After Deportation, John McAfee Returns to U.S.

MIAMI (AP) — John McAfee, the antivirus software pioneer, arrived in the United States on Wednesday night after being deported from Guatemala, where he had sought to evade police questioning in the killing of a man in neighboring Belize.

Johan Ordonez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

John McAfee at the airport in Guatemala City. He was deported from that country and arrived in Miami on Wednesday night.

A commercial jet carrying Mr. McAfee landed in Miami shortly before 7 p.m. Wednesday, said Greg Chin, a spokesman for Miami International Airport.

A short time later, a posting on McAfee’s Web site announced that he was at a hotel in Miami’s South Beach neighborhood. Mr. McAfee has frequently communicated through the Web site.

“I have no phone, no money, no contact information,” the post says. Reached by telephone at the hotel, Mr. McAfee said that he could not talk because he was waiting for a call from his girlfriend.

Other passengers on the flight said that Mr. McAfee, 67, was escorted off the aircraft before everyone else.

Maria Claridge, a 36-year-old photographer from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said, “He walked very peacefully, chin up. He didn’t seem stressed.”

She said he was well dressed, in a black suit and white shirt, and appeared to be traveling alone.

An F.B.I. spokesman in Miami, James Marshall, said in an e-mail that the agency was not involved with Mr. McAfee’s return to the United States. Authorities from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the United States Marshals office and the United States attorney’s office did not immediately respond to questions about whether Mr. McAfee would be questioned or detained. They said there was no active arrest warrant for Mr. McAfee that would justify taking him into custody.His expulsion from Guatemala marked the last chapter in a strange, monthlong odyssey to avoid police questioning about the November killing of American expatriate Gregory Viant Faull, who lived a couple of houses down from McAfee’s compound on Ambergris Caye, off Belize’s Caribbean coast.

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World Briefing | Middle East: U.N. Nuclear Inspectors Pay Visit to Iran

nuclear inspectors visited Iran for their first meeting since August, but they appeared to be no closer to resolving a dispute over their repeated requests to examine Parchin, a military site that the inspectors suspect was used for atomic weapons trigger tests. The head of the inspector delegation, Herman Nackaerts, deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna, told reporters as the group left for Tehran that the purpose of the visit was to devise a way to satisfy the agency’s concerns over the Iranian program’s “possible military dimensions.” He also said his delegation still hoped the Iranians would allow a visit to Parchin. Some members of his group were seen carrying equipment that could be used for testing at Parchin.

Iran has insisted that its uranium enrichment program is peaceful and has dismissed as Western propaganda commercial satellite imagery that has shown cleanup work at Parchin. The inspectors’ visit came as new diplomatic efforts were under way by the six big powers that have been negotiating with Iran over its uranium enrichment to re-engage in talks, which have been stalled for months. Michael Mann, a spokesman for Catherine Ashton , the European Union foreign policy chief who is the lead negotiator for the six powers, said her deputy had discussed possible dates and locations for a new meeting with Iran’s deputy negotiator. “We hope that an agreement with Iran can soon be reached on how to continue the talks and make concrete progress toward addressing international concerns and finding a diplomatic solution,” Mr. Mann said.

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Top Executives End Opposition to Higher Taxes

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

White House officials have been pressing top business executives, like Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, to support higher taxes on wealthy Americans.

A broad swath of the nation’s leading chief executives dropped its opposition to tax increases on the wealthiest Americans on Tuesday, while the White House quietly pressed Wall Street titans for their support as well.

Before Tuesday’s about-face, the Business Roundtable had insisted that the White House extend Bush-era tax cuts to taxpayers of all income brackets, but the executives’ resistance crumbled as pressure builds to find a compromise for the fiscal impasse in Washington before the end of the year.

“We recognize that part of the solution has to be tax increases,” David M. Cote, chief executive of Honeywell, said on a conference call with reporters. “That’s the only thing that allows a reasonable compromise to be reached.”

Even as the Fortune 500 leaders announced their shift, the White House continued to work behind the scenes to woo some of Wall Street’s most powerful financiers — a group that had largely abandoned President Obama in his bid for a second term after supporting him in 2008.

After seeking out corporate leaders from industrial companies last month, the White House has intensified outreach to Wall Street in December.

On Wednesday, several hedge fund managers, including Daniel Och, the billionaire founder of Och-Ziff Capital Management, will meet with Valerie Jarrett, a top adviser to the president, and members of the White House economic team.

Last Monday, White House officials sat down with a more than half a dozen top bankers and financiers, including Gary D. Cohn, president of Goldman Sachs, and Greg Fleming, head of wealth management at Morgan Stanley.

