Kerry Is Hoping to Nudge Egypt Toward Reforms

CAIRO — Secretary of State John Kerry told Egypt’s political and business leaders on Saturday that it was urgent their country institute economic reforms and satisfy the conditions the International Monetary Fund has set for a $4.8 billion loan.

“It is paramount, essential, urgent that the Egyptian economy get stronger, that it gets back on its feet,” Mr. Kerry told a group of Egyptian and American business executives in Cairo. “It’s clear to us that the I.M.F. arrangement needs to be reached, that we need to give the market that confidence.”

Mr. Kerry’s visit — his first trip to an Arab capital as secretary of state — comes at a time of economic peril in Egypt. The country’s economy has teetered near collapse for months, with soaring unemployment, a gaping budget deficit, dwindling hard-currency reserves and steep declines in the currency’s value.

The fund’s loan is critical, economists say, because it would provide a seal of approval that Egypt’s economy is on a path toward self-sufficiency, allowing it to obtain enough other international loans to fill in its deficit. Both the United States and the European Union are prepared to provide substantial additional assistance if Egypt and the I.M.F. can come to terms.

But even as Mr. Kerry stressed the need for prompt economic steps — and the political peace needed to achieve those changes — some opponents of President Mohamed Morsi sought to put the spotlight on the nation’s uneasy political course.

Parliamentary elections are scheduled for April. The major opposition group, the National Salvation Front, has announced that it plans to boycott the vote to protest what it says is a push by Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies to dominate politics.

The Obama administration has been criticized by some of Mr. Morsi’s rivals as being too supportive of the Egyptian president, as has Mr. Kerry, who was the first American senator to meet Mr. Morsi.

The delicacy of the issue was apparent when members of the political opposition were invited to a Saturday session with Mr. Kerry. Some members, including Hamdeen Sabahi, who came in third in the presidential election last year, decided not to attend. Mohamed ElBaradei, one of the leaders of the National Salvation Front, chose not to go, but to speak by phone with Mr. Kerry instead.

Those that attended, Mr. Kerry later said, engaged in a “very, very spirited” discussion.

 Mohamed El Orabi, a former foreign minister and a leading member of the National Congress Party who went to the meeting, said that Mr. Kerry had talked about the importance of democracy while driving home his message on the economy.

Mr. Kerry also met separately with Amr Moussa, a former secretary general of the Arab League and the head of the National Congress Party.

The two years of tumult that began with the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak has sharply slowed foreign investment and tourism, and economists say the Egyptian government urgently needs a cash infusion of several billion dollars to fend off the risk of an economic calamity that could lead to more unrest and instability.

In September, the United States brought more than 100 business executives to Cairo to encourage trade and economic development. But continuing political protests, including when demonstrators scaled the walls of the American Embassy here on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, discouraged many businessmen from following up, Mr. Kerry noted. (The protesters that day were angry over an amateurish American-made video denouncing Islam.)

The International Monetary Fund has held on-again, off-again negotiations with Egypt for more than a year about providing the $4.8 billion.

The fund has imposed two difficult conditions. It has required the Egyptian government to commit itself to undertaking painful reforms like raising taxes and reducing energy subsidies.

It has also required a demonstration of political support for the reforms and the loan, to ensure that the government will honor its commitments in the future. That requires a dependable political process, as well as a degree of consensus that Egypt’s political factions have been unable to sustain.

On Sunday, Mr. Kerry is scheduled to meet with Mr. Morsi. The secretary of state said he would discuss specific steps the United States could take to boost the Egyptian economy if Egypt worked out a loan package with the I.M.F. That will be Mr. Kerry’s final meeting in Egypt before departing for Saudi Arabia, the seventh stop on his nine-nation tour.

The protests and street violence that have destabilized Egypt’s transition continued Saturday. The Egyptian state media reported that a demonstrator in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura was killed when he was run over by an armored police vehicle.

Violence also flared again in the Suez Canal city of Port Said, where the state media reported that protesters had burned down a police station. The Port Said protests began Jan. 26 after 21 local soccer fans were sentenced to death for their role in a deadly riot at a match last year.

But over the past month, the demonstrations in Port Said have blurred together with sometimes-violent protests in several other cities along the Suez Canal or in the Nile Delta. Some protesters are angry at Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, accusing them of failing to deliver fast enough on the anticipated rewards of the revolution, including economic benefits.

Michael R. Gordon reported from Cairo, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Istanbul.

Read More..

England Develops a Voracious Appetite for a New Diet

LONDON — Visitors to England right now, be warned. The big topic on people’s minds — from cabdrivers to corporate executives — is not Kate Middleton’s increasingly visible baby bump (though the craze does involve the size of one’s waistline), but rather a best-selling diet book that has sent the British into a fasting frenzy.

“The Fast Diet,” published in mid-January in Britain, could do the same in the United States if Americans eat it up. The United States edition arrived last week.

The book has held the No. 1 slot on Amazon’s British site nearly every day since its publication in January, according to Rebecca Nicolson, a founder of Short Books, the independent publishing company behind the sensation. “It is selling,” she said, “like hot cakes,” which coincidentally are something one can actually eat on this revolutionary diet.

With an alluring cover line that reads, “Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer,” the premise of this latest weight-loss regimen — or “slimming” as the British call “dieting” — is intermittent fasting, or what has become known here as the 5:2 diet: five days of eating and drinking whatever you want, dispersed with two days of fasting.

