my news: 七月 2011

2011年7月6日星期三

Bits: Google Executives Throw Themselves Into the Google+ Fray

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

It may be too soon to say whether Google+, the search company’s answer to Facebook, will avoid the same disastrous fate as some of its earlier social networking products like Buzz and Wave, but there’s no shortage of action on the site among those who have early access.

Members are already sharing content and photos through the site, but it seems as though most of the activity revolves around poring over the intricate details of the service and dissecting the best ways to use the features of the service.

There’s another unlikely suspect jumping into the fray: Googlers.

When Danny Sullivan, a noted blogger and early users, complained that it was difficult to set up an account for his blog, Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management who is overseeing the project jumped in to clarify that the service wasn’t yet set up for that. On another thread, where users were discussing the challenges around sorting their networks into groups for sharing, Jim Prosser, another Googler who works in public relations, gave tips on how to more easily shuffle friends around.

The transparency is not uncommon for smaller start-ups, whose momentum rests almost entirely on their ability to listen to user feedback and nimbly and quickly respond to bugs and glitches in the system. But for the larger companies, such as Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, it is not as common to see executives directly involved with the project working with users in real time to answer questions and resolve issues. Google has a lot riding on the success of Google+, its latest effort to build a successful social networking service that won’t turn people off or cause them to cry privacy foul. Google has long hoped to understand the social connections and interests of its users. It also hopes to gain access to data and information about the links, topics, photos and products that its users are sharing with each other to improve targeted advertisements. This, in turn, helps them compete with Facebook, which has long reaped the benefits of having access to such data.

Mr. Horowitz, who was also involved with Google Buzz, said that it was not uncommon for him to join discussions about product introductions to try and answer questions and give feedback.

“Obviously in a launch like this, for a product like this, direct engagement is the best and most important means of understanding what’s working and how to prioritize features,” he said.

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DealBook: Apple and Microsoft Beat Google for Nortel Patents

Blair Gable/ReutersGeorge Riedel, chief strategy officer of Nortel, after testifying to a House of Commons committee in August 2009.

8:31 p.m. | Updated

Nortel Networks, the defunct Canadian telecommunications equipment maker, says it has agreed to sell more than 6,000 patent assets to an alliance made up of Apple, Microsoft and other technology giants for $4.5 billion in cash.

The group of companies, which also includes Research in Motion, Sony, Ericsson and EMC, beat out Google and Intel for the patents and patent applications that Nortel had accumulated when it was still one of the largest telecommunications equipment makers in North America.

Nortel, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009, said in a statement late Thursday that it had sold its last remaining patents, covering businesses including wireless and networking technology and semiconductors, in an auction that it called “very robust.”

“The size and dollar value for this transaction is unprecedented, as was the significant interest in the portfolio among major companies around the world,” said George A. Riedel, chief strategy officer of Nortel.

Nortel delayed the auction once last month because of what it called “significant interest,” and started the sale on Monday. Nortel said it hoped to close the transaction in the third quarter.

In April, Google made a stalking-horse bid of $900 million for the patents, some of which are related to the wireless technology known as long-term evolution. Networks based on that technology, considered crucial to the future of telecommunications, are created to carry large amounts of data like streamed video to mobile devices.

The Google offer was interpreted as a defensive move. The search giant was seeking intellectual property rights to shield itself from lawsuits as it moves deeper into the mobile business with its Android software.

Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, wrote at the time of the bid that it was supposed to “create a disincentive for others to sue Google.”

“The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents,” Mr. Walker wrote.

Now, thousands of crucial patents will be in the hands of rivals like Apple and Microsoft, both of which have shown themselves to be much more aggressive in patent litigation than Google.

On Friday, Mr. Walker said in an e-mail that the auction’s outcome was “disappointing for anyone who believes that open innovation benefits users and promotes creativity and competition.”

The sale announced Thursday will require approval from courts in Canada and the United States, Nortel said. About 2,600 of the patent assets are American. A joint hearing has been scheduled for July 11.

Nortel, based in Mississauga, Ontario, was once a flagship Canadian company but filed for bankruptcy in 2009 after losing nearly $6 billion in 2008.

Since then, it has sold its wireless equipment business for $1.13 billion to the Swedish company Ericsson, which walked away with $340 million worth of patents from the auction on Thursday. More recently, Ericsson bought Telcordia, an American telecom network equipment maker, for $1.15 billion.

In 2009, Nortel sold another unit dealing with enterprise solutions for $475 million to Avaya, a former AT&T unit that is now owned by private equity and which filed for an initial public offering of stock last month.

RIM, Canada’s most prominent technology company since Nortel collapsed, said in a separate statement that it had paid about $770 million for patents at the auction. The sale of patents raised more than the rest of Nortel’s disposals combined.

The company said it did not anticipate that holders of its common shares or preferred stock would benefit from the bankruptcy process. Creditor protection proceedings “will result in the cancellation of these equity interests,” Nortel said.

Nortel was advised by Lazard.

Nortel’s creditors’ committee, which includes the Bank of New York Mellon and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, hired Jefferies as its financial adviser for the auction, which saw the patent assets reap five times the stalking-horse bid.

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Ping: Silicon Valley Culture, but in San Francisco?

FREE lunch — heck, free breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus all the M&Ms and Red Bull you can stand — is a delicious perk of working in Silicon Valley.

Free or even subsidized food in corporate cafeterias makes eminent sense in such a suburban setting. Corporate campuses, built where fruit and nut trees once stood, are cut off by busy thoroughfares. To go out for lunch, you have to drive a mile or so, park, eat and then high-tail it back to work.

Nothing much, food-wise, has sprouted around those campuses. There is not a bite to eat within a half-mile of Hewlett-Packard’s midcentury modern lab building in Palo Alto, the model of tech campuses in the valley.

So when this cafeteria culture hits the big city, does the collision somehow stultify economic activity??Cities, after all, need people out on the sidewalks.

That was an important lesson learned in the 1960s and ’70s, after urban renewal advocates like Robert Moses in New York bulldozed neighborhoods in hopes of starting afresh. Buildings with no space for shops rose on the scraped earth, and it took years for people to return to the sidewalks.

All of this comes to mind because San Francisco is offering tax breaks to tech companies that relocate their offices to the city’s blighted neighborhoods. Twitter will be the first recipient of this largess when it moves into new offices in the Furniture Mart on a particularly desolate section of Market Street next year.

Twitter, which is competing for talent with Google and Facebook, gives its employees free food. The question is whether those urban employees will leave the building often enough to dramatically improve the neighborhood.

Gabriel Metcalf, the executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, an urban policy research group, says the impact of corporate cafeterias in an urban setting has not been rigorously studied. But, Mr. Metcalf says, “You certainly get more life on the street if everyone is going out to lunch.”

Twitter may be a good test case. Market Street, a wide avenue that bisects downtown San Francisco, begins at the Ferry Building. Smart designers transformed that structure from a seedy and little-used transportation hub; it now teems with shops and restaurants that attract tourists and office workers alike. During the twice-a-week farmers’ market, people stand in line for a half-hour to buy ramen, exotic sausages or rotisserie pork sandwiches from food carts.

But a mile and a half up Market, in the shadow of the golden dome of City Hall, it’s a different picture. Boarded-up buildings. Empty, littered lots. Even in boom times, the area never improved.

This is where the city has encouraged Twitter to set up shop. To transform the area, though, people will have to get out on the street. When the people come, shops open. When the shops open, more people come. A virtuous cycle begins.

But what happens when people don’t leave the buildings — when the culture of the suburban campus drops into an urban center? Two places in the city offer laboratories of sorts for a possible answer.

In a former industrial neighborhood called Mission Bay, the University of California, San Francisco, built its medical center. The university stashed its cafeterias up off street level. As a result, the area has remained sterile and empty. Employees and students drive in, then drive out. The public stays away.

That is expected to change when Salesforce.com, a company that has thrived providing Web services to corporate sales representatives, finishes building a new headquarters nearby. It will consist of eight buildings over 14 acres — a suburban campus in the city. The architects, Legorreta & Legorreta, of Mexico City, have incorporated street-level retail space into the project that is open to the sidewalk. They say they want to invite the public in. Salesforce has never had a corporate cafeteria.

Then there is a no-name neighborhood, south of San Francisco’s financial district, that is home to a satellite office of Google. While the fare in that office’s corporate cafeteria isn’t as extensive as it is in the company’s home office in Mountain View, 40 miles to the south, it is still copious and free for employees.

The results are not surprising. In the time that Google has been in San Francisco, few establishments that draw people to the sidewalk have opened in its neighborhood. There is a new expense-account-set restaurant across the street, and a taco truck popular with the employees at the nearby Gap headquarters, which also has a corporate cafeteria, though meals there are unsubsidized.

EVEN a city like San Francisco, which in some ways likes to tell people how to live their lives — trying to ban McDonald’s Happy Meals, second-hand smoke outdoors and plastic shopping bags — is unlikely to start telling companies how to feed their employees.

