India Ink: Deadly Fire Breaks Out at Market in Kolkata







KOLKATA, India (AP) — A fire broke out at an illegal six-story plastics market in the Indian city of Kolkata early Wednesday morning, killing at least 19 people, police said.




The blaze, which started before 4 a.m., was likely caused by a short circuit, said West Bengal fire minister Javed Khan. The fire was under control by mid-morning, he said, but toxic gases being released by the blaze were hampering rescue efforts.


A police official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said at least 19 people had died. He said police were looking for the owner of the building, which was filled with dozens of small shops selling various plastic products.


Another 10 people were hospitalized in critical condition and the death toll was expected to rise, Khan said.


He called the scene of the fire "an illegal, unauthorized market."


However, local residents said the market had been operating in the building for nearly 40 years. They said there was only one entrance to the building, which made rescue efforts difficult.


The building housed several warehouses on its upper floors, where chemicals, paper and plastics were stored.


Police said the victims were porters working in the market, who also slept there at night. Eighteen of the dead were men.


Mamata Banerjee, the state's top elected official, who visited the site soon after the blaze was brought under control, issued an ultimatum to the building's owners to install fire safety equipment within two months.


Banerjee said the previous government that ruled the state for more than three decades had allowed the building to operate without any permits or safety measures.


She said she has ordered police, fire service and the city administration to file a report on the cause of the blaze and take steps to prevent the recurrence of such fires.


In December 2011, at least 93 people died in a deadly fire in a hospital in Kolkata. Soon after that, Banerjee had promised that her government would crackdown on lax safety procedures in public buildings.


Safety regulations are routinely ignored in India, where fire stairways and evacuation drills are rare. Even if fire extinguishers are present, they are commonly several years old and almost never serviced.


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Bits Blog: Yahoo Issues a Statement on Work-at-Home Ban

In a front-page article in The New York Times on Tuesday morning, Catherine Rampell and I wrote about Yahoo‘s new policy banning employees from working remotely. The company declined to comment for that article, but on Tuesday afternoon, it issued a statement about the ban against work-at-home arrangements.

“This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home,” the statement said. “This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.”

A company spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the statement, saying, “We don’t discuss internal matters.”

But based on information from several Yahoo employees, what that statement means is that Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s new chief executive, is in crisis mode, and she believes the policy is necessary to get Yahoo back into shape.

The employees spoke anonymously because they are not allowed to discuss internal matters.

The company also seems to be trying to distance itself from the broader national debate over workplace flexibility, and from criticism that the new policy is disruptive for employees who have family responsibilities outside work.

The work ethic at Yahoo among some workers has deteriorated over time, the Yahoo employees said, and requiring people to show up is a way to keep an eye on them and re-energize the troops. If some of the least productive workers leave as a result, the thinking goes, all the better.

Some employees have abused the former policy permitting work at home to the point of founding start-ups while being on salary at Yahoo, said the Yahoo employees and others have worked at the company.

Several business analysts said that if work-at-home arrangements don’t work, it is generally a management problem.

Yahoo’s culture and employee morale have dissolved as it has fallen behind hotter tech companies. And, business analysts say, those are two things that are difficult to repair without having employees present in the same place.

Still, Ms. Mayer has said many times that one of her top priorities for the company is to recruit the most talented engineers and other employees. Even if requiring people to show up is the only way to repair Yahoo’s culture, it could result in losing valuable employees.

And even if Yahoo’s broader work-at-home policy needed revision, the internal memo announcing the new policy struck some as tone-deaf by implying that employees should avoid staying at home even once in a while when there are extenuating circumstances.

“For the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” it said.

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Well: What Housework Has to Do With Waistlines

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

One reason so many American women are overweight may be that we are vacuuming and doing laundry less often, according to a new study that, while scrupulously even-handed, is likely to stir controversy and emotions.

The study, published this month in PLoS One, is a follow-up to an influential 2011 report which used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine that, during the past 50 years, most American workers began sitting down on the job. Physical activity at work, such as walking or lifting, almost vanished, according to the data, with workers now spending most of their time seated before a computer or talking on the phone. Consequently, the authors found, the average American worker was burning almost 150 fewer calories daily at work than his or her employed parents had, a change that had materially contributed to the rise in obesity during the same time frame, especially among men, the authors concluded.

