Panel Lukewarm on Hepatitis C Screening for Baby Boomers

An influential advisory committee has given only lukewarm support to a government recommendation that all baby boomers be tested for hepatitis C.

In a draft opinion Monday, the United States Preventive Services Task Force said that clinicians may “consider offering” hepatitis C screening to adults born between 1945 and 1965.

That falls short of the recommendation made in August by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all adults in that age group should get a one-time test to see if they are infected.

The task force is made up of outside experts appointed by the government, and its recommendations can in some cases carry more weight than those of the C.D.C. Had hepatitis C screening for baby boomers received a stronger recommendation from the task force, health plans would have been required to pay for it under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, with no charge to the patient.

Some advocates of wider screening said they feared the new opinion would be used by insurers to deny reimbursement for testing and would slow efforts to ferret out hidden cases of hepatitis C at a time when more effective and tolerable treatments are being developed.

The recommendation “could derail the hard work that the C.D.C. has put in in proving the case that it’s smart for baby boomers to get a one-time hepatitis C test,” said Martha B. Saly, director of the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable, a coalition of more than 200 groups dedicated to eradicating hepatitis. Some drug companies, which would benefit from wider screening, are associate members of the round table.

Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, of the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the task force, said differences in the recommendations were merely a matter of degree. “I would say our findings are compatible,” she said.

The C.D.C. declined to comment, saying the opinion was still a draft.

About 3 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C, but 45 percent to 85 percent of them do not know it, according to the C.D.C. The virus can cause scarring of the liver and liver cancer, though typically not until decades after the initial infection, and not in everyone. About 15,000 people a year die from hepatitis C.

The C.D.C. used to recommend screening only for people most likely to be infected: intravenous drug users or people who got blood transfusions before 1992 when testing of donated blood for the virus began.

But a lot of cases were missed because people did not remember risky behaviors from decades ago or did not tell their doctors.

So in August the C.D.C. recommended that all baby boomers be tested. Although only about 3 percent of this age group is infected, they account for about three quarters of all cases. Screening them would detect more than 800,000 infections, which could then potentially be treated, averting many cases of liver disease and about 120,000 deaths.

But the task force said there were no clinical trials or studies directly proving that screening asymptomatic adults would reduce liver disease or deaths.

It noted that the C.D.C. recommendation was based partly on computer models that might have overestimated how many people with hepatitis C would develop liver cirrhosis or die, and therefore overstated the number of cases or deaths that could be prevented.

The task force concluded that there would be at least a small benefit from screening baby boomers and gave the recommendation a grade of C, meaning “for most individuals without signs or symptoms there is likely to be only a small benefit from this service.”

The task force provoked controversy in the past with recommendations against screening for prostate cancer and against routine mammograms for women under 50.

In 2004, the task force recommended against hepatitis C screening of adults not considered at high risk.

The draft, posted on the task force Web site, will be open for comment until Dec. 24. The evidence behind the recommendation is being published in The Annals of Internal Medicine.

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DealBook: Lehman Estate to Sell Archstone for $6.5 Billion

The deal that helped sink Lehman Brothers is now playing an important role in paying off the failed investment bank’s creditors.

It was the deal that helped sink Lehman Brothers. Now, it will play an important role in paying off the failed investment bank’s creditors.

The Lehman estate agreed on Monday to sell Archstone, a sprawling apartment complex company, to its two biggest real estate rivals — Equity Residential, a company run by the investor Samuel Zell, and AvalonBay Communities — for about $6.5 billion in cash and stock.

The sale will dispose of the Lehman estate’s single biggest asset as it continues efforts to wind itself down and pay off the firm’s legions of creditors. And it will end the estate’s plans to take Archstone public, which had been expected to raise $3.45 billion in an offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

While the acquisition of Archstone by Lehman came just as the housing market was slipping from its lofty peak, its sale follows a recovery from the market’s lows. Residential apartment values have surpassed their 2007 peak, and occupancy rates are strong. Still, the market for rental apartments has taken a breather.

Even with the collapse of its Wall Street parent, Archstone has been held in high regard among investors and analysts for the high quality of its properties and the abilities of its management team. The company, based in Englewood, Colo., owns or has a stake in 181 developments with 57,948 apartment units, as of Sept. 30. Its apartments are largely in metropolitan areas in the Northeast, California and southeast Florida.

“Archstone is a highly sophisticated and very well thought-of manager of apartment assets,” said Craig Leupold, the president of Green Street Advisors, a research firm. “If it’s not the highest-quality portfolio around, it’s certainly up there.”

