the draft constitution, the results may also render a verdict on Mr. Morsi’s ability to stabilize the country and the Obama administration’s bet that it can build a workable partnership with a government guided by the Brotherhood — a group the United States shunned for decades as a threat to Western values and interests.

White House officials say that as Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mr. Morsi has a unique chance to build a credible democratic process with broad participation, which is the surest source of stability.

But critics of the Brotherhood have cited Mr. Morsi’s strong-arm push for the Islamist-backed charter as vindication of their argument that Islamist politics are fundamentally incompatible with tolerance, pluralism and the open debate essential to democracy. They say that his turn to authoritarianism has discredited the Obama administration’s two-year courtship of Egypt’s new Islamist leaders.

Some say they suspect the White House may envision the trade-off it offered to the ousted president, Hosni Mubarak: turning a blind eye to heavy-handed tactics so long as he continues to uphold the stability of American-backed regional order.

And by muting its criticism, the Obama administration shares some of the blame, said Michael Hanna, a researcher at the Century Foundation in New York and an Egyptian-American in Cairo for the vote. “Silence is acquiescence,” he said, adding about Mr. Morsi: “At some point if you are so heedless of the common good that you are ready to take the country to the brink and overlook bodies in the street, that is just not O.K.”

Mr. Obama’s advisers, though, say that in Egypt the dual goals of stability and democracy are aligned, because in the math of the revolution Egyptians will no longer accept the old autocracy.

As for Mr. Morsi, administration officials and other outside analysts argue that so far his missteps appear to be matters of tactics, not ideology, with only an indirect connection to his Islamist politics. “The problem with Morsi isn’t whether he is Islamist or not, it is whether he is authoritarian,” said a Western diplomat in Cairo, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic protocol.

What is more, the leading opposition alternatives appeared no less authoritarian: Ahmed Shafik, who lost the presidential runoff, was a former Mubarak prime minister campaigning as a new strongman, and Hamdeen Sabahi, who narrowly missed the runoff, is a Nasserite who has talked of intervention by the military to unseat Mr. Morsi despite his election as president.

“The problem with ‘I told you so’ is the assumption that if things had turned out differently the outcome would be better, and I don’t see that,” the diplomat said, noting that the opposition to the draft constitution had hardly shown more respect than Mr. Morsi has for the norms of democracy or the rule of law. “There are no black hats and white hats here, there are no heroes and villains. Both sides are using underhanded tactics and both sides are using violence.”

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On Instagram, a Thriving Bazaar Taps a Big Market

Instagram, the picture-sharing application that Facebook bought earlier this year, has not yet figured out a way to make money. But some of its users have.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Services like Prinstagram let people turn their Instagram images into prints, wall calendars and stickers.

These entrepreneurs have realized that they can piggyback on the popularity of Instagram, which has more than 100 million users, and create their own businesses, some of which have turned out to be quite profitable. They join a long line of innovators who have found creative ways to build new services on top of existing sites and platforms.

Services like Printstagram, for example, let people turn their Instagram images into prints, wall calendars and stickers. A group of designers are building a digital picture frame for Instagram photos. Some early users of the service are leveraging their expertise and sizable followings and starting consulting agencies, advising big-name brands on how best to use Instagram themselves.

And others have simply realized that the app is a great place to post photos of things they are trying to sell. Jenn Nguyen, 26, who lives in Irvine, Calif., has 8,300 followers on Instagram, where she posts images of lavishly made-up women who are wearing her brand of false eyelashes.

“When we post a new picture of someone wearing our lashes, we instantly see sales,” she said.

Ms. Nguyen is part of a wave of entrepreneurial Instagrammers who have transformed their feeds into virtual shop windows, full of handmade jewelry, retro eyewear, high-end sneakers, cute baking accessories, vintage clothing and custom artwork.

Those who want to sell things on Instagram have to resort to surprisingly low-tech tactics. Instagram does not allow users to add links to their photo posts, so merchants have to list a phone number for placing orders, or hope their followers will type the Web address of their store into a browser.

Shoppers seem willing to put up with that hassle. Ms. Nguyen said that during a recent holiday sale, she offered Instagram followers a coupon for 35 percent off their orders. That day, she said, she netted 100 orders, about $4,000 in sales, up from her usual $500. In her photo captions she mentions her online store and highlights products that are new or soon to be sold out.

