second news

Venezuela Governors Warned Not to Question Government’s Legitimacy

Label: World

CARACAS, Venezuela — Top government officials are threatening to take action against opposition governors and issuing dark warnings about conspiracies against the government of President Hugo Chávez, who is ailing and remains incommunicado in Cuba.

At a large rally for the cancer-stricken Mr. Chávez on Thursday, the day designated for his inauguration, Vice President Nicolás Maduro sent a warning to government critics who had objected to a Supreme Court ruling that endorsed the indefinite postponement of the president’s swearing-in.

Many interpreted his words to be directed at Henrique Capriles, the governor of Miranda State who lost to Mr. Chávez in the presidential election in October. He is the most likely opposition candidate if a special election has to be held should Mr. Chávez die, resign or become too sick to continue in office.

“Some governors out there have come out to make declarations, playing with words,” Mr. Maduro said. “We say to them, ‘Stop the waffling.’ If you don’t recognize the legitimate government of President Chávez, we are evaluating legally very forceful actions, because if you don’t recognize me, I’m not obligated to recognize you. It’s that simple.”

He added: “Watch your words and your actions. Take care not to get involved in coups and destabilizing adventures.”

Before leaving for cancer surgery in Havana in early December, Mr. Chávez designated Mr. Maduro as his political heir and said that he wanted him to run for president if a special election became necessary.

It is not unusual for Venezuelan officials to threaten or lash out at the opposition, which they routinely characterize as an enemy bent on overthrowing Mr. Chávez’s revolution. But in recent days, amid an intense debate over the constitutionality of postponing the president’s swearing in, the tone has gotten harsher.

Later on Thursday, Mr. Capriles posted a reply on Twitter saying, “Threats from No. 2s make us laugh, let’s see if starting tomorrow they get back to work, Government in paralysis.”

Mr. Capriles added in another post: “What do you know, they didn’t let Al Capone speak, what happened?”

Vladimir Villegas, a former ambassador who is now critical of the government, said that in Mr. Chávez’s absence, Mr. Maduro and other officials were using the clash with the opposition to promote unity among their followers.

“They can’t live without an enemy,” Mr. Villegas said. “The confrontation with the opposition holds them together.”

The vice president is appointed by the president, and some in the opposition have argued that Mr. Maduro cannot continue to serve in the new term without being reappointed by Mr. Chávez. But the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Maduro and other appointees could continue in their posts.

Mr. Capriles has pointed out repeatedly that although Mr. Maduro is now at the head of the government, he is not an elected official.

“He was not elected Oct. 7,” Mr. Capriles said last week, referring to the recent presidential election. “He shouldn’t come and talk to us about legitimacy.”

The front page of the newspaper Tal Cual on Friday showed a caricature of Mr. Maduro with the headline: “The Usurper.” Another newspaper opposed to the government, El Nacional, ran a front-page headline that said: “The new term starts with legality questioned.”

On Thursday, Mr. Maduro also said the government had uncovered a plot to destabilize the country, although he offered no evidence and was vague in his description of the conspiracy.

“There is a plan by sectors of the ultraright to find a cadaver, two cadavers and fill the streets of Venezuela with protests,” Mr. Maduro said, adding that the opposition was planning “a kind of sabotage and constant fires in the cities.”

“We alerted all the police security forces to be very careful of their actions because they are looking to stain the political life” of the country, Mr. Maduro said.

Also last week, the government said it was starting an administrative proceeding against Globovisión, a television station closely allied with the opposition, over its coverage of the constitutional controversy around Mr. Chávez’s swearing-in. The proceeding could result in a large fine or the temporary shutdown of the station.

The National Telecommunications Commission announced the proceeding on Wednesday, several hours after Diosdado Cabello, president of the National Assembly and a top Chávez ally, said in a speech that the station should be sanctioned for its coverage of the issue.

The director of the commission, Pedro Maldonado, said punishment could include a fine of up to 10 percent of the station’s gross revenue and a 72-hour shutdown.

