IHT Rendezvous: Environmental Warning Fatigue

Record levels of industrial smog? A dwindling number of fish in the world’s oceans? A 4° Celsius warming in global temperatures by the end of the century?

How about environmental warning fatigue?

Global concern for major environmental issues is at an all time low, according to the results of a global poll of more than 22,000 people in 22 countries, released earlier this week.

“Scientists report that evidence of environmental damage is stronger than ever — but our data shows that economic crisis and a lack of political leadership mean that the public are starting to tune out,” said Doug Miller, the chairman of GlobeScan, the company that carried out the study.

While respondents clearly still had grave environmental concerns, fewer people were “very concerned” about various environmental issues than at any point in the last 20 years. The sharpest decrease in global concern occurred over the last two years.

The issue of climate change, which 49 percent of respondents rated last year as “very serious” was the only exception to the general trend. Pollsters found that there was less concern between 1998 and 2003 than today.

Shortages of fresh water and water pollution were the highest global concern, with 58 percent of the respondents marking it as “very serious.”

Respondents were asked to rate seven different environmental issues – from climate change to loss of biodiversity – as being either a “very serious problem,” “somewhat serious problem,” “not very serious problem” or “not a serious problem at all.”

The latest numbers were gathered last summer in telephone and face-to-face interviews with participants in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Join our sustainability conversation. Do you take the environmental issues more seriously now than in the past? Do you find yourself tuning out?

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Jennifer Sultan Pleads Guilty to Selling Prescription Drugs

At the height of dot-com mania 13 years ago, Jennifer Sultan and a few colleagues sold their small technology company for $70 million in stock and cash. She and her boyfriend rented a large house in the Hamptons for the summer and bought a spacious loft near Union Square.

John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

Jennifer Sultan faced 15 years to life on the top charge against her, and a potential for more prison time on other counts.

In the years since, that temporary flush of wealth evaporated and Ms. Sultan, 38, developed an addiction to prescription painkillers.

On Friday, she sat handcuffed in a courtroom at State Supreme Court in Manhattan. In exchange for a promise of a four-year prison sentence, she pleaded guilty to selling prescription painkillers and conspiring to sell a firearm.

She was arrested last July and accused of being part of a ring that sold prescription drugs and guns. Four others arrested with Ms. Sultan had already pleaded guilty. One, Nicholas Mina, a former New York City police officer, agreed to serve more than 15 years in prison as part of a plea bargain under which he admitted stealing guns from his colleagues’ precinct house lockers and selling them. Mr. Mina was also addicted to prescription painkillers.

Though Ms. Sultan’s lawyer said she had hoped for less than four years, she faced 15 years to life in prison on the top count against her and the potential for more prison time on other charges. She said little in court but smiled broadly several times as she spoke quietly with her lawyer, Frank Rothman.

“She was happy to be done with it, but she was not happy with the sentence,” Mr. Rothman said afterward.

Ms. Sultan grew up in West Long Branch, N.J., five miles north of Asbury Park, and graduated from New York University in 1996. She and her boyfriend at the time, Adam Cohen, worked at a company, Live Online, that was an early pioneer in live streaming events on the Internet.

After the sale of Live Online, efforts by Ms. Sultan and Mr. Cohen to start other technology companies failed. Ms. Sultan explored other interests, including acupuncture and holistic health.

Early last year, a city narcotics investigator discovered an advertisement Ms. Sultan had placed on Craigslist offering prescription painkillers for sale. She and Mr. Cohen were still living in the penthouse loft near Union Square that they bought after the sale of Live Online.

Five times from February through June, she sold pills to an undercover officer, according to her indictment. One sale took place at the Starbucks on Union Square. In another, she sold 183 oxycodone tablets to the officer for $4,400 at a Starbucks in the Flatiron district near the school where she was studying acupuncture.

A separate investigation into the ring that sold stolen guns and pain medication picked up Ms. Sultan sending a text message to the man accused of being the ringleader, Ivan Chavez, saying she wanted to sell him a .357 Magnum handgun for $850, according to a separate indictment obtained by the Manhattan district attorney.

Mr. Chavez was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Ms. Sultan and Mr. Cohen, who was not accused of participating in the drug and guns ring, filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Last August, the bankruptcy judge ordered them to vacate the loft to allow a bankruptcy trustee to sell it. The 5,600-square-foot loft is still listed for sale at just under $6 million.

She has been incarcerated since her arrest in July because she was unable to raise $85,000 for bail. With credit for good behavior and time served since her arrest, Ms. Sultan could be released from prison in about two years.

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England Develops a Voracious Appetite for a New Diet

LONDON — Visitors to England right now, be warned. The big topic on people’s minds — from cabdrivers to corporate executives — is not Kate Middleton’s increasingly visible baby bump (though the craze does involve the size of one’s waistline), but rather a best-selling diet book that has sent the British into a fasting frenzy.

“The Fast Diet,” published in mid-January in Britain, could do the same in the United States if Americans eat it up. The United States edition arrived last week.

The book has held the No. 1 slot on Amazon’s British site nearly every day since its publication in January, according to Rebecca Nicolson, a founder of Short Books, the independent publishing company behind the sensation. “It is selling,” she said, “like hot cakes,” which coincidentally are something one can actually eat on this revolutionary diet.

With an alluring cover line that reads, “Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer,” the premise of this latest weight-loss regimen — or “slimming” as the British call “dieting” — is intermittent fasting, or what has become known here as the 5:2 diet: five days of eating and drinking whatever you want, dispersed with two days of fasting.

A typical fasting day consists of two meals of roughly 250 to 300 calories each, depending on the person’s sex (500 calories for women, 600 for men). Think two eggs and a slice of ham for breakfast, and a plate of steamed fish and vegetables for dinner.

It is not much sustenance, but the secret to weight loss, according to the book, is that even after just a few hours of fasting, the body begins to turn off the fat-storing mechanisms and turn on the fat-burning systems.

“I’ve always been into self-experimentation,” said Dr. Michael Mosley, one of the book’s two authors and a well-known medical journalist on the BBC who is often called the Sanjay Gupta of Britain.

He researched the science of the diet and its health benefits by putting himself through intermittent fasting and filming it for a BBC documentary last August called “Eat, Fast and Live Longer.” (The broadcast gained high ratings, three million viewers, despite running during the London Olympics. PBS plans to air it in April.)

“This started because I was not feeling well last year,” Dr. Mosley said recently over a cup of tea and half a cookie (it was not one of his fasting days). “It turns out I was suffering from high blood sugar, high cholesterol and had a kind of visceral fat inside my gut.”

Though hardly obese at the time, at 5 feet 11 inches and 187 pounds, Dr. Mosley, 55, had a body mass index and body fat percentage that were a few points higher than the recommended amount for men. “Given that my father had died at age 73 of complications from diabetes, and I was now looking prediabetic, I knew something had to change,” he added.

The result was a documentary, almost the opposite of “Super Size Me,” in which Dr. Mosley not only fasted, but also interviewed scientific researchers, mostly in the United States, about the positive results of various forms of intermittent fasting, tested primarily on rats but in some cases human volunteers. The prominent benefits, he discovered, were weight loss, a lower risk of cancer and heart disease, and increased energy.

“The body goes into a repair-and-recover mode when it no longer has the work of storing the food being consumed,” he said.

Though Dr. Mosley quickly gave up on the most extreme forms of fasting (he ate little more than one cup of low-calorie soup every 24 hours for four consecutive days in his first trial), he finally settled on the 5:2 ratio as a more sustainable, less painful option that could realistically be followed without annihilating his social life or work.

“Our earliest antecedents,” Dr. Mosley argued, “lived a feast-or-famine existence, gorging themselves after a big hunt and then not eating until they scored the next one.” Similarly, he explained, temporary fasting is a ritual of religions like Islam and Judaism — as demonstrated by Ramadan and Yom Kippur. “We shouldn’t have a fear of hunger if it is just temporary,” he said.

What Dr. Mosley found most astounding, however, were his personal results. Not only did he lose 20 pounds (he currently weighs 168 pounds) in nine weeks, but his glucose and cholesterol levels went down, as did his body fat. “What’s more, I have a whole new level of energy,” he said.

The documentary became an instant hit, which in turn led Mimi Spencer, a food and fashion writer, to propose that they collaborate on a book. “I could see this was not a faddish diet but one that was sustainable with long-term health results, beyond the obvious weight-loss benefit,” said Ms. Spencer, 45, who has lost 20 pounds on the diet within four months and lowered her B.M.I. by 2 points.

The result is a 200-page paperback: the first half written by Dr. Mosley outlining the scientific findings of intermittent fasting; the second by Ms. Spencer, with encouraging text on how to get through the first days of fasting, from keeping busy so you don’t hear your rumbling belly, to waiting 15 minutes for your meal or snack.

She also provides fasting recipes with tantalizing photos like feta niçoise salad and Mexican pizza, and a calorie counter at the back. (Who knew a quarter of a cup of balsamic vinegar dressing added up to a whopping 209 calories?)

In London, the diet has taken off with the help of well-known British celebrity chefs and food writers like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who raved about it in The Guardian after his sixth day of fasting, having already lost eight pounds. (“I feel lean and sharper,” he wrote, “and find the whole thing rather exhilarating.”)