But that study, while fascinating, was narrow, focusing only on people with formal jobs. It overlooked a large segment of the population, namely a lot of women.

“Fifty years ago, a majority of women did not work outside of the home,” said Edward Archer, a research fellow with the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and lead author of the new study.

So, in collaboration with many of the authors of the earlier study of occupational physical activity, Dr. Archer set out to find data about how women had once spent their hours at home and whether and how their patterns of movement had changed over the years.

He found the information he needed in the American Heritage Time Use Study, a remarkable archive of “time-use diaries” provided by thousands of women beginning in 1965. Because Dr. Archer wished to examine how women in a variety of circumstances spent their time around the house, he gathered diaries from both working and non-employed women, starting with those in 1965 and extending through 2010.

He and his colleagues then pulled data from the diaries about how many hours the women were spending in various activities, how many calories they likely were expending in each of those tasks, and how the activities and associated energy expenditures changed over the years.

As it turned out, their findings broadly echoed those of the occupational time-use study. Women, they found, once had been quite physically active around the house, spending, in 1965, an average of 25.7 hours a week cleaning, cooking and doing laundry. Those activities, whatever their social freight, required the expenditure of considerable energy. (The authors did not include child care time in their calculations, since the women’s diary entries related to child care were inconsistent and often overlapped those of other activities.) In general at that time, working women devoted somewhat fewer hours to housework, while those not employed outside the home spent more.

Forty-five years later, in 2010, things had changed dramatically. By then, the time-use diaries showed, women were spending an average of 13.3 hours per week on housework.

More striking, the diary entries showed, women at home were now spending far more hours sitting in front of a screen. In 1965, women typically had spent about eight hours a week sitting and watching television. (Home computers weren’t invented yet.)

By 2010, those hours had more than doubled, to 16.5 hours per week. In essence, women had exchanged time spent in active pursuits, like vacuuming, for time spent being sedentary.

In the process, they had also greatly reduced the number of calories that they typically expended during their hours at home. According to the authors’ calculations, American women not employed outside the home were burning about 360 fewer calories every day in 2010 than they had in 1965, with working women burning about 132 fewer calories at home each day in 2010 than in 1965.

“Those are large reductions in energy expenditure,” Dr. Archer said, and would result, over the years, in significant weight gain without reductions in caloric intake.

What his study suggests, Dr. Archer continued, is that “we need to start finding ways to incorporate movement back into” the hours spent at home.

This does not mean, he said, that women — or men — should be doing more housework. For one thing, the effort involved is such activities today is less than it once was. Using modern, gliding vacuum cleaners is less taxing than struggling with the clunky, heavy machines once available, and thank goodness for that.

Nor is more time spent helping around the house a guarantee of more activity, over all. A telling 2012 study of television viewing habits found that when men increased the number of hours they spent on housework, they also greatly increased the hours they spent sitting in front of the TV, presumably because it was there and beckoning.

Instead, Dr. Archer said, we should start consciously tracking what we do when we are at home and try to reduce the amount of time spent sitting. “Walk to the mailbox,” he said. Chop vegetables in the kitchen. Play ball with your, or a neighbor’s, dog. Chivvy your spouse into helping you fold sheets. “The data clearly shows,” Dr. Archer said, that even at home, we need to be in motion.

Read More..

Well: What Housework Has to Do With Waistlines

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

One reason so many American women are overweight may be that we are vacuuming and doing laundry less often, according to a new study that, while scrupulously even-handed, is likely to stir controversy and emotions.

The study, published this month in PLoS One, is a follow-up to an influential 2011 report which used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine that, during the past 50 years, most American workers began sitting down on the job. Physical activity at work, such as walking or lifting, almost vanished, according to the data, with workers now spending most of their time seated before a computer or talking on the phone. Consequently, the authors found, the average American worker was burning almost 150 fewer calories daily at work than his or her employed parents had, a change that had materially contributed to the rise in obesity during the same time frame, especially among men, the authors concluded.

But that study, while fascinating, was narrow, focusing only on people with formal jobs. It overlooked a large segment of the population, namely a lot of women.

“Fifty years ago, a majority of women did not work outside of the home,” said Edward Archer, a research fellow with the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and lead author of the new study.

So, in collaboration with many of the authors of the earlier study of occupational physical activity, Dr. Archer set out to find data about how women had once spent their hours at home and whether and how their patterns of movement had changed over the years.

