In Reversal, Florida to Take Health Law’s Medicaid Expansion

MIAMI — Gov. Rick Scott of Florida reversed himself on Wednesday and announced that he would expand his state’s Medicaid program to cover the poor, becoming the latest — and, perhaps, most prominent — Republican critic of President Obama’s health care law to decide to put it into effect.

It was an about-face for Mr. Scott, a former businessman who entered politics as a critic of Mr. Obama’s health care proposals. Florida was one of the states that sued to try to block the law. After the Supreme Court ruled last year that though the law was constitutional, states could choose not to expand their Medicaid programs to cover the poor, Mr. Scott said that Florida would not expand its programs.

Mr. Scott said Wednesday that he now supported a three-year expansion of Medicaid, through the period that the federal government has agreed to pay the full cost of the expansion, and before some of the costs are shifted to the states.

“While the federal government is committed to paying 100 percent of the cost, I cannot in good conscience deny Floridians that needed access to health care,” Mr. Scott said at a news conference. “We will support a three-year expansion of the Medicaid program under the new health care law as long as the federal government meets their commitment to pay 100 percent of the cost during that time.”

He said there were “no perfect options” when it came to the Medicaid expansion. “To be clear: our options are either having Floridians pay to fund this program in other states while denying health care to our citizens,” he said, “or using federal funding to help some of the poorest in our state with the Medicaid program as we explore other health care reforms.”

Mr. Scott said the state would not create its own insurance exchange to comply with another provision of the law.

His reversal sent ripples through the nation, especially given the change in tone and substance since the summer, when he said he would not create an exchange or expand Medicaid.

“Floridians are interested in jobs and economic growth, a quality education for their children, and keeping the cost of living low,” Mr. Scott said in a statement at the time. “Neither of these major provisions in Obamacare will achieve those goals, and since Florida is legally allowed to opt out, that’s the right decision for our citizens.”

Mr. Scott now joins the Republican governors of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota and Ohio, who have decided to join the Medicaid expansion. Some, like Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, were also staunch opponents of Mr. Obama’s overall health care law.

Shortly before his announcement, the governor received word from the federal government that it planned to grant Florida the final waiver needed to privatize Medicaid, a process the state initially undertook as a pilot project. Mr. Scott, who is running for re-election next year, has heavily lobbied for the waiver, arguing that Florida could not expand Medicaid without it.

Mr. Scott’s support of Medicaid expansion is significant, but is far from the last word. The program requires approval from Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature, which has been averse to expanding Medicaid under the health care law. The Legislature’s two top Republican leaders said that before making a decision they would consider recommendations from a select committee, which has been asked to review the state’s options.

“The Florida Legislature will make the ultimate decision,” Will Weatherford, the state House speaker, said. “I am personally skeptical that this inflexible law will improve the quality of health care in our state and ensure our long-term financial stability.”

Medicaid, which covers three million people in Florida, costs the state $21 billion a year. The expansion would extend coverage to one million more people.

Mr. Scott’s reversal is sure to anger his original conservative supporters.

The governor “was elected because of his principled conservative leadership against Obamacare’s overreach,” said Slade O’Brien, state director for Americans for Prosperity, an influential conservative advocacy organization. “Hopefully our legislative leaders will not follow in Governor Scott’s footsteps, and will reject expansion.”

During his announcement on Wednesday, Mr. Scott said his mother’s recent death and her lifetime struggle to raise five children “with very little money” played a role in his decision.

“Losing someone so close to you puts everything in a new perspective, especially the big decisions,” he said.

Michael Cooper contributed reporting from New York.

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Hacking Victims Edge Into Light

Steve Ruark for The New York Times

Alan Paller of the SANS Institute said recently hacked companies were seeking safety in numbers.

SAN FRANCISCO — Hackers have hit thousands of American corporations in the last few years, but few companies ever publicly admit it. Most treat online attacks as a dirty secret best kept from customers, shareholders and competitors, lest the disclosure sink their stock price and tarnish them as hapless.

Rarely have companies broken that silence, usually when the attack is reported by someone else. But in the last few weeks more companies have stepped forward. Twitter, Facebook and Apple have all announced that they were attacked by sophisticated cybercriminals. The New York Times revealed its experience with hackers in a front-page article last month.

The admissions reflect the new way some companies are calculating the risks and benefits of going public. While companies once feared shareholder lawsuits and the ire of the Chinese government, some can’t help noticing that those that make the disclosures are lauded, as Google was, for their bravery. Some fear the embarrassment of being unable to fend off hackers who may still be in high school.

