Alarm in Albuquerque Over Plan to End Methadone for Inmates

Mark Holm for The New York Times

Officials at New Mexico’s largest jail want to end its methadone program. Addicts like Penny Strayer hope otherwise.

ALBUQUERQUE — It has been almost four decades since Betty Jo Lopez started using heroin.

Her face gray and wizened well beyond her 59 years, Ms. Lopez would almost certainly still be addicted, if not for the fact that she is locked away in jail, not to mention the cup of pinkish liquid she downs every morning.

“It’s the only thing that allows me to live a normal life,” Ms. Lopez said of the concoction, which contains methadone, a drug used to treat opiate dependence. “These nurses that give it to me, they’re like my guardian angels.”

For the last six years, the Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico’s largest jail, has been administering methadone to inmates with drug addictions, one of a small number of jails and prisons around the country that do so.

At this vast complex, sprawled out among the mesas west of downtown Albuquerque, any inmate who was enrolled at a methadone clinic just before being arrested can get the drug behind bars. Pregnant inmates addicted to heroin are also eligible.

Here in New Mexico, which has long been plagued by one of the nation’s worst heroin scourges, there is no shortage of participants — hundreds each year — who have gone through the program.

In November, however, the jail’s warden, Ramon Rustin, said he wanted to stop treating inmates with methadone. Mr. Rustin said the program, which had been costing Bernalillo County about $10,000 a month, was too expensive.

Moreover, Mr. Rustin, a former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania and a 32-year veteran of corrections work, said he did not believe that the program truly worked.

Of the hundred or so inmates receiving daily methadone doses, he said, there was little evidence of a reduction in recidivism, one of the program’s main selling points.

“My concern is that the courts and other authorities think that jail has become a treatment program, that it has become the community provider,” he said. “But jail is not the answer. Methadone programs belong in the community, not here.”

Mr. Rustin’s public stance has angered many in Albuquerque, where drug addiction has been passed down through generations in impoverished pockets of the city, as it has elsewhere across New Mexico.

Recovery advocates and community members argue that cutting people off from methadone is too dangerous, akin to taking insulin from a diabetic.

The New Mexico office of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes an overhaul to drug policy, has implored Mr. Rustin to reconsider his stance, saying in a letter that he did not have the medical expertise to make such a decision.

Last month, the Bernalillo County Commission ordered Mr. Rustin to extend the program, which also relies on about $200,000 in state financing annually, for two months until its results could be studied further.

“Addiction needs to be treated like any other health issue,” said Maggie Hart Stebbins, a county commissioner who supports the program.

“If we can treat addiction at the jail to the point where they stay clean and don’t reoffend, that saves us the cost of reincarcerating that person,” she said.

Hard data, though, is difficult to come by — hence the county’s coming review.

Darren Webb, the director of Recovery Services of New Mexico, a private contractor that runs the methadone program, said inmates were tracked after their release to ensure that they remained enrolled at outside methadone clinics.

While the outcome was never certain, Mr. Webb said, he maintained that providing methadone to inmates would give them a better chance of staying out of jail once they were released. “When they get out, they won’t be committing the same crimes they would if they were using,” he said. “They are functioning adults.”

In a study published in 2009 in The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, researchers found that male inmates in Baltimore who were treated with methadone were far more likely to continue their treatment in the community than inmates who received only counseling.

Those who received methadone behind bars were also more likely to be free of opioids and cocaine than those who received only counseling or started methadone treatment after their release.

Read More..

Michael Cronan, Who Gave TiVo and Kindle Their Names, Dies at 61

Michael Cronan, a San Francisco-based graphic designer and marketing executive who placed his stamp on popular culture when he created the brand names TiVo and Kindle, died on Tuesday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 61.

The cause was colon cancer, said his wife, Karin Hibma, with whom he founded the marketing firm Cronan in the early 1980s.

Mr. Cronan, who studied art in college, had many corporations and cultural institutions as clients, but he was most remembered for the pair of brand names he came up with a decade apart.

In the spring of 1997, he was asked to forge a name and an identity for a new device, a digital video recorder developed by a company called Teleworld that offered more sophisticated television recording choices than the videocassette recorder.

“We reviewed probably 1,600-plus name alternatives, seriously considered over 800 names and presented over 100 strong candidates to the team,” Mr. Cronan told Matt Haughey for his blog PVR (the letters stand for personal video recorder) in 2005.

“We spent the early meetings trying to place a cultural context on the product,” he said. Among the possibilities were Bongo and Lasso, which never got far.

Believing that “we were naming the next TV,” Mr. Cronan recalled, “I thought it should be as close as possible to what people would find familiar, so it must contain T and V.”

“I started looking at letter combinations,” he added, “and pretty quickly settled on TiVo.” (The “Vo” portion, he said, had a connection to the Latin and Italian words for vocal sound and voice.) Then came the search for a mascot that Mr. Cronan hoped “would become as recognizable as the mouse ears are to Disney.” He created a TV-shaped smiley character with the name TiVo inscribed on its face, rabbit ears suggesting an early TV set and large, splayed feet. Teleworld changed its name to TiVo Inc.