A typical fasting day consists of two meals of roughly 250 to 300 calories each, depending on the person’s sex (500 calories for women, 600 for men). Think two eggs and a slice of ham for breakfast, and a plate of steamed fish and vegetables for dinner.

It is not much sustenance, but the secret to weight loss, according to the book, is that even after just a few hours of fasting, the body begins to turn off the fat-storing mechanisms and turn on the fat-burning systems.

“I’ve always been into self-experimentation,” said Dr. Michael Mosley, one of the book’s two authors and a well-known medical journalist on the BBC who is often called the Sanjay Gupta of Britain.

He researched the science of the diet and its health benefits by putting himself through intermittent fasting and filming it for a BBC documentary last August called “Eat, Fast and Live Longer.” (The broadcast gained high ratings, three million viewers, despite running during the London Olympics. PBS plans to air it in April.)

“This started because I was not feeling well last year,” Dr. Mosley said recently over a cup of tea and half a cookie (it was not one of his fasting days). “It turns out I was suffering from high blood sugar, high cholesterol and had a kind of visceral fat inside my gut.”

Though hardly obese at the time, at 5 feet 11 inches and 187 pounds, Dr. Mosley, 55, had a body mass index and body fat percentage that were a few points higher than the recommended amount for men. “Given that my father had died at age 73 of complications from diabetes, and I was now looking prediabetic, I knew something had to change,” he added.

The result was a documentary, almost the opposite of “Super Size Me,” in which Dr. Mosley not only fasted, but also interviewed scientific researchers, mostly in the United States, about the positive results of various forms of intermittent fasting, tested primarily on rats but in some cases human volunteers. The prominent benefits, he discovered, were weight loss, a lower risk of cancer and heart disease, and increased energy.

“The body goes into a repair-and-recover mode when it no longer has the work of storing the food being consumed,” he said.

Though Dr. Mosley quickly gave up on the most extreme forms of fasting (he ate little more than one cup of low-calorie soup every 24 hours for four consecutive days in his first trial), he finally settled on the 5:2 ratio as a more sustainable, less painful option that could realistically be followed without annihilating his social life or work.

“Our earliest antecedents,” Dr. Mosley argued, “lived a feast-or-famine existence, gorging themselves after a big hunt and then not eating until they scored the next one.” Similarly, he explained, temporary fasting is a ritual of religions like Islam and Judaism — as demonstrated by Ramadan and Yom Kippur. “We shouldn’t have a fear of hunger if it is just temporary,” he said.

What Dr. Mosley found most astounding, however, were his personal results. Not only did he lose 20 pounds (he currently weighs 168 pounds) in nine weeks, but his glucose and cholesterol levels went down, as did his body fat. “What’s more, I have a whole new level of energy,” he said.

The documentary became an instant hit, which in turn led Mimi Spencer, a food and fashion writer, to propose that they collaborate on a book. “I could see this was not a faddish diet but one that was sustainable with long-term health results, beyond the obvious weight-loss benefit,” said Ms. Spencer, 45, who has lost 20 pounds on the diet within four months and lowered her B.M.I. by 2 points.

The result is a 200-page paperback: the first half written by Dr. Mosley outlining the scientific findings of intermittent fasting; the second by Ms. Spencer, with encouraging text on how to get through the first days of fasting, from keeping busy so you don’t hear your rumbling belly, to waiting 15 minutes for your meal or snack.

She also provides fasting recipes with tantalizing photos like feta niçoise salad and Mexican pizza, and a calorie counter at the back. (Who knew a quarter of a cup of balsamic vinegar dressing added up to a whopping 209 calories?)

In London, the diet has taken off with the help of well-known British celebrity chefs and food writers like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who raved about it in The Guardian after his sixth day of fasting, having already lost eight pounds. (“I feel lean and sharper,” he wrote, “and find the whole thing rather exhilarating.”)

The diet is also particularly popular among men, according to Dr. Mosley, who has heard from many of his converts via e-mail and Twitter, where he has around 24,000 followers. “They find it easy to work into their schedules because dieting for a day here and there doesn’t feel torturous,” he said, adding that couples also particularly like doing it together.

But not everyone is singing the diet’s praises. The National Health System, Britain’s publicly funded medical establishment, put out a statement on its Web site shortly after the book came out: “Despite its increasing popularity, there is a great deal of uncertainty about I.F. (intermittent fasting) with significant gaps in the evidence.”

The health agency also listed some side effects, including bad breath, anxiety, dehydration and irritability. Yet people in London do not seem too concerned. A slew of fasting diet books have come out in recent weeks, notably the “The 5:2 Diet Book” and “The Feast and Fast Diet.”

There is also a crop of new cookbooks featuring fasting-friendly recipes. Let’s just say, the British are hungry for them.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of the national healthcare organization in Britain. It is the National Health Service, not the National Health System. The article also misidentified the Balsamic product that has 209 calories per cup. It is Balsamic vinegar dressing, not Balsamic vinegar.

Read More..

DealBook: Buffett’s Annual Letter Plays Up Newspapers’ Value

Over the last half-century, Warren E. Buffett has built a reputation as a contrarian investor, betting against the crowd to amass a fortune estimated at $54 billion.

Mr. Buffett underscored that contrarian instinct in his annual letter to shareholders published on Friday. In a year when Mr. Buffett did not make any large acquisitions, he bought dozens of newspapers, a business others have shunned. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has bought 28 dailies in the last 15 months.