But as hacking revelations become more common, the threat of looking foolish fades and more companies are seizing the opportunity to take the leap in a crowd.

“There is a ‘hide in the noise’ effect right now,” said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a nonprofit security research and education organization. “This is a particularly good time to get out the fact that you got hacked, because if you are one of many, it discounts the starkness of the announcement.”

In 2010, when Google alerted some users of Gmail — political activists, mostly — that it appeared Chinese hackers were trying to read their mail, such disclosures were a rarity. In its announcement, Google said that it was one of many — two dozen — companies that had been targeted by the same group. Google said it was making the announcement, in part, to encourage other companies to open up about the problem.

But of that group, only Intel and Adobe Systems reluctantly stepped forward, and neither provided much detail.

Twitter admitted that it had been hacked this month. Facebook and Apple followed suit two weeks later. Within hours after The Times published its account, The Wall Street Journal chimed in with a report that it, too, had been attacked by what it believed to be Chinese hackers. The Washington Post followed.

Not everyone took advantage of the cover. Bloomberg, for example, has repeatedly denied that its systems were also breached by Chinese hackers, despite several sources that confirmed that its computers were infected with malware.

Computer security experts estimate that more than a thousand companies have been attacked recently. In 2011, security researchers at McAfee unearthed a vast online espionage campaign, called Operation Shady Rat, that found more than 70 organizations had been hit over a five-year period, many in the United States.

“I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly) with the great majority of the victims rarely discovering the intrusion or its impact,” Dmitri Alperovitch, then McAfee’s vice president for threat research, wrote in his findings.

“In fact,” said Mr. Alperovitch, now the chief technology officer at Crowdstrike, a security start-up, “I divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.”

Of that group, there are still few admissions. A majority of companies that have at one time or another been the subject of news reports of online attacks refuse to confirm them. The list includes the International Olympic Committee, Exxon Mobil, Baker Hughes, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Chesapeake Energy, the British energy giant BG Group, the steel maker ArcelorMittal and Coca-Cola.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.

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India Ink: Quel Brouhaha! A Diatribe on Unions Irks the French

PARIS — “How stupid do you think we are?”

With those choice words, and several more similar in tone, the chief executive of an American tire company touched off a furor in France on Wednesday as he responded to a government plea to take over a Goodyear factory slated for closing in northern France.

“I have visited the factory a couple of times,” Maurice Taylor Jr., the head of Titan International, wrote to the country’s industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, in a letter published in French newspapers on Wednesday.

“The French work force gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They have one hour for their breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three.”

“I told this to the French unions to their faces and they told me, ‘That’s the French way!’ ” added Mr. Taylor, a swaggering businessman who is nicknamed “the Grizz” by Wall Street analysts for his abrasive negotiating style.

His decidedly undiplomatic assessment quickly struck a nerve in France, where concerns about declining competitiveness and the divisive tax policies of President François Hollande’s government have led some economists to ask whether the nation is at risk of becoming the next sick man of Europe.

Mr. Montebourg, who is known for lashing out at French corporate bosses without hesitation, initially seemed at a loss for words on how to respond to the American charge.

“I do not want to harm French interests,” he said when asked about Mr. Taylor’s letter. Later, Mr. Montebourg released a letter to Mr. Taylor, calling the executive’s comments “extreme” and “insulting,” adding that they pointed to a “perfect ignorance” about France and its strengths, which continue to attract international investors.

French media outlets minced no words. “Incendiary!” “Insulting!” and “Scathing!” were just a few of the terms replayed on French newspaper Web sites and on the airwaves throughout the day. The French blogosphere lit up with hundreds of remarks condemning the “predatory” American corporate culture that Mr. Taylor seemed to represent; other commentators who ventured to admit that there might be something to Mr. Taylor’s observations were promptly bashed.

And France’s main labor union wasted no time in weighing in.

Mickaël Wamen, the head of the Confédération Générale du Travail union at the Goodyear plant, in Amiens, said Mr. Taylor belonged in a “psychiatric ward.”

A spokesman for Mr. Taylor did not immediately respond to calls for comment. France’s 35-hour workweek, its rigid labor market and the influence that labor unions hold over the workplace have long been a source of aggravation for businesses.

Last month, after a government report warning that French competitiveness was slipping, labor unions and business leaders struck a deal to overhaul swaths of the labor code, a move Mr. Hollande said was needed to burnish France’s international allure as a place to do business.

