Way of the World: A Symbol of Progress, or Villainy?

NEW YORK — Is oil like red meat or is it like tobacco? Your answer to that question determines how you feel about the North American boom in unconventional sources of fossil fuel, particularly the Canadian oil sands.

If you think oil is like tobacco, it is a strictly noxious commodity, which seriously harms its users and those around them. We should stop consuming it at once and at all costs. But if you think oil is like red meat, you take a more nuanced view. For the health of the planet, we should find greener alternatives to it whenever we can, but used wisely and in moderation, it has an honorable role in the 21st-century economy.

This morality play is being acted out with the greatest intensity in the fight over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would stretch from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. “Keystone is really a symbol of oil, it is very emotive,” Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning energy expert and chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, told me. “It is probably the most famous pipeline in the history of the world, and it hasn’t even been built yet. It is a symbol around which the opponents of hydrocarbon have rallied.”

Last autumn, the consensus view was that the pipeline would be approved after the U.S. presidential election, no matter who won. In recent weeks, those odds have shifted.

“If you had asked me prior to the U.S. election, I would’ve said, ‘Of course it’s going to be built after the election, regardless of who wins,”’ said Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, Alberta, where many of the oil companies that are counting on Keystone have their headquarters.

“If you had asked me immediately after the U.S. election, I would’ve said, ‘Of course it’s going to be built, now that the immediate political pressure is off,”’ he said. But today, Mr. Nenshi is less certain: “The feeling in Canada over the past four or five weeks has become less optimistic about this thing being built.”

Jim Flaherty, the Canadian finance minister, took the same view. “I actually don’t know,” he replied, when I asked him if the Keystone pipeline would be built. “I had reason for optimism before the election that the president would approve it, were he re-elected.”

But, Mr. Flaherty said, President Barack Obama’s inaugural address “was not encouraging.”

Many politicians and business leaders in Canada, whose economy relies heavily on fossil fuels, have been caught by surprise by the intense opposition to the Keystone pipeline, and to the oil sands crude it would carry south. The paperback edition of Mr. Yergin’s latest book, “The Quest,” provides a powerful explanation of that mystery.

“We have to start somewhere to end the addiction to oil,” is the way one environmentalist explained the broader strategy to Mr. Yergin. “The pipeline is a convenient device for fighting a larger battle,” Mr. Yergin said.

Canadians, who are accustomed to being thought of as the world’s official nice guys — think of all those students globe-trotting with maple leaves on their backpacks — are uncomfortable with this new role as climate change villains. (Disclosure: I am a proud Canadian myself.)

“I think it’s a shame that a one-meter-in-diameter pipe is suddenly having to wear all of the sins of the carbon economy,” Mr. Nenshi said. “You know, it’s not clubbing seals with child labor.”

Mr. Yergin agrees. “The one thing that doesn’t get much talked about is that this oil sands technology continues to advance, it is not static,” he said.

“We reached peak oil demand in the U.S. more than half a decade ago. Our oil demand is going down. Our cars are getting more efficient,” he said. “Meanwhile, there is a supply of energy we do need now. The real trade-off is, is it going to be Canadian oil, or is it going to be Venezuelan oil?”

That trade-off used to be viewed in primarily strategic terms: Were our oil suppliers political friends or foes? By that measure, the Canadians score high. But the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, of all places, underscored another consequence of the North American boom in unconventional sources of oil: its impact on jobs.

Participants from slow-growth Europe and more vigorous Asia alike were dazzled by the job-creating potential of North America’s renaissance as a fossil fuel producer. Moreover, these jobs happen to be the very sort that are being hollowed out by globalization and the technology revolution: high-paying, skilled, blue-collar work that cannot be outsourced or done by robots.

Which may be why the Canadians are picking up such mixed messages from the White House on the Keystone pipeline. For the Al Gore wing of the Democratic Party, it has become a symbolic battle in the fight to save the planet; for the Joe Biden wing, Keystone and the unconventional oil revolution are a source of the middle-class jobs many feared modern economies could no longer provide.

The pipeline is also a litmus test for what you think is the most important problem in the early 21st century.

Chrystia Freeland is editor of Thomson Reuters Digital.

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Telecoms boom leaves rural Africa behind

JOHANNESBURG/FREETOWN (Reuters) – While mobile phone usage has exploded across Africa over the last decade, transforming daily life and commerce for millions, it’s a revolution that has left behind perhaps two thirds of its people.