The differing strategies — highly public meetings with corporate America and private arm-twisting with Wall Street — both appear to be aimed at winning popular support for higher taxes on the wealthy. The trade-offs being roundly fought over in Washington, like what government programs may be cut and which entitlements may be spared, are less important in this effort to muster highly compensated chieftains whose support for tax increases will provide cover for Congressional Republicans wary of being seen as too quick to compromise on higher tax rates.

What’s more, the political symbolism of some of the wealthiest Americans’ saying they support higher taxes on the rich takes a bit of the sting out of the idea of raising rates, for both Democrats and Republicans. Indeed, by appealing to both camps and enlisting their support, President Obama hopes to neutralize potential critics, according to allies of the president on Wall Street.

President Obama’s supporters cited the example of Frederick W. Smith, the chief executive of FedEx. Last week, Mr. Smith signaled he was not angered by higher tax rates for the wealthiest individuals, a centerpiece of President Obama’s plan to reduce the deficit and a key sticking point for Republicans in Congress.

“If people who didn’t support the president believe the president is acting reasonably, they’re going to put pressure on the other side,” said Marc Lasry, a longtime supporter of the president who runs Avenue Capital. “You need both sides to be reasonable.”

For example, Mr. Lasry invited the real estate tycoon Barry Sternlicht, a onetime Obama supporter who raised money for Mitt Romney in the last election cycle, to the White House last week. Mr. Lasry, who has $13 billion under management, including $1.3 billion of his own money, is among a small group of Wall Street figures who stuck with the president before the election, even as those like Mr. Sternlicht deserted him.

This core group met with President Obama on Nov. 16, and included Tony James, president of the Blackstone Group, as well as Roger Altman, a Democratic stalwart who is executive chairman of Evercore Partners, and Robert Wolf, a longtime UBS executive who recently began his own firm, 32 Advisors.

Also in attendance were Blair W. Effron, co-founder of Centerview Partners, and Mark T. Gallogly, a Blackstone veteran who founded Centerbridge Partners in 2005.

Catherine Rampell contributed reporting.

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Well: Why Afternoon May Be the Best Time to Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Does exercise influence the body’s internal clock? Few of us may be conscious of it, but our bodies, and in turn our health, are ruled by rhythms. “The heart, the liver, the brain — all are controlled by an endogenous circadian rhythm,” says Christopher Colwell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Brain Research Institute, who led a series of new experiments on how exercise affects the body’s internal clock. The studies were conducted in mice, but the findings suggest that exercise does affect our circadian rhythms, and the effect may be most beneficial if the exercise is undertaken midday.

For the study, which appears in the December Journal of Physiology, the researchers gathered several types of mice. Most of the animals were young and healthy. But some had been bred to have a malfunctioning internal clock, or pacemaker, which involves, among other body parts, a cluster of cells inside the brain “whose job it is to tell the time of day,” Dr. Colwell says.

These pacemaker cells receive signals from light sources or darkness that set off a cascade of molecular effects. Certain genes fire, expressing proteins, which are released into the body, where they migrate to the heart, neurons, liver and elsewhere, choreographing those organs to pulse in tune with the rest of the body. We sleep, wake and function physiologically according to the dictates of our body’s internal clock.

But, Dr. Colwell says, that clock can become discombobulated. It is easily confused, for instance, by viewing artificial light in the evening, he says, when the internal clock expects darkness. Aging also worsens the clock’s functioning, he says. “By middle age, most of us start to have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep,” he says. “Then we have trouble staying awake the next day.”

The consequences of clock disruptions extend beyond sleepiness. Recent research has linked out-of-sync circadian rhythm in people to an increased risk for diabetes, obesity, certain types of cancer, memory loss and mood disorders, including depression.

“We believe there are serious potential health consequences” to problems with circadian rhythm, Dr. Colwell says. Which is why he and his colleagues set out to determine whether exercise, which is so potent physiologically, might “fix” a broken clock, and if so, whether exercising in the morning or later in the day is more effective in terms of regulating circadian rhythm.

They began by letting healthy mice run, an activity the animals enjoy. Some of the mice ran whenever they wanted. Others were given access to running wheels only in the early portion of their waking time (mice are active at night) or in the later stages, the equivalent of the afternoon for us.

After several weeks of running, the exercising mice, no matter when they ran, were found to be producing more proteins in their internal-clock cells than the sedentary animals. But the difference was slight in these healthy animals, which all had normal circadian rhythms to start with.

So the scientists turned to mice unable to produce a critical internal clock protein. Signals from these animals’ internal clocks rarely reach the rest of the body.