With unemployment above 10 percent and growth slowing, the government has also been desperate to avoid large-scale layoffs. Mr. Montebourg has even brandished the threat of nationalization to try to save jobs. PSA Peugeot Citroën, ArcelorMittal, Sanofi and Air France all announced big job cuts last year as Europe’s long-running debt crisis hit their bottom lines.

So it was no surprise that Mr. Montebourg approached Titan International last year to ask if it would take over the Goodyear factory, which was scheduled to close because of labor disputes and sagging profitability — a move that would threaten 1,173 jobs.

Titan had already considered taking over the Goodyear factory’s farm tire operations. But it dropped the plan in 2011 after union representatives opposed a deal, saying they suspected Titan would close production of passenger-vehicle tires if the group took over. Tensions between Mr. Taylor and the union were evident at the time in a Titan news release, which included Mr. Taylor’s observation that “only a nonbusiness person would understand the French labor rules.”

In January, Mr. Montebourg tried to entice Titan back to the negotiating table, saying he hoped unions would put “some water in their wine, that managers put some wine in their water, and that Titan would drink the wine and the water of both” and reach an accord.

But late last month, as union workers protested en masse at the Amiens site, with a large police presence, Goodyear told workers it would close the plant and cut its French work force by 39 percent.

In his letter, dated Feb. 8, Mr. Taylor explained his reasons for refusing to come back to the negotiating table. “Goodyear tried for over four years to save part of the Amiens jobs that are some of the highest-paid, but the French unions and the French government did nothing but talk,” Mr. Taylor wrote.

“Sir, your letter says you want Titan to start a discussion,” he added. “How stupid do you think we are? Titan is the one with the money and the talent to produce tires. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government.”

He said his company would seek to produce cheaper tires in India or China, where he said Titan would pay the workers less than one euro an hour, and then sell the tires back to the French. He predicted that Michelin, the French tiremaker, would not be able to compete with lower prices and would have to halt production in France within five years.

“You can keep your so-called workers,” he wrote. “Titan is not interested in the Amiens factory.”

In his response, Mr. Montebourg reacted strongly to what he called Mr. Taylor’s “condemnable calculation” and noted that France and its European partners were working to stop illegal dumping of imports.

“In the meantime,” he added, “rest assured that you can count on me to have the competent government agencies survey your imported tires with a redoubled zeal.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the status of the Goodyear factory in Amiens. While it is scheduled for closure, it remains open; it is not closed. The error was repeated in a picture caption.

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Honda to Offer Customers a Home Solar System Option

Automakers have long resorted to incentives like zero-percent financing, rewards points and rebates to inspire customer loyalty. Now Honda is offering a different deal: inexpensive home solar power systems for customers.

Through a partnership with SolarCity, a residential and commercial installer, Honda and Acura will offer their customers home solar systems at little or no upfront cost, the companies said on Tuesday. The automaker will also offer its dealers preferential terms to lease or buy systems from SolarCity on a case-by-case basis, executives said.

The deal, in which Honda will provide financing for $65 million worth of installations, will help the automaker promote its environmental aims and earn a modest return, executives said. It could also open the door for more corporate investment in solar leasing companies, which has largely been limited to a small cluster of banks to provide capital for their projects.

And SolarCity, one of the few clean-tech start-ups to find a market for an initial public offering of its stock last year, will potentially gain access to tens of millions of new customers through Honda’s vast lists of current and previous owners.

“When we partner with financial institutions, they aren’t promoting us to their customers, they’re essentially just providing us with capital,” said Lyndon R. Rive, SolarCity’s chief executive. But with Honda, he said, the company is gaining, “access to a broader customer base, and a customer base that is conscious of the environment.”

Whether the marriage will prove successful remains to be seen. “I don’t think that by finding Honda buyers you’ve homed in on the perfect solar customer, but there’s enough overlapping between the demographics that you’re better off than the general population,” said Shayle Kann, vice president at GTM Research, adding that car buyers were more likely to own their homes and have the income and credit history to qualify for solar leasing. While the American solar industry in general has been struggling in the face of declining government subsidies, overcapacity in production and a glut of inexpensive Chinese panels, interest and investment in solar leasing, or third-party ownership, has continued to grow. According to a recent report from GTM Research, a renewable energy consulting firm that is a unit of Greentech Media, third-party ownership accounts for more than 70 percent of all residential installations in developed markets like Arizona, California and Colorado and has generated at least $3.4 billion in private investment since 2008.

SolarCity and a rival, Sunrun, were among pioneers of the approach, but players like Clean Power Finance and Vivint, a home security company owned by the Blackstone Group, are also gaining momentum.

