In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

Read More..

In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

Read More..

John E. Karlin, 1918-2013: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94

Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA

John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use.

A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them?

And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new questions arose: round buttons, or square? How big should they be? Most crucially, how should they be arrayed? In a circle? A rectangle? An arc?

For decades after World War II, these questions were studied by a group of social scientists and engineers in New Jersey led by one man, a Bell Labs industrial psychologist named John E. Karlin.

By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.

But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones. And that keypad, in turn, would inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects.

It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.

“He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,” Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone, the answers to those questions remain palpable at the press of a button. The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.

The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment.

Mr. Karlin, associated from 1945 until his retirement in 1977 with Bell Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., was widely considered the father of human-factors engineering in American industry.

A branch of industrial psychology that combines experimentation, engineering and product design, human-factors engineering is concerned with easing the awkward, often ill-considered marriage between man and machine. In seeking to design and improve technology based on what its users are mentally capable of, the discipline is the cognitive counterpart of ergonomics.

“Human-factors studies are different from market research and other kinds of studies in that we observe people’s behavior and record it, systematically and without bias,” Mr. Israelski said. “The hallmark of human-factors studies is they involve the actual observation of people doing things.”

Among the issues Mr. Karlin examined as the head of Bell Labs’ Human Factors Engineering department — the first department of its kind at an American company — were the optimal length for a phone cord (a study that involved gentle, successful sabotage) and the means by which rotary calls could be made efficiently after the numbers were moved from inside the finger holes, where they had nestled companionably for years, to the rim outside the dial.

John Elias Karlin was born in Johannesburg on Feb. 28, 1918, and reared nearby in Germiston, where his parents owned a grocery store and tearoom.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, psychology and music, and a master’s degree in psychology, both from the University of Cape Town. Throughout his studies he was a violinist in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra and the Cape Town String Quartet.

Moving to the United States, Mr. Karlin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1942. Afterward, he became a research associate at Harvard; he also studied electrical engineering there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At Harvard, Mr. Karlin did research for the United States military on problems in psychoacoustics that were vital to the war effort — studying the ways, for instance, in which a bomber’s engine noise might distract its crew from their duties.

Read More..

IHT Rendezvous: IHT Quick Read: Feb. 9

After a failed attempt to set spending targets at a summit meeting in November and in a 24-hour marathon of talks this week, European leaders finally agreed late Friday to a common budget for the next seven years. The new budget, which is slightly smaller than its predecessor — the first decrease in the European Union’s history — reflects the climate of austerity across a Continent still struggling to emerge from a crippling debt crisis. James Kanter and Andrew Higgins report from Brussels.

Few things divide British eating habits from those of Continental Europe as clearly as a distaste for consuming horse meat, so news that many Britons have unknowingly done so has prompted alarm among shoppers and plunged the country’s food industry into crisis. A trickle of discoveries of horse meat in hamburgers, starting in Ireland last month, has turned into a steady stream of revelations, including, on Friday, that lasagna labeled beef from one international distributor of frozen food, Findus, contained in some cases 100 percent horse meat. Stephen Castle reports from London.

The coaches of England’s Premier League are an aggressively unstylish bunch, stalking the sideline in the most scrutinized sport in the world with wardrobes that speak less of Savile Row than of the remainder rack on the Island of Misfit Clothes. The way the coaches dress, there’s no mistaking the English Premier League sideline for a fashion runway. Sarah Lyall reports from London.

With only two weeks to go before national elections, the Italian campaign has become a surreal spectacle in which a candidate many had given up for dead, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has surged. Although he is not expected ever to govern again, with his media savvy and pie-in-the-sky offers of tax refunds, Mr. Berlusconi now trails the front-runner, Pierluigi Bersani, the leader of the Democratic Party, by about five or six points, according to a range of opinion polls published on Friday. Rachel Donadio reports from Rome.

ARTS The auction of Impressionist and Modern art followed by Surrealist works that took place at Sotheby’s on Tuesday evening ended with 52 lots fetching £121 million. It will be remembered by auction house professionals as the second most successful sale in the field held at Sotheby’s London and, by some of those attending, as the strangest session in living memory. Souren Melikian reports from New York.

