Egypt’s President Said to Limit Scope of Judicial Decree

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptians at a burned-out school in Cairo on Monday before the funeral of an activist who was injured in a clash and died Sunday.

CAIRO — With public pressure mounting, President Mohamed Morsi appeared to pull back Monday from his attempt to assert an authority beyond the reach of any court. His allies in the Muslim Brotherhood canceled plans for a large demonstration in his support, signaling a chance to calm an escalating battle that has paralyzed a divided nation.

After Mr. Morsi met for hours with the judges of Egypt’s Supreme Judicial Council, his spokesman read an “explanation” on television that appeared to backtrack from a presidential decree placing Mr. Morsi’s official edicts above judicial scrutiny — even while saying the president had not actually changed a word of the statement.

Though details of the talks remained hazy, and it was not clear whether the opposition or the court would accept his position, Mr. Morsi’s gesture was another demonstration that Egyptians would no longer allow their rulers to operate above the law. But there appeared little chance that the gesture alone would be enough to quell the crisis set off by his perceived power grab.

Protesters remained camped in Tahrir Square, and the opposition was moving ahead with plans for a major demonstration on Tuesday.

The presidential spokesman, Yasser Ali, said for the first time that Mr. Morsi had sought only to assert pre-existing powers already approved by the courts under previous precedents, not to free himself from judicial oversight.

He said that the president meant all along to follow an established Egyptian legal doctrine suspending judicial scrutiny of presidential “acts of sovereignty” that work “to protect the main institutions of the state.” The judicial council had said Sunday that it could bless aspects of the decree deemed to qualify under the doctrine.

Mr. Morsi had maintained from the start that his purpose was to empower himself to prevent judges appointed by former President Hosni Mubarak from dissolving the constituent assembly, which is led by his fellow Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. The courts have already dissolved the Islamist-led Parliament and an earlier constituent assembly, and the Supreme Constitutional Court was widely expected to rule against this one next week.

But the text of the original decree had exempted all presidential edicts from judicial review until the ratification of a constitution, not just those edicts related to the assembly or justified as “acts of sovereignty.”

Legal experts said that the spokesman’s explanations of the president’s intentions, if put into effect, would amount to a revision of the decree Mr. Morsi issued last Thursday. But lawyers said that the verbal statements alone carried little legal weight.

How the courts would apply the doctrine remained hard to predict. And Mr. Morsi’s opposition indicated it was holding out for far greater concessions, including the breakup of the whole constituent assembly.

Speaking at a news conference while Mr. Morsi was meeting with the judges, the opposition activist and intellectual Abdel Haleem Qandeil called for “a long-term battle,” declaring that withdrawal of Mr. Morsi’s new powers was only the first step toward the opposition’s goal of “the withdrawal of the legitimacy of Morsi’s presence in the presidential palace.” Completely withdrawing the edict would be “a minimum,” he said.

Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer and former presidential candidate, pointed to the growing crowd of protesters camped out in Tahrir Square for a fourth night. “The one who did the action has to take it back,” Mr. Ali said.

Moataz Abdel Fattah, a political scientist at Cairo University, said Mr. Morsi was saving face during a strategic retreat. “He is trying to simply say, ‘I am not a new pharaoh; I am just trying to stabilize the institutions that we already have,’ ” he said. “But for the liberals, this is now their moment, and for sure they are not going to waste it, because he has given them an excellent opportunity to score.”

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Oprah Winfrey Seeks a Younger Audience to Bolster a Flagging Empire

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

Oprah Winfrey spoke last month at a convention held by O, The Oprah Magazine, in Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES — It’s not easy to find a fresh way to photograph Oprah Winfrey.

That’s why the editors of O, The Oprah Magazine, recently tried to create a shot that recalled the glory days of Ms. Winfrey’s syndicated talk show. They arranged to photograph her for its April 2013 issue as she stepped onstage to speak to 5,000 attendees at the magazine’s annual conference, a New Age slumber party of sorts for women held at the convention center here last month. When Ms. Winfrey confidently strode out dressed in a sea foam green V-neck dress and a pair of perilously tall ruby red stilettos, the audience collectively leapt to its feet and shrieked at the sight of her.

“I love you, Oprah,” some women shouted, while other fans brushed away tears. “I love you back,” she responded in her signature commanding voice. “It’s no small thing to get the dough to come here.”

Ms. Winfrey, who used to receive this kind of applause from fans five days a week, has had fewer such receptions since the talk show she hosted for 25 years ended 18 months ago. The cable network OWN, which she started with Discovery Communications, is emerging from low ratings and management shake-ups. And without a regular presence on daytime network television, she cannot steer traffic to her other products as easily as in the past. Her magazine, in particular, has experienced a decline in advertising revenue and newsstand sales since the talk show finished.

“She’s still Oprah. But she’s still struggling,” said Janice Peck, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Colorado who wrote the 2008 book “The Age of Oprah.” “I think she’s scared, even though she’s very, very rich and she’s always going to be very, very rich. The possibility of failure, it’s quite scary.”

