Botox, the wrinkle treatment made by Allergan, has been approved to treat adults with overactive bladders who cannot tolerate or were not helped by other drugs, the Food and Drug Administration said on Friday. Botox injected into the bladder muscle causes the bladder to relax, increasing its storage capacity. “Clinical studies have demonstrated Botox’s ability to significantly reduce the frequency of urinary incontinence,” Dr. Hylton V. Joffe, director of the F.D.A.’s reproductive and urologic products division, said in a statement. “Today’s approval provides an important additional treatment option for patients with overactive bladder, a condition that affects an estimated 33 million men and women in the United States.”
Business Briefing | Medicine: F.D.A. Clears Botox to Help Bladder Control
Label: HealthBoeing Closer to Answer on 787s, but Not to Getting Them Back in Air
Label: Business
Issei Kato/Reuters
Safety inspectors looked over a 787 on Friday in Japan. The plane made an emergency landing after receiving a smoke alarm.
With 787 Dreamliners grounded around the world, Boeing is scrambling to devise a technical fix that would allow the planes to fly again soon, even as investigators in the United States and Japan are trying to figure out what caused the plane’s lithium-ion batteries to overheat.
Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary, made it clear on Friday that a rapid outcome was unlikely, saying that 787s would not be allowed to fly until the authorities were “1,000 percent sure” they were safe.
“Those planes aren’t flying now until we have a chance to examine the batteries,” Mr. LaHood told reporters. “That seems to be where the problem is.”
The Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday took the rare step of grounding Boeing’s technologically advanced 787s after a plane in Japan made an emergency landing when one of its two lithium-ion batteries set off a smoke alarm in the cockpit. Last week at Boston’s Logan Airport, a battery ignited in a parked 787.
The last time the government grounded an entire fleet of airplanes was in 1979, after the crash of a McDonnell Douglas DC-10.
The grounding comes as the United States is going through a record stretch of safe commercial jet flying: It has been nearly four years since a fatal airline crash, with nearly three billion passengers flying in that period. The last airliner crash, near Buffalo, came after a quiet period of two and a half years, which suggests a declining crash rate.
Investigators in Japan said Friday that a possible explanation for the problems with the 787’s batteries was that they were overcharged — a hazard that has long been a concern for lithium-ion batteries. But how that could have happened to a plane that Boeing says has multiple systems to prevent such an event is still unclear.
Given the uncertainty, it will be hard for federal regulators to approve any corrective measures proposed by Boeing. To lift the grounding order, Boeing must demonstrate that any fix it puts in place would prevent similar episodes from happening.
The government’s approach, while prudent, worries industry officials who fear it does not provide a rapid exit for Boeing.
The F.A.A. typically sets a course of corrective action for airlines when it issues a safety directive. But in the case of the 787, the government’s order, called an emergency airworthiness directive, required that Boeing demonstrate that the batteries were safe but did not specify how.
While the government and the plane maker are cooperating, there are few precedents for the situation.
“Everyone wants the airplane back in the air quickly and safely,” said Mark V. Rosenker, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. “But I don’t believe there will be a corner cut to accomplish that. It will happen when all are confident they have a good solution that will contain a fire or a leak.”
Boeing engineers, Mr. Rosenker said, are working around the clock. “I bet they have cots and food for the engineers who are working on this,” he said. “They have produced a reliable and safe aircraft and as advanced as it is, they don’t want to put airplanes in the air with the problems we have seen.”
The government approved Boeing’s use of lithium-ion batteries to power some of the plane’s systems in 2007, but special conditions were imposed on the plane maker to ensure the batteries would not overheat or ignite. Government inspectors also approved Boeing’s testing plans for the batteries and were present when they were performed.
Even so, after the episode in Boston, the federal agency said it would review the 787’s design and manufacturing with a focus on the electrical systems and batteries. The agency also said it would review the certification process.
The 787 has more electrical systems than previous generations of airplanes. These systems operate hydraulic pumps, de-ice the wings, pressurize the cabin and handle other tasks. The plane also has electric brakes instead of hydraulic ones. To run these systems, the 787 has six generators with a capacity equivalent to the power needed by 400 homes.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 19, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the response of regulators after small cracks were found in the wings of the Airbus A380, and the year those cracks were found. Regulators required inspections, followed by fixes; they did not order the plane grounded. And the discovery was made in 2012, not two years ago.
