RIM sees BB10 devices in stores soon after launch

WATERLOO, Ontario (Reuters) – Research In Motion is confident its new BlackBerry 10 devices will be 100 percent ready for the January 30 launch and available in stores “not too long after” that, Chief Operating Officer Kristian Tear said on Tuesday.

“We’re working hard right now to make sure all the bits and pieces and all the details are in place for the date, when the devices will be available for consumers and enterprises,” Tear told Reuters in an interview.

RIM, which virtually invented the concept of mobile email with its first line of BlackBerry devices more than a decade ago, was roundly criticized for the botched 2011 launch of its PlayBook tablet computer, which RIM had hoped would compete with Apple’s blockbuster iPad.

The PlayBook looked pretty and had top-of-the-line hardware. But its software was far from complete at the launch and needed multiple updates.

The device also lacked the library of apps available on the iPad and on devices that run on Google Inc’s competing Android operating system.

RIM says its the new devices will be faster and smoother than its existing phones and have a large catalog of applications that are crucial to the success of any smartphone.

The company hopes the new devices will allow it to claw back some of the market share it has lost to Android and Apple phones.

Tear said RIM has used input from current BlackBerry users to influence the design of the new devices, The new phones both build on the strengths of RIM’s existing operating system and improve on its weak points, he said.

RIM last month began carrier testing on the new devices, with an initial rollout to more than 50 carriers. Tear, who joined RIM a few months ago from Sony Mobile Communications, said RIM was expanding that to a wider group of carriers across the globe.

“We submitted to 50 carriers to begin with, and obviously that number is increasing as we move forward,” he said. “Our ambition is to make this a global launch, everything will not happen at the same time, but it will be a global launch.”

RIM has said it initially plans to roll out a high-end touchscreen version of the device. Phones with the mini QWERTY keyboards that many long-time BlackBerry users adore will come a few weeks later, while lower-end versions of both devices will be launched later in the year.

The company has yet to say exactly when the devices will be available in stores worldwide or how much they will cost.

“We have to agree with carriers as well on what they want to announce when, so it’s not absolutely to our own discretion,” Tear said.

COST CUTTING

RIM, whose share price has fallen more than 90 percent from a 2008 peak around $ 148, is part way through a major restructuring, as it seeks to trim costs in the run-up to the launch of the new devices.

The company, which has also said it is examining its strategic options, is lowering operating costs by about $ 1 billion and cutting about 5,000 jobs, or about 30 percent of its workforce, by the time its fiscal year ends in early March.

“We are on track to deliver on that,” said Tear. “It is an ongoing process, when it comes to efficiencies and costs.”

RIM’s Chief Legal Officer Steve Zipperstein said the company is pushing ahead with its strategic review.

“The process is ongoing and it continues to be a focus on RIM’s senior management, but we have nothing to report at this moment,” said Zipperstein.

RIM shares, which have risen slightly over the last couple of months in the run-up to the launch of BB10 devices, closed 4.7 percent lower at $ 8.40 on Nasdaq. RIM’s Toronto-listed shares fell by a similar margin to C$ 8.40.

(Reporting by Euan Rocha; Editing by Janet Guttsman, Leslie Adler and Tim Dobbyn)

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AP source: Marlins trade Josh Johnson to Blue Jays

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Kidney Donors Given Mandatory Safeguards

ST. LOUIS — Addressing long-held concerns about whether organ donors have adequate protections, the country’s transplant regulators acted late Monday to require that hospitals thoroughly inform living kidney donors of the risks they face, fully evaluate their medical and psychological suitability, and then track their health for two years after donation.

Enactment of the policies by the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the transplant system under a federal contract, followed six years of halting development and debate.

Meeting at a St. Louis hotel, the group’s board voted to establish uniform minimum standards for a field long regarded as a medical and ethical Wild West. The organ network, whose initial purpose was to oversee donation from people who had just died, has struggled at times to keep pace with rapid developments in donations from the living.

