Used to Hardship, Latvia Accepts Austerity, and Its Pain Eases

RIGA, Latvia — When a credit-fueled economic boom turned to bust in this tiny Baltic nation in 2008, Didzis Krumins, who ran a small architectural company, fired his staff one by one and then shut down the business. He watched in dismay as Latvia’s misery deepened under a harsh austerity drive that scythed wages, jobs and state financing for schools and hospitals.

But instead of taking to the streets to protest the cuts, Mr. Krumins, whose newborn child, in the meantime, needed major surgery, bought a tractor and began hauling wood to heating plants that needed fuel. Then, as Latvia’s economy began to pull out of its nose-dive, he returned to architecture and today employs 15 people — five more than he had before. “We have a different mentality here,” he said.

Latvia, feted by fans of austerity as the country-that-can and an example for countries like Greece that can’t, has provided a rare boost to champions of the proposition that pain pays.

Hardship has long been common here — and still is. But in just four years, the country has gone from the European Union’s worst economic disaster zone to a model of what the International Monetary Fund hails as the healing properties of deep budget cuts. Latvia’s economy, after shriveling by more than 20 percent from its peak, grew by about 5 percent last year, making it the best performer in the 27-nation European Union. Its budget deficit is down sharply and exports are soaring.

“We are here to celebrate your achievements,” Christine Lagarde, the chief of the International Monetary Fund, told a conference in Riga, the capital, this past summer. The fund, which along with the European Union financed a $7.5 billion bailout for the country at the end of 2008, is “proud to have been part of Latvia’s success story,” she said.

When Latvia’s economy first crumbled, it wrestled with many of the same problems faced since by other troubled European nations: a growing hole in government finances, a banking crisis, falling competitiveness and big debts — though most of these were private rather than public as in Greece.

Now its abrupt turn for the better has put a spotlight on a ticklish question for those who look to orthodox economics for a solution to Europe’s wider economic woes: Instead of obeying any universal laws of economic gravity, do different people respond differently to the same forces?

Latvian businessmen applaud the government’s approach but doubt it would work elsewhere.

“Economics is not a science. Most of it is in people’s heads,” said Normunds Bergs, chief executive of SAF Tehnika, a manufacturer that cut management salaries by 30 percent. “Science says that water starts to boil at 100 degrees Celsius; there is no such predictability in economics.”

In Greece and Spain, cuts in salaries, jobs and state services have pushed tempers beyond the boiling point, with angry citizens staging frequent protests and strikes. Britain, Portugal, Italy and also Latvia’s neighbor Lithuania, meanwhile, have bubbled with discontent over austerity.

But in Latvia, where the government laid off a third of its civil servants, slashed wages for the rest and sharply reduced support for hospitals, people mostly accepted the bitter medicine. Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, who presided over the austerity, was re-elected, not thrown out of office, as many of his counterparts elsewhere have been.

The cuts calmed fears on financial markets that the country was about to go bankrupt, and this meant that the government and private companies could again get the loans they needed to stay afloat. At the same time, private businesses followed the government in slashing wages, which made the country’s labor force more competitive by reducing the prices of its goods. As exports grew, companies began to rehire workers.

Economic gains have still left 30.9 percent of Latvia’s population “severely materially deprived,” according to 2011 data released in December by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, second only to Bulgaria. Unemployment has fallen from more than 20 percent in early 2010, but was still 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, according to Eurostat, and closer to 17 percent if “discouraged workers” are included. This is far below the more than 25 percent jobless rate in Greece and Spain but a serious problem nonetheless.

Read More..

Ground Zero Volunteers Face Obstacles to Compensation

On the day the terrorists flew into the World Trade Center, the Wu-Tang Clan canceled its meeting with a record mixer named Richard Oliver, so Mr. Oliver rushed downtown from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment to help out.

He said he spent three sleepless days at ground zero, tossing body bags. “Then I went home, ate, crashed, woke up,” he said. He had left his Dr. Martens boots on the landing outside his apartment, where he said they “had rotted away.”

“That was kind of frightening,” he continued. “I was breathing that stuff.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, nothing symbolized the city’s rallying around like many New Yorkers who helped at ground zero for days, weeks, months, without being asked. Now Mr. Oliver, suffering from back pain and a chronic sinus infection, is among scores of volunteers who have begun filing claims for compensation from a $2.8 billion fund that Congress created in 2010.

But proving they were there and eligible for the money is turning out to be its own forbidding task.

The other large classes of people who qualify — firefighters, police officers, contractors, city workers, residents and students — have it relatively simple, since they are more likely to have official work orders, attendance records and leases to back them up. But more than a decade later, many volunteers have only the sketchiest proof that they are eligible for the fund, which is expected to make its first awards early this year. (A separate $1.5 billion treatment fund also was created.)

