‘Liquipod’ takes smartphone waterproofing on the road

Amid a sea of Ultra-HD TVs, smart washing machines and various other gadgets, waterproofing expert Liquipel took to CES 2013 to make two announcements. The firm, which adds an interior and exterior waterproof nanocoating to cell phones, revealed a new and improved waterproofing material that is even more effective than its first-generation solution. Liquipel also unveiled its new “Liquipod,” a portable machine that can waterproof gadgets anywhere in the world while device owners wait, according to TechCrunch. Previously, Liquipel required customers to ship their handsets to the company’s offices for treatment.

[More from BGR: iPhone 5 now available with unlimited service, no contract on Walmart’s $ 45 Straight Talk plan]

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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Steroids fallout: No BB Hall for Bonds, Clemens

NEW YORK (AP) — No one was elected to the Hall of Fame this year. When voters closed the doors to Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa, they also shut out everybody else.

For only the second time in four decades, baseball writers failed to give any player the 75 percent required for induction to Cooperstown, sending a powerful signal that stars of the Steroids Era will be held to a different standard.

All the awards and accomplishments collected over long careers by Bonds, Clemens and Sosa could not offset suspicions those feats were boosted by performance-enhancing drugs.

Voters also denied entry Wednesday to fellow newcomers Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza and Curt Schilling, along with holdovers Jack Morris, Jeff Bagwell and Lee Smith.

Among the most honored players of their generation, these standouts won't find their images among the 300 bronze plaques on the oak walls in Cooperstown, where — at least for now — the doors appear to be bolted shut on anyone tainted by PEDs.

"After what has been written and said over the last few years I'm not overly surprised," Clemens said in a statement he posted on Twitter.

Bonds, Clemens and Sosa retired after the 2007 season. They were eligible for the Hall for the first time and have up to 14 more years on the writers' ballot.

"Curt Schilling made a good point, everyone was guilty. Either you used PEDs, or you did nothing to stop their use," Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt said in an email to The Associated Press after this year's vote was announced. "This generation got rich. Seems there was a price to pay."

Biggio, 20th on the career list with 3,060 hits, appeared on 68.2 percent of the 569 ballots, the highest total but 39 votes shy. The three newcomers with the highest profiles failed to come close to even majority support, with Clemens at 37.6 percent, Bonds at 36.2 and Sosa at 12.5.

Other top vote-getters were Morris (67.7), Jeff Bagwell (59.6), Piazza (57.8), Tim Raines (52.2), Lee Smith (47.8) and Schilling (38.8).

"I'm kind of glad that nobody got in this year," Hall of Famer Al Kaline said. "I feel honored to be in the Hall of Fame. And I would've felt a little uneasy sitting up there on the stage, listening to some of these new guys talk about how great they were. ... I don't know how great some of these players up for election would've been without drugs. But to me, it's cheating."

At ceremonies in Cooperstown on July 28, the only inductees will be three men who died more than 70 years ago: Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, umpire Hank O'Day and barehanded catcher Deacon White. They were chosen last month by the 16-member panel considering individuals from the era before integration in 1947.

"It is a dark day," said Jose Canseco, the former AL MVP who was among the first players to admit using steroids. "I think the players should organize some type of lawsuit against major league baseball or the writers. It's ridiculous. Most of these players really have no evidence against them. They've never tested positive or they've cleared themselves like Roger Clemens."

It was the eighth time the BBWAA failed to elect any players. There were four fewer votes than last year and five members submitted blank ballots.

"With 53 percent you can get to the White House, but you can't get to Cooperstown," BBWAA secretary-treasurer Jack O'Connell said. "It's the 75 percent that makes it difficult."

There have been calls for the voting to be taken away from the writers and be given to a more diverse electorate that would include players and broadcasters. The Hall says it is content with the process, which began in 1936.

"It takes time for history to sort itself out, and I'm not surprised we had a shutout today," Hall President Jeff Idelson said. "I wish we had an electee. I will say that, but I'm not surprised given how volatile this era has been in terms of assessing the qualities and the quantities of the statistics and the impact on the game these players have had."

Bonds, baseball's only seven-time Most Valuable Player, hit 762 home runs, including a record 73 in 2001. He was indicted on charges he lied to a grand jury in 2003 when he denied using PEDs but a jury two years ago failed to reach a verdict on three counts he made false statements and convicted him on one obstruction of justice count, finding he gave an evasive answer.

"It is unimaginable that the best player to ever play the game would not be a unanimous first-ballot selection," said Jeff Borris of the Beverly Hills Sports Council, Bonds' longtime agent.