Poor or no reception outside the towns helps explain why the continent’s mobile penetration, in terms of the percentage of the population using the service, is far lower than previously thought, and the cost of providing that service to impoverished, sparsely populated areas remains prohibitive.

In rural Sierra Leone, a country where GDP per capita is less than $ 400 a year, money doesn’t grow on trees, but mobile reception can, says street trader Abass Bangura in Freetown, the West African country’s capital.

In parts of Tonkolili, a district in the center of the country, or Kailahun to the east, it’s the only way you can get reception, he said.

“You climb stick, like mango tree, before you have network,” he said.

In South Sudan, the world’s newest state, it’s a similar story. Less than a year old, the country already has five mobile operators, and its capital, Juba, is teeming with giant billboards advertising mobile phones, but go just a few kilometers beyond a handful of fast-growing towns, and cell phones become useless.

Multiple SIM cards help users navigate patchy network coverage and take advantage of price promotions from rival operators.

That is typical of much of the continent.

With a population of just over a billion people, Africa has over 700 million SIM cards, but with most users owning at least two cards, penetration is only about 33 percent, according to a study released in November by industry research firm Wireless Intelligence.

“If we look at the fact that the rural population of Africa is about 60-70 percent of the population, and if we look at the degree of penetration into the rural market, it’s very, very low,” said Spiwe Chireka of advisory firm IDC.

In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, there are more than enough SIM cards for everyone, but penetration is only 61 percent, according to a 2012 study by research firm Informa.

The average mobile phone user in Nigeria owns an average of 2.39 SIM cards. Globally, only Indonesia is higher, with an average of 2.62 SIM cards per user.

Even in Africa’s biggest economy, South Africa, SIM numbers comfortably exceed the population, but given the number of people using multiple devices, actual population penetration is closer to 80 percent, says market leader Vodacom.

“You’ve got a lot of people buying SIMs, but maybe not enough phones to put it in,” said Olayemi Jinadu, an executive with the Sierra Leone arm of Indian telco Bharti Airtel.

COST VERSUS BENEFIT

The unserved rural millions could represent another growth opportunity for Africa-focused telcos like South Africa’s MTN Group, Bharti Airtel and Kuwait’s Zain, but first they have to figure out a cost-effective way to push into sub-Saharan Africa’s remote corners.

“There’s great potential, but the big concern for us is operational costs,” said Andre Claasson, chief operating officer at Zain South Sudan.

In rural Africa, the cost of running a network tower often exceeds the revenue it reaps. Fuel is typically about 40 percent of a tower’s operating cost, and in remote areas companies burn more diesel by bringing fuel to towers than is used powering them.

Although roughly 73 percent of Africa’s land has cell phone coverage, according to market research firm IDC, that still leaves vast tracts of rural Africa without network access.

Africa has 170,000 mobile towers now and needs another 60,000, according to tower company IHS Group, which at an average $ 200,000 each means an outlay of $ 12 billion.

“If you are an operator asked to spend $ 200,000 to build a site and another $ 2,000 a month to run it in an area with 500 people herding cows, it doesn’t make sense,” said Issam Darwish, IHS’s chief executive.

Average revenue per user is also low. It can vary between $ 1 and $ 10 per month, much lower than in developed markets such as the United States, which delivered ARPU of $ 51 in 2012 or Britain, $ 27.

Bharti, sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest telecom group, says it makes $ 6.40 per user in Africa, which is higher than its home Indian market, where it makes only $ 3.30 a month, but the cost of operating in Africa is much higher and there isn’t a comparable middle class ready and able to spend more.

“You either have a handful of people in the affluent part of the society or you have lots of people who can’t afford the services,” its Chairman Sunil Mittal said last year.

Operators can save money by sharing towers, but even then, some sites will never make sense without government subsidies, analysts say.

African expansion has not been cheap for telcos. Over the past five years, mobile operators have spent a combined $ 16.5 billion on capital expenditure in the key markets of South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal and Ghana, according to Wireless Intelligence.

Bharti has earmarked $ 1.5 billion for capex this year, while fourth-placed France Telecom is spending $ 9.3 billion between 2010 and 2015.

Spare cash is increasingly rare for debt-strapped European telecoms operators, which are cutting their dividends to cope with falling revenues and network upgrade costs in their home markets.

Some African regulators have set up funds to promote coverage, to which operators are expected to contribute.

In Sierra Leone, the Universal Access Development Fund (UADF) is yet to subsidize the cost of putting up a single mast, though it has been active for several years. The regulator complains networks do not contribute the fees they should.

