IHT Rendezvous: Regulating the British Press

LONDON — News doesn’t just travel fast here. It happens fast, too. And once it has happened, new news overtakes the old: the dogs bark, as the old Middle Eastern adage has it, but the caravan moves on.

So it has seemed in the almost two months since the publication of the bulky Leveson Report into the culture and behavior of the British press. The land has been swamped by a procession of other front-page stories — British hostages in Algeria! Referendum on Europe! — and the urgency of Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson’s call for statutory oversight of the rambunctious press here seems to have dissipated.

But a couple of developments in recent days have recalled some of the issues — quite apart from a steady trickle of arrests linked to the phone hacking and allied scandals that prompted the Leveson inquiry in the first place.

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Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.

One was the return from duty in Afghanistan of Prince Harry, the third in line to the British throne, who, as I describe in my latest column on Page Two of The International Herald Tribune, stirred a media frenzy by acknowledging that — no real surprise here — as the gunner co-pilot of an Apache attack helicopter, he was expected to fire on Taliban insurgents.

But there was a sub-plot.

Prince Harry’s aversion to the British media — equally unsurprising in light of the tangled relationship between his mother, Princess Diana, and the world’s newspapers, photographers and broadcasters — appears to be growing to the extent that he accused the British press of always writing “rubbish” about him.

A video report from Britain’s Channel 4 News shot during Prince Harry’s recent deployment to Afghanistan.

And yet, for the 20 weeks of Prince Harry’s deployment in Afghanistan, most news outlets in Britain had largely agreed with Buckingham Palace and the Ministry of Defense not to cover closely his role in the war, in return for guaranteed access at the end of his tour — a gesture of what the authorities would doubtless call responsibility on the part of that same press the prince dismissed.

The prince’s comments drew a tart response from Peter Barron, the editor of the regional Northern Echo. “It would have been nice if Prince Harry had resisted getting out his huge tar brush to blacken the entire British press and acknowledged that there are good and bad in every profession — including the armed forces,” he said.

The broader issue of how Britain regulates its media is still the object of closed-door talks among editors and executives and between politicians. But it could well resurface publicly next month.

“This is not about politicians determining what journalists do or do not write. The freedom of the press is essential,” Harriet Harman, the spokeswoman on media affairs for the opposition Labour Party, told a gathering in Oxford, England, last week. “But so is that other freedom: the freedom of a private citizen to go about their business without harassment, intrusion or the gross invasion of their grief and trauma. Those two freedoms are not incompatible.”

She challenged the government directly to set out its own proposals for the future regulation of the press.

“It is now time for the government to have the courage of its convictions,” she said, adding: “The public must be able to scrutinize the proposals. And Parliament — to whom Lord Justice Leveson trusted a key role in setting up the new system — must be able to decide.”

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Cómo se desarrolló el Linux de las netbooks educativas

La elección de un sistema operativo para una computadora es una situación que, en situaciones cotidianas al ingresar a una tienda de venta de artículos electrónicos, está marcada por la presencia de la plataforma Windows de Microsoft. Nada de esto impide que los usuarios puedan optar por software libre, sin costo alguno al momento de realizar la descarga e instalación, con propuestas como Ubuntu, Fedora o Mint , por mencionar sólo algunas de las alternativas disponibles en Internet.

Esto mismo ocurrió con el plan Conectar Igualdad, que busca desarrollar su propia plataforma basada en GNU-Linux adaptada a las necesidades de la comunidad educativa, tanto para los docentes como para los alumnos.

La inciativa comenzó a tomar forma en 2010, cuando Javier Castrillo comenzó a trabajar en Conectar Igualdad, el programa del gobierno nacional que distribuye computadoras portátiles para alumnos y docentes de escuelas públicas. Desde aquel momento, con el antecedente de haber coordinado la implementación de estas iniciativas en el ambiente educativo, impulsó con su equipo el desarrollo de Huayra, el sistema operativo libre basado en GNU-Linux de las netbooks escolares.

“Debido al porte de este programa era necesaria una plataforma estable, libre, un estándar y sobre todo con soberanía tecnológica, para no depender de ninguna corporación. Con nuestro sistema nos aseguramos que va a ser constante en el tiempo, que va a ser gratuito para todos aquellos que lo quieran descargar y, por sobre todas las cosas, libre. Todo el código está publicado a disposición para que cualquiera que tenga los conocimientos lo pueda auditar y modificar”, asegura Javier Castrillo, coordinador del Proyecto Huayra.

En una entrevista exclusiva con LA NACIÓN , Javier Castrillo habla sobre la plataforma, sus características y los prejuicios que aún existen sobre el software libre.

¿Qué es Huayra?

Es el sistema operativo libre que las netbooks del Programa Conectar Igualdad van a traer instaladas a partir de este año. Además cualquier persona puede descargarlo en su máquina desde huayra.conectarigualdad.gob.ar

Está basado en Debian GNU/Linux, es seguro, ágil y con un desarrollo realizado en la Argentina, teniendo en cuenta las necesidades tanto de estudiantes como de docentes, y manteniendo nuestra identidad nacional.

