8 Violations for School in Wake of Lab Fire

Abstract: Fire Department investigators have cited Beacon High School in Manhattan for eight violations, finding that dangerous chemicals were being stored unsafely and that safety equipment and practices were lacking in at least three rooms. One was the makeshift lab where two students were engulfed in flames last week when a chemistry demonstration went horribly awry . The department gave the school, which is on the Upper West Side, 10 days to correct some of the violations of fire and building codes, and 30 days for others. But it did not issue a “cease and desist” order, which could have closed the teaching labs, James Long, a Fire Department spokesman, said on Wednesday. The state Labor Department is also investigating the accident and its context, state officials said, because regulations require safety equipment like chemical fume hoods when teachers handle potentially explosive flammable liquids and toxic chemicals in the workplace. There was none in Room 317, a “science demo room,” where Alonzo Yanes, 16, was badly burned when fumes from the methanol used by a teacher to burn different substances ignited. Alonzo remained in critical condition on Wednesday in the burn unit of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. The other student suffered relatively minor burns. The Fire Department violations, issued to the principal, Ruth Lacey, also focused on the chemical storage room, Room 331; the school was ordered to immediately reduce the supply of hazardous chemicals to the amounts allowed by law, including no more than 15 gallons of flammable liquids and no more than five pounds of toxic substances. In a formal science laboratory, Room 321, the school was ordered to provide a safety shower and eye wash for decontamination, and to show that a chemical fume hood there was being tested annually for safe ventilation of dangerous fumes. Devon Puglia, a spokesman for the city Education Department, said it was working closely with the Fire Department to correct the violations as soon as possible. Science safety experts say that the deficiencies found at Beacon are widespread in American schools, and that accidents that have maimed teachers and students keep happening because of systemic shortcomings. “I’ve inspected hundreds of thousands of school laboratories and there are problems everywhere with them,” said James A. Kaufman, founder and president of the Laboratory Safety Institute, a national nonprofit educational organization, who has served as an expert witness in personal injury suits in which schools have had to pay millions of dollars for similar accidents. “The kinds of problems that the Fire Department found at the Beacon school are the tip of the iceberg.” Like all but seven states, he noted, New York does not make lab safety education part of the written requirements for science teacher certification, so many teachers are not even aware of the hazards or the safety regulations. Though surveys find that lab accident rates are 10 to 100 times higher in schools than in industry, the scope of the problem has been obscured, he said, because there is no requirement that lab injuries or even fatalities be reported to a central database. Jonathan Burman, a spokesman for the state Education Department, which certifies science teachers, said safety information was most likely already included in science teachers’ coursework. By state law, local districts have sole responsibility for school curriculum, including science experiments, he said. A federal chemical safety agency last month issued a video warning of the dangers of the same popular demonstration, known as the rainbow or the flame test, that injured the Beacon students. But Mr. Burman said the state’s science education officials were not among the 60,000 subscribers who received the warning from the agency, the United States Chemical Safety Board. Asked whether the department had recommendations to make in light of the fire code violations, he wrote: “We would remind teachers that experiments which utilize flammable or explosive gasses should always be conducted under appropriate fume hoods. We would also remind them of the need to comply with all building and fire codes.”

Labs
Fires
Beacon School Manhattan NY
Accidents and Safety
HazMat
K-12 Education


Judging Whether a Killer Is Sane Enough to Die

Abstract: HOUSTON, June 1 — Scott Panetti, a death row inmate in Texas , understands that the state says it intends to execute him for the murder of his wife's parents. But Mr. Panetti, 48, who represented himself in court despite a long and colorful history of mental illness, says he believes that the state's real reason is a different one. He says the state, in league with Satan, wants to kill him to keep him from preaching the Gospel. That delusion has been documented by doctors and acknowledged by judges and prosecutors. It poses what experts call the next big question in death penalty law now that the Supreme Court has barred the execution of juvenile offenders and the mentally retarded: what makes someone too mentally ill to be executed? A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, recently said Mr. Panetti was sane enough to die. The full court will soon decide whether to hear the case. Mr. Panetti, in prison now almost 14 years for the killings in 1992 in the quaint Hill Country city of Fredericksburg, has long seemed to exemplify madness, addressing himself to the jury in his trial in 1995 as "the born-again April Fool," a schizophrenic healed by God. In and out of mental institutions 14 times and addicted to drugs and alcohol since he almost drowned as a child and was nearly electrocuted by a power line, Mr. Panetti wore cowboy costumes to court, delivered rambling monologues, put himself on the witness stand and sought to subpoena the pope, Jesus and John F. Kennedy. Jurors were clearly alienated and took little more than an hour to reject his insanity defense. They found that Mr. Panetti knew right from wrong and so deserved the death penalty. That is a separate question from whether his mental illness should bar his execution. Two decades ago, the United States Supreme Court in Ford v. Wainwright ruled that the Eighth Amendment prohibited the execution of the insane. Since then, lower courts have struggled to find a way to apply that principle in practice. The state and federal courts that have heard Mr. Panetti's case have said that a bare awareness of the fact of impending execution and the stated reason for it is enough. "In Texas," said Greg Wiercioch, a lawyer with the Texas Defender Service who has consulted with Mr. Panetti's defense, "if you cast a shadow on a sunny day, you're competent to be executed." Other courts require more. Relying on a concurring opinion in the Supreme Court decision, they say the inmate actually has to perceive the connection between the crime and the punishment. The three-judge panel in Mr. Panetti's case acknowledged that he was mentally ill with what has been diagnosed as schizoaffective disorder and that he thus might lack a rational understanding of his fate. But the panel nonetheless ruled that he was competent to be executed because he was able to understand the stated basis for his execution. His new lawyers dispute that. "He completely scoffs at the notion that it's the State of Texas trying to execute him," said Keith Hampton, a lawyer from Austin who filed the latest appeal with a co-counsel, Michael C. Gross of San Antonio. "He thinks it's the demons and evil ones." Legal and medical experts estimate that hundreds of people with schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses are on death rows around the nation. Courts have spared the lives of seven inmates based on the 1986 decision, the Texas Defender Service said. David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston who has met more than 75 death row inmates, visited Mr. Panetti at his lawyers' request. "Of all the people I have met on death row, he's the gold-medal-crazy winner," Professor Dow said. On Sept. 8, 1992, Mr. Panetti broke into the home of his in-laws, Joe and Amanda Alvarado, and shot them to death in front of his estranged second wife, Sonja, and his 3-year-old daughter, Amanda, known as Birdie. Taking on his defense, and calling himself as a witness, he argued that he had been taken over by an alter ego he called Sarge Ironhorse. "Sarge boom boom," Mr. Panetti testified. "Sarge is gone. No more Sarge. Sonja and Birdie. Joe, Amanda lying kitchen, here, there blood. No, leave. Scott, remember exactly what Sarge did. Shot the lock. Walked in the kitchen. Sonja, where's Birdie? Sonja here." Prosecutors, their medical experts and the courts agreed that Mr. Panetti suffers from mental illness. Judge Sam Sparks of Federal District Court in Austin found in 2004 that Mr. Panetti's illness was characterized by "grandiosity and a delusional belief system in which he believes himself to be persecuted for his religious activities and beliefs." Judge Sparks said that was not enough to spare Mr. Panetti. Others agree. Robert Blecker, a law professor at the New York Law School and a cautious supporter of the death penalty, said Mr. Panetti's execution could serve the goal of retribution. "He knows what he did," Professor Blecker said. "He knows what the state is about to do to him, and why. For the retributivist, the past counts. It counts for us, and for us to be retributively satisfied, it must also count for him." Prosecutors made the same point in a brief to the Fifth Circuit last year. "All that is required to avoid the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment is that the petitioner factually understand the reason for this punishment," the prosecutors wrote. Executions of inmates who exhibited signs of madness are not unusual. In 1992, Arkansas executed Ricky Ray Rector not long after he put aside the dessert of his last meal to eat later. In March, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., split, 7 to 6, over whether Percy L. Walton could be executed, notwithstanding his delusional belief that after his death he would "come back as a better person" and "get a Burger King." A majority said this was proof that Mr. Walton understood he would be executed. "That a person believes that he will have an 'afterlife,' however strange his views of that 'afterlife' may be," Judge Dennis W. Shedd wrote, "necessarily suggests he believes his existing life will end." The laws of most states, based on English common law, have long banned the execution of the insane. "The reasons for the rule are less sure and less uniform than the rule itself," Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in the 1986 case. Some judges say the "miserable spectacle" of such executions simply offends humanity. Others say retribution is not served by executing someone who cannot understand why he is being put to death. Still others point to the inability of the insane to assist their lawyers in last-minute litigation. In the Middle Ages, it was thought that madness was its own punishment. Mr. Hampton, who filed the latest appeals brief, said that from the trial on he was revolted by the Panetti case. "I thought there was no way, no way, no matter how bad things in the state of Texas got, that it would allow someone in the full flower of schizophrenia to represent himself," he said. But in repeatedly calling himself insane — "I went nuts," Mr. Panetti told the police officers after the killings, "well, I am nuts" — Mr. Panetti seemed to have run into his own Catch-22, leaving jurors skeptical of anyone so eager to establish his insanity. Now the courts, taking one last look at Mr. Panetti, must decide whether he is sane enough to die.

