Investors Shrug Off a Weak Earnings Report From Amazon

Amazon sold many more things in the fourth quarter while barely bothering to eke out a profit.

Revenue went up 22 percent to $21.27 billion, while earnings per share fell to 21 cents from 38 cents in the fourth quarter of 2011.

In both cases, the numbers were less than expectations. Analysts had predicted revenue of $22.2 billion and 27 cents a share.

Despite this apparent bad news, investors were unfazed. The stock rose $24 a share, or 9 percent, in after-hours trading.

“We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon chief executive, said in a statement. “After 5 years, eBooks is a multibillion-dollar category for us and growing fast — up approximately 70 percent last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5 percent.”

By traditional metrics of profitability, 2012 was a poor year for Amazon. The retailer lost 9 cents a share, compared with a profit of $1.37 in 2011.

But Amazon has never been measured in traditional ways. The company has been growing at the furious rate of a start-up, more than 25 percent each quarter, despite now ranking among the country’s largest retailers. It makes hardly any money — about half a cent on every dollar. Instead it makes huge investments in infrastructure, selling products from e-books to diapers as cheaply as it can, and then makes more investments to account for the increase in sales.

Customers naturally loved this. What is not to like about free shipping, an Amazon innovation that has become a consumer expectation? But investors, once upon a time, saw this as money going out of their pockets.

“Wall Street gets in a kerfuffle when we lower product prices and invest heavily in the future,” Mr. Bezos acknowledged eight years ago. “So don’t buy our stock — instead buy our products and enjoy our investments.”

That would have been a bad idea. The stock is up more than 700 percent since then. Investors have clearly bought into Mr. Bezos’s notion that “if we take care of customers, the stock will take care of itself.”

Shares in Amazon, which closed earlier this month at a new record above $280, pulled back slightly before the earnings report. They fell nearly $16 in regular trading Tuesday, to $260.

Jason Moser, an analyst with the Motley Fool site who owns shares in Amazon, said that “many investors, myself included, will more than likely watch this story play out for as long as it takes.”

Mr. Moser added in an e-mail message that the market is “betting a lot on what Amazon hasn’t done yet and betting on the fact that it will do it based on what it’s doing now. Kind of a ‘build it and they will come’ sort of thing.”

Literally, in some cases. Last year, the retailer announced it was building a million-square-foot warehouse in Patterson, Calif., about 85 miles from San Francisco. Two weeks ago, with the Patterson warehouse still not open, Amazon announced another million-square-foot warehouse barely 30 miles north of Patterson, in Tracy. As usual, Amazon did not say what its plans were, but it obviously has designs on fast (if not quite same-day) shipping to the seven million generally affluent, Internet-savvy residents of the Bay Area.

Many of those shoppers will be buying material that originated not with Amazon but with more than two million third-party sellers. The volume of items sold by these firms during the 2012 holidays was up 40 percent from 2011. Some of these sellers merely used Amazon to digitally display their goods, while others also used the retailer to ship it.

Amazon said earlier this month that third-party sellers sold enough Santa hats during the holiday for Santa to wear a new hat every day for the next 127 years, and enough guitar picks to give one to every attendee of Woodstock — about a half million. Analysts expect third-party sales to outpace Amazon deals over the next few years.

Recently several states, including California, successfully made deals with Amazon to collect sales tax. This had the effect of raising prices on many Amazon items by more than 5 percent. Land-based retailers, which had agitated for years for such a move, thought this might finally level the playing field.

Their hopes might be misplaced. Any drop in online sales from the collecting of sales tax tends to be temporary, said Scot Wingo, chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, which helps retailers sell online, including on Amazon.

In California, Mr. Wingo said, there was a spike in third-party sales before the tax took effect, as consumer took advantage of the last days of cheaper prices. Then there was a pullback as the tax took effect. Now sales are recovering. “It’s a little counterintuitive,” he said.

Read More..

Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

Read More..

Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

Read More..

