Cheick Modibo Diarra, Mali’s Prime Minister, Resigns After Arrest

BAMAKO, Mali — Soldiers carried out a late-night arrest of Mali’s prime minister at his home here, forcing his resignation early Tuesday and casting new doubt on plans to chase out radical Islamists who control much of this troubled West African nation.

Hours after being taken to the main army camp outside the capital for a dressing-down by military officers, Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra, a former NASA astrophysicist, appeared grim-faced on national television to announce that he was resigning, along with all of his ministers.

Mali’s interim president, Dioncounda Traoré, named Django Sissoko as prime minister. Mr. Sissoko, who had been Mali’s ombudsman, will be tasked with forming a new government, according to a presidential decree read on state television.

A spokesman for the soldiers who seized power in Mali this year — and later nominally relinquished it to Mr. Diarra — accused him of “playing a personal agenda” while the country faced a crisis in the north, which fell to the Islamists after a military coup d’état in March. “There was a paralysis in the executive,” said the spokesman, Bakary Mariko.

But diplomats, human rights activists and analysts said the military’s arrest of Mr. Diarra on Monday merely confirmed that the army junta continued to hold power, despite the window-dressing of the civilian government, whose presence it resented. That reality, they said, complicates planned military aid meant to help the army reconquer northern Mali, an area that now alarms Western governments as a large-scale stronghold for Qaeda-linked jihadists.

“You don’t need to be an Einstein to know that this will slow everything down,” a Western diplomat here said Tuesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The planned assistance to Mali “just has to be on ice,” he said. Power has shifted entirely to the junta, the diplomat said.

The prime minister’s forced resignation was greeted in Paris and Berlin with expressions of dismay Tuesday, and new uncertainty surrounds a planned United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing force to retake the north.

France has been pushing for early intervention there, although the United States has expressed skepticism about plans by the regional grouping of West African states to retake the region and wariness about providing aid to the shaky civilian government — reservations likely to be reinforced by the latest developments.

In Washington, the State Department sharply criticized Mr. Diarra’s forced resignation. “These events endanger the anticipated national dialogue and unhelpfully delay a return to constitutional order, and the restoration of the territorial integrity of Mali,” Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement.

With scorn for Mr. Diarra, the coup leader, Capt. Amadou Sanogo, said in an interview on state television Tuesday night, “Cheick Modibo Diarra has not given a thing, one single piece of equipment, to the Malian Army.”

Several soldiers and police officers guarded Mr. Diarra’s expansive villa at the edge of town here Tuesday. A request to see Mr. Diarra was turned down by soldiers, who said he was inside “resting.”

The prime minister’s fall from grace, via a military that had helped install him nine months ago, was as sudden as it was steep. He was appointed last spring as a caretaker prime minister until new elections, halted by the coup, could be organized.

Early Tuesday, after Mr. Diarra was hauled to the camp at Kati, outside the capital, Captain Sanogo, who led the coup in March, told him there was proof “against him that he was calling for subversion,” said Mr. Mariko, the military spokesman. “He had recorded cassettes that were going to be broadcast on ORTM,” the state broadcaster, Mr. Mariko said. “These cassettes called on the people of Mali to go into the street to oppose the army.”

But a more likely explanation was a growing and public clash about the best way of chasing the Islamists from the north.

Mr. Diarra, derided as an amateur politician by the well-entrenched political class here, has nonetheless been steadily raising his profile at the expense of Captain Sanogo. He has made the rounds of foreign capitals to push his view that reconquering the north required immediate international military assistance. Captain Sanogo has rebuffed suggestions that the Malian Army is incapable of handling the job on its own. Indeed, for weeks, the captain resisted the idea that troops from other African nations should even go near the capital.

Despite this, the Malian Army, defeated by Islamists and nomadic rebels last winter and spring, has been deemed seriously deficient by United Nations and Western military officials.

Captain Sanogo, trained in the United States, has depicted himself as a national savior, even comparing himself to Gen. Charles de Gaulle in an op-ed article in Le Monde several months ago. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch has implicated him in serious violations involving rival soldiers who tried to roll back the coup in April.

The conflict between the two men was evident in the declarations of the military’s spokesman Tuesday. “Since he has been in power, he has been working simply to position his own family,” Mr. Mariko said.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

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Daily Stock Market Activity

Stocks rose on Tuesday, led by gains in technology companies, helping the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index to end at its highest level since Election Day.

A 2.18 percent gain, to $541.39, in Apple’s stock lifted the Nasdaq composite index, as the company rebounded from a week in which investors took profits before a possible tax increase next year. Before Tuesday’s trading, Apple shares had lost 25 percent from an intraday high hit in September.

Stocks pared some gains by late afternoon as more news on the negotiations over a fiscal policy in Washington emerged. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said it would be difficult to reach an agreement resolving tax increases and spending cuts before Christmas.

“There’s been a real explosion in anxiety over this thing,” said James Dailey, portfolio manager of Team Asset Strategy Fund in Harrisburg, Pa. “Because markets have become the way they are, you’ve got people just stepping back.”

