Storm-Damaged Homes Mean Lower Property Tax Revenues in New York Region

Localities across the New York region, already reeling from the cost of cleaning up from Hurricane Sandy, are confronting the prospect of an even bigger blow to their finances: a precipitous decline in property tax revenues.

The storm damaged tens of billions of dollars’ worth of real estate, especially in coastal areas of Long Island and New Jersey. As a result, localities can no longer expect to reap the same taxes from properties that have lost much of their value — in some cases, permanently.

Without new revenues, state and local officials and Wall Street analysts said, these areas may have to make deep cuts in spending on schools, police and fire departments and other services. They also may be hard-pressed to finance rebuilding.

“Absolutely, this is going to be devastating for several years,” said Ester Bivona, former president of the New York State Receivers and Collectors Association, which represents local tax officials.

The Division of Local Government Services in New Jersey estimated this month that more than a dozen municipalities in the state could lose at least 10 percent of their tax bases. About another 10 face a drop between 5 percent and 10 percent, state and local officials said.

Among the worst hit is Toms River, one of New Jersey’s largest municipalities, with 90,000 people. It recently warned Wall Street that property tax receipts could drop 10 percent to 15 percent, according to its financial disclosure documents.

Down the coast, the tiny borough of Tuckerton lost close to 20 percent of its property tax base. In Sea Bright, nearly half the homes are uninhabitable.

The situation is similar on Long Island, according to interviews with officials there.

The village of Freeport in Nassau County expects that many of its 15,000 homeowners will qualify for reductions in property tax bills, erasing at least 5 percent of property tax revenues and probably far more.

Experts said the looming revenue crisis for localities in the region underscores how natural disasters can have a profound effect long after the debris is gone.

If localities try to raise overall tax rates to make up for looming deficits, they may touch off a backlash from homeowners with undamaged properties.

“My thing is to encourage property owners to not seek reassessments because you’re going to pay on one end or the other,” said Andrew Hardwick, Freeport’s mayor. “If too many people seek reassessment and are successful with it, that means, how do you pay the bills on the other end? You raise the taxes again? It doesn’t make sense.”

Some localities, like Long Beach, on Long Island, had shaky finances before the storm and are now in deeper trouble, according to local budget records. But many others had been on solid financial ground.

Two major bond-rating agencies, Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s, have expressed concerns in recent weeks about the fiscal stability of numerous municipalities in the region.

New York City and county governments in New York are far less reliant on property taxes than localities, so they are expected to have an easier time weathering a drop in the value of the tax base caused by storm damage. The city, for example, has its own income and business taxes.

What’s more, the city and county governments in both states have a much broader property tax base than small localities.

The $50.7 billion Hurricane Sandy relief bill approved this month by the House of Representatives provides up to $300 million in low-interest loans for localities facing shortfalls. The Senate has supported a similar provision in its own relief package.

But some local officials said such financing was not nearly enough. States themselves have not yet sent aid, and senior state officials said they were not inclined to do so until federal money was exhausted.

“It’s a pretty inescapable conclusion that there will be an impact on the tax base,” said Michael Drewniak, chief spokesman for Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

“In many instances, we had homes completely wiped out or severely damaged to the point they were rendered uninhabitable,” Mr. Drewniak said. “That left behind rebuildable land but, in the meantime, no ‘improvements’ to tax. In other cases, people may find it cost prohibitive to rebuild at all, depending on their individual circumstances.”

It could be a year or two before the aftereffects are fully understood, given that localities will have to assess damaged properties before lowering property taxes on them.

Griff Palmer contributed reporting.

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IHT Rendezvous: Britons Promised Vote on Europe, Again

LONDON — A British political leader faces dissent within his own party over the country’s membership in Europe. He promises to renegotiate the terms and to hold a referendum on the issue if he wins the next election.

That was Harold Wilson, the Labour Party leader, who as prime minister in 1975 fulfilled an election pledge to hold a nationwide vote on Britain’s continued membership in what was then the European Economic Community.

Plus ça change, as the French would say.

David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister who was 8 at the time of Britain’s first and only referendum, has now promised a rerun, announcing on Wednesday in a long-anticipated speech:

“It is time for the British people to have their say. It is time to settle this European question in British politics.”

There seemed little doubt that he had been pushed to the decision by Euro-skeptic sentiment in his own party and the emerging electoral challenge from the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party, which is threatening to capture Tory votes.

Divisions over Europe used to be the Labour Party disease. The left of the party viewed the E.C.C. as a club for the rich that had more to do with enhancing the profits of transnational business than enhancing the lot of the common man.

“The development of the Community since its inception has been largely directed to business rather than social goals,” the Trades Union Congress, the umbrella group for British labor unions, argued at the time. “The effect has been to increase the mobility of capital . . . enabling business to avoid more easily its obligations to employees.”

The split continued to dog the Labour Party, in and out of government, long after two-thirds of voters opted in 1975 to remain in Europe.

These days, labor union spokesmen are as likely to argue that Europe has been good for workers in terms of Continent-wide rights and protections.

