Instagram Reversal Doesn’t Appease Everyone

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Kevin Systrom, right, co-founder of Instagram, with employees in the company office in San Francisco last year.

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook may have quelled a full-scale rebellion by quickly dumping the contentious new terms of use for Instagram, its photo-sharing service. But even as the social network furiously backpedaled, some users said Friday they were carrying through on plans to leave.

Eric Piermont/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s co-founder, said the company would complete its plans, then explain its ad policy.

Ryan Cox, a 29-year-old management consultant at ExactTarget, an Indianapolis-based interactive marketing software company, said he had already moved his photos to Flickr, Yahoo’s photo-sharing app, where he could have better control.

Mr. Cox said the uproar this week over whether Instagram owned its users’ photos was “a wake-up call.”

“It’s my fault,” he continued. “I’m smart enough to know what Instagram had and what they could do — especially the minute Facebook acquired them — but I was a victim of naïve optimism.”

“Naïve optimism” is as good a term as any for the emotion that people feel as they put their private lives onto social networks.

Companies like Google, Twitter, Yelp and Facebook offer themselves as free services for users to store and share their most intimate pictures, secrets, messages and memories. But to flourish over the long term, they need to seek new ways to market the personal data they accumulate. They must constantly push the envelope, hoping users either do not notice or do not care.

So they sell ads against the content of an e-mail, as Google does, or transform a user’s likes into commercial endorsements, as Facebook does, or sell photographs of your adorable 3-year-old, which is what Instagram was accused of planning this week.

“The reality is that companies have always had to make money,” said Miriam H. Wugmeister, chair of Morrison Foerster’s privacy and data security group.

Even as Instagram was pulling back on its changed terms of service on Thursday night, it made clear it was only regrouping. After all, Facebook, as a publicly held corporation, must answer to Wall Street’s quarterly expectations.

“We are going to take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work,” Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s youthful co-founder, wrote on the company’s blog.

Instagram’s actions angered many users who were already incensed over the company’s decision earlier this month to cut off its integration with Twitter, a Facebook rival, making it harder for its users to share their Instagram photos on Twitter.

Users were apprehensive that the new terms of service meant that data on their favorite things would be shared with Facebook and its advertisers. Users also worried that their photos would become advertising.

Instagram is barely two years old but has 100 million users. Last spring, Facebook announced plans to buy it in a deal that was initially valued at $1 billion. The deal was closed in September for a somewhat smaller amount.

For some users, Mr. Systrom’s apology and declaration that “Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did” was sufficient.

National Geographic, which suspended its account in the middle of the uproar, held a conference call with members of Facebook’s legal and policy teams. Afterward, the magazine, which has 658,000 Instagram followers, said it would resurrect its account.

Also mollified was Noah Kalina, who took wedding photographs earlier this year for Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. In a widely circulated post on Twitter, Mr. Kalina said the new terms of service were “a contract no professional or nonprofessional should ever sign.” His advice: “Walk away.”

On Friday, the photographer said he had walked back. “It’s nice to know they listened.”

Kim Kardashian, the most followed person on Instagram, said on Tuesday that she “really loved” the service — note the past tense — and that the new rules were not “fair.” She had yet to update her 17 million Twitter followers on Friday, but since she is pushing her True Reflection fragrance it is a safe bet that she has forgiven and forgotten.

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IHT Rendezvous: IHT Quick Read: Dec. 22

NEWS In its first extended comment since the primary-school massacre in Connecticut last week, the United States’ powerful gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, called on Friday for American schools to be patrolled by armed guards. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A. vice president. Eric Lichtblau and Motoko Rich report from Washington.

Survivors of the Syrian military’s use of cluster bombs, a weapon that is impossible to use precisely, describe the tactic as collective punishment, a mass reprisal against populations that are with the rebels. C.J. Chivers reports from Marea, Syria.

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in October, has asked a provincial government to reverse its decision to name a college after her, citing concern for female students’ safety, an official said Friday. Salman Masood reports from Islamabad.

German audiences know Ilka Bessin as Cindy from Marzahn, her louder, ruder and more profane alter ego, playing up the worst stereotypes of Germany’s contemporary version of the welfare queen. Critics call her act lowbrow and worse, mixing high-minded attacks on her with patronizing depictions of her supposedly benighted fans; but those fans see her as a hero, one of them, one who made it. Nicholas Kulish reports from Berlin.

North Korea said on Friday that it had charged an American citizen detained there with committing “hostile acts against the republic,” a crime punishable by years in prison. Choe Sang-Hun reports from Seoul.

Ceremonies in Guatemala and Mexico marked the close of a cycle in the Mayan calendar — not the apocalypse, despite hysteria elsewhere. Randal C. Archibold reports from Tulum, Mexico.

An appeals court in Milan on Friday overturned the conviction of three Google executives on charges of violating Italian privacy laws, in a decision that the company hailed as a victory for Internet freedom. Eric Pfanner reports from Paris.

SPORTS Suzy Favor Hamilton, a three-time Olympian middle-distance runner, shocked her admirers this week with the disclosure that she had been working as a $600-an-hour prostitute for an escort service. “I do not expect people to understand, but the reasons for doing this made sense to me at the time and were very much related to depression,” she wrote on Twitter. Jeré Longman reports.

