Whether it’s George Washington’s teeth or Bill Clinton’s former hamburger habit, Americans have always been fascinated by the health of the president and presidential candidates.
With help from the Web site DoctorZebra, which has compiled an exhaustive list of the medical history of American presidents, we’ve created an Election Day quiz to test your knowledge of presidential fitness and health.
Whether it’s George Washington’s teeth or Bill Clinton’s former hamburger habit, Americans have always been fascinated by the health of the president and presidential candidates.
With help from the Web site DoctorZebra, which has compiled an exhaustive list of the medical history of American presidents, we’ve created an Election Day quiz to test your knowledge of presidential fitness and health.
Shares on Wall Street edged lower on Thursday as investors continued to adjust for upcoming negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff, overshadowing a batch of positive economic data.
Investors worry that if no deal is reached in Congress over the fiscal cliff — some $600 billion in spending cuts and tax increases set to kick in early next year — it could derail the American economic recovery.
Data showed that the United States trade deficit narrowed in September as exports increased, suggesting that the economy expanded more than previously estimated in the third quarter.
Also on Thursday, the government reported than fewer Americans than expected filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week. The jobs data was distorted by the effects from Hurricane Sandy, though it was not clear if the storm increased or decreased claims.
“We’ve seen a big spike in the trend of the jobs market in the past few months,” said Adam Sarhan, chief executive of Sarhan Capital in New York. “We should react positively to this.”
In afternoon trading, Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 0.3 percent, as was the Dow Jones industrial average. The Nasdaq composite was 0.5 percent lower.
On Wednesday, equities slumped more than 2 percent, as investor focus returned to Europe’s economic troubles and the looming tax hikes and budget cuts in the United States.
McDonald’s shares dropped 1.4 percent after the company reported a 1.8 percent drop in October sales at established restaurants around the world, its first monthly sales fall since March 2003.
Qualcomm reported quarterly revenue late Wednesday that beat expectations, sending shares up more than 6 percent.
Whole Foods Market reported earnings that met expectations, but its shares were down 4.9 percent.
For all the talk of a “fiscal cliff” threatening the nation’s finances, President Obama also faces a foreign policy cliff of sorts, with a welter of national security issues that he put on the back burner during the campaign now clamoring for his attention.
Atop that list, administration officials and foreign policy experts say, is the bloody civil war in Syria and the standoff with Iran over its nuclear program. The United States is likely to engage the Iranian government in direct negotiations over the next few months, in perhaps a last-ditch diplomatic effort to head off a military strike on its nuclear facilities.
Administration officials said that they had not set a date for talks and that they did not know if Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would give his blessing. But with Iran’s uranium centrifuges spinning and Israel threatening its own military action, the need to avoid a war may make this high-risk diplomatic effort Mr. Obama’s No. 1 priority.
Syria, too, will demand a pressing response, given the high human toll of the violence and the danger of a spreading regional conflict. Mr. Obama, however, remains leery of being dragged into the conflict, rejecting calls to supply weapons to rebel groups. His reluctance has been partly political, experts say, but he also has strategic qualms.
“At a time when he was running on a platform of ending wars in the Middle East, he did not want to be seen as starting one,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel.
“But if he doesn’t try to intervene in a way that gives him a way to shape a post-Assad regime on the ground,” Mr. Indyk continued, referring to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, “there’s a high risk of descent into chaos in Syria, and a sectarian war that spreads to Lebanon, Bahrain and eventually Saudi Arabia.”
Beyond those flash points, the president will have to grapple with Pakistan, an unstable nuclear state whose relationship with Washington has eroded during his presidency. And he will have to oversee an orderly exit from Afghanistan, where the waning American role threatens to throw the country back into chaos and Islamic militancy.
As he does so, some question whether he will rethink his administration’s heavy reliance on drone strikes to kill people suspected of being extremists, a policy that has proved lethally efficient but has sown deep resentment in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
More broadly, Mr. Obama will face Russia under the aggressive leadership of President Vladimir V. Putin and China with the opposite problem — negotiating a tumultuous change in power after a scandal that tainted the top ranks of its Communist leadership.
None of these problems are new, but many were effectively shelved over the past year as the president waged a bitter re-election battle dominated by his stewardship of the economy. Foreign policy played such a bit part in the election that even in the debate ostensibly devoted to it, Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney detoured into a discussion of high school test scores in Massachusetts.
For reasons of history and political reality, a re-elected Mr. Obama is likely to devote more time to foreign affairs. From Richard M. Nixon to Bill Clinton, presidents have tended to make their bid for statesman status in their second terms. The prospect of continuing gridlock — with the Republicans still controlling the House — gives Mr. Obama all the more reason to favor diplomacy over domestic legislation.
