IHT Rendezvous: In China, Fears Ours Would Be a 'One-Week Puppy'

BEIJING — China has many genuine pet lovers who care well for their dogs, but also many owners who don’t. The dog trade is virtually unsupervised and selling sick animals to unsuspecting customers is common. Animal shelters are full. The pet scene is tough. Buying a dog, which I write about in my latest Letter from China, can be a risky business.

“Some breeders just want to make money. Some are real animal lovers,” said Xing Xiaosi, an editor and marketer at goumin.com, a Web site for dog lovers in China that offers an interactive education and information platform.

“But in general, the situation isn’t that positive or optimistic,” she said.

A week after we bought our boxer puppy, Xiao Tongzhi, or Little Comrade, he fell ill.

Knowing the horror stories, I took him to the vet, feeling queasy.

Here’s how Ms. Xing described an all-too common scenario: “Many dogs are not well treated in kennels and if the owners feel the dog looks sick, they may give it an injection to stimulate it, and make it more active. It usually lasts for about a week. They hope to sell the dog within a week to make their money, but the dog may die very soon after the week. If the buyer takes it to an animal hospital for treatment it may live. But if he doesn’t want to spend the money, it won’t.”

The serious — possibly deadly — illnesses include puppy distemper, canine parvovirus and canine coronavirus, usually contracted in dirty and crowded conditions at kennels.

Was Little Comrade a “one-week puppy,” as they are called?

Thankfully, the vet said he had only caught a cold. He tested negative for parvovirus and distemper, though he had been exposed to coronavirus, she said. Beijing’s cold had turned even harsher the weekend we bought him in early December, with temperatures dropping below freezing.

Still, the vet didn’t take any chances, administering anti-distemper serum and large amounts of antibiotics. The bottom line was — all puppies are vulnerable to serious disease because of the conditions they are often kept in before sale.

Overall, animal rights awareness here is low, said Ms. Xing.

“Many people are not responsible towards their pets,” she said. “They buy them as if they were toys. Then, once they have them back home, they feel they are difficult to care for because they urinate and defecate and they feel that’s dirty.”

“Some people throw their pets away when the family gets a baby,” she added. “When they’re abandoned some people do try to look for a new home. But many just throw them into the streets.”

As a result, animal shelters in Beijing and other cities are full.

“People’s consciousness about keeping pets needs to be raised,” Ms. Xing said. “They need to feel responsible for their lives.”

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App Smart: Apps Help Extend the Battery Life of Devices

As you jet off on a winter vacation or a holiday season trip to see family, chances are you’ll face a 21st-century problem: mobile device battery angst. It’s a never-ending itch at the back of your thoughts. Though we all love to use our smartphones to stave off boredom, or to navigate a new city, every moment of use eats precious battery time. And, particularly during a journey, you never know when you will find power next.

Thanks to my job, I experience more battery angst than most people, so I have tried some battery life apps. You may too. But unlike other types of apps, you need to be wary with these.

Apple’s tight control of iOS means battery apps on the App Store, even popular ones like Battery Life Pro All-in-One (free on iTunes), cannot automatically control an iPhone or iPad’s real-time battery consumption. This is because of Apple’s own systems for protecting battery life and app security. That said, there are some supposed best practices you can follow to keep your iDevice’s battery healthy. And there are ways you can manually adjust your phone.

Battery Doctor Pro is one of the best-designed battery advice apps ($1 on iTunes). Its main page has a graph showing current battery charge and a grid of icons that activate submenus. The “status” submenu lists estimates of how much talk time your battery offers at that moment, how much video playback and so on. The “inspection” submenu offers a list of actions to help extend battery life — like disabling Wi-Fi. Some of these actions are accompanied with tips on how to carry them out. These are the really useful parts of the app, which teach you about your phone.

Another useful feature is the “maintain” submenu, which guides you through a process said to increase the performance of lithium batteries. This involves letting the battery run down to less than 20 percent charge, then charging it to 100 percent and letting it remain on charge for a while.

Battery Doctor Pro has a long list of other options, like a selection of themes — monitoring the device, keeping track of charges — but really these are just useless frills. For example, it may be interesting to use the “monitor” to see what code your phone is running, but it will not be of immediate use in extending battery life.

Battery Boost Magic (free on iTunes) is a very similar app, with a slightly flashier interface, and its battery life tips section may be more easily accessible for iDevice beginners. Essentially, however, this app works in the same way as Battery Doctor Pro. If you are really into these apps, Battery Life Pro All-in-One has a very flashy interface, although it too works the same way.

