Google’s fourth quarter results shine after ad rate decline slows

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Revenue from Google Inc’s core Internet business outpaced many analysts’ expectations during the crucial holiday quarter and advertising rates fell less than in previous periods, pushing its shares up more than 4 percent.

The world’s largest Internet search company introduced new product listings during the fourth quarter – typically its strongest – and also benefited from business growth in international markets, analysts said.

Excluding traffic-acquisition costs, the business generated net revenue of $ 9.83 billion, up from $ 8.13 billion a year earlier, Google reported on Tuesday. That surpassed a $ 9.6 billion average forecast from six analysts polled by Reuters.

“Business looked really strong, especially from a profitability perspective. They really grew their margins in the core business,” said Sameet Sinha, an analyst with B. Riley Caris. “Most of that strength seems to be coming from international markets which grew revenues quite substantially: up 23 percent year over year, versus the 15 percent growth in the third quarter.”

Average cost-per-click, a critical metric that denotes the price advertisers pay Google, declined 6 percent from a year ago, the fifth consecutive quarter of decline.

Google executives told analysts on a conference call that the company had focused on improving the metric – shoring up margins – while lowering the overall growth rate of paid clicks in the holiday quarter.

“Click prices are still declining, but it’s better than expected,” said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis.

MOTOROLA MOBILITY “STILL LOSING MONEY”

Consolidated net income in the fourth quarter was $ 2.89 billion or $ 8.62 per share, compared with $ 2.71 billion, or $ 8.22 per share, in the year-ago period when Google had not yet acquired Motorola.

Excluding certain items, Google said it earned $ 10.65 per share in the fourth quarter.

“The core business is a great business and the fourth-quarter is always a time for Google to shine. However, Motorola is still losing money and click rates still declined. They only declined 6 percent, but go back four or five quarters and click prices were improving. So mobile is still pressuring click prices,” Gillis said.

The company posted consolidated revenue – which includes its Motorola Mobility mobile phone business but not the television set-top box business it recently agreed to sell – of $ 14.42 billion on Tuesday.

Motorola Mobility had an operating loss of $ 353 million during the quarter.

Shares of Google were up roughly 4.5 percent at $ 734.46 in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Bernard Orr)

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“Zero Dark Thirty” heads to Europe: will torture controversy follow?

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Best Picture Oscar nominee “Zero Dark Thirty” rolls out in several Western European countries starting Wednesday, absent – at least for now – the firestorm of criticism that has accompanied its U.S. release.

The movie has been a lightning rod for detractors in the U.S. over its perceived endorsement of torture, an allegation that director Kathryn Bigelow and Sony executives have repeatedly denied.

“Overall, I believe Europeans are far less ambiguous than Americans when it comes to the use of torture,” Bruce Nash of box-office tracking service TheNumbers told TheWrap.

“To the extent that the film is perceived as pro-torture — whether it is or not, and I don’t believe it is — if that somehow became how the film is defined, that would hurt it at the box office,” Nash said. “But I don’t think that’s the case.”

Bigelow, screenwriter Marc Boal and several others involved with the picture have been in Europe for the past two weeks to promote the film. Boal told the New York Times that interviewers in France seemed to regard the torture issue as belonging to the Americans, and in fact appreciated the film’s head-on approach.

Indeed, the film begins its foreign run with a lot of momentum. The dark thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden was No. 1 in its first week of wide release on January 11 and has finished a strong second for the past two weeks.

Of course, the publicity surrounding the torture issue hasn’t hurt it at the box office in the U.S. The domestic haul for “Zero Dark Thirty” to this point is nearly $ 57 million, ahead of pre-release projections and likely heading for $ 100 million.

The film’s five Oscar nominations and the critical acclaim it has received have helped, too, but even Sony has acknowledged the flood of news stories raised the film’s profile.

Universal will be handling the film’s release in most countries in Western Europe, after buying rights to those territories from Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures, which financed it and cut distribution deals territory by territory.

