IHT Rendezvous: China Calls for 'No Delay' on Gun Controls in U.S.

HONG KONG — The state news agency in China, the official voice of the government, has called for the United States to quickly adopt stricter gun controls in the aftermath of the shooting rampage in Connecticut that left 28 people dead, including 20 schoolchildren.

According to the state medical examiner who was overseeing autopsies of the children, all of them had been hit multiple times. At least one child had been shot 11 times.

All of the children were in the first grade.

“Their blood and tears demand no delay for U.S. gun control,” said the news agency, Xinhua, which listed a series of shootings this year in the United States.

“However, this time, the public feels somewhat tired and helpless,” the commentary said. “The past six months have seen enough shooting rampages in the United States.”

China suffered its own school tragedy on Friday — a man stabbed 22 children at a village elementary school in Henan Province. An 85-year-old woman also was stabbed.

There were no fatalities, although Xinhua reported that some of the children had had their fingers and ears cut off. The attacker, a 36-year-old man, was reportedly in custody. There was no immediate explanation for his possible motives.

China experienced a spate of attacks on schoolchildren in 2010, with almost 20 deaths and more than 50 injuries. In the fourth of the assaults, a crazed man beat five toddlers with a hammer, then set himself on fire while holding two youngsters.

In another of those attacks in 2010, Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed and killed eight primary school students in Fujian Province. Five weeks later, after a quick trial, he was executed.

My colleague Michael Wines reported at the time: “Some news reports stated that Mr. Zheng had mental problems, but most state media said no such evidence existed. Mental illness remains a closeted topic in modern China, and neither medication nor modern psychiatric treatment is widely used.”

“Most of the attackers have been mentally disturbed men involved in personal disputes or unable to adjust to the rapid pace of social change in China,” The Associated Press reported Saturday, adding that the rampages pointed to “grave weaknesses in the antiquated Chinese medical system’s ability to diagnose and treat psychiatric illness.”

Private ownership of guns — whether pistols, rifles or shotguns — is almost unheard of in China. Handgun permits are sometimes (but rarely) given to people living in remote areas for protection against wild animals.

The Chinese school assaults were carried out with knives, kitchen cleavers or hammers, the usual weapons of choice in mass attacks in China. As a precaution before the recent Communist Party Congress in Beijing, the sale of knives was banned in the central area of the capital.

Dr. Ding Xueliang, a sociologist at the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong, speaking about the Chinese tragedy, told CNN that “the huge difference between this case and the U.S. is not the suspect, nor the situation, but the simple fact he did not have an effective weapon.

“In terms of the U.S., there’s much easier availability of killing instruments — rifles, machine guns, explosives — than in nearly every other developed country.”

In a blog on the Web site of The New Yorker, the magazine’s China correspondent, Evan Osnos, wrote:

It takes a lot to make China’s government — beset, as it is, by corruption and opacity and the paralyzing effects of special interests — look good, by comparison, in the eyes of its people these days. But we’ve done it.

When Chinese viewers looked at the two attacks side by side, more than a few of them concluded, as one did that, “from the look of it, there’s no difference between a ‘developed’ country and a ‘developing’ country. And there’s no such thing as human rights. People are the most violent creatures on earth, and China, with its ban on guns, is doing pretty well!”

Japan, too, has a near-total ban on private gun ownership, and the infrequent mass attacks there — which included a tragic rampage at a primary school in 2001— typically have involved knives.

“Almost no one in Japan owns a gun,” said Max Fisher, writing in The Atlantic in July. “Most kinds are illegal, with onerous restrictions on buying and maintaining the few that are allowed. Even the country’s infamous, mafia-like Yakuza tend to forgo guns; the few exceptions tend to become big national news stories.”

In 2006, Japan had two gun-related homicides. “And when that number jumped to 22 in 2007,” Mr. Fisher said, “it became a national scandal.”

“East Asia, despite its universally restrictive domestic gun policies, hosts some of the world’s largest firearm exporters and emerging industry giants: China, South Korea and Japan,” according to GunPolicy.org, a comprehensive global database maintained by the Sydney School of Public Health at the University of Sydney.