¿En qué instancia se encuentra el desarrollo?

Está en fase Beta pero ya se puede bajar y utilizar.

Un mito presente en este tipo de plataformas es que muchas personas creen que no hay virus porque no se conoce mucho. Esto no es verdad, no hay virus porque el sistema no admite virus porque, como dije, está todo a la vista. Los servidores de la bases de datos de los bancos, las grandes bases de datos importantes son de código libre, Google es libre, por ejemplo.

¿Por qué pensaron que era necesario desarrollar un sistema operativo basado en software libre?

Porque se estaban dejando tres millones y medio de máquinas en manos de una corporación, que tiene intereses económicos y sus tiempos. Asimismo, por ejemplo, si queríamos hacer un procesador de texto para las comunidades aborígenes no podíamos hacerlo porque no es posible traducir el Word o si necesitábamos adaptar la placa de red, según el tipo de servicio de determinada zona también teníamos inconvenientes. Tener un software de una empresa es como comprarte un auto y tener el capó soldado.

¿Cuáles son las ventajas que presenta utilizar Huayra frente a Windows?

Es libre y puede ser utilizado por cualquier persona de la comunidad; es gratuito, y ofrece la libertad de poder administrar ese código y hacer las reformas que queremos. Uno de los problemas que veíamos era que los profesores traían un programa para compartir con los chicos y ponían el pendrive en cada computadora y lo bajaban, sin darse cuenta que podían utilizar la red de la escuela. Lo que sucede es que configurar una red no es algo trivial. Huayra, en cambio, autoconfigura la red entonces el profesor deja el programa directamente en una carpeta especial que comparte y los alumnos entran allí para utilizar el programa.

¿En qué se benefician los alumnos al utilizar Huayra?

Que el Estado les brinde su propio sistema operativo libre es un beneficio implícito es más seguro y mucho más rápido. Además, está pensado para que corra en las máquinas más livianas y también funciona bien en las máquinas más viejas.

Otra gran ventaja para los chicos es que tienen una herramienta que sale de la propia escuela, con las necesidades y el aporte de su institución. Hay cientos de aplicaciones del equipo de Huayra y aportadas por las comunidades escolares. En total son casi 30.000 piezas de software.

¿La interfaz es similar a la de Windows o los usuarios verán muchos cambios?

Es similar y además encontrarán programas que no tenían en Windows porque son muy caros. En Huayra, por ejemplo, hay un software para hacer animaciones en 3D que si tuviéramos que comprarlo saldría muy caro. También hay editores de fotos similares a Photoshop.

El procesador de textos de Huayra permite guardarlo en un formato de Word. En el pasado había grandes problemas de compatibilidad entre el software libre y el licenciado pero ahora todo ha evolucionado y ya no existen esos inconvenientes.

Las netbooks de Conectar Igualdad son de diez fabricantes distintos, y tuvimos que trabajar bastante para el desarrollo del sistema operativo, cuenta Javier Castrillo, responsable del proyecto Huayra

Todavía nos falta un buen programa de Autocad 3D, pero tenemos Autocad en 2D. Pero tenemos son muchas herramientas de programación y de robótica incluidas dentro de Hayra.

¿Cómo se realizará la capacitación?

Las netbooks de nuestro programa, a partir de 2012, incluyen TV Digital abierta y allí incluye un montón de tutoriales y paso a paso para poder aprender a utilizarla.

Por otro lado, todas las instancias de capacitación que tiene Educar y el Ministerio de Educación van a tener cursos de Huayra tanto para alumnos como para docentes. Y ya se han formado comunidades de Huayra en Facebook y en Twitter que hacen su propia formación y su aporte a la comunidad.

¿Qué obstáculos tuvieron que sortear?

La principal fue la compatibilidad de hardware. Las netbooks de Conectar Igualdad son de diez fabricantes distintos y tuvimos que trabajar bastante para hacer funcionar nuestro sistema en todos los equipos. Después debimos luchar con los prejuicios que difunden los propios monopolios, que dicen que Linux es difícil, por ejemplo.

Pero ahora estamos muy entusiasmados porque las pruebas están saliendo bien y estamos dentro de los tiempos previstos.

¿Cuáles son los principales proyectos?

La primera etapa de Huayra es que funcione bien en todas las netbooks y en eso estamos abocados. Luego estamos pensando en que funcione en tablets y celulares.

También queremos trabajar para que la TV digital no sirva sólo para ver canales sino que podamos interactuar y brindarle, a través de ella, información útil para el ciudadano.

Y queremos fomentar el desarrollo para que los chicos programen, dándoles herramientas para que puedan programar aunque no sepan hacerlo, para que puedan, por ejemplo, hacer sus propios juegos con las características de su región, de su lenguaje, sus costumbres y que lo compartan con la comunidad.

