In Islamist Bastion, Support Ebbs for Egypt’s Brotherhood

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

A school with old posters of Mohamed Morsi, now the president, in Al Talbeya, a neighborhood in Giza, where disaffection with the government is growing. More Photos »

AL TALBEYA, Egypt — Mohamed Salamah used to vote with the Muslim Brotherhood. But in Saturday’s referendum on the Islamist-backed constitution, Mr. Salamah says he is voting against it, mainly because he no longer trusts the movement.

“They aren’t even doing anything very Islamic,” said Mr. Salamah, a 24-year-old waiter in a cafe in Al Talbeya, a working-class neighborhood in Giza across the Nile from Cairo that was an Islamist stronghold in previous votes. “They are just doing things that aren’t very competent.”

Throughout the neighborhood, both loyal supporters and critics of the Brotherhood described a deep erosion in the group’s street-level support. That was evident, they said, even before the low turnout and narrow margin in last weekend’s first round of voting on what residents here call “the Brotherhood constitution.”

The results so far appear to have surprised leaders of the Brotherhood and their opposition. And even if the draft constitution is approved, as expected, on Saturday in the second half of the vote, the new questions about the charter’s popularity and the Brotherhood’s mandate could prolong Egypt’s political turbulence and, as a result, defer badly needed economic reforms as well.

Residents here and around Cairo say the damage to the Brotherhood’s popularity is unrelated to its religious ideology. It reflects a consistent trio of complaints: confusing economic policies of the Brotherhood-led government, a near-monopoly on power and civilian supporters’ use of force against opponents in a street battle two weeks ago. Even so, many say the Brotherhood remains the most potent political force, in part because of the incoherence of the opposition, which has often focused on accusing the Brotherhood of imposing religious rule.

But for now economists say the battle for power is jeopardizing progress on the bread-and-butter issues that are paramount across the ideological spectrum. “What the economy needs are decisions that are politically courageous and credible, and no government can do that now,” said Ragui Assaad, an economist at the University of Minnesota with an office in Cairo.

A critical loan of more than $4 billion from the International Monetary Fund, expected to be signed this month, has been delayed until the political situation settles. The Egyptian pound is slipping against the dollar. And the most obvious step to improve the growth and fairness of the economy requires a government with credibility and political skill. Attempts at overhauling Egypt’s vast subsidies to energy prices have in the past set off riots.

“What we have now is a government that lacks legitimacy but also economic competence,” Mr. Assaad said. “I don’t see anything better coming out of this government.”

Brotherhood leaders have acknowledged the emergence of hostility against them. Mobs attacked more than three dozen Brotherhood offices, including its headquarters, in the prelude to the first round of voting on the constitution. “I am telling everyone, do not hate the Muslim Brotherhood so much that you forget Egypt’s best interest,” said Mohamed Badie, the group’s spiritual leader. “You can be angry at us and hate us as much as you want; we cannot control affection. But I say to you, be rational. Protect Egypt. Its unity cannot survive what is happening.”

For many in Al Talbeya, the defining moment of the prelude to the referendum was the night of Dec. 5, when the Brotherhood called its supporters to defend President Mohamed Morsi against protesters outside his office. Ten died in the fight. And although the Brotherhood has claimed all those killed were its members, seemingly everyone in Al Talbeya still blamed the group for the violence.

“People don’t like the Muslim Brotherhood as much as they used to, because they saw how they tried to control everything and how they beat people up,” said Emad Mohamed Yosri, 37, a tailor who still counts himself a supporter of the group.

Omar Ateh, 30, a shopkeeper and Islamist, said he was trying to defend the Brotherhood. “We are trying to make people understand, they are not from another planet,” he said, “they just like politics more than we do.”

But Ahmed Ragab, 14, interjected, “If they are such good people, why are they beating people up in the streets?”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo.

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Alabama to End Isolation of Inmates With H.I.V.

Jamie Martin/Associated Press

The H.I.V. ward of an Alabama women's prison in 2008. The state was ordered to stop segregating inmates with the virus.

A federal judge on Friday ordered Alabama to stop isolating prisoners with H.I.V.

Alabama is one of two states, along with South Carolina, where H.I.V.-positive inmates are housed in separate prisons, away from other inmates, in an attempt to reduce medical costs and stop the spread of the virus, which causes AIDS.

Judge Myron H. Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama ruled in favor of a group of inmates who argued in a class-action lawsuit that they had been stigmatized and denied equal access to educational programs. The judge called the state’s policy “an unnecessary tool for preventing the transmission of H.I.V.” but “an effective one for humiliating and isolating prisoners living with the disease.”

After the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, many states, including New York, quarantined H.I.V.-positive prisoners to prevent the virus from spreading through sexual contact or through blood when inmates tattooed one another. But most states ended the practice voluntarily as powerful antiretroviral drugs reduced the risk of transmission.

In Alabama, inmates are tested for H.I.V. when they enter prison. About 250 of the state’s 26,400 inmates have tested positive. They are housed in special dormitories at two prisons: one for men and one for women. No inmates have developed AIDS, the state says.

H.I.V.-positive inmates are treated differently from those with other viruses like hepatitis B and C, which are far more infectious, according to the World Health Organization. Inmates with H.I.V. are barred from eating in the cafeteria, working around food, enrolling in certain educational programs or transferring to prisons near their families.

Prisoners have been trying to overturn the policy for more than two decades. In 1995, a federal court upheld Alabama’s policy. Inmates filed the latest lawsuit last year.

“Today’s decision is historic,” said Margaret Winter, the associate director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the inmates. “It spells an end to a segregation policy that has inflicted needless misery on Alabama prisoners with H.I.V. and their families.”

Brian Corbett, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections, said the state is “not prejudiced against H.I.V.-positive inmates” and has “worked hard over the years to improve their health care, living conditions and their activities.”

“We will continue our review of the court’s opinion and determine our next course of action in a timely manner,” he wrote.

During a monthlong trial in September, lawyers for the department argued that the policy improved the treatment of H.I.V.-positive inmates. Fewer doctors are needed if specialists in H.I.V. focus on 2 of the 29 state’s prisons.

The state spends an average of $22,000 per year on treating individual H.I.V.-positive inmates. The total is more than the cost of medicine for all other inmates, said Bill Lunsford, a lawyer for the Corrections Department.

South Carolina has also faced legal scrutiny. In 2010, the Justice Department notified the state that it was investigating the policy and might sue to overturn it.

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Alabama to End Isolation of Inmates With H.I.V.

Jamie Martin/Associated Press

The H.I.V. ward of an Alabama women's prison in 2008. The state was ordered to stop segregating inmates with the virus.

A federal judge on Friday ordered Alabama to stop isolating prisoners with H.I.V.

Alabama is one of two states, along with South Carolina, where H.I.V.-positive inmates are housed in separate prisons, away from other inmates, in an attempt to reduce medical costs and stop the spread of the virus, which causes AIDS.

Judge Myron H. Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama ruled in favor of a group of inmates who argued in a class-action lawsuit that they had been stigmatized and denied equal access to educational programs. The judge called the state’s policy “an unnecessary tool for preventing the transmission of H.I.V.” but “an effective one for humiliating and isolating prisoners living with the disease.”