Ms. Winfrey, 58, has shown some signs of strain. She arrived at the conference with faint shadows under her eyes and announced to her best friend, Gayle King, and the audience simultaneously that she had a breast cancer scare the week before. (It was ultimately a false alarm.) When Ms. King grew visibly upset, one woman chided Ms. Winfrey for not telling her friend ahead of time and ordered her to apologize to Ms. King — all before an audience. Ms. Winfrey also did not hide her dissatisfaction with the criticism she had faced. She told the audience, “the press tried to cut me off at the knees” in its coverage of OWN, and bristled at questions about the challenges her magazine confronted.

“I don’t care what the form is,” Ms. Winfrey said with the conviction of a preacher. “I care about what the message is.”

With signs of progress at OWN, Ms. Winfrey now has more time to devote to other media platforms — her magazine, her radio channel on XM Satellite Radio, her Facebook page, which has 7.8 million subscribers, her Twitter account, which has nearly 15 million followers, and her latest content channel on The Huffington Post.

“It’s all an opportunity to speak to people,” Ms. Winfrey said as she sat for an interview during the conference, a pair of glittery gold stilettos slung in her hand and a couple of handlers in the corner quietly tapping away at smartphones. She pushed aside a bottle of sparkling water, a glass with a silver straw and a delicate orchid placed before her and spoke frankly about her plans.

“Ultimately, you have to make money because you are a business. I let other people worry about that. I worry about the message. I am always, always, always about holding true to the vision and the message, and when you are true to that, then people respond.”

When it comes to the magazine, Ms. Winfrey said her staff prepared her to expect a 25 percent decline in newsstand sales after the talk show ended. (It has been closer to 22 percent.) And while she acknowledged that she enjoyed “holding the magazine in my hand,” she was pragmatic about print’s future and said she would stop publishing a print magazine if it were not profitable.

“Obviously, the show was helping in ways that you know I hadn’t accounted for,” Ms. Winfrey said. “I’m not interested, you know, in bleeding money.”

Ms. Winfrey, who spoke in a conference room over the roars of an expectant crowd in the convention space below, said she knew that her brand’s strength stemmed from how she resonated with a breadth of viewers.

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Agency Investigates Deaths and Injuries Associated With Bed Rails

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black’s mother died in her bed at a care facility.

In November 2006, when Clara Marshall began suffering from the effects of dementia, her family moved her into the Waterford at Fairway Village, an assisted living home in Vancouver, Wash. The facility offered round-the-clock care for Ms. Marshall, who had wandered away from home several times. Her husband Dan, 80 years old at the time, felt he could no longer care for her alone.

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black, visiting her mother’s grave in Portland, Ore. She has documented hundreds of deaths associated with bed rails and said families should be informed of their possible risks.

But just five months into her stay, Ms. Marshall, 81, was found dead in her room apparently strangled after getting her neck caught in side rails used to prevent her from rolling out of bed.

After Ms. Marshall’s death, her daughter Gloria Black, who lives in Portland, Ore., began writing to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. What she discovered was that both agencies had known for more than a decade about deaths from bed rails but had done little to crack down on the companies that make them. Ms. Black conducted her own research and exchanged letters with local and state officials. Finally, a letter she wrote in 2010 to the federal consumer safety commission helped prompt a review of bed rail deaths.

Ms. Black applauds the decision to study the issue. “But I wish it was done years ago,” she said. “Maybe my mother would still be alive.” Now the government is studying a problem it has known about for years.

Data compiled by the consumer agency from death certificates and hospital emergency room visits from 2003 through May 2012 shows that 150 mostly older adults died after they became trapped in bed rails. Over nearly the same time period, 36,000 mostly older adults — about 4,000 a year — were treated in emergency rooms with bed rail injuries. Officials at the F.D.A. and the commission said the data probably understated the problem since bed rails are not always listed as a cause of death by nursing homes and coroners, or as a cause of injury by emergency room doctors.

Experts who have studied the deaths say they are avoidable. While the F.D.A. issued safety warnings about the devices in 1995, it shied away from requiring manufacturers to put safety labels on them because of industry resistance and because the mood in Congress then was for less regulation. Instead only “voluntary guidelines” were adopted in 2006.

More warnings are needed, experts say, but there is a technical question over which regulator is responsible for some bed rails. Are they medical devices under the purview of the F.D.A., or are they consumer products regulated by the commission?

“This is an entirely preventable problem,” said Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, who first alerted federal regulators to deaths involving bed rails in 1995. The government at the time declined to recall any bed rails and opted instead for a safety alert to nursing homes and home health care agencies.

Forcing the industry to improve designs and replace older models could have potentially cost bed rail makers and health care facilities hundreds of million of dollars, said Larry Kessler, a former F.D.A. official who headed its medical device office. “Quite frankly, none of the bed rails in use at that time would have passed the suggested design standards in the guidelines if we had made them mandatory,” he said. No analysis has been done to determine how much it would cost the manufacturers to reduce the hazards.