Texas
Capital Punishment
Mental Health and Disorders


From Petraeus Scandal, an Apostle for Privacy

Abstract: TAMPA, Fla. — Jill Kelley still glances around for cameras before she leaves her large, six-columned house on Hillsborough Bay, and she rarely goes to the grocery store. Since November 2012, when the government released her name in connection with a scandal that brought down the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Ms. Kelley has yet to return to her children’s schools, she said, and could not even summon the courage to go to their holiday plays. Desperate to restore her reputation, resume her old life and, she said, protect others from similar ordeals, Ms. Kelley is, with the help of some of the nation’s most renowned and expensive privacy lawyers, suing three federal agencies and a spate of current and former Pentagon and F.B.I. officials. She asserts that they violated her privacy, defamed her and improperly gained access to her email without her consent, all in a way that hurt her reputation and livelihood. Reclusion remains an uncomfortable cloak for Ms. Kelley, 38, who just over a year ago was the social spindle of MacDill Air Force Base here: a woman known for her lavish parties and connections with the top leaders of United States Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East. Commanders and their wives were regulars at her dining room table, where Champagne flowed under a huge oil painting of Ms. Kelley and her husband, Scott T. Kelley, a cancer surgeon. “People don’t understand what I went through,” Ms. Kelley said in a recent interview, conducted in her breakfast room with breathtaking views of Hillsborough Bay. “I am still suffering the consequences from the bad acts and false and untrue headlines. They created a sideshow at my expense.” Her demeanor vacillated between cheerful, determined and pained; she occasionally wiped away tears. In a lawsuit that is half legal document and half news release, Ms. Kelley seeks damages and a formal apology from the government for revealing her identity after she reported what she assumed was a crime: threatening emails sent by a woman with whom Gen. David H. Petraeus, then director of the C.I.A., was having an affair. The suit, filed in United States District Court for the District of Columbia, is also an attempt by Ms. Kelley to tell her side of a story that she says was distorted and dismissed, leaving her family as collateral damage. A spokesman for the F.B.I., Michael P. Kortan, declined to comment on the specifics of the case, citing the continuing litigation. “We approach all investigations equally and in accordance with guidelines and the law,” he said. Several privacy experts said that while Ms. Kelley was an unlikely advocate for the right to live free from the public’s glare, her claims of government overreach would resonate, particularly as the nation debates the proper balance of personal privacy and national security. “This case shows that privacy is really important and that the legal rules we have are not tailored for modern technology,” said Neil M. Richards, a privacy law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “I think it shows also how so many questions that we deal with on an everyday basis, from government to criminal investigations, all deal with the issue of privacy.” Thirteen months ago, the government revealed that the Kelleys, who are co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit, had received a series of menacing emails from Paula Broadwell, who was having an affair with General Petraeus. F.B.I. investigators examined all of Ms. Kelley’s emails as a routine step and in the process discovered what Pentagon officials said was potentially “inappropriate communication” with Gen. John R. Allen, then the top American commander in Afghanistan. The emails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley numbered in the hundreds and covered two and a half years starting in 2010, when General Allen was deputy commander of Central Command in Tampa. He has since retired from the military. Although an inquiry by the Pentagon inspector general cleared General Allen of any wrongdoing, Ms. Kelley morphed from entertainer to exile. She was banned from the Air Force base and stripped of her (essentially meaningless) diplomatic titles, including honorary consul to South Korea . “Just because you’re stalked by a mistress doesn’t mean you are one,” Ms. Kelley said in the interview. “It’s not contagious.” Her husband said he had never suspected his wife of inappropriate dalliances with General Allen. “I saw the emails,” Dr. Kelley said. “I knew it was complete nonsense.” When the emails were discovered, a law enforcement official called them “sexually explicit,” Pentagon officials described them as embarrassing, and General Allen’s associates said they were innocuous and contained little beyond language like “you’re a sweetheart.” Ms. Kelley, too, describes them as innocuous, but the government has refused to release them. The Kelleys moved to Tampa in 2001. At a charity dinner that year, Ms. Kelley met the wife of the deputy commander of Central Command, who invited her to dinner and asked if the Kelleys might offer their home for social events for the families of foreign military officials based in Tampa, Ms. Kelley said. “Because I grew up in a war-torn country, I had the honor to thank them and show our appreciation,” she said. (Ms. Kelley moved to the United States from Beirut, Lebanon, as an infant in 1976 and grew up in the Philadelphia area, where her mother owned restaurants and her father was an insurance broker. She speaks fluent Arabic and Spanish.) The informal gatherings soon became large, catered parties, including holiday meals for generals and receptions for the spouses of deployed personnel. Ms. Kelley said she would have monthly dinners in her home with General Petraeus, who was head of Central Command from 2008 to 2010, as well as with his deputy at the time, General Allen. If Ms. Kelley learned anything of national security interest over her baked chicken, her lawyers have told her not to say. After her good times in Tampa ended in November 2012, a low point came, she said, when she and her husband went to bed and turned on “Saturday Night Live” to unwind, only to be confronted with a parody of her. Ms. Kelley and her lawyers said the lawsuit touched on an array of issues: what the government can access, how it disseminates information about private citizens, whether it protects people who report crimes, what constitutes leaking, and the laws governing public records. “Here, the government did not adhere to its own standards for avoiding electronic intrusion into innocent citizens’ lives,” said Alan Charles Raul, a lawyer for the Kelleys. “Instead, they turned around and blamed the victim. If privacy rights mean anything, it means the government must be held accountable for protecting people who committed no crime or wrongdoing.” Privacy lawyers said the outcome of the case would rest in part on whether the agencies involved were subject to exemptions under the Privacy Act of 1974, and on how the court interpreted arcane aspects of laws governing electronic records. “They made a pretty good facial claim that the government violated the ‘no disclosure without consent’ rule,” said Paul M. Schwartz, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. The court will also examine whether Ms. Kelley suffered distress and loss of income. Ms. Kelley’s fortunes differ starkly from those of General Petraeus, who has teaching positions at the University of Southern California , the City University of New York and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government , and is chairman of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’s KKR Global Institute . (He resigned from his C.I.A. post after the scandal unfolded.) General Allen is now an adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry on the Middle East peace talks. Ms. Broadwell, who was not charged with a crime, is living with her husband and two children in Charlotte, N.C., teaching, writing and working with groups that help veterans. Ms. Kelley remains insistent that she did nothing wrong. “I was seeking protection,” she said, “not publicity.”

Privacy
Jill Kelley
Defamation
Email
Lawsuits
David H Petraeus
US Military
Adultery


Toyota Is Recalling 1.5 Million Cars for 2 Problems

Abstract: TOKYO — The Toyota Motor Company announced a global recall of 1.53 million vehicles on Thursday because of brake and fuel pump problems, but stressed that the repairs reflected a companywide effort to be more active in addressing potential flaws. Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, will call back about 750,000 cars in North America, including Lexus and Avalon models, and 599,000 cars in Japan. The recalled models were mostly made from 2004 to 2006, a period of rapid growth for Toyota that analysts have charged coincided with lapses in the automaker’s attention to quality. About 140,000 cars in the rest of Asia and Australia, and 50,000 cars in Europe, also are being recalled. Quality at Toyota has been under the spotlight since the automaker recalled about 8.5 million cars and trucks worldwide over a range of problems , including gas pedals that could jam or get stuck under floor mats, causing vehicles to speed out of control. The size of the earlier recalls, as well as Toyota’s slow handling of recall procedures, was widely criticized by United States policy makers and set off a series of Congressional hearings. The president of the company, Akio Toyoda, subsequently promised to improve quality and customer service, including paying more attention to customer complaints and speeding up recall decisions. In February, the automaker set up a special global committee to oversee quality, led by Mr. Toyoda. “Every time we announce a recall, that is a step toward increasing quality,” a spokesman for Toyota in Tokyo, Paul Nolasco, said Thursday. The pedal-related recalls had “brought it home to Toyota that we need to refocus on quality,” he said. Most of the vehicles in Thursday’s recall need to be fixed for a problem in the brakes’ master cylinder, Mr. Nolasco said. The cylinder, which contains brake fluid, could leak if filled with a third-party fluid, causing a loss in braking power, he said. Toyota has also found an electrical fault with the fuel pump that could cause the engine to stall, Mr. Nolasco said. That defect was concentrated in models sold in Japan. The automaker is not aware of any accidents linked to these problems, he said. Analysts said Toyota was eager to appear more forthcoming about potential defects. “The nature of the recall — the items they had problems with — are fairly mundane,” said Paul Newton, a London-based auto analyst at IHS Global Insight, a global research firm. “They are trying to demonstrate to everybody that they’re on top of this,” Mr. Newton said. “They are trying to demonstrate that they’re more transparent.” Mike Rozembajgier, director of recalls for ExpertRecall, a consulting firm that helps manufacturers conduct product recalls, said he expected to see other automakers also become more eager to call back their vehicles to avoid any accusations of delays or cover-ups. “We have seen Toyota and the entire automotive industry become more proactive in addressing potential problems,” Mr. Rozembajgier said. “Toyota specifically announced new product quality initiatives and is now taking additional steps to ensure that their recalls are effective and that they are seen as protecting consumers.” Models affected in the United States include the 2005-6 Avalon; the 2004-6 nonhybrid Highlander and Lexus RX 330 ; and 2006 Lexus GS 300 , IS 250 and IS 350 vehicles, according to a company release. Owners will be notified by mailings beginning early next month, and dealers will replace part of the brake’s master cylinder free of charge, Toyota said. In Japan, the recall includes the Crown, Crown Majesta, Harrier, Mark X, Alphard, Kluger, Lexus GX 350, Lexus IS 250 and Lexus IS 350 . A Toyota rival, Honda, said Thursday that it planned a similar recall of some 2005 to 2007 models of the Acura RL sedans and Honda Odyssey minivans because of brake fluid leaks. Toyota is still racing to fix cars affected by its gas pedal and floor mat recalls, the first of which was announced last November. Earlier this month, Toyota said its dealers had repaired 3.7 million of the six million vehicles affected in the United States in those recalls, or about 65 percent of the total. In April, Toyota agreed to pay a record $16.4 million fine to United States regulators for waiting too long to initiate a recall after learning that its accelerator pedals contained a defect.