“It’s not the kind of thing you can micromanage,” says Mr. Metcalf of SPUR. “It’s nice to have something that they leave alone.”

But he hopes that the executives who move into blighted city neighborhoods see a reason to encourage employees to get out.

?“The city benefits,” he says, “when a company decides to integrate more with the public life of the street.”

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Link by Link: Speed Bumps on the Road to Virtual Cash

MONEY is accumulated, traded and transferred online every day, but can there be a form of currency that exists only online and yet has real-world value?

That is the premise of Bitcoin, an open-source virtual currency system that since 2009 has grown to a market worth more than $100 million.

But the past few weeks have shown that a virtual currency can be just as vulnerable as the paper kind. Bitcoin accounts have been subject to hacking and theft; the currency itself experienced a bubble and a crash. And at least one group that was collecting donations in Bitcoins has decided against using them because of possible legal entanglements.

Gavin Andresen, who is the lead developer of the open-source software that operates the currency, said in an interview from his home in Amherst, Mass.: “I expected it to have lots of speed bumps along the way — but I didn’t expect there to be so many speed bumps in a row.”

There are several appeals to the idea of an online currency. The standard way to ensure the validity of online transactions, according to Jerry Brito, a technology expert at George Mason University, is “to have an intermediary to keep the ledger,” that is, a service like PayPal or a credit card company that takes a percentage of the transaction.

A virtual currency would not need an intermediary. It would also make it harder for authorities to track transactions (particularly appealing for gambling sites or other quasi-legal activities).

Bitcoin began as a kind of thought experiment. In 2009, an anonymous programmer published a paper proposing a virtual currency that would elegantly solve many of the problems surrounding currency that exists only on the Internet, including the main one, that the money would simply be copied like, say, music files, and plummet in value.

Another part of the challenge was to create a currency without having to resort to a central bank to issue the currency and track the transactions. In other words, the transactions would be genuinely “peer-to-peer” rather than pass though a virtual bank.

The solution of the Bitcoin programmer, who wrote under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, was to ensure that each “coin” was its own certificate of authenticity — that the coin, in essence, would be nothing more than that certificate.

In the Bitcoin system, a new coin is produced whenever a computer can calculate an answer to a difficult problem, and then attaches that answer to a digital record of every transaction of every Bitcoin ever traded — a breathtakingly large amount of information to carry around in order to buy a pack of gum, but in a time when information can zip around the Internet, not too much to ask. Anyone would be free to create a new coin, within proscribed supply limits, by having a computer do the work needed to prove that it was in fact a valid Bitcoin.

“The incentives are right, they are a check that everyone is following the rules,” said Mr. Andresen. “Early adopters want it to succeed, because they already own the currency. And if you generate Bitcoins no one thinks is valid, you have wasted a lot of computer time.”

In fact, Bitcoin is a rarity for a currency in that it is neither a so-called fiat currency — one like dollars, which are valuable because the government says they are — nor is it a specie currency, one that gets its value because it can be converted into a precious metal like silver or gold.

But why would a Bitcoin have value if it is only a stream of numbers, unsupported by government fiat or by some underlying asset?

“Why does any tool have value?” Mr. Andresen asked. “It is valuable because it is useful.”

Starting almost as soon as the coins were introduced, they have been traded for dollars at online exchanges, serving as a crude measure of the currency’s popularity and health (and also giving a market where owners can trade in Bitcoins for real dollars).

After two years, there are seven million of these “coins” in circulation and the rate of increase — currently 50 coins are added every 10 minutes — will slow each year until the number tops out at 21 million coins around 2025. The coins, which trade for about $17 each at online exchanges, have a cumulative value of about $100 million. “I do think of it as the market cap of Bitcoin,” said Mr. Andresen. Today, a list of businesses that accept Bitcoin currency is a motley collection of companies on the fringe of the computer world, groups that conduct gambling or the like, and, notably, the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, which accepts contributions in Bitcoins. You certainly can’t stock the pantry or furnish your home with Bitcoins.

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Tools of Entry, No Need for a Key Chain

New technology lets smartphones unlock hotel, office and house doors and open garages and even car doors. ?

It’s a not-too-distant cousin of the technology that allows key fobs to remotely unlock automobiles or key cards to be waved beside electronic pads at office entrances. What’s new is that it is on the device more people are using as the Swiss Army knife of electronics — in equal parts phone, memo pad, stereo, map, GPS unit, camera and game machine.

The phone simply sends a signal through the Internet and a converter box to a deadbolt or door knob. Other systems use internal company networks, like General Motors’ OnStar system, to unlock car doors.

Because nearly everyone has a cellphone, a number of start-ups, lock companies and carmakers are betting on broad acceptance of the technology.?

Schlage, a major lock maker, markets a system that lets homeowners use their mobile phones to unlock their doors from miles away, and manage their home heating and air-conditioning, lights and security cameras. Customers buy locks that are controlled by wireless radio signals sent from an Internet-connected box in their home.

Recently, Dwight Gibson,?vice president for connected home solutions at Ingersoll Rand, Schlage’s parent, said that he used the system to let a friend into his house while he was sitting at his desk at work. “She thought it was magic,” he said.

Daimler-Benz now has it on its Mercedes. ?Zipcar, the car sharing service, has a mobile phone app that allows customers to unlock their car doors by pressing a button on their phone screen that looks like a lock. They have used it 250,000 times since it was introduced two years ago.?

In October, General Motors introduced an app that lets owners of most 2011 G.M. models lock and unlock the doors and start the engine remotely. It allows car owners to warm up the engine on a frigid day or fire up the air-conditioning on a hot one from the comfort of their office cubicle, said Timothy Nixon, who oversees “infotainment” products for the automaker. “In the winter, when my wife and I went to dinner and the check came, I pulled out my phone and started the car,” he said. “By the time we got to it, it was toasty and warm.”

Other times, Mr. Nixon has landed after a flight and used his phone to double-check that he had locked his car door at his departure airport.

But having a phone double for entry or ignition does not yet feel fail-safe. “You don’t want a dead phone battery and discover you can’t go anywhere,” Mr. Nixon said.

It’s unlikely you’d hide a spare phone under a rock or in the bushes. (Though a homeowner may want to stash a physical house key outside in case the home Internet connection goes down.)

Another sticking point is that the technology remains fairly cumbersome by requiring users to push buttons on their phone to establish a connection with a system in the car or house.

Mobile phone industry analysts say that process will get easier with the emergence of a technology called near field communications, or N.F.C. It allows a phone to be waved like a magnetic card near a device that can capture the signal and click open a door.

N.F.C is now in only a handful of phones, but manufacturers should ship around 550 million N.F.C. phones in 2015, according to IHS iSuppli, a technology consulting firm. Rajeev Chand, head of research for Rutberg & Company, a boutique investment bank that focuses on emerging companies and technology in the mobile phone industry, said keys might seem like outdated technology in a few years. “Keys are not going away, but they will become an arcane thing.”?

In an eight-month trial that ended last month using N.F.C technology, visitors to the Clarion Hotel in Stockholm were invited to use their phones to gain access to their rooms. ?

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Cultural Studies: Talking (Exclamation) Points

One shudders to imagine what Twain would have made of e-mail.

Writing is by definition an imperfect medium for relaying the human voice. And in the age of electronic communication, when that voice is transmitted so often via e-mail and text message, many literate and articulate people find themselves justifying the exclamation point to convey emotion, enthusiasm or excitement. Some do so guiltily, as if on a slippery slope to smiley faces.

“I’ve degenerated to the point where I allow one per e-mail, but I don’t feel good about it,” said Alex Knight, a media and technology investor in Seattle. “If I use one, I will go back and delete the previous ones. It’s sort of ‘Sophie’s Choice.’?”

In their book “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” David Shipley and Will Schwalbe say that the exclamation point was originally reserved for an actual exclamation (“My goodness!” or “Good grief!”) but that they have become unexpected champions of this maligned punctuation. “We call it the ur emoticon,” Mr. Schwalbe said in a recent phone conversation. “In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.”

“E-mail has such a flattening effect: it’s toneless and affectless,” he said. “The exclamation point is the quickest and easiest way to kick things up a notch, but not if you’re angry. Only happy exclamation points.”

It’s unusual for a punctuation mark to carry such infamy. “Italics are far more expressive, and they never get a bad reputation,” Joni Evans, chief executive of the Web site WowOwow.com, wrote in an e-mail. “I’m not ashamed of using exclamation points to convey emphasis. I would never use a smiley face, but there are smiley-face personalities. Kathie Lee Gifford comes to mind. People are what they type. But now I am worried: I’m a frequent user of the dash, which might mean that I’m a dash kind of person. Could be a bad sign.”

Coincidentally, many of the earliest typewriters did not include a specialized key for the exclamation point, and the endeavor to sound animated required three strokes: an apostrophe, a backspace and a period. The computer not only renders such labor unnecessary but also, with a lingering finger on the key, facilitates exclamatory abuse: A conga line (!!!) is effortless, so standards must be self-imposed. “I draw the line at more than one at a time,” said Cyndi Stivers, a digital media consultant in Manhattan, but she permits herself three if she wants to signify being “gobsmacked.”

