F.D.A. May Tap Experts on Energy Drinks

The Food and Drug Administration said in a letter released on Tuesday that it was likely to seek advice from outside experts to help determine whether energy drinks posed particular risks to teenagers or people with underlying health problems.

The letter appears to signal a change in the agency’s approach to the drinks, which contain high levels of caffeine.

Previously, F.D.A. officials have said that they were investigating possible risks posed by popular products like 5-Hour Energy, Monster Energy and Red Bull. But an agency spokeswoman, Shelly Burgess, said the new letter was the first time that the F.D.A. had said it might turn to outside experts.

The F.D.A. letter, which was released Tuesday by Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, follows disclosures that the agency received reports of 18 deaths and over 150 injuries that mentioned the possible involvement of energy drinks.

The filing of such reports with the F.D.A. does not prove that a product was responsible for a death or an injury. Energy drink makers have said their products are safe and were not responsible for the health problems.

The officials said a review of the drinks might be “greatly enhanced by also engaging specialized expertise” from an outside group, like the Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences.

Industry analysts said the letter indicated that the F.D.A. did not plan any immediate actions on energy drinks, an interpretation that set off a rally on Tuesday in the stock of Monster Beverage, the producer of Monster Energy. Company shares closed at $51.97, up over 13 percent. Any regulatory outcome is likely to be “benign,” Judy Hong, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, said in a note to investors, according to Bloomberg News.

In Canada, however, the use of an outside panel led to limits on caffeine levels in energy drinks.

In their letter, F.D.A. officials indicated that an outside review would focus on the possible risks posed by high levels of caffeine, a stimulant, to certain groups. They reiterated that daily consumption of significant levels of caffeine, which is found in products like coffee and tea, is safe.

“Areas of particular focus would include such matters as the vulnerability of certain populations to stimulants and the incidence and consequence of excessive consumption” of energy drinks, especially by young people, F.D.A. officials wrote.

In Canada, an expert panel made several recommendations, including arguing that such beverages be labeled “stimulant drug-containing drinks.”

Health Canada, that country’s counterpart to the F.D.A., did not adopt many of the group’s recommendations, but it has put in place new rules limiting caffeine levels in cans of energy drinks to 180 milligrams.

Some larger-size cans of energy drinks sold in the United States, like the 24-ounce can of Monster Energy and the 20-ounce can of Red Bull, have caffeine levels above that limit.

An eight-ounce cup of coffee, depending on how it is made, can contain from 100 to 150 milligrams of caffeine.

In the new letter, F.D.A. officials also said that studies that had examined other ingredients, like taurine, that are often used in energy drinks had determined those substances were safe. The agency also said that a survey suggested that energy drinks constitute a small portion of the caffeine consumed in this country, even by teenagers.

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Ex-NASA Scientist’s Data Fears Come True

In 2007, Robert M. Nelson, an astronomer, and 27 other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sued NASA arguing that the space agency’s background checks of employees of government contractors were unnecessarily invasive and violated their privacy rights.

Privacy advocates chimed in as well, contending that the space agency would not be able to protect the confidential details it was collecting.

The scientists took their case all the way to the Supreme Court only to lose last year.

This month, Dr. Nelson opened a letter from NASA telling him of a significant data breach that could potentially expose him to identity theft.

The very thing he and advocates worried about had occurred. A laptop used by an employee at NASA’s headquarters in Washington had been stolen from a car parked on the street on Halloween, the space agency said.

Although the laptop itself was password protected, unencrypted files on the laptop contained personal information on about 10,000 NASA employees — including details like their names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and in some cases, details related to background checks into employees’ personal lives.

Millions of Americans have received similar data breach notices from employers, government agencies, medical centers, banks and retailers. NASA in particular has been subject to “numerous cyberattacks” and computer thefts in recent years, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, an agency that conducts research for Congress.

Even so, Dr. Nelson, who recently retired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a research facility operated by the California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA, stands out as a glaring example of security lapses involving personal data, privacy advocates say.

“To the extent that Robert Nelson looks like millions of other people working for firms employed by the federal government, this would seem to be a real problem,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group which filed a friend-of-the-court brief for Dr. Nelson in the Supreme Court case.

In a 2009 report titled “NASA Needs to Remedy Vulnerabilities in Key Networks,” the Government Accountability Office noted that the agency had reported 1,120 security incidents in fiscal 2007 and 2008 alone.