When Amazon prepared to introduce its first electronic reader in 2007, it turned to Mr. Cronan, who envisioned imagery reflecting the reading experience as an embryonic but rising technology.

Ms. Hibma said in an interview on Friday that in pondering a brand name, Mr. Cronan “wanted to create something small, humble, with no braggadocio,” while choosing an image that “was about starting something, giving birth to something.” He found the name, she said, by likening use of the new e-reader to “starting a fire.”

Michael Patrick Cronan was born on June 9, 1951, in San Francisco. He studied painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), where he later taught, and received a degree in art from California State University, Sacramento. He was a founder and past president of the San Francisco branch of AIGA, the professional association for design.

Mr. Cronan and his wife expanded their focus in 1992 to create the Walking Man clothing collection, featuring loose-knit tops and pants. Mr. Cronan also designed a pair of 1999 postage stamps, one commemorating the 50th anniversary of NATO and the other promoting prostate cancer awareness, and painted portraits and watercolors.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Cronan is survived by his sons, Shawn HibmaCronan and Nick Cronan; a brother, Christopher; a sister, Patricia Cronan; and a granddaughter.

For all his devotion to marketing and branding, Mr. Cronan felt that sometimes the demands of commerce went too far, as in the often-changing corporate names attached to sports stadiums and concert halls.

“There was a time in American life where going to a sporting event or a concert was sort of magical, because a lot of these places had these fun names,” he told The Denver Post in 2010. “But these days, with the amount of people craving advertising exposure, the sponsors have found a way to sell everything. They’re selling our nostalgia, and it’s sad.”

Read More..

India Takes Aim at Poverty With Cash Transfer Program

Manish Swarup/Associated Press

Poor and homeless people waited for food on Tuesday at a New Delhi temple.

NEW DELHI — India has more poor people than any nation on earth, but many of its antipoverty programs end up feeding the rich more than the needy. A new program hopes to change that.

On Jan. 1, India eliminated a raft of bureaucratic middlemen by depositing government pension and scholarship payments directly into the bank accounts of about 245,000 people in 20 of the nation’s hundreds of districts, in a bid to prevent corrupt state and local officials from diverting much of the money to their own pockets. Hundreds of thousands more people will be added to the program in the coming months.

In a country of 1.2 billion, the numbers so far are modest, but some officials and economists see the start of direct payments as revolutionary — a program intended not only to curb corruption but also to serve as a vehicle for lifting countless millions out of poverty altogether.

The nation’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, described the cash transfer program to Indian news media as a “pioneering and pathbreaking reform” that is a “game changer for governance.” He acknowledged that the initial rollout had been modest because of “practical difficulties, some quite unforeseen.” He promised that those problems would be resolved before the end of 2013, when the program is to be extended in phases to other parts of the country.

Some critics, however, said the program was intended more to buy votes among the poor than to overcome poverty. And some said that in a country where hundreds of millions have no access to banks, never mind personal bank accounts, direct electronic money transfers are only one aspect of a much broader effort necessary to build a real safety net for India’s vast population.

“An impression has been created that the government is about to launch an ambitious scheme of direct cash transfers to poor families,” Jean Drèze, an honorary professor at the Delhi School of Economics, wrote in an e-mail. “This is quite misleading. What the government is actually planning is an experiment to change the modalities of existing transfers — nothing more, nothing less.”

The program is based on models in Mexico and Brazil in which poor families receive stipends in exchange for meeting certain social goals, like keeping their children in school or getting regular medical checkups. International aid organizations have praised these efforts in several places; in Brazil alone, nearly 50 million people participate.

But one of India’s biggest hurdles is simply figuring out how to distinguish its 1.2 billion citizens. The country is now in the midst of another ambitious project to undertake retinal and fingerprint scans in every village and city in the hope of giving hundreds of millions who have no official identification a card with a 12-digit number that would, among other things, give them access to the modern financial world. After three years of operation, the program has issued unique numbers to 220 million people.

Bindu Ananth, the president of IFMR Trust, a financial charity, said that getting people bank accounts can be surprisingly beneficial because the poor often pay stiff fees to cash checks or get small loans, fees that are substantially reduced for account holders.

“I think this is one of the biggest things to happen to India’s financial system in a decade,” Ms. Ananth said.

Only about a third of Indian households have bank accounts. Getting a significant portion of the remaining households included in the nation’s financial system will take an enormous amount of additional effort and expense, at least part of which will fall on the government to bear, economists said.

“There are two things this cash transfer program is supposed to do: prevent leakage from corruption, and bring everybody into the system,” said Surendra L. Rao, a former director general of the National Council of Applied Economic Research. “And I don’t see either happening anytime soon.”

The great promise of the cash transfer program — as well as its greatest point of contention — would come if it tackled India’s expensive and inefficient system for handing out food and subsidized fuel through nearly 50,000 government shops.