It will open in France and Switzerland on Wednesday and in the U.K and Finland on Friday. Its debut in Germany will be on January 31, and Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Norway and South Africa will follow in February. Regional distributors will handle the film’s February releases in Russia and Latin America, and the Annapurna is still considering a China run.

“Zero Dark Thirty” is one of three Best Picture Oscar nominees that is currently hitting overseas theaters with a distributor different than the one that handled its U.S.release.

Sony, which along with the Weinstein Company co-financed “Django Unchained,” is overseeing the foreign release of Quentin Tarantino’s slave saga. It opened last weekend and took in $ 48 million from 54 overseas markets.

DreamWorks’ “Lincoln,” distributed by Disney in North America, debuted in Spain and Mexico this past weekend via Fox.

With an explanatory preamble approved by director Steven Spielberg added, “Lincoln” opened to $ 2.3 million on 344 screens in Spain and to $ 729,000 on 259 screens in Mexico. “Lincoln” goes much wider next weekend, when it opens in 19 markets including Brazil, Germany, Italy, Russia and the U.K..

As for the torture controversy that accompanied “Zero Dark Thirty’s” U.S. release, it doesn’t seem to have caused the slightest ripple.

Indeed, the fact that torture has been used in the war against terror has been seen as a reality in Europe for some time.

In December, Europe’s highest court, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, concluded that techniques used routinely by the Bush-era CIA in connection with its extraordinary-renditions program constituted torture.

If torture does not become an issue, The Numbers’ Nash said it should do solid business. He pointed out that other U.S. films about the war on terror have done pretty well overseas. In 2006, “United 93″ made $ 31 million domestically and nearly $ 45 million overseas. Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” did $ 70 million in the U.S. and went to make $ 92 million abroad that same year.

Bigelow’s last movie, “The Hurt Locker,’” was about a U.S. bomb squad in the Iraq war, and it nearly doubled its $ 17 million domestic take, with $ 32 million from abroad in 2009. The bulk of that foreign run came after its surprise victory over “Avatar” for the Best Picture Oscar, however.

This weekend’s U.K. and France debuts will be telling, but Universal quietly opened “Zero Dark Thirty” on just 250 screens in Spain on January 4. With a minimum of criticism, politicians’ ire or public furor, the movie has taken in nearly $ 4 million over three weekends.

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Medicaid Patients Could Face Higher Fees Under a Proposed Federal Policy

WASHINGTON — Millions of low-income people could be required to pay more for health care under a proposed federal policy that would give states more freedom to impose co-payments and other charges on Medicaid patients.

Hoping to persuade states to expand Medicaid, the Obama administration said state Medicaid officials could charge higher co-payments and premiums for doctors’ services, prescription drugs and certain types of hospital care, including the “nonemergency use” of emergency rooms. State officials have long asked for more leeway to impose such charges.

The 2010 health care law extended Medicaid to many childless adults and others who were previously ineligible. The Supreme Court said the expansion of Medicaid was an option for states, not a requirement as Congress had intended. The administration has been trying to persuade states to take the option, emphasizing that they can reconfigure Medicaid to hold down their costs and “promote the most effective use of services.”

In the proposed rule published Tuesday in the Federal Register, the administration said it was simplifying a complex, confusing array of standards that limit states’ ability to charge Medicaid beneficiaries. Under the proposal, a family of three with annual income of $30,000 could be required to pay $1,500 in premiums and co-payments.

As if to emphasize the latitude given to states, the administration used this heading for part of the new rule: “Higher Cost Sharing Permitted for Individuals With Incomes Above 100 Percent of the Federal Poverty Level” (that is, $19,090 for a family of three).

Barbara K. Tomar, director of federal affairs at the American College of Emergency Physicians, said the administration had not adequately defined the “nonemergency services” for which low-income people could be required to pay. In many cases, she said, patients legitimately believe they need emergency care, but the final diagnosis does not bear that out.

“This is just a way to reduce payments to physicians and hospitals” from the government, Ms. Tomar said.

With patients paying more, the federal government and states would pay less than they otherwise would. Medicaid covers 60 million people, and at least 11 million more are expected to qualify under the 2010 law. The federal government pays more than half of Medicaid costs and will pay a much larger share for those who become eligible under the law.

