DealBook: Standard Chartered Agrees to Settle Iran Money Transfer Claims

The British bank Standard Chartered reached a deal with federal and state prosecutors on Monday over accusations that it had illegally funneled money for Iranian banks and corporations.

The 150-year-old bank will pay $327 million to settle claims by the Justice Department, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Treasury Department.

“Investigations of financial institutions, businesses and individuals who violate U.S. sanctions by misusing banks in New York are vitally important to national security and the integrity of our banking system,” Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said in a statement.

The agreement allows the bank to move beyond a turbulent period.

In August, the New York State Department of Financial Services, headed by Benjamin M. Lawsky, broke from regulators and moved to accuse Standard Chartered of scheming for nearly a decade to hide 60,000 transactions worth $250 billion. Standard Chartered agreed to pay $340 million over the matter a month later.

United States authorities have been cracking down on banks that flouted federal law to transfer money on behalf of sanctioned nations. Investigations into Standard Chartered began in 2009, according to several law enforcement officials.

Executives at Standard Chartered have spent months trying to work out a settlement and resolve the investigation. Lawyers for the bank, in numerous conversations with federal and state prosecutors, maintained vociferously that a large majority of the transactions with Iran were permitted under a federal law that previously allowed foreign banks to transfer money for Iranian clients to another foreign institution through their American subsidiaries.

The settlement will also help to quell tensions between the law enforcement agencies, which were riven by divisions after Mr. Lawsky moved independently against the bank.

Since January 2009, the Justice Department, Treasury and the Manhattan prosecutor have charged five foreign banks in an effort to crack down on the illegal movement of tainted money across the globe. In June, ING Bank reached a $619 million settlement to resolve claims that it had transferred billions of dollars in the United States for Cuba and Iran.

As part of the agreement announced on Monday, Standard Chartered admitted to processing more than $200 million for Iranian and Sudanese clients through its American subsidiaries. To avoid having those transactions detected by Treasury Department computer filters, Standard Chartered deliberately removed identifying information, according to the authorities.

Until 2008, foreign banks like Standard Chartered were permitted to transfer money for Iranian clients through their American branches to separate offshore institutions. These so-called U-turn transactions required banks to provide scant information about the original client to their American operations as long as they had checked for questionable activities. The Iranian loophole was closed in 2008 after American authorities suspected that Iranian banks were funneling money to support nuclear weapons development.

While the overwhelming majority of payments processed by Standard Chartered for Iran and Sudan were technically legal, they should have been disclosed, the Manhattan district attorney said on Monday.

Mr. Lawsky of the New York financial services department had based his case against Standard Chartered, in large part, on similar claims that the bank had thwarted efforts to spot sanctions violations by cloaking the identities of Iranian clients and lying to regulators.

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Changes to Agriculture Highlight Cuba’s Problems

HAVANA — Cuba’s liveliest experiment with capitalism unfolds every night in a dirt lot on the edge of the capital, where Truman-era trucks lugging fresh produce meet up with hundreds of buyers on creaking bicycle carts clutching wads of cash.

“This place, it feeds all of Havana,” said Misael Toledo, 37, who owns three small food stores in the city. “Before, you could only buy or sell in the markets of Fidel.”

The agriculture exchange, which sprang up last year after the Cuban government legalized a broader range of small businesses, is a vivid sign of both how much the country has changed, and of all the political and practical limitations that continue to hold it back.

President Raúl Castro has made agriculture priority No. 1 in his attempt to remake the country. He used his first major presidential address in 2007 to zero in on farming, describing weeds conquering fallow fields and the need to ensure that “anyone who wants can drink a glass of milk.”

No other industry has seen as much liberalization, with a steady rollout of incentives for farmers. And Mr. Castro has been explicit about his reasoning: increasing efficiency and food production to replace imports that cost Cuba hundreds of millions of dollars a year is a matter “of national security.”

Yet at this point, by most measures, the project has failed. Because of waste, poor management, policy constraints, transportation limits, theft and other problems, overall efficiency has dropped: many Cubans are actually seeing less food at private markets. That is the case despite an increase in the number of farmers and production gains for certain items. A recent study from the University of Havana showed that market prices jumped by nearly 20 percent in 2011 alone. And food imports increased to an estimated $1.7 billion last year, up from $1.4 billion in 2006.

“It’s the first instance of Cuba’s leader not being able to get done what he said he would,” said Jorge I. Domínguez, vice provost for international affairs at Harvard, who left Cuba as a boy. “The published statistical results are really very discouraging.”

A major cause: poor transportation, as trucks are in short supply, and the aging ones that exist often break down.

