German Lawmakers Seek to Ban Far-Right Party

BERLIN — Nearly a decade after the German government embarrassingly failed in an attempt to ban the country’s leading extreme-right political party, the upper house of Parliament on Friday voted overwhelmingly to launch a new effort to have the National Democratic Party deemed unconstitutional.

The decision to ask the country’s highest court to open proceedings against the party, known by its German initials N.P.D., just before campaigning heats up for a parliamentary election next year raises the political stakes of a move that was already divisive.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is seeking a third term in office at a time when her center-right government has been criticized by its opposition rivals, the center-left Social Democrats, for mishandling the investigation into a murderous neo-Nazi trio that terrorized Germany’s minority population for the better part of the past decade. Ms. Merkel cannot afford to be viewed as weak in fighting against far-right extremists.

Lawmakers are still struggling to untangle how that trio, which called itself the National Socialist Underground, was able to terrorize minorities from 2000 to 2007, murdering 10 people, setting off two bombs and robbing 15 banks. A leading member of the N.P.D. has confessed to having contacts with the neo-Nazi trio — a statement seized upon by opponents as further proof of the need to ban the party.

“These murders confronted us with a new level of far-right extremism,” Christine Lieberknecht, governor of the eastern state of Thuringia, told the upper house, the Bundesrat, on Friday. “Out of far-right extremism grew far-right terror.”

Germany’s Bundesrat, which represents the 16 states, drew up a petition based on findings gleaned from a review of documents, interviews and observations from security services about the N.P.D. Fifteen of the 16 state governors backed the petition to ban the party.

Ms. Lieberknecht said the governors felt confident that there was sufficient proof of the threat the party posed to Germany’s democratic principles.

“We are convinced that the N.P.D. violates the Constitution,” Ms. Lieberknecht said. “The N.P.D.’s attitude is anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic. Its goals, behavior and actions are similar in character to those of the Nazis.”

In a statement, the N.P.D. leadership called the latest attempt to ban the party “a foolhardy and stupid endeavor,” while insisting they viewed it with “necessary seriousness, but commensurate calmness.”

The Bundesrat’s decision is only an initial step in what could be a very long process. The greatest legal uncertainty is beyond German control, as the European Court of Justice may have a say in whether the party can be banned.

The previous attempt to outlaw the party collapsed in 2003 when it emerged that several of the government-paid informants keeping tabs on the party had simultaneously held high-ranking positions in it. The legal debacle — and the moral implications in a country with a long history of two-faced Nazi and Communist informants — proved an embarrassment for the then center-left Social Democrat government of Gerhard Schröder, which had initiated the ban.

So far, Ms. Merkel’s government has appeared reluctant to join the governors’ effort. After meeting them earlier this month, she expressed “understanding” for their position, but said her government would examine the “risks and chances” of the case before deciding on a position early next year.

Steffen Seibert, Ms. Merkel’s spokesman, said recently that there was understanding for the states’ move because the N.P.D. holds seats in some state legislatures “where they develop their politically unpleasant behavior, which should be rejected.”

The N.P.D. had 6,300 members last year, according to government figures. It is not represented at the national level, but remains a force in the east, especially Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where its representatives sit in regional legislatures. It also is allowed, like all political parties in Germany, to draw public financing, which particularly galls those who consider it an extremist group.

Germans widely agree with banning the party, recent surveys show. A poll released Thursday indicated that 67 percent of Germans supported a ban, and 21 percent opposed it, Emnid pollsters said.

Not all politicians believe that the effort to ban will succeed, and if it fails again, the move may even strengthen the party. Norbert Lammert, president of the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, expressed concern that the motion could give the N.P.D. what he called “an instrument of propaganda” for the national campaign next year.

“I consider the political risks that could result from such a motion far greater than the hoped-for advantages,” Mr. Lammert said in an interview Friday with German public radio Westdeutscher Rundfunk.