They are volunteers like Terry Graves, now ill with lung cancer, who kept a few business cards of people she worked with until 2007, then threw them away. Or Jaime Hazan, a former Web designer with gastric reflux, chronically inflamed sinuses and asthma, who managed to dig up a photograph of himself at ground zero — taken from behind.

Or Mr. Oliver, who has a terse two-sentence thank-you note on American Red Cross letterhead, dated 2004, which does not meet the requirement that it be witnessed or sworn.

“For some people, there’s great records,” said Noah H. Kushlefsky, whose law firm, Kreindler & Kreindler, is representing volunteers and others who expect to make claims. “But in some respects, it was a little bit of a free-for-all. Other people went down there and joined the bucket brigade, talked their way in. It’s going to be harder for those people, and we do have clients like that.”

As documentation, the fund requires volunteers to have orders, instructions or confirmation of tasks they performed, or medical records created during the time they were in what is being called the exposure zone, including the area south of Canal Street, and areas where debris was being taken.

Failing that, it will be enough to submit two sworn statements — meaning the writer swears to its truth, under penalty of perjury — from witnesses describing when the volunteers were there and what they were doing.

Proving presence at the site might actually be harder than proving the illness is related to Sept. 11, since the rules now allow a host of ailments to be covered, including 50 kinds of cancer, despite an absence of evidence linking cancer to ground zero.

A study by the New York City health department, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found no clear association between cancer and Sept. 11, though the researchers noted that some cancers take many years to develop.

Unlike the original compensation fund, administered by Kenneth Feinberg, which dealt mainly with people who were killed or maimed in the attack, “This one is dealing with injuries that are very common,” said Sheila L. Birnbaum, a former mediator and personal injury defense lawyer, who is in charge of the new fund. “So it’s sort of a very hard process from the fund’s point of view to make the right call, and it requires some evidence that people were actually there.”

Asked how closely the fund would scrutinize documents like sworn statements, Ms. Birnbaum said she understood how hard it was to recreate records after a decade, and was going on the basic assumption that people would be honest.

In his career as a record mixer, Mr. Oliver, 56, has been associated with 7 platinum and 11 gold records, and 2 Grammy credits, which now line the walls of his condominium in College Point, Queens. He said he first got wind of the Sept. 11 attacks from a client, the Wu-Tang Clan. “One of the main guys called me: ‘Did you see what’s on TV? Because our meeting ain’t going to happen,’ ” he recalled.

Having taken a hazmat course after high school, he called the Red Cross and was told they needed people like him. “I left my soon-to-be-ex-wife and 1-year-old son and went down,” he said. “I came back three days later,” after surviving on his own adrenaline, Little Debbie cakes handed out to volunteers and bottled water. After working for three days setting up a morgue, he was willing to go back, he said, but “they said we have trained people now, thank you very much for your service.”

Read More..

Ground Zero Volunteers Face Obstacles to Compensation

On the day the terrorists flew into the World Trade Center, the Wu-Tang Clan canceled its meeting with a record mixer named Richard Oliver, so Mr. Oliver rushed downtown from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment to help out.

He said he spent three sleepless days at ground zero, tossing body bags. “Then I went home, ate, crashed, woke up,” he said. He had left his Dr. Martens boots on the landing outside his apartment, where he said they “had rotted away.”

“That was kind of frightening,” he continued. “I was breathing that stuff.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, nothing symbolized the city’s rallying around like many New Yorkers who helped at ground zero for days, weeks, months, without being asked. Now Mr. Oliver, suffering from back pain and a chronic sinus infection, is among scores of volunteers who have begun filing claims for compensation from a $2.8 billion fund that Congress created in 2010.

But proving they were there and eligible for the money is turning out to be its own forbidding task.

The other large classes of people who qualify — firefighters, police officers, contractors, city workers, residents and students — have it relatively simple, since they are more likely to have official work orders, attendance records and leases to back them up. But more than a decade later, many volunteers have only the sketchiest proof that they are eligible for the fund, which is expected to make its first awards early this year. (A separate $1.5 billion treatment fund also was created.)

They are volunteers like Terry Graves, now ill with lung cancer, who kept a few business cards of people she worked with until 2007, then threw them away. Or Jaime Hazan, a former Web designer with gastric reflux, chronically inflamed sinuses and asthma, who managed to dig up a photograph of himself at ground zero — taken from behind.

Or Mr. Oliver, who has a terse two-sentence thank-you note on American Red Cross letterhead, dated 2004, which does not meet the requirement that it be witnessed or sworn.

“For some people, there’s great records,” said Noah H. Kushlefsky, whose law firm, Kreindler & Kreindler, is representing volunteers and others who expect to make claims. “But in some respects, it was a little bit of a free-for-all. Other people went down there and joined the bucket brigade, talked their way in. It’s going to be harder for those people, and we do have clients like that.”

As documentation, the fund requires volunteers to have orders, instructions or confirmation of tasks they performed, or medical records created during the time they were in what is being called the exposure zone, including the area south of Canal Street, and areas where debris was being taken.