Brakes
Automobiles
Toyota Motor Corp
Recalls and Bans of Products


At Bayern Munich, Doctor Takes the Blame for Rash of Injuries

Abstract: LONDON — Why blame the doctor for the frailties of the human body? That is happening more and more these days at Europe’s top clubs as star players break down under the strain of running at breakneck speeds in ever-more demanding schedules. Even so, the spat at Bayern Munich that led Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt to resign abruptly after 38 years as team doctor came as a shock. “Doctor Mull,” as the players called him, has some weird, and some say wonderful, remedies that he has used not just with soccer players, but with athletes from all over the sporting world, including the track star Usain Bolt, cyclists, marathon runners and even Australian rules football players. Athletes have flown thousands of miles to be treated at Müller-Wohlfahrt’s clinic in Munich, sometimes as a treatment of last resort, and the unusual care has been reported to include injections extracted from goats’ blood and the combs of cockerels . The Spanish golfer José María Olazábal, who suffered from crippling rheumatoid arthritis, credited the Bavarian doctor with helping him recover after visiting him in the mid-90s. To each, as they say, his own. The point is that the doctor had been trusted for decades by players for both Bayern and the German national soccer team, where he remains the team doctor. Yet the breakdown that caused Müller-Wohlfahrt to quit last weekend — right in the middle of Bayern’s two most important games of the season, its Champions League quarterfinal series against Porto — was apparently caused by a remark that Karl-Heinz Rummenigge made to Müller-Wohlfahrt’s assistant. Rummenigge, Bayern’s chairman, reportedly told the assistant, Fredi Binder, that the medical team was responsible for a rash of injuries to players, including Franck Ribéry, Arjen Robben and Bastian Schweinsteiger, all of whom were unable to play last week as Bayern lost, 3-1, at Porto. There had been tensions last year when Pep Guardiola, in his second season coaching Munich, said that he felt the team physician should be at the training center the whole time, whereas Müller-Wohlfahrt operated out of his private practice eight miles away. The friction between a relatively young coach — who at Barcelona had been used to having doctors on hand whenever and wherever the players worked out — and chief doctor is understandable. In the modern game, where speed is so essential on the field, the coach is entitled to expect that the best possible treatment be available at the club. Bayern has been at pains this week to tell reporters that there is no story, that nobody was blaming the doctor and that the club’s board had reluctantly accepted the resignation. It is, nevertheless, odd. Müller-Wohlfahrt may be 72, but there is no suggestion of him withdrawing from the medicine he practices or the sport that he loves. The German soccer federation made it clear that it retains absolute faith in the doctor. “I trust him, one hundred percent,” said the national coach, Joachim Löw. This means that, despite the sudden separation, much of the Bayern team will still be in Müller-Wohlfahrt’s hands because much of its lineup forms the core of the German national team that won the World Cup last summer. And there, rather than in the spat inside the club, probably lies the real reason behind Bayern’s lengthy list of injuries. Take the German players who played to the very end of the tournament in the heat and humidity of Brazil and add Robben, who arguably ran harder and farther for his Dutch national team than any other player at the Cup, and you can glean what has taken such a toll on the players. It is similar, though maybe to a different degree, to what is happening in other leagues. Arsenal, which has had the same coach for almost two decades, and Manchester United, which switched to a new manager at the start of this season, both have had to play for months with first-team selections missing because of injuries. In Manchester, the new coach Louis van Gaal introduced higher-tempo, higher-intensity workouts this season. He doubled the training, to two sessions a day from one. Even the coach would admit that his players might have been jolted by the demands he places, as well as by his new approach to training. Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager who has always taken a holistic approach to preparation, even down to recommending diets, recruited a new trainer last summer. That trainer, Shad Forsythe , had been a part of Germany’s World Cup preparation for years. And the Germans on Arsenal’s roster — Mesut Ozil, Per Mertesacker and the since-departed Lukas Podolski — knew of his expertise from their time on the national team. But Wenger knew something else: that clubs cannot continually go on treating players as commodities. Summers used to be the time when players went to the beaches for rest and recuperation. Now, clubs use summers to market their brand and recoup some of the millions of dollars they pay in wages. The United States is an easy off-season break. Asia, Africa, the Gulf and even Australia have increasingly become destinations where top clubs go to win new fans and get the players some preseason exercise. Wenger is not a fan of this. Bob Paisley, once the wise old owl who managed Liverpool, said, “Flying is like putting paraffin in players’ petrol tanks.” In other words, messing with the gasoline in a tank disrupts the running of the machine. The players take on too much and get too little time to recuperate, and the consequences cause players to break down. Blaming the healers is a futile exercise.

Soccer
Manchester United
Bayern Munich Soccer Team
Sports injury
Arsenal Soccer Team


Woods: Vulnerable Off the Course, Vulnerable on the Course

Abstract: After each of Tiger Woods ’s five tedious tournaments leading to this week’s Masters , he sounded like a recording when he spoke about how well he was progressing with his new golf swing. But his scores contradicted him. After a final-round 66 that lifted him into a tie for 10th at the World Golf Championship event at Doral, he talked about how his swing was “definitely getting better.” And after dropping into a tie for 24th with only one round under par in the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, where he won six times before the scandal that interrupted his career, he said: “I’ve kept progressing. I’m feeling very, very good.” Maybe he’s feeling very, very good, but his scores haven’t been very, very good. Over all, he has averaged about two strokes a round (eight strokes over 72 holes) higher than when he was winning 71 PGA Tour events, including a dazzling 14 majors. After all those years as No. 1 in the convoluted world ranking, he has skidded only to No. 5, but if rated only since his return at last year’s Masters, he would be much lower. His inability to adjust to a different swing under his new coach , Sean Foley, is considered the reason for his inconsistency. But in observing him on television, he is not merely coping with a different swing. He appears to be a different person.  At his best, his fierce determination set him apart. You could see it in his eyes. But now his eyes are empty. He used to find a way to win. Now he finds a way to lose. On the first playoff hole of his first-round loss to Thomas Bjorn in the Accenture Match Play Championship in Arizona, his tee shot soared far to the right of the 200-yard-wide fairway into a desert bush. He once ruled golf with a smiling arrogance and a stern stride. He’s more confused than confident now. Or has he simply been shamed by the sordid details of his scandal? He doesn’t look the same, doesn’t walk the same. He doesn’t score the same because he no longer makes all those par-saving 10-footers. He has hit some shots he maybe never hit before as a professional. At Doral, he hit two tee shots in the second round that would embarrass a 20-handicapper. His drive at No. 2 was a smothered hook that bounced to a stop in the rough only 122 yards from the tee. At No. 14, he popped up a 3-wood only 188 yards. He might not have hit two shots like that in the same round since he was a golf prodigy on the Mike Douglas television show. With his name seldom on the leader boards, his presence no longer intimidates his rivals, especially the new wave of winning younger pros. In showing himself to be vulnerable off the course, he has become vulnerable on the course. In always trying to be even better, he has changed coaches before. He won eight majors, including three Masters, under Butch Harmon before they split. He hired Hank Haney and won six more majors, including two British Opens and two P.G.A. Championships, before their noisy breakup last year. But under Foley, Woods has come close to winning only once, a one-hole playoff loss to Graeme McDowell late last year. Haney said there was “a slip” in Woods’s work ethic their last three years together. Or is he suffering from paralysis by analysis, prompted by too many swing thoughts? His slump has prompted other questions. Is his left leg, which he limped on while winning the 2008 United States Open at Torrey Pines before needing knee surgery, bothering him? At 35, is he approaching burnout after three decades on display? Is he having difficulty fitting in time with his two young children under the terms of his divorce? And whatever happened to his promise, during his public confession more than a year ago, to respect the game more? After a poor shot out of a fairway bunker at Torrey Pines early this year, he uttered an expletive that was heard on television. At Dubai, he was fined an undisclosed amount by the European Tour for blatantly spitting on the green while lining up a putt. After other shots that have sailed off line, he has pounded his club into a manicured tee or fairway.  The PGA Tour doesn’t announce fines for misconduct, but it should. Especially when the world’s most famous golfer is the culprit. Otherwise, he appears to be getting away with it. Despite his current form, Tiger Woods remains the betting favorite of the Las Vegas and British oddsmakers for the Masters, at anywhere from 3-1 to 8-1. Not that the oddsmakers believe he will win; they know he will be the public’s favorite because once upon a time, he always deserved to be the favorite. But until proved otherwise, he is a different golfer now. And a different person.