The diet is also particularly popular among men, according to Dr. Mosley, who has heard from many of his converts via e-mail and Twitter, where he has around 24,000 followers. “They find it easy to work into their schedules because dieting for a day here and there doesn’t feel torturous,” he said, adding that couples also particularly like doing it together.

But not everyone is singing the diet’s praises. The National Health System, Britain’s publicly funded medical establishment, put out a statement on its Web site shortly after the book came out: “Despite its increasing popularity, there is a great deal of uncertainty about I.F. (intermittent fasting) with significant gaps in the evidence.”

The health agency also listed some side effects, including bad breath, anxiety, dehydration and irritability. Yet people in London do not seem too concerned. A slew of fasting diet books have come out in recent weeks, notably the “The 5:2 Diet Book” and “The Feast and Fast Diet.”

There is also a crop of new cookbooks featuring fasting-friendly recipes. Let’s just say, the British are hungry for them.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of the national healthcare organization in Britain. It is the National Health Service, not the National Health System. The article also misidentified the Balsamic product that has 209 calories per cup. It is Balsamic vinegar dressing, not Balsamic vinegar.

Read More..

England Develops a Voracious Appetite for a New Diet

LONDON — Visitors to England right now, be warned. The big topic on people’s minds — from cabdrivers to corporate executives — is not Kate Middleton’s increasingly visible baby bump (though the craze does involve the size of one’s waistline), but rather a best-selling diet book that has sent the British into a fasting frenzy.

“The Fast Diet,” published in mid-January in Britain, could do the same in the United States if Americans eat it up. The United States edition arrived last week.

The book has held the No. 1 slot on Amazon’s British site nearly every day since its publication in January, according to Rebecca Nicolson, a founder of Short Books, the independent publishing company behind the sensation. “It is selling,” she said, “like hot cakes,” which coincidentally are something one can actually eat on this revolutionary diet.

With an alluring cover line that reads, “Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer,” the premise of this latest weight-loss regimen — or “slimming” as the British call “dieting” — is intermittent fasting, or what has become known here as the 5:2 diet: five days of eating and drinking whatever you want, dispersed with two days of fasting.

A typical fasting day consists of two meals of roughly 250 to 300 calories each, depending on the person’s sex (500 calories for women, 600 for men). Think two eggs and a slice of ham for breakfast, and a plate of steamed fish and vegetables for dinner.

It is not much sustenance, but the secret to weight loss, according to the book, is that even after just a few hours of fasting, the body begins to turn off the fat-storing mechanisms and turn on the fat-burning systems.

“I’ve always been into self-experimentation,” said Dr. Michael Mosley, one of the book’s two authors and a well-known medical journalist on the BBC who is often called the Sanjay Gupta of Britain.

He researched the science of the diet and its health benefits by putting himself through intermittent fasting and filming it for a BBC documentary last August called “Eat, Fast and Live Longer.” (The broadcast gained high ratings, three million viewers, despite running during the London Olympics. PBS plans to air it in April.)

“This started because I was not feeling well last year,” Dr. Mosley said recently over a cup of tea and half a cookie (it was not one of his fasting days). “It turns out I was suffering from high blood sugar, high cholesterol and had a kind of visceral fat inside my gut.”

Though hardly obese at the time, at 5 feet 11 inches and 187 pounds, Dr. Mosley, 55, had a body mass index and body fat percentage that were a few points higher than the recommended amount for men. “Given that my father had died at age 73 of complications from diabetes, and I was now looking prediabetic, I knew something had to change,” he added.

The result was a documentary, almost the opposite of “Super Size Me,” in which Dr. Mosley not only fasted, but also interviewed scientific researchers, mostly in the United States, about the positive results of various forms of intermittent fasting, tested primarily on rats but in some cases human volunteers. The prominent benefits, he discovered, were weight loss, a lower risk of cancer and heart disease, and increased energy.

“The body goes into a repair-and-recover mode when it no longer has the work of storing the food being consumed,” he said.

Though Dr. Mosley quickly gave up on the most extreme forms of fasting (he ate little more than one cup of low-calorie soup every 24 hours for four consecutive days in his first trial), he finally settled on the 5:2 ratio as a more sustainable, less painful option that could realistically be followed without annihilating his social life or work.

“Our earliest antecedents,” Dr. Mosley argued, “lived a feast-or-famine existence, gorging themselves after a big hunt and then not eating until they scored the next one.” Similarly, he explained, temporary fasting is a ritual of religions like Islam and Judaism — as demonstrated by Ramadan and Yom Kippur. “We shouldn’t have a fear of hunger if it is just temporary,” he said.

What Dr. Mosley found most astounding, however, were his personal results. Not only did he lose 20 pounds (he currently weighs 168 pounds) in nine weeks, but his glucose and cholesterol levels went down, as did his body fat. “What’s more, I have a whole new level of energy,” he said.

The documentary became an instant hit, which in turn led Mimi Spencer, a food and fashion writer, to propose that they collaborate on a book. “I could see this was not a faddish diet but one that was sustainable with long-term health results, beyond the obvious weight-loss benefit,” said Ms. Spencer, 45, who has lost 20 pounds on the diet within four months and lowered her B.M.I. by 2 points.

The result is a 200-page paperback: the first half written by Dr. Mosley outlining the scientific findings of intermittent fasting; the second by Ms. Spencer, with encouraging text on how to get through the first days of fasting, from keeping busy so you don’t hear your rumbling belly, to waiting 15 minutes for your meal or snack.

She also provides fasting recipes with tantalizing photos like feta niçoise salad and Mexican pizza, and a calorie counter at the back. (Who knew a quarter of a cup of balsamic vinegar dressing added up to a whopping 209 calories?)

In London, the diet has taken off with the help of well-known British celebrity chefs and food writers like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who raved about it in The Guardian after his sixth day of fasting, having already lost eight pounds. (“I feel lean and sharper,” he wrote, “and find the whole thing rather exhilarating.”)

The diet is also particularly popular among men, according to Dr. Mosley, who has heard from many of his converts via e-mail and Twitter, where he has around 24,000 followers. “They find it easy to work into their schedules because dieting for a day here and there doesn’t feel torturous,” he said, adding that couples also particularly like doing it together.

But not everyone is singing the diet’s praises. The National Health System, Britain’s publicly funded medical establishment, put out a statement on its Web site shortly after the book came out: “Despite its increasing popularity, there is a great deal of uncertainty about I.F. (intermittent fasting) with significant gaps in the evidence.”

The health agency also listed some side effects, including bad breath, anxiety, dehydration and irritability. Yet people in London do not seem too concerned. A slew of fasting diet books have come out in recent weeks, notably the “The 5:2 Diet Book” and “The Feast and Fast Diet.”

There is also a crop of new cookbooks featuring fasting-friendly recipes. Let’s just say, the British are hungry for them.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of the national healthcare organization in Britain. It is the National Health Service, not the National Health System. The article also misidentified the Balsamic product that has 209 calories per cup. It is Balsamic vinegar dressing, not Balsamic vinegar.

Read More..

DealBook: Buffett’s Annual Letter Plays Up Newspapers’ Value

Over the last half-century, Warren E. Buffett has built a reputation as a contrarian investor, betting against the crowd to amass a fortune estimated at $54 billion.

Mr. Buffett underscored that contrarian instinct in his annual letter to shareholders published on Friday. In a year when Mr. Buffett did not make any large acquisitions, he bought dozens of newspapers, a business others have shunned. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has bought 28 dailies in the last 15 months.

“There is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job,” he wrote.

Those purchases, which cost Mr. Buffett a total of $344 million, are relatively minor deals for Berkshire, and just a small part of the giant conglomerate. Mr. Buffett bemoaned his inability to do a major deal in 2012. “I pursued a couple of elephants, but came up empty-handed,” he said. “Our luck, however, changed earlier this year.”

Mr. Buffett was making a reference to one of his largest-ever deals. Last month, Berkshire, along with a Brazilian investment group, announced a $23.6 billion takeover,of the ketchup maker H. J. Heinz.

Written in accessible prose largely free of financial jargon, Berkshire’s annual letter holds appeal far beyond Wall Street. This year’s dispatch contained plenty of Mr. Buffett’s folksy observations about investing and business that his devotees relish.

“More than 50 years ago, Charlie told me that it was far better to buy a wonderful business at a fair price than to buy a fair business at a wonderful price,” Mr. Buffett wrote, referring to his longtime partner at Berkshire, Charlie Munger.

Mr. Buffett also struck a patriotic tone, directly appealing to his fellow chief executives “that opportunities abound in America.” He noted that the United States gross domestic product, on an inflation-adjusted basis, had more than quadrupled over the last six decades.

“Throughout that period, every tomorrow has been uncertain,” he wrote. “America’s destiny, however, has always been clear: ever-increasing abundance.”

The letter provides more than entertainment value and patriotic stirrings, delivering to Berkshire shareholders an update on the company’s vast collection of businesses. With a market capitalization of $250 billion, Berkshire ranks among the largest companies in the United States.

Its holdings vary, with big companies like the railroad operator Burlington Northern Santa Fe and the electric utility MidAmerican Energy, and smaller ones like the running-shoe outfit Brooks Sports and the chocolatier See’s Candies. All told, Berkshire employs about 288,000 people.

The letter, once again, did not answer a question that has vexed Berkshire shareholders and Buffett-ologists: Who will succeed Mr. Buffett, who is 82, as chief executive?

