U.N. Suspends Polio Campaign in Pakistan After Killings of Workers


B.K. Bangash/Associated Press


A Pakistani woman administered polio vaccine to an infant on Wednesday in the slums of Islamabad. Militants have killed eight polio workers over three days.







LAHORE, Pakistan — The front-line heroes of Pakistan’s war on polio are its volunteers: young women who tread fearlessly from door to door, in slums and highland villages, administering precious drops of vaccine to children in places where their immunization campaign is often viewed with suspicion.




Now, those workers have become quarry. After militants stalked and killed eight of them over the course of a three-day, nationwide vaccination drive, the United Nations suspended its anti-polio work in Pakistan on Wednesday, and one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health campaigns has been plunged into crisis.


The World Health Organization and Unicef ordered their staff members off the streets, while government officials reported that some polio volunteers — especially women — were afraid to show up for work.


At the ground level, it is those female health workers who are essential, allowed privileged entrance into private homes to meet and help children in situations denied to men because of conservative rural culture. “They are on the front line; they are the backbone,” said Imtiaz Ali Shah, a polio coordinator in Peshawar.


The killings started in the port city of Karachi on Monday, the first day of a vaccination drive aimed at the worst affected areas, with the shooting of a male health worker. On Tuesday four female polio workers were killed, all gunned down by men on motorcycles in what appeared to be closely coordinated attacks.


The hit jobs then moved to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which, along with the adjoining tribal belt, constitutes Pakistan’s main reservoir of new polio infections. The first victim there was one of two sisters who had volunteered as polio vaccinators. Men on motorcycles shadowed them as they walked from house to house. Once the sisters entered a quiet street, the gunmen opened fire. One of the sisters, Farzana, died instantly; the other was uninjured.


On Wednesday, a man working on the polio campaign was shot dead as he made a chalk mark on the door of a house in a suburb of Peshawar. Later, a female health supervisor in Charsadda, 15 miles to the north, was shot dead in a car she shared with her cousin.


Yet again, Pakistani militants are making a point of attacking women who stand for something larger. In October, it was Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl advocate for education who was gunned down by a Pakistani Taliban attacker in the Swat Valley. She was grievously wounded, and the militants vowed they would try again until they had killed her. The result was a tidal wave of public anger that clearly unsettled the Pakistani Taliban.


In singling out the core workers in one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health initiatives, militants seem to have resolved to harden their stance against immunization drives, and declared anew that they consider women to be legitimate targets. Until this week, vaccinators had never been targeted with such violence in such numbers.


Government officials in Peshawar said that they believe a Taliban faction in Mohmand, a tribal area near Peshawar, was behind at least some of the shootings. Still, the Pakistani Taliban have been uncharacteristically silent about the attacks, with no official claims of responsibility. In staying quiet, the militants may be trying to blunt any public backlash like the huge demonstrations over the attack on Ms. Yousafzai.


Female polio workers here make for easy targets. They wear no uniform but are readily recognizable, with clipboards and refrigerated vaccine boxes, walking door to door. They work in pairs — including at least one woman — and are paid just over $2.50 a day. Most days one team can vaccinate 150 to 200 children.


Faced with suspicious or recalcitrant parents, their only weapon is reassurance: a gentle pat on the hand, a shared cup of tea, an offer to seek religious assurances from a pro-vaccine cleric. “The whole program is dependent on them,” said Mr. Shah, in Peshawar. “If they do good work, and talk well to the parents, then they will vaccinate the children.”


That has happened with increasing frequency in Pakistan over the past year. A concerted immunization drive, involving up to 225,000 vaccination workers, drove the number of newly infected polio victims down to 52. Several high-profile groups shouldered the program forward — at the global level, donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations and Rotary International; and at the national level, President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa, who have made polio eradication a “personal mission.”


On a global scale, setbacks are not unusual in polio vaccination campaigns, which, by dint of their massive scale and need to reach deep inside conservative societies, end up grappling with more than just medical challenges. In other campaigns in Africa and South Asia, vaccinators have grappled with natural disaster, virulent opposition from conservative clerics and sudden outbreaks of mysterious strains of the disease.


Declan Walsh reported from Lahore, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.



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Four State Department Officials Are Out After Benghazi Report





WASHINGTON — Four State Department officials were removed from their posts on Wednesday after an independent panel criticized the “grossly inadequate” security at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that was attacked on Sept. 11, leading to the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.




Eric J. Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, resigned. Charlene R. Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for embassy security, and another official in the diplomatic security office whom officials would not identify were relieved of their duties. So was Raymond Maxwell, a deputy assistant secretary who had responsibility for North Africa. The four officials, a State Department spokeswoman said, “have been placed on administrative leave pending further action.” 


The report criticized officials in the State Department’s Bureau for Diplomatic Security as having displayed a “lack of proactive leadership.” It also said that some officials in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs “showed a lack of ownership of Benghazi’s security issues.” 


The report did not criticize more senior officials, including Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary for management, who has vigorously defended the State Department’s decision-making on Benghazi to Congress.