Golf
Woods Tiger
Masters Golf Tournament
PGA Tour Inc


Going for That Presidential Look, but Trying Not to Overdo It

Abstract: LONDON — He stood in the shadow of the Temple of Hercules, held forth at the Élysée Palace and convened a one-man news conference here on Saturday outside No. 10 Downing Street, all with a simple aim: to make a one-term senator from Illinois look presidential to voters back home in America. But along the way to appearing presidential, did Senator Barack Obama cross a political line — as he and his advisers quietly feared, and some Republicans hoped — by coming across as too presumptuous? “In terms of raw politics, in the short-term there’s just as much downside as upside to a trip like this, even when it’s well executed,” Mr. Obama said in an interview as he flew here from Paris on the final leg of his trip. “People at home are worried about gas prices, they’re worried about mortgage foreclosures — and for a week they’re seeing me traipse around the world? It’s easy to paint that as somehow being removed from people’s day-to-day problems.” Leaning forward in his chair aboard a campaign plane freshly emblazoned with his logo, he added, “We thought it was worth the risk.” In many ways, as his journey ended here on Saturday, the answer to that question may prove crucial in gauging what effect, if any, his ambitious overseas trip will have in the final months of the presidential race on the people who will decide the election. This is one area where Republicans, who were generally bereft about the day-by-day dispatches of Mr. Obama’s international trip — if not about his candidacy generally — see an opportunity, if only a glimmer of one. While the country’s mood may favor Democrats, there has been no detectable flurry of swing voters rushing to Mr. Obama. The quandary for Mr. Obama is that while his trip clearly presented an opportunity for him — even many Republicans conceded that he seized it masterfully with eight days of appearances in troubled lands, meetings with foreign leaders and visits to soldiers — it also fueled the questions his critics have used to try to undercut him: whether he is arrogant and taking his election for granted. “With all the breathless coverage from abroad, and with Senator Obama now addressing his speeches to ‘the people of the world,’ I’m starting to feel a little left out,” Senator John McCain said in a radio address on Saturday. “Maybe you are too.” While his opponent was on this side of the Atlantic, Mr. McCain sought to tap into Mr. Obama’s storyline to avoid being overshadowed. He turned up in a German restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, the day Mr. Obama addressed a crowd of about 200,000 in Berlin. The Republican National Committee ran anti-Obama advertisements in Berlin, Pa., and other namesake villages in Wisconsin and New Hampshire. He also broadcast radio advertisements in London, Ohio, and London, W.Va., while Mr. Obama was here. “We’re in a very tight race, despite having a week of great press and John McCain having had a week of not-so-great press,” Mr. Obama said in the interview. “If that doesn’t keep you on your toes, I don’t know what will.” Seldom are presidential candidates afforded such a taste of the job for which they are applying. Mr. Obama settled quickly into the routine, shuttling from country to country for private meetings with more than two dozen world leaders and delivering the speech in Berlin to a crowd that was larger than many American cities in which he has campaigned. Even though Mr. Obama’s campaign intends to shelve his experiences abroad for now — the urgent matter at hand this week are trips to Iowa and Missouri, Florida and Texas — the worldly images are precisely what Mr. Obama hopes voters will begin internalizing in the coming months. “Even if the economy ends up being the dominant issue in the election,” he said, “when people go to the polling place in November, for them to have in the back of their mind, all right, here’s what it looks like for Obama to be in discussions with other heads of state.” Still, the challenge remained for Mr. Obama of trying to balance the positives and negatives that come with adoring comments from leaders like President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who declared: “Good luck to Barack Obama. If he is chosen, then France will be delighted.” In nearly every city on his eight-day trip, Mr. Obama awoke to find a newspaper with his photograph — and often several — on the cover. Yet by the time he reached the end of his travels here on Saturday, a moment of political reality set in with a headline in The Times of London that stated, “Obama’s capital tour loses him ground back home.” Asked on Saturday about his political fortunes, he said, “I wouldn’t even be surprised if in some polls we saw a little bit of a dip because we’ve been out of the country for a week.” The context of Mr. Obama’s abrupt rise — on the domestic and the international stage — came into clear view as he waved from the front step of No. 10 Downing Street shortly before lunchtime on Saturday, after a meeting and a stroll outdoors with Prime Minister Gordon Brown. At least 200 reporters and photographers awaited, with several shouting over one another: “Can we get a wave, sir? Mr. Obama, to your left!” It was a chaotic scene compared with his visit here as part of a Congressional delegation in 2005, when he stepped out in near obscurity with Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana. A dozen journalists were on hand, at least half of whom were waiting for someone else. This time, at least 20 aides and advisers to Mr. Obama watched from a short distance as he stood before the microphones. The size of the contingent easily matched one that accompanies a president on a typical foreign trip. While Mr. Obama said he knew the risks of “flying too close to the sun,” as he put it, his confidence has swelled since he claimed the Democratic nomination early last month. These days, his public statements and news conferences often contain four words — “in an Obama administration” — as he settles to find the proper measure of confidence and humility in his pitch to voters. “How do I avoid looking presumptuous?” Mr. Obama said in the interview. “I’m very much looking forward over the next three months to going back to Iowa, literally and figuratively, and spending a lot of time in town hall meetings, talking to voters and listening to voters.” The pictures of Mr. Obama’s travels dominated the political news of the last week. While Mr. McCain criticized his opponent’s itinerary, even though he took a similar foreign trip in March, other Republicans conceded that the imagery could help Mr. Obama shore up one of his leading shortcomings. “Americans are seeing a presidential Obama on the world stage, and he fits comfortably,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist who worked in the primary campaign for Mitt Romney. With the Normandy coast coming into view through the windows of Mr. Obama’s campaign plane as he left France, he smirked when asked to respond to criticism that he was on the cusp of measuring the White House drapes. Turning to an aide, he said, “Have you been measuring the drapes?” “We don’t buy our own hype,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re always looking around the corner.”

Presidential Election of 2008
Obama Barack
McCain John


Debate on Economy Muted as Germans Prepare to Vote

Abstract: FRANKFURT — The global financial crisis knocked Germany and the rest of the world badly off course this year. Yet as the country grinds toward national elections on Sunday, the campaign’s most notable absence has been a debate over the direction and future of Europe’s largest economy. Neither Chancellor Angela Merkel nor her challenger from the center-left, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has delved deeply into policy matters, preferring to focus on personality and politics. And neither is temperamentally inclined to attack the other. But the most important reason for the absence of any real economic debate, many analysts say, is that the stark choices Germany faces are bound to polarize a country that so deeply values consensus. Many economists see Germany as settling into a phase of slow growth or stagnation in the coming months and years. The export-oriented economy is struggling to find its place in a new global economic order in which other countries, notably the United States, will not have such a voracious appetite for Germany’s high-value industrial products, at least not anytime soon. For all the risks, however, a debate over possible corrective measures — revamping the German welfare state, changing tax policies or deregulation — offers little political benefit to either camp. “If one of them tries to break out of the mold, they don’t know whether they simply energize the other side without winning,” said Kurt Lauk, a former conservative member of the European Parliament who has advocated a more forceful discussion of economic issues. Mrs. Merkel seems likely to secure another term on the strength of her image as a kind of mother-protector. Her future coalition partner is in doubt, however. Her Christian Democrats are hoping to wiggle out of the “Grand Coalition” with Mr. Steinmeier’s Social Democrats that they reluctantly embraced four years ago. But that depends on whether Mrs. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, together with its preferred partner, the Free Democratic Party, clinches a narrow majority. Analysts broadly agree that a coalition with the Free Democrats would encourage Mrs. Merkel to embrace some traditional center-right policies, like tax cuts. But a serious debate over the shape of Germany’s economic order never got started during the campaign. In broad brush, economists and analysts said, that debate would have focused on the question of how to stimulate domestic consumption and the growth of the services sector after a long period of dependence on muscular manufacturing, whose bread and butter is exports. Although Germany edged out of recession over the summer, it exported 23.5 percent less in the first six months of this year than it did in 2008, when global growth was already slowing. Almost unanimously, economists expect a sharp increase in unemployment, now at 8.5 percent. So far, a combination of government programs and retraining has masked what is an increasingly idle work force. On a broader level, leaders at the Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh on Thursday and Friday will be preoccupied with how to rebalance the global economy so that some countries, notably the United States, spend less and save more, while others, like Germany and China, move in the opposite direction. The German contribution to the debate could have a center-right flavor to it, with calls for tax cuts that would reduce the heavy social insurance charges that make labor so expensive and stimulate employment in sectors like health care. But left-leaning politicians and economists argue that the years of meager wage settlements for German workers, which helped make the country’s exports so competitive, need to give way to fatter paychecks, so households can spend more.

