Media Decoder Blog: In Wake of Restructuring, NBC News President Quits

8:30 p.m. | Updated

The longest-serving president of any of the three network news divisions, Steve Capus of NBC News, stepped down from his position on Friday, six months after Comcast restructured its news units in a way that diminished his authority.

Pat Fili-Krushel, chairwoman of the NBCUniversal News Group, said in a brief telephone interview on Friday that she would “cast a wide net” while searching for a successor to Mr. Capus. In the interim, the leaders of the news division will report directly to her.

Ms. Fili-Krushel became Mr. Capus’s boss last July when Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, consolidated all of NBC’s news units — NBC News, the cable news channels MSNBC and CNBC, and its stake in the Weather Channel — under a new umbrella, the NBCUniversal News Group. Mr. Burke asked Ms. Fili-Krushel, one of his most trusted lieutenants, to run it, while keeping Mr. Capus and the heads of the other units in place.

Ms. Fili-Krushel worked early in her career at HBO and Lifetime. A veteran of the Walt Disney Company, where she helped program ABC, and  Time Warner, where she was an administrator, she is by her own admission not a journalist.  But now she is, by default, the highest-ranking woman in the American television news industry — not just at the moment, but in the history of the medium. The heads of the news divisions at ABC and CBS are men, as are the heads of the Fox News Channel, CNN, and Bloomberg.

Ms. Fili-Krushel has kept a low public profile, but has been a forceful presence behind the scenes, recently moving from her office on the 51st floor of 30 Rockefeller Center, near Mr. Burke’s, to a new one on the third floor, where NBC News is based. On Friday, she said she had spent her first six months “learning, listening and getting to know the players here.” She called the News Group an “unbelievably strong organization.”

Though Mr. Capus’s exit saddened many at NBC News on Friday, it came as little surprise. He had previously reported directly to Mr. Burke, but after the restructuring he reported to Ms. Fili-Krushel, and he made no secret of his unhappiness with the change. His contract had a clause that allowed him to leave in the event that he no longer reported to Mr. Burke, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement at NBC, and he decided to exercise that right after months of contemplation. The people insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized by the network to speak publicly.

Mr. Capus told Ms. Fili-Krushel of his intent to leave last Friday. It is likely that he would have left sooner, but a series of major news stories kept him busy late last year — including Hurricane Sandy, the presidential election and the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. Mr. Capus also oversaw the network’s response to the kidnapping of Richard Engel and an NBC News crew in Syria last month.

“It has been a privilege to have spent two decades here, but it is now time to head in a new direction,” he wrote in an e-mail to staff members on Friday afternoon.

Mr. Capus guided NBC through a revolutionary time in news-gathering and distribution. He maintained the news division’s profitability, managed tensions between NBC News and its increasingly liberal cable channel MSNBC, and fostered new business ventures like an in-house production company and an annual education summit. Last year, he unwound an old deal with Microsoft to give the news division complete control over its Web site, now named NBCNews.com, for the first time.

Ms. Fili-Krushel wrote in a separate e-mail to staff members that “NBC News is America’s leading source of television news and Steve has been a big part of that success.”

NBC News is the producer of the most popular evening newscast in the country. But its single biggest source of profits, the morning show “Today,” fell to second place last year, behind ABC’s “Good Morning America,” for the first time since the 1990s. The decline caused widespread anxiety inside the news division and speculation that Mr. Capus would be relieved of his duties.

Inside NBC, both Mr. Capus and the executive producer of “Today,” Jim Bell, received much of the blame for the botched removal of Ann Curry from “Today” last June, which worsened the show’s already tenuous position in the ratings. Ms. Fili-Krushel was put in charge just a few weeks later.

Mr. Bell was replaced at “Today” last fall and is now the executive producer for NBC Olympics. Savannah Guthrie is now the co-host of “Today,” and Ms. Curry is a national and international correspondent for the network, but is rarely seen. Mr. Capus’s exit was seen by some at the network as the last shoe that had to drop.