“There is no question that this is a major development in living donor protection,” said Dr. Christie P. Thomas, a nephrologist at the University of Iowa and the chairman of the network’s living donor committee.

Yet some donor advocates complained that the measures did not go far enough, and argued that the organ network, in its mission to encourage transplants, has a conflict of interest when it comes to safeguarding donors.

Three years ago, the network issued some of the same policies as voluntary guidelines, only to have the Department of Health and Human Services insist they be made mandatory.

Although long-term data on the subject is scarce, few living kidney donors are thought to suffer lasting physical or psychological effects. Kidney donations, known as nephrectomies, are typically done laparoscopically these days through a series of small incisions. The typical patient may spend only a few nights in a hospital and feel largely recovered after several months.

Kidneys are by far the most transplanted organs, and there have been nearly as many living donors as deceased ones over the last decade. What data is available suggests that those with one kidney typically live as long as those with two, and that the risk of a donor dying during the procedure is roughly 3 in 10,000.

But kidney transplants, like all surgery, can sometimes end in catastrophe.

In May at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, a 41-year-old mother of three died when her aorta was accidentally cut during surgery to donate a kidney to her brother. In other recent isolated cases, patients have received donor kidneys infected with undetected H.I.V. or hepatitis C.

Less clear are any longer-term effects on donors. Research conducted by the United Network for Organ Sharing shows that of roughly 70,000 people who donated kidneys between late 1999 and early 2011, 27 died within two years of medical causes that may — or may not — have been related to donation. For a small number of donors, their remaining kidney failed, and they required dialysis or a transplant.

The number of living donors — 5,770 in 2011 — has dropped 10 percent over the last two years, possibly because the struggling economy has made it difficult for prospective donors to take time off from work to recuperate. With the national kidney waiting list now stretching past 94,000 people, and thousands on the list dying each year, transplant officials have said they must improve confidence in the system so more people will donate.

The average age of donors has been rising, posing additional medical risks. And new ethical questions have been raised by the emergence of paired kidney exchanges and transplant chains started by good Samaritans who give an organ to a stranger.

Brad Kornfeld, who donated a kidney to his father in 2004, told the board that it had been impossible to find good information about what to expect, leaving him to search for answers on unreliable Internet chat rooms. He said he had almost backed out.

“If information is power,” said Mr. Kornfeld, a Coloradan who serves on the living donor committee, “the lack of information is crippling.”

Under the policies approved this week, the organ network will require hospitals to collect medical data, including laboratory test results, on most living donors to study lasting effects. Results must be reported at six months, one year and two years.

Similar regulations have been in place since 2000, but they did not require blood and urine testing, and hospitals were allowed to report donors who could not be found as simply lost.

That happened often. In recent years, hospitals have submitted basic clinical information — like whether donors were alive or dead — for only 65 percent of donors and lab data for fewer than 40 percent, according to the organ network. Although the network holds the authority, no hospital has ever been seriously sanctioned for noncompliance.

“It’s time we put some teeth into our policy,” said Jill McMaster, a board member from Tennessee.

By 2015, transplant programs will have to report thorough clinical information on at least 80 percent of donors and lab results on at least 70 percent. The requirements phase in at lower levels for the next two years.

Dr. Stuart M. Flechner of the Cleveland Clinic, the chairman of a coalition of medical societies that made recommendations to the organ network, said 9 of 10 hospitals would currently not meet the new requirement.

Donna Luebke, a kidney donor from Ohio who once served on the organ network’s board, said the new standards would matter only if enforcement were more rigorous. She noted that the organization was dominated by transplant doctors: “UNOS is nothing but the foxes watching the henhouse,” she said.

Another of the new regulations prescribes in detail the medical and psychological screenings that hospitals must conduct for potential donors. It requires automatic exclusion if the potential donor has diabetes, uncontrolled hypertension or H.I.V., among other conditions.

The new policies also require that hospitals appoint an independent advocate to counsel and represent donors, and that donors receive detailed information in advance about medical, psychological and financial risks.