SPORTS If size or the weight of history were the sole determining factors in a soccer match, then you might wonder why Burkina Faso would even bother to turn up against Nigeria in the Africa Cup final. Rob Hughes reports from London.

Read More..

Chinese Imports and Exports Soar in January

HONG KONG — January trade data from China on Friday showed a surge in exports and imports from a year earlier — a phenomenon that was largely due to the timing of the Lunar New Year holiday, but that also supported the view that the Chinese economy is firming.

Economic data from China are often severely distorted by the holiday, the highlight of the Chinese calendar, when many factories shut down for a week or more.

The holiday this year takes place in February — the first day of the Lunar New Year is on Sunday — but last year it fell squarely in January, cutting down on the number of working days during that month.

The trade data released Friday reflected this with a large increase compared with the year before, as analysts had expected. Exports climbed 25 percent from January 2012, according to the General Administration of Customs, and imports soared 28.8 percent.

Both figures beating expectations by a wide margin, however, supported the view that the rise was also caused in part by healthier domestic and overseas demand.

“This strong export number cannot be fully explained by the Chinese New Year effect alone,” Zhiwei Zhang, chief China economist at Nomura in Hong Kong, said in a research note.

“These data suggest that external and domestic demand are both strong, which supports our view that the economy is on track for a cyclical recovery” in the first half of this year, he added.

Dariusz Kowalcyk, an economist at Crédit Agricole in Hong Kong, said “we need to wait for February results to have the full picture of trade at the start of 2013.”

However, he added, “one trend is clear: exports have been doing very well recently. This may be a sign of improved external demand, but is also a testimony to the resilience of Chinese exporters and to their competitiveness.”

The Chinese economy has been accelerating gradually in the past few months, reversing a marked slowdown that had raised fears of a possible “hard landing” in China early last year.

Improved overseas demand, combined with a string of government-mandated stimulus measures, have gradually propped up growth and dispelled those fears.

Data released last month showed the Chinese economy expanded just 7.8 percent last year — down from 9.3 percent in 2011 and 10.4 percent in 2010 — but many analysts expect slightly faster growth again in 2013.

Read More..

Peter Hauri, Psychologist Who Focused on Insomnia, Dies at 79

Peter Hauri, a psychologist who was among the first researchers to study the mysterious mechanics of a good night’s sleep, and who established widely used guidelines for avoiding insomnia without drugs, died on Jan. 31 in Rochester, Minn., where he had been director of the Mayo Sleep Disorders Center until he retired in 2000. He was 79.

The cause was complications of a brain injury sustained the day before in a fall, a family spokesman said.

Dr. Hauri’s early work included studies of narcolepsy and sleepwalking. He later studied the use of biofeedback in helping people with insomnia to fall asleep, and he measured the relative depths of so-called rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep and non-REM sleep. Those studies established him as part of the first generation of scientists to recognize sleep as an organized physiological process, not a simple “turning off” of the brain.

He was best known, though, for a 1992 book, “No More Sleepless Nights.” Written with Shirley Linde, it outlined some of the practical strategies he had developed for helping people sleep without taking pills.

The book mainly describes a painstaking process of self-observation and note-taking, followed by behavior modification.

Dr. Hauri said the most important thing he had learned in his research — in sleep lab experiments with volunteers draped in bridal trains of wires and electrodes so he could record the pulsing of their sleeping, or nonsleeping, brains — was that, like snowflakes, every person’s sleeping problem was unique. “There is no one set of rules that can be mimeographed and given to every patient who comes into the office,” he said in a 2010 videotaped interview for the archive of the Sleep Research Society.

Nonetheless, Dr. Hauri devised guidelines that became the standard medical advice of recent decades. Among them was this paradox of insomnia therapy strategies: Never try to sleep. “The more a person tries to sleep, the more aroused he or she gets,” Dr. Hauri said in an interview. Instead, he advised, get out of bed — and leave the bedroom — until sleepiness calls.

Another suggestion: Eliminate the bedroom clock, or turn it to the wall, out of reach. “There is no scientific proof,” Dr. Hauri said in 2010, “but I’m convinced of that one: Getting rid of the alarm clock works.”

