Petraeus’s Lower C.I.A. Profile Leaves Benghazi Void

WASHINGTON — In 14 months as C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus has shunned the spotlight he once courted as America’s most famous general. His low-profile style has won the loyalty of the White House, easing old tensions with President Obama, and he has overcome some of the skepticism he faced from the agency’s work force, which is always wary of the military brass.

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

The low-profile style of David H. Petraeus, right, has won the loyalty of the White House, easing old tensions with President Obama.

Win Mcnamee/Getty Images

C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus, right, appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in Washington in January.

But since an attack killed four Americans seven weeks ago in Benghazi, Libya, his deliberately low profile, and the C.I.A.’s penchant for secrecy, have left a void that has been filled by a news media and Congressional furor over whether it could have been prevented. Rather than acknowledge the C.I.A.’s presence in Benghazi, Mr. Petraeus and other agency officials fought a losing battle to keep it secret, even as the events there became a point of contention in the presidential campaign.

Finally, on Thursday, with Mr. Petraeus away on a visit to the Middle East, pressure from critics prompted intelligence officials to give their own account of the chaotic night when two security officers died along with the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and another diplomat. The officials acknowledged for the first time that the security officers, both former members of the Navy SEALs, worked on contract for the C.I.A., which occupied one of the buildings that were attacked.

The Benghazi crisis is the biggest challenge so far in the first civilian job held by Mr. Petraeus, who retired from the Army and dropped the “General” when he went to the C.I.A. He gets mostly high marks from government colleagues and outside experts for his overall performance. But the transition has meant learning a markedly different culture, at an agency famously resistant to outsiders.

“I think he’s a brilliant man, but he’s also a four-star general,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Four-stars are saluted, not questioned. He’s now running an agency where everything is questioned, whether you’re a four-star or a senator. It’s a culture change.”

Mr. Petraeus, who turns 60 next week, has had to learn that C.I.A. officers will not automatically defer to his judgments, as military subordinates often did. “The attitude at the agency is, ‘You may be the director, but I’m the Thailand analyst,’ ” said one C.I.A. veteran.

Long a media star as the most prominent military leader of his generation, Mr. Petraeus abruptly abandoned that style at the C.I.A. Operating amid widespread complaints about leaks of classified information, he has stopped giving interviews, speaks to Congress in closed sessions and travels the globe to consult with foreign spy services with little news media notice.

“He thinks he has to be very discreet and let others in the government do the talking,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution scholar who is a friend of Mr. Petraeus’s and a member of the C.I.A.’s advisory board.

Mr. Petraeus’s no-news, no-nonsense style stands out especially starkly against that of his effusive predecessor, Leon E. Panetta, who is now the defense secretary.

Mr. Panetta, a gregarious politician by profession, was unusually open with Congress and sometimes with the public — to a fault, some might say, when he spoke candidly after leaving the C.I.A. about a Pakistani doctor’s role in helping hunt for Osama bin Laden, or about the agency’s drone operations.

Mr. Petraeus’s discretion and relentless work ethic have had a positive side for him: old tensions with Mr. Obama, which grew out of differing views on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, appear to be gone. Mr. Petraeus is at the White House several times a week, attending National Security Council sessions and meeting weekly with James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, and Thomas E. Donilon, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser. Mr. Donilon said recently that the C.I.A. director “has done an exceptional job,” bringing “deep experience, intellectual rigor and enthusiasm” to his work.

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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NYC Marathon is canceled following storm damage

NEW YORK (AP) — Gisela Clausen delivered the news to her fellow runners from Germany as they walked into the New Yorker Hotel.

"We spend a year on this. We don't eat what we want. We don't drink what we want. And we're on the streets for hours. We live for this marathon," she said, "but we understand."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg reversed himself Friday and yielded to mounting criticism that this was no time to run the New York City Marathon: runners were ready but weary residents were still recovering from a monster storm named Sandy.

And just like that, the race was scrapped.

Bloomberg, who as late as Friday afternoon insisted the world's largest marathon should go on as scheduled Sunday, changed course shortly afterward amid intensifying opposition from the city comptroller, the Manhattan borough president and sanitation workers unhappy they had volunteered to help storm victims but were assigned to the race instead. The mayor said he would not want "a cloud to hang over the race or its participants."

"I'm shocked," said Clausen, who is from Munich. "Not at the situation, but at how short this decision is (in) coming."

Like Clausen, many of the runners understood the rationale behind the decision. The death toll in the city stood at 41 and thousands of people were shivering without electricity, making many New Yorkers recoil at the idea of police officers protecting a foot race and evicting storm victims from hotels to make way for runners.