In 2009, hundreds of tons of tomatoes, part of a bumper crop that year, rotted because of a lack of transportation by the government agency charged with bringing food to processing centers.

“It’s worse when it rains,” said Javier González, 27, a farmer in Artemisa Province who described often seeing crops wilt and rot because they were not picked up.

Behind him were the 33 fertile, rent-free acres he had been granted as part of a program Mr. Castro introduced in 2008 to encourage rural residents to work the land. After clearing it himself and planting a variety of crops, Mr. Gonzalez said, he was doing relatively well and earned more last year than his father, who is a doctor, did.

But Cuba’s inefficiencies gnawed at him. Smart, strong, and ambitious, he had expansion plans in mind, even as in his hand he held a wrench. He was repairing a tractor part meant to be grading land. It was broken. Again.

The 1980s Soviet model tractor he bought from another farmer was as about good as it gets in Cuba. The Cuban government maintains a monopoly on selling anything new, and there simply is not enough of anything — fertilizer, or sometimes even machetes — to go around.

Government economists are aware of the problem. “If you give people land and no resources, it doesn’t matter what happens on the land,” said Joaquin Infante of the Havana-based Cuban National Association of Economists.

But Mr. Castro has refused to allow what many farmers and experts see as an obvious solution to the shortages of transportation and equipment: Let people import supplies on their own. “It’s about control,” said Philip Peters, a Cuba analyst with the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based research group.

Other analysts agree, noting that though the agricultural reforms have gone farther than other changes — like those that allow for self-employment — they remain constrained by politics.

“The government is not ready to let go,” said Ted Henken, a Latin American studies professor at Baruch College. “They are sending the message that they want to let go, or are trying to let go, but what they have is still a mechanism of control.”

For many farmers, that explains why land leases last for 10 years with a chance to renew, not indefinitely or the 99 years offered to foreign developers. It is also why many farmers say they will not build homes on the land they lease, despite a concession this year to allow doing so.

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You for Sale: Company Envisions ‘Vaults’ for Personal Data

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Michael Fertik, the founder and chief executive of Reputation.com, at its offices in Redwood City, Calif., where he has amassed a database of information collected on millions of consumers.

“YOU are walking around naked on the Internet and you need some clothes,” says Michael Fertik. “I am going to sell you some.”

Naked? Not exactly, but close.

Mr. Fertik, 34, is the chief executive of Reputation.com, a company that helps people manage their online reputations. From his perch here in Silicon Valley, he views the digital screens in our lives, the smartphones and the tablets, the desktops and the laptops, as windows of a house. People go about their lives on the inside, he says, while dozens of marketing and analytics companies watch through the windows, sizing them up like peeping Toms.

By now many Americans are learning that they are living in a surveillance economy. “Information resellers,” also known as “data brokers,” have collected hundreds to thousands of details — what we buy, our race or ethnicity, our finances and health concerns, our Web activities and social networks — on almost every American adult. Other companies that specialize in ranking consumers use computer algorithms to covertly score Internet users, identifying some as “high-value” consumers worthy of receiving pitches for premium credit cards and other offers, while dismissing others as a waste of time and marketing money. Yet another type of company, called an ad-trading platform, profiles Internet users and auctions off online access to them to marketers in a practice called “real-time bidding.”

As these practices have come to light, several members of Congress, and federal agencies, have opened investigations.

At least for now, however, these companies typically do not permit consumers to see the records or marketing scores that have been compiled about them. And that is perfectly legal.

Now, Mr. Fertik, the loquacious, lion-maned founder of Reputation.com, says he has the free-market solution. He calls it a “data vault,” or “a bank for other people’s data.”

Here at Reputation.com’s headquarters, a vast open-plan office decorated with industrial-looking metal struts and reclaimed wood — a discreet homage to the lab where Thomas Edison invented the light bulb — his company has amassed a database on millions of consumers. Mr. Fertik plans to use it to sell people on the idea of taking control of their own marketing profiles. To succeed, he will have to persuade people that they must take charge of their digital personas.

Pointing out the potential hazards posed by data brokers and the like is part of Mr. Fertik’s M.O. Covert online profiling and scoring, he says, may unfairly exclude certain Internet users from marketing offers that could affect their financial, educational or health opportunities — a practice Mr. Fertik calls “Weblining.” He plans to market Reputation.com’s data vault, scheduled to open for business early next year, as an antidote.

“A data privacy vault,” he says, “is a way to control yourself as a person.”