Android device owners face a different situation. Android apps can get access directly to some settings in the device to help preserve battery life without the user’s having to dive into them manually. But the more open design of Android itself presents a problem, because some apps can run in ways that really do eat up battery life.

The 2X Battery — Battery Saver app (free) is perhaps one of the more straightforward battery life apps for Android. It indicates how long a battery has left until it runs out and also offers alerts about whether power-hungry systems like GPS are turned on. Tapping these alerts takes you directly to Android’s settings so you can turn off services to save battery life. The app also has different modes, so it can automatically control a device’s behavior — turning Wi-Fi off for long intervals at night, for example, on the premise that you are not using the device while asleep.

Easy Battery Saver (free) is another good battery app. Its best feature is its main dashboard, which reports on current battery status and allows one-tap access to turn off or adjust Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, mobile data and screen brightness. Like 2X Battery, this app has different power-saving modes that try to minimize power-gulping activities like getting access to wireless networks. The app also shows graphically which apps seem to be using the most power. This data may prompt you to turn off an especially power-hungry app you may have forgotten is running, like a live wallpaper app.

The problem with these apps is that the next time you pick up your Android device, you might find you have turned off the very function you need. For example, you may have selected low screen brightness to save battery life, but suddenly find you need to read the screen in a brightly lighted room. Thus you may have to jump in and out of your battery saver apps to adjust their settings.

My advice would be to concentrate on free versions of these different apps on iOS or Android. Try them for a while to see if they help, or at least teach you good habits. But do not panic about battery apps; you bought your phone to use it, after all.

Quick Calls

YouSendIt, the popular cloud file-sharing service, has introduced an exclusive Windows Phone 8 app on the Nokia Lumia 920 and 820. The app has all the usual YouSendIt tricks about syncing and sharing files, and users can share files directly between phones using NFC. ... Etsy, the online store for handmade crafts, has finally released a dedicated Android app (free on Google Play) to help you shop among its wares.

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Health Centers Find Opportunity in Brownfields

PHILADELPHIA — The community health center rising on a derelict corner here in West Philadelphia never would have broken ground if not for the asbestos inside the building that was demolished to make way for it. Because of the contamination, Spectrum Health Services received a $2 million federal cleanup grant, the first piece of a $14 million construction financing puzzle.

When complete, the 36,000-square-foot building will provide a new home for a health center that has been squeezed into a deteriorating strip mall nearby for decades. It will also be the latest in a nationwide trend to replace contaminated tracts in distressed neighborhoods with health centers, in essence taking a potential source of health problems for a community and turning it into a place for health care. In recent years, health care facilities have been built on cleaned-up sites in Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Oregon and California.

“These health care providers are getting good at it,” said Elizabeth Schilling, policy manager for Smart Growth America, an advocacy group. “They have internalized the idea that this is an opportunity for them.”

Because these sites are contaminated, many qualify for government tax credits and grants, providing health centers with vital seed money to build. Community health centers, by design, exist to serve populations in poor neighborhoods, where there also tend to be available but contaminated properties like old gas stations, repair shops and industrial sites.

In fact, many of the country’s 450,000 contaminated sites, known as brownfields, are in poor neighborhoods, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. These tracts are disproportionately concentrated in poor communities because contaminated sites are more difficult to redevelop if property values are depressed. Banks are often reluctant to finance construction on a property that might require a costly cleanup.

“In communities where the real estate market isn’t working that well, you end up with a brownfield,” said Jody Kass, executive director of New Partners for Community Revitalization, a brownfield advocacy group.

“It’s a Catch-22,” said Phyllis B. Cater, chief executive of Spectrum Health Services. “The environmental issues are significant and yet there are scarce resources for communities to do the cleanup and remediation that’s required.”

But if the state or federal government provides the first piece of financing, other funders are more likely to fall into step.

Community health centers, in particular, are under pressure to grow. By 2015, the number of Americans who rely on community health centers for care is expected to double to 40 million from the 20 million who relied on the centers in 2010, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers. The Affordable Care Act allocated $11 billion to expand these centers. Of that, $1.5 billion was allotted to construction.

But finding a viable site is not always easy. It took Spectrum 15 years to find its new home on Haverford Avenue. The original building, an aging medical office, went up for auction in 2007 after the owner was arrested on a tax evasion charge. Spectrum bought the property for $650,000. Ms. Cater speculated that if Spectrum hadn’t bought the site, it most likely would have fallen into disrepair like the decaying row houses and the dilapidated bodega across the street that Spectrum hopes to redevelop eventually.