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 78.56 points, or 0.6 percent, to 13,248.44.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was up 9.29 points, or 0.65 percent, to 1,427.84.

The Nasdaq composite index was up 35.34 points, or 1.18 percent, at 3,022.30.

Other major tech stocks also rose. Texas Instruments gained 4 percent, to $31.01, after raising its profit target late Monday. That helped other chip makers rally. The PHLX Semiconductor index was up 1.9 percent. Microsoft rose 1.41 percent, to $27.32.

Retailers like the luggage maker Tumi Holdings and Michael Kors Holding gained after a positive report from Goldman Sachs Equity Research. Tumi was up 4.73 percent, to $21.92, and Michael Kors gained 2.35 percent, reaching $50.92.

The discount retailers Dollar General and Family Dollar declined. Dollar General, down 7.8 percent, to $42.94, said it expected margins to be under pressure in 2013. Family Dollar shares dropped 8.36 percent, to $64.68.

The Treasury is selling its remaining stake in the insurer American International Group. Shares of AIG were up 5.7 percent at $35.26.

The Fed began a two-day policy-setting meeting on Tuesday. The central bank is expected to announce a new round of Treasury bond purchases when the meeting ends on Wednesday. They will replace its Operation Twist stimulus, which expires at the end of the year.

Interest rates were higher. The Treasury’s benchmark 10-year note fell 11/32, to 99 23/32, and the yield rose to 1.66 percent, from 1.62 percent late Monday.

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Rate of Childhood Obesity Falls in Several Cities

PHILADELPHIA — After decades of rising childhood obesity rates, several American cities are reporting their first declines.

The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white students.

“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011.

The drops are small, just 5 percent here in Philadelphia and 3 percent in Los Angeles. But experts say they are significant because they offer the first indication that the obesity epidemic, one of the nation’s most intractable health problems, may actually be reversing course.

The first dips — noted in a September report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — were so surprising that some researchers did not believe them.

Deanna M. Hoelscher, a researcher at the University of Texas, who in 2010 recorded one of the earliest declines — among mostly poor Hispanic fourth graders in the El Paso area — did a double-take. “We reran the numbers a couple of times,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘Will you please check that again for me?’ ”

Researchers say they are not sure what is behind the declines. They may be an early sign of a national shift that is visible only in cities that routinely measure the height and weight of schoolchildren. The decline in Los Angeles, for instance, was for fifth, seventh and ninth graders — the grades that are measured each year — between 2005 and 2010. Nor is it clear whether the drops have more to do with fewer obese children entering school or currently enrolled children losing weight. But researchers note that declines occurred in cities that have had obesity reduction policies in place for a number of years.

Though obesity is now part of the national conversation, with aggressive advertising campaigns in major cities and a push by Michelle Obama, many scientists doubt that anti-obesity programs actually work. Individual efforts like one-time exercise programs have rarely produced results. Researchers say that it will take a broad set of policies applied systematically to effectively reverse the trend, a conclusion underscored by an Institute of Medicine report released in May.

Philadelphia has undertaken a broad assault on childhood obesity for years. Sugary drinks like sweetened iced tea, fruit punch and sports drinks started to disappear from school vending machines in 2004. A year later, new snack guidelines set calorie and fat limits, which reduced the size of snack foods like potato chips to single servings. By 2009, deep fryers were gone from cafeterias and whole milk had been replaced by one percent and skim.

Change has been slow. Schools made money on sugary drinks, and some set up rogue drink machines that had to be hunted down. Deep fat fryers, favored by school administrators who did not want to lose popular items like French fries, were unplugged only after Wayne T. Grasela, the head of food services for the school district, stopped buying oil to fill them.

But the message seems to be getting through, even if acting on it is daunting. Josh Monserrat, an eighth grader at John Welsh Elementary, uses words like “carbs,” and “portion size.” He is part of a student group that promotes healthy eating. He has even dressed as an orange to try to get other children to eat better. Still, he struggles with his own weight. He is 5-foot-3 but weighed nearly 200 pounds at his last doctor’s visit.

“I was thinking, ‘Wow, I’m obese for my age,’ ” said Josh, who is 13. “I set a goal for myself to lose 50 pounds.”

Nationally, about 17 percent of children under 20 are obese, or about 12.5 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which defines childhood obesity as a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex. That rate, which has tripled since 1980, has leveled off in recent years but has remained at historical highs, and public health experts warn that it could bring long-term health risks.

Obese children are more likely to be obese as adults, creating a higher risk of heart disease and stroke. The American Cancer Society says that being overweight or obese is the culprit in one of seven cancer deaths. Diabetes in children is up by a fifth since 2000, according to federal data.

“I’m deeply worried about it,” said Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, who added that obesity is “almost certain to result in a serious downturn in longevity based on the risks people are taking on.”

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Mobile Apps for Children Fall Short on Disclosure to Parents, F.T.C. Report Says

Several hundred of the most popular educational and gaming mobile apps for children fail to give parents basic explanations about what kinds of personal information the apps collect from children, who can see that data and what they use it for, a new federal report says.