But Euro-skepticism was never confined to the Labour Party. For the Conservatives, it was and remains a divisive issue between a broadly pro-European mainstream and right wingers who rail at loss of sovereignty and an overweening Brussels bureaucracy.

Harold Wilson’s 1975 referendum was a gamble that paid off. He supported Britain’s continued membership in the face of opponents who included members of his own cabinet.

Will David Cameron’s own “dangerous gamble” silence Conservative dissent? Or will Britain end up sleepwalking out of Europe, as some have warned?

Peter Kellner, a veteran political commentator, says there’s an “uncanny resemblance” between public opinion in 1975 and today.

So, if there is a referendum in which Britons again opt to stay in, will that be the end of the argument?

Tell us what you think. Is David Cameron playing domestic politics over Europe and, if so, what are the risks? And, if you’re British, which way would you vote?

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Google Wants to Own the Airwaves, Now

As if Google‘s launching a free Wi-Fi network in New York City earlier this month wasn’t curious enough, now the search giant is asking the Federal Communications Commission for a license to create an “experimental radio service.” What’s an experimental radio service, you ask? Well, Google won’t say exactly what its doing with the air above its Mountain View, California headquarters, but the details of the FCC application suggest it’s trying to build its own proprietary wireless network.

RELATED: Who’s Winning the Facebook-Google Tech War

Oh, so this must have something to do with Google Fiber and Google‘s becoming an Internet service provider, offering insanely fast Internet, right? Again, not exactly. “Google‘s small-scale wireless network would use frequencies that wouldn’t be compatible with nearly any of the consumer mobile devices that exist today, such as Apple’s iPad or iPhone or most devices powered by Google‘s Android operating system,” explain The Wall Street Journal‘s Amir Efrati and Anton Troianovski. “The network would only provide coverage for devices built to access certain frequencies, from 2524 to 2625 megahertz.” However, networks using those frequencies are under construction in Asia, just waiting for devices that support them. And last year, Google purchased Motorola Mobility, a mobile phone manufacturer that could ostensibly manufacture such devices. This is starting to sound sort of shady.

RELATED: You Were Right to Delete Your Google History

While it’s too soon to understand the extent of the company’s plans, it certainly looks like Google actually wants to own the airwaves now. Could we see a Google phone that works on a custom built Wi-Fi network, one that nobody else can use? It’s very possible. For now, Google‘s official answer to that line of questioning is that the company experiments all the time with all kinds of things. But according to Steven Crowley, a wireless engineer who first spotted the FCC application, ”The only reason to use these frequencies is if you have business designs on some mobile service.” 

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No. 1 Duke routed by No. 25 Miami 90-63

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (AP) — With a steady din coming from the sea of orange behind the visitors' basket, No. 1 Duke had a tough time making a shot.

The Blue Devils went more than 8 minutes without a field goal in the first half Wednesday night, and a sellout became a blowout for No. 25 Miami, which delighted a boisterous crowd with a 90-63 victory.

The defeat was the third-worst ever for a No. 1 team. The last time Duke lost a regular-season game by a bigger margin was in January 1984.

"It wasn't demoralizing; they played better," Blue Devils guard Rasheed Sulaimon said. "I believe we have them on the schedule again."

"We expected them to be terrific, and we have to match terrific, and then you have a terrific game," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "What you had was a terrific win for them, but not a terrific game. We didn't hold our end of the bargain."

Miami (14-3, 5-0 Atlantic Coast Conference) beat a No. 1 team for the first time, taking control with a stunning 25-1 run midway through the opening half. The Blue Devils missed 13 consecutive shots despite numerous good looks, while four Hurricanes hit 3-pointers during the run that transformed a 14-13 deficit into a 38-15 lead.

Duke (16-2, 3-2) fell to 0-2 when playing on an opponent's court. The Blue Devils' other loss came at North Carolina State, a defeat that cost them the No. 1 ranking.

They regained the top spot this week but seemed rattled by the capacity crowd, only the 10th in 10 years at Miami's on-campus arena. Students began lining up for seats outside the arena almost 24 hours before tipoff, a rarity for the attendance-challenged Hurricanes.

"I don't know how you can sit outside for a basketball game for that long," Miami guard Durand Scott said. "That made me want to win for them even more."

The Hurricanes, who are alone atop the league standings, won their sixth consecutive game. They beat Duke for the second straight time — but only the fourth time in the 19-game series.

Miami had been 0-6 against No. 1 teams. Coach Jim Larranaga also beat a No. 1 team for the first time.

"This is a great memory," Larranaga said.

Scott scored a season-high 25 points for the Hurricanes, and Kenny Kadji added a season-high 22. Shane Larkin had 18 points, 10 rebounds and five assists, and Durham, N.C. native Julian Gamble had 10 rebounds and four blocked shots.

Miami senior center Reggie Johnson came off the bench in his first action since being sidelined with a broken left thumb Dec. 18. He had two points and five rebounds in 16 minutes.