El software libre en Conectar Igualdad

Huayra toma su nombre del vocablo quechua que significa viento, una analogía que los responsables del proyecto buscan reflejar con la filosofía del proyecto, relacionada con la independencia tecnológica y la libertad que ofrece el software libre. “Es una práctica habitual dentro de la comunidad para que cada programa esté ser representado por un animal. Linux eligió el pingüino, nosotros una vaca”, explica Javier Castrillo.

El equipo de trabajo de Huayra consta de 13 personas, divididos en tres áreas: Desarrollo (programadores), Diseño (artistas, historiadores del arte, diseñadores gráficos) y Sistematización (Sociólogos y estadísticos).

Además de Huayra existe la iniciativa de la comunidad de software libre Tuquito, con sendas versiones para las computadoras de las iniciativas OLPC y Conectar Igualdad .

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Woods wins at Torrey Pines for 8th time

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Tiger Woods was so good for so long at Torrey Pines that it didn't matter how bad it looked at the end.

In a finish that was fitting for such a long and exasperating week, Woods built an eight-shot lead with five holes to play on Monday until he lost patience with the slow play and started losing shots that only determined the margin of victory.

Despite two bogeys and a double bogey in the final hour, he closed with an even-par 72 for a four-shot victory in the Farmers Insurance Open.

"I'm excited the way I played all week," Woods said. "I hit the ball well — pretty much did everything well and built myself a nice little cushion. I had some mistakes at the end, but all my good play before that allowed me to afford those mistakes."

He won for the 75th time in his PGA Tour career, seven behind the record held by Sam Snead.

Woods won this tournament for the seventh time, and he set a PGA Tour record by winning at Torrey Pines for the eighth time, including his 2008 U.S. Open. Woods also has won seven times at Bay Hill and at Firestone.

Torrey Pines is a public course that he has turned into his private domain.

"I don't know if anybody would have beaten him this week," said Nick Watney, who got within five shots of Woods when the tournament was still undecided until making three bogeys on his next five holes. "He's definitely on his game."

It was the 23rd time Woods has won by at least four shots on the PGA Tour. Defending champion Brandt Snedeker (69) and Josh Teater (69) tied for the second. Watney had a 71 and tied for fourth with Jimmy Walker.

It was a strong statement for Woods, who was coming off a missed cut last week in Abu Dhabi. This was the second time in his career that Woods won in his next tournament after missing the cut, but this was the first time it happened the following week.

Abu Dhabi is now a distant memory. The question how is what kind of season is shaping up for Woods.

"I think he wanted to send a message," said Hunter Mahan, who shares a swing coach with Woods. "I think deep down he did. You play some games to try to motivate yourself. There's been so much talk about Rory (McIlroy). Rory is now with Nike. That would be my guess."

The last time Woods won at Torrey Pines also was on a Monday, when he beat Rocco Mediate in a playoff to capture the U.S. Open for his 14th major.

Of all his wins on this course along the Pacific, this might have been the most peculiar.

Thick fog cost the tournament an entire day of golf on Saturday, forcing the first Monday finish in tournament history. Woods effectively won the tournament during his 25 holes on Sunday, when he turned a two-shot lead into a six-shot margin with only 11 holes to play. CBS Sports wanted to televise the final day in late afternoon on the East Coast, but it still went long because of the pace of play.

It took Woods about 3 hours, 45 minutes to finish his 11 holes on Monday. His 19-hole win over Mediate lasted 4½ hours.

As much as Woods got off to a good start, equal attention was given to slow play, an increasing problem on the PGA Tour.

"It got a little ugly toward the end," Woods said. "I started losing patience a little bit with the slow play. I lost my concentration a little bit."

He made bogey from the bunker on No. 14. He hooked a tee shot off the eucalyptus trees and into a patch of ice plant on the 15th, leading to double bogey. After another long wait on the 17th tee, he popped up his tee shot and made another bogey. With a four-shot lead on the 18th — Kyle Stanley blew a three-shot lead a year ago — he hit wedge safely behind the hole for a two-putt par.

Woods finished on 14-under 274 for his 14th win in California, and 11th in San Diego County.

"I think a win always makes it special, especially the way I played," Woods said. "To have not won would have been something else because I really played well. Playing the way I did for most of this tournament, until the very end, the last five holes, I felt like I should have won this tournament. I put myself in a position where I had a big enough lead, and that's basically how I felt like I played this week.

"I know I can do that, and it was nice to be able to do it."

Like so many of his big wins, the only drama was for second place.

Brad Fritsch, the rookie from Canada, birdied his last two holes for a 75. That put him into a tie for ninth, however, making him eligible for the Phoenix Open next week. Fritsch had been entered in the Monday qualifier that he had to abandon when the Farmers Insurance Open lost Saturday to a fog delay.

Woods was so far ahead that he would have had to collapse for anyone to have a chance, and that never looked possible.

Even so, the red shirt seemed to put him on edge. It didn't help that as he settled over his tee shot on the par-5 ninth, he backed off when he heard a man behind the ropes take his picture.

