Patents, for all their flaws, are a widely used proxy for innovation. And a new study from the Brookings Institution shows just how clustered patent-related innovation is in America.
That cities are hot beds of creativity of all kinds well known. But the Brookings research details just how concentrated an activity associated with scientific and technological innovation â€" patent filings â€" really is. There are more than 370 metropolitan statistical areas in the United States. But the people living in just 20 metro areas â€" home to 34 percent of the population â€" generate 63 percent of the nation’s patents. In the five most patent-intensive metro areas, the study found, the average resident is 2.4 times more likely to produce a patented innovation than the average American.
Those five metro areas with the most patent filings per million people, from 2007 to 2011, were: San Jose-Snnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif; Burlington-South Burlington, Vt.; Rochester, Minn.; Corvallis, Ore.; and Boulder, Colo.
(It’s easy to see why silicon Valley is on the list, but the others The common thread among three of the cities, Burlington, Rochester and Boulder, is universities and I.B.M. Corvallis is also a university town, with a Hewlett-Packard facility.)
The 49-page report, according to its lead author, Jonathan Rothwell, a senior research associate at Brookings, was an attempt to put a yardstick to the output of innovation, make comparisons and suggest useful policy steps.
One school of thought in regional economic development, Mr. Rothwell observed, has emphasized stimulating consumption by investing in downtown sports stadiums, convention centers and shopping malls â€" attractive urban settings to attract people and dollars. That was the path, he said, taken by some central California cities, like Stockton.
“Those investments proved to be made on a house of sand,â€! Mr. Rothwell said, noting that Stockton declared bankruptcy last year, a financial casualty of the real estate recession.
The prime economic engines, Mr. Rothwell said, are research universities. These university communities are patent-generating powerhouses and large recipients of research funding from the federal government, a resource at risk, Mr, Rothwell observed, with budget cuts in the offing. And companies that receive federal Small Business Innovation Research grants tend to be prolific patenters.
Patent-intensive metro areas, Mr. Rothwell said, enjoy higher incomes, even compared with cities of comparable size and education levels. “San Diego does much better than, say, Atlanta or Houston,†he said. One factor, he added, was that the college educated in San Diego were far more likely to have degrees in science, technology, engineering or math than in Atlanta or Houston.
The Brookings report says some critical things to say about sectors of the patent system, notably broad ad vague software patents. “The growing popularity of open-source software is something of a rebuke to the patent system,†write the authors Mr. Rothwell, Jose Lobo, Deborah Shrumsky and Mark Muro.
But the study points to the trends of increasing research spending per patent, and the rising number of citations and claims in each patent as evidence that the pace of patent activity overall is a good stand-in measure of innovation â€" and it is growing.
Patents, for all their flaws, are a widely used proxy for innovation. And a new study from the Brookings Institution shows just how clustered patent-related innovation is in America.
That cities are hot beds of creativity of all kinds well known. But the Brookings research details just how concentrated an activity associated with scientific and technological innovation â€" patent filings â€" really is. There are more than 370 metropolitan statistical areas in the United States. But the people living in just 20 metro areas â€" home to 34 percent of the population â€" generate 63 percent of the nation’s patents. In the five most patent-intensive metro areas, the study found, the average resident is 2.4 times more likely to produce a patented innovation than the average American.
Those five metro areas with the most patent filings per million people, from 2007 to 2011, were: San Jose-Snnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif; Burlington-South Burlington, Vt.; Rochester, Minn.; Corvallis, Ore.; and Boulder, Colo.
(It’s easy to see why silicon Valley is on the list, but the others The common thread among three of the cities, Burlington, Rochester and Boulder, is universities and I.B.M. Corvallis is also a university town, with a Hewlett-Packard facility.)
The 49-page report, according to its lead author, Jonathan Rothwell, a senior research associate at Brookings, was an attempt to put a yardstick to the output of innovation, make comparisons and suggest useful policy steps.
One school of thought in regional economic development, Mr. Rothwell observed, has emphasized stimulating consumption by investing in downtown sports stadiums, convention centers and shopping malls â€" attractive urban settings to attract people and dollars. That was the path, he said, taken by some central California cities, like Stockton.
“Those investments proved to be made on a house of sand,â€! Mr. Rothwell said, noting that Stockton declared bankruptcy last year, a financial casualty of the real estate recession.
The prime economic engines, Mr. Rothwell said, are research universities. These university communities are patent-generating powerhouses and large recipients of research funding from the federal government, a resource at risk, Mr, Rothwell observed, with budget cuts in the offing. And companies that receive federal Small Business Innovation Research grants tend to be prolific patenters.
Patent-intensive metro areas, Mr. Rothwell said, enjoy higher incomes, even compared with cities of comparable size and education levels. “San Diego does much better than, say, Atlanta or Houston,†he said. One factor, he added, was that the college educated in San Diego were far more likely to have degrees in science, technology, engineering or math than in Atlanta or Houston.
The Brookings report says some critical things to say about sectors of the patent system, notably broad ad vague software patents. “The growing popularity of open-source software is something of a rebuke to the patent system,†write the authors Mr. Rothwell, Jose Lobo, Deborah Shrumsky and Mark Muro.
But the study points to the trends of increasing research spending per patent, and the rising number of citations and claims in each patent as evidence that the pace of patent activity overall is a good stand-in measure of innovation â€" and it is growing.
A Russian judge who decided to spend his vacation moonlighting as a war correspondent in Syria survived being shot in the face and arm this week in the Damascus suburb of Darayya, according to the Web news agency he writes for as a volunteer.
The shooting of the judge, Sergey Aleksandrovich Berezhnoy, was caught on video by the crew from the Abkhazian Network News Agency he was accompanying as it reported on a unit of the Syrian Army fighting rebel forces outside the capital. The ANNA video report shows him snapping photographs on a ruined street before the incident, and also includes graphic scenes from the emergency surgery in a Syrian military hospital that saved his life.
A video report from an Abkhazian news agency embedded with a Syria Army outside Damascus showed a Russian judge
What exactly the 57-year-old deputy chairman of a provincial arbitration court in the Russian city of Belgorod was doing on a Syrian front line on Monday remains unclear. His wife told reporters that her husband had traveled to Syria “on a charity mission,†Russia’s state news agency reported. His boss told a Russian news site that he knew Mr. Berezhnoy was on vacation but had no idea where he’d gone until reports of his misadventure in Syria surfaced.