At a news conference at the State Department on Wednesday, Thomas R. Pickering, a former ambassador who led the independent review, said that most of the blame should fall on officials in the two bureaus.


“We fixed it at the assistant secretary level, which is, in our view, the appropriate place to look, where the decision-making in fact takes place, where, if you like, the rubber hits the road,” said Mr. Pickering, who did not identify the officials.


At the same time, the report that Mr. Pickering oversaw suggested that there was a culture of “husbanding resources” at senior levels of the State Department that contributed to the security deficiencies in Benghazi. Without identifying Mr. Kennedy or other senior officials, the report said that attitude “had the effect of conditioning a few State Department managers to favor restricting the use of resources as a general orientation.”


Two deputy secretaries of state, William J. Burns and Thomas R. Nides, are scheduled to testify to Congressional committees on Thursday. The question of whether senior officials at the State Department should be held accountable is likely to be raised by lawmakers at the hearing.


“The board severely critiques a handful of individuals, and they have been held accountable,” said Representative Ed Royce, Republican of California, who is the incoming chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The degree that others bear responsibility warrants Congressional review, given the report’s rather sweeping indictment. And the Foreign Affairs Committee must hear from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton concerning her role, which this report didn’t address.”


Mrs. Clinton, in a letter to Congress, outlined a number of steps the department is taking to improve security, including hiring hundreds of additional Marine guards for high-risk embassies and consulates around the world.


In an apparent gesture of support for the American diplomatic corps, President Obama — speaking at a diplomatic reception at the State Department on Wednesday night — praised the department’s personnel, who he said often worked “at great risk.”


Another issue that might be raised and that was largely skirted by the panel, concerns what role the American military should play in protecting diplomats abroad.


The Pentagon had no forces that could be readily sent to Benghazi when the crisis unfolded. The closest AC-130 gunship was in Afghanistan. There are no armed drones thought to be within range of Libya. There was no Marine expeditionary unit — a large seaborne force with its own helicopters — in the Mediterranean Sea. The Africa Command, whose area of operation includes North Africa, also did not have on hand its own force able to respond rapidly to emergencies — a Commanders’ In-Extremis Force, or C.I.F. Every other regional command had one at the time.


The Defense Department has repeatedly declined to say whether the Africa Command requested that any of these forces be on hand during the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Nor has it said whether Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta or Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave any thought to moving forces in the region as a precaution.


The unclassified version of the Benghazi report concluded that “there simply was not enough time given the speed of the attacks for armed U.S. military assets to have made a difference.” But the report did not address whether it would have been prudent to station quick-reaction forces in the region or whether the United States would have been in a position to quickly respond militarily had Ambassador Stevens been kidnapped and the crisis had dragged on, as was initially feared.


The United States military’s best-trained team to extract diplomats under fire — Delta Force commandos — was half a world away, in Fort Bragg, N.C. “What this report shows is that we need a fundamental rethink of the problem,” said one senior Pentagon official who has spent considerable time examining the issue of protecting American diplomats since the attack in September. “It’s not the military’s job to protect diplomats; it’s the host government’s. But in the absence of a real government, we never asked the question, ‘So how do we do this?’ ”


But as the military budget declines, some ranking officers are wary about taking on new commitments, even ones that involve protecting Americans.


“It is not reasonable nor feasible to tether U.S. forces at the ready to respond to protect every high-risk post in the world,” Mike Mullen, the retired admiral and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who served as vice chairman of the independent review, said Wednesday.


David E. Sanger contributed reporting.



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Kodak in $525 million patent deal, eyes bankruptcy end






(Reuters) – Eastman Kodak Co agreed to sell its digital imaging patents for about $ 525 million, a key step to bringing the photography pioneer out of bankruptcy in the first half of 2013.


The deal for the 1,100 patents allows Kodak to fulfill a condition for securing $ 830 million in financing.






The patent deal was reached with a consortium led by Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corp, and which includes some of the world’s biggest technology companies, which will license or acquire the patents.


Those companies are Adobe Systems Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc, Facebook Inc, Fujifilm, Google Inc, Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, HTC Corp, Microsoft Corp, Research In Motion Ltd, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Shutterfly Inc, according to court documents.


Kodak still must sell its personalized and document-imaging businesses as part of the financing package, and also has to resolve its UK pension obligation.


Kodak said the patent deal puts it on a path to emerge from Chapter 11 in the first half of 2013.


“Our progress has accelerated over the past several weeks as we prepare to emerge as a strong, sustainable company,” said Antonio Perez, chairman and chief executive of the Rochester, New York-based company.


The patent portfolio was expected to be a major asset for Kodak when it filed for bankruptcy in January. An outside firm had estimated the patents could be worth as much as $ 2.6 billion.


Kodak’s patents hit the market as intellectual property values have soared and technology companies have plowed money into patent-related litigation.


For example, last year Nortel Networks sold 6,000 wireless patents in a bankruptcy auction for $ 4.5 billion and earlier this year Google spent $ 12.5 billion for patent-rich Motorola Mobility.