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Alternative Fuels’ Long-Delayed Promise Might Be Near Fruition

WASHINGTON — For years, scientists and engineers have been juggling various combinations of acids, steam, bacteria, catalysts and the digestive juices of microorganisms to convert agricultural waste and even household garbage into motor fuel.

So far, such alternative fuels have not moved beyond small pilot plants, despite federal incentives to encourage companies to develop them.

But that could be about to change.

Officials at two companies that have built multimillion-dollar factories say they are very close to beginning large-scale, commercial production of these so-called cellulosic biofuels, and others are predicting success in the months to come.

In Columbus, Miss., KiOR has spent more than $200 million on a plant that is supposed to mix shredded wood waste with a patented catalyst, powdered to talcumlike consistency. Its process does in a few seconds what takes nature millions of years: removes the oxygen from the biomass and converts the other main ingredients, hydrogen and carbon, into molecules that can then be processed into gasoline and diesel fuel.

KiOR aims to turn out 13 million gallons of fuel a year and has already lined up three companies to buy its output, including FedEx and a joint venture of Weyerhauser and Chevron. KiOR said on Thursday that it had begun producing what it called “renewable crude” and intended to refine that into gasoline and diesel that it would begin shipping by the end of the month.

And Ineos, a European oil and chemical company, is putting the final touches on a plant in Vero Beach, Fla., that would cook wood and woody garbage until they broke down into tiny molecules of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Those molecules would be pumped into a giant steel tank, where bacteria would eat them and excrete ethanol. The company has spent $130 million on the plant, which is supposed to make eight million gallons a year, about 1 percent of Florida’s ethanol demand. The plant is next to a county landfill, and executives covet the incoming garbage.

Both plants are far smaller than typical oil refineries, but commercial production at either one — or at any of several of the plants that are a step behind them — would be a major milestone in renewable energy.

At such plants, the goal is sometimes to make ethanol and sometimes gasoline or diesel fuel or their ingredients. The pathways to make the biofuels are varied. But the feedstocks have something in common: they are derived from plants and trees, but not from food crops like corn kernels, which are the basis of most of the biofuel currently made in the United States.

Often, the raw ingredients for the cellulosic biofuels are the wastes of farms, paper mills or households, with a value that is low or even negative, meaning people will pay the fuel producers to dispose of them. And the companies developing the new fuels say that their products produce far fewer carbon emissions than petroleum-based gasoline and diesel.

KiOR says that its fuel will release one-sixth the amount of carbon dioxide as an equivalent amount of petroleum fuel. That is mostly because every tree or woody plant fed into its process will eventually be replaced by a new tree or plant, which will suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And a byproduct of its factory is surplus electricity, which will be exported to the grid, displacing electricity that would otherwise be generated from natural gas or coal.

Ineos goes a step further, saying its production process actually reduces the overall amount of carbon in the atmosphere. “We could make the argument that we’re carbon-negative,” said Peter Williams, the chief executive. The reason, he said, is that electricity produced from its plant averts emissions that would have come from other electricity sources.

Just becoming the first company to produce commercial volumes of these alternative biofuels is no guarantee of commercial success. That depends on further optimizing production processes to get more gallons of fuel per ton of raw materials at lower operating costs.

Industry officials say that profits also depend on continued high prices for oil, the commodity that biofuels would replace, and a continuation of a federal government mandate that requires fuel blenders to mix a certain percentage of biofuels into the gasoline sold at service stations.

“Sustainability requires good economics,” Mr. Williams said.

Many companies have produced biofuel successfully, but only in quantities characteristic of a factory that makes fine whisky or perhaps perfume. The trick is to get reliability up and costs down to a level that allows operation on a large scale.

Government policy has anticipated far more technical progress than the industry has made. Congress set a goal of 250 million gallons of cellulosic biofuel for 2011 and 500 million gallons for this year, but the Environmental Protection Agency cut the requirement to six million gallons for 2012 because of the lack of commercial production.