It also singled out an incident in 2009 in which a NASA center reported the theft of a laptop containing about 3,000 unencrypted files about arms traffic regulations and wind tunnel tests for a supersonic jet.

“NASA had not installed full-disk encryption on its laptops at all three centers,” the report said. “As a result, sensitive data transmitted through the unclassified network or stored on laptop computers were at an increased risk of being compromised.” Other federal agencies have had similar problems. In 2006, for example, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs reported the theft of an employee laptop and hard drive that contained personal details on about 26.5 million veterans. Last year, the G.A.O. cited the Internal Revenue Service for weaknesses in data control that could “jeopardize the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of financial and sensitive taxpayer information.”

Also last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission warned its employees that their confidential financial information, like brokerage transactions, might have been compromised because an agency contractor had granted data access to a subcontractor without the S.E.C.’s authorization.

In a phone interview, Dr. Nelson, the astronomer, said he planned to hold a news conference on Wednesday morning in which he would ask members of Congress to investigate NASA’s data collection practices and the recent data breach.

Robert Jacobs, a NASA spokesman, said the agency’s data security policy already adequately protected employees and contractors because it required computers to be encrypted before employees took them off agency premises. “We are talking about a computer that should not have left the building in the first place,” Mr. Jacobs said. “The data would have been secure had the employee followed policy.”

The government argued in the case Dr. Nelson filed that a law called the Privacy Act, which governs data collection by federal agencies, provided the scientists with sufficient protection. The case reached the Supreme Court, which upheld government background checks for employees of contractors. The roots of Dr. Nelson’s case against NASA date back to 2004 when the Department of Homeland Security, under a directive signed by President George Bush, required federal agencies to adopt uniform identification credentials for all civil servants and contract employees. As part of the ID card standardization process, the department recommended agencies institute background checks.

Several years later, when NASA announced it intended to start doing background checks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dr. Nelson and other scientists there objected.

Those security checks could have included inquiries into medical treatment, counseling for drug use, or any “adverse” information about employees such as sexual activity, or participation in protests, said Dan Stormer, a lawyer representing Dr. Nelson.

But Dr. Nelson and other long-term employees of the lab challenged the legality of those checks, arguing that they violated their privacy rights. NASA, they said, had not established a legitimate need for such extensive investigations about low-risk employees like themselves who did not have security clearances or handle confidential information. Dr. Nelson, for example, specializes in solar system science — concerning, for example, Jupiter’s moon Io and Titan, a moon of Saturn — and publishes his work in scientific journals

“It was an invitation to an open-ended fishing expedition,” Dr. Nelson said of the background checks.

In friend of the court briefs for Dr. Nelson, privacy groups cited many data security problems at federal agencies, arguing that there was a risk that NASA was not equipped to protect the confidential details it was collecting about employees and contractors.

In 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco temporarily halted the background checks, saying that the case had raised important questions about privacy rights. But last year, the Supreme Court upheld the background investigations of employees of government contractors.

Dr. Nelson said he retired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory last June rather than submit to a background check. He now works as a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute of Tucson.

NASA has contracted with ID Experts, a data breach company, to help protect employees whose data was contained on the stolen laptop against identity theft. Mr. Jacobs, the NASA spokesman, said the agency has encrypted almost 80 percent of its laptops and plans to encrypt the rest by Dec. 21. He added that he too received a letter from NASA warning that his personal information might have been compromised by the laptop theft.

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Japan Expands Its Regional Military Role

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Coast guard officials from a dozen Asian and African nations, at right, joined a training cruise around Tokyo Bay aboard a Japanese Coast Guard cutter.

TOKYO — After years of watching its international influence eroded by a slow-motion economic decline, the pacifist nation of Japan is trying to raise its profile in a new way, offering military aid for the first time in decades and displaying its own armed forces in an effort to build regional alliances and shore up other countries’ defenses to counter a rising China.

Already this year, Japan crossed a little-noted threshold by providing its first military aid abroad since the end of World War II, approving a $2 million package for its military engineers to train troops in Cambodia and East Timor in disaster relief and skills like road building. Japanese warships have not only conducted joint exercises with a growing number of military forces in the Pacific and Asia, but they have also begun making regular port visits to countries long fearful of a resurgence of Japan’s military.