Last year, he acknowledged that he had chosen a successor, but he did not name the candidate.

He has said that upon his death, Berkshire will split his job in three, naming a chief executive, a nonexecutive chairman and several investment managers of its publicly traded holdings.

In 2010, he said that his son, Howard Buffett, would succeed him as nonexecutive chairman.

Berkshire’s share price recently traded at a record high, surpassing its prefinancial crisis peak reached in 2007 and rising about 22 percent over the last year.

The company reported net income last year of about $14.8 billion, up about 45 percent from 2011. Yet the company’s book value, or net worth — Mr. Buffett’s preferred performance measure — lagged the broader stock market, increasing 14.4 percent, compared with the market’s 16 percent return.

Mr. Buffett lamented that 2012 was only the ninth time in 48 years that Berkshire’s book value increase was less than the gain of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. But he pointed out that in eight of those nine years, the S.& P. had a gain of 15 percent or more, suggesting that Berkshire proved to be a most valuable investment during bad market periods.

“We do better when the wind is in our face,” he wrote.

For Berkshire’s largest collection of assets, its insurance operations, the wind has been at its back. We “shot the lights out last year” in insurance, Mr. Buffett said.

He lavished praise on the auto insurer Geico, giving a special shout-out to the company’s mascot, the Gecko lizard.

Investors also keep a keen eye on changes in Berkshire’s roughly $87 billion stock portfolio. Its holdings include large positions in iconic companies like International Business Machines, Coca-Cola, American Express and Wells Fargo. He said Berkshire’s investment in each of those was likely to increase in the future.

“Mae West had it right: ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,’ ” Mr. Buffett wrote.

He also complimented two relatively new hires, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, who now each manage about $5 billion in stock portfolios for Berkshire. Both men ran unheralded, modest-size money management firms before Mr. Buffett plucked them out of obscurity and moved them to Omaha to work for him.

He called the men “a perfect cultural fit” and indicated that the two would manage Berkshire’s entire stock portfolio once he steps aside. “We hit the jackpot with these two,” Mr. Buffett said, noting that last year, each outperformed the S.& P. by double-digit margins.

Then, sheepishly, employing supertiny type, he wrote: “They left me in the dust as well.”

A former paperboy and member of the Newspaper Association of America’s carrier hall of fame, Mr. Buffett devoted nearly three out of 24 pages of his annual report to newspapers.

While Mr. Buffett has been a longtime owner of The Buffalo News and a stakeholder in The Washington Post Company, he told shareholders four years ago that he wouldn’t buy a newspaper at any price.

But his latest note reflects how much his opinion has turned. His buying spree started in November 2011, when he struck a deal to buy The Omaha World-Herald Company, this hometown paper, for a reported $200 million. By May 2012, he bought out the chain of newspapers owned by Media General, except for The Tampa Tribune. In recent months, he continued to express his interest in buying more papers “at appropriate prices — and that means a very low multiple of current earnings.”

“Papers delivering comprehensive and reliable information to tightly bound communities and having a sensible Internet strategy will remain viable for a long time,” wrote Mr. Buffett.

Mr. Buffett said in a telephone interview last month that he would consider buying The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., a paper that the Tribune Company is considering selling. But Mr. Buffett said he had not contacted Tribune executives.

“It’s solely a question of the specifics of it and the price,” he said about the Allentown paper. “But it’s similar to the kinds of communities that we bought papers in.”

Mr. Buffett has plenty of cash to make more newspaper acquisitions. To cover his portion of the Heinz purchase, Mr. Buffett will deploy about $12 billion of Berkshire’s $42 billion cash hoard. That leaves a lot of money for Mr. Buffett to continue his shopping spree for newspapers — and more major deals like Heinz.

“Charlie and I have again donned our safari outfits,” Mr. Buffett wrote, “and resumed our search for elephants.”

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The Lede: With Rodman Stunt, American Reality TV and North Korean Propaganda Fuse

Elements of American show business and North Korean propaganda briefly fused on Friday, when the former basketball star Dennis Rodman told reporters in Pyongyang that North Koreans “love” their new leader, Kim Jong-un. “And guess what?” the athlete turned reality TV star added, “I love him — the guy’s awesome.”

An Associated Press video report on the end of Dennis Rodman’s visit to North Korea.

Speaking with the regional knowledge of a man who seemed to believe less than 48 hours ago that the upscale Seoul neighborhood featured in the global pop hit “Gangnam Style” was not in South Korea but somewhere in the impoverished North, Mr. Rodman parted with these words of praise for the heir to the Kim dynasty: “Guess what? His grandfather and his father were great leaders.”

Unsurprisingly, the former Chicago Bull’s visit, along with three current Harlem Globetrotters and a crew from “Vice,” the HBO “news magazine series” that arranged the trip, was extensively covered on North Korean state television, which is no more averse to reporting on staged events as news than the producers of the American reality television shows Mr. Rodman now gets paid to spice up.

North Korean state television footage of Dennis Rodman and his traveling companions arriving in Pyongyang this week.

Footage of the party’s arrival in Pyongyang was broadcast on Wednesday, and Mr. Kim and Mr. Rodman’s watching an exhibition game together, before adjourning to the leader’s palace for sushi, was a featured news item on Thursday.

A news report from North Korean state television on Kim Jong-un and Dennis Rodman watching a basketball game together.

In newsrooms not owned and run by the North Korean government, though, there has been some debate about whether any of these stage-managed events could fairly be described as news.

According to the producers of “Vice,” their new television program — inspired by the “thinking man’s lad magazine” of the same name — promises to be “an honest approach to documentary journalism.” But you don’t have to be Werner Heisenberg to wonder if the fact that they orchestrated this “basketball diplomacy mission” so they could film it raises questions about whether they were observing and documenting life in North Korea as it is or bringing a new form of reality television to the isolated nation.

As readers who watched the observational documentary “Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times” might recall, the founder of Vice magazine who led its expansion into filmmaking, Shane Smith — who is featured in a promotion for the new series — explained to my colleague David Carr in 2010 that his approach was perhaps more like a form of extreme tourism than journalism. “I’m not a journalist,” he said during a particularly salty exchange. “I’m not there to report.”

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Gadgetwise Blog: How to Beat Some Facebook Scammers

You’ve probably seen those wildly popular Facebook postings that entice you to share something — like a photo of a bear sneaking up on a man — with the instructions, “Press Like and type the number 1 and see what happens.” These posts often list hundreds of thousands of responses.

If you’ve tried it, here’s what you saw happen: nothing. Behind the scenes something is happening, though. With each click, a scammer gets a little closer to cashing in.

The most thorough explanation I’ve seen of how this deception works comes from Daylan Pearce, whose job title is Search Lead at Next Digital, described as Australia’s largest independent digital agency, in Melbourne.

Somewhat simplified, here’s how it works. There is a thriving business in selling Facebook pages. The idea is that a page builds an audience, then essentially sells that audience to someone else. It’s a practice Facebook opposes, but has limited control over.

If a company can buy that audience, its “edge rank” will increase. Edge rank — a term people like Mr. Pearce use, but which Facebook doesn’t officially acknowledge — measures how often someone’s posts show up in other people’s news feeds. “So,” Mr. Pearce said, “a page that has 50,000 likes will have greater exposure on people’s news feeds than a page with only 10,000.”

Edge rank is based on several factors, chief among them affinity, weight and decay, Mr. Pearce said. Affinity is largely based on the number of likes. Weight is based on what accompanies those likes. “A ‘like’ isn’t worth as much as a comment and a comment isn’t worth as much as a ‘share,’” he said.

Decay relates to the age of the post. More views, likes and shares over more time increases edge rank.

Facebook did not quarrel with the basics of Mr. Pearce’s explanation, but said it’s more complicated.

These scam posts are designed to do three things. Get you to like, comment and share the post. It’s a recipe to make it go viral, which takes care of decay.

To hook you, the posts make an intriguing promise, or ask you to support a worthy cause – “like this and share it if you know of someone who has suffered from cancer.”

While you can’t stop people from such postings, you can keep them off your page and reduce the potential profit. You lower their edge rank when you report or at least hide the post.

To do that, hold your cursor over the post and an arrow should appear in the upper right corner. Click it and a drop-down menu offers you the option of hiding or reporting the post.

The more often you report or hide these kinds of posts, the less often they will show up in your news feed.

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Well: A Rainbow of Root Vegetables

This week’s Recipes for Health is as much a treat for the eyes as the palate. Colorful root vegetables from bright orange carrots and red scallions to purple and yellow potatoes and pale green leeks will add color and flavor to your table.

Since root vegetables and tubers keep well and can be cooked up into something delicious even after they have begun to go limp in the refrigerator, this week’s Recipes for Health should be useful. Root vegetables, tubers (potatoes and sweet potatoes, which are called yams by most vendors – I mean the ones with dark orange flesh), winter squash and cabbages are the only local vegetables available during the winter months in colder regions, so these recipes will be timely for many readers.

Roasting is a good place to begin with most root vegetables. They sweeten as they caramelize in a hot oven. I roasted baby carrots and thick red scallions (they may have been baby onions; I didn’t get the information from the farmer, I just bought them because they were lush and pretty) together and seasoned them with fresh thyme leaves, then sprinkled them with chopped toasted hazelnuts. I also roasted a medley of potatoes, including sweet potatoes, after tossing them with olive oil and sage, and got a wonderful range of colors, textures and tastes ranging from sweet to savory.