The apps often transmit the phone number, precise location or unique serial code of a mobile device to app developers, advertising networks or other companies, according to the report by the Federal Trade Commission, released Monday. Regulators said such information could be used to find or contact children or track their activities across different apps without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

The agency reviewed 400 of the most popular children’s apps available on Google and Apple platforms, and reported that only 20 percent disclosed their data collection practices.

“The survey results described in this report paint a disappointing picture of the privacy protections provided by apps for children,” the report said.

Regulators said they were investigating whether the practices of certain apps violated a federal law requiring Web site operators to get parents’ permission before collecting or sharing names, phone numbers, addresses or other personal information obtained from children under 13.

The report comes as the agency is preparing to strengthen those protections by requiring site operators to obtain parental consent before collecting many other kinds of personal information from children.

But over the last few months, the agency’s efforts have met with pushback from Apple, Facebook, Google and Viacom as well as from technology associations and marketing industry groups, who say the agency’s proposed solution is so broad that it could inhibit companies from offering sites, apps and other services for children.

In its report, the agency did not disclose the names of apps it found problems with.

“We think this is a systematic problem,” said Jessica Rich, the associate director of the F.T.C.’s division of financial practices, adding that parents should not think “if they avoid certain apps, they are home free.”

Representatives of the app industry said they had already been working with app developers to make disclosures about data collection clearer and simpler for consumers. But “the F.T.C. report is a reminder that there is more work to do,” said Jon Potter, the president of the Application Developers Alliance, an industry group.

The agency’s researchers also reported that most apps failed to tell parents when they involved interactive features like advertising, social network sharing or allowing children to make purchases for virtual goods within the app.

For instance, researchers found that 58 percent of the children’s apps contained ads, even though just 15 percent disclosed this before download. Moreover, of the 24 apps that stated they did not contain in-app advertising, 10 did contain ads, the report said.

Children’s advocates said the report’s findings reinforced the need to strengthen online privacy protections for children. The agency has not substantially revised its regulations based on the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or Coppa, since the law’s introduction more than a decade ago.

“This makes the case as to why we need major revisions,” said James Steyer, the chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit advocacy and education group in San Francisco that focuses on children and technology. “It shows that parents don’t have enough information to make good choices.”

The timing of the report suggests that the agency is trying to lay the groundwork for its push for broader children’s online privacy protections. In interviews, agency officials have said the protections needed to be modernized to keep pace with developments in mobile apps, voice recognition, facial recognition and comprehensive online data collection by marketers.

For example, regulators have proposed a longer list of data about children that would require parental consent for Web site operators to collect, including photos, voice recordings and unique mobile device serial numbers. Agency officials have also emphasized that they considered the precise location of a mobile device to be personal information whose collection required parental permission.

If the agency includes these changes in the final version of its updated regulations, apps would need to get parental consent for a number of data collection practices that are in widespread use.

For example, agency researchers reported that almost 60 percent of the children’s apps in the study transmitted a device’s ID number, most commonly to an advertising network or another third party. But only 20 percent of the apps disclosed information about these kinds of practices. Regulators said their concern was that marketers or other entities could use these unique device numbers to follow individual children across multiple apps over time, compiling detailed dossiers on their activities.

“The transmission of kids’ information to third parties that are invisible and unknown to parents raises concerns,” the report said.

Although state and federal regulators, along with industry groups, have been working to improve disclosures for consumers about how mobile apps collect and use their data, progress has been incremental.

Kamala D. Harris, the attorney general of California, signed an agreement this year with seven leading app platforms to make sure apps available through their stores displayed privacy policies. She also recently sent letters to 100 companies whose apps, she said, did not comply with a California law requiring them to post privacy policies.

Last week, Ms. Harris’s office sued Delta Air Lines for not warning users of its Fly Delta app that it collected personal information like a user’s full name, phone number, e-mail address, photographs and location.

App industry associations have also been working to improve transparency for consumers and parents. For instance, the Application Developers Alliance, in a joint project with the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups, has created prototype disclosure notices that apps could voluntarily display before consumers download them.

“I think the app industry continues to work with our members, companies and consumer groups to identify and eventually implement more effective ways of communicating with consumers,” said Mr. Potter, the president of the app developers’ group.

Ms. Rich of the Federal Trade Commission said she hoped the agency’s report would “light a fire” under such efforts. She added that the agency intended to conduct studies regularly on the children’s app market and publicly report its findings.

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Moscow Journal: Book Translates American Minutiae for Russians

MOSCOW — After 20 years of opining on weighty bilateral issues like NATO expansion and ballistic missile defense, the political analyst Nikolai V. Zlobin recently found himself trying to explain, for an uncomprehending Russian readership, the American phenomenon of the teenage baby sitter.

In Russia, children are raised by their grandmothers, or, if their grandmothers are not available, by women of the same generation in a similar state of unremitting vigilance against the hazards — like weather — that arise in everyday life. An average Russian mother would no sooner entrust her children’s upbringing to a local teenager than to a pack of wild dogs.

But of course much in everyday American life sounds bizarre to Russians, as Mr. Zlobin documents meticulously in his 400-page book, “America — What a Life!”

