Protests Erupt After Egypt’s Leader Seizes New Power

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptians in central Cairo ran from tear gas during clashes with the police on Friday. Protesters took to the streets in several cities. More Photos »

CAIRO — Protests erupted across Egypt on Friday, as opponents of President Mohamed Morsi clashed with his supporters over a presidential edict that gave him unchecked authority and polarized an already divided nation while raising a specter, the president’s critics charged, of a return to autocracy.  

In an echo of the uprising 22 months ago, thousands of protesters chanted for the downfall of Mr. Morsi’s government in Cairo, while others ransacked the offices of the president’s former party in Suez, Alexandria and other cities.

Mr. Morsi spoke to his supporters in front of the presidential palace here, imploring the public to trust his intentions as he cast himself as a protector of the revolution and a fledgling democracy.

In a speech that was by turns defensive and conciliatory, he ultimately gave no ground to the critics who now were describing him as a pharaoh, in another echo of the insult once reserved for the deposed president, Hosni Mubarak.

“God’s will and elections made me the captain of this ship,” Mr. Morsi said.

The battles that raged on Friday — over power, legitimacy and the mantle of the revolution — posed a sharp challenge not only to Mr. Morsi but also to his opponents, members of secular, leftist and liberal groups whose crippling divisions have stifled their agenda and left them unable to confront the more popular Islamist movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The crisis over his power grab came just days after the Islamist leader won international praise for his pragmatism, including from the United States, for brokering a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel.

On Friday, the State Department expressed muted concern over Mr. Morsi’s decision. “One of the aspirations of the revolution was to ensure that power would not be overly concentrated in the hands of any one person or institution,” said the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.

She said, “The current constitutional vacuum in Egypt can only be resolved by the adoption of a constitution that includes checks and balances, and respects fundamental freedoms, individual rights and the rule of law consistent with Egypt’s international commitments.”

But the White House was notably silent after it had earlier this week extolled the emerging relationship between President Obama and Mr. Morsi and credited a series of telephone calls between the two men with helping to mediate the cease-fire in Gaza.

For Mr. Morsi, who seemed to be saying to the nation that it needed to surrender the last checks on his power in order to save democracy from Mubarak-era judges, the challenge was to convince Egyptians that the ends justified his means.

But even as he tried, thousands of protesters marched to condemn his decision. Clashes broke out between the president’s supporters and his critics, and near Tahrir Square, the riot police fired tear gas and bird shot as protesters hurled stones and set fires.

Since Thursday, when Mr. Morsi issued the decree, the president and his supporters have argued that he acted precisely to gain the power to address the complaints of his critics, including the families of protesters killed during the uprising and its aftermath.

By placing his decisions above judicial review, the decree enabled him to replace a public prosecutor who had failed to win convictions against senior officers implicated in the killings of protesters.

The president and his supporters also argued that the decree insulated the Constituent Assembly, which is drafting the constitution, from meddling by Mubarak-era judges.

Since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, courts have dissolved Parliament, kept a Mubarak loyalist as top prosecutor and disbanded the first Assembly.

But by ending legal appeals, the decree also removed a safety valve for critics who say the Islamist majority is dominating the drafting of the constitution.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo, and Helene Cooper from Washington.

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Gadgetwise Blog: Having a Beer With a Smartphone

Drinking beer used to be simple. But the exploding popularity of craft beer over the past several years has changed that, giving beer drinkers a new world of possibilities — and a range of hard decisions.

Predictably, the ever-expanding roster of oatmeal stouts and vanilla porters has been accompanied by the creation of dozens of beer-related apps. These include local guides to the best pints, inane games, beery social networks and recommendation engines that determine which beers you might like based on what you have enjoyed in the past.

An app released this month, Craft Beer New York, gives local connoisseurs an excellent guide to the city’s bars, breweries and bottle shops ($1.99 for iPhones and other iOS devices; you must be 17 years old to download this and the other Apple beer apps). Its developer, Blue Crow Media, also makes attractive apps focused on coffee. The content for this app comes from Joshua M. Bernstein, a beer writer living in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, and the author of Brewed Awakening, a book about the craft beer movement.

The app rates 122 bars, 34 shops and 22 breweries. I first tested it out in Astoria, Queens, where I live, and it seemed to get things right without just picking the most obvious places to drink. There were short entries on half a dozen establishments, including specific recommendations on which beers to order.

It is worth noting that this app is different from a guide to bars. Good spots will not show up if they have pedestrian beer selections. At the same time, bars do not automatically get good ratings for having lots of choices. Mr. Bernstein acknowledges that the Beer Authority, a 70-tap bar that recently opened on a stretch of Eighth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, is “a life preserver for folks working around the Port Authority.” But the app still sticks it with a 2 out of 5 rating because of its unimaginative décor, high prices and a tendency to play lame music.

Mr. Bernstein updates the app with newly opened establishments, and it also has a news tab that includes bulletins on things like how to ensure that an I.P.A. is fresh, or how to help out beer-related businesses affected by Hurricane Sandy. An Android version is due out in early 2013.

One of the more popular beer apps is Untappd, a location-based social-networking app for beer drinkers (free and available for Android and iOS). The app is designed to get people to share their impressions of beers, keeping track of what they liked while also guiding friends and strangers to good bars and brews. The app has an active community, but like any crowdsourced project there is a lot to sift through to find anything useful.

Another way to find new beers to try is to tell an algorithm what you drink and have it determine what else you might like. BrewGene is a nice version of this idea (free and available for Android, iOS or on the Web). It has a truly extensive database. I recently ordered a Goose Island I.P.A. from a bar, but when I went to enter it into the app found that there were five different beers with that name. I rated a few beers from the app’s top 100 list, and it began generating credible suggestions for me. The app’s ability to point me toward an establishment that would serve me these beers is lacking, however. Its “Places” function pulled in a seemingly random selection of nearby bars, bodegas and restaurants. There’s supposed to be a beer menu for each establishment, but all the ones I got were blank.