India spends almost $14 billion annually on this system, or nearly 1 percent of its gross domestic product, but the system is poorly managed and woefully inefficient.

Malavika Vyawahare contributed reporting.

Read More..

Slipstream: Legislation Would Regulate Tracking of Cellphone Users

THERE are three things that matter in consumer data collection: location, location, location.

E-ZPasses clock the routes we drive. Metro passes register the subway stations we enter. A.T.M.’s record where and when we get cash. Not to mention the credit and debit card transactions that map our trajectories in comprehensive detail — the stores, restaurants and gas stations we frequent; the hotels and health clubs we patronize.

Each of these represents a kind of knowing trade, a conscious consumer submission to surveillance for the sake of convenience.

But now legislators, regulators, advocacy groups and marketers are squaring off over newer technology: smartphones and mobile apps that can continuously record and share people’s precise movements. At issue is whether consumers are unwittingly acquiescing to pervasive tracking just for the sake of having mobile amenities like calendar, game or weather apps.

For Senator Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, the potential hazard is that by compiling location patterns over time, companies could create an intimate portrait of a person’s familial and professional associations, political and religious beliefs, even health status. To give consumers some say in the surveillance, Mr. Franken has been working on a locational privacy protection bill that would require entities like app developers to obtain explicit one-time consent from users before recording the locations of their mobile devices. It would prohibit stalking apps — programs that allow one person to track another person’s whereabouts surreptitiously.

The bill, approved last month by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would also require mobile services to disclose the names of the advertising networks or other third parties with which they share consumers’ locations.

“Someone who has this information doesn’t just know where you live,” Mr. Franken said during the Judiciary Committee meeting. “They know the roads you take to work, where you drop your kids off at school, the church you attend and the doctors that you visit.”

Yet many marketers say they need to know consumers’ precise locations so they can show relevant mobile ads or coupons at the very moment a person is in or near a store. Informing such users about each and every ad network or analytics company that tracks their locations could hinder that hyperlocal marketing, they say, because it could require a new consent notice to appear every time someone opened an app.

“Consumers would revolt if this was the case, and applications could be rendered useless,” said Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, who promulgated industry arguments during the committee meeting. “Worse yet, free applications that rely on advertising could be pushed by the consent requirement to become fee-based.”

Mr. Franken’s bill may seem intended simply to protect consumer privacy. But the underlying issue is the future of consumer data property rights — the question of who actually owns the information generated by a person who uses a digital device and whether using that property without explicit authorization constitutes trespassing.

In common law, a property intrusion is known as “trespass to chattels.” The Supreme Court invoked the legal concept last January in United States v. Jones, in which it ruled that the government had violated the Fourth Amendment — which protects people against unreasonable search and seizure — by placing a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car for 28 days without getting a warrant.

Some advocacy groups view location tracking by mobile apps and ad networks as a parallel, warrantless commercial intrusion. To these groups, Mr. Franken’s bill suggests that consumers may eventually gain some rights over their own digital footprints.

“People don’t think about how they broadcast their locations all the time when they carry their phones. The law is just starting to catch up and think about how to treat this,” says Marcia Hofmann, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco. “In an ideal world, users would be able to share the information they want and not share the information they don’t want and have more control over how it is used.”

Even some marketers agree.

One is Scout Advertising, a location-based mobile ad service that promises to help advertisers pinpoint the whereabouts of potential customers within 100 meters. The service, previously known as ThinkNear and recently acquired by Telenav, a personalized navigation service, works by determining a person’s location; figuring out whether that place is a home or a store, a health club or a sports stadium; analyzing weather and other local conditions; and then showing a mobile ad tailored to the situation.

Eli Portnoy, general manager of Scout Advertising, calls the technique “situational targeting.” He says Crunch, the fitness center chain, used the service to show mobile ads to people within three miles of a Crunch gym on rainy mornings. The ad said: “Seven-day pass. Run on a treadmill, not in the rain.”

When a person clicks on one of these ads, Mr. Portnoy says, a browser-based map pops up with turn-by-turn directions to the nearest location. Through GPS tracking, Scout Advertising can tell when someone starts driving and whether that person arrives at the site.

Despite the tracking, Mr. Portnoy describes his company’s mobile ads as protective of privacy because the service works only with sites or apps that obtain consent to use people’s locations. Scout Advertising, he adds, does not compile data on individuals’ whereabouts over time.

Still, he says, if Congress were to enact Mr. Franken’s location privacy bill as written, it “would be a little challenging” for the industry to carry out, because of the number and variety of companies involved in mobile marketing.

“We are in favor of more privacy,” Mr. Portnoy says, “but it has to be done within the nuances of how mobile advertising works so it can scale.”

A SPOKESMAN for Mr. Franken said the senator planned to reintroduce the bill in the new Congress. It is one of several continuing government efforts to develop some baseline consumer data rights.