More than four years ago, it was a millstone around the neck of a foundering Lehman. In 2007, the Wall Street firm teamed up with Tishman Speyer to buy Archstone for more than $23 billion, having triumphed in a contest for one of the nation’s premier apartment landlords. The deal was led by Mark Walsh, then Lehman’s head of real estate and considered one of the smartest investors on Wall Street, fond of complex transactions that yielded big profits.

But it meant taking on huge amounts of debt as the housing boom was showing signs of deflating, leaving Lehman significantly weakened as the market turmoil was escalating in 2008. Lehman filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15 of that year.

During the bankruptcy and as Lehman emerged with a liquidation plan earlier this year, Archstone was identified as an asset that could yield a significant payday for creditors. Even as the Lehman estate sold off other high-quality holdings, including the asset manager Neuberger Berman, it held onto Archstone. It also sold off about $3.6 billion worth of lower-quality assets from the Archstone business.

The stock component of the transaction announced on Monday will give make the Lehman estate the single biggest investor in Equity Residential, with a 9.8 percent stake, and in AvalonBay, with a 13.2 percent stake.

The business attracted suitors, and one of the most persistent was Equity Residential, which had long followed the path set by Mr. Zell: serial deal-making that made it one of the biggest apartment investors in the country.

Another was AvalonBay, an apartment company known for developing properties rather than buying them.

Both companies began talking to the Lehman estate as far back as the summer of 2011, though the talks were in fits and starts, according to people with direct knowledge of the process.

Among the primary concerns within the Lehman real estate team was fetching the highest possible value for Archstone. And that meant buying out the other partners in Archstone: Bank of America and Barclays.

Lehman spent about $2.88 billion to acquire their stakes earlier this year to simplify matters for any new owner.

Yet at the same time, the estate also began an initial offering process for Archstone in case the sales talks broke down. An I.P.O. would have been one of the biggest staged this year, trailing only the likes of Facebook.

In recent weeks, talks between Lehman and the real estate investors picked up steam, these people said. The partnering of Equity Residential and AvalonBay proved especially reassuring, as it reduced the risks that either company would have taken on.

So while Lehman periodically updated Archstone’s offering documents — the most recent update was filed with regulators just last week — teams worked around the clock to secure a transaction.

The Lehman team finally breathed a sigh of relief when most of the major legal paperwork was signed around 1:30 a.m. on Monday.

Under the terms of the deal, Equity Residential and AvalonBay will pay $2.685 billion in cash and about $3.8 billion in stock. That represents a roughly 17 percent premium to what Lehman had valued the company earlier this year. The two companies will also assume Archstone’s roughly $9.5 billion in debt.

Equity Residential, which is run by Mr. Zell, will own about 60 percent of Archstone’s assets and liabilities. AvalonBay will own the remainder.

In return, the Lehman estate will become the single biggest shareholder in each company, holding a 9.8 percent stake in Equity Residential and a 13.2 percent stake in AvalonBay.

“The sale of Archstone to Equity Residential and Avalon Bay is a very positive outcome for our creditors,” Owen Thomas, the chairman of Lehman’s board of directors, said in a statement.

But the Lehman real estate team’s work is not finished: the estate still owns several major properties in New York City and on the West Coast that must be sold.

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Bangladesh Fire Kills More Than 100 and Injures Many

MUMBAI, India — More than 100 people died Saturday and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, in one of the worst industrial tragedies in that country.

It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it started about 7 p.m. on Saturday, a retired fire official said by telephone from Dhaka, the capital. At least 111 people were killed, and scores of workers were taken to hospitals for treatment of burns and smoke inhalation.

“The main difficulty was to put out the fire; the sufficient approach road was not there,” said the retired official, Salim Nawaj Bhuiyan, who now runs a fire safety company in Dhaka. “The fire service had to take great trouble to approach the factory.”

Bangladesh’s garment industry, the second-largest exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor fire safety record. Since 2006, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop advocacy group in Amsterdam. Experts say many of the fires could have easily been avoided if the factories had taken the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods and have too few fire escapes, and they widely flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, most of them women.

Activists say that global clothing brands like Tommy Hilfiger and the Gap and those sold by Walmart need to take responsibility for the working conditions in Bangladeshi factories that produce their clothes.

“These brands have known for years that many of the factories they choose to work with are death traps,” Ineke Zeldenrust, the international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, said in a statement. “Their failure to take action amounts to criminal negligence.”