ARTS An ambitious project by Dassault Systèmes, a French software company, in partnership with the Carnavalet Museum creates an interactive, 3-D, virtual-reality representation of Paris through the ages. One of its many lessons: The Bastille was a less imposing presence than it’s often imagined to be. Eric Pfanner reports from Paris.

WINE How many dollops of sugar are there in that Champagne you’re drinking? Eric Pfanner on wine.

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Boehner Tax Plan in House Is Pulled, Lacking Votes

Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio leaving a meeting Thursday with fellow House Republicans on talks over the “fiscal cliff.”

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner’s effort to pass fallback legislation to avert a fiscal crisis in less than two weeks collapsed Thursday night in an embarrassing defeat after conservative Republicans refused to support legislation that would allow taxes to rise on the most affluent households in the country.

House Republican leaders abruptly canceled a vote on the bill after they failed to rally enough votes for passage in an emergency meeting about 8 p.m. Within minutes, dejected Republicans filed out of the basement meeting room and declared there would be no votes to avert the “fiscal cliff” until after Christmas. With his “Plan B” all but dead, the speaker was left with the choice to find a new Republican way forward or to try to get a broad deficit reduction deal with President Obama that could win passage with Republican and Democratic votes.

What he could not do was blame Democrats for failing to take up legislation he could not even get through his own membership in the House.

“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement that said responsibility for a solution now fell to the White House and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. “Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.”

The stunning turn of events in the House left the status of negotiations to head off a combination of automatic tax increases and significant federal spending cuts in disarray with little time before the start of the new year.

At the White House, the press secretary, Jay Carney, said the defeat should press Mr. Boehner back into talks with Mr. Obama.

“The president will work with Congress to get this done, and we are hopeful that we will be able to find a bipartisan solution quickly that protects the middle class and our economy,” he said.

The refusal of a band of House Republicans to allow income tax rates to rise on incomes over $1 million came after Mr. Obama scored a decisive re-election victory campaigning for higher taxes on incomes over $250,000. Since the November election, the president’s approval ratings have risen, and opinion polls have shown a strong majority not only favoring his tax position, but saying they will blame Republicans for a failure to reach a deficit deal.

With a series of votes on Thursday, the speaker, who faces election for his post in the new Congress next month, had hoped to assemble a Republican path away from the cliff. With a show of Republican unity, he also sought to strengthen his own hand in negotiations with Mr. Obama. The House did narrowly pass legislation to cancel automatic, across-the-board military cuts set to begin next month, and shift them to domestic programs.

But the main component of “Plan B,” a bill to extend expiring Bush-era tax cuts for everyone with incomes under $1 million, could not win enough Republican support to overcome united Democratic opposition. Democrats questioned Mr. Boehner’s ability to deliver any agreement.

“I think this demonstrates that Speaker Boehner has a real challenge,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat. “He hasn’t been able to cut any deal, make any agreement that’s balanced. Even if it’s his own compromise.”

Representative Rick Larsen of Washington accused Republicans of shirking their responsibility by leaving the capital. “The Republicans just picked up their toys and went home,” he said.

Futures contracts on indexes of United States stock listings and shares in Asia fell sharply after Mr. Boehner conceded that his bill lacked the votes to pass.

The point of the Boehner effort was to secure passage of a Republican plan, then demand that the president and the Senate to take up that measure and pass it, putting off the major fights until early next year when Republicans would conceivably have more leverage because of the need to increase the federal debt limit. It would also allow Republicans to claim it was Democrats who had caused taxes to rise after the first of the year had no agreement been reached.

That strategy lay in tatters after the Republican implosion.“Some people don’t know how to take yea for an answer,” said Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a Republican who supported the measure and was open about his disappointment with his colleagues.

Opponents said they were not about to bend their uncompromising principles on taxes just because Mr. Boehner asked.

“The speaker should be meeting with us to get our views on things rather than just presenting his,” said Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, who recently lost a committee post for routinely crossing the leadership.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

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U.S. Makes Arrest in Olympus Accounting Scandal

Federal agents arrested a former bank executive in Los Angeles on Thursday in connection with the accounting scandal that erupted last year at Olympus, the Japanese camera and medical equipment maker.

Prosecutors in New York said that the executive, Chan Ming Fon, received more than $10 million from Olympus for assisting in its accounting fraud.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Mr. Chan, 50, was a citizen of Taiwan living in Singapore. He was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, with a maximum potential penalty of 20 years in prison. His lawyer was not disclosed.

“As alleged, Chan Ming Fon was handsomely paid to play an international shell game with hundreds of millions of dollars of assets in order to allow Olympus to keep a massive accounting fraud going for years,” said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, in a news release.

The authorities did not identify the financial institutions with which Mr. Chan was affiliated.

In February, the Japanese authorities arrested seven people in connection with the accounting missteps at Olympus, including Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, the company’s former chairman. Mr. Chan was not among those seven.

The company has admitted that executives set up a scheme to cover up $1.7 billion in losses. The illicit maneuvers came to light after Olympus fired Michael C. Woodford, its British chief executive, in October 2011. Soon after, Mr. Woodford made allegations of accounting misdeeds at Olympus.