“New technology may provide increased convenience or security at the expense of privacy and many people may find the trade-off worthwhile,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote last year in his opinion in the Jones case. “On the other hand,” he added, “concern about new intrusions on privacy may spur the enactment of legislation to protect against these intrusions.”

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.

Read More..

Skin Deep: Questions Surround Iris Implant Procedure – Skin Deep

ANITA ADAMS was born with one green eye and one brown eye. While differently colored irises, a condition otherwise known as heterochromia, may look exotic on David Bowie and Kate Bosworth, Ms. Adams did not like them on herself.

“I wanted my irises to match,” said Ms. Adams, 41, who works as a caretaker for at-risk adolescents in Grand Junction, Colo.

In mid-2008, she began looking online to see if there was any solution other than colored contact lenses (which comprised about 20 percent of the $7.8 billion global contact lens market in 2011, according to a January 2012 report published by BCC Market Research). She found a company, New Color Iris, marketing a device invented by a Panamanian ophthalmologist, Dr. Alberto Delray Kahn, that could apparently implant an artificial or prosthetic iris over her natural one.

The device was not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, nor were there any clinical studies or peer-reviewed publications about it. But Ms. Adams found Facebook posts and YouTube testimonials from patients whose eyes had gone from drab brown to an icy blue and were thrilled with the results. On his Web site, Kahnmedical.com, Dr. Kahn wrote that he supported “programs for the prevention of blindness in the Kuma and Embera Indians of Panama,” who have high rates of ocular albinism, which makes them sensitive to light. 

Ms. Adams was impressed. At the company’s request, she went for routine tests to her ophthalmologist, who told her he had never heard of the procedure and advised against it. She didn’t listen. “I went, ‘Oh, whatever,’ ” she said. “I don’t think anything was going to convince me not to do it. At that point my mind was made up.”

Ms. Adams is not alone in her quest for symmetry, whatever the risk.

Dr. Gregory J. Pamel, a corneal and refractive surgeon in Manhattan and a clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology at New York University, said that for the last two years he has received about three inquiries a month from patients who have learned from his Web site that he implants artificial irises for medical reasons. “They’d want to enroll in the clinical trial, and I would say, ‘There’s nothing available in the U.S.,’ ” he said. “There are no approved devices in the U.S. to change the eye color cosmetically. There are no clinical trials to date that are looking into this. There’s nothing on the horizon.”

There are, however, iris implants for patients with serious conditions like aniridia, a rare hereditary absence or partial absence of the iris, that are available under a special “compassionate use” F.D.A. provision. The provision allows patients with serious or life-threatening medical conditions to be treated with devices that have not been approved by the F.D.A., but “we can only use it for people with trauma,” Dr. Pamel said. “I would be very hesitant and skeptical about any technology that purports to change the iris color for cosmetic reasons.” 

Dr. Kenneth Steinsapir, an oculofacial surgeon and ophthalmologist in Los Angeles, also received calls from patients wanting their eye color changed, so he began investigating New Color Iris. He found no positive reports, but he did find a number of studies reporting serious complications. In July 2010, he blogged about it on his Web site, lidlift.com. “The colored disk that is put in the eye has been shown to cause harm,” he wrote.  “If you are not albino and missing iris pigment or have part of the iris missing either from a birth defect or from trauma, then there is no compelling medical reason for this surgery.” 

But Ms. Adams was determined to fix her perceived imperfection. In September 2008, she wired nearly $2,000 to New Color Iris, and a month later flew with her mother (paying their airfare) to Panama. She was told the surgery would present no complications other than a slight risk of glaucoma. She signed a consent form, paid an additional $5,000 and underwent the 15-minute procedure.

For two days, Ms. Adams’s vision was blurry, which she was told was normal. By the third day, she could see well enough to tour around the city. “I was happy with the experience at the time,” she said.

She appeared on “Inside Edition” to talk about how delighted she was, for which she said New Color Iris paid her $500, promising an additional $500 for every future media appearance she did. She also allowed the company to use her likeness on its Web site and on YouTube.

Ms. Adams was pleased with her matching irises for about two years. But in fall 2010, she said, her vision grew “spotty,” and she was “scared to death I was going blind.” She repeatedly tried to contact Dr. Kahn as well as the company in New York, but said she received no response. She started a Facebook page (now dismantled) highlighting her negative experience, noticing that other people had shared similar stories.

And when she returned to the New Color Iris Web site, she was redirected to another site, Brightocular.com, which was marketing another implant to cosmetically change eye color and offering more glowing testimonials.

Ms. Adams said she contacted it using a fake name and was told that the procedure was being offered in Istanbul and soon “in all of Europe” and that the company was not affiliated with New Color Iris. Convinced this was untrue, she contacted Dr. Steinsapir in February 2011, and he began blogging about a possible relationship between the two companies. On Aug. 16, 2011, Dr. Steinsapir received a certified letter from Kevin J. Abruzzese, a lawyer in Mineola, N.Y., representing Stellar Devices, which owns the trademark for Brightocular, that denied that any association existed between the two companies. The letter also asserted that Stellar Devices was working with Minnesota Eye Consultants, in Minneapolis, to obtain “F.D.A. compassionate approval for a patient with aniridia,” and ordered  the doctor to remove “any and all defamatory content” about Brightocular.