Six governors, oil refiners and companies hurt by high corn prices have asked the agency to waive its requirements for ethanol and other renewable fuels. Some single out the corn ethanol mandate, but others want the quota for cellulosic fuels waived, too, partly because there is no actual production.

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Ismail Khan, Powerful Afghan, Stokes Concern in Kabul

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Supporters of Ismail Khan gathered outside Herat city on Nov. 1.

HERAT, Afghanistan — One of the most powerful mujahedeen commanders in Afghanistan, Ismail Khan, is calling on his followers to reorganize and defend the country against the Taliban as Western militaries withdraw, in a public demonstration of faltering confidence in the national government and the Western-built Afghan National Army.

Mr. Khan is one of the strongest of a group of warlords who defined the country’s recent history in battling the Soviets, the Taliban and one another, and who then were brought into President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet as a symbol of unity. Now, in announcing that he is remobilizing his forces, Mr. Khan has rankled Afghan officials and stoked fears that other regional and factional leaders will follow suit and rearm, weakening support for the government and increasing the likelihood of civil war.

This month, Mr. Khan rallied thousands of his supporters in the desert outside Herat, the cultured western provincial capital and the center of his power base, urging them to coordinate and reactivate their networks. And he has begun enlisting new recruits and organizing district command structures.

“We are responsible for maintaining security in our country and not letting Afghanistan be destroyed again,” Mr. Khan, the minister of energy and water, said at a news conference over the weekend at his office in Kabul. But after facing criticism, he took care not to frame his action as defying the government: “There are parts of the country where the government forces cannot operate, and in such areas the locals should step forward, take arms and defend the country.”

President Karzai and his aides, however, were not greeting it as an altruistic gesture. The governor of Herat Province called Mr. Khan’s reorganization an illegal challenge to the national security forces. And Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Aimal Faizi, tersely criticized Mr. Khan.

“The remarks by Ismail Khan do not reflect the policies of the Afghan government,” Mr. Faizi said. “The government of Afghanistan and the Afghan people do not want any irresponsible armed grouping outside the legitimate security forces structures.”

In Kabul, Mr. Khan’s provocative actions have played out in the news media and brought a fierce reaction from some members of Parliament, who said the warlords were preparing to take advantage of the American troop withdrawal set for 2014.

“People like Ismail Khan smell blood,” Belqis Roshan, a senator from Farah Province, said in an interview. “They think that as soon as foreign forces leave Afghanistan, once again they will get the chance to start a civil war, and achieve their ominous goals of getting rich and terminating their local rivals.”

Indeed, Mr. Khan’s is not the only voice calling for a renewed alliance of the mujahedeen against the Taliban, and some of the others are just as familiar.

Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, an ethnic Tajik commander who is President Karzai’s first vice president, said in a speech in September, “If the Afghan security forces are not able to wage this war, then call upon the mujahedeen.”

Another prominent mujahedeen fighter, Ahmad Zia Massoud, said in an interview at his home in Kabul that people were worried about what was going to happen after 2014, and he was telling his own followers to make preliminary preparations.

“They don’t want to be disgraced again,” Mr. Massoud said. “Everyone tries to have some sort of Plan B. Some people are on the verge of rearming.”

He pointed out that it was significant that the going market price of Kalashnikov assault rifles had risen to about $1,000, driven up by demand from a price of $300 a decade ago. “Every household wants to have an AK-47 at home,” he said.

“The mujahedeen come here to meet me,” Mr. Massoud added. “They tell me they are preparing. They are trying to find weapons. They come from villages, from the north of Afghanistan, even some people from the suburbs of Kabul, and say they are taking responsibility for providing private security in their neighborhood.”

Habib Zahori and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Herat, Afghanistan, and an employee of The New York Times from Kabul.

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Trout, Harper voted Rookies of the Year

NEW YORK (AP) — Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels became the youngest AL Rookie of the Year on Monday and Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals was voted the second-youngest winner of the NL honor.

