N.I.H. to Start Initiatives to Raise Number of Minority Scientists

Few blacks enter biomedical research, and those who do often encounter obstacles in their career paths.

A study published last year found that a black scientist was markedly less likely to obtain research money from the National Institutes of Health than a white one — even when differences of education and stature were taken into account.

The institute has now announced initiatives aimed at helping blacks and other ethnic and racial groups who have been unrepresented among medical researchers, including a pilot program that will test a grant review process in which all identifying information about the applicant is removed.

The initiatives take a step further than addressing the problem identified in the study — the goal is to entice more minorities into the field.

“It needed to go well beyond that,” said Francis S. Collins, director of the N.I.H., “because even if we fixed that, it would still be the case that there would be a very distressingly low number of individuals from underrepresented groups who are part of what we’re trying to do in science.”

The N.I.H. program will provide research opportunities for undergraduate students, financial support for undergraduate and graduate students, and set up a mentoring program to help students and researchers beginning their careers.

When the program ramps up, it will cost about $50 million a year and support about 600 students.

The N.I.H. formed a group of 16 scientists to study the causes of the problem, and the group presented its recommendations in June. At a meeting this month of his advisory committee, Dr. Collins and other officials discussed how to implement the recommendations.

At the meeting, Dr. Reed Tuckson, an executive vice president and the chief of medical affairs for UnitedHealth Group, who was one of the group’s co-chairman, acknowledged the controversies that would inevitably accompany the effort, especially as the N.I.H., like the rest of the federal government, could soon face sizable cuts in its budget.

“This is a heavy, laden issue which no matter which way you turn, someone is going to be irritated,” he said.

Dr. Tuckson, who is black, urged his colleagues to support the efforts. “A lot of people put themselves on the line,” he said.

The study last year, published in the journal Science, reviewed 83,000 grant applications between 2000 and 2006. For every 100 applications submitted by white scientists, 29 were awarded grants. For every 100 applications from black scientists, only 16 were financed.

After statistical adjustments to ensure a more apples-to-apples comparison, the gap narrowed but persisted.

That raised the uncomfortable possibility that the scientists reviewing the applications were discriminating against black scientists, possibly reflecting an unconscious bias. Members of other races and ethnic groups, including Hispanics, do not appear to run into the same difficulties, the study said.

Only about 500 doctoral degrees in a year in biological sciences go to underrepresented minorities, like blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans.

To persuade more students to pursue this as a career, the N.I.H. aims to provide more summer research opportunities for undergraduates.

“That is the single strongest predictor of somebody deciding that that’s the career they want to pursue,” Dr. Collins said of mentored research.”

The program will also provide money to professors so that they can have more time to mentor students or train new mentors.

“They’re talking about a multipronged approach, which I think is a smart approach,” said Dr. Raynard S. Kington, president of Grinnell College in Iowa and a former deputy director of N.I.H. who was a co-author of the Science paper. “If they had just said, ‘We’re going to focus on review,’ I would have been deeply disappointed.”

Donna K. Ginther, an economics professor at the University of Kansas who led the Science study, has taken a closer look at a subset of 2,400 proposals included in the original study. It turns out, she said, that the black applicants published fewer papers and have fewer co-authors than other scientists.

That helps explain the financing gap, but also suggests that the professional networks of black scientists are smaller. “The hypothesis being that professionally, they’re not as integrated,” Dr. Ginther said, “and that’s why I think the mentoring network is such a good idea.”

Read More..

In Spain, Having a Job No Longer Guarantees a Paycheck

Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

Raul, a truck driver in Castellón, Spain, hoped last month to be paid from a government fund. Courts are jammed with requests.

VALENCIA, Spain — Over the past two years, Ana María Molina Cuevas, 36, has worked five shifts a week in a ceramics factory on the outskirts of this city, hand-rolling paint onto tiles. But at the end of the month, she often went unpaid.

Still, she kept showing up, trying to keep her frustration under control. If she quit, she reasoned, she might never get her money. And besides, where was she going to find another job? Last month, she was down to about $130 in her bank account with a mortgage payment due.

“On the days you get paid,” she said at home with her disabled husband and young daughter, “it is like the sun has risen three times. It is a day of joy.”

Mrs. Molina, who is owed about $13,000 by the factory, is hardly alone. Being paid for the work you do is no longer something that can be counted on in Spain, as this country struggles through its fourth year of an economic crisis.

With the regional and municipal governments deeply in debt, even workers like bus drivers and health care attendants, dependent on government financing for their salaries, are not always paid.