The fire at the Tazreen factory in Savar, northwest of Dhaka, started in a warehouse on the ground floor that was used to store yarn, and quickly spread to the upper floors. The building was nine stories high, with the top three floors under construction, according to a garment industry official at the scene who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. Though most workers had left for the day when the fire started, the industry official said, as many as 600 workers were still inside working overtime.

The factory, which opened in May 2010, employed about 1,500 workers and had sales of $35 million a year, according to a document on the company’s Web site. It made T-shirts, polo shirts and fleece jackets.

Most of the workers who died were on the first and second floors, fire officials said, and were killed because there were not enough exits. “So the workers could not come out when the fire engulfed the building,” said Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, the operations director for the Fire Department, according to The Associated Press.

In a telephone interview later on Sunday, Major Mahbub said the fire could have been caused by an electrical fault or by a spark from a cigarette.

In a brief phone call, Delowar Hossain, the managing director of the Tuba Group, the parent company of Tazreen Fashions, said he was too busy to comment. “Pray for me,” he said and then hung up.

Television news reports showed badly burned bodies lined up on the floor in what appeared to be a government building. The injured were being treated in hallways of local hospitals, according to the reports.

The industry official said that many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition and that it would take some time to identify them.

One survivor, Mohammad Raju, 22, who worked on the fifth floor, said he escaped by climbing out of a third-floor window onto the bamboo scaffolding that was being used by construction workers. He said he lost his mother, who also worked on the fifth floor, when they were making their way down.

“It was crowded on the stairs as all the workers were trying to come out from the factory,” Mr. Raju said. “There was no power supply; it was dark, and I lost my mother in dark. I tried to search for her for 10 to 15 minutes but did not find her.”

A document posted on Tazreen Fashions’ Web site indicated that an “ethical sourcing” official for Walmart had flagged “violations and/or conditions which were deemed to be high risk” at the factory in May 2011, though it did not specify the nature of the infractions. The notice said that the factory had been given an “orange” grade and that any factories given three such assessments in two years from their last audit would not receive any Walmart orders for a year.

A spokesman for Walmart, Kevin Gardner, said the company was “so far unable to confirm that Tazreen is a supplier to Walmart nor if the document referenced in the article is in fact from Walmart.”

But the International Labor Rights Forum, which tracks fires in the Bangladesh garment industry, said documents and logos found in the debris indicated that the factory produced clothes for Walmart’s Faded Glory line as well as for other American and foreign companies.

Bangladesh exports about $18 billion worth of garments a year. Employees in the country’s factories are among the world’s lowest-paid, with entry-level workers making the government-mandated minimum wage of about $37 a month or slightly above.

Tensions have been running high between workers, who have been demanding an increase in minimum wages, and the factory owners and government. A union organizer, Aminul Islam, who campaigned for better working conditions and higher wages, was found tortured and killed outside Dhaka this year.

Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Stephanie Clifford and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

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Nokia imaging chief to quit

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Nokia‘s long-time imaging chief Damian Dinning has decided to leave the loss-making cellphone maker at the end of this month, the company said in a statement.

The strong imaging capabilities of the new Lumia smartphone models are a key sales argument for the former market leader, which has been burning through cash while losing share in both high-end smartphones and cheaper handsets.

Nokia’s Chief Executive Stephen Elop has replaced most of the top management since he joined in late 2010 and Dinnig is the latest of several executives to leave.

Dinning did not want to move to Finland as part of the phonemakers’ effort to concentrate operations and will join Jaguar Land Rover to head innovations in the field of connected cars, he said on Nokia’s imaging fan site PureViewclub.com.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki, editing by William Hardy)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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49ers use defense to beat Saints, 31-21

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Ahmad Brooks, Donte Whitner and the rest of the San Francisco defense made enough plays for the 49ers to win no matter who they started at quarterback.

Brooks and Whitner returned interceptions for touchdowns, the 49ers sacked Drew Brees five times, and San Francisco ended the New Orleans Saints' three-game winning streak, 31-21 on Sunday.

Colin Kaepernick was solid in his second career start while Alex Smith, deemed healthy enough to suit up after recovering from a concussion, watched from the sideline. Kaepernick passed for 231 yards, including a short touchdown to Frank Gore. He also ran for a 7-yard score. He threw his first career interception, but it was inconsequential.