In recent weeks, Chinese police officials in Jiangsu Province seized more than 6,000 illegal guns from two underground workshops and warehouses; a retired prison guard in Hong Kong was jailed for 18 months for keeping an arsenal of guns, silencers, grenades and thousands of rounds of ammunition in his public-housing apartment; and 17 suspected gun smugglers went on trial in Shanghai as part of a joint investigation with U.S. law enforcement officials.

In the Shanghai case, more than 100 semiautomatic handguns, rifles, shotguns and gun parts were express-mailed to China from the United States. One of the masterminds on the American end was Staff Sgt. Joseph Debose, 30, a soldier with a Special Forces National Guard unit in North Carolina. He pleaded guilty to federal charges in September.

“The defendant traded the honor of his position in the National Guard for the money he received for smuggling arms to China,” said Loretta E. Lynch, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “In blatant disregard for everything he was sworn to uphold, the defendant placed numerous firearms into a black market pipeline from the United States to China.”

What’s your view? Would the United States do well to emulate China and Japan, with their comprehensive bans on guns? Or is America a special case because of its Constitutional protections of gun ownership? And apropos of the Fujian attack described above, would you support similarly speedy trials and the death penalty for mass murderers of children?

Read More..

Microsoft Battles Google by Hiring Political Brawler Mark Penn

SEATTLE — Mark Penn made a name for himself in Washington by bulldozing enemies of the Clintons. Now he spends his days trying to do the same to Google, on behalf of its archrival Microsoft.

Since Mr. Penn was put in charge of “strategic and special projects” at Microsoft in August, much of his job has involved efforts to trip up Google, which Microsoft has failed to dislodge from its perch atop the lucrative Internet search market.

Drawing on his background in polling, data crunching and campaigning, Mr. Penn created a holiday commercial that has been running during Monday Night Football and other shows, in which Microsoft criticizes Google for polluting the quality of its shopping search results with advertisements. “Don’t get scroogled,” it warns. His other projects include a blind taste test, Coke-versus-Pepsi style, of search results from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.

The campaigns by Mr. Penn, 58, a longtime political operative known for his brusque personality and scorched-earth tactics, are part of a broader effort at Microsoft to give its marketing the nimbleness of a political campaign, where a candidate can turn an opponent’s gaffe into a damaging commercial within hours. They are also a sign of the company’s mounting frustration with Google after losing billions of dollars a year on its search efforts, while losing ground to Google in the browser and smartphones markets and other areas.

Microsoft has long attacked Google from the shadows, whispering to regulators, journalists and anyone else who would listen that Google was a privacy-violating, anticompetitive bully. The fruits of its recent work in this area could come next week, when the Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce the results of its antitrust investigation of Google, a case that echoes Microsoft’s own antitrust suit in the 1990s. A similar investigation by the European Union is also wrapping up. A bad outcome for Google in either one would be a victory for Microsoft.

But Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., has realized that it cannot rely only on regulators to scrutinize Google — which is where Mr. Penn comes in. He is increasing the urgency of Microsoft’s efforts and focusing on their more public side.

In an interview, Mr. Penn said companies underestimated the importance of policy issues like privacy to consumers, as opposed to politicians and regulators. “It’s not about whether they can get them through Washington,” he said. “It’s whether they can get them through Main Street.”

Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman, declined to comment on Microsoft’s actions specifically, but said that while Google also employed lobbyists and marketers, “our focus is on Google and the positive impact our industry has on society, not the competition.”

In Washington, Mr. Penn is a lightning rod. He developed a relationship with the Clintons as a pollster during President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, when he helped identify the value of “soccer moms” and other niche voter groups.

As chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 campaign for president, he conceived the “3 a.m.” commercial that raised doubts about whether Barack Obama, then a senator, was ready for the Oval Office. Mr. Penn argued in an essay he wrote for Time magazine in May that “negative ads are, by and large, good for our democracy.”

But his approach has ended up souring many of his professional relationships. He left Mrs. Clinton’s campaign after an uproar about his consulting work for the government of Colombia, which was seeking the passage of a trade treaty with the United States that Mrs. Clinton, then a senator, opposed.