His boss tells Life News: “Sergei Alexandrovich was on holiday.â€
An account of the shooting published on Monday by the Abkhaz news agency’s manager, Marat Musin, described the judge as a prize-winning prose stylist but mentioned in passing that Mr. Berezhnoy had fought, as a military intelligence officer, in the separatist wars that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. One of those conflicts was in Abkhazia, the breakaway Georgian republic now governed by Russia, Mr. Musin wrote:
Sergey Aleksandrovich who fought for five years as an intelligence officer in Abkhazia and in other hot spots of our vast Motherland did not utter a single groan. Surgery was made by a general, the head of the military hospital. The bullet will be extracted tonight or tomorrow morning.
Before the volunteer member of our agency and well-known writer was wounded, we drove to the front line in the vicinity of Skaine mosque in Darayya. Sergey Berezhnoy is the winner of many literary prizes, namely for his military prose.
Mr. Musin went on to describe how the Russians embedded with the Syrian Army were forced to cross one “fire-swept street†after another as they attempted to make their way to safety. After a rebel sniper nearly shot the crew’s translator, Viktor Kuznetsov, in the head, Mr. Musin wrote:
The next to cross this street was Sergey. The first bullet did not stop him; neither did the second which hit his arm. He managed to run to the safety of a wall and stood up there.
I couldn’t understand why he was standing there instead of stealing into a hole. When we saw a stream of blood, we realized what had happened. The wounded Sergey Berezhnoy had to run across another fire-swept street. Then we were in a car to the hospital for tomography, x-ray and surgery.
To stifle his groans he tried to joke.
Please, light a candle for the miraculous s! urvival o! f my friend.
The reference to Mr. Berezhnoy’s past service in military intelligence got the attention of reporters in Moscow, who were trying to puzzle out what the Russian was doing in Syria.
Russian “volunteer†injured by sniper in Syria was intelligence officer who fought 5yrs in Abkhazia, Rosbalt reports. http://t.co/Wm8hs5zQ
But after even state television mentioned his intelligence career, the judge himself denied that he was a spy in a blog post published on the ANNA Web site early Thursday, apparently written from a hospital bed in Damascus.
Russian sho in Syria blogs fm hospital: I took time off work as judge, “not military intel, not saboteur, not spy.†http://t.co/QPv9nA2H
As The Moscow Times reported, Mr. Berezhnoy invoked a version of the domino theory to explain his motivation to bear witness to the Syrian struggle against rebels he characterized as sectarian, Islamist “terrorists.†If President Bashar al-Assad were to fall, he speculated, the instability would quickly ripple to the Russian Caucuses, then to the Volga region and the Urals, until all of “Mother Russia†would be “dismembered.â€
The dramatic video of the Russian judge being wounded and operated on drew attention to the work of the previously obscure news agency and raised questions about who its reporting is aimed at. Chief among those questions was why a tiny Georgian enclave attached to Russia’s Black Sea coast would set up a news agency that appears to be devoted almost entirely to coverage of Syria. Of more than 300 video reports posted on the ANNA ouTube channel in the past two years, all but a handful on Libya appear to be about the Syrian civil war, as seen from the government’s perspective.
What relationship, exactly, ANNA bears to Abkhazia is also unclear. An online biography for the news agency’s manager, Marat Musin, describes him as a professor at Moscow University and the “deputy head of the Russian Committee for Solidarity with the Peoples of Syria and Libya.â€
One theory, supported by the fact that several of the ANNA video reports are subtitled in English, is that the producers of the clips might be working in support of a Russian foreign policy aim, to cast the Syrian government’s battle with “terrorism†in a more positive light for viewers outside Russia. The news agency’s reports, which appear online under the motto “Truth Explaining Facts | Facts Supporting Truth,†could be part of an effort to make a better case for Mr. Assad’s g! overnment! , and partly redress the imbalance in global public opinion that formed early in 2011, when images of peaceful protesters being shot at by the Syrian security forces flooded social networks.
A typical example is a video report from earlier this month on the fighting in Darayya that features an interview with a Syrian general explaining the struggle. The report begins with images of government soldiers mocking the rebel battle cry of “Allahu Akbar†or “God Is Great.â€
A recent video report, with English subtitles on the Syrian military’s effort to regain control of a Damascus suburb.
Another video report, from last week, featured an interviews with a Syrian government soldiers who claimed that the rebels had plaed mines in a mosque in the Damascus suburb, “trying to flame a sectarian war; but they will not manage to do so, because the Syrian people are one, while they are foreigners.â€
A video report shot last week by a Russian news agency crew embedded with Syrian troops.
While the efforts of the Abkhaz news agency are in line with the Russian government’s support for the Assad government, the battle for Russian hearts and minds is not at all one-sided.
There are many, many Russian citizens in Syria â€" 30,000 was the estimate from the Russian embassy there last year, but it could be considerably more than that â€" in large part as the result of decades of intermarriage between Syrian men and Russian women.
Though Russia’s government has provided Mr. Assad with crucial political support, ! it’s no! t clear that the Russians in Syria support that view â€" in fact, a deputy foreign minister in December said in an unscripted moment that half the Russians in Syria hold opposition views. In many cases, this may be because they are women married to Syrian men who support the opposition. Moreover, in Syria there are a significant number of ethnic Circassians, a non-Slavic ethnic group which was driven out of the south of Russia by the Tsar’s armies, and many of them are critical of the Kremlin’s pro-Assad position.
Just last week, the Saudi satellite news channel Al Arabiya discovered (and translated into English) a propaganda video posted online by a rebel brigade in which a Russian-speaking woman declared her allegiance to the Free Syrian Army.
Video posted online by Syrian rebels featured a Russian-speaking woman declaring her support for the uprising.
Wearing a military uniform, and holding a camera, the woman said: “I am a Russian citizen and am standing amongst members of the Free Syrian Army. Every person here has the right to fight back and defend himself and his family. Waiting for aid from the Russian government is pointless, and it’s completely idiotic to wait for the Syrian regime’s help as well.â€
Her declaration concluded:
Both the Russian and Syrian people are peaceful and of good hearts, but the governments in both countries are aiming to destroy Syria. And a government like this will topple sooner or later.
On a personal level, I used to be a supporter of Bashar al-Assad, until I witnessed with my own eyes how his forces destroyed my neighborhood and killed my relatives. And the Shabiha! kidnappe! d girls from the streets and have done many unrighteous acts towards them. As such, we should not forgive them and I will continues to protect whatever is left for me here.
Hadiya Pendleton appeared in an antigang video that was filmed in 2008 when she was an elementary school student.