There is also some unfinished business from the past four years, not least Mr. Obama’s frustrated efforts to broker a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But several experts cast doubt on whether the president would throw himself into the role of Middle East peacemaker, as Mr. Clinton did in his second term.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has had a fraught relationship with Mr. Obama, faces his own voters early next year, but he seems likely to stay in power with a right-wing government. Such an arrangement could make peacemaking difficult.
“Because he got his fingers burned and was outmaneuvered by Netanyahu, he will wait to see the outcome in the Israeli election,” said Mr. Indyk, who wrote a book about Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, “Bending History.” He added that the president is “going to think long and hard about trying again.”
The added wrinkle for the United States: the Palestinian Authority is likely to petition for nonstate membership in the United Nations next month, a step it had put off until after the election. If the United Nations were to grant it, that would trigger Congress to cut off aid not only to the Palestinian Authority but also to the United Nations itself.
The mere fact of Mr. Obama’s victory does not ease these problems. But as the president himself famously said to Russia’s former president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, at a nuclear conference in South Korea, he may have more room to maneuver in dealing with them.
Ask foreign policy experts for wild cards in a second Obama term and two countries come up: India and Cuba. Little progress was made in opening the door to Havana during the past four years, but hope springs eternal for those who advocate an end to the half-century-old trade embargo. Mr. Obama also is likely to build on his ties to India.
India figures into the biggest geopolitical bet of Mr. Obama’s presidency: the American pivot from the Middle East to China and Asia. With four more years, experts said, Mr. Obama can put meat on the bones of an ambitious, but incomplete, policy.
Here, however, is where the fiscal cliff meets foreign policy. To be credible in reasserting an American presence in Asia, experts said, will require a robust military presence from the Yellow Sea to the South China Sea. But unless the White House and Congress can strike some kind of fiscal deal, the Pentagon will face deep automatic cuts in its budget, depriving it of the ability to project power as it once did.
For Mr. Obama to realize his grandest visions abroad, then, he will still have to work with the same House Republicans who thwarted him on the home front in his first term.
SAN FRANCISCO — What was supposed to be a shortcut for Facebook users to log into their pages ended up exposing their e-mail addresses — and, in some cases, potentially allowing access to their accounts as well.
A Facebook spokesman said on Friday that the company had created the shortcut, called auto login, to let some users go directly to their pages by clicking on a Web link sent to their e-mail addresses. Once they clicked on the link, they could get into their accounts, rather than having to go to Facebook.com and log in.
Some of the links required users to type their passwords, while others did not, the company said.
On the Web site Hacker News, a technology discussion board, Matt Jones, an engineer at Facebook, said the company had offered the service for “ease of use” and never made the Web addresses “publicly available.”
But they did become publicly available, as the discussion on Hacker News revealed on Friday.
The Facebook spokesman, Frederic Wolens, said some users may have posted the links on the Web, allowing anyone to search for them. Those links could give a stranger access to the Facebook pages connected to them, as well as the e-mail addresses of those users. Mr. Wolens said he had no explanation why someone would post the links.
When Facebook found the problem, it discontinued the shortcut.
The Hacker News thread said over one million Facebook accounts had been affected. Facebook could not confirm that figure on Friday afternoon.
TrendMicro, a private security company that offers safety tools for Facebook users, said Web address shortcuts were inherently dangerous because they could ultimately end up on the Web.
“Many, many hackers are targeting these portals because of the ubiquitous trust and use of them,” said Tom Kellermann, vice president for cybersecurity at TrendMicro. He added, “You don’t take shortcuts through the woods in cyberspace.”
The news of the security hole comes a week after a Bulgarian blogger, Bogomil Shopov, said he had bought 1.1 million Facebook users’ names and e-mail addresses on the Web for $5. He found the information for sale on a marketplace site, gigbucks.com. The items are no longer available.
Mr. Wolens of Facebook said the data had been acquired and compiled by someone who took whatever information Facebook users made public on their pages — and from other publicly available data about those users.
Mr. Kellermann of TrendMicro said the problem with the shortcut could explain how the names and e-mail addresses that Mr. Shopov had found became public. Facebook said the security flaw and the user data for sale had nothing to do with each another.
“We have no reason whatsoever to believe that these two incidents are related,” Mr. Wolens said.