In the proposed rule, the administration said it had discovered several potential problems in its efforts to carry out the law.

First, it said, it has not found a reliable, comprehensive and up-to-date source of information about whether people have employer-sponsored health insurance. The government needs such information to decide whether low- and middle-income people can obtain federal subsidies for private insurance.

The subsidies can be used to buy coverage in competitive marketplaces known as insurance exchanges. Under the law, people can start enrolling in October for coverage that starts in January 2014, when most Americans will be required to have health insurance. People who have access to affordable coverage from employers will generally be ineligible for subsidies.

In applying for subsidies, people must report any employer-sponsored insurance they have. But the administration said it could be difficult to verify this information because the main sources of data reflect only “whether an individual is employed and with which employer, and not whether the employer provides health insurance.”

Since passage of the health care law, the administration has often said that people seeking insurance would use a single streamlined application for Medicaid and the subsidies for private coverage. Moreover, the state Medicaid agency and the exchange are supposed to share data and issue a “combined eligibility notice” for all types of assistance.

But the administration said this requirement would be delayed to Jan. 1, 2015, because more time was needed to establish electronic links between Medicaid and the exchanges.

Leonardo D. Cuello, who represents Medicaid beneficiaries as a lawyer at the National Health Law Program, expressed concern.

“Under the proposed rule,” Mr. Cuello said, “many people will be funneled into health insurance exchanges even though they have special needs that are better met in Medicaid. And if you asked the right questions, you would find out that they are eligible for Medicaid.”

The federal government will have the primary responsibility for running exchanges in more than half the states. About 20 states are expected to expand Medicaid; governors in other states are opposed or uncommitted.

The proposed rule allows hospitals to decide, “on the basis of preliminary information,” whether a person is eligible for Medicaid. States must provide immediate temporary coverage to people who appear eligible.

Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, said this could be a boon to low-income people. “Currently,” he said, “only children and pregnant women are presumed eligible for inpatient admissions under Medicaid in New York.”

The public has until Feb. 13 to comment on the proposed rule. Comments can be submitted at www.regulations.gov.

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Wal-Mart Toughens Fire Safety Rules for Suppliers

Facing criticism for selling garments made at a Bangladesh factory where 112 workers died in a fire last November, Wal-Mart Stores told its worldwide suppliers Tuesday that it was adopting tougher rules on fire safety at its contractors and would have “zero tolerance” for suppliers that used unauthorized subcontractors.

At least two suppliers were using the Tazreen Fashions factory in Bangladesh to produce garments for Wal-Mart in the weeks before the fire there. After the fatal blaze, Wal-Mart said those suppliers had used the factory without its knowledge after it had stopped authorizing production there. It did not say why. Wal-Mart said it had ended its relationship with those two suppliers.

In a letter sent to its suppliers on Tuesday, Wal-Mart said they must “fully and accurately disclose” in advance any factories they or any of their subcontractors plan to use. Under the policy, suppliers will be subject to termination even if an undisclosed factory is used “without the supplier’s knowledge” by anyone in the supplier’s supply chain. David Schilling, a program director at the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, praised the move, saying, “It’s an important step toward increased transparency and accountability of suppliers.”

Wal-Mart also announced tougher requirements on fire safety, saying “facilities found to have fire safety-related violations must initiate corrective actions immediately.” The company said that the repairs must be completed no later than 30 days after the violations were identified.

Three inspection reports that worker advocates found at the Tazreen factory after the fire showed that it had serious, continuing fire safety violations from May 2011 through April 2012.

Wal-Mart also told its suppliers that if they want to use additional factories, those factories will be required to “prequalify,” meaning they must first pass ethical sourcing standards on fire safety and other criteria.

Some labor rights groups said Wal-Mart’s new policy did not go nearly far enough.

Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a monitoring group financed by American universities, said: “There are giant gaps. There is no commitment on covering the costs of the fire safety repairs and renovations that we all know are necessary.”