“There is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job,” he wrote.

Those purchases, which cost Mr. Buffett a total of $344 million, are relatively minor deals for Berkshire, and just a small part of the giant conglomerate. Mr. Buffett bemoaned his inability to do a major deal in 2012. “I pursued a couple of elephants, but came up empty-handed,” he said. “Our luck, however, changed earlier this year.”

Mr. Buffett was making a reference to one of his largest-ever deals. Last month, Berkshire, along with a Brazilian investment group, announced a $23.6 billion takeover,of the ketchup maker H. J. Heinz.

Written in accessible prose largely free of financial jargon, Berkshire’s annual letter holds appeal far beyond Wall Street. This year’s dispatch contained plenty of Mr. Buffett’s folksy observations about investing and business that his devotees relish.

“More than 50 years ago, Charlie told me that it was far better to buy a wonderful business at a fair price than to buy a fair business at a wonderful price,” Mr. Buffett wrote, referring to his longtime partner at Berkshire, Charlie Munger.

Mr. Buffett also struck a patriotic tone, directly appealing to his fellow chief executives “that opportunities abound in America.” He noted that the United States gross domestic product, on an inflation-adjusted basis, had more than quadrupled over the last six decades.

“Throughout that period, every tomorrow has been uncertain,” he wrote. “America’s destiny, however, has always been clear: ever-increasing abundance.”

The letter provides more than entertainment value and patriotic stirrings, delivering to Berkshire shareholders an update on the company’s vast collection of businesses. With a market capitalization of $250 billion, Berkshire ranks among the largest companies in the United States.

Its holdings vary, with big companies like the railroad operator Burlington Northern Santa Fe and the electric utility MidAmerican Energy, and smaller ones like the running-shoe outfit Brooks Sports and the chocolatier See’s Candies. All told, Berkshire employs about 288,000 people.

The letter, once again, did not answer a question that has vexed Berkshire shareholders and Buffett-ologists: Who will succeed Mr. Buffett, who is 82, as chief executive?

Last year, he acknowledged that he had chosen a successor, but he did not name the candidate.

He has said that upon his death, Berkshire will split his job in three, naming a chief executive, a nonexecutive chairman and several investment managers of its publicly traded holdings.

In 2010, he said that his son, Howard Buffett, would succeed him as nonexecutive chairman.

Berkshire’s share price recently traded at a record high, surpassing its prefinancial crisis peak reached in 2007 and rising about 22 percent over the last year.

The company reported net income last year of about $14.8 billion, up about 45 percent from 2011. Yet the company’s book value, or net worth — Mr. Buffett’s preferred performance measure — lagged the broader stock market, increasing 14.4 percent, compared with the market’s 16 percent return.

Mr. Buffett lamented that 2012 was only the ninth time in 48 years that Berkshire’s book value increase was less than the gain of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. But he pointed out that in eight of those nine years, the S.& P. had a gain of 15 percent or more, suggesting that Berkshire proved to be a most valuable investment during bad market periods.

“We do better when the wind is in our face,” he wrote.

For Berkshire’s largest collection of assets, its insurance operations, the wind has been at its back. We “shot the lights out last year” in insurance, Mr. Buffett said.

He lavished praise on the auto insurer Geico, giving a special shout-out to the company’s mascot, the Gecko lizard.

Investors also keep a keen eye on changes in Berkshire’s roughly $87 billion stock portfolio. Its holdings include large positions in iconic companies like International Business Machines, Coca-Cola, American Express and Wells Fargo. He said Berkshire’s investment in each of those was likely to increase in the future.

“Mae West had it right: ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,’ ” Mr. Buffett wrote.

He also complimented two relatively new hires, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, who now each manage about $5 billion in stock portfolios for Berkshire. Both men ran unheralded, modest-size money management firms before Mr. Buffett plucked them out of obscurity and moved them to Omaha to work for him.

He called the men “a perfect cultural fit” and indicated that the two would manage Berkshire’s entire stock portfolio once he steps aside. “We hit the jackpot with these two,” Mr. Buffett said, noting that last year, each outperformed the S.& P. by double-digit margins.

Then, sheepishly, employing supertiny type, he wrote: “They left me in the dust as well.”

A former paperboy and member of the Newspaper Association of America’s carrier hall of fame, Mr. Buffett devoted nearly three out of 24 pages of his annual report to newspapers.

While Mr. Buffett has been a longtime owner of The Buffalo News and a stakeholder in The Washington Post Company, he told shareholders four years ago that he wouldn’t buy a newspaper at any price.

But his latest note reflects how much his opinion has turned. His buying spree started in November 2011, when he struck a deal to buy The Omaha World-Herald Company, this hometown paper, for a reported $200 million. By May 2012, he bought out the chain of newspapers owned by Media General, except for The Tampa Tribune. In recent months, he continued to express his interest in buying more papers “at appropriate prices — and that means a very low multiple of current earnings.”

“Papers delivering comprehensive and reliable information to tightly bound communities and having a sensible Internet strategy will remain viable for a long time,” wrote Mr. Buffett.

Mr. Buffett said in a telephone interview last month that he would consider buying The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., a paper that the Tribune Company is considering selling. But Mr. Buffett said he had not contacted Tribune executives.