Failing that, it will be enough to submit two sworn statements — meaning the writer swears to its truth, under penalty of perjury — from witnesses describing when the volunteers were there and what they were doing.

Proving presence at the site might actually be harder than proving the illness is related to Sept. 11, since the rules now allow a host of ailments to be covered, including 50 kinds of cancer, despite an absence of evidence linking cancer to ground zero.

A study by the New York City health department, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found no clear association between cancer and Sept. 11, though the researchers noted that some cancers take many years to develop.

Unlike the original compensation fund, administered by Kenneth Feinberg, which dealt mainly with people who were killed or maimed in the attack, “This one is dealing with injuries that are very common,” said Sheila L. Birnbaum, a former mediator and personal injury defense lawyer, who is in charge of the new fund. “So it’s sort of a very hard process from the fund’s point of view to make the right call, and it requires some evidence that people were actually there.”

Asked how closely the fund would scrutinize documents like sworn statements, Ms. Birnbaum said she understood how hard it was to recreate records after a decade, and was going on the basic assumption that people would be honest.

In his career as a record mixer, Mr. Oliver, 56, has been associated with 7 platinum and 11 gold records, and 2 Grammy credits, which now line the walls of his condominium in College Point, Queens. He said he first got wind of the Sept. 11 attacks from a client, the Wu-Tang Clan. “One of the main guys called me: ‘Did you see what’s on TV? Because our meeting ain’t going to happen,’ ” he recalled.

Having taken a hazmat course after high school, he called the Red Cross and was told they needed people like him. “I left my soon-to-be-ex-wife and 1-year-old son and went down,” he said. “I came back three days later,” after surviving on his own adrenaline, Little Debbie cakes handed out to volunteers and bottled water. After working for three days setting up a morgue, he was willing to go back, he said, but “they said we have trained people now, thank you very much for your service.”

Read More..

Tech Giants, Learning the Ways of Washington, Brace for More Scrutiny

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Nadine Wolf demonstrated against online piracy legislation a year ago in New York. The measures were defeated.

SAN FRANCISCO — Silicon Valley lobbied hard in Washington in 2012, and despite some friction with regulators, fared fairly well. In 2013, though, government scrutiny is likely to grow. And with this scrutiny will come even greater efforts by the tech industry to press its case in the nation’s capital and overseas.

In 2012, among other victories, the industry staved off calls for federal consumer privacy legislation and successfully pushed for a revamp of an obscure law that had placed strict privacy protections on Americans’ video rental records. It also helped achieve a stalemate on a proposed global effort to let Web users limit behavioral tracking online, using Do Not Track browser settings.

But this year is likely to put that issue in the spotlight again, and bring intense negotiations between industry and consumer rights groups over whether and how to allow consumers to limit tracking.

Congress is likely to revisit online security legislation — meant to safeguard critical infrastructure from attack — that failed last year. And a looming question for Web giants will be who takes the reins of the Federal Trade Commission, the industry’s main regulator, this year. David C. Vladeck, the director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, has resigned, and there have been suggestions that its chairman, Jon Leibowitz, would step down.

The agency is investigating Google over possible antitrust violations and will subject Facebook to audits of its privacy policy for the next 20 years. Its next steps could serve as a bellwether of how aggressively the commission will take on Web companies in the second Obama administration.

“Now that the election is over, Silicon Valley companies each are thinking through their strategy for the second Obama administration,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and a former White House privacy official. “The F.T.C. will have a new Democratic chairman. A priority for tech companies will be to discern the new chair’s own priorities.”

In early 2012, an unusual burst of lobbying by tech companies helped defeat antipiracy bills, which had been backed by the entertainment industry. Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google feared that the bills would force them to police the Internet.

At the end of the year, Silicon Valley also got its way when the Obama administration stood up against a proposed global treaty that would have given government authorities greater control over the Web.

The key to the industry’s successes in 2012 was simple: it expanded its footprint in Washington just as Washington began to pay closer attention to how technology companies affect consumers. “Privacy and security became top-tier important policy issues in Washington in 2012,” said David A. Hoffman, director of security policy and global privacy officer at Intel.

“Industry has realized it is important to be engaged,” he continued, “to make sure government stakeholders are fully informed and educated about the role that new technology plays and to make sure any action taken doesn’t unnecessarily burden the innovation economy while still protecting individual trust in new technology.”

At the end of 2012, tech companies were on track to have spent record amounts on lobbying for the year. In the first three quarters, they spent close to $100 million, which meant that they were likely to surpass the $127 million they spent on lobbying in 2011, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based nonpartisan group that tracks corporate spending. Even the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz hired a lobbyist in Washington: Adrian Fenty, a former mayor of the city.

Technology executives and investors also made generous contributions in the 2012 presidential race, luring both President Obama and Mitt Romney to Northern California for fund-raisers and nudging them to speak out on issues like immigration overhaul and lower tax rates.