The Hurricanes, ranked this week for the first time in three years, improved to 8-0 at home.

Seth Curry, Tyler Thornton and Quinn Cook went a combined 1 for 29 for the Blue Devils, who shot a season-low 30 percent. Sulaimon led them with 16 points.

Duke went 4 for 23 from 3-point range, while Miami went 9 for 19 and shot 57 percent overall.

"Especially in the first couple of minutes, we got a lot of great shots," Blue Devils forward Mason Plumlee said. "You're going to miss some, but you have to keep shooting. The biggest mistake you can make is questioning your shot because you're missing open shots."

Kadji made two 3s during the Hurricanes' first-half spurt, then capped it with a three-point play. Duke shot 22 percent in the first half, including two for 11 on 3-pointers, and trailed 42-19 at halftime.

There was no letup by the Hurricanes to start the second half. They scored the first seven points for a shocking 49-19 lead, and punctuated the drubbing with five dunks in the final 10 minutes.

"Some teams come out in the second half flat and think they have the game won," Larkin said, "but we stayed with it with the same energy in the second half. We played great the whole game."

A Duke mistake — one in a long series — early in the second half had Krzyzewski red-faced and on the court, screaming at his team. But he couldn't inspire a turnaround.

"Over-rated," fans chanted with 3 minutes left. When the game ended, they poured onto the court and mobbed their team.

"The crowd I'm sure helped them some," Krzyzewski said. "But they didn't need much help."

Back in North Carolina, fans of the Tar Heels savored the loss by their rivals. When the final score of the Duke game was posted on the video board at the North Carolina-Georgia Tech game, students chanted, "Go to hell, Duke!"

___

AP Sports Writer Joedy McCreary in Chapel Hill, N.C., contributed to this report.

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Well: Long Term Effects on Life Expectancy From Smoking

It is often said that smoking takes years off your life, and now a new study shows just how many: Longtime smokers can expect to lose about 10 years of life expectancy.

But amid those grim findings was some good news for former smokers. Those who quit before they turn 35 can gain most if not all of that decade back, and even those who wait until middle age to kick the habit can add about five years back to their life expectancies.

“There’s the old saw that everyone knows smoking is bad for you,” said Dr. Tim McAfee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But this paints a much more dramatic picture of the horror of smoking. These are real people that are getting 10 years of life expectancy hacked off — and that’s just on average.”

The findings were part of research, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, that looked at government data on more than 200,000 Americans who were followed starting in 1997. Similar studies that were done in the 1980s and the decades prior had allowed scientists to predict the impact of smoking on mortality. But since then many population trends have changed, and it was unclear whether smokers today fared differently from smokers decades ago.

Since the 1960s, the prevalence of smoking over all has declined, falling from about 40 percent to 20 percent. Today more than half of people that ever smoked have quit, allowing researchers to compare the effects of stopping at various ages.

Modern cigarettes contain less tar and medical advances have cut the rates of death from vascular disease drastically. But have smokers benefited from these advances?

Women in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s had lower rates of mortality from smoking than men. But it was largely unknown whether this was a biological difference or merely a matter of different habits: earlier generations of women smoked fewer cigarettes and tended to take up smoking at a later age than men.

Now that smoking habits among women today are similar to those of men, would mortality rates be the same as well?

“There was a big gap in our knowledge,” said Dr. McAfee, an author of the study and the director of the C.D.C.’s Office on Smoking and Public Health.

The new research showed that in fact women are no more protected from the consequences of smoking than men. The female smokers in the study represented the first generation of American women that generally began smoking early in life and continued the habit for decades, and the impact on life span was clear. The risk of death from smoking for these women was 50 percent higher than the risk reported for women in similar studies carried out in the 1980s.

“This sort of puts the nail in the coffin around the idea that women might somehow be different or that they suffer fewer effects of smoking,” Dr. McAfee said.

It also showed that differences between smokers and the population in general are becoming more and more stark. Over the last 20 years, advances in medicine and public health have improved life expectancy for the general public, but smokers have not benefited in the same way.

“If anything, this is accentuating the difference between being a smoker and a nonsmoker,” Dr. McAfee said.

The researchers had information about the participants’ smoking histories and other details about their health and backgrounds, including diet, alcohol consumption, education levels and weight and body fat. Using records from the National Death Index, they calculated their mortality rates over time.

People who had smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes were not classified as smokers. Those who had smoked at least 100 cigarettes but had not had one within five years of the time the data was collected were classified as former smokers.

Not surprisingly, the study showed that the earlier a person quit smoking, the greater the impact. People who quit between 25 and 34 years of age gained about 10 years of life compared to those who continued to smoke. But there were benefits at many ages. People who quit between 35 and 44 gained about nine years, and those who stopped between 45 and 59 gained about four to six years of life expectancy.

From a public health perspective, those numbers are striking, particularly when juxtaposed with preventive measures like blood pressure screenings, colorectal screenings and mammography, the effects of which on life expectancy are more often viewed in terms of days or months, Dr. McAfee said.