Globovisión paid a fine of about $2.2 million last year for its coverage of a deadly prison riot in 2010. The government said its reporting threatened public order and fomented anxiety.

On Friday, Globovisión ran a short spot several times showing a section of the Constitution that defends free speech followed by Mr. Maldonado announcing the proceeding against the station. It ends with the words, “Censorship of the Constitution.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Maduro flew to Cuba on Friday to visit the president and his family and speak with his doctors.

Mr. Chávez has not been seen or heard from since his cancer surgery on Dec. 11 in Havana. Officials have said that he is fighting a severe lung infection. In past trips to Cuba for cancer treatment, starting in June 2011, Mr. Chávez stayed in the public eye, posting on Twitter, making phone calls to government-run television stations and on one occasion conducting a televised government meeting from Havana.

Your Money: She’ll Tell You, It’s Time to Think Ahead

Label: Business

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Once Chanel Reynolds had enough emotional distance from her husband's death, she built the site that attempts to convince others to take a couple of hours now to spare themselves countless hours of hardship later.

In the days after Chanel Reynolds’s husband was hit while riding his bicycle near Lake Washington here and the best-case possibilities just kept getting worse, she was not yet consumed by grief. There were no dogged middle-of-the-night Web searches for faraway cures for his crushed upper spine or tearful bedside vigils with their 5-year-old son.

Instead, the buzz in her brain came from a growing list of financial tasks that grown-ups are supposed to have finished by the time they approach middle age. And she and her husband, José Hernando, had not finished them.

“I was finding it really hard for me to stay present and in the room and to be able to hear what the doctors were saying because I was so overwhelmed with not knowing how much money we had in our checking account, and the fact that we had our wills drafted but not signed,” she said. “I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to float a family by myself.”

In the many months of suffering after Mr. Hernando’s death in July 2009, she beat herself up while spending dozens of hours excavating their financial life and slowly reassembling it. But then, she resolved to keep anyone she knew from ever again being in the same situation.

The result is a Web site named for the scolding, profane exhortation that her inner voice shouted during those dark days in the intensive care unit. She might have called it Getyouracttogether.org, but she changed just one word.

The site offers some basic financial advice, gives away free templates for a master checklist and provides starter forms to draft a will, living will and power of attorney. There’s also a guide to starting a list of all of the accounts in your life that someone might need to access and shut down in your absence.

All of these forms and lists are already out there on the Web in various places, though rarely in one place. But there are two things that make Ms. Reynolds’s effort decidedly different.

First, the world of personal finance suffers from an odd sort of organizational failure. We tend to organize our thinking around products: retirement accounts, mortgages, long-term care insurance.

But in the real world, it’s a big life event that often governs our hunt for solutions. Sometimes, it’s a happy one, like getting married. But there are few ready-made tool kits like the one Ms. Reynolds has assembled for people considering the possibility of serious illness or death.

The other thing that compelled me to sprint here right after I stumbled across her site Tuesday night was that it is not neutered, stripped of the mess of feelings that govern much of what we do with our money. Sometimes, we just need to meet the person in personal finance. Maybe, just maybe, hearing the story of someone who has been there, in the worst possible way, can finally push us all into action.

And we desperately need to act. According to a survey that the legal services site Rocket Lawyer conducted in 2011, 57 percent of adults in the United States do not have a will. Of those 45 to 64 years of age, a shocking 44 percent still have not gotten it down.

People who get a fatal diagnosis from a doctor at least have a bit of time to sort things out. But Ms. Reynolds and her husband had made only a few plans.

Mr. Hernando was 43 years old on the day in July 2009 when a van mowed him down while making a left turn into the path of his bicycle. He was a self-taught engineer who played guitar in a band called Moonshine back when Seattle was the world capital of rock. At the time of his death, he rode for a cycling team and was a Flash developer working at the highly regarded firm Frog Design.

Given all that vitality, death was the farthest thing from Ms. Reynolds’s mind when she kissed him goodbye after failing to persuade him to take their son along for the ride. Which was why she was confused when she checked her phone from a party two hours later and found 14 missed calls, none of which were from numbers she recognized.