Bucks Blog: When Good Drivers Pay More for Insurance Than Bad Ones

Some big insurance companies charge higher auto rates for lower-income drivers, even if the drivers have safe driving records, an analysis from the Consumer Federation of America finds.

The federation, a nonprofit comprising 250 consumer groups, has argued that insurers often give nondriving-related factors, like occupation and education, more weight than driving-related factors, and that such practices unfairly penalize lower- and moderate-income drivers. Occupation and education, the federation says, are proxies for income.

In its latest report, the federation obtained insurance quotes in 12 different cities from the public Web sites of five big auto insurers, using information for two hypothetical women. The insurers — State Farm, Allstate, Geico, Farmers and Progressive — represent more than half of the private auto insurance market, the federation said.

Both drivers shared certain characteristics: Each was 30 years old; had been a driver for 10 years; lived in a ZIP code with a median income of $50,000; owned and drove a 2002 Honda Civic; drove 7,500 miles per year; and carried the minimum auto liability insurance required by state law (minimums vary from state to state).

The first driver, however, was a single receptionist with a high school education who had a 45-day gap in her insurance coverage, but had never had an accident or moving violation. (Gaps in coverage often occur because drivers can’t afford their premiums, said Robert Hunter, the federation’s director of insurance and a former Texas state insurance commissioner.)

The second driver was a married executive with a master’s degree who owned a home, had continuous insurance coverage and one at-fault accident with $800 of damage in the last three years.

In two-thirds of the 60 quotes, the receptionist was quoted higher premiums, even though her driving record was clean. And in more than three-fifths of the cases, the premium quoted the receptionist exceeded the quote for the executive, who wasn’t as safe a driver, by at least 25 percent.

The federation argues that “largely uncontrollable” factors, like education and occupation, are often given greater weight in rate setting than actual losses.

Robert Passmore, senior director of personal lines for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, said in a telephone interview that it was reasonable to use such factors because “they are predictive of loss.”  Different insurers give different weights to different factors, he said, depending on what they saw as the best way to predict a given driver’s risk.

During a conference call with reporters, Mr. Hunter and Stephen Brobeck, the federation’s executive director, were asked why the analysis didn’t include smaller automobile insurers as well. They said it was because the analysis was time consuming and because the largest companies tend to offer the lowest rates, even though the federation still considered many of them to be unreasonably high for lower-income drivers.

The federation argues that the wide disparity in rates quoted, from company to company and market to market, suggests that the auto insurance market is not truly competitive, but the insurance industry rejects that position.

“Auto insurance provides important, cost-effective financial protection to millions of Americans, and most drivers have dozens of auto insurers constantly competing for their business,” said  Steven Weisbart, chief economist for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, in a prepared statement. “The price is risk-based and always will be.”

The federation’s analysis found that in every case, Geico and Progressive quoted the safe driver — the receptionist — a higher premium than the driver who had caused an accident. In several cases, companies refused to provide a quote to the “good” driver, but offered one to the executive.

“We work to price each driver’s policy as accurately as possible, so that every driver pays the appropriate amount based on his or her risk of having an accident,” said Jeff Sibel, a spokesman for Progressive, in an e-mail.  “We use multiple rating factors, which sometimes include nondriving factors that have been proven to be predictive of a person’s likelihood of being involved in a crash.”

Geico didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

State Farm, however, charged the receptionist (the good driver) less than the bad driver in all 12 cities. In addition, in all the markets, State Farm’s quotes were either the lowest or the second lowest.

That suggests, said Mr. Hunter, that State Farm gives less weight to nondriving factors than other companies. A State Farm representative declined to comment.

Mr. Hunter said states should insist that insurance companies make the factors used in setting their rates transparent, so consumers know how their applications for coverage were being considered.

Do you think factors like education and occupation should be used to set auto insurance rates?

Read More..