Most of the people taking this sales approach are small-scale entrepreneurs and artists, looking for another way to find customers for their consignment shops and jewelry businesses. Hundreds of larger companies and big-name brands have accounts on Instagram, but only a few have taken steps toward actually selling there. Bergdorf Goodman, the luxury retailer, has posted photographs of women’s shoes and jewelry alongside telephone numbers for the store.

Instagram is a compelling medium “because a photo translates to any language,” said Liz Eswein, one of the founders of the Mobile Media Lab, a digital agency focused entirely on helping companies figure out their Instagram strategies. “It’s easier to get lost in the shuffle on other networks” like Facebook and Twitter, she added.

Ms. Eswein, Brian DiFeo and Anthony Danielle formed the company in March after realizing that their collective Instagram followers — nearly 850,000 — and understanding of the service could be valuable to companies like Nike, Delta, Samsung and Marc Jacobs who were hoping to reach fans of their brands. Now Mobile Media Lab runs promotions and special campaigns for those clients and others.

“We aren’t saying ‘Click here and buy this product’ — it’s more about putting the image in their head and introducing them to a product within the service,” said Ms. Eswein. In that way, it’s closer to traditional advertising, Mr. DiFeo said: “It’s classic marketing. You see an ad on a billboard, or on a bus as it goes by, on TV and now, in an Instagram post. It sticks.”

The mini-industries cropping up on and around Instagram are fueled by the service’s explosive growth. In April, Instagram had 25 million users. Eight months later it has quadrupled that figure and amassed more than five billion photos. In October, the mobile service had 7.8 million daily active visitors, according to comScore, more than Twitter’s 6.6 million.

Both Facebook and Instagram declined to talk about how Instagram might make money directly. But analysts suspect that Facebook will try to weave advertising into the Instagram app at some point, much as it has with its own app.

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Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

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Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

Read More..

On Instagram, a Thriving Bazaar Taps a Big Market

Instagram, the picture-sharing application that Facebook bought earlier this year, has not yet figured out a way to make money. But some of its users have.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Services like Prinstagram let people turn their Instagram images into prints, wall calendars and stickers.

These entrepreneurs have realized that they can piggyback on the popularity of Instagram, which has more than 100 million users, and create their own businesses, some of which have turned out to be quite profitable. They join a long line of innovators who have found creative ways to build new services on top of existing sites and platforms.

Services like Printstagram, for example, let people turn their Instagram images into prints, wall calendars and stickers. A group of designers are building a digital picture frame for Instagram photos. Some early users of the service are leveraging their expertise and sizable followings and starting consulting agencies, advising big-name brands on how best to use Instagram themselves.

And others have simply realized that the app is a great place to post photos of things they are trying to sell. Jenn Nguyen, 26, who lives in Irvine, Calif., has 8,300 followers on Instagram, where she posts images of lavishly made-up women who are wearing her brand of false eyelashes.

“When we post a new picture of someone wearing our lashes, we instantly see sales,” she said.

Ms. Nguyen is part of a wave of entrepreneurial Instagrammers who have transformed their feeds into virtual shop windows, full of handmade jewelry, retro eyewear, high-end sneakers, cute baking accessories, vintage clothing and custom artwork.

Those who want to sell things on Instagram have to resort to surprisingly low-tech tactics. Instagram does not allow users to add links to their photo posts, so merchants have to list a phone number for placing orders, or hope their followers will type the Web address of their store into a browser.

Shoppers seem willing to put up with that hassle. Ms. Nguyen said that during a recent holiday sale, she offered Instagram followers a coupon for 35 percent off their orders. That day, she said, she netted 100 orders, about $4,000 in sales, up from her usual $500. In her photo captions she mentions her online store and highlights products that are new or soon to be sold out.

Most of the people taking this sales approach are small-scale entrepreneurs and artists, looking for another way to find customers for their consignment shops and jewelry businesses. Hundreds of larger companies and big-name brands have accounts on Instagram, but only a few have taken steps toward actually selling there. Bergdorf Goodman, the luxury retailer, has posted photographs of women’s shoes and jewelry alongside telephone numbers for the store.