Sweet winter vegetables also pair well with spicy seasonings. I like to combine sweet potatoes and chipotle peppers, and this time in a hearty lentil stew that we enjoyed all week.

Here are five colorful and delicious dishes made with root vegetables.

Spicy Lentil and Sweet Potato Stew With Chipotles: The combination of sweet potatoes and spicy chipotles with savory lentils is a winner.

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Roasted Carrots and Scallions With Thyme and Hazelnuts: Toasted hazelnuts add a crunchy texture and nutty finish to this dish.

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Carrot Wraps: A vegetarian sandwich that satisfies like a full meal.

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Rainbow Potato Roast: A multicolored mix that can be vegan, or not.

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Leek Quiche: A lighter version of a Flemish classic.

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Read More..

Well: A Rainbow of Root Vegetables

This week’s Recipes for Health is as much a treat for the eyes as the palate. Colorful root vegetables from bright orange carrots and red scallions to purple and yellow potatoes and pale green leeks will add color and flavor to your table.

Since root vegetables and tubers keep well and can be cooked up into something delicious even after they have begun to go limp in the refrigerator, this week’s Recipes for Health should be useful. Root vegetables, tubers (potatoes and sweet potatoes, which are called yams by most vendors – I mean the ones with dark orange flesh), winter squash and cabbages are the only local vegetables available during the winter months in colder regions, so these recipes will be timely for many readers.

Roasting is a good place to begin with most root vegetables. They sweeten as they caramelize in a hot oven. I roasted baby carrots and thick red scallions (they may have been baby onions; I didn’t get the information from the farmer, I just bought them because they were lush and pretty) together and seasoned them with fresh thyme leaves, then sprinkled them with chopped toasted hazelnuts. I also roasted a medley of potatoes, including sweet potatoes, after tossing them with olive oil and sage, and got a wonderful range of colors, textures and tastes ranging from sweet to savory.

Sweet winter vegetables also pair well with spicy seasonings. I like to combine sweet potatoes and chipotle peppers, and this time in a hearty lentil stew that we enjoyed all week.

Here are five colorful and delicious dishes made with root vegetables.

Spicy Lentil and Sweet Potato Stew With Chipotles: The combination of sweet potatoes and spicy chipotles with savory lentils is a winner.

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Roasted Carrots and Scallions With Thyme and Hazelnuts: Toasted hazelnuts add a crunchy texture and nutty finish to this dish.

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Carrot Wraps: A vegetarian sandwich that satisfies like a full meal.

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Rainbow Potato Roast: A multicolored mix that can be vegan, or not.

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Leek Quiche: A lighter version of a Flemish classic.

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Pictures From the Week in Business

Shari Lanning, assistant professor of anatomy at Ross University in the West Indies, a veterinary college, led a discussion with students as Georgia the dog was examined for a pain evaluation. They don’t teach much at veterinary school about bears, particularly the figurative kind, although debt as large and scary as any grizzly shadows most vet school grads, usually for decades. Nor is there much in the curriculum about the prospects for graduates or the current state of the profession. Neither, say many professors and doctors, looks very promising. The problem is a boom in supply (that is, vets) and a decline in demand (namely, for veterinary services). 

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The Lede: Video of Turkish Premier Comparing Zionism to Anti-Semitism and Fascism

One day after Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told a United Nations forum the world should consider Islamophobia a crime against humanity, “just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism,” his Israeli counterpart lashed back. “I strongly condemn the remarks made by Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey, comparing Zionism to fascism,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replied on Twitter.

I strongly condemn the remarks made by Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey, comparing Zionism to Fascism.This is a dark and false statement,

— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) 28 Feb 13

Video of Mr. Erdogan’s complete address to the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations forum in Vienna was posted online by the United Nations with simultaneous translation into English.

In his remarks, Mr. Erdogan bemoaned “a lack of understanding between religions and sects” and said that the way ahead was “emphasizing the richness that comes from diversity.” After he praised “countries which see cultural and ethnic differences not as a reason for division or conflict but as a richness,” he complained of what he called the world’s indifference to the suffering of Muslims in Syria and elsewhere.

About seven minutes into the video, Mr. Erdogan said:

Unfortunately the modern world has not passed the test when it comes to Syria. In the last two years, we have seen close to 70,000 people lose their lives, and every single day we see innocent children, women, civilians, killed. And the fact that the world has not reacted to this situation seriously injures the sense of justice. In the same way, rising racism in Europe is a serious, problematic area, vis-à-vis the Alliance of Civilizations project.

In addition to indifference vis-à-vis the Muslim countries, we also see harsh, offending, insulting behavior towards Muslims who live in countries other than their own, and this continues to be an inconscionable act that has been ongoing around the world. We should be striving to better understand the beliefs of others but instead we see that people act based on prejudice and exclude others and despiuse them. And that is why it is necessary that we must consider — just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism — Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.

Mr. Erdogan immediately went on to condemn those, including politicians, who use “the media or mass communication vehicles” for “provoking the sensitivities of a religion or a sect or a society.”

The Turkish prime minister has expressed his anger with Israeli policies in blunt terms at international forums in the past, most notably at Davos in 2009. He stormed off the stage at the end of a heated discussion of Israel’s Gaza offensive, after telling President Shimon Peres, “When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill.”

Video of an argument between Turkey’s prime minister and Israel’s president at Davos in 2009.

Relations between the countries suffered another blow in 2010, when Israeli commandos killed nine Turks during a bloody raid on the ship leading an effort to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza organized by a Turkish aid organization.

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Bits Blog: Senator John D. Rockefeller IV Introduces 'Do Not Track' Bill

Before his planned retirement from Congress at the end of next year, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat, intends to give American consumers more meaningful control over personal data collected about them online.

To that end, Mr. Rockefeller on Thursday introduced a bill called the “Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2013.”

The bill would require the Federal Trade Commission to establish standardized mechanisms for people to use their Internet browsers to tell Web sites, advertising networks, data brokers and other online entities whether or not they were willing to submit to data-mining.

The bill would also require the F.T.C. to develop rules to prohibit online services from amassing personal details about users who had opted out of such tracking.

Mr. Rockefeller proposed the same bill two years ago. But he did not push it in the Senate at the time because industry groups had pledged to voluntarily develop systems to honor the browser-based don’t-track-me flags. Last year, however, negotiations between industry groups and consumer advocates over how to execute these mechanisms essentially broke down and have since made little progress.

The new Rockefeller bill indicates that the senator believes the industry has not acted in good faith.

“The privacy of Americans is increasingly under assault as more and more of their daily lives are conducted online,” Mr. Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, wrote on Thursday in an e-mail sent to a reporter. “Industry made a public pledge to develop do-not-track standards that will truly protect consumer privacy — and it has failed to live up to that commitment. They have dragged their feet long enough.”

Industry representatives said that legislation was unnecessary because advertising networks and data brokers several years ago voluntarily introduced their own opt-out program for consumers, called Your AdChoices. Unlike the Do Not Track signals which would allow users to make a one-time decision about all online tracking from their own browsers, the industry program requires people to go to a site and individually select the companies, among several hundred, from whom they prefer not to receive marketing offers based on data-mining.

Stuart Ingis, a lawyer for the Digital Advertising Alliance, an industry consortium, said the program, which involves consumers installing individual cookies on their browsers, demonstrates that users already have choices about data collection.

“It’s a lot easier to use a system that is already built and works,” Mr. Ingis said.

Over the last few years, the number of companies that collect information about the reading habits, health concerns, financial capacity, search queries, purchasing patterns and other activities of online consumers has skyrocketed. Industry representatives argue that this benefits people because it enables companies to show them relevant ads, and that the ads themselves finance online sites and services that are free to consumers. Moreover, they say, the data collection is “anonymous” because online services typically use numerical customer codes, not real names or e-mail addresses, to track the behavior of individuals.

But consumer advocates warn that such profiling systems, which can collect thousands of details on nearly every adult in the United States, can be used to segment some people for preferential offers while relegating others to inferior treatment. Despite industry claims that online tracking is anonymous, a few computer scientists have reported that sites often leak information that can identify individuals, including names, addresses and other details, to third parties.

“Nowadays, there is an incredible proliferation of tracking,” said Dan Auerbach, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group in San Francisco. “Data brokers, companies that you never heard of, are collecting massive dossiers about you as you browse around the Web and, right now, there are no limitations on the collection or use of those dossiers.”

To give people greater control over their own surveillance online, the Federal Trade Commission in a report on consumer privacy last March urged industry groups to adopt Do Not Track mechanisms by the end of 2012. In fact, the major browsers — Firefox from Mozilla, Google’s Chrome, and the more recent iterations of Internet Explorer — already offer the don’t-track-me buttons. When these options are turned on, they send out signals to sites, and third parties like ad networks operating on those sites, that certain users do not want to have their information collected.

But industry groups and consumer advocates have been at odds for more than a year over how “Do Not Track” mechanisms should be presented to users and how online services should respond to the signals. In the absence of legislation or industry consensus, companies are free to ignore those user preferences.

Some browsers have responded to this standstill by taking matters into their own hands and blocking third-party tracking cookies, as my colleague Somini Sengupta reported this week.