Even without support from the government and the lower house, the constitutional court must still act on the Bundesrat petition. The country’s Constitution sets high hurdles for censuring political parties and only two have been banned in postwar Germany: the successor to the Nazi Party, in 1952, and the Communist Party, in 1956.

Stanislaw Tillich, the governor of Saxony, has had to grapple with N.P.D. representatives seeking to disrupt the regional legislature by calling Israel a “Jewish terror state,” or showing up in clothing by a well known neo-Nazi designer. He acknowledged the challenges the petition may face.

“Yes, we are taking a risk,” Mr. Tillich said. “But this is a risk worth taking.”

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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.

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F.D.A. Gives Early Approval to Leukemia Drug Iclusig

First there was Gleevec, the wonder cancer drug. Then came the sons of Gleevec. Now there is the grandson of Gleevec.

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved another Gleevec-like drug for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia, or C.M.L., adding to a crowded field vying to treat this rare cancer of white blood cells.

The new drug, Iclusig from Ariad Pharmaceuticals, works in some patients not helped by Gleevec or some of its imitators.

“The approval of Iclusig is important because it provides a treatment option to patients with C.M.L. who are not responding to other drugs,” Dr. Richard Pazdur, director of the agency’s office of cancer drugs, said in a statement.

Iclusig, known generically as ponatinib, is the first product to reach the market for Ariad, a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Mass., that was founded in 1991.

A tablet taken once a day, Iclusig (pronounced eye-CLUE-sig) will have a wholesale price of about $115,000 a year, the latest cancer drug to pierce the $100,000-a-year level. Ariad said the price was about 15 percent higher than the drug’s competitors’.

While the approval was expected, it came three months before the federal agency’s deadline of March 27, and the drug’s label allows broader use of the drug than some analysts expected. However, the label also contains a boxed warning about the side effects of blood clots and liver toxicity, something analysts did not expect.

Ariad’s shares, which have roughly doubled in the last year, sank 21 percent to $18.93 on Friday.

Chronic myeloid leukemia would seem at first glance to be an unattractive target for pharmaceutical companies. Not only is it rare — with about 5,000 new cases a year in the United States and 600 deaths — it is also one of the more effectively treated of cancers.

But it is also a well-understood cancer. Drug companies know how to attack it, so they do — something akin to looking for lost keys under the lamppost because that is where the light is. Iclusig is the third drug for chronic myeloid leukemia approved by the agency this year, after Pfizer’s Bosulif and Teva’s Synribo.

The disease occurs when pieces of two separate chromosomes come together to form what is known as the Philadelphia chromosome. A fusion of genes creates an aberrant protein, known as BCR-ABL, which fuels uncontrolled cell growth.

Gleevec, developed by Novartis and approved in 2001, inhibits the action of that errant protein. It turned chronic myeloid leukemia from a death sentence into a chronic disease for many patients and is still considered the paragon of molecularly targeted drugs. Global sales were $4.7 billion in 2011.

But about 20 to 30 percent of patients have cancers that do not respond to Gleevec or that develop resistance to it.

So companies developed other drugs — Tasigna from Novartis and Sprycel from Bristol-Myers Squibb — that also inhibit the aberrant protein but work in many of the cases that are resistant to Gleevec. But some cases do not respond to those drugs, either.

Iclusig was designed by chemists and computers at Ariad to work against cancer cells with a mutation — known as T315I — that makes them resistant to Gleevec, Tasigna and Sprycel.

However, Iclusig was approved not only for patients with that mutation but for any patient who has tried one of the other three drugs without success. Ariad estimates that each year about 2,500 patients with the disease switch therapies, making them candidates for Iclusig.

That can still be a lucrative market, given the high price of the drugs and the fact that patients must take them for the rest of their lives, which is usually many years. Dr. Harvey J. Berger, chief executive of Ariad since the company’s inception, said he expected annual sales to reach $600 million to $800 million in a few years.