Still skeptical, Dr. Steinsapir found a registered trademark for Brightocular, originally filed March 18, 2010 and granted registration on April 19, 2011.

But the company to which the trademark was registered was not Stellar Devices, but New Color Iris. What’s more, New Color Iris and Stellar Devices shared the same Midtown Manhattan address. Dr. Steinsapir later published his findings. He said he also arranged surgery for people who had iris color surgery and needed urgent help.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

Read More..

Skin Deep: Questions Surround Iris Implant Procedure – Skin Deep

ANITA ADAMS was born with one green eye and one brown eye. While differently colored irises, a condition otherwise known as heterochromia, may look exotic on David Bowie and Kate Bosworth, Ms. Adams did not like them on herself.

“I wanted my irises to match,” said Ms. Adams, 41, who works as a caretaker for at-risk adolescents in Grand Junction, Colo.

In mid-2008, she began looking online to see if there was any solution other than colored contact lenses (which comprised about 20 percent of the $7.8 billion global contact lens market in 2011, according to a January 2012 report published by BCC Market Research). She found a company, New Color Iris, marketing a device invented by a Panamanian ophthalmologist, Dr. Alberto Delray Kahn, that could apparently implant an artificial or prosthetic iris over her natural one.

The device was not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, nor were there any clinical studies or peer-reviewed publications about it. But Ms. Adams found Facebook posts and YouTube testimonials from patients whose eyes had gone from drab brown to an icy blue and were thrilled with the results. On his Web site, Kahnmedical.com, Dr. Kahn wrote that he supported “programs for the prevention of blindness in the Kuma and Embera Indians of Panama,” who have high rates of ocular albinism, which makes them sensitive to light. 

Ms. Adams was impressed. At the company’s request, she went for routine tests to her ophthalmologist, who told her he had never heard of the procedure and advised against it. She didn’t listen. “I went, ‘Oh, whatever,’ ” she said. “I don’t think anything was going to convince me not to do it. At that point my mind was made up.”

Ms. Adams is not alone in her quest for symmetry, whatever the risk.

Dr. Gregory J. Pamel, a corneal and refractive surgeon in Manhattan and a clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology at New York University, said that for the last two years he has received about three inquiries a month from patients who have learned from his Web site that he implants artificial irises for medical reasons. “They’d want to enroll in the clinical trial, and I would say, ‘There’s nothing available in the U.S.,’ ” he said. “There are no approved devices in the U.S. to change the eye color cosmetically. There are no clinical trials to date that are looking into this. There’s nothing on the horizon.”

There are, however, iris implants for patients with serious conditions like aniridia, a rare hereditary absence or partial absence of the iris, that are available under a special “compassionate use” F.D.A. provision. The provision allows patients with serious or life-threatening medical conditions to be treated with devices that have not been approved by the F.D.A., but “we can only use it for people with trauma,” Dr. Pamel said. “I would be very hesitant and skeptical about any technology that purports to change the iris color for cosmetic reasons.” 

Dr. Kenneth Steinsapir, an oculofacial surgeon and ophthalmologist in Los Angeles, also received calls from patients wanting their eye color changed, so he began investigating New Color Iris. He found no positive reports, but he did find a number of studies reporting serious complications. In July 2010, he blogged about it on his Web site, lidlift.com. “The colored disk that is put in the eye has been shown to cause harm,” he wrote.  “If you are not albino and missing iris pigment or have part of the iris missing either from a birth defect or from trauma, then there is no compelling medical reason for this surgery.” 

But Ms. Adams was determined to fix her perceived imperfection. In September 2008, she wired nearly $2,000 to New Color Iris, and a month later flew with her mother (paying their airfare) to Panama. She was told the surgery would present no complications other than a slight risk of glaucoma. She signed a consent form, paid an additional $5,000 and underwent the 15-minute procedure.

For two days, Ms. Adams’s vision was blurry, which she was told was normal. By the third day, she could see well enough to tour around the city. “I was happy with the experience at the time,” she said.

She appeared on “Inside Edition” to talk about how delighted she was, for which she said New Color Iris paid her $500, promising an additional $500 for every future media appearance she did. She also allowed the company to use her likeness on its Web site and on YouTube.

Ms. Adams was pleased with her matching irises for about two years. But in fall 2010, she said, her vision grew “spotty,” and she was “scared to death I was going blind.” She repeatedly tried to contact Dr. Kahn as well as the company in New York, but said she received no response. She started a Facebook page (now dismantled) highlighting her negative experience, noticing that other people had shared similar stories.

And when she returned to the New Color Iris Web site, she was redirected to another site, Brightocular.com, which was marketing another implant to cosmetically change eye color and offering more glowing testimonials.