Brees finished with 267 yards and three TDs. After rushing for 140 yards or more in each of its previous three games, New Orleans (5-6) managed only 59 yards against San Francisco (8-2-1).

One of Brees' scoring passes went to Marques Colston, who set a Saints record with his 56th career touchdown with the club.

The Niners gained 144 yards on the ground, led by Gore with 83. The Saints shut down tight end Vernon Davis, the player they feared perhaps the most, but the Niners' other tight end, Delanie Walker, had three catches for 81 yards, including one for 45 yards to set up a touchdown.

San Francisco's interceptions turned a 14-7 deficit into a 28-14 lead.

Brooks snagged the first, returning it 50 yards late in the first half. The second came on Brees' first pass of the second half. The ball deflected off Colston's hands as the leaping receiver was upended and briefly shaken up. Whitner snagged the deflected pass and returned it 42 yards to make it 28-14

Since losing to the New York Giants on Oct. 14, the Niners are 5-0-1 and now hold a 2 1/2-game lead in the NFC West with five games to go.

It seems their biggest problem at this point is deciding who should be their No. 1 QB. Smith, who led the Niners to the NFC title game last season, started the first nine games this season before his injury.

The Saints, meanwhile, missed a chance to pull into a tie for the last NFC wild card berth, and remain a game out with another tough game coming up at Atlanta on Thursday night.

Kaepernick used the running ability that served him so well in college at Nevada to give the Niners the early lead, scoring on a read-option run that fooled the Saints defense as well as the Superdome crowd, which erupted, initially believing the play had been snuffed out, while Kaepernick scampered to his left and scored easily.

The drive was highlighted by Mario Manningham's 40-yard gain after Kaepernick found him wide open on a short crossing route.

Then, New Orleans' offense, which could not muster a first down on its first two drives, suddenly ignited, marching 79 yards in 10 plays — highlighted by Joe Morgan's diving 33-yard catch — to tie it on tight end David Thomas' 6-yard catch.

San Francisco entered the game allowing a league-low 13.4 points per game. The Saints surpassed that in the second quarter when Brees hit Colston to make it 14-7 and capitalize on Ted Ginn Jr.'s fumbled punt, which Rafael Bush had recovered on the 49ers 10.

New Orleans looking intent on going up by two scores after Kaepernick's first career interception on an underthrown pass that cornerback Patrick Robinson easily caught. But the crowd has hardly finished celebrating when Brooks stepped in front of Brees' pass for Jimmy Graham and returned it 50 yards to tie it at 14 shortly before halftime.

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

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M.I.T. Lab Hatches Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens

HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair.

The Langer Lab is on the front lines of turning discoveries made in the lab into a range of drugs and drug delivery systems. Without this kind of technology transfer, the thinking goes, scientific discoveries might well sit on the shelf, stifling innovation.

A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Langer has helped start 25 companies and has 811 patents, issued or pending, to his name. That’s not too far behind Thomas Edison, who had 1,093. More than 250 companies have licensed or sublicensed Langer Lab patents.

Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm, has invested $220 million in 18 Langer Lab-inspired businesses. Combined, these businesses have improved the health of many millions of people, says Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris.

Along the way, Dr. Langer and his lab, including about 60 postdoctoral and graduate students at a time, have found a way to navigate some slippery territory: the intersection of academic research and the commercial market.

Over the last 30 years, many universities — including M.I.T. — have set up licensing offices that oversee the transfer of scientific discoveries to companies. These offices have become a major pathway for universities seeking to put their research to practical use, not to mention add to their revenue streams.

In the sciences in particular, technology transfer has become a key way to bring drugs and other treatments to market. “The model of biomedical innovation relies on research coming out of universities, often funded by public money,” says Josephine Johnston, director of research at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research organization based in Garrison, N.Y.

Just a few of the products that have emerged from the Langer Lab are a small wafer that delivers a dose of chemotherapy used to treat brain cancer; sugar-sequencing tools that can be used to create new drugs like safer and more effective blood thinners; and a miniaturized chip (a form of nanotechnology) that can test for diseases.

The chemotherapy wafer, called the Gliadel, is licensed by Eisai Inc. The company behind the sugar-sequencing tools, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, raised $28.4 million in an initial public offering in 2004. The miniaturized chip is made by T2Biosystems,  which completed a $23 million round of financing in the summer of 2011.