It seems strange, 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, that ordinary Russians would still be hungry for details about how ordinary Americans eat and pay mortgages. But to Mr. Zlobin’s surprise, his book — published this year and marketed as a guide to Russians considering a move abroad — is already in its fifth print run, and his publisher has commissioned a second volume.

With the neutrality of a field anthropologist dispatched to suburbia, Mr. Zlobin scrutinizes the American practice of interrogating complete strangers about the details of their pregnancies; their weird habit of leaving their curtains open at night, when a Russian would immediately seal himself off from the prying eyes of his neighbors. Why Americans do not lie, for the most part. Why they cannot drink hard liquor. Why they love laws but disdain their leaders.

“The secret is that everyone wants to know what America is without its ideological blanket,” said Mr. Zlobin, who has lived in the United States on and off for 20 years and serves, at times, as an informal consultant to the Kremlin. “Originally I thought you had to watch the important issues, but it turns out what matters are the very basic ones.”

He is not the first Russian to engage in this exercise. In 1935, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, Soviet satirists, embarked on a road trip across the United States. Their book, “One-Story America,” described its residents’ earnestness (“Americans never say anything they do not mean”) their provinciality (“curiosity is almost absent”) and the ubiquity of advertising, which, they wrote, “followed us all over America, convincing us, begging us, persuading us, and demanding of us that we chew ‘Wrigley’s,’ the flavored, incomparable, first-class gum.”

That book, published less than two decades after the Bolshevik Revolution, was a touch subversive because it did not focus on the class struggle, then the Kremlin’s central talking point about the United States.

Mr. Zlobin is writing at a moment when state-controlled television casts the United States as a global bully, releasing waves of turbulence on the world and covertly undermining President Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Zlobin does not make much effort to advance that thesis, instead suggesting, in his soft way, that Russian leaders would benefit from understanding what Americans are like.

“I often get appeals for help in Washington — ‘Get to know so and so,’ they tell me, naming some public figure, ‘We need to solve this problem,’ ” he writes. “It is difficult to explain that in the United States, in most cases, problems are not solved this way.”

Mr. Zlobin, who has lived in St. Louis, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Washington, finds his answers in middle-class neighborhoods that most Europeans never see. Readers have peppered him with questions about his chapter about life on a cul-de-sac. Most Russians grew up in dense housing blocks, where children ran wild in closed central courtyards. Cul-de-sac translates in Russian as tupik — a word that evokes vulnerability and danger, a dead end with no escape.

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Euro Watch: Bonds in Spain and Italy Shaken by Italian Politics

ROME — Italian stock and bond prices fell on Monday after a weekend of political turmoil in Italy gave rise to fears that the country was headed for renewed instability.

Shares of Italian banks, which are big holders of the government’s bonds, were among the hardest hit.

The action occurred in the first day of trading after Prime Minister Mario Monti said over the weekend that he would soon step down after his predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, withdrew his party’s support from Mr. Monti and said he would again seek election as prime minister.

Mr. Berlusconi, who was elected prime minister three times, left office a year ago as markets pushed Italy to the brink of financial collapse. Mr. Monti, an economist who was appointed as his temporary successor, has restored Italy’s credibility with investors, who have given the country a break on its borrowing costs. But those gains have come at the cost of painful austerity measures that have worsened the country’s economic situation and given Mr. Berlusconi an opening to attack.

The Milan benchmark index, MIB, fell more than 2 percent on Monday. Italian banks, which remain sensitive to declines in the country’s bond prices, were among the big losers. Intesa Sanpaolo, the most active stock, fell 5.2 percent, as did UniCredit.

Mr. Monti, who joined other leaders in Oslo on Monday to receive the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the European Union, said at a news conference that the market reactions “need not be dramatized.”

“I am confident,” he said, that the Italian elections would result in a government “that will be responsible and oriented toward the E.U. and this will be in line with efforts the Italian government has made so far.”

The decline in bond prices sent their yields, or interest rates, higher — an indicator of the Italian government’s borrowing costs. The spread between interest rates on Italian 10-year sovereign bonds and equivalent German securities, the European benchmark for safety, grew to 3.5 percentage points on Monday. That was up from 3.25 percentage points late Friday, suggesting that investors were growing more wary of holding Italian debt.

The yield on Italian 10-year bonds, which breached 7 percent this year, ended trading on Monday at 4.8 percent, up 29 basis points. A basis point is one-hundredth of a percent.

Bonds of Spain, which is the other big economy of concern in the euro zone, also came under renewed pressure on Monday after Mr. Monti’s announcement.

The spread between Spanish 10-year bonds and equivalent German bonds widened to 4.27 percentage points from 4.16 points on Friday. The yield on the benchmark Spanish 10-year rose 10 basis points, to 5.5 percent; it reached 7.1 percent in July amid concerns that Spain would be forced into a full bailout after having to negotiate a 100 billion euro, or $129 billion, rescue package for its banks in June.

Luis de Guindos, the Spanish economy minister, warned that Italy’s political turmoil would affect his country.

“When doubts emerge over the stability of a neighboring country like Italy, which is also seen as vulnerable, there’s an immediate contagion for us,” he said Monday morning on Spanish national radio.

