European Mobile Stocks Fall After Costly Spectrum Auction

BERLIN — Shares of four big European cellphone operators fell Monday after they paid more than twice what investors had been expecting in a spectrum auction in the Netherlands, raising concern that a damaging bidding war could sap the industry.

The Dutch auction began Oct. 31 and ended Friday, raising €3.8 billion, or $4.9 billion, for spectrum that the companies plan to use for high-speed service using Long Term Evolution, or LTE, technology. But analysts warned that the sale, to be followed next year by a much larger spectrum auction in Britain, could herald a new round of expensive infrastructure levies that may hamstring operators at a time when their sales have been stagnating.

The winners were KPN, the former Dutch monopoly; Vodafone, the British mobile group; the German company T-Mobile, and the Swedish operator Tele2.

LTE supports all of the typical high-speed applications including audio and video and Internet surfing, but is much faster, cutting download times and vastly expanding the capacity of existing networks to handle increases in data traffic.

After the bidding, KPN, which is partly owned by the Mexican communications mogul Carlos Slim Helú, canceled its dividend for 2012 and lowered its projected investor payout for 2013 to cover the $1.35 billion the company spent in the auction.

On Monday, the first day of stock trading after the auction’s completion, shares of KPN fell by as much as 14 percent in Amsterdam, the steepest drop in more than a decade. Shares of Vodafone were down 2.6 percent in London through mid-afternoon trading.

Shares of Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile, fell 1 percent in Frankfurt, and shares of Tele2 declined 3.5 percent in Stockholm.

“The money raised in the Dutch auction was a lot more than investors were expecting,” said Phil Kendall, an analyst at Strategy Analytics in Milton Keynes, England. “The concern now is that the sums will now be so great the technology will be unprofitable.”

Mr. Kendall said mobile operators were eager to obtain extra spectrum because extensive bandwidth had become increasingly critical amid the explosion of mobile Internet data, which is testing the capacity of some carriers’ grids and causing overloading.

“Really, for many operators, the only way they will be able to differentiate themselves from other operators is by having enough spectrum to manage the demand on their services,” Mr. Kendall said. “That is why there is such intense interest in buying more frequency.”

More radio spectrum, or wireless network capacity, is crucial to delivering the high speeds advertised in LTE, which theoretically can produce download rates of up to 300 megabits per second on a wireless connection. Such speeds and the expanded capacity of the networks are considered essential to support the rapid expansion of the wireless Internet, as well as the increasing use of mobile grids for robotic communication between devices.

Speeds on the first generation of LTE networks activated in Germany, South Korea, Sweden and the United States have averaged much less, generally 10 to 25 megabits per second, in part because operators do not have enough spectrum to exploit the technology’s full potential.

The Dutch auction also raised the specter of another costly round of infrastructure fees on the cellphone industry similar to those in 1999 and 2000, when operators paid billions for the first European 3G mobile licenses.

Investors were concerned that the Dutch prices could set a precedent for auctions planned in Britain and perhaps Poland next year, as well as others that will be held across Europe over the next five years as bandwidth is freed up and sold by national governments to wireless carriers. Germany, which held its latest spectrum auction in 2010, has indicated that it may hold another in 2016.

Those license sales in 1999 and 2000, engineered by cash-strapped governments in most cases to extract the maximum amount of money from mobile operators, led to large profit write-downs by operators including Vodafone and Telefónica, which owns the O2 carrier in Europe.

With completion of the Dutch auction, the focus will now shift to Britain, where the telecommunications regulator is planning to begin its spectrum auction in January.

All four British mobile network operators are expected to bid: Everything Everywhere, the venture of Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom; Vodafone; O2 U.K.; and 3, a unit of Hutchison Whampoa. The former landline monopoly, BT, has not ruled out a potential bid, which could further raise the stakes.

Matthew Howett, an analyst at Ovum, a research firm in London, said the British auction could raise £2 billion to £4 billion, or $3.2 billion to $6.5 billion.

“The £2 billion to £4 billion range that is widely touted is based on similar auctions elsewhere in Europe,” Mr. Howett said. “There is nothing to suggest that the U.K. should be any different. It’s possibly the most competitive market in Europe and all existing operators will want to make sure they walk away with spectrum to feed the almost insatiable appetite we in the U.K. now have for data.”

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The New Old Age Blog: In the Middle: Why Elderly Couples Fight

George and Gracie (let’s call them that because using their real names would make them even unhappier than they already appear to be) are in their 80s and have been married for more than 65 years. Until recently they seemed to ride the waves that are inevitable in any marriage that spans nearly seven decades; through good and bad, they were partners and best friends.