In a blog post in November, the center said Silicon Valley’s lobbying expenditures have ballooned in recent years, even as spending by other industries has fallen.

Facebook more than doubled its lobbying outlay in the year, reporting close to $2.6 million through the third quarter of 2012. Google spent more than any other company in the industry, doling out more than $13 million in the same period and more than double its nearest competitor, Microsoft, which spent just over $5.6 million in the same period.

Among Google’s advocates on Capitol Hill is a former Republican congresswoman, Susan Molinari, who heads Google’s office in Washington.

Google has particular reason to be engaged. It faces a wide-reaching antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, just as Microsoft did a decade ago. At issue is whether Google’s search engine results favor Google products over its rivals’.

Although the agency was ready to settle that case before the holidays, without harsh remedies, late last month it shelved the inquiry and put stronger penalties back in play. A resolution is expected in January.

Read More..

Beate Gordon, Feminist Heroine in Japan, Dies at 89

Beate Sirota Gordon, the daughter of Russian Jewish parents who at 22 almost single-handedly wrote women’s rights into the Constitution of modern Japan, and then kept silent about it for decades, only to become a feminist heroine there in recent years, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, her daughter, Nicole Gordon, said.

A civilian attached to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s army of occupation after World War II, Ms. Gordon was the last living member of the American team that wrote Japan’s postwar Constitution.

Her work — drafting language that gave women a set of legal rights pertaining to marriage, divorce, property and inheritance that they had long been without in Japan’s feudal society — had an effect on their status that endures to this day.

“It set a basis for a better, a more equal society,” Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University, said Monday in a telephone interview. “By just writing those things into the Constitution — our Constitution doesn’t have any of those things — Beate Gordon intervened at a critical moment. And what kind of 22-year-old gets to write a constitution?”

If Ms. Gordon, neither lawyer nor constitutional scholar, was indeed an unlikely candidate for the task, then it is vital to understand the singular confluence of forces that brought her to it:

Had her father not been a concert pianist of considerable renown; had she not been so skilled at foreign languages; and had she not been desperate to find her parents, from whom she was separated during the war and whose fate she did not know for years, she never would have been thrust into her quiet, improbable role in world history.

Nor would she have been apt to embark on her later career as a prominent cultural impresario, one of the first people to bring traditional Asian performing arts to audiences throughout North America — a job, pursued vigorously until she was nearly 70, that entailed travel to some of Asia’s most remote, inaccessible reaches.

The daughter of Leo Sirota and the former Augustine Horenstein, Beate (pronounced bay-AH-tay) Sirota was born on Oct. 25, 1923, in Vienna, where her parents had settled.

When she was 5, her father was invited to teach at the Imperial Academy of Music in Tokyo, and the family moved there for a planned six-month stay. Mr. Sirota soon became revered in Japan as a performer and teacher, and they wound up living in Tokyo for more than a decade.

Beate was educated at a German school in Tokyo and, from the mid-1930s on, after the school became far too Nazified for her parents’ liking, at the American School in Japan. In 1939, shortly before her 16th birthday, she left for Mills College in Oakland, Calif. Her parents remained in Japan.

In December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it became impossible to contact Japan. Beate had no word from her parents, and no money.

She put her foreign language prowess to work: by this time, she was fluent in English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish and Russian.

Obtaining permission from Mills to take examinations without having to attend classes, she took a job at a United States government listening post in San Francisco, monitoring radio broadcasts from Tokyo. She later worked in San Francisco for the United States Office of War Information, writing radio scripts urging Japan to surrender.

Beate Sirota received her bachelor’s degree in modern languages from Mills in 1943 and became a United States citizen in January 1945. At war’s end, she still did not know whether her parents were alive or dead.

For American civilians, travel to Japan was all but impossible. She went to Washington, where she secured a job as an interpreter on General MacArthur’s staff. Arriving in a devastated Tokyo on Christmas Eve 1945, she went immediately to her family’s house. Where it had stood was only a single charred pillar.

She eventually found her parents, who had been interned in the countryside and were malnourished. She took them to Tokyo, where she nursed them while continuing her work for General MacArthur.

One of MacArthur’s first priorities was drafting a constitution for postwar Japan, a top-secret assignment, begun in February 1946, that had to be finished in just seven days. As the only woman assigned to his constitutional committee, along with two dozen men, young Beate Sirota was deputized to compose the section on women’s rights.

She had seen women’s lives firsthand during the 10 years she lived in Japan, and urgently wanted to improve their status.

“Japanese women were historically treated like chattel; they were property to be bought and sold on a whim,” Ms. Gordon told The Dallas Morning News in 1999. “Women had no rights whatsoever.”

Read More..

Frequent Flier: An Environmentalist Weighs the Fallout of Flying

Ami Vitale

M. Sanjayan, the lead scientist for The Nature Conservancy, at Firehole River in Yellowstone National Park.

I FLY a lot. And honestly, flying now is a means to an end, although I used to enjoy it. It’s not that I hate it or am paranoid. It’s just that it’s a chore.