Peter Johannes Hauri was born on June 25, 1933, in Sirnach, Switzerland, one of six children of Rudolf and Verena Hauri. After graduating from a teachers college, he taught junior high school students in Switzerland for several years until an opportunity arose to study in the United States. In 1960 he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from North Central College in Naperville, Ill. He studied psychology from 1960 to 1965 at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D.

Survivors include his wife, Cindy, and their son, Matthew. He is also survived by a daughter, Heidi Hauri-Gill; a son, David Courard-Hauri; and four grandchildren from a previous marriage.

In the 2010 archive interview, Dr. Hauri was asked what had begun his interest in sleep.

He replied with an impish smile, “My mother was a very famous insomniac.” And, he added, “I don’t sleep so well myself.”

Read More..

Peter Hauri, Psychologist Who Focused on Insomnia, Dies at 79

Peter Hauri, a psychologist who was among the first researchers to study the mysterious mechanics of a good night’s sleep, and who established widely used guidelines for avoiding insomnia without drugs, died on Jan. 31 in Rochester, Minn., where he had been director of the Mayo Sleep Disorders Center until he retired in 2000. He was 79.

The cause was complications of a brain injury sustained the day before in a fall, a family spokesman said.

Dr. Hauri’s early work included studies of narcolepsy and sleepwalking. He later studied the use of biofeedback in helping people with insomnia to fall asleep, and he measured the relative depths of so-called rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep and non-REM sleep. Those studies established him as part of the first generation of scientists to recognize sleep as an organized physiological process, not a simple “turning off” of the brain.

He was best known, though, for a 1992 book, “No More Sleepless Nights.” Written with Shirley Linde, it outlined some of the practical strategies he had developed for helping people sleep without taking pills.

The book mainly describes a painstaking process of self-observation and note-taking, followed by behavior modification.

Dr. Hauri said the most important thing he had learned in his research — in sleep lab experiments with volunteers draped in bridal trains of wires and electrodes so he could record the pulsing of their sleeping, or nonsleeping, brains — was that, like snowflakes, every person’s sleeping problem was unique. “There is no one set of rules that can be mimeographed and given to every patient who comes into the office,” he said in a 2010 videotaped interview for the archive of the Sleep Research Society.

Nonetheless, Dr. Hauri devised guidelines that became the standard medical advice of recent decades. Among them was this paradox of insomnia therapy strategies: Never try to sleep. “The more a person tries to sleep, the more aroused he or she gets,” Dr. Hauri said in an interview. Instead, he advised, get out of bed — and leave the bedroom — until sleepiness calls.

Another suggestion: Eliminate the bedroom clock, or turn it to the wall, out of reach. “There is no scientific proof,” Dr. Hauri said in 2010, “but I’m convinced of that one: Getting rid of the alarm clock works.”

Peter Johannes Hauri was born on June 25, 1933, in Sirnach, Switzerland, one of six children of Rudolf and Verena Hauri. After graduating from a teachers college, he taught junior high school students in Switzerland for several years until an opportunity arose to study in the United States. In 1960 he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from North Central College in Naperville, Ill. He studied psychology from 1960 to 1965 at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D.

Survivors include his wife, Cindy, and their son, Matthew. He is also survived by a daughter, Heidi Hauri-Gill; a son, David Courard-Hauri; and four grandchildren from a previous marriage.

In the 2010 archive interview, Dr. Hauri was asked what had begun his interest in sleep.

He replied with an impish smile, “My mother was a very famous insomniac.” And, he added, “I don’t sleep so well myself.”

Read More..

Hewlett-Packard Joins Push to Limit Use of Student Labor in China

Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

A worker checks parts of a laptop on a Hewlett Packard assembly line in Chongqing, China.

HONG KONG — Hewlett-Packard, one of the world’s largest makers of computers and other electronics, is imposing new limits on the employment of students and temporary agency workers at factories across China. The move, following recent efforts by Apple to increase scrutiny of student workers, reflects a significant shift in how electronics companies view problematic labor practices in China.

Many factories in China have long relied on high school students, vocational school students and temporary workers to cope with periodic surges in orders as factory labor becomes increasingly scarce. Students complain of being ordered by school administrators to put in very long hours on short notice at jobs with no relevance to their studies; local governments sometimes order schools to provide labor, and the factories pay school administrators a bonus.