Spectrum currently occupies 10,000 square feet in a rundown strip mall four blocks away. The center is divided among three crowded spaces, so employees must walk outside to get from the medical offices to the billing department. The treatment rooms are dreary and cramped, with holes in the drywall and collapsing ceiling panels.

“I’ve seen better centers in rural Mississippi. This is not how you support a community,” Ms. Cater said.

When it opens next summer, the new, three-story center will have 34 exam rooms, eight dental rooms, a spacious community center and a full-service laboratory. It will also employ twice as many people as the current facility, adding 66 jobs to Spectrum’s payroll.

The 50-year-old building was in poor shape, but it was the presence of asbestos that allowed Spectrum to qualify for the critical first piece of financing: a $2 million brownfield redevelopment grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The organization also received an additional $2 million H.U.D. loan that was tied to the brownfield grant, a $1.7 million redevelopment grant from Pennsylvania and $3.45 million in other loans.

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Mandela Is Suffering From Lung Infection

Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In Soweto, an area of Johannesburg, a resident walked past images of Nelson Mandela, the 94-year-old former president of South Africa and hero of the antiapartheid movement, who remained hospitalized on Tuesday.

JOHANNESBURG — Former President Nelson Mandela, who has been hospitalized since Saturday, is suffering from a recurrence of a lung infection and is responding to treatment, the office of South Africa’s current president, Jacob Zuma, announced on Tuesday.

It was the first indication of Mr. Mandela’s medical condition since he was flown to Pretoria and taken to a hospital for unspecified tests over the weekend. It was his second hospitalization this year; in February he s checked into a hospital for tests to address a chronic stomach complaint, the government said at the time. He was released after minor diagnostic surgery, officials said.

Mr. Mandela, who is 94 and increasingly frail, was said by Mr. Zuma’s office to be “receiving appropriate treatment and he is responding to the treatment.”

The current stay in the hospital is the longest in recent memory, raising fears that Mr. Mandela’s condition is grave. Government officials have been upbeat about his prognosis while offering few details about his condition. Given his age, any infection is by its nature serious, medical experts say.

“I’m not sure we should press the panic button every single time a man of his age has the sniffles,” Mark Sonderup, vice chairman at the South African Medical Association, told The Mail and Guardian, a weekly newspaper, this week. “But unfortunately, we have to accept that simple health matters for a person of that age can turn very serious, very quickly.”

Mr. Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, has suffered from respiratory ailments for years, in part owing to the 27 years he spent in prison, most of it on Robben Island, working in a bleak quarry. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1988 and had fluid drained from his lungs.

Mr. Mandela retired from public life some years ago, and was last seen publicly at the celebrations for the World Cup soccer tournament, which South Africa hosted in 2010, although he receives frequent visits from old friends and visiting dignitaries.

In January 2011, he was hospitalized for an acute respiratory infection, and the news of that illness set off a panic about his health.

When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited South Africa in August, she stopped by his home in the rural village of Qunu to see him. In a photograph of the two of them, Mr. Mandela beamed his trademark grin, but looked frail seated in an armchair and dressed in a gray cardigan.

Mr. Mandela led the African National Congress to a resounding victory in the first fully democratic elections in South Africa’s history in 1994, after successfully negotiating a peaceful transition from white rule. Despite harsh treatments at the hands of the apartheid government, Mr. Mandela advocated forgiveness and reconciliation, making him an icon of peacemaking the world over. After a single term as president, Mr. Mandela retired from politics in 1999.

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DealBook: Wallflowers of Silicon Valley Get Asked to Dance

SAN FRANCISCO — After years of being wallflowers at Silicon Valley’s hottest tech conferences and Sean Parker’s after-parties, enterprise technology firms are now part of the “in” crowd.

The flameouts of social media stocks over the last year have left venture capital firms searching for a more measured approach to investing.

“Watching capital markets do what they just did — to Facebook, to Groupon, to Zynga — not a lot of people want to get over their skis,” said Hans Swildens, the managing director of Industry Ventures, who said he had not invested in consumer tech since 2010. “They want a nice ride down the hill.”

That means technology sectors — including mobile security, data analytics and storage companies and mobile payment systems — which previously elicited a shrug or a snooze, are suddenly finding millions of dollars of investments coming at them. Here’s a look at some of the more promising sectors.

SEALING THE LEAKS Increasingly, employees are taking sensitive corporate data home with them, frustrated with the limits of corporate technology and using their personal phones and tablets to work. That has created huge security and compliance headaches for chief information officers struggling to regain control over corporate data.