Reputation.com is at the forefront of a nascent industry called “personal identity management.” The company’s business model for its vault service involves collecting data about consumers’ marketing preferences and giving them the option to share the information on a limited basis with certain companies in exchange for coupons, say, or status upgrades. In turn, participating companies will get access both to potential customers who welcome their pitches and to details about the exact products and services those people are seeking. In theory, the data vault would earn money as a kind of authorization supervisor, managing the permissions that marketers would need to access information about Reputation.com’s clients.

To some, the idea seems a bit quixotic.

Reputation.com, with $67 million in venture capital, is not making a profit. Although the company’s “privacy” products, like removing clients’ personal information from list broker and marketing databases, are popular, its reputation management techniques can be controversial. For instance, it offers services meant to make negative commentary about individual or corporate clients less visible on the Web.

And there are other hurdles, like competition. A few companies, like Personal, have already introduced vault services. Also, a number of other enterprises have tried — and quickly failed — to sell consumers on data lockers.

Even so, Mr. Fertik contends Reputation.com has the answer. The company already has several hundred thousand paying customers, he says, and patents on software that can identify consumers’ information online and score their reputations. He intends to show clients their scores and advise them on how to improve them.

“You can’t just build a vault and wish that vendors cared enough about your data to pay for it,” Mr. Fertik says. “You have to build a business that gives you the lift to accumulate a data set and attract consumers, the science to create insights that are valuable to vendors, and the power to impose restrictions on the companies who consume your data.”

THE consumer data trade is large and largely unregulated.

Companies and organizations in the United States spend more than $2 billion a year on third-party data about individuals, according to a report last year on personal identity management from Forrester Research, a market research firm. They spend billions more on credit data, market research and customer data analytics, the report said.

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New Taxes to Take Effect to Fund Health Care Law

WASHINGTON — For more than a year, politicians have been fighting over whether to raise taxes on high-income people. They rarely mention that affluent Americans will soon be hit with new taxes adopted as part of the 2010 health care law.

The new levies, which take effect in January, include an increase in the payroll tax on wages and a tax on investment income, including interest, dividends and capital gains. The Obama administration proposed rules to enforce both last week.

Affluent people are much more likely than low-income people to have health insurance, and now they will, in effect, help pay for coverage for many lower-income families. Among the most affluent fifth of households, those affected will see tax increases averaging $6,000 next year, economists estimate.

To help finance Medicare, employees and employers each now pay a hospital insurance tax equal to 1.45 percent on all wages. Starting in January, the health care law will require workers to pay an additional tax equal to 0.9 percent of any wages over $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly.

The new taxes on wages and investment income are expected to raise $318 billion over 10 years, or about half of all the new revenue collected under the health care law.

Ruth M. Wimer, a tax lawyer at McDermott Will & Emery, said the taxes came with “a shockingly inequitable marriage penalty.” If a single man and a single woman each earn $200,000, she said, neither would owe any additional Medicare payroll tax. But, she said, if they are married, they would owe $1,350. The extra tax is 0.9 percent of their earnings over the $250,000 threshold.

Since the creation of Social Security in the 1930s, payroll taxes have been levied on the wages of each worker as an individual. The new Medicare payroll is different. It will be imposed on the combined earnings of a married couple.

Employers are required to withhold Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes from wages paid to employees. But employers do not necessarily know how much a worker’s spouse earns and may not withhold enough to cover a couple’s Medicare tax liability. Indeed, the new rules say employers may disregard a spouse’s earnings in calculating how much to withhold.

Workers may thus owe more than the amounts withheld by their employers and may have to make up the difference when they file tax returns in April 2014. If they expect to owe additional tax, the government says, they should make estimated tax payments, starting in April 2013, or ask their employers to increase the amount withheld from each paycheck.

In the Affordable Care Act, the new tax on investment income is called an “unearned income Medicare contribution.” However, the law does not provide for the money to be deposited in a specific trust fund. It is added to the government’s general tax revenues and can be used for education, law enforcement, farm subsidies or other purposes.

Donald B. Marron Jr., the director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, said the burden of this tax would be borne by the most affluent taxpayers, with about 85 percent of the revenue coming from 1 percent of taxpayers. By contrast, the biggest potential beneficiaries of the law include people with modest incomes who will receive Medicaid coverage or federal subsidies to buy private insurance.

Wealthy people and their tax advisers are already looking for ways to minimize the impact of the investment tax — for example, by selling stocks and bonds this year to avoid the higher tax rates in 2013.

The new 3.8 percent tax applies to the net investment income of certain high-income taxpayers, those with modified adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for couples filing jointly.