Four years before Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old honors student, was shot and killed in a Chicago park after school on Tuesday, she had starred in a YouTube video urging fellow students to avoid gangs.
The shooting of Ms. Pendleton, who had recently returned with her high school drill team from Washington, where they had performed at President Obama’s inauguration ceremonies, has fueled the debate on gun control and gun violence.
On Thursday, the Chicago police said they were getting tips they hoped would lead to the arrest of the gunman who shot at a group of high school students, mostly members of the volleyball team, huddled under a canopy to avoi heavy rain.
Ms.Pendleton was struck in the back as she fled. Another student was wounded. The police said that they had no motive for the shooting but that it was possible the gunman mistakenly believed the students were members of a rival gang.
Her death was at least the 40th homicide in Chicago this year. In 2012, there were more than 500 homicides in the city.
As my colleagues Steve Yaccino and Catrin Einhorn report, the death of Ms. Pendleton, a sophomore at King Prep High School, shook the school community and added to the national conversation on gun violence that began after the mass school shooting in Connecticut on Dec. 14.
As we previously reported on The Lede, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, cited Ms! . Pendleton’s death during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence on Wednesday. The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, called her killing another example “of the problem that we need to deal with.â€
On Thursday, news broke of another shooting, this time outside a middle school in Atlanta. According to a report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a 14-year-old boy was wounded in the head by another student, who was quickly arrested by an armed school resource officer.
Ms. Pendleton was a sixth grader in 2008 when she appeared in the antigang video with a handful of other students. Speaking into the camera, with two other students at her side, she says, smiling:
“Hi, my name is Hadiya. This commercial is informational for you and your future children. So many children out there are in gangs, and it’s your job as students to say no to gangs and yes to a great future.â€
he camera then shows children pretending to be victims of gang violence, sprawled in a stairwell, against a locker, lying on the floor. One of the girls, standing next to Hadiya, concludes their public service announcement by saying:
“So many children in the world have died from gang violence. More than 500 children have died from being in the wrong place at the wrong time.â€
Ms. Pendleton had just finished an exam and, the police said, was standing under the canopy at the park with a group of teenagers, mostly members of the school volleyball team, when a man jumped over a fence and began firing.
The Chicago Tribune reports that the police said the gunman apparently mistakenly believed they were members of a rival gang. The police said the teenagers targeted had no gang connection.
The park where Hadiya Pendleton was gunned down wh! ile she &! her friends took shelter from the rain http://t.co/tlJiP46g
Californians who don’t want to drive will soon have more ways to hire a ride. Uber, a start-up company that offers a smartphone app for summoning cars, is expanding its service to support ride sharing so ordinary citizens can drive people around in exchange for money.
Uber and the California Public Utilities Commission said on Thursday that they had reached an agreement that would allow Uber to operate its hire-a-car service as well as expand into ride sharing.
Previously, Uber faced a $20,000 fine from the commission, which said the company was operating without a license. Now the parties have agreed that Uber’s business can stay on the road as long as it adheres to basic safety requirements. The commission said it had suspended its fine and cease and desist order against Uber.
In California, Uber operates in San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange County, Sacramento and some smaller ciies around those areas.
Uber’s business started out in 2011 as an app for summoning luxury town cars for a price higher than that of a cab. Later, in some cities, it began the cheaper Uber X, which allowed customers to get rides from professional car services that used hybrid vehicles.
In an interview on Thursday, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, said it was possible that the company would incorporate its ride sharing service into Uber X. He said to expect ride sharing to become available in California in the coming weeks.
The news comes a day after the commission said it had reached a similar agreement with Zimride, a San Francisco start-up that offers a ride sharing app called Lyft. Its $20,000 fine was also suspended.
“When Uber doe! s it, it’s going to go mainstream,†Mr. Kalanick said about ride sharing. “It’s the continuation of what Uber started. We’re making it easy to get around cities.â€
The commission said in December that it would evaluate Uber and similar services to ensure public safety while encouraging innovation in transportation. It said this week that Uber could continue to operate if it adhered to basic safety requirements for drivers, like proof of insurance and national criminal background checks. The agreement can be terminated if Uber fails to comply, the commission said.
The priority given by BlackBerry to its new touch-screen phone raises questions about the company's strategy. Is it aiming to bring former BlackBerry owners back as customers, or is it shooting for brand-new customers who have never owned a smartphone
For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees, Nicole Perlroth reports in Thursday’s New York Times.
After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.
The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.
Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultant have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.
“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,†said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.
The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.
SAN FRANCISCO â€" Facebook made a lot of money in the last quarter. It also spent a lot. And that made investors once again cautious about the company.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, told analysts the company’s profit might not grow as fast as investors would like.
Employees at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The company’s fourth-quarter revenue was up 40 percent, helped by advertising aimed at its users.
After an eight-month roller coaster ride on the public markets, Facebook did well in the fourth quarter of 2012 by aggressively ramping up advertisements aimed at its users, including on mobile phones. In its financial report on Wednesday, it beat expectations, increasing revenue by a handsome 40 percent from the same period a year ago.
But its expenses also climbed rapidly as the company hired engineers and built data centers, causing profit to dip from the last quarter in 2011. With that, Wall Street lost some enthusiasm.
Facebook shares, which had closed at $31.24 on Wednesday, fell more than 3 percent in after-hours trading after the results were released.
In recent weeks, the stock had recovered much of the ground it lost in the eight months since its introduction last year.
“The quarter was a little like a cold shower after you’ve been out all night â€" it’s something that makes you sober up very quickly,†said Jordan Rohan, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, adding that the numbers made it clear that Facebook intended to spend more “to go after the opportunities before them.â€
In the conference call with analysts after the earnings report, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, cautioned Wall Street that profit might not grow as fast as investors would like. That, he said, was because Facebook would continue to spend money hiring people and building products for the future, like the new search tool it introduced this month. “It’s important to start planting seeds,†he said.
The most closely watched part of the earnings report was how much money the company brought in from its mobile users; most people log in to the site using their cellphones. Facebook said advertising on the mobile newsfeed accounted for 23 percent of its advertising revenue, up from 14 percent in the third quarter but slightly lower than some analysts had forecast.
Mr. Zuckerberg predicted that the company would eventually make more money on every minute spent on the Facebook mobile app than on the desktop computer.
Facebook reported fourth-quarter revenue of $1.59 billion, compared with $1.52 billion predicted by analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. The company earned $64 million in net income, or 3 cents a share. Excluding certain items, Facebook said it had a net income of $426 million in the fourth quarter, or 17 cents a share, beating analysts’ expectations by 2 cents.