But Mr. Rockefeller’s bill indicates that legislative action could pre-empt voluntary industry measures.

“This is a signal that Senator Rockefeller is serious about getting Do Not Track done,” said David C. Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown Law. Until last month, Mr. Vladeck served as director of the bureau of consumer protection at the F.T.C. “I think industry writ large – browser companies, advertising networks, data brokers – are going to understand that he is serious about getting across the finish line.”

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Doctor and Patient: Why Failing Med Students Don’t Get Failing Grades

Tall and dark-haired, the third-year medical student always seemed to be the first to arrive at the hospital and the last to leave, her white coat perpetually weighed down by the books and notes she jammed into the pockets. She appeared totally absorbed by her work, even exhausted at times, and said little to anyone around her.

Except when she got frustrated.

I first noticed her when I overheard her quarreling with a nurse. A few months later I heard her accuse another student of sabotaging her work. And then one morning, I saw her storm off the wards after a senior doctor corrected a presentation she had just given. “The patient never told me that!” she cried. The nurses and I stood agape as we watched her stamp her foot and walk away.

“Why don’t you just fail her?” one of the nurses asked the doctor.

“I can’t,” she sighed, explaining that the student did extremely well on all her tests and worked harder than almost anyone in her class. “The problem,” she said, “is that we have no multiple choice exams when it comes to things like clinical intuition, communication skills and bedside manner.”

Medical educators have long understood that good doctoring, like ducks, elephants and obscenity, is easy to recognize but difficult to quantify. And nowhere is the need to catalog those qualities more explicit, and charged, than in the third year of medical school, when students leave the lecture halls and begin to work with patients and other clinicians in specialty-based courses referred to as “clerkships.” In these clerkships, students are evaluated by senior doctors and ranked on their nascent doctoring skills, with the highest-ranking students going on to the most competitive training programs and jobs.

A student’s performance at this early stage, the traditional thinking went, would be predictive of how good a doctor she or he would eventually become.

But in the mid-1990s, a group of researchers decided to examine grading criteria and asked directors of internal medicine clerkship courses across the country how accurate and consistent they believed their grading to be. Nearly half of the course directors believed that some form of grade inflation existed, even within their own courses. Many said they had increasing difficulty distinguishing students who could not achieve a “minimum standard,” whatever that might be. And over 40 percent admitted they had passed students who should have failed their course.

The study inspired a series of reforms aimed at improving how medical educators evaluated students at this critical juncture in their education. Some schools began instituting nifty mnemonics like RIME, or Reporter-Interpreter-Manager-Educator, for assessing progressive levels of student performance; others began to call regular meetings to discuss grades; still others compiled detailed evaluation forms that left little to the subjective imagination.

Now a new study published last month in the journal Teaching and Learning in Medicine looks at the effects of these many efforts on the grading process. And while the good news is that the rate of grade inflation in medical schools is slower than in colleges and universities, the not-so-good news is that little has changed. A majority of clerkship directors still believe that grade inflation is an issue even within their own courses; and over a third believe that students have passed their course who probably should have failed.

“Grades don’t have a lot of meaning,” said Dr. Sara B. Fazio, lead author of the paper and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who leads the internal medicine clerkship at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “‘Satisfactory’ is like the kiss of death.”

About a quarter of the course directors surveyed believed that grade inflation occurred because senior doctors were loath to deal with students who could become angry, upset or even turn litigious over grades. Some confessed to feeling pressure to help students get into more selective internships and training programs.

But for many of these educators, the real issue was not flunking the flagrantly unprofessional student, but rather evaluating and helping the student who only needed a little extra help in transitioning from classroom problem sets to real world patients. Most faculty received little or no training or support in evaluating students, few came from institutions that had remediation programs to which they could direct students, and all worked under grading systems that were subjective and not standardized.

Despite the disheartening findings, Dr. Fazio and her co-investigators believe that several continuing initiatives may address the evaluation issues. For example, residency training programs across the country will soon be assessing all doctors-in-training with a national standards list, a series of defined skills, or “competencies,” in areas like interpersonal communication, professional behavior and specialty-specific procedures. Over the next few years, medical schools will likely be adopting a similar system for medical students, creating a national standard for all institutions.

“There have to be unified, transparent and objective criteria,” Dr. Fazio said. “Everyone should know what it means when we talk about educating and training ‘good doctors.’”

“We will all be patients one day,” she added. “We have to think about what kind of doctors we want to have now and in the future.”

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Doctor and Patient: Why Failing Med Students Don’t Get Failing Grades

Tall and dark-haired, the third-year medical student always seemed to be the first to arrive at the hospital and the last to leave, her white coat perpetually weighed down by the books and notes she jammed into the pockets. She appeared totally absorbed by her work, even exhausted at times, and said little to anyone around her.

Except when she got frustrated.

I first noticed her when I overheard her quarreling with a nurse. A few months later I heard her accuse another student of sabotaging her work. And then one morning, I saw her storm off the wards after a senior doctor corrected a presentation she had just given. “The patient never told me that!” she cried. The nurses and I stood agape as we watched her stamp her foot and walk away.

“Why don’t you just fail her?” one of the nurses asked the doctor.

“I can’t,” she sighed, explaining that the student did extremely well on all her tests and worked harder than almost anyone in her class. “The problem,” she said, “is that we have no multiple choice exams when it comes to things like clinical intuition, communication skills and bedside manner.”

Medical educators have long understood that good doctoring, like ducks, elephants and obscenity, is easy to recognize but difficult to quantify. And nowhere is the need to catalog those qualities more explicit, and charged, than in the third year of medical school, when students leave the lecture halls and begin to work with patients and other clinicians in specialty-based courses referred to as “clerkships.” In these clerkships, students are evaluated by senior doctors and ranked on their nascent doctoring skills, with the highest-ranking students going on to the most competitive training programs and jobs.

A student’s performance at this early stage, the traditional thinking went, would be predictive of how good a doctor she or he would eventually become.

But in the mid-1990s, a group of researchers decided to examine grading criteria and asked directors of internal medicine clerkship courses across the country how accurate and consistent they believed their grading to be. Nearly half of the course directors believed that some form of grade inflation existed, even within their own courses. Many said they had increasing difficulty distinguishing students who could not achieve a “minimum standard,” whatever that might be. And over 40 percent admitted they had passed students who should have failed their course.

The study inspired a series of reforms aimed at improving how medical educators evaluated students at this critical juncture in their education. Some schools began instituting nifty mnemonics like RIME, or Reporter-Interpreter-Manager-Educator, for assessing progressive levels of student performance; others began to call regular meetings to discuss grades; still others compiled detailed evaluation forms that left little to the subjective imagination.

Now a new study published last month in the journal Teaching and Learning in Medicine looks at the effects of these many efforts on the grading process. And while the good news is that the rate of grade inflation in medical schools is slower than in colleges and universities, the not-so-good news is that little has changed. A majority of clerkship directors still believe that grade inflation is an issue even within their own courses; and over a third believe that students have passed their course who probably should have failed.

“Grades don’t have a lot of meaning,” said Dr. Sara B. Fazio, lead author of the paper and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who leads the internal medicine clerkship at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “‘Satisfactory’ is like the kiss of death.”

About a quarter of the course directors surveyed believed that grade inflation occurred because senior doctors were loath to deal with students who could become angry, upset or even turn litigious over grades. Some confessed to feeling pressure to help students get into more selective internships and training programs.

But for many of these educators, the real issue was not flunking the flagrantly unprofessional student, but rather evaluating and helping the student who only needed a little extra help in transitioning from classroom problem sets to real world patients. Most faculty received little or no training or support in evaluating students, few came from institutions that had remediation programs to which they could direct students, and all worked under grading systems that were subjective and not standardized.

Despite the disheartening findings, Dr. Fazio and her co-investigators believe that several continuing initiatives may address the evaluation issues. For example, residency training programs across the country will soon be assessing all doctors-in-training with a national standards list, a series of defined skills, or “competencies,” in areas like interpersonal communication, professional behavior and specialty-specific procedures. Over the next few years, medical schools will likely be adopting a similar system for medical students, creating a national standard for all institutions.

“There have to be unified, transparent and objective criteria,” Dr. Fazio said. “Everyone should know what it means when we talk about educating and training ‘good doctors.’”

“We will all be patients one day,” she added. “We have to think about what kind of doctors we want to have now and in the future.”

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High & Low Finance: Report Lays Out Plan to Reduce Government Role in Home Financing

Can the American mortgage market ever function again without Uncle Sam guaranteeing that lenders will be repaid?

It is amazing just how few people think it can.

“For the foreseeable future, there is simply not enough capacity on the balance sheets of U.S. banks to allow a reliance on depository institutions as the sole source of liquidity for the mortgage market,” stated a report on the American housing market this week, issued by a group that was filled with members of the housing establishment.

The panel, which included Frank Keating, the president of the American Bankers Association and a former governor of Oklahoma, does not see that as an indictment of the American banking system, which would much rather trade leveraged derivatives than keep a lot of mortgage loans on its books.

“Given the size of the market and capital constraints on lenders, the secondary market for mortgage-backed securities must continue to play a critical role in providing mortgage liquidity,” added the report, issued by a housing commission formed by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a group that was begun by former Senate majority leaders from both parties. The group thinks investors will not be willing to finance enough mortgages — particularly 30-year fixed-rate loans — without a government guarantee.