Have a favorite New York City app? Send tips via e-mail to appcity@nytimes.com or via Twitter to @joshuabrustein.

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

Read More..

Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

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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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Military Analysis: For Israel, Gaza Conflict Is Test for an Iran Confrontation

Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

An Israeli missile is launched from a battery. Officials said their antimissile system shot down 88 percent of all assigned targets.

WASHINGTON — The conflict that ended, for now, in a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel seemed like the latest episode in a periodic showdown. But there was a second, strategic agenda unfolding, according to American and Israeli officials: The exchange was something of a practice run for any future armed confrontation with Iran, featuring improved rockets that can reach Jerusalem and new antimissile systems to counter them.

It is Iran, of course, that most preoccupies Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama. While disagreeing on tactics, both have made it clear that time is short, probably measured in months, to resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.

And one key to their war-gaming has been cutting off Iran’s ability to slip next-generation missiles into the Gaza Strip or Lebanon, where they could be launched by Iran’s surrogates, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, during any crisis over sanctions or an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Michael B. Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a military historian, likened the insertion of Iranian missiles into Gaza to the Cuban missile crisis.

“In the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. was not confronting Cuba, but rather the Soviet Union,” Mr. Oren said Wednesday, as the cease-fire was declared. “In Operation Pillar of Defense,” the name the Israel Defense Force gave the Gaza operation, “Israel was not confronting Gaza, but Iran.”

It is an imprecise analogy. What the Soviet Union was slipping into Cuba 50 years ago was a nuclear arsenal. In Gaza, the rockets and parts that came from Iran were conventional, and, as the Israelis learned, still have significant accuracy problems. But from one point of view, Israel was using the Gaza battle to learn the capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad — the group that has the closest ties to Iran — as well as to disrupt those links.

Indeed, the first strike in the eight-day conflict between Hamas and Israel arguably took place nearly a month before the fighting began — in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, as another mysterious explosion in the shadow war with Iran.

A factory said to be producing light arms blew up in spectacular fashion on Oct. 22, and within two days the Sudanese charged that it had been hit by four Israeli warplanes that easily penetrated the country’s airspace. Israelis will not talk about it. But Israeli and American officials maintain that Sudan has long been a prime transit point for smuggling Iranian Fajr rockets, the kind that Hamas launched against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem over recent days.

The missile defense campaign that ensued over Israeli territory is being described as the most intense yet in real combat anywhere — and as having the potential to change warfare in the same way that novel applications of air power in the Spanish Civil War shaped combat in the skies ever since.

Of course, a conflict with Iran, if a last-ditch effort to restart negotiations fails, would look different than what has just occurred. Just weeks before the outbreak in Gaza, the United States and European and Persian Gulf Arab allies were practicing at sea, working on clearing mines that might be dropped in shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.

But in the Israeli and American contingency planning, Israel would face three tiers of threat in a conflict with Iran: the short-range missiles that have been lobbed in this campaign, medium-range rockets fielded by Hezbollah in Lebanon and long-range missiles from Iran.

The last of those three could include the Shahab-3, the missile Israeli and American intelligence believe could someday be fitted with a nuclear weapon if Iran ever succeeded in developing one and — the harder task — shrinking it to fit a warhead.

A United States Army air defense officer said that the American and Israeli militaries were “absolutely learning a lot” from this campaign that may contribute to a more effective “integration of all those tiered systems into a layered approach.”

The goal, and the challenge, is to link short-, medium- and long-range missile defense radar systems and interceptors against the different types of threats that may emerge in the next conflict.

Even so, a historic battle of missile versus missile defense has played out in the skies over Israel, with Israeli officials saying their Iron Dome system shot down 350 incoming rockets — 88 percent of all targets assigned to the missile defense interceptors. Israeli officials declined to specify the number of interceptors on hand to reload their missile-defense batteries.

Before the conflict began, Hamas was estimated to have amassed an arsenal of 10,000 to 12,000 rockets. Israeli officials say their pre-emptive strikes on Hamas rocket depots severely reduced the arsenal of missiles, both those provided by Iran and some built in Gaza on a Syrian design.

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Bits Blog: Amazon’s Diminishing Discounts

Is it just my imagination, or is the price of physical books on Amazon going up? I have no evidence beyond what I see as I browse through the retailer’s virtual shelves, where I have routinely been noticing books selling for the same price they cost in the rest of the world. Selling at full price is not the sort of value proposition that propelled Amazon to its current perch as one of the country’s biggest and most feared retailers.

A few examples of books published in the last year or two that Amazon is offering at zero discount from list price: “Liebling’s War: World War II Dispatches of A.J. Liebling.” Brian Boyd, “Stalking Nabokov.” Gerald Suttles, “Front Page Economics.” Deborah Kohn, “The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism During the Cold War.” Sandra Messinger Cypess, “Uncivil Wars: Elena Garro, Octavio Paz and the Battle for Cultural Memory.” Others are only marginally discounted: Ira Wood’s “You’re Married to Her,” published by Leapfrog in August, is available at a whopping 4 percent discount. I could get the book $2 cheaper directly from Leapfrog. Juan Rulfo’s “The Plain in Flames” is off 3 percent.

(Here are some caveats: These are all new books sold by Amazon itself, not by third parties that may have damaged or used or other copies for cheaper. Books published by university presses are often available at a smaller discount than books from trade publishers. And yes, there are doubtless many popular books on Amazon at big discounts. But like many readers, I go to Amazon for the long tail — little-known books that are unavailable in even the best-stocked bookshop.)

The issue of pricing on Amazon matters for more than my pocketbook. The central question about the company has always been: How will it choose to make money? It has invested for the future for 18 years now, in the process demolishing much of the competition while giving it one of the priciest stocks on Wall Street. But at some point, somehow, it will have to become a normal business, which means selling things for more than it paid. One way to do that: erase discounts on books that readers cannot easily get anywhere else.

Another possibility: Amazon is intentionally pricing its books higher so buyers will instead purchase from the cheaper third-party sellers, which are more profitable for Amazon. In other words, Amazon would rather run a mall or bazaar than try and be Wal-Mart.