Facebook’s biggest, long-term challenge remains how to profit from the enormous piles of personal data of its one billion users without alienating them or inviting the wrath of government regulators in the United States and abroad. The company reported on Wednesday that it had 1.06 billion active users â€" those who log in at least once a month.
Secondarily, it must figure out a way to profit abroad. Most of its revenue still comes from North America and to a lesser extent Europe.
Despite the stock’s decline after the earnings report, it is still much recovered since last year’s slump. It opened at $38 a share last May, but shortly after that, the stock plummeted as Wall Street soured on its ability to increase profit as fast as investors wanted. Shares sank to half the public offering price last September.
But the company focused on its advertising business and released a series of new products aimed at taking on some of its biggest rivals, including Google and Apple. Mr. Zuckerberg took the initiative to reassure investors it had their interests at heart. The improvement in the share price in recent weeks suggests that the company’s charm offensive is paying off.
In the last few months, Facebook has floated several trial balloons aimed at pleasing Wall Street and, in particular, convincing investors that it can thrive in the mobile era.
It offered marketers more refined targeting options, including Facebook Exchange, which allows companies to track users as they are browsing and shopping for products around the Web and lets companies show advertisements for those products when the users log back on to Facebook.
Before Christmas last year, in a bid to step into territory dominated by Amazon, it introduced the Gifts application, which lets users buy goods and services for their Facebook friends, and in turn, share with the company an extremely valuable piece of data: their credit card numbers. The company made clear in the conference call on Wednesday that this would not be an immediate moneymaker.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 31, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Facebook’s Solid Results Are Greeted Cautiously.
TOKYO â€" Nintendo said on Wednesday that it expected to sell far fewer units of its Wii U game console than it had anticipated, reducing the sales outlook for its flagship device just two months after its release.
A Wii U display at a Target store in Glenview, Ill. Nintendo said it expected to sell four million of the game consoles through March, compared with a previous projection of 5.5 million.
Nintendo has a lot riding on the Wii U, the successor to the Wii, which revolutionized the gaming industry seven years ago with a casual approach that brought video games to new audiences. The company is banking on the Wii U to revive its fortunes after the disappointing introduction in 2011 of its hand-held gaming machine, the 3DS, which prompted the company to reduce its price sharply to stoke demand.
Nintendo executives had also said the Wii U would prove that dedicated game systems still had a future in a world now teeming with less expensive, more convenient mobile games played on smartphones and tablets.
The latest numbers from Nintendo are not promising. The company said that it had sold 3.06 million Wii U games and that it expected sales to reach just four million units through March, almost 30 percent less than a previous projection of 5.5 million.
Nintendo also downgraded its 3DS sales expectations, saying that it would sell 15 million units through March instead of the 17.5 million units it previously forecast, and that it expected to sell fewer games.
“Nintendo needs a change in strategy,†said Michael Pachter, a gaming research analyst for Wedbush Securities, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. He said that Nintendo had botched the Wii U design â€" a touch screen used together with a television â€" and that the device was unimpressive for dedicated gamers and baffling for casual ones.
Nintendo executives need to reorganize the company so it will continue to be profitable even with lower hardware sales, Mr. Pachter said. He also said the company should consider developing smartphone games, a move Nintendo has resisted.
“Smartphones and tablets are nibbling away at the edges of the market for games,†he said. “If they can’t beat it, they should consider making money off it. Why can’t Mario be on the smartphoneâ€
Still, Nintendo returned to profitability for the first nine months of its business year, largely thanks to the weakening of the yen. That lowers the costs of Japanese exporters and bolsters their earnings.
Nintendo’s profit for the April-to-December period came to 14.55 billion yen, or $160 million, compared with a loss of 48.35 billion yen a year earlier, the company said in an earnings announcement that painted a mixed picture of its prospects.
The company raised its profit forecast for the business year through March to 14 billion yen from 6 billion yen. Nintendo does not break out quarterly results.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 31, 2013, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Nintendo Lowers Forecast for Wii U Sales.
The ability to summon a car with a smartphone app sounds convenient, but lawmakers and city governments have been nervous about how these apps might pose risks to consumers. A car-requesting app called Lyft has persuaded California to loosen up.
Hundreds of people, including families who lost children in the Dec. 14 mass shooting, packed Newtown High School in Connecticut on Wednesday night so they could tell members of a state legislative task force on gun violence and children’s safety what changes in laws and policies they wanted to see.
Members of the General Assembly’s 52-member bipartisan task force traveled to Newtown to hear from residents at the hearing. The task force, looking to make changes in areas ranging from gun control to mental health, held a similar hearing recently in Hartford.
Among those who spoke on Wednesday night was Scarlett Lewis, a 44-year-old single mother, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, died in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“We need to somehow hold onto that feeling of oeness.†Scarlet, mother of Jesse Lewis, child killed in Newtown. http://t.co/nQHBp4TC
The task force hearing in Newtown was held on the same day that the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington held its first hearing on gun violence in the aftermath of the Connecticut shooting, which left 20 pupils and 6 staff members of the elementary school dead.
During the hearing in Washington, which the Lede covered earlier, former Representative Gabrielle Giffords called on lawmakers to be “bold and courageous†in creating! solutions to reduce gun violence.
In Connecticut, the hearing also drew teachers with views on what steps should and should not be taken to quell violence.
Tom Swets, taught shooter Adam Lanza at NHS. He will quit tomorrow if teachers are told to carry guns. http://t.co/g73ULZeP
Earlier this week, The Newtown Bee, the town’s newspaper, reported that the first permanent memorial to the lives lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School had been dedicated.
First Permanent Memorial To Sandy Hook School Victims Is Dedicated http://t.co/yoGWPCK9 http://t.co/kGRSNUJH
At least two people were killed when a powerful line of storms in the Southeast spawned tornadoes, demolishing homes and businesses, downing trees and flipping more than 100 cars and several tractor-trailers on a major interstate in northern Georgia./p>
In Adairsville, Ga., about 60 miles northwest of Atlanta, a WBS-TV reporter captured a video on his iPhone of a funnel cloud that suddenly appeared before him.
Ross Cavitt, who is also a meteorologist for WSB-Channel 2, reported that the funnel cloud moved across a parking lot in Adairsville’s downtown area.
On Twitter, there were images of the devastation, including photos of a flattened manufacturing plant in Adairsville. The factory’s manager told reporters that employees hid in a kitchen as the tornado tore the building apart around them starting about 11:15 a.m. Wednesday.