The Olympus scandal rocked the Japanese corporate sector. The case is being watched closely to gauge how serious the Japanese authorities will be in their pursuit of white-collar crime. The men arrested in February could each serve up to 10 years if found guilty.

The allegations against Mr. Chan could shed more light on Olympus’s elaborate accounting ruses. The company hid losses sustained in the 1990s, later masking them with inflated acquisitions and payments through shadowy overseas funds.

Mr. Chan was a principal at a fund that received large payments from Olympus, according to the F.B.I. The bureau contends that Mr. Chan told Olympus’s auditors in 2009 that the fund held hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of Olympus, in the form of conservative investments like Japanese government bonds. The complaint says, however, that the money had been passed on to an entity controlled by Olympus to pay off a loan.

In the complaint, the F.B.I. said that Mr. Chan “acknowledged that it was wrong to assist Olympus in deceiving its auditor.”

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Syria Uses Cluster Bombs to Attack as Many Civilians as Possible

MAREA, Syria — The plane came in from the southeast late in the afternoon, releasing its weapons in a single pass. Within seconds, scores of finned bomblets struck and exploded on the homes and narrow streets of this small Syrian town.

After the screams and the desperate gathering of the victims, the staff at the local Freedom Hospital counted 4 dead and 23 wounded. All were civilians, doctors and residents said.

Many forms of violence and hardship have befallen Syria’s people as the country’s civil war has escalated this year. But the Syrian government’s attack here on Dec. 12 pointed to one of the war’s irrefutable patterns: the deliberate targeting of civilians by President Bashar al-Assad’s military, in this case with a weapon that is impossible to use precisely.

Syrians on both sides in this fight have suffered from the bloodshed and sectarian furies given dark license by the war. The victims of the cluster bomb attacks describe the tactic as collective punishment, a mass reprisal against populations that are with the rebels.

The munitions in question — Soviet-era PTAB-2.5Ms — were designed decades ago by Communist engineers to destroy battlefield formations of Western armored vehicles and tanks. They are ejected in dense bunches from free-falling dispensers dropped from aircraft. The bomblets then scatter and descend nose-down to land and explode almost at once over a wide area, often hundreds of yards across.

Marea stands along an agricultural plain, surrounded for miles by empty fields. Even at night, or in bad weather, it cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is — the densely packed collection of small businesses, offices and homes that together form a town.

Two journalists from The New York Times were traveling toward Marea as the attack occurred and arrived not long after the exploding bomblets had rippled across its neighborhoods.

Blood pooled on the street, including beside a water-collection point at an intersection where Nabhan al-Haji, 18, was killed.

Another victim, Ahmad Najjar Asmail, had been riding a motorcycle when a submunition landed beside him. He was decapitated. Ramy Naser, 15, was also fatally wounded.

The hospital was crowded with patients. Many more were en route to hospitals in Turkey.

The use of cluster munitions is banned by much of the world, although Syria, like the United States, is not party to that international convention. In the detached parlance of military planners, they are also sometimes referred to as area weapons — ordnance with effects that cover a sprawling amount of ground.

In the attack on Marea, at least three dispensers, each containing 42 bomblets slightly smaller than a one-liter bottle and packed with a high-explosive shaped charge, were dropped squarely onto neighborhoods and homes.

Two funerals began as the sun set, the latest in a town that rose early against Syria’s government, and has been one of the seats of defiance.

One homeowner, Ali Farouh, showed the place where a PTAB-2.5M struck an exterior wall on his patio. His young son held up bits of shrapnel.

“Bashar is a horse,” Mr. Farouh said, almost spitting with disgust as he said the president’s name. “He is a donkey.”

An examination of the area by daylight found the signature signs of an air-delivered cluster munitions attack, including unexploded PTAB-2.5M submunitions, the tail sections and fins of three dispensers and three main dispenser bodies.

One resident also displayed the nearly intact remains of an ATK-EB mechanical time fuse associated with the same dispensers. Fragments of the submunitions’ fins were in abundance. An interior spacer and dispenser nose plate were also found.

Throughout the town, many of the narrow, telltale craters made by shaped charges could be seen. Some cut deep holes through asphalt into the dirt below, almost like a drill.

It was not immediately clear why Marea was attacked, although many residents ascribed motives that mix collective punishment with revenge.

The town is the home of Abdulkader al-Saleh, a prominent rebel field commander in the Aleppo region. Mr. Saleh, charismatic and lean, is locally known with near reverence as Haji Marea, and is celebrated by his townspeople for his mix of battlefield savvy, courage and luck. This month, just days before the cluster attack on his hometown, he was named a leader in the reorganized Free Syrian Army, as many rebels call themselves.

Residents said Marea’s recent history, and its indelible connection to the commander it produced, has earned it a high place on Mr. Assad’s list of targets.

“The regime especially hates us,” said Yasser al-Haji, an activist who lost a cousin in the attack.

No one disputes that Marea has repeatedly been attacked by some of the Assad government’s most frightening weapons. On Thursday, residents reported being hit by cruise missiles, perhaps Scuds, which they said landed just north of the town with tremendous, earth-heaving explosions.