Asked whether Spain would itself seek further European rescue funding, he instead said, “The help that Spain needs is that the doubts over the future of the euro be removed.”

Speaking before the Nobel ceremony on Monday, the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, said Italy must “continue on the road of structural reforms.” The elections, Mr. Barroso said on Sky News, “must not be used to postpone reforms.”

A dismal economic report on Monday served as a reminder that despite Mr. Monti’s success with investors, the real economy continues to suffer. Italian industrial production fell a seasonally adjusted 1.1 percent in October from September, and by 6.2 percent from a year earlier, Istat, the national statistics agency, said.

Some analysts said they thought that Mr. Berlusconi’s re-emergence as a political leader was as responsible for unnerving investors as Mr. Monti’s unexpected decision to resign. Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy, a research firm, wrote on Monday in a note that Mr. Berlusconi remained “the boogeyman of investors,” who “epitomizes the dysfunctional nature of Italian politics.”

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, was to meet on Monday with Mr. Monti on the sidelines of the Nobel ceremony, said Georg Streiter, a spokesman for the chancellor.

Ms. Merkel pushed to have Mr. Monti succeed Mr. Berlusconi. But she ended up facing Mr. Monti’s own ideas for economic change, which focused more on growth and job creation than on the austere fiscal discipline championed by Ms. Merkel.

As a rule, the German government does not comment on its partners’ domestic politics, but Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle warned that an attempt to scale back Italy’s reform push could result in further destabilization in the euro zone.

“Italy cannot remain stagnant on two-thirds of its reform process,” Mr. Westerwelle said through a spokesman. “This would throw not only Italy but the rest of Europe into turbulence.”

Elisabetta Povoledo reported from Rome and David Jolly from Paris. Raphael Minder contributed reporting from Madrid and Melissa Eddy from Berlin.

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A Breakthrough Against Leukemia Using Altered T-Cells

PHILIPSBURG, Pa. — Emma Whitehead has been bounding around the house lately, practicing somersaults and rugby-style tumbles that make her parents wince.

It is hard to believe, but last spring Emma, then 6, was near death from leukemia. She had relapsed twice after chemotherapy, and doctors had run out of options.

Desperate to save her, her parents sought an experimental treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one that had never before been tried in a child, or in anyone with the type of leukemia Emma had. The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells.

The treatment very nearly killed her. But she emerged from it cancer-free, and about seven months later is still in complete remission. She is the first child and one of the first humans ever in whom new techniques have achieved a long-sought goal — giving a patient’s own immune system the lasting ability to fight cancer.

Emma had been ill with acute lymphoblastic leukemia since 2010, when she was 5, said her parents, Kari and Tom. She is their only child.

She is among just a dozen patients with advanced leukemia to have received the experimental treatment, which was developed at the University of Pennsylvania. Similar approaches are also being tried at other centers, including the National Cancer Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

“Our goal is to have a cure, but we can’t say that word,” said Dr. Carl June, who leads the research team at the University of Pennsylvania. He hopes the new treatment will eventually replace bone-marrow transplantation, an even more arduous, risky and expensive procedure that is now the last hope when other treatments fail in leukemia and related diseases.

Three adults with chronic leukemia treated at the University of Pennsylvania have also had complete remissions, with no signs of disease; two of them have been well for more than two years, said Dr. David Porter. Four adults improved but did not have full remissions, and one was treated too recently to evaluate. A child improved and then relapsed. In two adults, the treatment did not work at all. The Pennsylvania researchers were presenting their results on Sunday and Monday in Atlanta at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

Despite the mixed results, cancer experts not involved with the research say it has tremendous promise, because even in this early phase of testing it has worked in seemingly hopeless cases. “I think this is a major breakthrough,” said Dr. Ivan Borrello, a cancer expert and associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Dr. John Wagner, the director of pediatric blood and marrow transplantation at the University of Minnesota, called the Pennsylvania results “phenomenal” and said they were “what we’ve all been working and hoping for but not seeing to this extent.”

A major drug company, Novartis, is betting on the Pennsylvania team and has committed $20 million to building a research center on the university’s campus to bring the treatment to market.

Hervé Hoppenot, the president of Novartis Oncology, called the research “fantastic” and said it had the potential — if the early results held up — to revolutionize the treatment of leukemia and related blood cancers. Researchers say the same approach, reprogramming the patient’s immune system, may also eventually be used against tumors like breast and prostate cancer.

To perform the treatment, doctors remove millions of the patient’s T-cells — a type of white blood cell — and insert new genes that enable the T-cells to kill cancer cells. The technique employs a disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells. The new genes program the T-cells to attack B-cells, a normal part of the immune system that turn malignant in leukemia.

The altered T-cells — called chimeric antigen receptor cells — are then dripped back into the patient’s veins, and if all goes well they multiply and start destroying the cancer.

The T-cells home in on a protein called CD-19 that is found on the surface of most B-cells, whether they are healthy or malignant.