After the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, many states, including New York, quarantined H.I.V.-positive prisoners to prevent the virus from spreading through sexual contact or through blood when inmates tattooed one another. But most states ended the practice voluntarily as powerful antiretroviral drugs reduced the risk of transmission.

In Alabama, inmates are tested for H.I.V. when they enter prison. About 250 of the state’s 26,400 inmates have tested positive. They are housed in special dormitories at two prisons: one for men and one for women. No inmates have developed AIDS, the state says.

H.I.V.-positive inmates are treated differently from those with other viruses like hepatitis B and C, which are far more infectious, according to the World Health Organization. Inmates with H.I.V. are barred from eating in the cafeteria, working around food, enrolling in certain educational programs or transferring to prisons near their families.

Prisoners have been trying to overturn the policy for more than two decades. In 1995, a federal court upheld Alabama’s policy. Inmates filed the latest lawsuit last year.

“Today’s decision is historic,” said Margaret Winter, the associate director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the inmates. “It spells an end to a segregation policy that has inflicted needless misery on Alabama prisoners with H.I.V. and their families.”

Brian Corbett, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections, said the state is “not prejudiced against H.I.V.-positive inmates” and has “worked hard over the years to improve their health care, living conditions and their activities.”

“We will continue our review of the court’s opinion and determine our next course of action in a timely manner,” he wrote.

During a monthlong trial in September, lawyers for the department argued that the policy improved the treatment of H.I.V.-positive inmates. Fewer doctors are needed if specialists in H.I.V. focus on 2 of the 29 state’s prisons.

The state spends an average of $22,000 per year on treating individual H.I.V.-positive inmates. The total is more than the cost of medicine for all other inmates, said Bill Lunsford, a lawyer for the Corrections Department.

South Carolina has also faced legal scrutiny. In 2010, the Justice Department notified the state that it was investigating the policy and might sue to overturn it.

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Park Geun-hye, South Korean President-Elect, Calls for Reconciliation

Ahn Young-Joon/Associated Press

President-elect Park Geun-hye during a news conference at her party's headquarters on Thursday in Seoul.

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s president-elect, Park Geun-hye, called for national reconciliation on Thursday, a day after she was elected as the country’s first female leader in a close contest that reflected generational divides and growing unease over North Korea’s military threat.

Ms. Park, 60, the daughter of South Korea’s longest-ruling dictator, won 51.6 percent of the votes cast on Wednesday to choose a successor to President Lee Myung-bak, who was barred by law from seeking a second term.

“I will reflect various opinions of the people, whether they have supported or opposed me,” Ms. Park said in a speech Thursday. She pledged “impartiality,” “national harmony” and “reconciliation,” saying she would bring people into her government “regardless of their regional background, gender and generation.”

She also promised “the sharing of fruits of economic growth,” mindful of doubts that her conservative party, the governing Saenuri Party, would address the widening income gap that was one of the biggest issues in the campaign.

Ms. Park on Wednesday became the first presidential candidate to win a majority of the vote since South Korea adopted a democratic constitution in 1987. But the campaign hardly put the country’s divisions to rest. It rekindled a dispute over the legacy of Ms. Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, who remains a polarizing figure 33 years after his iron-fisted rule ended with his assassination in 1979.

It also highlighted a generational divide over issues like North Korea and the powerful, family-controlled business conglomerates known as chaebol. Exit polls indicated that Ms. Park won twice as many votes among people 50 and older than did her main rival, Moon Jae-in, but only half as many among voters in their 20s and 30s.

She defeated Mr. Moon in most provinces and big cities. But Seoul and the southwestern provinces of North and South Jeolla, traditionally a progressive stronghold, chose the liberal Mr. Moon, who championed bold economic investment in North Korea as a means of inducing denuclearization and more aggressive measures to tame the conglomerates, which have been widely blamed for growing economic inequality. Mr. Moon won 48 percent of the vote nationwide.

Ms. Park met Thursday with the ambassadors from the United States, China, Japan and Russia, the four other countries involved with the two Koreas in talks over the North’s nuclear weapons programs.

Worries over the North’s weapons programs flared again last week with the launching of a long-range rocket that many saw as a test of its missile capabilities. Such missiles could eventually be used to deliver a nuclear weapon.

Ms. Park on Thursday referred to the launching as “a symbolic demonstration of how serious a challenge we face in national security.”

She has, however, promised to be more open to the North than Mr. Lee, who took a hard-line approach that many South Koreans felt proved to be counterproductive.

“North Korea will wait a few months to see if Park Geun-hye will appease it with money,” said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea specialist at Kookmin University in Seoul. “If she does not — and it looks unlikely that she will, given her statements so far and the hard-liners surrounding her — then North Korea will launch provocations.”

With Ms. Park’s election, South Korea extended the tenure of its staunchly pro-American governing party and handed power to the first woman to win the post in a deeply patriarchal part of Asia. Voters appeared to prefer stability over Mr. Moon’s calls for radical change.

“This is a victory for the people’s wish to overcome crises and revive the economy,” Ms. Park told her cheering supporters after the results came in, a crowd that had gathered in freezing weather in downtown Seoul to celebrate a woman whose steeliness in the face of adversity is legend. According to her memoir, when told of her father’s assassination in 1979, she responded, “Is everything all right along the border with North Korea?”

In its starkest terms, this election was about South Korea’s continuing confrontation with its authoritarian past, and confusion over whether a conservative or liberal approach would best serve the country as it tries to stop North Korea’s excesses and to handle growing frustration over economic inequality without derailing the country’s economic miracle. Mr. Moon, a former human rights lawyer who was once imprisoned for opposing the authoritarian rule of Ms. Park’s father, campaigned on restoring liberal policies from the early 2000s, including a warm embrace of North Korea as a way of trying to curb its aggression.

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‘We Steal Secrets’ Is First of WikiLeaks Films

LOS ANGELES — At the end of Alex Gibney’s not-quite-finished documentary “We Steal Secrets” — about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks — is a screen crawl describing the fate of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who now faces trial for the release of confidential military and diplomatic documents.

“He was found guilty of TK, and sentenced to TK years” in prison, the line says.

“TK” is journalistic shorthand for facts yet to come. The syntax suggests that Mr. Gibney doesn’t see much ahead.

But it is Private Manning, even more than Mr. Assange, who has the breakout role in this first of several Hollywood films about the little-known people who grew larger than the most powerful of governments by using the Internet to broadcast their secrets.

Set for debut at the Sundance Film Festival next month, “We Steal Secrets” is a collaboration between the producer Marc Shmuger, who until 2009 was a chairman of Universal Pictures, and Mr. Gibney, a prolific documentarian who won an Oscar for “Taxi to the Dark Side.”

After leaving Universal, Mr. Shmuger started a film company, Global Produce. But he spent much of 2010 transfixed by reports about Mr. Assange, an Australian computer hacker who stepped into the limelight as a self-appointed czar of government and corporate transparency — and ultimately as a fugitive from authorities in Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning related to allegations of sexual assault. He is avoiding extradition from Britain by claiming asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London.

Mr. Shmuger found an e-mail address for Mr. Gibney, whom he did not know, and proposed a documentary. Mr. Gibney, who had just finished “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer” and always has prospective projects to pursue, recalls trying to avoid adding this one.