In the case of the cluster munitions attack, one of the submunitions did strike a building being used by the rebels — a school where some of Haji Marea’s fighters are based. It blasted a small hole in the concrete roof and sprayed bits of concrete and shrapnel into the room below, which was empty.

Several fighters, who were meeting in the next room as the jet screamed overhead — and the sole bomblet, out of more than 100, hit their building — chuckled at their near miss. But they were enraged by the attack.

They spoke of the government’s escalation of weapons throughout the year — from mortars, tanks and artillery to helicopter gunships, then to fixed-wing attack jets. Since summer, Mr. Assad’s military has used cluster munitions repeatedly, and recently began using incendiary cluster munitions, too. This month, Syrian activists and officials in Washington said the government had ratcheted up the pressure with one of the last unused weapons left in its stock — cruise missiles, with conventional warheads. Analysts who have watched the gradual escalations said the Assad government has followed a “boil-the-frog-slowly” strategy.

With the incremental escalations, they say, Mr. Assad has prevented the West from finding cause to enter the war, as NATO did against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya after he rolled out almost all of his military’s full might at the war’s outset.

One fighter, who gave his name as Mustafa, said that Mr. Assad had little left that he had not used. The fighter said he expected no restraint.

“In the coming days, he’ll use the chemicals and he’ll destroy everything,” he said. “And will burn the people, and kill all the people — children, women, old men, the elders.”

Mr. Assad, Mustafa said, “just needs to kill.”

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Obama and Boehner Split on Fiscal Plan

Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Speaker John A. Boehner delivered a cutting response to President Obama on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — Hopes for a broad deficit-reduction agreement faded on Wednesday as President Obama insisted he had offered Republicans “a fair deal” while Speaker John A. Boehner moved for a House vote as early as Thursday on a scaled-down plan to limit tax increases to yearly incomes of $1 million and up, despite Senate opposition and Mr. Obama’s veto threat.

The impasse was clear as Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner separately spoke to the television cameras instead of each other, after a weekend of private negotiations amid grieving over the shootings in Newtown, Conn., had narrowed their differences enough to raise optimism about a far-reaching deal to stabilize the nation’s debt.

First Mr. Obama and then Mr. Boehner faulted the other side for the impasse, and ultimately the failure, if a year-end deal could not be reached to stop automatic tax increases and the indiscriminate spending cuts in military and domestic programs known as the “sequester.” The president, saying he had gone “at least halfway” toward Republicans’ demands, evoked Hurricane Sandy and the Newtown school massacre to prod lawmakers to compromise for the nation’s benefit.

“When you think about what we’ve gone through over the last couple months — a devastating hurricane, and now one of the worst tragedies in our memory — the country deserves us to be willing to compromise on behalf of the greater good,” he said during an appearance at the White House to discuss gun control.

“Frankly, up until a couple days ago if you looked at it, the Republicans in the House and Speaker Boehner were in a position to say, ‘We’ve gotten a fair deal,’ ” the president said.

About two hours later at the Capitol, Mr. Boehner delivered a surprisingly brief but sharp retort to Mr. Obama, after which he took no questions from reporters. He started by saying that on Thursday, the House would pass the fallback bill that he has called his Plan B, which would extend the Bush-era tax cuts, which would otherwise expire on Dec. 31, for all incomes up to $1 million — although later his leadership team was scrambling for votes.

“Then the president will have a decision to make,” he said. “He can call upon Senate Democrats to pass that bill, or he can be responsible for the largest tax increase in American history.”

The Boehner bill does hold tax benefits for those with a yearly income above $1 million. It would repeal two Clinton-era tax provisions that limit the personal exemptions and deductions that wealthy taxpayers can claim; extend the lower tax rates on inherited estates rather than allow them to revert to the pre-Bush administration level; and set a 20 percent tax rate for the dividends and capital gains of households earning at least $1 million a year.

The speaker’s package would raise about $300 billion in additional revenue over 10 years, compared with extending the Bush tax rates for all income, as Republicans long espoused. That is about $500 billion less than Mr. Boehner’s original offer for $800 billion. It is about $700 billion less than would be collected under Mr. Obama’s proposal to extend the Bush rates only for incomes below a $250,000 threshold for couples, and $200,000 for individuals. In the talks with Mr. Boehner, he moved that line to $400,000.

Mr. Boehner’s statement suggested confidence that Republican leaders would have the votes to pass his plan. But lawmakers who were counting votes for the leadership said the tally was short, and House leaders were adding provisions to the speaker’s bill to mollify dissidents.

Some Republicans, for example, objected that the plan would do nothing to prevent the automatic military cuts, about $50 billion, from taking effect in January. To satisfy Republican hawks, leaders will hold a separate vote on legislation, nearly identical to a bill passed earlier this year, that would cancel those cuts and instead shift them to domestic programs, a decision likely to amplify Democratic opposition.

Even if the House Republican majority passes the speaker’s measure, it probably faces doom in the Democratic-controlled Senate, making Mr. Obama’s threatened veto moot. Mr. Boehner’s office has countered that Congressional Democratic leaders in 2011 had supported a $1 million threshold for higher tax rates. Democrats said those proposals were largely intended to show that Republicans would not raise taxes even for millionaires.