“These things are very important, but the size of the benefit pales in comparison to what you can get from stopping smoking,” he said. “The notion that you could add 10 years to your life by something as straightforward as quitting smoking is just mind boggling.”

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Media Decoder Blog: A Resurgent Netflix Beats Projections, Even Its Own

9:12 p.m. | Updated For all those who have doubted its business acumen, Netflix had a resounding answer on Wednesday: 27.15 million.

That’s the number of American homes that were subscribers to the streaming service by the end of 2012, beating the company’s own projections for the fourth quarter after a couple of quarters of underwhelming results.

Netflix’s growth spurt in streaming — up by 2.05 million customers in the United States, from 25.1 million in the third quarter — was its biggest in nearly three years, and helped the company report net income of $7.9 million, surprising many analysts who had predicted a loss.

The results reflected just how far Netflix has come since the turbulence of mid-2011, when its botched execution of a new pricing plan for its services — streaming and DVDs by mail — resulted in an online flogging by angry customers. Investors battered its stock price, sending it from a high of around $300 in 2011 to as low as $53 last year.

“It’s risen from the ashes,” said Barton Crockett, a senior analyst at Lazard Capital Markets. “A lot of investors have been very skeptical that Netflix will work. With this earnings report, they’re making a strong argument that the business is real, that it will work.”

Investors, cheered by the results, sent Netflix shares soaring more than 35 percent in after-hours trading Wednesday. The stock had ended regular trading at $103.26.

Netflix’s fourth-quarter success was a convenient reminder to the entertainment and technology industries that consumers increasingly want on-demand access to television shows and movies. Streaming services by Amazon, Hulu and Redbox are all competing on the same playing field, but for now Netflix remains the biggest such service, and thus a pioneer for all the others.

“Our growth and our competitors’ growth shows just how large the opportunity is for Internet TV, where people get to control their viewing experience,” Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, said in a telephone interview Wednesday evening.

Questions persist, though, about whether Netflix will be able to attract enough subscribers to keep paying its ever-rising bills to content providers, which total billions of dollars in the years to come. The company said on Wednesday that it might take on more debt to finance more original programs, the first of which, the political thriller “House of Cards,” will have its premiere on the service on Feb. 1. Netflix committed about $100 million to make two seasons of “House of Cards,” one of five original programs scheduled to come out on the service this year.

“The virtuous cycle for us is to gain more subscribers, get more content, gain more subscribers, get more content,” Mr. Hastings said in an earnings conference call.

The company’s $7.9 million profit for the quarter represented 13 cents a share, surprising analysts who had expected a loss of 12 cents a share. The company said revenue of $945 million, up from $875 million in the quarter in 2011, was driven in part by holiday sales of new tablets and television sets.

Netflix added nearly two million new subscribers in other countries, though it continued to lose money overseas, as expected, and said it would slow its international expansion plans in the first part of this year.

The “flix” in Netflix, its largely forgotten DVD-by-mail business, fared a bit better than the company had projected, posting a loss of just 380,000 subscribers in the quarter, to 8.22 million. The losses have slowed for four consecutive quarters, indicating that the homes that still want DVDs really want DVDs.

On the streaming side, Netflix’s retention rate improved in the fourth quarter, suggesting growing customer satisfaction.

Asked whether the company’s reputation had fully recovered after its missteps in 2011, Mr. Hastings said, “We’re on probation at this point, but we’re not out of jail.”

He has emphasized subscriber happiness, even going so far as to say on Wednesday that “we really want to make it easy to quit” Netflix. If the exit door is well marked, he asserted, subscribers will be more likely to come back.

The hope is that original programs like “House of Cards” and “Arrested Development” will lure both old and new subscribers to the service. Those programs, plus the film output deal with the Walt Disney Company announced in December, affirm that Netflix cares more and more about being a gallery — with showy pieces that cannot be seen anywhere else — and less about being a library of every film and TV show ever made.

“They’re morphing into something that people understand,” said Mr. Crockett of Lazard Capital.

Mr. Hastings said this had been happening for years, but that it was becoming more apparent now to consumers and investors.

Mr. Hastings’s letter to investors brought up the elephant in the room, the activist investor Carl C. Icahn, who acquired nearly 10 percent of the company’s stock last October. Mr. Icahn, known for his campaigns for corporate sales and revampings, stated then that Netflix “may hold significant strategic value for a variety of significantly larger companies.”

Netflix subsequently put into place a shareholder rights plan, known as a poison pill, to protect itself against a forced sale by Mr. Icahn.

The company said on Wednesday, “We have no further news about his intentions, but have had constructive conversations with him about building a more valuable company.”

Factoring in the stock’s 30 percent rise since November and the after-hours action on Wednesday, Mr. Icahn’s stake has now more than doubled in value, to more than $700 million from roughly $320 million.