Instagram is a compelling medium “because a photo translates to any language,” said Liz Eswein, one of the founders of the Mobile Media Lab, a digital agency focused entirely on helping companies figure out their Instagram strategies. “It’s easier to get lost in the shuffle on other networks” like Facebook and Twitter, she added.

Ms. Eswein, Brian DiFeo and Anthony Danielle formed the company in March after realizing that their collective Instagram followers — nearly 850,000 — and understanding of the service could be valuable to companies like Nike, Delta, Samsung and Marc Jacobs who were hoping to reach fans of their brands. Now Mobile Media Lab runs promotions and special campaigns for those clients and others.

“We aren’t saying ‘Click here and buy this product’ — it’s more about putting the image in their head and introducing them to a product within the service,” said Ms. Eswein. In that way, it’s closer to traditional advertising, Mr. DiFeo said: “It’s classic marketing. You see an ad on a billboard, or on a bus as it goes by, on TV and now, in an Instagram post. It sticks.”

The mini-industries cropping up on and around Instagram are fueled by the service’s explosive growth. In April, Instagram had 25 million users. Eight months later it has quadrupled that figure and amassed more than five billion photos. In October, the mobile service had 7.8 million daily active visitors, according to comScore, more than Twitter’s 6.6 million.

Both Facebook and Instagram declined to talk about how Instagram might make money directly. But analysts suspect that Facebook will try to weave advertising into the Instagram app at some point, much as it has with its own app.

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Rice Ends Bid to Succeed Clinton as Secretary of State

WASHINGTON — President Obama knew before he picked up the phone on Thursday afternoon what Susan E. Rice, his ambassador to the United Nations, was calling about: she wanted to take herself out of the running for secretary of state and spare him a fight.

By acceding to Ms. Rice’s request, which she had conveyed to White House aides the night before, Mr. Obama averted a bitter, potentially disruptive battle with Republicans in Congress at the start of his second term and at a time when his administration is struggling to reach a politically difficult deal on the federal budget.

In a statement, the president praised Ms. Rice and expressed some anger over the withering criticism directed at her by Republicans because of  comments she made in the aftermath of the lethal attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya.

“While I deeply regret the unfair and misleading attacks on Susan Rice in recent weeks,” he said, “her decision demonstrates the strength of her character, and an admirable commitment to rise above the politics of the moment to put our national interests first.”

By all accounts, Ms. Rice had been Mr. Obama’s first choice to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton, though recently he seemed to be signaling that her nomination was far from a foregone conclusion. Her decision to withdraw, which senior officials insist Ms. Rice made without prodding from the White House, clears the way for Mr. Obama to nominate Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, officials said.

Republicans say Mr. Kerry would sail through a confirmation process, while several senators had vowed to block Ms. Rice’s nomination, citing what they said were her misleading statements about the Sept. 11 attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

By stepping aside, Ms. Rice will allow Mr. Obama to present a full slate of appointees to his national security team, as early as next week. Among the other candidates for key posts, officials said, is former Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, for secretary of defense. Like Mr. Kerry, Mr. Hagel, a Vietnam veteran who opposed the Iraq war, would be supported by many of his former colleagues.

Their nominations would also remove a major source of tension between the White House and Congressional Republicans, who had expanded their attack on Ms. Rice from Benghazi to a broader indictment of her record as a policy maker on Africa, her role in securing American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that came under terrorist attack, and even her personal finances.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and one of Ms. Rice’s fiercest critics, said Thursday that he respected her decision, but added in a statement that he planned “to continue working diligently to get to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi.”

In a letter she sent to Mr. Obama before her call, Ms. Rice attributed her decision to a recognition that “the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive and costly — to you and to our most pressing national and international priorities. The trade-off is simply not worth it to our country.”

Mr. Obama said he accepted her request with regret, describing her in a statement as “an extraordinarily capable, patriotic, and passionate public servant” with a “limitless capability to serve our country” — a line that one official said signaled that Ms. Rice, who will continue in her job at the United Nations, remains a candidate for other senior posts, including national security adviser.

Republicans are eager to see a new appointee, and should it be Mr. Kerry, his party’s 2004 presidential nominee, he would receive a far different reception.  “She made her own decision and I think it’s the right decision,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. “I think she would have had a very hard time getting through.” Mr. Kerry, by contrast, is “immensely qualified and he would be easily confirmed,” he said.