“It’s inconvenient to have to send things to a lab,” so the company is trying to develop more sophisticated methods, says Dr. Ralph Weissleder, a co-founder, with Dr. Langer and others, of T2Biosystems and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

FOR Dr. Langer, starting a company is not the same as it was, say, for Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook. “Bob is not consumed with any one company,” says H. Kent Bowen, an emeritus professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who wrote a case study on the Langer Lab. “His mission is to create the idea.”

Dr. Bowen observes that there are many other academic laboratories, including highly productive ones, but that the Langer Lab’s combination of people, spun-out companies and publications sets it apart. He says Dr. Langer “walks into the great unknown and then makes these discoveries.”

Dr. Langer is well known for his mentoring abilities. He is “notorious for replying to e-mail in two minutes, whether it’s a lowly graduate school student or the president of the United States,” says Paulina Hill, who worked in his lab from 2009 to 2011 and is now a senior associate at Polaris Venture Partners. (According to Dr. Langer, he has corresponded directly with President Obama about stem cell research and federal funds for the sciences.)

Dr. Langer says he looks at his students “as an extended family,” adding that “I really want them to do well.”

And they have, whether in business or in academia, or a combination of the two. One former student, Ram Sasisekharan, helped found Momenta and now runs his own lab at M.I.T. Ganesh Venkataraman Kaundinya is Momenta’s chief scientific officer and senior vice president for research.

Hongming Chen is vice president of research at Kala Pharmaceuticals. Howard Bernstein is chief scientific officer at Seventh Sense Biosystems, a blood-testing company. Still others have taken jobs in the law or in government.

Dr. Langer says he spends about eight hours a week working on companies that come out of his lab. Of the 25 that he helped start, he serves on the boards of 12 and is an informal adviser to 4. All of his entrepreneurial activity, which includes some equity stakes, has made him a millionaire. But he says he is mainly motivated by a desire to improve people’s health.

Operating from the sixth floor of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Langer’s lab has a research budget of more than $10 million for 2012, coming mostly from federal sources.

The research in labs like Dr. Langer’s is eyed closely by pharmaceutical companies. While drug companies employ huge research and development teams, they may not be as freewheeling and nimble, Dr. Langer says. The basis for many long-range discoveries has “come out of academia, including gene therapy, gene sequencing and tissue engineering,” he says.

He has served as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies. Their large size, he says, can end up being an impediment.

“Very often when you are going for real innovation,” he says, “you have to go against prevailing wisdom, and it’s hard to go against prevailing wisdom when there are people who have been there for a long time and you have some vice president who says, ‘No, that doesn’t make sense.’ ”

Pharmaceutical companies are eager to tap into the talent at leading research universities. In 2008, for example, Washington University in St. Louis announced a $25 million pact with Pfizer to collaborate more closely on biomedical research.

But in some situations, the close — critics might say cozy — ties between business and academia have the potential to create conflicts of interest.

There was a controversy earlier this year when it was revealed that the president of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center owned stock in Aveo Oncology, which had announced earlier that the university would be leading clinical trials of one of its cancer drugs.  Last month, the University of Texas announced that he would be allowed to keep his ties with three pharmaceutical companies, including Aveo Oncology; his holdings will be placed in a blind trust.

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Legality of Warrantless Cellphone Searches Goes to Courts and Legislatures

Judges and lawmakers across the country are wrangling over whether and when law enforcement authorities can peer into suspects’ cellphones, and the cornucopia of evidence they provide.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where Hanni Fakhoury is a lawyer, have lobbied for legislation that would require authorities to obtain a warrant before demanding cellphone location records.

A Rhode Island judge threw out cellphone evidence that led to a man being charged with the murder of a 6-year-old boy, saying the police needed a search warrant. A court in Washington compared text messages to voice mail messages that can be overheard by anyone in a room and are therefore not protected by state privacy laws.

In Louisiana, a federal appeals court is weighing whether location records stored in smartphones deserve privacy protection, or whether they are “business records” that belong to the phone companies.

“The courts are all over the place,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a criminal lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group. “They can’t even agree if there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy in text messages that would trigger Fourth Amendment protection.”

The issue will attract attention on Thursday when a Senate committee considers limited changes to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 law that regulates how the government can monitor digital communications. Courts have used it to permit warrantless surveillance of certain kinds of cellphone data.

A proposed amendment would require the police to obtain a warrant to search e-mail, no matter how old it was, updating a provision that currently allows warrantless searches of e-mails more than 180 days old.

As technology races ahead of the law, courts and lawmakers are still trying to figure out how to think about the often intimate data that cellphones contain, said Peter P. Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University. Neither the 1986 statute nor the Constitution, he said, could have anticipated how much information cellphones are privy to, including detailed records of people’s travels and diagrams of their friends.