He found the information he needed in the American Heritage Time Use Study, a remarkable archive of “time-use diaries” provided by thousands of women beginning in 1965. Because Dr. Archer wished to examine how women in a variety of circumstances spent their time around the house, he gathered diaries from both working and non-employed women, starting with those in 1965 and extending through 2010.

He and his colleagues then pulled data from the diaries about how many hours the women were spending in various activities, how many calories they likely were expending in each of those tasks, and how the activities and associated energy expenditures changed over the years.

As it turned out, their findings broadly echoed those of the occupational time-use study. Women, they found, once had been quite physically active around the house, spending, in 1965, an average of 25.7 hours a week cleaning, cooking and doing laundry. Those activities, whatever their social freight, required the expenditure of considerable energy. (The authors did not include child care time in their calculations, since the women’s diary entries related to child care were inconsistent and often overlapped those of other activities.) In general at that time, working women devoted somewhat fewer hours to housework, while those not employed outside the home spent more.

Forty-five years later, in 2010, things had changed dramatically. By then, the time-use diaries showed, women were spending an average of 13.3 hours per week on housework.

More striking, the diary entries showed, women at home were now spending far more hours sitting in front of a screen. In 1965, women typically had spent about eight hours a week sitting and watching television. (Home computers weren’t invented yet.)

By 2010, those hours had more than doubled, to 16.5 hours per week. In essence, women had exchanged time spent in active pursuits, like vacuuming, for time spent being sedentary.

In the process, they had also greatly reduced the number of calories that they typically expended during their hours at home. According to the authors’ calculations, American women not employed outside the home were burning about 360 fewer calories every day in 2010 than they had in 1965, with working women burning about 132 fewer calories at home each day in 2010 than in 1965.

“Those are large reductions in energy expenditure,” Dr. Archer said, and would result, over the years, in significant weight gain without reductions in caloric intake.

What his study suggests, Dr. Archer continued, is that “we need to start finding ways to incorporate movement back into” the hours spent at home.

This does not mean, he said, that women — or men — should be doing more housework. For one thing, the effort involved is such activities today is less than it once was. Using modern, gliding vacuum cleaners is less taxing than struggling with the clunky, heavy machines once available, and thank goodness for that.

Nor is more time spent helping around the house a guarantee of more activity, over all. A telling 2012 study of television viewing habits found that when men increased the number of hours they spent on housework, they also greatly increased the hours they spent sitting in front of the TV, presumably because it was there and beckoning.

Instead, Dr. Archer said, we should start consciously tracking what we do when we are at home and try to reduce the amount of time spent sitting. “Walk to the mailbox,” he said. Chop vegetables in the kitchen. Play ball with your, or a neighbor’s, dog. Chivvy your spouse into helping you fold sheets. “The data clearly shows,” Dr. Archer said, that even at home, we need to be in motion.

Read More..

Media Decoder Blog: SFX Entertainment Buys Electronic Dance Music Site

SFX Entertainment, the company led by the media executive Robert F. X. Sillerman, has agreed to buy the music download site Beatport, part of the company’s plan to build a $1 billion empire centered on the electronic dance music craze.

Mr. Sillerman declined on Tuesday to reveal the price. But two people with direct knowledge of the transaction, who were not authorized to speak about it, said it was for a little more than $50 million.

Beatport, founded in Denver in 2004, has become the pre-eminent download store for electronic dance music, or E.D.M., with a catalog of more than one million tracks, many of them exclusive to the service. It says it has nearly 40 million users, and while the company does not disclose sales numbers, it is said to be profitable.

The site has also become an all-purpose online destination for dance music, with features like a news feed, remix contests and D.J. profiles. Those features, and its reach, could help in Mr. Sillerman’s plan to unite the disparate dance audience through media.

“Beatport gives us direct contact with the D.J.’s and lets us see what’s popular and what’s not,” Mr. Sillerman said in an interview. “Most important, it gives us a massive platform for everything related to E.D.M.”

Since the company was revived last year, SFX has focused mostly on live events, with the promoters Disco Donnie Presents and Life in Color; recently it also invested in a string of nightclubs in Miami and formed a joint venture with ID&T, the European company behind festivals like Sensation, to put on its events in North America.