But after several weeks of running, the animals’ internal clocks were sturdier. Messages now traveled to these animals’ hearts and livers far more frequently than in their sedentary counterparts.

The beneficial effect was especially pronounced in those animals that exercised in the afternoon (or mouse equivalent).

That finding, Dr. Colwell says, “was a pretty big surprise.” He and his colleagues had expected to see the greatest effects from morning exercise, a popular workout time for many athletes.

But the animals that ran later produced more clock proteins and pumped the protein more efficiently to the rest of the body than animals that ran early in their day.

What all of this means for people isn’t clear, Dr. Colwell says. “It is evident that exercise will help to regulate” our bodily clocks and circadian rhythms, he says, especially as we enter middle age.

But whether we should opt for an afternoon jog over one in the morning “is impossible to say yet,” he says.

Late-night exercise, meanwhile, is probably inadvisable, he continues. Unpublished results from his lab show that healthy mice running at the animal equivalent of 11 p.m. or so developed significant disruptions in their circadian rhythm. Among other effects, they slept poorly.

“What we know, right now,” he says, “is that exercise is a good idea” if you wish to sleep well and avoid the physical ailments associated with an aging or clumsy circadian rhythm. And it is possible, although not yet proven, that afternoon sessions may produce more robust results.

“But any exercise is likely to be better than none,” he concludes. “And if you like morning exercise, which I do, great. Keep it up.”

Read More..

Well: Why Afternoon May Be the Best Time to Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Does exercise influence the body’s internal clock? Few of us may be conscious of it, but our bodies, and in turn our health, are ruled by rhythms. “The heart, the liver, the brain — all are controlled by an endogenous circadian rhythm,” says Christopher Colwell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Brain Research Institute, who led a series of new experiments on how exercise affects the body’s internal clock. The studies were conducted in mice, but the findings suggest that exercise does affect our circadian rhythms, and the effect may be most beneficial if the exercise is undertaken midday.

For the study, which appears in the December Journal of Physiology, the researchers gathered several types of mice. Most of the animals were young and healthy. But some had been bred to have a malfunctioning internal clock, or pacemaker, which involves, among other body parts, a cluster of cells inside the brain “whose job it is to tell the time of day,” Dr. Colwell says.

These pacemaker cells receive signals from light sources or darkness that set off a cascade of molecular effects. Certain genes fire, expressing proteins, which are released into the body, where they migrate to the heart, neurons, liver and elsewhere, choreographing those organs to pulse in tune with the rest of the body. We sleep, wake and function physiologically according to the dictates of our body’s internal clock.

But, Dr. Colwell says, that clock can become discombobulated. It is easily confused, for instance, by viewing artificial light in the evening, he says, when the internal clock expects darkness. Aging also worsens the clock’s functioning, he says. “By middle age, most of us start to have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep,” he says. “Then we have trouble staying awake the next day.”

The consequences of clock disruptions extend beyond sleepiness. Recent research has linked out-of-sync circadian rhythm in people to an increased risk for diabetes, obesity, certain types of cancer, memory loss and mood disorders, including depression.

“We believe there are serious potential health consequences” to problems with circadian rhythm, Dr. Colwell says. Which is why he and his colleagues set out to determine whether exercise, which is so potent physiologically, might “fix” a broken clock, and if so, whether exercising in the morning or later in the day is more effective in terms of regulating circadian rhythm.

They began by letting healthy mice run, an activity the animals enjoy. Some of the mice ran whenever they wanted. Others were given access to running wheels only in the early portion of their waking time (mice are active at night) or in the later stages, the equivalent of the afternoon for us.

After several weeks of running, the exercising mice, no matter when they ran, were found to be producing more proteins in their internal-clock cells than the sedentary animals. But the difference was slight in these healthy animals, which all had normal circadian rhythms to start with.

So the scientists turned to mice unable to produce a critical internal clock protein. Signals from these animals’ internal clocks rarely reach the rest of the body.

But after several weeks of running, the animals’ internal clocks were sturdier. Messages now traveled to these animals’ hearts and livers far more frequently than in their sedentary counterparts.

The beneficial effect was especially pronounced in those animals that exercised in the afternoon (or mouse equivalent).

That finding, Dr. Colwell says, “was a pretty big surprise.” He and his colleagues had expected to see the greatest effects from morning exercise, a popular workout time for many athletes.

But the animals that ran later produced more clock proteins and pumped the protein more efficiently to the rest of the body than animals that ran early in their day.