But few workers in this situation believe they have any choice but to stick it out, and none wanted to name their employers, to protect both the companies and their jobs. They try to manage their lives with occasional checks and partial payments on random dates — never sure whether they will get what they are owed in the end. Spain’s unemployment rate is the highest in the euro zone at more than 25 percent, and despite the government’s labor reforms, the rate has continued to rise month after month.

“Before the crisis, a worker might let one month go by, and then move on to another job,” said José Francisco Perez, a lawyer who represents unpaid workers in the Valencia area. “Now that just isn’t an option. People now have nowhere to go, and they are scared. They are afraid even to complain.”

No one is keeping track of workers like Mrs. Molina. But one indication of their number can be seen in the courts, which have become jammed with people trying to get back pay from a government insurance fund, aimed at giving workers something when a company does not pay them.

In Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city, the unemployment rate is 28.1 percent and the courts are so overwhelmed that processing claims, which used to take three to six months, now takes three to four years.

Since the start of the crisis in 2008, the insurance fund has paid nearly a million workers nationally back pay or severance. In 2007, it paid 70,000 workers. It is on track to pay more than 250,000 this year, and experts say the figures would be much higher if not for the logjam in the courts.

Often the unpaid workers, like Mrs. Molina, whose company is now in bankruptcy proceedings, hope their labor will keep a struggling operation afloat over the long run. Unemployment benefits last only two years, they point out, and they wonder what they would do after that. But in the meantime, they cannot even claim unemployment benefits. And no amount of budgeting can cover no payment at all.

Beatriz Morales García, 31, said she could not remember the last time she went shopping for herself. A few years ago, she and her husband, Daniel Chiva, 34, thought that they had settled into a comfortable life, he as a bus driver and she as a therapist in a rehabilitation center for people with mental disabilities. His job is financed by the City of Valencia, and hers by the regional government of Valencia.

They never expected any big money. But it seemed reasonable to expect a reliable salary, to take on a mortgage and think about children. In the past year, however, both of them have had trouble being paid. She is owed 6,000 euros, nearly $8,000. They have cut back on everything they can think of. They have given up their landline and their Internet connection. They no long park their car in a garage or pay for extra health insurance coverage. Mr. Chiva even forgoes the coffee he used to drink in a cafe before his night shifts. Still, the anxiety is constant.

“There are nights when we cannot sleep,” he said. “Moments when you talk out loud to yourself in the street. It has been terrible, terrible.”

Mrs. Morales said it was particularly hard to watch other mothers in the park with their children while she must leave her own toddler to go to work, unsure she will ever get paid.

“We are working eight hours, and we’re suffering more than people who are not working,” she said.

The couple’s pay has been so irregular that they are having a hard time even keeping track of how much they are owed, because small payments show up sporadically in their account.

Rachel Chaundler contributed reporting.

Read More..

Chávez Party Wins Vote Amid Uncertainty

CARACAS, Venezuela — With President Hugo Chávez cancer-stricken and potentially unable to continue in office, Venezuelans showed overwhelming support for his party in elections for governor on Sunday, giving it control over almost all of the nation’s 23 states.

But voters also delivered an important victory to Mr. Chávez’s main rival, re-electing Henrique Capriles Radonski as governor of one of the most populous states and cementing his position as the opposition’s standard-bearer.

Candidates loyal to Mr. Chávez won in at least 19 states. The opposition, which started the day with governors in eight states, won only two and was leading in a third. In one other state, Bolívar, results were not complete Sunday night.

“This has been an immense victory,” said Jorge Rodríguez, the campaign chief for Mr. Chávez’s United Socialist Party.

Most attention going into the election focused on Mr. Capriles’s state of Miranda, which includes part of Caracas and surrounding areas, and where he faced a difficult race for re-election against an all-out government effort to defeat him.

Mr. Capriles was the candidate of a unified opposition in the presidential race in October, when he ran a strong but losing campaign against Mr. Chávez. He received 6.5 million votes, 44 percent of the total, the best showing by an opposition candidate since Mr. Chávez was first elected in 1998. Mr. Capriles, 40, crisscrossed the nation during his campaign, energizing voters unhappy with the status quo and even finding support in areas that had long been strongholds for Mr. Chávez.

“It’s hard to come here and smile,” Mr. Capriles said on Sunday, referring to the widespread opposition losses. But he added: “This dream we have, I know that it’s around the corner. We will achieve it.”

After the election in October, Mr. Capriles took the politically risky decision to run for re-election in his home state. That made him a target for Mr. Chávez’s government, which saw a chance to weaken him as a serious contender and sow disarray within the opposition.

Mr. Chávez dispatched a former vice president, Elías Jaua, to run against Mr. Capriles, and the government and the United Socialist Party dedicated vast resources to defeat Mr. Capriles.