In the 1990s, Mr. Sillerman spent $1.2 billion creating a nationwide network of concert promoters under the name SFX, which he sold to Clear Channel Entertainment in 2000 for $4.4 billion; those promoters are now the basis of Live Nation’s concert division.

Matthew Adell, Beatport’s chief executive, said that being part of SFX could help the company extend its business into live events, and also into countries where the dance genre is exploding, like India and Brazil.

“We already are by far the largest online destination of qualified fans and talent in the market,” Mr. Adell said, “and we can continue to grow that.”

Read More..

India Ink: What, No Trishna’s?

Is a pricy Japanese restaurant one of India’s best places to eat? Does southern Indian cuisine pale in comparison to Northern Indian food?

That’s what a recent list of the “50 Best Restaurants in Asia” would have you believe.

The list, organized by William Reed media, a British trade publishing house, ranks Dum Pukht, the Nawab-style cuisine in the ITC hotel in Delhi, as the top restaurant in India, and ranking No. 17 on the Asia-wide ranking.

A close second is Wasabi by Morimoto, the Japanese restaurant in Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, at No. 20.

Other Indian restaurants that make the cut include Bukhara, the ITC’s ever-popular dhaba-style kebab restaurant, Indigo, a European fusion staple in Mumbai, Varq and Indian Accent, two Indian fusion spotsin Dehli, and Karavalli, Bangalore’s southwest specialist.

Conspicuous by its absence is Trishna’s, the Mumbai  seafood staple that the former New York Times journalist R.W. “Johnny” Apple put on his list of “10 restaurants outside the United States that would be worth boarding a plane to visit.” In fact, Karavalli is the only Southern Indian cuisine that gets a mention.

The list of Asia’s best restaurants was voted for by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants Academy, made up of 936 voters from the hospitality industry, including 36 from India, who each submit a list of their seven top restaurants in the world. Rashmi Uday Singh, the television host and author, was the chair of the India panel this year.

At least India’s restaurants fared better than South Korea’s – there isn’t a single Korean entry on the list.

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Yahoo Orders Home Workers Back to the Office





Since Marissa Mayer became chief executive of Yahoo, she has been working hard to get the Internet pioneer off its deathbed and make it an innovator once again.




She started with free food and new smartphones for every employee, borrowing from the playbook of Google, her employer until last year. Now, though, Yahoo has made a surprise move: abolishing its work-at-home policy and ordering everyone to work in the office.


A memo explaining the policy change, from the company’s human resources department, says face-to-face interaction among employees fosters a more collaborative culture — a hallmark of Google’s approach to its business.


In trying to get back on track, Yahoo is taking on one of the country’s biggest workplace issues: whether the ability to work from home, and other flexible arrangements, leads to greater productivity or inhibits innovation and collaboration. Across the country, companies like Aetna, Booz Allen Hamilton and Zappos.com are confronting these trade-offs as they compete to attract and retain the best employees.


Bank of America, for example, which had a popular program for working remotely, decided late last year to require employees in certain roles to come back to the office.


Employees, especially younger ones, expect to be able to work remotely, analysts say. And over all the trend is toward greater workplace flexibility.


Still, said John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger Gray & Christmas, an outplacement and executive coaching firm, “A lot of companies are afraid to let their workers work from home some of the time or all of the time because they’re afraid they’ll lose control.”


Studies show that people who work at home are significantly more productive but less innovative, said John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University who runs a human resource advisory firm.


“If you want innovation, then you need interaction,” he said. “If you want productivity, then you want people working from home.”


Reflecting these tensions, Yahoo’s policy change has unleashed a storm of criticism from advocates for workplace flexibility who say it is a retrograde approach, particularly for those who care for young children or aging parents outside of work. Their dismay is heightened by the fact that they hoped Ms. Mayer, who became chief executive at 37 while pregnant with her first child, would make the business world more hospitable for working parents.


“The irony is that she has broken the glass ceiling, but seems unwilling for other women to lead a balanced life in which they care for their families and still concentrate on developing their skills and career,” said Ruth Rosen, a professor emerita of women’s history at the University of California.


But not only women take advantage of workplace flexibility policies. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly as many men telecommute.


The bureau says 24 percent of employed Americans report working from home at least some hours each week. And 63 percent of employers said last year that they allowed employees to work remotely, up from 34 percent in 2005, according to a study by the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit group studying the changing work force.