Classic style manuals generally decree that exclamation points be used sparingly. “But e-mails seemed from the start to require different punctuation,” said Lynne Truss, the author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” “As if by common consent, people turned to the ellipsis and the exclamation point. There must have been a reason for this. My theory is that both of these marks are ways of trying to keep the attention of the reader. One of them says, ‘Don’t go away, I haven’t finished, don’t go, don’t go,’ while the other says, ‘Listen! I’m talking to you!’?”

“Since the advent of e-mail, I have personally started all my messages with a yell,” she said. “Instead of ‘Dear George,’ I write, ‘George!’ My belief is that when we read a printed page, we engage an inner ear, which follows the sense, the voice and the music in a linear way. We sort of listen to the writer. Whereas on a computer screen, we tend to pick out bits of information and link them for ourselves. The exclamation point is a natural reaction to this: Writers are shouting to be heard.”

Unsurprisingly, the literati are particularly sensitive to, or particularly defensive about, the use of the exclamation point. “I’m definitely guilty of abusing it in e-mails,” said Jennifer Egan, whose book “A Visit From the Goon Squad” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And she notes a curious rebound effect: “The more exclamation points you use, the more you need to use in order create an impression of exclamation.”

Aimee Lee Ball writes for numerous national magazines and is the co-author of four books, including “No Time to Die.”

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Citing Homeless Law, Hackers Turn Sights on Orlando

Anonymous, a large yet loosely formed group of hackers that claimed responsibility for crashing the Web sites of MasterCard and the Church of Scientology, began attacking the Orlando-based Web sites earlier this week.

The group described its attacks as punishment for the city’s recent practice of arresting members of Orlando Food Not Bombs, an antipoverty group that provides vegan and vegetarian meals twice a week to homeless people in one of the city’s largest parks.

“Anonymous believes that people have the right to organize, that people have the right to give to the less fortunate and that people have the right to commit acts of kindness and compassion,” the group’s members said in a news release and video posted on YouTube on Thursday. “However, it appears the police and your lawmakers of Orlando do not.”

A 2006 city ordinance requires organizations to obtain permits to feed groups of 25 people or more in downtown parks. The law was passed after numerous complaints by residents and businesses owners about the twice-weekly feedings in Lake Eola Park, city officials said. The law limits any group to no more than two permits per year per park.

Since June 1, the city police have arrested 25 Orlando Food Not Bombs volunteers without permits as they provided meals to large groups of homeless people in the park. One of those arrested last week on trespassing charges was Keith McHenry, a co-founder of the first Food Not Bombs chapter in 1980 in Cambridge, Mass. He remained in the Orange County Jail on Thursday awaiting a bond hearing.

This week Anonymous offered a “cease-fire” if no volunteers were arrested during Wednesday evening’s feeding of the homeless. But the police arrested two volunteers, and on Thursday morning Anonymous disrupted the Web site Downtown Orlando, which promotes redevelopment there and is run by the city. An organization spokeswoman confirmed the attack but declined to comment, referring questions to the mayor’s office.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Buddy Dyer, whose re-election campaign site was disabled on Tuesday, called the attack on the Downtown Orlando site an “inconvenience.” She said the city would not change its policy of arresting volunteers who feed homeless people without a permit.

“We will continue to enforce the city ordinance,” said the spokeswoman, who asked not to be identified out of a concern she would become a target of Anonymous. “We must continue to focus on what our Orlando residents want and not the desires of others from outside the community.”

The attack on the Orlando Web sites was the second on a city or state government in two weeks. Last week, hackers gained access to the computer system of the Arizona Department of Public Safety and released law-enforcement records.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Orlando Police Department are investigating, officials said.

Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs condemned the cyberattacks. “We have absolutely nothing to do with Anonymous or any other group that is doing this kind of thing,” said one member, Ben Markeson. “And what Anonymous is doing is a distraction from the real issue at hand.”

Mr. Markeson said the Orlando mayor and City Council members had attempted to “criminalize poverty” by passing a series of ordinances intended to “hide the homeless.”

“Mayor Dyer wants to hide the poor and the hungry people living in our community,” he said.

The mayor’s spokesman denied the allegation, saying: “Nothing could be further from the truth. The city has a strong relationship with our region’s homeless providers and will continue to dedicate resources and services that assist our homeless population.”

Anonymous has become known for prominent denial-of-service attacks on high-traffic Web sites. A denial-of-service attack takes place when an overwhelming crush of Web traffic is intentionally sent to a Web site until it is incapacitated and knocked off line.

Anonymous members rallied a call-to-arms against the city as part of a campaign it dubbed Operation Orlando. Its members promised that future arrests of volunteers helping the homeless would be met with fresh attacks. “For every arrested person,” the group said on Twitter, “Anonymous will deface or assault TEN websites in Orlando.”

Nick Bilton contributed from New York.

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Green Column: Electric Cars Remain Tough Sell in China

The pilot project, which could be replicated in other cities, underpins China’s ambitious plans to put at least half a million electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015.

The country is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — which scientists say are causing global warming — from the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities. With the largest and fastest-growing auto market in the world, China’s carbon footprint can only grow.

To bolster China’s energy security, Beijing has pronounced electric vehicles a top priority. It has earmarked $1.5 billion annually for the industry for the next 10 years in the hope that it can transform the country into one of the leading producers of clean vehicles.

But even with government support and the enthusiasm of electric-taxi customers, challenges remain if electric vehicles are to gain broader acceptance and widespread use.

Charging stations are few and far between, repair shops are hard to find and the cars are costly. Even after generous government support, a Shenzhen electric taxi costs 80 percent more than the Volkswagen Santana that ordinarily cruises the streets of Shenzhen.

“The electric car is still too expensive, and we ended up paying a lot more than for a Santana, even with government subsidies,” said Du Jun, general manager of Pengcheng E-taxi, the operator participating in the pilot project.

Local automakers like SAIC Motor and Dongfeng Motor Group have pledged large investments in greener vehicles. Global automakers, including BMW and Nissan Motor, are also working with local governments to roll out such vehicles — in these two cases the Mini E and the Leaf, respectively.

China’s investment in the electric-vehicle industry has no comparable counterpart in the United States, although the U.S. Congress is considering a bill that would allocate $2.9 billion for a program to help develop the infrastructure for widespread use of electric cars.

Germany’s cabinet agreed on plans in May to encourage the country’s electric auto sector with billions of euros in subsidies, aiming to have one million of the cars on the road by 2020. The subsidies will double state support for research and development to €2 billion, or $2.9 billion, through 2013.

For China, however, hitting its electric-vehicle targets will mean quickly winning market acceptance for an untested technology.

“I think it’s going to be a very, very long time, because the Chinese consumer, at the end of the day, is very pragmatic and wants a reliable car with a gasoline engine,” said Michael Dunne, president of the industry consulting firm Dunne & Co. in Hong Kong. “They don’t want to be the ones experimenting.”

But he said that government fleets and bus companies were more likely to buy electric vehicles.

The Chinese government picked Shenzhen, along with 12 other cities, in 2009 to lead the migration to green vehicles. Shenzhen and Hangzhou are the only ones attempting to establish e-taxi fleets.

The state-controlled Pengcheng E-Taxi, partly owned by BYD, a major domestic manufacturer of green vehicles that is backed by Warren E. Buffett, was incorporated in March 2010. Fifty e6 cabs made by BYD hit the roads in the city three months later.

“People are really interested in the car,” said Zeng Xiweng, one of the top drivers in the company. “Over 90 percent of customers start asking questions, once they get in.”

“And it’s not just me,” he added. “All my colleagues have similar experiences as well.”

Daniel Li, a Shenzhen resident, recently took a ride in an electric taxi, one of the red cars with a wavy white band around the body that have been operating in the city for more than a year.

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World Bank Is Opening Its Treasure Chest of Data

THE Piper PA-31 Navajo took off into the sultry Miami morning and streaked southward toward the Caribbean. High over Haiti, the cameras inside began to snap.

Behind this reconnaissance mission was, of all things, a financial institution: the World Bank, symbol of globalization and, to many, the hubris of wealthy nations.

But this was hardly some clandestine operation. On the contrary, the aerial photographs taken that January morning in 2010, shortly after a powerful earthquake leveled much of Port-au-Prince, were soon uploaded to the Web for all to see, along with an invitation to help World Bank specialists assess the damage and figure out how to aid Haiti.

The appeal marked a radical departure for the often close-to-the-vest World Bank, which, like its brother, the International Monetary Fund, has been called everything from arrogant to inept. The World Bank, you see, wants the world to know that it is finally opening up, albeit slowly and, at times, a bit painfully.