Another photo from Jerry Holmes from an Adairsville manufacturing facility #StormWatchOn2 h! ttp://t.co/pcjU0RcO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that one man died in Adairsville after a tree fell on his mobile home.
It was the same line of storms overnight that killed a man in Tennessee when a tree fell on a shed, according to WSMV-TV in Nashville. The National Weather Service has confirmed that at least eight tornadoes touched down in Tennessee, where the extent of the damage is still being assessed, authorities said.
In northern Georgia, The Journal-Constitution reports that Robert Jones, the police chief in Adairsville, estimated that the tornao was a quarter-mile wide late Wednesday morning as it ripped through the town while on the ground for about two miles. He said the police had not yet determined the extent of injuries because officers and volunteers were still assessing the damage and going door to door.
On Interstate 75 and downtown streets, the storm tossed around cars and turned over tractor-trailers.
YouTubeDozens of bodies were found in a river in Aleppo, Syria.
As my colleagues Hania Mourtada and Alan Cowell report, the bodies of dozens of young men, shot in the head from close range with their hands bound, were found in a narrow river in a neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria, on Tuesday.
The bodies were found in the Queiq River, which skirts the front line and de facto border between government-held areas of Aleppo and territory controlled by rebel fighters in the neighborhood of Bustan al-Qasr.
Video posted to YouTube showed bodies lined up alongthe muddy riverbank. Many had visible head wounds and lengths of cord wrapped around their wrists. Gunfire echoed in the distance, and at the end of the clip the cameraman broke into a run. “A sniper is firing at us,†he said.
Dozens of bodies, shot in the head and bound at the wrists, were found in a river in a suburb of Aleppo.
Early video and reports from the scene on Tuesday suggested the number of dead to be around 50, a figure that rose significantly on Wednesday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-government group based in Britain that has a network of contacts inside Syria, said 65 bod! ies were recovered from the river. The group estimated that 15 more remained in the water but could not be retrieved because of a threat posed by government snipers.
The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper whose correspondent, Ruth Sherlock, was on the scene of the grim discovery, reported that residents pulled 79 bodies out of the river. A rebel fighter interviewed by Ms. Sherlock estimated that as many as 30 more bodies could remain in the water, but said they were impossible to retrieve because of nearby government sniper positions.
Went to the scene of the massacre site. Corpses all men, most aged 20-40yrs, but 2 young boys also. Many in civilian clothes #Syria #Aleppo
Thomas Rassloff, a freelance photographer based in Germany, was taken to the riverbank by Free Syrian Army fighters who he said told him “there are a lot of bodies.†Mr. Rassloff somber commemorations of Hitler’s rise to power eight decades ago on Wednesday, Egypt’s president was pressed several times to explain anti-Semitic comments he made in 2010, when he called Israelis “bloodsuckers†and “the descendants of apes and pigs.â€
As my colleagues Melissa Eddy and Nicholas Kulish report, Mr. Morsi insisted that his comments had been taken out of context when asked about them by a German reporter at a joint news conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. “I am not against Judaism as a religion,†he replied. “I am not against Jews practicing heir religion. I was talking about anybody practicing any religion who spills blood or attacks innocent people â€" civilians. I criticize such behavior.â€
Before her meeting with the Egyptian president, Ms. Merkel spoke at the opening of a new exhibition on the Nazi era at the Topography of Terror Museum and urged Germans to remember that Hitler was appointed chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933 with popular support.
A video report from the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle on commemorations of Hitler’s rise to power on Jan. 30, 1933.
Speaking at the museum, which is located on the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters, Ms. Merkel said, “There ! is no other way to say this: the rise of the National Socialists was made possible because the elite and other groups within German society helped and, most importantly, because most Germans at least tolerated their rise.â€
Later in the day, when Mr. Morsi sat down for a discussion of the upheaval in the Arab world organized by the Körber Foundation, he was again reminded of how seriously Germans take his inflammatory remarks about Zionists and Jews. As video of the event shows, the first question put to the Egyptian president by Georg Mascolo, editor in chief of Der Spiegel, concerned “this infamous video†of Mr. Morsi calling Jews “bloodsuckers.†In response to Mr. Mascolo’s question, “did you really say that or not†Mr. Morsi first complained that he had already answered the question “five times today†and reiterated his claim that the comments needed to be put into context.
He then went on to esentially defend his rhetorical attacks on Jews and Zionists as an appropriate response to the killing of civilians in Gaza by Israel’s military during the offensive that preceded his remarks in 2010. “The bloodshed of innocent people is universally condemned, now and in the future. The colonizing of the land of others is to be condemned as unacceptable, and the right to self-defense is also guaranteed†as a human right, Mr. Morsi said.
Mr. Mascolo then asked about a report in his magazine this week, in which a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood said that Mr. Morsi, in his previous role as a senior leader of that organization, was ultimately responsible for the publication of even more inflammatory remarks in articles on the society’s Web site, Ikhwan Online. In one such ar! ticle! from 2010 that was discovered last week by an anti-Islamist American Web site, a Brotherhood official called the Holocaust “a myth†fabricated by American intelligence agents and “the biggest scam in modern history.â€
That Spiegel report was based on an interview with Abdel-Jalil el-Sharnoubi, a former editor of the Brotherhood’s Web site, who said that Mr. Morsi had used the exact same words about Zionists in 2004 and had never objected to hate speech against Jews on the site.
Sharnoubi wasn’t surprised by the Morsi hate video. “Agitation against the Israelis is in keeping with the way Morsi thinks. For the Morsi I know, any cooperation with Israel is a serious sin, a crime.†Morsi’s choice of words is also nothing new, says Sharnoubi. As proof, he opens his black laptop and shows us evidence of the former Muslim Botherhood member’s true sentiments.
Indeed, the video gaffes do not appear to be a one-time occurrence. In 2004 Morsi, then a member of the Egyptian parliament, allegedly raged against the “descendants of apes and pigs,†saying that there could be “no peace†with them. The remarks were made at a time when Israeli soldiers had accidentally shot and killed three Egyptian police officers. The source of the quote can hardly be suspected of incorrectly quoting fellow Brotherhood members: Ikhwan Online, the Islamist organization’s website.