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India Ink: At This Year's Jaipur Lit Fest, Feminism, the Dalai Lama and Cricket

NEW DELHI —– It is that time of year again when the pink city of Jaipur in Rajasthan State warms up to host a carefully curated panel of literary greats from across the globe for the Jaipur Literature Festival, South Asia’s biggest annual literary event. In its sixth year now, the five-day event will kick off on Thursday at the majestic Diggi Palace, where 283 writers will appear before an audience of several thousand people and engage them through conversations and book readings.

The runup to the festival has not been without controversy. The Hindu right-wing group RSS and the national opposition Bharatiya Janata Party are demanding a ban on the participation of Pakistani writers in the wake of the recent skirmish along the Line of Control between India and Pakistan. And Muslim clerics have threatened to agitate if any of the four authors who last year read out excerpts from Salman Rushdie’s banned book ‘The Satanic Verses’ are seen at this year’s festival. Of the four, only the novelist Jeet Thayil is on the speaker’s list this time.

Organizers said that these threats would not affect the festival’s schedule.

“The media should not give space to this kind of rabble-rousing,” said Sanjoy K. Roy, the festival’s producer.  He said the venue was already secure, with more than 200 security personnel, and added that there was no need for any additional security.

A day ahead of the official opening, on Wednesday, an unlikely marriage of cricket and literature is culminating in a friendly game between authors and cricket players on the home turf of one of India’s premier league teams, the Rajasthan Royals. It will be ‘Royals XI’ versus ‘Authors XI’.

This year the festival is more “multilingual and multivocal” than the previous editions, said Namita Gokhale, one of the directors of the festival.

Writings in 17 Indian languages, including Bangla, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Tamil and Kashmiri, will be showcased at the multilingual sessions that will offer a flavor of regional literary history as well as folk literature. Santhali, a language spoken in India’s east coast, will be represented at the festival for the first time. There will also be readings of literature in several foreign languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, as well as in Sinhala, spoken by the ethnic Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka and in Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan.

The idea of the festival is to show “India to the world and the world to India,” said William Dalrymple, the festival’s co-director.

The overarching theme of this year’s festival, which features 174 sessions, is Buddha in literature.

Spirituality has been central to literature in India, said Mr. Dalrymple, adding, “Buddhist literature has influenced so much of Asian literature.”

Complementing the theme, the big surprise guest this year is his holiness the Dalai Lama. The Tibetan leader, who is living in exile in India, will hold a conversation with the British-born novelist Pico Iyer on Thursday afternoon in a session titled “Kinships of Faiths.”

After the brouhaha last year over Oprah Winfrey’s star-spangled reception, the selection of this year’s chief guest seems to have been tempered on purpose.

“Oprah’s appearance sucked the oxygen from the other sessions,” Mr. Dalrymple said. “She took so much press.” Some of the other big names like Tom Stoppard, “one of the best playwrights” did not get the attention that he should have received last year.

Nonetheless, he said this year’s guest list is still spectacular.

Among those appearing are several award-winning authors, including the Commonwealth Prize Winner Aminatta Forna from Sierra Leone, Howard Jacobson, a Booker Prize winning author, and Andrew Solomon, a Pulitzer winner.

The historical novelist Lawrence Norfolk will be introduced to Indian book lovers for the first time along with other popular British writers including Sebastian Faulks and Deborah Moggach.

Mr. Dalrymple pointed out that several prominent authors from the Arab world are participating in the festival, including the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif and the Moroccon writer Tahar Ben Jalloun.

An emphasis on feminist writing and featuring women’s voices would seem to be a natural choice for the organizers after the recent spate of protests against sexual harassment of women in India.

“It wasn’t by design, but by instinct,” Ms. Gokhale said, noting planning for the event began in March last year.

Mahasweta Devi, an octogenarian Bengali writer and social activist, who will make her first appearance at the festival, has been on the organizers’ wish list for each of the past few years. A Tamil feminist writer who writes under the pseudonym Ambai will also be making her first appearance.

Diana L. Eck, a religious scholar form Harvard, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a postmodern and postcolonial theorist from Columbia, are among the distinguished women scholars scheduled to speak at the festival.

“The strand of sessions on ‘The Buddha in Literature’ examines the role of women in the Buddhist theology and hierarchy,” Ms. Gokhale explained. Other session including “Imagine: Resistance, Protest, Assertion” emphasize the “inspirational surge of women’s solidarity,” she said.

The phenomenal growth of the festival over the years has led the organizers to add another venue, the Char Bagh to the existing venues at the Diggi Palace to accommodate the crowds. Mr. Roy, the festival producer, said that 22,000 people can be accommodated per hour, up from 14,000 last year. A total of 122,000 people attended last year.

The festival organizers have spent an estimated 56 million rupees (about $1 million) this year. While Teamwork Productions, which is overseeing the event, is struggling to break even, the event will continue to be egalitarian and open to all without an admission fee, said Mr. Roy, who is also the managing director of the company. “Arts create wealth in a different way,” he said.

Chiki Sarkar, the publisher of Penguin Books India, uses the annual festival to launch a featured new book or talent. This year will see the launch of Anjan Sundaram, the author of “Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo.”