During the recession, the institute expected employers to demand more face time, but instead found that 12 percent increased workplace flexibility, said Ellen Galinsky, its president and co-founder. She attributed this to companies’ desire to reduce real estate costs, carbon footprints and commuting times.


Technologies developed in Silicon Valley, from video chat to instant messaging, have made it possible for employees across America to work remotely. Yet like Yahoo, many tech companies believe that working in the same physical space drives innovation.


A Yahoo spokeswoman, Sara Gorman, declined to comment, saying only that the company did not publicly discuss internal matters.


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Horse Meat in European Beef Raises Questions on U.S. Exposure





The alarm in Europe over the discovery of horse meat in beef products escalated again Monday, when the Swedish furniture giant Ikea withdrew an estimated 1,670 pounds of meatballs from sale in 14 European countries.




Ikea acted after authorities in the Czech Republic detected horse meat in its meatballs. The company said it had made the decision even though its tests two weeks ago did not detect horse DNA.


Horse meat mixed with beef was first found last month in Ireland, then Britain, and has now expanded steadily across the Continent. The situation in Europe has created unease among American consumers over whether horse meat might also find its way into the food supply in the United States. Here are answers to commonly asked questions on the subject.


Has horse meat been found in any meatballs sold in Ikea stores in the United States?


Ikea says there is no horse meat in the meatballs it sells in the United States. The company issued a statement on Monday saying meatballs sold in its 38 stores in the United States were bought from an American supplier and contained beef and pork from animals raised in the United States and Canada.


“We do not tolerate any other ingredients than the ones stipulated in our recipes or specifications, secured through set standards, certifications and product analysis by accredited laboratories,” Ikea said in its statement.


Mona Liss, a spokeswoman for Ikea, said by e-mail that all of the businesses that supply meat to its meatball maker  issue letters guaranteeing that they will not misbrand or adulterate their products. “Additionally, as an abundance of caution, we are in the process of DNA-testing our meatballs,” Ms. Liss wrote. “Results should be concluded in 30 days.”


Does the United States import any beef from countries where horse meat has been found?


No. According to the Department of Agriculture, the United States imports no beef from any of the European countries involved in the scandal. Brian K. Mabry, a spokesman for the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said: “Following a decision by Congress in November 2011 to lift the ban on horse slaughter, two establishments, one located in New Mexico and one in Missouri, have applied for a grant of inspection exclusively for equine slaughter. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (F.S.I.S.) is currently reviewing those applications.”


Has horse meat been found in ground meat products sold in the United States?


No. Meat products sold in the United States must pass Department of Agriculture inspections, whether produced domestically or imported. No government financing has been available for inspection of horse meat for human consumption in the United States since 2005, when the Humane Society of the United States got a rider forbidding financing for inspection of horse meat inserted in the annual appropriations bill for the Agriculture Department. Without inspection, such plants may not operate legally.


The rider was attached to every subsequent agriculture appropriations bill until 2011, when it was left out of an omnibus spending bill signed by President Obama on Nov. 18. The U.S.D.A.  has not committed any money for the inspection of horse meat.


“We’re real close to getting some processing plants up and running, but there are no inspectors because the U.S.D.A. is working on protocols,” said Dave Duquette, a horse trader in Oregon and president of United Horsemen, a small group that works to retrain and rehabilitate unwanted horses and advocates the slaughter of horses for meat. “We believe very strongly that the U.S.D.A. is going to bring inspectors online directly.”


Are horses slaughtered for meat for human consumption in the United States?


Not currently, although live horses from the United States are exported to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. The lack of inspection effectively ended the slaughter of horse meat for human consumption in the United States; 2007 was the last year horses were slaughtered in the United States. At the time financing of inspections was banned, a Belgian company operated three horse meat processing plants — in Fort Worth and Kaufman, Tex., and DeKalb, Ill. — but exported the meat it produced in them.


Since 2011, efforts have been made to re-establish the processing of horse meat for human consumption in the United States. A small plant in Roswell, N.M., which used to process beef cattle into meat has been retooled to slaughter 20 to 25 horses a day. But legal challenges have prevented it from opening, Mr. Duquette said. Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico opposes opening the plant and has asked the U.S.D.A. to block it.