But lately — ever since her hospitalization and his fall — they have been arguing more bitterly than usual (“Do you have to make such a mess in the kitchen?”), criticizing each other (“Why haven’t you dealt with the insurance company yet?”), withdrawing from each other, and generally making each other more miserable, more often than ever before.

This kind of degenerative relationship is not uncommon among the elderly in even the happiest marriages, marriage therapists and geriatricians said. But that is small comfort to either the couple in the middle of the maelstrom, or the children who care for them, as evidenced by a number of postings on caregiver blogs. As some of the children have wondered there: “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Therapists and others who work with the elderly said the first step to addressing the problem is understanding where it came from.

“A key question is whether the marital bickering is part of a lifelong marital style or a change,” said Dr. Linda Waite, director of the Center on Demography and Economics of Aging at NORC/University of Chicago. Is it new behavior – or just new to the grown children who are suddenly so deeply enmeshed in their parents’ lives that they are only now noticing that something is amiss?

How much of the problem is really just the marriage style? “Some couples like to fight and argue – it keeps their adrenaline going,” said Dr. Nancy K. Schlossberg, professor emerita of counseling psychology at the University of Maryland and author of “Overwhelmed: Coping With Life’s Ups and Downs.”

Sometimes the best judges of whether there is a problem are outsiders, said Dr. William Dale, chief of geriatrics at the University of Chicago Geriatrics Medicine. Pay attention if someone says, “‘Gee, Mom seems more argumentative or withdrawn than the last time I saw her,’” Dr. Dale advised.

If the tone or severity of the marital tensions seem new, then it is important to find out why. The causes could be mental or physical, doctors say.

On the mental front, increased anger and fighting could be one of the first signs of mild cognitive impairment, a precursor of dementia or Alzheimer’s, in one or both of the spouses, said Dr. Lisa Gwyther, director of the Duke Center for Aging Family Support Program and an associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

Dr. Dale concurs: “There is good evidence that the earliest signs of cognitive impairment are often emotional changes” — anger, anxiety, depression — “rather than cognitive ones” — memory, abstract thought.

But these early signs of cognitive decline can be so subtle that neither the spouses themselves, or their grown children, recognize them for what they are, Dr. Gwyther said. So husband and wife blame each other for the changes and allow feelings of hurt and resentment to grow.

Withdrawing from activities that used to give them pleasure can be a telltale sign of mild cognitive impairment – and can trigger anger and arguments.

“In one couple, the husband just didn’t want to participate in the holidays — the wife got angry and said he was being lazy and stubborn,” said Dr. Gwyther. But the truth was that his cognitive decline made all the activity overwhelming, and he didn’t want anyone to know that he was anxious about not remembering everyone’s names and embarrassing himself.

Suspicion and paranoia can also accompany mild cognitive decline and precipitate distrust and hurtful accusations. Dr. Gwyther recalled another woman who “called her daughter frantic because she said her husband dropped her at her chemo appointment, went to park the car, and didn’t return to get her.” The woman couldn’t imagine that her husband could possibly have lost his sense of time and direction, Dr. Gwyther added. She took it personally, complaining to her daughter that “your father doesn’t seem to care any more.”

Dr. Dale told of a spouse who accused her mate of infidelity because “she was convinced that when he was out grocery shopping he was really having an affair.”

Hoarding, an early symptom of mild cognitive impairment, can also create tension in a marriage. (For new treatments, see this recent post by my colleague Paula Span.)

When one couple came to a counseling session with Dr. Norman Abeles, emeritus professor of psychology and former director of psychological clinic at Michigan State University, the hoarding spouse finally said she did it because she thought that they would run out of money, “even though there was enough money to go around.” Dr. Abeles said that incident led to her diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment.

Adding to the confusion, mild cognitive impairment, or M.C.I., comes and goes. “There are good days and bad days, good hours and bad hours,” said Dr. Gwyther. “Alzheimer’s and dementia don’t start on Tuesday — it’s a slow insidious onset.” But the diagnosis is becoming more common: The Institute for Dementia Research and Prevention predicts that 1 in 6 women, and 1 in 10 men, who live past the age of 55 will develop dementia in their lifetime.

“Spouses find it difficult to know when their partner with M.C.I. is acting differently, usually badly, due to the advancing illness or due to ‘willful’ personality issues,” said Dr. Dale, citing a 2007 study in the journal Family Relations exploring the problems this can create for couples.

Blaming is often easier than understanding. Another of Dr. Gwyther’s patients was furious at her husband for not filing their taxes. “He’s a C.P.A.,” she said. “How could we owe back taxes?” It did not occur to her that he might be unable to handle that task — and was too frightened about his deteriorating mental focus to let her know.