“Google should be prepared for everything but the kitchen sink thrown at them,” said a former colleague who worked closely with Mr. Penn in politics and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Actually, they should be prepared for the kitchen sink to be thrown at them, too.”

Hiring Mr. Penn demonstrates how seriously Microsoft is taking this fight, said Michael A. Cusumano, a business professor at M.I.T. who co-wrote a book about Microsoft’s browser war.

“They’re pulling out all the stops to do whatever they can to halt Google’s advance, just as their competition did to them,” Professor Cusumano said. “I suppose that if Microsoft can actually put a doubt in people’s mind that Google isn’t unbiased and has become some kind of evil empire, they might very well get results.”

Nick Wingfield reported from Seattle and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco.

Read More..

Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

Read More..

Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

Read More..

Social Media Strategy Crucial for Transit Agencies After Storm

Mel Evans/Associated Press; Barton Silverman/The New York Times

Train travel in November, just after Hurricane Sandy, with Josh Lin, left, looking for a New Jersey Transit ride, and commuters, right, boarding at the Hicksville station of the Long Island Rail Road.

The rider was growing more and more frustrated. Again and again, her questions were met with virtual silence. It was like waiting for a bus that never came, which was in fact what she had been doing.

How to Help

Hurricane Relief

A guide to donating money, goods, time and shelter to people and places affected by the storm.

Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Boarding a New Jersey Transit bus last month. A look at how that agency and the Long Island Rail Road communicated on Facebook showed the importance of keeping customers up to date.

“I have asked nicely several times about what’s going on with the 317 bus,” the rider, who identified herself as Mary Scandell, fumed on the Facebook page of New Jersey Transit a few days after Hurricane Sandy. “Now I’m gonna ask in a nasty way.”

Change the scene to New York. A commuter named Jim Temple posted a question on the Long Island Rail Road’s Facebook page, asking for a status update of the damaged Long Beach line. The railroad promptly replied. “Thank you for the info,” Mr. Temple answered.

If there is one lesson transit officials have learned from Hurricane Sandy, it is that in the Internet era, keeping riders up to date is just as important as tracks and rolling stock. Blow it, and they will let you know. As workers raced to bring washed-out tracks, flooded tunnels and swamped electrical equipment back online, they also faced the daunting task of keeping millions of riders informed of conditions and schedules that sometimes shifted by the minute, using tools that included Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

A look at how New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road communicated, as viewed through the prism of Facebook, showed how approaches to messaging could make the difference between shaping expectations or fueling the ire of customers forced to find new ways to get to work and home.

The Long Island Rail Road continually updated its Facebook page with photographs and videos of storm preparations before Hurricane Sandy hit. The dispatches continued as high winds and surge waters ripped down power lines and clogged rail lines with wayward boats and other debris. The agency frequently answered passengers’ questions and posted other helpful updates, like where to seek federal assistance for damaged homes.

New Jersey Transit also regularly updated its page — but did not start posting photographs until after noon on Oct. 30, after the storm had barreled through. It answered riders’ questions sporadically, sometimes referring them to incorrect information on its Web site, even as commuters grew more confused trying to figure out shifting schedules.

The result: the Long Island Rail Road conveyed a narrative of shared pain, of workers fighting back against unprecedented damage that was beyond their control. Passengers frequently and vociferously critical of the railroad suddenly sympathized and even praised communication efforts that, if not perfect, were viewed as improved.

New Jersey Transit’s communications, on the other hand, became for many commuters yet another source of misery.

“Long Island Rail Road learned the lesson of telling their riders what’s going on,” said Mitchell Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at the New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. “And it turns out that is as important as the level of service you are providing.”

The Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit also used Twitter extensively. But The New York Times examined the Facebook pages of each agency because they allow for more detailed comments — providing a deeper look at how passengers were viewing communications — and more of a back-and-forth discussion. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which was also criticized for its communications, used Twitter but does not have a Facebook page.

New Jersey Transit has come under scrutiny after the storm damaged more than 300 train cars and locomotives parked in rail yards in Hoboken and the Meadowlands that prestorm warnings indicated would flood.

But even before that decision became widely known, passenger tensions were spiking.