Yemen Seizes Boat Suspected of Smuggling Iranian Arms

WASHINGTON – Authorities in Yemen have seized a boat in their territorial waters filled with a large quantity of explosives, weapons and money, according to American officials briefed on the interdiction. The officials said there were indications that Iran was smuggling the military contraband to insurgents inside Yemen, although they declined to provide details.

Yemeni security forces halted and searched the 130-foot dhow last Tuesday, and found the weapons in three large cargo rooms in the hold, according to reports on the mission reaching Washington. There was American support for the interdiction, officials said.

A full inventory of the arms cache has not been disclosed. Two senior American officials cited reports from Yemen saying the weapons included shoulder-launched missiles designed for shooting down aircraft.

If the weapons turn out to be the Iranian-made Misagh-2 as cited in the reports from Yemen, it would reflect a significant increase in lethality for the insurgents. A large amount of C-4 explosives also was on board, the officials said, as well as rocket-propelled grenades and 122-milimeter rockets.

It was not possible to independently verify the details of the mission, the type of cargo seized or the exact intelligence said to link the explosives, arms and money to Iran. Yemen has not revealed the seizure, although a public statement was expected in the coming days.

Yemen is already awash with small arms and explosives acquired over years of war and insurgency, much of it brought in from a number of foreign sources through its poorly controlled ports. There has been little effort to regulate the supply – one governor of a northern province is also a major arms dealer – and insurgents have often raided the stores of Yemen’s corrupt and divided military. Many of Yemen’s unruly tribes command powerful arsenals.

The United States has a publicly acknowledged security assistance effort under way with Yemen. At the same time, the American military and the C.I.A. are engaged in a clandestine program of using drones to strike militants associated with a terrorist organization, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen. With the United States and Saudi Arabia providing both public and secret security assistance there, and with Iran also said to be arming militant forces, Yemen has become the battlefield for a major proxy war by outside powers.

American officials said the weapons on board were made in Iran, and that the pattern of shipment aboard the boat matched past instances of suspected Iranian smuggling into Yemen. Officials described the smuggling as part of a plan by Iran to increase its political outreach to rebels and other political figures in Yemen. To identify with greater certainty the source of the seized weapons, the boat’s navigation instruments will most likely be examined to determine its origin and route, and the crew will be questioned.

For years, Yemen has accused Iran of supporting the Houthi rebels, who fought an intermittent guerrilla war against the Yemeni government from 2004 to 2010. Those accusations – including claims of intercepted weapons shipments – often lacked evidence and, up until about a year ago, routinely were dismissed as propaganda.

But after the uprising in Yemen in 2011, the Houthi movement expanded from its base in the northwest — now a de facto Houthi statelet — across the country. It has benefited from widespread dissatisfaction with both Yemen’s government and the local equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood, known as Islah.

By last spring, American military and intelligence officials described what they viewed as a widening effort to extend Iranian influence across the greater Middle East.

Iranian smugglers backed by the Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, had begun shipping AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and other arms to replace older weapons used by the rebels, American officials said early last year.

Thom Shanker reported from Washington, and Robert F. Worth from Sana, Yemen. Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.

Read More..

A Conversation With Nick Goldman: Using DNA to Store Digital Information

European Molecular Biology Laboratory

Nick Goldman, a molecular biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England, used a technique with error-correction software to store and retrieve data in synthetic DNA molecules.

Last Wednesday, a group of researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute reported in the journal Nature that they had managed to store digital information in synthetic DNA molecules, then recreated the original digital files without error.

The amount of data, 739 kilobytes all told, is hardly prodigious by today’s microelectronic storage standards: all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a scientific paper, a color digital photo of the researchers’ laboratory, a 26-second excerpt from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech and a software algorithm. Nor is this the first time digital information has been stored in DNA.

But the researchers said their new technique, which includes error-correction software, was a step toward a digital archival storage medium of immense scale. Their goal is a system that will safely store the equivalent of one million CDs in a gram of DNA for 10,000 years.