But the suddenness of it all forced runners to deal with an unexpected twist: What to do with no race.

Nearly 40,000 athletes — well over half from out of town — were expected at the Staten Island start line on Sunday. Their entry fees were paid. Their airline tickets were purchased. Their friends and family had hotel rooms. And all week the race was a go — even after Sandy came ashore Monday and ripped up everything in its path.

"I understand why it cannot be held under the current circumstances," Meb Keflezighi, the 2009 men's champion and 2004 Olympic silver medalist, said in a statement. "Any inconveniences the cancellation causes me or the thousands of runners who trained and traveled for this race pales in comparison to the challenges faced by people in NYC and its vicinity."

The cancellation means there won't be another NYC Marathon until next year.

"We cannot allow a controversy over an athletic event — even one as meaningful as this — to distract attention away from all the critically important work that is being done to recover from the storm and get our city back on track," Bloomberg said.

The nationally televised marathon had been held annually since 1970, including 2001, about two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The 26.2-mile race had been scheduled to start in Staten Island, one of the storm's hardest-hit places, and wind through all of the city's five boroughs with 2 million spectators usually lining the route.

In Staten Island, Cynthia Spinner said, "Thank God, thank God," when she heard the marathon was canceled.

"More for our people in New York," she said. "They shouldn't take their police or ambulance services off of what they're doing now to go for the marathon. People need homes. They're in hotels; they need everything right now."

Across the metro area Friday, the recovery made slow progress. Companies turned the lights back on, and many employees returned to their desks. Many major retailers also reopened.

But patience was wearing thin among New Yorkers who had been without power for most of the week.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo told utilities to step up power repair work or risk losing business in the state. And officials said the cost of the storm could exceed $18 billion in New York alone.

From storm-scarred New Jersey to parts of Connecticut, a widespread lack of gasoline frustrated people who were just trying to get to work or pick up a load of groceries.

Lines of cars, and in many places queues of people on foot carrying bright red jerry cans, waited for hours for precious fuel. And those were the lucky ones. Other customers gave up after finding only closed stations or dry pumps marked with yellow tape or "No Gas" signs.

Bloomberg called the marathon an "integral part of New York City's life for 40 years" and insisted that holding the race would not require resources to be diverted from the recovery effort. But, he said, he understood the doubts.

City and race officials considered several alternatives: a modified course, postponement or an elite runners-only race. But they decided cancellation was the best option.

Organizers will donate various items that had been brought in for the race to relief efforts, from food, blankets and portable toilets to generators already set up on Staten Island.

Mary Wittenberg, president of the New York Road Runners, the group that organizes the marathon, said canceling was the right move.

"This is what we need to do and the right thing at this time," she said.

"It's been a week where we worked very closely with the mayor's office and felt very strongly, both of us together, that on Tuesday, it seemed that the best thing for New York on Sunday would be moving forward. As the days went on, just today it got to the point where that was no longer the case."

Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association — the police department's largest union — called the decision to cancel the marathon "a wise choice."

"When you have a significant amount of people voicing real pain and unhappiness over its running, you have to hear that. You have to take that into consideration," said Howard Wolfson, deputy mayor for government affairs and communications.

"Something that is such a celebration of the best of New York can't become divisive," he said. "That is not good for the city now as we try to complete our recovery effort, and it is not good for the marathon in the long run."

ING, the financial company that is the title sponsor of the marathon, said it supported the decision to cancel. The firm's charitable giving arm has made a $500,000 contribution to help with relief and recovery efforts and is matching employee donations. Sponsor Poland Spring said it would donate the bottled water earmarked for the marathon to relief agencies, more than 200,000 bottles.

Race organizers had been expecting about 47,500 runners before the storm.

For now, they are sticking to their policy of no refunds for runners, but they will guarantee entry to next year's marathon or the half-marathon in March. However, Wittenberg said the group would review the refund policy.

Steve Brune, a Manhattan entrepreneur, was set to run his fourth New York City Marathon.

"I'm disappointed, but I can understand why it's more important to use our resources for those who have lost a lot," he said.

Nikki Davies arrived from London on Friday, eager to race.

"I can understand not wanting to run through devastated parts of the city," she said. "I thought if they cancel it, they'd cancel it earlier."

Now, she had 10 days to fill. On her agenda?

"A lot of sightseeing," she said.

___

Associated Press writers Cara Anna, Ronald Blum, Verena Dobnik, Melissa Murphy, Christina Rexrode, Michael Rubinkam and Ted Shaffrey in New York contributed to this report.

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Second Illness Infects Meningitis Sufferers

Just when they might have thought they were in the clear, people recovering from meningitis in an outbreak caused by a contaminated steroid drug have been struck by a second illness.