In a typical arrangement, a company provides a system at little or no cost in exchange for a long-term contract in which the customer pays a fixed fee for the electricity generated, set at less than the customer would pay for power from the local utility. The solar price often rises over the life of the agreement, which can last 20 years.

Honda approached SolarCity more than a year ago when it was looking for a partner to provide solar installation services for its hybrid and electric vehicle customers, said Ryan Harty, American Honda’s assistant manager for environmental business development. The company then decided to expand to all its customers — a group it is defining “very, very broadly,” Mr. Harty said, to include not just car owners but also those who have explored its Web sites. The offer will be available in 14 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, and the District of Columbia.

The two companies say they hope the joint venture leads to projects that integrate solar power and electric vehicle recharging for its customers.

The program will give Honda and Acura customers an extra $400 discount on top of SolarCity’s normal promotions, which they can use to sweeten the terms of the solar contract, like eliminating the escalation of the monthly payment. Honda projects the fund can finance as many as 3,000 systems on homes and 20 for its dealers. If the program catches on, Honda plans to expand it. Executives said they saw more immediate promise in cutting carbon emissions through solar power than the electric vehicles it would sell.

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Well: No Consensus on Plantar Fasciitis

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

There are more charismatic-sounding sports injuries than plantar fasciitis, like tennis elbow, runner’s knee and turf toe. But there aren’t many that are more common. The condition, characterized by stabbing pain in the heel or arch, sidelines up to 10 percent of all runners, as well as countless soccer, baseball, football and basketball players, golfers, walkers and others from both the recreational and professional ranks. The Lakers star Kobe Bryant, the quarterback Eli Manning, the Olympic marathon runner Ryan Hall and the presidential candidate Mitt Romney all have been stricken.

But while plantar fasciitis is democratic in its epidemiology, its underlying cause remains surprisingly enigmatic. In fact, the mysteries of plantar fasciitis underscore how little is understood, medically, about overuse sports injuries in general and why, as a result, they remain so insidiously difficult to treat.

Experts do agree that plantar fasciitis is, essentially, an irritation of the plantar fascia, a long, skinny rope of tissue that runs along the bottom of the foot, attaching the heel bone to the toes and forming your foot’s arch. When that tissue becomes irritated, you develop pain deep within the heel. The pain is usually most pronounced first thing in the morning, since the fascia tightens while you sleep.

But scientific agreement about the condition and its causes ends about there.

For many years, “most of us who treat plantar fasciitis believed that it involved chronic inflammation” of the fascia, said Dr. Terrence M. Philbin, a board-certified orthopedic surgeon at the Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Center in Westerville, Ohio, who specializes in plantar fasciitis.

It was thought that by running or otherwise repetitively pounding their heels against the ground, people strained the plantar fascia, and the body responded with a complex cascade of inflammatory biochemical processes that resulted in extra blood and fluids flowing to the injury site, as well as enhanced pain sensitivity.

But instead of lasting only a few days and then fading, as acute inflammation usually does, the process can become chronic and create its own problems, causing tissue damage and continuing pain.

This progression is also what experts believed was happening when people developed chronic Achilles tendon pain, tennis elbow or other lingering, overuse injuries.

But when scientists actually biopsied fascia tissue from people with chronic plantar fasciitis, “they did not find much if any inflammation,” Dr. Philbin said. There were virtually none of the cellular markers that characterize that condition.

“Plantar fasciitis does not involve inflammatory cells,” said Dr. Karim Khan, a professor of family practice medicine at the University of British Columbia and editor of The British Journal of Sports Medicine, who has written extensively about overuse sports injuries.

Instead, plantar fasciitis more likely is caused by degeneration or weakening of the tissue. This process probably begins with small tears that occur during activity and that, in normal circumstances, the body simply repairs, strengthening the tissue as it does. That is the point of exercise training.

But sometimes, for unknown reasons, this ongoing tissue damage overwhelms the body’s capacity to respond. The small tears don’t heal. They accumulate. The tissue begins subtly to degenerate, even to shred. It hurts.

By and large, most sports medicine experts now believe that this is how we develop other overuse injuries, like tennis elbow or Achilles tendinopathy, which used to be called tendinitis. The suffix “itis” means inflammation. But since the injury isn’t thought to involve chronic inflammation, its name has changed.

This has not yet happened with plantar fasciitis, and may not, given what a mouthful fasciopathy would be.