Last month, the two houses of the Oklahoma Legislature passed separate bills to override a law against the slaughter of horses for meat but kept the law’s ban on consumption of such meat by state residents. California, Illinois, New Jersey, Tennessee and Texas prohibit horse slaughter for human consumption.


Is there a market for horse meat in the United States?


Mr. Duquette said horse meat was popular among several growing demographic groups in the United States, including Tongans, Mongolians and various Hispanic populations. He said he knew of at least 10 restaurants that wanted to buy horse meat. “People are very polarized on this issue,” he said. Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, disagreed, saying demand in the United States was limited. Italy is the largest consumer of horse meat, he said, followed by France and Belgium.


Is horse meat safe to eat?


That is a matter of much debate between proponents and opponents of horse meat consumption. Mr. Duquette said that horse meat, some derived from American animals processed abroad, was eaten widely around the world without health problems. “It’s high in protein, low in fat and has a whole lot of omega 3s,” he said.


The Humane Society says that because horse meat is not consumed in the United States, the animals’ flesh is likely to contain residues of many drugs that are unsafe for humans to eat. The organization’s list of drugs given to horses runs to 29 pages.


“We’ve been warning the Europeans about this for years,” Mr. Pacelle said. “You have all these food safety standards in Europe — they do not import chicken carcasses from the U.S. because they are bathed in chlorine, and won’t take pork because of the use of ractopamine in our industry — but you’ve thrown out the book when it comes to importing horse meat from North America.”


The society has filed petitions with the Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration, arguing that they should test horse meat before allowing it to be marketed in the United States for humans to eat.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated how many pounds of meatballs Ikea was withdrawing from sale in 14 European countries. It is 1,670 pounds, not 1.67 billion pounds.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the last year that horses were slaughtered in the United States. It is 2007, not 2006.




Read More..

Horse Meat in European Beef Raises Questions on U.S. Exposure





The alarm in Europe over the discovery of horse meat in beef products escalated again Monday, when the Swedish furniture giant Ikea withdrew an estimated 1,670 pounds of meatballs from sale in 14 European countries.




Ikea acted after authorities in the Czech Republic detected horse meat in its meatballs. The company said it had made the decision even though its tests two weeks ago did not detect horse DNA.


Horse meat mixed with beef was first found last month in Ireland, then Britain, and has now expanded steadily across the Continent. The situation in Europe has created unease among American consumers over whether horse meat might also find its way into the food supply in the United States. Here are answers to commonly asked questions on the subject.


Has horse meat been found in any meatballs sold in Ikea stores in the United States?


Ikea says there is no horse meat in the meatballs it sells in the United States. The company issued a statement on Monday saying meatballs sold in its 38 stores in the United States were bought from an American supplier and contained beef and pork from animals raised in the United States and Canada.


“We do not tolerate any other ingredients than the ones stipulated in our recipes or specifications, secured through set standards, certifications and product analysis by accredited laboratories,” Ikea said in its statement.


Mona Liss, a spokeswoman for Ikea, said by e-mail that all of the businesses that supply meat to its meatball maker  issue letters guaranteeing that they will not misbrand or adulterate their products. “Additionally, as an abundance of caution, we are in the process of DNA-testing our meatballs,” Ms. Liss wrote. “Results should be concluded in 30 days.”


Does the United States import any beef from countries where horse meat has been found?


No. According to the Department of Agriculture, the United States imports no beef from any of the European countries involved in the scandal. Brian K. Mabry, a spokesman for the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said: “Following a decision by Congress in November 2011 to lift the ban on horse slaughter, two establishments, one located in New Mexico and one in Missouri, have applied for a grant of inspection exclusively for equine slaughter. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (F.S.I.S.) is currently reviewing those applications.”


Has horse meat been found in ground meat products sold in the United States?


No. Meat products sold in the United States must pass Department of Agriculture inspections, whether produced domestically or imported. No government financing has been available for inspection of horse meat for human consumption in the United States since 2005, when the Humane Society of the United States got a rider forbidding financing for inspection of horse meat inserted in the annual appropriations bill for the Agriculture Department. Without inspection, such plants may not operate legally.


The rider was attached to every subsequent agriculture appropriations bill until 2011, when it was left out of an omnibus spending bill signed by President Obama on Nov. 18. The U.S.D.A.  has not committed any money for the inspection of horse meat.