After his death, this much was clear: The family with the six-figure income and the four-bedroom house that they had bought in the Mount Baker neighborhood one year before had a will with no signature, little emergency savings and an unknown number of accounts with passwords that had been in Mr. Hernando’s head.

What saved Ms. Reynolds, now 42, from ruin was life insurance. They didn’t have a lot, but they had just enough (a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the end) to keep her from having to go right back to work as a freelance project manager and sell the house at a big loss right away. It helped pay for the education of their son, Gabriel, who is now 9, and for Mr. Hernando’s daughter from a previous relationship, Lyric, who is 16 and still close to Ms. Reynolds and her brother. Ms. Reynolds now carries a $1,000,000 term policy on her own life.

Well: Calling All Cauliflower

Label: Health

At my house we eat cauliflower like popcorn. Using a simple recipe from Alice Waters, we slice it thin, toss in olive oil and salt, and roast. One head of cauliflower is never enough.

This week in Recipes for Health, Martha Rose Shulman takes us on a trip to Sicily, where cauliflower is a favorite food. She writes:

Every once in a while I revisit the cuisine of a particular part of the world (usually it is located somewhere in the Mediterranean). This week I landed in Sicily. I was nosing around my cookbooks for some cauliflower recipes and opened my friend and colleague Clifford A. Wright’s very first cookbook, “Cucina Pariso: The Heavenly Food of Sicily.” The cuisine of this island is unique, with many Arab influences – lots of sweet spices, sweet and savory combinations, saffron, almonds and other nuts. Sicilians even have a signature couscous dish, a fish couscous they call Cuscusù.
Cauliflower is a favorite vegetable there, though the variety used most often is the light green cauliflower that we can find in some farmers’ markets in the United States. I adapted a couple of Mr. Wright’s pasta recipes, changing them mainly by reducing the amount of olive oil and anchovies enough to reduce the sodium and caloric values significantly without sacrificing the flavor and character of the dishes.
I didn’t just look to Sicily for recipes for this nutrient-rich cruciferous vegetable, but I didn’t stray very far. One recipe comes from Italy’s mainland, and another, a baked cauliflower frittata, is from its close neighbor Tunisia, fewer than 100 miles away across the Strait of Sicily.

Here are five new ways to cook with cauliflower.

Sicilian Pasta With Cauliflower: Raisins or currants and saffron introduce a sweet element into the savory and salty mix.

Baked Ziti With Cauliflower: A delicious baked macaroni dish that has a lot more going for it nutritionally than mac and cheese.

Cauliflower and Tuna Salad: Tuna adds a new element to a classic Italian antipasto of cauliflower and capers dressed with vinegar and olive oil.

Tunisian Style Baked Cauliflower Frittata: A lighter and simpler version of an authentic Tunisian frittata.

Sicilian Cauliflower and Black Olive Gratin: A simple gratin that is traditionally made with green cauliflower, but is equally delicious with the easier-to-obtain white variety.

Well: Calling All Cauliflower

Label: Lifestyle

At my house we eat cauliflower like popcorn. Using a simple recipe from Alice Waters, we slice it thin, toss in olive oil and salt, and roast. One head of cauliflower is never enough.

This week in Recipes for Health, Martha Rose Shulman takes us on a trip to Sicily, where cauliflower is a favorite food. She writes:

Every once in a while I revisit the cuisine of a particular part of the world (usually it is located somewhere in the Mediterranean). This week I landed in Sicily. I was nosing around my cookbooks for some cauliflower recipes and opened my friend and colleague Clifford A. Wright’s very first cookbook, “Cucina Pariso: The Heavenly Food of Sicily.” The cuisine of this island is unique, with many Arab influences – lots of sweet spices, sweet and savory combinations, saffron, almonds and other nuts. Sicilians even have a signature couscous dish, a fish couscous they call Cuscusù.
Cauliflower is a favorite vegetable there, though the variety used most often is the light green cauliflower that we can find in some farmers’ markets in the United States. I adapted a couple of Mr. Wright’s pasta recipes, changing them mainly by reducing the amount of olive oil and anchovies enough to reduce the sodium and caloric values significantly without sacrificing the flavor and character of the dishes.
I didn’t just look to Sicily for recipes for this nutrient-rich cruciferous vegetable, but I didn’t stray very far. One recipe comes from Italy’s mainland, and another, a baked cauliflower frittata, is from its close neighbor Tunisia, fewer than 100 miles away across the Strait of Sicily.