Bed rails are metal bars used on hospital beds and in home care to assist patients in pulling themselves up or helping them out of bed. They can also prevent people from rolling out of bed. But sometimes patients — particularly those suffering from Alzheimer’s — can get confused and trapped between a bed rail and a mattress, which can lead to serious injury or even death.

While the use of the devices by hospitals and nursing homes has declined as professional caregivers have grown aware of the dangers, experts say dozens of older adults continue to die each year as more rails are used in home care and many health care facilities continue to use older rail models.

Since those first warnings in 1995, about 550 bed rail-related deaths have occurred, a review by The New York Times of F.D.A. data, lawsuits, state nursing home inspection reports and interviews, found. Last year alone, the F.D.A. data shows, 27 people died.

As deaths continued after the F.D.A. warning, a working group put together in 1999 and made up of medical device makers, researchers, patient advocates and F.D.A. officials considered requiring bed rail makers to add warning labels.

But the F.D.A. decided against it after manufacturers resisted, citing legal issues. The agency said added cost to small manufacturers and difficulties of getting regulations through layers of government approval, were factors against tougher standards, according to a meeting log of the group in 2000 and interviews.

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Agency Investigates Deaths and Injuries Associated With Bed Rails

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black’s mother died in her bed at a care facility.

In November 2006, when Clara Marshall began suffering from the effects of dementia, her family moved her into the Waterford at Fairway Village, an assisted living home in Vancouver, Wash. The facility offered round-the-clock care for Ms. Marshall, who had wandered away from home several times. Her husband Dan, 80 years old at the time, felt he could no longer care for her alone.

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black, visiting her mother’s grave in Portland, Ore. She has documented hundreds of deaths associated with bed rails and said families should be informed of their possible risks.

But just five months into her stay, Ms. Marshall, 81, was found dead in her room apparently strangled after getting her neck caught in side rails used to prevent her from rolling out of bed.

After Ms. Marshall’s death, her daughter Gloria Black, who lives in Portland, Ore., began writing to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. What she discovered was that both agencies had known for more than a decade about deaths from bed rails but had done little to crack down on the companies that make them. Ms. Black conducted her own research and exchanged letters with local and state officials. Finally, a letter she wrote in 2010 to the federal consumer safety commission helped prompt a review of bed rail deaths.

Ms. Black applauds the decision to study the issue. “But I wish it was done years ago,” she said. “Maybe my mother would still be alive.” Now the government is studying a problem it has known about for years.

Data compiled by the consumer agency from death certificates and hospital emergency room visits from 2003 through May 2012 shows that 150 mostly older adults died after they became trapped in bed rails. Over nearly the same time period, 36,000 mostly older adults — about 4,000 a year — were treated in emergency rooms with bed rail injuries. Officials at the F.D.A. and the commission said the data probably understated the problem since bed rails are not always listed as a cause of death by nursing homes and coroners, or as a cause of injury by emergency room doctors.

Experts who have studied the deaths say they are avoidable. While the F.D.A. issued safety warnings about the devices in 1995, it shied away from requiring manufacturers to put safety labels on them because of industry resistance and because the mood in Congress then was for less regulation. Instead only “voluntary guidelines” were adopted in 2006.

More warnings are needed, experts say, but there is a technical question over which regulator is responsible for some bed rails. Are they medical devices under the purview of the F.D.A., or are they consumer products regulated by the commission?

“This is an entirely preventable problem,” said Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, who first alerted federal regulators to deaths involving bed rails in 1995. The government at the time declined to recall any bed rails and opted instead for a safety alert to nursing homes and home health care agencies.

Forcing the industry to improve designs and replace older models could have potentially cost bed rail makers and health care facilities hundreds of million of dollars, said Larry Kessler, a former F.D.A. official who headed its medical device office. “Quite frankly, none of the bed rails in use at that time would have passed the suggested design standards in the guidelines if we had made them mandatory,” he said. No analysis has been done to determine how much it would cost the manufacturers to reduce the hazards.

Bed rails are metal bars used on hospital beds and in home care to assist patients in pulling themselves up or helping them out of bed. They can also prevent people from rolling out of bed. But sometimes patients — particularly those suffering from Alzheimer’s — can get confused and trapped between a bed rail and a mattress, which can lead to serious injury or even death.

While the use of the devices by hospitals and nursing homes has declined as professional caregivers have grown aware of the dangers, experts say dozens of older adults continue to die each year as more rails are used in home care and many health care facilities continue to use older rail models.

Since those first warnings in 1995, about 550 bed rail-related deaths have occurred, a review by The New York Times of F.D.A. data, lawsuits, state nursing home inspection reports and interviews, found. Last year alone, the F.D.A. data shows, 27 people died.