But as harmful as mental decline can be for a marriage, it is just part of the equation. Physical ailments – even those that seem completely unrelated to marital relations – “can upset the equilibrium of the marriage,” according to a study in The Canadian Medical Association Journal.

“Most men get angry at what’s happened to them when they get ill, women get angry and scared when he’s not what he used to be — so they fight,” said Dr. Schlossberg.

Chronic illnesses, like diabetes, arthritis and heart disease, can have a strong negative effect on mood, said Dr. Waite, who will soon be publishing a study on the subject. Diabetes is so often accompanied by depression that Dr. Waite said “one of my colleagues argues that that it is even part of the disease.”

And ailments can have an effect on a couple’s sex life — which can compound the marital problems, doctors said.

“Diabetes brings on neuropathy,” said Dr. Waite. “That means touching and feeling in sex is not as rewarding.” Without the pleasures of affectionate touching — whether a passing hug at the sink or more — tensions can build. That’s why, if a couple is having problems with sex, they are more likely to have problems in the relationship — and vice versa, according to a 2007 New England Journal of Medicine study of sex and health among older adults.

Other changes in circumstances — retirement, shifting roles, the loss of autonomy, disparities in health and abilities — can wreak havoc. Losing independence can feel like losing oneself — and if you don’t know who you are any more, how can you know how to relate to your spouse?

“Fighting may come from a misguided notion that you can regain power by asserting it over your spouse,” said Dr. Schlossberg, whose observations are echoed in a 1984 study in The Canadian Journal of Medicine. “It doesn’t work, it’s false power – but they’ll try anything.”

The sheer exhaustion that can come from being the caregiving spouse is also bound to “make them stressed and angry,” said Dr. Waite. Not to mention guilty and resentful — never a prescription for happy marital relations.

“Part of the trap for the caregiver is the idea that you have to do it all, and the guilt you feel when you cannot live up to it,” said Dr. Gordon Herz, a psychologist in private practice in Madison, Wisc. Not surprisingly, resentment can soon follow, Dr. Herz added, because it is hard to admit to anyone that, “‘this is too much for me.’”

What can outside caregivers — children or other loved ones — do about these golden marriages on the rocks? Should they intervene — or butt out? And can marital therapy help — or is it too late to change?

Share your thoughts and experiences — and on Tuesday we will try to provide some advice from experts.

Read More..

The New Old Age Blog: In the Middle: Why Elderly Couples Fight

George and Gracie (let’s call them that because using their real names would make them even unhappier than they already appear to be) are in their 80s and have been married for more than 65 years. Until recently they seemed to ride the waves that are inevitable in any marriage that spans nearly seven decades; through good and bad, they were partners and best friends.

But lately — ever since her hospitalization and his fall — they have been arguing more bitterly than usual (“Do you have to make such a mess in the kitchen?”), criticizing each other (“Why haven’t you dealt with the insurance company yet?”), withdrawing from each other, and generally making each other more miserable, more often than ever before.

This kind of degenerative relationship is not uncommon among the elderly in even the happiest marriages, marriage therapists and geriatricians said. But that is small comfort to either the couple in the middle of the maelstrom, or the children who care for them, as evidenced by a number of postings on caregiver blogs. As some of the children have wondered there: “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Therapists and others who work with the elderly said the first step to addressing the problem is understanding where it came from.

“A key question is whether the marital bickering is part of a lifelong marital style or a change,” said Dr. Linda Waite, director of the Center on Demography and Economics of Aging at NORC/University of Chicago. Is it new behavior – or just new to the grown children who are suddenly so deeply enmeshed in their parents’ lives that they are only now noticing that something is amiss?

How much of the problem is really just the marriage style? “Some couples like to fight and argue – it keeps their adrenaline going,” said Dr. Nancy K. Schlossberg, professor emerita of counseling psychology at the University of Maryland and author of “Overwhelmed: Coping With Life’s Ups and Downs.”

Sometimes the best judges of whether there is a problem are outsiders, said Dr. William Dale, chief of geriatrics at the University of Chicago Geriatrics Medicine. Pay attention if someone says, “‘Gee, Mom seems more argumentative or withdrawn than the last time I saw her,’” Dr. Dale advised.

If the tone or severity of the marital tensions seem new, then it is important to find out why. The causes could be mental or physical, doctors say.

On the mental front, increased anger and fighting could be one of the first signs of mild cognitive impairment, a precursor of dementia or Alzheimer’s, in one or both of the spouses, said Dr. Lisa Gwyther, director of the Duke Center for Aging Family Support Program and an associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

Dr. Dale concurs: “There is good evidence that the earliest signs of cognitive impairment are often emotional changes” — anger, anxiety, depression — “rather than cognitive ones” — memory, abstract thought.

