Egypt’s President Said to Limit Scope of Judicial Decree

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptians stand near a burned out school, before the funeral of Mohammed Gaber Salah, an activist who died Sunday from injuries sustained during protests.

CAIRO — With public pressure mounting, President Mohamed Morsi appeared to pull back Monday from his attempt to assert an authority beyond the reach of any court. His allies in the Muslim Brotherhood canceled plans for a large demonstration in his support, signaling a chance to calm an escalating battle that has paralyzed a divided nation.

After Mr. Morsi met for hours with the judges of Egypt’s Supreme Judicial Council, his spokesman read an “explanation” on Egyptian television that appeared to backtrack from a presidential decree that had placed Mr. Morsi’s official edicts above judicial scrutiny — even while saying the president had not actually changed a word of the statement.

Though details of the talks remained hazy, and it was not at all clear whether the opposition or even the court would accept his position, Mr. Morsi’s gesture was another demonstration that Egyptians would no longer allow their rulers to operate above the law. But there appeared little chance that Mr. Morsi’s gesture alone would be enough to quell the crisis set off by his perceived power grab.

How far that gesture might go toward alleviating the political crisis, however, remained uncertain. Protesters remained camped in Tahrir Square, and the opposition was moving ahead with plans for a major demonstration on Tuesday.

In a televised statement, the presidential spokesman, Yasser Ali, said for the first time that Mr. Morsi had sought only to assert pre-existing powers already approved by the courts under previous precedents, not to give himself carte blanche from judicial oversight.

He said that the president meant all along to follow an established Egyptian legal doctrine suspending judicial scrutiny of presidential “acts of sovereignty” that work “to protect the main institutions of the state.” Mr. Morsi had maintained from the moment of his decree that his purpose was to empower himself to protect the constitutional assembly from threats that Mubarak-appointed judges might dissolve the constituent assembly, which is led by his fellow Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. The courts have already dissolved the Islamist-led Parliament and an earlier constituent assembly.

But the text of the original decree has exempted all presidential edicts from judicial review until the ratification of a constitution, not just those edicts justified as “acts of sovereignty.”

Legal experts said that the spokesman’s “explanations” of the president’s intentions, if put into effect, would amount to a revision of the decree he had issued last Thursday. But lawyers said that the verbal statements alone carried little legal weight.

How the courts would apply the doctrine remained hard to predict. And Mr. Morsi’s political opposition indicated it was holding out for far greater concessions, including the breakup of the Islamist-led constituent assembly.

Speaking at a news conference while Mr. Morsi was meeting with the judges, the opposition activist and intellectual Abdel Haleem Qandeil called for “a long-term battle,” declaring that withdraw of Mr. Morsi’s new powers was only the first step toward the opposition’s goal of “the withdrawal of the legitimacy of Morsi’s presence in the presidential palace.” Completely withdrawing the edict would be “a minimum,” he said.

Most in the opposition focused on the spokesman’s declaration that the president had not revised the text of his decree. Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer and former presidential candidate, pointed to the growing crowd of protesters camped out in Tahrir Square for a fourth night. “Reason here means that the one who did the action has to take it back,” Mr. Ali said.

Moataz Abdel Fattah, a political scientist at Cairo University, said Mr. Morsi appeared to be trying to save face with a strategic retreat. “He is trying to simply say, ‘I am not a new pharaoh, I am just trying to stabilize the institutions that we already have,’ ” he said. “But for the liberals, this is now their moment, and for sure they are not going to waste it, because he has given them an excellent opportunity to score.”

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$1,499 Gaming Laptop is Ready for Steam on Linux

Alternative, Linux-based operating systems like Ubuntu haven’t historically carried much weight with PC gamers. Very few PC games have been made for Linux, over the years, ever since the company that was porting AAA gaming titles to Linux (Loki Games) went bankrupt in 2001. And while it’s possible to use a “compatibility layer” such as Wine to run Windows PC games in Linux, the results are mixed at best and require a lot of technical tweaking, sometimes even in between updates.