If the new technology proves workable, it will have arrived just in time. The lead author, the British molecular biologist Nick Goldman, said he had conceived the idea with a colleague, Ewan Birney, while the two sat in a pub pondering the digital fire hose of genetic information their institute is now receiving — and the likelihood that it would soon outpace even today’s chips and disk drives, whose capacity continues to double roughly every two years, as predicted by Moore’s law.

The telephone interview with Dr. Goldman, from his laboratory in Hinxton, near Cambridge, has been edited and condensed.

Does your experiment suggest that DNA is a reasonable alternative for archiving digital information?

It’s too far beyond us at the moment because of the price. I don’t know if there are enough machines to write DNA in big quantities. I suspect not. The experiment we did converted about three-quarters of a megabyte of information off a hard disk drive into DNA. We showed it worked on a large scale, and part of what we published is an analysis of how that might scale up, at least theoretically. But we couldn’t do the scale-up experiments.

You’ve proved something. What’s next?

We’ve got a couple of ideas to pursue to make this a bit more likely to be something to turn up in the real world. One is to improve the coding and the decoding to see if we can get more information into the same amount of DNA. Hopefully if we can store twice as much information, that will halve our costs.

We were quite conservative in the approach we took. We really wanted to make sure that it worked, and so we used quite a lot of error-correction code. We could maybe sacrifice less to the error-correction part and use more actual information.

The other thing to make it work on a scale that the world would really be interested in is to automate and miniaturize. All the technologies exist — they’re all commercially available. But they’re not all in one place, and they’re not designed to work with each other as such.

If you wanted to do it properly you’d invest in the site, you’d have DNA synthesis at the site, you’d have the storage there, you’d have the reading back in one place, and you’d miniaturize it all. You’d have micro-fluidics to do what is currently lab science — even to the level of having robots to do the filing of the test tubes onto shelves. Robots are used in magnetic tape archive centers now, and you’d just want a smaller version of the same.

How similar is what you’ve done to what is involved in today’s gene-sequencing systems, which read and store the proteins in a DNA molecule?

The sequencing, or reading it back, that we did is exactly the same. We designed it that way. We designed it so that it would work in the standard protocols that we and our laboratory collaborators are familiar with, day in day out. It is really exactly the same process. We use an Illumina sequencing machine.

The writing of the information is a technology I’m a little bit less familiar with. But Agilent Technologies, whom we worked with, is one of the world leaders in developing this, and it is, I believe, very much like an inkjet printing system. But you’re not using colored dyes on paper — you’re using chemical solutions that include in them the nucleotides, the basis of DNA, fired very accurately onto a glass slide so that each little spot on the slide you build up is a separate sequence.

Is there a category of information you were most interested in archiving?

Read More..

Observatory: Viagra as Diet Pill?

New evidence suggests that the erectile-dysfunction drug Viagra might have another use: helping burn away excess fat.

The drug, generically known as sildenafil, helped convert undesirable white fat cells to energy-burning beige fat cells in laboratory mice, researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany report in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

It was already known that mice fed Viagra became less prone to obesity when fed a high-fat diet. What was not clear was why.

Dr. Alexander Pfeifer, director of the university’s Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology, said he already had some clues: Viagra works by preventing the degradation of the intercellular messenger cGMP. Dr. Pfeifer has long been testing the effects of cGMP on fat cells.

So he fed the drug to mice for seven days and monitored their fat cells. As it turned out, the troublesome white fat cells, which are associated with human problems like the dreaded spare tire, were being converted to the beneficial type of fat cells at a higher rate than usual. Dr. Pfeifer called the results “very promising.”

Still, he cautions against taking the drug purely for dieting purposes. “The idea to have one pill and then obesity goes away, that is a dream, but not easy to come by,” he said. “What we are up to is basic research in mice. This pill is approved by the F.D.A. for a particular purpose for a reason.” DOUGLAS QUENQUA

Read More..

Observatory: Viagra as Diet Pill?

New evidence suggests that the erectile-dysfunction drug Viagra might have another use: helping burn away excess fat.