Woods rarely hits the fairway after an encounter with a camera shutter, and this was no different — it went so far right that it landed on the other side of a fence enclosing a corporate hospitality area.

Woods took his free drop, punched out below the trees into the fairway and then showed more irritation when his wedge nicked the flag after one hop and spun down the slope 30 feet away instead of stopping next to the hole.

He didn't show much reaction on perhaps his most memorable shot of the day — with his legs near the edge of a bunker some 75 feet to the left of the 11th green, he blasted out to the top shelf and watched the ball take dead aim until it stopped a foot short. A two-putt birdie on the 13th gave him an eight-shot lead, and then it was only a matter of time — a lot of time — until the trophy presentation.

Before anyone projects a monster year for Woods based on one week, especially when that week is at Torrey Pines, remember that no one else in golf — not even McIlroy — is the subject of more snap judgments.

Woods, however, likes the direction he is headed, especially with his short game.

"I'm excited about this year. I'm excited about what I'm doing with Sean (Foley) and some of the things that I've built," he said. "This is a nice way to start the year."

Woods is not likely to return to golf until the Match Play Championship next month.

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Rescuer Appears for New York Downtown Hospital

Manhattan’s only remaining hospital south of 14th Street, New York Downtown, has found a white knight willing to take over its debt and return it to good health, hospital officials said Monday.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, one of New York City’s largest academic medical centers, has proposed to take over New York Downtown in a “certificate of need” filed with the State Health Department. The three-page proposal argues that though New York Downtown is projected to have a significant operating loss in 2013, it is vital to Lower Manhattan, including Wall Street, Chinatown and the Lower East Side, especially since the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital after it declared bankruptcy in 2010.

The rescue proposal, which would need the Health Department’s approval, comes at a precarious time for hospitals in the city. Long Island College Hospital, just across the river in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has been threatened with closing after a failed merger with SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and several other Brooklyn hospitals are considering mergers to stem losses.

New York Downtown has been affiliated with the NewYork-Presbyterian health care system while maintaining separate operations.

“We are looking forward to having them become a sixth campus so the people in that community can continue to have a community hospital that continues to serve them,” Myrna Manners, a spokeswoman for NewYork-Presbyterian, said.

Fred Winters, a spokesman for New York Downtown, declined to comment.

Presbyterian’s proposal emphasized that it would acquire New York Downtown’s debt at no cost to the state, a critical point at a time when the state has shown little interest in bailing out failing hospitals.

The proposal said that if New York Downtown were to close, it would leave more than 300,000 residents of Lower Manhattan, including the financial district, Greenwich Village, SoHo, the Lower East Side and Chinatown, without a community hospital. In addition, it said, 750,000 people work and visit in the area every day, a number that is expected to grow with the construction of 1 World Trade Center and related buildings.

The proposal argues that New York Downtown is essential partly because of its long history of responding to disasters in the city. One of its predecessors was founded as a direct result of the 1920 terrorist bombing outside the J. P. Morgan Building, and the hospital has responded to the 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern, the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and, this month, the crash of a commuter ferry from New Jersey.

Like other fragile hospitals in the city, New York Downtown has shrunk, going to 180 beds, down from the 254 beds it was certified for in 2006, partly because the more affluent residents of Lower Manhattan often go to bigger hospitals for elective care.

The proposal says that half of the emergency department patients at New York Downtown either are on Medicaid, the program for the poor, or are uninsured.

NewYork-Presbyterian would absorb the cost of the hospital’s maternity and neonatal intensive care units, which have been expanding because of demand, but have been operating at a deficit of more than $1 million a year, the proposal said.

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DealBook Column: Mary Jo White, Nominee for S.E.C.'s 'New Sherrif,' Has Worn Banks' Hat

“You don’t want to mess with Mary Jo.”

That’s what President Obama said about his pick to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Jo White. The nomination of Ms. White, a former prosecutor who took on the terrorists behind the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Mafia boss John Gotti, was meant to signal that the S.E.C. would be getting tough on Wall Street. CBS called her “Wall Street’s new sheriff.” The Wall Street Journal said she would be “putting a tougher face on an agency still tainted by embarrassing enforcement missteps in the run-up to the financial crisis.” The New York Times said her appointment represented a “renewed resolve to hold Wall Street accountable.”

Hold on.

While Ms. White is a decorated prosecutor, she has spent the last decade vigorously defending — and billing by the hour — Wall Street’s biggest banks, as a rainmaking partner at the white-shoe law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. The average partner at the firm was paid $2.1 million a year, according to American Lawyer; but she was no average partner, very likely being paid at least double that. Her husband, John W. White, is a corporate partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He counts JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse and UBS as clients. The average partner at Cravath makes $3.1 million. He, too, was a former official at the S.E.C. — he left Cravath to run the corporate division of the S.E.C. starting in 2006 just in time for the run-up to the financial crisis. He left in November 2008, a month after the bank bailouts, to return to Cravath.