“If we can’t subsidize, they’ll never erect towers there,” said Bashir Kamara, Project Manager at UADF.

($ 1 = 0.6350 British pounds)

(Additional reporting by Hereward Holland in Juba and Chijioke Ohuocha in Lagos; Editing by David Dolan and Will Waterman)

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49ers' Culliver apologizes for anti-gay remarks

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — San Francisco 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver has apologized for anti-gay comments he made to a comedian during Super Bowl media day.

Culliver said Thursday that's "not what's in my heart" and he was "just kidding around."

He also apologized to the city of San Francisco and added he would welcome a gay teammate to the 49ers, a reversal of his remarks to comedian Artie Lange two days ago. San Francisco and the Bay Area are home to a large gay community.

During an interview Tuesday at the Superdome, Culliver responded to questions from Lange by saying he wouldn't welcome a gay player in the locker room. He said the 49ers didn't have any gay players, and if they did those players should leave.

Culliver's apology reiterated his statement of regret released by the team Wednesday night.

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Well: Myths of Weight Loss Are Plentiful, Researcher Says

If schools reinstated physical education classes, a lot of fat children would lose weight. And they might never have gotten fat in the first place if their mothers had just breast fed them when they were babies. But be warned: obese people should definitely steer clear of crash diets. And they can lose more than 50 pounds in five years simply by walking a mile a day.

Those are among the myths and unproven assumptions about obesity and weight loss that have been repeated so often and with such conviction that even scientists like David B. Allison, who directs the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have fallen for some of them.

Now, he is trying to set the record straight. In an article published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine, he and his colleagues lay out seven myths and six unsubstantiated presumptions about obesity. They also list nine facts that, unfortunately, promise little in the way of quick fixes for the weight-obsessed. Example: “Trying to go on a diet or recommending that someone go on a diet does not generally work well in the long term.”

Obesity experts applauded this plain-spoken effort to dispel widespread confusion about obesity. The field, they say, has become something of a quagmire.

“In my view,” said Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, a Rockefeller University obesity researcher, “there is more misinformation pretending to be fact in this field than in any other I can think of.”

Others agreed, saying it was about time someone tried to set the record straight.

“I feel like cheering,” said Madelyn Fernstrom, founding director of the University of Pittsburgh Weight Management Center. When it comes to obesity beliefs, she said, “We are spinning out of control.”

Steven N. Blair, an exercise and obesity researcher at the University of South Carolina, said his own students believe many of the myths. “I like to challenge my students. Can you show me the data? Too often that doesn’t come into it.”

Dr. Allison sought to establish what is known to be unequivocally true about obesity and weight loss.

His first thought was that, of course, weighing oneself daily helped control weight. He checked for the conclusive studies he knew must exist. They did not.

“My goodness, after 50-plus years of studying obesity in earnest and all the public wringing of hands, why don’t we know this answer?” Dr. Allison asked. “What’s striking is how easy it would be to check. Take a couple of thousand people and randomly assign them to weigh themselves every day or not.”

Yet it has not been done.

Instead, people often rely on weak studies that get repeated ad infinitum. It is commonly thought, for example, that people who eat breakfast are thinner. But that notion is based on studies of people who happened to eat breakfast. Researchers then asked if they were fatter or thinner than people who happened not to eat breakfast — and found an association between eating breakfast and being thinner. But such studies can be misleading because the two groups might be different in other ways that cause the breakfast eaters to be thinner. But no one has randomly assigned people to eat breakfast or not, which could cinch the argument.

So, Dr. Allison asks, why do yet another study of the association between thinness and breakfast? “Yet, I can tell you that in the last two weeks I saw an association study of breakfast eating in Islamabad and another in Inner Mongolia and another in a country I never heard of.”

“Why are we doing these?” Dr. Allison asked. “All that time and effort is essentially wasted. The question is: ‘Is it a causal association?’” To get the answer, he added, “Do the clinical trial.”

He decided to do it himself, with university research funds. A few hundred people will be recruited and will be randomly assigned to one of three groups. Some will be told to eat breakfast every day, others to skip breakfast, and the third group will be given vague advice about whether to eat it or not.

As he delved into the obesity literature, Dr. Allison began to ask himself why some myths and misconceptions are so commonplace. Often, he decided, the beliefs reflected a “reasonableness bias.” The advice sounds so reasonable it must be true. For example, the idea that people do the best on weight-loss programs if they set reasonable goals sounds so sensible.