In response to a query, Amazon said, rather generally, that it wasn’t raising prices.

Amazon executives say the price of a book falls as it sells faster, but the site has always seemed more mysterious than that. Here’s one example of a book dropping so fast it seemed to be falling out of the sky, but I doubt it was because people were gobbling up copies. In July, Arcade published an omnibus of the works of the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. List price: $40. Over the rest of the summer and into the fall, the price tumbled. By Nov. 12, it was down to $1.32 — a 97 percent drop. Mr. Paz is dead and out of fashion, so it seemed as if he was on a rather quick trip to the recycling bin. I finally took pity on the book and bought it. As a Prime member, I got it shipped for free.

The book arrived promptly but was damaged. So I complained, and Amazon of course said it would send another and refund my postage. Now presumably Amazon is still paying the standard rate to Arcade for the book — about $18. (Arcade didn’t get back to me.) Amazon’s total revenue from me on this deal was $1.32. It had to send me the book twice and refund my return $3.99 shipping. Overall I’d guess that Amazon lost about $30 on this transaction.

Perhaps because I bought a copy, the book didn’t last at $1.32. It is now back up to $11.34. Who ever thought that buying a physical book would have all the mystery and excitement of buying a plane ticket?

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Documents Show F.D.A.’s Failures in Meningitis Outbreak

Newly released documents add vivid detail to the emerging portrait of the Food and Drug Administration’s ineffective and halting efforts to regulate a Massachusetts company implicated in a national meningitis outbreak that has sickened nearly 500 people and killed 34.

In the documents, released on Tuesday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the agency would threaten to bring the full force of its authority down on the company, only to back away, citing lack of jurisdiction.

The company, the New England Compounding Center, at times cooperated with F.D.A. inspectors and promised to improve its procedures, and at other times challenged the agency’s legal authority to regulate it, refused to provide records and continued to ship a drug in defiance of the agency’s concerns.

Some of the documents were summarized last week by Congressional committees that held hearings on the meningitis outbreak. Republicans and Democrats criticized the F.D.A. for failing to act on information about unsafe practices at the company as far back as March 2002.

By law, compounding pharmacies are regulated primarily by the states, but the pharmacies have grown over the years into major suppliers of some of the country’s biggest hospitals. The F.D.A. is asking Congress for stronger, clearer authority to police them, but Republicans have said the agency already has enough power.

Records show that the agency was sometimes slow in pursuing its own inspection findings. In one case involving the labeling and marketing of drugs, the agency issued a warning letter to New England Compounding 684 days after an inspection, a delay that the company’s chief pharmacist complained was so long that some of the letter’s assertions no longer applied to its operations.

The agency said in a statement Wednesday that it “was not the timeline we strive for,” but that much of the delay was because of “our limited, unclear and contested authority in this area.” Because of litigation, it said, there was “significant internal discussion about how to regulate compounders.”

The agency first inspected the company in April 2002 after reports that two patients had become dizzy and short of breath after being injected with a steroid made by the company.

 On the first day of the inspection, Barry Cadden, the chief pharmacist, was cooperative, but the next day, the agency inspectors wrote, Mr. Cadden “had a complete change in attitude & basically would not provide any additional information either by responding to questions or providing records,” adding that he challenged their legal authority to be at his pharmacy at all.

The F.D.A. was back at New England Compounding in October 2002 because of possible contamination of another of its products, methylprednisolone acetate, the same drug involved in the current meningitis outbreak.

 While the F.D.A. had the right to seize an adulterated steroid, officials at the time said that action alone would not resolve the company’s poor compounding practices. In a meeting with Massachusetts regulators, F.D.A. officials left authority in the hands of the state, which “would be in a better position to gain compliance or take regulatory action,” according to a memo by an F.D.A. official summarizing the meeting.

 David Elder, compliance branch director for the F.D.A.’s New England District, warned at the meeting that there was the “potential for serious public health consequences if N.E.C.C.’s compounding practices, in particular those relating to sterile products, are not improved.”

 The company fought back hard, repeatedly questioning the F.D.A.’s jurisdiction. In a September 2004 inspection over concerns that the company was dispensing trypan blue, a dye used for some eye surgeries that had not been approved by the F.D.A., Mr. Cadden told the agency inspector that he had none in stock.

But in the clean room, the inspector noticed a drawer labeled “Trypan Blue,” which contained 189 vials of the medicine.

A few days later, Mr. Cadden was defiant. He told the agency that he was continuing to dispense trypan blue and that there was nothing in the law saying a compounder could not dispense unapproved products.

 The conversation turned testy. “Don’t answer any more questions!” Mr. Cadden told another pharmacy executive, according to the F.D.A.’s report.

Mr. Cadden rejected many of the assertions in the warning letter that finally came in December 2006. The next correspondence from the agency did not come until almost two years later, in October 2008, saying that the agency still had “serious concerns” about the company’s practices, and that failing to correct them could result in seizure of products and an injunction against the company and its principals.

It is not known whether any corrective actions were taken. The agency did not conduct another inspection until the recent meningitis outbreak.

Denise Grady contributed reporting.

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Documents Show F.D.A.’s Failures in Meningitis Outbreak

Newly released documents add vivid detail to the emerging portrait of the Food and Drug Administration’s ineffective and halting efforts to regulate a Massachusetts company implicated in a national meningitis outbreak that has sickened nearly 500 people and killed 34.

In the documents, released on Tuesday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the agency would threaten to bring the full force of its authority down on the company, only to back away, citing lack of jurisdiction.

The company, the New England Compounding Center, at times cooperated with F.D.A. inspectors and promised to improve its procedures, and at other times challenged the agency’s legal authority to regulate it, refused to provide records and continued to ship a drug in defiance of the agency’s concerns.

Some of the documents were summarized last week by Congressional committees that held hearings on the meningitis outbreak. Republicans and Democrats criticized the F.D.A. for failing to act on information about unsafe practices at the company as far back as March 2002.