Germany
Economic Conditions and Trends
Social Democratic Party (Germany)
Christian Democratic Union (Germany)
Group of Twenty
Merkel Angela
Steinmeier Frank-Walter


Teeth of Australopithecines Hold Clues to Social Structure

Abstract: Researchers studying the diet of human ancestors who lived two million years ago in southern Africa have unexpectedly come across a crucial clue to their social structure. The males never strayed far from home, and the females dispersed after puberty to neighboring groups. The pattern of female dispersal is not unexpected, since it is practiced by chimpanzees, the closest living species to humans, and by some hunter-gatherers. But social behavior does not fossilize, and any data on the subject is invaluable in reconstructing how human social structure evolved. “This is the first direct evidence that we have about the residence pattern of hominins,” said Bernard Chapais, a primatologist and expert on human social evolution at the University of Montreal. The evidence emerged from study of the fossil teeth of 19 australopithecines, the still apelike ancestors of the human lineage. The makeup of teeth can reflect local geography because some chemicals like strontium are drawn from rocks into plants, and then into tooth enamel when the plants are eaten. In australopithecines, the absorption of strontium continued until the teeth were completed around age 8. The researchers were measuring different versions, or isotopes, of strontium to see if the australopithecines traveled far from home in search of food. As the data rolled out of the measuring device, “we were at first disappointed,” said Julia Lee-Thorp of Oxford University, a member of the research team, “but we soon realized that we had found another prize.” This was that half the females had been born far away, whereas all the males had grown up locally , the team reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. The team was led by Sandi R. Copeland of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. In most mammals, the females stay in the home community and the males disperse after adolescence to avoid inbreeding. But chimpanzees and many human hunter-gatherer groups are unusual in following the opposite pattern. The reason may have to do with the aggressive territoriality of both species: A group of males who have grown up with one another is more cohesive and better at defending a territory against competitors. This obliges the females to be the gender that disperses. “It’s really nice to see there is biological continuity from chimpanzees to australopithecines,” said Joan B. Silk, an expert on primate social behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles. The joint ancestor of chimps and humans lived about five million years ago and is often assumed to have had a chimplike social structure, with a male hierarchy, promiscuous mating by the females and all-out war between neighboring bands. The central puzzle of human social evolution, in Dr. Chapais’s view, is to explain how promiscuity was replaced by the pair bond and aggressive relations were pushed up from the band level to that of the tribe, a group of bands tied together by the exchange of women. The australopithecines studied by Dr. Copeland’s team still had a somewhat chimplike social structure, Dr. Chapais said, because the pair bond did not evolve until the appearance of Homo erectus around 1.8 million years ago. The australopithecine fossils came from the Sterkfontein valley, and one of them has been dated to 2.2 million years ago. The pair bond, in his view, arose when human ancestors started to develop more dispersed sources of food and males increasingly guarded a group of females to protect both them and their own paternity. With the male around anyway, he could also help rear the children, which allowed for a longer period of juvenile dependence and hence for brain size to grow. The relatively small size of the australopithecine brain suggests that this process had not yet started, Dr. Chapais said. Another far-reaching consequence of the developing pair bond was that individuals could at last start to recognize their relatives, which chimpanzees mostly cannot do. So when females dispersed to neighboring groups, males from their home community could recognize their daughters or sisters, together with their in-laws, who had an equal interest in their children’s welfare. This transformed the neighboring group from an adversary to an ally, and the human social structure expanded to being that of a tribe. Friendly relations, in Dr. Chapais’s view, then allowed males as well as females to transfer, the pattern typical of hunter-gatherers today. “It is great to think that we might be in a position to begin dating such major events in our evolution,” he said of the new finding. The australopithecine fossils are few and precious, and researchers are reluctant to damage them in any way. In a new technique, a barely visible pit is blasted out of a tooth with a laser and the vaporized enamel is passed into a mass spectrometer, which measures the amount of strontium or any other element of interest. The researchers started out looking at carbon isotopes, which showed them that australopithecines had a highly variable diet. To determine whether that was because they ranged far and wide, the researchers then looked at strontium isotopes, the ratio of which varies according to the local geology. And this led to the discovery of the female dispersal pattern.

Research
Evolution
Teeth and Dentistry
Monkeys and Apes
Science and Technology


Hasselbeck Helps Seahawks Upset Saints

Abstract: SEATTLE — The Seattle Seahawks spent most of the week being derided as the worst team ever to enter the N.F.L. playoffs. History will remember these postseason interlopers for perpetrating one of the game’s biggest upsets. The surprising Seahawks, 7-9 in the regular season, beat the defending Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints , 41-36, on the strength of Matt Hasselbeck’s four touchdown passes, a spongy defense that stiffened at the right moments and the consistent cacophony of 66,336 spectators at Qwest Field. The Seahawks, suddenly recast as the best sub-.500 team in playoff history, will go on the road to play either the Atlanta Falcons or the Chicago Bears next weekend. “We’re not satisfied,” said tight end John Carlson, who caught two touchdown passes. “We’re not even .500 yet.” Running back Marshawn Lynch rumbled 67 start-and-stop yards for the game’s clinching touchdown with 3 minutes 22 seconds left to give Seattle a 41-30 lead. Breaking a half-dozen tackles as if he were made of soap, Lynch stomped out the growing gloom that accompanied the impending dusk as the Saints seemed positioned for a comeback. Seattle succumbed to another in a string of long scoring drives by quarterback Drew Brees and the Saints before Carlson captured the onside kickoff with 1:30 remaining. Coach Pete Carroll, in his first year with the Seahawks, raised his arms as the final seconds ticked away and fireworks shot off above the stadium. “We kind of expected to win,” Carroll said. “I know that sounds crazy, but we did expect to win. The fact that it happened, it’s just kind of like, we want to take it in stride and go to the next one.” The Seahawks were the first team with a losing record to make the playoffs in a nonstrike year. But they also had a division title, something the wild-card Saints (11-5) did not. That meant the Seahawks got to play at home amid some of the N.F.L.’s most vociferous fans and the Northwest’s chilly, damp weather. The Saints had mostly pressure on their side. They were the largest road favorite in postseason history (11 points) and a franchise that had never won a playoff road game. “I’ve been the heavy favorite,” Seattle receiver Brandon Stokley said two days before the game. “All of a sudden, you get in a heavy game, and it’s ‘Uh-oh. It’s not supposed to be like this.’ You start feeling the pressure. If we can battle with them, get that thing into the fourth quarter, then doubt starts creeping in their minds.” The Saints jumped to a quick 10-0 lead, and the game looked to be taking its expected, lopsided course. Hasselbeck threw an interception on his third pass. “Not exactly how you want to start a game,” he said. Carroll approached him on the sideline. You cannot win or lose the game in the first quarter, the coach said. The usually anemic Seahawks began moving the ball as if they had switched uniforms with the Saints’ dynamic offense between possessions. Hasselbeck soon led the Seahawks on a touchdown drive, capped by an 11-yard throw to Carlson that brought temporary equilibrium to the contest. Seattle outscored New Orleans by 34-10 from midway through the first quarter to the end of the third. Hasselbeck, who missed the last regular-season game and most of the one before it with a hip injury, completed 22 of 35 passes for 272 yards. “To come in in this atmosphere, with everything at stake, and to play like he did shows what a professional he is,” Stokley said. “And what a great quarterback he really is.” On paper, the game should not have been close. The Saints brought the league’s sixth-best offense (372.5 yards a game) and fourth-best defense (306.2 yards). The Seahawks were 28th in offense (297.8 yards) and 27th in defense (368.6 yards). The Seahawks lost all nine of their games by at least 15 points. None of their players made the Pro Bowl. All that was a preamble to a game as dizzying in its action as it was confounding in its outcome. With each move of the chains, Qwest Field rumbled with hope. With each touchdown, it quaked with belief. The Seahawks pulled ahead for the first time with 1:15 left in the second quarter. Hasselbeck lobbed a 45-yard touchdown pass to Stokley. Even the Saints’ spirited response — 11 plays, 77 yards and a short field goal on the half’s final play — could not dampen the sense that one of the N.F.L.’s more memorable games was unfolding. Hasselbeck’s prettiest completion may have been the touchdown that capped the first drive of the second half — a 38-yard lob over the shoulder of Mike Williams that sent fans into delirium. The Seahawks had a 31-20 lead. And the Saints seemed far, far from home, and last year’s Super Bowl. The Saints did not go meekly. Trailing by two touchdowns to start the fourth quarter, they punctuated an 87-yard drive with a 4-yard touchdown run by Julius Jones. Seattle’s lead was 34-27 with 13:11 left. The Seahawks punted after three plays. The Saints marched downfield again, only to be stopped inside the 10-yard line for the third time. Garrett Hartley kicked his third field goal of 26 yards or less. “Just imagine if we could have gotten one more touchdown, two more, out of those three stops,” said Brees, who completed 39 of 60 passes for 404 yards and 2 touchdowns. At the end of last season, Brees held his young son in his arms as confetti fell on the Super Bowl champions. This time, Hasselbeck beamed as his children cavorted on the field. In the locker room later, as Hasselbeck dressed, Carroll sat down next to him. The two spoke in whispers. Henry Hasselbeck, age 5, drew up plays on a nearby dry-erase board. The Seahawks — surprise, surprise — have more work to do.