“We all want to be reasonable,” Dr. Allison said. But, he said, when he examined weight-loss studies he found no consistent association between the ambitiousness of the goal and how much weight was lost and how long it had stayed off. This myth, though, illustrates the tricky ground weight-loss programs have to navigate when advising dieters. The problem is that on average people do not lose much – 10 percent of their weight is typical – but setting 10 percent as a goal is not necessarily the best strategy. A very few lose a lot more and some people may be inspired by the thought of a really life-changing weight loss.

“If a patient says, ‘Do you think it is reasonable for me to lose 25 percent of my body weight,’ the honest answer is, ‘No. Not without surgery,’” Dr. Allison said. But, he said, “If a patient says, ‘My goal is to lose 25 percent of my body weight,’ I would say, ‘Go for it.’”

Yet all this negativism bothers people, Dr. Allison conceded. When he talks about his findings to scientists, they often say: “O.K., you’ve convinced us. But what can we do? We’ve got to do something.” He replies that scientists have an ethical duty to make clear what is established and what is speculation. And while it is fine to recommend things like bike paths or weighing yourself daily, scientists must make sure they preface their advice with the caveat that these things seem sensible but have not been proven.

Among the best established methods is weight-loss surgery, which, of course, is not right for most people. But surgeons have done careful studies to show that on average people lose substanial amounts of weight and their health improves, Dr. Allison said. For dieters, the best results occur with structured programs, like ones that supply complete meals or meal replacements.

In the meantime, Dr. Allison said, it is incumbent upon scientists to change their ways. “We need to do rigorous studies,” he said. “We need to stop doing association studies after an association has clearly been demonstrated.”

“I never said we have to wait for perfect knowledge,” Dr. Allison said. But, as John Lennon said, “Just give me some truth.”

---

Here is an overview of the obesity myths looked at by the researchers and what is known to be true:

MYTHS

Small things make a big difference. Walking a mile a day can lead to a loss of more than 50 pounds in five years.

Set a realistic goal to lose a modest amount.

People who are too ambitious will get frustrated and give up.

You have to be mentally ready to diet or you will never succeed.

Slow and steady is the way to lose. If you lose weight too fast you will lose less in the long run.

Ideas not yet proven TRUE OR FALSE

Diet and exercise habits in childhood set the stage for the rest of life.

Add lots of fruits and vegetables to your diet to lose weight or not gain as much.

Yo-yo diets lead to increased death rates.

People who snack gain weight and get fat.

If you add bike paths, jogging trails, sidewalks and parks, people will not be as fat.

FACTS — GOOD EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT

Heredity is important but is not destiny.

Exercise helps with weight maintenance.

Weight loss is greater with programs that provide meals.

Some prescription drugs help with weight loss and maintenance.

Weight-loss surgery in appropriate patients can lead to long-term weight loss, less diabetes and a lower death rate.

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Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

A Cyberattack from China:
Chinese hackers infiltrated The New York Times’s computer systems, getting passwords for its reporters and others.

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.

The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

The attackers first installed malware — malicious software — that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times’s network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”

The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.

Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

Signs of a Campaign

The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of a cyberattack that caused damage at Iran’s main nuclear enrichment plant. Evidence suggests that the United States and Israel released a computer worm around 2008, not 2012.

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India Ink: No Knowledge of Pakistan Complaints, Indian Officials Say

Following the recent killings of Indian and Pakistani soldiers near the Kashmir border, a local newspaper reported classified United Nations documents show that the cycle of violence between troops of the two countries has continued despite the cease-fire in 2003.

The Hindu, a national English-language daily newspaper, said Wednesday that Pakistan has repeatedly complained to the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan about the killings of at least 18 of its soldiers, including four beheadings, by Indian forces between 2000 and 2011. The United Nations group was set up in 1949 to monitor cease-fire violations between the two countries.

Indian officials denied the report on Wednesday.

In the worst flare-up since the 2003 cease-fire, Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged gunfire near the Line of Control earlier this month, resulting in deaths on both sides. At the time, India accused Pakistan of beheading one of its soldiers, a charge Pakistan denies.

Among the complaints it filed, Pakistan alleged in 2003 that Indian forces decapitated one of its soldiers, the Hindu said.

The Hindu also reported that Pakistan also complained that Indian forces decapitated two civilians during a massacre in the village of Bandala in 1998, which claimed 22 civilian lives.

Indian army spokesperson Col. Jagdeep Dahiya described the article as “erroneous and speculative.”

“The Indian Army is highly professional and does not indulge in un-soldierly acts as alleged in the article,” he said. “The very fact that Pakistan has not raised such issues in bilateral interactions since 1998 bears testimony to allegations leveled against the Indian army being misleading,” he said.