But Kodak’s patent auction dragged on beyond the initial expectation that it would be wrapped up in August. One patent specialist blamed those early, overly optimistic valuations, which he said encouraged Kodak’s team to set their sights too high.


“Unfortunately (Kodak management) was misled into thinking it was worth billions of dollars and it wasn’t,” said Alex Poltorak, chairman of General Patent Corp, a patent licensing firm. “I think they sold them at a very good price.”


He said after Google acquired Motorola, the search engine company no longer needed patents at any price, deflating the intellectual property market.


Kodak traces its roots to the 19th century and invented the handheld camera. But it has been unable to successfully shift to digital imaging.


It will likely be a different company when it exits bankruptcy, out of the consumer business and focused instead on providing products and services to the commercial imaging market.


The patent sale is subject to approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.


The Kodak bankruptcy case is in Re: Eastman Kodak Co. et al, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, No. 12-10202.


(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware and Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bangalore; Editing by Nick Zieminski,; John Wallace and Peter Galloway)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Cruz: Meeting Pinto family was "toughest by far"


EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. (AP) — For much of his hour-long visit with the family of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Connecticut school shootings, Victor Cruz talked about football, life and young Jack, the child who idolized him.


Tears were shed. Feelings were shared. Cleats and gloves worn by Cruz to honor Jack Pinto at Sunday's game against Atlanta were given to his family.


The New York Giants wide receiver somberly recounted Wednesday his meeting with Pinto's parents and brother in Newtown, Conn.


He struggled in his retelling only when asked about the family's decision to bury the child in the receiver's No. 80 Giants jersey. The father of an infant girl, Cruz stopped for a moment, and his eyes became watery.


"You never go through some circumstances like this and circumstances where a kid faces or a family faces something of this magnitude at their school," Cruz said. "This definitely was the toughest by far."


Jack Pinto was buried on Monday and Cruz telephoned the family to ask whether he could visit them Tuesday.


The family disclosed after Friday's massacre that Cruz was Jack's favorite player. The boy was one of 20 first-graders and six adults killed in the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.


Cruz drove to Newtown with his girlfriend, Elaina Watley, and their daughter, Kennedy.


"I had no expectations. I was a little nervous," Cruz said. "I just didn't know how I was going to be received. You never know when they are going through something like that. You never know how it is going to go down."


Seeing the family outside the home along with some local children made Cruz feel better.


"They were still pretty emotional, crying and stuff like that," Cruz said. "I saw how affected they were by just my presence alone. I got out and gave them the cleats and the gloves and they appreciated it. The older brother (Ben) was still emotional, so I gave them to him."


Cruz had written "Jack Pinto, My Hero" and "R.I.P. Jack Pinto" on his cleats before the Giants' loss to the Falcons Sunday in Atlanta.


The 26-year-old player best known for his salsa dances after touchdowns, signed autographs for the children before heading inside.


"I didn't want to go in there and make a speech," Cruz said. "I just wanted to go and spend some time with them and be someone they could talk to, and be someone they can vent to, talk about how much of a fans they are of the team, or different times they watched the Super Bowl."


Cruz spent that part of the visit sitting in the chair where Jack's father, Dean, sat when he watched the Giants' Super Bowl win over the New England Patriots in February.


It was a day Jack got to see his favorite team win a championship.


"It was just an emotional time," Cruz said. "I spent a little bit of time with them. We got to smile a little bit, which was good for them. It was a time where I just wanted to be a positive voice, a positive light in the tunnel where it can really be negative, so it was a good time. They are a great family and they're really united at this time and it was good to see."


Cruz said it was strange thinking about a child being buried in his jersey. He did not know how to react. Should he thank the family?


"It leaves you kind of blank," Cruz said. "I am definitely honored by it. I am definitely humbled by it, and it's definitely an unfortunate but humbling experience for me."


The visit also gave Cruz time to reflect, especially looking at his daughter.


"Ever since it happened I've kind of been spending more time with her, just cherishing the little moments, the little time you get with her because you never know when that can be taken from you," he said.


Giants coach Tom Coughlin said he was incredibly proud of Cruz for visiting with the Pinto family.


"Hopefully some of their grief might at least temporarily be suspended in being able to embrace Victor Cruz," Coughlin said, adding what he did speaking volumes of what he has inside.


Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice said what Cruz did took heart.


"You've got to be able to put yourself in that family's situation to understand at least what they're going through," Rice said in a conference call with the New York media about Sunday's game against the Giants. "That's what it's about. That's something that you don't just say, 'I'm going to do it.' You do it from the heart, from within and what he did was amazing."


___


Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL


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DealBook: Leniency Denied, UBS Unit Admits Guilt in Rate Case

UBS on Wednesday became the first big global bank in more than two decades to have a subsidiary plead guilty to fraud.

UBS, the Swiss bank, scrambled until the last minute to avoid that fate. A week ago, in a bid for leniency over interest-rate manipulation, the bank’s chairman traveled to Washington to plead his case to the Justice Department, according to people briefed on the matter. Knowing the long odds, the chairman, Axel Weber, asked the criminal division for a lighter punishment.