In his e-mail to staff members, Mr. Capus called it an “extremely difficult decision to walk away,” noting that he started at NBC as a producer 20 years ago this month. He did not make any mention of what he would do next. “Journalism is, indeed, a noble calling, and I have much I hope to accomplish in the next phase of my career,” he wrote.

“Today” continues to lose to ABC’s “Good Morning America” among total viewers, but lately it has won a few weeks in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet.

“NBC Nightly News” has more successfully fended off ABC’s “World News,” despite an aggressive push by ABC. Mr. Capus said, “NBC News has grown in all key metrics — from ratings and reputation to profitability.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/02/2013, on page B2 of the NewYork edition with the headline: In Wake of Restructuring, NBC News President Quits.

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Suicide Bomber Attacks Mosque in Pakistan

Abdul Basit/Associated Press

People gathered at the scene of the explosion in a market in northwestern Pakistan on Friday.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — An explosion in a market in northwestern Pakistan on Friday killed at least 21 people and wounded 33 in what police described as a suicide bombing.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in Hangu, about 70 miles west of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Abu Omar, a Taliban commander in the neighboring tribal region of North Waziristan, said in a telephone interview that the attack was in revenge for the killing on Thursday of a Sunni cleric.

The cleric, Mufti Abdul Majeed Deenpuri, 60, was shot in the southern port city of Karachi, setting off fears of reprisals against Shiites.

Mr. Deenpuri was a senior teacher at Jamia Binoria, one of the largest seminaries in Pakistan. A gunman opened fire on a vehicle carrying the cleric and a colleague at a busy intersection and then fled.

While the security situation is precarious across Pakistan, Rehman Malik, the interior minister, had warned of the potential for an attack in Karachi, a sprawling, violence-prone port city. Cellphone service was suspended there from noon to 3 p.m. during Friday Prayer.

Sectarian violence has also occurred in Hangu in the past, often forcing the authorities to impose a curfew. The town borders the Orakzai tribal region, where the army and paramilitary forces are fighting Taliban militants.

Friday’s explosion occurred just after Friday Prayer as worshipers filed out of a Sunni mosque and a nearby Shiite place of worship, police officials said. “People were coming out of the mosque when the explosion occurred,” said one officer in Hangu, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Another police official in Hangu said a suicide bomber had detonated his explosives. While Shiites were the likely target, the dead included people from both Islamic sects, he said. “There are Sunnis and Shias killed.”

Separately, a Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said 30 mortar shells fired from Afghanistan on Friday morning killed six residents of Angoor Adda, a border village in South Waziristan. However, there was no official comment from the Pakistani military. 

In recent years, Pakistan and Afghanistan have traded barbs over allegations of cross border rocket and artillery fire. The 1,510 mile long craggy border between the two countries has long posed a problem for both sides, each accusing the other of not manning the border effectively. Both sides maintain that insurgents easily cross over the porous border, but plans to fence the border have been shot down as impractical.

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch released its World Report 2013, which sharply criticized the Pakistani government and its military and intelligence agencies for failing to reduce human rights abuses.

“Pakistan’s human rights crisis worsened markedly in 2012 with religious minorities bearing the brunt of killings and repression,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, the director in Pakistan for Human Rights Watch. “While the military continued to perpetrate abuses with impunity in Baluchistan and beyond, Sunni extremists killed hundreds of Shia Muslims and the Taliban attacked schools, students, and teachers.”

Ismail Khan reported from Peshawar, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan. Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting from Islamabad.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 1, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. It is Peshawar, not Hangu.

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Appeals judges: Anti-paparazzi law appears legal

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An appeals panel says California's anti-paparazzi statute appears to be constitutional based on a brief filed by prosecutors.

A preliminary statement by three judges in Los Angeles requires a judge who dismissed charges aimed at a paparazzo who authorities say was driving recklessly to review his order. The judge may stick to his ruling, which would trigger a full appeal, or he could schedule further arguments on the case against freelance photographer Paul Raef.

Raef was the first person charged under the new law after a high-speed chase involving Justin Bieber last year.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Rubinson dismissed two charges in November, ruling the law is too broad and is unconstitutional.

Raef's attorney David S. Kestenbaum says he is asking Rubinson to stand by his ruling and allow a full appeal.