“It didn’t take into account what the modern cellphone has — your location, the content of communications that are easily readable, including Facebook posts, chats, texts and all that stuff,” Mr. Swire said.

Courts have also issued divergent rulings on when and how cellphones can be inspected. An Ohio court ruled that the police needed a warrant to search a cellphone because, unlike a piece of paper that might be stuffed inside a suspect’s pocket and can be confiscated during an arrest, a cellphone may hold “large amounts of private data.”

But California’s highest court said the police could look through a cellphone without a warrant so long as the phone was with the suspect at the time of arrest.

Judges across the nation have written tomes about whether a cellphone is akin to a “container” — like a suitcase stuffed with marijuana that the police might find in the trunk of a car — or whether, as the judge in the Rhode Island murder case suggested, it is more comparable to a face-to-face conversation. That judge, Judith C. Savage, described text messages as “raw, unvarnished and immediate, revealing the most intimate of thoughts and emotions.” That is why, she said, citizens can reasonably expect them to be private.

There is little disagreement about the value of cellphone data to the police. In response to a Congressional inquiry, cellphone carriers said they responded in 2011 to 1.3 million demands from law enforcement agencies for text messages and other information about subscribers.

Among the most precious information in criminal inquiries is the location of suspects, and when it comes to location records captured by smartphones, court rulings have also been inconsistent. Privacy advocates say a trail of where people go is inherently private, while law enforcement authorities say that consumers have no privacy claim over signals transmitted from an individual mobile device to a phone company’s communications tower, which they refer to as third-party data.

Delaware, Maryland and Oklahoma have proposed legislation that would require the police to obtain a warrant before demanding location records from cellphone carriers. California passed such a law in August after intense lobbying by privacy advocates, including Mr. Fakhoury’s group. But Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, questioning whether it struck “the right balance between the operational needs of law enforcement and individual expectations of privacy.”

Similar legislation has been proposed in Congress.

Lacking a clear federal statute, the courts have been unable to reach a consensus. In Texas, a federal appeals court said this year that law enforcement officials did not need a warrant to track suspects through cellphones. In Louisiana, another federal appeals court is considering a similar case. Prosecutors are arguing that location information is part of cellphone carriers’ business records and thus not constitutionally protected.

The Supreme Court has not directly tackled the issue, except to declare, in a landmark ruling this year, that the police must obtain a search warrant to install a GPS tracking device on someone’s private property.

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Morsi Urged to Retract Edict to Bypass Judges in Egypt

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Protesters lit flares and denounced the edict of President Mohamed Morsi during clashes with riot police officers in front of the high court building in Cairo on Saturday. More Photos »

CAIRO — Egyptian judges rebelled Saturday against an edict by President Mohamed Morsi exempting his decrees from judicial review, denouncing it as an attack on judicial independence and calling for a judges’ strike.

The condemnation came from an array of organizations. The Supreme Council of the Judiciary, a top judicial body, called the decree “an unprecedented attack on judicial independence” and urged the president to rescind it. A major association of judges, the Judges Club, called for a strike by courts across Egypt. The leader of the national lawyers’ association endorsed the strike call.

A judicial strike would be the steepest escalation yet in a political struggle between the country’s new Islamist leaders and the institutions of the old authoritarian government over the drafting of a new constitution. Those tensions have flared since Mr. Morsi announced his decree on Thursday, saying he acted to prevent the courts from dissolving the Constitutional Assembly, as they had dissolved an earlier assembly and the Parliament.

He said his expanded powers, which he announced a day after he won international praise for brokering a cease-fire in Gaza, would last only until the new constitution was ratified.

The judges, all of whom were appointed by Egypt’s ousted strongman, Hosni Mubarak, joined political leaders in opposing the decree. Because the court dissolved the Parliament, the judiciary was the last check on his power, and critics called the decree a step toward autocracy.

State news media reported that judges and prosecutors had already declared a strike in Alexandria, and there were other news reports of planned walkouts in Qulubiya and Beheira, but those could not be confirmed.

There were small street protests outside the court building where the judges met. And a coalition of disparate opposition leaders, including the former United Nations diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei and three other former Egyptian presidential candidates, demanded the cancellation of the decree.