But the government did not budge. With support from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., the agency’s criminal division decided the bank’s actions were simply too egregious, people briefed on the matter said.

On Wednesday, UBS announced it would plead guilty to one count of felony wire fraud as part of a broader settlement. With federal prosecutors, British, Swiss and American regulators secured about $1.5 billion in fines, more than triple the only other rate-rigging case, against Barclays. The Justice Department also filed criminal charges against two former UBS traders.

The guilty plea and the individual charges provide the Justice Department with a long-awaited case to prove it is taking a hard line against financial wrongdoing.

Since the financial crisis, the government has faced criticism that it has not brought significant criminal actions. The money-laundering case against HSBC, which averted indictment when it agreed instead last week to pay $1.9 billion, raised more concerns that the world’s largest and most interconnected banks were too big to indict.

With UBS, prosecutors wanted to send a warning.

The Justice Department’s decision stops short of imperiling the broader financial system because it shields UBS’s parent company from losing its charter, among other major repercussions. But by securing a guilty plea against a subsidiary, the department has shown that it is willing to punish severely one of the world’s most powerful banks. It was the first guilty plea from a major financial institution since Drexel Burnham Lambert admitted to six counts of fraud in 1989.

“We are holding those who did wrong accountable,” Lanny A. Breuer, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said at a news conference on Wednesday. “We cannot, and we will not, tolerate misconduct on Wall Street.”

The rate-rigging inquiry, which has ensnared more than a dozen big banks, is focused on major benchmarks like the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. Such rates are central to determining the borrowing rates for trillions of dollars of financial products like corporate loans, mortgages and credit cards.

The fallout from the UBS case is expected to increase pressure on some of the world’s largest financial institutions and spur settlement talks across the banking industry. The Royal Bank of Scotland has said it expects to pay fines before its next earnings statement in February, while American institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, also remain in regulators’ cross hairs.

The UBS case highlighted a pattern of abuse that authorities have uncovered in a multiyear investigation into the rate-setting process. The government complaints laid bare a 10-year scheme, describing how the bank had reported false rates to squeeze out extra profits and deflect concerns about its health during the financial crisis.

“The settlement reflects the magnitude of the wrongdoing and how critical it is that these be honest and reliable,” said Gary S. Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the American regulator that opened the UBS investigation.

Six months ago, authorities did not seem ready to take an aggressive stance with UBS.

They had just scored their first Libor settlement, a $450 million payout from Barclays. UBS, which had already struck a conditional immunity deal with the Justice Department’s antitrust division, figured its penalty would be similar.

The immunity deal, some UBS executives contended, would protect the bank from criminal charges. Even officials at the Justice Department were skeptical about the prospect of levying large penalties, according to people briefed on the matter.

Then the tone shifted this fall. After examining thousands of e-mails and hours of taped phone calls, the agency’s criminal division concluded that the conduct at the Japanese subsidiary warranted a criminal charge.

Agency officials also cited the bank’s repeated run-ins with authorities. For example, the Swiss bank had agreed in 2009 to pay $780 million to settle charges that it had helped clients avoid taxes.

Not everyone in the Justice Department agreed on the course of action. According to people briefed on the matter, the antitrust unit pushed for less-onerous penalties, citing the cooperation of UBS. With officials split over how to proceed, Mr. Holder cast the deciding vote in favor of securing a guilty plea from the subsidiary.

The move caught UBS off guard. The bank dispatched several lawyers to Washington to negotiate the fine print of the deal, setting up makeshift offices at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown.

Mr. Weber joined the lawyers, in a typical last-ditch appeal to the criminal division. Last Wednesday, Mr. Weber and his general counsel explained to the agency how UBS had overhauled its management ranks, bolstered internal controls and generally tried to clean up its act.

Mr. Breuer and other Justice Department officials agreed to consider the bank’s request to abandon the guilty plea, people briefed on the talks said. But hours later, a prosecutor phoned to say the agency was standing firm.

UBS agreed to the guilty plea, conceding that the Japanese unit would otherwise most likely face an indictment. In turn, prosecutors credited the bank for its recent efforts to improve.

“We are pleased that the authorities gave us credit for the important and positive changes we have already made,” Mr. Weber said in a statement.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission adopted a similarly tough attitude.

Since Thanksgiving, UBS has tried to negotiate lower penalties with the regulator, according to people briefed on the matter. But David Meister, the agency’s enforcement chief, would not back down from $700 million in fines, an agency record.

“Even for a megabank, that amount serves as a direct deterrent,” said Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the regulator.

Authorities’ strict stance stems from the extent of the bank’s actions. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission cited more than 2,000 instances of illegal acts involving dozens of UBS employees across continents.

The most significant wrongdoing took place within the Japanese unit, where traders colluded with other banks and brokerage firms to tinker with yen-denominated Libor and bolster their returns.

In colorful e-mails, instant messages and phone calls, traders tried to influence the rates. “I need you to keep it as low as possible,” one UBS trader said to an employee at another brokerage firm, according to the complaint filed by the Financial Services Authority of Britain.