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The New Old Age Blog: Caregiving, Laced With Humor

“My grandmother, she’s not a normal person. She’s like a character when she speaks. Every day she’s playing like she’s an actress.”

These are words of love, and they come from Sacha Goldberger, a French photographer who has turned his grandmother, 93-year-old Frederika Goldberger, into a minor European celebrity.

In the photos, you can see the qualities grandson and grandmother have in common: a wicked sense of humor, an utter lack of pretension and a keen taste for theatricality and the absurd.

This isn’t an ordinary caregiving relationship, not by a long shot. But Sacha, 44 years old and unmarried, is deeply devoted to this spirited older relation who has played the role of Mamika (“my little grandmother,” translated from her native Hungarian) in two of his books and a photography exhibition currently underway in Paris.

As for Frederika, “I like everything that my grandson does,” she said in a recent Skype conversation from her apartment, which also serves as Sacha’s office. “I hate not to do anything. Here, with my grandson, I have the feeling I am doing something.”

Their unusual collaboration began after Frederika retired from her career as a textile consultant at age 80 and fell into a funk.

“I was very depressed because I lived for working,” she told me in our Skype conversation.

Sacha had long dreamed of creating what he calls a “Woody Allen-like Web site with a French Jewish humor” and he had an inspiration. What if he took one of the pillars of that type of humor, a French man’s relationship with his mother and grandmother, and asked Frederika to play along with some oddball ideas?

This Budapest-born baroness, whose family had owned the largest textile factory in Hungary before World War II, was a natural in front of the camera, assuming a straight-faced, imperturbable comic attitude whether donning a motorcycle helmet and goggles, polishing her fingernails with a gherkin, wearing giant flippers on the beach, lighting up a banana, or dressed up as a Christmas tree with a golden star on her head. (All these photos and more appear in “Mamika: My Mighty Little Grandmother,” published in the United States last year.)

“It was like a game for us, deciding what crazy thing we were going to do next, how we were going to keep people from being bored,” said Sacha, who traces his close relationship with his grandmother to age 14, when she taught him how to drive and often picked him up at school. “Making pictures was a very good excuse to spend time together.”

“He thought it was very funny to put a costume on me,” said Frederika. “And I liked it.”

People responded enthusiastically, and before long Sacha had cooked up what ended up becoming the most popular character role for Frederika: Super Mamika, outfitted in a body-hugging costume, tights, a motorcycle helmet and a flowing cape.

His grandmother was a super hero of sorts, because she had helped save 10 people from the Nazis during World War II, said Sacha. He also traced inspiration to Stan Lee, a Jewish artist who created the X-Men, The Hulk and the Fantastic Four for Marvel comics. “I wanted to ask what happens to these super heroes when they get old in these photographs with my grandmother.”

Lest this seem a bit trivial to readers of this blog, consider this passage from Sacha’s introduction to “Mamika: My Might Little Grandmother”:

In a society where youth is the supreme value; where wrinkles have to be camouflaged; where old people are hidden as soon as they become cumbersome, where, for lack of time or desire, it is easier to put our elders in hospices rather than take care of them, I wanted to show that happiness in aging was also possible.

In our Skype conversation, Sacha confessed to anxiety about losing his grandmother, and said, “I always was very worried about what would happen if my grandmother disappeared. Because she is exceptional.”

“I am not normal,” Frederika piped up at his side, her face deeply wrinkled, her short hair beautifully coiffed, seemingly very satisfied with herself.

“So, making these pictures to me is the best thing that could happen,” Sacha continued, “because now my grandma is immortal and it seems everyone knows her. I am giving to everybody in the world a bit of my grandma.”

This wonderful expression of caring and creativity has expanded my view of intergenerational relations in this new old age. What about you?

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DealBook: Ex-Peregrine Chief Sentenced to 50 Years in Prison

8:33 p.m. | Updated

A prominent futures-industry executive was sentenced to 50 years in prison on Thursday for embezzling from clients and misleading banks for two decades.

Russell Wasendorf Sr., the chief executive of the now-defunct brokerage firm the Peregrine Financial Group, stole more than $215 million, money that a judge said is likely never to be recovered.