Seattle Seahawks
New Orleans Saints
Football
Playoff Games


Digital Hearing Aids Offer Promise and Limits

Abstract: HEARING aids provide many benefits, but they do not restore hearing to normal, and that is a tough lesson to learn for many people who use them. “Regardless of how good they are, they never match the quality of your hearing at its best,” said William McKenna, a lawyer and former deputy district attorney in Westchester County, N.Y., who has been wearing hearing aids in both ears for nearly 20 years. “Recently my audiologist asked me how good my hearing was on a scale of 1 to 10. I said, 8 ½.” People who use hearing aids, on average, live with hearing loss for seven years before resigning themselves, usually around age 70, to using a device, according to the Hearing Loss Association of America. “You are in a position where you’ve been struggling, and you get tired of asking people to repeat themselves,” Mr. McKenna said. Most people with hearing loss eventually acknowledge that “the standard becomes hearing better than you heard before,” said Eduardo Bravo, an audiologist with Audio Help Associates in Manhattan. Today, baby boomers account for 10 million of the 31.5 million Americans with hearing loss, according to the Better Hearing Institute, a nonprofit educational organization, and many hearing experts attribute this to listening to overly loud rock music. “The noise exposure just builds up, and with baby boomers it’s been a lifetime of amplified music,” said John M. Burkey, director of audiology at the Lippy Group for Ear Nose and Throat, in Warren, Ohio. Most of these boomers are still in the work force and can’t afford not to hear. “I had to have the best hearing I could because I wanted to remain a psychologist,” said Teresa Cochran of Alexandria, Va., who has a cochlear implant in one ear but depends on a hearing aid in the other to augment her range of hearing. “I see patients six hours a day during weekdays, and I need to be alert to what they say.” Why do hearing aids fall short of restoring hearing to the equivalent of 20/20 vision? Because there is no cure for sensorineural hearing loss, by far the most common problem. It is caused by degeneration of the nerve cells, known as hair cells, that line the cochlea, the inner ear structure that looks like a snail. The hair cells transmit signals received from the bones in the middle ear to the auditory nerve, which sends them to the brain. Aging and exposure to noise cause hair cells to die off, starting with those that transmit high-frequency sounds like “s” and “t.” Medical science has not yet found a way to repair this nerve damage. “Birds and fish can regenerate their hair cells, and we’ve done it on frogs,” said Dr. John House, president of the House Ear Institute, a nonprofit research group in Los Angeles, which is working on hair-cell regeneration. “But taking a dead or damaged nerve and replacing it — that’s 5 or 10 years off.” Or even 20, in the view of Mr. Burkey, who is also the author of “Baby Boomers and Hearing Loss: A Guide to Prevention and Care.” Hair-cell regeneration is “going to be the future” of hearing technology, he said. Meanwhile, consumers expect the devices to work as well as glasses or contact lenses . But eyes pose a different problem, one that is more often readily solved. “There is a perfectly good optic nerve,” Dr. House said. “The only problem is that the focus is not perfect on the retina. Glasses focus the image on the retina.” With the ear, the problem is the nerve itself. But hearing aids can do a lot, especially for those with mild to moderate high-frequency loss, a group that encompasses most people who are hard of hearing. Digital technology allows fine-tuning to address the wearer’s specific loss rather than amplifying sounds indiscriminately, a common complaint about older hearing aids. Feedback cancellation eliminates most of the whistling that bedevils wearers and distracts many others at movies and concerts. Open-fit hearing aids, tucked discreetly behind the ear with an almost invisible plastic tube going into the canal, offer a more natural sound by allowing low-frequency sounds to penetrate the ear while amplifying the high-frequency ones. A telecoil, a small device that can be embedded in the hearing aid to eliminate feedback, can improve hearing on the telephone. And the entire package can be encased in colors or leopard-skin plastic for the fashion-forward. A problem that remains unresolved is background noise. While directional microphones reduce sounds from behind the wearer and amplify those in front, no technology can pull the one voice you want to hear from the babble of other voices. “Wearers get frustrated,” said Brenda Battat, associate executive director of the Hearing Loss Association of America. “Their reaction is, ‘I still can’t hear at a party, and I just spent $4,000 for these things.’ ” Because digital hearing aids are tiny computers that can be adjusted for subtle changes, wearers must keep returning to the audiologist who sold them the devices until they feel comfortable. Sometimes, the process takes months. Typically, the price of a hearing aid — $1,986 per ear on average in 2007, according to Hearing Aid Journal — includes two or three return visits to the audiologist during a 30- to 45-day trial period. Even after the trial period, many audiologists do not charge for adjustments. “We have a number of patients who come back and back,” said Dr. Bravo, the Manhattan audiologist. “We stay with them until they are happy.” Medicare does not pay for hearing aids, although it does cover cochlear implants. Coverage among insurers varies, but most do not pay for hearing aids. Dr. Cochran, the psychologist, suggested that people with hearing loss try to take control of their environments. She asks for a quiet table in restaurants and sits with her back to the wall to eliminate distracting noise behind her. And she reminds herself: “Your hearing becomes better, but it does not become perfect.”

Hearing Aids
Cochlear Implants
Elderly
Retirement
Medicine and Health


Google to Buy AdMob for $750 Million

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — In a push to expand its digital advertising empire to cellphones, Google has agreed to acquire AdMob, a fast-growing mobile advertising start-up, for $750 million in stock, the companies said Monday. AdMob is one of the top sellers of banner ads on iPhone applications and Web pages that can be retrieved from mobile phones. The acquisition could help establish Google as an early leader in the small but rapidly expanding mobile phone advertising business. “The deal shows that Google is serious about becoming a major player in the mobile advertising ecosystem,” said Neil Strother, an analyst with Forrester Research. “It puts Google in the front-runner position.” Mr. Strother and other analysts said that position could prove tenuous. The mobile advertising business, which has long been hailed as the next big thing, remains embryonic. Sales of mobile ads were just $160 million last year, according to the Kelsey Group, a market researcher, and the vast majority of it went to ads delivered by text message. By comparison, marketers spent more than $23 billion in online ads in 2008, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. The growing popularity of the iPhone and other powerful mobile devices ensures that mobile ads will become more ubiquitous, but predictions for the growth of the business vary widely. “We see mobile as a huge growth opportunity for us,” Susan Wojcicki, vice president for product management at Google, said in an interview. “We see an opportunity working with AdMob to really accelerate our efforts in an important industry for Google.” Google is already ahead of its rivals, Microsoft and Yahoo, in one segment of the mobile advertising business: ads linked to search queries. The acquisition of AdMob, whose ad clients include Procter & Gamble, Adidas and Land Rover, will help it expand into display ads. The all-stock deal is modest for Google, given its roughly $177 billion market value. But it is the company’s third-largest acquisition, behind the $3.1 billion deal last year for the advertising specialist DoubleClick and the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006. As Google’s core business of selling text ads has been slowing, the company has been looking for businesses that could bring new growth. It has focused in two areas in particular: display advertising, a business where it has lagged behind rivals like Yahoo, and mobile advertising. Google’s ambitious push into cellphones includes mobile applications like search and maps as well as the Android software for smartphones. AdMob also sells banners that appear inside apps made for smartphones running on Android, and the acquisition could help Google profit from that growing market. AdMob was founded by Omar Hamoui in 2006 while he was still a graduate student at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. The company is one of a few mobile advertising start-ups that analysts say have outsmarted the giants of Web advertising and established themselves as leaders in the emerging business. Analysts said that the others, which include JumpTap, Millennial Media and Quattro Wireless, are likely to draw the interest of Google rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo. “I suspect the market is ripe for consolidation,” said Noah Elkin, an analyst with eMarketer. AdMob has received $47 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and other investors and has about 140 employees. In an interview, Mr. Hamoui, who is chief executive, declined to disclose AdMob’s revenue but said that sales had more than doubled in the last year. Google said it hoped to close the acquisition in the next several months. The deal is likely to be reviewed by regulators, but Ms. Wojcicki said she expected it would be approved. “We think that mobile advertising is a very competitive area, and we don’t see a lot of regulatory concerns,” she said. Critics of Google’s rapid expansion, however, said they hoped the deal would face a thorough review. “We’ve reached a point in Google’s evolution in which Washington agencies and Congressional committees need to look more closely at the company’s dominance of Internet services,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who had opposed Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick.