As deaths continued after the F.D.A. warning, a working group put together in 1999 and made up of medical device makers, researchers, patient advocates and F.D.A. officials considered requiring bed rail makers to add warning labels.

But the F.D.A. decided against it after manufacturers resisted, citing legal issues. The agency said added cost to small manufacturers and difficulties of getting regulations through layers of government approval, were factors against tougher standards, according to a meeting log of the group in 2000 and interviews.

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Libel Case That Snared BBC Widens to Twitter

PARIS — The Internet, it is sometimes said, turns every citizen into a journalist. If that is the case, some Twitter users in Britain are discovering one of the downsides of the business.

As many as 10,000 Twitter users reportedly face the threat of legal action because of comments posted on the Internet or forwarded to others in which they referred to a BBC report wrongly linking a former Conservative Party official to the sexual abuse of a child. The official, Alistair McAlpine, was not named in the Nov. 2 BBC report, but enough clues were provided that Twitter users were able to identify him — which they did, in great numbers.

The BBC quickly settled a libel claim, paying Mr. McAlpine £185,000, or nearly $300,000, and apologized for the error as a case of mistaken identity. Another British television broadcaster, ITV, agreed on Thursday to pay Mr. McAlpine £125,000 to settle another claim, this one over a subsequent broadcast in which a list purporting to show Conservative figures linked to sex abuse accusations had been visible to viewers.

Mr. McAlpine did not stop with the mainstream media. On Friday, a spokeswoman for the politician told The Guardian newspaper that his lawyers had identified 20 “high-profile tweeters” from whom they were seeking libel damages. Among them were a comedian, Alan Davies; Sally Bercow, the wife of John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons; and George Monbiot, a Guardian columnist.

There have been previous libel suits over comments posted on Twitter, a site that lets users write short messages to their followers. In March, a New Zealand cricket player, Chris Cairns, was awarded £90,000 by the High Court in London over a Twitter post by an Indian cricket official in which he falsely accused Mr. Cairns of match-fixing.

But the campaign by Mr. McAlpine appears to be the broadest yet, and it employs some novel tactics.

“Many people have had their reputations trashed on Twitter before, but nobody has decided to take action on this scale,” said Tim Lowles, a media lawyer at Collyer Bristow in London.

In addition to the prominent figures, Mr. McAlpine is reportedly pursuing action against thousands of other Twitter users, including people who had merely repeated to their own followers comments made by others.

Twitter users with fewer than 500 online followers who are “wishing to apologize and make contact” can use a Web site created by Mr. McAlpine’s law firm, R.M.P.I., to try to settle their cases.

“It is not this firm or Lord McAlpine’s intention to create any hardship,” a letter posted on the site states.

All that Twitter users who think they might have libeled Mr. McAlpine have to do is read the letter, fill out a downloadable form asking them for details of the postings in question, make an apology and send the form back via e-mail. Those who respond are reportedly asked to make donations to charity, and the firm warns that there will also be a “small administrative charge.”

British libel and defamation laws are notoriously friendly to claimants. While a planned overhaul would give publishers a bit more protection, the rise of social media like Twitter has vastly expanded the possibilities for libeling someone.

Some of the Twitter posts in question do not directly mention the offense to which Mr. McAlpine was falsely linked. The posting by Ms. Bercow asked, “Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*” She insisted in a subsequent post that her initial comment had not been libelous.

Mr. Lowles said that under British law it was possible to libel someone indirectly or by innuendo, even if the incorrect accusations were not mentioned directly, as long as they were clear from the context.

It is not clear how far Mr. McAlpine intends to go in pursuing Twitter users who commented on the BBC accusations. R.M.P.I. did not return calls.

Some people register on Twitter anonymously or under fake names. British courts have ruled in previous cases that Internet companies like Twitter can be ordered to turn over the personal details of users, but this can be time-consuming and costly. A Twitter spokeswoman in Britain declined to comment on whether the company had received any such requests.

Like other social media companies, Twitter considers itself a conduit for its users but disavows responsibility for the content of the 400 million comments posted daily. The site’s guidelines state that users bear this burden.

“Most people still don’t think when they write something on Twitter that they are actually publishing,” Mr. Lowles said. “Whether or not this will act as a deterrent, I don’t know. People should think before they tweet.”

Could the threat of libel action dissuade Britons from posting on Twitter? By Friday, at least one prominent Twitter account had disappeared — that of Ms. Bercow, who had more than 50,000 followers, and who had followed up her comments on Mr. McAlpine with an apparent mistake in a different case: she appeared to have violated a court order by naming a British teenager who had been abducted by one of her teachers.

“This could have a chilling effect,” Paul Bernal, a lecturer in media law at the University of East Anglia, said of the McAlpine case. “I know people who have said that they are not going to post as much because of this.”

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As Rebels Gain, Congo Again Slips Into Chaos

GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The lights are out in most of Goma. There is little water. The prison is an empty, garbage-strewn wasteland with its rusty front gate swinging wide open and a three-foot hole punched through the back wall, letting loose 1,200 killers, rapists, rogue soldiers and other criminals.