David J. Kautter, the director of the Kogod Tax Center at American University, offered this example. In 2013, John earns $160,000, and his wife, Jane, earns $200,000. They have some investments, earn $5,000 in dividends and sell some long-held stock for a gain of $40,000, so their investment income is $45,000. They owe 3.8 percent of that amount, or $1,710, in the new investment tax. And they owe $990 in additional payroll tax.

The new tax on unearned income would come on top of other tax increases that might occur automatically next year if President Obama and Congress cannot reach an agreement in talks on the federal deficit and debt. If Congress does nothing, the tax rate on long-term capital gains, now 15 percent, will rise to 20 percent in January. Dividends will be treated as ordinary income and taxed at a maximum rate of 39.6 percent, up from the current 15 percent rate for most dividends.

Under another provision of the health care law, consumers may find it more difficult to obtain a tax break for medical expenses.

Taxpayers now can take an itemized deduction for unreimbursed medical expenses, to the extent that they exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income. The health care law will increase the threshold for most taxpayers to 10 percent next year. The increase is delayed to 2017 for people 65 and older.

In addition, workers face a new $2,500 limit on the amount they can contribute to flexible spending accounts used to pay medical expenses. Such accounts can benefit workers by allowing them to pay out-of-pocket expenses with pretax money.

Taken together, this provision and the change in the medical expense deduction are expected to raise more than $40 billion of revenue over 10 years.

Read More..

New Taxes to Take Effect to Fund Health Care Law

WASHINGTON — For more than a year, politicians have been fighting over whether to raise taxes on high-income people. They rarely mention that affluent Americans will soon be hit with new taxes adopted as part of the 2010 health care law.

The new levies, which take effect in January, include an increase in the payroll tax on wages and a tax on investment income, including interest, dividends and capital gains. The Obama administration proposed rules to enforce both last week.

Affluent people are much more likely than low-income people to have health insurance, and now they will, in effect, help pay for coverage for many lower-income families. Among the most affluent fifth of households, those affected will see tax increases averaging $6,000 next year, economists estimate.

To help finance Medicare, employees and employers each now pay a hospital insurance tax equal to 1.45 percent on all wages. Starting in January, the health care law will require workers to pay an additional tax equal to 0.9 percent of any wages over $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly.

The new taxes on wages and investment income are expected to raise $318 billion over 10 years, or about half of all the new revenue collected under the health care law.

Ruth M. Wimer, a tax lawyer at McDermott Will & Emery, said the taxes came with “a shockingly inequitable marriage penalty.” If a single man and a single woman each earn $200,000, she said, neither would owe any additional Medicare payroll tax. But, she said, if they are married, they would owe $1,350. The extra tax is 0.9 percent of their earnings over the $250,000 threshold.

Since the creation of Social Security in the 1930s, payroll taxes have been levied on the wages of each worker as an individual. The new Medicare payroll is different. It will be imposed on the combined earnings of a married couple.

Employers are required to withhold Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes from wages paid to employees. But employers do not necessarily know how much a worker’s spouse earns and may not withhold enough to cover a couple’s Medicare tax liability. Indeed, the new rules say employers may disregard a spouse’s earnings in calculating how much to withhold.

Workers may thus owe more than the amounts withheld by their employers and may have to make up the difference when they file tax returns in April 2014. If they expect to owe additional tax, the government says, they should make estimated tax payments, starting in April 2013, or ask their employers to increase the amount withheld from each paycheck.

In the Affordable Care Act, the new tax on investment income is called an “unearned income Medicare contribution.” However, the law does not provide for the money to be deposited in a specific trust fund. It is added to the government’s general tax revenues and can be used for education, law enforcement, farm subsidies or other purposes.

Donald B. Marron Jr., the director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, said the burden of this tax would be borne by the most affluent taxpayers, with about 85 percent of the revenue coming from 1 percent of taxpayers. By contrast, the biggest potential beneficiaries of the law include people with modest incomes who will receive Medicaid coverage or federal subsidies to buy private insurance.

Wealthy people and their tax advisers are already looking for ways to minimize the impact of the investment tax — for example, by selling stocks and bonds this year to avoid the higher tax rates in 2013.

The new 3.8 percent tax applies to the net investment income of certain high-income taxpayers, those with modified adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for couples filing jointly.

David J. Kautter, the director of the Kogod Tax Center at American University, offered this example. In 2013, John earns $160,000, and his wife, Jane, earns $200,000. They have some investments, earn $5,000 in dividends and sell some long-held stock for a gain of $40,000, so their investment income is $45,000. They owe 3.8 percent of that amount, or $1,710, in the new investment tax. And they owe $990 in additional payroll tax.