And after stepping up civilian aid programs to train and equip the coast guards of other nations, Japanese defense officials and analysts say, Japan could soon reach another milestone: beginning sales in the region of military hardware like seaplanes, and perhaps eventually the stealthy diesel-powered submarines considered well suited to the shallow waters where China is making increasingly assertive territorial claims.

Taken together those steps, while modest, represent a significant shift for Japan, which had resisted repeated calls from the United States to become a true regional power for fear that doing so would move it too far from its postwar pacifism. The country’s quiet resolve to edge past that reluctance and become more of a player comes as the United States and China are staking their own claims to power in Asia, and as jitters over China’s ambitions appear to be softening bitterness toward Japan among some Southeast Asian countries trampled last century in its quest for colonial domination.

The driver for Japan’s shifting national security strategy is its tense dispute with China over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that is feeding Japanese anxiety that the country’s relative decline — and the financial struggles of its traditional protector, the United States — are leaving Japan increasingly vulnerable.

“During the cold war, all Japan had to do was follow the U.S.,” said Keiro Kitagami, a special adviser on security issues to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. “With China, it’s different. Japan has to take a stand on its own.”

Japan’s moves do not mean it might transform its military, which serves a purely defensive role, into an offensive force anytime soon. The public has resisted past efforts by some politicians to revamp Japan’s pacifist constitution, and the nation’s vast debt will limit how much military aid it can extend.

But it is also clear that attitudes in Japan are evolving as China continues its double-digit annual growth in military spending and asserts that it should be in charge of the islands that Japan claims, as well as vast swaths of the South China Sea that various Southeast Asian nations say are in their control.

Japanese leaders have met the Chinese challenge over the islands known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China with an uncharacteristic willingness to push back, and polls show the public increasingly agrees. Both major political parties are also talking openly about instituting a more flexible reading of the constitution that would allow Japan to come to the defense of allies — shooting down any North Korean missile headed for the United States, for instance — blurring the line between an offensive and defensive force.

The country’s self-defense forces had already begun nosing over that line in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Japan backed the United States-led campaigns by deploying naval tankers to refuel warships in the Indian Ocean.

Japanese officials say their strategy is not to begin a race for influence with China, but to build up ties with other nations that share worries about their imposing neighbor. They acknowledge that even building the capacity of other nations’ coast guards is a way of strengthening those countries’ ability to stand up to any Chinese threat.

“We want to build our own coalition of the willing in Asia to prevent China from just running over us,” said Yoshihide Soeya, director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Keio University in Tokyo.

Or, as the vice minister of defense, Akihisa Nagashima, said in an interview, “We cannot just allow Japan to go into quiet decline.”

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DealBook: Autonomy's Ex-Chief Calls on H.P. Board to Defend Allegations

The former head of Autonomy, the British software maker that Hewlett-Packard acquired last year, is not happy about H.P.’s accusations of accounting fraud at his former company.

So he is calling on H.P. to defend its $8.8 billion write-down tied to the takeover.

In a public letter released on Tuesday, the executive, Mike Lynch, again rejected H.P.’s claims about Autonomy. (Mr. Lynch has not been accused of wrongdoing.) Instead, he argued that H.P. botched its takeover of the British company and mishandled its integration.

“Having no details beyond the limited public information provided last week, and still with no further contact from you, I am writing today to ask you, the board of H.P., for immediate and specific explanations for the allegations H.P. is making,” he wrote in the letter.

Mr. Lynch has been exceptionally vocal about defending his reputation and that of Autonomy, which grew over 16 years to become one of Britain’s most successful technology start-ups.

He emphasized that nothing improper had taken place at the company, and that it had followed all the rules set forth under British accounting guidelines. Possible discrepancies over how Autonomy recognized revenue from sales, he said, might be attributable to differences between British and American accounting rules.

In his letter, Mr. Lynch outlined a number of concerns about the $8.8 billion charge. Some of those questions were thinly veiled jabs at H.P., which fired him as the head of Autonomy in May after missing sales estimates. (He does not dispute that characterization, but has said he was hamstrung by a number of obstacles and a string of poor management decisions.)

Among his questions:

• In order to justify a $5 billion accounting write-down, a significant amount of revenue must be involved. Please explain how such issues could possibly have gone undetected during the extensive acquisition due diligence process and H.P.’s financial oversight of Autonomy for a year from acquisition until October 2012 (a period during which all of the Autonomy finance reported to H.P.’s C.F.O., Cathie Lesjak).
• Can H.P. really state that no part of the $5 billion write-down was, or should be, attributed to H.P.’s operational and financial mismanagement of Autonomy since the acquisition?
• Why did H.P. senior management apparently wait six months to inform its shareholders of the possibility of a material event related to Autonomy?