Now, rebel fighters are going house to house arresting people, many of whom have not been seen again by their families.

“You say the littlest thing and they disappear you,” said an unemployed man named Luke.

In the past week, the rebels have been unstoppable, steamrolling through one town after another, seizing this provincial capital, and eviscerating a chaotic Congolese Army whose drunken soldiers stumble around with rocket-propelled grenades and whose chief of staff was suspended for selling crates of ammunition to elephant poachers.

Riots are exploding across the country — in Bukavu, Butembo, Bunia, Kisangani and Kinshasa, the capital, a thousand miles away. Mobs are pouring into streets, burning down government buildings and demanding the ouster of Congo’s weak and widely despised president, Joseph Kabila.

Once again, chaos is courting Congo. And one pressing question is, why — after all the billions of dollars spent on peacekeepers, the recent legislation passed on Capitol Hill to cut the link between the illicit mineral trade and insurrection, and all the aid money and diplomatic capital — is this vast nation in the heart of Africa descending to where it was more than 10 years ago when foreign armies and marauding rebels carved it into fiefs?

“We haven’t really touched the root cause,” said Aloys Tegera, a director for the Pole Institute, a research institute in Goma.

He said Congo’s chronic instability is rooted in very local tensions over land, power and identity, especially along the Rwandan and Ugandan borders. “But no one wants to touch this because it’s too complicated,” he added.

The most realistic solution, said another Congo analyst, is not a formal peace process driven by diplomats but “a peace among all the dons, like Don Corleone imposed in New York.”

Congo’s problems have been festering for years, wounds that never quite scabbed over.

But last week there was new urgency after hundreds of rebel fighters, wearing rubber swamp boots and with belt-fed machine guns slung across their backs, marched into Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province and one of the country’s most important cities.

The rebels, called the M23, are a heavily armed paradox. On one hand, they are ruthless. Human rights groups have documented how they have slaughtered civilians, pulling confused villagers out of their huts in the middle of the night and shooting them in the head.

On the other hand, the M23 are able administrators — seemingly far better than the Congolese government, evidenced by a visit in recent days to their stronghold, Rutshuru, a small town about 45 miles from Goma.

In Rutshuru, there are none of those ubiquitous plastic bags twisted in the trees, like in so many other parts of Congo. The gravel roads have been swept clean and the government offices are spotless. Hand-painted signs read: “M23 Stop Corruption.” The rebels even have green thumbs, planting thousands of trees in recent months to fight soil erosion.

“We are not a rebellion,” said Benjamin Mbonimpa, an electrical engineer, a bush fighter and now a top rebel administrator. “We are a revolution.”

Their aims, he said, were to overthrow the government and set up a more equitable, decentralized political system. This is why the rebels have balked at negotiating with Mr. Kabila, though this weekend several rebels said that the pressure was increasing on them to compromise, especially coming from Western countries.

On Sunday, rebel forces and government troops were still squared off, just a few miles apart, down the road from Goma.

The M23 rebels are widely believed to be covertly supported by Rwanda, which has a long history of meddling in Congo, its neighbor blessed with gold, diamonds and other glittering mineral riches. The Rwandan government strenuously denies supplying weapons to the M23 or trying to annex eastern Congo. Rwanda has often denied any clandestine involvement in this country, only to have the denials later exposed as lies.

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Lobbying, a Windfall and a Leader’s Family

Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

Ping An, one of China’s largest financial services companies, is building a 115-story office tower in Shenzhen. The company is a $50 billion powerhouse now worth more than A.I.G., MetLife or Prudential.

SHENZHEN, China — The head of a financially troubled insurer was pushing Chinese officials to relax rules that required breaking up the company in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis.

The survival of Ping An Insurance was at stake, officials were told in the fall of 1999. Direct appeals were made to the vice premier at the time, Wen Jiabao, as well as the then-head of China’s central bank — two powerful officials with oversight of the industry.

“I humbly request that the vice premier lead and coordinate the matter from a higher level,” Ma Mingzhe, chairman of Ping An, implored in a letter to Mr. Wen that was reviewed by The New York Times.

Ping An was not broken up.

The successful outcome of the lobbying effort would prove monumental.

Ping An went on to become one of China’s largest financial services companies, a $50 billion powerhouse now worth more than A.I.G., MetLife or Prudential. And behind the scenes, shares in Ping An that would be worth billions of dollars once the company rebounded were acquired by relatives of Mr. Wen.

The Times reported last month that the relatives of Mr. Wen, who became prime minister in 2003, had grown extraordinarily wealthy during his leadership, acquiring stakes in tourist resorts, banks, jewelers, telecommunications companies and other business ventures.

The greatest source of wealth, by far, The Times investigation has found, came from the shares in Ping An bought about eight months after the insurer was granted a waiver to the requirement that big financial companies be broken up.