Here are five new ways to cook with cauliflower.

Sicilian Pasta With Cauliflower: Raisins or currants and saffron introduce a sweet element into the savory and salty mix.

Baked Ziti With Cauliflower: A delicious baked macaroni dish that has a lot more going for it nutritionally than mac and cheese.

Cauliflower and Tuna Salad: Tuna adds a new element to a classic Italian antipasto of cauliflower and capers dressed with vinegar and olive oil.

Tunisian Style Baked Cauliflower Frittata: A lighter and simpler version of an authentic Tunisian frittata.

Sicilian Cauliflower and Black Olive Gratin: A simple gratin that is traditionally made with green cauliflower, but is equally delicious with the easier-to-obtain white variety.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Dealing With Duplicate Work on Dropbox

Label: Technology

What happens if two people work on the same file at the same time in a shared Dropbox folder? Does one copy of the file overwrite the other?

If two people are editing the same file at the same time, Dropbox saves both versions of the file in the shared folder. The service does not merge the two different files, but adds the words “conflicted copy” to the file name of the second version so it is obvious that two different copies of the same file now exist.

The file name of the second copy also lists the date that the conflict occurred between the two versions of the file. The computer name or name of the person who was working on the file is appended to the name as well, making it somewhat easier to identify the collaborator and ensure that everyone’s changes are incorporated into one final version of the document.

France Sends Troops to Mali to Help Counter Islamist Advance

Label: World

Romaric Hien/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Fighters of the hard-line Salafi group Ansar Dine in August. The group has controlled Timbuktu and much of northern Mali since a coup d’état and a successful revolt against the central authority in March.

BAMAKO, Mali — France sent armed forces into combat in Mali on Friday, answering an urgent plea from the government of its former colony in West Africa to help blunt a sudden and aggressive advance into the center of the country by Islamist extremist militants who have been in control of the north for much of the past year.

French officials confirmed that the French forces, which included paratroopers and helicopter gunships, had engaged in fighting with the Islamists after landing at a major airfield in the central Mali town of Sévaré.

It was unclear how many French troops had been sent or from where, but a Western diplomat in neighboring Niger said the Islamist forces numbered between 800 and 900 fighters, with about 200 vehicles.

“French forces brought their support this afternoon to Malian army units to fight against terrorist elements,” President François Hollande of France said in a statement to reporters in Paris. “This operation will last as long as is necessary.”

Mr. Hollande has been especially outspoken in his animosity toward northern Mali’s Islamist occupiers and their harsh practices, which rights activists say include arbitrary killings, stonings, amputations, forced marriages and the destruction of non-Islamist cultural shrines. Thousands of Malians have sought to flee the north in recent months.

“Mali is dealing with terrorist elements form the north, whose brutality and fanaticism are now clear to the entire world,” Mr. Hollande said. “The very existence of the friendly state of Mali is at stake, as is the security of its people and that of our citizens. There are 6,000 of them there.”

The French president was responding to an urgent request received the day before from Mali’s interim president, Dioncounda Traore, who said Malian government forces were in dire need of help to stop the Islamists, who have turned the northern half of the country into a militant haven since seizing the territory, about twice of the size of Germany, last April.

The United Nations Security Council, which has repeatedly condemned the Islamist takeover of northern Mali and last month authorized an African-led force to enter the country to help drive the Islamists out, said Thursday that it was closely monitoring events there and may take additional steps. Mr. Hollande is also to meet with the Malian president next week.

The swift French response came after two days of clashes between the Malian Army and militants around Konna, a sleepy mud-brick village that for months had marked the outer limit of the Malian Army’s control after it lost half of the country to the Islamists and their allies eight months ago.