But these early signs of cognitive decline can be so subtle that neither the spouses themselves, or their grown children, recognize them for what they are, Dr. Gwyther said. So husband and wife blame each other for the changes and allow feelings of hurt and resentment to grow.

Withdrawing from activities that used to give them pleasure can be a telltale sign of mild cognitive impairment – and can trigger anger and arguments.

“In one couple, the husband just didn’t want to participate in the holidays — the wife got angry and said he was being lazy and stubborn,” said Dr. Gwyther. But the truth was that his cognitive decline made all the activity overwhelming, and he didn’t want anyone to know that he was anxious about not remembering everyone’s names and embarrassing himself.

Suspicion and paranoia can also accompany mild cognitive decline and precipitate distrust and hurtful accusations. Dr. Gwyther recalled another woman who “called her daughter frantic because she said her husband dropped her at her chemo appointment, went to park the car, and didn’t return to get her.” The woman couldn’t imagine that her husband could possibly have lost his sense of time and direction, Dr. Gwyther added. She took it personally, complaining to her daughter that “your father doesn’t seem to care any more.”

Dr. Dale told of a spouse who accused her mate of infidelity because “she was convinced that when he was out grocery shopping he was really having an affair.”

Hoarding, an early symptom of mild cognitive impairment, can also create tension in a marriage. (For new treatments, see this recent post by my colleague Paula Span.)

When one couple came to a counseling session with Dr. Norman Abeles, emeritus professor of psychology and former director of psychological clinic at Michigan State University, the hoarding spouse finally said she did it because she thought that they would run out of money, “even though there was enough money to go around.” Dr. Abeles said that incident led to her diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment.

Adding to the confusion, mild cognitive impairment, or M.C.I., comes and goes. “There are good days and bad days, good hours and bad hours,” said Dr. Gwyther. “Alzheimer’s and dementia don’t start on Tuesday — it’s a slow insidious onset.” But the diagnosis is becoming more common: The Institute for Dementia Research and Prevention predicts that 1 in 6 women, and 1 in 10 men, who live past the age of 55 will develop dementia in their lifetime.

“Spouses find it difficult to know when their partner with M.C.I. is acting differently, usually badly, due to the advancing illness or due to ‘willful’ personality issues,” said Dr. Dale, citing a 2007 study in the journal Family Relations exploring the problems this can create for couples.

Blaming is often easier than understanding. Another of Dr. Gwyther’s patients was furious at her husband for not filing their taxes. “He’s a C.P.A.,” she said. “How could we owe back taxes?” It did not occur to her that he might be unable to handle that task — and was too frightened about his deteriorating mental focus to let her know.

But as harmful as mental decline can be for a marriage, it is just part of the equation. Physical ailments – even those that seem completely unrelated to marital relations – “can upset the equilibrium of the marriage,” according to a study in The Canadian Medical Association Journal.

“Most men get angry at what’s happened to them when they get ill, women get angry and scared when he’s not what he used to be — so they fight,” said Dr. Schlossberg.

Chronic illnesses, like diabetes, arthritis and heart disease, can have a strong negative effect on mood, said Dr. Waite, who will soon be publishing a study on the subject. Diabetes is so often accompanied by depression that Dr. Waite said “one of my colleagues argues that that it is even part of the disease.”

And ailments can have an effect on a couple’s sex life — which can compound the marital problems, doctors said.

“Diabetes brings on neuropathy,” said Dr. Waite. “That means touching and feeling in sex is not as rewarding.” Without the pleasures of affectionate touching — whether a passing hug at the sink or more — tensions can build. That’s why, if a couple is having problems with sex, they are more likely to have problems in the relationship — and vice versa, according to a 2007 New England Journal of Medicine study of sex and health among older adults.

Other changes in circumstances — retirement, shifting roles, the loss of autonomy, disparities in health and abilities — can wreak havoc. Losing independence can feel like losing oneself — and if you don’t know who you are any more, how can you know how to relate to your spouse?

“Fighting may come from a misguided notion that you can regain power by asserting it over your spouse,” said Dr. Schlossberg, whose observations are echoed in a 1984 study in The Canadian Journal of Medicine. “It doesn’t work, it’s false power – but they’ll try anything.”

The sheer exhaustion that can come from being the caregiving spouse is also bound to “make them stressed and angry,” said Dr. Waite. Not to mention guilty and resentful — never a prescription for happy marital relations.

