Microsoft Battles Google by Hiring Political Brawler Mark Penn

SEATTLE — Mark Penn made a name for himself in Washington by bulldozing enemies of the Clintons. Now he spends his days trying to do the same to Google, on behalf of its archrival Microsoft.

Since Mr. Penn was put in charge of “strategic and special projects” at Microsoft in August, much of his job has involved efforts to trip up Google, which Microsoft has failed to dislodge from its perch atop the lucrative Internet search market.

Drawing on his background in polling, data crunching and campaigning, Mr. Penn created a holiday commercial that has been running during Monday Night Football and other shows, in which Microsoft criticizes Google for polluting the quality of its shopping search results with advertisements. “Don’t get scroogled,” it warns. His other projects include a blind taste test, Coke-versus-Pepsi style, of search results from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.

The campaigns by Mr. Penn, 58, a longtime political operative known for his brusque personality and scorched-earth tactics, are part of a broader effort at Microsoft to give its marketing the nimbleness of a political campaign, where a candidate can turn an opponent’s gaffe into a damaging commercial within hours. They are also a sign of the company’s mounting frustration with Google after losing billions of dollars a year on its search efforts, while losing ground to Google in the browser and smartphones markets and other areas.

Microsoft has long attacked Google from the shadows, whispering to regulators, journalists and anyone else who would listen that Google was a privacy-violating, anticompetitive bully. The fruits of its recent work in this area could come next week, when the Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce the results of its antitrust investigation of Google, a case that echoes Microsoft’s own antitrust suit in the 1990s. A similar investigation by the European Union is also wrapping up. A bad outcome for Google in either one would be a victory for Microsoft.

But Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., has realized that it cannot rely only on regulators to scrutinize Google — which is where Mr. Penn comes in. He is increasing the urgency of Microsoft’s efforts and focusing on their more public side.

In an interview, Mr. Penn said companies underestimated the importance of policy issues like privacy to consumers, as opposed to politicians and regulators. “It’s not about whether they can get them through Washington,” he said. “It’s whether they can get them through Main Street.”

Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman, declined to comment on Microsoft’s actions specifically, but said that while Google also employed lobbyists and marketers, “our focus is on Google and the positive impact our industry has on society, not the competition.”

In Washington, Mr. Penn is a lightning rod. He developed a relationship with the Clintons as a pollster during President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, when he helped identify the value of “soccer moms” and other niche voter groups.

As chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 campaign for president, he conceived the “3 a.m.” commercial that raised doubts about whether Barack Obama, then a senator, was ready for the Oval Office. Mr. Penn argued in an essay he wrote for Time magazine in May that “negative ads are, by and large, good for our democracy.”

But his approach has ended up souring many of his professional relationships. He left Mrs. Clinton’s campaign after an uproar about his consulting work for the government of Colombia, which was seeking the passage of a trade treaty with the United States that Mrs. Clinton, then a senator, opposed.

“Google should be prepared for everything but the kitchen sink thrown at them,” said a former colleague who worked closely with Mr. Penn in politics and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Actually, they should be prepared for the kitchen sink to be thrown at them, too.”

Hiring Mr. Penn demonstrates how seriously Microsoft is taking this fight, said Michael A. Cusumano, a business professor at M.I.T. who co-wrote a book about Microsoft’s browser war.

“They’re pulling out all the stops to do whatever they can to halt Google’s advance, just as their competition did to them,” Professor Cusumano said. “I suppose that if Microsoft can actually put a doubt in people’s mind that Google isn’t unbiased and has become some kind of evil empire, they might very well get results.”

Nick Wingfield reported from Seattle and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco.

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Susan Rice’s Bluntness Endeared Her to President

Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

Susan E. Rice before a cabinet meeting last month at which President Obama lauded the job she was doing. She will now, presumably, stay in her job.

WASHINGTON — For President Obama, the decision to forgo the fight to make Susan E. Rice his secretary of state was a deeply painful one. It required publicly abandoning one of his most loyal aides, who had broken with the Democratic foreign policy establishment early to side with his improbable candidacy, and whose blunt-speaking style — which helped cost her the job — had always been, for Mr. Obama, a part of her appeal.