“It’s solely a question of the specifics of it and the price,” he said about the Allentown paper. “But it’s similar to the kinds of communities that we bought papers in.”

Mr. Buffett has plenty of cash to make more newspaper acquisitions. To cover his portion of the Heinz purchase, Mr. Buffett will deploy about $12 billion of Berkshire’s $42 billion cash hoard. That leaves a lot of money for Mr. Buffett to continue his shopping spree for newspapers — and more major deals like Heinz.

“Charlie and I have again donned our safari outfits,” Mr. Buffett wrote, “and resumed our search for elephants.”

Read More..

French and Chad Forces Bear Down on Militants in Mali

DAKAR, Senegal — The French military struck at Islamist militants dug in along the remote, rocky mountain ranges of northern Mali over the last week, killing scores, a French military spokesman said Friday.

The week’s operations, conducted with Chadian troops, were a further sign that the French military intervention against the jihadists in Mali, initially viewed as a quick strike, was not winding down soon.

Meanwhile, the Chadian president, Idriss Déby Itno, confirmed that Abu Zeid, the most important commander in Al Qaeda’s regional franchise, had been killed in combat, Mr. Déby’s communications director, Dieudonné Djonabaye, said Friday night.

The Algerian newspaper El Khabar asserted that samples from the corpse presumed to be that of Abu Zeid — he was of Algerian birth — had been sent to Algiers for testing against relatives; a senior Algerian official declined to confirm the report on Friday night.

Abu Zeid’s death would represent a significant blow to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, as he was considered the toughest, most resilient of the local Qaeda commanders, and the most ruthless. Abu Zeid is held responsible for the executions of at least two Western hostages in 2009 and 2010 — an elderly Frenchman and an elderly Briton — and his Qaeda unit is believed to be holding perhaps half a dozen other Western hostages. In addition, he has an extensive network of contacts throughout the region, allowing him to recruit in many countries, analysts said.

Abu Zeid had been spotted at Timbuktu during the Islamist ascendancy in northern Mali last year, and the harsh Shariah rule instituted there — public whippings, destruction of monuments, banning of music and other leisure activities — is attributed at least in part to him.

Still, hundreds of jihadist fighters remain in the mountains, said a senior official with the Tuareg rebel movement, which is playing a supporting role in the French military campaign. Analysts suggested nonetheless that the French and Chadian successes this week — as many as 130 terrorists were killed in ground and air operations, according to the French spokesman — did not mean the French were getting bogged down in Mali, but rather that intelligence was improving and more extremists were being flushed out of their mountain retreats.

The French have some 1,200 soldiers in the region, and the Chadians 800, and they are concentrating their efforts on a 15-mile zone in the Adrar des Ifoghas, the rocky, barren mountains at Mali’s Algerian border, according to Col. Thierry Burkhard, the French military spokesman.

“From the beginning this has been the refuge of the region’s terrorist groups,” Colonel Burkhard said of the area around Tessalit, a settlement near the Algerian border. “Our objective is to comb through this zone, find the terrorist groups, then neutralize them.”

Colonel Burkhard said French forces alone had killed some 40 jihadists over the last week, while Chadian troops had eliminated perhaps 90. The French said there had been about 60 airstrikes, and about 10 of the jihadists’ vehicles had been destroyed.

“They are hanging on in a very determined fashion,” Colonel Burkhard said. “They are not looking to retreat. They want to hang on to their positions. They’ve been implanted in this region for a long time, and they’ve prepared the terrain. They’ve got foxholes, and they’ve got enough weapons to resist over the long term.”

Some 25 Chadian soldiers were killed in clashes with the jihadists last week — deaths that provoked Mr. Déby to call on other African nations to relieve Chad of some of the burden. Although other countries have deployed in Mali, they are generally well away from the fighting.

French and Chadian forces are carrying on the fight, more or less alone. “It’s not prolonged because of failure,” a Western defense attaché in the Malian capital, Bamako, said Friday night. “They are finding more jihadists. The French are very much keeping the tempo up. They are inflicting significant attrition,” but he added that the jihadists “are proving surprisingly resilient.”

Adam Nossiter reported from Dakar, Senegal, and Maïa de la Baume from Paris. Martin Zoutane contributed reporting from Ndjamena, Chad.

Read More..

Well: A Rainbow of Root Vegetables

This week’s Recipes for Health is as much a treat for the eyes as the palate. Colorful root vegetables from bright orange carrots and red scallions to purple and yellow potatoes and pale green leeks will add color and flavor to your table.

Since root vegetables and tubers keep well and can be cooked up into something delicious even after they have begun to go limp in the refrigerator, this week’s Recipes for Health should be useful. Root vegetables, tubers (potatoes and sweet potatoes, which are called yams by most vendors – I mean the ones with dark orange flesh), winter squash and cabbages are the only local vegetables available during the winter months in colder regions, so these recipes will be timely for many readers.

Roasting is a good place to begin with most root vegetables. They sweeten as they caramelize in a hot oven. I roasted baby carrots and thick red scallions (they may have been baby onions; I didn’t get the information from the farmer, I just bought them because they were lush and pretty) together and seasoned them with fresh thyme leaves, then sprinkled them with chopped toasted hazelnuts. I also roasted a medley of potatoes, including sweet potatoes, after tossing them with olive oil and sage, and got a wonderful range of colors, textures and tastes ranging from sweet to savory.