“Part of the trap for the caregiver is the idea that you have to do it all, and the guilt you feel when you cannot live up to it,” said Dr. Gordon Herz, a psychologist in private practice in Madison, Wisc. Not surprisingly, resentment can soon follow, Dr. Herz added, because it is hard to admit to anyone that, “‘this is too much for me.’”

What can outside caregivers — children or other loved ones — do about these golden marriages on the rocks? Should they intervene — or butt out? And can marital therapy help — or is it too late to change?

Share your thoughts and experiences — and on Tuesday we will try to provide some advice from experts.

Read More..

In Spain, Having a Job No Longer Guarantees a Paycheck

Working but Waiting:
The Times’s Suzanne Daley reports on struggling Spanish workers who have avoided losing their jobs but often face weeks or months without paychecks.

VALENCIA, Spain — Over the past two years, Ana María Molina Cuevas, 36, has worked five shifts a week in a ceramics factory on the outskirts of this city, hand-rolling paint onto tiles. But at the end of the month, she often went unpaid.

Still, she kept showing up, trying to keep her frustration under control. If she quit, she reasoned, she might never get her money. And besides, where was she going to find another job? Last month, she was down to about $130 in her bank account with a mortgage payment due.

“On the days you get paid,” she said at home with her disabled husband and young daughter, “it is like the sun has risen three times. It is a day of joy.”

Mrs. Molina, who is owed about $13,000 by the factory, is hardly alone. Being paid for the work you do is no longer something that can be counted on in Spain, as this country struggles through its fourth year of an economic crisis.

With the regional and municipal governments deeply in debt, even workers like bus drivers and health care attendants, dependent on government financing for their salaries, are not always paid.

But few workers in this situation believe they have any choice but to stick it out, and none wanted to name their employers, to protect both the companies and their jobs. They try to manage their lives with occasional checks and partial payments on random dates — never sure whether they will get what they are owed in the end. Spain’s unemployment rate is the highest in the euro zone at more than 25 percent, and despite the government’s labor reforms, the rate has continued to rise month after month.

“Before the crisis, a worker might let one month go by, and then move on to another job,” said José Francisco Perez, a lawyer who represents unpaid workers in the Valencia area. “Now that just isn’t an option. People now have nowhere to go, and they are scared. They are afraid even to complain.”

No one is keeping track of workers like Mrs. Molina. But one indication of their number can be seen in the courts, which have become jammed with people trying to get back pay from a government insurance fund, aimed at giving workers something when a company does not pay them.

In Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city, the unemployment rate is 28.1 percent and the courts are so overwhelmed that processing claims, which used to take three to six months, now takes three to four years.

Since the start of the crisis in 2008, the insurance fund has paid nearly a million workers nationally back pay or severance. In 2007, it paid 70,000 workers. It is on track to pay more than 250,000 this year, and experts say the figures would be much higher if not for the logjam in the courts.

Often the unpaid workers, like Mrs. Molina, whose company is now in bankruptcy proceedings, hope their labor will keep a struggling operation afloat over the long run. Unemployment benefits last only two years, they point out, and they wonder what they would do after that. But in the meantime, they cannot even claim unemployment benefits. And no amount of budgeting can cover no payment at all.

Beatriz Morales García, 31, said she could not remember the last time she went shopping for herself. A few years ago, she and her husband, Daniel Chiva, 34, thought that they had settled into a comfortable life, he as a bus driver and she as a therapist in a rehabilitation center for people with mental disabilities. His job is financed by the City of Valencia, and hers by the regional government of Valencia.

They never expected any big money. But it seemed reasonable to expect a reliable salary, to take on a mortgage and think about children. In the past year, however, both of them have had trouble being paid. She is owed 6,000 euros, nearly $8,000. They have cut back on everything they can think of. They have given up their landline and their Internet connection. They no long park their car in a garage or pay for extra health insurance coverage. Mr. Chiva even forgoes the coffee he used to drink in a cafe before his night shifts. Still, the anxiety is constant.

“There are nights when we cannot sleep,” he said. “Moments when you talk out loud to yourself in the street. It has been terrible, terrible.”

Mrs. Morales said it was particularly hard to watch other mothers in the park with their children while she must leave her own toddler to go to work, unsure she will ever get paid.

“We are working eight hours, and we’re suffering more than people who are not working,” she said.

The couple’s pay has been so irregular that they are having a hard time even keeping track of how much they are owed, because small payments show up sporadically in their account.

Rachel Chaundler contributed reporting.

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Abdessalam Yassine, Leader of Moroccan Opposition Movement, Dies at 84

RABAT, Morocco (AP) — Abdessalam Yassine, the charismatic religious leader of Morocco’s largest opposition movement and a longtime opponent of two Moroccan kings, died on Thursday. He was 84.