It seems Mr. and Ms. White have made a fine art of the revolving door between government and private practice.

So how conflicted is Ms. White? Let’s count the ways.

They are well documented: she was JPMorgan Chase’s go-to lawyer for many of the cases brought against it relating to the financial crisis. She was arm-in-arm with Kenneth D. Lewis, Bank of America’s former chief executive, keeping him out of trouble when the New York attorney general accused Mr. Lewis of defrauding investors by not disclosing the losses at Merrill Lynch before completing Bank of America’s acquisition of the firm. (And empirically, Mr. Lewis did keep crucial information about the deal from investors.)

This is what she had to say about Mr. Lewis, in a court filing submitted on his behalf: “Some have looked to assign blame for every aspect of the financial crisis, even where there is no evidence of misconduct. This case is a product of that dynamic and does not withstand either legal or factual scrutiny.” It was a refrain she often made about her clients related to the financial crisis.

And then there was Senator Bill Frist, the Republican from Tennessee, whom she successfully represented when the S.E.C. and the Justice Department started an investigation into whether he was involved in insider trading in shares of HCA, the hospital chain. She persuaded them to shut down the investigation.

She also worked with Siemens, the German industrial giant, when it pleaded guilty to charges of bribery, paying a record $1.6 billion penalty.

And then, of course, there was John Mack. She worked for the board of Morgan Stanley during a now well-publicized 2005 investigation into insider trading that ended soon after she made a phone call to the S.E.C. Using her connections at the top of the agency, she dialed up Linda Thomsen, then the commission’s head of enforcement, to find out whether Mr. Mack, who was being considered for Morgan Stanley’s chief executive position, was being implicated. He ultimately wasn’t. As the Huffington Post pointed out in a recent article about Ms. White, Robert Hanson, an S.E.C. supervisor, later testified, “It is a little out of the ordinary for Mary Jo White to contact Linda Thomsen directly, but that White is very prestigious and it isn’t uncommon for someone prominent to have someone intervene on their behalf.”

All of Ms. White’s previous engagements create not only an “optics” problem, but a practical, on-the-job problem. She will most likely need to recuse herself from just about anything related to her previous work.

“I will not for a period of two years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts,” is the language in an ethics pledge that she will have to agree to follow.

Some appointees, including Mary L. Schapiro, the former chairwoman of the S.E.C., recused themselves from any involvement in work that was related to a previous employer even after the two-year moratorium. Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, recused himself from the investigation into MF Global because of his previous employment at Goldman Sachs, where Jon Corzine was the firm’s head, even though it had been years since the two had worked together.

And then there is the issue of Mr. White’s husband, who will have a continuing role at Cravath, one of the most pre-eminent firms in the country, whose clients include some of the nation’s largest corporations.

“This president has adopted the toughest ethics rules of any administration in history,” said Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman, “and this nominee is no exception. As S.E.C. chair, Mary Jo White will be in complete compliance with all ethics rules.”

None of these conflicts gets at another potential problem for Ms. White. The job of chairwoman of S.E.C. isn’t simply about enforcement; she has a deputy for that. The biggest challenge anyone who takes the job will have to confront over the next several years will be executing and enforcing provisions of Dodd-Frank and working to regulate electronic trading — something that even the most sophisticated financial professionals, let alone a lawyer, often have a tough time understanding. She has zero experience in this area.

Of course, there can always be a value to inviting a onetime rival onto the team.

“I believe she is one of those people who will understand that her public role will be very, very different than her role as a defense lawyer,” Dennis M. Kelleher of Better Markets, a watchdog group, told me. “I don’t think she’s going to be like so many others who don’t get that they have a very different role when they hold high public office.

“No question, she’s said some things that are controversial and questionable,” Mr. Kelleher said. “Moreover, I hope and expect that she will be asked publicly about them in the confirmation process and that she will have convincing answers.”

Of course, if she is confirmed, we must all hope that she can put her previous client relationships behind her and work for her new client — us.

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Stanley Karnow, Historian and Journalist, Is Dead at 87

Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist who produced acclaimed books and television documentaries about Vietnam and the Philippines in the throes of war and upheaval, died on Sunday at his home in Potomac, Md. He was 87.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Mr. Karnow’s son, Michael.

For more than three decades Mr. Karnow was a correspondent in Southeast Asia, working for Time, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, The Washington Post, NBC News, The New Republic, King Features Syndicate and the Public Broadcasting Service. But he was best known for his books and documentaries.

He was in Vietnam in 1959, when the first American advisers were killed, and lingered long after the guns fell silent, talking to fighters, villagers, refugees, North and South Vietnamese political and military leaders, the French and the Americans, researching a people and a war that had been little understood.

The result was the 750-page book “Vietnam: A History,” published in 1983, and its companion, a 13-hour PBS documentary, “Vietnam: A Television History.” Unlike many books and films on Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s and the nightly newscasts that focused primarily on America’s role and its consequences at home and abroad, Mr. Karnow addressed all sides of the conflict and traced Vietnam’s culture and history.