IHT Rendezvous: How Far Will Europeans Support France's Counter-Jihad?
Label: WorldLONDON — It did not require a crystal ball to foresee, as Rendezvous did in our 2013 preview, that Mali would be in the news and that France might be the first to intervene there to counter a perceived terrorist threat to Europe.
Less predictable, however, is the extent to which the French can rely on the support of their European allies now that they have decided to go it alone.
The crisis had been building for the best part of a year since mutinous soldiers staged a coup in Bamako, the Malian capital, last March, and separatist Tuareg tribesmen took the opportunity to seize the north of the country. The tribesmen were quickly pushed aside by radical Islamists, including those behind this week’s hostage-taking in neighboring Algeria.
They were poised to extend their rule this month beyond the two-thirds of the country they already control when the French stepped in at the request of the Bamako government.
As early as last April, Alain Juppé, the then French foreign minister, was warning of the “extremely grave threat” posed by the Qaeda-linked insurgents and their aim of establishing a jihadist regime in northern Mali.
In early September, António Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, was telling readers of the IHT:
If unchecked, the Mali crisis threatens to create an arc of instability extending west into Mauritania and east through Niger, Chad and Sudan to the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden, characterized by extended spaces where state authority is weak and pockets of territorial control are exercised by transnational criminals.
So, did the international community, and Europe in particular, react too slowly to the escalating crisis? Or has France acted precipitously in opting for a military solution to contain the threat?
David Rohde writes elsewhere on Rendezvous that regional experts believe the French had to act.
But, as French troops launched ground operations this week in support of local forces, how far are France’s European allies prepared to be sucked into a potential Malian quagmire?
Germany, Denmark and Britain are among European Union partners that have offered logistical support in Mali.
However, as David Cameron, the British prime minister, assured Parliament when he announced the offer of transport aircraft to assist the French mission, there was no question of putting British boots on the ground.
The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is being even more cautious, limiting its assistance to supplying planes to airlift African troops from the regional ECOWAS alliance.
“Under no circumstances does Germany want to become involved in a messy conflict with no clear end in sight,” Germany’s Der Spiegel commented, “particularly not in an election year.”
Germany held out against intervention in Libya in 2011, eventually spearheaded by France and Britain, siding with Russia in a crucial United Nations vote in defiance of its European allies.
Libya underlined the lack of a common foreign policy, let alone a common defense policy, among the 27 European partners who now face a new crisis in North Africa.
Facing recriminations from some in France that it was only its soldiers who were doing the fighting, European foreign ministers agreed on Thursday to speed up the dispatch of more than 200 military personnel to train Malian government forces to confront the Islamists.
But that was an option that had been on the table since October, when European Union officials said the alliance was considering such a move.
The E.U. also stressed that the trainers, due to be deployed by mid-February at the latest, would not be involved in combat operations.
Commenting on the outcome of Thursday’s meeting, Christophe Giltay of Belgium’s RTL broadcaster, said, “More and more French people are asking themselves if the Europeans have really understood the gravity of the situation.”
Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer and Martin Michelot of the Washington-based German Marshall Fund of the United States wrote this week that “the glacial pace at which decisions are taken at the national level to support France’s efforts in Mali only underscores the need for European leaders to be willing to discuss common security issues.”
Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign policy chief, said on Thursday some of France’s partners were “willing to help and support France in every way and they did not rule in or rule out any aspect of that, including military support.”
But, according to the German Marshall Fund experts: “The French military is nevertheless facing the hard reality of acting on its own, with very little support from other European allies.”
Bits Blog: Facebook's Other Big Disruption
Label: TechnologyFacebook just made a potentially game-changing announcement. It got less fanfare than Tuesday’s announcement that it is going into the social search business, but this other announcement may have bigger long-term implications for the technology industry.
Put simply, some of the world’s biggest computing systems just got a little cheaper, and a lot easier to configure. As a consequence, the companies that supply the hardware to these systems may have to scramble to remain as profitable. The reason is a Facebook-led open source project.
In 2011 Facebook began the Open Compute Project, an effort among technology companies to use open-source computer hardware. Tech companies similarly shared intellectual property with Linux software, which lowered costs and spurred innovation. Facebook’s project has attracted many significant participants, including Goldman Sachs, Arista Networks, Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
At a user summit on Wednesday Intel, another key member of the Open Compute Project, announced it would release to the group a silicon-based optical system that enables the data and computing elements in a rack of computer servers to communicate at 100 gigabits a second. That is significantly faster than conventional wire-based methods, and uses about half the power.