Sweet winter vegetables also pair well with spicy seasonings. I like to combine sweet potatoes and chipotle peppers, and this time in a hearty lentil stew that we enjoyed all week.

Here are five colorful and delicious dishes made with root vegetables.

Spicy Lentil and Sweet Potato Stew With Chipotles: The combination of sweet potatoes and spicy chipotles with savory lentils is a winner.

---

Roasted Carrots and Scallions With Thyme and Hazelnuts: Toasted hazelnuts add a crunchy texture and nutty finish to this dish.

---

Carrot Wraps: A vegetarian sandwich that satisfies like a full meal.

---

Rainbow Potato Roast: A multicolored mix that can be vegan, or not.

---

Leek Quiche: A lighter version of a Flemish classic.

---

Read More..

A Volatile Week Ends With Modest Gains

Stocks advanced modestly on Friday, leaving the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index with slight gains after a volatile week, as strong economic data overshadowed growth concerns in China and Europe and let investors discount the impact of federal spending cuts.

Data reported early in the day showed that Asian factories were slowing and European output was falling, setting off a sharp drop at the beginning of trading in New York. But most of the losses evaporated after a report showed that United States manufacturing activity had expanded in February at the fastest pace in 20 months. Consumer sentiment also rose in February as Americans turned more optimistic about the job market.

As $85 billion in government budget cuts took effect on Friday, President Obama blamed Republicans for the lack of a compromise to avert the so-called sequester. But the stock market appeared to have already priced in legislators’ failure to reach an agreement.

“We were able to dig out of that hole, but not make any great strides on it either,” said Peter M. Jankovskis, co-chief investment officer at OakBrook Investments in Lisle, Ill. “We will probably be in a holding pattern pending some big development on a broader budget deal.”

The Dow Jones industrial average gained 35.17 points, or 0.25 percent, to 14,089.66. The S.& P. 500 rose 3.52 points, or 0.23 percent, to 1,518.20. The Nasdaq composite index advanced 9.55 points, or 0.3 percent, to 3,169.74.

For the week, the Dow rose 0.64 percent, the S.& P. 500 edged up 0.17 percent and the Nasdaq gained 0.25 percent.

It was a bumpy road to the week’s slight gains. The markets slid on Monday after inconclusive elections in Italy revived concerns about the euro zone, only to rebound in the next two sessions after the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, defended the central bank’s stimulus measures.

The low interest rates from the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy have helped equities continue to attract investors. The Dow is less than 1 percent away from its nominal intraday record of 14,198.10. Declines have been shallow and short-lived, with investors jumping in to buy when the market dips.

Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones on the New York Stock Exchange by a ratio of about 17 to 13, while on the Nasdaq, about seven stocks rose for every five that fell.

Shares of Intuitive Surgical jumped 8.5 percent on Friday, to $553.40, after a Cantor Fitzgerald analyst, Jeremy Feffer, upgraded the stock, saying a slide of more than 11 percent on Thursday had been a gross overreaction to a news report.

Groupon shares surged 12.6 percent, to $5.10, a day after the company fired its chief executive in response to weak quarterly results.

Gap stock rose 2.9 percent, to $33.87, after the company reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat expectations and raised its dividend by 20 percent. Salesforce.com posted sales that beat forecasts, driving its stock up 7.6 percent, to $182.

Chesapeake Energy shares fell 2.4 percent, to $19.67, after the Securities and Exchange Commission escalated its investigation of the company and its chief executive, Aubrey McClendon, over a perk that granted him a share in each of the natural gas producer’s wells.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury note rose 10/32, to 101 13/32, and its yield fell to 1.85 percent from 1.88 percent late on Thursday.

Read More..

Czechs Split Deeply Over Joining the Euro

PRAGUE — Vaclav Klaus, the departing president of the Czech Republic, has equated the European Union to the former Soviet bloc, blamed the euro for the Greek crisis and called the single currency a mistake. He has even refused to hang the Union’s gold-starred flag at the Prague Castle, the seat of the Czech president.

So when Mr. Klaus, a Thatcher-loving economist who became a potent spokesman for continental Europhobes, steps down next week to make way for Milos Zeman as president, euro enthusiasts here will rejoice. Mr. Zeman has not only promised to hang the Union’s flag at the castle but has also suggested a referendum on whether to join the euro zone and suggested 2017 as the earliest possible date for entry.

But the celebrating could be premature. While the presidency, a largely ceremonial post, has the power to influence the debate, the Czech Republic remains deeply polarized between a business community clamoring to get into the euro club and skeptics who associate the currency with the economic pain buffeting Europe’s southern tier.

More than 80 percent of Czechs are against entering the euro zone, according to the latest Eurobarometer poll, making the Czechs the strongest opponents among the seven former Soviet bloc members in the European Union that have yet to join. Deeply resistant to embracing the euro’s one-size-fits-all monetary policy and loath to bail out cash-poor countries like Greece, many policy makers here insist that the Czech Republic is a striking example of why life outside the euro is simply better.

“Being inside the euro is not a sign of the quality of a country’s economy — the crisis has proved that,” Mojmir Hampl, 37, vice governor of the Czech National Bank, said in an interview. “The average Czech household says, ‘Thank God we don’t have to pay for these profligate Greeks.”’