Mr. Chávez, 58, is in Cuba recovering from what officials have called a complex and difficult cancer operation. If he is not able to begin his new six-year term on Jan. 10, or if he is forced to leave office soon because of poor health, the Constitution says that new elections will have to be called.

If that happens, Mr. Chávez, who has been president for nearly 14 years, has said that Vice President Nicolás Maduro should lead in his place and be his party’s candidate. His blessing is likely to go a long way to shore up support for Mr. Maduro.

But the opposition has never been able to beat Mr. Chávez in a head-to-head race, and running against Mr. Maduro would give it its best chance in years, something that opposition voters had in mind on Sunday.

“This was a trial by fire for him, to show his leadership,” Rubén Colmenares, 24, a university student, said of Mr. Capriles, predicting he could go on to beat Mr. Maduro if a special election was called.

Yet the losses in many other states, especially the large state of Zulia, left the opposition reeling. Supporters of Mr. Chávez in Miranda said they did not think that Mr. Capriles would be able to defeat Mr. Maduro in a special election. “Maduro beats Capriles, the revolution continues — it’s that simple,” said Carlos Bolívar, 40, a street vendor, after voting in Petare, a sprawling Caracas slum. “If Capriles wins, the whole process goes backward 20 years if not 200 years.”

Andrew Rosati contributed reporting.

Read More..

Is Google Abusing Its Market Power? Former Legal Allies Disagree

Left: Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Right: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Susan Creighton is now in Google's corner while Gary Reback represents several companies that  have complained to the government about Google.

In the digital economy, 14 years is an eternity. Fast-shifting technology means that companies, once feared and seemingly invincible, fade, while new powers rise to dominance, raising fresh sets of concerns.

Exhibit A: In the spring of 1998, the federal government and 20 states filed a landmark antitrust suit against Microsoft. A few months later, Google was founded.

Now Google is the subject of major antitrust investigations in the United States and Europe.  In the United States, regulators are expected to announce a decision within days to sue or settle, and under what terms. The European decision will come soon as well.

Much has changed over the years, but two lawyers who helped build the case against Microsoft are playing important roles once again. But this time, Gary L. Reback and Susan A. Creighton are on opposite sides.

The two lawyers, and the positions they have taken, point to some striking similarities yet also significant differences between the two high-stakes investigations — and why the pursuit of Google has proved challenging for antitrust officials.

In 1996, Mr. Reback and Ms. Creighton were partners, representing Netscape, the pioneering Web browser company. They wrote a 222-page “white paper,” laying out Microsoft’s campaign to use its dominance of personal computer software to stifle competition from Netscape, the Internet insurgent. After Netscape sent their report to the Justice Department, the head of the antitrust division ordered an investigation.

Mr. Reback is now an attorney at Carr & Ferrell in Silicon Valley, where he represents several companies that have complained to the government about Google. He does not represent Microsoft, though that company is a born-again champion of antitrust action, against its rival Google.

In Google, Mr. Reback sees a familiar pattern — a giant company trying to hinder competition and attack new markets. Google, he says, is unfairly using its dominant search engine to favor the company’s offerings in online shopping, travel and local listings and thus stifle competition from Web sites that rely on Google search for traffic.

“From my perspective, it’s an instant replay of the Microsoft case,” Mr. Reback said in a recent interview, though he would not comment for this article. “It’s the same playbook.”

Not to Ms. Creighton, a partner in the Washington office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, who is in Google’s corner. She has testified before Congress on Google’s behalf and negotiated with the Federal Trade Commission, the agency conducting the antitrust investigation, and where she was a senior official during the Bush administration.

“Google’s conduct is pro-competitive,” Ms. Creighton declared in her Senate testimony last year. “Far from threatening competition, Google has consistently enhanced consumer welfare by increasing the services available to consumers.”

Ms. Creighton hits two main themes in Google’s defense. The first is the consumer benefit of all Google’s free services. The second is that the cost to consumers of switching to Internet alternatives like Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the Expedia travel site or Yelp local listings is “zero,” she said. Or, as Google repeatedly says, competition is “just a click away.”

In the late 1990s, Microsoft had its version of both arguments. Microsoft bundled a free Web browser into its Windows operating system — an added feature at no cost, surely a consumer benefit. In its trial testimony, Microsoft showed that millions of people had downloaded the competing Netscape browser onto Windows — a rival product just a double-click away.

But in the trial, the evidence taken as a whole portrayed a wide-ranging effort by Microsoft to crush Netscape. It is not an antitrust violation for a powerful company to gain a dominant share of one market and then expand into other markets. The legal issue is the tactics the dominant company employs to expand its empire.