For much of the last decade, many of the world’s big electronics companies have largely neglected the problem, beyond in some cases tracking reports of the abuses. Apple made the unusual move last year of joining the Fair Labor Association, one of the largest workplace monitoring groups, which inspects factories in China that make computers, iPhones and other devices under contract from Apple. And last month, Apple said it would begin requiring suppliers to provide information about their student workers “so we can monitor this issue more carefully.”

Now H.P. is pushing even harder. Its rules, given to suppliers in China on Friday morning, say that all work must be voluntary, and that students and temporary workers must be free “to leave work at any time upon reasonable notice without negative repercussions, and they must have access to reliable and reprisal-free grievance mechanisms,” according to the company.

The rules also require that student work “must complement the primary area of study” — a restriction that could rule out huge numbers of students whose studies have nothing to do with electronics or manufacturing.

Enforcing workplace rules in China has always been difficult, as even Chinese laws on labor practices are flagrantly ignored by some manufacturers as they struggle to keep up with production demand amid labor shortages. The Chinese government announced last month that the nation’s labor force had begun to shrink slowly because of the increasingly rigorous one-child policy through the 1980s and 1990s.

But complying with the new rules might be easier for suppliers contracting with H.P., which has relatively steady demand through the year for its products, than for suppliers working for rivals like Apple, with its big bursts of sales when new models are introduced.

Howard Clabo, an H.P. spokesman, said that the company would hold training sessions for suppliers starting in March and also discussion sessions for government officials, nongovernment organizations and academics — an initiative that could put pressure on other companies.

Tony Prophet, H.P.’s senior vice president for worldwide supply chain operations, said in a phone interview that H.P. was also capping the combined number of students and temp workers at any supplier factory at no more than 20 percent of labor during peak periods, which tend to be during summer vacations and the lengthy Chinese New Year holiday. H.P. plans to reduce that to 10 percent, but has not decided when, Mr. Prophet said.

The practice of employing students and temporary workers has been at the center of growing criticism of employment practices at Chinese suppliers used by big international electronics companies. Some of the companies are now seeing that the problems can harm their reputations.

In announcing increased scrutiny of student workers last month, Apple said in its supplier responsibility report that the “cyclical nature” of the student work “makes it difficult to catch problems.”

“We’ve begun to partner with industry consultants to help our suppliers improve their policies, procedures and management of internship programs to go beyond what the law requires,” Apple said.

Mr. Prophet of H.P. presented his company’s new rules as a sign of corporate responsibility, as opposed to a competitive maneuver. “We’re doing this because we think this is an important issue, and there are certainly concerns around it and some ambiguity around the appropriate standards,” he said.

Labor activists have been particularly critical of Foxconn, a large Taiwanese contract manufacturer that produces electronic devices for Hewlett-Packard, Apple and other companies.

Keith Bradsher reported from Hong Kong and David Barboza from Shanghai. Xu Yan contributed research from Shanghai.

Read More..

Lens Blog: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen's Photos of Her Newcastle Neighborhood

On clear days in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, a small yet bustling working-class city in northeast England, the view from the hills of Byker can be spectacular. That shabby neighborhood’s rows of brick houses and terraced streets overlook a historic city center, the river and sometimes far beyond.

Those vistas were rare in 1969, when Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, a 21-year-old Finnish photographer, arrived. The landscape was cloaked in an industrial fog belched from the coal and shipbuilding industries.

Despite the grayness, the laughter and vivacity that radiated from this close-knit community appealed to Ms. Konttinen. It welcomed a young foreigner whose presence stoked curiosity, but also generosity. They joked with her in pubs. Some of the older women took her under their wing — she kindled a protective instinct in them.

“People were baffled by my choice to live there,” Ms. Konttinen recalled. “Not that many people had any idea where Finland was, but if they did, they thought it such a beautiful clean country, and why would I choose to come to Byker?”

She had ventured there because of Amber Collective, a progressive documentary project that she helped found, which chronicled the lives of working people in northeast England. The group was formed in London by a handful of students who made a film following Vietnam War demonstrations at Grosvenor Square that turned violent. Titled “All You Need Is Dynamite,” it was just a student effort, but its makers found they shared a philosophy.