Ms. Adams said she contacted it using a fake name and was told that the procedure was being offered in Istanbul and soon “in all of Europe” and that the company was not affiliated with New Color Iris. Convinced this was untrue, she contacted Dr. Steinsapir in February 2011, and he began blogging about a possible relationship between the two companies. On Aug. 16, 2011, Dr. Steinsapir received a certified letter from Kevin J. Abruzzese, a lawyer in Mineola, N.Y., representing Stellar Devices, which owns the trademark for Brightocular, that denied that any association existed between the two companies. The letter also asserted that Stellar Devices was working with Minnesota Eye Consultants, in Minneapolis, to obtain “F.D.A. compassionate approval for a patient with aniridia,” and ordered  the doctor to remove “any and all defamatory content” about Brightocular.

Still skeptical, Dr. Steinsapir found a registered trademark for Brightocular, originally filed March 18, 2010 and granted registration on April 19, 2011.

But the company to which the trademark was registered was not Stellar Devices, but New Color Iris. What’s more, New Color Iris and Stellar Devices shared the same Midtown Manhattan address. Dr. Steinsapir later published his findings. He said he also arranged surgery for people who had iris color surgery and needed urgent help.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

Read More..

Services Still the Backbone of Job Growth, Data Shows

Reports on Friday on the nation’s job market, factory activity and the service sector painted a picture of a national economy that was growing late last year. This was despite the concern that the economy might be tipped back into recession by a federal budget dispute that was settled on Tuesday.

Barton Silverman/The New York Times

More than 90 percent of jobs created since January were in the service sector, like restaurants.

Employers added 155,000 jobs in December, approximately matching the solid but unspectacular monthly rate of the last two years.

Companies increased their orders in November for manufactured goods, reflecting investment plans, even though total orders were unchanged for the month, the Commerce Department said in a second report.

Back-to-back increases in core capital goods followed a period of weakness that raised concerns about business investment, which has been a driving force in the economic rebound.

Analysts say they think that companies will increase spending on computers and other equipment to expand and modernize now that Congress and President Obama have reached a deal on taxes, removing uncertainty that had been weighing on business investment.

In a third report, a gauge of service companies’ activity expanded in December by the most in nearly a year, driven by an increase in new orders and hiring, a trade group said.

The industry group, the Institute for Supply Management, said its index of nonmanufacturing activity rose to 56.1 in December from 54.7 in November. It was the highest level since February and above the 12-month average of 54.7. Any reading above 50 indicates expansion.

Companies had a “year-end surge” in orders, in the words of one executive surveyed by the institute.

Services have been a crucial source of job growth, creating about 90 percent of the net jobs added since January. For all of 2012, the economy added 1.69 million service jobs, about the same as in 2011. Many of the new jobs are in low-paying retail and restaurant industries. The increase conflicted with a Labor Department report Friday that said the economy added just 109,000 service jobs last month, the fewest since June. One important difference between the two reports is the inclusion of construction jobs in the institute’s index. The government index excludes that category, which would have raised the December total by 30,000.

The institute’s report measures service growth in industries that cover 90 percent of the work force, including retail, construction, health care and financial services.

Read More..

Crackdowns Make Fleeing North Korea Harder

Woohae Cho for the International Herald Tribune

The Rev. Kim Seung-eun at his church in Cheonan, a center for activists who help smuggle refugees from North Korea.

CHEONAN, South Korea — The Rev. Kim Seung-eun said he could measure the increasing difficulty of smuggling people out of North Korea by the higher cost of bribing North Korean soldiers on the Chinese border to look the other way.

“They demand not only more cash, but also all kinds of things for themselves and their superiors,” said Mr. Kim, a South Korean human rights activist who helps North Koreans flee their totalitarian homeland and resettle in the South. “They’ve developed a taste for South Korean goods, too.”

Under North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong-un, human rights activists and South Korean officials say, it has become increasingly difficult to smuggle refugees out of the country, contributing to a sharp drop in the number of North Koreans reaching South Korea in the past year.

The number of refugees has never been particularly large, since most North Koreans are so impoverished they find it all but impossible to raise the money to attempt an escape. But the tightening of controls at the Chinese border led to a fall of about 44 percent from the previous year in the number of refugees reaching South Korea in 2012. The total was 1,509, according to South Korean government data.

Despite the relatively small number, the flow of North Koreans defecting to South Korea to escape poverty and oppression has long been a major embarrassment for the North. Lately, the Chinese also appear to have tightened their control at the river border to help protect their client government. “The crackdowns in China and North Korea came in tandem,” said Mr. Kim, who manages a network of activists and smugglers from his Caleb Mission church in Cheonan, a city about 60 miles south of Seoul. “It’s become more difficult for my people to operate in North Korea and China.”

A devastating famine in the 1990s caused many North Koreans to flee, and the number of refugees peaked at 2,917 in 2009. Today, about 24,000 people who escaped from North Korea live in South Korea.