Colorado-based indie PC hardware company System76, however, clearly expects that not only are there PC gamers on Linux out there, but that some of them are willing to pay $ 1,499 for a tricked-out gaming laptop — the 17.3-inch Bonobo Extreme. Like all of System76′s machines, it runs the Ubuntu flavor of Linux; and its actual price tag is $ 1,599, but it’s gotten a $ 100 discount for the holidays.

Is it ahead of its time, like the Loki Games ports? Or has the time come for a new age of Linux gaming? For whatever reason, Valve — the creators of the Steam social gaming service — seems to think the latter.

​The hardware

The 17.3-inch screen is full 1080p, with a 1920×1080 resolution. Pretty much every spec starts out at “high end” and maxes out at “over the top”; it comes standard with an Intel Core i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM and a 500 GB, 7200 RPM hard drive, with a second drive bay and the option to swap the DVD burner out for a third storage disk. All three have the option of going up to a 512 GB Crucial solid state disk, or a 480 GB Intel SSD.

Gaming graphics are powered by an nVidia GeForce GTX 670MX, with 3 GB of memory. An extra $ 340 will get you a GTX 680M with 4 GB of memory. All told, with every possible hardware upgrade the Bonobo Extreme maxes out at an “extreme” $ 4,333 … and the Alienware-style, multicolored light-up keyboard is included for free.

​But what about the games?

Valve’s Linux Steam client is currently in beta, with another 5,000 testers added over the Thanksgiving holiday. About two dozen games are already available for purchase, including Valve’s free-to-play multiplayer online shooter Team Fortress 2 and a selection of games from previous Humble Indie Bundles.

The HIB previously became famous not just for having nearly all of its games support Linux, but for posting public sales figures online, and showing that a good-sized chunk of each bundle’s sales were for Linux gamers. Efforts such as this helped to convince Valve that supporting Linux would be worthwhile … and also seem to have reached someone at System76.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Column: Johnny Football should be Johnny Heisman

Johnny Football finally got a chance to speak Monday.

This was it, our first opportunity to hear from the quarterback himself why he feels he should win the Heisman Trophy.

Turns out, he's not much of a lobbyist.

Off the charts when he's got that ol' pigskin in his hands, Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel sounds like just another boring QB when asked about his chances of becoming the first freshman to claim college football's highest individual honor.

He says it would be "a dream come true." (Boooring!) He says "whatever is meant to happen will happen." (Give this man an award for clichés.) He deflects credit to his teammates and coaches, pointing out time and time again that none of his success would be possible without those around him. (Wake us when he's done.)

That's OK. Nothing more really needs to be said.

Johnny Football, meet Johnny Heisman.

With a nod to Notre Dame defensive star Manti Te'o, a dominating linebacker with a bittersweet back story, Manziel's numbers are simply too outlandish to be denied.

— He's rushed for 1,181 yards and 19 touchdowns.

— He's thrown for 3,419 yards and another two dozen TDs.

— He's already surpassed Cam Newton's totals from two years ago by 273 yards (in two fewer games), and the former Auburn quarterback won the award in a landslide.

Manziel deserves a similar rout.

"The way Johnny has performed this season, the numbers speak for themselves," said Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin, who had barred Manziel from talking to reporters until Monday. "He's a tremendous competitor, a tremendous leader. That's something you really don't see in a player as a redshirt freshman. But all his leadership — on and off the field, all throughout the season — made our season a real special one."

Sumlin's policy of denying media privileges to all his freshmen, even those like Manziel who are in their second year of school, has only added to the mystique.

Here was a guy with the cool nickname and enough highlights to fill his own YouTube channel, but we didn't really know anything else about him other than what was in the biography. The small-town Texas kid who initially committed to Oregon but really wanted to play in the Lone Star State, who signed with the Aggies when Mike Sherman was the coach but didn't get a chance to play until Sumlin took over the job.

Otherwise, our impressions were formed by what he did with the helmet on.

How he ran circles around opposing defenses, how he threw touchdown passes off the wrong foot, how he chased down and tackled two Louisiana Tech players after a turnover, how he led the Aggies to a surprising 10-win season in their Southeastern Conference debut, including an upset of mighty Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Now, after an hour-long conference call with media from all over the country, we know a little more.