Enrico Fabian for The New York Times
A man at the Yamuna River, an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. Filthy standing water abounds in New Delhi. More Photos »
NEW DELHI — An epidemic of dengue fever in India is fostering a growing sense of alarm even as government officials here have publicly refused to acknowledge the scope of a problem that experts say is threatening hundreds of millions of people, not just in India but around the world.
India has become the focal point for a mosquito-borne plague that is sweeping the globe. Reported in just a handful of countries in the 1950s, dengue (pronounced DEN-gay) is now endemic in half the world’s nations.
“The global dengue problem is far worse than most people know, and it keeps getting worse,” said Dr. Raman Velayudhan, the World Health Organization’s lead dengue coordinator.
The tropical disease, though life-threatening for a tiny fraction of those infected, can be extremely painful. Growing numbers of Western tourists are returning from warm-weather vacations with the disease, which has reached the shores of the United States and Europe. Last month, health officials in Miami announced a case of locally acquired dengue infection.
Here in India’s capital, where areas of standing water contribute to the epidemic’s growth, hospitals are overrun and feverish patients are sharing beds and languishing in hallways. At Kalawati Saran Hospital, a pediatric facility, a large crowd of relatives lay on mats and blankets under the shade of a huge banyan tree outside the hospital entrance recently.
Among them was Neelam, who said her two grandchildren were deathly ill inside. Eight-year-old Sneha got the disease first, followed by Tanya, 7, she said. The girls’ parents treated them at home but then Sneha’s temperature rose to 104 degrees, a rash spread across her legs and shoulders, and her pain grew unbearable.
“Sneha has been given five liters of blood,” said Neelam, who has one name. “It is terrible.”
Officials say that 30,002 people in India had been sickened with dengue fever through October, a 59 percent jump from the 18,860 recorded for all of 2011. But the real number of Indians who get dengue fever annually is in the millions, several experts said.
“I’d conservatively estimate that there are 37 million dengue infections occurring every year in India, and maybe 227,500 hospitalizations,” said Dr. Scott Halstead, a tropical disease expert focused on dengue research.
A senior Indian government health official, who agreed to speak about the matter only on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that official figures represent a mere sliver of dengue’s actual toll. The government only counts cases of dengue that come from public hospitals and that have been confirmed by laboratories, the official said. Such a census, “which was deliberated at the highest levels,” is a small subset that is nonetheless informative and comparable from one year to the next, he said.
“There is no denying that the actual number of cases would be much, much higher,” the official said. “Our interest has not been to arrive at an exact figure.”
The problem with that policy, said Dr. Manish Kakkar, a specialist at the Public Health Foundation of India, is that India’s “massive underreporting of cases” has contributed to the disease’s spread. Experts from around the world said that India’s failure to construct an adequate dengue surveillance system has impeded awareness of the illness’s vast reach, discouraged efforts to clean up the sources of the disease and slowed the search for a vaccine.
“When you look at the number of reported cases India has, it’s a joke,” said Dr. Harold S. Margolis, chief of the dengue branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Neighboring Sri Lanka, for instance, reported nearly three times as many dengue cases as India through August, according to the World Health Organization, even though India’s population is 60 times larger.
Enrico Fabian for The New York Times
A man at the Yamuna River, an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. Filthy standing water abounds in New Delhi. More Photos »
NEW DELHI — An epidemic of dengue fever in India is fostering a growing sense of alarm even as government officials here have publicly refused to acknowledge the scope of a problem that experts say is threatening hundreds of millions of people, not just in India but around the world.
India has become the focal point for a mosquito-borne plague that is sweeping the globe. Reported in just a handful of countries in the 1950s, dengue (pronounced DEN-gay) is now endemic in half the world’s nations.
“The global dengue problem is far worse than most people know, and it keeps getting worse,” said Dr. Raman Velayudhan, the World Health Organization’s lead dengue coordinator.
The tropical disease, though life-threatening for a tiny fraction of those infected, can be extremely painful. Growing numbers of Western tourists are returning from warm-weather vacations with the disease, which has reached the shores of the United States and Europe. Last month, health officials in Miami announced a case of locally acquired dengue infection.
Here in India’s capital, where areas of standing water contribute to the epidemic’s growth, hospitals are overrun and feverish patients are sharing beds and languishing in hallways. At Kalawati Saran Hospital, a pediatric facility, a large crowd of relatives lay on mats and blankets under the shade of a huge banyan tree outside the hospital entrance recently.
Among them was Neelam, who said her two grandchildren were deathly ill inside. Eight-year-old Sneha got the disease first, followed by Tanya, 7, she said. The girls’ parents treated them at home but then Sneha’s temperature rose to 104 degrees, a rash spread across her legs and shoulders, and her pain grew unbearable.