As the employees carried out the ostensible manipulation, they also celebrated the efforts, with one trader referring to a partner in the scheme as “superman.” “Be a hero today,” he urged, according the complaint.

The Justice Department also took aim at two former UBS traders, Tom Hayes, 33, and Roger Darin, 41, bringing the first criminal charges against individuals connected to the Libor case.

Like other traders at UBS, Mr. Hayes was willing to reward others for their efforts. He trumpeted the work of an outside broker who had helped, writing in a message, “i reckon i owe him a lot more.” Another broker responded that the person was “ok with an annual champagne shipment,” and “a small bonus every now and then.”

As prosecutors ramped up their investigation, Mr. Hayes even tried to dissuade former colleagues from cooperating, the complaint said. “The U.S. Department of Justice, mate, you know,” he said, they are the “dudes who…put people in jail. Why…would you talk to them?”

Mark Scott, Ashley Southall and Julia Werdigier contributed reporting.

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Attackers in Pakistan Kill Anti-Polio Workers


Athar Hussain/Reuters


Relatives of Nasima Bibi, a worker in a polio vaccination drive, at a hospital morgue in Karachi.







ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Gunmen shot dead five female health workers who were immunizing children against polio on Tuesday, causing the Pakistani government to suspend vaccinations in two cities and dealing a fresh setback to an eradication campaign dogged by Taliban resistance in a country that is one of the disease’s last global strongholds.




“It is a blow, no doubt,” said Shahnaz Wazir Ali, an adviser on polio to Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf. “Never before have female health workers been targeted like this in Pakistan. Clearly there will have to be more and better arrangements for security.”


No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but most suspicion focused on the Pakistani Taliban, which has previously blocked polio vaccinators and complained that the United States is using the program as a cover for espionage.


The killings were a serious reversal for the multibillion-dollar global polio immunization effort, which over the past quarter century has reduced the number of endemic countries from 120 to just three: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.


Nonetheless, United Nations officials insisted that the drive would be revived after a period for investigation and regrouping, as it had been after previous attacks on vaccinators here, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.


Pakistan has made solid gains against polio, with 56 new recorded cases of the diseases in 2012, compared with 192 at the same point last year, according to the government. Worldwide, cases of death and paralysis from polio have been reduced to less than 1,000 last year, from 350,000 worldwide in 1988.


But the campaign here has been deeply shaken by Taliban threats and intimidation, though several officials said Tuesday that they had never seen such a focused and deadly attack before.


Insurgents have long been suspicious of polio vaccinators, seeing them as potential spies. But that greatly intensified after the C.I.A. used a vaccination team headed by a local doctor, Shakil Afridi, to visit Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, reportedly in an attempt to obtain DNA proof that the Bin Laden family was there before an American commando raid on it in May 2011.


In North Waziristan, one prominent warlord has banned polio vaccinations until the United States ceases drone strikes in the area.


Most new infections in Pakistan occur in the tribal belt and adjoining Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province — some of the most remote areas of the country, and also those with the strongest militant presence. People fleeing fighting in those areas have also spread the disease to Karachi, the country’s largest city, where the disease has been making a worrisome comeback in recent years.


After Tuesday’s attacks, witnesses described violence that was both disciplined and well coordinated. Five attacks occurred within an hour in different Karachi neighborhoods. In several cases, the killers traveled in pairs on motorcycle, opening fire on female health workers as they administered polio drops or moved between houses in crowded neighborhoods.


Of the five victims, three were teenagers, and some had been shot in the head, a senior government official said. Two male health workers were also wounded by gunfire; early reports incorrectly stated that one of them had died, the official said.


In Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, gunmen opened fire on two sisters participating in the polio vaccination program, killing one of them. It was unclear whether that shooting was directly linked to the Karachi attacks.


In remote parts of the northwest, the Taliban threat is exacerbated by the government’s crumbling writ. In Bannu, on the edge of the tribal belt, one polio worker, Noor Khan, said he quit work on Tuesday once news of the attacks in Karachi and Peshawar filtered in.


“We were told to stop immediately,” he said by phone.


Still, the Pakistani government has engaged considerable political and financial capital in fighting polio. President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa have been at the forefront of immunization drives. With the help of international donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they have mounted a huge vaccination campaign aimed at up to 35 million children younger than 5, usually in three-day bursts that can involve 225,000 health workers.


The plan seeks to have every child in Pakistan immunized at least four times per year, although in the hardest-hit areas one child could be reached as many as 12 times in a year.


Declan Walsh reported from Islamabad, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Zia ur-Rehman from Karachi, Pakistan.



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Thai Buddhist Monks Struggle to Stay Relevant


Giulio Di Sturco for the International Herald Tribune


Young monks rehearsed an evening candlelight ceremony at Wat Chedi Luang in Chiang Mai, Thailand. More Photos »







BAAN PA CHI, Thailand — The monks of this northern Thai village no longer perform one of the defining rituals of Buddhism, the early-morning walk through the community to collect food. Instead, the temple’s abbot dials a local restaurant and has takeout delivered.