The strike call by the Judges Club, which has been led in recent years by a clique loyal to Mr. Mubarak and opposed to the Islamists, followed a vote at a more representative assembly of about 1,000 of the club’s members. They urged courts to suspend all activities except those vital to citizens, and it was unclear how individual courts might respond.

As the Judges Club met in the High Court building, the small crowd of protesters outside chanted that Egypt’s judges were “a red line.” When another group armed with the flares favored by hard-core soccer fans tried to force their way into the building, the police fired tear gas.

Inside, the Mubarak-appointed chief prosecutor, Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, declared to a crowd of cheering judges that he rejected Mr. Morsi’s attempt to fire him. He called the presidential decree “null and void” and warned of a “systematic campaign against the country’s institutions in general and the judiciary in particular.” Judges in the meeting chanted for the “fall of the regime,” reprising the signature rallying cry of the revolt last year against Mr. Mubarak, but this time against Mr. Morsi.

Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer, said he had filed one of several lawsuits asking the courts to attempt to overturn Mr. Morsi’s decree.

The coalition of opposition leaders, calling their group the National Salvation Front, declared that it would not negotiate with Mr. Morsi about resolving the crisis until he withdrew his decree. “We will not enter into a dialogue about anything while this constitutional declaration remains intact and in force,” said Amr Moussa, one of the leaders and Mr. Mubarak’s former foreign minister. “We demand that it be withdrawn, and then we can talk.”

What set off the battle was the year-end deadline for the Constitutional Assembly chosen last spring to draft a new constitution. There have been rumors that the Supreme Constitutional Court was poised to dissolve the assembly in a ruling next Sunday. Top courts had already dissolved both an earlier Constitutional Assembly and the Parliament. All three bodies were dominated by Islamists, who have prevailed in elections, and many of the top judges harbor deep fears of an Islamist takeover.

Kareem Fahim, Nevine Ramzy and Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

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HP says products may have been sold to Syria by others

(Reuters) – Hewlett Packard Co said in a letter made public on Friday that its products could have been delivered to Syria through resellers or distributors, but the world’s largest PC maker affirmed it did not sell directly to the country.

The letter was a response to a request from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission‘s Office of Global Security Risk that asked whether HP’s products were sold in countries where they would be subject to U.S. sanctions.

“We are aware of November 2011 news reports that your equipment was installed by the Italian company, Area SpA, in Syria as part of a nationwide surveillance and tracking system designed to monitor people in that country,” the SEC wrote in its request.

“Please describe to us the nature, duration, and extent of your past, current, and anticipated contacts with Syria and Iran, whether through subsidiaries, distributors, resellers, vendors, retailers, or other direct or indirect arrangements.”

In a letter dated October 9, HP said it had not authorized the sale of products to Syria.

Instead, HP said the Italian surveillance company had likely obtained its products from an HP partner that was unaware of their ultimate destination.

In another October 9 letter to the agency, HP said it ended its contract with Area SpA in April.

Calls to HP seeking further comment were unanswered as were calls to Area SpA.

HP’s overseas subsidiaries ended sales of printers and related supplies to third-party distributors and resellers with customers in Iran in early 2009, the company wrote.

But because its products are often sold by others through indirect channels without its knowledge or consent “it is always possible that products may be diverted to Iran or Syria after being sold to channel partners, such as distributors and resellers,” HP said.

Reuters has documented how banned computer equipment from U.S. companies has made its way to Iran’s largest telecommunications company through China-based ZTE.

Networking equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc has since cut its ties to ZTE.

HP said in both letters that it would continue to work with ZTE, but it had conducted an internal investigation relating to an alleged sale of its products to MTN Irancell, Iran’s second largest mobile carrier.

The company was also asked about EDS – an IT outsourcing company that HP bought in 2008 – and any activity in Iran, Syria and Sudan.

HP said it had the same policy regarding Sudan as it did on sales to Iran or Syria.

HP is eager to avoid more negative publicity after surprising the market on Tuesday with an $ 8.8 billion write-down on its $ 11.1 billion acquisition of software group Autonomy, accusing the British company of improper accounting to inflate sales.

Autonomy has denied any wrongdoing.

(Reporting by Nicola Leske in New York. Editing by Leslie Gevirtz and Andre Grenon)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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No. 6 Florida rolls to 37-26 win over No. 10 FSU

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida coach Will Muschamp doesn't have any doubt where his team's next stop should be: Miami for the BCS championship game on Jan. 7.

And the sixth-ranked Gators made a strong case for consideration Saturday by crushing archrival Florida State.