“Vietnam: A History” was widely praised and a best seller. The documentary, with Mr. Karnow as chief correspondent, was at the time the most successful ever produced by public television, viewed by an average of nearly 10 million people a night through 13 episodes. It won six Emmy Awards, as well as Peabody, Polk and duPont-Columbia awards.

Six years later, Mr. Karnow delivered his second comprehensive book and television examination of a Southeast Asian nation. The book, “In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines” (1989), was a panorama of centuries of Filipino life under Spanish and American colonial rule, followed by independence under sometimes corrupt American-backed leaders. It won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for history.

Narrated by Mr. Karnow, the three-part PBS documentary “The U.S. and the Philippines: In Our Image” traced America’s paternalistic colonial rule in the Philippines, the shared suffering of Filipinos and Americans under a cruel Japanese occupation in World War II, and Manila’s postwar independence under regimes nominally democratic but repressive, corrupt or indifferent to the miseries of its people.

Mr. Karnow also wrote “Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution” (1972) and was a co-author of or contributor to books based on his years in Asia, including “Asian-Americans in Transition” (1992), “Passage to Vietnam” (1994), “Mekong” (1995) and “Historical Atlas of the Vietnam War” (1995).

Early in his career he lived in Paris for a decade, and in 1997 he published a memoir, “Paris in the Fifties.” A nostalgic reporter’s notebook of life among the cafe philosophers, berated musicians and pseudo-revolutionary artistes, it danced with digressions about taxes, restaurants, the guillotine, Hemingway, Charles de Gaulle and the Devil’s Island penal colony.

In its range, learning and appetite for fun, Bernard Kalb, the former CBS reporter and Mr. Karnow’s friend since Vietnam, told The Associated Press in 2009, the memoir was vintage Karnow. “Stanley has a great line about how being a journalist is like being an adolescent all your life,” he said.

Stanley Karnow was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 4, 1925, the son of Harry and Henriette Koeppel Karnow. He grew up in a city with more than a dozen daily newspapers and decided early that he wanted to become a reporter. He served in the Army Air Forces in World War II. After graduating from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in 1947, he sailed for France, intending to spend the summer. He stayed for a decade.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the year in which Stanley Karnow was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. It was 1958, not 2002. The article also misspelled the name of the Nieman Fellowship.

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Providence theater experiments with ‘tweet seats’

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Sarah Bertness slipped into her seat at a recent staging of the musical “Million Dollar Quartet” and, when the lights dimmed, started doing something that’s long been taboo inside theaters: typing away at her iPhone.

The 26-year-old freelance writer from Providence wasn’t being rude. She had a spot in the “tweet seat” section at the Providence Performing Arts Center.

The downtown theater is now setting aside a small number of seats — in the back — for those who promise to live-tweet from the performance using a special hash tag. They might offer impressions of the set, music or costumes, lines of dialogue that resonate with them or anything else that strikes them, really.

At “Million Dollar Quartet,” based on the true story of a 1956 recording session that united music greats Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, PPAC for the first time had cast members tweeting from backstage, too.

A growing number of theaters, including some on Broadway, have been experimenting in recent years with tweet seats and other real-time uses of social media as they try to figure out the relationship between the stage and the smartphone.

Some insist the theater should remain a sacred, technology-free place and that allowing the use of phones during a show — even discreetly — only serves as a potential distraction for other patrons. But others say theaters can’t afford not to engage the digital generation, and that the way performances were once enjoyed, in a vacuum, doesn’t hold up anymore.

“I think that it’s important that PPAC and cultural institutions in general kind of jump on the social media bandwagon and learn to engage a broader audience,” said Bertness, who runs the blog The Rhode Islander and is such a big Johnny Cash fan that she showed up to the performance wearing all black. “I think it’s such a valuable tool.”

Scott Moreau, an understudy for Johnny Cash, hadn’t ever tweeted from backstage during a performance. He tried to provide a glimpse of what life’s like on the tour, which he likened to the special features on a DVD. He said he enjoyed getting instant feedback from the tweeters — feedback he shared with other cast members.

“It makes it feel a lot more personal,” Moreau said.

A picture of Moreau that was tweeted out from backstage — he was tweeting in it himself — prompted someone in the tweet seats to declare that’s what the Man in Black would have looked like, with an iPhone.

Other theaters are also trying different digital ways to engage with patrons. In Boston, the Huntington Theater plans to introduce a “Twittermission” where an artist affiliated with the production, or someone from the theater’s staff, answers questions about the show on Twitter during intermissions. The tweets will also be projected on screens in the theater lobby, according to spokeswoman Rebecca Curtiss.

The theater won’t be introducing tweet seats, though.

“We feel strongly that the experience that an audience member has in our theater should be limited to what they are seeing on the stage,” Curtiss said. “When the lights go down and the show begins, we want the art on stage to speak for itself.”