Read More..

Experts Say Thimerosal Ban Would Imperil Global Health Efforts

A group of prominent doctors and public health experts warns in articles to be published Monday in the journal Pediatrics that banning thimerosal, a mercury compound used as a preservative in vaccines, would devastate public health efforts in developing countries.

Representatives from governments around the world will meet in Geneva next month in a session convened by the United Nations Environmental Program to prepare a global treaty to reduce health hazards by banning certain products and processes that release mercury into the environment.

But a proposal that the ban include thimerosal, which has been used since the 1930s to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination in multidose vials of vaccines, has drawn strong criticism from pediatricians.

They say that the ethyl-mercury compound is critical for vaccine use in the developing world, where multidose vials are a mainstay.

Banning it would require switching to single-dose vials for vaccines, which would cost far more and require new networks of cold storage facilities and additional capacity for waste disposal, the authors of the articles said.

“The result would be millions of people, predominantly in low- and middle-income countries, with significantly restricted access to lifesaving vaccines for many years,” they wrote.

In the United States, thimerosal has not been used in children’s vaccines since the early 2000s after the Food and Drug Administration and public health groups came under pressure from advocacy groups that believed there was an association between the compound and autism in children.

At the time, few, if any, studies had evaluated the compound’s safety, so the American Academy of Pediatrics called for its elimination in children’s vaccines, a recommendation that the authors argued was made under the principle of “do no harm.”

Since then, however, there has been a lot of research, and the evidence is overwhelming that thimerosal is not harmful, the authors said. Louis Z. Cooper, a former president of the academy and one of the authors, said that if the members had known then what they know now, they never would have recommended against using it. “Science clearly documented that we can’t find hazards from thimerosal in vaccines,” he said. “The preservative plays a critical role in distribution of vaccine to the global community. It was a no-brainer what our position needed to be.”

Advocacy groups have lobbied to include the substance in the ban, and some global health experts worry that because the government representatives due to vote next month are for the most part ministers of environment, not health, they may not appreciate the consequences of banning thimerosal in vaccines. The Pediatrics articles are timed to raise a warning before the meeting.

“If you don’t know about this, and you’re a minister of environment who doesn’t usually deal with health, it’s confusing,” said Heidi Larson, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who runs the Vaccine Confidence Project.

In an open letter to the United Nations Environmental Program and the World Health Organization this year, the Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs, a nonprofit group that supports the ban, disputed the assertion that scientific studies had offered proof that thimerosal is safe, and urged member states to include it in the ban.

That it is being used in developing countries, but not developed countries, is an “injustice,” the letter said.

The World Health Organization has also weighed in. In April, a group of experts on immunization wrote in a report that they were “gravely concerned that current global discussions may threaten access to thimerosal-containing vaccines without scientific justification.”

Dr. Larson said she believed that the efforts of pediatricians and global health experts, including the W.H.O., would influence the negotiations in Geneva and that the compound would most likely be left out of the final ban.

“You can’t just pull the plug on something without having a plan for an alternative,” she said.

Read More..

Experts Say Thimerosal Ban Would Imperil Global Health Efforts

A group of prominent doctors and public health experts warns in articles to be published Monday in the journal Pediatrics that banning thimerosal, a mercury compound used as a preservative in vaccines, would devastate public health efforts in developing countries.

Representatives from governments around the world will meet in Geneva next month in a session convened by the United Nations Environmental Program to prepare a global treaty to reduce health hazards by banning certain products and processes that release mercury into the environment.

But a proposal that the ban include thimerosal, which has been used since the 1930s to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination in multidose vials of vaccines, has drawn strong criticism from pediatricians.

They say that the ethyl-mercury compound is critical for vaccine use in the developing world, where multidose vials are a mainstay.

Banning it would require switching to single-dose vials for vaccines, which would cost far more and require new networks of cold storage facilities and additional capacity for waste disposal, the authors of the articles said.

“The result would be millions of people, predominantly in low- and middle-income countries, with significantly restricted access to lifesaving vaccines for many years,” they wrote.

In the United States, thimerosal has not been used in children’s vaccines since the early 2000s after the Food and Drug Administration and public health groups came under pressure from advocacy groups that believed there was an association between the compound and autism in children.

At the time, few, if any, studies had evaluated the compound’s safety, so the American Academy of Pediatrics called for its elimination in children’s vaccines, a recommendation that the authors argued was made under the principle of “do no harm.”