“We’re real close to getting some processing plants up and running, but there are no inspectors because the U.S.D.A. is working on protocols,” said Dave Duquette, a horse trader in Oregon and president of United Horsemen, a small group that works to retrain and rehabilitate unwanted horses and advocates the slaughter of horses for meat. “We believe very strongly that the U.S.D.A. is going to bring inspectors online directly.”


Are horses slaughtered for meat for human consumption in the United States?


Not currently, although live horses from the United States are exported to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. The lack of inspection effectively ended the slaughter of horse meat for human consumption in the United States; 2007 was the last year horses were slaughtered in the United States. At the time financing of inspections was banned, a Belgian company operated three horse meat processing plants — in Fort Worth and Kaufman, Tex., and DeKalb, Ill. — but exported the meat it produced in them.


Since 2011, efforts have been made to re-establish the processing of horse meat for human consumption in the United States. A small plant in Roswell, N.M., which used to process beef cattle into meat has been retooled to slaughter 20 to 25 horses a day. But legal challenges have prevented it from opening, Mr. Duquette said. Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico opposes opening the plant and has asked the U.S.D.A. to block it.


Last month, the two houses of the Oklahoma Legislature passed separate bills to override a law against the slaughter of horses for meat but kept the law’s ban on consumption of such meat by state residents. California, Illinois, New Jersey, Tennessee and Texas prohibit horse slaughter for human consumption.


Is there a market for horse meat in the United States?


Mr. Duquette said horse meat was popular among several growing demographic groups in the United States, including Tongans, Mongolians and various Hispanic populations. He said he knew of at least 10 restaurants that wanted to buy horse meat. “People are very polarized on this issue,” he said. Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, disagreed, saying demand in the United States was limited. Italy is the largest consumer of horse meat, he said, followed by France and Belgium.


Is horse meat safe to eat?


That is a matter of much debate between proponents and opponents of horse meat consumption. Mr. Duquette said that horse meat, some derived from American animals processed abroad, was eaten widely around the world without health problems. “It’s high in protein, low in fat and has a whole lot of omega 3s,” he said.


The Humane Society says that because horse meat is not consumed in the United States, the animals’ flesh is likely to contain residues of many drugs that are unsafe for humans to eat. The organization’s list of drugs given to horses runs to 29 pages.


“We’ve been warning the Europeans about this for years,” Mr. Pacelle said. “You have all these food safety standards in Europe — they do not import chicken carcasses from the U.S. because they are bathed in chlorine, and won’t take pork because of the use of ractopamine in our industry — but you’ve thrown out the book when it comes to importing horse meat from North America.”


The society has filed petitions with the Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration, arguing that they should test horse meat before allowing it to be marketed in the United States for humans to eat.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated how many pounds of meatballs Ikea was withdrawing from sale in 14 European countries. It is 1,670 pounds, not 1.67 billion pounds.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the last year that horses were slaughtered in the United States. It is 2007, not 2006.




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India Ink: On Kissing, Bollywood, and Rebellion

Gardiner Harris’s recent piece in the New York Times made me do a double take, not just because of the attachment of the word “bombshell” before Katrina Kaif, which to me is somewhat like using “razor-sharp” as the defining adjective for President George W. Bush, but because of the cultural “Rubicon-crossing” significance attributed to a scene in “Jab Tak Hai Jaan:”

A pivotal screen kiss reflected the changing romantic landscape here. Kissing scenes were banned by Indian film censors until the 1990s, and Shah Rukh Khan, a Bollywood heartthrob who is one of the world’s biggest movie stars, has been teasing Indian audiences in dozens of films since then by bringing his lips achingly close to those of his beautiful co-stars. But his lips never touched any of theirs until he kissed the Bollywood bombshell Katrina Kaif in “Jab Tak Hai Jaan,” which was released in December 2012.

Mr. Khan tried to soften the impact by saying in a published interview that his director made him do it. But the cultural Rubicon had been crossed.

As a longtime pop culture buff and dispassionate observer of screen-kisses, while I may agree with the author’s observation of Shah Rukh Khan’s lips historically tending toward those of his heroine’s but never quite getting there, like the limit of a function, I firmly dispute the notion that Mr. Khan’s tepid liplock has given the kiss the acceptability it did not have before. That’s because kisses have been in mainstream Indian movies since the late 1920s with reigning screen diva, Devika Rani’s kiss with her off-screen husband, Himanshu Rai, for a full four minutes in “Karma” (1933) being the veritable stuff of legends.