An H.P. representative was not immediately available for comment.

Open Letter to the Board of Hp Final

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Imaging Shows Progressive Damage by Parkinson’s

For the first time, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report, brain imaging has been able to show in living patients the progressive damage Parkinson’s disease causes to two small structures deep in the brain.

The new technique confirms some ideas about the overall progress of the disease in the brain. But the effects of Parkinson’s vary in patients, the researchers said, and in the future, the refinement in imaging may help doctors monitor how the disease is affecting different people and adjust treatment accordingly.

The outward symptoms and progress of Parkinson’s disease — tremors, stiffness, weakness — have been well known since James Parkinson first described them in 1817. But its progress in the brain has been harder to document.

Some of the structures affected by the disease have been buried too deep to see clearly even with advances in brain imaging. An important recent hypothesis about how the disease progresses was based on the examinations of brains of patients who had died.

Now, a group of scientists at M.I.T. and Massachusetts General Hospital report that they have worked out a way to combine four different sorts of M.R.I. to get clear pictures of damage to two brain structures in people living with Parkinson’s. In doing so, they have added support to one part of the recent hypothesis, which is that the disease first strikes an area involved in movement and later progresses to a higher part of the brain more involved in memory and attention.

Suzanne Corkin, a professor emerita of behavioral neuroscience at M.I.T. and the senior author on the paper published online Monday in The Archives of Neurology, said that this progression was part of the hypothesis put forward in 2003 by Heiko Braak, a German neuroscientist, based on autopsies.

But, she said, because of the limits of brain imaging, “nobody could test this in living patients.”

David A. Ziegler, who was at M.I.T. when the research was done, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, said that the study, of 29 patients with Parkinson’s and 27 healthy patients of roughly the same age, showed that the peanut-sized substantia nigra lost volume first, and another structure called the basal forebrain, involved in memory and attention, was struck later.

Glenda Halliday, a neuroscientist at Neuroscience Research Australia and the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the study, said the paper confirmed “the progression of degeneration in two important affected brain regions in people with Parkinson’s.”

Dr. Corkin, Dr. Ziegler and their colleagues developed a way to use four different varieties of M.R.I. — each using different settings on the same machine — to come up with four different images that could be used to form one image that showed structures deep in the brain like the substantia nigra, long known to be important in Parkinson’s.

The disease kills brain cells, shrinking the parts of the brain that it affects, and the comparative study showed that the reduction in size of the substantia nigra showed up in early stage Parkinson’s patients, compared with a healthy group.

The reduction in size in the basal forebrain, compared with the healthy group, did not show up in the patients in the early stage, but was clear in patients in the later stage.

“This is a project we’ve been working on in our lab for years,” she said. A next step, already in progress, is to correlate damage to specific brain structures with symptoms.

Parkinson’s, she said, is a disease that shows the same broad outlines of development in most patients, but with considerable variation. Dementia may arrive early or may not appear. The M.R.I. technique described in the paper, she said, might help tease out what is going on in the brain in subgroups of Parkinson’s patients that show different symptoms and could influence treatment.

One important difference between the two brain structures is that damage to the substantia nigra decreases production of the neurotransmitter dopamine, while a smaller basal forebrain would reduce the production of a different chemical, acetylcholine.

The research is just one step, Dr. Ziegler said. One of the “big outstanding questions,” he said, is whether all patients will eventually get dementia.

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Imaging Shows Progressive Damage by Parkinson’s

For the first time, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report, brain imaging has been able to show in living patients the progressive damage Parkinson’s disease causes to two small structures deep in the brain.

The new technique confirms some ideas about the overall progress of the disease in the brain. But the effects of Parkinson’s vary in patients, the researchers said, and in the future, the refinement in imaging may help doctors monitor how the disease is affecting different people and adjust treatment accordingly.

The outward symptoms and progress of Parkinson’s disease — tremors, stiffness, weakness — have been well known since James Parkinson first described them in 1817. But its progress in the brain has been harder to document.