The I.M.F. has grabbed the hot headlines lately, having become a tabloid fixture after its leader, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in a Midtown Manhattan hotel. That allegation began unraveling on Friday, when prosecutors themselves questioned the victim’s credibility. Not that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is going back to his old job; last week, the fund named Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, as its next leader.

But while the I.M.F. is busy with scandal and the debt crisis now shaking Europe, officials at the World Bank’s headquarters here are confronting some existential questions, including the big one: What exactly are we doing here?

The World Bank’s traditional role has been to finance specific projects that foster economic development, whereas the I.M.F.’s goal is to safeguard the global monetary system. But many people, particularly in the developing world, have long questioned whether the economic prescriptions that these two lofty institutions hand down from Washington — essentially: liberalize, privatize and deregulate — have done anything but advance the interests of wealthy nations like the United States. That the I.M.F. is now championing deeply unpopular austerity measures for Greece, where street protests continued last week, only sharpens that point.

So it might come as a surprise that the president of the World Bank, Robert B. Zoellick, a career diplomat and member of the Republican foreign-policy elite, argues that the most valuable currency of the World Bank isn’t its money — it is its information.

Created in 1944 and, by custom, headed by an American, the World Bank initially helped finance the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Since then, it has extended many trillions in loans for a wide variety of projects, be they institutions like schools and hospitals, infrastructure like roads or, controversially, environmentally unfriendly projects like coal-fired power plants and hydroelectric dams. Along the way the World Bank, like the I.M.F., has tinkered with entire economies, sometimes with disastrous results.

Yet the Haiti flights — which cost about the same as a World Bank report — were the harbinger of a quiet revolution now gripping this aloof institution.

More than 600 engineers in 21 countries analyzed the data collected over Haiti, and their conclusions — essentially what to rebuild and where — have since been used by the Haitian government, relief organizations, companies and myriad others.

“It was like the cowboy West in terms of the boundaries of the project and what we were able to do,” says Stuart P. D. Gill, a computational cosmologist and project coordinator for the bank’s disaster reduction and recovery labs.

Long regarded as a windowless ivory tower, the World Bank is opening its vast vault of information. True, the bank still lends roughly $170 billion annually. But it is increasingly competing for influence and power with Wall Street, national governments and smaller regional development banks, who have as much or more money to offer. It is no longer the only game in town.

And so Mr. Zoellick, 57, is wielding knowledge — lots of it. For more than a year, the bank has been releasing its prized data sets, currently giving public access to more than 7,000 that were previously available only to some 140,000 subscribers — mostly governments and researchers, who pay to gain access to it.

Those data sets contain all sorts of information about the developing world, whether workaday economic statistics — gross domestic product, consumer price inflation and the like — or arcana like how many women are breast-feeding their children in rural Peru.

It is a trove unlike anything else in the world, and, it turns out, highly valuable. For whatever its accuracy or biases, this data essentially defines the economic reality of billions of people and is used in making policies and decisions that have an enormous impact on their lives.

Mr. Zoellick says the bank’s newfound openness is part of a push to embrace competition, both internally and externally, as it tries to reduce poverty and foster economic development.

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Bits: Hackers Claim Small Breach on Apple Site

A group of hackers who have attacked a number of Web sites in recent months said Sunday that they had stolen a small number of internal passwords and usernames from an Apple server.

The information was supposedly taken from a server used by Apple for online surveys and did not belong to the public or Apple customers. The data was posted publicly on pastebin, a file-sharing Web site.

Anonymous, the group claiming?responsibility?for the attack, is believed to be working closely with hackers who were involved in Lulz Security, a hacker group?that disbanded last week after attacking a?number of sites over the past two months, including PBS.org, the United States Senate, the?Arizona Department of Public Safety and the Web site of a company?associated?with the Federal?Bureau?of Investigation.

The latest breach, which only contains 27 internal Apple usernames and passwords, is a relatively small amount of data compared to attacks on other companies, but it underscores the potential for other attacks by Anonymous.

Apple could not be reached for comment to confirm whether the information was stolen from the company.

In the Twitter message about the data breach, hackers said Apple could become a larger target but that members were currently busy with other goals. “Apple?could be target, too. But don’t worry, we are busy elsewhere,” the group wrote in the message.

Earlier this month Lulz Security claimed it had breached Apple’s iCloud servers, which are used for the company’s cloud music and photo service that is expected to launch later this year, but the group never posted any of this alleged information online.

This latest breach, and other?recent attacks on?corporate?and government Web sites, is part of a growing movement by hackers called Anti Security, or AntiSec online. The public stated goal of this movement is to expose loopholes and software?vulnerabilities on company and?government?Web sites and servers. Security experts and law?enforcement?see the string of AntiSec-labeled attacks as a?justification?by hackers to wreak?havoc?online.

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Bits: Many Smartphone Customers Are Still Up for Grabs

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News The smartphone market is growing at a pace quicker than analysts and companies expected.

About 10 years ago I met an advertising executive in New York who explained the?difficulty?of?advertising a new brand of deodorant to consumers. “Most people never change their?deodorant,” I remember him saying. “They pick one brand when they are young, and stick with it for a long, long time. If it works, why switch?”

The same theory can be applied to customers who are making the switch to smartphones today. Once they have picked a type of phone, whether it’s Apple iOS, Google Android or something else, it’s difficult, and often expensive, to switch. Consumers become comfortable with the interface and design of the phone and the apps they have purchased on that platform.?If it works, why switch?

That is why the race to pull in smartphone buyers is going to be especially vicious over the next 18 to 24 months. Although it may seem that everyone owns a smartphone these days, there are still hundreds of millions of mobile phone owners around the world who have yet to move from a standard mobile or feature phone to its smarter, more intelligent big brother: the smartphone.

Yet the change is happening at a much quicker pace than technology analysts?and companies?originally?theorized.?A report issued this week by Nielsen, the market research firm, found that among Americans who purchased a new mobile phone in the last three months, 55 percent opted for a smartphone. This is up from 34 percent a year ago.

IDC, another technology research firm, said in a report issued last month that customers around the globe are on track to?purchase?472 million smartphones in 2011, up from?305 million in 2010. IDC also estimates that these numbers will double by 2015, when customers will buy almost 1 billion smartphones.

At this point, who will lead that market is not up for debate. Android has been growing at a pace no one could have imagined, even Google. The company said this week that it now activates more than 500,000 Android devices each day.

“Android is going to be No. 1 outright for the?foreseeable?future — they have devices and partners everywhere — but how much they lead by is definitely going to be challenged by others,” said Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC’s mobile devices technology and trends team.

Mr. Llamas said Apple, which changed the smartphone game in 2007 when it introduced the iPhone, potentially has a?ceiling?with consumers as its mobile phone is often more expensive than those of its competitors.

Although millions of customers flock to Apple products for their beauty, simplicity and powerful brand, many can’t afford a new iPhone. This could change if Apple offers a less expensive model of the iPhone later this year, as some analysts expect.?”Right now the iPhone only comes in one flavor; it’s not like other Apple products like the iPod where there are several different sizes, shapes and prices,” Mr. Llamas said.

Although Windows Phone 7 is not destined to become the top smartphone operating system in the world, it could eat into Android’s market share.

“Nokia has great brand recognition oversees, and once they start offering Nokia phones with the Windows Phone 7 operating system on them, Microsoft has no choice but to go up,” said Mr. Llamas.

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The Paperless Cockpit

But instead of carrying all that paperwork, a growing number of pilots are carrying a 1.5 pound iPad.

The Federal Aviation Administration has authorized a handful of commercial and charter carriers to use the tablet computer as a so-called electronic flight bag. Private pilots, too, are now carrying iPads, which support hundreds of general aviation apps that simplify preflight planning and assist with in-flight operations.

“The iPad allows pilots to quickly and nimbly access information,” said Jim Freeman, a pilot and director of flight standards at Alaska Airlines, which has given iPads to all its pilots. “When you need to a make a decision in the cockpit, three to four minutes fumbling with paper is an eternity.”

Alaska Airlines received F.A.A. approval in May to permit its pilots to consult digital flight, systems and performance manuals on the iPad — cutting about 25 pounds of paper from each flight bag. The e-manuals include hyperlinks and color graphics to help pilots find information quickly and easily. And pilots do not have to go through the tedium of updating the manuals by swapping out old pages with new ones because updates are downloaded automatically.

In the next phase of what Alaska Airlines calls Operation Bye, Bye, Flight Bag, the carrier plans to petition the F.A.A. to use the iPad to read aeronautical charts, saving another five pounds of paper per pilot. Counting both the pilot and co-pilot, that would remove 60 pounds of paper from the cockpit — a significant savings not only in paper and printing costs but also in fuel because planes are that much lighter.

Because Apple’s tablet computer weighs less and is more compact than a laptop and its touch screen easier to manipulate, its introduction in 2010 made the move away from paper in the cockpit easier.