Few people are as familiar with the contents of that website as Sharnoubi, who was the its editor-in-chief until 2011. The current president became the general inspector of the organization in 2007, says Sharnoubi. In this capacity, Morsi would have been partly responsible for the anti-Jewish propaganda on the website, which featured the “banner of jihad†at the time and saw “Jews and Zionists as archenemies.â€
Without po! inting to! any specific factual errors, Mr. Morsi claimed that the Spiegel article was inaccurate and reiterated that he was “not against Judaism or Jews,†but reserved the right to criticize Zionism in the strongest terms.
The Pakistani teenager who was shot in the head by the Taliban last year for advocating for the education of girls will return to a British hospital for skull surgery and has asked to keep a fragment of bone from her skull as a souvenir, medical staff said on Wednesday.
The schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai, was shot in October 2012 by a gunman who singled her out as she returned from school in Mingora, in the northwestern Swat Valley. Just 15 years old at the time of the shooting, she had already worked for several years to promote girls’ education and children’s rights.
She was initially treated at a Pakistani hospital before being flown to Britain for what medical experts said would be a long period of rehabilitation. When she was discharged from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham in early January, doctors said at the time that she would be staying with her family, who had joined her in Britain, before returning for further surgery to rebuild her skull. Video posted online showed her waving as she left the hospital.
On Wednesday, the hospital explained the surgery needed on her skull, which she will undergo in the next week or so. Dr. Dave Rosser, the medical director at the hospital, said Ms. Yousafzai’s skull would be fitted with a titanium plate that had been shaped to recreate the original contour of her skull and cover the piece that had been removed. Doctors had sewn that piece of skull b! one under the skin in her abdomen; it had been removed in the initial surgery in Pakistan.
But after consultation with Ms. Yousafzai, the decision was made to fit her skull with the plate instead of trying to replant the bone, which might have been partly reabsorbed and therefore slightly smaller in size, Dr. Rosser said. The bone piece will be surgically removed from her abdomen, sterilized, and given to the girl “who wishes to keep it for, as a memory I guess,†he said in a video of the news conference posted by The Telegraph.
She will also be implanted with a cochlear implant since she is completely deaf in her left ear.
Her shooting brought global condemnation of the Taliban, who have vowed to try to attack her again.
Stefan Edmondson, the principal maxillofacial prosthetist, provided further dtails about the procedure, known as titanium cranioplasty, using a series of videos and animations based on her medical records released by the hospital. They show the making of the plate, the image of her CT scans when she was first admitted to the hospital, and the fitting of the plate and implant. A red line drawn diagonally down the skull shows the approximate journey of the bullet.
A hospital statement said:
Malala was shot at point blank range. The bullet hit her left brow and instead of penetrating her skull it traveled underneath the skin, the whole length of the side of her head and into her shoulder. The shock wave shattered the thinnest bone of the skull and the soft tissues at the base of her jaw/neck were damaged. The bullet and its fracture lines also destroyed her eardrum and the bones for hearing. She has no hearing in her left ear (right ear remains normal) howe! ver, the ! nerve of hearing is intact.
The titanium cranioplasty procedure is carried out first and will take between one and two hours. The head will be shaved at the wound location and the flap of skin covering it will be prepared and draped back. This will expose the dura - the tough fibrous membrane covering the brain. The 0.6mm metal plate that has been molded from a 3D model created through CT imaging from Malala’s own skull, will then be put in place. It is secured to the skull with screws placed in 2 mm countersunk holes. The flap of skin is then draped back over the plate and stitched into place.
The cochlear surgeon then takes over from the neurosurgeon. The surgeon will locate the cochlear and identify the structures of the inner ear. An incision will be made in the round window membrane and the implant is fed through it. A small well will be drilled in the skull behind the titanium plate to allow the electronics to be implanted. This part of the surgery will take approximately 90 minutes.
The surgery was similar to a procedure done on former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head and was fitted with a custom-made piece of synthetic bone attached to cover for the portion of her skull that was removed to allow her brain to swell, as this CNN interview with the neurosurgeon who performed the operation showed. Ms. Giffords testified at a Senate hearing on gun violence on Wednesday.
In an interview on Wednesday, Ms. Giffords doctor, Dr. Dong H. Kim, the chair of neurosurgery at Memorial Hermann Hospital-Texas Medical Center, said the two operations were similar. Usually, he said, the layer of bone that is removed from the skull is better replaced with an artificial one rather than the original.
Both titanium and plastic are fairly similar and equivalent, it is a local choice. They can both be molded to size, so there is no cosmetic defect. If you are going to use the patient’s own bone there might be problems. Sometimes it shrinks over time and doesn’t fit the skull and cosmetically it is not as good. And when you remove the bone after trauma, especially from a laceration or bullet, you cannot be certain that the bone has not been contaminated with bacteria.
He added that the practice of inserting a piece of the skull in the abdomen was not an uncommon one. The abdomen is sterile and the fragment is portable, meaning it goes with the patient if at some point he or she might end up somewhere else. In the United States however, it is usually not done anymore because surgeons do not want to create another incision.
Tools of Modern Gunmaking: Plastic and a 3-D Printer
A gun with a plastic lower receiver that was produced using a 3-D printer.
A man in Wisconsin viewed it as a technical challenge. Another, in New Hampshire, was looking to save some money. And in Texas, a third wanted to make a political point.
Chapman Baetzel, right, with his girlfriend, said that to save money he made his receiver on a 3-D printer he built from a kit.
The three may have had different motivations but their results were the same: each built a working gun that included a part made in plastic with a 3-D printer.
What they did was legal and, except for the technology and material used, not much different from what do-it-yourself gunsmiths have been doing for decades. But in the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Conn., and the intensified debate over gun control, their efforts, which began last summer, have stoked concerns that the inexpensive and increasingly popular printers and other digital fabrication tools might make access to weapons even easier.
“We now have 3-D printers that can manufacture firearms components in the basement,†said Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York. “It’s just a matter of time before a 3-D printer will produce a weapon capable of firing bullets.â€
A 3-D printer builds an object layer by layer in three dimensions, usually in plastic. To effectively outlaw weapons made with them, Mr. Israel wants to extend an existing law, set to expire this year, that makes weapons that are undetectable by security scanners â€" like a printed all-plastic gun â€" illegal.
But there are also major technical obstacles to creating an entire gun on a 3-D printer, not the least of which is that a plastic gun would probably melt or explode upon firing a single bullet, making it about as likely to kill the gunman as the target.
In the meantime, Michael Guslick in Milwaukee, Chapman Baetzel in Dover, N.H., and Cody Wilson in Austin, Tex., did something much simpler and, for now, more effective. They printed the part of an AR-15 assault rifle called the lower receiver, the central piece that other parts are attached to. Then, using standard metal components, including the chamber and barrel â€" the parts that must be strong enough to withstand the intense pressure of a bullet firing â€" they assembled working guns.