Clemens, the only seven-time Cy Young Award winner, is third in career strikeouts (4,672) and ninth in wins (354). He was acquitted last year on one count of obstruction of Congress, three counts of making false statements to Congress and two counts of perjury, all stemming from his denials of drug use.

"To those who did take the time to look at the facts," Clemens said, "we very much appreciate it."

Sosa, eighth with 609 home runs, was among those who tested positive in MLB's 2003 anonymous survey, The New York Times reported in 2009. He told a congressional committee in 2005 that he never took illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

Since 1961, the only years the writers didn't elect a candidate had been when Yogi Berra topped the 1971 vote by appearing on 67 percent of the ballots cast and when Phil Niekro headed the 1996 ballot at 68 percent — both got in the following years. The other BBWAA elections without a winner were in 1945, 1946, 1950, 1958 and 1960.

Morris will make his final ballot appearance next year, when fellow pitchers Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine are eligible for the first time along with slugger Frank Thomas.

"Next year, I think you'll have a rather large class, and this year, for whatever reasons, you had a couple of guys come really close," Commissioner Bud Selig said at the owners' meetings in Paradise Valley, Ariz. "This is not to be voted to make sure that somebody gets in every year. It's to be voted on to make sure that they're deserving. I respect the writers as well as the Hall itself. This idea that this somehow diminishes the Hall or baseball is just ridiculous in my opinion."

Players' union head Michael Weiner called the vote "unfortunate, if not sad."

"To ignore the historic accomplishments of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, for example, is hard to justify. Moreover, to penalize players exonerated in legal proceedings — and others never even implicated — is simply unfair. The Hall of Fame is supposed to be for the best players to have ever played the game. Several such players were denied access to the Hall today. Hopefully this will be rectified by future voting."

The BBWAA election rules say "voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played."

An Associated Press survey of 112 eligible voters conducted in late November after the ballot was announced indicated Bonds, Clemens and Sosa would fall well short of 50 percent. The big three drew even less support than that as the debate raged over who was Hall worthy.

Voters are writers who have been members of the BBWAA for 10 consecutive years at any point.

BBWAA president Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle said she didn't vote for Bonds, Clemens or Sosa.

"The evidence for steroid use is too strong," she said.

As for Biggio, "I'm surprised he didn't get in."

Mark McGwire, 10th on the career home run list with 583, received 16.9 percent on his seventh try, down from 19.5 last year. He got 23.7 percent in 2010 — a vote before he admitted using steroids and human growth hormone.

Rafael Palmeiro, among just four players with 500 homers and 3,000 hits along with Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Eddie Murray, received 8.8 percent in his third try, down from 12.6 percent last year. Palmeiro received a 10-day suspension in 2005 for a positive test for performance-enhancing drugs, claiming it was due to a vitamin vial given to him by teammate Miguel Tejada.

MLB.com's Hal Bodley, the former baseball columnist for USA Today, said Biggio and others paid the price for other players using PEDs.

"They got caught in the undertow of the steroids thing," he said.

Bodley said this BBWAA vote was a "loud and clear" message on the steroids issue. He said he couldn't envision himself voting for stars linked to drugs.

"We've a forgiving society, I know that," he said. "But I have too great a passion for the sport."

NOTES: There were four write-in votes for career hits leader Pete Rose, who never appeared on the ballot because of his lifetime ban that followed an investigation of his gambling while manager of the Cincinnati Reds. ... Two-time NL MVP Dale Murphy received 18.6 percent in his 15th and final appearance. ... At the July 28 ceremonies, the Hall also will honor Lou Gehrig and Rogers Hornsby among a dozen players who never received formal inductions because of restrictions during World War II. ... Piazza has a book due out next month that could change the view of voters before the next election.

___

AP Sports Writers Dan Gelston, Mike Fitzpatrick, John Marshall and Ben Walker contributed to this report.

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Obama’s Pick for Treasury Is Said to Be His Chief of Staff

WASHINGTON — With his choice of Jacob J. Lew to be the secretary of Treasury, President Obama on Thursday will complete the transformation of his economic team from the big-name economists and financial firefighters hired four years ago to budget negotiators ready for the next fiscal fights in Congress.

If confirmed by the Senate, the 57-year-old Mr. Lew — Mr. Obama’s current chief of staff and former budget director — would become the president’s second Treasury secretary, succeeding Timothy F. Geithner, who was the last remaining principal from the original economic team that took office at the height of the global crisis in January 2009.