AdMob
Smartphones
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures
Google Inc
Computers and the Internet
Online Advertising
Cellular Telephones


In Cookies and Coaxing, the Will of the Democrats Comes to Life

Abstract: NEVADA, Iowa — By midafternoon, Kathy Johnson was nervous. In a few hours, she would be chairwoman of Nevada 2, one of 1,781 Democratic caucuses in Iowa, and one of five in this town of 6,000 people, a 40-minute drive north of Des Moines. Turnout could be too high for her and her assistants to handle, Ms. Johnson worried. Local volunteers for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton asked and were told not to bring dinner for caucusgoers; in this county, only cookies and water were allowed. But earlier, at the Hy-Vee supermarket, Ms. Johnson noticed 15 shopping carts labeled with the candidate’s name. Ms. Johnson was worried about a face-off at the caucus entrance: what would she do, extract a sandwich from someone’s mouth? Also, Ms. Johnson had no idea for whom she would vote. 5:30 P.M. The Clinton people arrived with sandwiches, along with supermarket cookies and chips. Ms. Johnson compromised: they could serve them just outside the caucus room. Ginger Primrose, Mrs. Clinton’s precinct captain here, had a glossy little spiral-bound book from the campaign, neatly tabbed with talking points. The book started with a page called Your Story, with a space for Ms. Primrose to write her own arguments. Ms. Primrose’s page was blank. After that, there was a page for each other Democratic candidate, with instructions on how to lure his supporters if his group were not large enough to stand (each candidate needed to win at least 15 percent of the caucusgoers in the room; otherwise the group would disperse). “Chris Dodd’s supporters are standing with him because they’re looking for someone with experience, someone who will end the war in Iraq and restore America’s standing in the world,” the book read. And then, the refrain, repeated on each candidate’s page: “You need to show them” — referring to up-for-grab caucusgoers — “how Hillary is similar.” Taken as a whole, the book made the argument that Mrs. Clinton was like every other candidate in the field. Meanwhile, the team from Senator Barack Obama arrived. Pat Zierke, his precinct captain, set out her cookies — these were homemade — a few feet from the Clinton snacks, on a table she had covered with a lace cloth. She also had Chex Mix in a cut-glass bowl and a dogeared, autographed copy of Mr. Obama’s “Dreams From My Father,” just for luck. There were no snack tables for any of the other candidates. 7:00 P.M. Inside the brightly lighted elementary school lunchroom where the caucus would take place, 109 people had checked in. (In 2004, Nevada 2 had 80). Ms. Johnson began the proceedings by asking how many people were first-time caucusgoers. About half raised their hands. It was time to break into candidate groups. Because there were 109 people here, each group needed 17 people to be viable. 7:20 P.M. The space under the sign for Senator Christopher J. Dodd was empty. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. had five caucusgoers. But all eyes were on Gov. Bill Richardson’s group, which had 14 members, three short of a delegate. “Go with your heart tonight, and your mind!” exclaimed Sherry Swihart, 54, a teacher in Des Moines, as she tried to urge her neighbors into her just-slightly undersize group. Harold Swihart, her husband and the Richardson precinct captain, said he had received no instructions as to which candidate his group should support if it were not viable. Ms. Johnson, the still-undecided caucus chairwoman, thought she would join their camp. “I have some friends who are Richardson people,” she said hesitantly. “I have been a Richardson supporter at one moment in time.” She said she would like her caucus to have more than three viable candidates. The Richardson group, still short in number, was along the wall next to that for John Edwards. The first started to bleed into the second, to hugs and cheers. A few of the Richardson supporters drifted over to the Obama camp, as well. No one was shouting political arguments at each other; instead, friends and neighbors coaxed one another over, clapping one other on the back as they arrived. 7:33 P.M. The final count was in. The Edwards group had 41 members, the Obama group 38, the Clinton group 30. “What threw me over to Edwards as a candidate is his longstanding presence here in Iowa and his stance against the status quo,” said David Alt, 45, a veterinarian. “We don’t need a return to the ’90s.” And where was Ms. Johnson, the chairwoman? “Edwards,” she said with a little smile. 8:20 P.M. Ms. Johnson and a few of the precinct captains and volunteers packed up. “It was fair, what the heck,” said Ms. Primrose, Mrs. Clinton’s captain. “We had some elderly people who didn’t show up,” said Betty Davis, another volunteer for Mrs. Clinton, explaining her third-place finish. “I’ve never seen such a young crowd,” she added. And no one has ever heard such clapping and cheering at a caucus, they all agreed. “What will I do with all of these?” asked Ms. Zierke, staring at stacks of untouched chocolate-chip cookies.

Iowa
Presidential Election of 2008
Democratic Party
Primaries
Elections
United States Politics and Government
Presidential Elections (US)
Clinton Hillary Rodham


Britons’ Fears Turn to Doubts About Climate Change

Abstract: LONDON — Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet? Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain , where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated. A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier. And London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery — not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned. “Before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this climate change problem is just dreadful,’ ” said Jillian Leddra, 50, a musician who was shopping in London on a recent lunch hour. “But now I have my doubts, and I’m wondering if it’s been overhyped.” Perhaps sensing that climate is now a political nonstarter, David Cameron, Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, was “strangely muted” on the issue in a recent pre-election debate, as The Daily Telegraph put it , though it had previously been one of his passions. And a poll in January of the personal priorities of 141 Conservative Party candidates deemed capable of victory in the recent election found that “reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” was the least important of the 19 issues presented to them. Politicians and activists say such attitudes will make it harder to pass legislation like a fuel tax increase and to persuade people to make sacrifices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “Legitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem,” Ben Stewart, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said at the meeting of environmentalists here. “This is happening in the context of overwhelming scientific agreement that climate change is real and a threat. But the poll figures are going through the floor.” The lack of fervor about climate change is also true of the United States, where action on climate and emissions reduction is still very much a work in progress, and concern about global warming was never as strong as in Europe. A March Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 percent a year ago. Here in Britain, the change has been driven by the news media’s intensive coverage of a series of climate science controversies unearthed and highlighted by skeptics since November. These include the unauthorized release of e-mail messages from prominent British climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that skeptics cited as evidence that researchers were overstating the evidence for global warming and the discovery of errors in a United Nations climate report. Two independent reviews later found no evidence that the East Anglia researchers had actively distorted climate data, but heavy press coverage had already left an impression that the scientists had schemed to repress data. Then there was the unusually cold winter in Northern Europe and the United States, which may have reinforced a perception that the Earth was not warming. (Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a United States agency, show that globally, this winter was the fifth warmest in history.) Asked about his views on global warming on a recent evening, Brian George, a 30-year-old builder from southeast London, mused, “It was extremely cold in January, wasn’t it?” In a telephone interview, Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank and a climate change expert, said that the shift in opinion “hadn’t helped” efforts to come up with strong policy in a number of countries. But he predicted that it would be overcome, not least because the science was so clear on the warming trend. “I don’t think it will be problematic in the long run,” he said, adding that in Britain, at least, politicians “are ahead of the public anyway.” Indeed, once Mr. Cameron became prime minister, he vowed to run “the greenest government in our history” and proposed projects like a more efficient national electricity grid. Scientists have meanwhile awakened to the public’s misgivings and are increasingly fighting back. An editorial in the prestigious journal Nature said climate deniers were using “every means at their disposal to undermine science and scientists” and urged scientists to counterattack. Scientists in France, the Netherlands and the United States have signed open letters affirming their trust in climate change evidence, including one published on May 7 in the journal Science. In March, Simon L. Lewis , an expert on rain forests at the University of Leeds in Britain, filed a 30-page complaint with the nation’s Press Complaints Commission against The Times of London, accusing it of publishing “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information” about climate change, his own research and remarks he had made to a reporter. “I was most annoyed that there seemed to be a pattern of pushing the idea that there were a number of serious mistakes in the I.P.C.C. report, when most were fairly innocuous, or not mistakes at all,” said Dr. Lewis, referring to the report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Meanwhile, groups like the wildlife organization WWF have posted articles like “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” providing stock answers to doubting friends and relatives, on their Web sites. It is unclear whether such actions are enough to win back a segment of the public that has eagerly consumed a series of revelations that were published prominently in right-leaning newspapers like The Times of London and The Telegraph and then repeated around the world. In January, for example, The Times chastised the United Nations climate panel for an errant and unsupported projection that glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear by 2035. The United Nations ultimately apologized for including the estimate, which was mentioned in passing within a 3,000-page report in 2007. Then came articles contending that the 2007 report was inaccurate on a host of other issues, including African drought, the portion of the Netherlands below sea level, and the economic impact of severe storms. Officials from the climate panel said the articles’ claims either were false or reflected minor errors like faulty citations that in no way diluted the evidence that climate change is real and caused by human activity. Stefan Rahmstorf , a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, successfully demanded in February that some German newspapers remove misleading articles from their Web sites. But such reports have become so common that he “wouldn’t bother” to pursue most cases now, he added. The public is left to struggle with the salvos between the two sides. “I’m still concerned about climate change, but it’s become very confusing,” said Sandra Lawson, 32, as she ran errands near Hyde Park.