Manziel is cool with the nickname. He enjoys playing video games, including the college football version, though apparently not so much as himself. He's still getting used to all the attention he receives when he does something as simple as going out to dinner.

"I don't see myself as Johnny Football. I see myself as Johnathan Manziel," he says. "When people want to take my picture or ask for an autograph, I'm shocked by it. I'm not used to the whole thing, even though it's kind of becoming a daily thing."

He tries to avoid watching highlights of himself, like the ones posted in countless tribute videos, or the more humorous attempts to pay homage to his growing legend. No, he hasn't seen the video by the woman old enough to be his mother, who croons to the camera with her own version of early-1960s hit "Johnny Angel" while surrounded by Aggies gear.

"Johnny Football, how we love him," she warbles. "He's got something Aggies can't resist. And he doesn't even know impossible exists."

In other seasons, when the race wasn't so clear-cut, Te'o might've been positioned to join Charles Woodson as only the second defensive player to capture the Heisman.

The Notre Dame senior certainly has the stats to back up his candidacy (103 tackles and seven interceptions), but there's so much more to his resume.

He's the undisputed leader on the nation's top-ranked team, a major reason the Fighting Irish went unbeaten in the regular season for the first time since 1988 and landed a spot in the national championship game against either Alabama or Georgia. It's hard not to shed a tear every time he makes a big play, either, remembering how he's still dealing with the grief of losing both his grandmother (who died after a long illness) and his girlfriend (who succumbed to leukemia) just a few hours apart on an awful day back in September.

A special season, to be sure.

But Manziel's debut season goes beyond that. It's transformational, like the first time you saw Herschel Walker flatten a defensive back, or Michael Vick cutting this way and that on one play, then unleashing a 70-yard pass on the next.

It's beyond Heisman-worthy.

"This is something you dream about as a kid," Manziel said. "When you're playing those NCAA (video) games as a kid, you create players who can win the Heisman by putting up some crazy numbers."

When he used to dream up his perfect player for that make-believe world, it looked more like Newton.

You know, 6-foot-6, about 250 pounds, stronger and faster than anyone else on the field.

In real life, Manziel didn't turn out that way. He's just a smidgen over 6-foot. He tips the scales at around 200 pounds. Solid, but not imposing.

"I did get tackled a couple of times and heard people say, 'You're really small' or 'You're not as big as we thought,'" Manziel conceded.

Turns out, he was better than the guy on the video game.

The one with the Heisman.

___

Paul Newberry in a national writer for The Associated Press. Write to him at pnewberry(at)ap.org or www.twitter.com/pnewberry1963

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Panel Lukewarm on Hepatitis C Screening for Baby Boomers

An influential advisory committee has given only lukewarm support to a government recommendation that all baby boomers be tested for hepatitis C.

In a draft opinion Monday, the United States Preventive Services Task Force said that clinicians may “consider offering” hepatitis C screening to adults born between 1945 and 1965.

That falls short of the recommendation made in August by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all adults in that age group should get a one-time test to see if they are infected.

The task force is made up of outside experts appointed by the government, and its recommendations can in some cases carry more weight than those of the C.D.C. Had hepatitis C screening for baby boomers received a stronger recommendation from the task force, health plans would have been required to pay for it under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, with no charge to the patient.

Some advocates of wider screening said they feared the new opinion would be used by insurers to deny reimbursement for testing and would slow efforts to ferret out hidden cases of hepatitis C at a time when more effective and tolerable treatments are being developed.

The recommendation “could derail the hard work that the C.D.C. has put in in proving the case that it’s smart for baby boomers to get a one-time hepatitis C test,” said Martha B. Saly, director of the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable, a coalition of more than 200 groups dedicated to eradicating hepatitis. Some drug companies, which would benefit from wider screening, are associate members of the round table.

Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, of the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the task force, said differences in the recommendations were merely a matter of degree. “I would say our findings are compatible,” she said.

The C.D.C. declined to comment, saying the opinion was still a draft.

About 3 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C, but 45 percent to 85 percent of them do not know it, according to the C.D.C. The virus can cause scarring of the liver and liver cancer, though typically not until decades after the initial infection, and not in everyone. About 15,000 people a year die from hepatitis C.