Col. Dahiya also said that there is an existing mechanism to regulate conflict near the line of control between India and Pakistan. “The article seems to have been based on one-sided allegations made by the Pakistan army to UNMOGIP,” he said, an organization whose status is questionable.

Sitanshu Kar, spokesman for the Indian Ministry of Defense, said that he had no knowledge of Pakistan’s complaints to the United Nations group, and that he had not been contacted for The Hindu article. “It’s the first time I’m hearing about this,” he said. “I have not seen any such document.”

Syed Akbaruddin, the spokesman for the India’s Ministry of External Affairs, said that India did not have any formal exchange with the United Nations Military Observer Group. “We feel that Unmogip has outlived its relevance,” he said. The country’s relationship with the organization ended after India and Pakistan entered the 1972 Simla Agreement, in which both countries said they would resolve their disputes bilaterally.

Mr. Akbaruddin added that Pakistan had not raised these complaints directly with India. “Frankly, this is not a discussion we have had diplomatically,” he said.

An official at the United Nations organization’s office in Srinagar refused to comment on the report, or whether such complaints by Pakistan had been received. Calls made to the group’s office in Delhi were not answered.

Lt. Gen. Baljit Singh Jaswal, who from October 2009 to December 2010 led the Northern Command, which supervises troops in Jammu and Kashmir, said that India had engaged in no cross-border violations during that time.

General Jaswal, now retired, added that Pakistan had violated the cease-fire “numerous times” and that India had exchanged retaliatory fire.

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RIM starts glitzy BlackBerry 10 launch parties

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Research In Motion Ltd on Wednesday kicked off a string of global launch parties for a long-delayed line of smartphones it says will put it on the comeback trail in a market it once dominated.

The new BlackBerry 10 phones will compete with Apple‘s iPhone and devices using Google‘s Android technology, both of which have soared above the BlackBerry in a competitive market.

They boast fast browsers, new features, smart cameras and, unlike previous BlackBerry models, enter the market primed with a large app library.

(Writing by Janet Guttsman; Editing by Frank McGurty)

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A-Rod implicated in PED use again as MLB probes

NEW YORK (AP) — Alex Rodriguez is in the middle of Major League Baseball's latest doping investigation after an alternative weekly newspaper reported baseball's highest-paid star was among the big leaguers listed in the records of a Florida clinic the paper said sold performance-enhancing drugs.

The Miami New Times said Tuesday that the three-time AL MVP bought human growth hormone and other performance-enhancing substances during 2009-12 from Biogenesis of America LLC, a now-closed anti-aging clinic in Coral Gables, Fla., near Rodriguez's offseason home.

The new public relations firm for the New York Yankees third baseman issued a statement denying the allegations.

New Times said it obtained records detailing purchases by Rodriguez, 2012 All-Star game MVP Melky Cabrera, 2005 AL Cy Young Award winner Bartolo Colon and 2011 AL championship series MVP Nelson Cruz of Texas.

Cabrera left San Francisco after the season to sign with Toronto, while Oakland re-signed Colon.

Other baseball players the newspaper said appeared in the records include Washington pitcher Gio Gonzalez, who finished third in last year's NL Cy Young Award voting, and San Diego catcher Yasmani Grandal.

Biogenesis, which the New Times said was run by Anthony Bosch, was located in a beige, nondescript office park. The former clinic is no longer listed as a business in its directory,

"There was a flier put out by the building management a couple weeks ago. It was put on all the doors and windows of all the offices," said Brad Nickel, who works in a cruise planning company on the floor above where the clinic was located. "It just said this guy's not really a doctor, he doesn't belong here, he's no longer allowed here, call the police or the building management if you see him."

The New Times posted copies of what it said were Bosch's handwritten records, obtained through a former Biogenesis employee it did not identify.

Bosch's lawyer, Susy Ribero-Ayala, said in a statement the New Times report "is filled with inaccuracies, innuendo and misstatements of fact."

"Mr. Bosch vehemently denies the assertions that MLB players such as Alex Rodriguez and Gio Gonzalez were treated by or associated with him," she said.

Rodriguez appears 16 times in the documents New Times received, the paper said, either as "Alex Rodriguez," ''Alex Rod" or the nickname "Cacique," a pre-Columbian Caribbean chief.