Such sentiments are not limited to the Czech Republic, and enthusiasm for the euro is diminishing in most of those former Soviet-bloc countries, according to the Eurobarometer poll. The European Commission, which commissions the poll, noted that 54 percent of people in these countries, which include Poland, Hungary and Romania, think the euro will have negative consequences for their countries. Even in Latvia, which wants to adopt the euro by next year, 68 percent of people believe that joining would constitute losing part of their national identity.

Here in the Czech Republic, pushed and pulled between East and West over the centuries, the national sense of self has also played an important part in stoking ambivalence. Petr Pithart, a lawyer and former prime minister, argued that the antipathy toward the euro was a byproduct of a deep-seated mistrust of the West in the Czech soul, planted in 1938, when France and Britain yielded to Nazi pressure and allowed Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia. “Those wounds have not completely healed,” he said. “Klaus knew how to exploit this very well.”

Yet Mr. Hampl, an appointee of Mr. Klaus whose current term at the Czech National Bank ends in 2018, said the main reason for resisting the euro came down to hard-headed economics. Mr. Hampl argued that an independent monetary policy had allowed the central bank to cut interest rates in August 2008 after the crisis first hit hard, thereby helping to cushion the country against the worst effects of the downturn.

Moreover, he estimated that being outside the euro zone — and not contributing to the European Union’s bailout fund — had saved the country roughly €280 billion, or about $370 billion, in potential liabilities over a three-year period. “Knowing that we haven’t been saddled with that debt has helped me to sleep at night,” he said.

Yet the Czech Republic has hardly been immune from the European debt crisis, and some economists counter that in a country where 80 percent of exports go the euro zone countries, the economy is inextricably linked to the fate of the euro, even if the Czechs use the koruna instead.

Indeed, the country has slumped into a modest recession since 2011, weighed down by weak demand for Czech products like cars and Bohemian crystal. Consumption at home has also been lackluster as the center-right coalition government has instituted tough austerity measures, including raising sales taxes and slashing spending. Unemployment of about 7.5 percent in December was a far cry from the roughly 25 percent in Spain or Greece, but it has hit especially hard in the poorer parts of the country.

Against that backdrop, euro entry remains a hard sell for officials like Tomas Zidek, the deputy finance minister, who said in an interview that the European Union and the euro were now vastly different propositions than what the Czechs had signed up for when they joined the Union in 2004. The current efforts to shore up the monetary union by integrating banking and fiscal measures, he added, were as ill-advised in an economically diverse bloc as trying to call a Czech pilsner a German beer.

Mr. Zidek acknowledged that the Finance Ministry was under pressure to join the euro from Czech companies that face huge transaction costs because the country is outside the zone. “Companies complain all the time,” he said. “Our exports are hit by the lack of exchange rate stability.”

Skoda, the Czech automobile company that is owned by Volkswagen, said it supported the Czech Republic’s joining the euro, “the faster, the better,” because the company exports 60 percent of its cars to countries in the European Union and does the bulk of its business in euros. Michal Kadera, a senior manager at Skoda, said that production planning for cars took at least two years and that sudden fluctuations in the koruna against the euro made planning much more difficult and expensive.

Tomas Sedlacek, an economist who has advised President Vaclav Havel, said that not being in the euro zone was costing Czech companies billions of korunas a year in hedging costs associated with the fluctuation of the koruna against the euro. An independent monetary policy was no panacea, he added, pointing to Hungary, which has held on to its currency, the forint, and had sought a bailout before Greece.

“Those Czechs like Klaus,” he said, “who think having the koruna has saved us from the crisis, are living in a dream world.”

Hana de Goeij contributed reporting.

Read More..

Doctor and Patient: Why Failing Med Students Don’t Get Failing Grades

Tall and dark-haired, the third-year medical student always seemed to be the first to arrive at the hospital and the last to leave, her white coat perpetually weighed down by the books and notes she jammed into the pockets. She appeared totally absorbed by her work, even exhausted at times, and said little to anyone around her.

Except when she got frustrated.

I first noticed her when I overheard her quarreling with a nurse. A few months later I heard her accuse another student of sabotaging her work. And then one morning, I saw her storm off the wards after a senior doctor corrected a presentation she had just given. “The patient never told me that!” she cried. The nurses and I stood agape as we watched her stamp her foot and walk away.

“Why don’t you just fail her?” one of the nurses asked the doctor.

“I can’t,” she sighed, explaining that the student did extremely well on all her tests and worked harder than almost anyone in her class. “The problem,” she said, “is that we have no multiple choice exams when it comes to things like clinical intuition, communication skills and bedside manner.”

Medical educators have long understood that good doctoring, like ducks, elephants and obscenity, is easy to recognize but difficult to quantify. And nowhere is the need to catalog those qualities more explicit, and charged, than in the third year of medical school, when students leave the lecture halls and begin to work with patients and other clinicians in specialty-based courses referred to as “clerkships.” In these clerkships, students are evaluated by senior doctors and ranked on their nascent doctoring skills, with the highest-ranking students going on to the most competitive training programs and jobs.

A student’s performance at this early stage, the traditional thinking went, would be predictive of how good a doctor she or he would eventually become.

But in the mid-1990s, a group of researchers decided to examine grading criteria and asked directors of internal medicine clerkship courses across the country how accurate and consistent they believed their grading to be. Nearly half of the course directors believed that some form of grade inflation existed, even within their own courses. Many said they had increasing difficulty distinguishing students who could not achieve a “minimum standard,” whatever that might be. And over 40 percent admitted they had passed students who should have failed their course.