More important, it means that elements of memory and processing that now must be fixed closely together can be separated within a rack, and used as needed for different kinds of tasks. There is a lot of waste in data centers today simply because, when there is an upgrade in servers, lots of other associated data-processing hardware has to be changed, too.
There were other announcements, like a computer motherboard called Grouphug that allows different manufacturers’ chips to be interchanged without altering other parts of the machine. Before, they were custom made. Put together, such innovations potentially lower the cost and complexity of running big and small data centers to an extent that works for a lot of companies.
“Who wouldn’t want a cheaper, more efficient server?” said Frank Frankovsky, vice president of hardware design at Facebook, and the chairman of Open Compute. “The problem we’re solving is much larger than Facebook’s own challenges. There is a massive amount of data in the world that people expect to have processed quickly.”
To be sure, it’s in Facebook’s interest to attack expensive hardware. The company makes money from a service that requires hundreds of thousands of computer servers distributed in big centers around the world. Google and Amazon.com, which are not members of the project, maintain proprietary systems which they apparently felt gave them a competitive edge.
For Facebook, the difference seems to be more in the software. To the extent hardware costs drop, that’s great for them. Mr. Frankovsky argued that, while “this puts challenges on the incumbents” in hardware, “it also helps them. They have a finite number of engineering resources, and this way they hear from a community about whether there is an interest for a product.” Intel may hope to benefit from its open-source release, since it could see an overall rise in demand for its chips with the move toward cheaper computing.
The real test is whether Facebook can increase the number of potential buyers for Open Compute equipment. “The question is, can they extend this beyond a few Web businesses like Facebook and Rackspace, or a few financial exercises at Goldman, and bring this to industries like oil or aerospace?” said Matt Eastwood, an analyst with IDC, a technology research firm. “That will take it from 20 or 30 companies to hundreds of companies.”
The issue isn’t so much a technical one, he argues, as it is one of getting corporate information technology professionals interested in radical design changes. Mr. Frankovsky is aware of the problem. Recently he and his colleagues led a seminar in Texas for BP, Shell and other oil giants on how they could use Open Compute hardware in their data centers.
This will not change things dramatically this year, and possibly even next, but over the long haul it could remake a lot of businesses. Linux, remember, was around for several years as a minor player, but eventually undid Sun Microsystems and others.
Well: Your Twitter Tips for Going Vegan
Label: LifestyleIn this week’s Well column, “How to Go Vegan,”, we asked you to send in your favorite tips and tricks for adopting a solely plant-based diet on Twitter. We received a range of responses, from quirky ingredient combinations that replicate a nonvegan dish to simple mantras to get you in a vegan frame of mind. Here are some of our favorites. To see the entire list of submissions, visit the hashtag, #vegantips.
Let’s start with some simple recipes that may satisfy your vegan craving:
Add some of your favorite ingredients:
Don’t forget to love your legumes:
And what about some tips to keep you on the vegan path?
And don’t forget to serve a healthy side of humor with that vegan dish:
Well: Your Twitter Tips for Going Vegan
Label: HealthIn this week’s Well column, “How to Go Vegan,”, we asked you to send in your favorite tips and tricks for adopting a solely plant-based diet on Twitter. We received a range of responses, from quirky ingredient combinations that replicate a nonvegan dish to simple mantras to get you in a vegan frame of mind. Here are some of our favorites. To see the entire list of submissions, visit the hashtag, #vegantips.
Let’s start with some simple recipes that may satisfy your vegan craving:
Add some of your favorite ingredients:
Don’t forget to love your legumes:
And what about some tips to keep you on the vegan path?
And don’t forget to serve a healthy side of humor with that vegan dish:
The Lede: Live Blog: Inside the Fed's 2007 Deliberations
Label: BusinessOn Friday the Federal Reserve released the transcripts of its discussions in 2007, the year the housing market, the financial markets, and the broader economy began to unravel. Reporters from The Times are sharing their findings on what the transcripts reveal in the blog entries and tweets below.
Read More..