Jalil Bounhar/Associated Press

Abdessalam Yassine in 2000.

His death was announced by his movement, Adl wal Ihsan (Justice and Spirituality).

During the Arab Spring, Mr. Yassine’s group was an important part of the pro-democracy movement that demonstrated in the streets for much of 2011 for political reform and an end to corruption.

The bearded and veiled members of his group marched side by side with left-wing and secular activists, calling for less power for the hereditary monarchy and more power for elected officials.

Since the election victory of a moderate Islamist opposition party last month, Mr. Yassine’s movement has largely remained quiet, apparently giving the new government time to enact reforms.

Formed in 1987, Adl wal Ihsan is officially banned but tolerated, though its members are frequently harassed or arrested by the police, and Mr. Yassine spent nine years under house arrest. The movement advocates an Islamic state and an end to the monarchy. Its following is believed to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Born in Marrakesh in 1928, Mr. Yassine worked for the Education Ministry and wrote two books advocating an Islamic state in Morocco before he rose to fame in 1974 by publishing “Islam or the Deluge,” an open letter to King Hassan II. Mr. Yassine accused the king of corruption and subservience to Western mores, questioned whether he was a true Muslim and called on him to step down.

Mr. Yassine was well acquainted with the classics of Western culture, but he did not want to see Morocco slide toward Westernization. He wrote that “our democracy” is not a Western democracy that “begins at pagan Athens and ends in advanced modern societies as a secularist practice, atheistic and immoral.”

After King Hassan died in 1999 and his son assumed the throne as Mohammed VI, Mr. Yassine challenged the new king in a 35-page memorandum, made public the next year, blaming the monarchy for Morocco’s social, economic, and political difficulties.

Nonetheless, King Mohammed released Mr. Yassine from house arrest in May 2000 in a string of gestures intended to show a break with the past.

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Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies

Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.

Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.

Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.

Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.

Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.

Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.

More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”

One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”

But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.

Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.

But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.

Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”

After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.

He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.

In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”

William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.

Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.

When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.

Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.

She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.

But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.

Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.

Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”

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Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies

Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.

Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.

Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.

Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.

Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.

Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.

More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”

One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”

But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.

Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.

But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.

Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”

After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.

He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.

In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”

William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.

Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.

When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.

Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.

She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.

But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.

Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.

Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”

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As Gold Is Spirited Out of Afghanistan, Officials Wonder Why

Zalmai for The New York Times

A Kabul jewelry shop. Officials are concerned about gold being flown out of Afghanistan.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Packed into hand luggage and tucked into jacket pockets, roughly hewed bars of gold are being flown out of Kabul with increasing regularity, confounding Afghan and American officials who fear money launderers have found a new way to spirit funds from the country.

Most of the gold is being carried on commercial flights destined for Dubai, according to airport security reports and officials. The amounts carried by single couriers are often heavy enough that passengers flying from Kabul to the Persian Gulf emirate would be well advised to heed warnings about the danger of bags falling from overhead compartments. One courier, for instance, carried nearly 60 pounds of gold bars, each about the size of an iPhone, aboard an early morning flight in mid-October, according to an airport security report. The load was worth more than $1.5 million.

The gold is fully declared and legal to fly. Some, if not most, is legitimately being sent by gold dealers seeking to have old and damaged jewelry refashioned into new pieces by skilled craftsmen in the Persian Gulf, said Afghan officials and gold dealers.

But gold dealers in Kabul and current and former Kabul airport officials say there has been a surge in shipments since early summer. The talk of a growing exodus of gold from Afghanistan has been spreading among the business community here, and in recent weeks has caught the attention of Afghan and American officials. The officials are now puzzling over the origin of the gold — very little is mined in Afghanistan, although larger mines are planned — and why so much appears to be heading for Dubai.

“We are investigating it, and if we find this is a way of laundering money, we will intervene,” said Noorullah Delawari, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank. Yet he acknowledged that there were more questions than answers at this point. “I don’t know where so much gold would come from, unless you can tell me something about it,” he said in an interview. Or, as a European official who tracks the Afghan economy put it, “new mysteries abound” as the war appears to be drawing to a close.

Figuring out what precisely is happening in the Afghan economy remains as confounding as ever. Nearly 90 percent of the financial activity takes place outside formal banks. Written contracts are the exception, receipts are rare and statistics are often unreliable. Money laundering is commonplace, say Western and Afghan officials.

As a result, with the gold, “right now you’re stuck in that situation we usually are: is there something bad going on here or is this just the Afghan way of commerce?” said a senior American official who tracks illicit financial networks.