The new tax on unearned income would come on top of other tax increases that might occur automatically next year if President Obama and Congress cannot reach an agreement in talks on the federal deficit and debt. If Congress does nothing, the tax rate on long-term capital gains, now 15 percent, will rise to 20 percent in January. Dividends will be treated as ordinary income and taxed at a maximum rate of 39.6 percent, up from the current 15 percent rate for most dividends.

Under another provision of the health care law, consumers may find it more difficult to obtain a tax break for medical expenses.

Taxpayers now can take an itemized deduction for unreimbursed medical expenses, to the extent that they exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income. The health care law will increase the threshold for most taxpayers to 10 percent next year. The increase is delayed to 2017 for people 65 and older.

In addition, workers face a new $2,500 limit on the amount they can contribute to flexible spending accounts used to pay medical expenses. Such accounts can benefit workers by allowing them to pay out-of-pocket expenses with pretax money.

Taken together, this provision and the change in the medical expense deduction are expected to raise more than $40 billion of revenue over 10 years.

Read More..

Changes to Agriculture Highlight Cuba’s Problems

HAVANA — Cuba’s liveliest experiment with capitalism unfolds every night in a dirt lot on the edge of the capital, where Truman-era trucks lugging fresh produce meet up with hundreds of buyers on creaking bicycle carts clutching wads of cash.

“This place, it feeds all of Havana,” said Misael Toledo, 37, who owns three small food stores in the city. “Before, you could only buy or sell in the markets of Fidel.”

The agriculture exchange, which sprang up last year after the Cuban government legalized a broader range of small businesses, is a vivid sign of both how much the country has changed, and of all the political and practical limitations that continue to hold it back.

President Raúl Castro has made agriculture priority No. 1 in his attempt to remake the country. He used his first major presidential address in 2007 to zero in on farming, describing weeds conquering fallow fields and the need to ensure that “anyone who wants can drink a glass of milk.”

No other industry has seen as much liberalization, with a steady rollout of incentives for farmers. And Mr. Castro has been explicit about his reasoning: increasing efficiency and food production to replace imports that cost Cuba hundreds of millions of dollars a year is a matter “of national security.”

Yet at this point, by most measures, the project has failed. Because of waste, poor management, policy constraints, transportation limits, theft and other problems, overall efficiency has dropped: many Cubans are actually seeing less food at private markets. That is the case despite an increase in the number of farmers and production gains for certain items. A recent study from the University of Havana showed that market prices jumped by nearly 20 percent in 2011 alone. And food imports increased to an estimated $1.7 billion last year, up from $1.4 billion in 2006.

“It’s the first instance of Cuba’s leader not being able to get done what he said he would,” said Jorge I. Domínguez, vice provost for international affairs at Harvard, who left Cuba as a boy. “The published statistical results are really very discouraging.”

A major cause: poor transportation, as trucks are in short supply, and the aging ones that exist often break down.

In 2009, hundreds of tons of tomatoes, part of a bumper crop that year, rotted because of a lack of transportation by the government agency charged with bringing food to processing centers.

“It’s worse when it rains,” said Javier González, 27, a farmer in Artemisa Province who described often seeing crops wilt and rot because they were not picked up.

Behind him were the 33 fertile, rent-free acres he had been granted as part of a program Mr. Castro introduced in 2008 to encourage rural residents to work the land. After clearing it himself and planting a variety of crops, Mr. Gonzalez said, he was doing relatively well and earned more last year than his father, who is a doctor, did.

But Cuba’s inefficiencies gnawed at him. Smart, strong, and ambitious, he had expansion plans in mind, even as in his hand he held a wrench. He was repairing a tractor part meant to be grading land. It was broken. Again.

The 1980s Soviet model tractor he bought from another farmer was as about good as it gets in Cuba. The Cuban government maintains a monopoly on selling anything new, and there simply is not enough of anything — fertilizer, or sometimes even machetes — to go around.

Government economists are aware of the problem. “If you give people land and no resources, it doesn’t matter what happens on the land,” said Joaquin Infante of the Havana-based Cuban National Association of Economists.

But Mr. Castro has refused to allow what many farmers and experts see as an obvious solution to the shortages of transportation and equipment: Let people import supplies on their own. “It’s about control,” said Philip Peters, a Cuba analyst with the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based research group.

Other analysts agree, noting that though the agricultural reforms have gone farther than other changes — like those that allow for self-employment — they remain constrained by politics.

“The government is not ready to let go,” said Ted Henken, a Latin American studies professor at Baruch College. “They are sending the message that they want to let go, or are trying to let go, but what they have is still a mechanism of control.”