By law, compounding pharmacies are regulated primarily by the states, but the pharmacies have grown over the years into major suppliers of some of the country’s biggest hospitals. The F.D.A. is asking Congress for stronger, clearer authority to police them, but Republicans have said the agency already has enough power.

Records show that the agency was sometimes slow in pursuing its own inspection findings. In one case involving the labeling and marketing of drugs, the agency issued a warning letter to New England Compounding 684 days after an inspection, a delay that the company’s chief pharmacist complained was so long that some of the letter’s assertions no longer applied to its operations.

The agency said in a statement Wednesday that it “was not the timeline we strive for,” but that much of the delay was because of “our limited, unclear and contested authority in this area.” Because of litigation, it said, there was “significant internal discussion about how to regulate compounders.”

The agency first inspected the company in April 2002 after reports that two patients had become dizzy and short of breath after being injected with a steroid made by the company.

 On the first day of the inspection, Barry Cadden, the chief pharmacist, was cooperative, but the next day, the agency inspectors wrote, Mr. Cadden “had a complete change in attitude & basically would not provide any additional information either by responding to questions or providing records,” adding that he challenged their legal authority to be at his pharmacy at all.

The F.D.A. was back at New England Compounding in October 2002 because of possible contamination of another of its products, methylprednisolone acetate, the same drug involved in the current meningitis outbreak.

 While the F.D.A. had the right to seize an adulterated steroid, officials at the time said that action alone would not resolve the company’s poor compounding practices. In a meeting with Massachusetts regulators, F.D.A. officials left authority in the hands of the state, which “would be in a better position to gain compliance or take regulatory action,” according to a memo by an F.D.A. official summarizing the meeting.

 David Elder, compliance branch director for the F.D.A.’s New England District, warned at the meeting that there was the “potential for serious public health consequences if N.E.C.C.’s compounding practices, in particular those relating to sterile products, are not improved.”

 The company fought back hard, repeatedly questioning the F.D.A.’s jurisdiction. In a September 2004 inspection over concerns that the company was dispensing trypan blue, a dye used for some eye surgeries that had not been approved by the F.D.A., Mr. Cadden told the agency inspector that he had none in stock.

But in the clean room, the inspector noticed a drawer labeled “Trypan Blue,” which contained 189 vials of the medicine.

A few days later, Mr. Cadden was defiant. He told the agency that he was continuing to dispense trypan blue and that there was nothing in the law saying a compounder could not dispense unapproved products.

 The conversation turned testy. “Don’t answer any more questions!” Mr. Cadden told another pharmacy executive, according to the F.D.A.’s report.

Mr. Cadden rejected many of the assertions in the warning letter that finally came in December 2006. The next correspondence from the agency did not come until almost two years later, in October 2008, saying that the agency still had “serious concerns” about the company’s practices, and that failing to correct them could result in seizure of products and an injunction against the company and its principals.

It is not known whether any corrective actions were taken. The agency did not conduct another inspection until the recent meningitis outbreak.

Denise Grady contributed reporting.

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The Lede Blog: Vignettes of Black Friday

With promotions, discounts and doorbusters already well under way on Thanksgiving Day itself, many big-box retailers are making Black Friday stretch longer than ever. The Lede is checking out the mood of American consumers in occasional vignettes Thursday and Friday as the economically critical holiday shopping season kicks off.

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Israel and Hamas Maintain Cease-Fire, After Push by the U.S. and Egypt

CAIRO — A cease-fire agreed to under intense Egyptian and American pressure between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas to halt eight days of bloody conflict seemed to be holding on Thursday, averting a full-scale Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza Strip without resolving the underlying disputes.

With Israeli forces still massed on the Gaza border, a tentative calm in the fighting descended after the agreement was announced on Wednesday night. Some of the tens of thousands of Israeli reservists called up during the conflagration appeared to be making preparations on Thursday to redeploy away from staging areas along the Gaza border where the Israeli military had mounted a buildup of armor and troops.

The success of the truce will be an early test of how Egypt’s new Islamist government might influence the most intractable conflict in the Middle East.

In southern Israel, the target of more than 1,500 rockets fired from Gaza over the past week, wary residents began to return to routine. But schools within a 25-mile radius of the Palestinian enclave remained closed and thousands of soldiers, mobilized for a possible ground invasion, remained along the Gaza border. The military said that a decision regarding the troop deployment would be made after an assessment of the situation later Thursday.

A rocket alert sounded at the small village of Nativ Haasara near the border with Gaza on Thursday morning, sending residents skeptical from the start about the cease-fire running for shelter. The military said the alert had been a false alarm.

In Gaza, traffic returned to streets that had been deserted, stores and markets opened and workers began the huge task of cleaning up the debris left by days of aerial and naval bombardment. Thousands of Palestinians demonstrated in Gaza in support of the cease-fire as the Hamas leadership emerged from the fighting claiming victory.

Israel Radio said a dozen rockets were fired from Gaza in the first few hours of the cease-fire, but Israeli forces did not respond. In the rival Twitter feeds that offered a cyberspace counterpoint to the exchanges of airstrikes and rockets, the Israel Defense Forces said they had achieved their objectives while the armed Al Qassam Brigades in Gaza said Israeli forces had “raised the white flag.”

After more than a week of nights punctuated by the crash of bombardment and the sound of outgoing missiles, reporters in Gaza said the night had been quiet.

At the same time, Israeli security forces said on Thursday that they detained 55 Palestinian militants in the West Bank after earlier confrontations. The army said the detentions were designed to “continue to maintain order” and to “prevent the infiltration of terrorists into Israeli communities.”

The United States, Israel and Hamas all praised Egypt’s role in brokering the cease-fire as the antagonists pulled back from violence that had killed more than 150 Palestinians and five Israelis over the past week. The deal called for a 24-hour cooling-off period to be followed by talks aimed at resolving at least some of the longstanding grievances between the two sides.