For his part, Mr. Kerry heaped praise on Ms. Rice. In a statement, he said, “As someone who has weathered my share of political attacks and understands on a personal level just how difficult politics can be, I’ve felt for her throughout these last difficult weeks, but I also know that she will continue to serve with great passion and distinction.”

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

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N. Joseph Woodland, Inventor of the Bar Code, Dies at 91

N. Joseph Woodland, who six decades ago drew a set of lines in the sand and in the process conceived the modern bar code, died on Sunday at his home in Edgewater, N.J. He was 91.

His daughter Susan Woodland confirmed the death.

A retired mechanical engineer, Mr. Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology — based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations — that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.

Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time. But it would ultimately give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code is officially known.

The code now adorns tens of millions of different items, scanned in retail establishments around the world at the rate of more than five billion a day.

The bar code would never have developed as it did without a chain of events noteworthy even in the annals of invention etiology:

Had Mr. Woodland not been a Boy Scout, had he not logged hours on the beach and had his father not been quite so afraid of organized crime, the code would very likely not have been invented in the form it was, if at all.

Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City on Sept. 6, 1921. As a Boy Scout he learned Morse code, the spark that would ignite his invention.

After spending World War II on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Mr. Woodland resumed his studies at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia (it is now Drexel University), earning a bachelor’s degree in 1947.

As an undergraduate, Mr. Woodland perfected a system for delivering elevator music efficiently. His system, which recorded 15 simultaneous audio tracks on 35-millimeter film stock, was less cumbersome than existing methods, which relied on LPs and reel-to-reel tapes.

He planned to pursue the project commercially, but his father, who had come of age in “Boardwalk Empire”-era Atlantic City, forbade it: elevator music, he said, was controlled by the mob, and no son of his was going to come within spitting distance.

The younger Mr. Woodland returned to Drexel for a master’s degree. In 1948, a local supermarket executive visited the campus, where he implored a dean to develop an efficient means of encoding product data.

The dean demurred, but Mr. Silver, a fellow graduate student who overheard their conversation, was intrigued. He conscripted Mr. Woodland.

An early idea of theirs, which involved printing product information in fluorescent ink and reading it with ultraviolet light, proved unworkable.

But Mr. Woodland, convinced that a solution was close at hand, quit graduate school to devote himself to the problem. He holed up at his grandparents’ home in Miami Beach, where he spent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking.

To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knew was the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.

What would happen, Mr. Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, were adapted graphically? He began trailing his fingers idly through the sand.

“What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn’t know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ”

That transformative sweep was merely the beginning. “Only seconds later,” Mr. Woodland continued, “I took my four fingers — they were still in the sand — and I swept them around into a full circle.”

Mr. Woodland favored the circular pattern for its omnidirectionality: a checkout clerk, he reasoned, could scan a product without regard for its orientation.

On Oct. 7, 1952, Mr. Woodland and Mr. Silver were awarded United States patent 2,612,994 for their invention — a variegated bull’s-eye of wide and narrow bands — on which they had bestowed the unromantic name “Classifying Apparatus and Method.”

But that method, which depended on an immense scanner equipped with a 500-watt light, was expensive and unwieldy, and it languished for years.

The two men eventually sold their patent to Philco for $15,000 — all they ever made from their invention.

By the time the patent expired at the end of the 1960s, Mr. Woodland was on the staff of I.B.M., where he worked from 1951 until his retirement in 1987.

Over time, laser scanning technology and the advent of the microprocessor made the bar code viable. In the early 1970s, an I.B.M. colleague, George J. Laurer, designed the familiar black-and-white rectangle, based on the Woodland-Silver model and drawing on Mr. Woodland’s considerable input.

Thanks largely to the work of Alan Haberman, a supermarket executive who helped select and popularize the rectangular bar code and who died in 2011, it was adopted as the industry standard in 1973.

Mr. Woodland, who earned a master’s in mechanical engineering from Syracuse University in the 1950s, received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1992. Last year, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. (Mr. Silver, who died in 1963, was inducted posthumously along with him.)

Besides his daughter Susan, Mr. Woodland is survived by his wife, the former Jacqueline Blumberg, whom he married in 1951; another daughter, Betsy Karpenkopf; a brother, David; and a granddaughter.