It is true, of course, that Indian movies have had far more people chasing each other around the trees than kissing, and that is primarily because of the dictates of the dreaded censor board, the cheerless cinematic embodiment of the Nehruvian ideal of big-government intruding into every aspect of national life, which made directors move the camera away at strategic moments to two flowers touching each other.

But around the time when I started watching movies, which was the mid-1980s, kisses and intimacy were very much part of big-banner Bollywood, be it in “Ram Teri Ganga Maili” (1985) or “Janbaaz” (1986) or “Qayamat Se Qayamat Se Tak” (1986) and the truly shuddering scene in “Dayavan” (1988) between the venerable Vinod Khanna and an upcoming actress by the name of Madhuri Dixit, a sequence responsible for many VCRs getting jammed due to excessive pausing and replaying (or so my unscientific survey tells me).

Then of course, there was Aamir Khan establishing his reputation for commitment to detail and the embracing of variety by kissing Juhi Chawla in “Qayamat Se Qayamat” (1986) and “Love Love Love” (1986), Pooja Bhatt in “Dil Hai Ki Manta Naheen” (1991), Pooja Bedi in “Jo Jeeta Hai Sikander” (1992) and then Karishma Kapoor in “Raja Hindustani” (1997) for a full 40 seconds, if experts are to be believed.

In the 2000s, there were movies that had 17 kissing scenes in them, and an actor by the name of Emran Hashmi had made kissing a calling card in each of his movies, earning the sobriquet “serial kisser.”

I don’t want to keep on inserting citations to prior art — after all, this is not a journal paper — but my point is that by 2012, when “Jab Tak Hai Jaan” came to pass, Indian audiences had been quite desensitized to on-screen kissing.

In other words, it is no big whoop. Or should I say, no big “mwah.”

So if it’s not the influence of movies, why then do we see more public displays of affection (of which kissing is but one manifestation) in Indian cities today than say 10 or 20 years ago?

Here is my explanation: The last decade or so has seen a social revolution in urban India. More men and more women are working together. There are more coeducational institutions than ever before. Social media have allowed people to find others with similar interests and points of view, subverting traditional social walls that prevent free interaction, and then they could keep in touch discreetly, through cellphones and instant messaging. (In my day, we had to use the single rotary phone kept in the living room, making it impossible to have a secret conversation.)

As a result, there are more opportunities for meeting people and maintaining relationships. This naturally leads to more unmarried couples or couples that are not married to each other.

Getting a room every time one wants to kiss one’s partner or hold hands is neither financially viable nor practically feasible. Budget hotels are loath to rent rooms to couples without proof of “marriage” because of the fear of police raids. Some even collude with crooked cops to do a bit of extortion, since couples are willing to pay to avoid being hauled to the police station. Being outside, in parks and deserted spaces, does not totally protect couples from the police, but at least it is better than being busted at a hotel.

Hence what one sees as increased public displays of affection is merely the inevitable effect of an increasing number of young couples in urban India, who, because of an antiquated legal system with ill-defined notions of “public decency,” unfortunately find themselves unable to have safe spaces of their own.

The biggest threat to their safety is not the police but young men described in Mr. Harris’s piece, those who “often sit and stare hungrily at kissing couples,” India’s increasingly angry and volatile class of getting-it-nots, those that desperately wish to have but do not, who see these displays of affection as arrogant flaunting of privilege. Many of these frustrated young men coalesce to form mobs of moral police, who then attack couples, especially women, in public places under the comforting banner of protecting Indian tradition.

And so an important cultural battle rages on, in the parks and in pubs and in other common spaces, one that reflects one of modern India’s defining conflicts, that between ordinary people in pursuit of individual happiness and a legal and social system that insists on imposing, interfering and getting in their way — where a kiss is no longer just a kiss but a small symbol of unintentional rebellion.

By the light of day, Arnab Ray is a research scientist at the Fraunhofer Center For Experimental Software Engineering and also an adjunct assistant professor at the Computer Science department of the University of Maryland at College Park. Come night, he metamorphoses into blogger, novelist (“May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss” and “The Mine”) and columnist. He is on Twitter at @greatbong.

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