New Jersey Transit officials defended their communications throughout and after the storm.

“We were tweeting information practically 24 hours a day,” said John Durso Jr., the agency’s spokesman. He said the agency also continually updated its Web site; sent out e-mail alerts; placed advertisements in newspapers on emergency shuttle, bus and ferry service; and made frequent appearances on television and radio broadcasts.

Read More..

Changing of the Guard: China’s Communist Leader Acts to Bolster Military

GUANGZHOU, China — Xi Jinping, the new Communist Party chief and civilian commander of the Chinese military, is moving quickly to make strengthening the country’s armed forces a centerpiece of what he calls the “Chinese dream” of national rejuvenation.

The nationalist message of building up the People’s Liberation Army has been broadcast loudly in the aftermath of Mr. Xi’s recent visit to south China. The trip, which began Dec. 7, was Mr. Xi’s first outside Beijing as party chief and is now being examined for his policy priorities. This week, the state news media gave prominent coverage to Mr. Xi’s visit with troops of the Guangzhou military region, including a trip aboard the Haikou, a destroyer that belongs to the fleet patrolling disputed waters in the South China Sea.

“We must insist on using battle-ready standards in undertaking combat preparations, constantly enhancing officers’ and troops’ thinking about serving in battle, and leading troops into battle and training troops for battle,” Mr. Xi said, according to a report on Wednesday by Xinhua, the state news agency, that was later published by prominent state-run newspapers. “And we must insist on rigorous military training based on the needs of actual combat.”

Speaking to soldiers in the city of Huizhou, Mr. Xi emphasized the military aspects of his Chinese dream: “This dream can be said to be the dream of a strong nation; and for the military, it is the dream of a strong military. We must achieve the great revival of the Chinese nation, and we must ensure there is unison between a prosperous country and a strong military.”

Mr. Xi’s comments and the gearing up of the party’s propaganda machinery behind them are certain to raise concerns among other Asian nations and the United States, the main military power in the Pacific. Analysts say the party has increasingly turned away from traditional Communist ideology and toward nationalism to try to legitimize itself in the eyes of Chinese citizens.

Mr. Xi “understands the military and what China’s military needs right now,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University of China in Beijing. “He wants real combat capabilities.”

Chinese naval forces are modernizing more quickly than the rest of the military, and certain aspects of that progression — particularly a newly operational aircraft carrier that is China’s first — have become potent symbols of the nation’s rise.

Mr. Xi made his comments during meetings with commanders of the Guangzhou military region, which encompasses large parts of south and central China, according to a front-page article on Friday in People’s Liberation Army Daily. It was part of Mr. Xi’s five-day trip in Guangdong Province and the special economic zone of Shenzhen.

Early this week, the state news media emphasized the economic side of Mr. Xi’s southern tour, showing photographs and video of him visiting private companies and discussing economic policy with officials in the provincial capital, Guangzhou. A Xinhua report said that Mr. Xi underscored the need to deepen the market-oriented reforms begun in 1979 by Deng Xiaoping, the former supreme leader.

But by midweek, official coverage of the trip had shifted to Mr. Xi’s visits with the military. Reflecting the more open style of leadership he has adopted, China Central Television ran extensive video of Mr. Xi shaking hands with cheering soldiers and eating a meal on Dec. 8 in a canteen with sailors in white uniforms aboard the Haikou. The People’s Liberation Army Daily said that Mr. Xi sat in the captain’s chair, signed the ship’s log and ate in a self-serve canteen.

“Whether you’ve got the stuff to be a sailor,” the newspaper said he told some sailors, “doesn’t depend on whether you throw up or not, but on whether you can eat after you’ve thrown up.”

The coverage coincided with what Japan called the latest Chinese provocation in the East China Sea. On Thursday, a Chinese military surveillance plane flew over islands there long under Japanese administration, escalating the already tense standoff over the islands, which are also claimed by China. Japan responded by sending fighter jets to the area, but the propeller-driven plane had already left. Earlier in the week, China sent a navy flotilla near the islands.