The study inspired a series of reforms aimed at improving how medical educators evaluated students at this critical juncture in their education. Some schools began instituting nifty mnemonics like RIME, or Reporter-Interpreter-Manager-Educator, for assessing progressive levels of student performance; others began to call regular meetings to discuss grades; still others compiled detailed evaluation forms that left little to the subjective imagination.

Now a new study published last month in the journal Teaching and Learning in Medicine looks at the effects of these many efforts on the grading process. And while the good news is that the rate of grade inflation in medical schools is slower than in colleges and universities, the not-so-good news is that little has changed. A majority of clerkship directors still believe that grade inflation is an issue even within their own courses; and over a third believe that students have passed their course who probably should have failed.

“Grades don’t have a lot of meaning,” said Dr. Sara B. Fazio, lead author of the paper and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who leads the internal medicine clerkship at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “‘Satisfactory’ is like the kiss of death.”

About a quarter of the course directors surveyed believed that grade inflation occurred because senior doctors were loath to deal with students who could become angry, upset or even turn litigious over grades. Some confessed to feeling pressure to help students get into more selective internships and training programs.

But for many of these educators, the real issue was not flunking the flagrantly unprofessional student, but rather evaluating and helping the student who only needed a little extra help in transitioning from classroom problem sets to real world patients. Most faculty received little or no training or support in evaluating students, few came from institutions that had remediation programs to which they could direct students, and all worked under grading systems that were subjective and not standardized.

Despite the disheartening findings, Dr. Fazio and her co-investigators believe that several continuing initiatives may address the evaluation issues. For example, residency training programs across the country will soon be assessing all doctors-in-training with a national standards list, a series of defined skills, or “competencies,” in areas like interpersonal communication, professional behavior and specialty-specific procedures. Over the next few years, medical schools will likely be adopting a similar system for medical students, creating a national standard for all institutions.

“There have to be unified, transparent and objective criteria,” Dr. Fazio said. “Everyone should know what it means when we talk about educating and training ‘good doctors.’”

“We will all be patients one day,” she added. “We have to think about what kind of doctors we want to have now and in the future.”

Read More..

Advertising: A Shared History in Detroit Is an Ad Inspiration

THE Chrysler Group is bringing to life the advertising theme for its Chrysler brand, “Imported from Detroit,” through an innovative partnership with a coming Broadway show that bears the Detroit-inspired name of one of the most famous brands in music.

The partnership unites Chrysler and “Motown: the Musical,” about the musical legacy of Berry Gordy and Motown, the record label he founded that is now owned by the Universal Music Group. The musical, scheduled to open on April 14 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, is the beneficiary of an elaborate promotional initiative by the Chrysler brand that supplements the show’s own efforts to encourage ticket sales.

The centerpiece of the Chrysler brand’s support is a television commercial that has been running nationally since December, featuring Mr. Gordy riding in a Motown Edition of a Chrysler 300C sedan as the seminal Motown song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” plays on the soundtrack.

The commercial, created by a Chrysler Group agency, GlobalHue in Southfield, Mich., begins with Mr. Gordy at the original “Hitsville U.S.A.” Motown headquarters building in Detroit and ends with him arriving at the Lunt-Fontanne and declaring: “We are Motown. And this is what we do.” As Mr. Gordy enters the theater, the Chrysler slogan appears, altered to read “Imported from Motown.”

The words “ ‘Motown: the Musical’ on Broadway March 2013” appear, referring to the start of previews on March 11, and the address of the show’s Web site, motownthemusical.com, along with the Chrysler brand Web address, chrysler.com.

The commercial is believed to be the first time that a Broadway show has had such paid national television exposure as it prepares to open in New York. The commercial is in addition to a commercial that the producers of “Motown: the Musical” are running on stations in the New York market; the local commercial was created by SpotCo in New York, part of Reach4entertainment Enterprises.

The Chrysler brand will also buttress the show’s marketing with colorful signs to go up in coming days in Penn Station and Times Square. The signs display a Chrysler 300 Motown Edition, the Chrysler logo, the logo of “Motown: the Musical” and photographs of cast members of the show like Brandon Victor Dixon, who portrays Mr. Gordy.

The Chrysler Group is spending an estimated $6 million to $8 million to promote “Motown: the Musical.” The budget for the ads from the show’s producers, Mr. Gordy, Kevin McCollum and Doug Morris, is estimated at $2 million.

The automaker’s efforts extend beyond the product placement and sponsorship agreements that have become increasingly prevalent on Broadway as theater enters the realm of so-called entertainment marketing with television, movies and video games. Unlike the provisions of many of those deals, the Chrysler name is not being added to a lyric of a Motown song, nor are there plans to park a car in the lobby of the Lunt-Fontanne.

Rather, the partnership is about “merging both journeys, the journey of the Chrysler brand and the journey of Mr. Gordy and his music,” said Olivier François, chief marketing officer at the Chrysler Group.

“Motown is the most exported from Detroit of any music and, in this case, imported to New York,” Mr. François said. “It’s putting together the sound and the drive of Detroit. We were meant to meet.”

That thought is expressed in the national commercial, in which a narrator proclaims, “Because if cars are our city’s heart, music is its soul.”

That the partnership is centered on music is no coincidence. Mr. François, a producer of pop music in his native France in the 1980s, described the Motown catalog as “part of the American patrimony” that “will live forever.”