Enter the mobile security industry. Venture firms like Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel Partners are backing companies that wrap extra security around employees’ personal iPhones and Android devices.

Lookout, a start-up, has already been valued at $1 billion. Its software offers spyware and malware protection, helps locate lost or stolen phones and alerts users when their phones have connected to unencrypted Wi-Fi networks.

Okta, a start-up that helps employees at companies like LinkedIn and Pandora securely connect to their work applications from their personal devices, recently raised $25 million in fresh financing from Sequoia Capital.

The mobile security sector is also attracting merger deals. ZenPrise, a mobile security start-up, was acquired last week by Citrix, a maker of virtualization software. Investors expect similar acquisitions to follow.

STORING THE BYTES New storage methods will be critical to harnessing the gigabytes of data now pouring in from those mobile devices, as well as the Web, social networks and video. To accommodate the fire hose of information, companies have started revamping their data centers. Increasingly, they are moving away from expensive disk drives and slow backup solutions to the cheaper, high-speed flash memory used in iPhones and digital cameras.

“For 30 years, companies stored everything on spinning disks. Now they’re moving to a flash memory-based model,” said Joseph Ansanelli, a partner at Greylock Partners.

Investors are taking note. Fusion-io, a high-capacity flash memory company, had a successful public offering last year, then increased revenue by 82 percent, to $359 million, in its latest fiscal year. Its technology packs in storage capacity and speeds up database performance — a compelling proposition for Facebook, its largest customer, which now stores 2.7 billion “Likes” and 300 million photos a day, or roughly 105 terabytes of data each half-hour.

Flash storage sites like Pure Storage and Nimble Storage are now attracting millions in venture backing. Pure Storage emerged from stealth mode only a year ago and now serves a wide range of businesses, including Sierra Nevada Brewing and the city of Davenport, Iowa. In August, it raised $40 million, bringing its total funding to $95 million. A month later, Nimble Storage doubled its funding with $40 million in new capital from Sequoia, Accel and others.

CRUNCHING MOUNTAINS OF DATA Some of the hottest innovations are in large-scale data mining. With the right analytical tools, big data can be used to solve complex problems quickly.

“Companies now need to be able to do large-scale data mining and analysis in real time, as opposed to one guy in the I.T. department running a pricing analysis over the weekend,” said Rich Wong, a partner at Accel Partners.

Corporate demand for such high-powered analysis helped make Splunk, a data analytics company, one of 2012’s top-performing I.P.O.’s.

Investors searching for the next Splunk are now watching several start-ups. One front-runner is Cloudera, founded by alumni of Yahoo, Google, Oracle and Facebook. The firm incorporates Hadoop, an open-source software, to make complex data queries that help drug firms predict adverse drug side effects, or media companies target readers with relevant content.

DIGITAL WALLET It may not be the end of paper money just yet, but more and more commercial products are making mobile payments a huge business. In hindsight, eBay’s $1.5 billion acquisition 10 years ago of PayPal, the mobile payments company, was a bargain; PayPal is expected to generate $10 billion in payment volume this year. Square, the four-year-old mobile payments start-up run by a Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, has caught up. In November, it said that it, too, was now processing $10 billion in payments a year.

Both are also vying for attention with Google and Intuit, which offer mobile payment services, and, more recently, with big retail chains like Best Buy and Walmart, which said in August that it were working on ways for customers to pay with smartphones.

Even with brutal competition, venture capitalists are still eagerly throwing money at a new crop of start-ups like Braintree, which helps e-commerce sites process credit card payments, and Stripe, which offers a similar service for software developers.

In the last two years, Braintree has raised nearly $70 million. And, this year, Stripe raised $40 million from venture firms and angels, including some of the PayPal founders, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Max Levchin.

Smaller start-ups may have a harder time taking on PayPal and Square as those services become more ubiquitous. They will also have to compete on the security front, where even one hacker breach can lead to a lack of confidence among customers.

MOBILE CONCIERGE Apps, with the proverbial “touch of a button,” have converted phones into urban remote controls, allowing customers to order meals, errands, car rides, concert tickets and even cocktails.

The darling of the space is Uber, an app that lets users order a car service with the touch of a screen. The three-year-old start-up has already raised $50 million from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief.

Though Uber has run into battles with municipal transportation authorities, other firms, including Cabulous, Taxi Magic and Hailo, are jumping into the space.