In the last years of his rule, Kim Jong-il, the previous dictator and the current ruler’s father, added more checkpoints on the roads to the Chinese border, according to South Korean activists and researchers. North Korea built more barriers along the border and rotated patrols more frequently to discourage corruption.

Under Kim Jong-un, who took over a year ago after his father’s death, border controls have tightened further, officials and activists say. The government began to jam the Chinese cellphone signals that activists relied on to coordinate their smuggling operations with collaborators in the North. North Korea also deployed equipment to trace cellphone signals.

“That significantly narrowed the window for cross-border cellphone conversations,” said Kim Hee-tae, a leader of the International Network of North Korea Human Rights Activists. His group raises money from churches; until last year it typically arranged for 180 to 190 North Korean refugees annually to escape to the South. But this past year, he said, his organization managed to bring in only about 100 people.

“Even after the bribes are paid, there is no guarantee of success,” said Do Hee-youn, head of the Citizens’ Coalition for the Human Rights of North Korean Refugees, based in Seoul. “We have recently seen cases where border guards were not punished for having taken bribes when they turned over the refugees.” Adding to the difficulty, some of the missionaries and brokers involved in the smuggling were rounded up by the Chinese police.

“It just became impossible to use public transportation in China because these days you cannot buy a train or bus ticket without a proper ID, which the North Koreans don’t have,” said the Rev. Chun Ki-won, another veteran human rights activist, who runs the Durihana Mission, a Christian group based in Seoul.

But for all the tighter controls imposed by the North Koreans and Chinese, there are still ways of slipping through the cracks.

Landing a border assignment is seen by many North Korean soldiers as a chance to make a fortune by collecting bribes from smugglers. The police in North Korea sometimes protect families with relatives in the South so they can take a cut from cash remittances from the South.

North Koreans have also developed an appetite for outside news and entertainment. “If early defectors fled North Korea for sheer ‘survival,’ an increasing number of North Koreans reaching South Korea flee for ‘a better life’ than they had in the North,” Kim Soo-am, an expert on North Korean refugees at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, recently wrote.

A group of 15 North Koreans that the Caleb Mission team in Cheonan had smuggled out in early December included a striking example of one such defector: a 29-year-old woman who yearned to become a television celebrity. “She had watched so many South Korean soap operas that she developed an illusion about life in South Korea,” Mr. Kim said, pointing out a particularly well-dressed woman in a photograph of the 15 North Koreans. “When we smuggled her out of North Korea, she was already wearing nothing but South Korean-made clothes.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 5, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article gave the incorrect time period for a devastating famine in North Korea. The famine happened in the 1990s, not in 2009.

Read More..

Op-Ed Contributors: Is Google Like Gas or Like Steel?

AFTER a two-year investigation, the Federal Trade Commission concluded this week that Google’s search practices did not violate antitrust law. Those who wanted to see an epic battle like the one the government fought with Microsoft in the 1990s were sorely disappointed. But the analogy to the browser war of the Web’s early days was never the right one. It failed to capture the dangers free speech would have faced if regulators had agreed with Google’s critics.

The theories that many critics advanced — that search must be “neutral” because it is akin to a public utility, or that computer-generated search results are not speech and therefore not protected under the First Amendment — would have undermined free press principles across the Internet. That the F.T.C. decision permits Google to continue to use its judgment in analyzing search requests and presenting pertinent results is a victory for online expression and is consistent with First Amendment law since the 1940s.

Seven decades ago, a lawsuit against The Associated Press applied antitrust rules to the media and was resolved in a way that ultimately protected First Amendment interests. This case was always a better parallel than Microsoft to the F.T.C. investigation of Google. Like Google today, The A.P. had extraordinary influence. Then as now there were questions about whether something more than common antitrust law should govern companies that play such an important role in the delivery of information to the public.

Back then, the Justice Department alleged that A.P. bylaws allowed its member papers to impede local competitors by denying them access to The A.P.’s expansive news network. A trial court agreed but applied a theory far broader than routine antitrust law. It held that news was not an “ordinary” product like “steel” governed solely by antitrust, but rather something more “vital” because it was “clothed with a public interest.”

In other words, the trial court wanted to treat the mass media like a public utility, which carried considerable consequences. For example, while it would be illegal under antitrust law for a large steel company to conspire with competitors to fix prices, that company has no obligation to sell to every carmaker that wants steel. A public utility, on the other hand, has to serve everyone in the marketplace equally. Applying that standard to The A.P. would have opened the door to far broader regulation and could, in theory, have meant something as absurd as requiring newspapers to cover every press release or publish every letter to the editor.

When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1945, the modern understanding of the First Amendment, with its insistence on an independent news media, had yet to take shape. So it was with great significance that — even though The A.P. lost its appeal and had to allow more access to its services — the court steered entirely clear of the public-utility model. It looked instead to standard antitrust law in finding The A.P.’s conduct to be a classic restraint on trade.