Typically, just hours before she called Mr. Obama to tell him she had decided to withdraw from contention as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s successor, she rebuked her Chinese counterpart in an informal meeting of the United Nations Security Council, telling him his views excusing a North Korean missile launching this week were “ridiculous.”

He shot back, according to witnesses, that she “better watch your language.”

It was the latest example of why Ms. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, has so often been criticized as being an unusually undiplomatic diplomat, direct to the point of rudeness. But friends and former White House aides say that Ms. Rice’s style is a reflection of Mr. Obama’s own: impatient with niceties, uninterested in small talk or long dinners, focused solely on results.

“They share a common vision and a common style,” said Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, who has known Ms. Rice since she was 4 years old and a schoolmate of Ms. Albright’s children. “Some of it is a generational thing, and some of it is life’s experiences.”

“She is incredibly bright, but lots of people in Washington are bright,” Ms. Albright added. “What separates people out here is that some are loyal.”

By the account of White House aides, it is loyalty that led Ms. Rice to conclude that a confirmation battle would be long, bloody and harmful to both her and the president. Pundits will long argue about whether she was pushed into her decision or jumped. But it is clear that for Mr. Obama, giving up on Ms. Rice’s appointment was far different than accepting the resignation of David H. Petraeus, his C.I.A. director, or firing Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, his commander in Afghanistan.

She began advising Mr. Obama after he was elected to the Senate. When he started his run for president in 2007, she took a significant career risk for a woman who had served in the Clinton administration as an assistant secretary of state and was presumed by her friends to be a supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. Instead, she left the fold, backing an upstart candidate and substituting her own foreign policy experience for his lack of it.

Mark Alexander, an early campaign adviser and distant cousin of Ms. Rice’s, remembers Mr. Obama saying back then, “I have Susan Rice, and she’s going to be getting her networks going and making sure I have top-notch foreign policy people.” Before making a decision involving foreign policy, “she was the last call he would make.”

For two years, she spent untold hours advising Mr. Obama without pay, appearing on television, organizing position papers and counseling a candidate who often found himself on the defensive. He had opposed the Iraq war and she had been a skeptic; they jointly developed the argument that the United States should quickly end its involvement in Iraq, bolster the American presence in Afghanistan and focus on a “light footprint” strategy elsewhere.

Together they contended that there was no reason the United States should avoid negotiating with Iranian or North Korean dictators, taking on, among others, Mrs. Clinton, then Mr. Obama’s chief Democratic rival for the presidential nomination.

“Throughout the campaign, Susan was making an argument about challenging conventions, whether it was about Iraq or diplomacy with Iran,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy White House national security adviser and Mr. Obama’s national security speechwriter, said Thursday. “Susan has the expertise that comes from being within the foreign policy establishment, but she had the willingness to challenge it. And for the president, that was a pretty attractive quality.”

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Jodi Kantor from New York.

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Malcolm Harris Pleads Guilty Over 2011 March

In the end, the tweets told the tale.

After more than a year of arguing in court papers that police officers had led hundreds of Occupy Wall Street marchers on to the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge and then arrested 700 of them, a Brooklyn writer’s own Twitter postings showed that he had, in fact, heard warnings from the police to stay off the road.

“They tried to stop us, absolutely did not want us on the motorway,” the writer, Malcolm Harris, posted during the march on Oct. 1, 2011, according to passages read by a prosecutor in court. “They tried to block and threaten arrest. We were too many and too loud. They backed up until they could put up barricades.”

Those postings and others by Mr. Harris, 23, were described publicly for the first time on Wednesday in Criminal Court in Manhattan as Mr. Harris pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.

The case had become a significant focus of attention for its involvement of posts to social networking sites and legal arguments over who controls that material. Mr. Harris and Twitter had opposed a subpoena of Twitter for Mr. Harris’s postings, which had been pushed off his public page by more recent postings.

