BlackBerry maker plans local skate, publicity in Waterloo to celebrate new phone

WATERLOO, Ont. – Call it BlackBerry Town, even if the name isn’t official.

In the lead up to the BlackBerry smartphone unveiling later this month, creator Research In Motion is turning its Waterloo, Ont., home base into a celebration of the device.

The company plans to decorate light poles in areas of Waterloo and neighbouring Kitchener with banners that promote its latest smartphone and thank the community for its support.

City councillors in Kitchener voted earlier this week to make an exception to rules that prevent corporations from using public property to advertise.

RIM says it is making plans for other events as well.

The company will hold skating rink parties at Kitchener City Hall and in Waterloo Town Square on Jan. 30 to coincide with the unveiling of its new BlackBerry devices.

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Story of Te'o girlfriend death apparently a hoax

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) — A story that Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o's girlfriend had died of leukemia — a loss he said inspired him to help lead the Irish to the BCS championship game — was dismissed by the university Wednesday as a hoax perpetrated against the linebacker.

Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick says his faith has not been shaken in Te'o "one iota."

Swarbrick says an investigation by a firm the school hired has convinced him that Te'o was duped into an online relationship with a woman whose death was then faked by the perpetrators of the hoax.

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Study Confirms Benefits of Flu Vaccine for Pregnant Women

While everyone is being urged to get the flu vaccine as soon as possible, some pregnant women avoid it in the belief that it may harm their babies. A large new study confirms that they should be much more afraid of the flu than the vaccine.

Norwegian researchers studied fetal death among 113,331 women pregnant during the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009-2010. Some 54,065 women were unvaccinated, 31,912 were vaccinated during pregnancy, and 27,354 were vaccinated after delivery. The scientists then reviewed hospitalizations and doctor visits for the flu among the women.

The results were published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The flu vaccine was not associated with an increased risk for fetal death, the researchers found, and getting the shot during pregnancy reduced the risk of the mother getting the flu by about 70 percent. That was important, because fetuses whose mothers got the flu were much more likely to die.

Unvaccinated women had a 25 percent higher risk of fetal death during the pandemic than those who had had the shot. Among pregnant women with a clinical diagnosis of influenza, the risk of fetal death was nearly doubled. In all, there were 16 fetal deaths among the 2,278 women who were diagnosed with influenza during pregnancy.

Dr. Marian Knight, a professor at the perinatal epidemiology unit of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the research, called it “a high-quality national study” that shows “there is no evidence of an increased risk of fetal death in women who have been immunized. Clinicians and women can be reassured about the safety of the vaccine in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy.”

The Norwegian health system records vaccinations of individuals and maintains linked registries to track effects and side effects. The lead author, Dr. Camilla Stoltenberg, director of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, said that there are few countries with such complete records.

“This is a great study,” said Dr. Denise J. Jamieson, an obstetrician and a medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was not involved in the work. “It’s nicely done, with good data, and it’s additional information about the importance of the flu vaccine for pregnant women. It shows that it’s effective and might reduce the risk for fetal death.”

In Norway, the vaccine is recommended only in the second and third trimesters, so the study includes little data on vaccination in the first trimester. The C.D.C. recommends the vaccine for all pregnant women, regardless of trimester.

“We knew from other studies that the vaccine protects the woman and the newborn,” Dr. Stoltenberg said. “This study clearly indicates that it protects fetuses as well. I seriously suggest that pregnant women get vaccinated during every flu season.”

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Flublok, a Flu Vaccine, Wins F.D.A. Approval

A new type of flu vaccine won regulatory approval on Wednesday, and its manufacturer said that limited supplies are expected to be available this winter.

The vaccine, developed by a small company called Protein Sciences, is made with a process that does not require the virus to be grown in chicken eggs, as is now generally done. That means a vaccine could be ready weeks earlier in the event of a pandemic.

“This approval represents a technological advance in the manufacturing of an influenza vaccine,” Dr. Karen Midthun, a senior official at the Food and Drug Administration, said in a statement announcing the agency’s approval of the product, which is called Flublok.

The approval comes during one of the more severe flu seasons in recent years, with many Americans rushing to find diminishing supplies of vaccine and spot shortages being reported.

Manon Cox, the chief executive of Protein Sciences, said the company could have about 150,000 doses ready to distribute later this flu season. That is a relatively small amount, but it could be particularly helpful for people who do not get flu shots now because they are allergic to eggs.