Switching to the iPad is also expected to reduce health care costs and absenteeism from shoulder and back injuries associated with hoisting heavy flight bags, said David Clark, pilot and manager of the connected aircraft program at American Airlines. “Cockpits are small, and lifting that thing up and over your seat causes damage, particularly when you consider a lot of pilots are over 40.”

American Airlines won F.A.A. approval last month for its pilots to use the iPad to read aeronautical charts. American received authorization last year to use the device instead of paper reference manuals. Executive Jet Management, a NetJets company owned by Berkshire Hathaway, received the F.A.A.’s permission in February for its pilots to read aeronautical charts on iPads.

Moreover, the F.A.A. said pilots at the two airlines would not have to shut off and store their iPads during taxiing, takeoff and landing because they had demonstrated that the devices would not impair the functioning of onboard electronics. Alaska Airlines pilots, like passengers, still have to put their iPads away during those critical phases of the flight.

“Each airline must submit a unique proposal on how they want to use the iPad and prove that both the device and software application are safe and effective for that proposed use,” said John W. McGraw, the F.A.A.’s deputy director of flight standards. Executive Jet Management, for example, had 55 pilots test the iPad on 10 types of aircraft to prove that it was reliable and that it would not interfere with flight instruments. The iPad was also subjected to rapid decompression at a simulated altitude of 51,000 feet.

Private and corporate pilots, however, do not have to go through the same approval process. According to F.A.A. regulations, they are responsible for determining what technologies are safe and appropriate for use in the cockpit. As a result, iPads are quickly becoming essential tools in planes ranging from Gulf Stream G650s to Piper Vagabonds.

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Thai Party Forms Coalition Even as the Military Promises Not to Interfere

The election result was a reversal of the coup and a repudiation of the elite establishment that backed it, taking Thailand into a precarious future.

The head of the victorious Pheu Thai Party and likely prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, 44, is a political novice. She is the youngest sister of Mr. Thaksin, who was forced from office in 2006 and now lives in Dubai, evading a jail term for abuse of power.

On Monday, Pheu Thai shored itself up against expected legal and political challenges by announcing the formation of a five-party coalition, even though it appeared to have won an outright majority of seats in Parliament.

The election result, like the “red shirt” street protests that ended in violence last year, challenged the established political and social order in which the poorer classes in Thailand have historically had little say. Mr. Thaksin, who served as prime minister from 2001 until his ouster, courted this mass base with populist economic policies and turned them into a political force.

Though there was no sign of a direct connection, the election resonated with events in the Middle East, said Charles Keyes, an expert on Thailand at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“There is a period in history going on right now that Thailand is part of,” he said. “There is a strong desire for more popular participation in the shaping of the political system.”

As the election approached and a Pheu Thai victory seemed increasingly likely, the military, which supported the losing Democrat Party, repeatedly denied that it would stage a coup.

The Thai military has staged 18 attempted or successful coups over the years, as much a part of the political process as electoral votes. “I’ve said this several times,” the defense minister, Gen. Prawit Wongsuwon, said on Monday. “We are not going to intervene.”

At the same time, the government’s electoral commission said that it was investigating accusations of fraud and other violations that could disqualify some winning candidates and reduce the margin of the Pheu Thai victory. It said it would announce the final tally within 30 days.

Preliminary results showed Pheu Thai with 264 seats, more than half the total of 500 seats and enough to form a single-party government.

But with both electoral and political challenges in view, Pheu Thai immediately began negotiating with parties that could augment its hold on power and offer safety in numbers.

The losing Democrat Party is the party of the establishment — royalists, old-money business owners and high-ranking military officers — who have defended their place at the center of a traditional hierarchical system of power and wealth.

“I think what this has shown to the military and to the elite is that you cannot simply deny that there is a strong desire on the part of the working class for a significant influence on the political system,” Mr. Keyes said.

The election result does not seem to have closed Thailand’s bitter divide.

“The election is over but the hatred remains,” said the English-language daily The Nation in a headline. It said that Ms. Yingluck had been “thrust into a minefield of power.”

In an informal poll, another daily, The Bangkok Post, found that more than half of respondents believed that there would be more political violence in the future.

A businesswoman with no political experience, Ms. Yingluck would become Thailand’s first female prime minister. After her victory, she denied that she would simply be a front for her brother. “There is a lot of work ahead — tackling economic woes and leading the country on the path of reconciliation,” she said. “These tasks fall upon me.”

At a news conference on Monday she said her government’s priorities would be economic development and reconciliation, a vague term that was also used by the Democrat Party during its divisive period in power.

“Corruption is another problem we will solve,” she said, repeating a campaign promise that also echoed the promises of earlier governments and was a charge leveled by leaders of the coup against Mr. Thaksin.

She promised to deliver on every promise from a campaign program filled with expensive handouts like tax relief, price supports and cash subsidies to the elderly.

Economists say they fear that implementation of these pledges could bring the economy to its knees. A promised 30 percent increase in the minimum wage, for example, could force many small businesses to shut down, they say.

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Alleged Zetas Cartel Leader Captured by Mexican Police

In a statement, Mexican officials described the suspect, Jesús Enrique Rejón Aguilar, as the third most powerful leader of the Zetas, who have become a dreaded source of violence, especially along Mexico’s eastern coast, where they are fighting for territory with the Gulf Cartel.

Experts said the arrest was a sign that the administration of President Felipe Calderón had refocused its efforts against the criminal group, but Eric L. Olson, a senior associate at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that by itself, the arrest should not be seen as a triumph.

“It is now more important than ever for the government of Mexico to demonstrate that it can go beyond the capture of cartel leaders and turn the captures into prosecutions and ultimately the dismantlement of the entire criminal network,” Mr. Olson said. “Good law enforcement should include effective prosecutions.”

Several years into Mr. Calderón’s declared war on the drug gangs, successful prosecutions are still rare, and corruption among public officials is still rampant. Mr. Rejón, the authorities said, was arrested just outside Mexico City, along with a municipal police officer hired to arrange safe passage to Mr. Rejón’s mother’s house in Campeche.

Mr. Rejón has been among the most sought of Mexico’s criminals for years. A former special forces soldier, he has been accused of several murders, of drug trafficking and of trying in 2004 to help a patron break out of prison.

The federal police said that more recently, he was the Zetas’ boss in central Mexico, including San Luis Potosí, the state where Jaime Zapata, an agent with United States Immigration and Customs EnforcementImmigration, was shot and killed in February.

Mr. Rejón was in the state coordinating Zetas activity at the time, according to the Mexican authorities, but his exact role in Mr. Zapata’s death is unclear. Mr. Rejón was also being investigated for the deaths of dozens of migrants found in unmarked graves this spring and summer.

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World Briefing | Europe: Greece: Flotilla Boat Is Impounded

Marital Bankruptcy Filed in Faraway Places

An Alchemist Reaches Out Across Centuries

How the president rallied Congress and the Union with a now-forgotten Fourth of July message.

Former Reds Prospect Back to the Army in Iraq

Family court judges need a formula, not just their own discretion, to avoid unfair settlements.

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2011年7月5日星期二

The Lede: Rap Video Satirizes Syrian Crackdown

A group called the Strong Heroes Of Moscow released a rap video last week that satirizes the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and the crackdown on his country’s uprising. Today, Al Jazeera published an English translation of the Arabic lyrics, which say that “freedom” is a “conspiracy coming from Mars.”

Here is an excerpt:

We’re going to fill all the cells, we’re going to fill all the prisons. We want to empty the Russian guns, for the sake of the Assadi nation.
Your name is always up there, your voice is heard up in the skies. Even if your own people starve to death we will elect you for eternity.
We don’t have one opinion, or two opinions. We have your light that blinds the eyes. You are our magnificent, you beautiful thing. You are the king of humanity!

The video relies on a stark palette of black Arabic lettering and blood-red illustrations, set against a white wall. Toward the end, blood splatters across newspaper pages, and finally onto the face of Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, a 13-year-old boy who became a symbol of government brutality when his mutilated body was returned to his family after he was arrested while protesting in the southern village of Jiza.

When the song is over, the video cuts to footage of men dressed in military gear beating a man who is on his knees.

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European Union to Send Food Aid to North Korea

BRUSSELS — Responding to the growing threat of a humanitarian crisis in North Korea, the European Union announced on Monday that it will provide about $14.5 million in emergency aid to feed more than some 650,000 North Koreans.

The bloc’s executive body, the European Commission, said that after its experts witnessed evidence of a developing crisis last month during a mission to North Korea, it negotiated an agreement with the North Koreans about how to monitor the delivery of assistance.

“Increasingly desperate and extreme measures are being taken by the hard-hit North Koreans, including the widespread consumption of grass,” the European Commission said in a statement.

The severity of the situation prompted a switch of tactics by the commission. In 2008, it stopped sending humanitarian aid to North Korea in favor of offering financing for longer-term development projects.

“The purpose of this aid package is to save the lives of at least 650,000 people who could otherwise die from lack of food,” Kristalina Georgieva, a European commissioner, said in the statement. “Our experts saw severely malnourished children in hospitals and nurseries where no treatment was available.