Q. How often do you fly for business?

A. Once or twice a week, mostly domestic, but also international about once a month.

Q. What’s your least favorite airport?

A. I hate to say it and know I will get criticized, but it’s Denver International. It should be a great airport, but it isn’t. There are no amenities, no decent meals, no nothing.

Q. Of all the places you’ve been, what’s the best?

A. East Africa. It’s where humans evolved, and it always feels like a homecoming to me. The temperature, the way it looks, the gestalt rekindles a cellular memory that when I’m there I’m in my ancestral home. I think it’s where humans really belong.

Q. What’s your secret airport vice?

A. I catch up on TV shows that I can’t watch at any other time. I’ve watched entire seasons of “Breaking Bad,” “Homeland” and “Downton Abbey” all in one trip.

As the lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy, I am fully aware of the ramifications of flying and its effect on the environment, but sometimes I have to do it. I do always ask myself the question: When I get to my destination, what can I deliver? In other words, is it really important for me to be someplace?

If not, I’m not going to go. I don’t go to meetings, conferences or events unless if I have a very specific role. And then, of course, there’s a personal toll. Flying can be tough on the body and spirit, even if you take good care of yourself.

I love seeing kids take their first flight. It can be so cool to fly as a kid, even today with all the hassle and limited service.

The first time I got to fly was as a 5-year-old on a KLM DC-8 from Colombo in Sri Lanka to Amsterdam. It was a huge thrill. My dad gave me the window seat and I stayed awake for as long as I could, following our path over darkened Asia and then Europe.

As I remember it, the food was fantastic. It was served in a tray that was partitioned into little quadrants. We ate with forks and knives, not with our hands as we did at home in Sri Lanka. Cheese was wrapped in foil, chocolate came in a Delft blue wrapper with a windmill stamped on it, and the juice wasn’t straight from an orange but a box. It was such a big deal to eat like a Westerner.

Since I often travel to remote locations, I rarely carry luggage. I want everything I need close at hand and I hate having to wait and guess whether my luggage will make it. If I really need something I don’t have, I can usually buy it locally. Occasionally, I don’t have a choice because a trip may be too long or too complicated for me to avoid taking my own gear. One time, I was particularly thankful that I put a red jersey in my carry-on.

A few years ago in Alaska, I was stranded with a Discovery Channel crew. We were on a sandy island on the Tana River in the gigantic Wrangell-St. Elias wilderness. The river was running ragged with heavy glacial melt and our rafts were no match for the white water.

We were drenched and miserable. To perhaps catch a passing plane’s attention, I actually wrote a message out on the sand beach with a big stick, just like you see in the movies. When I did see a plane coming, I whirled my red jersey over my head to catch the eye of the bush pilot.

The plane came in very low, the pilot read the message in the sand about our need for help, and then he tossed out a radio and a note, wrapped in his rain jacket. It was amazing. We used the radio to talk to him, and then we arranged a pickup.

The funny thing was that when I was writing out the message in the sand, which gave our GPS coordinates and pickup date, everyone who was with me had advice about what I should say, how big the letters should be, how to make it visible and so on. I mean, really?

Flagging down flying aircraft while you’re on an island is not as common as hailing a cab in rush hour. But everyone had an opinion.

As a scientist, I have to replicate experiments. This is one I don’t really want to repeat ever again.

By M. Sanjayan, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com

Read More..

U.S. Birthrate Dips, Especially for Hispanics

ORLANDO, Fla. — Hispanic women in the United States, who have generally had the highest fertility rates in the country, are choosing to have fewer children. Both immigrant and native-born Latinas had steeper birthrate declines from 2007 to 2010 than other groups, including non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Asians, a drop some demographers and sociologists attribute to changes in the views of many Hispanic women about motherhood.

As a result, in 2011, the American birthrate hit a record low, with 63 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, led by the decline in births to immigrant women. The national birthrate is now about half what it was during the baby boom years, when it peaked in 1957 at 122.7 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

The decline in birthrates was steepest among Mexican-American women and women who immigrated from Mexico, at 25.7 percent. This has reversed a trend in which immigrant mothers accounted for a rising share of births in the United States, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. In 2010, birthrates among all Hispanics reached their lowest level in 20 years, the center found.

The sudden drop-off, which coincided with the onset of the recession, suggests that attitudes have changed since the days when older generations of Latinos prized large families and more closely followed Roman Catholic teachings, which forbid artificial contraception.

Interviews with young Latinas, as well as reproductive health experts, show that the reasons for deciding to have fewer children are many, involving greater access to information about contraceptives and women’s health, as well as higher education.

When Marucci Guzman decided to marry Tom Beard here seven years ago, the idea of having a large family — a Guzman tradition back in Puerto Rico — was out of the question.