It is unclear how Mr. Xi’s emphasis on building up the military will affect China’s defense budget next year. In March, China announced that its military budget for 2012 had increased by 11.2 percent over last year, which was consistent with the pace of growth in military spending over the past decade. The official military budget was $106 billion, which is widely considered by foreign analysts to be an underestimate, but it is still a fraction of the military spending of the United States, which topped $700 billion this year.

The Xinhua report said that Mr. Xi also visited units in Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Huizhou. In his remarks in Huizhou, Mr. Xi emphasized the fact that the military is subordinate to the Communist Party. The relationship between the party and the military has been a recurring theme in official military publications. Editorials attacked the notion of “nationalizing” the army, which means separating the army from the party. There is talk that some generals may believe that to create a truly professional army, the military must distance itself from the party, but it is unclear how widespread this belief is.

Questions over officers’ loyalties were raised in part by the scandal over Bo Xilai, the disgraced party official, and the ties that Mr. Bo had cultivated with generals.

Mr. Xi himself has close personal ties to some powerful generals because he, like Mr. Bo, is a so-called princeling, the son of a revolutionary leader. Mr. Xi’s father was a revered Communist guerrilla commander during the Chinese civil war and later became party chief of Guangdong, where he helped to shape more open economic policies. Many princelings believe they are the inheritors of the revolutionary mandate to build a strong China, one that can stand up to the West.

Some generals have already latched onto Mr. Xi’s take on national revival. Maj. Gen. Luo Yuan, an outspoken military commentator, wrote in an essay published Dec. 4 in Global Times, a populist newspaper, that “the great revival of the Chinese nation includes the revival of the militaristic spirits worshiped by our ancestors, as well as the promotion of the revolutionary heroism of the Red Army.”

Mia Li and Amy Qin contributed research.

Read More..

Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

Read More..

Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

Read More..

Companies See High-Tech Factories as Fonts of Ideas

Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times

Workers at a G.E. battery plant in upstate New York. G.E. has researchers nearby, which allows for more collaboration.

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. — The Obama administration has long heralded the potential of American factories to offer good, stable middle-class jobs in an economy that desperately needs them. But experts say there might be another advantage to expanding manufacturing in the United States: a more innovative economy.

A growing chorus of economists, engineers and business leaders are warning that the evisceration of the manufacturing work force over the last 30 years might not have scarred just Detroit and the Rust Belt. It might have dimmed the country’s capacity to innovate and stunted the prospects for long-term growth.

“In sector after sector, we’ve lost our innovation edge because we don’t produce goods here anymore,” said Mitzi Montoya, dean of the college of technology and innovation at Arizona State University.

These experts say that in industries that produce complex, high-technology products — things like bioengineered tissues, not light bulbs — companies that keep their research and manufacturing employees close together might be more innovative than businesses that develop a schematic and send it overseas for low-wage workers to make. Moreover, clusters of manufacturers, where workers and ideas can naturally flow between companies, might prove more productive and innovative than the same businesses if they were spread across the country.

A General Electric facility in upstate New York provides a test case. In a custom-built facility the size of four football fields, workers are casting into thin tubes a kind of ceramic that G.E. invented. Those tubes get filled with a secret chemical “brownie mix,” packaged into batteries and shipped across the world.

The plant sits just a few miles down the road from the research campus where G.E. scientists developed the technology. That allows them to work out kinks on the assembly line, and test prototypes of and uses for the battery, the company’s scientists said.

“We’re not thinking about just one generation,” said Glen Merfeld of G.E.’s chemical energy systems laboratory, showing off a test battery his employees had run into exhaustion. “We’re working on the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth.”

The idea is to knit together manufacturing, design, prototyping and production, said Michael Idelchik, vice president for advanced technologies, who holds a dozen patents himself. “We believe that rather than a sequential process where you look at product design and then how to manufacture it, there is a simultaneous process,” Mr. Idelchik said. “We think it is key for sustaining our long-term competitive advantage.”

Economists and policy experts are now researching whether such strategies offer the same benefits for other businesses — and examining how those benefits might show up in national data on innovation, productivity and growth.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Suzanne Berger has helped to start the Production in the Innovation Economy project to study the subject. “It is something that’s very difficult to establish systematically,” said Professor Berger. “You really have to be willing to look at case-by-case evidence, qualitative evidence. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

Thus far, she said, the anecdotal evidence from about 200 companies has proved striking, with company after company detailing the advantages of keeping makers and thinkers together. That does not mean every business, she stressed. Companies with products early in their life cycle seemed to benefit more than ones with products on the market for years. So did companies making especially complicated or advanced goods, from new medicines to new machines.