A spokeswoman for the F.D.A. said the timing of the approval was unrelated to the current flu season.

Most flu vaccines are made by growing the virus in chicken eggs, then inactivating or killing it, a long process.

Flublok, by contrast, consists only of a protein — hemagglutinin — from the virus. The protein is made by putting the gene for hemagglutinin into a virus that infects insect cells. Those cells, from the fall armyworm, are grown in culture and churn out the protein. Neither eggs nor the live virus are used, though viral genetic information is needed.

While new for flu, such protein-based vaccines are used to prevent some other diseases.

Protein Sciences, a privately held company in Meriden, Conn., first applied for approval nearly five years ago. It was turned down twice, in part because of the novelty of using insect cells. “Every time we were asked to do more and more studies to prove that this cell substrate was safe,” Ms. Cox said.

The company was close to bankruptcy in 2009 when it received a federal contract worth tens of millions of dollars to help develop its vaccine.

The vaccine is approved only for adults 18 to 49 years old. In a clinical trial, Flublok was about 44.6 percent effective against all influenza strains, not just the three contained in the vaccine, the F.D.A. said. As with current vaccines, Flublok will need to change each year to match the flu strains in circulation.

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U.S. Criticizes Egypt’s Leader for Anti-Semitic Remarks

CAIRO — A White House spokesman on Tuesday condemned anti-Semitic comments made by President Mohamed Morsi before he took office, calling on him to “make clear this kind of rhetoric is not acceptable or productive in a democratic Egypt.”

In a three-year-old video clip that resurfaced recently, Mr. Morsi, then a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, urged Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. In another video clip from 2010 that was recently distributed by a Washington research group, Mr. Morsi referred to “Zionists” as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”

Asked about Mr. Morsi’s anti-Semitic statements during a briefing at the White House, Jay Carney, the press secretary, said, “We have raised our concerns over these remarks with the government of Egypt.”

He added: “We completely reject these statements, as we do any language that espouses religious hatred. This kind of discourse has been acceptable in the region for far too long and is counter to the goal of peace. President Morsi should make clear that he respects people of all faiths.”

Representatives of Mr. Morsi have declined repeated requests to comment on the remarks, and on Tuesday they again remained silent.

Though inflammatory anti-Semitism is a staple of political discourse of all stripes in Egypt, Mr. Morsi’s vitriolic statements threaten to undermine his efforts to build a reputation as a leader for moderation and stability in the Middle East. And attention to his remarks may embolden critics in Israel and the West who distrust his commitment to peace with Israel because of his background as an Islamist.

What is more, Mr. Morsi already faces attacks from ultraconservative Islamists and the left that he is too close to the United States and, by extension, Israel. Were he to back away from his remarks, he could become more vulnerable to such criticism.

Mr. Carney emphasized that the White House was still ready to work with the Egyptian president. “Since taking office, President Morsi has reaffirmed Egypt’s commitment to its peace treaty with Israel in both word and deed and has proved willing to work with us toward shared objectives, including a cease-fire during the crisis in Gaza last year,” he said.

“This is about action,” Mr. Carney added. “It’s about deeds.”

Although as a Brotherhood leader Mr. Morsi was a fiery critic of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, his tone as president has been far more civil. He has done little to reshape Egyptian policy toward the Jewish state, and he has worked to maintain close ties with Washington.

The video clip about “apes and pigs” was unearthed in early January by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington group that monitors Arabic news media for anti-Semitic statements.

The other clip, about nurturing hatred, was broadcast on Friday by an Egyptian television satirist, Bassem Youssef, who models his program on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” He often uses footage of public figures for satire and is building a reputation for finding memorable examples of bigotry or extremism. His clip came from a video of a speech by Mr. Morsi in his hometown in the Nile Delta in early 2010 that was publicly available on a Web site run by the Muslim Brotherhood.

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Tablet shipments in 2013 could be lower than previously expected

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Anti-doping officials want Armstrong under oath

A televised confession by Lance Armstrong isn't enough.

Anti-doping officials want the disgraced cyclist to admit his guilt under oath before considering whether to lift a lifetime ban clouding his future as a competitive athlete. That was seconded by at least one former teammate whom Armstrong pushed aside on his way to the top of the Tour de France podium.

"Lance knows everything that happened," Frankie Andreu told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "He's the one who knows who did what because he was the ringleader. It's up to him how much he wants to expose."

Armstrong has been in conversations with U.S. Anti-Doping Agency officials, touching off speculation that he may be willing to cooperate with authorities there and name names.