The F.D.A. approved the drug based on a trial with 449 patients, all of whom received Iclusig. The patients had already tried treatment with one, two or three of the other drugs.

About 54 percent of patients in the early stage of the disease had a major cytogenic response, meaning a reduction in cells with the Philadelphia chromosome.

Iclusig was also approved Friday as a treatment for an even rarer cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia characterized by presence of the Philadelphia chromosome.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Joe Allbritton, TV and Banking Titan, Dies at 87

Joe L. Allbritton, a Texas financier who at age 50 became a television and newspaper baron in Washington, then climbed the city’s social hierarchy as he transformed himself into the foremost banker to Embassy Row, died on Tuesday in Houston. He was 87.

The cause was a heart ailment, said Frederick J. Ryan Jr., the president of Allbritton Communications, which is based in Arlington, Va. Mr. Allbritton lived in Houston in his retirement.

After early success in the banking business in the Southwest, the diminutive Mr. Allbritton — he stood barely 5 feet tall — expanded in 1974 with the purchase of The Washington Star, the city’s feisty, conservative-leaning No. 2 paper after The Washington Post. The deal included the local ABC television affiliate.

His foray into the Washington publishing scene — he had never before stepped into a newspaper office — was short-lived. In 1978, he was forced to sell The Star after the Federal Communications Commission barred common ownership of broadcast and newspaper properties in the same market. (The buyer was Time Inc., which closed the paper in 1981.)

But keeping the TV station, WMAL, proved a bonanza. It became highly profitable as WJLA — he changed the call letters, using his initials — and it was the foundation of Allbritton Communications, which today has TV outlets in Harrisburg, Pa.; Little Rock, Ark.; and a half-dozen other cities, as well as other media properties.

His son, Robert, now heads the company and in 2007 founded Politico, the news Web site and newspaper devoted to politics.

Briefly retired after selling The Star, Mr. Allbritton found himself bored and decided to return to banking.

A friend invited him to invest in the venerable Riggs National Bank, Washington’s biggest financial institution and one with a rich history. It had provided financing for Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph and the gold used to purchase Alaska. Some two dozen presidential families had banked there. Mr. Allbritton wound up with a 40 percent controlling interest.

Riggs became his fief, its board larded with relatives and friends, and the vehicle for his frequent travels to exploit his top-level foreign connections, including a close one with Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator.

He transformed Riggs from a traditional deposit-and-loan institution into a niche asset manager and private banker to the carriage trade. It boasted of being “the most important bank in the most important city in the world.”

Its fortunes waned, however, as competition increased and Riggs became enmeshed in money-laundering investigations. One resulted in a $25 million fine for what the authorities called “willful and systemic” violations of laws governing cash reporting. Federal regulators said the bank had failed to actively monitor transfers through Saudi Arabian and Equatorial Guinean accounts, which were considered possible conduits for terrorist funds or the proceeds of graft.

Mr. Allbritton refused numerous offers to buy Riggs, but under pressure from an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission involving oil money from Equatorial Guinea, he succumbed and sold the bank in 2005 to the PNC Corporation.

Besides his son, Robert, who at one time was chief executive of Riggs, Mr. Allbritton is survived by his wife, the former Barbara Jean Balfanz, whom he married in 1967, and two grandchildren.

Joe Lewis Allbritton was born in D’Lo, Miss., near Jackson, on Dec. 29, 1924, to Lewis A. Allbritton  and the former Ada Carpenter. As a youngster during the Depression he stirred orange juice for $1 a day at a local bottling plant. While in junior high school he moved with his parents to Houston, where he worked after school each day in the cafe opened by his father.

In high school he was a champion debater. He left Baylor University after a year to serve in the Navy from 1943 to 1946.

Mr. Allbritton returned to take a law degree at Baylor and opened a small office, but after a few years he discovered that he did not like what he called “the environment of practicing law” and gravitated toward business.