“We thought one, maybe two,” said Ms. Guzman Beard, who gave birth to a daughter, Attalai, four years ago.

Asked whether Attalai might ever get her wish for a little brother or sister, Ms. Guzman Beard, 29, a vice president at a public service organization, said: “I want to go to law school. I’m married. I work. When do I have time?”

The decisions were not made in a vacuum but amid a sputtering economy, which, interviewees said, weighed heavily on their minds.

Latinos suffered larger percentage declines in household wealth than white, black or Asian households from 2005 to 2009, and, according to the Pew report, their rates of poverty and unemployment also grew more sharply after the recession began.

Prolonged recessions do produce dips in the birthrate, but a drop as large as Latinos have experienced is atypical, said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution. “It is surprising,” Mr. Frey said. “When you hear about a decrease in the birthrate, you don’t expect Latinos to be at the forefront of the trend.”

D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center and an author of the report, said that in past recessions, when overall fertility dipped, “it bounced back over time when the economy got better.”

“If history repeats itself, that will happen again,” she said.

But to Mr. Frey, the decrease has signaled much about the aspirations of young Latinos to become full and permanent members of the upwardly mobile middle class, despite the challenges posed by the struggling economy.

Jersey Garcia, a 37-year-old public health worker in Miami, is in the first generation of her family to live permanently outside of the Dominican Republic, where her maternal and paternal grandmothers had a total of 27 children.

“I have two right now,” Ms. Garcia said. “It’s just a good number that I can handle.”

“Before, I probably would have been pressured to have more,” she added. “I think living in the United States, I don’t have family members close by to help me, and it takes a village to raise a child. So the feeling is, keep what you have right now.”

But that has not been easy. Even with health insurance, Ms. Garcia’s preferred method of long-term birth control, an IUD, has been unaffordable. Birth control pills, too, with a $50 co-payment a month, were too costly for her budget. “I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “So what I’ve been doing is condoms.”

According to research by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the overwhelming majority of Latinas have used contraception at some point in their lives, but they face economic barriers to consistent use. As a consequence, Latinas still experience unintended pregnancy at a rate higher than non-Hispanic whites, according to the institute.

And while the share of births to teenage mothers has dropped over the past two decades for all women, the highest share of births to teenage mothers is among native-born Hispanics.

“There are still a lot of barriers to information and access to contraception that exist,” said Jessica Gonzáles-Rojas, 36, the executive director of the institute, who has one son. “We still need to do a lot of work.”

Read More..

U.S. Birthrate Dips, Especially for Hispanics

ORLANDO, Fla. — Hispanic women in the United States, who have generally had the highest fertility rates in the country, are choosing to have fewer children. Both immigrant and native-born Latinas had steeper birthrate declines from 2007 to 2010 than other groups, including non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Asians, a drop some demographers and sociologists attribute to changes in the views of many Hispanic women about motherhood.

As a result, in 2011, the American birthrate hit a record low, with 63 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, led by the decline in births to immigrant women. The national birthrate is now about half what it was during the baby boom years, when it peaked in 1957 at 122.7 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

The decline in birthrates was steepest among Mexican-American women and women who immigrated from Mexico, at 25.7 percent. This has reversed a trend in which immigrant mothers accounted for a rising share of births in the United States, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. In 2010, birthrates among all Hispanics reached their lowest level in 20 years, the center found.

The sudden drop-off, which coincided with the onset of the recession, suggests that attitudes have changed since the days when older generations of Latinos prized large families and more closely followed Roman Catholic teachings, which forbid artificial contraception.

Interviews with young Latinas, as well as reproductive health experts, show that the reasons for deciding to have fewer children are many, involving greater access to information about contraceptives and women’s health, as well as higher education.

When Marucci Guzman decided to marry Tom Beard here seven years ago, the idea of having a large family — a Guzman tradition back in Puerto Rico — was out of the question.

“We thought one, maybe two,” said Ms. Guzman Beard, who gave birth to a daughter, Attalai, four years ago.

Asked whether Attalai might ever get her wish for a little brother or sister, Ms. Guzman Beard, 29, a vice president at a public service organization, said: “I want to go to law school. I’m married. I work. When do I have time?”

The decisions were not made in a vacuum but amid a sputtering economy, which, interviewees said, weighed heavily on their minds.

Latinos suffered larger percentage declines in household wealth than white, black or Asian households from 2005 to 2009, and, according to the Pew report, their rates of poverty and unemployment also grew more sharply after the recession began.

Prolonged recessions do produce dips in the birthrate, but a drop as large as Latinos have experienced is atypical, said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution. “It is surprising,” Mr. Frey said. “When you hear about a decrease in the birthrate, you don’t expect Latinos to be at the forefront of the trend.”

D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center and an author of the report, said that in past recessions, when overall fertility dipped, “it bounced back over time when the economy got better.”

“If history repeats itself, that will happen again,” she said.