Gazans poured into the streets declaring victory against the far more powerful Israeli military. In Israel, the public reaction was far more subdued. Many residents in the south expressed doubt that the agreement would hold, partly because at least five Palestinian rockets thudded into southern Israel after the cease-fire began.

The one-page memorandum of understanding left the issues that have most inflamed the tensions between the Israelis and the Gazans up for further negotiation. Israel demands long-term border security, including an end to Palestinian missile launching over the border. Hamas wants an end to the Israeli embargo.

The deal demonstrated the pragmatism of Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, who balanced public support for Hamas with a determination to preserve the peace with Israel. But it was unclear whether the agreement would be a turning point or merely a lull in the conflict.

The cease-fire deal was reached only through a final American diplomatic push: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conferred for hours with Mr. Morsi and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, at the presidential palace here. Hanging over the talks was the Israeli shock at a Tel Aviv bus bombing on Wednesday — praised by Hamas — that recalled past Palestinian uprisings and raised fears of heavy Israeli retaliation. After false hopes the day before, Western and Egyptian diplomats said they had all but given up hope for a quick end to the violence.

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Jodi Rudoren from Gaza. Reporting was contributed by Fares Akram from Gaza, Isabel Kershner and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem, Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo, Rick Gladstone from New York, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

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H.P.’s Misstep Shows Risk in the Push for Big Ideas

When Hewlett-Packard spent roughly $10 billion on the software company Autonomy, it thought it was buying a slice of the future — investing in the hot trend of big data. But the deal turned out to be a debacle, and not only because H.P. wrote down $5 billion of the purchase.

The ill-fated marriage of the companies is a lesson for H.P. and other older technology giants as they throw billions at supposedly game-changing acquisitions, trying to gain a foothold in the future.

In that future, smartphones and tablets, connected to cloud-computing data centers, are the essential tools of work and play. Companies rent software over the air, rather than buying it with expensive maintenance contracts.

And vast streams of data are continually analyzed to find new patterns and make predictions about consumer behavior and product design. Autonomy, for instance, makes software that can analyze marketing patterns and advise a company on matters like where it should increase marketing resources.

These forces threaten older businesses, like H.P.’s traditional personal computer and data storage products. Other companies, like Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco, also face pressure. They are all trying to buy the future — and have the cash to do it.

In July, Microsoft decided to pay $1.2 billion for Yammer, which makes a Facebook-like social media product for the office. Oracle recently paid over $3.4 billion for two small cloud computing companies that provide software for human resources and sales management. Last Sunday, the computer networking giant Cisco agreed to pay $1.2 billion in cash for Meraki, a company that manages the free wireless service at Starbucks and other businesses.

There are lots more such deals, from these companies as well as I.B.M., SAP and others.

The pace of change is so fast that Google, so recently seen as an upstart and a giant killer, in 2011 paid $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility to supercharge its Android smartphone business, which competes with Apple. Earlier this year, Facebook spent $750 million on Instagram so it wouldn’t miss the next thing in social media.

But identifying the next big thing can be difficult, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor of management at Yale University. Likely as not, he said, deals like the one for Autonomy have “maybe a 40 percent success, 60 percent failure rate.”

He added, “The odds are against you succeeding, but the odds are also worth taking.”

The real hazard, he said, is in the way companies describe these acquisitions as “natural, inevitable victories.” They should be seen, he said, as “an investment, like in research and development.”

The pace of acquisitions hardly matches the level seen during the late ’90s Internet bubble, when Cisco paid $9.6 billion for three networking companies that former officials said yielded almost no benefit. In 2002, AOL Time Warner wrote down $54 billion in good will related to its troubled merger. Several telecommunications equipment makers and service providers also had multibillion-dollar write-downs.

But there are also notable successes.

EMC, a maker of data storage equipment, paid $625 million in 2003 for VMWare, which makes some of the critical technology in cloud computing. Today, after taking some of the company public, EMC’s stake is worth about $30 billion. VMWare recently took a gamble of its own, buying a next-generation networking company, Nicira, that had virtually no revenue, for $1.26 billion.

Microsoft, which also paid $8.5 billion for Skype in 2011, said Yammer was being integrated into SharePoint, Microsoft’s successful collaboration software, and will be included in its premium version of Office communications and productivity software at no cost. It did not say whether, or how, Yammer would be profitable on its own, however.

The real issue with Autonomy may be less its questionable sales than its core technology, said Leslie Owens, who follows data analysis software at Forrester Research.

“H.P. thought it was an entirely new platform, but Autonomy’s clients said it wasn’t as good as Google’s corporate search product,” she said.

Autonomy, which was founded 16 years ago, “was based on using powerful algorithms,” she said, but the software was not attuned “to new kinds of search signals, like what your friends are doing, what people like you are doing, what other data you might draw off on.” Over time those new methods attracted customers.

In a demonstration of the Autonomy product last month, H.P. appeared to have addressed some of those issues, but others remained. An application to help figure out what to pay for Web ads initially failed to work, then delivered results that appeared similar to those of several other search products.

“We remain 100 percent committed to Autonomy and its industry-leading technology,” H.P. said in a statement. “The company’s products are cutting-edge and provide many customers with unique solutions.”

In an interview Tuesday, Meg Whitman, the chief executive of H.P., indicated that the company also had strong hopes for its security software, most of which it got from other acquisitions.

H.P. has accused Autonomy of improperly accounting for much of its sales in the years before H.P. bought the company last year. It took a $5 billion noncash charge related to the purchase price.

Ms. Whitman gave Autonomy tepid support.

“It’s very disappointing,” she said of the write-down. “We’ve integrated the technology into a couple of places; we will integrate it into more.”

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Recipes for Health: Apple Pear Strudel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

This strudel is made with phyllo dough. When I tested it the first time, I found that I had enough filling for two strudels. Rather than cut the amount of filling, I increased the number of strudels to 2, as this is a dessert you can assemble and keep, unbaked, in the freezer.