Since then, however, there has been a lot of research, and the evidence is overwhelming that thimerosal is not harmful, the authors said. Louis Z. Cooper, a former president of the academy and one of the authors, said that if the members had known then what they know now, they never would have recommended against using it. “Science clearly documented that we can’t find hazards from thimerosal in vaccines,” he said. “The preservative plays a critical role in distribution of vaccine to the global community. It was a no-brainer what our position needed to be.”

Advocacy groups have lobbied to include the substance in the ban, and some global health experts worry that because the government representatives due to vote next month are for the most part ministers of environment, not health, they may not appreciate the consequences of banning thimerosal in vaccines. The Pediatrics articles are timed to raise a warning before the meeting.

“If you don’t know about this, and you’re a minister of environment who doesn’t usually deal with health, it’s confusing,” said Heidi Larson, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who runs the Vaccine Confidence Project.

In an open letter to the United Nations Environmental Program and the World Health Organization this year, the Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs, a nonprofit group that supports the ban, disputed the assertion that scientific studies had offered proof that thimerosal is safe, and urged member states to include it in the ban.

That it is being used in developing countries, but not developed countries, is an “injustice,” the letter said.

The World Health Organization has also weighed in. In April, a group of experts on immunization wrote in a report that they were “gravely concerned that current global discussions may threaten access to thimerosal-containing vaccines without scientific justification.”

Dr. Larson said she believed that the efforts of pediatricians and global health experts, including the W.H.O., would influence the negotiations in Geneva and that the compound would most likely be left out of the final ban.

“You can’t just pull the plug on something without having a plan for an alternative,” she said.

Read More..

As Gold Is Spirited Out of Afghanistan, Officials Wonder Why

Zalmai for The New York Times

A Kabul jewelry shop. Officials are concerned about gold being flown out of Afghanistan.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Packed into hand luggage and tucked into jacket pockets, roughly hewed bars of gold are being flown out of Kabul with increasing regularity, confounding Afghan and American officials who fear money launderers have found a new way to spirit funds from the country.

Most of the gold is being carried on commercial flights destined for Dubai, according to airport security reports and officials. The amounts carried by single couriers are often heavy enough that passengers flying from Kabul to the Persian Gulf emirate would be well advised to heed warnings about the danger of bags falling from overhead compartments. One courier, for instance, carried nearly 60 pounds of gold bars, each about the size of an iPhone, aboard an early morning flight in mid-October, according to an airport security report. The load was worth more than $1.5 million.

The gold is fully declared and legal to fly. Some, if not most, is legitimately being sent by gold dealers seeking to have old and damaged jewelry refashioned into new pieces by skilled craftsmen in the Persian Gulf, said Afghan officials and gold dealers.

But gold dealers in Kabul and current and former Kabul airport officials say there has been a surge in shipments since early summer. The talk of a growing exodus of gold from Afghanistan has been spreading among the business community here, and in recent weeks has caught the attention of Afghan and American officials. The officials are now puzzling over the origin of the gold — very little is mined in Afghanistan, although larger mines are planned — and why so much appears to be heading for Dubai.

“We are investigating it, and if we find this is a way of laundering money, we will intervene,” said Noorullah Delawari, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank. Yet he acknowledged that there were more questions than answers at this point. “I don’t know where so much gold would come from, unless you can tell me something about it,” he said in an interview. Or, as a European official who tracks the Afghan economy put it, “new mysteries abound” as the war appears to be drawing to a close.

Figuring out what precisely is happening in the Afghan economy remains as confounding as ever. Nearly 90 percent of the financial activity takes place outside formal banks. Written contracts are the exception, receipts are rare and statistics are often unreliable. Money laundering is commonplace, say Western and Afghan officials.

As a result, with the gold, “right now you’re stuck in that situation we usually are: is there something bad going on here or is this just the Afghan way of commerce?” said a senior American official who tracks illicit financial networks.

There is reason to be suspicious: the gold shipments track with the far larger problem of cash smuggling. For years, flights have left Kabul almost every day carrying thick wads of bank notes — dollars, euros, Norwegian kroner, Saudi Arabian riyals and other currencies — stuffed into suitcases, packed into boxes and shrink-wrapped onto pallets. At one point, cash was even being hidden in food trays aboard now-defunct Pamir Airways flights to Dubai.

Last year alone, Afghanistan’s central bank says, roughly $4.5 billion in cash was spirited out through the airport. Efforts to stanch the flow have had limited impact, and concerns about money laundering persist, according to a report released last week by the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

The unimpeded “bulk cash flows raise the risk of money laundering and bulk cash smuggling — tools often used to finance terrorist, narcotics and other illicit operations,” the report said. The cash, and now the gold, is most often taken to Dubai, where officials are known for asking few questions. Many wealthy Afghans park their money and families in the emirate, and gold dealers say more middle-class Afghans are sending money and gold — seen as a safeguard against economic ruin — to Dubai as talk of a postwar economic collapse grows louder.