Before long, they had relocated to Newcastle.

The city was in decline. Urban planners sought flashy new development projects, and some sections, like Byker, were scheduled for demolition. Ms. Konttinen was unaware that she was documenting a place that was about to disappear. Not drawn to gloomy topics, she found the place spirited and interesting.

“Initially, I don’t think we ever thought that we need to document it because it will be the only thing left for people to remember the place and what the area was like,” she said. “I personally have never felt that that was my mission.”

The Amber Collective has produced an enormous amount of material, dating back decades, that is focused on the communities of northeast England, although Ms. Konttinen’s Byker pictures are probably the collective’s best-known project. That work was published as a book in 1983; Amber also released a film companion of the same name, and in 2011 her documentation was registered with the Unesco U.K. Memory of the World. For the first time in a commercial art space, photographs from the series will be shown in the United States, on view at the L. Parker Stephenson Gallery from Feb. 15 through May 11. Ms. Konttinen will also deliver a lecture at the International Center for Photography on Feb. 13.

In recent years, she returned to Byker. The new Byker is changed — more on that Friday — and the changes required her to reconsider her approach when she decided to photograph it. The newer project, “Byker Revisited,” is a result of a far more collaborative endeavor. Not that she hadn’t collaborated in other ways with a subject before. Her 1971 photo of Heather (Slide 3) brought about one such relationship.

“I heard music coming from a derelict house,” she said. “This was one of the last terraces before the final demolition, and there were no steps left to the house, but upstairs I heard music, piano, coming out the windows.”

She entered the house, climbing a rickety staircase to where the music was coming from. She found a girl, Heather, “playing the piano, banging the notes that were kind of stuck and unstuck.”

Ms. Konttinen and Heather started talking, and Ms. Konttinen taught her a simple tune.

“I told her if she ever wanted to come and play, she could come and play it again on my piano,” Ms. Konttinen said. Heather showed up a few days later, with her little brother. On Ms. Konttinen’s piano, they played the tune together.

---

Friday: Returning to Byker, in color.

Photographs from “Byker” will be on view at the L. Parker Stephenson Gallery from Feb. 15 through May 11. Ms. Konttinen will also deliver a lecture at the International Center for Photography on Feb. 13.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.

Read More..

DealBook: R.B.S. to Pay $612 Million Over Rate Rigging

A campaign to root out financial fraud secured a victory on Wednesday, as authorities took aim at the Royal Bank of Scotland for its role in an interest rate manipulation scheme that has emboldened prosecutors and consumed the banking industry.

American and British authorities struck a combined $612 million settlement with the bank, the latest case to emerge from the global investigation into rate-rigging. The Justice Department dealt another blow to the bank, forcing its Japanese unit to plead guilty to criminal wrongdoing.

The penalty for the subsidiary, a hub of rate manipulation, underscores a recent shift in the way federal authorities punish financial wrongdoing. The R.B.S. case echoed an earlier action taken against a UBS subsidiary, which similarly pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud as part of a larger settlement. These cases represent the first units of a big bank to agree to criminal charges in more than a decade.

“I want financial institutions to know that this department will absolutely hold them to account,” Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in an interview Wednesday.

Some of the world’s largest financial institutions remain caught in the cross hairs of the rate manipulation case, an investigation that could drag on for years. Authorities suspect that more than a dozen banks falsified reports to influence benchmarks like the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, which underpins the costs for trillions of dollars in financial products like mortgages and credit cards.

A person involved in the investigation indicated that the first banks to settle were among the worst actors in the rate case. But they also received a “discount” for their eager cooperation, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

That approach raises the prospect that remaining banks could face high-priced settlements.

Deutsche Bank, which set aside an undisclosed amount to cover potential penalties and suspended five employees tied to the case, is expected to settle with authorities in late 2013, several people briefed on the matter said. But the timetable could shift. The bank is not in formal settlement talks and is not prepared to resolve the case, the people said.

While foreign banks have borne the brunt of the scrutiny, an American institution could be among the next to settle. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase are under investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the American regulator leading the case, though actions are not imminent.