Similarly, GrubHub’s app offers mobile convenience for food delivery. Hotel Tonight’s app does the same for same-day hotel bookings. Every day at noon, spontaneous or stranded travelers can find heavily discounted rates for hotel rooms that night. The two-year-old mobile app has already raised more than $35 million in financing.

A younger start-up, WillCall, lets users buy concert and theater tickets. And Coaster even lets users order, pay and tip for cocktails at bars with their smartphones. Those two apps are only in San Francisco, but venture capitalists are optimistic that on-demand mobile services are no fad.

“Soon there will be a remote control for your life,” said Peter Fenton, a venture partner at Benchmark Capital. “The future has arrived.”

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Rate of Childhood Obesity Falls in Several Cities

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

At William H. Ziegler Elementary in Northeast Philadelphia, students are getting acquainted with vegetables and healthy snacks.

PHILADELPHIA — After decades of rising childhood obesity rates, several American cities are reporting their first declines.

The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white students.

“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011.

The drops are small, just 5 percent here in Philadelphia and 3 percent in Los Angeles. But experts say they are significant because they offer the first indication that the obesity epidemic, one of the nation’s most intractable health problems, may actually be reversing course.

The first dips — noted in a September report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — were so surprising that some researchers did not believe them.

Deanna M. Hoelscher, a researcher at the University of Texas, who in 2010 recorded one of the earliest declines — among mostly poor Hispanic fourth graders in the El Paso area — did a double-take. “We reran the numbers a couple of times,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘Will you please check that again for me?’ ”

Researchers say they are not sure what is behind the declines. They may be an early sign of a national shift that is visible only in cities that routinely measure the height and weight of schoolchildren. The decline in Los Angeles, for instance, was for fifth, seventh and ninth graders — the grades that are measured each year — between 2005 and 2010. Nor is it clear whether the drops have more to do with fewer obese children entering school or currently enrolled children losing weight. But researchers note that declines occurred in cities that have had obesity reduction policies in place for a number of years.

Though obesity is now part of the national conversation, with aggressive advertising campaigns in major cities and a push by Michelle Obama, many scientists doubt that anti-obesity programs actually work. Individual efforts like one-time exercise programs have rarely produced results. Researchers say that it will take a broad set of policies applied systematically to effectively reverse the trend, a conclusion underscored by an Institute of Medicine report released in May.

Philadelphia has undertaken a broad assault on childhood obesity for years. Sugary drinks like sweetened iced tea, fruit punch and sports drinks started to disappear from school vending machines in 2004. A year later, new snack guidelines set calorie and fat limits, which reduced the size of snack foods like potato chips to single servings. By 2009, deep fryers were gone from cafeterias and whole milk had been replaced by one percent and skim.

Change has been slow. Schools made money on sugary drinks, and some set up rogue drink machines that had to be hunted down. Deep fat fryers, favored by school administrators who did not want to lose popular items like French fries, were unplugged only after Wayne T. Grasela, the head of food services for the school district, stopped buying oil to fill them.

But the message seems to be getting through, even if acting on it is daunting. Josh Monserrat, an eighth grader at John Welsh Elementary, uses words like “carbs,” and “portion size.” He is part of a student group that promotes healthy eating. He has even dressed as an orange to try to get other children to eat better. Still, he struggles with his own weight. He is 5-foot-3 but weighed nearly 200 pounds at his last doctor’s visit.

“I was thinking, ‘Wow, I’m obese for my age,’ ” said Josh, who is 13. “I set a goal for myself to lose 50 pounds.”

Nationally, about 17 percent of children under 20 are obese, or about 12.5 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which defines childhood obesity as a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex. That rate, which has tripled since 1980, has leveled off in recent years but has remained at historical highs, and public health experts warn that it could bring long-term health risks.

Obese children are more likely to be obese as adults, creating a higher risk of heart disease and stroke. The American Cancer Society says that being overweight or obese is the culprit in one of seven cancer deaths. Diabetes in children is up by a fifth since 2000, according to federal data.

“I’m deeply worried about it,” said Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, who added that obesity is “almost certain to result in a serious downturn in longevity based on the risks people are taking on.”

Read More..

Rate of Childhood Obesity Falls in Several Cities

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

At William H. Ziegler Elementary in Northeast Philadelphia, students are getting acquainted with vegetables and healthy snacks.

PHILADELPHIA — After decades of rising childhood obesity rates, several American cities are reporting their first declines.

The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white students.

“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011.