He made a killing in real estate selling land for a freeway between Houston and Galveston. He then organized and ran the San Jacinto Savings and Loan. Within 15 years he had acquired and merged his way to Texas banking eminence as the biggest shareholder in First International Bancshares of Dallas.

His reach extended as far as Los Angeles, where he acquired Pierce National Life Insurance and Pierce Brothers, a regional chain of 60 funeral homes, the largest in the area.

Having made a fortune and deciding that prospects for Texas banking were limited, Mr. Allbritton sold his shares and turned his attention in the early 1970s to Washington, where he found what he considered an undervalued TV property whose profits he figured could be used to support The Star.

“Opportunities in a community are rarely seen by the people who grew up there,” he later told Washingtonian magazine.

Mr. Allbritton also owned The Hudson Dispatch in New Jersey from 1977 to 1985; it was eventually merged into The Jersey Journal.

Mr. Allbritton’s chief avocation was racehorses. His Lazy Lane Farms in Upperville, Va., produced Hansel, winner of the 1991 Preakness and Belmont Stakes, the final two-thirds of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown.

But none from his stable ever won the Kentucky Derby, a goal he called “one great ambition yet unfulfilled.”

Daniel E. Slotnick contributed reporting.

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World Briefing | The Americas: Cuban Foreign Minister Named to Top Party Body

Cuba has elevated its foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, to the Communist Party’s Political Bureau, where he will join a handful of other senior leaders who are a generation younger than Fidel and Raúl Castro. Mr. Rodríguez, 54, is a former military officer, law professor and ambassador to the United Nations. He became the foreign minister in 2009. Known for his command of English and his loyalty to the Castros, he delivered a speech last month to the United Nations criticizing President Obama for failing to advance United States-Cuba relations despite the president’s promise to “launch a new chapter of engagement.”

The announcement about his rise to the Political Bureau in Granma, Cuba’s state-run newspaper, did not say whether he was replacing one of the 14 current members of the Political Bureau, nor did it signal whether Mr. Rodríguez was being considered as a successor to Raúl Castro, 81. But it did describe the move as part of a generational transition, and as a necessary break from what it called a “blockade of thinking that still persists when the time comes to select and prepare young leaders.”

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After Deportation, John McAfee Returns to U.S.

MIAMI (AP) — John McAfee, the antivirus software pioneer, arrived in the United States on Wednesday night after being deported from Guatemala, where he had sought to evade police questioning in the killing of a man in neighboring Belize.

Johan Ordonez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

John McAfee at the airport in Guatemala City. He was deported from that country and arrived in Miami on Wednesday night.

A commercial jet carrying Mr. McAfee landed in Miami shortly before 7 p.m. Wednesday, said Greg Chin, a spokesman for Miami International Airport.

A short time later, a posting on McAfee’s Web site announced that he was at a hotel in Miami’s South Beach neighborhood. Mr. McAfee has frequently communicated through the Web site.

“I have no phone, no money, no contact information,” the post says. Reached by telephone at the hotel, Mr. McAfee said that he could not talk because he was waiting for a call from his girlfriend.

Other passengers on the flight said that Mr. McAfee, 67, was escorted off the aircraft before everyone else.

Maria Claridge, a 36-year-old photographer from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said, “He walked very peacefully, chin up. He didn’t seem stressed.”

She said he was well dressed, in a black suit and white shirt, and appeared to be traveling alone.

An F.B.I. spokesman in Miami, James Marshall, said in an e-mail that the agency was not involved with Mr. McAfee’s return to the United States. Authorities from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the United States Marshals office and the United States attorney’s office did not immediately respond to questions about whether Mr. McAfee would be questioned or detained. They said there was no active arrest warrant for Mr. McAfee that would justify taking him into custody.His expulsion from Guatemala marked the last chapter in a strange, monthlong odyssey to avoid police questioning about the November killing of American expatriate Gregory Viant Faull, who lived a couple of houses down from McAfee’s compound on Ambergris Caye, off Belize’s Caribbean coast.

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