Some of the structures affected by the disease have been buried too deep to see clearly even with advances in brain imaging. An important recent hypothesis about how the disease progresses was based on the examinations of brains of patients who had died.

Now, a group of scientists at M.I.T. and Massachusetts General Hospital report that they have worked out a way to combine four different sorts of M.R.I. to get clear pictures of damage to two brain structures in people living with Parkinson’s. In doing so, they have added support to one part of the recent hypothesis, which is that the disease first strikes an area involved in movement and later progresses to a higher part of the brain more involved in memory and attention.

Suzanne Corkin, a professor emerita of behavioral neuroscience at M.I.T. and the senior author on the paper published online Monday in The Archives of Neurology, said that this progression was part of the hypothesis put forward in 2003 by Heiko Braak, a German neuroscientist, based on autopsies.

But, she said, because of the limits of brain imaging, “nobody could test this in living patients.”

David A. Ziegler, who was at M.I.T. when the research was done, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, said that the study, of 29 patients with Parkinson’s and 27 healthy patients of roughly the same age, showed that the peanut-sized substantia nigra lost volume first, and another structure called the basal forebrain, involved in memory and attention, was struck later.

Glenda Halliday, a neuroscientist at Neuroscience Research Australia and the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the study, said the paper confirmed “the progression of degeneration in two important affected brain regions in people with Parkinson’s.”

Dr. Corkin, Dr. Ziegler and their colleagues developed a way to use four different varieties of M.R.I. — each using different settings on the same machine — to come up with four different images that could be used to form one image that showed structures deep in the brain like the substantia nigra, long known to be important in Parkinson’s.

The disease kills brain cells, shrinking the parts of the brain that it affects, and the comparative study showed that the reduction in size of the substantia nigra showed up in early stage Parkinson’s patients, compared with a healthy group.

The reduction in size in the basal forebrain, compared with the healthy group, did not show up in the patients in the early stage, but was clear in patients in the later stage.

“This is a project we’ve been working on in our lab for years,” she said. A next step, already in progress, is to correlate damage to specific brain structures with symptoms.

Parkinson’s, she said, is a disease that shows the same broad outlines of development in most patients, but with considerable variation. Dementia may arrive early or may not appear. The M.R.I. technique described in the paper, she said, might help tease out what is going on in the brain in subgroups of Parkinson’s patients that show different symptoms and could influence treatment.

One important difference between the two brain structures is that damage to the substantia nigra decreases production of the neurotransmitter dopamine, while a smaller basal forebrain would reduce the production of a different chemical, acetylcholine.

The research is just one step, Dr. Ziegler said. One of the “big outstanding questions,” he said, is whether all patients will eventually get dementia.

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News Analysis: St. Jude Medical Suffers for Redacting a Product Name

Peter Muhly for The New York Times

Dr. Ernest Lau holds a Durata lead from a St. Jude Medical Fortify ICD, an implanted heart defibrillator.

IS covering a product’s name in a public document a sign that a company has something to hide? And how should doctors, patients and investors react if the product at issue is one on which peoples’ lives and a company’s fortunes depend?

Such questions now loom over St. Jude Medical after the disclosure last week that its executives had blacked out the name of a heart device component when they released a critical federal report involving the product. The value of St. Jude has since plummeted more than $1 billion, or 12 percent. But the company’s actions may have a more lasting impact on its reputation and the health of patients, some experts say.

Last week’s incident was the latest development in a controversy involving the component, an electrical wire that connects an implanted defibrillator to a patient’s heart. St. Jude officials say the wire, which is known as the Durata, is safe. But uncertainty about the company’s statements is growing, underscored by its handling of the report, which involved a Food and Drug Administration inspection of a plant that makes the Durata.

St. Jude released that report in October as part of a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The F.D.A. provides device makers with the reports in an unaltered form, and they may contain criticisms of a company’s procedures.

But the version of the report that St. Jude filed with the S.E.C. left some doctors and analysts uncertain about which company product or products were at issue for a simple reason — St. Jude had redacted, or blocked out, all 20 references to the Durata in it.

Company executives said they had done so based on their “good faith” interpretation of how the F.D.A. would act if it publicly released the report under the Freedom of Information Act. But both an F.D.A spokeswoman and a lawyer who specializes in medical devices took exception with that view, saying that names of approved products typically do not qualify as the type of confidential business information that the F.D.A. would redact.