Trout, who turned 21 on Aug. 7, received all 28 first-place votes from the Baseball Writers' Association of America's AL panel. The center fielder was the eighth unanimous AL pick and the first since Tampa Bay's Evan Longoria in 2008.

Trout, who hit .326 with 30 homers and 83 RBIs, received the maximum 140 points. Oakland outfielder Yoenis Cespedes was second with 63, followed by Texas pitcher Yu Darvish (46), who joined Trout as the only players listed on every ballot.

Detroit second baseman Lou Whitaker had been the youngest AL winner in 1978, but he was 2 months, 26 days older than Trout when he took home the award.

In addition to Trout and Longoria, the only other unanimous AL winners were Nomar Garciaparra, Derek Jeter, Tim Salmon, Sandy Alomar Jr., Mark McGwire and Carlton Fisk.

Trout, a son of former Minnesota minor league infielder Jeff Trout, spent some time in the majors last year but still retained his rookie status. He began this season in the minors and made his first big league appearance this year on April 28 — the day of Harper's major league debut. Trout's season put him in contention for the AL MVP award along with Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera of Detroit. That voting is announced Thursday.

For winning the award, Trout earned a $10,000 bonus on top of his $482,500 salary.

Harper turned 20 on Oct. 16. The outfielder got 16 of 32 first-place votes and 112 points from the NL panel. Arizona pitcher Wade Miley was second with 12 first-place votes and 105 points, followed by Cincinnati slugger Todd Frazier with three firsts and 45 points.

Harper was the top pick of the 2010 amateur draft and batted .270 with 22 home runs and 59 RBIs as Washington brought postseason play to the nation's capital for the first time since 1933. Only Tony Conigliaro (24) hit more home runs as a teenager.

Harper became the youngest position player in All-Star history. At 20 years, 27 days on Monday, he was 24 days older than New York Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden when he won the NL award in 1984.

At this time last year, Trout and Harper were teammates on the Scottsdale Scorpions in the Arizona Fall League. The pair were among a record five rookie All-Stars.

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Alzheimer’s Precursors Founds at Earlier Age

Scientists studying Alzheimer’s disease are increasingly finding clues that the brain begins to deteriorate years before a person shows symptoms of dementia.

Now, research on a large extended family of 5,000 people in Colombia with a genetically driven form of Alzheimer’s has found evidence that the precursors of the disease begin even earlier than previously thought, and that this early brain deterioration occurs in more ways than has been documented before.

The studies, published this month in the journal Lancet Neurology, found that the brains of people destined to develop Alzheimer’s clearly show changes at least 20 years before they have any cognitive impairment. In the Colombian family, researchers saw these changes in people ages 18 to 26; on average, members of this family develop symptoms of mild cognitive impairment at 45 and of dementia at 53.

These brain changes occur earlier than the first signs of plaques made from a protein called beta amyloid or a-beta, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s. Researchers detected higher-than-normal levels of amyloid in the spinal fluid of these young adults. They found suggestions that memory-encoding parts of the brain were already working harder than in normal brains. And they identified indications that brain areas known to be affected by Alzheimer’s may be smaller than in those who do not have the Alzheimer’s gene.

“This is one of the most important pieces of direct evidence that individual persons have the disease and all the pathology many years before,” said Dr. Kaj Blennow, a professor in clinical neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, who was not involved in the research.

Dr. Nick Fox, a neurologist at University College London, who was also not part of the research, said the findings suggested that “some of the things that we thought were more downstream may not be quite so downstream; they may be happening earlier.”

That, in turn, said Dr. Fox, who wrote a commentary about the findings in Lancet Neurology, could have implications for when and how to treat people, because “there may be targets to attack, whether it’s high levels of a-beta or whatever, when people are still functioning very well.”

The Colombian family suffers from a rare form of Alzheimer’s that is caused by a genetic mutation; it strikes about a third of its members in midlife. Because the family is so large and researchers can identify who will get the disease, studying the family provides an unusual opportunity to learn about Alzheimer’s causes and pathology.