While the team is changing, so far it is made up entirely of men who have been part of the administration since its first months. Gene B. Sperling, like Mr. Lew a veteran of the Clinton administration, is expected to remain as director of the White House National Economic Council. Alan B. Krueger, a former Treasury economist, continues as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and Jeffrey D. Zients, a former business executive, as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.

That composition gives Mr. Obama a high degree of comfort with his economic advisers, who have experience in the budget struggles that have occupied the administration since Republicans took control of the House two years ago. Those struggles will resume later this month. Yet the continuity also plays into criticism that the president is too insular and insufficiently open to outside voices and fresh eyes in the White House.

Adding to a scarcity of female advisers among Mr. Obama’s top aides, Hilda L. Solis, the secretary of labor for four years, announced on Wednesday that she would be resigning, following the most prominent female Cabinet member, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, out of the administration.

Separately, administration officials let it be known on Wednesday that several Cabinet members will remain in their jobs: Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, who is expected to stay through the full adoption of the 2010 health care law in 2014; Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general; and Eric K. Shinseki, the secretary of veterans affairs.

If Mr. Lew is confirmed in time, his first test as Treasury secretary could come as soon as next month, when the administration and Congressional Republicans are expected to face off over increasing the nation’s debt ceiling, which is the legal limit on the amount that the government can borrow. Mr. Obama has said he will not negotiate over raising that limit, which was often lifted routinely in the past, but Republican leaders have said they will refuse to support an increase unless he agrees to an equal amount of spending cuts, particularly to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Mr. Lew was passed over for Mr. Obama’s economic team four years ago, when Mr. Obama instead chose Lawrence H. Summers, a former Harvard University president and Treasury secretary, as director of the National Economic Council. Mrs. Clinton then hired Mr. Lew at the State Department, and in late 2010 — over the objections of Mrs. Clinton, who had come to rely on Mr. Lew — Mr. Obama made him budget director, the same post Mr. Lew had held late in the Clinton administration.

Mr. Lew in the 1980s was a Democratic adviser to the House speaker then, Thomas P. O’Neill, participating in fiscal talks with the Reagan administration. Mr. Lew is known for his low-key style and organizational skills.

While Mr. Lew has much less experience than Mr. Geithner in international economics and financial markets, he would come to the job with far more expertise in fiscal policy than Mr. Geithner did. That shift in skills reflects the changed times, when emphasis has shifted from a global financial crisis to the budget fights with Republicans in Congress.

The partisan tension suggests that Mr. Lew will be questioned closely by Senate Republicans in confirmation hearings.

But, Republicans have not signaled the kind of opposition they put up to some of Mr. Obama’s other potential nominations.

Mr. Lew’s departure as chief of staff would create a vacancy for what would be Mr. Obama’s fifth White House chief of staff, a turnover rate that is in contrast with the stability atop Treasury the last four years with Mr. Geithner. The leading candidates are said to be Denis McDonough, currently the deputy national security adviser in the White House, and Ronald A. Klain, a former chief of staff to two vice presidents, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Al Gore.

Before joining the Obama administration, Mr. Lew spent a brief period in the financial sector, at Citigroup, first as managing director of Citi Global Wealth Management and then as chief operating officer of Citigroup Alternative Investments.

By contrast, Mr. Geithner had been president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, which includes overseeing Wall Street. For the financial industry, Mr. Lew is a largely a blank slate.

“While he can undoubtedly learn the material on the job, we question whether he has sufficient relationships with the banking industry in the U.S. and abroad, which can be critical during a financial crisis,” Brian Gardner, head of Washington research for the investment banking firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, wrote to clients on Wednesday.

But Michael Schein, who worked with Mr. Lew at Citigroup and is now head of a nonprofit financial services organization, Accion, countered: “People in the business community like to deal with people in Washington who they can trust. I think Jack already does, and will do, very well with Wall Street and with business leaders because he is a very, very straight shooter.”

Mr. Lew has a reputation as a fiscal progressive who, like Mr. Obama, is eager to protect Medicaid and other antipoverty programs from deep cuts. But advocates for tighter financial regulation of Wall Street question whether he is too conservative.

The question is relevant because major regulations under the 2010 Dodd-Frank law remain to be put into effect in Mr. Obama’s second term.

“He appears to share a Wall Street mentality, particularly when it comes to financial reform,” said Dennis M. Kelleher, the president of Better Markets, a Washington-based nonprofit. “Financial reform is all about making the banking system safer and preventing more taxpayer bailouts.”  

Annie Lowrey contributed reporting.

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Economic Scene: Health Care and Pursuit of Profit Make a Poor Mix

Thirty years ago, Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered an interesting pattern in the use of sedatives at nursing homes in the south of the state.