“Most of the time, I stay inside,” said the abbot, Phra Nipan Marawichayo, who is one of only two monks living in what was once a thriving temple. “Values have changed with time.”


The gilded roofs of Buddhist temples are as much a part of Thailand’s landscape as rice paddies and palm trees. The temples were once the heart of village life, serving as meeting places, guesthouses and community centers. But many have become little more than ornaments of the past, marginalized by a shortage of monks and an increasingly secular society.


“Consumerism is now the Thai religion,” said Phra Paisan Visalo, one of the country’s most respected monks. “In the past, people went to temple on every holy day. Now, they go to shopping malls.”


The meditative lifestyle of the monkhood offers little allure to the iPhone generation. The number of monks and novices relative to the population has fallen by more than half over the last three decades. There are five monks and novices for every 1,000 people today, compared with 11 in 1980, when governments began keeping nationwide records.


Although it is still relatively rare for temples to close, many districts are so short on monks that abbots here in northern Thailand recruit across the border from impoverished Myanmar, where monasteries are overflowing with novices.


Many societies have witnessed a gradual shift from the sacred toward the profane as they have modernized. What is striking in Thailand is the compressed time frame, a vertiginous pace of change brought on by the country’s rapid economic rise. In a relatively short time, the local Buddhist monk has gone from being a moral authority, teacher and community leader fulfilling important spiritual and secular roles to someone whose job is often limited to presiding over periodic ceremonies.


Phra Anil Sakya, the assistant secretary to the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand, the country’s governing body of Buddhism, said that Thai Buddhism needed “new packaging” to match the country’s fast-paced lifestyle. (Phra is the honorific title for monks in Thailand.)


“People today love high-speed things,” he said in an interview. “We didn’t have instant noodles in the past, but now people love them. For the sake of presentation, we have to change the way we teach Buddhism and make it easy and digestible like instant noodles.”


He says Buddhist leaders should make Buddhism more relevant by emphasizing the importance of meditation as a salve for stressful urban lifestyles. The teaching of Buddhism, or dharma, does not need to be tethered to the temple, he said.


“You can get dharma in department stores, or even over the Internet,” he said.


But Phra Paisan is markedly more pessimistic about what is sometimes called “fast-food Buddhism.” He is encouraged by the embrace of meditation among many affluent Thais and the healthy sales of Buddhist books, but he sees basic incompatibilities between modern life and Buddhism.


His life is a portrait of traditional Buddhist asceticism. He lives in a remote part of central Thailand in a stilt house on a lake, connected to the shore by a rickety wooden bridge. He has no furniture, sleeps on the floor and is surrounded by books. He requested that a reporter meet him for an interview at 6 a.m., before he led his fellow monks in prayer, when mist on the lake was still evaporating.


Monks are suffering a decline in “quantity and quality,” he said, partly because young people are drawn to the riches and fast-paced life of the cities. The monastic education of young boys, once widespread in rural areas, has been almost entirely replaced by the secular education provided by the state.


Poypiti Amatatham contributed reporting from Bangkok.



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Nielsen to buy Arbitron for about $1.26B






NEW YORK (AP) — Nielsen, the dominant source of TV ratings, on Tuesday said it had agreed to buy Arbitron for about $ 1.26 billion to expand into radio measurement.


Arbitron pays 70,000 people to carry around gadgets that register what stations they’re listening to. Since Nielsen also collects cash register data, CEO David Calhoun said buying Arbitron will let Nielsen be a one-stop shop for advertisers who want to know how the radio advertising they buy affects product sales.






The acquisition will let Nielsen expand the amount of media consumption it tracks by about 2 hours per person per day to 7 hours, Calhoun said in an interview.


“You don’t find many mediums that allow for that kind of increase,” Calhoun said.


Arbitron’s operations are mainly in the U.S., while Nielsen operates globally. Calhoun said another major driver for the deal is that Nielsen wants to spread Arbitron’s tracking technology to other countries.


Evercore Partners analyst Douglas Arthur said Nielsen doesn’t need traditional radio measurement to grow, but Arbitron seemed like a willing seller, and it will be a “nice complementary but not ‘must have’ platform.”


Nielsen Holdings N.V. said it will pay $ 48 per share, which is a 26 percent premium to Arbitron’s Monday closing price of $ 38.04. Shares of Arbitron, which is based in Columbia, Md., jumped $ 8.99, or 23.6 percent, to close at $ 47.03.


Nielsen, which went public in January 2011, has headquarters in the Netherlands and New York. Its stock added $ 1.30, or 4.4 percent, to close at $ 30.92.


Nielsen said it expects the deal to add about 13 cents per share to its adjusted earnings a year after closing and about 19 cents per share to adjusted earnings two years after closing.


Abitron’s chief operating officer, Sean Creamer, is set to take over as CEO from William Kerr on Jan. 1. Calhoun said he hoped Creamer would remain with Nielsen after the deal closes.