Rodriguez admitted four years ago that he used PEDs from 2001-03. Cabrera, Colon and Grandal were suspended for 50 games each last year by MLB following tests for elevated testosterone. Responding to the testosterone use, MLB and the players' union said Jan. 10 they were authorizing the World Anti-Doping Agency laboratory outside Montreal to store each major leaguer's baseline testosterone/epitestosterone (T/E) ratio in order to detect abnormalities.

"We are always extremely disappointed to learn of potential links between players and the use of performance-enhancing substances," MLB said in a statement. "Only law enforcement officials have the capacity to reach those outside the game who are involved in the distribution of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. ... We are in the midst of an active investigation and are gathering and reviewing information."

A baseball official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make public statements, said Monday that MLB did not have any documentation regarding the allegations. If MLB does obtain evidence, the players could be subject to discipline. First offenses result in a 50-game suspension and second infractions in 100-game penalties. A third violation results in a lifetime ban.

Rodriguez is sidelined for at least the first half of the season after hip surgery Jan. 16. A 50-game suspension would cost him $7.65 million of his $28 million salary.

"The news report about a purported relationship between Alex Rodriguez and Anthony Bosch are not true," Rodriguez said in a statement issued by a publicist. "He was not Mr. Bosch's patient, he was never treated by him and he was never advised by him. The purported documents referenced in the story — at least as they relate to Alex Rodriguez — are not legitimate."

Jay Reisinger, a lawyer who has represented Rodriguez in recent years, said the three-time AL MVP had retained Roy Black, an attorney from Rodriguez's hometown of Miami. Black's clients have included Rush Limbaugh and William Kennedy Smith.

Bosch did not return a phone message seeking comment.

MLB hopes to gain the cooperation of Bosch and others connected with the clinic, another baseball official said, also on condition of anonymity because no public statements on the matter were authorized. In order to successfully discipline players based on the records, witnesses would be needed to authenticate them, the official said.

Players could be asked to appear before MLB for interviews, but the official said MLB would be reluctant to request interviews before it has more evidence.

Rodriguez spent years denying he used PEDs before Sports Illustrated reported in February 2009 that he tested positive for two steroids in MLB's anonymous survey while with the Texas Rangers in 2003. Two days later, he admitted in an ESPN interview that he used PEDs over a three-year period. He has denied using PEDs after 2003.

If the new allegations were true, the Yankees would face high hurdles to get out of the final five years and $114 million of Rodriguez's record $275 million, 10-year contract. Because management and the players' union have a joint drug agreement, an arbitrator could determine that any action taken by the team amounted to multiple punishments for the same offense.

But if Rodriguez were to end his career because of the injury, about 85 percent of the money owed by the Yankees would be covered by insurance, one of the baseball officials said.

Gonzalez, 21-8 for the Washington Nationals last season, posted on his Twitter feed: "I've never used performance enhancing drugs of any kind and I never will, I've never met or spoken with tony Bosch or used any substance provided by him. anything said to the contrary is a lie."

Colon was not issuing a statement, agent Adam Katz said through spokeswoman Lisa Cohen.

"We are aware of certain allegations and inferences," Cruz's law firm, Farrell & Reisinger, said in a statement. "To the extent these allegations and inferences refer to Nelson, they are denied."

Cruz and Gonzalez had not previously been linked to performance-enhancing drugs. Cruz hit 24 home runs last year for the Rangers.

The New Times report said it obtained notes by Bosch listing the players' names and the substances they received. Several unidentified employees and clients confirmed to the publication that the clinic distributed the substances, the paper said. The employees said that Bosch bragged of supplying drugs to professional athletes but that they never saw the sports stars in the office.

The paper said the records list that Rodriguez paid for HGH; testosterone cream; IGF-1, a substance banned by baseball that stimulates insulin production; and GHRP, which releases growth hormones.

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Associated Press writers Jennifer Kay in Coral Gables, Fla., and Curt Anderson in Miami, and AP Sports Writers Howard Fendrich and Tim Reynolds contributed to this report.

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Phys Ed: Helmets for Ski and Snowboard Safety

Recently, researchers from the department of sport science at the University of Innsbruck in Austria stood on the slopes at a local ski resort and trained a radar gun on a group of about 500 skiers and snowboarders, each of whom had completed a lengthy personality questionnaire about whether he or she tended to be cautious or a risk taker.

The researchers had asked their volunteers to wear their normal ski gear and schuss or ride down the slopes at their preferred speed. Although they hadn’t informed the volunteers, their primary aim was to determine whether wearing a helmet increased people’s willingness to take risks, in which case helmets could actually decrease safety on the slopes.