Today, the bar code graces nearly every surface of contemporary life — including groceries, wayward luggage and, if you are a traditionalist, the newspaper you are holding — all because a young man, his mind ablaze with dots and dashes, one day raked his fingers through the sand.

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My Story: Taking on Cancer Again, This Time With the Wisdom of Age

After I finished eight months of treatment for testicular cancer in my mid-20s, my psychologist said, “Well, that was like having five years of therapy all at once.” What he meant was that you learn a lot about yourself in weekly talk sessions, but during a life-threatening illness, the “issues” come at you nonstop. I relished the slow unfolding of myself in the first, but I resented — no, hated — every step of the second. Nearly two decades later, when confronted with the same diagnosis, I finally understood the benefits of that earlier trial by fire, much as I did the wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson when he wrote, “The years teach much which the days never knew.”

To be sure, there were benefits to being young — I was 26 — when I was first diagnosed, not the least of which was my competitive swimmer’s body. After almost dying in the I.C.U. and becoming a “patient-in-residence,” I plunged back into the pool (and my day job) just a fortnight after my release.

Ah, the determination — and denial — of youth.

But facing cancer at that young age had more drawbacks than benefits, not the least of which was losing my sense of invulnerability when confronted with the prospect of disfigurement and disability, even death.

Less obvious, but still unsettling, was the loss of my laissez-faire attitude toward life itself. I had always been the kind of guy who focused on the journey (the experience) more than the destination (winning). During backstroke events prior to falling ill I was more interested in watching the clouds race overhead than the swimmer racing in the next lane. This mindset didn’t do much for my success in the pool, but it helped define who I was.

To make matters worse, conventional wisdom says only one thing matters when it comes to cancer: Beating the hell out of it. Suddenly I had to find an emotional depth I hadn’t sought before, a passion for a fight that I didn’t want.

Am I the kind of person who can win this battle? I asked myself early on.

To ensure that I was, I did a complete about-face, saying “No way” to the journey and “Hell, yes” to the destination. Every decision began to turn on life and longevity, and for that I tolerated side effects like hair loss, neuropathy and “dry ejaculation” — because I simply had to win.

I re-read Dylan Thomas, who told me to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” and I did. I became a rager. And it almost ruined my life.

Not in terms of my health, because in fact my treatment was effective. I was “clinically cured” and chalked up that achievement to my new “Top Gun” mentality. Then I jumped back into daily life — and managed to mess everything up. I applied my new approach to relationships (“My way or the highway”), and got dumped by my boyfriend. In graduate school, I aced my studies but lost friends.

Fortunately, my best friends didn’t hold back on telling me I had become a jerk, and that got my attention. I had upshifted at the start of my treatment, but now I needed to downshift. I struggled to find my pace, but eventually found a middle gear, more vulnerable than I cared to be but also more human.

The second time I was diagnosed, the oncologist sat me down to give me the new installment of the old bad news. I surprised myself and my friends with a very different approach.

I did not rage, which isn’t to say I was happy about this predicament. And I had moved on from my original question to a new one: How can I go through this and still be the kind of person I want to be?

In the intervening years, I had come to realize that cancer victories are not won by personality types, but by a combination of doggedness (choosing the best physician, getting the right diagnosis and treatment), responsibility (doing your own research and taking care of your overall health), and plain old luck.

From that very first day of my second time around, I challenged myself not to shift into that “win at any cost” mentality. That’s where the gift of age and experience came to my aid, even if my older body did not. Over the years I had learned that life was not a series of choices between winners and losers — I knew that way of seeing things to be oversimplified, if not dead wrong. You can be stronger than an ox, never miss a day of work, or swim your lungs out and, damn it, still die.

I could become a jerk again and focus on the end point, or I could accept that the journey is the destination – which I did.

Two months after I had been diagnosed and two days before the surgeon was scheduled to excise my remaining testicle, I had a dream so vivid — “I am cancer-free!” — that I demanded to go on a “surveillance” protocol. Reluctantly my doctor agreed, but by year’s end I had “won” the debate when my so-called tumor was reclassified as a benign nodule.

The years had taught me much — both to listen to my body and to trust in its wisdom. And, most importantly, to find the courage to speak its truth — whether in the doctor’s office or out in the world.

Steven Petrow writes the Civil Behavior column for Booming, addressing questions about gay and straight etiquette for a boomer-age audience. You can find him on Facebook and Twitter.