Interviewer Oprah Winfrey didn't say if the subject was broached during the taping Monday at a downtown Austin hotel. In an appearance on "CBS This Morning," she declined to give details of what Armstrong told her, but said she was "mesmerized and riveted by some of his answers."

Asked whether the disgraced cyclist appeared genuinely contrite after a decade of fierce denials, Winfrey replied, "I felt that he was thoughtful, I thought that he was serious, I thought that he certainly had prepared for this moment. I would say that he met the moment."

She was promoting what has become a two-part special, Thursday and Friday, on her OWN network.

Around the same time, World Anti-Doping Agency officials issued a statement saying nothing short of "a full confession under oath" would cause them to reconsider Armstrong's lifetime ban from sanctioned events.

The International Cycling Union also urged Armstrong to tell his story to an independent commission it has set up to examine claims that the sport's governing body hid suspicious samples from the cyclist, accepted financial donations from him and helped him avoid detection in doping tests.

The ban was only one of several penalties handed to Armstrong after a scathing, 1,000-page report by USADA last year. The cyclist was also stripped of his seven Tour de France titles, lost nearly all of his endorsements and was forced to cut ties with the Livestrong cancer charity he founded in 1997.

The report portrayed Armstrong as the mastermind of a long-running scheme that employed steroids, blood boosters such as EPO, and a range of other performance-enhancers to dominate the tour. It included revealing testimony from 11 former teammates, including Andreu and his wife, Betsy.

"A lot of it was news and shocking to me," Andreu said. "I am sure it's shocking to the world. There's been signs leading up to this moment for a long time. For my wife and I, we've been attacked and ripped apart by Lance and all of his people, and all his supporters repeatedly for a long time. I just wish they wouldn't have been so blind and opened up their eyes earlier to all the signs that indicated there was deception there, so that we wouldn't have had to suffer as much.

"And it's not only us," he added, "he's ruined a lot of people lives."

Armstrong was believed to have left for Hawaii. The street outside his Spanish-style villa on Austin's west side was quiet the day after international TV crews gathered there hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Nearby, members of his legal team mapped out a strategy on how to handle at least two pending lawsuits against Armstrong, and possibly a third.

The AP reported earlier Tuesday that Justice Department officials were likely to join a whistleblower lawsuit against Armstrong by former teammate Floyd Landis, citing a source who works outside the government and requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record about the matter.

The lawsuit by Landis, who was stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title after testing positive, alleges that Armstrong defrauded the U.S. government by repeatedly denying he used performance-enhancing drugs. The deadline to join the False Claims Act lawsuit, which could require Armstrong to return substantial sponsorship fees and pay a hefty penalty, is Thursday.

Landis is hardly the only one seeking money back from Armstrong.

During his long reign as cycling champion, Armstrong scolded some critics in public, didn't hesitate to punish outspoken riders during the race, and waged legal battles against still others in court.

The London-based Sunday Times has already filed a lawsuit to recover about $500,000 it paid Armstrong to settle a libel case, and Dallas-based SCA Promotions, which tried to deny him a promised bonus for a Tour de France win, has threatened to bring another lawsuit seeking to recover more than $7.5 million awarded by an arbitration panel.

In Australia, the government of the state of South Australia said it will seek the repayment of several million dollars in appearance fees paid to Armstrong for competing in the Tour Down Under in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

"We'd be more than happy for Mr. Armstrong to make any repayment of monies to us," South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill said.

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Litke reported from Chicago, Vertuno from Austin, Texas. Pete Yost in Washington and John L. Mone in Dearborn, Mich., also contributed to this report.

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Well: How to Go Vegan

When I first heard former President Bill Clinton talk about his vegan diet, I was inspired to make the switch myself. After all, if a man with a penchant for fast-food burgers and Southern cooking could go vegan, surely I could too.

At the grocery store, I stocked up on vegan foods, including almond milk (that was the presidential recommendation), and faux turkey and cheese to replicate my daughter’s favorite sandwich. But despite my good intentions, my cold-turkey attempt to give up, well, turkey (as well as other meats, dairy and eggs) didn’t go well. My daughter and I couldn’t stand the taste of almond milk, and the fake meat and cheese were unappealing.

Since then, I’ve spoken with numerous vegan chefs and diners who say it can be a challenge to change a lifetime of eating habits overnight. They offer the following advice for stocking your vegan pantry and finding replacements for key foods like cheese and other dairy products.