“Very often projects that I have been thinking about for a while get crystallized in Jaipur,” she said.

Festival regulars say that much of the magic of the Jaipur Literature Festival takes place outside the sessions themselves. “The best thing is the surprise element, the random encounter that can result in something completely unexpected, new, and sometimes wonderful,” said Urvashi Butalia, a publisher and writer who is the co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house and the director of Zubaan, an imprint of Kali.

At least 20 parties will be hosted during the festival and 145 artists are expected to perform through the course of the five-day event, including Indian folk artists and Spanish performers.

(Neha Thirani contributed reporting.)

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FTC study taking aim at online marketing of booze and kids

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) plans this summer to recommend ways that the alcoholic beverage industry can better protect underage viewers from seeing its advertisements online.

Distillers, brewers and wineries pour millions of dollars into brand promotion on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and industry critics contend they are not doing enough to prevent young consumers from receiving these messages.

“We’re doing a deep dive on how they’re using the Internet and social media,” said Janet Evans, a lawyer with the FTC, which is conducting a year-long study due to be released by early summer. “We’re focusing on underage exposure.”

She would not elaborate on any potential recommendations that might come out of the study, which began in April 2012.

The FTC is reviewing data from 14 big producers, Evans said, including Beam Inc, the maker of Jim Beam, Diageo Plc, home to Johnnie Walker, and Constellation Brands Inc, which makes Robert Mondavi and Ravenswood wines.

The FTC report “is something we take seriously and place at high priority,” said Karena Breslin, director for digital marketing at Constellation.

The FTC has made two requests for information since the study began, she said.

The regulatory agency has not said it intends to impose restrictions on liquor company social media advertising but it can make recommendations to the industry.

The FTC is empowered to file suit to ensure consumers are protected from deceptive marketing practices, Evans said, but she stressed that studies of this nature are meant to promote better self-regulation, not provide a basis for a case.

Executives say alcohol makers and distributors voluntarily adhere to the same industry-set standard for marketing to underage viewers on social media sites that the industry set for its ads on TV and other medium. That requires that at least 71.6 percent of an audience consists of adults 21 and older.

“No one in their right mind would want to advertise to people who can’t legally buy their product,” said Frank Coleman, senior vice president for Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS), the trade group that sets the industry’s advertising codes.

In June 2011, DISCUS revised its code upwards to 71.6 percent from 70 percent, after the FTC recommended it review the standard to better reflect U.S. Census population data.

Industry critics, including David Jernigen, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Johns Hopkins University, and Sarah Mart, research director of the advocacy group Alcohol Justice, contend the industry didn’t go far enough and should raise the standard further.

Jernigen says it needs to be at least 85 percent to effectively protect youth, so there would be no more than 15 percent exposure to the underage drinking population.

“The industry says its self-regulating but it’s ineffective and social media opens up a whole new set of problems because their ads are everywhere,” said Sarah Mart, research director for the San Rafael, Calif.-based group Alcohol Justice.

The industry group’s Coleman said the group now requires members to install age-checking tools via instant-messaging as a gateway to Twitter feeds and other branded Web platforms that ask the user for a birth date before admitting them.

In the first nine months of 2012, beer, wine and spirits manufacturers’ spent an estimated $ 35 million for paid Web display advertising, but industry executives estimate many millions more were spent on Web site creation, video production for platforms like Google’s YouTube and social media marketing efforts.

“We’ve significantly adjusted more money to digital for online video, Web sites, Facebook and Twitter content,” said Kevin George, global chief marketing officer for Jim Beam, which he says spends 30 percent of its media spend for online outlets, up from 10 percent in 2008.

Many companies are expanding their digital staff. Wine maker Constellation hired Breslin three years ago to initiate digital marketing and now has a team of five reporting to her.

Many alcoholic beverage companies flocked to Facebook because it requires users to post their birth dates when signing up. Last year Twitter partnered with Buddy Media to offer a more effective screening tool that sends a direct message to fans who click on a brand. The message sends the fan a link to a site that asks for date of birth, which has allowed Twitter to grab some more of the sector marketing. Salesforce.com bought Buddy Media last June, which is now folding the platform into its marketing cloud portfolio.

Health advocates and industry critics are crying foul. “Facebook and other interactive platforms are poorly monitored and not well age protected,” said Jernigen of Johns Hopkins University. “Anyone can say they’re 21 and click yes.”

(Reporting By Susan Zeidler; Editing by Ron Grover and Alden Bentley)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Williams loses in quarters; Azarenka into semis

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Serena Williams' dominating run at the majors ended in a painful loss to American teenager Sloane Stephens.

After the biggest victory of her life, the 19-year-old Stephens is headed to the semifinals of the Australian Open.

Williams hurt her back in the eighth game of the second set, slowing down her serve, restricting her movement and causing her obvious pain.

Stephens kept her composure, blocking out the injury issue on the opposite side of the net, and rallied for a 3-6, 7-5, 6-4 victory on Wednesday — by far the most significant in her seven Grand Slams.