The C.D.C. used to recommend screening only for people most likely to be infected: intravenous drug users or people who got blood transfusions before 1992 when testing of donated blood for the virus began.

But a lot of cases were missed because people did not remember risky behaviors from decades ago or did not tell their doctors.

So in August the C.D.C. recommended that all baby boomers be tested. Although only about 3 percent of this age group is infected, they account for about three quarters of all cases. Screening them would detect more than 800,000 infections, which could then potentially be treated, averting many cases of liver disease and about 120,000 deaths.

But the task force said there were no clinical trials or studies directly proving that screening asymptomatic adults would reduce liver disease or deaths.

It noted that the C.D.C. recommendation was based partly on computer models that might have overestimated how many people with hepatitis C would develop liver cirrhosis or die, and therefore overstated the number of cases or deaths that could be prevented.

The task force concluded that there would be at least a small benefit from screening baby boomers and gave the recommendation a grade of C, meaning “for most individuals without signs or symptoms there is likely to be only a small benefit from this service.”

The task force provoked controversy in the past with recommendations against screening for prostate cancer and against routine mammograms for women under 50.

In 2004, the task force recommended against hepatitis C screening of adults not considered at high risk.

The draft, posted on the task force Web site, will be open for comment until Dec. 24. The evidence behind the recommendation is being published in The Annals of Internal Medicine.

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Budget Talks and Retailers’ Discounts Drag Markets Down

The stock market mostly slipped on Monday, pulling back from last week’s gains in Thanksgiving-shortened trading, as retailers fell on concerns about heavy discounts at the start of the holiday shopping season and the overhang of federal budget negotiations kept investors wary of making big bets.

The Nasdaq composite index closed higher, led by gains in eBay and Apple. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index cut most of its losses during Monday’s trading session and remained above its 200-day moving average, maintaining its long-term upward trend.

The S.& P. 500 consumer discretionary index fell 0.5 percent after the start of the holiday shopping season over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. Target, one of the largest retailers by market value, fell $1.71, or 2.6 percent, to $62.78.

“The concern is big retailers are discounting so much, sales look better, but at what cost?” said Angel Mata, managing director of listed equity trading at Stifel Nicolaus Capital Markets.

Bucking the retail trend, shares of eBay closed at their highest in almost eight years, rising $2.39, or 4.9 percent, to $51.40, as the online marketplace posted strong sales on Cyber Monday. Amazon gained $3.74, or 1.6 percent, to $243.62.

The White House showed little enthusiasm on Monday for a proposal to avoid the fiscal shock of tax increases and spending cuts to take effect at the first of the year by limiting tax deductions and loopholes, instead of allowing tax rates to rise for the richest Americans.

Investors are hoping for advances in Congressional talks over the more than $600 billion in spending cuts and tax increases that threaten to drag the American economy back into recession.

Indications of progress in talks, or just a political willingness to negotiate, contributed to the market’s recent rally. Major indexes last week gained 3 to 4 percent; the Dow Jones industrial average moved above 13,000 and the S.&P. 500 above 1,400 for the first time since Nov. 6.

On Monday, the Dow industrials fell 42.31 points, or 0.33 percent, to 12,967.37. The S.& P. 500 dropped 2.86 points, or 0.20 percent, to 1,406.29. The Nasdaq gained 9.93 points, or 0.33 percent, to 2,976.78.

Apple, a big mover in the Nasdaq, jumped $18.03, or 3.2 percent, to $589.53. The company said on Friday that it had asked a federal court to add six more products to its patent infringement lawsuit against Samsung Electronics, including the Samsung Galaxy Note II, the latest move in the continuing legal war between the two companies.

In the bond market, interest rates slipped. The price of the Treasury’s 10-year note rose 8/32, to 99 20/32, while its yield fell to 1.67 percent, from 1.69 percent on Friday.

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Bangladesh Fire Kills More Than 100 and Injures Many

MUMBAI, India — More than 100 people died Saturday and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, in one of the worst industrial tragedies in that country.

It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it started about 7 p.m. on Saturday, a retired fire official said by telephone from Dhaka, the capital. At least 111 people were killed, and scores of workers were taken to hospitals for treatment of burns and smoke inhalation.