While Mr. Boehner scrambled to unify his party, Mr. Obama faced unrest as well from liberals who said he had broken a campaign pledge to keep Social Security out of the deficit-reduction talks. Mr. Obama had given tentative support to Republicans’ demand that the government adopt a new inflation formula for calculating cost-of-living adjustments for federal benefits. The new formula would slightly reduce the growth in Social Security benefits from what it would be under the current inflation index.

Recalling his campaign, Mr. Obama countered, “What I said was that the ultimate package would involve a balance of spending cuts and tax increases. That’s exactly what I have put forward. What I have said is, in order to arrive at a compromise, I am prepared to do some very tough things, some things that some Democrats don’t want to see, and probably there are a few Republicans who don’t want to see them either.”

The president said he would continue to have discussions with Mr. Boehner and others. But on Wednesday, even the chief staff negotiators for the two leaders were not speaking.

In trying to line up votes, Republican leaders circulated word that the longtime antitax advocate Grover Norquist had blessed Mr. Boehner’s plan as compliant with his “Taxpayer Protection Pledge.” Because most Republican candidates sign the pledge not to approve any tax increase, Mr. Norquist effectively has long locked in their votes.

But Mr. Norquist seemed to bend his principles to issue the endorsement, perhaps to maintain his relevance in tax debates. Even senior Republicans lately have denounced Mr. Norquist as a deterrent to resolving the nation’s fiscal problems, given increasing bipartisan agreement that higher tax revenues are required to control debt growth.

Even so, the Club for Growth, a conservative group, said on Wednesday that it considered even Mr. Boehner’s scaled-back plan a tax increase bill and that it might work to defeat Republican lawmakers who voted for it.

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Iraqi President Is Flown to Germany for Treatment

BERLIN — Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq, was flown to Germany on Thursday for medical treatment for a stroke suffered this week, his spokesman said. The president, 79, was said to be in “stable” condition, and the decision to move him was announced after medical specialists from abroad were dispatched to Iraq to assess the possibility of sending him out of the country for further treatment.

Barazan Sheikh Ottoman, the head of the presidential media office, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Talabani left for accompanied by doctors after they established that he was well enough to be transferred.

In Berlin, the Foreign Ministry confirmed that Mr. Talabani had arrived in Germany. A spokeswoman at Berlin's Charité hospital, Manuela Zingl, confirmed that he was being treated there but said that she could not disclose any information on his condition because of rules on medical privacy.

Mr. Talabani, whose influence in mediating disputes among the country’s many political factions has far outweighed the limited powers of the office he occupies, was rushed to a hospital on Monday after having the stroke.

In a brief update on Wednesday, the Iraqi medical staff at the hospital, Baghdad Medical City, said that “his health is stable.” Doctors were using the same medical procedures on him that they had used when he was admitted to the facility, where newly arrived medical experts from Iran, Germany and Britain had begun to monitor his condition, the Iraqi staff said.

One of the country’s two vice presidents, Khudayr al-Khuzai, a Shiite, will take on Mr. Talabani’s duties in his absence.

Mr. Talabani’s illness, announced in a statement from his office on Tuesday, cast a shadow over the Kurdish lands in the north, where he once fought a guerrilla war and where he now lives. It added a new element of uncertainty to the country’s divided politics a year after the American military departed, leaving Iraq’s leaders to steer the country’s shaky democracy on their own.

Mr. Talabani has been treated abroad for medical conditions in recent years. At a news conference on Tuesday at the same hospital, a doctor had also described Mr. Talabani’s condition as “stable” and said he expected it to improve. On Twitter, Mr. Talabani’s son, Qubad Talabani, who represents the Kurdistan Regional Government in Washington, wrote of hope that his father “can begin his recovery soon.”

But privately other officials have suggested his condition is more serious. A hospital official and a high-level government official, both of whom requested anonymity out of respect for Mr. Talabani’s family, said Tuesday that the president was in a coma.

The Iraqi medical staff members did not take questions on Wednesday.

Chris Cottrell reported from Berlin, and Duraid Adnan from Baghdad. Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York and Stephen Castle from London.

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DealBook: As Unit Pleads Guilty, UBS Pays $1.5 Billion Over Rate Rigging

UBS, the Swiss banking giant, announced a record settlement with global authorities on Wednesday, agreeing to a combined $1.5 billion in fines for its role in a multiyear scheme to manipulate interest rates.

In a sign that officials are increasingly taking a hard line against financial wrongdoing, the Justice Department also secured a guilty plea from the bank’s Japanese subsidiary, sending a warning shot to other big banks suspected of rate rigging. The UBS subsidiary, which agreed to plead to a single count of wire fraud, is the first unit of a big bank to agree to criminal charges in more than a decade.

The cash penalties represented the largest fines to date related to the rate-rigging inquiry. The fine is also one of the biggest sanctions that American and British authorities have ever levied against a financial institution, falling just short of the $1.9 billion payout that HSBC made last week over money laundering accusations.

The severity of the UBS penalties, authorities said, reflected the extent of the problems. The government complaints laid bare a scheme that spanned from 2005 to 2010, describing how the bank reported false rates to squeeze out extra profits and deflect concerns about its health during the financial crisis.