The new problem, called an epidural abscess, is an infection near the spine at the site where the drug — contaminated by a fungus — was injected to treat back or neck pain. The abscesses are a localized infection, different from meningitis, which affects the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. But in some cases, an untreated abscess can cause meningitis. The abscesses have formed even while patients were taking powerful antifungal medicines, putting them back in the hospital for more treatment, often with surgery.

The problem has just begun to emerge, so far mostly in Michigan, which has had more people sickened by the drug — 112 out of 404 nationwide — than any other state.

“We’re hearing about it in Michigan and other locations as well,” said Dr. Tom M. Chiller, the deputy chief of the mycotic diseases branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We don’t have a good handle on how many people are coming back.”

He added, “We are just learning about this and trying to assess how best to manage these patients. They’re very complicated.”

In the last few days, about a third of the 53 patients treated for meningitis at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., have returned with abscesses, said Dr. Lakshmi K. Halasyamani, the chief medical officer.

“This is a significant shift in the presentation of this fungal infection, and quite concerning,” she said. “An epidural abscess is very serious. It’s not something we expected.”

She and other experts said they were especially puzzled that the infections could occur even though patients were taking drugs that, at least in tests, appeared to work against the fungus causing the infection, a type of black mold called Exserohilum.

The main symptom is severe pain near the injection site. But the abscesses are internal, with no visible signs on the skin, so it takes an M.R.I. scan to make the diagnosis. Some patients have more than one abscess. In some cases, the infection can be drained or cleaned out by a neurosurgeon.

But sometimes fungal strands and abnormal tissue are wrapped around nerves and cannot be surgically removed, said Dr. Carol A. Kauffman, an expert on fungal diseases at the University of Michigan. In such cases, all doctors can do is give a combination of antifungal drugs and hope for the best. They have very little experience with this type of infection.

Some patients have had epidural abscesses without meningitis; St. Joseph Mercy Hospital has had 34 such cases.

A spokesman for the health department in Tennessee, which has had 78 meningitis cases, said that a few cases of epidural abscess had also occurred there, and that the state was trying to assess the extent of the problem.

Dr. Chiller said doctors were also reporting that some patients exposed to the tainted drug had arachnoiditis, a nerve inflammation near the spine that can cause intense pain, bladder problems and numbness.

“Unfortunately, we know from the rare cases of fungal meningitis that occur, that you can have complicated courses for this disease, and it requires prolonged therapy and can have some devastating consequences,” he said.

The meningitis outbreak, first recognized in late September, is one of the worst public health disasters ever caused by a contaminated drug. So far, 29 people have died, often from strokes caused by the infection. The case count is continuing to rise. The drug was a steroid, methylprednisolone acetate, made by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. Three contaminated lots of the drug, more than 17,000 vials, were shipped around the country, and about 14,000 people were injected with the drug, mostly for neck and back pain. But some received injections for arthritic joints and have developed joint infections.

Inspections of the compounding center have revealed extensive contamination. It has been shut down, as has another Massachusetts company, Ameridose, with some of the same owners. Both companies have had their products recalled.

Compounding pharmacies, which mix their own drugs, have had little regulation from either states or the federal government, and several others have been shut down recently after inspections found sanitation problems.

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For Hourly Workers After the Storm, No Work, No Pay

Chantal Sainvilus, a home health aide in Brooklyn who makes $10 an hour, does not get paid if she does not show up. So it is no wonder that she joined the thousands of people taking extreme measures to get to work this week, even, in her case, hiking over the Williamsburg Bridge.

While salaried employees worked if they could, often from home after Hurricane Sandy, many of the poorest New Yorkers faced the prospect of losing days, even a crucial week, of pay on top of the economic ground they have lost since the recession.

Low-wage workers, more likely to be paid hourly and work at the whim of their employers, have fared worse in the recovery than those at the top of the income scale — in New York City the bottom 20 percent lost $463 in annual income from 2010 to 2011, in contrast to a gain of almost $2,000 for the top quintile. And there are an increasing number of part-time and hourly workers, the type that safety net programs like unemployment are not designed to serve. Since 2009, when the recovery began, 86 percent of the jobs added nationally have been hourly. Over all, about 60 percent of the nation’s jobs are hourly.

Even as the sluggish economy has accentuated this divide, Hurricane Sandy has acted as a further wedge, threatening to take a far greater toll on the have-littles who live from paycheck to paycheck.

“There’s a lot of people in our society that are living in a very precarious situation in terms of low wages or very insecure work,” said Arne L. Kalleberg, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of “Good Jobs, Bad Jobs.” “That’s why it’s important to have a safety net that’s based on the idea of people working insecure jobs like this.”