“Sneha has been given five liters of blood,” said Neelam, who has one name. “It is terrible.”
Officials say that 30,002 people in India had been sickened with dengue fever through October, a 59 percent jump from the 18,860 recorded for all of 2011. But the real number of Indians who get dengue fever annually is in the millions, several experts said.
“I’d conservatively estimate that there are 37 million dengue infections occurring every year in India, and maybe 227,500 hospitalizations,” said Dr. Scott Halstead, a tropical disease expert focused on dengue research.
A senior Indian government health official, who agreed to speak about the matter only on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that official figures represent a mere sliver of dengue’s actual toll. The government only counts cases of dengue that come from public hospitals and that have been confirmed by laboratories, the official said. Such a census, “which was deliberated at the highest levels,” is a small subset that is nonetheless informative and comparable from one year to the next, he said.
“There is no denying that the actual number of cases would be much, much higher,” the official said. “Our interest has not been to arrive at an exact figure.”
The problem with that policy, said Dr. Manish Kakkar, a specialist at the Public Health Foundation of India, is that India’s “massive underreporting of cases” has contributed to the disease’s spread. Experts from around the world said that India’s failure to construct an adequate dengue surveillance system has impeded awareness of the illness’s vast reach, discouraged efforts to clean up the sources of the disease and slowed the search for a vaccine.
“When you look at the number of reported cases India has, it’s a joke,” said Dr. Harold S. Margolis, chief of the dengue branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Neighboring Sri Lanka, for instance, reported nearly three times as many dengue cases as India through August, according to the World Health Organization, even though India’s population is 60 times larger.
Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times
A self-appointed citizens patrol that tries to protect women on Cairo’s streets spray-painted a youth for identification last month.
CAIRO — The young activists lingered on the streets around Tahrir Square, scrutinizing the crowds of holiday revelers. Suddenly, they charged, pushing people aside and chasing down a young man. As the captive thrashed to get away, the activists pounded his shoulders, flipped him around and spray-painted a message on his back: “I’m a harasser.”
Egypt’s streets have long been a perilous place for women, who are frequently heckled, grabbed, threatened and violated while the police look the other way. Now, during the country’s tumultuous transition from authoritarian rule, more and more groups are emerging to make protecting women — and shaming the do-nothing police — a cause.
“They’re now doing the undoable?” a police officer joked as he watched the vigilantes chase down the young man. The officer quickly went back to sipping his tea.
The attacks on women did not subside after the uprising. If anything, they became more visible as even the military was implicated in the assaults, stripping female protesters, threatening others with violence and subjecting activists to so-called virginity tests. During holidays, when Cairenes take to the streets to stroll and socialize, the attacks multiply.
But during the recent Id al-Adha holiday, some of the men were surprised to find they could no longer harass with impunity, a change brought about not just out of concern for women’s rights, but out of a frustration that the post-revolutionary government still, like the one before, was doing too little to protect its citizens.
At least three citizens groups patrolled busy sections of central Cairo during the holiday. The groups’ members, both men and women, shared the conviction that the authorities would not act against harassment unless the problem was forced into the public debate. They differed in their tactics: some activists criticized others for being too quick to resort to violence against suspects and encouraging vigilantism. One group leader compared the activists to the Guardian Angels in the United States.
“The harasser doesn’t see anyone who will hold him accountable,” said Omar Talaat, 16, who joined one of the patrols.
The years of President Hosni Mubarak’s rule were marked by official apathy, collusion in the assaults on women, or empty responses to the attacks, including police roundups of teenagers at Internet cafes for looking at pornography.
“The police did not take harassment seriously,” said Madiha el-Safty, a sociology professor at the American University in Cairo. “People didn’t file complaints. It was always underreported.”
Mr. Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne, who portrayed herself as a champion of women’s rights, pretended the problem hardly existed. As reports of harassment grew in 2008, she said, “Egyptian men always respect Egyptian women.”
Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, has presided over two holidays, and many activists say there is no sign that the government is paying closer attention to the problem. But the work by the citizens groups may be having an effect: Last week, after the Id al-Adha holiday, Mr. Morsi’s spokesman announced that the government had received more than 1,000 reports of harassment, and said that the president had directed the Interior Ministry to investigate them.
“Egypt’s revolution cannot tolerate these abuses,” the spokesman quoted Mr. Morsi as saying.