“The findings we have set out in our notice today do not make for pretty reading,” Tracey McDermott, the enforcement director for the Financial Services Authority of Britain, said in a statement. “The integrity of benchmarks,” she said, “are of fundamental importance to both U.K. and international financial markets. UBS traders and managers ignored this.”

The UBS case reflects a pattern of abuse that authorities have uncovered as part of a multi-year investigation into rate-rigging. The inquiry, which has ensnared more than a dozen big banks, is focused on key benchmarks like the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. Such rates are used to help determine the borrowing rates for trillions of dollars of financial products like corporate loans, mortgages and credit cards.

Libor Explained

In the UBS matter, the wrongdoing occurred largely within the Japanese unit, where traders colluded with other banks and brokerage firms to tinker with Yen denominated Libor and bolster their returns. During the 2008 financial crisis, UBS managers also “inappropriately gave guidance to those employees charged with submitting interest rates, the purpose being to positively influence the perception of UBS’s creditworthiness,” according to authorities.

In a series of colorful e-mails and phone calls, traders tried to influence the rate-setting process. “I need you to keep it as low as possible,” one UBS trader said to an employee at another brokerage firm in September 2008, according to the complaint filed by the Financial Services Authority. “If you do that,” the trader promised to pay “whatever you want. I’m a man of my word.”

As the employees carried out the alleged manipulation, they also celebrated the efforts, with one trader referring to a partner in the scheme as “superman.” “Be a hero today,” he urged, according the complaint by regulators.

The British and Swiss authorities released their complaints on Wednesday before the bank’s shares began trading in Switzerland. American authorities are expected to release their own complaints later Wednesday in Washington.

In a statement, UBS highlighted its cooperation with the investigation. The firm previously stated that it made provisions of 897 million Swiss francs ($975 million) to cover potential legal and regulatory fines.

“We discovered behavior of certain employees that is unacceptable,” the chief executive of UBS, Sergio P. Ermotti, said in the statement. “We deeply regret this inappropriate and unethical behavior. No amount of profit is more important than the reputation of this firm, and we are committed to doing business with integrity.”

The UBS case provides a lens to view broader problems in the rate-setting process, which affects how consumers and companies borrow money around the world. In June, authorities scored their first Libor settlement, securing a $450 million payout from Barclays, the big British bank.

The UBS case — the product of cross-border collaboration among regulators and federal prosecutors – is more than triple the earlier fine.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department leveled about $1.2 billion in combined fines. The Financial Services Authority of Britain fined the bank $260 million. The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, which does not have the power to fine, recovered $65 million in the bank’s supposed ill-gotten gains.

The Justice Department’s criminal division, which arranged the guilty plea with the Japanese subsidiary, also struck a non-prosecution agreement with the parent company. The exact total of the penalties was unclear, because the department has not yet released its settlement documents.

The Justice Department’s case is also expected to take aim at some of the bank’s traders, including 33-year-old Thomas Hayes. The Justice Department plans to announce charges against Mr. Hayes, the former UBS and Citigroup trader, who featured prominently in the investigation, according to people with knowledge of the matter. He was arrested in London last week and later released on bail. Other UBS employees have been suspended or fired following an internal investigation.

The fallout from the UBS case is expected to ratchet up the pressure on some of the world’s largest financial institutions and spur settlement talks across the banking industry.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has said it expects to pay fines before its next earnings statement in February, while Deutsche Bank has set aside an undisclosed amount to cover potential penalties. Some American institutions, including Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, also remain in regulators’ crosshairs.

The UBS case has exposed the systemic problems with the rate-setting process. Over a 6-year period, UBS traders targeted the major currencies that form the Libor system, including the U.S. dollar denominated rate. The bank was also cited for attempting to manipulate other benchmarks like the Euro Interbank Offered Rate, or Euribor, and the Tokyo Interbank Offered Rate, or Tibor.

Much of the activity took place in the bank’s Japanese unit. Authorities said four UBS traders colluded to manipulate submissions to Yen Libor. The individuals made more than 1,900 requests to brokers and other banks to alter the rate, according to regulatory filings. As part of their efforts, UBS employees made quarterly payments of £15,000 ($24,000) to outside brokers involved in the rate-rigging for at least 18 months for their help, the complaint said.

To avoid arousing suspicion, UBS employees routinely made small changes to submissions, the complaint detailed. The individuals, who communicated with colleagues about the rate-setting through emails and instant messages, also altered rate submissions to benefit traders at other banks.

The Japanese unit’s guilty plea for wire fraud follows frantic last-minute negotiations last week between senior UBS officials and American authorities. The actions detailed in the complaint emboldened the Justice Department to seek the guilty plea from the Japanese unit. By forcing the plea from the firm’s Japanese subsidiary, federal authorities sent a clear message about the level of wrongdoing, but stopped far short of shutting UBS out of the American markets.

Still, the steep sanctions come as a surprise, given the bank’s cooperation with investigators.

Since first announcing that it was the subject of Libor investigations, the Swiss bank has eagerly worked with authorities in a bid for leniency. UBS, for example, had received conditional immunity from the Justice Department’s antitrust unit, a deal that did not apply to the Justice Department’s criminal division.