On Friday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that New York City and four suburban counties were eligible for disaster unemployment relief, which covers a broader spectrum of workers than regular unemployment benefits, including the self-employed like taxi drivers and street vendors as well as those who were unable to get to work.

New Jersey has also declared people in 10 counties eligible for disaster unemployment assistance. In Connecticut, residents of four counties and the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Reservation are eligible.

A New York Department of Labor spokesman emphasized that workers who lost wages should call to apply because the program is flexible and many eligibility issues would be determined on a case-by-case basis.

But the program might not help people whose commute simply lasted longer or cost more, like Ibezim Oki, a cabdriver who spent $50 on a cab to get from his Brooklyn home to Manhattan on Friday, rather than risk long bus delays, and “now I don’t know how long I’m going to have to wait for gas.”

The commute alone represented a hardship for workers whose jobs require a physical presence, while neighborhood coffee shops in the boroughs and suburbs overflowed with those who needed nothing more than a laptop and Wi-Fi to stay connected to work.

Ms. Sainvilus estimated that on Thursday, she had traveled eight hours to work for five, making her effective pay less than $4 an hour.

Others could not work because their place of business was closed. At a food distribution center in Chelsea, Mike Samuel, 55, a delivery man for a florist, was feeling the pain of five days of lost income. “We don’t work, we don’t get no tips, we don’t get no pay,” he said.

Muta Prather said the chemical company where he works in Newark was flooded, causing him to miss three days of work. He worked part of the day on Thursday helping to clean up, but worried about how he would pay for damage to his own roof.

“It hurts, you know,” said Mr. Prather, who is 49 and lives in West Orange, N.J. “I looked up at my roof, and it’s going to cost me like seven grand. I don’t make that kind of money.”

But at a playground in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, Damien Carney stood with his baby daughter strapped to his chest and his toddler on a nearby swing, enjoying a surprise week off. For Mr. Carney, a salaried portfolio manager for a wine distributor that was closed because it had no power, the storm was amounting to something like a paid vacation with time for cooking and rearranging the living room. “They basically said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ ” Mr. Carney said of his employers.

Federal labor laws include more protections for salaried workers than hourly workers when a disaster hits. Employers must continue to pay salaries if the worksite is closed for less than a week, even though they are allowed to require employees to use vacation or paid leave for the duration of the closure. Hourly workers, on the other hand, do not have to be paid if the worksite closes. If the workplace is open but salaried workers cannot get there, their pay may be reduced.

Of course, policies vary from workplace to workplace, and some hourly workers were luckier than others. Cassandra Williams, 54, waiting for the bus from Brooklyn to Manhattan with her 6-year-old granddaughter, said the family for whom she keeps house would pay her full wages despite her missing three days of work. Tinash Makots, a 24-year-old salesman at the Nike store in Midtown Manhattan, said he would be paid for the days missed as well.

One nanny in the bus line said she would be paid her regular wages, while another said she would not be compensated for hours missed.

A financial district worker who would identify himself only as William S. said he did not strictly need to go into Manhattan to do his job, but felt that he should make an appearance after one of his staff members showed up every day at 6 a.m. and another paid $40 a day to get to a distant office in Queens.

But Anthony Howell, a 42-year-old hair stylist in Chelsea, said he hadn’t worked all week because his salon, like his high-rise apartment, has no electricity.

“That’s the brutal part,” he said. “The hair industry is like that. You don’t do the work, you don’t get the money.”

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Guinea-Bissau, After Coup, Is Drug-Trafficking Haven

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Soldiers in Bissau, the capital.

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau — When the army ousted the president here just months before his term was to expire, a thirst for power by the officer corps did not fully explain the offensive. But a sizable increase in drug trafficking in this troubled country since the military took over has raised suspicions that the president’s sudden removal was what amounted to a cocaine coup.

The military brass here has long been associated with drug trafficking, but the coup this spring means soldiers now control the drug racket and the country itself, turning Guinea-Bissau in the eyes of some international counternarcotics experts into a nation where illegal drugs are sanctioned at the top.

“They are probably the worst narco-state that’s out there on the continent,” said a senior Drug Enforcement Administration official in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his work in the region. “They are a major problem.”

Since the April 12 coup, more small twin-engine planes than ever are making the 1,600-mile Atlantic crossing from Latin America to the edge of Africa’s western bulge, landing in Guinea-Bissau’s fields, uninhabited islands and remote estuaries. There they unload their cargos of cocaine for transshipment north, experts say.

The fact that the army has put in place a figurehead government and that military officers continue to call the shots behind the scenes only intensifies the problem.