The report does an excellent job of analyzing the history of the American housing finance system, as well as looking at the government’s efforts over the years to promote and subsidize rental housing. It calls for changes in those policies as well, aimed at assuring that those with very low incomes “are assured access to housing assistance if they need it.”

But those rental proposals are unlikely to lead to legislation any time soon, said Mel Martinez, one of four co-chairmen of the housing panel. Mr. Martinez, a former Republican senator from Florida and housing secretary under President George W. Bush, said in an interview that any proposal calling for spending government money, as this one does, would face tough sledding in Congress.

But he said it was possible that changes in the housing finance system, which is widely criticized on both sides of the aisle, had a better chance of getting approval.

Certainly, one principle enunciated by the panel will get wide support: “The private sector must play a far greater role in bearing housing risk.” But the details show that the panel still thinks sufficient money can be found for housing only if Uncle Sam remains the ultimate guarantor for most home mortgages.

Currently, the government backs about 90 percent of newly issued mortgages, more than ever before. The proportion fell in the years leading up to 2007 as subprime loans proliferated and then soared after that market collapsed. Since then, the Federal Housing Administration has expanded its role in backing home loans on the low end of the scale. But most mortgages are purchased by either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that the government took over after the housing bubble burst.

So-called jumbo mortgages, that is mortgages too large to qualify for purchase by Fannie or Freddie, account for most of the rest. Some mortgages are put into securitizations that have no government guarantee, but many jumbo mortgages end up being owned by the banks for the long term.

The F.H.A. appears to be more cautious than it used to be. The report notes that last year the average FICO score for an F.H.A. or Department of Veterans Affairs loan was close to 720 on a range of 300 to 850. That is about what the average Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac borrower had in 2001.

The commission, whose other co-chairmen were George J. Mitchell, the former Senate Democratic leader; Christopher S. Bond, a former Republican senator; and Henry Cisneros, who served as housing secretary under President Bill Clinton, wants to preserve the F.H.A., but orient it more to those who need the most help. It would phase out Fannie and Freddie — something that is politically necessary — but replace them with something that sounds sort of similar.

The new organization would be called a “public guarantor.” It would guarantee that investors in mortgage-backed securitizations would not lose money, much as Fannie and Freddie now do. But its responsibility would come after that of a “private credit enhancer,” which sounds like a monoline insurer that would make payments to securitization holders if the underlying mortgages were performing badly. That organization would be regulated by the public guarantor, and only after it goes broke — something that should happen only if housing prices fall more than they did in the recent crisis — would the public guarantor be responsible for making investors whole.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

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IHT Rendezvous: Eve Best Returns to the Globe, This Time as a Director

LONDON — The recent press conference announcing the 2013 season at Shakespeare’s Globe on one level seemed like variations on an ongoing theme.

A onetime Falstaff at this address, Roger Allam, is returning to open the season as Prospero in “The Tempest,” directed by Jeremy Herrin, while the perennial favorite, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will be seen in May in a new staging, this time from the Globe’s artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole. The 2011 Olivier winner Michelle Terry (“Tribes”) will play Titania.

The international season that so galvanized the space for six weeks last spring will return in a greatly pared-down form, and there will be three new plays, including one, “Blue Stockings” by Jessica Swale, that tells of the first female students at Cambridge University.

But it’s the last in the trio of supernaturally charged Shakespeares that promises to break fresh theatrical ground. In what represents her first-ever stab (you’ll forgive the word in context) at directing, the much-laureled actress Eve Best will stage a new production in June of “Macbeth.” Joseph Millson and Samantha Spiro have signed on as the murderous couple at the play’s black, bleak heart.

What prompted one of the most accomplished stage performers of her generation (an actress with an Olivier Award and two Tony nominations) to make the shift? The answer was arrived at via a lengthy phone call to a remote island in Denmark, where Ms. Best, 41, is currently filming “Someone You Love” for the director Lars von Trier’s Zentropa production group. This film’s specific director is Pernille Fischer Christensen.

To hear Ms. Best describe it, she thought her time at the Globe was finished, at least for a while, following a triumphant 2011 production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which she played Beatrice opposite Charles Edwards’s no less witty and scintillating Benedick. (That staging opened within days of a contrasting commercial production of the same play, with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and trumped its starrier competitor hands down.)

“I love the Globe so much,” Ms. Best recalled, “and wanted any excuse to spend some time there, having played Beatrice which was just my most favorite part ever. But I did think I was sort of running out of parts to play for a little while until I get into the world of Cleopatra and those kinds of parts” — that’s to say, Shakespeare’s more senior women.

But all that was before Mr. Dromgoole surprised Ms. Best with an offer to take on the directing of the Shakespeare tragedy in which she had made her Globe debut in 2001, opposite Jasper Britton.

“I put myself forward to direct something thinking that they might say yes in a couple of years and that if they did say yes they might start me off with something light or something simpler or more obscure,” she said.

“I was not prepared for them to turn around and say, ‘Yes, all right, and what about “Macbeth?”’ Ms. Best continued, delight evident in her voice. “It took me back. My first response was: ‘Absolutely no way; you must be kidding!’”

The play is particularly challenging at the Globe. Open to the elements, the theater is a tricky fit for a text suffused with darkness, and it can be hard to focus the gathering intensity of the Macbeths’ toxic rise and fall.

“We are in the broad daylight and the open air,” Ms. Best acknowledged, “and that particular circular shape is certainly going to have a significant effect on the kind of production ours is. We can’t set it in the dark with candles, so we just have to embrace what it is that the Globe will give us: I’m very interested in just seeing the play as clearly as we possibly can and focusing on the human relationships within it.”

Mr. Dromgoole for his part said he thought Ms. Best would be able to meet the play head-on without lots of additional mumbo jumbo. “I wanted someone who I thought could just let [“Macbeth”] play itself rather than forcing it down a tunnel of darkness.”

As it happens, Ms. Best has firsthand knowledge of both central roles. In addition to acting Lady Macbeth at the Globe, she participated in workshops of the play in New York with the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in which she played the title role opposite Mr. Cumming’s Lady. Mr. Cumming is soon to open his own solo take on the play on Broadway.

(For those collecting “Macbeths,” the West End is now hosting the film actor James McAvoy in a modern-dress, gory, commendably visceral version. That one, at the Trafalgar Studios, will have finished roughly two months before Ms. Best’s begins.)

“What’s really lovely about this play — and all Shakespeare plays obviously — is that they are so magnificently and eminently flexible,” said Ms. Best, who was sounding in no way deterred by other productions arriving before hers. “They can encompass 6 or 8 or 10 productions all going on at the same time, all equally fascinating, all equally interesting, with all kinds of different approaches.”

Nor was she sounding spooked by a famously hexed play that has on occasion brought disaster in its wake. Whereas theater lore, for instance, often insists that those involved with this text refer to it as “the Scottish play,” Ms. Best was having none of that.

“I’ve been saying it like mad,” she said. “If we’re going to be working on it for two months, life’s too short to be worried.”

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Bits Blog: Yahoo Issues a Statement on Work-at-Home Ban

In a front-page article in The New York Times on Tuesday morning, Catherine Rampell and I wrote about Yahoo’s new policy banning employees from working remotely. The company declined to comment for that article, but on Tuesday afternoon, it issued a statement about the ban against work-at-home arrangements.

“This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home,” the statement said. “This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.”

A company spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the statement, saying, “We don’t discuss internal matters.”

But based on information from several Yahoo employees, what that statement means is that Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s new chief executive, is in crisis mode, and she believes the policy is necessary to get Yahoo back into shape.

The employees spoke anonymously because they are not allowed to discuss internal matters.

The company also seems to be trying to distance itself from the broader national debate over workplace flexibility, and from criticism that the new policy is disruptive for employees who have family responsibilities outside work.

The work ethic at Yahoo among some workers has deteriorated over time, the Yahoo employees said, and requiring people to show up is a way to keep an eye on them and re-energize the troops. If some of the least productive workers leave as a result, the thinking goes, all the better.

Some employees have abused the former policy permitting work at home to the point of founding start-ups while being on salary at Yahoo, said the Yahoo employees and others who have worked at the company.

Several business analysts said that if work-at-home arrangements don’t work, it is generally a management problem.

Yahoo’s culture and employee morale have dissolved as it has fallen behind hotter tech companies. And, business analysts say, those are two things that are difficult to repair without having employees present in the same place.

Still, Ms. Mayer has said many times that one of her top priorities for the company is to recruit the most talented engineers and other employees. Even if requiring people to show up is the only way to repair Yahoo’s culture, it could result in losing valuable employees.

And even if Yahoo’s broader work-at-home policy needed revision, the internal memo announcing the new policy struck some as tone-deaf by implying that employees should avoid staying at home even once in a while when there are extenuating circumstances.

“For the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” it said.

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Global Health: After Measles Success, Rwanda to Get Rubella Vaccine

Rwanda has been so successful at fighting measles that next month it will be the first country to get donor support to move to the next stage — fighting rubella too.

On March 11, it will hold a nationwide three-day vaccination campaign with a combined measles-rubella vaccine, hoping to reach nearly five million children up to age 14. It will then integrate the dual vaccine into its national health service.