“It’s a very serious situation, very dangerous,” said a Malian officer here in Bamako, the capital, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The Islamists had been threatening a major airfield 25 miles away in Sévaré, also the home of a significant army base. And 10 miles from Sévaré is the historic river city of Mopti, the last major town controlled by the Malian government, with a population of more than 100,000.

“There were hard fights, but we lost,” the officer said.

A spokesman for the Islamists, Sanda Ould Boumana, said Thursday from rebel-held Timbuktu: “We have taken the town of Konna. We control Konna, and the Malian Army has fled. We have pushed them back.” Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, who was traveling in neighboring Niger, said he understood that French paratroopers and helicopter gunships had landed in Sévaré and had engaged the Islamists in combat. He also said the United States, which shares France’s deep concern about the Islamist seizure of northern Mali, was considering what it could do to help, perhaps by repositioning satellites or sending in surveillance drones.

This week’s clashes were the first time that the two sides had fought since Islamists and their Tuareg rebel allies conquered the north of Mali last spring, splitting the country in two and leaving the Malian Army in disarray.

For months, the United Nations and Mali’s neighbors have been debating and planning a military campaign to retake the north by force, if necessary, an international push that is supposed to be led by Malian forces. Analysts had previously said that the outcome of this week’s fighting at Konna would be a significant indicator of the army’s fitness to undertake the reconquest of the north.

Malian politicians reacted with shock to news of Konna’s loss.

“This is a very disagreeable surprise. Terrible. A dagger blow,” said Fatoumata Dicko, a deputy in Mali’s Parliament in Bamako. “People are fleeing Sévaré. They think there is nothing to hold the Islamists back.”

Adam Nossiter reported from Bamako and Eric Schmitt from Niamey, Niger. Reporting was contributed by Cheick Diouara from Accra, Ghana; Rick Gladstone from New York; and Richard Berry from Paris.

2 Years Into Its Turnaround, Nokia Shows Promise

Label: Business

BERLIN — Nearly two years ago, Stephen Elop, fresh from a senior post at Microsoft, spoke of flaming ocean platforms and shark-infested waters to describe the competitive climate he inherited at Nokia, the erstwhile leader in mobile phones that was then teetering on the brink of irrelevance.

Mr. Elop, an affable Canadian engineer, painted the bleak outlook as he prescribed a radical cure on the once-proud Finnish mobile phone pioneer: The rejection of the company’s own Symbian smartphone operating system for a shotgun collaboration with Microsoft, itself stumbling badly in the sector.

On Thursday, the Nokia chief executive delivered the biggest news from the Finnish company since he started the last-ditch transformation: Nokia may be on its way back.

Thanks in part to an all-out marketing push, sales of its new smartphone line, the Lumia, powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, soared more than 50 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, leading Nokia to an unexpected profit. Thanks largely to demand for its newest models, Nokia had to correct its financial forecasts — upward.

In what was seen as a make-or-break quarter, Mr. Elop was able to tell investors that Nokia would break even or turn a 2 percent profit rather than report a loss as large as 10 percent.

“While we definitely experienced some tough challenges in the first half of 2012, we are managing through these issues,” Mr. Elop said during a conference call with journalists.

What Nokia has accomplished under Mr. Elop, whose professional future is tied to resuscitating the company, is to produce a line of increasingly competitive smartphones that are starting to draw favorable comparisons with Samsung and Apple, the two companies most responsible for knocking Nokia from its lofty perch, according to analysts.

“The Lumia smartphones are night-and-day different from Nokia’s old Symbian handsets,” said Francisco Jeronimo, an analyst in London at International Data Corp. “I think what we are starting to see now is what will be a steady turnaround in Nokia’s fortunes.”

The company, which dominated the cellphone business until Apple introduced its iPhone in 2007, still has a long way to go to approach its former stature. In the third quarter, Nokia had just a 4 percent share of the global smartphone market, and was a distant No.10 in the sector, trailing the not-so-illustrious likes of LG and ZTE, among others, according to Strategy Analytics, a research firm.