But to Mr. Frey, the decrease has signaled much about the aspirations of young Latinos to become full and permanent members of the upwardly mobile middle class, despite the challenges posed by the struggling economy.

Jersey Garcia, a 37-year-old public health worker in Miami, is in the first generation of her family to live permanently outside of the Dominican Republic, where her maternal and paternal grandmothers had a total of 27 children.

“I have two right now,” Ms. Garcia said. “It’s just a good number that I can handle.”

“Before, I probably would have been pressured to have more,” she added. “I think living in the United States, I don’t have family members close by to help me, and it takes a village to raise a child. So the feeling is, keep what you have right now.”

But that has not been easy. Even with health insurance, Ms. Garcia’s preferred method of long-term birth control, an IUD, has been unaffordable. Birth control pills, too, with a $50 co-payment a month, were too costly for her budget. “I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “So what I’ve been doing is condoms.”

According to research by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the overwhelming majority of Latinas have used contraception at some point in their lives, but they face economic barriers to consistent use. As a consequence, Latinas still experience unintended pregnancy at a rate higher than non-Hispanic whites, according to the institute.

And while the share of births to teenage mothers has dropped over the past two decades for all women, the highest share of births to teenage mothers is among native-born Hispanics.

“There are still a lot of barriers to information and access to contraception that exist,” said Jessica Gonzáles-Rojas, 36, the executive director of the institute, who has one son. “We still need to do a lot of work.”

Read More..

Some Companies Seek to Wean Employees From Their Smartphones

Resolutions to change behavior are common at this time of year, but they usually involve exercising more or smoking less. Now, some companies are adopting policies aimed at weaning employees from their electronic devices.

Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times

Michelle Barry and Mark Jacobsen of Centric Brand Anthropology strive for the elusive work-life balance.

Atos, an international information technology company, plans to phase out all e-mails among employees by the end of 2013 and rely instead on other forms of communication. And starting in the new year, employees at Daimler, the German automaker, can have incoming e-mail automatically deleted during vacations so they do not return to a flooded in-box. An automatic message tells the sender which person is temporarily dealing with the employee’s e-mail.

No one is expected to be on call at all hours of the day and night, and “switching off” after work is important, “even if you are on a business trip,” said Sabrina Schrimpf, a Daimler spokeswoman, referring to the company’s recently released report, “Balanced! — Reconciling Employees’ Work and Private Lives.”

Disconnecting can be more challenging for business travelers who frequently work across time zones.

And there is a ripple effect, said Leslie A. Perlow, a professor of leadership at Harvard Business School and the author of “Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” “These guys fly in the middle of the night and send e-mails back to colleagues” who wait up, ready to respond.

A study conducted last spring by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that while mobile phones were valued as a way to stay productive, there were downsides to being available at all times. The nationwide survey of 2,254 adults found that 44 percent of cellphone owners had slept with their phone next to their bed and that 67 percent had experienced “phantom rings,” checking their phone even when it was not ringing or vibrating. Still, the proportion of cellphone owners who said they “could live without it” has gone up, to 37 percent from 29 percent in 2006.

Sam Chapman, chief executive of Empower Public Relations in Chicago, said he used to feel phantom vibrations and frequently read and sent e-mail on his BlackBerry in the middle of the night. He slept poorly, did not feel refreshed in the morning and considered himself addicted. “I wanted to make sure that what happened to me didn’t happen to my employees,” he said.

So Mr. Chapman adopted what he called a BlackBerry blackout policy. He and his staff of about 20 turn off their BlackBerrys from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. on weekdays and completely on weekends for all work-related use, with rare exceptions. “When I’m well rested, I show up to work ready to go,” he said.

He maintains that regimen while traveling, and said the policy had increased company productivity.

Professor Perlow agreed that companies could improve their bottom line by encouraging employees to disconnect at times. “Being constantly on actually undermines productivity,” she said.

But it is not always easy. In early 2012, when Michelle Barry, Mark Jacobsen and a third partner created Centric Brand Anthropology, a Seattle-based company that advises clients on brand strategy, design and culture management, they gave serious thought to the issue.

“A huge priority for us was to have a good balance between work-life,” said Mr. Jacobsen, Centric’s vice president and creative director. “Yet we have found that very difficult to do while working with large multinational clients,” which often require international travel and constant availability.

Being a start-up compounded those challenges. “Just because you can e-mail at 2 a.m., doesn’t mean it’s a good thing,” he said.

Centric encourages employees to prepare a week before a trip, designating a colleague as backup, informing clients about their travel plans, and trying to avoid deadlines immediately after they return. Employees are also encouraged to take spouses or partners on longer assignments and to build in downtime, said Ms. Barry, the company’s president and chief executive. When traveling, she said, “I make a commitment to myself not to stay up all night answering e-mails.”