The gravity of it didn't hit Stephens until she was warming down, and even then the victory had an unreal feeling.

"I was stretching, and I was like, 'I'm in the semis of a Grand Slam.' I was like, 'Whoa. It wasn't as hard as I thought.' But it's pretty cool," she said. "To be in the semis of a Grand Slam is definitely I say a good accomplishment. A lot of hard work."

It was Williams' first loss since Aug. 17, ending a run of 20 consecutive wins.

The 15-time major winner hadn't lost a match at a Grand Slam tournament since the French Open, where her first-round exit sparked her resurgence in the second half of 2012 that included titles at Wimbledon, the London Olympics, the U.S. Open and the WTA Championship.

After winning her first Grand Slam quarterfinal, Stephens next plays defending champion Victoria Azarenka.

In the men's draw, U.S. Open champion Andy Murray moved into the semifinals with a 6-4, 6-1, 6-2 win over unseeded Jeremy Chardy of France.

The No. 29-seeded Stephens had been given barely a chance of beating Williams, who lost only four matches in 2012 and was in contention to regain the No. 1 ranking at the age of 31.

Williams' latest winning streak included a straight-sets win over Stephens at the Brisbane International earlier this month.

And Stephens wasn't even sure that she could beat Williams, until she woke up Wednesday.

"When I got up, I was like, 'Look, Dude, like, you can do this.' Like, 'Go out and play and do your best," she said.

It wasn't until after losing the first set and being broken in the first game of the second that she really convinced herself she could.

"I was like, 'Hmm, this is not the way you want it to happen. But you just fight and just get every ball back, run every ball down, and just get a lot of balls in play, I think you'll be OK.'

"From then on I got aggressive, started coming to the net more, and just got a lot more comfortable."

She started hitting winners, cutting down on the errors, and pushing the injured Williams around the court.

Williams walked around the net to congratulate Stephens, who then clapped her hand on her racket and waved to the crowd, a look of disbelief on her face.

She then went to her tennis bag, pulled out her phone and started checking for any text messages from her mother.

"I was hoping she had texted me right away. I thought maybe she was texting me during the match," Stephens said. "I'm sure my grandparents are like freaking out."

Stephens has said she had a photo of Williams up in her room when she was a child, and had long admired the Williams sisters.

"This is so crazy. Oh my goodness," Stephens said, wiping away tears in her post-match TV interview. "I think I'll put a poster of myself (up) now."

For her part, Williams said the bad back was just another problem to contend with at a Grand Slam event that had been "absolutely" her worst for injuries. It started when she injured her ankle in the first round.

"I'm almost relieved that it's over because there's only so much I felt I could do," she said. "It's been a little difficult. I've been thrown a lot of (curve) balls these two weeks."

Williams was up a set and a break before Stephens settled in. In the eighth game of the second set, Williams was chasing a drop shot to the net when she appeared to hurt her back. She needed a medical timeout after the set, and then slowly started to regain the speed in her serve.

She said her back "just locked up" on her.

"I couldn't really rotate after that," she said. "It was a little painful, but it's OK."

There were times when she barely concealed the pain, and had to bend over or stretch out her back. Yet the thought of retiring from the match only crossed her mind "for a nanosecond."

It didn't mean she wasn't frustrated. Williams smashed her racket into the court in the third set, breaking the frame and then flinging it toward the chairs on the side of the court. She looked to the sky occasionally and yelled at herself.

The racket abuse cost her $1,500 in fines.

Azarenka, with her most famous fan sitting in the crowd wearing a shirt reminding her to keep calm, overcame some early jitters to beat Svetlana Kuznetsova 7-5, 6-1 in the earlier quarterfinal at Rod Laver Arena.

After dropping serve in a long fourth game that went to deuce 10 times, Azarenka recovered to dominate the rest of the match against Kuznetsova, a two-time major winner who was floating dangerously in the draw with a No. 75 ranking as she recovers from a knee injury.

Azarenka's American rapper friend, Redfoo, returned from a concert in Malaysia to attend Wednesday's quarterfinal.

Wearing a red sleeveless T-shirt that read "Keep Calm and Bring Out the Bottles," the name of his next single, Redfoo stood, clapped and yelled "Come on, Vika!" during the tight first set.

Asked if it helped to have her No. 1 fan wearing a keep calm logo, Azarenka said "I was looking more at the part that says 'Bring out the bottles.'"

Of her game, she added, "I'm just glad I could produce my good tennis when it was needed."

Williams' loss was a boost for Azarenka, who lost all five head-to-heads against the American in 2012 and is 1-11 in their career meetings.

In the men's quarterfinals, 17-time major winner Roger Federer was playing No. 7 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in a night match for a spot in the semifinals against Murray.

The 25-year-old Murray had his service broken for only the second time while serving for the match. But he broke back immediately to clinch the quarterfinal victory.

"I'll watch a little bit but I won't watch the whole match," Murray said of the night quarterfinal, adding that he hoped "Roger and Jo play 4 to 5 hours if possible!"