There is reason to be suspicious: the gold shipments track with the far larger problem of cash smuggling. For years, flights have left Kabul almost every day carrying thick wads of bank notes — dollars, euros, Norwegian kroner, Saudi Arabian riyals and other currencies — stuffed into suitcases, packed into boxes and shrink-wrapped onto pallets. At one point, cash was even being hidden in food trays aboard now-defunct Pamir Airways flights to Dubai.

Last year alone, Afghanistan’s central bank says, roughly $4.5 billion in cash was spirited out through the airport. Efforts to stanch the flow have had limited impact, and concerns about money laundering persist, according to a report released last week by the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

The unimpeded “bulk cash flows raise the risk of money laundering and bulk cash smuggling — tools often used to finance terrorist, narcotics and other illicit operations,” the report said. The cash, and now the gold, is most often taken to Dubai, where officials are known for asking few questions. Many wealthy Afghans park their money and families in the emirate, and gold dealers say more middle-class Afghans are sending money and gold — seen as a safeguard against economic ruin — to Dubai as talk of a postwar economic collapse grows louder.

But given Dubai’s reputation as a haven for laundered money, an Afghan official said that the “obvious suspicion” is that at least some of the apparent growth in gold shipments to Dubai is tied to the myriad illicit activities — opium smuggling, corruption, Taliban taxation schemes — that have come to define Afghanistan’s economy.

There are also indications that Iran could be dipping into the Afghan gold trade. It is already buying up dollars and euros here to circumvent American and European sanctions, and it may be using gold for the same purpose.

Yahya, a dealer in Kabul, said other gold traders were helping Iran buy the precious metal here. Payment was being made in oil or with Iranian rials, which readily circulate in western Afghanistan. The Afghan dealers are then taking it to Dubai, where the gold is sold for dollars. The money is then moved to China, where it was used to buy needed goods or simply funneled back to Iran, said Yahya, who like many Afghans uses a single name.

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Changing of the Guard: Chinese Opposition to Labor Camps Widens

BEIJING — It is hard to say exactly which “subversive” sentiments drew the police to Ren Jianyu, who posted them on his microblog last year, although “down with dictatorship” and “long live democracy” stand out.

In the end, Mr. Ren, 25, a college graduate from Chongqing, the southwestern metropolis, was sent without trial to a work camp based on the T-shirt that investigators found in his closet: “Freedom or death,” it said.

Last year Mr. Ren was among tens of thousands of Chinese who were dumped into the nation’s vast “re-education through labor” system, a Stalinist-inspired constellation of penal colonies where pickpockets, petitioners, underground Christian church members and other perceived social irritants toil in dismal conditions for up to four years, all without trial. With as many as 190,000 inmates at any one time, it is one of the world’s largest systems of forced labor.

But now the labor system, known by its shorthand, “laojiao,” is facing a groundswell of opposition from both inside and outside the Communist Party. Critics say the once-in-a-decade leadership transition last month, which included the demotion of the chief of the nation’s vast internal security apparatus, has created a potential opening for judicial and legal reform.

“It’s high time we demolish this unconstitutional and abusive system that violates basic human rights, fuels instability and smears the government’s image,” said Hu Xingdou, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology who frequently rails against the system that Mao Zedong created in the 1950s to take down suspected class enemies and counterrevolutionaries.

The calls for change go beyond longstanding advocates of political reform like Professor Hu. China’s national bar association is circulating an online petition that has been signed by thousands. Legal experts have convened seminars to denounce the system. And almost every day, it seems, the state-run news media, with the top leadership’s tacit support, report on hapless citizens ensnared by the arbitrary justice that the local police impose with the wave of a hand.

Mr. Ren’s case would probably have gone unnoticed if not for China’s increasingly emboldened human rights defenders, who showcased his plight on the Internet. Evidently prodded by the torrent of news coverage, Chongqing officials cut short his two-year sentence and freed him.

“It was a depressing, dreadful experience,” Mr. Ren said in a telephone interview this month, describing long days spent in the camp’s wire-coiling workshop.

Other examples abound. A migrant worker from Inner Mongolia was sent away for quarreling with an official at a restaurant. A mother from Hunan Province was given an 18-month sentence after she publicly protested that the men who had raped and forced her 11-year-old daughter into prostitution had been treated too leniently.

This month an 80-year-old Korean War veteran with Parkinson’s disease sobbed on national television as he described spending 18 months in a labor camp as punishment for filing local corruption complaints.

People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, took aim at the system last month, saying it had become “a tool of retaliation” for local officials. In October the head of a government judicial reform committee noted a broad consensus in favor of addressing the system’s worst abuses.