Filling for 2 strudels:

1/2 pound mixed dried fruit, like raisins, currants, chopped dried figs, chopped dried apricots, dried cranberries

1 1/2 pounds apples (3 large) (I recommend Braeburns), peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons unsalted butter for cooking the apples

1/4 cup (50 grams) brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (30 grams) chopped or slivered almonds

3/4 pound (1 large or 2 small) ripe but firm pears, peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

For each strudel:

8 sheets phyllo dough

7/8 cup (100 grams) almond powder, divided

1 1/2 ounces butter, melted, for brushing the phyllo

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment.

2. Place the dried fruit in a bowl and pour on hot or boiling water to cover. Let sit 5 minutes, and drain. Toss the apples with the lemon juice.

3. Heat a large, heavy frying pan over high heat and add 2 tablespoons butter. Wait until it becomes light brown and carefully add the apples and the sugar. Do not add the apples until the pan and the butter are hot enough, or they won’t sear properly and retain their juice. But be careful when you add them so that the hot butter doesn’t splatter. When the apples are brown on one side, add the vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and almonds, flip the apples and continue to sauté until golden brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the pears and dried fruit, then scrape out onto one of the lined sheet pans and allow to cool completely. Divide into two equal portions (easiest to do this if you weigh it).

4. Place 8 sheets of phyllo dough on your work surface. Cover with a dish towel and place another, damp dish towel on top of the first towel. Place a sheet of parchment on your work surface horizontally, with the long edge close to you. Lay a sheet of phyllo dough on the parchment. Brush lightly with butter and top with the next sheet. Continue to layer all eight sheets, brushing each one with butter before topping with the next one.

5. Brush the top sheet of phyllo dough with butter. Sprinkle on half of the almond powder (50 grams). With the other half, create a line 3 inches from the base of the dough, leaving a 2 1/2-inch margin on the sides. Top this line with one portion of the fruit mixture. Fold the bottom edge of the phyllo up over the filling, then fold the ends over and roll up like a burrito. Using the parchment paper to help you, lift the strudel and place it on the other parchment-lined baking sheet. Brush with butter and make 3 or 4 slits on the diagonal along the length of the strudel. Repeat with the other sheets of phyllo to make a second strudel. If you are freezing one of them, double-wrap tightly in plastic.

6. Place the strudel in the oven and bake 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, brush again with butter, rotate the pan and return to the oven. Continue to bake for another 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes. Serve warm or room temperature.

Yield: 2 strudels, each serving 8

Advance preparation: The fruit filling will keep for a couple of days in the refrigerator. The strudel can be baked a few hours before serving it. Recrisp in a medium oven for 10 minutes. It can also be frozen before baking, double-wrapped in plastic. Transfer directly from the freezer to the oven and add 10 minutes to the baking time.

Nutritional information per serving: 259 calories; 13 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 3 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 15 milligrams cholesterol; 34 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 91 milligrams sodium; 4 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Recipes for Health: Apple Pear Strudel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

This strudel is made with phyllo dough. When I tested it the first time, I found that I had enough filling for two strudels. Rather than cut the amount of filling, I increased the number of strudels to 2, as this is a dessert you can assemble and keep, unbaked, in the freezer.

Filling for 2 strudels:

1/2 pound mixed dried fruit, like raisins, currants, chopped dried figs, chopped dried apricots, dried cranberries

1 1/2 pounds apples (3 large) (I recommend Braeburns), peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons unsalted butter for cooking the apples

1/4 cup (50 grams) brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (30 grams) chopped or slivered almonds

3/4 pound (1 large or 2 small) ripe but firm pears, peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

For each strudel:

8 sheets phyllo dough

7/8 cup (100 grams) almond powder, divided

1 1/2 ounces butter, melted, for brushing the phyllo

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment.

2. Place the dried fruit in a bowl and pour on hot or boiling water to cover. Let sit 5 minutes, and drain. Toss the apples with the lemon juice.

3. Heat a large, heavy frying pan over high heat and add 2 tablespoons butter. Wait until it becomes light brown and carefully add the apples and the sugar. Do not add the apples until the pan and the butter are hot enough, or they won’t sear properly and retain their juice. But be careful when you add them so that the hot butter doesn’t splatter. When the apples are brown on one side, add the vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and almonds, flip the apples and continue to sauté until golden brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the pears and dried fruit, then scrape out onto one of the lined sheet pans and allow to cool completely. Divide into two equal portions (easiest to do this if you weigh it).

4. Place 8 sheets of phyllo dough on your work surface. Cover with a dish towel and place another, damp dish towel on top of the first towel. Place a sheet of parchment on your work surface horizontally, with the long edge close to you. Lay a sheet of phyllo dough on the parchment. Brush lightly with butter and top with the next sheet. Continue to layer all eight sheets, brushing each one with butter before topping with the next one.

5. Brush the top sheet of phyllo dough with butter. Sprinkle on half of the almond powder (50 grams). With the other half, create a line 3 inches from the base of the dough, leaving a 2 1/2-inch margin on the sides. Top this line with one portion of the fruit mixture. Fold the bottom edge of the phyllo up over the filling, then fold the ends over and roll up like a burrito. Using the parchment paper to help you, lift the strudel and place it on the other parchment-lined baking sheet. Brush with butter and make 3 or 4 slits on the diagonal along the length of the strudel. Repeat with the other sheets of phyllo to make a second strudel. If you are freezing one of them, double-wrap tightly in plastic.

6. Place the strudel in the oven and bake 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, brush again with butter, rotate the pan and return to the oven. Continue to bake for another 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes. Serve warm or room temperature.

Yield: 2 strudels, each serving 8

Advance preparation: The fruit filling will keep for a couple of days in the refrigerator. The strudel can be baked a few hours before serving it. Recrisp in a medium oven for 10 minutes. It can also be frozen before baking, double-wrapped in plastic. Transfer directly from the freezer to the oven and add 10 minutes to the baking time.