Cameron to Outline a Recast European Role for Britain
Label: World
Weighted down by centuries of entrenched wariness in this island nation toward the Continent — and the knowledge that a gallery of his predecessors as Conservative prime ministers saw their tenures blighted by divisions within the party over the issue — Mr. Cameron is heading for Amsterdam on Friday to set out his vision of a sharply whittled-down role for Britain in the affairs of 21st-century Europe.
The speech in the Netherlands, carefully chosen as a country with a strong historical friendship with Britain, is a watershed moment for Mr. Cameron, and for Britain. It could be a deeply jarring occasion, as well, for other European nations, which have grown increasingly impatient, angry even, with Britain’s policy during the crisis in the euro zone. Some European officials have described as blackmail its use of the crisis — one that Britain, with the pound, has largely escaped — to demand a new, “pick-and-mix” status for itself within the 27-nation European Union.
After months of delay, Mr. Cameron is expected to brush aside the warnings of the Obama administration and European leaders and call for a referendum on whether Britain should remain squarely in Europe or negotiate a more arm’s-length relationship, most likely before the next Parliament’s mandate expires in 2018. In a clamorous House of Commons on Wednesday, the prime minister set out his thinking.
“Millions of people in this country, myself included, want Britain to stay in the European Union,” he said. “But they believe that there are chances to negotiate a better relationship. Throughout Europe, countries are looking at forthcoming treaty change, and asking, ‘What can I do to maximize my national interest?’ That is what the Germans will do. That is what the Spanish will do. That is what the British should do.”
For months, Mr. Cameron has been holding off on a promise to explain just what he wants from Europe. As a reformist Conservative pressing ahead with, among other things, a plan to legalize gay marriage, he has scant common ground with the “little Englanders” in his party, the core of about 100 members who make up a third of its representation in Parliament.
But Mr. Cameron can see votes, too, in the strong anti-Europe currents that run wherever people in Britain gather.
In pubs and bars, on radio and in Parliament itself, talk of the European Union tends to center on the bloc’s real — and, in some cases, apocryphal — abuses: its highhanded, bloated bureaucracy, with nearly 1,000 featherbedded officials earning more than Mr. Cameron’s $230,000 salary as prime minister; its endless proliferation of rules on everything from the length of dog leashes to the shape of carrots; the recent claim by a former high-ranking Cameron aide that government ministers spend 40 percent of their time dealing with the mass of pettifogging European “directives,” many of them widely ignored elsewhere in Europe.
Not only has Mr. Cameron been hemmed in by deep divisions over Europe within the Conservative Party — an issue that helped unseat Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major as prime ministers — but he has also been wary of stirring a fresh wave of anger among other European leaders, particularly Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, a center-right politician and onetime ally in European councils.
Her aides have described her as frustrated with Mr. Cameron’s maneuvering and, as she is said to see it, his bid to take advantage of other European states as they struggle to save the euro and keep the most debt-laden nations, like Greece, Portugal and Spain, from dropping out of the European Union.
Concern about the reactions in Berlin and Paris prompted a last-minute rescheduling of the Amsterdam speech. Germany and France had protested that the original date, next Monday, might overshadow long-planned celebrations that day of the 50th anniversary of the treaty between them, itself a landmark in the building of postwar Europe, that sealed their reconciliation after the wounds of World War II.
Along with this, commentators say, Mr. Cameron has been recalculating the ways in which the European issue can be managed to bolster the Conservatives’ sagging prospects in a general election expected in 2015, in which polls show them lagging as much as 13 percentage points behind the opposition Labour Party. He has also been contending with heavy lobbying by American officials, including President Obama.
The Americans, diplomats say, have told Mr. Cameron squarely in private what made headlines here last week when a senior State Department official, Philip Gordon, who is assistant secretary for European affairs, spoke on the issue with British reporters. Mr. Gordon said a continued “strong British voice” in an “outward-looking” European Union was in America’s interests, and warned specifically against the referendum on Europe that is an important component in Mr. Cameron’s plans. “Referendums,” Mr. Gordon said, “have often turned countries inward.”
For all his delaying, his aides say, Mr. Cameron is ready now to outline a strategy for renegotiating Britain’s status in the European Union in a way that would keep Britain free from the centralizing forces at work. Other major European states, France and Germany in particular, see a new federal Europe with enhanced powers of fiscal oversight as essential to the long-term survival of the tottering euro.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 17, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the year that a referendum approving Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union, was held. It was 1975, not 1974.