Nielsen said it has a financing commitment for the transaction.


Nielsen was the prime source of audience ratings in the early days of radio, thanks to a device similar to Arbitron’s People Meter. The Audimeter was attached to the radio set. The company’s focus shifted to TV measurement in the 1950s.


On Monday, Nielsen announced a deal with Twitter to measure how much U.S. TV watchers tweet about the shows they’re watching. The “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating” will debut in the fall.


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A&M's Johnny Football is AP's Player of the Year


Johnny Manziel ran for almost 1,700 yards and 30 touchdowns as a dual-threat quarterback his senior year of high school at Kerrville Tivy.


Who would have thought he'd be even more impressive at Texas A&M when pitted against the defenses of the Southeastern Conference?


On Tuesday, Manziel picked up another major award for his spectacular debut season. He was voted The Associated Press Player of the Year. As with the Heisman Trophy and Davey O'Brien Award that Manziel already won, the QB nicknamed Johnny Football is the first freshman to collect the AP award.


Manziel's 31 votes were more than twice that of second place finisher Manti Te'o, Notre Dame's start linebacker. He is the third straight Heisman-winning quarterback to receive the honor, following Robert Griffin III and Cam Newton.


Manziel erased initial doubts about his ability when he ran for 60 yards and a score in his first game against Florida.


"I knew I could run the ball, I did it a lot in high school," Manziel said in an interview with the AP. "It is just something that you don't get a chance to see in the spring. Quarterbacks aren't live in the spring. You don't get to tackle. You don't get to evade some of the sacks that you would in normal game situations. So I feel like when I was able to avoid getting tackled, it opened some people's eyes a little bit more."


The 6-foot-1 Manziel threw for 3,419 yards and 24 touchdowns and ran for 1,181 yards and 19 more scores to help the Aggies win 10 games for the first time since 1998 — and in their inaugural SEC year, too.


Ryan Tannehill, Manziel's predecessor now with the Dolphins after being drafted eighth overall this season, saw promise from the young quarterback last year when he was redshirted. But even he is surprised at how quickly things came together for Manziel.


"It's pretty wild. I always thought he had that playmaking ability, that something special where if somebody came free, he can make something exciting happen," Tannehill said. "I wasn't really sure if, I don't think anyone was sure if he was going to be able to carry that throughout an SEC season, and he's shocked the world and he did it."


After Manziel sat out as a redshirt in 2011, Texas A&M's scheduled season-opener against Louisiana Tech this year was postponed because of Hurricane Isaac. That left him to get his first taste of live defense in almost two years against Florida.


He responded well, helping the Aggies race to a 17-7 lead early using both his arm and his feet. The Gators shut down Manziel and A&M's offense in the second half and Texas A&M lost 20-17.


But Manziel's performance was enough for Texas A&M's coaching staff to realize that his scrambling ability was going to be a big part of what the Aggies could do this season.


"The first half really showed that I was a little bit more mobile than we had seen throughout the spring," Manziel said. "Me and (then-offensive coordinator) Kliff Kingsbury sat down and really said: 'Hey we can do some things with my feet as well as throwing the ball.' And it added a little bit of a new dimension."


Manziel knew that the biggest adjustment from playing in high school to college would be the speed of the game. Exactly how quick players in the SEC were was still a jolt to the quarterback.


"The whole first drive I was just seeing how fast they really flew to the ball and I felt like they just moved a whole lot faster," he said of the Florida game. "It was different than what I was used to, different than what I was used to in high school. So it was just having to learn quick and adjust on the fly."


He did just that and started piling up highlight reel material by deftly avoiding would-be tacklers to help the Aggies run off five consecutive wins after that.


His storybook ride hit a roadblock when he threw a season-high three interceptions in a 24-19 loss to LSU. But Manziel used it as a learning experience, taking to heart some advice he received from Kingsbury.


"He just told me to have a plan every time, before every snap," Manziel said. "Make sure you have a plan on what you want to do and where you want to go with the ball."


"I feel like as the year went on, I just learned the offense more and knew exactly where I wanted to go, instead of maybe evading the blitz and just taking off running for the first down instead of hitting a hot route or throwing it underneath to an open guy and doing things a lot simpler and cleaner."


The Aggies and Manziel rebounded from the loss to LSU by winning their last five games, highlighted by their stunning 29-24 upset of top-ranked Alabama on Nov. 10.


By the time Manziel wrapped up a 253-yard passing and 92-yard rushing performance to lead Texas A&M to the victory in Tuscaloosa, you could hardly call him a freshman anymore.


"You keep growing and growing every week," he said. "By the time I played Alabama I had a much better grasp of the game than I did in the first one."


The 4,600 yards of total offense Manziel gained in 12 games broke the SEC record for total yards in a season. The record was previously held by 2010 Heisman winner Newton, who needed 14 games to pile up 4,327 yards. The output also made him the first freshman, first player in the SEC and fifth player overall to throw for 3,000 yards and run for 1,000 in a season.