Nutritional information per serving: 259 calories; 13 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 3 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 15 milligrams cholesterol; 34 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 91 milligrams sodium; 4 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Tool Kit: Online Shopping Tips for the Holidays

Some people may be looking forward to leaving Thanksgiving dinner before the pie is served to join the Black Friday rush, which will begin during dinnertime Thursday, earlier than ever, at stores like Sears, Walmart and Lord & Taylor.

But for those who prefer to stay for the pie course, avoid the lines and freezing temperatures and shop from the comfort of their homes, there are just as many deals to be found online this year, especially for smart shoppers.

Last year, online shoppers spent $816 million on Black Friday, an increase of 26 percent from the year before, and an additional $2.3 billion over Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday, according to comScore. It expects online spending to rise this year.

Online, there is no commute, no parking and no crowds — and shopping can be done in bed or at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Still, you cannot try clothes on, you have to wait for your purchase to arrive and there is always the nagging feeling that a better price is just one more click away.

To find your way around those problems, here are some tips from online shopping pros, retailers and shopping bloggers.

BARGAINS START EARLY “Cyber Monday is passé,” said Fiona Dias, chief strategy officer for ShopRunner.com, a network of e-commerce sites. “With online sales beginning as early as the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, consumers who hold out for the best deal may find that what they are looking for has already sold out.”

Amazon.com, for example, started its Black Friday deals on Monday, but they end Saturday. SHOP ON TUESDAYS One of the secrets of online shopping is that prices change by the second. To maximize your chances of getting the best price year-round, shop on Tuesday, a variety of e-commerce experts say. For whatever reason, Tuesday is when most e-commerce sites, including Shopbop, Etsy and RetailMeNot, post discounts and new items.

No matter the day, online retailers often start sales in the wee hours, so shop early.

As for the time of year, women’s clothes, shoes and accessories are discounted most in January, February, August and September, according to Shop It To Me, an online shopping search site. For consumer electronics like laptops, shop in midsummer and late September, before and after the back-to-school rush, according to Decide.com, a price comparison site.

NEVER PAY FULL PRICE Online holiday shoppers should use 40 percent off as a benchmark for a good deal, said Marjorie Cader, a Shop It To Me spokeswoman, based on discount data the site has collected. Expect discounts that are about 5 percent better from online-only retailers than from those that also operate brick and mortar stores, she said.

Comparison shopping sites like TheFind or ShopStyle can locate the best prices; Google or coupon sites like RetailMeNot can also help find a discount.

Google, Amazon and even flash sale sites like Gilt.com do not always have the lowest prices. You might check small shopping blogs dedicated to your favorite brands, like Grechen’s Closet for contemporary women’s clothes or J. Crew Aficionada.

“Spend 20 minutes and ensure you are getting the best deal out there,” said John Faith, senior vice president of mobile at WhaleShark Media, which operates coupon sites, including RetailMeNot.

BE A HAGGLER This is the year haggling at the cash register could become acceptable, as offline retailers try to keep shoppers offline. If you find a better price online — by using an application like RedLaser or searching Amazon — ask whether the cashier will match it. Big retailers like Target have already said they will.

WAIT TILL THE LAST MINUTE Procrastinators might benefit during the holidays. Electronics sold online are least expensive in the week before Christmas, according to Decide, especially TVs, laptops and cameras.

And while Dec. 17 is the last day that most online retailers will offer free shipping in time for Christmas, Walmart, the luxury clothing seller Net-a-Porter and others will deliver the same day. In San Francisco and New York, eBay now offers same-day delivery from hundreds of stores, including Macy’s, Target and Toys “R” Us.

NEVER PAY FOR SHIPPING... Nine of ten retailers will offer free shipping on certain purchases this holiday season, and a third will offer free shipping on all purchases, according to the National Retail Federation.

Some, though, require that you enter a promotional code, so it’s wise to take a minute to look around the Web site or search a coupon site to find it.

Stores including Walmart, Toys “R” Us and Nordstrom allow you to shop online and pick up your order locally.

...OR FOR RETURNS Sites like Zappos.com and Piperlime send prepaid shipping labels, but beware.

“When it comes to returns, read the fine print,” said Brian Hoyt, a spokesman for WhaleShark Media. Some merchants include a prepaid return label but subtract the price from your refund, and others charge a restocking fee as high as 30 percent for consumer electronics.

Many companies, including Gap and J. Crew, also let you return an online purchase to a local store. And until Dec. 31, PayPal will cover the return shipping cost if the merchant does not, as long as you pay with PayPal and make the return within 30 days.

SEARCH WISELY Try searching synonyms, like “coat” instead of “jacket.” On sites like eBay, try leaving out words — if you are looking for an Yves Saint Laurent handbag on eBay, search for “Saint Laurent” or “Laurent bag.”

“If you search for ‘Yves Saint Laurent,’ you’ll be fighting over pieces with a bigger group of people,” said Sophia Amoruso, founder and chief executive of the e-commerce retailer Nasty Gal, who suggested purposefully misspelling brand names as well. “Think of what an uninformed person might list a really great designer piece as, and you can get an amazing gem for an incredible price.”

EBay Fashion also lets shoppers search by taking a cellphone picture of a fabric to find similar designs.

GET INSPIRED Search for “black sequin dress,” and you’ll get 128 results on Zappos.com, 2,618 on Amazon.com and a truly overwhelming 18 million on Google.

One solution: Trust online curators to suggest items. Etsy creates lists of recommended items. On Pinterest, you can peruse items culled by others. Other sites to search for inspiration: Polvyore, Fancy, Svpply, Lookbook.nu and We Heart It.

TRY IT ON, VIRTUALLY You can visit sites that show real people wearing the clothes you’re interested in buying, like Go Try It On, Fashism and Rent the Runway and sites that show video, including Asos, MyHabit and Joyus. Or, as long as a site offers free shipping and returns, order two sizes and return one.

SHOP INTERNATIONALLY “Don’t let international shopping scare you off,” said Caroline Nolan, the writer of Pregnant Fashionista, a maternity shopping blog.