For many farmers, that explains why land leases last for 10 years with a chance to renew, not indefinitely or the 99 years offered to foreign developers. It is also why many farmers say they will not build homes on the land they lease, despite a concession this year to allow doing so.

Read More..

IHT Rendezvous: Romany Were European 500 Years Earlier Than Previously Thought

LONDON — The Romany people constitute Europe’s largest and, arguably, now its most persecuted minority.

A new genetic study published this week suggests their ancestors arrived in Europe from northwestern India in a single wave around 1,500 years ago, half a millennium earlier than previously thought.

The international authors of the peer-reviewed paper in Current Biology journal said their study is the most comprehensive ever of the demographic history of the Romany. They said it reveals the origins of a people who “constitute a mosaic of languages, religions, and lifestyles while sharing a distinct social heritage.”

Scientific American noted that earlier studies of the Romany language and cursory analysis of genetic patterns had determined India was the group’s place of origin. But the new study points to a single migration from northwestern India around 500 CE.

Previous studies largely overlooked the place of Europe’s 11 million Romany in the Continent’s gene pool. That was partly a consequence of their continued isolation and marginalization, and partly due to a history of oppression that in many countries continues to this day.

The prejudice has historically been most evident in Eastern European countries with large Romany populations. But recent tensions have spread, including to Romany families seeking a new life in the west.

In one incident in late September, a mob in Marseille, France set fire to an encampment of 35 foreign Roma. As many as 20,000 foreign Roma are said to live in France, most of them Romanians or Bulgarians.

Thousands were deported and their encampments razed during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, as my colleague Scott Sayare recalled in an article in August, although François Hollande, his successor, has promised to better integrate the newcomers into French society.

A more activist Romany population has found a voice, however, showing it is no longer prepared to take the old prejudices lying down.

Some even reject the word Gypsy because of its historically negative connotations, a perception borne out when Lindsay Lohan used the term last week as an allegedly racial slur during a nightclub altercation.

Romany protestors last year turned out in Rome to demand better living conditions after four children died in a fire that destroyed their illegal camp.

And Romany families last month won a pledge from the Czech education ministry that it would finally end widespread discrimination against their children in schools after a landmark 2007 case in the European Court of Human Rights.

The European Roma Rights Center, based in Budapest, is active in pushing similar cases in European courts to combat anti-Romany racism.

My colleague Chris Cottrell wrote in October of continuing discrimination in a report on a ceremony in Berlin to unveil a memorial commemorating an estimated half million Romany who died in the Holocaust.

He quoted Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany saying, “Let’s not beat around the bush. Sinti and Roma suffer today from discrimination and exclusion.”

The latest genetic study may at least contribute to establishing the Romany’s rightful place in European history — for the last millennium and a half.

The scientists, who revealed a strong admixture of non-Romany genes in northern and western countries during their migrations, said further studies would help define the identity of their Indian ancestors and provide further details of their migration and subsequent history in Europe.

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In Private Manning Case, Jailers Become the Accused

Patrick Semansky/Associated Press

Pfc. Bradley Manning faces a potential life sentence if convicted of leaking documents.

FORT MEADE, Md. — In a half-empty courtroom here, with a crew of fervent supporters in attendance, Pfc. Bradley Manning and his lawyer have spent the last two weeks turning the tables on the government.

Private Manning faces a potential life sentence if convicted on charges that he gave WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy organization, hundreds of thousands of confidential military and diplomatic documents. But for now, he has been effectively putting on trial his former jailers at the Quantico, Va., Marine Corps base. His lawyer, David E. Coombs, has grilled one Quantico official after another, demanding to know why his client was kept in isolation and stripped of his clothing at night as part of suicide-prevention measures.

Mr. Coombs, a polite but relentless interrogator who stands a foot taller than his client, has laid bare deep disagreements inside the military: psychiatrists thought the special measures unnecessary, while jail commanders ignored their advice and kept the suicide restrictions in place. In a long day of testimony last week, Private Manning of the Army, vilified as a dangerous traitor by some members of Congress but lauded as a war-crimes whistle-blower on the political left, heartened his sympathizers with an eloquent and even humorous performance on the stand.

“He was engaged, chipper, optimistic,” said Bill Wagner, 74, a retired NASA solar physicist who is a courtroom regular, dressed in the black “Truth” T-shirt favored by Private Manning’s supporters.

Private Manning, who turns 25 on Dec. 17 and looks much younger, was quietly attentive during Friday’s court session, in a dress uniform, crew-cut blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses. If his face were not already familiar from television news, he might have been mistaken for a first-year law student assisting the defense team.