“It couldn’t have come at a worse time,” said Mr. Gibney, who spoke from New York this week in a joint interview with Mr. Shmuger, who is based here.

But Mr. Gibney, like Mr. Shmuger, was soon captivated by the unlikely characters and bizarre narrative that are promising to make the WikiLeaks story the subject of not one movie, but many.

“Underground: The Julian Assange Story,” an Australian television film about the young Mr. Assange, was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

In January, DreamWorks Studios and Participant Media plan to begin shooting a dramatic feature film to be directed by Bill Condon. It will be based on a script by Josh Singer and two books: “Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website,” by a former Assange colleague, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy,” by David Leigh and Luke Harding.

HBO also had plans for an Assange movie, but Nancy Lesser, a spokeswoman for the channel, said the film has been delayed. Mark Boal, the writer and a producer of “Zero Dark Thirty,” continues to work on a possible Assange drama based on a New York Times Magazine article, “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” by Bill Keller.

In an e-mail, Mr. Keller, a former executive editor of The Times, said Mr. Boal recently asked whether he had any interest in writing the script for that one. “I told him I thought screenplays were outside my skill set,” Mr. Keller said.

“We Steal Secrets” has moved more quickly than the dramas, threatening at times to outpace events. Mr. Manning’s trial, for instance, had been expected by some to occur this year. But it has been delayed — perhaps to keep it out of the presidential campaign, Mr. Gibney suggested this week — and is now scheduled for March.

Focus Features expects to release “We Steal Secrets” through its FocusWorld label in the months after Sundance, which runs Jan. 17 to 27. Mr. Shmuger’s company will have another film, a comedy called “The Spectacular Now,” at the festival.

Running more than two hours, the documentary is a relatively full retelling of Mr. Assange’s story. It ranges from his youthful hacking into a network connected to an American rocket launch, through an arrest for entering government and business computers in the 1990s, to his rise as the overlord of WikiLeaks, the online organization that helped whistle-blowers post documents while remaining anonymous.

The film promises to break ground, particularly with its deep exploration of the sex case in Sweden. Mr. Gibney has asked to avoid spoilers on this point, but his narrative and supporting research are not friendly toward those who would see Sweden’s pursuit of Mr. Assange as cover for a supposed American agenda to prosecute or smear him.

Mr. Gibney tells on-screen of rejecting Mr. Assange’s demands for money in exchange for an interview and says that the market rate for an interview was $1 million.  Instead, that became an example of what one figure in the film calls “noble cause corruption” — a tendency to excuse transgressions supposedly done in the service of good. (A query was sent this week to an Assange representative for comment on this article, but Mr. Assange did not respond.)

But the film also takes issue with what Mr. Gibney considers shabby treatment of Mr. Assange by The Times, which cooperated with him in publishing many WikiLeaks revelations, but later described him with what Mr. Gibney called “derision.”

Mr. Keller, in his e-mail, said “being a source doesn’t buy you reverent treatment as a subject.” Mr. Assange’s release of secret documents, Mr. Keller added, is “entitled to the same First Amendment protection as the stories we wrote.”

Still, it is Private Manning who steals the spotlight in “We Steal Secrets.” Relying in part on information from the legal proceeding against him, the film traces his loneliness and confusion over sexual identity, and his unease with conduct and incidents he saw described in secret documents. The film also deals with communications he had with a cyberfriend who ultimately betrayed him to authorities.

Though widely condemned for perhaps exposing both civilians and government operatives around the world to mortal danger, Private Manning, in Mr. Gibney’s view, deserves empathy.

“We explore him as a human being far more fully than anyone else has,” he said this week.

In fact, Mr. Shmuger and Mr. Gibney have acquired rights to the book “Private: Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and the Biggest Exposure of Official Secrets in American History,” by Denver Nicks, and are hoping to give Mr. Manning a full-blown dramatic film of his own.

“We’re looking for a screenwriter,” said Mr. Shmuger.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 21, 2012

An article on Thursday about the coming documentary “We Steal Secrets” and other films about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange referred imprecisely to a comment that Alex Gibney, the maker of “We Steal Secrets,” says in the film about Mr. Assange’s demands for money in exchange for collaborating on it. While he says that he rejected the demands, and that the market rate for an interview was $1 million, he does not specifically say that he rejected a demand from Mr. Assange for a $1 million fee for an interview. And a picture with the article, using information from a publicist, carried an erroneous credit. The picture, showing Mr. Assange seated, is by Focus World, not Focus Features.

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Recipes for Health: Marinated Olives

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Marinated olives.

These are inspired by Patricia Wells’ “Chanteduc Rainbow Olive Collection” in her wonderful book “The Provence Cookbook.” It is best to use olives that have not been pitted.

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

5 bay leaves

2 large garlic cloves, peeled, green shoots removed, thinly sliced

Strips of rind from 1 lemon (preferably organic)

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary

1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds

2 cups imported olives (black, green or a mix) (about 3/4 pound)

 

1. Combine the olive oil, vinegar, bay leaves and garlic in a small saucepan and heat just until warm over low heat. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon rind, thyme, rosemary and fennel seeds.

2. Place the olives in a wide mouthed jar and pour in the olive oil mixture. Shake the jar to coat the olives. Refrigerate for two hours or for up to two weeks. Shake the jar a few times a day to redistribute the seasonings.

Yield: 2 cups, serving 12

Advance preparation: These will keep for about two weeks in the refrigerator.

Nutritional information per ounce (does not include marinade): 43 calories; 4 grams fat; 0 grams saturated fat; 0 grams polyunsaturated fat; 3 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 1 gram carbohydrates; 0 grams dietary fiber; 468 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 0 grams protein

 

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Recipes for Health: Marinated Olives

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Marinated olives.

These are inspired by Patricia Wells’ “Chanteduc Rainbow Olive Collection” in her wonderful book “The Provence Cookbook.” It is best to use olives that have not been pitted.

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

5 bay leaves

2 large garlic cloves, peeled, green shoots removed, thinly sliced

Strips of rind from 1 lemon (preferably organic)

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary

1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds

2 cups imported olives (black, green or a mix) (about 3/4 pound)

 

1. Combine the olive oil, vinegar, bay leaves and garlic in a small saucepan and heat just until warm over low heat. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon rind, thyme, rosemary and fennel seeds.

2. Place the olives in a wide mouthed jar and pour in the olive oil mixture. Shake the jar to coat the olives. Refrigerate for two hours or for up to two weeks. Shake the jar a few times a day to redistribute the seasonings.

Yield: 2 cups, serving 12

Advance preparation: These will keep for about two weeks in the refrigerator.

Nutritional information per ounce (does not include marinade): 43 calories; 4 grams fat; 0 grams saturated fat; 0 grams polyunsaturated fat; 3 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 1 gram carbohydrates; 0 grams dietary fiber; 468 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 0 grams protein

 

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Boehner Tax Plan in House Is Pulled, Lacking Votes

Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio leaving a meeting Thursday with fellow House Republicans on talks over the “fiscal cliff.”

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner’s effort to pass fallback legislation to avert a fiscal crisis in less than two weeks collapsed Thursday night in an embarrassing defeat after conservative Republicans refused to support legislation that would allow taxes to rise on the most affluent households in the country.