The case presents the latest setback for UBS.

The Swiss bank already agreed to a $780 million fine in 2009 with American authorities to settle charges that it helped American clients avoid tax. The firm also announced a $2.3 billion loss last year related to illegal trading activity by a former employee, Kweku M. Adoboli. Mr. Adoboli subsequently was sentenced to seven years, and British authorities fined UBS $47.5 million over the scandal.

UBS said it expected to report a net loss of up to $2.7 billion in the fourth quarter of the year because of the costs related to Libor and other legal matters. The figure includes around $2.3 billion of provisions of legal and regulatory costs, as well as $548 million in restructuring charges.

In the wake of the Libor scandal, UBS has been forced to beef up its compliance and rate-setting procedures, according to the Swiss regulator. The bank has also fired individuals connected to the rate-rigging.

“We are pleased that the authorities gave us credit for the important and positive changes we have already made,” the chairman of UBS, Axel Weber, said in a statement. “I have zero tolerance for inappropriate and unethical behavior of any of our staff.”

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 19, 2012

An earlier version of this post misstated a loss announced by UBS related to illegal trading activity by a former employee, Kweku M. Adoboli. It was $2.3 billion, not $2.3 million.

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The New Old Age Blog: Older People Become What They Think, Study Shows

All of us have beliefs — many of them subconscious, dating back to childhood — about what it means to get older. Psychologists call these “age stereotypes.” And, it turns out, they can have an important effect on seniors’ health.

When stereotypes are negative — when seniors are convinced becoming old means becoming useless, helpless or devalued — they are less likely to seek preventive medical care and die earlier, and more likely to suffer memory loss and poor physical functioning, a growing body of research shows.

When stereotypes are positive — when older adults view age as a time of wisdom, self-realization and satisfaction — results point in the other direction, toward a higher level of functioning. The latest report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that seniors with this positive bias are 44 percent more likely to fully recover from a bout of disability.

For people who care about and interact with older people, the message is clear: your attitude counts because it can activate or potentially modify these deeply held age stereotypes.

The researcher who has done more than anyone else to advance our understanding of this is Becca Levy, an associate professor of epidemiology and psychology at Yale University.

In the mid-1990s, she began a series of experiments with older people in laboratory settings. The idea was to expose them subliminally to negative or positive stereotypes by flashing words associated with aging on a computer screen too fast for them to process consciously. Then these seniors were asked to perform a task.

Those exposed to negative words such as “decrepit” had poorer handwriting, slower walking speeds, higher levels of cardiovascular stress and a greater willingness to reject hypothetical medical interventions that could prolong their lives. Those primed with positive words such as “wisdom” did much better.

The experiments involved external stimuli, however, and Dr. Levy was interested in peoples’ subjective experience of older age. For that, she turned to a database of adults age 50 and older in Oxford, Ohio, who were followed for a period of 23 years, from 1975 to 1998.

Many had filled out questionnaires at the start of the study designed to elicit stereotypes about aging. This involved soliciting a “yes” or “no” answer to a series of statements like “things keep getting worse as I get older,” or “as you get older, you get less useful.”

When Dr. Levy looked at 660 participants, she found that those with positive age stereotypes lived 7.5 years longer than those with negative stereotypes. The research was published in The Journal of Personal and Social Psychology in 2002.

What might account for this finding? In her paper, Dr. Levy speculated that people with positive age stereotypes have a stronger will to live, and that this might affect their ability to adapt to the rigors of older age. Also, people with negative age stereotypes may have a heightened cardiovascular response to stress, with attendant ill health effects.

In other research using this data set, Dr. Levy established that people with positive age stereotypes were more likely to eat a balanced diet, exercise, limit their alcohol consumption, stop smoking and get regular physical exams, and that they had a higher level of physical functioning over time. Results were controlled for other factors like illness, gender, race and socioeconomic status.

In these papers, Dr. Levy hypothesized that positive age stereotypes are associated with a greater sense of control and that this enhanced seniors’ sense of self efficacy — their ability to remain captains of their own ship, as it were.

Her new findings about the impact of age stereotypes on older adults’ recovery from disability is an extension of this body of work. In this case, Dr. Levy and her co-authors followed 598 adults age 70 and older in New Haven, Conn., from 1998 to 2008. Disability was defined as needing help with basic activities of daily living like bathing, dressing and walking, and its onset was typically precipitated by an illness or injury.

Again, seniors with positive age stereotypes were much more likely to have good results and recover fully.

Dr. Marie Bernard, a geriatrician who serves as deputy director of the National Institute on Aging, said she found the report “quite intriguing” and that it confirmed her clinical observations in more than 30 years of medical practice. But she cautioned that it is a small study that needs to be replicated.

“What we really need to understand is the mechanism,” she said. “Is it something that is malleable and, if so, could we help people live longer, healthier lives?”

Researchers don’t have an answer to that yet. But many believe that part of the answer has to lie in tackling ageism – which is pervasive in our youth-oriented culture — early on, from earliest childhood.