In all, the three men, who have written about their efforts on the Web, have fired hundreds of rounds, although the plastic receivers eventually deform, crack or otherwise fail from heat and shock. But Mr. Wilson, for one, is working on a fourth-generation design that he says should be more durable.
A lower receiver is the only part of an AR-15 that, when bought, requires the filing of federal paperwork. But it is legal to make an AR-15 â€" and many other guns â€" for personal use as long as there is no intent to sell them. And if the lower receiver is homemade, no paperwork is required.
Amateur gunsmiths have made lower receivers for years, in metal, although the process requires a certain level of machining expertise. Inexpensive 3-D printers have grown in popularity â€" their rise has been compared with that of personal computers in the 1980s â€" in part because they are easy to use. It is not even necessary to know how to create the design files that instruct the device to print bit after bit of plastic to build the object, as there are files for tens of thousands of objects available on the Internet, created by other users and freely shared.
Still, some tinkering is usually required. Mr. Guslick, who works in information technology and describes himself as a hobbyist gunsmith, printed his receiver on a machine he bought online through Craigslist. He used a file and abrasive paper to make the piece fit properly, but over all the project was not much of a technical challenge. “Anybody could do this,†he said.
Mr. Baetzel, who made his receiver on a 3-D printer he built from a kit, said the part worked fine until he cracked it when bumping the gun while putting it in his car. He has since printed a replacement along with a modified grip and stock which, he said, has made the gun sturdier.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 30, 2013, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Tools of Modern Gunmaking: Plastic and a 3-D Printer.
Research in Motion’s introduction on Wednesday of a new BlackBerry phone will be the most important event in the company’s history since 1996, when its founders showed investors a small block of wood and promised that a wireless e-mail device shaped like that would change business forever, Ian Austen of The New York Times reports.
RIM, now with just 4.6 percent of the global market for smartphones in 2012, according to IDC data, long ago exchanged dominance for survival mode. On Wednesday, the company will introduce a new line of smartphones called the BlackBerry 10 and an operating system of the same name that Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, says will restore the company to glory.
The main elements of the new phones and their operating system are already well-known. Mr. Heins and other executives at RIM have been demonstrating the units for months to a variety of audiences. App developers received prototype versions as far back as last spring.
While analyst and app developers may be divided about the future of RIM, there is a consensus that BlackBerry 10, which arrives more than year behind schedule, was worth the wait.
Initially, RIM will release two variations of the BlackBerry 10, one that will be a touch-screen model that resembles many other phones now on the market. The other model is a hybrid - with a keyboard similar to those now found on current BlackBerrys as well as a small touch screen.
The real revolution, though, may be in the software that manages a person’s business and personal information. It is clearly designed with an eye toward retaining and, more important, luring back corporate users.
In other reports across the Web on RIM’s new phone, Crackberry.com focused on the entertainment possibilities of the new phone. The Register sees the NFC capabiliti! es of the phone as more promising.
The Lede is following testimony Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing entitled “What Should America Do About Gun Violence†Former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, her husband, Mark E. Kelly and Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, are among the witnesses expected to testify. As our colleague, Jennifer Steinhauer reports, this is the first hearing since the Dec. 14 mass shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members.
The Lede is following testimony Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing entitled “What Should America Do About Gun Violence†Former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, her husband, Mark E. Kelly and Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, are among the witnesses expected to testify. As our colleague, Jennifer Steinhauer reports, this is the first hearing since the Dec. 14 mass shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members.
The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. For Tuesday, selections include Google Maps adding information on North Korea, a computer virus that has stolen thousands of Facebook log-in credentials, and a book that tells how all the versions of a popular video game fit together.
Office is one of the great gushers of profits in the software industry, so it is noteworthy when Microsoft starts fiddling with how it charges for its suite of productivity applications.
On Tuesday, the company began what it called a reinvention of its Office product for consumers. Users will now subscribe to the software for a $100 annual fee, rather than buying it outright as they have for years. While Microsoft is still offering the more conventional option of buying a “perpetual†version of Office for the home â€" prices start at $140 â€" it’s clearly betting that it can get most of its customers to move to the new model over time.
“I would say in 10 years, the majority of customers, perhaps all customers, will be in a subscription relationship as opposed to a perpetual,†Kurt DelBene, president of Microsoft’s Office division, said in an interview.
Why fork over $100 for Office each year, rather than make one payment of $140 Perhaps more pointedly, why pay anything at al when Google offers online alternatives to Word, Excel and PowerPoint that are free for basic versions and cost only $50 a year for versions with extra features
Microsoft justifies the price for the subscription version of Office, called Office 365 Home Premium, by adding some flexibility for households with multiple computers. A subscription comes with the rights to install the software on up to five Windows and Mac computers. If you’re using a computer outside the home that doesn’t have Office on it, you can download a version of the software from Microsoft’s site that deletes itself from the computer when you’re finished.
Office subscribers also get extra online storage through Microsoft’s SkyDrive service and 60 minutes of free Skype phone calls. Microsoft also says it will up! date the subscription version of software with new features before it updates the version that people buy the old-fashioned way.
There is one glaring omission in the new Office offering: support for the iPad. Although Microsoft has a hush-hush development effort to bring its major Office apps to Apple’s tablet, the company hasn’t done so yet. The company has released one Office app, OneNote, for the iPad and says people can do light editing of Office documents through versions of the Office apps that run through the iPad’s Web browser.
Still, there are undoubtedly many users who would love to have an authentic version of Office on their devices, given how popular the iPad is becoming in the workplace.
Mr. DelBene said Microsoft had “nothing to announce at this point†when asked when the company will bring the complete version of Office to the iPad.
As for Google, Mr. DelBne said it has not “in any way diminished demand†for Office because Microsoft’s applications are “just so far beyond the capabilities that are in those alternative products.†As an example, he cited a feature in Excel that analyzes a batch of numbers selected by a user and automatically recommends the best way to represent the data in a chart.
Despite Google, Mr. DelBene said, “we think that we’re on track for Office 365 to be one of the fastest-growing businesses in the history of Microsoft.â€
Video produced by activists said to show tear gas in the neighborhood of an 8-year-old boy who died from exposure to the gas this month.
The government of Bahrain has drawn renewed criticism for its use of tear gas after activists said an 8-year-old boy died this month when his village was exposed to tear gas. But Bahrain’s government contradicted that claim, saying the boy died after being admitted to the hospital with severe pneumonia.