House Republican leaders abruptly canceled a vote on the bill after they failed to rally enough votes for passage in an emergency meeting about 8 p.m. Within minutes, dejected Republicans filed out of the basement meeting room and declared there would be no votes to avert the “fiscal cliff” until after Christmas. With his “Plan B” all but dead, the speaker was left with the choice to find a new Republican way forward or to try to get a broad deficit reduction deal with President Obama that could win passage with Republican and Democratic votes.

What he could not do was blame Democrats for failing to take up legislation he could not even get through his own membership in the House.

“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement that said responsibility for a solution now fell to the White House and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. “Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.”

The stunning turn of events in the House left the status of negotiations to head off a combination of automatic tax increases and significant federal spending cuts in disarray with little time before the start of the new year.

At the White House, the press secretary, Jay Carney, said the defeat should press Mr. Boehner back into talks with Mr. Obama.

“The president will work with Congress to get this done, and we are hopeful that we will be able to find a bipartisan solution quickly that protects the middle class and our economy,” he said.

The refusal of a band of House Republicans to allow income tax rates to rise on incomes over $1 million came after Mr. Obama scored a decisive re-election victory campaigning for higher taxes on incomes over $250,000. Since the November election, the president’s approval ratings have risen, and opinion polls have shown a strong majority not only favoring his tax position, but saying they will blame Republicans for a failure to reach a deficit deal.

With a series of votes on Thursday, the speaker, who faces election for his post in the new Congress next month, had hoped to assemble a Republican path away from the cliff. With a show of Republican unity, he also sought to strengthen his own hand in negotiations with Mr. Obama. The House did narrowly pass legislation to cancel automatic, across-the-board military cuts set to begin next month, and shift them to domestic programs.

But the main component of “Plan B,” a bill to extend expiring Bush-era tax cuts for everyone with incomes under $1 million, could not win enough Republican support to overcome united Democratic opposition. Democrats questioned Mr. Boehner’s ability to deliver any agreement.

“I think this demonstrates that Speaker Boehner has a real challenge,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat. “He hasn’t been able to cut any deal, make any agreement that’s balanced. Even if it’s his own compromise.”

Representative Rick Larsen of Washington accused Republicans of shirking their responsibility by leaving the capital. “The Republicans just picked up their toys and went home,” he said.

Futures contracts on indexes of United States stock listings and shares in Asia fell sharply after Mr. Boehner conceded that his bill lacked the votes to pass.

The point of the Boehner effort was to secure passage of a Republican plan, then demand that the president and the Senate to take up that measure and pass it, putting off the major fights until early next year when Republicans would conceivably have more leverage because of the need to increase the federal debt limit. It would also allow Republicans to claim it was Democrats who had caused taxes to rise after the first of the year had no agreement been reached.

That strategy lay in tatters after the Republican implosion.“Some people don’t know how to take yea for an answer,” said Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a Republican who supported the measure and was open about his disappointment with his colleagues.

Opponents said they were not about to bend their uncompromising principles on taxes just because Mr. Boehner asked.

“The speaker should be meeting with us to get our views on things rather than just presenting his,” said Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, who recently lost a committee post for routinely crossing the leadership.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

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Arrests Made in Maple Syrup Theft From Quebec Warehouse

Francis Vachon

Danny Ayotte prepares maple syrup for pasteurization. The authorities are trying to recover six million pounds of stolen syrup.

OTTAWA — It was an inside job of sorts. Thieves with access to a warehouse and a careful plan loaded up trucks and, over time, made off with $18 million of a valuable commodity.

The question is what was more unusual: that the commodity in question was maple syrup, or that it came from something called the global strategic maple syrup reserve, run by what amounts to a Canadian cartel.

On Tuesday, the police in Quebec arrested three men in connection with the theft from the warehouse, which is southwest of Quebec City. The authorities are searching for five others suspected of being involved, and law enforcement agencies in other parts of Canada and the United States are trying to recover some of the stolen syrup.

Both the size and the international scope of the theft underscore Quebec’s outsize position in the maple syrup industry.

Depending on the year, the province can produce more than three-quarters of the world’s supply. And its marketing organization appears to have taken some tips from the producers of another valuable liquid commodity when it comes to exploiting market dominance.

“It’s like OPEC,” said Simon Trépanier, acting general manager of the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers. “We’re not producing all the maple syrup in the world. But by producing 70 to 78 percent, we have the ability to adjust the quantity that is in the marketplace.”

Since 1999, Quebec’s maple syrup industry has used a marketing system found in other Canadian agricultural sectors, particularly dairy and poultry.

Put simply, the supply management system sets strict quotas for producers and, in the case of maple syrup, requires them to sell their product through the federation.

The sap that becomes maple syrup after being boiled down often flows for only a short period each spring. Weather changes can introduce wild fluctuations in how much emerges from sugar maple trees.

To maintain stable and high prices, the federation stockpiles every drop its members produce beyond their quota. During bad seasons, it dips into that supply.

“In the States you have the strategic oil reserve,” Mr. Trépanier said, continuing with his petroleum analogy. “Mother Nature is not generous every year, so we have our own global strategic reserve.”

Mr. Trépanier estimates that the reserve now holds 46 million pounds of syrup.

The spring of 2011 produced so much maple syrup that the federation added a third rented warehouse, in an industrial park alongside a busy highway in Saint-Louis-de-Blandford, to accommodate the overflow. The surplus was pasteurized and packed into 16,000 drums, each holding 54 gallons, and left to rest except for inspections twice a year.

Lt. Guy Lapointe of the Sûreté du Québec, the police force that led the investigation, said that the thieves rented another portion of the warehouse for an unrelated business. That enabled them to drive large trucks into the building.

“They were basically inside guys,” Lieutenant Lapointe said. “The leader wasn’t with the federation, but he had access to the warehouse that would not attract any suspicion.”

When no one else was around, Lieutenant Lapointe said, the thieves gradually began emptying syrup barrels. Some Quebec news reports indicated that they also filled some barrels with water to disguise the theft.

Over time, the thieves helped themselves to six million pounds of syrup. Mr. Trépanier said their work was discovered in July, when inspectors found a few empty barrels. The full extent of the theft, he said, became clear once the police arrived.

The police spared no resources. Lieutenant Lapointe said that about 300 people were questioned and 40 search warrants executed. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement service joined the investigation.

Like many thieves, the maple syrup gang was faced with how to unload a large quantity of a commodity that is not easily moved. But unlike most thieves, Lieutenant Lapointe said, they found a way to get full price on the open market.

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Start-Ups Take on Special Tasks for Small Business

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Leah Busque, right, founder of TaskRabbit, with Lauren Sherman, a marketing manager, in San Francisco.

Small-business owners are like Swiss Army knives: expected to handle dozens of specialized tasks without falling apart. But even the sharpest entrepreneurs have it tough this time of year — inevitably, some will outsource part of their workload to other enterprising people.

This season, dozens of start-ups are competing to take on your holiday headaches. Here are four time-gobbling situations and the young companies vying to eliminate them:

CHALLENGE Your to-do list is crammed with tiny tasks. How can you delegate them cheaply?

ONE SOLUTION For $5 you could drink a large latte and work through the night. Or you could hire a minion at Fiverr, which bills itself as “the world’s largest marketplace for small services.” Starting at $5 apiece, tasks include designing business cards and letterheads, sending out handwritten cards, editing newsletters, making short commercial videos and throwing darts at a picture of your rival.