The R.B.S. action concluded a first phase of rate-rigging investigations for authorities, who are now planning to take a brief hiatus from filing cases. The next case is not expected until spring at the earliest, two of the people briefed on the matter said.

Some bank executives, fearful that fallout from the case will stain their firms, are pushing for a broad deal encompassing multiple institutions. But authorities are balking at a “global settlement,” people involved in the case say, arguing that investigations are proceeding at different stages and involve widely varying fact patterns.

As regulators continue to pursue actions, prosecutors are planning charges against traders involved in the scheme. The first charges came last year when the Justice Department filed actions against two former UBS traders.

“Our investigation is far from finished,” Mr. Breuer said.

The rate-rigging case has centered on how much banks charge each other for loans. Such figures form the basis of Libor and other rates. But banks corrupted the process. Government complaints filed over the last year outlined a scheme in which banks reported false rates to lift trading profits.

Authorities announced the first Libor case in June, extracting a $450 million settlement with the British bank Barclays. In December, UBS agreed to a record $1.5 billion settlement with authorities. The Justice Department also secured the guilty plea from one of the bank’s subsidiaries.

Royal Bank of Scotland, based in Edinburgh, had aimed to avert the guilty plea for its Japanese subsidiary, people involved in the case said. But the Justice Department’s criminal division declined to back down, and the bank had little leverage to push back. It decided not to formally appeal its case to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., another person said.

With fines coming from multiple authorities, the $612 million case amounted to the second-largest penalty levied in the multiyear investigation into rate manipulation. “The settlement with R.B.S. is much more than a slap on the wrist,” argued Bart Chilton, a member of the trading commission who is critical of soft fines on big banks.

The settlement represents the latest setback for Royal Bank of Scotland, which has struggled to shake the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis. The British firm, which is majority-owned by the government after a bailout, already has put aside $2.7 billion to compensate customers who were inappropriately sold loan insurance in recent years.

Since the financial crisis, the bank has shaken up its management team and refocused its operations, as part of an effort to repair its bruised image. On Wednesday, it announced plans to claw back bonuses to help pay for the latest settlement.

At a news conference in London on Wednesday, Stephen Hester, the bank’s chief executive, admitted that the rate-rigging episode significantly strained the bank. “It is one of the most difficult moments over the entire period,” he said.

As authorities stitched together the R.B.S. case, they seized on a series of colorful e-mails that highlighted an effort to influence the rate-setting process, a plot that spanned multiple currencies and countries from 2006 to 2010. One Royal Bank of Scotland trader mused in a 2007 message how the process was becoming a “cartel,” adding “its just amazing how libor fixing can make you that much money.”

The wrongdoing spread broadly, authorities say, noting that Royal Bank of Scotland “aided and abetted” UBS and other firms. A senior official at the Justice Department’s antitrust unit, Scott D. Hammond, contends that the bank “secretly rigged” interest rates.

A UBS trader, the department said, once asked a co-worker to “have a word with” another bank about Libor submissions. The UBS trader, Thomas Hayes, who was recently charged by the Justice Department with fraud, indicated that he had already approached R.B.S. for help.

The government complaints also portray a permissive culture that allowed rate-rigging to persist for four years. David Meister, the enforcement director of the trading commission, declared that “the environment was ripe for manipulation at R.B.S.”

The bank’s own records captured the scheme in striking detail, revealing how traders pressured other employees to submit certain rates. Submitters and traders sat in earshot of each other in London, forming what authorities termed a “cozy ring.” The bank eventually separated the employees, who then moved to make additional requests via instant messages.

To persuade employees who submitted Libor rates, some traders promised affection. Others offered steak and sushi. One trader resorted to begging, invoking a plea of “pretty please.” Another trader, after pressuring a colleague to submit a certain rate, offered a reward of sorts: “I would come over there and make love to you.”

When authorities began scrutinizing the bank, the traders adopted a more covert approach. In 2010, a Libor submitter rebuffed an instant message request to influence rates. But then the submitter called the trader to explain “we’re not allowed to have those conversations” over instant message.

The employees laughed, according to a transcript of the call, and the submitter reassured the trader that he would fulfill the request: “Leave it with me, and uh, it won’t be a problem.”

Read More..