Long before most investors could buy Ping An stock, Taihong, a company that would soon be controlled by Mr. Wen’s relatives, acquired a large stake in Ping An from state-owned entities that held shares in the insurer, regulatory and corporate records show. And by all appearances, Taihong got a sweet deal. The shares were bought in December 2002 for one-quarter of the price that another big investor — the British bank HSBC Holdings — paid for its shares just two months earlier, according to interviews and public filings.

By June 2004, the shares held by the Wen relatives had already quadrupled in value, even before the company was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. And by 2007, the initial $65 million investment made by Taihong would be worth $3.7 billion.

Corporate records show that the relatives’ stake of that investment most likely peaked at $2.2 billion in late 2007, the last year in which Taihong’s shareholder records were publicly available. Because the company is no longer listed in Ping An’s public filings, it is unclear if the relatives continue to hold shares.

It is also not known whether Mr. Wen or the central bank chief at the time, Dai Xianglong, personally intervened on behalf of Ping An’s request for a waiver, or if Mr. Wen was even aware of the stakes held by his relatives.

But internal Ping An documents, government filings and interviews with bankers and former senior executives at Ping An indicate that both the vice premier’s office and the central bank were among the regulators involved in the Ping An waiver meetings and who had the authority to sign off on the waiver.

Only two large state-run financial institutions were granted similar waivers, filings show, while three of China’s big state-run insurance companies were forced to break up. Many of the country’s big banks complied with the breakup requirement — enforced after the financial crisis because of concerns about the stability of the financial system — by selling their assets in other institutions.

Ping An issued a statement to The Times saying the company strictly complies with rules and regulations, but does not know the backgrounds of all entities behind shareholders. The company also said “it is the legitimate right of shareholders to buy and sell shares between themselves.”

In Beijing, China’s foreign ministry did not return calls seeking comment for this article. Earlier, a Foreign Ministry spokesman sharply criticized the investigation by The Times into the finances of Mr. Wen’s relatives, saying it “smears China and has ulterior motives.”

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Indian Prostitutes’ New Autonomy Imperils AIDS Fight

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

Sex workers in Mumbai’s long-established red-light district, where brothels are dwindling.

MUMBAI, India — Millions once bought sex in the narrow alleys of Kamathipura, a vast red-light district here. But prostitutes with inexpensive mobile phones are luring customers elsewhere, and that is endangering the astonishing progress India has made against AIDS.

Indeed, the recent closings of hundreds of ancient brothels, while something of an economic victory for prostitutes, may one day cost them, and many others, their lives.

“The place where sex happens turns out to be an important H.I.V. prevention point,” said Saggurti Niranjan, program associate of the Population Council. “And when we don’t know where that is, we can’t help stop the transmission.”

Cellphones, those tiny gateways to modernity, have recently allowed prostitutes to shed the shackles of brothel madams and strike out on their own. But that independence has made prostitutes far harder for government and safe-sex counselors to trace. And without the advice and free condoms those counselors provide, prostitutes and their customers are returning to dangerous ways.

Studies show that prostitutes who rely on cellphones are more susceptible to H.I.V. because they are far less likely than their brothel-based peers to require their clients to wear condoms.

In interviews, prostitutes said they had surrendered some control in the bedroom in exchange for far more control over their incomes.

“Now, I get the full cash in my hand before we start,” said Neelan, a prostitute with four children whose side business in sex work is unknown to her husband and neighbors. (Neelan is a professional name, not her real one.)

“Earlier, if the customer got scared and didn’t go all the way, the madam might not charge the full amount,” she explained. “But if they back out now, I say that I have removed all my clothes and am going to keep the money.”

India has been the world’s most surprising AIDS success story. Though infections did not appear in India until 1986, many predicted the nation would soon become the epidemic’s focal point. In 2002, the C.I.A.’s National Intelligence Council predicted that India would have as many as 25 million AIDS cases by 2010. Instead, India now has about 1.5 million.

An important reason the disease never took extensive hold in India is that most women here have fewer sexual partners than in many other developing countries. Just as important was an intensive effort underwritten by the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to target high-risk groups like prostitutes, gay men and intravenous drug users.

But the Gates Foundation is now largely ending its oversight and support for AIDS prevention in India, just as efforts directed at prostitutes are becoming much more difficult. Experts say it is too early to identify how much H.I.V. infections might rise.

“Nowadays, the mobility of sex workers is huge, and contacting them is very difficult,” said Ashok Alexander, the former director in India of the Gates Foundation. “It’s a totally different challenge, and the strategies will also have to change.”

An example of the strategies that had been working can be found in Delhi’s red-light district on Garstin Bastion Road near the old Delhi railway station, where brothels have thrived since the 16th century. A walk through dark alleys, past blind beggars and up narrow, steep and deeply worn stone staircases brings customers into brightly lighted rooms teeming with scores of women brushing each other’s hair, trying on new dresses, eating snacks, performing the latest Bollywood dances, tending small children and disappearing into tiny bedrooms with nervous men who come out moments later buttoning their trousers.