“Pretty much anything you imagine can be found on Fiverr,” said the company’s chief executive, Micha Kaufman, who set out in 2010 with Shai Wininger to build what Mr. Kaufman calls “an eBay for services.”

“It’s giving people the tools to do business with the entire world,” he added.

Fiverr, with headquarters in Tel Aviv and offices in New York and Amsterdam, has more than a million active buyers and sellers across 200 countries, Mr. Kaufman said. He would not disclose revenue or the number of sales his site has brokered so far. Fiverr has raised $20 million in financing and has 60 full-time staff members. The company collects a 20 percent commission on each sale.

THE COMPETITION Fiverr’s success has inspired an army of imitators, including Gig Me 5, Gigbucks, TenBux and Zeerk. Building and selling Fiverr copycat sites has also become a cottage industry for online software developers. Asked whether he took this as a compliment, Mr. Kaufman replied dryly, “One of my friends said, ‘It may be flattering, but it’s a very annoying way to flatter you.’ ”

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CHALLENGE You want to delegate complex, highly specialized tasks, but it’s hard to find people whose expertise matches your needs.

ONE SOLUTION SkillPages connects skilled workers with those who want to hire them. The site showcases an array of specialists — beekeepers, tree surgeons, witches, clog dancers — along with professionals with more conventional business skills, like payroll administrators, social media marketers and typists.

Iain Mac Donald decided to start SkillPages after seeking a tree cutter online to do work in his yard. “This guy arrives with a huge truck, and he could have taken down a forest,” Mr. Mac Donald said. “He was going to charge me $3,000. It just wasn’t right.”

Mr. Mac Donald figured there had to be a way to help make better matches. To that end, SkillPages identifies specialists whom users’ families and friends may already know through social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Users can also view work samples online and contact members directly.

Based in Ireland, SkillPages went live in 2011 and opened an office in Palo Alto, Calif., this year. The company’s 35 employees handle traffic from more than nine million users worldwide, 1.5 million of them in North America. The company has received $18.5 million in financing, said Mr. Mac Donald, the chief executive, declining to disclose sales figures.

SkillPages’ basic services are free. To make money, it sells advertising space and offers premium memberships with stand-alone Web sites for those offering services. Next year, Mr. Mac Donald plans to offer a paid matchmaking service for talent-seeking companies. He is also building a “targeted offers” program that will let niche vendors present deals on products and services to members with relevant expertise. The vendors will pay SkillPages a bounty for each sale.

THE COMPETITION Guru, oDesk and Elance also focus on skilled work. LinkedIn added a “skills” component to its profiles last year.

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CHALLENGE You are overwhelmed by errands and other location-specific jobs that cannot be farmed out to the other side of the planet. You need an affordable gofer: competent, trustworthy, local.

ONE SOLUTION TaskRabbit is an on-demand service for handling quick jobs: assembling Ikea furniture, packing boxes, wrapping gifts, mailing invitations or even carrying awkward objects like Christmas trees. The company sends requests to a network of “rabbits” — errand-runners screened through video interviews and background checks — who bid for the work. Last month, 80 were hired to wait on Black Friday lines.

Leah Busque got the idea for TaskRabbit one night in 2008, when she was going out to dinner and realized she had no food in the house for Kobe, her yellow Labrador. Envisioning an online service for dispatching errand-runners, she quit her job as an I.B.M. software engineer to build it. A year later, she won a slot in Facebook’s now defunct incubator program and later moved her company, then called RunMyErrand, to San Francisco from Boston.

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Europe Proposes New Tobacco Rules

BRUSSELS — Health warnings should cover 75 percent of cigarette packs but governments should also have leeway to require plain packaging, the European Commission said Wednesday.

Yves Logghe/Associated Press

European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy Tonio Borg held up a mock package of cigarettes during a news conference on proposals to revise the Tobacco Products Directive, at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday.

The commission’s proposal would also ban cigarettes containing large quantities of flavorings including menthol and vanilla, restrict the sale of slimmer cigarettes and maintain a ban in most of the European Union on a form of chewing tobacco called snus.

The proposals still are less strict than in Australia, where a prohibition on logos and colorful designs went into effect this month. But the proposed ban on slim and super-slim cigarettes that are marketed to young women “is a positive development and a world first,” said the Smoke Free Partnership, a European organization that promotes tobacco control and research.

Tonio Borg, the E.,U. commissioner for health and consumer policy, said the overall goal of the so-called Tobacco Products Directive was to make smoking less attractive and to discourage young people from tobacco consumption.

“Consumers must not be cheated,” Mr. Borg said. “Tobacco products should look and taste like tobacco products, and this proposal ensures that attractive packaging and flavorings are not used as a marketing strategy.”

But Unitab, a European association of tobacco growers, said regulators had declared “total war” on their industry. The increased restrictions on branding would make price the deciding factor in tobacco sales; that in turn would favor suppliers from countries with lower production costs and put thousands of jobs in Europe at risk, the association said.

Written health warnings already must cover about 40 percent of a cigarette pack in the Union, although some countries also use pictorial warnings. In the future, Mr. Borg would like pictorial warnings to be mandatory, and for the warnings to cover three-quarters of the front and back of each pack of cigarettes, and half of each side.

E.U. officials conceded that the entire top and bottom sides of cigarette packs sold in Europe still could be used for branding under Mr. Borg’s proposals. Member states could opt to require plain packaging, however.

The directive also would require that smokeless electronic cigarettes providing more than a certain amount of nicotine should be available only in outlets like pharmacies. National or Europe-wide “test panels” would determine what quantities of flavoring like menthol should be banned, they said.

Much of the interest in the legislation in recent months had focused on apparent attempts to influence its wording.

Mr. Borg’s predecessor, John Dalli, resigned in October after the commission concluded that he had probably known about an attempt by a lobbyist to solicit a multimillion-dollar payoff in exchange for easing the ban on snus. The product can be sold only in Sweden, where some people consider it a safer alternative to smoking.

Mr. Dalli denied the allegations and said he was forced to resign under pressure from José Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission. Mr. Dalli also said his ouster had jeopardized chances for the revised directive to be passed before the current term of the European Parliament, which must approve the legislation, expires in 2014.

Mr. Borg suggested Wednesday that the law still could be adopted before the Parliament’s term expires, and go into force in 2015 or 2016.

But the Smoke Free Partnership warned that lobbying still could water down the proposals on labeling and packaging, as well as the ban on flavors and slim cigarettes. Governments and members of the European Parliament “are likely to face attempts by the tobacco industry to further block, weaken and delay this important legislation,” said Florence Berteletti Kemp, the director of the partnership.

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Europe Proposes New Tobacco Rules

BRUSSELS — Health warnings should cover 75 percent of cigarette packs but governments should also have leeway to require plain packaging, the European Commission said Wednesday.

Yves Logghe/Associated Press

European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy Tonio Borg held up a mock package of cigarettes during a news conference on proposals to revise the Tobacco Products Directive, at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday.

The commission’s proposal would also ban cigarettes containing large quantities of flavorings including menthol and vanilla, restrict the sale of slimmer cigarettes and maintain a ban in most of the European Union on a form of chewing tobacco called snus.