NONDAIRY MILK Taste all of them to find your favorite. Coconut and almond milks (particularly canned coconut milk) are thicker and good to use in cooking, while rice milk is thinner and is good for people who are allergic to nuts or soy. My daughter and I both prefer the taste of soy milk and use it in regular or vanilla flavor for fruit smoothies and breakfast cereal.

NONDAIRY CHEESE Cheese substitutes are available under the brand names Daiya, Tofutti and Follow Your Heart, among others, but many vegans say there’s no fake cheese that satisfies as well as the real thing. Rather than use a packaged product, vegan chefs prefer to make homemade substitutes using cashews, tofu, miso or nutritional yeast. At Candle 79, a popular New York vegan restaurant, the filling for saffron ravioli with wild mushrooms and cashew cheese is made with cashews soaked overnight and then blended with lemon juice, olive oil, water and salt.

THINK CREAMY, NOT CHEESY Creaminess and richness can often be achieved without a cheese substitute. For instance, Chloe Coscarelli, a vegan chef and the author of “Chloe’s Kitchen,” has created a pizza with caramelized onion and butternut squash that will make you forget it doesn’t have cheese; the secret is white-bean and garlic purée. She also offers a creamy, but dairy-free, avocado pesto pasta. My daughter and I have discovered we actually prefer the rich flavor of butternut squash ravioli, which can be found frozen and fresh in supermarkets, to cheese-filled ravioli.

NUTRITIONAL YEAST The name is unappetizing, but many vegan chefs swear by it: it’s a natural food with a roasted, nutty, cheeselike flavor. Ms. Coscarelli uses nutritional yeast flakes in her “best ever” baked macaroni and cheese (found in her cookbook). “I’ve served this to die-hard cheese lovers,” she told me, “and everyone agrees it is comparable, if not better.”

Susan Voisin’s Web site, Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, offers a nice primer on nutritional yeast, noting that it’s a fungus (think mushrooms!) that is grown on molasses and then harvested and dried with heat. (Baking yeast is an entirely different product.) Nutritional yeasts can be an acquired taste, she said, so start with small amounts, sprinkling on popcorn, stirring into mashed potatoes, grinding with almonds for a Parmesan substitute or combining with tofu to make an eggless omelet. It can be found in Whole Foods, in the bulk aisle of natural-foods markets or online.

BUTTER This is an easy fix. Vegan margarines like Earth Balance are made from a blend of oils and are free of trans fats. Varieties include soy-free, whipped and olive oil.

EGGS Ms. Coscarelli, who won the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars with vegan cupcakes, says vinegar and baking soda can help baked goods bind together and rise, creating a moist and fluffy cake without eggs. Cornstarch can substitute for eggs to thicken puddings and sauces. Vegan pancakes are made with a tablespoon of baking powder instead of eggs. Frittatas and omelets can be replicated with tofu.

Finally, don’t try to replicate your favorite meaty foods right away. If you love a juicy hamburger, meatloaf or ham sandwich, you are not going to find a meat-free version that tastes the same. Ms. Voisin advises new vegans to start slow and eat a few vegan meals a week. Stock your pantry with lots of grains, lentils and beans and pile your plate with vegetables. To veganize a recipe, start with a dish that is mostly vegan already — like spaghetti — and use vegetables or a meat substitute for the sauce.

“Trying to recapture something and find an exact substitute is really hard,” she said. “A lot of people will try a vegetarian meatloaf right after they become vegetarian, and they hate it. But after you get away from eating meat for a while, you’ll find you start to develop other tastes, and the flavor of a lentil loaf with seasonings will taste great to you. It won’t taste like meat loaf, but you’ll appreciate it for itself.”

Ms. Voisin notes that she became a vegetarian and then vegan while living in a small town in South Carolina; she now lives in Jackson, Miss.

“If I can be a vegan in these not-quite-vegan-centric places, you can do it anywhere,” she said. “I think people who try to do it all at once overnight are more apt to fail. It’s a learning process.”

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What are your tips for vegan cooking and eating? Share your suggestions on ingredients, recipes and strategies by posting a comment below or tweeting with the hashtag #vegantips.

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Bits Blog: Facebook Unveils a New Search Tool

8:53 p.m. | Updated

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook has spent eight years nudging its users to share everything they like and everything they do. Now, the company is betting it has enough data so that people can find whatever they want on Facebook. And on Tuesday, it unveiled a new tool to help them dig for it.