What all of this means for people isn’t clear, Dr. Colwell says. “It is evident that exercise will help to regulate” our bodily clocks and circadian rhythms, he says, especially as we enter middle age.

But whether we should opt for an afternoon jog over one in the morning “is impossible to say yet,” he says.

Late-night exercise, meanwhile, is probably inadvisable, he continues. Unpublished results from his lab show that healthy mice running at the animal equivalent of 11 p.m. or so developed significant disruptions in their circadian rhythm. Among other effects, they slept poorly.

“What we know, right now,” he says, “is that exercise is a good idea” if you wish to sleep well and avoid the physical ailments associated with an aging or clumsy circadian rhythm. And it is possible, although not yet proven, that afternoon sessions may produce more robust results.

“But any exercise is likely to be better than none,” he concludes. “And if you like morning exercise, which I do, great. Keep it up.”

Read More..

European Union Officials Accept Nobel Peace Prize

OSLO — Besieged by economic woes and insistent questions about its future, the European Union accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday with calls for further integration and a plea to remember the words of Abraham Lincoln as he addressed a divided nation at Gettysburg.

Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

Leaders of the European Union member countries attended the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony at City Hall in Oslo on Monday.

The prize ceremony, held in Oslo’s City Hall and attended by 20 European leaders as well as Norway’s royal family, brought a rare respite from the gloom that has settled on the European Union since the Greek debt crisis exploded three years ago, unleashing doubt about the long-term viability of the euro and about an edifice of European institutions built up over more than half a century to promote an ever closer union.

Unemployment — now at over 25 percent in Greece and Spain — and sputtering economic growth across the 27-nation bloc are “putting the political bonds of our union to the test,” Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, said in his acceptance speech. “If I can borrow the words of Abraham Lincoln at the time of another continental test, what is being assessed today is whether that union, or any union so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

The European Union, said Mr. Van Rompuy, will “answer with our deeds, confident we will succeed.”

“We are working very hard to overcome the difficulties, to restore growth and jobs,” he continued.

Aside from economic misery, the most serious threat to the bloc so far is growing pressure in Britain for a referendum on whether to pull out of the union. The British prime minister, David Cameron, did not attend the ceremony, but most other European leaders showed up, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and the French president, François Hollande, who sat next to each other and whose countries, once bitter enemies, have been the main motors driving European integration.

Mr. Van Rompuy’s comparison of the European Union to the United States is likely to irritate critics of the European Union, who reject efforts to push European nations to surrender more sovereignty in pursuit of what champions of a federal European state hope will one day be a United States of Europe.

Just how far Europe is from such a goal, however, was made clear by the presence of three Union presidents in Oslo. In addition to Mr. Van Rompuy, whose European Council represents the leaders of the union’s member states, there was José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, the bloc’s main administrative and policy-making arm, and Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament.

Instead of the customary Nobel lecture delivered by the winner, Mr. Van Rompuy and Mr. Barroso each read parts of what Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, described as “one speech but two chapters.”

Hailing the European Union for helping bring peace to Europe after repeated wars, Mr. Jagland said, “What this continent has achieved is truly fantastic, from being a continent of war to becoming a continent of peace.”

Mr. Barroso spoke of the horrors of past wars and tyranny and Europe’s efforts to overcome them through the building of supranational institutions, which began in 1951 with the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community by France, Germany and four other countries. But he also cited the current conflict in Syria, describing it as a “stain on the world’s conscience” that other nations have “a moral duty” to address. The European Union’s member states are themselves divided about how far to go in supporting opponents of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president.

The decision to honor the European Union with the Nobel Peace Prize stirred widespread criticism in Norway, whose citizens have twice voted not to join the union. On the eve of Monday’s award ceremony, peace activists and supporters of left-wing political groups paraded through the streets of Oslo, carrying flaming torches and chanting, “The E.U. is not a worthy winner.”

Many peace activists say they have no problem with European integration but question whether the union has lived up to conditions laid down by Alfred Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish industrialist who bequeathed the peace prize and four other Nobel Prizes.

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Rate of Childhood Obesity Falls in Several Cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read More..

Rate of Childhood Obesity Falls in Several Cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read More..

BUSINESS: Concern Over Apps for Kids

December 10, 2012By Fritzie Andrade, Emily B. Hager, David Gillen and Pedro Rafael Rosado

TimesCast Media+Tech: An update in the battle over children’s privacy online. | Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen. | Bloomberg weighs bidding on Financial Times.

Read More..

Afghan Army Still Needs Support, Pentagon Says

WASHINGTON — As President Obama considers how quickly to withdraw the remaining 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan and turn over the war to Afghan security forces, a bleak new Pentagon report has found that only one of the Afghan National Army’s 23 brigades is able to operate independently without air or other military support from the United States and NATO partners.