The proposals still are less strict than in Australia, where a prohibition on logos and colorful designs went into effect this month. But the proposed ban on slim and super-slim cigarettes that are marketed to young women “is a positive development and a world first,” said the Smoke Free Partnership, a European organization that promotes tobacco control and research.

Tonio Borg, the E.,U. commissioner for health and consumer policy, said the overall goal of the so-called Tobacco Products Directive was to make smoking less attractive and to discourage young people from tobacco consumption.

“Consumers must not be cheated,” Mr. Borg said. “Tobacco products should look and taste like tobacco products, and this proposal ensures that attractive packaging and flavorings are not used as a marketing strategy.”

But Unitab, a European association of tobacco growers, said regulators had declared “total war” on their industry. The increased restrictions on branding would make price the deciding factor in tobacco sales; that in turn would favor suppliers from countries with lower production costs and put thousands of jobs in Europe at risk, the association said.

Written health warnings already must cover about 40 percent of a cigarette pack in the Union, although some countries also use pictorial warnings. In the future, Mr. Borg would like pictorial warnings to be mandatory, and for the warnings to cover three-quarters of the front and back of each pack of cigarettes, and half of each side.

E.U. officials conceded that the entire top and bottom sides of cigarette packs sold in Europe still could be used for branding under Mr. Borg’s proposals. Member states could opt to require plain packaging, however.

The directive also would require that smokeless electronic cigarettes providing more than a certain amount of nicotine should be available only in outlets like pharmacies. National or Europe-wide “test panels” would determine what quantities of flavoring like menthol should be banned, they said.

Much of the interest in the legislation in recent months had focused on apparent attempts to influence its wording.

Mr. Borg’s predecessor, John Dalli, resigned in October after the commission concluded that he had probably known about an attempt by a lobbyist to solicit a multimillion-dollar payoff in exchange for easing the ban on snus. The product can be sold only in Sweden, where some people consider it a safer alternative to smoking.

Mr. Dalli denied the allegations and said he was forced to resign under pressure from José Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission. Mr. Dalli also said his ouster had jeopardized chances for the revised directive to be passed before the current term of the European Parliament, which must approve the legislation, expires in 2014.

Mr. Borg suggested Wednesday that the law still could be adopted before the Parliament’s term expires, and go into force in 2015 or 2016.

But the Smoke Free Partnership warned that lobbying still could water down the proposals on labeling and packaging, as well as the ban on flavors and slim cigarettes. Governments and members of the European Parliament “are likely to face attempts by the tobacco industry to further block, weaken and delay this important legislation,” said Florence Berteletti Kemp, the director of the partnership.

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Challenging France to Do Business Differently

Pool photo by Bertrand Langlois

President François Hollande must find a way to make palatable a shift in French labor practices.

PARIS — Louis Gallois, one of France’s most influential industrialists, knew he was about to make waves for the country’s Socialist president.

It was late October, and President François Hollande, faced with an alarming deterioration in the economy, had turned to Mr. Gallois for advice on how to put corporate France on a more competitive footing with the rest of Europe.

Mr. Gallois didn’t sugar-coat the message. His report called for a “competitiveness shock” that would require politicians to curb the “cult of regulation” he said was choking business in France.

The report said that unless France relaxed its notoriously rigid labor market, the country would continue on an industrial decline that had destroyed more than 750,000 jobs in a decade and helped shrink France’s share of exports to the European Union to 9.3 percent, from 12.7 percent, during that period. The report also called for cuts to a broad range of business taxes used to pay for big government and France’s expensive social safety net.

But some wonder whether those measures, even if they can be adopted, would suffice. For them, there is a larger question: Can France be fixed?

While the European crisis has made the French acutely aware of the need to modernize the economy, the country may be running short on time. And there are mixed signals on whether the Hollande government is willing to heed the advice.

As details of the report leaked, the French news media went into a frenzy over whether their country — so resistant to change that the government still controls the price of a baguette of bread — was prepared for such upheaval.

Mr. Hollande quickly provided an answer: a competitiveness “pact” between business and government would better suit French society.

As Mr. Hollande’s finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, hastened to explain, “A shock causes trauma, whereas a pact reassures.”

But many observers say reassurance may no longer be an option.

Even the Germans are alarmed: Behind closed doors, Chancellor Angela Merkel and officials in her entourage are said to be worried that a failure by Mr. Hollande to improve competitiveness could ricochet back to the weakening German economy, further stalling what had long been twin engines of growth for Europe.

“The concern is not just that France could be the next candidate affected by turbulence” from the euro crisis, said Lars P. Feld, an economics professor at the University of Freiburg and an adviser to the German government. “The fear is that it doesn’t manage to cope with the loss of competitiveness and therefore produces little growth or perhaps even stagnation for the next few years,” Mr. Feld said. “And that after that, it could become the new sick man of Europe.”

France still has much working in its favor. Second only to Germany as Europe’s biggest economy, and the fifth-largest in the world, France is a wealthy country with a high savings rate, large foreign direct investment and world-class research and development capabilities.

And the interest rate on French 10-year bonds is only about 2 percent. That is much closer to Germany’s rate than to those of the euro zone’s staggering giants, Italy and Spain, which are above 4 percent and 5 percent respectively, as they struggle to clean up their economies.

Yet, last week the French central bank warned that growth would shrink 0.1 percent in the last three months of 2012, after stagnating for most of the year. Last month Moody’s Investors Service followed Standard & Poor’s in stripping France of its triple-A credit rating, saying the government was failing to ignite competitiveness fast enough.

Meanwhile, an ambitious effort Mr. Hollande began shortly after his election in May to cut the deficit to 3 percent next year from 4.5 percent through tax increases and spending cuts may dampen growth further and ratchet up unemployment, which recently neared 11 percent, twice the rate in Germany.

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For Modernizing Thais, Monastic Life Loses Allure

Young monks rehearsed an evening candlelight ceremony at the Chedi Luang temple in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The country’s Buddhist temples are as much a part of the landscape as rice paddies and palm trees. But many temples in rural Thailand have fallen quiet.

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Oracle’s Profit Climbs 18%

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Oracle, the business software maker, said Tuesday that its profit rose 18 percent in its most recent quarter because companies spent more on software and other technology as the year was winding down.

The results were an improvement from Oracle’s previous quarter, when its revenue fell slightly from a year earlier.

The latest quarter spanned September through November. That makes Oracle the first technology bellwether to provide insight into corporate spending since the Nov. 6 re-election of President Obama and negotiations to avoid a fiscal crisis began to heat up in Washington.

Oracle said it earned $2.6 billion, or 53 cents a share, in its fiscal second quarter. That compares with net income of $2.2 billion, or 43 cents a share, a year earlier.

If not for charges for past acquisitions and certain other costs, Oracle said it would have earned 64 cents a share. On that basis, Oracle topped the average earnings estimate of 61 cents a share among analysts surveyed by FactSet.

Revenue increased 3 percent from last year to $9.1 billion, about $900 million more than analysts had projected.

In a particularly heartening sign, Oracle said sales of new software licenses and subscriptions to its online services climbed 17 percent from last year to outstrip the most optimistic predictions issued by management three months ago.

The flow of new licenses and subscriptions, which represent about a quarter of Oracle’s revenue, is closely tracked by investors because they lead to more revenue in the future from upgrades.