Global Warming
Research
Great Britain
Polls and Public Opinion


Senate Confirms 2 Fed Board Nominees

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday confirmed two nominees chosen by President Obama for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, overcoming Republican objections and bringing the seven-member board to full strength for the first time since 2006, before the economic crisis. The Harvard economist Jeremy C. Stein and the investment banker and lawyer Jerome H. Powell were confirmed easily after a morning of debate. The vote for Mr. Stein was 70 to 24 , and for Mr. Powell, 74 to 21 . Neither has widely known views on the central policy questions facing the Fed: whether to take more action to reduce unemployment or whether the economy is already at risk of a dangerous acceleration of inflation. For months, Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican and a member of the Banking Committee, held up the nominations, saying the two men would be “rubber stamps” for the policies of the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and, by implication, the Obama administration. Mr. Bernanke has already done more to increase economic growth and reduce unemployment than many of his conservative critics favor, while other critics — predominantly liberal — argue that he has not done enough. After JPMorgan Chase’s recently acknowledged trading losses, which raised questions about whether the Fed and other agencies had a tight enough hand on the regulatory reins, Senate Democratic leaders found enough votes to surmount objections from Mr. Vitter and others. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, explicitly linked the vote to the JPMorgan Chase matter, saying the bank had been behaving as if its business were a game of craps. In addition to setting interest rates based on the economy’s condition, the Fed also is one of the main regulators of financial businesses. Both of the new governors are experienced in financial regulation , Mr. Powell as a senior Treasury Department official under President George H. W. Bush, and Mr. Stein as an adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. Some Fed watchers have expressed concern that the institution has been operating below full capacity for so long. Mr. Obama had been slow to fill all of the vacancies, and Republicans had blocked some of his nominees. In 2010, Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, put a hold on the nomination of Peter A. Diamond, a Nobel laureate in economics, causing Mr. Diamond to withdraw last June. On Thursday, some senators expressed hope that the vote would lead to broader comity. For too long, said Senator Lamar Alexander, a Republican of Tennessee, being in the Senate had felt like “being invited to join the Grand Ole Opry and not being allowed to sing.” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said, “We hope it can set the tone for agreements well into the future, this year and in 2013 as well,” A White House statement expressed gratitude that “both parties have come together” for the votes on Mr. Stein and Mr. Powell. “Today’s broad bipartisan vote in the Senate reflects their deep knowledge of economic and monetary policy, as well as their distinguished backgrounds and unique experience,” it said. Opening the debate on the Senate floor, Mr. Vitter made clear that he opposed the candidates, and that he opposed the Fed’s monetary policy of low interest rates. “This Federal Reserve has set essentially a zero interest rate policy, an extremely easy policy for an extended period of time,” he said, calling it a “very dangerous policy.” On the regulatory front, Mr. Vitter said, approving the two new members would make it easier for the board to enact rules carrying out the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law and pushing “those regulations to the left, if you will.” The two nominees were confirmed by a voice vote of the Senate Banking Committee on March 29, and neither is controversial in his own right. But Senate Republicans have blocked many of Mr. Obama’s nominees, out of a broader opposition to his policies. Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, said he would vote to confirm the nominees, saying they were qualified even though he believed they were not as “hawkish” on inflation as he would like. Mr. Corker expressed hope that, if Mitt Romney won the presidential election, Democrats would not stand in the way when he nominated the next Fed chairman and vice chairman.

Powell Jerome H
Stein Jeremy C
Federal Reserve System
United States Economy
United States Politics and Government
Appointments and Executive Changes


To France From Israel: Lessons on Living With Terror

Abstract: JERUSALEM — For many Israelis, the horrifying images of a truck plowing through crowds for more than a mile in the French resort town of Nice struck a macabrely familiar chord. “We had tractors!” said Ami Zini, 49, who runs a boutique on the shopping street of the leafy German Colony neighborhood of Jerusalem. “One of them flipped over a bus with its bucket.” He was referring to a 2014 attack , by a Palestinian resident of the city, that killed an Israeli pedestrian. Nice was an even more direct, if far deadlier, echo of a 2011 rampage in which an Arab-Israeli man’s truck barreled down a Tel Aviv street for a mile, killing one and wounding 17. These followed a spate of attacks with heavy construction vehicles and cars as weapons in 2008. And since October, according to Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, at least 32 Palestinians have rammed vehicles into people at bus stops, intersections and military checkpoints. The French prime minister said after the Nice attack, the nation’s third mass killing in 18 months, that France “must live with terrorism.” That is what Israelis have been doing for decades, through the plane hijackings of the 1970s; the suicide bombers of the second intifada , or Palestinian uprising, which began in 2000; and the lone-wolf stabbings and shootings of the past 10 months. In Israel, ordinary citizens, security officials and experts feel they have seen it all and say they have adapted to a perennial, if ever-changing, threat. They speak of constantly staying alert, exercising caution and growing accustomed to what some may find to be intrusive levels of security, but essentially carrying on. “There were times when we were afraid to stop our cars at a red light next to a bus,” Mr. Zini, whose clothing store is named Rendezvous, to lend an air of French chic, recalled of the years in which buses were a frequent bombing target. “We live with terrorism. But we are not fearful. It is part of our daily routine.” That routine includes opening bags for a check and passing through metal detectors at train or bus stations, shopping malls and movie complexes. At the height of the suicide bombings, customers paid a small surcharge at cafes and restaurants to subsidize the cost of a guard at the door. Hundreds of armed civilian guards have been deployed to protect public transportation in Jerusalem in recent months amid the wave of attacks, which have been glorified by some Palestinians on social media. The guards stand at bus and light-rail stops, and hop on and off buses along main routes, with the same powers to search and arrest as the police. Israel has also invested hugely in intelligence, its tactics evolving as its enemies change theirs. Several psychological studies in Israel have found that people habituate quickly to threats, making adjustments to daily life — keeping children at home, for example, rather than sending them to summer camp — and adopting dark humor about the randomness of the threat. “If I don’t get blown up, I will meet you at Dizengoff Center in about 45 minutes,” a Tel Aviv bus rider told a friend over a cellphone, in a conversation overheard by Israeli psychologists researching the aftermath of the second intifada. The survey of 458 people, led by Yechiel Klar of Tel Aviv University, found that 55 percent had changed their behavior — spending less time outside the house, for instance, or making fewer long trips by public transportation. The other 45 percent said they had made no changes. A separate study, done in 2003-4 at Ben Gurion University, found that residents close to attack sites — in this case, those living in Israeli settlements then in the Gaza Strip — reported a lower sense of personal threat and stress than those in two other communities, one in a Tel Aviv suburb and one in a larger settlement near the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. The research suggested that the religious fervor of the Gaza residents might have been a key factor. Some Israeli politicians have been disparaging about what they view as European negligence in security matters. After the attacks in March in Brussels , for example, a senior minister, Israel Katz, said Belgium would not be able to fight Islamist terrorism “if Belgians continue eating chocolate and enjoying life and looking like great democrats and liberals.” In a radio interview on Sunday, Yaakov Perry, a former Shin Bet chief now in Parliament, recommended deeper intelligence supervision of neighborhoods “where Muslims, refugees, Daesh supporters of various sorts live,” using an Arabic acronym to refer to the Islamic State. He also suggested that the French police were complacent, referring to news reports that the driver in Nice had told officers he was delivering ice cream. “If the driver says he has ice cream, open the truck and check if he has ice cream,” Mr. Perry said. That the attack occurred at a mass gathering for Bastille Day, France’s national holiday, had Israelis shaking their heads. Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman, said that to secure a major event like Independence Day celebrations, when tens of thousands of people gather along the Tel Aviv seafront to watch an air and naval display, officers gather intelligence for weeks beforehand, and erect a 360-degree enclosure of the area, with layers of security around the perimeter. Main roads are typically blocked off with rows of buses, and smaller side streets with patrol cars. In addition to a large uniformed and undercover police presence, counterterrorism teams are strategically placed to provide a rapid response if needed. For intelligence gathering, Shin Bet has used a “basic coverage” method, which involves homing in on a particular neighborhood or population sector that is considered a potential security risk. The agency then builds an intimate system of surveillance and a network of local informers who can point to any sign of suspicious or unusual activity. Lior Akerman, a former Shin Bet division head, said that while an attack like the one in Nice could certainly happen in Israel, “it should be emphasized that the French, like the rest of the European countries, do not conduct themselves intelligence-wise in this way at all.” But several security experts acknowledged that with citizens in a democracy, including Israel’s large Arab minority, these methods of intelligence gathering — “neighbors informing on neighbors,” as one put it — can be difficult to balance with civil liberties. These measures are also less effective, they say, in trying to prevent individual attacks that are not affiliated with any organization and that at times appear to have erupted spontaneously. “The bad news is that even Israel doesn’t have good experience in preventing lone-wolf attacks,” said Boaz Ganor, who heads the International Institute for Counterterrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, “or local network attacks, because traditional intelligence is almost nonrelevant in those cases.” Shaul Shay, a former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, said Israelis at home and abroad were generally better prepared for terrorism than citizens of other Western societies. “Here we are living with it since childhood,” he said. Many here said that even if Israel’s security apparatus could not have prevented an attack like the one in Nice, they imagine it would have been ended far sooner — with many fewer casualties. “It would be impossible here because there is good security,” said Muhammad Anati, 18, a Palestinian resident of the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem. Inbal Berner, 37, an Israeli school librarian who was sipping an iced coffee at a nearby bus stop, gave voice to the new normal the French may now face. “I look around; I don’t go to crowded places if I don’t have to,” she said. It has been that way “forever,” Ms. Berner added, or at least since the bus bombings of more than a decade ago. Because while people do get used to terrorism to some extent, she said, “something always remains.”

France
Israel
Terrorism
Jerusalem
Shin Bet
Nice Attack