The drug, generically known as sildenafil, helped convert undesirable white fat cells to energy-burning beige fat cells in laboratory mice, researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany report in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

It was already known that mice fed Viagra became less prone to obesity when fed a high-fat diet. What was not clear was why.

Dr. Alexander Pfeifer, director of the university’s Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology, said he already had some clues: Viagra works by preventing the degradation of the intercellular messenger cGMP. Dr. Pfeifer has long been testing the effects of cGMP on fat cells.

So he fed the drug to mice for seven days and monitored their fat cells. As it turned out, the troublesome white fat cells, which are associated with human problems like the dreaded spare tire, were being converted to the beneficial type of fat cells at a higher rate than usual. Dr. Pfeifer called the results “very promising.”

Still, he cautions against taking the drug purely for dieting purposes. “The idea to have one pill and then obesity goes away, that is a dream, but not easy to come by,” he said. “What we are up to is basic research in mice. This pill is approved by the F.D.A. for a particular purpose for a reason.” 

Read More..

A Conversation With Nick Goldman: Using DNA to Store Digital Information

European Molecular Biology Laboratory

Nick Goldman, a molecular biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England, used a technique with error-correction software to store and retrieve data in synthetic DNA molecules.

Last Wednesday, a group of researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute reported in the journal Nature that they had managed to store digital information in synthetic DNA molecules, then recreated the original digital files without error.

The amount of data, 739 kilobytes all told, is hardly prodigious by today’s microelectronic storage standards: all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a scientific paper, a color digital photo of the researchers’ laboratory, a 26-second excerpt from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech and a software algorithm. Nor is this the first time digital information has been stored in DNA.

But the researchers said their new technique, which includes error-correction software, was a step toward a digital archival storage medium of immense scale. Their goal is a system that will safely store the equivalent of one million CDs in a gram of DNA for 10,000 years.

If the new technology proves workable, it will have arrived just in time. The lead author, the British molecular biologist Nick Goldman, said he had conceived the idea with a colleague, Ewan Birney, while the two sat in a pub pondering the digital fire hose of genetic information their institute is now receiving — and the likelihood that it would soon outpace even today’s chips and disk drives, whose capacity continues to double roughly every two years, as predicted by Moore’s law.

The telephone interview with Dr. Goldman, from his laboratory in Hinxton, near Cambridge, has been edited and condensed.

Does your experiment suggest that DNA is a reasonable alternative for archiving digital information?

It’s too far beyond us at the moment because of the price. I don’t know if there are enough machines to write DNA in big quantities. I suspect not. The experiment we did converted about three-quarters of a megabyte of information off a hard disk drive into DNA. We showed it worked on a large scale, and part of what we published is an analysis of how that might scale up, at least theoretically. But we couldn’t do the scale-up experiments.

You’ve proved something. What’s next?

We’ve got a couple of ideas to pursue to make this a bit more likely to be something to turn up in the real world. One is to improve the coding and the decoding to see if we can get more information into the same amount of DNA. Hopefully if we can store twice as much information, that will halve our costs.

We were quite conservative in the approach we took. We really wanted to make sure that it worked, and so we used quite a lot of error-correction code. We could maybe sacrifice less to the error-correction part and use more actual information.

The other thing to make it work on a scale that the world would really be interested in is to automate and miniaturize. All the technologies exist — they’re all commercially available. But they’re not all in one place, and they’re not designed to work with each other as such.

If you wanted to do it properly you’d invest in the site, you’d have DNA synthesis at the site, you’d have the storage there, you’d have the reading back in one place, and you’d miniaturize it all. You’d have micro-fluidics to do what is currently lab science — even to the level of having robots to do the filing of the test tubes onto shelves. Robots are used in magnetic tape archive centers now, and you’d just want a smaller version of the same.

How similar is what you’ve done to what is involved in today’s gene-sequencing systems, which read and store the proteins in a DNA molecule?