Researchers, led by Dr. Eric Reiman of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix, and in Colombia by Dr. Francisco Lopera, a neurologist at the University of Antioquia, recently received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a clinical trial to test a drug on family members before they develop symptoms, to see if early brain changes can be halted or slowed.

The studies in Lancet Neurology used several tests, including spinal taps, brain imaging and functional M.R.I.

“The prevailing theory has been that development of Alzheimer’s disease begins with the progressive accumulation of amyloid in the brain,” Dr. Reiman said. “This study suggests there are changes that are occurring before amyloid deposition.”

One possibility is that brain areas are already impaired. Another possibility, experts said, is that these brain differences may go back to the young developing brain.

“It is a genetic disease, and it’s not hard to imagine that your gene results in some differences in the way your brain is formed,” said Dr. Adam Fleisher, director of brain imaging at the Banner Institute and an author of the studies.

In one of the Lancet Neurology studies, researchers examined 44 relatives between ages 18 to 26. Twenty had the mutation that causes Alzheimer’s. The cerebrospinal fluid of those with the mutation contained more amyloid than that of relatives without it. This was striking because researchers know that when people develop amyloid plaques — whether they have early-onset or late-onset Alzheimer’s — amyloid levels in their spinal fluid are lower than normal. That is believed to be because the fluid form of amyloid gets absorbed into the plaque form, Dr. Reiman said.

So, the high level of amyloid fluid in the Colombian family supports a hypothesis about a difference between the beginning phases of genetic early-onset Alzheimer’s and the more common late-onset Alzheimer’s. The difference may be that early-onset Alzheimer’s involves an overproduction of amyloid, while late onset involves a problem clearing amyloid from the brain.

In another result, when the subjects performed a task matching names with faces, those with the mutation had greater activity in the hippocampus and parahippocampus, areas involved in memory. Dr. Reiman suggested this could mean that the pre-Alzheimer’s brain has to expend more effort to encode memories than a normal brain.

Researchers also found that the mutation carriers had less gray matter in areas that tend to shrink when people develop dementia. Dr. Fox emphasized that seeing less gray matter so early was so novel that it should be treated cautiously unless other studies find a similar result.

In the second study, brain imaging was used to look for amyloid plaques in 50 people ages 20 to 56: 11 with dementia, 19 mutation carriers without symptoms and 20 normal family members. Plaques occurred at an average age of 28, more than 15 years before cognitive impairment would be expected and two decades before dementia.

The study also found that amyloid plaques increased steadily until about age 37, after which the brain did not seem to gain many more plaques. Dr. Blennow said that while researchers know that amyloid plaques plateau when people already have dementia, they did not know that the plateau appears to occur years before.

The researchers are currently analyzing data from family members ages 7 to 17 to see if some of the brain changes occur at an even younger age.

“Some people think that that may be scary, that you can see it so many years before,” Dr. Reiman said. “But it seems to me that that provides potential opportunities for the development of future therapies.”

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Bruce Bent Sr. and Son Cleared of Fraud Charges

Regulators failed Monday to win a clear victory over the father-and-son team whose mutual fund failed in one of the signal events of the 2008 financial crisis. It was the latest setback in efforts by regulators to hold individuals responsible for the risk-taking that nearly brought down the American economy.

Louis Lanzano/Associated Press

Bruce Bent, right, and his son, Bruce Bent II, in October. The two were accused of defrauding investors when their flagship money market fund collapsed in September 2008.

Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Bruce Bent is credited with inventing a popular type of mutual fund.

A Manhattan federal jury rejected claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bruce Bent, the inventor of a popular investment vehicle called a money market fund, defrauded investors when his flagship fund collapsed in September 2008, sowing panic among ordinary investors.

The collapse was a turning point because the fund, the Reserve Primary Fund, run by Mr. Bent and his son, Bruce Bent II, was pitched to investors as a nearly risk-free alternative to a bank account. The fund ended up foundering under the weight of hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds issued by Lehman Brothers that became worthless with Lehman’s bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008.