PPAC isn’t sure yet whether any social media buzz generated by those in the tweet seats will have a measurable effect at the box office. But spokeswoman P.J. Prokop said the theater intends to keep the program through the end of the year, and then evaluate it. Those who sit in the tweet seats get their tickets for free.

Kirsten DiChiappari, who has tweeted three shows there to her nearly 1,400 followers, grew up in New Jersey going to Broadway musicals, plays and the opera. The 41-year-old social media consultant from Bristol sees her live-tweeting as a way to lure people from their living rooms, where many are glued to “horrible reality television.”

“It’s kind of a way to tease people back to support the live arts, the real arts, the original arts,” she said. “I feel like once they go, they’ll go again.”

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Well: Keeping Blood Pressure in Check

Since the start of the 21st century, Americans have made great progress in controlling high blood pressure, though it remains a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and kidney disease.

Now 48 percent of the more than 76 million adults with hypertension have it under control, up from 29 percent in 2000.

But that means more than half, including many receiving treatment, have blood pressure that remains too high to be healthy. (A normal blood pressure is lower than 120 over 80.) With a plethora of drugs available to normalize blood pressure, why are so many people still at increased risk of disease, disability and premature death? Hypertension experts offer a few common, and correctable, reasons:

¶ About 20 percent of affected adults don’t know they have high blood pressure, perhaps because they never or rarely see a doctor who checks their pressure.

¶ Of the 80 percent who are aware of their condition, some don’t appreciate how serious it can be and fail to get treated, even when their doctors say they should.

¶ Some who have been treated develop bothersome side effects, causing them to abandon therapy or to use it haphazardly.

¶ Many others do little to change lifestyle factors, like obesity, lack of exercise and a high-salt diet, that can make hypertension harder to control.

Dr. Samuel J. Mann, a hypertension specialist and professor of clinical medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College, adds another factor that may be the most important. Of the 71 percent of people with hypertension who are currently being treated, too many are taking the wrong drugs or the wrong dosages of the right ones.

Dr. Mann, author of “Hypertension and You: Old Drugs, New Drugs, and the Right Drugs for Your High Blood Pressure,” says that doctors should take into account the underlying causes of each patient’s blood pressure problem and the side effects that may prompt patients to abandon therapy. He has found that when treatment is tailored to the individual, nearly all cases of high blood pressure can be brought and kept under control with available drugs.

Plus, he said in an interview, it can be done with minimal, if any, side effects and at a reasonable cost.

“For most people, no new drugs need to be developed,” Dr. Mann said. “What we need, in terms of medication, is already out there. We just need to use it better.”

But many doctors who are generalists do not understand the “intricacies and nuances” of the dozens of available medications to determine which is appropriate to a certain patient.

“Prescribing the same medication to patient after patient just does not cut it,” Dr. Mann wrote in his book.

The trick to prescribing the best treatment for each patient is to first determine which of three mechanisms, or combination of mechanisms, is responsible for a patient’s hypertension, he said.

¶ Salt-sensitive hypertension, more common in older people and African-Americans, responds well to diuretics and calcium channel blockers.

¶ Hypertension driven by the kidney hormone renin responds best to ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers, as well as direct renin inhibitors and beta-blockers.

¶ Neurogenic hypertension is a product of the sympathetic nervous system and is best treated with beta-blockers, alpha-blockers and drugs like clonidine.

According to Dr. Mann, neurogenic hypertension results from repressed emotions. He has found that many patients with it suffered trauma early in life or abuse. They seem calm and content on the surface but continually suppress their distress, he said.

One of Dr. Mann’s patients had had high blood pressure since her late 20s that remained well-controlled by the three drugs her family doctor prescribed. Then in her 40s, periodic checks showed it was often too high. When taking more of the prescribed medication did not result in lasting control, she sought Dr. Mann’s help.

After a thorough work-up, he said she had a textbook case of neurogenic hypertension, was taking too much medication and needed different drugs. Her condition soon became far better managed, with side effects she could easily tolerate, and she no longer feared she would die young of a heart attack or stroke.

But most patients should not have to consult a specialist. They can be well-treated by an internist or family physician who approaches the condition systematically, Dr. Mann said. Patients should be started on low doses of one or more drugs, including a diuretic; the dosage or number of drugs can be slowly increased as needed to achieve a normal pressure.

Specialists, he said, are most useful for treating the 10 percent to 15 percent of patients with so-called resistant hypertension that remains uncontrolled despite treatment with three drugs, including a diuretic, and for those whose treatment is effective but causing distressing side effects.

Hypertension sometimes fails to respond to routine care, he noted, because it results from an underlying medical problem that needs to be addressed.

“Some patients are on a lot of blood pressure drugs — four or five — who probably don’t need so many, and if they do, the question is why,” Dr. Mann said.

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Stanley Karnow, Historian and Journalist, Is Dead at 87

Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist who produced acclaimed books and television documentaries about Vietnam and the Philippines in the throes of war and upheaval, died on Sunday at his home in Potomac, Md. He was 87.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Mr. Karnow’s son, Michael.