In September, Twitter complied with a court order to turn over thousands of Mr. Harris’s archived postings to Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. of Criminal Court in Manhattan, who reviewed the messages himself and later turned over a few pages to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Prosecutors wanted the postings because they suspected the notes would contradict what they expected to be Mr. Harris’s defense: that the police had baited people onto the roadway of the bridge. Mr. Harris’s lawyer, Martin R. Stolar, voiced that theory in motions he filed in court.

“Destined for Brooklyn, the marchers began crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on the pedestrian walkway,” Mr. Stolar wrote in court papers last year. “When their numbers grew too numerous, the police directed them onto the vehicular roadway, announcing through a barely audible bullhorn that a march on the roadway was not permitted.”

Faced with the messages that he acknowledged would be detrimental to his case, Mr. Harris offered to plead guilty on Wednesday, as a trial was about to begin, to disorderly conduct, a violation that carries a penalty of up to 15 days in jail.

Judge Sciarrino withdrew an early offer of not sentencing Mr. Harris to anything beyond the nine hours he was held after his arrest.

Lee Langston, an assistant district attorney, requested a sentence of 10 days’ community service, arguing that Mr. Stolar had wasted judicial resources by representing that marchers had not heard warnings from police officers on the bridge, something his client’s writing contradicted.

“I had no idea what was in those tweets until about a month ago,” Mr. Stolar said. “If you really want to get into it,” he continued, before being interrupted by the judge.

“Not really,” Judge Sciarrino said. “Nor are you doing any service to your client.”

The judge offered Mr. Harris a choice of three days of community service, or six days if Mr. Harris wanted to pick a program himself.

“I’ll take the latter,” Mr. Harris said.

Outside court, Mr. Stolar and Mr. Harris said the charge against Mr. Harris was not the focus of their concerns. They were more focused on appealing the ruling that approved the subpoena of material from Twitter.

“Setting the legal precedent for how this material is going to be used is much more important than six days of community service,” Mr. Harris said.

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Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

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Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

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Top Russian Envoy for Syria and NATO Leader Say Assad Losing Control

Manu Brabo/Associated Press

Free Syrian Army fighters warmed themselves in the northern province of Aleppo on Wednesday.

MOSCOW — Russia’s top Middle East diplomat and the leader of NATO offered dark and strikingly similar assessments of the embattled Syrian president’s future on Thursday, asserting that he was losing control of the country after a nearly two-year conflict that has taken 40,000 lives and has threatened to destabilize the Middle East.

The bleak appraisals — particularly from Russia, a steadfast strategic Syrian ally — amounted to a new level of pressure on the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, who has been resorting to increasingly desperate military measures, including the use of Scud ballistic missiles, to contain an armed insurgency that has encroached on the capital, Damascus.

The Russian diplomat, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, acknowledged that Mr. Assad’s forces could be defeated by rebels, whom the Syrian leader has repeatedly dismissed as ragtag foreign-backed terrorists with no popular support.

“Unfortunately, it is impossible to exclude a victory of the Syrian opposition,” said Mr. Bogdanov — the clearest indication to date that Russia believed that Mr. Assad could lose.

Mr. Bogdanov’s remarks, reported by Russia’s Interfax news service, came as the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told reporters in Brussels that Mr. Assad’s use of ballistic missiles, which Western officials monitoring the Syrian conflict reported on Wednesday — and which Syria has denied — reflected his “utter disregard” for Syrian lives. Mr. Rasmussen also predicted the demise of Mr. Assad’s government.

“I think the regime in Damascus is approaching collapse,” he told reporters after a meeting with the Dutch prime minister at NATO headquarters. “I think now it is only a question of time.”

While the leaders of NATO member states have made similar predictions before, the assertion by Mr. Rasmussen, the leader of the Western military alliance, reinforced a growing consensus that Mr. Assad’s options for remaining in power had been all but exhausted — a view now apparently shared by Russia.