“And so is Chrysler,” he said hopefully. “Regardless of my passion for the Motown music and my respect for Mr. Gordy, I would not have pushed to tie a brand to Motown if there wasn’t this new Chrysler story,” Mr. François said, referring to “Imported from Detroit,” which was introduced in 2011 with a Super Bowl commercial featuring another famous Detroit music figure, Eminem.

“The Motown name has a huge value,” he added. “Does it have a huge value for any car? Maybe not.”

Mr. McCollum, whose Broadway credits include “Avenue Q” and “Rent,” invoked another musical to explain how the show and the Chrysler Group came together: “Kismet.”

“About a year ago, we flew to Detroit and sat down with Olivier and his team, and they pitched the idea,” Mr. McCollum said. “It’s about a collaboration between these two great American industries that came out of one place.”

Besides, he added, Mr. Gordy was “highly influenced by his early days working in an auto plant, learning that you have to put something out there people want.”

Mr. McCollum said he was glad to join Mr. François and Mr. Gordy in “celebrating Detroit when you’d think it’s contrarian thinking” to do so because Motown, Chrysler and “Motown: the Musical” are all about “the power of the American dream.”

The SpotCo campaign for the show — and a public relations effort by Boneau/Bryan-Brown in New York — play that up. The local commercial, for instance, extols Motown’s songs as “the soundtrack that changed America, the beat of a generation, the soul of a nation.”

The goal is “less transactional,” said Ilene Rosen, associate chief operating officer at SpotCo, and “more about synergizing the Motown and Chrysler brands to elevate both.”

As much as other Broadway producers would probably welcome a deep-pocketed partner like the Chrysler Group, the unique circumstances that produced the partnership may make it difficult to emulate, she added.

Read More..

The Lede: Syrians Describe Apparent Missile Strikes on Aleppo

A Human Rights Watch video report on the aftermath of apparent missile strikes in Syria’s largest city, Aleppo.

Human Rights Watch investigators who visited Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, have concluded that the Syrian government fired at least four ballistic missiles into civilian neighborhoods there last week, killing more than 141 people, including 71 children. As my colleague Anne Barnard explained, the rights group released details of the four documented strikes, and a video report, on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, opposition activists added English subtitles to an emotional account of the devastation caused by one missile strike on Aleppo from a young boy who said he survived the bombing, but lost several family members and neighbors.

An interview with a boy who said he had survived a missile attack on a neighborhood in Aleppo.

The original interview with the boy was posted on YouTube on Monday by Orient News, a private Syrian satellite channel that began broadcasting from Dubai before the antigovernment uprising began. Within a week of the first protests in Syria, Ghassan Aboud, the Syrian businessman who owns the channel, told a Saudi broadcaster that senior government officials close to President Bashar al-Assad had threatened to kidnap his journalists if they did not stop covering the demonstrations.

The boy’s account was subtitled by the ANA New Media Association, a group of opposition video activists led by Rami Jarrah, who blogs as Alexander Page.

The new reports come weeks after experts told The Lede that video of a huge explosion at Aleppo University last month suggested that the campus had been hit by a ballistic missile.

When Liz Sly of the Washington Post visited Aleppo’s Ard al-Hamra neighborhood after two missile strikes, residents gave similarly graphic accounts of pulling the mangled bodies of victims from wrecked buildings. The scenes of devastation, she wrote, more closely resembled “those of an earthquake, with homes pulverized beyond recognition, people torn to shreds in an instant and what had once been thriving communities reduced to mountains of rubble.”

Ole Solvang, a Human Rights Watch researcher who helped document the damage in Aleppo, drew attention to video posted online by opposition activists, which is said to show the desperate search for survivors immediately after the strike on Ard al-Hamra.

Video said to show a neighborhood in Aleppo after a missile strike last week.

As Mr. Solvang assessed the wreckage in person on Thursday and Friday, he described the damage to Aleppo and a neighboring town in words and images posted on Twitter.

Visited a site of similar attack in Tel Rifat today. 25 houses destroyed and 3 killed last Monday. Unbelievable. http://t.co/FaFhNFiAsS

— Ole Solvang (@OleSolvang) 22 Feb 13

Today visited site of yesterday’s missile attack on Ard al Hamra in #Aleppo #Syria. Dozens houses destroyed. Unbelievable destruction. @hrw

— Ole Solvang (@OleSolvang) 23 Feb 13

Bodies are still under the rubble. 3 found during our 30 min visit. Casualty # still unclear. #Aleppo #Syria @hrw http://t.co/gaT7COpRT3

— Ole Solvang (@OleSolvang) 23 Feb 13

Late Tuesday, an Aleppo blogger who supported the uprising but has been critical of the armed rebellion on his @edwardedark Twitter feed, reported that another huge blast had shaken the city.

a massive blast shockwave shakes Aleppo city just now. no idea what it is yet #Syria

— edward dark (@edwardedark) 26 Feb 13

Ms. Sly reported on Twitter on Wednesday night that two more missiles were fired at rural Aleppo. “They landed in fields,” she observed. “That’s how accurate they are. Seems a bit pointless.”

Late Wednesday, Mr. Solvang pointed to video posted on YouTube by opposition activists, showing what they said were distant images of a missile being launched from Damascus in the direction of Aleppo.

Video said to show a missile being fired by Syrian government forces outside the capital, Damascus, on Wednesday night.

Read More..