The political instability continued as soldiers attacked an army barracks on Oct. 21, apparently in an attempt to topple the government. A dissident army captain was arrested on an offshore island on Oct. 27 and accused of being the organizer of the countercoup attempt. Two critics of the government were also assaulted and then left outside the capital.

From April to July there were at least 20 landings in Guinea-Bissau of small planes that United Nations officials suspected were drug flights — traffic that could represent more than half the estimated annual cocaine volume for the region. The planes need to carry a 1.5-ton cargo to make the transatlantic trip viable, officials say. Europe, already the destination for about 50 tons of cocaine annually from West Africa, United Nations officials say, could be in for a far greater flood.

Was the military coup itself a diversion for drug trafficking? Some experts point to signs that as the armed forces were seizing the presidency, taking over radio stations and arresting members government officials, there was a flurry of drug activity on one of the islands of the Bijagós Archipelago, what amounted to a three-day offloading of suspicious sacks.

That surreptitious activity appears to have been simply a prelude for what was to come.

“There has clearly been an increase in Guinea-Bissau in the last several months,” said Pierre Lapaque, head of the regional United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for West and Central Africa. “We are seeing more and more drugs regularly arriving in this country.”

Mr. Lapaque called the trafficking in Guinea-Bissau “a major worry” and an “open sore,” and, like others, suggested it was no coincidence that trafficking has spiked since the coup.

Joaquin Gonzalez-Ducay, the European Union ambassador in Bissau, said: “As a country it is controlled by those who formed the coup d’état. They can do what they want to do. Now they have free rein.”

The senior D.E.A. official said that “people at the highest levels of the military are involved in the facilitation” of trafficking and added: “In other African countries government officials are part of the problem. In Guinea-Bissau, it is the government itself that is the problem.”

United Nations officials agree. “The coup was perpetrated by people totally embedded in the drugs business,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the political environment here.

The country’s former prosecutor general, Octávio Inocêncio Alves, said, “A lot of the traffickers have direct relationships with the military.”

The civilian government and the military leadership that sits watchfully in its headquarters in an old Portuguese fort at the other end of town rebuff the United Nations drug accusations.

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Apple rolls out iPad mini to shorter lines

SYDNEY/NEW YORK (Reuters) - The launch of Apple Inc's iPad mini attracted smaller crowds from Sydney to New York on Friday than have been typical for previous Apple product debuts, events marked by people lining up for hours or even days.

A proliferation of comparable rival devices may have sapped some interest for the device, which is priced above rival gadgets from Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc.

A few hundred people were in line at Apple's Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York at about 8 a.m., days after the city was battered by Hurricane Sandy, one of the biggest storms to ever hit the United States.

Lisa Sieber, 59, from Germany rode a bike to the Apple store on Friday as she said she's been going 'stir crazy' from lack of power and water at her 81-year-old mother's home in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

"I didn't think I needed an iPad but once you get your first Mac, you slide into the iPhone and the next one and it makes it easy to get more Apple products," she said, adding that "there's not much to do without power and lights."

While many people have been happy to camp overnight at the New York store for past launches, some were angry on Friday that Apple changed the store's opening time to 10 a.m. for this launch from 8 a.m. previously.

"Usually it's 8 a.m.," said Vincent Leroy, 27, a student from Long Island City in Queens who showed up at the store at 6:30 a.m. His friends complained loudly in unison when he told them he had found out about the delayed opening.

In Amsterdam two hours after the Apple store opened, it looked like a typical day at the store with no lines outside the door. An Apple employee on the scene told Reuters that people had lined up ahead of the store opening.

About 50 people waited for the Apple store in Sydney, Australia, to open, where in the past the line had stretched for several blocks when the company debuted new iPhones.

At the head of Friday's line was Patrick Li, who had been waiting since 4:30 a.m. and was eager to get his hands on the 7.9-inch slate.

"It's light, easy to handle, and I'll use it to read books. It's better than the original iPad," Li said.

There were queues of 100 or more outside Apple stores in Tokyo and Seoul when the device went on sale, but when the company's flagship Hong Kong store opened staff appeared to outnumber those waiting in line.

The iPad mini marks Apple's first foray into the smaller-tablet segment, and the latest salvo in a global mobile-device war that has engulfed combatants from Internet search leader Google, whose Android software runs on tablets from several vendors, to Web retailer Amazon.com and software giant Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft's 10-inch Surface tablet, powered by the just-launched Windows 8 software, went on sale in October, while Google and Amazon now dominate sales of smaller, 7-inch multimedia tablets.