Dressed in orange prison garb, his wrists and ankles shackled, Mr. Wasendorf sat expressionless as Judge Linda Reade of the United States District Court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, handed down the maximum sentence recommended by the government.

“The lengthy prison sentence imposed today is just punishment for a con man who built a business on smoke and mirrors,” said Sean Berry, acting United States attorney in Cedar Rapids.

Mr. Wasendorf’s penalty is the latest in a string of stiff sentences handed down by judges for financial crimes. Bernard L. Madoff received 150 years for perpetrating the largest Ponzi scheme ever uncovered. Allen Stanford is serving a 110-year term after being convicted of swindling investors of nearly a $7 billion. Thomas J. Petters got a 50-year sentence for defrauding investors of nearly $4 billion.

Given the extremely lengthy sentences and advanced age of some of the defendants, many of these terms are largely symbolic, intended to reflect the gravity of the crimes and the need for retribution.

The fraud carried out by Mr. Wasendorf, 64, took place more than 1,000 miles from Wall Street, in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Federal regulators discovered the crime last summer after local police found Mr. Wasendorf unconscious in his car in Peregrine’s parking lot, a hose running from the exhaust pipe into the passenger compartment. He left a detailed suicide note explaining his crimes.

Mr. Wasendorf stole millions of dollars from his customers at Peregrine, which also did business as PFGBest, by using laser printers and software like Photoshop and Excel to make near-perfect replicas of account statements from US Bank. He duped regulators by supplying them with a false post-office box address for sending forms to the bank, which he would then intercept and send back on forged US Bank letterhead.

Mr. Wasendorf said that he acted alone, keeping his scheme from his approximately 240 employees by being the only Peregrine employee with access to customers’ accounts. No one else, including his son, Russell Wasendorf Jr., who worked at the firm, has been charged in the case.

“With careful concealment and blunt authority, I was able to hide my fraud from others at P.F.G.,” he wrote in his suicide note.

Mr. Wasendorf’s fraud shocked the financial world, coming just months after the implosion of MF Global, a commodities and futures brokerage firm where about $1 billion in client money disappeared. The scandal raised questions about oversight failures in the futures industry. Futures brokerage firms like Peregrine match buyers and sellers of contracts for commodities, charging a small commission for the service.

Peregrine’s clients — and Mr. Wasendorf’s 13,000 victims — including speculators betting on the price of orange juice and farmers who use such contracts to protect themselves from large price fluctuations.

The case also stunned Cedar Falls, a town of 40,000 perhaps best known as the home of the University of Northern Iowa, the college where Mr. Wasendorf, an Iowa native, earned his degree. He started his business there in the late 1960s before moving it to Chicago, the epicenter of the futures industry. (Cedar Falls is about 60 miles north of Cedar Rapids, where Mr. Wasendorf was sentenced.)

In 2009, Mr. Wasendorf returned to Cedar Falls, spending $20 million to build a gleaming headquarters on the outskirts of town. A delegation of Iowa lawmakers, including Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, attended the office’s grand opening.

He became a local hero, creating jobs, sponsoring numerous charitable causes and opening two restaurants in town. His Italian eatery, myVerona, became a Cedar Falls hot spot and a coveted place to land a job. In 2010, Mr. Wasendorf paid for the entire staff to travel to Italy — visiting Milan, Parma and Modena — to hone their culinary skills and sample the authentic cuisine.

“How can I expect them to prepare and cook north Italian food if they haven’t experienced it?” Mr. Wasendorf told The Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier.

His estate, a compound carved out of Iowa farmland, featured a 1,000-bottle wine cellar and a U-shaped indoor swimming pool with a retractable glass-paneled roof. He owned a private jet — nicknamed Air Wasendorf — that he flew out of nearby Waterloo, traveling frequently to Chicago for meetings.

Judge Reade rejected any leniency for Mr. Wasendorf because of his contributions to the community. “It is easy to be generous with other people’s money,” she said.

Iowa newspapers nicknamed Mr. Wasendorf “the Madoff of the Midwest.” Though Mr. Wasendorf’s criminal proceeds were a tiny fraction of Mr. Madoff’s, the two men suggested similar reasons for why they turned to a life of crime.