Patients entering church-affiliated nonprofit homes were prescribed drugs roughly as often as those entering profit-making “proprietary” institutions. But patients in proprietary homes received, on average, more than four times the dose of patients at nonprofits.

Writing about his colleagues’ research in his 1988 book “The Nonprofit Economy,” the economist Burton Weisbrod provided a straightforward explanation: “differences in the pursuit of profit.” Sedatives are cheap, Mr. Weisbrod noted. “Less expensive than, say, giving special attention to more active patients who need to be kept busy.”

This behavior was hardly surprising. Hospitals run for profit are also less likely than nonprofit and government-run institutions to offer services like home health care and psychiatric emergency care, which are not as profitable as open-heart surgery.

A shareholder might even applaud the creativity with which profit-seeking institutions go about seeking profit. But the consequences of this pursuit might not be so great for other stakeholders in the system — patients, for instance. One study found that patients’ mortality rates spiked when nonprofit hospitals switched to become profit-making, and their staff levels declined.

These profit-maximizing tactics point to a troubling conflict of interest that goes beyond the private delivery of health care. They raise a broader, more important question: How much should we rely on the private sector to satisfy broad social needs?

From health to pensions to education, the United States relies on private enterprise more than pretty much every other advanced, industrial nation to provide essential social services. The government pays Medicare Advantage plans to deliver health care to aging Americans. It provides a tax break to encourage employers to cover workers under 65.

Businesses devote almost 6 percent of the nation’s economic output to pay for health insurance for their employees. This amounts to nine times similar private spending on health benefits across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, on average. Private plans cover more than a third of pension benefits. The average for 30 countries in the O.E.C.D. is just over one-fifth.

We let the private sector handle tasks other countries would never dream of moving outside the government’s purview. Consider bail bondsmen and their rugged sidekicks, the bounty hunters.

American TV audiences may reminisce fondly about Lee Majors in “The Fall Guy” chasing bad guys in a souped-up GMC truck — a cheap way to get felons to court. People in most other nations see them as an undue commercial intrusion into the criminal justice system that discriminates against the poor.

Our reliance on private enterprise to provide the most essential services stems, in part, from a more narrow understanding of our collective responsibility to provide social goods. Private American health care has stood out for decades among industrial nations, where public universal coverage has long been considered a right of citizenship. But our faith in private solutions also draws on an ingrained belief that big government serves too many disparate objectives and must cater to too many conflicting interests to deliver services fairly and effectively.

Our trust appears undeserved, however. Our track record suggests that handing over responsibility for social goals to private enterprise is providing us with social goods of lower quality, distributed more inequitably and at a higher cost than if government delivered or paid for them directly.

The government’s most expensive housing support program — it will cost about $140 billion this year — is a tax break for individuals to buy homes on the private market.

According to the Tax Policy Center, this break will benefit only 20 percent of mostly well-to-do taxpayers, and most economists agree that it does nothing to further its purported goal of increasing homeownership. Tax breaks for private pensions also mostly benefit the wealthy. And 401(k) plans are riskier and costlier to administer than Social Security.

From the high administrative costs incurred by health insurers to screen out sick patients to the array of expensive treatments prescribed by doctors who earn more money for every treatment they provide, our private health care industry provides perhaps the clearest illustration of how the profit motive can send incentives astray.

By many objective measures, the mostly private American system delivers worse value for money than every other in the developed world. We spend nearly 18 percent of the nation’s economic output on health care and still manage to leave tens of millions of Americans without adequate access to care.

Britain gets universal coverage for 10 percent of gross domestic product. Germany and France for 12 percent. What’s more, our free market for health services produces no better health than the public health care systems in other advanced nations. On some measures — infant mortality, for instance — it does much worse.

In a way, private delivery of health care misleads Americans about the financial burdens they must bear to lead an adequate existence. If they were to consider the additional private spending on health care as a form of tax — an indispensable cost to live a healthy life — the nation’s tax bill would rise to about 31 percent from 25 percent of the nation’s G.D.P. — much closer to the 34 percent average across the O.E.C.D.

A quarter of a century ago, a belief swept across America that we could reduce the ballooning costs of the government’s health care entitlements just by handing over their management to the private sector. Private companies would have a strong incentive to identify and wipe out wasteful treatment. They could encourage healthy lifestyles among beneficiaries, lowering use of costly care. Competition for government contracts would keep the overall price down.

We now know this didn’t work as advertised. Competition wasn’t as robust as hoped. Health maintenance organizations didn’t keep costs in check, and they spent heavily on administration and screening to enroll only the healthiest, most profitable beneficiaries.