POSITIVE REVIEWS

Unveiled last week, the iPad mini has won mostly positive reviews, with criticism centering on a lofty price tag and a screen considered inferior to those of rivals. The new tablet essentially replicates most of the features of its full-sized sibling, but in a smaller package.

"Well, first of all it's so thin and light and very cute - so cute!" said iPad mini customer Ten Ebihara at the Apple store in Tokyo's upscale Ginza district.

At $329 for a Wi-Fi only model, the iPad mini is a little costlier than predicted, but some analysts see that as Apple's attempt to retain premium positioning.

Some investors fear the gadget will lure buyers away from Apple's $499 flagship 9.7-inch iPad, while proving ineffective in combating the threat of Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus 7, both of which are sold at or near cost.

Also on Friday, Apple rolled out its fourth-generation iPad, with the same 9.7-inch display as the previous version but with a faster A6X processor and better Wi-Fi. Both devices were going on sale in more than 30 countries.

Apple will likely sell between 1 million and 1.5 million iPad minis in the first weekend, far short of the 3 million third-generation iPads sold last March in their first weekend, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

"The reason we expect fewer iPad minis compared to the 3rd Gen is because of the lack of the wireless option and newness of the smaller form factor for consumers," Munster said in a note to clients. "We believe that over time that will change."

Reviewers have applauded Apple for squeezing most of the iPad's features into a smaller package that can be comfortably manipulated with one hand.

James Vohradsky, a 20-year-old student who previously queued for 17 hours at the Sydney store to buy the iPhone 5, only stood in line for an hour and a half this time.

"I had an iPad 1 before, I kind of miss it because I sold it about a year ago. It's just more practical to have the mini because I found it a bit too big. The image is really good and it's got the fast A5 chip too," Vohradsky said.

The iPad was launched in 2010 by late Apple boss Steve Jobs and since then it has taken a big chunk out of PC sales, upending the industry and reinventing mobile computing with its apps-based ecosystem.

A smaller tablet is the first device to be added to Apple's compact portfolio under Chief Executive Tim Cook, who took over from Jobs just before his death a year ago. Analysts credit Google and Amazon for influencing the decision.

Some investors worry that Apple might have lost its chief visionary with Jobs, and that new management might not be able to stay ahead of the pack as rivals innovate and encroach on its market share.

Apple shares were down 1 percent at $590.56 in morning trade on Friday.

(Additional reporting by Mariko Lochridge in Tokyo, Stefanie McIntyre in Hong Kong and Miyoung Kim in Seoul, Roberta Cowan in Amsterdam; Writing by Noel Randewich and Edwin Chan in San Francisco, Sinead Carew in New York; Editing by Phil Berlowitz, Alex Richardson and Steve Orlofsky)

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Norv's Bolts beat staggering Chiefs 31-13

SAN DIEGO (AP) — It took a win against arguably the worst team in the NFL to get Norv Turner off the hot seat, at least for 10 days.

And if things have been bad for the embattled Turner, imagine what Romeo Crennel is going through.

Antonio Gates caught a 14-yard yard scoring pass from Philip Rivers on the game's opening drive to snap a streak of six straight quarters without a touchdown and the San Diego Chargers went on to a 31-13 victory Thursday night over the woeful Kansas City Chiefs.

The Chiefs committed four turnovers and lost their fifth straight game.

Turner had been heavily criticized by fans after the Chargers (4-4) blew double-digit, second-half leads in losses to New Orleans and Denver, and then lost 7-6 at Cleveland on Sunday.

At the start of halftime, some fans in one end zone unfurled a big yellow banner that read: "Mr. Spanos, please fire A.J. & Norv."

Team president Dean Spanos decided in January to bring back both Turner and general manager A.J. Smith even though the Chargers missed the playoffs for the second straight year and have only one postseason win in four seasons.

Spanos probably wasn't inclined to fire Turner during the season, although a loss to the Chiefs (1-7) would have been more than embarrassing.

"We didn't talk about it specifically, but we want to win for him every week," Rivers said. "You play for a lot of things, but we play for our coach. I think that has been evident over the years when we have struggled."

Rivers, who looked shaky during the losing streak, did his part by completing 18 of 20 passes, or 90 percent, for 220 yards and two touchdowns, with one interception. It was the sixth time in NFL history a quarterback had completed 90 percent or more of his passes, and tied Steve Young for fifth on that list.

Rivers also threw a 13-yard TD pass to Malcom Floyd early in the fourth quarter.

"It was good to play well, but more importantly, it was good to win a game. We needed a win in the worst way," Rivers said. "Game like this, wins like this can jump start us."

The Chiefs' NFL-high 29 turnovers have led to 104 points.