For more than three decades Mr. Karnow was a correspondent in Southeast Asia, working for Time, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, The Washington Post, NBC News, The New Republic, King Features Syndicate and the Public Broadcasting Service. But he was best known for his books and documentaries.

He was in Vietnam in 1959, when the first American advisers were killed, and lingered long after the guns fell silent, talking to fighters, villagers, refugees, North and South Vietnamese political and military leaders, the French and the Americans, researching a people and a war that had been little understood.

The result was the 750-page book “Vietnam: A History,” published in 1983, and its companion, a 13-hour PBS documentary, “Vietnam: A Television History.” Unlike many books and films on Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s and the nightly newscasts that focused primarily on America’s role and its consequences at home and abroad, Mr. Karnow addressed all sides of the conflict and traced Vietnam’s culture and history.

“Vietnam: A History” was widely praised and a best seller. The documentary, with Mr. Karnow as chief correspondent, was at the time the most successful ever produced by public television, viewed by an average of nearly 10 million people a night through 13 episodes. It won six Emmy Awards, as well as Peabody, Polk and duPont-Columbia awards.

Six years later, Mr. Karnow delivered his second comprehensive book and television examination of a Southeast Asian nation. The book, “In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines” (1989), was a panorama of centuries of Filipino life under Spanish and American colonial rule, followed by independence under sometimes corrupt American-backed leaders. It won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for history.

Narrated by Mr. Karnow, the three-part PBS documentary “The U.S. and the Philippines: In Our Image” traced America’s paternalistic colonial rule in the Philippines, the shared suffering of Filipinos and Americans under a cruel Japanese occupation in World War II, and Manila’s postwar independence under regimes nominally democratic but repressive, corrupt or indifferent to the miseries of its people.

Mr. Karnow also wrote “Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution” (1972) and was a co-author of or contributor to books based on his years in Asia, including “Asian-Americans in Transition” (1992), “Passage to Vietnam” (1994), “Mekong” (1995) and “Historical Atlas of the Vietnam War” (1995).

Early in his career he lived in Paris for a decade, and in 1997 he published a memoir, “Paris in the Fifties.” A nostalgic reporter’s notebook of life among the cafe philosophers, berated musicians and pseudo-revolutionary artistes, it danced with digressions about taxes, restaurants, the guillotine, Hemingway, Charles de Gaulle and the Devil’s Island penal colony.

In its range, learning and appetite for fun, Bernard Kalb, the former CBS reporter and Mr. Karnow’s friend since Vietnam, told The Associated Press in 2009, the memoir was vintage Karnow. “Stanley has a great line about how being a journalist is like being an adolescent all your life,” he said.

Stanley Karnow was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 4, 1925, the son of Harry and Henriette Koeppel Karnow. He grew up in a city with more than a dozen daily newspapers and decided early that he wanted to become a reporter. He served in the Army Air Forces in World War II. After graduating from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in 1947, he sailed for France, intending to spend the summer. He stayed for a decade.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the year in which Stanley Karnow was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. It was 1958, not 2002. The article also misspelled the name of the Nieman Fellowship.

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India Ink: Scattered Protests in Delhi on Republic Day

Several groups of protesters marched and demonstrated in New Delhi on Saturday as India celebrated its 64^th Republic Day, demanding better safety for women, a movement that started after the Dec. 16 gang rape of a young woman here.

A march of several hundred students, organized by the All India Students’ Association, sat on the street at Jantar Mantar, a designated protest area in central Delhi. The protesters carried the placards bearing slogans including, “No Violence Against Women,”l “Unknown Citizen,” and “Freedom Without Fear.” They shouted slogans including, “We Want Justice” and “Rajpath is yours. Janpath is ours.” (Rajpath is the street where the official Republic Day parade passes and Janpath is where the protesters began their march.)

“We want to counter the notion that women are safe inside. We want women to be safe outside,” said Oshin Siao Bhatt, a student at Miranda House College of Delhi University who attended.

“In 2012 only one rapist was convicted in Delhi while about 600 rapes took place,” Shafaq Khan, a philosophy student at Jawaharlal Nehru University said. “We want to reclaim our republic.”

At another rally organized by the Progressive Democratic Student Union, protesters’ placards proclaimed: “Respect The Sex Which Gave You Birth” and  “Punish The Police, Sensitize Judiciary, Eradicate Rape.”

At a third, placards read, “We Want Safety, Not Compensation,” referring to the money given by government to the family of the rape victim, and “We Want Justice Not Dates,” referring to the judicial delays.

At a fourth protest rally, an activist, Arvind Kejriwal, who has formed the Aam Admi, or Common Men, party to run for election, told a crowd that if the right people enter into politics, violence against women will decline. One small group of protesters had created a funeral pyre that they said represented the Delhi rape victim, and said they would not move themselves until the rapists were hanged.

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