The evolving medical opinions about plantar fasciitis matter, beyond nomenclature, though, because treatments depend on causes. At the moment, many physicians rely on injections of cortisone, a steroid that is both a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory, to treat plantar fasciitis. And cortisone shots do reduce the soreness. In a study published last year in BMJ, patients who received cortisone injections reported less heel pain after four months than those whose shots had contained a placebo saline solution.

But whether those benefits will last is unknown, especially if plantar fasciitis is, indeed, degenerative. In studies with people suffering from tennis elbow, another injury that is now considered degenerative, cortisone shots actually slowed tissue healing.

We need similar studies in people with plantar fasciitis, Dr. Khan said. “They have not been done.”

Thankfully, most people who develop plantar fasciitis will recover within a few months without injections or other invasive treatments, Dr. Philbin said, if they simply back off their running mileage somewhat or otherwise rest the foot and stretch the affected tissues. Stretching the plantar fascia, as well as the Achilles tendon, which also attaches to the heel bone, and the hamstring muscles seems to result in less strain on the fascia during activity, meaning less ongoing trauma and, eventually, time for the body to catch up with repairs.

To ensure that you are stretching correctly, Dr. Philbin suggests consulting a physical therapist, after, of course, visiting a sports medicine doctor for a diagnosis. Not all heel or arch pain is plantar fasciitis. And comfort yourself if you do have the condition with the knowledge that Kobe Bryant, Eli Manning and Ryan Hall have all returned to competition and Mr. Romney still runs.

Read More..

Well: No Consensus on Plantar Fasciitis

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

There are more charismatic-sounding sports injuries than plantar fasciitis, like tennis elbow, runner’s knee and turf toe. But there aren’t many that are more common. The condition, characterized by stabbing pain in the heel or arch, sidelines up to 10 percent of all runners, as well as countless soccer, baseball, football and basketball players, golfers, walkers and others from both the recreational and professional ranks. The Lakers star Kobe Bryant, the quarterback Eli Manning, the Olympic marathon runner Ryan Hall and the presidential candidate Mitt Romney all have been stricken.

But while plantar fasciitis is democratic in its epidemiology, its underlying cause remains surprisingly enigmatic. In fact, the mysteries of plantar fasciitis underscore how little is understood, medically, about overuse sports injuries in general and why, as a result, they remain so insidiously difficult to treat.

Experts do agree that plantar fasciitis is, essentially, an irritation of the plantar fascia, a long, skinny rope of tissue that runs along the bottom of the foot, attaching the heel bone to the toes and forming your foot’s arch. When that tissue becomes irritated, you develop pain deep within the heel. The pain is usually most pronounced first thing in the morning, since the fascia tightens while you sleep.

But scientific agreement about the condition and its causes ends about there.

For many years, “most of us who treat plantar fasciitis believed that it involved chronic inflammation” of the fascia, said Dr. Terrence M. Philbin, a board-certified orthopedic surgeon at the Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Center in Westerville, Ohio, who specializes in plantar fasciitis.

It was thought that by running or otherwise repetitively pounding their heels against the ground, people strained the plantar fascia, and the body responded with a complex cascade of inflammatory biochemical processes that resulted in extra blood and fluids flowing to the injury site, as well as enhanced pain sensitivity.

But instead of lasting only a few days and then fading, as acute inflammation usually does, the process can become chronic and create its own problems, causing tissue damage and continuing pain.

This progression is also what experts believed was happening when people developed chronic Achilles tendon pain, tennis elbow or other lingering, overuse injuries.

But when scientists actually biopsied fascia tissue from people with chronic plantar fasciitis, “they did not find much if any inflammation,” Dr. Philbin said. There were virtually none of the cellular markers that characterize that condition.

“Plantar fasciitis does not involve inflammatory cells,” said Dr. Karim Khan, a professor of family practice medicine at the University of British Columbia and editor of The British Journal of Sports Medicine, who has written extensively about overuse sports injuries.

Instead, plantar fasciitis more likely is caused by degeneration or weakening of the tissue. This process probably begins with small tears that occur during activity and that, in normal circumstances, the body simply repairs, strengthening the tissue as it does. That is the point of exercise training.

But sometimes, for unknown reasons, this ongoing tissue damage overwhelms the body’s capacity to respond. The small tears don’t heal. They accumulate. The tissue begins subtly to degenerate, even to shred. It hurts.

By and large, most sports medicine experts now believe that this is how we develop other overuse injuries, like tennis elbow or Achilles tendinopathy, which used to be called tendinitis. The suffix “itis” means inflammation. But since the injury isn’t thought to involve chronic inflammation, its name has changed.

This has not yet happened with plantar fasciitis, and may not, given what a mouthful fasciopathy would be.