Manziel, who turned 20 two days before taking home the Heisman, has been so busy he hasn't had a second to step back and digest the historical significance of his accomplishments this season.


He's far more concerned with helping the Aggies extend their winning streak to six games with a win over Oklahoma on Jan. 4 in the Cotton Bowl.


"I think it will happen after the bowl game and after the season is completely over," he said. "I'm just ready for it to die down a little bit and get back into a practice routine where we get better and hopefully do what we want to do in the bowl game."


He'll have to do it without his mentor Kingsbury, who left A&M last week to become coach at Texas Tech, where he starred at quarterback not that long ago. Manziel said is happy Kingsbury got to return to his alma matter, but is still adjusting to the idea of playing without him.


"I'm the happiest guy on the face of the earth for him," Manziel said, speaking from California where he appeared on the "Tonight Show" Monday evening. "I think he deserves it with how hard he's worked this year to get us where we were. It's bittersweet though, because I'd like him to be here for the entire time that I'm here."


Manziel is eager to get back on the field for the Cotton Bowl and is focused on helping the offense pick up where it left off in the regular-season finale.


"Even though Kliff Kingsbury's not here anymore, we just need to continue to get better and do what we do," Manziel said. "Push tempo, go fast and be the high-flying offense that we have been all year."


_____


AP Sports Writer Steven Wine contributed to this story from Miami.


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Boehner Plan Addresses Taxes but Delays Fight Over Spending Cuts


Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times


Speaker John A. Boehner, leaving a news conference Tuesday, proposes allowing tax rates to rise only on incomes over $1 million.







WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders struggled on Tuesday night to rally their colleagues around a backup measure to ease the sting of a looming fiscal crisis by allowing tax rates to rise only on incomes over $1 million.




The plan would leave in place across-the-board spending cuts to military and domestic programs that Republicans have been warning could have dire consequences, especially to national defense.


Speaker John A. Boehner unveiled what he dubbed “Plan B” less than 24 hours after President Obama offered a more comprehensive deal that would raise tax rates on incomes over $400,000 and, over 10 years, produce $1.2 trillion in tax increases and cut $930 billion in spending.


Mr. Boehner pledged to continue negotiating on a broad deficit-reduction deal but called the president’s plan unbalanced and insufficient.


“What we’ve offered meets the definition of a balanced approach, but the president is not there yet,” Mr. Boehner said Tuesday.


The Boehner proposal was intended to raise the pressure on Democrats to compromise further still by embracing a tax increase on millionaires first pushed by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader.


Confronted with her past support for raising income taxes only on millionaires, Ms. Pelosi said that effort had merely been “a plan to smoke out” Republicans.


But a protracted meeting of the House Republican Conference on Tuesday night made it clear that passage of Mr. Boehner’s proposal would be difficult. Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he was not sure he could support a bill that would allow $500 billion in military cuts over the next 10 years and indicated that other Republicans on his committee shared his concern.


Representative John Fleming, a conservative Republican from Louisiana, dismissed the speaker’s plan as a pointless “messaging exercise.”


“Why go on record raising taxes on anybody if it won’t cut spending and won’t even become law?” he asked. “I haven’t found a way of supporting that.”


Ms. Pelosi was leaning hard on House Democrats to stay united in their opposition. If she succeeds, the speaker could afford about only 18 Republican defections, fewer than he has had on any major fiscal vote since Republicans took control two years ago.


Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta was unsparing on Tuesday in his criticism of lawmakers resisting a deal to stop the military cuts.


“It is unacceptable to me that men and women who put their lives on the line in distant lands have to worry about whether those here in Washington can effectively support them,” Mr. Panetta said in a speech at the National Press Club. “We’re down to the wire now. In these next few days, Congress needs to make the right decisions to avoid the fiscal disaster that awaits us.”


Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, an influential Republican, said the Pentagon cuts would damage not only military readiness but also the fragile economy.


House Republican leaders on Tuesday night sought to assess whether the speaker’s proposal could be brought to the House floor on Thursday. Under that plan, the House would take up take up tax legislation and consider two amendments. The first would mirror a Senate-passed bill to extend the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for incomes below $250,000. That would be expected to fail, as a show to the president that his initial offer cannot pass.


A second amendment would raise that threshold to incomes below $1 million. The House may also vote on some middle ground, like the president’s $400,000.


Mr. Boehner told House Republicans that he would also like the bill to include provisions to prevent the existing alternative minimum tax from expanding to impact more of the middle class and to extend existing low tax rates on inherited estates.


But he said the bill would not cancel across-the-board spending cuts — known as sequestration — that are scheduled to total $110 billion in 2013 and more than $1 trillion over 10 years.


Republicans would resume the fight for broad spending cuts, especially to entitlement programs like Medicare, in late January or February, when the government will face raising its borrowing limit and when, many Republicans believe, they will have much more leverage than they do now.


The White House came out strongly against the speaker’s plan. The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said that it could not pass the Senate and “therefore will not protect middle-class families” from large tax increases schedule to begin on Jan. 1.


Jennifer Steinhauer and Thom Shanker contributed reporting.



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