It seemed incongruous that he has essentially acknowledged responsibility for the largest leak of classified material in history. The material included a quarter-million State Department cables whose release may have chilled diplomats’ ability to do their work discreetly but also helped fuel the Arab Spring; video of American helicopter crews shooting people on the ground in Baghdad who they thought were enemy fighters but were actually Reuters journalists; field reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and confidential assessments of the detainees locked up at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

As the military pursues the case against Private Manning, the Justice Department continues to explore the possibility of charging WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, or other activists with the group, possibly as conspirators in Private Manning’s alleged offense. Federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., are still assigned to that investigation, according to law enforcement officials, but it is not clear how active they have been lately in presenting evidence to a grand jury.

The current tone of the legal proceedings against Private Manning is most likely temporary. His lawyer is asking the judge overseeing the case to throw out the charges on the ground that his pretrial treatment was unlawful, but that outcome appears unlikely.

As a fallback, Mr. Coombs is hoping the court will at least give Private Manning extra credit against any ultimate sentence for the time he spent held under harsh conditions at Quantico and earlier in Kuwait, where he was kept in what he described as “an animal cage.” After the uproar about his treatment, including public criticism from the State Department’s top spokesman and the United Nations’ top torture expert, military officials moved Private Manning in April 2011 from Quantico to a new prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he has not faced the same restrictions on clothing, sleeping conditions and conversation with other inmates.

As if to underscore the gravity of his legal predicament, Private Manning offered last month to plead guilty to lesser charges that could send him to prison for 16 years. Prosecutors have not said whether they are interested in such a deal, which would mean they would have to give up seeking a life sentence for the most serious charges: aiding the enemy and violating the Espionage Act.

Friday’s court session was attended by a dozen Manning loyalists, including Thomas A. Drake, the former National Security Agency official who was accused of leaking documents and pleaded guilty to a minor charge last year. They heard the commander of the Quantico brig, or military jail, explain why she refused Private Manning’s request to be taken off “prevention of injury” status.

Scott Shane reported from Fort Meade, and Charlie Savage from Washington.

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Khaled Meshal, the Leader of Hamas, Makes First Visit to Gaza

Wissam Nassar for The New York Times

Khaled Meshal, left, the head of the political bureau of Hamas, arrived for a visit to the Gaza Strip on Friday. With him is Ismail Haniya, Hamas's prime minister in Gaza.

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Khaled Meshal, whom the Israelis tried to assassinate in Jordan in 1997, arrived for his first visit to the Gaza Strip on Friday as head of the political bureau of Hamas, which has established a ministate here.

For Mr. Meshal, 56, it was a triumphant visit, and Hamas fighters, armed with rifles and wearing balaclavas, lined the streets where he was to travel. He entered from Egypt, through the Rafah crossing, an indication of a new alliance with Cairo.

“Gaza, with its martyrs, cannot be described in words,” he said as he arrived here in Rafah, with tears in his eyes. “There are no words to describe Gaza, to describe the heroes, the martyrs, the blood, the mothers who lost their sons.

“I say I return to Gaza even if I never have been here. It has always been in my heart.”

Mr. Meshal fled the West Bank with his family after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and had never returned to Palestinian territory. In 1997, when he was in Amman, Jordan, agents from the Israeli intelligence service, posing as Canadian tourists, tried to kill him by injecting him with poison. The agents were captured by Jordanian authorities, and Mr. Meshal lay in a coma until the agents handed over the antidote.

He arrived in Gaza to celebrate the 25th anniversary on Saturday of the founding of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has also risen to power in neighboring Egypt and has been a key to the Arab “awakening” that has shaken old alliances throughout the Middle East.

“This is my third birth,” Mr. Meshal said. “The first was my natural birth. The second was when I recovered from the poisoning. I ask God that my fourth birth will be the day we liberate all of Palestine.”

Mr. Meshal also plans to celebrate what Hamas considers a victory over Israel in the recent conflict here, eight days of fighting featuring Israeli airstrikes and shelling and Hamas rocket launches against Israel. The Israeli government claims that it sharply reduced Hamas’s military capacity, destroying storehouses of rockets and weapons and killing the operational commander of the Hamas forces, Ahmed al-Jaabari, at the outset of the fighting.

Still, Hamas negotiated a cease-fire with Israel through the agency of the Egyptians, and for the movement it may represent an important step toward becoming a more recognized international player and representative of at least a portion of the Palestinian people.