In the current quarter, which ends in February, Oracle expects software licenses and subscriptions to increase in the range of 3 percent to 13 percent from the previous year. The company, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., predicted its adjusted earnings in the current quarter will range from 64 cents to 68 cents a share on revenue ranging from $9.1 billion to $9.5 billion. That would be a 1 percent to 5 percent increase from the prior year.

Shares of in Oracle rose 1.28 percent in extended trading after the numbers came out. They ended regular trading at $32.88.

In Tuesday’s conference call, the chief executive, Lawrence Ellison, said some of the erosion in the hardware division has been by design as Oracle weeded out some of the less profitable equipment. He assured analysts that hardware revenue would start increasing in the final quarter of Oracle’s fiscal year, the period spanning March through May. Sun’s Java programming language already has been paying off for the software side of Oracle’s business, according to Mr. Ellison.

“Sun has already proven to be the most strategic and profitable acquisition Oracle has ever made,” he said.

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Church Officials Call on Filipinos to Campaign Against Birth Control Law

MANILA — After losing a battle to stop the passage of a contentious birth control law, Roman Catholic Church officials on Tuesday dug in and instructed their millions of followers to campaign against the measure in communities, schools and homes.

“Let us intensify the moral spiritual education of our youth and children so that they can stand strong against the threats to their moral fiber,” Archbishop Socrates Villegas said in a statement. “Let us use all the means within our reach to safeguard the health of expectant mothers in our communities.”

The Philippine Congress passed legislation on Monday to help the country’s poorest women gain access to birth control. Each chamber of the national legislature passed its own version of the measure, and minor differences between the two must be reconciled before the measure goes to President Benigno S. Aquino III for his signature.

The measure had been stalled for more than a decade because of determined opposition from the church in this overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Birth control is legal and widely available in the Philippines for people who can afford it, particularly those living in cities. But condoms, birth control pills and other forms of contraception are sometimes kept out of community health centers and clinics by local government and Catholic Church officials.

The measure passed on Monday would stock government health centers, including those in remote areas, with free or subsidized birth control options for the poor. It would also require sex education in public schools and family-planning training for community health officers.

Archbishop Villegas, the vice president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, on Tuesday encouraged Catholics to resist the measure by disseminating information about natural family planning methods and warning people about “the hazardous effects of contraceptive pills on the health of women.”

“Let us conduct our own sex education of our children insuring that sex is always understood as a gift of God,” Archbishop Villegas stated. “Sex must never be taught separate from God and isolated from marriage.”

Bishop Gabriel V. Reyes, chairman of the conference’s Episcopal Commission on Family and Life, said after the vote Monday that “we need to explain to our fellow believers that they ought to refuse contraceptives even when they are being offered these.”

The Philippines has one of the highest birthrates in Asia, but backers of the legislation, including the Aquino administration, have said repeatedly that its purpose is not to limit population growth. Rather, they say, the bill is meant to offer poor families the same reproductive health options that wealthier people in the country enjoy.

Though lacking the numbers needed to defeat the legislation, lawmakers who opposed the measure sought to delay the vote. In one instance, an opposition senator proposed 35 amendments just before a vote was to take place.

Often the debate took bizarre turns, as when a congressman claimed that the birth control measure was a plot by the Philippine Communist Party to take over the government.

In another instance, a male senator requested removal of the phrase “satisfying sex” from a passage in the bill that referred to “safe and satisfying sex.” Several female senators opposed its removal, and the amendment was debated live on television while social media networks crackled with sarcastic commentary. “I am a Filipina,” Senator Miriam Santiago said in response to the amendment. “I am also a married woman, and I insist whoever is married to me should give me safe and satisfying sex, period.”

During a vote on the measure in the House of Representatives, the boxer and congressman Manny Pacquiao linked the birth control measure to his having been knocked unconscious on Dec. 8 by Juan Manuel Marquez during their W.B.O. world welterweight fight in Las Vegas.

“Some thought I was dead,” Mr. Pacquiao said in a speech explaining his vote against the measure. “What happened in Vegas strengthened my already firm belief in the sanctity of life.” He added: “Manny Pacquiao is pro-life. Manny Pacquiao votes no.”

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Church Officials Call on Filipinos to Campaign Against Birth Control Law

MANILA — After losing a battle to stop the passage of a contentious birth control law, Roman Catholic Church officials on Tuesday dug in and instructed their millions of followers to campaign against the measure in communities, schools and homes.

“Let us intensify the moral spiritual education of our youth and children so that they can stand strong against the threats to their moral fiber,” Archbishop Socrates Villegas said in a statement. “Let us use all the means within our reach to safeguard the health of expectant mothers in our communities.”

The Philippine Congress passed legislation on Monday to help the country’s poorest women gain access to birth control. Each chamber of the national legislature passed its own version of the measure, and minor differences between the two must be reconciled before the measure goes to President Benigno S. Aquino III for his signature.

The measure had been stalled for more than a decade because of determined opposition from the church in this overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Birth control is legal and widely available in the Philippines for people who can afford it, particularly those living in cities. But condoms, birth control pills and other forms of contraception are sometimes kept out of community health centers and clinics by local government and Catholic Church officials.

The measure passed on Monday would stock government health centers, including those in remote areas, with free or subsidized birth control options for the poor. It would also require sex education in public schools and family-planning training for community health officers.

Archbishop Villegas, the vice president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, on Tuesday encouraged Catholics to resist the measure by disseminating information about natural family planning methods and warning people about “the hazardous effects of contraceptive pills on the health of women.”

“Let us conduct our own sex education of our children insuring that sex is always understood as a gift of God,” Archbishop Villegas stated. “Sex must never be taught separate from God and isolated from marriage.”

Bishop Gabriel V. Reyes, chairman of the conference’s Episcopal Commission on Family and Life, said after the vote Monday that “we need to explain to our fellow believers that they ought to refuse contraceptives even when they are being offered these.”

The Philippines has one of the highest birthrates in Asia, but backers of the legislation, including the Aquino administration, have said repeatedly that its purpose is not to limit population growth. Rather, they say, the bill is meant to offer poor families the same reproductive health options that wealthier people in the country enjoy.

Though lacking the numbers needed to defeat the legislation, lawmakers who opposed the measure sought to delay the vote. In one instance, an opposition senator proposed 35 amendments just before a vote was to take place.

Often the debate took bizarre turns, as when a congressman claimed that the birth control measure was a plot by the Philippine Communist Party to take over the government.

In another instance, a male senator requested removal of the phrase “satisfying sex” from a passage in the bill that referred to “safe and satisfying sex.” Several female senators opposed its removal, and the amendment was debated live on television while social media networks crackled with sarcastic commentary. “I am a Filipina,” Senator Miriam Santiago said in response to the amendment. “I am also a married woman, and I insist whoever is married to me should give me safe and satisfying sex, period.”

During a vote on the measure in the House of Representatives, the boxer and congressman Manny Pacquiao linked the birth control measure to his having been knocked unconscious on Dec. 8 by Juan Manuel Marquez during their W.B.O. world welterweight fight in Las Vegas.

“Some thought I was dead,” Mr. Pacquiao said in a speech explaining his vote against the measure. “What happened in Vegas strengthened my already firm belief in the sanctity of life.” He added: “Manny Pacquiao is pro-life. Manny Pacquiao votes no.”