The family stated that their village, Karbabad, was attacked extensively with tear gas on the 17th of January 2013 and as Qassim suffers from asthma, it is believed by the family that this attack made him vulnerable to tear gas and lead to his death.
Qassim was suffering from a severe form of asthma. He was following up with doctors in Bahrain and the family was strongly advised to take extra care of him during changes in the weather or any other stimulant that may precipitate a lethal deterioration of his health.
He was admitted to ! the pediatric intensive care unit in Salmaniya Medical Complex in Bahrain where he died later due to respiratory failure from the severity of the asthma attack and worsening general condition.
The rights group said Qassim was one of two people who died this month after exposure to tear gas. The other was an 87-year-old man named Habeeb Ebrahim, who inhaled tear gas on Sept. 27 and Nov. 30 of last year and was hospitalized several times before he died on Jan. 12, his family told the rights group.
Bahrain’s public prosecutor said in a statement that the boy’s death was investigated.
A post-mortem was conducted on the child’s body and his medical record was reviewed which indicated that he was admitted to hospital on 19-1-2013 following breathing problems due to severe pneumonia. Meanwhile, the medical examiner confirmed in his report that there was no criminal cause of death and that doctors exerted all effrts to treatment the child but without any use.
A video produced by a local Karbabad resistance group shows tear gas inundating what it says is the boy’s house and neighborhood. The group has also posted video of protesters lobbing flaming petrol bombs at security forces who appeared to respond by firing tear gas.
Feb. 14 is a reference to the day in 2011 when the uprising began in the country. Police officers responded with force, and the government has since continued to silence its critics and jail dissidents, as my colleague Kareem Fahim wrote in a recent report.
This month, the European Parliament called ! for sanctions against Bahrain for its violent handling of protesters.
The House expresses its “strong disapproval†of the EU’s lack of response to the ongoing crackdown in Bahrain and calls for sanctions against the individuals directly responsible for the human rights abuses and for restrictions on EU exports of surveillance technology, tear gas and crowd-control material.
Video of unidentified men streaming into the lobby of Cairo’s Semiramis InterContinental hotel broadcast live on Egypt’s ONTV early Tuesday.
As our colleagues Kareem Fahim, David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh report, the mayhem on Cairo’s streets briefly spilled into the lobby of one of the city’s luxury hotels, the Semiramis InterContinental, during intense clashes between riot police and protesters along the Nile Corniche overnight.
Images of a mob streaming into the hotel, broadcast live on Egyptian television and then posted online, raised fears of further damage to the country’s already battered tourist industry.
<>Judging by a series of urgent pleas for help posted on the hotel’s Twitter feed, the raid came just after 2:30 a.m. local time.
We r under attack and several thugs have entered the Semiramis … We need help #jan25 #jan28 #Tahrir #EgyPolice
Guards at the hotel told Bel Trew of the Egyptian news site Ahram Online that phone calls to the police and the army initially went unheeded as about 40 men armed with shotguns, knives and a semiautomatic weapon broke into the shuttered lobby and started looting.
An Ahram Online journalist who witnessed the attack, Karim Hafez, said that protesters had stopped fighting with the police to help secure the hotel: “When they realized these groups were trying to loot the hotel, protesters shot fire crackers at them as they attacked the building and tried to push them away from the area but these groups were armed with birdshot bullets.â€
This reported cooperation of the protesters with the police officers they have been battling on and off for more than two years prompted bloggers like the British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr to comment on the black comedy of the situation.
Protesters and police suddenly one hand at the Semiramis.
An Egyptian blogger, Mohammed Maree, reported on his @mar3e Twitter feed that a police captain on the scene confirmed to him that the protesters who were fighting with the security forces when the raid took place were not responsible for the storming of the hotel.
police captain named Moataz told me that the protesters stopped fighting with us and told us that there are some gunmen stormed Semiramis-2
Mr. Maree also reported that witnesses to the raid said it began after four people drove up in a car with no license plates and fired shots to scare protesters away, before storming the hotel. He later posted a photograph of some of the hotel’s guests leaving under the protection of protesters.
pic: under the protection of “protesters†,some guests of Semiramis leave the Hotel and take a taxis to the Airport http://t.co/bwSvVJBf 10
Nabila Samak, ! a spokesw! oman for the hotel who posted the calls for help on Twitter, told The Times that the staff had called Egyptian television stations for help earlier in the evening, well before the attack, because they’d been worried about an attack during the running street battle that has now continued for several days.
To clarify we contacted all relevant authorise & later media to draw attention as the break in attempts increased & aid had not yet arrived.
Ms. Samak told Ahram Online that the staff worked to secure the hotel’s guests but were not equipped to cope with the effective collapse of the police force, since, “no guards of hotels in Egypt are armed.†Later she thanked protesters for coming to the aid of the hotel’s staff and guests.
Thank you all revolutionaries that stood by us last night…You are awesome#jan2813
A Saudi women who identified herself as a guest at the hotel, Hilda Ismail, posted updates and photographs from a shelter the guests were taken to during the incident on her Arabic-language Twitter feed.
In one message, she wrote: “If there is no Egyptian security, and if Morsi is sleeping, where are this country’s men!! Come get these dogs, the Semiramis Hotel is being ransacked and we are there.â€
Later, Ms. Ismail uploaded a brief video clip of a man attempting to reassure guests that they were safe after the arrival of special forces officers from the ministry of the interior led by a Captain Moataz.
In the clip, the man tells the guests that the police captain wants “to assure you that the hotel is secured and it is under the control of the ministry of the interior now. Within no time you will go back to your rooms and already are in safe hans.†The police, the man added, “will make sure that such thugs will not enter the hotel again. We are sorry.â€
Ms. Ismail also posted an image of the ransacked lobby on Twitter.
Intercontinental’s lobby earlier this morning (photo by @Hildaismail ) http://t.co/P8aO2v6I
Ms. Ismai’s claim to have been a guest at the hotel was supported by the fact that she had uploaded a brief video clip, apparently shot from a high floor of the hotel, showing the fighting on the Nile Corniche below.
The luxury hotel chain, which was created in 1946 by Pan American World Airw! ays, did ! not immediately reply to a request for comment, but an executive in Cairo told Al-Masry Al-Youm, an Egyptian newspaper, that “more than 45 clients insisted on leaving despite the hotel’s offer to relocate them to higher floors, away from the clashes.â€
Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim in Cairo.
Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.
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