Among other things, F.D.A. inspectors found significant flaws in the company’s testing and oversight of the Durata. It was those revelations and the implications that the problems could lead to further F.D.A. action against St. Jude that led to the sharp fall last week in its stock price.

In 2005, Guidant, a device maker that no longer exists, also found itself under scrutiny. Back then, its executives decided not to tell doctors that one of its defibrillators could short-circuit when a patient needed an electrical jolt to save a life. The expert who brought the Guidant problem to light, Dr. Robert Hauser, a heart specialist in Minnesota, has also raised concerns about the St. Jude wires, adding that he believes that its executives have been less than forthright.

“Patients and physicians would appreciate more information,” Dr. Hauser said.

In an earlier interview, St. Jude’s chief executive, Daniel J. Starks, said the company had hidden nothing about the Durata or another heart wire named the Riata, which it stopped selling in 2010.

“We’ve been more transparent than others,” said Mr. Starks, referring to company competitors like Medtronic.

Still, some Wall Street analysts share Dr. Hauser’s view. And if one St. Jude executive can claim credit for shaping their opinion, it would be Mr. Starks.

Earlier this year, he sought, among other things, to have a medical journal retract an article written by Dr. Hauser that was critical of the Riata. The publication refused.

Now, after St. Jude’s latest misfire, Wall Street analysts, who usually agree more than disagree, are placing wildly differing bets on St. Jude, with some valuing it at $48 a share and others at $30. On Monday, St. Jude closed at $31.86 on the New York Stock Exchange.

One of those bearish analysts, Matthew Dodds of Citigroup, said he thought the Food and Drug Administration might act soon on Durata. “I believe that a lot of their actions have made the situation worse, ” he said of the company’s executives.

A St. Jude spokeswoman, Amy Jo Meyer, reiterated the company’s stance that it had interpreted agency rules in “good faith” when releasing the redacted report about the Durata. An F.D.A. spokeswoman, Mary Long, said the agency did not consider the names of approved products to be confidential. And a lawyer, William Vodra, said that while device makers try to make a confidentiality argument for product data they consider embarrassing, like injury reports, they rarely succeed.

“In my experience, the F.D.A. consistently rejects” such arguments, Mr. Vodra wrote in an e-mail.

For patients, the dilemma may become more excruciating. The company’s earlier heart wire, the Riata, has begun failing prematurely in some of the 128,000 patients worldwide who received it. And those patients and their doctors face a difficult decision: whether to leave it in place or have it surgically removed, a procedure that carries significant risks.

St. Jude executives say that the Durata, which uses a different type of insulation than the Riata, is not prone to such problems.

And with the Durata already implanted in 278,000 people, many heart specialists certainly hope they are right.

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Taliban Claim Responsibility for Fatal Bombing in Pakistan

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (AP) — A bombing claimed by the Taliban killed at least six people and wounded about 90 others in a religious procession in northwestern Pakistan on Sunday, the police said, as Shiite Muslims observed the annual Ashura holiday.

Since Wednesday, at least 31 people have been killed in bombings aimed at Pakistani Shiites and claimed by the Taliban, who espouse an extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam. More than 100 people were wounded in the attacks just before the holiday, which commemorates the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson in the seventh century. The schism between Sunnis and Shiites dates back to that time.

Sunday’s explosion went off as hundreds of Shiites were passing through the main intersection of the city of Dera Ismail Khan, the police said, where food and water stalls were set up to serve the crowd. An initial investigation suggested that a bomb was planted near a shop along the procession route. “The bomb contained about eight kilograms of explosives and steel balls, and was detonated with a remote-control device,” said the city’s police chief, Sohail Khalid.

Several of the wounded were in serious condition, said Dr. Faridullah Mahsud, an official at the city’s hospital, who added that three members of a paramilitary unit providing security for the procession were among the wounded.

Dr. Khalid Aziz, the top official at the hospital, put the death toll at six.

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Building Start-Ups Using Stars’ Social Media Ties to Fans

You might have heard Jessica Alba on daytime TV talking about her new e-commerce company, which sells diapers and other baby supplies, or seen Kim Kardashian pitching her online shoe store in the tabloids.

The man behind the companies, Brian Lee, is far from a household name. Yet in the world of tech start-ups, he is an emerging force.