The report, released Monday, also found that violence in Afghanistan is higher than it was before the surge of American forces into the country two years ago, although it is down from a high in the summer of 2010.

The assessment found that the Taliban remain resilient, that widespread corruption continues to weaken the central Afghan government and that Pakistan persists in providing critical support to the insurgency. Insider attacks by Afghan security forces on their NATO coalition partners, while still small, are up significantly: there have been 37 so far in 2012, compared with 2 in 2007.

As bright spots the report identified the continued transition by Afghan security forces into taking the lead on most routine patrols throughout the country and a decline in violence in populated areas like Kabul, the Afghan capital, and Kandahar, the largest city in the south.

The assessment, “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,” is required twice a year by Congress and covers the six-month period from April 1 through the end of September. Although the problems in the report have been familiar for years to national security officials in Washington, the report’s publication comes at an important juncture in the war.

American officials say that Gen. John R. Allen, the senior American commander in Afghanistan, wants to keep a large majority of the 68,000 troops in Afghanistan through the fighting season next fall so that Afghan forces have as much support as possible as they move out on their own by 2014. But military officials anticipate that the White House may push for a more rapid withdrawal to cut losses in an increasingly unpopular war.

More than 2,000 American service members have died in the war, which has cost the United States more than $500 billion since 2001. More than 1,200 American service members have died in Afghanistan from the beginning of 2010 to the present, which is roughly the period of the surge.

Obama administration officials have said that progress in the war in large part depends on whether the Taliban could rebuild after the hammering it took during the surge, when American forces, with 33,000 additional troops, aggressively pursued insurgents and drove them from critical territory in the south.

But the report was blunt in its assessment of the Taliban’s current strength. “The Taliban-led insurgency remains adaptive and determined, and retains the capability to emplace substantial numbers of I.E.D.s and to conduct isolated high-profile attacks,” the report said, using the term for homemade bombs. “The insurgency also retains a significant regenerative capacity.”

The report said that although the insurgents had less capability to directly attack American and Afghan forces, they had increasingly resorted to “assassinations, kidnappings, intimidation tactics, encouraging insider attacks and strategic messaging campaigns.”

A defense official who briefed reporters at the Pentagon sought to offer a more positive picture of the Afghan security forces’ abilities than the report would suggest. Acknowledging that the progress of the security forces had been “incremental,” the official said that many of the forces patrol and carry out some operations independently, without help from NATO. “They often don’t rely on any assistance from us at all,” said the official, who declined to be named under ground rules imposed by the Pentagon.

But the official said there were nonetheless broad problems with the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police, which together number 350,000 personnel. The security forces still depend over all on American air power, communications, intelligence gathering, logistics and leadership. That is true especially at the level of a brigade, which typically is composed of 3, 000 to 5,000 troops.

The official acknowledged that it would be a “challenge” to have the security forces ready to defend their own country by the end of 2014, when most American troops are to be out of Afghanistan. The White House is debating how many American forces should be left in the country after 2014 and it has opened negotiations with the Afghans on what their mission should be.

The defense official said that the rise in violence in Afghanistan — measured by what the report termed “enemy initiated attacks” — was a result of Afghan security forces pushing into Taliban-dominated areas, forcing the Taliban to fight back. The official cited three volatile districts in Kandahar Province — Maiwand, Panjwai and Zhari — as highly contested, violent areas.

Although the report did not provide month-by-month specific numbers of enemy-initiated attacks, it plotted them on a bar graph that showed, for example, that in July 2012 there were slightly more than 3,000 enemy-initiated attacks. In July 2009, before the surge began, the graph showed some 2,000 enemy-initiated attacks.

The official said it was a sign of progress that the report found that enemy-initiated attacks had declined in the city of Kandahar by 62 percent from a year ago.

The report found many problems with the Afghan government that American security officials have been aware of for years. The government, the report said, suffers from “widespread corruption, limited human capacity, lack of access to rural areas due to a lack of security, a lack of coordination between the central government and the Afghan provinces and districts, and an uneven distribution of power among the judicial, legislative and executive branches.”

One area of improvement, the report said, was the American relationship with Pakistan, which has been acrimonious in recent years. The report noted that the Pakistanis had agreed to reopen their country to trucks transporting matériel for the war in Afghanistan. However, the report said that “tensions remain” over insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan and cross-border attacks.

The report had been due to be released in early November, before the presidential election, but was delayed. The Pentagon did not give a reason for the delay.

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting.

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