But given Dubai’s reputation as a haven for laundered money, an Afghan official said that the “obvious suspicion” is that at least some of the apparent growth in gold shipments to Dubai is tied to the myriad illicit activities — opium smuggling, corruption, Taliban taxation schemes — that have come to define Afghanistan’s economy.

There are also indications that Iran could be dipping into the Afghan gold trade. It is already buying up dollars and euros here to circumvent American and European sanctions, and it may be using gold for the same purpose.

Yahya, a dealer in Kabul, said other gold traders were helping Iran buy the precious metal here. Payment was being made in oil or with Iranian rials, which readily circulate in western Afghanistan. The Afghan dealers are then taking it to Dubai, where the gold is sold for dollars. The money is then moved to China, where it was used to buy needed goods or simply funneled back to Iran, said Yahya, who like many Afghans uses a single name.

Read More..

As Gold Is Spirited Out of Afghanistan, Officials Wonder Why

Zalmai for The New York Times

A Kabul jewelry shop. Officials are concerned about gold being flown out of Afghanistan.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Packed into hand luggage and tucked into jacket pockets, roughly hewed bars of gold are being flown out of Kabul with increasing regularity, confounding Afghan and American officials who fear money launderers have found a new way to spirit funds from the country.

Most of the gold is being carried on commercial flights destined for Dubai, according to airport security reports and officials. The amounts carried by single couriers are often heavy enough that passengers flying from Kabul to the Persian Gulf emirate would be well advised to heed warnings about the danger of bags falling from overhead compartments. One courier, for instance, carried nearly 60 pounds of gold bars, each about the size of an iPhone, aboard an early morning flight in mid-October, according to an airport security report. The load was worth more than $1.5 million.

The gold is fully declared and legal to fly. Some, if not most, is legitimately being sent by gold dealers seeking to have old and damaged jewelry refashioned into new pieces by skilled craftsmen in the Persian Gulf, said Afghan officials and gold dealers.

But gold dealers in Kabul and current and former Kabul airport officials say there has been a surge in shipments since early summer. The talk of a growing exodus of gold from Afghanistan has been spreading among the business community here, and in recent weeks has caught the attention of Afghan and American officials. The officials are now puzzling over the origin of the gold — very little is mined in Afghanistan, although larger mines are planned — and why so much appears to be heading for Dubai.

“We are investigating it, and if we find this is a way of laundering money, we will intervene,” said Noorullah Delawari, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank. Yet he acknowledged that there were more questions than answers at this point. “I don’t know where so much gold would come from, unless you can tell me something about it,” he said in an interview. Or, as a European official who tracks the Afghan economy put it, “new mysteries abound” as the war appears to be drawing to a close.

Figuring out what precisely is happening in the Afghan economy remains as confounding as ever. Nearly 90 percent of the financial activity takes place outside formal banks. Written contracts are the exception, receipts are rare and statistics are often unreliable. Money laundering is commonplace, say Western and Afghan officials.

As a result, with the gold, “right now you’re stuck in that situation we usually are: is there something bad going on here or is this just the Afghan way of commerce?” said a senior American official who tracks illicit financial networks.

There is reason to be suspicious: the gold shipments track with the far larger problem of cash smuggling. For years, flights have left Kabul almost every day carrying thick wads of bank notes — dollars, euros, Norwegian kroner, Saudi Arabian riyals and other currencies — stuffed into suitcases, packed into boxes and shrink-wrapped onto pallets. At one point, cash was even being hidden in food trays aboard now-defunct Pamir Airways flights to Dubai.

Last year alone, Afghanistan’s central bank says, roughly $4.5 billion in cash was spirited out through the airport. Efforts to stanch the flow have had limited impact, and concerns about money laundering persist, according to a report released last week by the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

The unimpeded “bulk cash flows raise the risk of money laundering and bulk cash smuggling — tools often used to finance terrorist, narcotics and other illicit operations,” the report said. The cash, and now the gold, is most often taken to Dubai, where officials are known for asking few questions. Many wealthy Afghans park their money and families in the emirate, and gold dealers say more middle-class Afghans are sending money and gold — seen as a safeguard against economic ruin — to Dubai as talk of a postwar economic collapse grows louder.

But given Dubai’s reputation as a haven for laundered money, an Afghan official said that the “obvious suspicion” is that at least some of the apparent growth in gold shipments to Dubai is tied to the myriad illicit activities — opium smuggling, corruption, Taliban taxation schemes — that have come to define Afghanistan’s economy.