One study of Medicare spending found that the program saved no money by relying on H.M.O.’s. Another found that moving Medicaid recipients into H.M.O.’s increased the average cost per beneficiary by 12 percent with no improvement in the quality of care for the poor. Two years ago, President Obama’s health care law cut almost $150 billion from Medicare simply by reducing payments to private plans that provide similar care to plain vanilla Medicare at a higher cost.

Today, again, entitlements are at the center of the national debate. Our elected officials are consumed by slashing a budget deficit that is expected to balloon over coming decades. With both Democrats and Republicans unwilling to raise taxes on the middle class, the discussion is quickly boiling down to how deeply entitlements must be cut.

We may want to broaden the debate. The relevant question is how best we can serve our social needs at the lowest possible cost. One answer is that we have a lot of room to do better. Improving the delivery of social services like health care and pensions may be possible without increasing the burden on American families, simply by removing the profit motive from the equation.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @portereduardo

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News Analysis: Obama Nominees in Step on Light Footprint

Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

President Obama named John O. Brennan, right, as his choice for C.I.A. director and chose Chuck Hagel, left, to be his next defense secretary.

WASHINGTON — With the selection of a new national security team deeply suspicious of the wisdom of American military interventions around the world, President Obama appears to have ended, at least for the moment, many of the internal administration debates that played out in the Situation Room over the past four years.

He has sided, without quite saying so, with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s view — argued, for the most part, in the confines of the White House — that caution, covert action and a modest American military footprint around the world fit the geopolitical moment. The question is whether that approach will fit the coming challenges of stopping Iran’s nuclear program and the potential collapse of Syria.

Gone for the second term are the powerful personalities, and more hawkish voices, that pressed Mr. Obama to pursue the surge in Afghanistan in 2009, a gamble championed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Robert M. Gates, the former secretary of defense. Gone from the C.I.A. is the man who urged Mr. Obama to keep troops there longer, David H. Petraeus.

The new team will include two Vietnam veterans, Senator John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, who bear the scars of a war that ended when the president was a teenager, and a counterterrorism chief, John O. Brennan, who helped devise the “light footprint” strategy of limiting American interventions, whenever possible, to drones, cyberattacks and Special Operations forces. All are advocates of those low-cost, low-American-casualty tools, and all have sounded dismissive of attempts to send thousands of troops to rewire foreign nations as wasteful and ill-conceived.

Most important to Mr. Obama and his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, all three are likely to accommodate themselves, in ways their predecessors often did not, to a White House that has insisted on running national security policy from the West Wing.

“One of the characteristics of this administration has been that decision-making has been centered in the White House,” said Dennis B. Ross, a Mideast expert who left the Obama administration a year ago but never wandered far from some of its key debates. “And most second-term administrations don’t change their sociology.”

But if they grab hold of the national security levers after what many predict will be, for Mr. Hagel and Mr. Brennan, bruising confirmation hearings, they will confront problems that may test whether the light footprint carries enough weight.

“Issues 1 and 2 will be cutting the defense budget and confronting Iran,” said Michael Mandelbaum, a political scientist whose 2010 book, “The Frugal Superpower,” dealt with the challenge of trying to manage the world on the cheap. “And then you will have issues like Syria, which test the question of whether you can manage to control a dangerous situation with no boots on the ground — and unless something dramatic changes, there will be no boots.”

Mr. Hagel, who was both a senator and a cellphone entrepreneur, has long been a critic of Pentagon bloat. But others with business experience, like Donald Rumsfeld, have believed they could bring market discipline to one of the country’s most sprawling enterprises, only to discover that killing off unneeded weapons systems has almost nothing to do with business decisions and everything to do with the politics of Congressional districts and campaign funds.

Mr. Obama’s bet was that by appointing a Republican, he will better his chances of overcoming those obstacles. What he discovered even before announcing Mr. Hagel’s appointment is that the former senator burned many bridges with his Republican colleagues, in part with his outspoken opposition to the Iraq war, despite voting in 2002 to authorize military action, and to the 2008 surge when President George W. Bush was still in office.

“If the president thinks Chuck Hagel can get him the Republican votes to downsize the Pentagon,” said one former senior aide to Mr. Bush, who declined to speak on the record, “I think he is in for a very rude surprise.”