Rwanda can do so “because they’ve done such a good job on measles,” said Christine McNab, a spokeswoman for the Measles and Rubella Initiative. M.R.I. helped pay for previous vaccination campaigns in the country and the GAVI Alliance is helping to finance the upcoming one.

Rubella, also called German measles, causes a rash that is very similar to the measles rash, making it hard for health workers to tell the difference.

Rubella is generally mild, even in children, but in pregnant women, it can kill the fetus or cause serious birth defects, including blindness, deafness, mental retardation and chronic heart damage.

Ms. McNab said that Rwanda had proved that it can suppress measles and identify rubella, and it would benefit from the newer, more expensive vaccine.

The dual vaccine costs twice as much — 52 cents a dose at Unicef prices, compared with 24 cents for measles alone. (The MMR vaccine that American children get, which also contains a vaccine against mumps, costs Unicef $1.)

More than 90 percent of Rwandan children now are vaccinated twice against measles, and cases have been near zero since 2007.

The tiny country, which was convulsed by Hutu-Tutsi genocide in 1994, is now leading the way in Africa in delivering medical care to its citizens, Ms. McNab said. Three years ago, it was the first African country to introduce shots against human papilloma virus, or HPV, which causes cervical cancer.

In wealthy countries, measles kills a small number of children — usually those whose parents decline vaccination. But in poor countries, measles is a major killer of malnourished infants. Around the world, the initiative estimates, about 158,000 children die of it each year, or about 430 a day.

Every year, an estimated 112,000 children, mostly in Africa, South Asia and the Pacific islands, are born with handicaps caused by their mothers’ rubella infection.

Thanks in part to the initiative — which until last year was known just as the Measles Initiative — measles deaths among children have declined 71 percent since 2000. The initiative is a partnership of many health agencies, vaccine companies, donors and others, but is led by the American Red Cross, the United Nations Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Unicef and the World Health Organization.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 27, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the source of the vaccine and some financing for the campaign. The vaccine and financing is being provided by the GAVI Alliance, not the Measles and Rubella Initiative.

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Global Health: After Measles Success, Rwanda to Get Rubella Vaccine

Rwanda has been so successful at fighting measles that next month it will be the first country to get donor support to move to the next stage — fighting rubella too.

On March 11, it will hold a nationwide three-day vaccination campaign with a combined measles-rubella vaccine, hoping to reach nearly five million children up to age 14. It will then integrate the dual vaccine into its national health service.

Rwanda can do so “because they’ve done such a good job on measles,” said Christine McNab, a spokeswoman for the Measles and Rubella Initiative. M.R.I. helped pay for previous vaccination campaigns in the country and the GAVI Alliance is helping to finance the upcoming one.

Rubella, also called German measles, causes a rash that is very similar to the measles rash, making it hard for health workers to tell the difference.

Rubella is generally mild, even in children, but in pregnant women, it can kill the fetus or cause serious birth defects, including blindness, deafness, mental retardation and chronic heart damage.

Ms. McNab said that Rwanda had proved that it can suppress measles and identify rubella, and it would benefit from the newer, more expensive vaccine.

The dual vaccine costs twice as much — 52 cents a dose at Unicef prices, compared with 24 cents for measles alone. (The MMR vaccine that American children get, which also contains a vaccine against mumps, costs Unicef $1.)

More than 90 percent of Rwandan children now are vaccinated twice against measles, and cases have been near zero since 2007.

The tiny country, which was convulsed by Hutu-Tutsi genocide in 1994, is now leading the way in Africa in delivering medical care to its citizens, Ms. McNab said. Three years ago, it was the first African country to introduce shots against human papilloma virus, or HPV, which causes cervical cancer.

In wealthy countries, measles kills a small number of children — usually those whose parents decline vaccination. But in poor countries, measles is a major killer of malnourished infants. Around the world, the initiative estimates, about 158,000 children die of it each year, or about 430 a day.

Every year, an estimated 112,000 children, mostly in Africa, South Asia and the Pacific islands, are born with handicaps caused by their mothers’ rubella infection.

Thanks in part to the initiative — which until last year was known just as the Measles Initiative — measles deaths among children have declined 71 percent since 2000. The initiative is a partnership of many health agencies, vaccine companies, donors and others, but is led by the American Red Cross, the United Nations Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Unicef and the World Health Organization.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 27, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the source of the vaccine and some financing for the campaign. The vaccine and financing is being provided by the GAVI Alliance, not the Measles and Rubella Initiative.

Read More..

Penney Reports Big Loss for Fourth Quarter

NEW YORK (AP) — Boy, it just wasn't J.C. Penney's year.

The mid-priced department store chain on Wednesday reported another much larger-than-expected loss in the fiscal fourth quarter on a nearly 30 percent plunge in revenue in the latest sign that shoppers aren't happy with the changes it's made in the past year.

The results mark a full year of massive quarterly losses and revenue declines that miss Wall Street estimates since J.C. Penney Co. began a turnaround strategy that included ditching most of its coupons and sales events in favor of everyday low prices, bringing in hipper designer brands such as Betsy Johnson and remaking outdated stores.

The quarterly performance also puts additional pressure on CEO Ron Johnson, the former Apple Inc. executive who was brought in about a year ago to turn the stodgy retailer that was losing money into a hip and profitable company that can compete with the likes of Macy's or H&M. In the past year since Johnson rolled out his plan, though, even once loyal customers have strayed away from the 1,100-store chain.

Teresa Cansell, for instance, used to make the 45-mile trek from her farm near Leon, Kan., to a Penney store in Wichita about once a month. But since Penney started making changes last year, she's only been twice. And on her latest trip in December, she walked out empty handed because she couldn't find a leather jacket she wanted.

"I loved the old J.C. Penney. I liked the coupons," Cansell, 53, said. "I used to go to Penney every time I got them in the mail. I would buy a ton of stuff."

Penney's results show that other shoppers feel the same way. During the fourth quarter that ended Feb. 2, Penney's revenue at stores opened at least a year — a figure the retail industry uses to measure of a store's health — dropped 31.7 percent.

That's on top of hefty drops in the previous three quarters of 26.1 percent in the third, 21.7 percent in the second and 19 percent in the first. And it's steeper than the decline of 26.1 percent Wall Street had expected.

Penney, based in Plano, Texas, also widened its loss to $552 million, or $2.51 per share, up from a loss of $87 million, or 41 cents per share a year ago. Excluding charges related to restructuring and management changes, Penney's adjusted loss for the quarter was $427 million, or $1.95 per share.

Total revenue dropped 28.4 percent to $3.88 billion. Analysts had expected a loss of 23 cents on revenue of $4.08 billion, according to research firm FactSet.

Penney's results for the full year reveal just how much the company is struggling to shore up its business.

For the fiscal year, Penney lost $985 million, or $4.49 per share, compared with a loss of $152 million, or 70 cents per share, in fiscal 2011. And the company's revenue fell nearly a quarter, or 24.8 percent, to $12.98 billion from the previous year's $17.26 billion.

"It's the worst performance I have ever seen by a company in one year," said Walter Loeb, an independent retail consultant.

Wall Street hasn't been any happier than Main Street with Penney's changes.

On the quarterly news of its quarterly results, which were reported after markets were closed for the day, Penney shares fell nearly 9 percent, or $1.89, to $19.27 in after-hour trading.

In total, investors, who initially sent Penney shares soaring 24 percent to about $43 after the company announced the everyday pricing plan in late January of last year, have pushed them down by about half since early last year and the company's ratings are in junk status.

It's not the way Johnson had hoped things would go when he took the top job at Penney in November 2012. A couple of months later, on Feb. 1 of last year, Johnson launched a new pricing that was designed to wean customers off the markdowns they'd become accustomed to, but that ultimately eat into profits.

He got rid of the nearly 600 sales Penney offered at various times throughout the year for a three-tiered strategy that permanently lowered prices on all items in the store by 40 percent, offered monthlong discounts on select items and periodic clearance events throughout the year. He also got rid of the word "sales" from the company's marketing and rolled out colorful ads that featured dogs and children.

But customers weren't responding to the changes, so Johnson had to tweak his strategy. The latest change started this month when Penney began adding back sales events. The company also started putting price tags on half of its merchandise that show customers how much they're saving by shopping at Penney. The chain also rolled out ads to showcase that people can save money by shopping there.

In addition to those changes, Johnson has said that Penney is starting to see some positive results from its makeover of stores with sectioned-off shops that feature different brands. The company said the reception has been warm to the 10 mini-shops that it rolled out this fall, including those for Levi's brand and Penney's new JCP line of casual clothes. Other brands, including Joe Fresh, will be rolled out in coming years.

The worry on Wall Street is that Johnson won't be able to turn around business fast enough to finance the transformation of its stores. But customers like Ricky Rodriguez, from Fort Worth, Texas, offer hope for Penney.

"I feel like the guy section is getting more hip," said the 27-year-old who recently bought a dress shirt for $25 at Penney. "I've been going there every other week."

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The Lede: Video of Fatal Balloon Crash in Egypt Captured by Witness

Last Updated, 5:59 p.m. As our colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, at least 18 people were killed and three were injured when a high-altitude balloon carrying tourists burst into flames near the Egyptian monuments at Luxor on Tuesday.