Experts say there is no firm data for how many companies have policies restricting the use of electronic devices outside the office. “The companies I know actively encourage workers to stay connected after hours and on weekends,” said Dennis J. Garritan, a managing partner of the private equity firm Palmer Hill Capital and an adjunct professor at Harvard Business School.

Read More..

Chinese Regulator’s Family Profited From Stake in Insurer

Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

The Ping An International Finance Center, being built in Shenzhen. Ping An is among the world’s biggest financial institutions.

SHANGHAI — Relatives of a top Chinese regulator profited enormously from the purchase of shares in a once-struggling insurance company that is now one of China’s biggest financial powerhouses, according to interviews and a review of regulatory filings.

The regulator, Dai Xianglong, was the head of China’s central bank and also had oversight of the insurance industry in 2002, when a company his relatives helped control bought a big stake in Ping An Insurance that years later came to be worth billions of dollars. The insurer was drawing new investors ahead of a public stock offering after averting insolvency a few years earlier.

With growing attention on the wealth amassed by families of the politically powerful in China, the investments of Mr. Dai’s relatives illustrate that the riches extend beyond the families of the political elites to the families of regulators with control of the country’s most important business and financial levers. Mr. Dai, an economist, has since left his post with the central bank and now manages the country’s $150 billion social security fund, one of the world’s biggest investment funds.

How much the relatives made in the deal is not known, but analysts say the activity raises further doubts about whether the capital markets are sufficiently regulated in China.

Nicholas C. Howson, an expert in Chinese securities law at the University of Michigan Law School, said: “While not per se illegal or even evidence of corruption, these transactions feed into a problematic perception that is widespread in the P.R.C.: the relatives of China’s highest officials are given privileged access to pre-I.P.O. properties.” He was using the abbreviation for China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.

The company that bought the Ping An stake was controlled by a group of investment firms, including two set up by Mr. Dai’s son-in-law, Che Feng, as well as other firms associated with Mr. Che’s relatives and business associates, the regulatory filings show.

The company, Dinghe Venture Capital, got the shares for an extremely good price, the records show, paying a small fraction of what a large British bank had paid per share just two months earlier. The company paid $55 million for its Ping An shares on Dec. 26, 2002. By 2007, the last time the value of the investment was made public, the shares were worth $3.1 billion.

In its investigation, The New York Times found no indication that Mr. Dai had been aware of his relatives’ activities, or that any law had been broken. But the relatives appeared to have made a fortune by investing in financial services companies over which Mr. Dai had regulatory authority.

In another instance, in November 2002, Dinghe acquired a big stake in Haitong Securities, a brokerage firm that also fell under Mr. Dai’s jurisdiction, according to the brokerage firm’s Shanghai prospectus.

By 2007, just after Haitong’s public listing in Shanghai, those shares were worth about $1 billion, according to public filings. Later, between 2007 and 2010, Mr. Dai’s wife, Ke Yongzhen, was chairwoman on Haitong’s board of supervisors.

A spokesman for Mr. Dai and the National Social Security Fund did not return phone calls seeking comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Che, the son-in-law, denied by e-mail that he had ever held a stake in Ping An. The spokeswoman said another businessman had bought the Ping An shares and then, facing financial difficulties, sold them to a group that included Mr. Che’s friends and relatives, but not Mr. Che.

The businessman “could not afford what he has created, so he had to sell his shares all at once,” the spokeswoman, Jenny Lau, wrote in an e-mail.

The corporate records reviewed by The Times, however, show that Mr. Che, his relatives and longtime business associates set up a complex web of companies that effectively gave him and the others control of Dinghe Venture Capital, which made the investments in Ping An and Haitong Securities. The records show that one of the companies later nominated Mr. Che to serve on the Ping An board of supervisors. His term ran from 2006 to 2009.

The Times reported last month that another investment company had also bought shares in Ping An Insurance at an unusually low price on the same day in 2002 as Dinghe Venture Capital. That company, Tianjin Taihong, was later partly controlled by relatives of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, then serving as vice premier with oversight of China’s financial institutions. In late 2007, the shares Taihong bought in Ping An were valued at $3.7 billion.

The investments by Dinghe and Taihong are significant in part because by late 2002, Beijing regulators had granted Ping An an unusual waiver to rules that would have forced the insurer to sell off some divisions. Throughout the late 1990s, the company was fighting rules that would have required a breakup, a move that Ping An executives worried could lead to bankruptcy.

It is unclear whether Mr. Wen or Mr. Dai intervened on behalf of Ping An, but in April 2002 the company was allowed to reorganize and retain its brokerage and trust division. Two years later, Ping An sold shares to the public for the first time in Hong Kong. In 2007, after a second stock listing in Shanghai, the value of the company’s shares skyrocketed. Today, Ping An is one of the world’s biggest financial institutions, worth an estimated $65 billion.

The decision to grant the waiver came after Ping An executives and the insurer’s bankers had aggressively lobbied regulators, including Mr. Dai.

Read More..