The tool, which the company calls graph search, is Facebook’s most ambitious stab at overturning the Web search business ruled by its chief rival, Google. It is also an effort to elbow aside other Web services designed to unearth specific kinds of information, like LinkedIn for jobs, Match for dates and Yelp for restaurants.

Facebook has spent over a year honing graph search, said Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, at an event here at Facebook’s headquarters introducing the new product. He said it would enable Facebook users to search their social network for people, places, photos and things that interest them.

That might include, Mr. Zuckerberg offered, Mexican restaurants in Palo Alto that his friends have “liked” on Facebook or checked into. It might be used to find a date, dentist or job, other Facebook executives said.

“Graph search,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, “is a completely new way to get information on Facebook.”

Graph search will be immediately available to a limited number of Facebook users — in the “thousands,” Mr. Zuckerberg said — and gradually extended to the rest.

Every Internet platform company has been interested in conquering search.

But Facebook search differs from other search services because of the mountain of social data the company has collected over the years. It knows which parks your friends like to take their children to, or which pubs they like to visit, and who among their network is single and lives nearby.

The company is betting that its users are more eager to hear their friends’ recommendations for a restaurant than advice from a professional food critic or from a stranger on Yelp.

Its search tool is based on the premise that the data within Facebook is enough and that its users will have little reason to venture outside its blue walled garden. What they cannot find inside the garden, its search partner, Bing, a Microsoft product, will help them find on the Web.

For now, the Facebook tool will mine its users’ pictures, likes and check-ins, but not their status updates. Graph search, Mr. Zuckerberg explained, is aimed at answering questions based on the data contained in your social network, not serving you a list of links to other Web sites.

Say, for example, you are searching for a grocery store in Manhattan. You would type that question into a box on your Facebook page and the results would show stores your friends liked or where they had checked in.

It remains unclear how users will react to having others mine the data they share on Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg took pains to reassure users that what they post would be found only if they wanted it to be found. Before the new search tool is available to them, he said, users will see this message: “Please take some time to review who can see your stuff.” Facebook tweaked its privacy controls last December.

Mr. Zuckerberg said Tuesday that initially, photos posted on Instagram, which Facebook owns, would not be part of the database of photos that can be searched. Nor would he specify how soon graph search would be available to those who log in using the Facebook app on their cellphones.

The search tool is plainly designed with an eye toward profits. If done right, said Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner, it could offer marketers a more precise signal of a Web user’s interests. “It’s going to lend itself to advertising or other revenue-generating products that better matches what people are looking for,” he said. “Advertisers are going to be able to better target what you’re interested in. It’s a much more meaningful search than keyword search.”

News of the new search tool offered a modest lift to Facebook shares, which rose 2.7 percent to a close at $30.10 Tuesday. Google remained stable, with a share price of nearly $725. Google retains two-thirds of the search market, and Facebook’s search tool by itself is not likely to affect Google’s business.

Still, introduction of the graph search sharpens the divide between Facebook and Google.

“If Facebook can truly provide relevant answers based on mining data from the social graph, it has an advantage,” said Venkat N. Venkatraman, a business professor at Boston University.

Google has been scrambling for several years to collect social data and incorporate it into search results, as Web users increasingly turn to social networks to seek friends’ recommendations.

It introduced Google Plus, its Facebook rival, in 2011, and from the beginning said its main purpose was to use social information to improve and personalize all Google products, from search to maps to ads. Last year, Google began showing posts, photos, profiles and conversations from Google Plus in Google search results. A search for restaurants in Seattle, for instance, could show posts and photos shared by friends in addition to links from around the Web. Google declined to comment for this article.

The kind of personal search that Facebook is promising is rife with potential privacy hazards, which Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged repeatedly. “The search we wanted to build is privacy aware,” he maintained. “On Facebook, most of the things people share with you isn’t public.”

The American Civil Liberties Union immediately posted a warning, reminding Facebook users to review their privacy settings. It pointed out that advertisers who, until now, could target only certain categories of people anonymously — “users under 35 who live in Texas,” for instance — could now find specific users under 35 who live in Texas, if their privacy settings allowed them to be found. It cautioned that “controlling your personal data means controlling not only who can see your information but how it can be found and what can be done with it.”

But Facebook pointed out that even though a business owner could personally search for specific personal data, a brand page could not. Detailed searching of Facebook data for the sake of sending promotional messages would violate the site’s internal policies.