“The main difficulty was to put out the fire; the sufficient approach road was not there,” said the retired official, Salim Nawaj Bhuiyan, who now runs a fire safety company in Dhaka. “The fire service had to take great trouble to approach the factory.”

Bangladesh’s garment industry, the second-largest exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor fire safety record. Since 2006, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop advocacy group in Amsterdam. Experts say many of the fires could have easily been avoided if the factories had taken the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods and have too few fire escapes, and they widely flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, most of them women.

Activists say that global clothing brands like Tommy Hilfiger and the Gap and those sold by Walmart need to take responsibility for the working conditions in Bangladeshi factories that produce their clothes.

“These brands have known for years that many of the factories they choose to work with are death traps,” Ineke Zeldenrust, the international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, said in a statement. “Their failure to take action amounts to criminal negligence.”

The fire at the Tazreen factory in Savar, northwest of Dhaka, started in a warehouse on the ground floor that was used to store yarn, and quickly spread to the upper floors. The building was nine stories high, with the top three floors under construction, according to a garment industry official at the scene who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. Though most workers had left for the day when the fire started, the industry official said, as many as 600 workers were still inside working overtime.

The factory, which opened in May 2010, employed about 1,500 workers and had sales of $35 million a year, according to a document on the company’s Web site. It made T-shirts, polo shirts and fleece jackets.

Most of the workers who died were on the first and second floors, fire officials said, and were killed because there were not enough exits. “So the workers could not come out when the fire engulfed the building,” said Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, the operations director for the Fire Department, according to The Associated Press.

In a telephone interview later on Sunday, Major Mahbub said the fire could have been caused by an electrical fault or by a spark from a cigarette.

In a brief phone call, Delowar Hossain, the managing director of the Tuba Group, the parent company of Tazreen Fashions, said he was too busy to comment. “Pray for me,” he said and then hung up.

Television news reports showed badly burned bodies lined up on the floor in what appeared to be a government building. The injured were being treated in hallways of local hospitals, according to the reports.

The industry official said that many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition and that it would take some time to identify them.

One survivor, Mohammad Raju, 22, who worked on the fifth floor, said he escaped by climbing out of a third-floor window onto the bamboo scaffolding that was being used by construction workers. He said he lost his mother, who also worked on the fifth floor, when they were making their way down.

“It was crowded on the stairs as all the workers were trying to come out from the factory,” Mr. Raju said. “There was no power supply; it was dark, and I lost my mother in dark. I tried to search for her for 10 to 15 minutes but did not find her.”

A document posted on Tazreen Fashions’ Web site indicated that an “ethical sourcing” official for Walmart had flagged “violations and/or conditions which were deemed to be high risk” at the factory in May 2011, though it did not specify the nature of the infractions. The notice said that the factory had been given an “orange” grade and that any factories given three such assessments in two years from their last audit would not receive any Walmart orders for a year.

A spokesman for Walmart, Kevin Gardner, said the company was “so far unable to confirm that Tazreen is a supplier to Walmart nor if the document referenced in the article is in fact from Walmart.”

But the International Labor Rights Forum, which tracks fires in the Bangladesh garment industry, said documents and logos found in the debris indicated that the factory produced clothes for Walmart’s Faded Glory line as well as for other American and foreign companies.

Bangladesh exports about $18 billion worth of garments a year. Employees in the country’s factories are among the world’s lowest-paid, with entry-level workers making the government-mandated minimum wage of about $37 a month or slightly above.

Tensions have been running high between workers, who have been demanding an increase in minimum wages, and the factory owners and government. A union organizer, Aminul Islam, who campaigned for better working conditions and higher wages, was found tortured and killed outside Dhaka this year.

Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Stephanie Clifford and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

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Nokia imaging chief to quit

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Nokia‘s long-time imaging chief Damian Dinning has decided to leave the loss-making cellphone maker at the end of this month, the company said in a statement.

The strong imaging capabilities of the new Lumia smartphone models are a key sales argument for the former market leader, which has been burning through cash while losing share in both high-end smartphones and cheaper handsets.

Nokia’s Chief Executive Stephen Elop has replaced most of the top management since he joined in late 2010 and Dinnig is the latest of several executives to leave.