The evolving medical opinions about plantar fasciitis matter, beyond nomenclature, though, because treatments depend on causes. At the moment, many physicians rely on injections of cortisone, a steroid that is both a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory, to treat plantar fasciitis. And cortisone shots do reduce the soreness. In a study published last year in BMJ, patients who received cortisone injections reported less heel pain after four months than those whose shots had contained a placebo saline solution.

But whether those benefits will last is unknown, especially if plantar fasciitis is, indeed, degenerative. In studies with people suffering from tennis elbow, another injury that is now considered degenerative, cortisone shots actually slowed tissue healing.

We need similar studies in people with plantar fasciitis, Dr. Khan said. “They have not been done.”

Thankfully, most people who develop plantar fasciitis will recover within a few months without injections or other invasive treatments, Dr. Philbin said, if they simply back off their running mileage somewhat or otherwise rest the foot and stretch the affected tissues. Stretching the plantar fascia, as well as the Achilles tendon, which also attaches to the heel bone, and the hamstring muscles seems to result in less strain on the fascia during activity, meaning less ongoing trauma and, eventually, time for the body to catch up with repairs.

To ensure that you are stretching correctly, Dr. Philbin suggests consulting a physical therapist, after, of course, visiting a sports medicine doctor for a diagnosis. Not all heel or arch pain is plantar fasciitis. And comfort yourself if you do have the condition with the knowledge that Kobe Bryant, Eli Manning and Ryan Hall have all returned to competition and Mr. Romney still runs.

Read More..

Bits Blog: Tech Predictions for 2013: It's All About Mobile

If there is one theme that will be the topic of digital business this year, it is mobile.

ComScore, which tracks Web and mobile usage, published a report about what happened in 2012, and what to expect in 2013.

It shows that the effects of a movement toward mobile are everywhere, from shopping to media to search. According to the report, “2013 could spell a very rocky economic transition,” and businesses will have to scramble to stay ahead of consumers’ changing behavior.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the 48-page report.

The mobile transition is happening astonishingly quickly. Last year, smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time, led by Android phones. People spend 63 percent of their time online on desktop computers and 37 percent on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, according to comScore.

Just as they compete on computers, Facebook and Google are dominant and at each other’s throats on phones.

Google’s map app for the iPhone, which had been the most used mobile app, lost its No. 1 spot to Facebook after Apple kicked Google’s maps off the iPhone in October. Now, Facebook reaches 76 percent of the smartphone market and accounts for 23 percent of total time spent using apps each month. The next five most used apps are Google’s, which account for 10 percent of time on apps.

As mobile continues to take share from desktop, some industries have been particularly affected, and they are seeing significant declines in desktop use of their products as a result. They are newspapers, search engines, maps, weather, comparison shopping, directories and instant messenger services.

The most visited Web sites are not so surprising: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. Facebook continues to take up most of our time online.

But there were a few surprises from younger, smaller Web companies. Tumblr was No. 8 on the list of sites, ordered by time spent on them. And several Web sites were breakout hits last year, as measured by growth and visitor numbers: Spotify (music), Dropbox (online storage), Etsy (shopping), BuzzFeed (news), JustFab (shopping), SoundCloud (music) and BusinessInsider (news).

Search, one of the biggest and most reliable Web industries, is at a crossroads, comScore said. Even though the search market continues to be extraordinarily profitable, there is a desire for it to evolve and offer new services to users.

Here is some evidence: Searches on traditional search engines, dominated by Google, declined 3 percent last year, and the number of searches per searcher declined 7 percent. Yet searches on specialty sites, known as vertical search engines, like Amazon.com or Whitepages.com, climbed 8 percent.

Social search, based on what users’ friends like, has put Facebook and Google on a “collision course,” comScore said, particularly in searches for local businesses like restaurants.

In social networking, the visual Web, as comScore calls it, has transformed the landscape. Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram, all of which emphasize images, each gained more than 10 million visitors last year.

Last year was also pivotal for online video, comScore said, as viewers increasingly seek the ability to watch video when and where they want. Watching TV shows online helped last year break viewing records, especially during the Olympics.

In the United States, 75 million people a day watch online video and stream 40 billion videos a month, and viewing is driven by YouTube.

There has also been a turning point for video ads. They cost more than typical ads, and have always lagged behind viewership. But in 2012, 23 percent of videos were accompanied by an ad, up from 14 percent the year before. More TV ad dollars are coming to online video, comScore concluded.