The drops are small, just 5 percent here in Philadelphia and 3 percent in Los Angeles. But experts say they are significant because they offer the first indication that the obesity epidemic, one of the nation’s most intractable health problems, may actually be reversing course.

The first dips — noted in a September report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — were so surprising that some researchers did not believe them.

Deanna M. Hoelscher, a researcher at the University of Texas, who in 2010 recorded one of the earliest declines — among mostly poor Hispanic fourth graders in the El Paso area — did a double-take. “We reran the numbers a couple of times,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘Will you please check that again for me?’ ”

Researchers say they are not sure what is behind the declines. They may be an early sign of a national shift that is visible only in cities that routinely measure the height and weight of schoolchildren. The decline in Los Angeles, for instance, was for fifth, seventh and ninth graders — the grades that are measured each year — between 2005 and 2010. Nor is it clear whether the drops have more to do with fewer obese children entering school or currently enrolled children losing weight. But researchers note that declines occurred in cities that have had obesity reduction policies in place for a number of years.

Though obesity is now part of the national conversation, with aggressive advertising campaigns in major cities and a push by Michelle Obama, many scientists doubt that anti-obesity programs actually work. Individual efforts like one-time exercise programs have rarely produced results. Researchers say that it will take a broad set of policies applied systematically to effectively reverse the trend, a conclusion underscored by an Institute of Medicine report released in May.

Philadelphia has undertaken a broad assault on childhood obesity for years. Sugary drinks like sweetened iced tea, fruit punch and sports drinks started to disappear from school vending machines in 2004. A year later, new snack guidelines set calorie and fat limits, which reduced the size of snack foods like potato chips to single servings. By 2009, deep fryers were gone from cafeterias and whole milk had been replaced by one percent and skim.

Change has been slow. Schools made money on sugary drinks, and some set up rogue drink machines that had to be hunted down. Deep fat fryers, favored by school administrators who did not want to lose popular items like French fries, were unplugged only after Wayne T. Grasela, the head of food services for the school district, stopped buying oil to fill them.

But the message seems to be getting through, even if acting on it is daunting. Josh Monserrat, an eighth grader at John Welsh Elementary, uses words like “carbs,” and “portion size.” He is part of a student group that promotes healthy eating. He has even dressed as an orange to try to get other children to eat better. Still, he struggles with his own weight. He is 5-foot-3 but weighed nearly 200 pounds at his last doctor’s visit.

“I was thinking, ‘Wow, I’m obese for my age,’ ” said Josh, who is 13. “I set a goal for myself to lose 50 pounds.”

Nationally, about 17 percent of children under 20 are obese, or about 12.5 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which defines childhood obesity as a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex. That rate, which has tripled since 1980, has leveled off in recent years but has remained at historical highs, and public health experts warn that it could bring long-term health risks.

Obese children are more likely to be obese as adults, creating a higher risk of heart disease and stroke. The American Cancer Society says that being overweight or obese is the culprit in one of seven cancer deaths. Diabetes in children is up by a fifth since 2000, according to federal data.

“I’m deeply worried about it,” said Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, who added that obesity is “almost certain to result in a serious downturn in longevity based on the risks people are taking on.”

Read More..

Health Centers Find Opportunity in Brownfields

PHILADELPHIA — The community health center rising on a derelict corner here in West Philadelphia never would have broken ground if not for the asbestos inside the building that was demolished to make way for it. Because of the contamination, Spectrum Health Services received a $2 million federal cleanup grant, the first piece of a $14 million construction financing puzzle.

When complete, the 36,000-square-foot building will provide a new home for a health center that has been squeezed into a deteriorating strip mall nearby for decades. It will also be the latest in a nationwide trend to replace contaminated tracts in distressed neighborhoods with health centers, in essence taking a potential source of health problems for a community and turning it into a place for health care. In recent years, health care facilities have been built on cleaned-up sites in Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Oregon and California.

“These health care providers are getting good at it,” said Elizabeth Schilling, policy manager for Smart Growth America, an advocacy group. “They have internalized the idea that this is an opportunity for them.”

Because these sites are contaminated, many qualify for government tax credits and grants, providing health centers with vital seed money to build. Community health centers, by design, exist to serve populations in poor neighborhoods, where there also tend to be available but contaminated properties like old gas stations, repair shops and industrial sites.

In fact, many of the country’s 450,000 contaminated sites, known as brownfields, are in poor neighborhoods, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. These tracts are disproportionately concentrated in poor communities because contaminated sites are more difficult to redevelop if property values are depressed. Banks are often reluctant to finance construction on a property that might require a costly cleanup.