A 2009 government survey found 2,000 prostitutes at Garstin Bastion (also known as G. B.) Road who served about 8,000 men a day. The government estimated that if it could deliver as many as 320,000 free condoms each month and train dozens of prostitutes to counsel safe-sex practices to their peers, AIDS infections could be significantly reduced. Instead of broadcasting safe-sex messages across the country — an expensive and inefficient strategy commonly employed in much of the world — it encircled Garstin Bastion with a firebreak of posters with messages like “Don’t take a risk, use a condom” and “When a condom is in, risk is out.”

Surprising many international AIDS experts, these and related tactics worked. Studies showed that condom use among clients of prostitutes soared.

“To the credit of the Indian strategists, their focus on these high-risk groups paid off,” said Dr. Peter Piot, the former executive director of U.N.AIDS and now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. A number of other countries, following India’s example, have achieved impressive results over the past decade as well, according to the latest United Nations report, which was released last week.

Sruthi Gottipati contributed reporting in Mumbai and New Delhi.

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M.I.T. Lab Hatches Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens

HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair.

The Langer Lab is on the front lines of turning discoveries made in the lab into a range of drugs and drug delivery systems. Without this kind of technology transfer, the thinking goes, scientific discoveries might well sit on the shelf, stifling innovation.

A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Langer has helped start 25 companies and has 811 patents, issued or pending, to his name. That’s not too far behind Thomas Edison, who had 1,093. More than 250 companies have licensed or sublicensed Langer Lab patents.

Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm, has invested $220 million in 18 Langer Lab-inspired businesses. Combined, these businesses have improved the health of many millions of people, says Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris.

Along the way, Dr. Langer and his lab, including about 60 postdoctoral and graduate students at a time, have found a way to navigate some slippery territory: the intersection of academic research and the commercial market.

Over the last 30 years, many universities — including M.I.T. — have set up licensing offices that oversee the transfer of scientific discoveries to companies. These offices have become a major pathway for universities seeking to put their research to practical use, not to mention add to their revenue streams.

In the sciences in particular, technology transfer has become a key way to bring drugs and other treatments to market. “The model of biomedical innovation relies on research coming out of universities, often funded by public money,” says Josephine Johnston, director of research at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research organization based in Garrison, N.Y.

Just a few of the products that have emerged from the Langer Lab are a small wafer that delivers a dose of chemotherapy used to treat brain cancer; sugar-sequencing tools that can be used to create new drugs like safer and more effective blood thinners; and a miniaturized chip (a form of nanotechnology) that can test for diseases.

The chemotherapy wafer, called the Gliadel, is licensed by Eisai Inc. The company behind the sugar-sequencing tools, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, raised $28.4 million in an initial public offering in 2004. The miniaturized chip is made by T2Biosystems,  which completed a $23 million round of financing in the summer of 2011.

“It’s inconvenient to have to send things to a lab,” so the company is trying to develop more sophisticated methods, says Dr. Ralph Weissleder, a co-founder, with Dr. Langer and others, of T2Biosystems and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

FOR Dr. Langer, starting a company is not the same as it was, say, for Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook. “Bob is not consumed with any one company,” says H. Kent Bowen, an emeritus professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who wrote a case study on the Langer Lab. “His mission is to create the idea.”

Dr. Bowen observes that there are many other academic laboratories, including highly productive ones, but that the Langer Lab’s combination of people, spun-out companies and publications sets it apart. He says Dr. Langer “walks into the great unknown and then makes these discoveries.”

Dr. Langer is well known for his mentoring abilities. He is “notorious for replying to e-mail in two minutes, whether it’s a lowly graduate school student or the president of the United States,” says Paulina Hill, who worked in his lab from 2009 to 2011 and is now a senior associate at Polaris Venture Partners. (According to Dr. Langer, he has corresponded directly with President Obama about stem cell research and federal funds for the sciences.)

Dr. Langer says he looks at his students “as an extended family,” adding that “I really want them to do well.”

And they have, whether in business or in academia, or a combination of the two. One former student, Ram Sasisekharan, helped found Momenta and now runs his own lab at M.I.T. Ganesh Venkataraman Kaundinya is Momenta’s chief scientific officer and senior vice president for research.

Hongming Chen is vice president of research at Kala Pharmaceuticals. Howard Bernstein is chief scientific officer at Seventh Sense Biosystems, a blood-testing company. Still others have taken jobs in the law or in government.

Dr. Langer says he spends about eight hours a week working on companies that come out of his lab. Of the 25 that he helped start, he serves on the boards of 12 and is an informal adviser to 4. All of his entrepreneurial activity, which includes some equity stakes, has made him a millionaire. But he says he is mainly motivated by a desire to improve people’s health.

Operating from the sixth floor of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Langer’s lab has a research budget of more than $10 million for 2012, coming mostly from federal sources.