Though e-commerce spending grew 13 percent last year, it was a disappointing holiday season online, largely because of economic pressures. Purchasing on mobile phones is beginning to make a dent in e-commerce, comScore said, with mobile shopping accounting for 11 percent of e-commerce in the fourth quarter of 2012, up from 3 percent in the period two years earlier.

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IHT Rendezvous: Concerns Grow About 'Severely Polluted' Water in China's Cities

HONG KONG — The recent headlines about China’s pollution problems — many are now calling it a crisis — have focused on the worsening air pollution in Beijing and other major Chinese cities, drawing worldwide attention to the issue.

But another peril, potentially just as dangerous, lurks — one that is also drawing increasing notice: the poor condition of China’s water supplies. On Tuesday, a report underscored just how widespread the problem is: an official with the China Geological Survey was quoted as saying that the groundwater of 90 percent of Chinese cities is polluted, with two-thirds of those cities having “severely polluted” water.

Danwei, a Web site that tracks the Chinese media, noted that the Strait Times newspaper in Fujian Province on Tuesday devoted its full front page to the issue, another example of mainland Chinese media being more aggressive in tackling environmental degradation. The newspaper also notes that another official from a Beijing research center describes the intractable nature of the problem: the polluted water is often contaminated with heavy metals whose organic byproducts are difficult to filter out through traditional water treatment systems.

The concerns about China’s water supply come in myriad forms. As my colleague Didi Kirsten Tatlow pointed out last week, the thirst that the Chinese coal and chemical industries have for water risks drying up key rivers, with a quarter of the flow in China’s Yellow River threatened by 2015. India and other nations are worried about China’s “hydro-supremacy” on the continent, particularly plans to build huge new dams on rivers that flow across international borders. These dams, the Indian author Brahma Chellaney asserts, “are designed to pump electricity into China’s southern electricity grid” as nations downstream bear “the environmental and social costs.” Some see such conflicts, with the potential for “water wars,” as among the most delicate challenges to Asian diplomacy in coming decades as water supplies get scarcer.

China, of course, is not alone as it struggles to balance economic growth with growing concern about water supply quality. The debate about whether to allow gas hydrofracking in the United States has pitted environmentalists against energy extraction companies and others who see such technology as a way to finally wean the nation away from dependence on foreign energy supplies.

As with the air pollution problem, bloggers and others have grown more vigilant in calling attention to water degradation throughout China. Caixin Online recently ran a troubling photo of what locals have called “Orange Juice River” — the Daqubang River in Zhejiang Province that has turned to a rust color because of pollution. Another in the series of pictures shows a woman drawing water from Luoyang River in Henan Province after it had been discolored by red dye from an illegal workshop upstream that had been dumping the substance from sewage pipes.

The issue is not just environmental. Where there is scarcity of precious resources, the opportunity to make money is not far behind. China Water Risk, a privately financed Web portal that examines the nation’s growing water supply problems, takes a realistic look at the long-term challenges the Chinese face — and the opportunities for investors.

“At the global level, investors have responded to the threat of water scarcity by investing in specialist water funds,” the site notes. But with China expected to spend roughly $150 billion over the next 12 years to deal with water shortage issues, “increasing attention is being paid to investment opportunities in water supply infrastructure, water treatment facilities and demand management technologies.”

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DealBook: Morgan Stanley Strives to Coordinate 2 Departments Often at Odds

Several hundred Morgan Stanley retail branch managers descended on the JW Marriott Orlando Grande Lakes resort in Florida early this month for a retreat. They were greeted by an unlikely colleague, Colm Kelleher, who runs the company’s sales and trading and investment banking departments.

Traditionally, traders and investment bankers think of themselves as the elite of Wall Street and look down on the retail business, seeing it as pedestrian. Yet Mr. Kelleher had a message for the branch managers: His group can work with retail brokers to increase profits at Morgan Stanley.

That message evokes the strategic emphasis that followed the 1997 merger of Morgan Stanley with Dean Witter, Discover & Company. The rationale for that deal was to create a financial supermarket where the retail brokerage and the investment banking businesses could complement each other.

But the company’s swaggering traders wanted little to do with the financial advisers, creating tension and turmoil that would lead to upheaval at the top.

The company over the years has set up revenue sharing agreements between bankers and traders. But that, too, created strife, with bankers and traders accusing each other of deliberating misstating revenue to avoid splitting fees, which some traders called the investment banker tax.

“Morgan Stanley has a horrible history of getting these groups to work together,” said Richard Bove, an analyst with Rafferty Capital Markets.