A sign that the treatment is working is that the patient becomes terribly ill, with raging fevers and chills — a reaction that oncologists call “shake and bake,” Dr. June said. Its medical name is cytokine-release syndrome, or cytokine storm, referring to the natural chemicals that pour out of cells in the immune system as they are being activated, causing fevers and other symptoms. The storm can also flood the lungs and cause perilous drops in blood pressure — effects that nearly killed Emma.

Steroids sometimes ease the reaction, but they did not help Emma. Her temperature hit 105. She wound up on a ventilator, unconscious and swollen almost beyond recognition, surrounded by friends and family who had come to say goodbye.

But at the 11th hour, a battery of blood tests gave the researchers a clue as to what might help save Emma: her level of one of the cytokines, interleukin-6 or IL-6, had shot up a thousandfold. Doctors had never seen such a spike before and thought it might be what was making her so sick.

Dr. June knew that a drug could lower IL-6 — his daughter takes it for rheumatoid arthritis. It had never been used for a crisis like Emma’s, but there was little to lose. Her oncologist, Dr. Stephan A. Grupp, ordered the drug. The response, he said, was “amazing.”

Within hours, Emma began to stabilize. She woke up a week later, on May 2, the day she turned 7; the intensive-care staff sang “Happy Birthday.”

Since then, the research team has used the same drug, tocilizumab, in several other patients.

In patients with lasting remissions after the treatment, the altered T-cells persist in the bloodstream, though in smaller numbers than when they were fighting the disease. Some patients have had the cells for years.

Dr. Michel Sadelain, who conducts similar studies at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, said: “These T-cells are living drugs. With a pill, you take it, it’s eliminated from your body and you have to take it again.” But T-cells, he said, “could potentially be given only once, maybe only once or twice or three times.”

The Pennsylvania researchers said they were surprised to find any big drug company interested in their work, because a new batch of T-cells must be created for each patient — a far cry from the familiar commercial strategy of developing products like Viagra or cholesterol medicines, in which millions of people take the same drug.

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Mobile Video Calling Spreads as Smartphones and Tablets Improve

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Tango engineers developing a cross-platform mobile voice and video, text, picture and video messaging application.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — The next competition in technology is your face — anywhere, anytime.

As the cameras and screens of smartphones and tablets improve, and as wireless networks offer higher bandwidth, more companies are getting into the business of enabling mobile video calls.

The details vary from one service to the next, but the experiences are similar: from anywhere in the world with a modern wireless network, a smartphone’s screen fills with the face of a friend or relative. The quality is about the same jerky-but-functional level as most desktop video. Sound is not always perfectly synced with the image, but it is very close. The calls start and end the same way, by pressing a button on the screen.

Mobile video calling has risen so quickly that industry analysts have not yet compiled exact numbers. But along the way, it is creating new business models, new stresses on mobile networks and even new rules of etiquette.

“All the communications — social messages, calls, texts and video — are merging fast,” said Eric Setton, co-founder and chief technology officer of Tango Mobile, whose free video calling service has 80 million active users. An additional 200,000 join daily, Mr. Setton said.

Once an interesting endeavor for a few start-ups like Tango, mobile video has caught the attention of big companies. Apple created FaceTime and made it a selling point for the iPad.

In September, the company made FaceTime available on cellular networks instead of limiting it to Wi-Fi systems, almost certainly in response to increasing consumer demand.

Last week, Yahoo purchased a video chat company called OnTheAir. And in 2011, Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype, a service for both video and audio-only calls. Though most people use Skype on desktop and laptop computers, the software for the service has been downloaded more than 100 million times just by owners of phones running Google’s Android mobile operating system. Microsoft built a service for its Windows 8 mobile phone that lets people receive calls even when Skype is not on.

Google, which has more than 100 million people a month using its Google Plus social networking service, now offers more than 200 apps for its video calling feature. It says it is interested not in making money on the applications, but in learning more about them so it can sell more ads by getting people to use its free video service, called Hangouts. Hangouts can be used for two-person or group calls, or for a video conference with up to 10 people.

“On a high level, Google works better when we know who you are and what your interests are,” said Nikhyl Singhal, director of product management for Google’s real-time communications group. “Video calling is becoming a basic service across different fronts.” While Mr. Singhal is an occasional user, he said, his 4-year-old daughter “is on it every day.”

Don’t expect video calling to improve productivity. Tango uses the same technology that enables video calls to sell games that people can play simultaneously. It sells virtual decorations like balloons to drop around someone’s image during a birthday call (both parties see the festive pixels). Google says some jokey applications on Hangouts, like a feature that can put a mustache over each caller, seem to encourage people to talk longer.

Currently, popular two-way games like Words With Friends on Facebook work by one player making a move and then passing the game over to the other player, not watching moves as they are made. Another promising area is avatars, like cartoon dogs and cats, that mouth speech when a user wants to have a video call but does not want to be seen.

The prospect of having to appear on-screen at any given moment might sound like a nonstarter for people who worry about bad hair days. But in fact, using mobile devices for video calls may be less bother than it seems.

“There may be natural inhibitions to being seen, but when I’m on a mobile device I’m out and about, so I’m more likely to be presentable,” said Michael Gartenberg, a consumer technology analyst at Gartner. “How people use this remains to be seen, but they are starting to expect it.”