According to Egyptian media accounts, the pilot had been pulling a rope to stabilize the balloon as it landed in a field of sugar cane near the southern city of Luxor. A gas hose ripped, the fire began and the pilot and some passengers jumped from the burning balloon before it soared back up into the air and burst into flames.

The Guardian obtained distressing video of the disaster recorded by a passenger in another balloon nearby.

Mohamed Youssef, the pilot of the balloon from which the video of was shot, told the British newspaper that after the fire started when the balloon was close to the ground, “the pilot jumped because the fire was on his body. Another customer near the edge of the balloon jumped.” After those two people jumped from the basket beneath the balloon, Mr. Youssef said, the balloon rose as a result of the loss of weight and the heat. “At 10 to 15 meters, another customer jumped,” he added. “Then it reached 300 feet. Four people jumped. Then the basket separated from the envelope because of the heat. Then it falls to earth.” Mr. Youssef also described the disaster in an interview with the BBC.

The Egyptian television channel Youm 7 broadcast video of the wreckage, which was also shown in images posted online by witnesses.

Video Youm 7 footage of the crash scene.

An Egyptian witness, Mahmoud Mohamed Salem, took photographs of the crash scene, showing remnants of the balloon and the covered remains of victims, and posted them on Twitter and Facebook.

#الأقصر، أنفجار #المنطاد_السياحي http://t.co/zmCbPxtiQi

— Mahmoud Salem (@7loElkalam) 26 Feb 13

حثث السياح التى يتم العثور عليها ، ووضع من يجدوه فى أكياس سوداء #الأقصر، أنفجار #المنطاد_السياحي http://t.co/5libkBqmlR

— Mahmoud Salem (@7loElkalam) 26 Feb 13

Several other witnesses described the aftermath of the disaster to news organizations, including France 24 and The Telegraph.

An American photographer, Christopher Michel, was on a balloon trip nearby and posted a series of serene shots of the balloons above Luxor before the accident on his Web site and Twitter feed.

Balloon crash in Luxor of the balloon behind mine. Heard the explosion and saw smoke. 19 dead. #luxor

— christopher michel (@chrismichel) 26 Feb 13

Photos of all the balloons in the air. http://t.co/6CVRglpwny

— christopher michel (@chrismichel) 26 Feb 13

“I heard the explosion just prior to our landing,” Mr. Michel explained in a telephone interview with The Telegraph. He added that over the subsequent hour he and others near the scene started to realize there had been fatalities.

In responses to other photographers who disagreed with his decision to make his photographs on the balloon trip available to news organizations without charge, Mr. Michel wrote that he did not want to profit from the tragedy.

@SimonJacobs didn’t want to profit from this tragedy.

— christopher michel (@chrismichel) 26 Feb 13

@mustardphoto @simonjacobs I wasn’t covering. I was involved. Very very sad day.

— christopher michel (@chrismichel) 26 Feb 13

Hot air balloon accidents in Egypt have been documented before in videos and in this report in the Daily Telegraph in 2009.

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Gadgetwise Blog: App Smart Extra: More Slide Show Apps

Last week in App Smart I talked about the many apps that promise to turn photos from your smartphone or tablet’s digital photo album into an attractive photo slide show. These apps make looking at digital photos of a vacation, or perhaps an event like a wedding, into the modern equivalent of flipping through a photo album.

On iOS, one powerful app for creating dynamic photo slide shows is ProShow (free on iTunes). The interface is easy to use, and the app tries to do much of the fiddly stuff involved in creating a new slide show by offering you themes. These themes automatically adjust settings like special effects between slides and background images. You can manually change these settings later if you prefer. The app can even include video clips. The app does require that you sign up for the company’s services, free, but this minor inconvenience gives you access to its Web site. There you can edit your slide shows and also view them online — a great option for sharing your slide show efforts with friends.

One neat option for Android is the $1 app Slideshow 5000. This app creates an unusual kind of slide show: the photos look as if they are being tossed onto a table while a camera pans above the table’s surface. Each photo is animated as if it were really falling, and even casts a shadow. You can adjust the background image and turn each of your images into a faux Polaroid snap, and it’s easy to select the photos you want. You can even turn the photo slide show into your device’s live Android wallpaper. But the show it produces is more for casual fun; it’s not really ideal for sharing treasured memories.

A simpler option for Android is the free app Slideshow Bob. This app is limited to showing photos from folders on your device, and you can’t organize them inside the app because you’re limited to sorting the photos by parameters like date or title. It does, however, have some transition options, and when it’s displaying the slide shows, it does so elegantly.

Many apps for smartphones and tablets can create photo slide shows, but their quality varies widely. I found it hard to find sophisticated apps that offer a lot of slide show control on Android devices. Luckily, many have a free or “lite” edition, meaning you could try out several before you buy.

Quick call: Lego Galaxy Squad Bug Battle is a new free game for iOS devices. It’s a 2-D scrolling space shooter that combines all the gaming fun of this genre with Lego’s cute imagery. The mission is to save humans by squashing the alien bugs. It will keep you amused when you have the odd five minutes to spare.

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Advanced Breast Cancer May Be Rising Among Young Women, Study Finds

The incidence of advanced breast cancer among younger women, ages 25 to 39, may have increased slightly over the last three decades, according to a study released Tuesday.

But more research is needed to verify the finding, which was based on an analysis of statistics, the study’s authors said. They do not know what may have caused the apparent increase.

Some outside experts questioned whether the increase was real, and expressed concerns that the report would frighten women needlessly.

The study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, found that advanced cases climbed to 2.9 per 100,000 younger women in 2009, from 1.53 per 100,000 women in 1976 — an increase of 1.37 cases per 100,000 women in 34 years. The totals were about 250 such cases per year in the mid-1970s, and more than 800 per year in 2009.

Though small, the increase was statistically significant, and the researchers said it was worrisome because it involved cancer that had already spread to organs like the liver or lungs by the time it was diagnosed, which greatly diminishes the odds of survival.

For now, the only advice the researchers can offer to young women is to see a doctor quickly if they notice lumps, pain or other changes in the breast, and not to assume that they cannot have breast cancer because they are young and healthy, or have no family history of the disease.

“Breast cancer can and does occur in younger women,” said Dr. Rebecca H. Johnson, the first author of the study and medical director of the adolescent and young adult oncology program at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

But Dr. Johnson noted that there is no evidence that screening helps younger women who have an average risk for the disease and no symptoms. “We’re certainly not advocating that young women get mammography at an earlier age than is generally specified,” she said.

Expert groups differ about when screening should begin; some say at age 40, others 50.

Breast cancer is not common in younger women; only 1.8 percent of all cases are diagnosed in women from 20 to 34, and 10 percent in women from 35 to 44. However, when it does occur, the disease tends to be more deadly in younger women than in older ones. Researchers are not sure why.

The researchers analyzed data from SEER, a program run by the National Cancer Institute to collect cancer statistics on 28 percent of the population of the United States. The study also used data from the past when SEER was smaller.

The study is based on information from 936,497 women who had breast cancer from 1976 to 2009. Of those, 53,502 were 25 to 39 years old, including 3,438 who had advanced breast cancer, also called metastatic or distant disease.

Younger women were the only ones in whom metastatic disease seemed to have increased, the researchers found.

Dr. Archie Bleyer, a clinical research professor in radiation medicine at the Knight Cancer Institute at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland who helped write the study, said scientists needed to verify the increase in advanced breast cancer in young women in the United States and find out whether it is occurring in other developed Western countries. “This is the first report of this kind,” he said, adding that researchers had already asked colleagues in Canada to analyze data there.

“We need this to be sure ourselves about this potentially concerning, almost alarming trend,” Dr. Bleyer said. “Then and only then are we really worried about what is the cause, because we’ve got to be sure it’s real.”

Dr. Johnson said her own experience led her to look into the statistics on the disease in young women. She had breast cancer when she was 27; she is now 44. Over the years, friends and colleagues often referred young women with the disease to her for advice.

“It just struck me how many of those people there were,” she said.

Dr. Donald A. Berry, an expert on breast-cancer data and a professor of biostatistics at the University of Texas’ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said he was dubious about the finding, even though it was statistically significant, because the size of the apparent increase was so small — 1.37 cases per 100,000 women, over the course of 30 years.

More screening and more precise tests to identify the stage of cancer at the time of diagnosis might account for the increase, he said.

“Not many women aged 25 to 39 get screened, but some do, but it only takes a few to account for a notable increase from one in 100,000,” Dr. Berry said.

Dr. Silvia C. Formenti, a breast cancer expert and the chairwoman of radiation oncology at New York University Langone Medical Center, questioned the study in part because although it found an increased incidence of advanced disease, it did not find the accompanying increase in deaths that would be expected.

A spokeswoman for an advocacy group for young women with breast cancer, Young Survival Coalition, said the organization also wondered whether improved diagnostic and staging tests might explain all or part of the increase.

“We’re looking at this data with caution,” said the spokeswoman, Michelle Esser. “We don’t want to invite panic or alarm.”

She said it was important to note that the findings applied only to women who had metastatic disease at the time of diagnosis, and did not imply that women who already had early-stage cancer faced an increased risk of advanced disease.

Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, said he and an epidemiologist for the society thought the increase was real.

“We want to make sure this is not oversold or that people suddenly get very frightened that we have a huge problem,” Dr. Lichtenfeld said. “We don’t. But we are concerned that over time, we might have a more serious problem than we have today.”

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