The S.E.C.’s lawyers accused the men of misleading investors and the company’s trustees as the fund’s investments fell below a net asset value of $1 per share, an event known as “breaking the buck.” That guaranteed value had been the symbol to investors that they could recover every dollar they invested in such a fund.

The agency accused the pair in a 2009 civil suit of falsely providing assurances that they would plow money into the faltering fund. In fact, the agency contended, both men “secretly harbored” concerns that they could not shore up the fund and keep it from insolvency.

The jury’s decision to clear Mr. Bent and his son on civil fraud charges underscores the difficulty that prosecutors and regulators have had in going after the big bets taken by various individuals and major financial institutions in the years leading up to the financial crisis.

The gulf in prosecutions against individuals is a stark departure from the prosecutions secured after the failure of savings and loan institutions in the late 1980s, after which more than 800 bank officials went to jail. In the wake of the latest crisis, law enforcement officials have failed to secure any high-profile courtroom victories.

“The agency has lost again because they haven’t been able to secure an individual conviction, even in this banner case,” said William K. Black, a professor of law at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and the federal government’s director of litigation during the savings and loan crisis.

The jurors did find the younger Mr. Bent negligent, and two entities associated with the fund were found liable on some counts of fraud.

Robert Khuzami, the S.E.C.’s director of enforcement, emphasized the points on which the commission’s case was affirmed.

“Today’s verdict of liability sends the message that fund executives cannot withhold from investors and trustees key information about their fund’s vulnerability,” he said. “This case, along with our actions against more than 100 other entities and individuals, demonstrates our continuing commitment to pursuing cases arising out of the financial crisis.”

But critics of the agency said Monday’s decision was still a defeat.

Thomas Gorman,  a partner at Dorsey & Whitney and formerly the senior counsel for the S.E.C.’s Division of Enforcement, noted that even with the negligence finding, “the complaint charged them with intentional fraud and went to great length to detail that, and the jury rejected those charges in each instance.”

Monday’s verdict came as regulators are still battling over rules to govern the money market fund industry.

In testimony at the trial, the elder Mr. Bent struck an unapologetic tone. “I thought Lehman was a good, worthwhile investment,” he said, adding in his testimony that the S.E.C. had made the same determination.

Mr. Bent’s fund had plowed roughly $785 million into the Lehman Brothers’ debt. That decision proved fatal when Lehman filed for bankruptcy and the debt, which made up about 1 percent of the fund’s assets, was suddenly worthless.

In the S.E.C.’s case, the agency accused the Bents of deceiving investors. Despite telling investors that they would avert the collapse of the fund by putting more money in, the agency alleged, the Bents never really had any intention of doing that.

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Changing of the Guard: Chinese Communist Party Faces Calls for Democracy

BEIJING — As the Communist Party’s 18th Congress approached, Li Weidong, a scholar of politics, made plans to observe a historic leadership battle in one of the world’s great nations.

Instead of staying in Beijing to monitor China’s once-a-decade transfer of power, Mr. Li boarded a plane.

“I’m going to the United States to study the elections,” Mr. Li said in a telephone interview during a stopover in Paris. After witnessing the American presidential election on Tuesday, Mr. Li went on the radio for another interview. “I still think China’s politics remain prehistoric,” he said. “I often joke that the Chinese civilization is the last prehistoric civilization left in the world.”

With China at a critical juncture, there is a rising chorus within the elite expressing doubt that the 91-year-old Communist Party’s authoritarian system can deal with the stresses bearing down on the nation and its 1.3 billion people. Policies introduced after 1978 by Deng Xiaoping lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and transformed the country into the world’s second-largest economy. But the way party leaders have managed decades of growth has created towering problems that critics say can no longer be avoided.