Yet a new etiquette for mobile video calls is already emerging. People often text each other first to see if it’s O.K. to appear on camera. Video messages sent in the text box of a phone, like snippets of a party or a child’s first steps, are also useful precursors to video conversations. Mr. Singhal said making avatars for users of Hangout would be “an extraordinarily important area” as well.

The greatest challenge for the business may not be getting more consumers to use the service, but making sure the service works. Most phones have slight variations in things like camera placement and video formatting from one model to the next. “A camera can show you upside down if you load the wrong software on it,” said Mr. Setton of Tango.

As a result, the 80 engineers among Tango’s 110 employees have adjusted their software to work on more than 1,000 types of phones worldwide. The top 20 models have more than a million customers each, but the complexity of building software for a wider range of phones has made it hard for new mobile video companies to enter the field, Mr. Setton said.

Tango’s average video call used to last six minutes, Mr. Setton said, but when the company started adding other applications to go with the videos, like games and designs that float over people, the average call length rose to 12 minutes.

Brian X. Chen contributed reporting.

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Chávez Put Party Unity Before Another Cancer Surgery

LA PAZ, Bolivia — President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has flown repeatedly to Cuba this year for cancer treatments, but the flight that took him back to Caracas on Friday may have been the most meaningful of all.

Mr. Chávez postponed emergency cancer surgery to return home, meet with his inner circle and announce on television on Saturday, for the first time, that he had picked the man he wanted to lead his socialist revolution when he is gone — something he seemed to suggest might come sooner than his millions of followers would hope.

He was scheduled to fly to Cuba again on Sunday night to prepare for surgery.

Mr. Chávez could well recover and remain a potent force, but on Saturday night he seemed intent on smoothing over factions within his party and solidifying support for the man he chose to succeed him, Vice President Nicolás Maduro.

Mr. Chávez, 58, spoke the word “unity” several times during Saturday’s somber, symbolically weighted appearance. To his left sat Mr. Maduro, and behind both of them viewers could see a bust of Mr. Chávez’s hero, the South American independence leader Simón Bolívar (who never realized his dream of unifying a fractious continent).

Mr. Chávez, a charismatic and polarizing leader who has crafted his own brand of socialist revolution in this oil-rich country, has been vague about the nature of his illness since it was first disclosed in June last year. Since then, he has had at least two surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Yet he said on Saturday that doctors had once again found malignant cells, necessitating a new operation.

The fact that he chose to go home to put his political house in order and clear up the long-unresolved line of succession — rather than write about it on Twitter or call it in to a government television show, as he so often has done with lesser policy decisions during his many medical absences — suggests that his doctors have told him that the news is not good.

“This is a huge passing of the torch,” said Javier Corrales, a political science professor at Amherst College.

Even if Mr. Chávez makes a strong recovery after his surgery, Mr. Corrales said, “there’s no question we are in the transition stage, and that’s always incredibly uncertain.”

Mr. Chávez, who has been president for nearly 14 years, was re-elected in October to another six years. His new term is to begin on Jan. 10.

But if he dies or cannot continue to govern before then, the Constitution states that the vice president, Mr. Maduro, would become president and finish out the last days of the current term.

If Mr. Chávez is unable to begin his new term, or if he leaves office within the first four years, then new elections would be called, according to the Constitution.

In that case, Mr. Chávez said on Saturday that he wanted Mr. Maduro to be his party’s candidate, and he asked his supporters to elect him.

“I ask it from my heart,” he said.

New elections could open the way for a new run by Henrique Capriles Radonski, a young state governor who opposed Mr. Chávez in October. Mr. Capriles received 44 percent of the vote and 6.5 million votes, far more than any previous candidate against Mr. Chávez.

But Mr. Capriles is now running a difficult race for re-election as governor of Miranda, one of the country’s most populous states and which includes part of Caracas, the capital. The election is on Sunday.

He is being challenged a former vice president, Elías Jaua, and the government and Mr. Chávez’s socialist party have made it a priority to defeat Mr. Capriles, hoping that it would weaken him politically and remove him as a threat.

“If Capriles loses, there will be a battle in the opposition, a struggle for power, and the leaders will call for a change,” said Luis Vicente León, a pollster close to the opposition.

Some polls taken earlier this year showed that Mr. Capriles could beat Mr. Maduro if they ran against each other.

But Mr. León said that conditions had changed with Mr. Chávez’s endorsement of Mr. Maduro. If Mr. Chávez were to die or become too ill to continue in office, it could give Mr. Maduro’s candidacy an emotional boost, he said.

But Mr. Maduro, 50, will have difficulties of his own in having to reign in factions within Mr. Chávez’s party. That could include the military and former military officers to whom Mr. Chávez has given a major role in his government.

For the time being, Venezuelans can look forward to more uncertainty.

The country has been obsessed with Mr. Chávez’s illness since it was first revealed. It has been the source of endless speculation and conspiracy theories. Some people even insist that he is not sick and has invented the illness to throw his opponents off guard. His fiercest opponents see his cancer as a sign of hope that his days as president are numbered; his supporters insist that he will recover and condemn such grim speculation as necrophilia.