Throughout the Syria crisis, as it has grown from peaceful protests in March 2011 to engulf the country in armed conflict, Russia has acted as Syria’s principal international shield, protecting Mr. Assad diplomatically from Western and Arab attempts to oust him and holding out the possibility of his staying in power during a transition.

Only in recent days has Russia’s view seemed to shift, while Mr. Assad’s foes, grouped in a newly minted and still uncertain coalition, have garnered ever broader international support as the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people.

“We must look squarely at the facts, and the trend now suggests that the regime and the government in Syria are losing more and more control and more and more territory,” Mr. Bogdanov said in remarks to Russia’s Public Chamber, a Kremlin advisory group, according to Interfax.

Russia, he said, was preparing to evacuate its citizens — a complex task, since for decades, Russian women have married Syrian men sent to study in Russia and returned to Syria with them to raise families.

It was the first time an official at Mr. Bogdanov’s level had announced plans for an evacuation, which sent a message to the Syrian government that Russia no longer held out hope that the government could prevail. He said Russia had a plan to withdraw its personnel from its embassy in the Syrian capital, Damascus, but that was s not yet necessary. Russia’s press attaché in Damascus confirmed this, telling Interfax that there was “no sharp deterioration” in conditions there.

Mr. Bogdanov offered a dark view of how the conflict would unfold from this point, saying that it took two years for the rebels to control 60 percent of Syria’s territory, and another year and a half will pass before they control the rest.

“If up until now 40,000 people have died, then from this point forward it will be crueler, and you will lose dozens or many hundreds of thousands of people,” he said. “If you accept this price to topple the president, what can we do? We of course consider this totally unacceptable.”

As the Russian official spoke, fresh evidence of the intensity of the battle emerged. During the civil war, Moscow has been the principal arms supplier for the Damascus government, as it has been for decades. Obama administration and NATO officials said on Wednesday that Syrian government forces had resorted to firing Scud missiles at rebel fighters as the government struggled to slow the momentum of the insurgency.

Ellen Barry reported from Moscow, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon.

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State of the Art: Google Maps App for iPhone Goes in the Right Direction - Review

It was one of the biggest tech headlines of the year: in September, Apple dropped its contract with Google, which had always supplied the data for the iPhone’s Maps app. For various strategic reasons, Apple preferred to write a new app, based on a new database of the world that Apple intended to assemble itself.

As everybody knows by now, Apple got lost along the way. It was like a 22-car pileup. Timothy Cook, Apple’s chief executive, made a quick turn, publicly apologizing, firing the executive responsible and vowing to fix Maps. For a company that prides itself on flawless execution, it was quite a detour.

Rumors swirled that Google would create an iPhone app of its own, one that would use its seven-year-old, far more polished database of the world.

That was true. Today, Google Maps for the iPhone has arrived. It’s free, fast and fantastic.

Now, there are two parts to a great maps app. There’s the app itself — how it looks, how it works, what the features are. In this regard, few people complain about Apple’s Maps app; it’s beautiful, and its navigation mode for drivers is clear, uncluttered and distraction-free.

But then there’s the hard part: the underlying data. Apple and Google have each constructed staggeringly complex databases of the world and its roads.

The recipe for both companies includes map data from TomTom, satellite photography from a different source, real-time traffic data from others, restaurant and store listings from still more sources, and so on. In the end, Apple says that it incorporated data from at least 24 different sources.

Those sources always include errors, if only because the world constantly changes. Worse, those sources sometimes disagree with one another. It takes years to fix the problems and mesh these data sources together.

So the first great thing about Google’s new Maps is the underlying data. Hundreds of Google employees have spent years hand-editing the maps, fixing the thousands of errors that people report every day. (In the new app, you report a mistake just by shaking the phone.) And since 2006, Google’s Street View vehicles have trawled 3,000 cities, photographing and confirming the cartographical accuracy of five million miles of roads.