Mr. Meshal was expected to visit the homes of Mr. Jaabari; the Dalu family, who lost 10 members in an Israeli airstrike in the November fighting; and Sheik Ahmed Yassin, an assassinated Hamas spiritual leader.

The Fatah movement controls the West Bank, which Israel still occupies, and the rivalry between Fatah and Hamas is the defining principle of Palestinian politics, despite continuing efforts by Egypt to bring about a reconciliation. The uprising in Syria drove Mr. Meshal and the Hamas political bureau out of its offices in the Syrian capital, Damascus, to resettle in Egypt, pulling Hamas farther from Shiite Iran, which continues to help sponsor it, and closer to its Sunni Muslim roots. That has also made Hamas potentially more attractive to Egypt and Israel as a negotiating partner, however indirect, in trying to preserve stability in the region.

But Hamas, which considers itself a fighting force in contrast to Fatah, which has engaged in direct negotiations with Israel, is proud of its accomplishments in Gaza, even as it has put a more repressive and Islamist stamp on society here.

Decorating the stage where the anniversary celebration will be held is a mock-up of a large rocket, called the M-75, that Hamas claims it has built on its own and can reach almost 50 miles, close to Tel Aviv. The M stands for a dead founder of Hamas, Ibrahim Maqadma, killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2003.

In fact the Hamas anniversary is Dec. 14, but the organization moved the celebration forward a week to honor the first intifada against Israel.

Fares Akram contributed reporting.

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In Shift of Jobs, Apple Will Make Some Macs in U.S.

Apple plans to join a small but growing number of companies that are bringing some manufacturing jobs back to the United States, drawn by the growing economic and political advantages of producing in their home market.

On Thursday, Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, who built its efficient Asian manufacturing network, said the company would invest $100 million in producing some of its Mac computers in the United States, beyond the assembly work it already does in the United States. He provided little detail about how the money would be spent or what kinds of workers might benefit.

Apple, which long manufactured parts in the United States but stopped about a decade ago, has been under pressure to create more jobs here given its market power. It sold 237 million iPods, iPads, Macs and other devices in the year ended in September.

“I don’t think we have a responsibility to create a certain kind of job,” Mr. Cook told Bloomberg Businessweek. “But I think we do have a responsibility to create jobs.”

Some analysts are hopeful that the move by a big, innovative company like Apple could inspire a broader renaissance in American manufacturing, but a number of experts remain skeptical.

“I find it hard to see how the supply chains that drive manufacturing are going to move back here,” said Andre Sharon, a professor at Boston University and director of the Fraunhofer Center for Manufacturing Innovation. “So much of the know-how has been lost to Asia, and there’s no compelling reason for it to return. It’s great when a company says they want to create American jobs — but it only really helps the country if those are jobs that belong here, if it starts a chain reaction or is part of a bigger economic shift.”

Over the last few years, companies across various industries, including electronics, automotive and medical devices, have announced that they are “reshoring” jobs after decades of shipping them abroad. Lower energy costs in America, rising wages in developing countries like China and Brazil, quality control issues and the desire to keep the supply chain close to the gigantic American consumer base have all factored into these decisions.

“Companies were going abroad in pursuit of cost reduction, and it turns out there were a lot of unintended costs,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial. “America has been looking a lot more competitive lately.”

Even so, the impact on the American job market has been modest so far. Much of the work brought back has been high-value-added, automated production that requires few actual workers, which is part of the reason America’s higher wages are not scaring off companies.

American manufacturing has been growing in the last two years, but the sector still has two million fewer jobs than it had when the recession began in December 2007. Worldwide manufacturing appears to be growing much faster, even for many of the American-owned companies that are expanding at home. General Electric, for example, has hired American workers to build water heaters, refrigerators, dishwashers and high-efficiency topload washers, but continues to add more jobs overseas as well.

Apple has not announced plans to move the complex, faster-growing portions of its product lines. Macs now represent a relatively small part of Apple’s business, accounting for less than 20 percent of its nearly $36 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter. The company’s iPad and iPhone products, which amount to nearly 70 percent of its sales, will continue to be made in low-cost centers of manufacturing like China, mostly on contract with outside companies like Foxconn.

Mr. Cook’s statements suggested Apple was planning to build more of the Mac’s components domestically, but with partners. He told Bloomberg Businessweek that the plan “doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money.”

Whether Apple’s newly announced plan might help create other higher-paying jobs along the supply line depends on the nature of the manufacturing.

Other computer manufacturing has been trickling back to the United States after largely shifting overseas in the 1990s.

Charles Duhigg and Quentin Hardy contributed reporting.

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