Mr. Lee, a lawyer turned entrepreneur, has a simple formula: partner with a celebrity that fans associate with a certain product, whether stilettos or baby supplies. He first did it in 1999, when he cold-called Robert Shapiro, O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, and persuaded him to join him at his first start-up, LegalZoom, for creating your own legal documents.

Hiring a famous face to represent your brand is the oldest marketing trick in the book. But Mr. Lee is doing it with an Internet twist. He uses celebrities’ social media connections with fans, coupled with recent innovations in e-commerce, to sell things in ways that were not possible just a few years ago.

The Honest Company, Ms. Alba’s start-up selling eco-friendly baby supplies, has raised $27 million from investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners. ShoeDazzle, Ms. Kardashian’s shoe company, has raised $66 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed and others. But despite this investment, it has recently struggled, replacing its chief executive, laying off employees and raising bigger questions about the new breed of subscription e-commerce companies.

E-commerce is going through a shift, as retailers move beyond publishing print catalogs online to creating new business models for the Web. According to the National Venture Capital Association, venture capitalists invested $2.2 billion in e-commerce start-ups last year, almost three times as much as the year before and more than they have invested since the first Internet boom, which created Amazon.com and eBay.

Mr. Lee’s companies tap the latest e-commerce trends, including selling monthly subscriptions, using software algorithms to determine personal style suggestions and eliminating middlemen by designing products in-house and selling them directly to consumers.

“Given the choice between shopping at a boutique or warehouse, if the styles were right, which would my wife choose?” Mr. Lee said, describing the strategy behind ShoeDazzle and Honest. “A large group of women would choose that kind of curated boutique.”

At Honest, customers sign up for monthly deliveries of diapers festooned with anchors or hearts as well as items like shampoo and detergent, each formulated in-house to reduce chemicals. Ms. Alba conceived the idea, along with Christopher Gavigan, former chief of the nonprofit Healthy Child Healthy World, and turned to Mr. Lee for a business model.

When ShoeDazzle was founded in 2009, it was the first of a flurry of subscription e-commerce start-ups. The shoes, generally $39.95, are suggested based on the results of a style quiz the customer takes. They are designed by ShoeDazzle and manufactured at the same factories that big shoe brands use.

But ShoeDazzle has been struggling with that model, and analysts say that could foreshadow problems for its many imitators, which, in addition to Honest, include Birchbox for cosmetics, Wittlebee for children’s clothing, JustFab for shoes and handbags, and BeachMint, which has sites for jewelry, T-shirts, skin care, shoes, home décor and lingerie. Earlier this month, Walmart joined the trend, introducing a monthly subscription box of food called The Goodies Company.

“Subscriptions were the hot trend in the last year, but I think some of that energy has really flattened,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, an e-commerce analyst at Forrester.

While subscriptions have worked well at companies like Amazon.com and Diapers.com for necessities like toilet paper and diapers, shoppers might find it harder to justify a recurring credit-card charge for colorful suede booties.

ShoeDazzle switched to a nonsubscription model this year, so shoppers log on whenever they are in the mood to shop instead of receiving monthly boxes. In September, the company replaced its chief executive, Bill Strauss, with Mr. Lee. He laid off 20 of its 220 employees and cut expenses like corporate apartments. Both Honest and ShoeDazzle are capital-intensive because they design, store and ship their own inventory.

“We lost our way,” said Jeremy Liew, managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners. “But there’s real value in this company and customers love the product.”

Mr. Lee said ShoeDazzle would approach $100 million in revenue this year and become profitable next year. Honest is not yet a year old, but its founders say it has proved popular with shoppers. Mr. Lee is the right person for the job, Mr. Liew said, because he has a Hollywood sensibility that Bay Area executives lack.

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Chia Seeds Gain Popularity for Nutritional Benefits

First there were Chia Pets; now there are chia people.

Ubiquitous in television ads that began 30 years ago, Chia Pets were called “the pottery that grows.” Mixing chia seeds and water on the outside of an animal-shaped terra-cotta figurine produces a plant resembling green hair almost overnight.

Now, chia is having a second life as a nutritional “it” item. Whole and ground chia seeds are being added to fruit drinks, snack foods and cereals and sold on their own to be baked into cookies and sprinkled on yogurt. Grown primarily in Mexico and Bolivia, chia, like fish, is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, though of a different sort. It also has antioxidants, protein and fiber. Recognition of its nutritional value can be traced as far back as the Aztecs.