“There is also no real transparency,” he said. “There’s no way of knowing for two months, six months, a year, what the inspection reports find, and they won’t tell the workers the results of the inspections at their factories.”

Brooke Buchanan, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the company would publicize the names of factories dropped for noncompliance. But she said there were no plans to list or publicize the names of all the factories that Wal-Mart and its suppliers use — something that worker rights groups have advocated to make it easier to monitor factories.

To help suppliers finance needed safety improvements, Wal-Mart is considering participating in a revolving fund that would provide loans to Bangladeshi factory owners, Ms. Buchanan said.

The letter to suppliers was first reported Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal.

Wal-Mart said all of its Bangladesh factories must have an “electrical and building safety assessment” by an independent, certified agency. Since 2005, factory fires in Bangladesh, many caused by electrical problems, have killed 600 workers.

After the Tazreen fire, many surviving workers said the eight-story factory had barred windows that prevented workers from escaping. In its new rules, Wal-Mart said any barred windows must have an emergency mechanism to allow for escape.

Wal-Mart also told its suppliers, “All floors and buildings, including dormitories, must have a secondary exit, and preferably an external fire escape route.”

But Mr. Nova voiced dismay that Wal-Mart’s new policy did not explicitly require fireproof staircases or external fire escapes in multistory factories. “The failure to have such effective means to exit was an important reason so many workers died at Tazreen,” he said. Ms. Buchanan said she expected inspectors to call for such measures when visiting multistory factories.

Dara O’Rourke, a specialist on labor policy at the University of California, Berkeley, praised Wal-Mart’s new requirement that fire safety violations be addressed immediately. “This is a critical step towards motivating factories to fix the problems they find in audits,” he said.

Wal-Mart is also requiring factories to have proper access for fire trucks and firefighting equipment, and that suppliers have a worker in each country where they operate responsible for ensuring factory compliance.

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A taste of home-kitchen-based business

When Caron Ory's father was diagnosed with diabetes and struggled to stop eating sugar, the trained dietitian told him not to worry.

"I'll create something for you," she promised.

Through two years of research, trial-and-error recipes and taste tests, Ory came up with Eco-BeeCo, a natural sugar alternative with a tad of freeze-dried honey that passed her requirements nutritionally and her father's gustatory muster.

But when Ory wanted to share her product outside of family and friends, she ran into a hurdle.

To sell the product she'd developed in her home kitchen, California law required her to contract with a commercial kitchen to produce it.

Instead of building a small market and gradually making the transition to large-scale distribution, Ory had to invest $35,000 to blend 6,000 pounds of Eco-BeeCo without ever having sold a pouch of it.

"I spent thousands, and it was a big, big, big risk," she said. "I didn't even know my product was a big seller, and here I am blending 6,000 pounds."

But that hurdle recently disappeared.

Last fall, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 1616, a law allowing Californians to make and sell certain non-hazardous foods out of their kitchens. Foods that don't include cream or meat, such as bread, fruit, baked goods, jarred goods and dry mixes — like Eco-BeeCo — could all bypass commercial production and be sold straight out of a home kitchen, according to the law.

When Ory learned that the relaxed requirements would start Jan. 1, she looked for a way she could help others get their products off the ground without making the upfront investment she had.

"Everybody has a signature recipe that they make and people rave about," Ory said.

So, on March 2, Ory, a Fountain Valley resident, will teach a class from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa about AB 1616 and the business of starting a cottage industry out of a home kitchen.

She'll outline the new law and guide students through the basic business side of things, including product assessment, pricing and packaging.

After the class, students will still have to apply for a permit and take a basic food-handling course to get state approval. Ory hopes she can be a mentor to her students as they go through that process.

"With the state of California, it's kind of like a moving target right now because it's a new law," she said.

Eco-BeeCo survived the gantlet of commercial production. It's now available at Whole Foods locations in Southern California and other grocers across the country.

"My dream for all of these people is they can do what I did," Ory said. "I just don't want them to do it with the risk I took on."

jeremiah.dobruck@latimes.com

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Sony to sell new Xperia tablet in Japan: Nikkei

(Reuters) – Sony Corp’s Sony Mobile Communications Inc said it will sell the new version of its Xperia tablet in Japan this spring, the Nikkei reported, citing Kyodo News.