Dinning did not want to move to Finland as part of the phonemakers’ effort to concentrate operations and will join Jaguar Land Rover to head innovations in the field of connected cars, he said on Nokia’s imaging fan site PureViewclub.com.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki, editing by William Hardy)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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49ers use defense to beat Saints, 31-21

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Ahmad Brooks, Donte Whitner and the rest of the San Francisco defense made enough plays for the 49ers to win no matter who they started at quarterback.

Brooks and Whitner returned interceptions for touchdowns, the 49ers sacked Drew Brees five times, and San Francisco ended the New Orleans Saints' three-game winning streak, 31-21 on Sunday.

Colin Kaepernick was solid in his second career start while Alex Smith, deemed healthy enough to suit up after recovering from a concussion, watched from the sideline. Kaepernick passed for 231 yards, including a short touchdown to Frank Gore. He also ran for a 7-yard score. He threw his first career interception, but it was inconsequential.

Brees finished with 267 yards and three TDs. After rushing for 140 yards or more in each of its previous three games, New Orleans (5-6) managed only 59 yards against San Francisco (8-2-1).

One of Brees' scoring passes went to Marques Colston, who set a Saints record with his 56th career touchdown with the club.

The Niners gained 144 yards on the ground, led by Gore with 83. The Saints shut down tight end Vernon Davis, the player they feared perhaps the most, but the Niners' other tight end, Delanie Walker, had three catches for 81 yards, including one for 45 yards to set up a touchdown.

San Francisco's interceptions turned a 14-7 deficit into a 28-14 lead.

Brooks snagged the first, returning it 50 yards late in the first half. The second came on Brees' first pass of the second half. The ball deflected off Colston's hands as the leaping receiver was upended and briefly shaken up. Whitner snagged the deflected pass and returned it 42 yards to make it 28-14

Since losing to the New York Giants on Oct. 14, the Niners are 5-0-1 and now hold a 2 1/2-game lead in the NFC West with five games to go.

It seems their biggest problem at this point is deciding who should be their No. 1 QB. Smith, who led the Niners to the NFC title game last season, started the first nine games this season before his injury.

The Saints, meanwhile, missed a chance to pull into a tie for the last NFC wild card berth, and remain a game out with another tough game coming up at Atlanta on Thursday night.

Kaepernick used the running ability that served him so well in college at Nevada to give the Niners the early lead, scoring on a read-option run that fooled the Saints defense as well as the Superdome crowd, which erupted, initially believing the play had been snuffed out, while Kaepernick scampered to his left and scored easily.

The drive was highlighted by Mario Manningham's 40-yard gain after Kaepernick found him wide open on a short crossing route.

Then, New Orleans' offense, which could not muster a first down on its first two drives, suddenly ignited, marching 79 yards in 10 plays — highlighted by Joe Morgan's diving 33-yard catch — to tie it on tight end David Thomas' 6-yard catch.

San Francisco entered the game allowing a league-low 13.4 points per game. The Saints surpassed that in the second quarter when Brees hit Colston to make it 14-7 and capitalize on Ted Ginn Jr.'s fumbled punt, which Rafael Bush had recovered on the 49ers 10.

New Orleans looking intent on going up by two scores after Kaepernick's first career interception on an underthrown pass that cornerback Patrick Robinson easily caught. But the crowd has hardly finished celebrating when Brooks stepped in front of Brees' pass for Jimmy Graham and returned it 50 yards to tie it at 14 shortly before halftime.

___

Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

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M.I.T. Lab Hatches Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens

HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair.

The Langer Lab is on the front lines of turning discoveries made in the lab into a range of drugs and drug delivery systems. Without this kind of technology transfer, the thinking goes, scientific discoveries might well sit on the shelf, stifling innovation.

A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Langer has helped start 25 companies and has 811 patents, issued or pending, to his name. That’s not too far behind Thomas Edison, who had 1,093. More than 250 companies have licensed or sublicensed Langer Lab patents.

Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm, has invested $220 million in 18 Langer Lab-inspired businesses. Combined, these businesses have improved the health of many millions of people, says Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris.