But the last announcement of his need for another surgery, coupled with his call to rally behind Mr. Maduro, takes the nervous focus on Mr. Chávez’s cancer and what it means for the country’s future to a new level.

Several hundred supporters of Mr. Chávez congregated on Sunday in Bolívar Plaza in central Caracas in what was an uncharacteristically subdued gathering, by the standards his followers. But on display was their quasi-religious connection with the president — and the refusal among many to acknowledge his mortality.

“He is going to overcome this difficult time,” said Israel Pérez, 32, a law student. “He will be with us forever.”

Nonetheless, would he support Mr. Maduro as Mr. Chávez’s replacement?

“Venezuelans would support any proposal the president asks them to,” Mr. Pérez said.

Andrew Rosati contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela.

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Mobile Video Calling Spreads as Smartphones and Tablets Improve

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Tango engineers developing a cross-platform mobile voice and video, text, picture and video messaging application.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — The next competition in technology is your face — anywhere, anytime.

As the cameras and screens of smartphones and tablets improve, and as wireless networks offer higher bandwidth, more companies are getting into the business of enabling mobile video calls.

The details vary from one service to the next, but the experiences are similar: from anywhere in the world with a modern wireless network, a smartphone’s screen fills with the face of a friend or relative. The quality is about the same jerky-but-functional level as most desktop video. Sound is not always perfectly synced with the image, but it is very close. The calls start and end the same way, by pressing a button on the screen.

Mobile video calling has risen so quickly that industry analysts have not yet compiled exact numbers. But along the way, it is creating new business models, new stresses on mobile networks and even new rules of etiquette.

“All the communications — social messages, calls, texts and video — are merging fast,” said Eric Setton, co-founder and chief technology officer of Tango Mobile, whose free video calling service has 80 million active users. An additional 200,000 join daily, Mr. Setton said.

Once an interesting endeavor for a few start-ups like Tango, mobile video has caught the attention of big companies. Apple created FaceTime and made it a selling point for the iPad.

In September, the company made FaceTime available on cellular networks instead of limiting it to Wi-Fi systems, almost certainly in response to increasing consumer demand.

Last week, Yahoo purchased a video chat company called OnTheAir. And in 2011, Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype, a service for both video and audio-only calls. Though most people use Skype on desktop and laptop computers, the software for the service has been downloaded more than 100 million times just by owners of phones running Google’s Android mobile operating system. Microsoft built a service for its Windows 8 mobile phone that lets people receive calls even when Skype is not on.

Google, which has more than 100 million people a month using its Google Plus social networking service, now offers more than 200 apps for its video calling feature. It says it is interested not in making money on the applications, but in learning more about them so it can sell more ads by getting people to use its free video service, called Hangouts. Hangouts can be used for two-person or group calls, or for a video conference with up to 10 people.

“On a high level, Google works better when we know who you are and what your interests are,” said Nikhyl Singhal, director of product management for Google’s real-time communications group. “Video calling is becoming a basic service across different fronts.” While Mr. Singhal is an occasional user, he said, his 4-year-old daughter “is on it every day.”

Don’t expect video calling to improve productivity. Tango uses the same technology that enables video calls to sell games that people can play simultaneously. It sells virtual decorations like balloons to drop around someone’s image during a birthday call (both parties see the festive pixels). Google says some jokey applications on Hangouts, like a feature that can put a mustache over each caller, seem to encourage people to talk longer.

Currently, popular two-way games like Words With Friends on Facebook work by one player making a move and then passing the game over to the other player, not watching moves as they are made. Another promising area is avatars, like cartoon dogs and cats, that mouth speech when a user wants to have a video call but does not want to be seen.

The prospect of having to appear on-screen at any given moment might sound like a nonstarter for people who worry about bad hair days. But in fact, using mobile devices for video calls may be less bother than it seems.

“There may be natural inhibitions to being seen, but when I’m on a mobile device I’m out and about, so I’m more likely to be presentable,” said Michael Gartenberg, a consumer technology analyst at Gartner. “How people use this remains to be seen, but they are starting to expect it.”

Yet a new etiquette for mobile video calls is already emerging. People often text each other first to see if it’s O.K. to appear on camera. Video messages sent in the text box of a phone, like snippets of a party or a child’s first steps, are also useful precursors to video conversations. Mr. Singhal said making avatars for users of Hangout would be “an extraordinarily important area” as well.

The greatest challenge for the business may not be getting more consumers to use the service, but making sure the service works. Most phones have slight variations in things like camera placement and video formatting from one model to the next. “A camera can show you upside down if you load the wrong software on it,” said Mr. Setton of Tango.

As a result, the 80 engineers among Tango’s 110 employees have adjusted their software to work on more than 1,000 types of phones worldwide. The top 20 models have more than a million customers each, but the complexity of building software for a wider range of phones has made it hard for new mobile video companies to enter the field, Mr. Setton said.

Tango’s average video call used to last six minutes, Mr. Setton said, but when the company started adding other applications to go with the videos, like games and designs that float over people, the average call length rose to 12 minutes.

Brian X. Chen contributed reporting.

Read More..