The search team was led by two former Google engineers, Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky. As they explained in a blog post on the Facebook Engineering Department page, graph search solves a problem of Facebook’s own making: it has collected so much information.

“As people shared more and more content, we saw that we needed to give them better ways to explore and enjoy those stories and memories,” they wrote.

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Cubans Take Advantage of Day 1 of New Travel Rules

HAVANA — Cubans flocked to immigration offices and travel agencies on Monday, eager to take advantage of a lifting of government travel restrictions that have been in place since Fidel Castro was a dark-bearded firebrand in his 30s.

The new rules eliminate the expensive bureaucratic hurdles long faced by Cubans wishing to go overseas, many of whom know loved ones who lost everything when they emigrated or who left the island in the dead of night on rafts and powerboats.

As of Monday, most Cubans can head for the airport with only a passport, a plane ticket and a visa, if required, from the country they intend to visit.

“We have lived for decades in captivity,” said Marta Rodríguez, 65, a retired office manager who was waiting to pick up a tourist visa from the United States Interests Section in Havana. “It’s a positive move — one they should have taken 50 years ago.”

The reform is not expected to prompt a major exodus, because most countries use entrance visas to control the number of visiting Cubans, and international travel remains way beyond the means of most islanders, who earn state salaries of about $20 per month. There are, of course, Cubans who want to travel from the island and return.

The government says it will continue to limit travel for tens of thousands of Cubans who work in strategic sectors, such as military personnel and scientific workers, as well as those they deem a threat to national security.

How tightly, and for how long, the government will continue to control those sectors’ movements will only become apparent over time, Cubans and outside analysts said. In a development that could signal new government flexibility, Yoani Sanchez, a prominent blogger and activist who says she has been denied an exit visa by the Cuban government at least 19 times in the past, said on Monday that she was one of the first in line at the immigration office and submitted paperwork for a new passport without any problems.

Arturo López-Levy, a Cuban-born academic who left the island 10 years ago and lectures at the University of Denver, said the migration reform was not simply a maneuver to defuse political pressure but a structural shift in the relationship between the island and the diaspora that the government once rejected as traitorous “worms.”

“This is a real change in the way in which the government perceives the relationship between the Cuban population and the outside world,” he said.

At immigration offices, Cubans scrutinized posters clarifying the new rules, stood in line to get new passports and pressed around immigration officials in spearmint-colored uniforms seeking details of what paperwork was now required.

More police were on hand than usual outside immigration offices and near consular offices, particularly the small park near the United States Interests Section — known locally as “the place between life and death” — where Cubans wait each day for appointments with American consular officers.

The Obama administration was watching the developments with interest. “We will see if this is implemented in a very open way and if it means that all Cubans can travel,” said Roberta S. Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, according to The Associated Press.

Despite multiple reports in recent weeks by official Cuban news media, many Cubans seemed unclear about how the new law would work: whether it applied to them, whether they needed a new passport or a special stamp (they do not), how it would work for minors.

Under the old system, most Cubans who applied for an exit permit to travel received it — if they could provide the authorities with an invitation letter from someone in the country they intended to visit — all at a cost of nearly $400.

Caridad Reyes Risse, 69, a retiree who was in line at a downtown travel agency to buy a ticket to visit her daughter in the United States, said she had waited until Monday to avoid that $400 expense.

“The question now is, ‘Will I get a ticket?’ ” she said, gesturing to the gaggles of Cubans that spilled out of the tiny agency.

Ramona María Moreno, 61, a restaurant worker, said that even though most Cubans who sought permission in the past received it, the change had psychological importance.

“It’s the idea you can go,” said Ms. Moreno, who was at an immigration office looking for a list of countries that admit Cubans without a visa. “It’s a freedom that we have never had.”

She acknowledged there were still barriers to travel. “I have no money,” she said with a chuckle.

The news last week that the government would allow members of its jealously guarded medical corps to travel has prompted excitement among doctors who for decades have had to go through a lengthy process to get permission, if they got it at all.

“Everyone is waiting to see what happens,” said Niurka, 45, a doctor who would like to join her family in Miami. Requesting that her last name not be published to avoid riling the authorities, she said she did not believe the tight restrictions on medical professionals would be lifted overnight.

“Still, it gives me hope,” she said.

However the government chose to carry out the new regulations, they signified a new era in Cuba’s relationship with its diaspora and the wider world, said Ms. Rodríguez, the retiree.

“They have realized the island needs to open up to the world,” she said “They can’t go back on this now.”

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