What they found was reassuring.

To many of us who hit the slopes with, in my case, literal regularity — I’m an ungainly novice snowboarder — the value of wearing a helmet can seem self-evident. They protect your head from severe injury. During the Big Air finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., this past weekend, for instance, 23-year-old Icelandic snowboarder Halldor Helgason over-rotated on a triple back flip, landed head-first on the snow, and was briefly knocked unconscious. But like the other competitors he was wearing a helmet, and didn’t fracture his skull.

Indeed, studies have concluded that helmets reduce the risk of a serious head injury by as much as 60 percent. But a surprising number of safety experts and snowsport enthusiasts remain unconvinced that helmets reduce overall injury risk.

Why? A telling 2009 survey of ski patrollers from across the country found that 77 percent did not wear helmets because they worried that the headgear could reduce their peripheral vision, hearing and response times, making them slower and clumsier. In addition, many worried that if they wore helmets, less-adept skiers and snowboarders might do likewise, feel invulnerable and engage in riskier behavior on the slopes.

In the past several years, a number of researchers have attempted to resolve these concerns, for or against helmets. And in almost all instances, helmets have proved their value.

In the Innsbruck speed experiment, the researchers found that people whom the questionnaires showed to be risk takers skied and rode faster than those who were by nature cautious. No surprise.

But wearing a helmet did not increase people’s speed, as would be expected if the headgear encouraged risk taking. Cautious people were slower than risk-takers, whether they wore helmets or not; and risk-takers were fast, whether their heads were helmeted or bare.

Interestingly, the skiers and riders who were the most likely, in general, to don a helmet were the most expert, the men and women with the most talent and hours on the slopes. Experience seemed to have taught them the value of a helmet.

Off of the slopes, other new studies have brought skiers and snowboarders into the lab to test their reaction times and vision with and without helmets. Peripheral vision and response times are a serious safety concern in a sport where skiers and riders rapidly converge from multiple directions.

But when researchers asked snowboarders and skiers to wear caps, helmets, goggles or various combinations of each for a 2011 study and then had them sit before a computer screen and press a button when certain images popped up, they found that volunteers’ peripheral vision and reaction times were virtually unchanged when they wore a helmet, compared with wearing a hat. Goggles slightly reduced peripheral vision and increased response times. But helmets had no significant effect.

Even when researchers added music, testing snowboarders and skiers wearing Bluetooth-audio equipped helmets, response times did not increase significantly from when they wore wool caps.

So why do up to 40 percent of skiers and snowboarders still avoid helmets?

“The biggest reason, I think, is that many people never expect to fall,” says Dr. Adil H. Haider, a trauma surgeon and associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-author of a major new review of studies related to winter helmet use. “That attitude is especially common in people, like me, who are comfortable on blue runs but maybe not on blacks, and even more so in beginners.”

But a study published last spring detailing snowboarding injuries over the course of 18 seasons at a Vermont ski resort found that the riders at greatest risk of hurting themselves were female beginners. I sympathize.

The takeaway from the growing body of science about ski helmets is in fact unequivocal, Dr. Haider said. “Helmets are safe. They don’t seem to increase risk taking. And they protect against serious, even fatal head injuries.”

The Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, of which Dr. Haider is a member, has issued a recommendation that “all recreational skiers and snowboarders should wear safety helmets,” making them the first medical group to go on record advocating universal helmet use.

Perhaps even more persuasive, Dr. Haider has given helmets to all of his family members and colleagues who ski or ride. “As a trauma surgeon, I know how difficult it is to fix a brain,” he said. “So everyone I care about wears a helmet.”

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BlackBerry 10’s Debut Is a Critical Day for Research in Motion

OTTAWA — Research in Motion’s introduction on Wednesday of a new BlackBerry phone will be the most important event in the company’s history since 1996, when its founders showed investors a small block of wood and promised that a wireless e-mail device shaped like that would change business forever.

Now with just 4.6 percent of the global market for smartphones in 2012, according to IDC, RIM long ago exchanged dominance for survival mode. On Wednesday, the company will introduce a new line of smartphones called the BlackBerry 10 and an operating system of the same name that Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, says will restore the company to glory.

But Frank Mersch, who became one of RIM’s earliest investors after seeing the block of wood, is far less excited by what he sees this time around.

“You’re in a very, very competitive market and you’re not the leader,” Mr. Mersch, now the chairman and a vice president at Front Street Capital in Toronto, said of RIM. “You have to ask: ‘At the end of the day are we really going to win?’ I personally think the jury’s out on that.”