Read More..

DealBook: As Unit Pleads Guilty, UBS Pays $1.5 Billion Over Rate Rigging

UBS, the Swiss banking giant, announced a record settlement with global authorities on Wednesday, agreeing to a combined $1.5 billion in fines for its role in a multiyear scheme to manipulate interest rates.

In a sign that officials are increasingly taking a hard line against financial wrongdoing, the Justice Department also secured a guilty plea from the bank’s Japanese subsidiary, sending a warning shot to other big banks suspected of rate rigging. The UBS subsidiary, which agreed to plead to a single count of wire fraud, is the first unit of a big bank to agree to criminal charges in more than a decade.

The cash penalties represented the largest fines to date related to the rate-rigging inquiry. The fine is also one of the biggest sanctions that American and British authorities have ever levied against a financial institution, falling just short of the $1.9 billion payout that HSBC made last week over money laundering accusations.

The severity of the UBS penalties, authorities said, reflected the extent of the problems. The government complaints laid bare a scheme that spanned from 2005 to 2010, describing how the bank reported false rates to squeeze out extra profits and deflect concerns about its health during the financial crisis.

“The findings we have set out in our notice today do not make for pretty reading,” Tracey McDermott, the enforcement director for the Financial Services Authority of Britain, said in a statement. “The integrity of benchmarks,” she said, “are of fundamental importance to both U.K. and international financial markets. UBS traders and managers ignored this.”

The UBS case reflects a pattern of abuse that authorities have uncovered as part of a multi-year investigation into rate-rigging. The inquiry, which has ensnared more than a dozen big banks, is focused on key benchmarks like the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. Such rates are used to help determine the borrowing rates for trillions of dollars of financial products like corporate loans, mortgages and credit cards.

In the UBS matter, the wrongdoing occurred largely within the Japanese unit, where traders colluded with other banks and brokerage firms to tinker with Yen denominated Libor and bolster their returns. During the 2008 financial crisis, UBS managers also “inappropriately gave guidance to those employees charged with submitting interest rates, the purpose being to positively influence the perception of UBS’s creditworthiness,” according to authorities.

In a series of colorful e-mails and phone calls, traders tried to influence the rate-setting process. “I need you to keep it as low as possible,” one UBS trader said to an employee at another brokerage firm in September 2008, according to the complaint filed by the Financial Services Authority. “If you do that,” the trader promised to pay “whatever you want. I’m a man of my word.”

As the employees carried out the alleged manipulation, they also celebrated the efforts, with one trader referring to a partner in the scheme as “superman.” “Be a hero today,” he urged, according the complaint by regulators.

The British and Swiss authorities released their complaints on Wednesday before the bank’s shares began trading in Switzerland. American authorities are expected to release their own complaints later Wednesday in Washington.

In a statement, UBS highlighted its cooperation with the investigation. The firm previously stated that it made provisions of 897 million Swiss francs ($975 million) to cover potential legal and regulatory fines.

“We discovered behavior of certain employees that is unacceptable,” the chief executive of UBS, Sergio P. Ermotti, said in the statement. “We deeply regret this inappropriate and unethical behavior. No amount of profit is more important than the reputation of this firm, and we are committed to doing business with integrity.”

The UBS case provides a lens to view broader problems in the rate-setting process, which affects how consumers and companies borrow money around the world. In June, authorities scored their first Libor settlement, securing a
$450 million payout from Barclays, the big British bank.

The UBS case — the product of cross-border collaboration among regulators and federal prosecutors – is more than triple the earlier fine.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department leveled about $1.2 billion in combined fines. The Financial Services Authority of Britain fined the bank $260 million. The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, which does not have the power to fine, recovered $65 million in the bank’s supposed ill-gotten gains.

The Justice Department’s criminal division, which arranged the guilty plea with the Japanese subsidiary, also struck a non-prosecution agreement with the parent company. The exact total of the penalties was unclear, because the department has not yet released its settlement documents.

The Justice Department’s case is also expected to take aim at some of the bank’s traders, including 33-year-old Thomas Hayes. The Justice Department plans to announce charges against Mr. Hayes, the former UBS and Citigroup trader, who featured prominently in the investigation, according to people with knowledge of the matter. He was arrested in London last week and later released on bail. Other UBS employees have been suspended or fired following an internal investigation.

The fallout from the UBS case is expected to ratchet up the pressure on some of the world’s largest financial institutions and spur settlement talks across the banking industry.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has said it expects to pay fines before its next earnings statement in February, while Deutsche Bank has set aside an undisclosed amount to cover potential penalties. Some American institutions, including Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, also remain in regulators’ crosshairs.

The UBS case has exposed the systemic problems with the rate-setting process. Over a 6-year period, UBS traders targeted the major currencies that form the Libor system, including the U.S. dollar denominated rate. The bank was also cited for attempting to manipulate other benchmarks like the Euro Interbank Offered Rate, or Euribor, and the Tokyo Interbank Offered Rate, or Tibor.

Much of the activity took place in the bank’s Japanese unit. Authorities said four UBS traders colluded to manipulate submissions to Yen Libor. The individuals made more than 1,900 requests to brokers and other banks to alter the rate, according to regulatory filings. As part of their efforts, UBS employees made quarterly payments of £15,000 ($24,000) to outside brokers involved in the rate-rigging for at least 18 months for their help, the complaint said.

To avoid arousing suspicion, UBS employees routinely made small changes to submissions, the complaint details. The individuals, who communicated with colleagues about the rate-setting through emails and instant messages, also altered rate submissions to benefit traders at other banks.

The Japanese unit’s guilty plea for wire fraud follows frantic last-minute negotiations last week between senior UBS officials and American authorities. The actions detailed in the complaint emboldened the Justice Department to seek the guilty plea from the Japanese unit. By forcing the plea from the firm’s Japanese subsidiary, federal authorities sent a clear message about the level of wrongdoing, but stopped far short of shutting UBS out of the American markets.

Still, the steep sanctions come as a surprise, given the bank’s cooperation with investigators.

Since first announcing that it was the subject of Libor investigations, the Swiss bank has eagerly worked with authorities in a bid for leniency. UBS, for example, had received conditional immunity from the Justice Department’s antitrust unit, a deal that did not apply to the Justice Department’s criminal division.

The case presents the latest setback for UBS.

The Swiss bank already agreed to a $780 million fine in 2009 with American authorities to settle charges that it helped American clients avoid tax. The firm also announced a $2.3 million loss last year related to illegal trading activity by a former employee, Kweku M. Adoboli. Mr. Adoboli subsequently was sentenced to seven years, and British authorities fined UBS $47.5 million over the scandal.

UBS said it expected to report a net loss of up to $2.7 billion in the fourth quarter of the year because of the costs related to Libor and other legal matters. The figure includes around $2.3 billion of provisions of legal and regulatory costs, as well as $548 million in restructuring charges.

In the wake of the Libor scandal, UBS has been forced to beef up its compliance and rate-setting procedures, according to the Swiss regulator. The bank has also fired individuals connected to the rate-rigging

“We are pleased that the authorities gave us credit for the important and positive changes we have already made,” the chairman of UBS, Axel Weber, said in a statement. “I have zero tolerance for inappropriate and unethical behavior of any of our staff.”

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