Companies like Dole and Nature’s Path have introduced chia products, which have begun showing up on shelves in mainstream grocery stores like Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons. Mintel, a market research firm, counted 100 products containing chia in a presentation it did in March on the potential of increasing the use of the seeds in dairy products.

“About two years ago, our retailers came to us and said, ‘We need you to be in this business everyone is talking about, the business of chia seeds,’ ” said Michael P. Hirsch, vice president of Joseph Enterprises, which sells Chia Pets and other novelty products and has now added chia seeds and milled chia called — what else? — Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia Omega.

Last spring, high demand collided with weather patterns that depressed production, raising prices and the awareness that chia had moved beyond the realm of health food stores into the broader market.

Janie Hoffman, founder of Mamma Chia fruit juices, was one of the first people to recognize chia’s potential as a food. She was complaining about flax seed — “I hate how you have to grind it and then it goes rancid” — to a friend, who asked why she wasn’t using chia instead. “She said it had no taste, it’s high in antioxidants, huge in omega-3, a far superior seed,” Ms. Hoffman said. “In short, she made me feel like an idiot — no one was using flax seed anymore.”

So she bought some chia seeds online and was quickly sold on their benefits. “I started incorporating it into everything I was eating,” she said. “Stir fries, yogurt, beverages — there really wasn’t anything in my kitchen that didn’t have chia in it.”

In 2009, Ms. Hoffman developed fruit juices with chia seeds suspended in them. (Exposure to liquid gives the seeds a sticky, gelatinous coating, which is how they bond to the terra-cotta pets.)

“My first sales call a year and a half later was to Whole Foods in the southern Pacific region,” she said. “I walked in to meet the buyer and presented this chia beverage and said I would like it to go into a few stores. She said, ‘No, I want you in all of them’ ” — about 40 stores — “and that was that.”

Within 11 months, Mamma Chia products were in Whole Foods stores across the nation, as well as in hundreds of bodegas and health and natural foods stores. They are now sold in Ralphs and Vons stores and will soon be in Albertsons.

“I personally think demand for it will grow for sure, though how big it will get is still a question,” said Brad C. Bartlett, president of Dole Food Company’s packaged foods business.

Dole chose chia as the first ingredient it would promote in its new Nutrition Plus line of products, which aim to provide a functional benefit to consumers. It won out over other candidates, Mr. Bartlett said, because of its long history as a source of nutrition — the Aztecs used it for many purposes — and because it does not require much processing to confer its benefits.

The company does independent clinical testing on each product in the Nutrition Plus line to back up claims it makes about their health benefits, and it was surprised by one finding: significantly more alpha-linolenic acid in omega-3 reached the bloodstream and was converted into eicosapentaenoic acid, a long-chain fatty acid considered good for the heart, when the seeds were milled rather than whole.

“That came as quite a surprise, and we stopped the rollout and reformulated our clusters to use milled chia instead of whole seeds,” Mr. Bartlett said, referring to Dole’s Chia & Fruit Clusters.

Nature’s Path, an organic cereal company, introduced its first chia-laced cereal, Apple Crumble Love Crunch, last December, and now has eight products that include the seed in some form. “Business has been great with these products — overwhelmingly positive and, perhaps surprisingly, not just in health food stores but also in regular grocery stores,” said Arjan Stephens, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Nature’s Path.

Mr. Stephens said chia’s nutritional attributes, along with its many uses in food processing, could turn it into a staple. “It can be used in gluten-free breads or waffles to add fluffiness or to replace eggs in vegan products,” he said. “It offers an alternative to those with nut allergies.”

Mr. Hirsch, the Joseph Enterprises vice president, was less certain that chia would be a blockbuster, even though his company is adding protein bars to its line of edible chia products, which are sold in Walgreens, CVS and other drugstores. He said he was concerned about the supply of chia seeds, which are harvested once a year and grown in rotation, usually with corn.

Australia has recently joined Mexico and Bolivia in the chia-production act with its own type of seed that is grown somewhat differently, Mr. Hirsch said. But it is a difficult crop to grow outside of the traditional areas, and the market is tiny, about $70 million.

“Everybody is looking at this because everybody is always looking for something new,” Mr. Hirsch said. “I also know from the sales at this point it’s a niche market still, and we don’t know how big the niche is yet.”

If that niche fails to expand, there will always be another Chia Pet. This year, Chia Hello Kitty is joining the lineup.

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