Then there is Iran, which will be a test for all three men, for different reasons. Mr. Hagel has been particularly vocal about the dangers of a military confrontation with Tehran. While both Mr. Gates and his successor, Leon E. Panetta, expressed similar concerns at various points in the first term, Mr. Hagel’s view is considerably to the left of Mr. Obama’s. The president has, gradually, endorsed “coercive diplomacy,” telling the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March, “As I’ve made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

But Mr. Hagel has opposed unilateral sanctions and suggested that threatening Iran just closes down opportunities for dialogue.

“The key to coercive diplomacy is that the side you are trying to influence is convinced you are willing to follow through on the threat,” said Mr. Ross, who drafted some of those threats. “The president has been clear, but from others there have been mixed messages.”

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AP Exclusive: Richardson pressing NKorean test ban

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Wednesday that his delegation is pressing North Korea to put a moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests and to allow more cell phones and an open Internet for its citizens.

Richardson told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview in Pyongyang that the group is also asking for fair and humane treatment for an American citizen detained in North Korea.

“The citizens of the DPRK (North Korea) will be better off with more cell phones and an active Internet. Those are the three messages we’ve given to a variety of foreign policy officials, scientists” and government officials, Richardson said.

He is accompanied by Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas think tank Director Jared Cohen on what Richardson has called a private, humanitarian trip. Schmidt, who is the highest-profile U.S. business executive to visit North Korea since leader Kim Jong Un took power a year ago, has not spoken publicly about the reasons behind the journey to North Korea.

The high-profile visit comes just weeks after North Korea launched a long-range rocket to send a satellite into space. Washington has condemned the launch as a banned test of missile technology.

Schmidt, who oversaw Google‘s expansion into a global Internet giant, speaks frequently about the importance of providing people around the world with Internet access and technology. Google now has offices in more than 40 countries, including all three of North Korea’s neighbors: Russia, South Korea and China, another country criticized for systematic Internet censorship.

He and Cohen have collaborated on a book about the Internet’s role in shaping society called “The New Digital Age” that comes out in April.

Using science and technology to build North Korea’s beleaguered economy was the highlight of a New Year’s Day speech by leader Kim Jong Un.

New red banners promoting slogans drawn from Kim’s speech line Pyongyang’s snowy streets, and North Koreans are still cramming to study the lengthy speech. It was the first time in 19 years for North Koreans to hear their leader give a New Year’s Day speech. During the rule of late leader Kim Jong Il, state policy was distributed through North Korea’s three main newspapers.

___

Follow AP’s bureau chief for Pyongyang and Seoul at www.twitter.com/newsjean.

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RG3 to have surgery on torn right knee ligament

WASHINGTON (AP) — Robert Griffin III is having surgery Wednesday on a torn ligament in his right knee — and to see if there's a second ligament that also needs to be repaired.

Baylor coach Art Briles confirmed to USA Today and The Associated Press on Tuesday night that the Washington Redskins rookie has a torn lateral collateral ligament. He said the surgery also will determine whether Griffin has damaged the ACL in that knee.

A person close to Griffin, speaking on condition of anonymity because the Redskins have not made an announcement, also confirmed the details surrounding Griffin's injury to the AP.

A torn LCL requires a rehabilitation period of several months, possibly extending into training camp and the start of next season. A torn ACL is a more severe injury, typically requiring nine to 12 months of recovery, although Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson make a remarkable return this season some eight months after tearing an ACL — and nearly broke the NFL's single-season rushing record.

Griffin tore his ACL in the same knee while playing for Baylor in the third game of the 2009 season and missed the rest of the year. He was injured on the opening drive against Northwestern State but kept playing until halftime.

Griffin came back to win the Heisman Trophy two years later, and Briles predicted a similar recovery this time.

"RG3 will be good as new, though. I know that!" Briles said in a text message to the AP.

Griffin sprained the LCL last month against the Baltimore Ravens and missed one game. He returned wearing a bulky black brace for subsequent games and reinjured the knee at least twice in Sunday's playoff loss to the Seattle Seahawks, prompting a national debate over whether coach Mike Shanahan endangered his franchise player's career by not taking him out sooner.

The Redskins said an MRI taken after the game was inconclusive, so Griffin flew to Florida on Tuesday for a more detailed examination conducted by orthopedist James Andrews. Andrews will perform the surgery Wednesday.

Griffin, the No. 2 overall pick, was one of several rookie quarterbacks to make an instant impact on the league this season. He set the NFL record for best season passer rating by a rookie QB and led the Redskins to their first NFC East title in 13 years.

But Griffin also had to leave three games early due to injuries — two because of his knee and one because of a concussion — and missed a fourth altogether because of the knee. Shanahan repeatedly said Griffin had clearance from doctors to return to play, but the coach also said he trusted Griffin's own word when deciding that the rookie should continue during Sunday's game — even though Griffin was clearly struggling after reinjuring the knee in the first quarter.