Many international e-commerce sites, like Asos, ship free to the United States. And because the seasons are different, winter clothes in Australia, for instance, go on sale just as Americans are starting to shop for winter, she said. FarFetch has items from small boutiques worldwide and 1stDibs is good at finding rare items like an antique from Paris. On eBay, you might have luck finding items made by a European designer by switching to eBay’s site for a particular country.

MAKE SITES WORK FOR YOU On Shop It To Me, you can enter your favorite designers and sizes and the site will send you personalized e-mails with promotions and sales. Many sites allow shoppers to place a symbol like a heart on best-liked items or save them to a wish list. On a site like Pinterest, shoppers can build a list.

“You always think you’ll remember where you saw something or what brand it was, but really you never do,” said Noria Morales, style director at SugarInc, a network of fashion and lifestyle blogs.

Even better, sites like Shopbop and Polyvore send alerts when items you have saved go on sale or are running low. EBay sends alerts when new items are listed for a search you have saved.

BE DILIGENT No one has time to read 50 e-mails a day from retailers. But for your favorite e-commerce sites, it is worth signing up for e-mails, as well as tracking them on Facebook and Twitter, where they often post exclusive deals. Many online shoppers have more luck hunting for items than trusting services to send alerts, said Grechen Reiter, owner of Grechen Media, a network of shopping blogs.

“It is the thrill of the hunt that gets us going, after all,” she said.

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Fighting Continues as U.S. Seeks Truce in Gaza

JERUSALEM — To a backdrop of airstrikes and mounting casualties, American efforts to negotiate a cease-fire in the latest Gaza fighting between Israel and Hamas continued on Wednesday but the struggle to achieve even a brief pause in the fighting emphasized the obstacles to finding any lasting solution.

Israeli airstrikes overnight continued into Wednesday morning, hitting government buildings, the smuggling tunnels under the southern Rafah border crossing and a bridge on the beach road that is one of three linking Gaza City to the central area of the strip. The Hamas health ministry said the Palestinian death toll stood at 140 at noon, with 1,100 injured. At least a third of those killed are believed to have been militants.

The eight-day conflict in the Gaza Strip also appeared to have spilled onto the streets of Tel Aviv on Wednesday, with what the police described as a bomb blast aboard a civilian bus. Eleven people were injured, one of them seriously.

The latest exchanges, which included the interception of at least two rockets fired from Gaza, came as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton held talks with Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Israeli leaders in Jerusalem. She flew on Wednesday to Cairo where Egyptian-brokered cease-fire talks have been inconclusive.

Around noon on Wednesday in the Gaza Strip, according to the Hamas government media office, a bomb hit the house of Issam Da’alis, an adviser to Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister. The house had been evacuated. Earlier, a predawn airstrike near a mosque in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp killed a 30-year-old militant, a spokesman said, and F-16 bombs destroyed two houses in the central Gaza Strip.

There were 23 punishing strikes against the southern tunnels that are used to bring weapons as well as construction material, cars and other commercial goods into Gaza from the Sinai Peninsula.

Within Gaza City, Abu Khadra, the largest government office complex, was obliterated overnight. Damage was also caused to shops, including two banks and a tourism office, and electricity cables fell on the ground and were covered in dust.

Separately, an F-16 bomb created a 20-foot crater in an open area in a stretch of hotels occupied by foreign journalists. Several of the hotels had windows blown out by the strike around 2 a.m., but no one was reported injured. By morning, the hole in the ground had filled with sludgy water, apparently from a burst pipe, appearing almost like a forgotten swimming hole with walls made of sand and cracked cinder block.

Surveying damage near a government complex, Raji Sourani of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said Gaza civilians were “in the eye of the storm,” and accused Israel of “inflicting pain and terror” on them. Israeli officials accuse Hamas of locating military sites in or close to civilian areas.

Overnight, as the conflict entered its eighth day, the Israeli military said in Twitter posts that “more than 100 terror sites were targeted, of which approximately 50 were underground rocket launchers.” The targets included the Ministry of Internal Security in Gaza, described as “one of the Hamas’ main command and control centers.”

While there was no immediate or formal claim of responsibility for the bus bombing in Tel Aviv, a message on a Twitter account in the name of the Al Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Hamas authorities in the Gaza Strip, declared: “We told you IDF that our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are, ‘You opened the Gates of Hell on Yourselves.’ ” The letters I.D.F. refer to the Israel Defense Forces.

On several occasions since the latest conflagration seized Gaza last week, militants have aimed rockets at Tel Aviv but they have either fallen short, landed in the sea or been intercepted. Hundreds of rockets fired by militants in Gaza have struck other targets.

But the bombing seemed to be the first time in the current fighting that violence had spread directly onto the streets of Tel Aviv.

On Tuesday — the deadliest day of fighting in the conflict — Mrs. Clinton arrived hurriedly in Jerusalem and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to push for a truce. Her planned visit to Cairo on Wednesday to consult with Egyptian officials in contact with Hamas placed her and the Obama administration at the center of a fraught process with multiple parties, interests and demands.

Before leaving for Cairo, news reports said, Mrs. Clinton headed to the West Bank to meet Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, which is estranged from the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip and has increasingly strained ties with Israel over a contentious effort to upgrade the Palestinian status at the United Nations to that of a nonmember state. Mrs. Clinton was to meet again with Mr. Netanyahu before heading for Egypt, the reports said.

Mr. Abbas’s faction is favored by the United States, but it is not directly involved in either the fighting in Gaza or the effort in Cairo to end it. Like Israel and much of the West, the United States regards Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Officials on all sides had raised expectations that a cease-fire would begin around midnight, followed by negotiations for a longer-term agreement. But by the end of Tuesday, officials with Hamas, the militant Islamist group that governs Gaza, said any announcement would not come at least until Wednesday.

Ethan Bronner reported from Jerusalem, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. Reporting was contributed by Jodi Rudoren and Fares Akram from Gaza; Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem; Alan Cowell from London; Peter Baker from Phnom Penh, Cambodia; David E. Sanger and Mark Landler from Washington; Andrea Bruce from Rafah; and Rick Gladstone from New York.

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