“In communities where the real estate market isn’t working that well, you end up with a brownfield,” said Jody Kass, executive director of New Partners for Community Revitalization, a brownfield advocacy group.

“It’s a Catch-22,” said Phyllis B. Cater, chief executive of Spectrum Health Services. “The environmental issues are significant and yet there are scarce resources for communities to do the cleanup and remediation that’s required.”

But if the state or federal government provides the first piece of financing, other funders are more likely to fall into step.

Community health centers, in particular, are under pressure to grow. By 2015, the number of Americans who rely on community health centers for care is expected to double to 40 million from the 20 million who relied on the centers in 2010, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers. The Affordable Care Act allocated $11 billion to expand these centers. Of that, $1.5 billion was allotted to construction.

But finding a viable site is not always easy. It took Spectrum 15 years to find its new home on Haverford Avenue. The original building, an aging medical office, went up for auction in 2007 after the owner was arrested on a tax evasion charge. Spectrum bought the property for $650,000. Ms. Cater speculated that if Spectrum hadn’t bought the site, it most likely would have fallen into disrepair like the decaying row houses and the dilapidated bodega across the street that Spectrum hopes to redevelop eventually.

Spectrum currently occupies 10,000 square feet in a rundown strip mall four blocks away. The center is divided among three crowded spaces, so employees must walk outside to get from the medical offices to the billing department. The treatment rooms are dreary and cramped, with holes in the drywall and collapsing ceiling panels.

“I’ve seen better centers in rural Mississippi. This is not how you support a community,” Ms. Cater said.

When it opens next summer, the new, three-story center will have 34 exam rooms, eight dental rooms, a spacious community center and a full-service laboratory. It will also employ twice as many people as the current facility, adding 66 jobs to Spectrum’s payroll.

The 50-year-old building was in poor shape, but it was the presence of asbestos that allowed Spectrum to qualify for the critical first piece of financing: a $2 million brownfield redevelopment grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The organization also received an additional $2 million H.U.D. loan that was tied to the brownfield grant, a $1.7 million redevelopment grant from Pennsylvania and $3.45 million in other loans.

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Moscow Journal: Book Gives Russians Close-Up of American Minutiae

MOSCOW — After 20 years of opining on weighty bilateral issues like NATO expansion and ballistic missile defense, the political analyst Nikolai V. Zlobin recently found himself trying to explain, for an uncomprehending Russian readership, the American phenomenon of the teenage baby sitter.

In Russia, children are raised by their grandmothers, or, if their grandmothers are not available, by women of the same generation in a similar state of unremitting vigilance against the hazards — like weather — that arise in everyday life. An average Russian mother would no sooner entrust her children’s upbringing to a local teenager than to a pack of wild dogs.

But of course much in everyday American life sounds bizarre to Russians, as Mr. Zlobin documents meticulously in his 400-page book, “America — What a Life!”

It seems strange, 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, that ordinary Russians would still be hungry for details about how ordinary Americans eat and pay mortgages. But to Mr. Zlobin’s surprise, his book — published this year and marketed as a guide to Russians considering a move abroad — is already in its fifth print run, and his publisher has commissioned a second volume.

With the neutrality of a field anthropologist dispatched to suburbia, Mr. Zlobin scrutinizes the American practice of interrogating complete strangers about the details of their pregnancies; their weird habit of leaving their curtains open at night, when a Russian would immediately seal himself off from the prying eyes of his neighbors. Why Americans do not lie, for the most part. Why they cannot drink hard liquor. Why they love laws but disdain their leaders.

“The secret is that everyone wants to know what America is without its ideological blanket,” said Mr. Zlobin, who has lived in the United States on and off for 20 years and serves, at times, as an informal consultant to the Kremlin. “Originally I thought you had to watch the important issues, but it turns out what matters are the very basic ones.”

He is not the first Russian to engage in this exercise. In 1935, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, Soviet satirists, embarked on a road trip across the United States. Their book, “One-Story America,” described its residents’ earnestness (“Americans never say anything they do not mean”) their provinciality (“curiosity is almost absent”) and the ubiquity of advertising, which, they wrote, “followed us all over America, convincing us, begging us, persuading us, and demanding of us that we chew ‘Wrigley’s,’ the flavored, incomparable, first-class gum.”

That book, published less than two decades after the Bolshevik Revolution, was a touch subversive because it did not focus on the class struggle, then the Kremlin’s central talking point about the United States.