"Similar to what's been happening throughout the course of this year, we shoot ourselves in the foot," Crennel said. "We're in a hole and we have to fight our way out. ... It wasn't very good overall, but we're going to keep coaching and keep fighting and play our way out of it."

The Chiefs had six turnovers in a 37-20 home loss to the Chargers on Sept. 30.

"We fought hard, played hard, but at the end of the game it came down to the turnovers," said quarterback Matt Cassel, whose fumble and interception both led to a Chargers TD.

The Chiefs still haven't led in regulation this season. Their only victory came when Ryan Succop kicked the winning field goal against the Saints in overtime.

In just more than two minutes, the Chargers' defense scored as many touchdowns as the offense had in 10 quarters.

With the Chiefs trailing 17-6, Cassel fumbled as he was sacked by Jarret Johnson in the end zone and Shaun Phillips recovered for a touchdown early in the fourth quarter. On the next drive, Cassel's high pass deflected off Dexter McCluster's hands and was intercepted by Demorrio Williams, who returned it 59 yards for a touchdown.

"I don't know If someone stepped in front of him and tipped the ball, but thank God I was there to make the play," Williams said.

In the loss to New Orleans, Williams had an interception return for a touchdown that was nullified after rookie Melvin Ingram was flagged for a late hit on Drew Brees.

Williams, who played for the Chiefs the last four seasons, forced a fumble in the first quarter.

Gates' first-quarter score was San Diego's first touchdown since the star tight end caught an 11-yard pass in the first half against Denver on Oct. 15. That score gave San Diego a 24-0 lead, but Peyton Manning rallied the Broncos to a 35-24 win.

The Chargers got only two field goals from Nick Novak in a 7-6 loss at Cleveland on Sunday, their third straight defeat.

After San Diego scored on the opening drive, Kansas City went on a 17-play drive, converting four third downs, but Dwayne Bowe fumbled after a 10-yard reception. Williams caused the fumble and Quentin Jammer recovered.

Bowe's fumble set up Novak's 25-yard field goal with 9:10 left in the second quarter.

After Kansas City decided not to go for it on fourth-and-1 from the San Diego 31, Succop kicked a 49-yard field goal with 2:51 left before halftime.

The Chargers had a third-and-goal from the 1 in the closing seconds of the half when Rivers was intercepted by Eric Berry.

Succop had a 41-yard field goal in the third quarter.

NOTES: K.C.'s Jamaal Charles was hurt when he was hit in the side of the head by Donald Butler. He said he would have gone back in, "but they told me to just relax." Charles said he was tested for a concussion but was cleared. ... San Diego's Ryan Mathews appeared to sprain his left ankle early in the second quarter and was in and out of the game after that. ... Chiefs LG Jeff Allen left with what was described as a head injury, and defensive end Glenn Dorsey left with a calf injury.

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Ameridose Announces Recall Amid Questions About Drugs’ Sterility

A drug producer linked to the pharmacy at the center of a national meningitis outbreak announced a recall of all of its products Wednesday after federal regulators found that it had not provided enough assurance that all the medicines it made were sterile.

Cj Gunther/European Pressphoto Agency

Ameridose’s sister company is the source of steroid medication linked to 29 meningitis deaths.

The company, Ameridose, which is based in Massachusetts and is a major supplier of sterile injectable medications to hospitals across the country, underscored that there had been no reports of impurities in any of its products and said that it had announced the recall “out of an abundance of caution.”

The company sells more than 2,200 blended drug products, including tranquilizers, anesthetics and antibiotics, according to its Web site. The drugs are pumped into both injectable and oral syringes, as well as intravenous medicine bags. It said it would post the precise list of all the products on its Web site, ameridose.com.

The announcement represented another blow to the family behind Ameridose and its sister company, the New England Compounding Center, whose fungal-tainted steroid medication was responsible for the deaths of 29 people. Ameridose has taken pains to emphasize that it is legally distinct from New England Compounding. But the companies are owned by some of the same people. Federal officials have said Ameridose is part of the investigation because of concerns that it had some of the same business practices as New England Compounding.

Federal and state regulators have suspended operations at Ameridose until Monday. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health said Wednesday that the agreement with the company was “under review.”

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration, said in a telephone interview that the company offered to recall all of its products after federal officials shared the results of their inspection, which found fault with some of its sterility “assurances.”

Ameridose said in a statement that the F.D.A. had notified the company that the agency would “be seeking improvements in Ameridose’s sterility testing process.”

Dr. Woodcock emphasized that the recall was different from that of New England Compounding, where there was known contamination. The agency is not asking health care providers to track down patients who were given Ameridose products, she said, because there have been no reports of problems. Instead, providers are being asked to send the products back to the company.