Along the way, Dr. Langer and his lab, including about 60 postdoctoral and graduate students at a time, have found a way to navigate some slippery territory: the intersection of academic research and the commercial market.

Over the last 30 years, many universities — including M.I.T. — have set up licensing offices that oversee the transfer of scientific discoveries to companies. These offices have become a major pathway for universities seeking to put their research to practical use, not to mention add to their revenue streams.

In the sciences in particular, technology transfer has become a key way to bring drugs and other treatments to market. “The model of biomedical innovation relies on research coming out of universities, often funded by public money,” says Josephine Johnston, director of research at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research organization based in Garrison, N.Y.

Just a few of the products that have emerged from the Langer Lab are a small wafer that delivers a dose of chemotherapy used to treat brain cancer; sugar-sequencing tools that can be used to create new drugs like safer and more effective blood thinners; and a miniaturized chip (a form of nanotechnology) that can test for diseases.

The chemotherapy wafer, called the Gliadel, is licensed by Eisai Inc. The company behind the sugar-sequencing tools, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, raised $28.4 million in an initial public offering in 2004. The miniaturized chip is made by T2Biosystems,  which completed a $23 million round of financing in the summer of 2011.

“It’s inconvenient to have to send things to a lab,” so the company is trying to develop more sophisticated methods, says Dr. Ralph Weissleder, a co-founder, with Dr. Langer and others, of T2Biosystems and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

FOR Dr. Langer, starting a company is not the same as it was, say, for Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook. “Bob is not consumed with any one company,” says H. Kent Bowen, an emeritus professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who wrote a case study on the Langer Lab. “His mission is to create the idea.”

Dr. Bowen observes that there are many other academic laboratories, including highly productive ones, but that the Langer Lab’s combination of people, spun-out companies and publications sets it apart. He says Dr. Langer “walks into the great unknown and then makes these discoveries.”

Dr. Langer is well known for his mentoring abilities. He is “notorious for replying to e-mail in two minutes, whether it’s a lowly graduate school student or the president of the United States,” says Paulina Hill, who worked in his lab from 2009 to 2011 and is now a senior associate at Polaris Venture Partners. (According to Dr. Langer, he has corresponded directly with President Obama about stem cell research and federal funds for the sciences.)

Dr. Langer says he looks at his students “as an extended family,” adding that “I really want them to do well.”

And they have, whether in business or in academia, or a combination of the two. One former student, Ram Sasisekharan, helped found Momenta and now runs his own lab at M.I.T. Ganesh Venkataraman Kaundinya is Momenta’s chief scientific officer and senior vice president for research.

Hongming Chen is vice president of research at Kala Pharmaceuticals. Howard Bernstein is chief scientific officer at Seventh Sense Biosystems, a blood-testing company. Still others have taken jobs in the law or in government.

Dr. Langer says he spends about eight hours a week working on companies that come out of his lab. Of the 25 that he helped start, he serves on the boards of 12 and is an informal adviser to 4. All of his entrepreneurial activity, which includes some equity stakes, has made him a millionaire. But he says he is mainly motivated by a desire to improve people’s health.

Operating from the sixth floor of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Langer’s lab has a research budget of more than $10 million for 2012, coming mostly from federal sources.

The research in labs like Dr. Langer’s is eyed closely by pharmaceutical companies. While drug companies employ huge research and development teams, they may not be as freewheeling and nimble, Dr. Langer says. The basis for many long-range discoveries has “come out of academia, including gene therapy, gene sequencing and tissue engineering,” he says.

He has served as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies. Their large size, he says, can end up being an impediment.

“Very often when you are going for real innovation,” he says, “you have to go against prevailing wisdom, and it’s hard to go against prevailing wisdom when there are people who have been there for a long time and you have some vice president who says, ‘No, that doesn’t make sense.’ ”

Pharmaceutical companies are eager to tap into the talent at leading research universities. In 2008, for example, Washington University in St. Louis announced a $25 million pact with Pfizer to collaborate more closely on biomedical research.

But in some situations, the close — critics might say cozy — ties between business and academia have the potential to create conflicts of interest.