The court went further in setting down a marker that to this day restrains government regulation of the media. Justice Hugo L. Black, who would become a leading champion of the First Amendment, wrote that nothing in the ruling could “compel A.P. or its members to permit publication of anything which their ‘reason’ tells them should not be published.”

This began a historic run in which the court transformed the media into an institution with the autonomy to serve as a check on government power. The First Amendment as we know it would look very different if public utility obligations had been forced onto the press that day.

If The A.P. was concerned about a regulator in every newsroom, Google was concerned about a regulator in every algorithm.

Advocates of aggressive action against Google saw the computer algorithms behind search as a utility that should be heavily regulated like the gas or electricity that flows into our homes. But search engines need to make choices about what results are most relevant to a query, just as a news editor must decide which stories deserve to be on the front page. Requiring “search neutrality” would have placed the government in the business of policing the speech of the Internet’s information providers. To quote Justice Black, it would have made search engines publish those results “which their ‘reason’ tells them should not be published.”

Others argued that the F.T.C. did not need to be guided by First Amendment concerns at all because search results are created by computers, not by human beings. Yet computers “speak” in many ways today. Lawmakers could have used F.T.C. precedent against Google to regulate the content of Amazon’s book recommendations, the locations on Bing’s maps, the news stories that trend on Facebook and Twitter, and many other online expressions of social and political importance.

The F.T.C. resisted these harmful theories, and as a result speakers all over the Internet won. But that doesn’t mean Google is exempt from regulation. The First Amendment is not a grant of immunity for any business, and antitrust scrutiny does not end where editorial judgment begins. But the A.P. case shows that antitrust laws can be enforced while protecting the right of a free press to print what it chooses and nothing more.

This makes regulation of the media difficult. But regulating speech should not be easy, like regulating a public utility, but hard, as the F.T.C. has correctly found.

Bruce D. Brown is the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a lecturer at the University of Virginia Law School. Alan B. Davidson is a visiting scholar at M.I.T.’s Technology and Policy Program and a former director of public policy for the Americas at Google.

Read More..

F.D.A. Offers Rules to Stop Food Contamination

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed two sweeping rules aimed at preventing the contamination of produce and processed foods, which has sickened tens of thousands of Americans annually in recent years.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Checking the temperature of lettuce at an Arizona farm. Safety measures would start at farms.

The proposed rules represent a sea change in the way the agency polices food, a process that currently involves taking action after contamination has been identified. It is a long-awaited step toward codifying the food safety law that Congress passed two years ago.

Changes include requirements for better record keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures that would prevent the spread of contaminants in the first place. While food producers would have latitude in determining how to execute the rules, farmers would have to ensure that water used in irrigation met certain standards and food processors would need to find ways to keep fresh food that may contain bacteria from coming into contact with food that has been cooked.

New safety measures might include requiring that farm workers wash their hands, installing portable toilets in fields and ensuring that foods are cooked at temperatures high enough to kill bacteria.

Whether consumers will ultimately bear some of the expense of the new rules was unclear, but the agency estimated that the proposals would cost food producers tens of thousands of dollars a year.

A big question to be resolved is whether Congress will approve the money necessary to support the oversight. President Obama requested $220 million in his 2013 budget, but Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the F.D.A., said “resources remain an ongoing concern.”

Nonetheless, agency officials were optimistic that the new rules would protect consumers better.

“These new rules really set the basic framework for a modern, science-based approach to food safety and shift us from a strategy of reacting to problems to a strategy for preventing problems,” Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in an interview. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the safety of about 80 percent of the food that Americans consume. The rest falls to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for meat, poultry and some eggs.

One in six Americans becomes ill from eating contaminated food each year, the government estimates; most of them recover without concern, but roughly 130,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The agency estimated the new rules could prevent about 1.75 million illnesses each year.

Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 after a wave of incidents involving tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.

But it took the Obama administration two years to move the rules through the regulatory agency, prompting complaints that the White House was more concerned about protecting itself from Republican criticism than about public safety.

Mr. Taylor said that the delay was a function of the wide variety of foods and the complexity of the food system. “Anything that is important and complicated will always take longer than you would like,” he said.

The first rule would require manufacturers of processed foods sold in the United States to come up with ways to reduce the risk of contamination. Food companies would be required to have a plan for correcting problems and for keeping records that government inspectors could audit.

An example might be to require the roasting of raw peanuts at a temperature guaranteed to kill salmonella, which has been a problem in nut butters in recent years. Roasted nuts would then have to be kept separate from raw nuts to further reduce the risk of contamination, said Sandra B. Eskin, director of the safe food campaign at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“This is very good news for consumers,” Ms. Eskin said. “We applaud the administration’s action, which demonstrates its strong commitment to making our food safer.”

The second rule would apply to the harvesting and production of fruits and vegetables in an effort to combat bacterial contamination like E. coli, which is transmitted through feces. It would address what advocates refer to as the “four Ws” — water, waste, workers and wildlife.

Read More..