“Even young kids have negative associations; they tell you that older adults are sick, slow, forgetful, no good,” said Dana Kotter-Gruehn, a visiting assistant professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University.

Also generations need to be brought together so that “people can experience what it means to be an older person” and stereotypes can be dispelled, Dr. Kotter-Gruehn said. This has been shown to help change people’s stereotypes about race and homosexuality, she noted.

Closer to home, all of us who interact with older people can “think about how to reinforce the more positive aspects of aging,” Dr. Levy said.

“If all of us became a little more aware of the implications of our communications” — the tone of voice we use with seniors, the attitude we adopt, the use of loaded phrases or expressions, the extent to which we give older adults our full, undivided attention — “that would help quite a lot.”

Read More..

The New Old Age Blog: Older People Become What They Think, Study Shows

All of us have beliefs — many of them subconscious, dating back to childhood — about what it means to get older. Psychologists call these “age stereotypes.” And, it turns out, they can have an important effect on seniors’ health.

When stereotypes are negative — when seniors are convinced becoming old means becoming useless, helpless or devalued — they are less likely to seek preventive medical care and die earlier, and more likely to suffer memory loss and poor physical functioning, a growing body of research shows.

When stereotypes are positive — when older adults view age as a time of wisdom, self-realization and satisfaction — results point in the other direction, toward a higher level of functioning. The latest report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that seniors with this positive bias are 44 percent more likely to fully recover from a bout of disability.

For people who care about and interact with older people, the message is clear: your attitude counts because it can activate or potentially modify these deeply held age stereotypes.

The researcher who has done more than anyone else to advance our understanding of this is Becca Levy, an associate professor of epidemiology and psychology at Yale University.

In the mid-1990s, she began a series of experiments with older people in laboratory settings. The idea was to expose them subliminally to negative or positive stereotypes by flashing words associated with aging on a computer screen too fast for them to process consciously. Then these seniors were asked to perform a task.

Those exposed to negative words such as “decrepit” had poorer handwriting, slower walking speeds, higher levels of cardiovascular stress and a greater willingness to reject hypothetical medical interventions that could prolong their lives. Those primed with positive words such as “wisdom” did much better.

The experiments involved external stimuli, however, and Dr. Levy was interested in peoples’ subjective experience of older age. For that, she turned to a database of adults age 50 and older in Oxford, Ohio, who were followed for a period of 23 years, from 1975 to 1998.

Many had filled out questionnaires at the start of the study designed to elicit stereotypes about aging. This involved soliciting a “yes” or “no” answer to a series of statements like “things keep getting worse as I get older,” or “as you get older, you get less useful.”

When Dr. Levy looked at 660 participants, she found that those with positive age stereotypes lived 7.5 years longer than those with negative stereotypes. The research was published in The Journal of Personal and Social Psychology in 2002.

What might account for this finding? In her paper, Dr. Levy speculated that people with positive age stereotypes have a stronger will to live, and that this might affect their ability to adapt to the rigors of older age. Also, people with negative age stereotypes may have a heightened cardiovascular response to stress, with attendant ill health effects.

In other research using this data set, Dr. Levy established that people with positive age stereotypes were more likely to eat a balanced diet, exercise, limit their alcohol consumption, stop smoking and get regular physical exams, and that they had a higher level of physical functioning over time. Results were controlled for other factors like illness, gender, race and socioeconomic status.

In these papers, Dr. Levy hypothesized that positive age stereotypes are associated with a greater sense of control and that this enhanced seniors’ sense of self efficacy — their ability to remain captains of their own ship, as it were.

Her new findings about the impact of age stereotypes on older adults’ recovery from disability is an extension of this body of work. In this case, Dr. Levy and her co-authors followed 598 adults age 70 and older in New Haven, Conn., from 1998 to 2008. Disability was defined as needing help with basic activities of daily living like bathing, dressing and walking, and its onset was typically precipitated by an illness or injury.

Again, seniors with positive age stereotypes were much more likely to have good results and recover fully.

Dr. Marie Bernard, a geriatrician who serves as deputy director of the National Institute on Aging, said she found the report “quite intriguing” and that it confirmed her clinical observations in more than 30 years of medical practice. But she cautioned that it is a small study that needs to be replicated.

“What we really need to understand is the mechanism,” she said. “Is it something that is malleable and, if so, could we help people live longer, healthier lives?”

Researchers don’t have an answer to that yet. But many believe that part of the answer has to lie in tackling ageism – which is pervasive in our youth-oriented culture — early on, from earliest childhood.

“Even young kids have negative associations; they tell you that older adults are sick, slow, forgetful, no good,” said Dana Kotter-Gruehn, a visiting assistant professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University.

Also generations need to be brought together so that “people can experience what it means to be an older person” and stereotypes can be dispelled, Dr. Kotter-Gruehn said. This has been shown to help change people’s stereotypes about race and homosexuality, she noted.

Closer to home, all of us who interact with older people can “think about how to reinforce the more positive aspects of aging,” Dr. Levy said.

“If all of us became a little more aware of the implications of our communications” — the tone of voice we use with seniors, the attitude we adopt, the use of loaded phrases or expressions, the extent to which we give older adults our full, undivided attention — “that would help quite a lot.”

Read More..