You can sense the new app’s polish and intelligence the minute you enter your first address; it’s infinitely more understanding. When I type “200 W 79, NYC,” Google Maps drops a pin right where it belongs: on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Apple’s Maps app, on the other hand, acts positively drunk. It asks me to clarify: “Did you mean 200 Durham Road, Madison, CT? Or 200 Madison Road, Durham, CT?”

Um, what?

And then there’s the navigation. Lots of iPhone owners report that they’ve had no problem with Apple’s driving instructions, and that’s great. But I’ve been idiotically misdirected a few times — and the trouble is, you never know in advance. You wind up with a deep mistrust of the app that’s hard to shake. Google’s directions weren’t great in the app’s early days either, and they’re still not always perfect. But after years of polishing and corrections, they’re right a lot more often.

The must-have features are all here: spoken driving directions, color-coded real-time traffic conditions, vector-based maps (smooth at any size). But the new app also offers some incredibly powerful, useful features that Apple’s app lacks.

Street View, of course, lets you see a photograph of a place, and even “walk” down the street in any direction. Great for checking out a neighborhood before you go, scoping out the parking situation or playing “you are there” when you read a news article.

Along with driving directions, Google Maps gives equal emphasis to walking directions and public transportation options.

This feature is brilliantly done. Google Maps displays a clean, step-by-step timeline of your entire public transportation adventure. If you ask for a route from Westport, Conn., to the Empire State Building, the timeline says: “4:27 pm, Board New Haven train toward Grand Central Terminal.” Then it shows you the names of the actual train stops you’ll pass. Then, “5:47 pm, Grand Central. Get off and walk 2 min.” Then, “5:57 pm, 33rd St: Board the #6 Lexington Avenue Local towards Brooklyn Bridge.” And so on.

Even if public transportation were all it did, Google Maps would be one of the best apps ever. (Apple kicks you over to other companies’ apps for this information.)

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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World’s Population Living Longer, New Report Suggests

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a new report, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases more associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are dramatic: infant mortality has declined by more than half between 1990 and 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

But while developing countries made big strides – the average age of death in Brazil and Paraguay, for example, jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 28 in 1970 – the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries between 1990 and 2010. The two years of life they gained was less than Cyprus, where women gained 2.3 years of life and Canada, where women gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organizationfinanced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women in this country formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said.

The World Health Organization issued a statement Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differ substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others are similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries – representing about 15 percent of the world’s population – produce quality cause-of-death data.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which measured disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published Thursday in the Lancet, a British health publication.

The one exception to the trend was sub-Saharan Africa, where infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternal causes of death still account for about 70 percent of all illness. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death there rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared to a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The change means that people are living longer, an outcome that public health experts praised. But it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing noncommunicable diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization in Geneva. “It’s not something that medical services can address as easily.”

Read More..

World’s Population Living Longer, New Report Suggests

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a new report, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases more associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are dramatic: infant mortality has declined by more than half between 1990 and 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

But while developing countries made big strides – the average age of death in Brazil and Paraguay, for example, jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 28 in 1970 – the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries between 1990 and 2010. The two years of life they gained was less than Cyprus, where women gained 2.3 years of life and Canada, where women gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organizationfinanced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women in this country formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said.

The World Health Organization issued a statement Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differ substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others are similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries – representing about 15 percent of the world’s population – produce quality cause-of-death data.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which measured disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published Thursday in the Lancet, a British health publication.

The one exception to the trend was sub-Saharan Africa, where infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternal causes of death still account for about 70 percent of all illness. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death there rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared to a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The change means that people are living longer, an outcome that public health experts praised. But it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing noncommunicable diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization in Geneva. “It’s not something that medical services can address as easily.”

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E.U. Leaders Hail Accord on Banking Supervision

BRUSSELS — European Union leaders on Thursday hailed an agreement to place banks in the euro area under a single supervisor, calling it a concrete measure to maintain the viability of the currency as well as a step toward a broader economic union.

The deal’s importance “cannot be appreciated highly enough,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told the Bundestag, the lower house of the German Parliament.

“Europe and the euro area are providing proof that they are able to meet the challenges they face,” François Hollande, the French president, said in a statement.