DealBook: H.P. Said to Have Suitors for Two Units
Label: TechnologyHewlett-Packard has received a number of inquiries from would-be buyers for its Autonomy and Electronic Data Systems units in recent weeks, though the technology company is not interested in selling at the moment, a person briefed on the matter said on Wednesday.
The calls from potential suitors and bankers picked up after H.P. filed its annual report with regulators on Dec. 28, said the person, who did not want to be identified because management deliberations were confidential.
In the securities filing, the company said, “We also continue to evaluate the potential disposition of assets and businesses that may no longer help us meet our objectives.”
That is standard legal boilerplate. But H.P. has been struggling with poor performance at both Autonomy and E.D.S., having significantly written down the value of those acquisitions.
The company has also claimed to have found accounting and disclosure issues at Autonomy, and has forwarded findings from an internal inquiry to securities regulators in the United States and the division’s home in Britain.
Shares of H.P. rose 4 percent on Wednesday after The Wall Street Journal reported news of the expressions of interest. Over the last 12 months, the shares have fallen 35 percent.
But H.P.’s management team, led by Meg Whitman, is not interested in selling what it considers to be core businesses. Instead, the company intends to focus on developing its enterprise operations, the person said.
The inquiries may also have been stoked by the sudden flurry of news coverage surrounding a potential leveraged buyout of Dell. That company still appears to be closing in on a potential deal to sell itself to a consortium that includes its founder, Michael S. Dell, and the investment firm Silver Lake, in the biggest leveraged buyout in more than five years.
Advisers to Dell and Silver Lake are still negotiating a number of elements in what is proving to be a complicated deal, though they have made advancements, according to a person briefed on the matter who did not want to be identified because the talks were private. A potential takeover may be priced around $14 a share, valuing the company at more than $24 billion.
Mr. Dell is expected to contribute his roughly 16 percent stake to a leveraged buyout. And Silver Lake has been in talks with potential partners, including sovereign wealth funds like Temasek of Singapore, about contributing additional capital, this person said.
Banks are also working on lining up the financing necessary for a deal, which could reach $15 billion. While an enormous amount of money, bankers are betting that debt investors will clamor for the financing package, hoping to reap yields that are higher than those for Treasury bonds.
Still, this person cautioned that the discussions could fall apart.
Confronting H.P. and Dell is the grinding pressure on both companies’ personal computer businesses, where profit margins have declined in the last few years as competition toughened.
The two tech companies are trying to decrease their dependence on making PCs.
That move had prompted H.P. to buy both E.D.S. and Autonomy, paying more than $20 billion for the pair.
A version of this article appeared in print on 01/17/2013, on page B4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Two Units Of Hewlett Reportedly Draw Suitors.
Ask Well: Help for the Deskbound
Label: LifestyleOne of the problems with office work is that many of us are using chairs that don’t fit our bodies very well or give adequate support to the back, said Jack Dennerlein, a professor at Northeastern’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences in Boston who specializes in ergonomics and safety. If you are experiencing back pain, you may be able to adjust your chair to increase its lumbar support. A good office chair will have an adjustable seat pan that you can slide back and forth as well as adjustable back and height features. First, sit in the chair so the lumbar region of your back, your lower back, is resting on the back support. At the same time, your feet should be resting comfortably on the ground and the back of your knees should be about three-finger widths from the edge of the chair, said Dr. Dennerlein.
Some high-end chair brands have adjustable seat pans, including the Steelcase Leap chair, which retails for between $800 and $900 and offers an adjustable seat and plenty of lumbar support.
The Steelcase Criterion chair sells anywhere from $350 to $850 online, depending on the model, and boasts seven different adjustments “to offer support through the full range of dynamic seating postures.”
The HumanScale Freedom chair is the winner of several design awards and also has an adjustable seat pan as well as “weight-sensitive recline, synchronously adjustable armrests, and dynamically positioned headrest.” ($400 to $1,400)
The Herman Miller Aeron chair is also popular because it comes in small, medium and large sizes and claims a PostureFit design that “supports the way your pelvis tilts naturally forward, so that your spine stays aligned and you avoid back pain.” ($680 to $850)
If all that sounds really wonderful and really too expensive, there may be a simpler solution to ease your back pain at work. Invest $15 to $30 in a lumbar chair pillow to make sure your back is getting the support it needs even when you are not sitting in a $900 chair.
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