There are also indications that Iran could be dipping into the Afghan gold trade. It is already buying up dollars and euros here to circumvent American and European sanctions, and it may be using gold for the same purpose.

Yahya, a dealer in Kabul, said other gold traders were helping Iran buy the precious metal here. Payment was being made in oil or with Iranian rials, which readily circulate in western Afghanistan. The Afghan dealers are then taking it to Dubai, where the gold is sold for dollars. The money is then moved to China, where it was used to buy needed goods or simply funneled back to Iran, said Yahya, who like many Afghans uses a single name.

Read More..

Using Facebook to Announce Bad News

Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

When his father died, Doug Anter of Royal Oak, Mich., called key family members, then put the news on Facebook.

LIKE many women these days, Aran Hissam, 35, of Melbourne, Fla., posted the news that she was pregnant on Facebook. On the morning of an ultrasound last year, she debated on the site whether to learn the baby’s sex, musing “to peek or not to peek?”

When she failed to post an update later that day, friends started to contact her. Ms. Hissam decided to return to Facebook to share the news that her unborn baby, a girl, had been found to have fetal hydrops and given no chance of survival.

“I wanted to communicate the news to get people off my back,” Ms. Hissam said in a telephone interview recently. Although her husband was at first surprised that she would share such emotional news publicly, she said, Facebook seemed like one of the least difficult ways to get the word out.

“It was too draining to actually call everybody, because I couldn’t emotionally speak about the same thing over and over,” Ms. Hissam said, adding that she continued to post updates about her daughter, who was born at 35 weeks and lived for 15 hours, and it became a form of therapy for her. (She also later wrote a book about her loss.)

Facebook, that repository of the mundane (mealtime updates, party reminders and job changes) that people have long used to show the positive sides of their lives, is increasingly also a place they go to break difficult news.

It was where the racecar driver Danica Patrick, 30, announced that she and her husband of seven years, Paul Hospenthal, 47, were “amicably” divorcing. And it is where a portrait photographer and mother of two named Alicia, 35 (who did not want her last name published because of continuing custody issues), posted a few succinct sentences about the breakup of her own marriage recently. People in her social circle were starting to hear rumors about her personal life, she said, and she wanted to address that.

“I didn’t want to start a pity party, but I did want to be honest about what was going on,” Alicia said, adding that making the announcement this way allowed her to control the message as well as avoid putting people on the spot. “One of the beautiful things about Facebook is that it’s passive communication, and it gives people freedom to respond — or not — in whichever way they are most comfortable.”

Posting bad news on a social media site eases the pain for the bearer of bad news and the recipient, because knowing what to say to someone who has just told you bad news can be one of the most socially fraught situations. “If you put the news on Facebook, you’re also maximizing the recipient’s comfort, so they can process the information on their own time,” said Dr. Janet Sternberg, assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University. “It’s really hard to break bad news without crying or falling apart. But we can share painful news in less painful ways.”

Dr. Louis Manza, a professor and chairman of the psychology department at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, said: “From a cognitive perspective, it’s easier to deal with it this way. You post it, come back in eight hours and read all the comments that you get, and don’t have to worry about having a difficult conversation.”

Still, intimates might react poorly to finding out about delicate or tragic situations via pixels.

“Really significant news is best delivered face to face, but sometimes speed is the concern,” said Daniel Post Senning, an etiquette author and a spokesman for the Emily Post Institute. “We’ve definitely crossed a threshold in how we use social media.”

The hand hovering ready to click the “Like” button can also create tremendously awkward situations.

“Ah, yes, the Facebook vocab challenge,” said Mr. Senning, who said it’s O.K. to “Like” negative news. “The ‘Like’ indicates an emotional connection, and indicates that you have read it.”

Doug Anter, 46, a public relations executive in Royal Oak, Mich., was hardly concerned about an excess of “Likes” when thinking about how to spread the word that his father had died in August.

At the time he was also expecting his first child, so he was feeling highly emotional, and phoned key family members before ultimately putting the news about his father on Facebook.

“I could have made countless phone calls, but it was incredibly inefficient, and I would be getting very emotional each time,” he said. After he posted about his father, Mr. Anter said he felt “blessed and fortunate for the outpouring of support” that followed.

But some experts think that putting bad news on Facebook almost inevitably trivializes it, to the sufferer’s further detriment.“If you post about someone’s death or your divorce, it’s not that different from typing, ‘I’m going to Starbucks,’ ” said Dr. Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, Calif. When someone puts bad news on social media, she said, “it’s trying to show bravado, and pretending that you’re not devastated by the news. It isn’t good because if you don’t feel the feelings, it interferes with your grief.”