“North Korea’s chronic nutrition problem is turning into an acute crisis in some parts of the country.”

Former President Jimmy Carter and two other former presidents, Mary Robinson of Ireland and Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, and former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway traveled to North Korea in April and issued grave warnings about the food situation there. (All four are members of the Elders, an independent group of world leaders established by Nelson Mandela.)

Mr. Carter was particularly concerned about the refusal of the United States and South Korea to send humanitarian assistance to the North, saying their deliberate withholding of food aid amounted to “a human rights violation.”

Mr. Carter, 86, who was not traveling as an official American envoy, had been invited to North Korea for meetings with senior political and military officials.

Mrs. Robinson echoed Mr. Carter’s concerns about what she called the “very serious crisis” over food supplies in North Korea because of a harsh winter, severe flooding and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. She said the withdrawal of American and South Korean food shipments had aggravated a dire situation, which had become, she said, “a matter of life-and-death urgency.”

The United States recently sent a team of experts to evaluate food and hunger conditions in North Korea. But the Obama administration has not yet decided about a resumption of food shipments.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently that “North Korea must address our serious concerns about monitoring.” Integral to any agreement to restart American aid deliveries, she said, would be “our ability to ensure and monitor that whatever food aid is provided actually reaches the people who are in need.”

After his trip in April, Mr. Carter said North Korean officials had guaranteed to make changes to the aid-distribution system so that Western governments and donors could track their deliveries and be certain that their aid was not being diverted to the military or the ruling elite.

The European aid will be distributed through the World Food Program, which has been used by the United States and other countries and donors. Ms. Georgieva said it would be strictly monitored, from the point of delivery at ports to when it reached recipients.

“If at any stage we discover that the aid is being diverted from its intended recipients, then the commission will not hesitate to end its humanitarian intervention,” she said.

According to the European Commission, its experts found that in North Korea the state-distributed food rations had been more than halved in recent months. Two-thirds of the population depends on the rations, it said.

The per-person ration, which had been 400 grams of cereals per day, about 14 ounces, was reduced to 150 grams, about 5.3 ounces, in June. That is a fifth of the daily average nutritional requirement, according to European experts. Most of the rations consist of corn.

“Food assistance will reach children under 5 who have already been hospitalized with severe acute malnutrition,” the commission said in the statement. “Children in residential care will also be fed, as well as pregnant and breast-feeding women, hospital patients and the elderly.”

The food shortages have been caused by years of economic mismanagement and underinvestment, and have been made worse by poor weather and a reduction of food imports from China and South Korea. The next main grain harvest is in October.

Initially, the North Koreans had planned to import 353,000 tons of grains, but that target was reduced to 220,000 tons, of which about half has been secured so far, European experts said.

The North Korean government has promised unrestricted access for random checks related to the aid, the commission said. While distributing the European aid, the World Food Program will pay 400 visits per month to warehouses, institutions caring for children, hospitals and distribution sites.

Stephen Castle reported from Brussels and Mark McDonald from Seoul, South Korea.

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World Briefing | Europe: Vatican: Ordination of Bishop by China is Condemned

How the president rallied Congress and the Union with a now-forgotten Fourth of July message.

Family court judges need a formula, not just their own discretion, to avoid unfair settlements.

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Statue of Reagan Is Unveiled in London

In defiance of the usual Fourth of July sentiments, American and British flags were intertwined and placed into perfectly trimmed hedges in leafy Grosvenor Square. Hundreds of guests demonstrated the much-vaunted special relationship by lining up patiently, in the accepted British style, for American cuisine in the form of Fresh ’n’ Tasty Jumbo Hot Dogs and Dippin’ Donuts.

As the brass band of the United States Army Europe struck up “America the Beautiful,” an assembly of grandees — most of them conservatives like Reagan’s former speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — as well as a Congressional delegation led by the House majority whip, Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, mingled with leaders of Britain’s governing Conservative Party.

Among those representing the British government were the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne; the minister of defense, Liam Fox; and the foreign secretary, William Hague.

The statue of a smiling Reagan, dressed in a crisp suit, was paid for by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation as part of a worldwide effort to promote his legacy, according to the organization’s executive director. Similar events have been held in the last few days in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

Inscribed on the statue is a quote from his friend Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister. “Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War,” it reads, “without firing a single shot.” (Some British commentators suggested that ignores the contributions of Eastern European dissidents.)

Though Mrs. Thatcher is in poor health and did not attend, she provided a statement that was read by Mr. Hague. “Through his strength and conviction,” she wrote, “he brought millions of people to freedom as the Iron Curtain finally came down.”

In a speech, Mr. McCarthy described Mr. Reagan’s fight not only against the forces of Communism, but against the “tyranny” of debt and big government. He and Mrs. Thatcher, he said, “did not move to the center to gather votes, they moved the center to them.”

Mr. Hague called Reagan “a great American hero.” Were he here today, Mr. Hague said in reference to the Arab Spring, “he would be saying, ‘It’s morning in the Middle East.’?”

Later, Mr. Hague admitted to reporters that the attendees had been “mostly conservatives.” The United States ambassador to Great Britain, Louis B. Susman, said in an interview that even those who rejected Reagan’s politics “admire his leadership, and the fact that the same qualities he embodied have been exported to North Africa, in the Arab Spring.”

Outside the square, Abraham Fisher, 31, was hurrying to work as a wine waiter. “I heard about the statue on the radio,” he said. “But to be honest, I don’t really know what Reagan did.”

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Departing U.S. Envoy Sees Progress in Afghanistan, and Pitfalls Ahead

That is how Mr. Eikenberry says he feels now, as he prepares to step down as the American ambassador to Afghanistan, after nearly a decade of working here, as a general during two tours, as a NATO official and for the past two and a half years as ambassador.

“One of the hard parts of leaving is you just don’t know how some of the big things are going to turn out,” said Mr. Eikenberry, quoting his father and drawing the parallel to his own imminent departure.

He will not be the only person to leave with that question: in the same three-week period, two other powerful figures will leave. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commanding general here, will lead the Central Intelligence Agency, and Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the No. 2 commanding general and the man who has been running the war day to day, will run the United States Army Forces Command, which prepares troops going overseas.

The three have presided over a period when American military and civilian power and spending in Afghanistan were at their zenith, and their departures mark the end of an era.

From an American policy standpoint, the changing of the guard means little, but from the Afghan standpoint, in which a leader’s personality can determine the policy, the triple departure, along with President Obama’s June 22 speech on the withdrawal of troops, has stoked fears of abandonment, especially for Afghans who have depended on the Americans.

“Ambassador Eikenberry and General Petraeus, both of them leaving at the same time, maybe it doesn’t affect the policy, but it affects the morale of the people,” said Fawzia Koofi, a member of Parliament and a strong advocate of women’s rights.

All three men have emphasized that the strategic partnership agreement — now under negotiation — will help guarantee firm American support.

They have said they are “cautiously optimistic” about Afghanistan, in the words of Mr. Eikenberry and General Rodriguez, but they have also made clear that questions loom about the government’s capacity to provide services, about Pakistan’s intentions and about the ability of the relatively inexperienced Afghan security forces to protect the country.

Afghans, by contrast, see a deeply unsettled landscape, where disaster is at least as likely as survival, where the decrease in NATO troops could make the country more vulnerable both to rapacious neighbors and to the Taliban. They see a government unable to accept the rulings of its own institutions in the case of elections and a dangerous standoff with the International Monetary Fund over how to overcome the paralyzing fraud at Kabul Bank, the nation’s largest financial institution.

“The announcement of a significant drawdown and discussion of 2014 makes people afraid,” said Ahmad Nader Nadery of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

“By 2014, all security responsibility will be in Afghan hands, so the leverage of the Taliban and support for the Taliban will be much more, and they will either take over or set terms that the government will have to listen to,” he said. “People are thinking how to prevent a total collapse,” Mr. Nadery added.

Mr. Eikenberry, whose career here has tracked the trajectory of the war, from the almost heady optimism of the early days after the Taliban’s fall to the recent foreboding that large portions of the country were at risk of again falling under Taliban influence, spoke enthusiastically about the United States’ efforts, but did not try to predict the future.

The ambassador gave a rare on-the-record interview to The New York Times last week.

He warned that the current political impasse over Parliament could have long-term consequences for Afghanistan’s future as a democracy and conveyed his sense that with the exception of the Afghan Army, which many Afghans already regard highly, there were profound questions about whether Afghan institutions would survive.

Ten days ago, a special court convened by President Hamid Karzai, which election officials and the international community say is illegal, ordered nearly a fourth of the seats in Parliament overturned. Parliament has responded by voting to censure judicial officials.

“Whenever the dust settles, it has to be a parliament that is accepted by the Afghan people,” Mr. Eikenberry said.

The Kabul Bank crisis is another major concern, said international advisers, including the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, because the International Monetary Fund has refused to renew its main credit program for Afghanistan, effectively halting aid from several major donors. Afghan efforts to reach an agreement with the monetary fund have fallen short. Longer-term economic issues are also looming.