And in a widely circulated recent essay, the vice president of the Supreme People’s Court, Jiang Bixin, argued that the government must act within the law if it is to survive. “Only with constraints on public power can the rights and freedoms of citizens be securely realized,” he wrote.

China’s incoming president, Xi Jinping, has not yet weighed in on the issue, but reform advocates are encouraged by a speech he gave this month talking up the widely ignored protections afforded by China’s Constitution, which include freedom from unlawful detention and the right to an open trial. “We must establish mechanisms to restrain and supervise power,” Mr. Xi said.

Until now, China’s powerful security establishment has staved off any erosion of its authority, warning of calamity if the police lose their ability to detain perceived troublemakers without the interference of judges or defense lawyers.

The Ministry of Public Security has other reasons to preserve the status quo. The system, which employs tens of thousands of people, is a gold mine for local authorities, who earn money from the goods produced by detainees. Officials also covet the bribes offered to reduce sentences, critics say, and the payments families make to ensure a loved one is properly fed while in custody.

Patrick Zuo contributed research.

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Microsoft Battles Google by Hiring Political Brawler Mark Penn

SEATTLE — Mark Penn made a name for himself in Washington by bulldozing enemies of the Clintons. Now he spends his days trying to do the same to Google, on behalf of its archrival Microsoft.

Since Mr. Penn was put in charge of “strategic and special projects” at Microsoft in August, much of his job has involved efforts to trip up Google, which Microsoft has failed to dislodge from its perch atop the lucrative Internet search market.

Drawing on his background in polling, data crunching and campaigning, Mr. Penn created a holiday commercial that has been running during Monday Night Football and other shows, in which Microsoft criticizes Google for polluting the quality of its shopping search results with advertisements. “Don’t get scroogled,” it warns. His other projects include a blind taste test, Coke-versus-Pepsi style, of search results from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.

The campaigns by Mr. Penn, 58, a longtime political operative known for his brusque personality and scorched-earth tactics, are part of a broader effort at Microsoft to give its marketing the nimbleness of a political campaign, where a candidate can turn an opponent’s gaffe into a damaging commercial within hours. They are also a sign of the company’s mounting frustration with Google after losing billions of dollars a year on its search efforts, while losing ground to Google in the browser and smartphones markets and other areas.

Microsoft has long attacked Google from the shadows, whispering to regulators, journalists and anyone else who would listen that Google was a privacy-violating, anticompetitive bully. The fruits of its recent work in this area could come next week, when the Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce the results of its antitrust investigation of Google, a case that echoes Microsoft’s own antitrust suit in the 1990s. A similar investigation by the European Union is also wrapping up. A bad outcome for Google in either one would be a victory for Microsoft.

But Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., has realized that it cannot rely only on regulators to scrutinize Google — which is where Mr. Penn comes in. He is increasing the urgency of Microsoft’s efforts and focusing on their more public side.

In an interview, Mr. Penn said companies underestimated the importance of policy issues like privacy to consumers, as opposed to politicians and regulators. “It’s not about whether they can get them through Washington,” he said. “It’s whether they can get them through Main Street.”

Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman, declined to comment on Microsoft’s actions specifically, but said that while Google also employed lobbyists and marketers, “our focus is on Google and the positive impact our industry has on society, not the competition.”

In Washington, Mr. Penn is a lightning rod. He developed a relationship with the Clintons as a pollster during President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, when he helped identify the value of “soccer moms” and other niche voter groups.

As chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 campaign for president, he conceived the “3 a.m.” commercial that raised doubts about whether Barack Obama, then a senator, was ready for the Oval Office. Mr. Penn argued in an essay he wrote for Time magazine in May that “negative ads are, by and large, good for our democracy.”

But his approach has ended up souring many of his professional relationships. He left Mrs. Clinton’s campaign after an uproar about his consulting work for the government of Colombia, which was seeking the passage of a trade treaty with the United States that Mrs. Clinton, then a senator, opposed.

“Google should be prepared for everything but the kitchen sink thrown at them,” said a former colleague who worked closely with Mr. Penn in politics and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Actually, they should be prepared for the kitchen sink to be thrown at them, too.”

Hiring Mr. Penn demonstrates how seriously Microsoft is taking this fight, said Michael A. Cusumano, a business professor at M.I.T. who co-wrote a book about Microsoft’s browser war.

“They’re pulling out all the stops to do whatever they can to halt Google’s advance, just as their competition did to them,” Professor Cusumano said. “I suppose that if Microsoft can actually put a doubt in people’s mind that Google isn’t unbiased and has become some kind of evil empire, they might very well get results.”

Nick Wingfield reported from Seattle and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco.

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