The research in labs like Dr. Langer’s is eyed closely by pharmaceutical companies. While drug companies employ huge research and development teams, they may not be as freewheeling and nimble, Dr. Langer says. The basis for many long-range discoveries has “come out of academia, including gene therapy, gene sequencing and tissue engineering,” he says.

He has served as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies. Their large size, he says, can end up being an impediment.

“Very often when you are going for real innovation,” he says, “you have to go against prevailing wisdom, and it’s hard to go against prevailing wisdom when there are people who have been there for a long time and you have some vice president who says, ‘No, that doesn’t make sense.’ ”

Pharmaceutical companies are eager to tap into the talent at leading research universities. In 2008, for example, Washington University in St. Louis announced a $25 million pact with Pfizer to collaborate more closely on biomedical research.

But in some situations, the close — critics might say cozy — ties between business and academia have the potential to create conflicts of interest.

There was a controversy earlier this year when it was revealed that the president of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center owned stock in Aveo Oncology, which had announced earlier that the university would be leading clinical trials of one of its cancer drugs.  Last month, the University of Texas announced that he would be allowed to keep his ties with three pharmaceutical companies, including Aveo Oncology; his holdings will be placed in a blind trust.

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New Zealand Wants a Hollywood Put on Its Map

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Standing by his desk in New Zealand’s distinctive round Parliament building, known locally as the Beehive, Prime Minister John Key proudly brandished an ornately engraved sword. It was used, he said, by Frodo Baggins, the protagonist of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and in the films it possesses magical powers that cause it to glow blue in the presence of goblins.

“This was given to me by the president of the United States,” said Mr. Key, marveling that President Obama’s official gift to New Zealand was, after all, a New Zealand product.

In Mr. Key’s spare blond-wood office — with no goblins in sight — the sword looked decidedly unmagical. But it served as a reminder that in New Zealand, the business of running a country goes hand in hand with the business of making movies.

For better or worse, Mr. Key’s government has taken extreme measures that have linked its fortunes to some of Hollywood’s biggest pictures, making this country of 4.4 million people, slightly more than the city of Los Angeles, a grand experiment in the fusion of film and government.

That union has been on enthusiastic display here in recent weeks as “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” the first of three related movies by the director Peter Jackson, approached its world premiere on Wednesday in Wellington (and on Dec. 14 in the United States). Anticipation in New Zealand has been building, and there are signs everywhere of the film’s integration into Kiwi life — from the giant replica of the movie’s Gollum creature suspended over the waiting area at Wellington Airport to the gift shops that are expanding to meet anticipated demand for Hobbit merchandise (elf ears, $14).

But the path to this moment has been filled with controversy. Two years ago, when a dispute with unions threatened to derail the “Hobbit” movies — endangering several thousand jobs and a commitment of some $500 million by Warner Brothers — Mr. Key persuaded the Parliament to rewrite its national labor laws.

It was a breathtaking solution, even in a world accustomed to generous public support of movie projects, and a substantial incentive package was included: the government agreed to contribute $99 million in production costs and add $10 million to the studio’s marketing budget. And its tourism office will spend about $8 million in its current fiscal year, and probably more in the future, as part of a promotional campaign with Time Warner that is marketing the country as a film-friendly fantasyland.

For a tiny nation like New Zealand, where plans to cut $35 million from the education budget set off national outrage earlier this year (and a backtrack from the government), the “Hobbit” concessions were difficult for many to swallow, especially since the country had already provided some $150 million in support for the three “Lord of the Rings” movies.

Now, even amid the excitement of the “Hobbit” opening, skepticism about the government’s film-centric strategy remains. And recently it has become entangled with new suspicions: that Mr. Key’s government is taking cues from America’s powerful film industry in handling a request by United States officials for the extradition of Kim Dotcom, the mogul whose given name was Kim Schmitz, so he can face charges of pirating copyrighted material.

New Zealand’s political scene erupted in September, as Mr. Key publicly apologized to Mr. Dotcom for what turned out to be illegal spying on him by the country’s Government Communications Security Bureau. The Waikato Times, a provincial paper, taunted Mr. Key, accusing him of making New Zealand the “51st state,” while others suggested that a whirlwind trip by Mr. Key to Los Angeles in early October was somehow tied to the Dotcom case.

“No studio executive raised it with me,” Mr. Key said in an interview last month. He spoke the day after a private dinner where he lobbied executives from Disney, Warner Brothers, Fox and other companies for still more New Zealand film work, with Mr. Jackson, a New Zealander, joining by video link.

Mr. Key has been sharply criticized for cozying up to Mr. Jackson in what some consider unseemly ways. Last year, a month before elections in which he and his National Party were fighting to keep control of the government, Mr. Key skipped an appointment with Queen Elizabeth II in Australia to visit the Hobbiton set. He also interviewed Mr. Jackson on a radio show, prompting an outcry from the opposition.

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