An estimated 95 percent of the country’s economic activity is derived from foreign aid and Western military expenditures, and Mr. Eikenberry warned of an economic collapse in Afghanistan as donors begin to reduce their spending here.

This year foreign aid from the United States peaked at $4 billion, but in the next fiscal year only $2.5 billion is planned for Afghanistan. The annual military budget now stands at nearly $120 billion and includes large amounts for development projects, more than $600 million in trucking contracts for Afghans to supply the NATO troops and nearly $12 billion annually to pay for Afghanistan’s security forces.

“We are concerned there could be an economic recession or recessionary effects will be felt in 2013 and 2014,” Mr. Eikenberry said.

General Rodriguez, who made his farewell tour of eastern Afghanistan last week with stops in Paktika and Ghazni and at Bagram Air Base, is acutely aware of the amount of money and jobs the military funnels into the Afghan economy and said he, too, was concerned about how to cement gains.

“We have to figure out how to build durability,” he said. “Progress has to improve exponentially.” The general added, “That is clearly doable.”

The American ambassador said he was departing with particular pride in two achievements. “I’ll leave here with the moniker of being the father of the Afghan Army, and for me that’s a very big deal because it’s one of the few institutions here in the state that’s looked at as all national and credible.”

“The second major achievement is having led the civilian surge,” he said, referring to the State Department’s increase in diplomats to Afghanistan to 1,200 from 325; 400 of them are in the provinces working on reconstruction.

“I think on our watch we did make a difference.”

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British Tabloid Hacked Missing Girl’s Phone, Lawyer Says

According to the lawyer, Mark Lewis, the newspaper not only intercepted messages left on the phone of the girl, Milly Dowler, 13, by her increasingly frantic family after her disappearance, but also deleted some of those messages when her voice mailbox became full — thus making room for new ones and listening to those in turn. This confused investigators and gave false hope to Milly’s relatives, who believed it showed she was still alive and deleting the messages herself, Mr. Lewis said.

In a statement, Mr. Lewis called the newspaper’s actions “heinous” and “despicable” and said the Dowler family had suffered “distress heaped upon tragedy” upon learning that News of the World “had no humanity at such a terrible time.”

The disclosures, reported first in The Guardian, came as part of a broader police investigation into News of the World’s routine practice of intercepting the cellphone messages of celebrities, politicians and other public figures in the mid-2000s. The newspaper has admitted that it did so in some cases, and has paid damages to the actress Sienna Miller and others. Numerous other people who say that their phones were hacked are suing the paper.

But the revelations about Milly Dowler are significant for two reasons. The first is that the alleged hacking in this case occurred in 2002 — five years before News of the World’s chief royal reporter, Clive Goodman, was jailed along with Glenn Mulcaire, an investigator hired by the paper, after they were found guilty of intercepting the phone messages of members of the royal family. The Dowler case is the first to indicate publicly that similar behavior had occurred before.

The second is that in 2002, the editor of News of the World was Rebekah Brooks, a confidant and favorite of Rupert Murdoch, whose corporation owns the paper. Ms. Brooks, who is now chief executive of News International, the British newspaper division of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, has always denied knowing anything about phone hacking at any Murdoch-owned papers.

If Mr. Lewis’s accusations about hacking during the Dowler case prove accurate, it would mean either that Ms. Brooks had no idea how the paper she edited was obtaining information about the Dowler family for its articles, or that she knew about the hacking and allowed it.

Evidence that News of the World had hacked into Milly’s cellphone and into the phones of her family members was found in notebooks belonging to Mr. Mulcaire that were turned over to the police as part of a wider investigation, The Guardian reported.

Mr. Lewis told the BBC that the police had notified Milly Dowler’s parents that “News of the World, or Glenn Mulcaire, was hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone while she was a missing person.”

“You have to ask the question: who was at the News of the World thinking it was appropriate to try and hack into the phone of a missing young girl, and what was Glenn Mulcaire thinking of at the time to take those instructions?” he said. “Both of them should have had common decency, moral right, to turn around and say, no, they weren’t prepared to do that.”

In a statement, News of the World said it was cooperating with the police and added, “This particular case is clearly a development of great concern.”

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Poor Care Led to Death of Lawyer, Russia Says

Mr. Magnitsky was drawn into a feud between his employer, an international investment company, and Russian law enforcement authorities, testifying that senior Interior Ministry officers had used his employer’s companies to embezzle $230 million from the Russian treasury. He was arrested and held without bail on charges of evading about $17.4 million in taxes. He died in 2009 after 11 months in custody.

Mr. Magnitsky’s aunt, Tatyana N. Rudenko, said Monday that the statement was good news. But she said she worried that only prison doctors would be held responsible, absolving investigators who had made crucial decisions about Mr. Magnitsky’s confinement.

“Of course, it gives us some hope, but we still don’t know what will be next,” she said. “We don’t believe that the responsibility ends with the doctors.”

She added: “I am afraid it will stop with the doctors.”

In May, the Investigative Committee, Russia’s top investigative body, announced that it had cleared Oleg F. Silchenko, the lead investigator in the case against Mr. Magnitsky, of any wrongdoing. Mr. Silchenko approved Mr. Magnitsky’s transfer to a prison with minimal medical facilities and refused repeated requests for follow-up treatment that had been prescribed by a doctor.

The new announcement comes amid increasing pressure for action in the investigation, now 18 months old.

A presidential advisory commission is expected to deliver a tough report on the case to President Dmitri A. Medvedev on Tuesday. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Western Europe and the United States are considering banning visas for and freezing the foreign assets of 60 officials his employers say contributed to Mr. Magnitsky’s death. The Dutch Parliament on Monday passed a resolution urging the government to impose sanctions.

The statement released Monday by the Investigative Committee said Mr. Magnitsky died because he had heart disease and active hepatitis; though he suffered from other ailments, it says, they were not connected to his death. It says adequate medical care would have allowed these diseases to be diagnosed before he was critically ill, and that on the day of his death he received no treatment despite being in grave condition.

These shortcomings, the statement says, “deprived Mr. Magnitsky of a benign outcome.”

“Thus, the shortcomings in the provision of medical assistance to Mr. Magnitsky have a direct cause-and-effect relationship with his death,” the statement said, adding that charges will be announced soon.

The statement released on Monday contradicts previous expert findings, one of which flatly concluded that “the drawbacks in medical aid given to Magnitsky have no connection to his death.”

The official response to the case has been inconsistent from the outset, with some officials — most notably the president — urging both reforms and prosecution. Law enforcement bodies, meanwhile, have bestowed public honors on police officials who handled the case and announced new accusations against Mr. Magnitsky on the anniversary of his death.

William F. Browder, the owner of Hermitage Capital, the company Mr. Magnitsky represented, said prosecuting only doctors would be “a farce of criminal justice,” and said he would continue to lobby for the prosecution of all 60 officials, including judges, prosecutors and investigators.

“To somehow isolate it to the last night of his life — to a bunch of doctors — is an amazingly cynical way to circle the wagons and protect the government figures who played a role in this thing,” he said.

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Russia Meets With NATO in New Push for Libyan Peace

At the same time, the president of the World Chess Federation, who is acting as Moscow’s informal go-between with Libya’s embattled leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, made his second trip to Tripoli.

On his last visit, the chess official, Kirsan N. Ilyumzhinov, played a game with Colonel Qaddafi while discussing whether he would consider stepping down and leaving Libya. During the match, Mr. Ilyumzhinov said later, he maneuvered Colonel Qaddafi close to checkmate but then offered him a draw instead.

But in their conversation, Mr. Qaddafi said he intended to die on Libyan soil and would not consider any negotiated settlement that called for his departure from the country.

On Monday, Mr. Ilyumzhinov told Russian news agencies that he had met with Muhammad el-Qaddafi, the colonel’s eldest son, and had again been told that Colonel Qaddafi would not leave Libya. But the Libyan government acknowledged that its emissaries had met on numerous occasions in Europe with representatives of the Libyan opposition, and that the talks were continuing, Reuters reported.

The Russian diplomatic effort to open a channel of communication with the Libyan leader, who has been a major buyer of Russian weapons for years, began after President Dmitri A. Medvedev met with President Obama on the sidelines of a Group of 8 gathering in France in May.

At that meeting, Mr. Medvedev offered to serve as a mediator, and to use what leverage Russia has in Libya to persuade Colonel Qaddafi to cede power. To date, with the colonel refusing the Libyan rebels’ demands that he leave the country, none of Moscow’s forays have borne fruit.

Russia has sharply criticized the NATO bombing campaign as overstepping the United Nations’ mandate to protect civilians, instead apparently aiming to oust Colonel Qaddafi. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also condemned a recently confirmed French weapons airdrop to the Libyan rebels, saying this, too, violated the United Nations resolution. Mr. Medvedev has, however, said that Colonel Qaddafi must step down.