You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming.

Read More..

My Story: Taking on Cancer Again, This Time With the Wisdom of Age

After I finished eight months of treatment for testicular cancer in my mid-20s, my psychologist said, “Well, that was like having five years of therapy all at once.” What he meant was that you learn a lot about yourself in weekly talk sessions, but during a life-threatening illness, the “issues” come at you nonstop. I relished the slow unfolding of myself in the first, but I resented — no, hated — every step of the second. Nearly two decades later, when confronted with the same diagnosis, I finally understood the benefits of that earlier trial by fire, much as I did the wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson when he wrote, “The years teach much which the days never knew.”

To be sure, there were benefits to being young — I was 26 — when I was first diagnosed, not the least of which was my competitive swimmer’s body. After almost dying in the I.C.U. and becoming a “patient-in-residence,” I plunged back into the pool (and my day job) just a fortnight after my release.

Ah, the determination — and denial — of youth.

But facing cancer at that young age had more drawbacks than benefits, not the least of which was losing my sense of invulnerability when confronted with the prospect of disfigurement and disability, even death.

Less obvious, but still unsettling, was the loss of my laissez-faire attitude toward life itself. I had always been the kind of guy who focused on the journey (the experience) more than the destination (winning). During backstroke events prior to falling ill I was more interested in watching the clouds race overhead than the swimmer racing in the next lane. This mindset didn’t do much for my success in the pool, but it helped define who I was.

To make matters worse, conventional wisdom says only one thing matters when it comes to cancer: Beating the hell out of it. Suddenly I had to find an emotional depth I hadn’t sought before, a passion for a fight that I didn’t want.

Am I the kind of person who can win this battle? I asked myself early on.

To ensure that I was, I did a complete about-face, saying “No way” to the journey and “Hell, yes” to the destination. Every decision began to turn on life and longevity, and for that I tolerated side effects like hair loss, neuropathy and “dry ejaculation” — because I simply had to win.

I re-read Dylan Thomas, who told me to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” and I did. I became a rager. And it almost ruined my life.

Not in terms of my health, because in fact my treatment was effective. I was “clinically cured” and chalked up that achievement to my new “Top Gun” mentality. Then I jumped back into daily life — and managed to mess everything up. I applied my new approach to relationships (“My way or the highway”), and got dumped by my boyfriend. In graduate school, I aced my studies but lost friends.

Fortunately, my best friends didn’t hold back on telling me I had become a jerk, and that got my attention. I had upshifted at the start of my treatment, but now I needed to downshift. I struggled to find my pace, but eventually found a middle gear, more vulnerable than I cared to be but also more human.

The second time I was diagnosed, the oncologist sat me down to give me the new installment of the old bad news. I surprised myself and my friends with a very different approach.

I did not rage, which isn’t to say I was happy about this predicament. And I had moved on from my original question to a new one: How can I go through this and still be the kind of person I want to be?

In the intervening years, I had come to realize that cancer victories are not won by personality types, but by a combination of doggedness (choosing the best physician, getting the right diagnosis and treatment), responsibility (doing your own research and taking care of your overall health), and plain old luck.

From that very first day of my second time around, I challenged myself not to shift into that “win at any cost” mentality. That’s where the gift of age and experience came to my aid, even if my older body did not. Over the years I had learned that life was not a series of choices between winners and losers — I knew that way of seeing things to be oversimplified, if not dead wrong. You can be stronger than an ox, never miss a day of work, or swim your lungs out and, damn it, still die.

I could become a jerk again and focus on the end point, or I could accept that the journey is the destination – which I did.

Two months after I had been diagnosed and two days before the surgeon was scheduled to excise my remaining testicle, I had a dream so vivid — “I am cancer-free!” — that I demanded to go on a “surveillance” protocol. Reluctantly my doctor agreed, but by year’s end I had “won” the debate when my so-called tumor was reclassified as a benign nodule.

The years had taught me much — both to listen to my body and to trust in its wisdom. And, most importantly, to find the courage to speak its truth — whether in the doctor’s office or out in the world.

Steven Petrow writes the Civil Behavior column for Booming, addressing questions about gay and straight etiquette for a boomer-age audience. You can find him on Facebook and Twitter.

You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming.

Read More..