Mr. Zlobin is writing at a moment when state-controlled television casts the United States as a global bully, releasing waves of turbulence on the world and covertly undermining President Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Zlobin does not make much effort to advance that thesis, instead suggesting, in his soft way, that Russian leaders would benefit from understanding what Americans are like.

“I often get appeals for help in Washington — ‘Get to know so and so,’ they tell me, naming some public figure, ‘We need to solve this problem,’ ” he writes. “It is difficult to explain that in the United States, in most cases, problems are not solved this way.”

Mr. Zlobin, who has lived in St. Louis, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Washington, finds his answers in middle-class neighborhoods that most Europeans never see. Readers have peppered him with questions about his chapter about life on a cul-de-sac. Most Russians grew up in dense housing blocks, where children ran wild in closed central courtyards. Cul-de-sac translates in Russian as tupik — a word that evokes vulnerability and danger, a dead end with no escape.

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Thefts a Concern as Holiday Deliveries Increase

Librado Romero/The New York Times

A driver in Midtown Manhattan on Friday. U.P.S. expects to deliver more than 500 million packages this season, leaving some to fear a rise in thefts.

A pair of brown leather boots was snatched last week from a doorstep in the suburbs of Chicago. A computer disappeared from a front porch in Fort Worth last month, and an iPad case was stolen outside a Long Island home this week.

As the peak of the holiday gift-buying season approaches and more people are ordering online, here is the downside: Grinch-like bandits are swiping the deliveries from doorsteps when families are not home. Some thieves follow U.P.S. and FedEx trucks along their routes and nab the gifts, while others simply drive through residential neighborhoods looking for packages.

In River Forest, Ill., where the police arrested two young men last week, accusing them of stealing deliveries from homes, plainclothes police officers trail U.P.S. trucks to ferret out thieves who may be following them, Cmdr. Jim O’Shea said.

“This is common at this time of year,” Commander O’Shea said. “We’re trying to take a proactive approach to curtail this.”

So far this holiday season, Americans have spent $21.4 billion online, up 14 percent from last year, according to comScore, a research company. U.P.S. alone expects to deliver more than 500 million packages, and with many of them being left on doorsteps, there could be ample opportunity for thieves to strike.

The Better Business Bureau now recommends that customers be proactive, asking their shipping companies for tracking numbers and requiring signatures upon delivery. If they are not at home, customers should ask for their packages to be held at a lobby desk or at a local shipping center, advised Claire Rosenzweig, the president of the group’s New York chapter.

 

There are no national statistics on doorstep thefts, but reports of local episodes abound. In Burbank, Calif., with five reported incidents this year, compared with one last year, two teenagers were arrested last month after they were found trailing a U.P.S. truck. One young man was released, while the other person, Ararat Gevondyan, 19, was charged with receiving stolen property, with his bail set at $10,000.

“It’s a crime of opportunity,” Sgt. Darin Ryburn of the Burbank Police Department said. The burglars are “going through these packages for items that could be resold,” he said.

On Long Island, two young men were arrested this week, suspected of stealing headphones, an iPad case and two pairs of Skechers shoes from homes in the Bay Shore area.

A few of the thefts have been caught by home surveillance cameras set up to catch or deter vandals. A television station in Pasadena, Calif., showed a video of a woman taking a package from a doorstep. The homeowner said she never got the Paula Deen electric salt-and-pepper shaker her sister had sent her.

While it may seem extreme to install cameras to keep an eye on packages, this type of home surveillance has become more common in recent years, said Marc Horowitz, a spokesman for Brickhouse Security. The company’s sales for home security cameras have more than doubled in the past year, he said, as the cameras have become less expensive. A simple motion-activated porch camera costs about $100.

Some camera customers fear the culprit is closer to home, breaking that commandment of the cul-de-sac, Do Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Flat-Screen TV.

Mr. Horowitz said he had heard reports from his sales representatives that some customers were buying cameras because they suspected neighbors of pilfering packages (or newspapers and plants).

U.P.S. started a program last year called U.P.S. My Choice, which allows a customer to receive an e-mail or text message before a package arrives and reroute it if no one is going to be home.

U.P.S. drivers are also trained to leave packages out of sight, said Natalie Godwin, a company spokeswoman. Ms. Godwin was with a driver in Atlanta on Tuesday when he decided not to leave a package on someone’s stoop because it was clearly an expensive computer monitor. He dropped it off nearby at the apartment complex’s office.

Drivers leave notes telling the tenants where to find packages, Ms. Godwin said. Often, she added, “They’ll use their own judgment.”

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