In a statement, Ameridose said it had shipped more than 70 million “units of product” since its founding in 2006 without problems.

It said it had agreed to recall its products “because customer confidence is paramount to its business.”

Hospitals have reported difficulties in obtaining certain types of injectable medications that Ameridose produces since the company first suspended its operations, and Wednesday’s recall was likely to exacerbate those shortages.

Dr. Woodcock said that the agency was working to mitigate the shortages, in part by asking other manufacturers to increase production. But she added that concerns about lack of sterility were also important.

“We have to balance the risk of lack of sterility assurance against the issues of products not being available,” she said. “That’s a line we walk every day.”

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Modest Jobs Growth in Final Report Before Election

In the last assessment of the job market before the presidential election, the Labor Department announced Friday that the nation’s employers added 171,000 positions in October, and more jobs than initially estimated in both August and September.

The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 7.9 percent in October, from 7.8 percent in September, as more workers joined the labor force and so officially became counted as unemployed.

The report showed persistent but modest improvement in the American economy, and broad-based gains in just about every industry except the government. It was based on surveys conducted too early in the month to capture work disruptions across the East Coast caused by Hurricane Sandy.

“Generally, the report shows that things are better than we’d expected and certainly better than we’d thought a few months ago,” said Paul Dales, senior United States economist for Capital Economics. “But we’re still not making enough progress to bring that unemployment rate down significantly and rapidly.”

The latest figures are probably good news for President Obama. They officially recorded a net gain in jobs under his presidency, and they allayed widespread suspicion that September’s large drop in the unemployment rate — below 8 percent for the first time since the month he took office — might have been a one-month statistical fluke.

In a statement, Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said Friday’s report provided “further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to heal from the wounds inflicted by the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, said in a statement that the jobs report is evidence of the need to change the nation’s economic policies.

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill,” he said.

The numbers arrived somewhat late in the game to have a huge impact on the election next Tuesday, particularly given the ongoing focus on Hurricane Sandy.

Economists were hopeful that once the election was over and Congress addressed the major fiscal tightening scheduled for the end of this year, job growth could speed up further.

“If we can do this kind of job growth with all the uncertainty out there, imagine if we were to clear up those tax issues and hold back the majority of tax increases that are pending at the end of the year,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “We could do much better in 2013, maybe as well as we appeared to be doing earlier this year.”

Job gains in previous months were revised to show bigger gains. September’s increase of 114,000 new jobs was revised to 148,000, and August’s 142,000 was revised to 192,000, the government said.

In October, the biggest job gains were in professional and business services, health care and retail trade, the Labor Department said. Government payrolls dipped slightly. State and local governments have been shedding jobs most months over the last three years.

One of the lowlights of the report was in hourly wages, which remained flat in October after showing barely any growth in the previous several months.

“Perhaps the decline in real wages is a factor here in being able to employ more people,” Mr. Ryding said. “It’s something to keep in mind when we think about creating jobs and whether we’re maybe creating the wrong sort of jobs.”

A report from the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy organization that focuses on labor issues, found that while the majority of jobs lost in the downturn were middle-wage jobs, the majority of the jobs created since then have been lower-wage ones.

There have now been 25 straight months of jobs gains in the United States, but the increases have been barely large enough to absorb people entering the work force. A queue of about 12 million unemployed people remain waiting for work, about two out of five of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.

That is in addition to more than eight million people who are working part-time but really want full-time jobs.

“I’m not just competing against all the other people who are out of work,” said Griff Coxey, 57, of Cascade, Wis., who was laid off in May from his controller job at a small business. “I’m also competing against all those people who are actually working but are underemployed.”

Like two million other idle workers, Mr. Coxey is scheduled to lose his unemployment benefits the last week of the year, when the federal extensions abruptly expire. He said he still has some savings to fall back on, but many workers do not.

Labor advocates and economists are hopeful that Congress will renew the benefits as part of their discussions of the “fiscal cliff” during their postelection session. So far, though, the issue has received little attention, and analysts worry that ending extended benefits could disrupt what modest forward momentum the economy currently has.

“Federal unemployment benefits are one of the most effective stimuli we have,” said Christine L. Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.

“The recovery is still fragile,” she said, “and to pull that amount of income and expenditure out of the economy — particularly at a time when people thinking about the holiday season — will have a significant impact on not just those individuals and their families but the economy as a whole.”

Friday’s jobs report is unlikely to affect policy from the Federal Reserve, which has pledged open-ended stimulus until the job market improves “substantially.”

“This was not a perfect report by any means,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist for Mesirow Financial. “We would like to see double these kind of gains in jobs. Our benchmark on improvement is still pretty low.”

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