In another sign of renewed efforts to shore up the euro, finance ministers and international officials approved the release of further aid to Greece, including long-delayed payments and other aid totaling nearly €50 billion, or $65 billion, that is crucial for the government to avoid defaulting on its debts.

“The sacrifices of the Greek people have not been in vain,” Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said, referring to stringent austerity measures Greece had adopted in order to obtain the aid.

“Today is not only a new day for Greece, it is indeed a new day for Europe,” Mr. Samaras said in Brussels ahead of a two-day summit meeting of European leaders.

The agreement on new banking supervision would put between 100 and 200 major banks under the direct oversight of the European Central Bank, leaving thousands of smaller institutions to be overseen primarily by national regulators.

But E.U. finance ministers, who reached a deal after meeting for 14 hours late Wednesday and early Thursday, insisted that the E.C.B. would be able to take over supervision of any bank in the euro area at any time.

Mario Draghi, the president of the central bank, said the agreement “marks an important step towards a stable economic and monetary union, and toward further European integration.”

Mr. Draghi added that governments and the European Commission still had to work on the details of the supervision mechanism, which is to be fully operational by March 2014.

The system must also be approved by the European Parliament and national legislatures before it goes into effect.

The new system is intended to strengthen oversight of a sector that, under the supervision of national regulators, failed to prevent banks from accumulating so much debt that they put at risk the finances of euro zone states including Ireland and Spain, in turn threatening the future of the currency.

The agreement on banking supervision was expected to act as a springboard for European leaders to discuss later on Thursday steps leading to a broader banking union. Such measures would include a unified system, and perhaps shared resources, to ensure failing banks are closed in an orderly fashion. This would be followed, in time, by measures intended to reinforce economic and monetary union, including, possibly, the creation of a fund that could be used to shore up the economies of vulnerable members of the euro zone.

To win France’s agreement on the new banking supervisor, finance ministers agreed that only banks holding more than €30 billion in assets, or assets greater than 20 percent of their country’s gross domestic product, would be directly regulated by the E.C.B. Previously, France and the European Commission had asked that all 6,000 banks in the euro area should be closely regulated by the central bank.

Germany, facing pressure from a powerful domestic banking lobby trying to shield many small savings banks from closer scrutiny, had sought a reduced remit for the E.C.B. In the end, Germany agreed to allow the central bank to step in and take over supervision of any bank in the euro area at its discretion.

The Germans also had concerns that the central bank could be tempted to alter its decisions on monetary policy to make its supervisory job easier. As a compromise, Germany agreed that member states would be given greater scope than originally foreseen to challenge central bank decisions.

“We succeeded in securing Germany’s key demands,” Ms. Merkel said in Berlin. There would be a “clear separation” between the central bank’s responsibility for monetary policy and for oversight, she added.

Britain, which is not a member of the euro zone, had sought assurances that the new banking supervisor would not have influence over British banks operating abroad or banks operating in the City of London.

Britain agreed to a formula that should free it and other E.U. members outside the euro zone from most, but probably not all, rule-making by the E.C.B. These countries will also be able to challenge E.C.B. decisions on cross-border banking.

“The safeguards we have secured protect Britain’s interests and the integrity of the European single market,” said the chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. “It shows that when Britain takes a tough stance but based on strong principle, Britain can win the argument and protect our interests.”

For countries including Spain and Ireland, the supervisor is a prerequisite for a new European bailout fund to provide aid directly to their troubled banks. That would allow those governments to avoid weighing down their national balance sheets with yet more debt..

But any direct recapitalization of banks is only likely to go ahead during 2014, once the supervisor is fully operating, and well after a German general election in October 2013. Still to be clarified is whether the aid could go to banks that have already run into trouble, or whether it would be used only to help lenders that falter in the future.

Providing direct support to banks is a sensitive matter for German taxpayers, who have grown weary of footing most of the bill for the euro zone’s bailouts.

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin and Niki Kitsantonis from Athens.

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