Samsung and Apple, the No.1 and No.2 smartphone makers, together had 50 percent of the global smartphone market, and their shares were growing. While its competitors rose, Nokia has generated nearly €5 billion, or $6.5 billion, in losses under Mr. Elop, and eliminated of a third of its work force.

In October, Microsoft introduced the Windows Phone 8, the operating system that would be used in the top-of-the-line Lumia 920 and 820. Since then, Nokia has spent heavily on advertising in Britain and Europe to promote the models. The company will not disclose how much it had spent on its campaign, but its television ads were ubiquitous over the holidays, said Neil Mawston, an analyst at Strategy Analytics in London.

The heavy promotion, which was aided by Microsoft, whose own mobile strategy is intimately tied up with Nokia’s, has helped the company recapture some of its lost glory, Mr. Mawston said.

But Mr. Mawston warned that “Nokia still lacks the true killer phone that will enable it to compete with the iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S III.”

Mr. Mawston said he expected Nokia’s share of the global smartphone market to rise to 6 percent by the end of the year.

The company’s financial position is likely to revive even more quickly as a result of the strict cost-cutting imposed by Mr. Elop, who used to run Microsoft’s business software division before coming to Nokia in late 2010.

Mr. Elop has eliminated a third of Nokia’s work force and shut factories across Europe. Last month, Nokia even sold its 540,000 square-foot, or 50,000 square-meter, glass-and-wood headquarters in the Helsinki suburb of Espoo to Finnish investors, and leased it back. The maneuver netted Nokia €170 million.

Besides a more competitive array of phones, Nokia has discarded its market-leader mentality. Employees are now routinely traveling in economy class and sharing rides to airports. Workers no longer use costly telephone conference calling but speak in group teleconferences using less expensive Internet calling services.

“The company is a lot smaller now but people are working better together,” said Susan Sheehan, a Nokia spokeswoman. “Everyone has been pitching in.”

Even at Nokia Siemens, the company’s long-suffering network equipment venture, the future is looking brighter than it was two years ago. On Thursday, Nokia said the unit, which contributes about 40 percent of its total sales, would report an operating profit for the third quarter, its third straight quarterly profit.

Nokia, in its information to investors, even revised the operating profit forecast at the venture to 13 percent to 15 percent of sales, up from a range of 4 percent to 12 percent.

Looking ahead, Nokia said it expected to return to an operating loss of 2 percent of sales in the first quarter amid the post-holiday buying lull and harsh competition. But the results for the coming three months could vary widely, Nokia warned, from an even bigger 6 percent operating loss to a 2 percent profit.

Pete Cunningham, an analyst at Canalys, a research firm in Reading, England, said that Nokia’s improving financial position was a positive step but that the company still faced challenges.

“On face value, this is a positive for Nokia,” Mr. Cunningham said. “But 2013 could still turn out to be another very difficult year for Nokia. It is way too premature to say that the company has made a turnaround.”

Mr. Cunningham said he used the Lumia 920, Nokia’s newest smartphone, during the Christmas holidays and liked the experience.

“But the more I used the phone, the more apparent it became to me that there are big gaps between Lumia and its competitors in terms of the functionality and usability of its apps,” Mr. Cunningham said. “I still think there is a lot of work to be done on Lumia.”

City Room: How Are You Warding Off the Flu?

Label: Health

Sure, you could go out and get a flu shot like everyone keeps telling you to do. It’s relatively cheap, and available just about everywhere.

But the shot is not 100 percent effective. And it takes two weeks to kick in. And needles are scary. (The spray vaccine, on the other hand — up your nose! — is just gross.) Plus, the flu has its upsides.

On the bright side, having the flu was a great start to my spring break diet.. eating nothing and still managing to puke
— Allison (@Ally_YM) 6 Jan 13

Turns out I don’t have the flu, I just really like NyQuil and hate wearing pants.
— NYC Blonde (@NYC_Blonde) 10 Jan 13

If you’re holding out, or procrastinating, or have decided against getting vaccinated altogether, what alternative means are you using to keep those bad bugs away? Comment in the box below.