The sequencing, or reading it back, that we did is exactly the same. We designed it that way. We designed it so that it would work in the standard protocols that we and our laboratory collaborators are familiar with, day in day out. It is really exactly the same process. We use an Illumina sequencing machine.

The writing of the information is a technology I’m a little bit less familiar with. But Agilent Technologies, whom we worked with, is one of the world leaders in developing this, and it is, I believe, very much like an inkjet printing system. But you’re not using colored dyes on paper — you’re using chemical solutions that include in them the nucleotides, the basis of DNA, fired very accurately onto a glass slide so that each little spot on the slide you build up is a separate sequence.

Is there a category of information you were most interested in archiving?

Read More..

Egypt’s Morsi Declares State of Emergency

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's president declared a state of emergency and curfew in three Suez Canal provinces hit hardest by a weekend wave of unrest that left more than 50 dead, using tactics of the ousted regime to get a grip on discontent over his Islamist policies and the slow pace of change.

Angry and almost screaming, Mohammed Morsi vowed in a televised address on Sunday night that he would not hesitate to take even more action to stem the latest eruption of violence across much of the country. But at the same time, he sought to reassure Egyptians that his latest moves would not plunge the country back into authoritarianism.

"There is no going back on freedom, democracy and the supremacy of the law," he said.

The worst violence this weekend was in the Mediterranean coastal city of Port Said, where seven people were killed on Sunday, pushing the toll for two days of clashes to at least 44. The unrest was sparked on Saturday by a court conviction and death sentence for 21 defendants involved in a mass soccer riot in the city's main stadium on Feb. 1, 2012 that left 74 dead.

Most of those sentenced to death were local soccer fans from Port Said, deepening a sense of persecution that Port Said's residents have felt since the stadium disaster, the worst soccer violence ever in Egypt.

At least another 11 died on Friday elsewhere in the country during rallies marking the second anniversary of the anti-Mubarak uprising. Protesters used the occasion to renounce Morsi and his Islamic fundamentalist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which emerged as the country's most dominant political force after Mubarak's ouster.

The curfew and state of emergency, both in force for 30 days, affect the provinces of Port Said, Ismailiya and Suez. The curfew takes effect Monday from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. every day.

Morsi, in office since June, also invited the nation's political forces to a dialogue starting Monday to resolve the country's latest crisis. A statement issued later by his office said that among those invited were the country's top reform leader, Nobel peace Laureate Mohammed ElBaradei, former Arab League chief Amr Moussa and Hamdeen Sabahi, a leftist politician who finished third in last year's presidential race.

The three are leaders of the National Salvation Front, an umbrella for the main opposition parties.

Khaled Dawoud, the Front's spokesman, said Morsi's invitation was meaningless unless he clearly states what is on the agenda. That, he added, must include amending a disputed constitution hurriedly drafted by the president's Islamist allies and rejected by the opposition.

He also faulted the president for not acknowledging his political responsibility for the latest bout of political violence.

"It is all too little too late," he told The Associated Press.

In many ways, Morsi's decree and his call for a dialogue betrayed his despair in the face of wave after wave of political unrest, violence and man-made disasters that, at times, made the country look like it was about to come unglued.

A relative unknown until his Muslim Brotherhood nominated him to run for president last year, Morsi is widely criticized for having offered no vision for the country's future after nearly 30 years of dictatorship under Mubarak and no coherent policy to tackle seemingly endless problems, from a free falling economy and deeply entrenched social injustices to surging crime and chaos on the streets.

Reform of the judiciary and the police, hated under the old regime for brutality, are also key demands of Morsi's critics.

Morsi did not say what he plans to do to stem the violence in other parts of the country outside those three provinces, but he did say he had instructed the police to deal "firmly and forcefully" with individuals attacking state institutions, using firearms to "terrorize" citizens or blocking roads and railway lines.

There were also clashes Sunday in Cairo and several cities in the Nile Delta region, including the industrial city of Mahallah.

Read More..