Griffin remained in the game until the fourth quarter, when he hurt the knee again while fielding a bad shotgun snap.

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AP Sports Writer Stephen Hawkins in Dallas contributed to this report.

___

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

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Online Banking Attacks Were Work of Iran, U.S. Officials Say

SAN FRANCISCO — The attackers hit one American bank after the next. As in so many previous attacks, dozens of online banking sites slowed, hiccupped or ground to a halt before recovering several minutes later.

Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

James A. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington believes that recent online attacks on American banks have been the work of Iran.

But there was something disturbingly different about the wave of online attacks on American banks in recent weeks. Security researchers say that instead of exploiting individual computers, the attackers engineered networks of computers in data centers, transforming the online equivalent of a few yapping Chihuahuas into a pack of fire-breathing Godzillas.

The skill required to carry out attacks on this scale has convinced United States government officials and security researchers that they are the work of Iran, most likely in retaliation for economic sanctions and online attacks by the United States.

“There is no doubt within the U.S. government that Iran is behind these attacks,” said James A. Lewis, a former official in the State and Commerce Departments and a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Mr. Lewis said the amount of traffic flooding American banking sites was “multiple times” the amount that Russia directed at Estonia in a monthlong online assault in 2007 that nearly crippled the Baltic nation.

American officials have not offered any technical evidence to back up their claims, but computer security experts say the recent attacks showed a level of sophistication far beyond that of amateur hackers. Also, the hackers chose to pursue disruption, not money: another earmark of state-sponsored attacks, the experts said.

“The scale, the scope and the effectiveness of these attacks have been unprecedented,” said Carl Herberger, vice president of security solutions at Radware, a security firm that has been investigating the attacks on behalf of banks and cloud service providers. “There have never been this many financial institutions under this much duress.”

Since September, intruders have caused major disruptions to the online banking sites of Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp, PNC, Capital One, Fifth Third Bank, BB&T and HSBC.

They employed DDoS attacks, or distributed denial of service attacks, named because hackers deny customers service by directing large volumes of traffic to a site until it collapses. No bank accounts were breached and no customers’ money was taken.

By using data centers, the attackers are simply keeping up with the times. Companies and consumers are increasingly conducting their business over large-scale “clouds” of hundreds, even thousands, of networked computer servers.

These clouds are run by Amazon and Google, but also by many smaller players who commonly rent them to other companies. It appears the hackers remotely hijacked some of these clouds and used the computing power to take down American banking sites.

“There’s a sense now that attackers are crafting their own private clouds,” either by creating networks of individual machines or by stealing resources wholesale from poorly maintained corporate clouds, said John Kindervag, an analyst at Forrester Research.

How, exactly, attackers are hijacking data centers is still a mystery. Making matters more complex, they have simultaneously introduced another weapon: encrypted DDoS attacks.

Banks encrypt customers’ online transactions for security, but the encryption process consumes system resources. By flooding banking sites with encryption requests, attackers can further slow or cripple sites with fewer requests.

A hacker group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters has claimed in online posts that it was responsible for the attacks.

The group said it attacked the banks in retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad, and pledged to continue its campaign until the video was scrubbed from the Internet. It called the campaign Operation Ababil, a reference to a story in the Koran in which Allah sends swallows to defeat an army of elephants dispatched by the king of Yemen to attack Mecca in A.D. 571.

But American intelligence officials say the group is actually a cover for Iran. They claim Iran is waging the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions and for a series of cyberattacks on its own systems. In the last three years, three sophisticated computer viruses — called Flame, Duqu and Stuxnet — have hit computers in Iran. The New York Times reported last year that the United States, together with Israel, was responsible for Stuxnet, the virus used to destroy centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010.

“It’s a bit of a grudge match,” said Mr. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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Global Update: China Moves to Prevent Spread of Yellow Fever From Africa

In a move that underlines how many Chinese citizens now work in Africa, China’s quarantine officials recently urged greater efforts to make sure that a yellow fever epidemic now raging in Sudan does not come back to China.

Local health authorities were asked to scan all travelers arriving from Sudan for fevers. Chinese citizens planning travel to Sudan were advised to get yellow fever shots. Customs officers were told that containers arriving from Sudan might have stray infected mosquitoes inside.

Sudan’s epidemic is considered the world’s worst in 20 years. Sweden, Britain and other donors have paid for vaccinations. The United States Navy’s laboratory in Egypt has helped with diagnoses.