Defending champion Novak Djokovic plays No. 4-seeded David Ferrer in the other semifinal.

On the other half of the women's draw, Maria Sharapova has conceded only nine games in five matches — a record in Australia — en route to a semifinal against 2011 French Open champion Li Na.

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Well: Is There an Ideal Running Form?

In recent years, many barefoot running enthusiasts have been saying that to reduce impact forces and injury risk, runners should land near the balls of their feet, not on their heels, a running style that has been thought to mimic that of our barefoot forebears and therefore represent the most natural way to run. But a new study of barefoot tribespeople in Kenya upends those ideas and, together with several other new running-related experiments, raises tantalizing questions about just how humans really are meant to move.

For the study, published this month in the journal PLoS One, a group of evolutionary anthropologists turned to the Daasanach, a pastoral tribe living in a remote section of northern Kenya. Unlike some Kenyan tribes, the Daasanach have no tradition of competitive distance running, although they are physically active. They also have no tradition of wearing shoes.

Humans have run barefoot, of course, for millennia, since footwear is quite a recent invention, in evolutionary terms. And modern running shoes, which typically feature well-cushioned heels that are higher than the front of the shoe, are newer still, having been introduced widely in the 1970s.

The thinking behind these shoes’ design was, in part, that they should reduce injuries. When someone runs in a shoe with a built-up heel, he or she generally hits the ground first with the heel. With so much padding beneath that portion of the foot, the thinking went, pounding would be reduced and, voila, runners wouldn’t get hurt.

But, as many researchers and runners have noted, running-related injuries have remained discouragingly common, with more than half of all runners typically being felled each year.

So, some runners and scientists began to speculate a few years ago that maybe modern running shoes are themselves the problem.

Their theory was buttressed by a influential study published in 2010 in Nature, in which Harvard scientists examined the running style of some lifelong barefoot runners who also happened to be from Kenya. Those runners were part of the Kalenjin tribe, who have a long and storied history of elite distance running. Some of the fastest marathoners in the world have been Kalenjin, and many of them grew up running without shoes.

Interestingly, when the Harvard scientists had the Kalenjin runners stride over a pressure-sensing pad, they found that, as a group, they almost all struck the ground near the front of their foot. Some were so-called midfoot strikers, meaning that their toes and heels struck the ground almost simultaneously, but many were forefoot strikers, meaning that they landed near the ball of their foot.

Almost none landed first on their heels.

What the finding seemed to imply was that runners who hadn’t grown up wearing shoes deployed a noticeably different running style than people who had always worn shoes.

And from that idea, it was easy to conjecture that this style must be better for you than heel-striking, since presumably it was more natural, echoing the style that early, shoeless cavemen would have used.

But the new study finds otherwise. When the researchers had the 38 Daasanach tribespeople run unshod along a track fitted, as in the Harvard study, with a pressure plate, they found that these traditionally barefoot adults almost all landed first with their heels, especially when they were asked to run at a comfortable, distance-running pace. For the group, that pace averaged about 8 minutes per mile, and 72 percent of the volunteers struck with their heels while achieving it. Another 24 percent struck with the midfoot. Only 4 percent were forefoot strikers.

When the Daasanach volunteers were asked to sprint along the track at a much faster speed, however, more of them landed near their toes with each stride, a change in form that is very common during sprints, even in people who wear running shoes. But even then, 43 percent still struck with their heels.

This finding adds to a growing lack of certainty about what makes for ideal running form. The forefoot- and midfoot-striking Kalenjin were enviably fast; during the Harvard experiment, their average pace was less than 5 minutes per mile.

But their example hasn’t been shown to translate to other runners. In a 2012 study of more than 2,000 racers at the Milwaukee Lakefront Marathon, 94 percent struck the ground with their heels, and that included many of the frontrunners.

Nor is it clear that changing running form reduces injuries. In a study published in October scientists asked heel-striking recreational runners to temporarily switch to forefoot striking, they found that greater forces began moving through the runners’ lower backs; the pounding had migrated from the runners’ legs to their lumbar spines, and the volunteers reported that this new running form was quite uncomfortable.

But the most provocative and wide-ranging implication of the new Kenyan study is that we don’t know what is natural for human runners. If, said Kevin G. Hatala, a graduate student in evolutionary anthropology at George Washington University who led the new study, ancient humans “regularly ran fast for sustained periods of time,” like Kalenjin runners do today, then they were likely forefoot or midfoot strikers.

But if their hunts and other activities were conducted at a more sedate pace, closer to that of the Daasanach, then our ancestors were quite likely heel strikers and, if that was the case, wearing shoes and striking with your heel doesn’t necessarily represent a warped running form.

At the moment, though, such speculation is just that, Mr. Hatala said. He and his colleagues plan to collaborate with the Harvard scientists in hopes of better understanding why the various Kenyan barefoot runners move so differently and what, if anything, their contrasting styles mean for the rest of us.

“Mostly what we’ve learned” with the new study, he said, “is how much still needs to be learned.”

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