There was a controversy earlier this year when it was revealed that the president of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center owned stock in Aveo Oncology, which had announced earlier that the university would be leading clinical trials of one of its cancer drugs.  Last month, the University of Texas announced that he would be allowed to keep his ties with three pharmaceutical companies, including Aveo Oncology; his holdings will be placed in a blind trust.

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Legality of Warrantless Cellphone Searches Goes to Courts and Legislatures

Judges and lawmakers across the country are wrangling over whether and when law enforcement authorities can peer into suspects’ cellphones, and the cornucopia of evidence they provide.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where Hanni Fakhoury is a lawyer, have lobbied for legislation that would require authorities to obtain a warrant before demanding cellphone location records.

A Rhode Island judge threw out cellphone evidence that led to a man being charged with the murder of a 6-year-old boy, saying the police needed a search warrant. A court in Washington compared text messages to voice mail messages that can be overheard by anyone in a room and are therefore not protected by state privacy laws.

In Louisiana, a federal appeals court is weighing whether location records stored in smartphones deserve privacy protection, or whether they are “business records” that belong to the phone companies.

“The courts are all over the place,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a criminal lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group. “They can’t even agree if there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy in text messages that would trigger Fourth Amendment protection.”

The issue will attract attention on Thursday when a Senate committee considers limited changes to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 law that regulates how the government can monitor digital communications. Courts have used it to permit warrantless surveillance of certain kinds of cellphone data.

A proposed amendment would require the police to obtain a warrant to search e-mail, no matter how old it was, updating a provision that currently allows warrantless searches of e-mails more than 180 days old.

As technology races ahead of the law, courts and lawmakers are still trying to figure out how to think about the often intimate data that cellphones contain, said Peter P. Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University. Neither the 1986 statute nor the Constitution, he said, could have anticipated how much information cellphones are privy to, including detailed records of people’s travels and diagrams of their friends.

“It didn’t take into account what the modern cellphone has — your location, the content of communications that are easily readable, including Facebook posts, chats, texts and all that stuff,” Mr. Swire said.

Courts have also issued divergent rulings on when and how cellphones can be inspected. An Ohio court ruled that the police needed a warrant to search a cellphone because, unlike a piece of paper that might be stuffed inside a suspect’s pocket and can be confiscated during an arrest, a cellphone may hold “large amounts of private data.”

But California’s highest court said the police could look through a cellphone without a warrant so long as the phone was with the suspect at the time of arrest.

Judges across the nation have written tomes about whether a cellphone is akin to a “container” — like a suitcase stuffed with marijuana that the police might find in the trunk of a car — or whether, as the judge in the Rhode Island murder case suggested, it is more comparable to a face-to-face conversation. That judge, Judith C. Savage, described text messages as “raw, unvarnished and immediate, revealing the most intimate of thoughts and emotions.” That is why, she said, citizens can reasonably expect them to be private.

There is little disagreement about the value of cellphone data to the police. In response to a Congressional inquiry, cellphone carriers said they responded in 2011 to 1.3 million demands from law enforcement agencies for text messages and other information about subscribers.

Among the most precious information in criminal inquiries is the location of suspects, and when it comes to location records captured by smartphones, court rulings have also been inconsistent. Privacy advocates say a trail of where people go is inherently private, while law enforcement authorities say that consumers have no privacy claim over signals transmitted from an individual mobile device to a phone company’s communications tower, which they refer to as third-party data.

Delaware, Maryland and Oklahoma have proposed legislation that would require the police to obtain a warrant before demanding location records from cellphone carriers. California passed such a law in August after intense lobbying by privacy advocates, including Mr. Fakhoury’s group. But Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, questioning whether it struck “the right balance between the operational needs of law enforcement and individual expectations of privacy.”

Similar legislation has been proposed in Congress.

Lacking a clear federal statute, the courts have been unable to reach a consensus. In Texas, a federal appeals court said this year that law enforcement officials did not need a warrant to track suspects through cellphones. In Louisiana, another federal appeals court is considering a similar case. Prosecutors are arguing that location information is part of cellphone carriers’ business records and thus not constitutionally protected.

The Supreme Court has not directly tackled the issue, except to declare, in a landmark ruling this year, that the police must obtain a search warrant to install a GPS tracking device on someone’s private property.

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