Estimates of the number of Chinese working in Africa, many in the oil and mining industries or on major construction projects, range from 500,000 to 1 million. Experts on AIDS have previously warned that the workers could become a new means of bringing that disease to China, which has a low H.I.V.-infection rate.

ProMED-mail, a Web site that follows emerging diseases, has tracked reports about the Sudan outbreak, with its moderators adding valuable context. China’s mosquito-killing winters make a large yellow fever outbreak there unlikely, moderators said. But Sudan’s containment efforts are troubled. For example, vaccinated people cannot get cards proving they have had shots, but the cards are reported to be for sale at police checkpoints.

Australia’s now-endemic dengue fever, according to ProMED moderators, may have come from mosquitoes arriving in containers from East Timor.

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Supporters Back Strike at Newspaper in China

James Pomfret/Reuters

Protesters gathered on Monday outside the headquarters of the relatively liberal newspaper Southern Weekend in Guangzhou, China.

BEIJING — Hundreds of people gathered outside the headquarters of a newspaper company in southern China on Monday, intensifying a battle over media censorship that poses a test of the willingness of China’s new leadership to tolerate calls for change.

The demonstration was an outpouring of support for journalists at the relatively liberal newspaper Southern Weekend, who erupted in fury late last week over what they called overbearing interference by local propaganda officials.

At the same time, the embattled newsroom received backing on the Internet from celebrities and other prominent commentators that turned what began as a local censorship dispute into a national display of solidarity.

“Hoping for a spring in this harsh winter,” Li Bingbing, an actress, said to her 19 million followers on a microblog account. Yao Chen, an actress with more than 31 million followers, quoted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

Disputes between media organizations and local party leaders over the limits of reporting and expressions of opinion are common in China, but rarely emerge into public view. This time, calls to support the frustrated journalists spread quickly in Chinese online forums over the weekend, and those who showed up on Monday outside the media offices in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, ran the gamut from high school and university students to retirees.

Many carried banners scrawled with slogans and white and yellow chrysanthemums, a flower that symbolizes mourning. One banner read: “Get rid of censorship. The Chinese people want freedom.” Police officers watched, but did not interfere.

The journalists at Southern Weekend have been calling for the ouster of Tuo Zhen, the top propaganda official in Guangdong Province, who took up his post last May.

They blame him for overseeing a change in a New Year’s editorial that originally called for greater respect for constitutional rights under the headline “China’s Dream, the Dream of Constitutionalism.”

The editorial went through layers of changes and ultimately became one praising the direction of the current political system, in which the Communist Party continues to exercise authority over all aspects of governance.

A well-known entrepreneur, Hung Huang, said online that the actions of Mr. Tuo had “destroyed, overnight, all the credibility the country’s top leadership had labored to re-establish since the 18th Party Congress,” the November gathering in Beijing that was the climax of the leadership transition installing Xi Jinping as Communist Party chief. Mr. Xi, who is also scheduled to assume the nation’s presidency in March, has raised expectations that he might pursue a more open-minded approach to molding China’s economic and political models during his planned decade-long tenure.

But more recently, he has said China must respect its socialist roots, which appeared to be a move to placate conservatives in the party.

One journalist for Southern Weekend said Monday night that talks between the various parties had taken place that afternoon, but there were no results to announce. “The negotiations did not go well at all,” the journalist said in a telephone interview.

Signs had emerged earlier that central propaganda officials were moving to dismantle support for the protest. A fiery editorial by Global Times, a populist newspaper, attacked the rebels at Southern Weekend and essentially accused them of conspiring against the government. Xinhua, the state news agency, and other prominent news sites published the editorial online, apparently at the orders of propaganda officials.

“Propaganda is still on the old road,” said an editor at a party media organization.

But by Tuesday morning, the news portals run by large Internet companies like Sina and Sohu rather than by the state had posted disclaimers with the Global Times editorial, saying the opinions did not reflect those of the companies.

It was on the Internet where the campaign to support the beleaguered journalists was reaching full bloom. Bloggers with large readerships, Han Han and Li Chengpeng, urged defiance of press censorship, and calls spread on microblogs for more rallies outside the newspaper offices on Tuesday.

It was unclear how many employees in the Southern Weekend newsroom had heeded calls by reporters for a strike to display their determination to resist censorship. A local journalist who went by the newspaper’s Beijing office on Monday said the building appeared to be open, but quiet. One employee at the site, where about 30 people work, told the journalist that the office was not on strike.

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing. Mia Li contributed research from Guangzhou, China, and Shi Da from Beijing.

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