Yet since Morgan Stanley moved to acquire control of the Smith Barney brokerage business from Citigroup in 2009, the balance of power has shifted to wealth management, which now accounts for almost 52 percent of the company’s earnings, up from roughly 16 percent in 2006.

Gregory J. Fleming, the chief of the brokerage business, and Mr. Kelleher have been under pressure from shareholders to coax greater profits from the low-margin brokerage business by finding ways for retail and investment banking to work better together. The two men are said to have a good working relationship, leading to renewed optimism that the company can finally find synergies among its various divisions.

That is a change from a few months ago, when cooperation was difficult, according to employees at the company, because of personality conflicts between Mr. Kelleher and the investment banker Paul Taubman, who were the two co-heads of the institutional securities business. The employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the policy against speaking to the news media without permission.

Mr. Taubman departed recently after a power struggle, leaving Mr. Kelleher solely in charge of sales and trading, and investment banking.

In recent months, the company has made changes intended to improve communication among divisions. Last fall, Morgan Stanley transferred Eric Benedict, an ally of Mr. Kelleher, to wealth management to run its capital markets operation. Previously Mr. Benedict worked for Mr. Kelleher on the equity syndicate desk.

A few months after Mr. Benedict moved to wealth management, the company created a bond, or fixed income, sales group to focus on middle-market clients. The company then transferred some of its smaller banking clients into wealth management to give them more attention. The fixed-income division will share revenue from this middle-market unit with wealth management.

James P. Gorman, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, is hoping that its sales and trading unit will work more closely with wealth management to increase lending, better tailor structured products for retail clients and improve collaboration on events like public offerings, company insiders said.

For instance, Morgan Stanley may take a company public and the executives at that company may need advice managing their personal wealth. In such an instance, the bankers would alert wealth management, which could dispatch a broker to assess the situation.

In January, on a call with investors to discuss the company’s fourth-quarter results, Mr. Gorman said 35 projects were under way to encourage collaboration between these businesses. One focus is how to increase lending to the firm’s corporate and individual clients.

A lot is riding on Mr. Gorman’s strategy. Morgan Stanley, which for years was best known for its high-flying trading operations and investment bank, was badly bruised in the financial crisis. Since then regulators have established rules that require banks to post more capital against riskier operations, compelling Morgan Stanley to scale back or get out of certain businesses. Morgan Stanley has shrunk its fixed income department, where most of its risk taking was embedded.

But, if Mr. Gorman can make it work, Mr. Bove predicted the chief could return Morgan Stanley to its former glory, “albeit in a different form.” Mr. Bove has a buy rating on Morgan Stanley.

Morgan Stanley emerged from the financial crisis safer, but less profitable. In 2012 it posted a return on equity (excluding a charge related to its debt) of 5 percent. Return on equity is an important measure of how effectively shareholder money is being deployed. Goldman posted a return on equity for the same period of 10.7 percent. To simply cover its debt expenses and other capital costs, Morgan Stanley must achieve a return on equity closer to 10 percent.

Investors also focused on another number, from Morgan Stanley’s wealth management unit. That division posted a pretax profit margin of 17 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, exceeding most analysts’ expectations.

The number was higher than expected, according to people briefed on the matter but not authorized to speak on the record, because the company deferred from the fourth quarter some major costs like compensation for certain executives.

As a result, some analysts and rivals are wondering how sustainable that level is. Morgan Stanley insiders say while some one-time items did help increase that number, it wasn’t significant and they expect Mr. Fleming to produce a lower but still high pretax profit margin for the current quarter.

“Although the first-quarter margin is seasonally lower, we believe that we can drive margins to the high teens and above over time even with only with modest revenue growth and a low interest rate environment,” said Ruth Porat, chief financial officer at Morgan Stanley, on a conference call last week with fixed-income investors.

For that number to rise significantly, Mr. Fleming must make some of recent initiatives work, analysts say.

“Everyone is watching that number,” said an executive at a rival firm who was not authorized to speak on the record. “If they can increase, it will be a sign Gorman’s strategy is working, but so far not everyone is convinced.”

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National Briefing | South: Abortion Curbs Clear Senate in Arkansas

The State Senate voted 25 to 7 on Monday to ban most abortions 20 weeks into a pregnancy. The measure goes back to the House to consider an amendment that added exceptions for rape and incest. The legislation is based on the belief that fetuses can feel pain 20 weeks into a pregnancy, and is similar to bans in several other states. Opponents say it would require mothers to deliver babies with fatal conditions. Gov. Mike Beebe has said he has constitutional concerns about the proposal but has not said whether he will veto it.

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