Azza Soliman, the director of the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, dismissed the president’s words as “weak.” During the holiday, she said, one of her sons was beaten on the subway after he tried to stop a man who was groping two foreign women. The police tried to stop him from filing a complaint. “The whole world is talking about harassment in our country,” Ms. Soliman said. “The Interior Ministry takes no action.”
For years, anti-harassment activists have worked to highlight the problems in Egypt, but the uprising seemed to give the effort more energy and urgency.
The theft of tax information from a South Carolina computer system appears to have been the largest cyberattack ever on a state government and has put other states on high alert, computer security experts say.
The state announced late last month that an international hacker had stolen 3.6 million Social Security numbers and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers. Now tax departments across the country are inspecting their own security systems.
“When one employee’s laptop gets stolen, it’s a big deal,” said Verenda Smith, the deputy director of the National Federation of Tax Administrators. “So you can imagine the reverberations when this news came out.”
Since 2005, at least 11 state tax agencies have faced security breaches, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer rights group. But most were caused by internal accidents, not attacks, and none were on this scale.
“As a cyberattack, this appears to be in a league of its own,” said Beth Givens, the group’s director.
The hacking has raised questions about whether South Carolina was unprotected or simply unlucky. Most of the stolen credit cards were encrypted, but the Social Security numbers were not. The computer system that was hacked did not have a free layer of security monitoring offered to all South Carolina agencies, according to the State Budget and Control Board.
In a lawsuit filed last Wednesday, a former state senator, John Hawkins, said the state had failed to protect taxpayers and had not reported the attack promptly. The tax agency detected the attack on Oct. 10 and, after notifying federal authorities, alerted the public on Oct. 26.
“Obviously these hackers picked South Carolina because it was vulnerable,” Mr. Hawkins said. “I equate it to a burglar going into a neighborhood. He’s going to break into the house with no alarms and the door open.”
But South Carolina is hardly the first state to suffer a large-scale security breach. In Texas last year, Social Security records for 3.5 million people were inadvertently disclosed to the public on a computer server.
In Georgia in 2007, a computer disk containing personal information on 2.9 million people disappeared. At the federal Veterans Affairs Department in 2006, an employee lost a laptop and an external hard drive containing the Social Security records of 26.5 million active-duty troops and veterans.
Gov. Nikki R. Haley said that South Carolina had a state-of-the-art security system but that the hacker nevertheless found a way around it. Her office said on Friday that it was encrypting all tax files to reduce the harm if any were stolen, and that the process would be completed within 90 days. The state is paying up to $12 million to provide a free year of credit monitoring and identity theft prevention to anyone affected.
Last Wednesday, the state disclosed that tax records for 657,000 businesses had also been hacked.
Anyone who has filed a tax return since 1998 has been urged to contact state law enforcement officials. By last Thursday, 653,000 people had called the state’s emergency hot line, and 521,000 had signed up for identity protection.
Within state governments, tax agencies face the highest risk for hacking, said Larry Ponemon, the founder of a security research firm, the Ponemon Institute. If stolen, their data can be used for tax fraud, credit card fraud and identity theft.
“This is the crown jewel for a cyberattacker: having the Social Security numbers, personal information and credit card for the same person,” he said.
After the attack, state tax agencies, including in California, said they were monitoring their security particularly closely.
Michael Hicks, the director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center at the University of Maryland, said states needed a clearer understanding of the attack in South Carolina.
“The only way states can raise the level of vigilance,” Mr. Hicks said, “is if they really get to the bottom of what really happened in this attack.”
Resveratrol, the red wine component shown to be helpful in improving metabolic function in obese or diabetic people, has no discernible effect on healthy women who are not obese, a new experiment has found.
In a small 12-week randomized, double-blinded trial, researchers gave 29 normal weight postmenopausal women either 75 milligrams a day of resveratrol or a placebo, testing their metabolic function at the start and end of the study.
Blood concentrations of resveratrol increased in the group given the supplements, but the scientists found no difference between them and those given the placebo in body composition, resting metabolic rate or glucose tolerance (a test for insulin resistance and diabetes).
The study, to be published in this week’s issue of the journal Cell Metabolism, found that blood pressure, heart rate, C-reactive protein levels (a measure of inflammation), LDL, HDL and total cholesterol were unaffected by resveratrol. In other words, resveratrol blood concentrations were associated with no quantifiable changes, beneficial or otherwise, in any measure of metabolic function.
Does this mean that resveratrol offers no benefits? Not necessarily, said the senior author, Dr. Samuel Klein, a professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. “We only show that metabolically healthy people get no benefits to begin with,” he said. “We have no way of knowing whether it will prevent future metabolic complications.”
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