Dr. Lieberman said that it is far preferable to tell people in person, as “it is very human, very real and you have to deal with your feelings.” In pre-Facebook days, she pointed out, we all had to make 50 difficult phone calls or ask friends and family to help — and we all managed to do it.

Read More..

School Yoga Class Draws Religious Protest From Christians

T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times

Miriam Ruiz during a yoga class last week at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Encinitas, Calif. A few dozen parents are protesting that the program amounts to religious indoctrination. More Photos »

ENCINITAS, Calif. — By 9:30 a.m. at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School, tiny feet were shifting from downward dog pose to chair pose to warrior pose in surprisingly swift, accurate movements. A circle of 6- and 7-year-olds contorted their frames, making monkey noises and repeating confidence-boosting mantras.

Jackie Bergeron’s first-grade yoga class was in full swing.

“Inhale. Exhale. Peekaboo!” Ms. Bergeron said from the front of the class. “Now, warrior pose. I am strong! I am brave!”

Though the yoga class had a notably calming effect on the children, things were far from placid outside the gymnasium.

A small but vocal group of parents, spurred on by the head of a local conservative advocacy group, has likened these 30-minute yoga classes to religious indoctrination. They say the classes — part of a comprehensive program offered to all public school students in this affluent suburb north of San Diego — represent a violation of the First Amendment.

After the classes prompted discussion in local evangelical churches, parents said they were concerned that the exercises might nudge their children closer to ancient Hindu beliefs.

Mary Eady, the parent of a first grader, said the classes were rooted in the deeply religious practice of Ashtanga yoga, in which physical actions are inextricable from the spiritual beliefs underlying them.

“They’re not just teaching physical poses, they’re teaching children how to think and how to make decisions,” Ms. Eady said. “They’re teaching children how to meditate and how to look within for peace and for comfort. They’re using this as a tool for many things beyond just stretching.”

Ms. Eady and a few dozen other parents say a public school system should not be leading students down any particular religious path. Teaching children how to engage in spiritual exercises like meditation familiarizes young minds with certain religious viewpoints and practices, they say, and a public classroom is no place for that.

Underlying the controversy is the source of the program’s financing. The pilot project is supported by the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in memory of Krishna Pattabhi Jois, who is considered the father of Ashtanga yoga.

Dean Broyles, the president and chief counsel of the National Center for Law and Policy, a nonprofit law firm that champions religious freedom and traditional marriage, according to its Web site, has dug up quotes from Jois Foundation leaders, who talk about the inseparability of the physical act of yoga from a broader spiritual quest. Mr. Broyles argued that such quotes betrayed the group’s broader evangelistic purpose.

“There is a transparent promotion of Hindu religious beliefs and practices in the public schools through this Ashtanga yoga program,” he said.

“The analog would be if we substituted for this program a charismatic Christian praise and worship physical education program,” he said.

The battle over yoga in schools has been raging for years across the country but has typically focused on charter schools, which receive public financing but set their own curriculums.

The move by the Encinitas Union School District to mandate yoga classes for all students who do not opt out has elevated the discussion. And it has split an already divided community.

The district serves the liberal beach neighborhoods of Encinitas, including Leucadia, where Paul Ecke Central Elementary is, as well as more conservative inland communities. On the coast, bumper stickers reading “Keep Leucadia Funky” are borne proudly. Farther inland, cars are more likely to feature the Christian fish symbol, and large evangelical congregations play an important role in shaping local philosophy.

Opponents of the yoga classes have started an online petition to remove the course from the district’s curriculum. They have shown up at school board meetings to denounce the program, and Mr. Broyles has threatened to sue if the board does not address their concerns.

The district has stood firm. Tim Baird, the schools superintendent, has defended the yoga classes as merely another element of a broader program designed to promote children’s physical and mental well-being. The notion that yoga teachers have designs on converting tender young minds to Hinduism is incorrect, he said.

“That’s why we have an opt-out clause,” Mr. Baird said. “If your faith is such that you believe that simply by doing the gorilla pose, you’re invoking the Hindu gods, then by all means your child can be doing something else.”

Ms. Eady is not convinced.

“Yoga poses are representative of Hindu deities and Hindu stories about the actions and interactions of those deities with humans,” she said. “There’s content even in the movement, just as with baptism there’s content in the movement.”

Russell Case, a representative of the Jois Foundation, said the parents’ fears were misguided.

“They’re concerned that we’re putting our God before their God,” Mr. Case said. “They’re worried about competition. But we’re much closer to them than they think. We’re good Christians that just like to do yoga because it helps us to be better people.”

Read More..