Mr. Madoff has said in interviews that he began his fraud after his investment performance soured and he couldn’t admit defeat. Similarly, Mr. Wasendorf, in his confession, said he began to steal from his clients when his business slumped and he began to run out of money.

“I guess my ego was too big to admit failure,” wrote Mr. Wasendorf. “So I cheated.”

On Thursday, Mr. Wasendorf, gaunt and diminished, expressed deep remorse.

“I feel I fully deserve whatever sentence I’m given,” he said. “The punishment I’ve caused myself is worse than anything you can impose.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/01/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Ex-Peregrine Chief Sentenced to 50 Years in Prison.

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The TV Watch: Tina Fey Signs Off ‘30 Rock,’ Broken Barriers Behind Her

Tina Fey leaves prime time television pretty much the way she entered it seven years ago, as a sly observer who bites the network that feeds her so much material.

Ending its run on Thursday night, “30 Rock,” the show Ms. Fey created, helped write and starred in, was a witty sendup of network television that cut uncannily close to the bone. It seemed at times almost like a transcript of production meetings at the NBC headquarters, at 30 Rockefeller Center. Ms. Fey made use and fun of everything that NBC holds sacred, including product placement, corporate synergy and some of its most venerable stars.

In a recent episode Ms. Fey’s character, Liz Lemon, is thrilled to be included in a celebration of “80 under 80.” Liz explains that the event honors “women in entertainment who aren’t Betty White.”

It’s funny, but the remark is also Ms. Fey’s way of deflecting attention from her own stature. For a new generation of female writer-performers who now have their own sitcoms, at least partly thanks to her, Ms. Fey is the new Betty White, a figure so accomplished, beloved and irreproachable that it’s almost impossible not to joke about her.

On “The Mindy Project,” on Fox, the doctor played by Mindy Kaling (like Ms. Fey, Ms. Kaling is the creator as well as the star of her show) riffles through an asthmatic male co-worker’s shoulder bag for an inhaler. She finds among other things a copy of Ms. Fey’s best-selling book, “Bossypants,” and demands to know why he is reading it.

Gasping, he replies, “I wanted to see how Tina Fey could juggle it all.”

The final episode of “30 Rock” is a one-hour special that sort of ties up loose ends but mostly gives its creator one last chance to don a disguise that was delightful and also the weakest part of the show.

Ms. Fey cast herself as a slovenly, aimless nerd who is a pushover at work and, for much of the series, single and hapless at home, the kind of person who was happy “eating night cheese and transitioning pajamas into day wear,” as Liz Lemon says of herself. Ms. Fey is better at writing — and impersonating Sarah Palin — than she is at acting. She was never fully convincing in the role of a loser.

“30 Rock” was modeled on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in many important ways, except for its heroine. Liz was not a goody-goody perfectionist like Mary Richards, or, by her own admission, Ms. Fey herself. Disciplined, ambitious type-A’s can be comical, as Ms. Moore, and later Candice Bergen, the star of “Murphy Brown,” proved. But Ms. Fey, who was the first female head writer of “Saturday Night Live,” chose as her alter ego a dumpy sad sack who just happened to be the head writer of a late-night sketch comedy show.

She created deliciously absurd characters like the silkily self-possessed network executive Jack Donaghy, played brilliantly by Alec Baldwin, and the insane comedian Tracy Jordan, played by Tracy Morgan, by grafting familiar show-business phenotypes onto those actors’ inner nuttiness. Ms. Fey borrows shamelessly from real life, except when it comes to her own success. It may be that she plays against type because she is uncomfortable with the deadly earnest role of trailblazer. But she is one.

There have been plenty of female comedy writers before she came along — Diane English (“Murphy Brown”) and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (“Designing Women”), to name but two, as well as notable performers who created their own characters and carried their own comedy shows like Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Tracey Ullman and Roseanne Barr. But before Ms. Fey there were almost no women on network television who created and wrote their own shows and starred in them. One of the more notable exceptions dates to the days of black-and-white: Gertrude Berg created, wrote and starred in a hit radio comedy about a Jewish matriarch in the Bronx that was turned into a CBS sitcom, “The Goldbergs,” in 1949.