Many of those critics have benefited from China’s stunning economic gains, and their ranks include billionaires, intellectuals and children of the party’s revolutionary founders. But they say the party’s agenda, as it stands today, is not visionary enough to set China on the path to stability. What is needed, they say, is a comprehensive strategy to gradually extricate the Communist Party, which has more than 80 million members, from its heavy-handed control of the economy, the courts, the news media, the military, educational institutions, civic life and just the plain day-to-day affairs of citizens.

Only then, the critics argue, can the government start to address the array of issues facing China, including rampant corruption, environmental degradation, and an aging population whose demographics have been skewed because of the one-child policy.

“In order to build a real market economy, we have to have real political reform,” said Yang Jisheng, a veteran journalist and a leading historian of the Mao era. “In the next years, we should have a constitutional democracy plus a market economy.”

For now, however, party leaders have given no indication that they intend to curb their role in government in a meaningful way.

“We will never copy a Western political system,” Hu Jintao, the departing party chief, said in a speech on Thursday opening the weeklong congress.

The party’s public agenda, which Mr. Hu described in detail in his 100-minute address, was laid out in a 64-page report that is in part intended to highlight priorities for the new leaders, who will be announced later this month. Much of the document had retrograde language that emphasized ideology stretching back to Mao and had little in the way of bold or creative thinking, said Qian Gang, the director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong.

Most telling, there was no language signaling that the incoming Politburo Standing Committee, the group that rules China by consensus, would support major changes in the political system, whose perversions many now say are driving the nation toward crisis.

While Chinese who are critical of the current system generally do not expect a wholesale adoption of a Western model, they do favor at least an openness to bolder experimentation.

“To break one-party rule right now is probably not realistic, but we can have factions within the party made public and legalized, so they can campaign against each other,” said Mr. Yang, who added that there was no other way at the moment to ensure political accountability.

Only in the last few years has the idea of liberalizing the political system gained currency, and urgency, among a broad cross-section of elites. Before that, as the West foundered at the onset of the global financial crisis, many here pointed to the triumph of a “China model” or “Beijing consensus” — a mix of authoritarian politics, a command economy and quasi-market policies.

But the way in which China weathered the crisis — with the injection of $588 billion of stimulus money into the economy and an explosion of lending from state banks — led to a spate of large infrastructure projects that may never justify their cost. As a result, many economists now say that China’s investment-driven, export-oriented economic model is unsustainable and needs to shift toward greater reliance on Chinese consumers.

Constant lip-service is paid to that goal, and on Saturday, Zhang Ping, a senior official, reiterated that stance. But it will not be easy for the new leaders to carry it out. At the root of the current economic model is the political system, in which party officials and state-owned enterprises work closely together, reaping enormous profits from the party’s control of the economy. Under Mr. Hu’s decade-long tenure, these relationships and the dominance of state enterprises have only strengthened.

“What happens in this kind of economy is that wealth concentrates where power is,” said Mr. Yang, the journalist.

The 400 or so incoming members of the party’s Central Committee, Politburo and Politburo Standing Committee, as well as their friends and families, have close ties to the most powerful of China’s 145,000 state-owned enterprises. The growing presence of princelings — the children of notable Communist officials — in the party, the government and corporations could mean an even more closely meshed web of nepotism. It is a system that Xi Jinping, anointed to be the next party chief and president and himself a member of the “red nobility,” would find hard to unravel, even if he wanted to.

Mia Li contributed research.

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Malaysian charged with Facebook insult of sultan; sister says he’ll file police complaint

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – The sister of a Malaysian man who has been charged with insulting a state sultan on Facebook says he is innocent and plans to lodge a complaint over his detention.

Anisa Abdul Jalil, sister of Ahmad Abdul Jalil, says her brother was charged Thursday with making offensive postings on Facebook last month.

She says the charges are ridiculous because there is no evidence linking Ahmad to the posts in question, which were made by someone using the name “Zul Yahaya.”

Ahmad was freed on bail Thursday after six days of detention. Anisa says he will file a complaint with police for unlawful detention and intimidation.

Nine Malaysian states have sultans and other royal figures. Though their roles are largely ceremonial, acts provoking hatred against them are considered seditious.

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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