The main elements of the new phones and their operating system are already well known. Mr. Heins and other executives at RIM have been demonstrating the units for months to a variety of audiences. App developers received prototype versions as far back as last spring.

While analysts and app developers may be divided about the future of RIM, there is a consensus that BlackBerry 10, which arrives more than year behind schedule, was worth the wait.

Initially RIM will release two variations of the BlackBerry 10, one a touch-screen model that resembles many other phones now on the market. The other model is a hybrid with a keyboard similar to those now found on current BlackBerrys as well as a small touch screen.

The real revolution, though, may be in the software that manages a person’s business and personal information. It is clearly designed with an eye toward retaining and, more important, luring back, corporate users.

Corporate and government information technology managers will be able to segregate business-related apps and data on BlackBerry 10 handsets from users’ personal material through a system known as BlackBerry Balance. It will enable an I.T. manager to, among other things, remotely wipe corporate data from fired employees’ phones while leaving the newly jobless workers’ personal photos, e-mails, music and apps untouched. The system can also block users from forwarding or copying information from the work side of the phone.

Messages generated by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and LinkedIn accounts are automatically consolidated into a single in-box that RIM calls BlackBerry Hub.

Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research, called the new phones “beautiful” and described the operating system as “a giant leap forward” from RIM’s current operating system. Ray Sharma, who followed RIM’s glory years as a financial analyst but who now runs XMG Studio, a mobile games developer in Toronto, has been similarly impressed.

But both men are among many analysts who question the ability of BlackBerry 10, whatever its merits, to revive RIM’s fallen fortunes.

“If it’s good, it will help inspire the upgrade cycle,” Mr. Sharma said. “But it has to be great in order to inspire touch-screen users to come back. If it’s good, not great, I will be concerned.”

Mr. Golvin was more blunt. “They’ll need to prove themselves in the face of a simultaneous onslaught of marketing from Microsoft, not to mention the continued push from Apple plus Google and its Android partners,” he wrote. “This is a gargantuan challenge for a company of RIM’s size.”

In the year since he took over from the founders, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, Mr. Heins has certainly remade RIM. He cut 5,000 jobs in a program to reduce operating costs by about $1 billion a year. Along the way, he also replaced RIM’s senior management and straightened out its balance sheet. While unprofitable, RIM remains debt-free and holds $2.9 billion in cash.

With BlackBerry 10, RIM not only started over with its operating system, it also rebuilt the company through acquisitions. Its core operating system comes from QNX Software Systems, the design of the user interface is largely the work of the Astonishing Tribe in Sweden while other main components, like the touch-screen technology, came from smaller companies that are now part of RIM.

Integrating all of those acquisitions, analysts and former RIM employees say, added to the delays that plagued BlackBerry 10.

Now that the new phones are finally here, Mr. Heins is counting on RIM’s remaining base of 79 million users globally to eagerly upgrade. But where those customers reside may be as important in their numbers in determining the success of that plan.

In the United States, which leads the world in setting smartphone trends, about 11 million BlackBerry users switched to other phones between 2009 and the middle of last year, according to an analysis by Horace Dediu on Asymco, a wireless industry blog he founded.

Until the final months of 2012, RIM continued to increase its subscriber base through sales of low-cost handsets to less developed countries like Nigeria and Indonesia. Although BlackBerry 10 will be made available worldwide, the initial phones will be too expensive for a majority of BlackBerry fans in those regions.

RIM may also have confused its loyalists, particularly in North America and Europe, in the run-up to the BlackBerry 10 debut. Many of those users stuck with BlackBerrys because of their physical keyboards. But public demonstrations for BlackBerry 10 were centered on the touch-screen-only version and its virtual keyboard.

While some corporations have remained loyal to BlackBerry, RIM not only has to sell them on the new handsets, it also must persuade them to upgrade server software to accommodate the new operating system, a costly and time-consuming process. Companies whose employees continue to use older BlackBerrys will have to run two separate BlackBerry servers.

Mr. Heins’s pitch to those corporations is that the BlackBerry 10 server software will also allow them to manage and control data on employees’ Android phones and iPhones. But any corporation or organization that allows those phones to connect with its systems long ago installed mobile device management software from other companies, including Good Technology and SAP. RIM is likely to find that the competition in device management software is as severe as it is in the handset business.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of the Toronto company where Frank Mersch is the chairman and a vice president. It is First Street Capital, not Front Street Capital. An earlier version of this correction misspelled Frank Mersch’s surname as Mersh.

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