“It’s the companies where the challenge of producing on a commercial scale requires levels of scientific activity that are just as complex as the original challenge of developing the technology,” Professor Berger said.

Read More..

In Cairo Crisis, Unheard Voice From the Poor

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

In Boulaq, so long neglected that houses regularly collapse, there had been little expectation that leaders would provide. But the disregard of the new president has been harder to take. More Photos »

CAIRO — A faded poster of Hosni Mubarak hangs on a wall in a crumbling neighborhood here, reminding residents of an empty pledge to find jobs for young people. Down the street, a campaign banner for his successor, Mohamed Morsi, hangs across the road, a reminder of more recent promises unkept.

In the neighborhood, called Boulaq, so long neglected that houses regularly collapse, there was little expectation that Mr. Mubarak would provide. But Mr. Morsi’s disregard has been much harder to take.

“We had high hopes in God, that things would improve,” Fathi Hussein said as he built a desk of dark wood for one of his clients, who are dwindling. “I elected a president to be good for the country. I did not elect him to impose his opinions on me.”

Away from the protests and violence that have marked the painful struggle over Egypt’s identity in the run-up to a referendum on Saturday on a constitution, residents of Boulaq have their own reasons to be consumed with the crisis. The chants of the protesters, for bread and freedom, resonate in Boulaq’s alleyways. In many of its industrial workshops, passed from struggling fathers to penniless sons, disappointment with the president, his Muslim Brotherhood supporters as well as the leaders of the opposition grows daily.

There is a sense in Boulaq that the raging arguments would be better resolved in places like this, where most Egyptians live, carrying the burdens of poverty with no help from an indifferent state, and where the revolution’s promise of dignity is long overdue.

When he took office five months ago, Mr. Morsi seemed to understand. “He talked about the conditions of the poor, the people in the slums,” said Amr Abdul Hafiz, a barber. “He talked about the street vendors and the tuk-tuk drivers. We thought he felt for us.”

The barber and many of his neighbors were convinced that Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood had earned their chance to rule. People remembered the Brotherhood’s charity after the earthquake in 1992, and its decades of struggle as an outlaw movement. In stages, though, doubts grew as the Brotherhood broke its promises and Mr. Morsi seized power, culminating in his decision to ram through his constitution. Boulaq’s residents, including the president’s supporters, bristled at the thought of being treated as subjects again.

“He became occupied with other issues,” Mr. Abdul Hafiz said. “They want power, to make up for all the injustice they suffered, as if we were the ones who inflicted the injustice on them.”

At night, the arguments rage at a storied cafe on Abu Talib Street, with an intensity that no one here recalls seeing before. By day, the arguments simmer, in a neighborhood whose former grandeur still peeks out from underneath the rot.

Everywhere, people tell stories about the government’s failures, suggesting that the new leaders had turned out no better than the old ones.

In the shadow of a fallen dwelling, one of many that make Boulaq look as if it suffered a war, a widow stood over workmen she had hired to fix a ruptured sewer pipe. The ministry assigned to handle such matters had ignored her calls for three months, so she and her neighbors collected the money to pay for the repairs themselves.

On Abu Talib Street, Mr. Abdul Hafiz fretted over the dangers facing his pregnant wife, whose belly was swelling with excessive amniotic fluid. An appointment to see a doctor at a private hospital, which would cost $80, was too expensive. The administrators at a public hospital told her she could see a doctor a month after she was supposed to give birth.

Security guards threw Mr. Abdul Hafiz out of the hospital when he pointed out how ridiculous that was.

He wanted a change from Mr. Mubarak, who had coverings placed over the houses in Boulaq during the public opening of a nearby building “to hide insects like us.” It was part of a pattern of neglect that stretched back for decades, when the land under the residents was sold to investors in shady deals that no one has untangled.

Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

Read More..