Mike Gillislee ran for two touchdowns and Florida scored 24 straight points in a span of less than nine minutes in the fourth quarter to keep its national title hopes alive with a convincing win over the 10th-ranked Seminoles.

"We have a really tough football team," Muschamp said he left the field for Florida's locker room. "We should be playing for the national championship."

Florida (11-1, 7-1 Southeastern Conference) came into the game fourth in the BCS standings, and could find itself in position to earn a spot in the national championship game if No. 1 Notre Dame loses to Southern California. The Gators lone loss was in late October to third-ranked Georgia, and it will keep them out of the SEC title game.

"Hopefully we can sneak in," said Florida quarterback Jeff Driskel, who completed 15 of 23 passes for 147 yards and a touchdown. "We're a resilient team."

He's not likely to get any argument from Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher, who hoped a victory over the Gators would not only persuade pollsters that the Seminoles belonged among the elite, but win some positive attention for the Atlantic Coast Conference.

"They controlled the line of scrimmage up front," Fisher said. "They have a very good team. They did a great job."

The game matching two of the nation's best defenses went back and forth with the Seminoles scoring 20 unanswered points to take a 20-13 lead late in the third quarter. They wouldn't score again until the final play of the game and victory out of reach.

"Our guys understand that it's about all 60 minutes," Muschamp said. "We just really needed to be patient and wear them down."

Did they ever.

Florida regained the lead for keeps at 23-20 on Gillislee's 37-yard run with 11:01 left in the final period on the first play after Florida State's EJ Manuel fumbled, his fourth turnover of the game. Gillislee finished with 140 yards rushing, surpassing the 1,000-yard mark for the season early in the game.

Florida State (10-2, 7-1 Atlantic Coast Conference) was hurt by five turnovers in the game. The Seminoles will play Georgia Tech next week in the ACC title game.

Florida State was hoping to keep its own long shot national title hopes alive with a third straight win over the Gators, but couldn't.

The Seminoles had been so dominant at home, outscoring opponents 324-54 in six previous games here with Clemson doing the most damage when Florida State prevailed in a 49-37 shootout in September.

Florida, not known for its offense, rushed for 244 of its 394 yards against the nation's top-ranked defense, which has benefited from a comparatively weak schedule.

And it was that schedule and a 17-16 loss at North Carolina State last month that has provoked questions about how good the Seminoles were. They couldn't capitalize on the opportunity to prove the doubters wrong.

"We're better than them," Florida nose guard Omar Hunter said. "You have to finish the game. The fourth quarter, that's the most important quarter."

Florida salted its victory away on Driskel's 14-yard touchdown throw to Quinton Dunbar with seven minutes left and Matt Jones' 32-yard run with 2:33 left for a 37-20 lead.

Caleb Sturgis kicked three field goals for the Gators. Florida State's Dustin Hopkins had field goals of 50 and 53 yards to tie former Georgia kicker Billy Bennett's NCAA record of 87 career field goals.

Florida State scored 20 straight points to wipe out an early 13-0 deficit. Manuel threw a 6-yard TD pass to Nick O'Leary and the quarterback bootlegged in from a yard out with 8:30 remaining. When Dustin Hopkins kicked a 53-yard field goal with 4:24 left in the third, the Seminoles looked as if they were on their way.

But Florida dominated the fourth quarter.

Gillislee's go-ahead TD run came the first play after Florida's Dominque Easley recovered the fumble by Manuel, who coughed up the ball after being nailed by Antonio Morrison. Manuel had to leave the game for a series, but was unable to rally the Seminoles after returning.

It was a tough game for Manuel for the second straight year against the Gators. He threw for only 65 yards in a 21-7 win at Florida last season and was intercepted three times Saturday in addition to the costly fourth quarter fumble. It was only the second time he was intercepted three times in a game in his career.

Florida dominated the first half, building a 13-0 lead before Florida State scored on the final play of the half when Hopkins kicked a 50-yard field goal into the wind.

Sturgis hit field goals of 39 and 45 yards and Gillislee scored on a 9-yard run moments after the Gators recovered a fumble on the kickoff by Florida State's Karlos Williams at the Seminoles 21.

The Gators, who missed a golden scoring opportunity near the end of the first quarter when Trey Burton underthrew a wide open Clay Burton at about the Florida State 10, ran 25 plays in the opening quarter to eight for the Seminoles.

By the time the fourth quarter rolled around, Florida State seemed to wear down and Florida rolled right into the middle of the national championship conversation.

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