When “30 Rock” had its premiere in 2006 Ms. Fey was that rare thing, a female writer starring in her own prime-time network show. She has moved on to movies, starring with Paul Rudd in a new comedy, “Admission,” to be released in the spring.

She doesn’t leave television in a vacuum. Now of course Ms. Kaling has her Fox show; Lena Dunham has “Girls” on HBO; and Whitney Cummings, who created and stars in “Whitney” on NBC, also is a co-creator of the CBS comedy “2 Broke Girls.” Amy Poehler, who like Ms. Fey is a “Saturday Night Live” alumna, is one of the writers as well as the lead of “Parks and Recreation” on NBC.

Ratings were never the real measure of the reach of “30 Rock.” Those only peaked in 2008, immediately after Ms. Fey’s dead-ringer impersonation of Ms. Palin on “Saturday Night Live” stoked audience interest. Critical praise and a deluge of Emmy Awards, so many that Ms. Fey has joked about it, are a better gauge of the show’s influence. So are the celebrity cameos.

It doesn’t take much to coax politicians and television anchors to make comic cameos anymore — Brian Williams is practically a regular on “30 Rock,” and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. let Ms. Poehler swoon over him on a recent episode of “Parks and Recreation.” But “30 Rock” had an even greater appeal, drawing famous people who are not particularly known for self-mockery, including Condoleezza Rice (in her cameo the former secretary of state is furious that her ex-boyfriend Jack broke up with her by text), Oprah Winfrey and the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi. In the final episode Ms. Pelosi gives a mock-television interview denouncing Jack Donaghy as an “economic war criminal.”

Ms. Fey is a pioneer who resists being taken too seriously. She prefers to be revered for her irreverence. But one sign of her influence is her ability to persuade powerful, sensible women to go on “30 Rock” and make fools of themselves.

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Telecoms boom leaves rural Africa behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is typical of much of the continent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

COST VERSUS BENEFIT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

($ 1 = 0.6350 British pounds)

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

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Beyonce to finally face media in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Beyonce is expected to face the media Thursday as she previews her halftime performance at the Super Bowl. But the focus will likely be on her performance at that other big event earlier this month.

The superstar hasn't spoken publicly since it was alleged that she lip-synched her rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at President Barack Obama's inauguration last week. Her critically praised performance came under scrutiny less than a day later when a representative from the U.S. Marine Band said she wasn't singing live and the band's accompanying performance was taped. Shortly after, the group backed off its initial statement and said no one could tell if she was singing live or not.

It's expected that the halftime performance will be a main focus of her afternoon press conference, even though she'd likely rather concentrate on questions about her set list for Sunday and her upcoming HBO documentary, "Life Is but a Dream." The documentary is being shown for the media just before Beyonce speaks and takes questions, as expected.

There has been plenty of speculation about Beyonce's Super Bowl performance, including reports there would be a Destiny's Child reunion with Michelle Williams and Kelly Rowland (Williams has shot down such speculation). Some are also curious about whether her husband, Jay-Z, will join her onstage, as they often do for each other's shows.

Beyonce has teased photos and video of herself preparing for the show, which will perhaps be the biggest audience of her career. Last year, Madonna's halftime performance was the most-watched Super Bowl halftime performance ever, with an average of 114 million viewers. It garnered more viewers than the game itself, which was the most-watched U.S. TV event in history.

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Well: Myths of Weight Loss Are Plentiful, Researcher Says

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet it has not been done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MYTHS

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

Set a realistic goal to lose a modest amount.

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

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

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

Ideas not yet proven TRUE OR FALSE

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

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

Yo-yo diets lead to increased death rates.

People who snack gain weight and get fat.

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

FACTS — GOOD EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT

Heredity is important but is not destiny.

Exercise helps with weight maintenance.

Weight loss is greater with programs that provide meals.

Some prescription drugs help with weight loss and maintenance.

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

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Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signs of a Campaign

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

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 31, 2013

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

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