Sergei A. Karaganov, dean of the department of international economics and foreign affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said Russia is appealing to two constituencies. Its mediation efforts gains Moscow points with the West, while its criticism of the NATO campaign plays well in the developing world.

“It might bring results, but nobody knows,” Mr. Karaganov said. “The game, of course, includes Qaddafi. And if he has proven one thing, it is that he is not an easy person to deal with. He doesn’t respond to threats.”

“And by the way,” Mr. Karaganov added of Colonel Qaddafi and Russia, “he is profoundly distrusted here. We know him better than others.”

After Monday’s meeting with the NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, at a Russian government retreat surrounded by palm trees in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, Mr. Medvedev offered encouraging words but no specifics.

“I think all of us are inspired with the results,” he said, the Interfax news agency reported. “The meeting was rather productive, and I hope we made progress.”

Mr. Medvedev also met Monday with Jacob G. Zuma, the president of South Africa, who has negotiated on behalf of the African Union and proposed that an interim government take power in Libya, Russian state television reported. At a meeting over the weekend, the African Union called on its members to disregard an arrest warrant for Colonel Qaddafi issued by the International Criminal Court, saying the warrant could hinder any settlement that included Mr. Qaddafi seeking asylum outside of Libya.

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Trotter Trainer’s Winning Ways, Transplanted

He fell for it as a teenager when his father sent him here from Sweden to learn a little more about the family business: training harness horses.

Bo Takter figured Jimmy would enjoy the adventure, then return home and keep the family name atop the training standings for decades to come. In Sweden, after all, trotter trainers and drivers are as famous as hockey and soccer stars.

Jimmy Takter did return home, but not for long. He has kept the family name atop training standings for decades, but in the United States.

Since coming here in 1982 with a new wife, Christina, and 1-year-old daughter, Nancy, Takter has won nearly 1,000 races, earned more than $55.1 million in purses and captured three Horse of the Year titles. What started as a two-horse barn has grown into a 63-head stable of stake horses that Takter owns either outright or as a majority partner.

His family has grown as well and begins each morning at dawn together on his 100-acre facility here with its own five-eighths-of-a-mile training track. His children, Nancy, Tiffany and Jimmy Jr., put the horses through their paces in the morning, and his son-in-law Marcus Johansson drives many of them at night, including what may be Takter Stables’ fourth champion, the 3-year-old filly pacer See You at Peelers.

She is unbeaten in 18 starts — including an emphatic three-and-a-half-length thumping of the boys last month in the $307,734 Art Rooney Pace at Yonkers Raceway — and has earned more than $1.2 million in purses.

Last year, See You at Peelers finished 13 for 13 and became only the second 2-year-old filly pacer to win the division’s Dan Patch Award with an undefeated season. This year she has continued to look like a once-in-a-generation horse.

See You at Peelers equaled the world record in winning the Empire Breeders Classic at Tioga Downs, became the first filly to capture the Art Rooney, and then equaled the stakes record with a victory in the $601,000 Fan Hanover Stakes at Mohawk Racetrack in Canada.

“She is the Zenyatta of the pacing world,” said Takter, 50. “Like all the great ones, she’s got tremendous heart and desire and just won’t let another horse finish in front of her.”

Next up for the filly is a New York Sire Stakes race Saturday at Vernon Downs near Syracuse, but Takter intends to run her against the boys again and take aim at history.

He thinks See You at Peelers can become just the second filly to win the Little Brown Jug, one of pacing’s Triple Crown races, on Sept. 22 in Delaware, Ohio. It is harness racing’s most significant test of speed and endurance: a horse has to win two heats in one afternoon, usually within two hours of each other, to be declared the Little Brown Jug winner.

In 1981, Fan Hanover became the first filly to win the Jug, and none have even entered since.

“She really hasn’t been challenged or asked to do too much,” Takter said. “The colts have been knocking heads with one another all year, and they might be a little banged up. I really do think she’s good enough.”

Takter knows a lot about talented horses. He has developed dozens of trotters that have become successful stallions in Europe as well as North America. He also trained and often drove the two-time Horse of the Year Moni Maker, who at the time of her retirement in 2000 was the richest standardbred racehorse, with more than $5.5 million in career earnings.

In 1998, Moni Maker took Takter back to Sweden, where she won the famed Elitlopp in Solvalla, as well as major stakes in Italy and Denmark. She came back to the United States later that year to win the Breeders Crown and Nat Ray. In 1999, Takter took Moni Maker back to Europe to win the Prix d’Amérique in France and earn a second-place finish in the Elitlopp.

“He thinks outside the box,” said Perry Soderberg, a fellow Swede and bloodstock agent who helps Takter select horses at auction. “Jimmy is never satisfied with a performance. He always sees something that he believes he can improve on.”

His daughter Nancy, for example, is often the one to put a saddle on many of his trotters or pacers to jog along a straightaway here or gambol through the trails of the adjacent 6,000-acre Horse Park of New Jersey.

“It develops different muscles, and breaks up the monotony,” said Nancy Johansson, 30. “He is always experimenting and trying different things.”

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At War: Dwelling on Dwell Time

FORT DRUM, N.Y. — “It must feel great to be back in the States, right?” I get this question all the time from friends who haven’t seen me since I got back from Afghanistan last December.

It seems like a simple enough question. Yes, it’s great to be around all the things that you are deprived of in Afghanistan: women, alcohol, not having everything you own covered in dust and sand. But the truth is that after six months of recuperation and rest, I’m ready to go back. Needless to say, my friends have quite the look of incredulity on their faces when I say that.

Of course, I’m hardly a bellwether. Most soldiers, and especially their families, no doubt rejoiced at the announcement by the Army chief of staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, that after nearly a decade of continuous war, he would like to decrease deployment time to nine months while increasing dwell time at home to a minimum of 18 months.

Unlike other branches of the military — and many coalition armies with their six-month tours of duty — the Army has had to bear the burden of 12- and, for a time, 15-month combat tours.

Combine this with multiple deployments over the past 10 years, and you can appreciate the incredible amount of stress this has put on soldiers and their families. Given that, many would think that spending more time at home and less time deployed would be a wholly positive thing. And while in the long term that statement would be correct, in the short term it presents many challenges not otherwise apparent. And to some soldiers, it is actually an unwelcome change.

As with anything that is done with enough repetition, deploying and training on a set schedule (one year deployed and one year at home) becomes a habit. Do it for 10 years, and it becomes ingrained in the culture. A whole generation of officers, noncommissioned officers and senior enlisted soldiers has come of age in an era during which anything from three to seven deployments was the norm. It was just a given that you would spend a year overseas, regroup for a year at home and head back out again. The urgency was always there.

Now, amid the the unspoken sense that we are nearing the ends of our wars — particularly with the drawdown in Iraq and one farther down the line in Afghanistan –- one of the challenges is to maintain the same sense of urgency in training without the pressure of an impending deployment.

I’ve overheard soldiers gripe about how they think there won’t even be a war by the time we redeploy again, as if they are missing out. As leaders it is necessary to correct such notions on the spot, but the challenge remains to instill a sense of urgency in soldiers who may now have upwards of two years at home, and no idea of the likely mission when they do eventually deploy again.

It’s harder to keep a soldier focused on fighting a war when it isn’t staring him in the face, and the environment around him seems to be transforming back to a garrison army.

Additionally, a somewhat counterintuitive corollary is that the increase in time at home is surprisingly unwelcome for some. While very few soldiers will complain about the decrease in deployment time, some who volunteered during a time of war expect just that: to go and fight in the war. One unmistakable theme I noticed while deployed was that the sense of purpose was clear, the stakes were real, and, most importantly, everyone was doing his job, and trying their best to do it well. More time training stateside is seen by some as more time away from their “real job.”

While this mentality is not common, neither is it rare, particularly among younger soldiers and those without families. Ask any noncommissioned officer, or NCO, with a family and multiple deployments under his belt, and he will gladly take any additional time with his wife and kids without feeling that he is shirking his duty. But for these young, single, soldiers there are incentives associated with deploying often. Financially, soldiers can make and save a considerable amount of money while deployed. Some of the less financially savvy soldiers have even become dependent on the year on/year off cycle, saving their deployment money only to spend it all while at home and needing another deployment to get back in the black.

Younger soldiers may also have a chip on their shoulders. In an Army that has been at war for a decade, no one wants to be the one without a combat patch, or with just one deployment. The private who was in elementary school during 9/11 is likely to have an inferiority complex when facing an NCO who has done five combat tours.

Of course, most soldiers are perfectly happy with more time between deployments. The soldiers in need of money and respect — or in my case who just happen to find Afghanistan curiously delightful — will have to wait the few extra months to get their fix.

Because after a decade of hard work and sacrifice, the Army and its soldiers both need and deserve some time to catch their breath.

First Lt. Mark Larson is a platoon leader stationed at Fort Drum, N.Y., with the 10th Mountain Division. He served in Afghanistan in 2010. His previous posts for At War can be read here.

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