The Xperia Tablet Z, whose price has not been announced, has a 10.1-inch display, is 6.9 mm thin and weighs 495 grams, according to the company’s website.

Rival Google Inc’s Nexus 10 tablet is 8.9 mm thick, while Apple Inc’s iPad mini measures 7.9 mm.

Sony halted sales of Xperia in October, a month after launch, after discovering gaps between the screen and the case that made some of the machines susceptible to water damage.

The Nikkei reported on Sunday that Japanese smartphone makers seem to be regaining some market share they lost to companies like Apple and Samsung Electronics Co.

(Reporting by Krithika Krishnamurthy in Bangalore; Editing by Joyjeet Das)

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Chastain horror film “Mama” takes big box office win

(Reuters) – Jessica Chastain overpowered Mark Wahlberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others as her low-budget horror flick emerged as the North American weekend box office champ and her Oscar-nominated “Zero Dark Thirty” captured the second spot as well.

Chastain’s supernatural thriller, “Mama,” pulled in $ 28.1 million from Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to studio estimates, beating out a crop of new testosterone-fueled, male-targeted releases that finished far back in the pack.

“Zero Dark Thirty,” for which Chastain is a leading best actress Oscar contender, took in $ 17.6 million, while another late 2012 release and Oscar favorite, “Silver Linings Playbook,” finished third with $ 11.35 million.

“Broken City,” a crime thriller starring Wahlberg and Russell Crowe, finished fifth with $ 9 million behind “Gangster Squad’s” $ 9.1 million, while Schwarzenegger’s new action film, “The Last Stand,” earned $ 6.3 million for a dismal 10th place.

“Mama” stars Chastain as a guitarist who doesn’t want children but is forced to take care of two orphaned nieces who have been living in the woods. She and her husband try to re-adjust the little girls to normal life.

Based on a 2008 short film, the movie was produced for roughly $ 15 million.

“This is a great result, one we never would have expected especially for a film of this genre,” said Nikki Rocco, Universal’s president for domestic distribution.

“The timing was perfect,” she said, noting “the key was it’s a PG-13 movie that appealed to the under-25 female audience.”

The studio said it was hopeful that as the only PG-13 film in release this month it would continue to find an audience.

Chastain is a best actress Oscar nominee for her role as a dogged CIA agent in “Zero Dark Thirty,” the weekend’s second-place film about the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden. The movie has taken in $ 55.9 million since late December.

“Silver Linings Playbook,” an Oscar-nominated romantic comedy about a former mental patient trying to rebuild his life, expanded nationwide for a strong third-place finish and a $ 55.3 million total since the movie starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence opened in late autumn.

Both Oscar contenders handily beat out a pair of new, male-oriented films, as did crime thriller “Gangster Squad.”

“The Last Stand” features Schwarzenegger’s return to a starring, big-screen role after a seven-year break while he was serving as governor of California, but managed only $ 6.3 million to finish 10th. The former “Terminator” will star in three movies over the next 12 months.

Schwarzenegger plays a retired Los Angeles policeman who works to protect a tiny border town from a notorious drug kingpin. The film was produced for about $ 45 million.

The studio noted that the weekend was crowded with several movie-going choices, and that two films were competing for the same audience, referring to the weekend’s other new movie, “Broken City,” which stars Wahlberg as a former New York cop who uncovers a scandal involving the mayor, played by Russell Crowe.

The top 10 movies were rounded out by “A Haunted House,” “Django Unchained,” “Les Miserables” and “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.”

“Zero Dark Thirty” was released by Sony Corp’s movie studio.

“The Last Stand” was distributed by Lions Gate Entertainment.

“The Hobbit” and “Gangster Squad” were released by Warner Bros, a unit of Time Warner Inc.

“A Haunted House” was released by Open Road Films, a joint venture between theater owners Regal Entertainment Group and AMC Entertainment Inc.

“Django Unchained” and “Silver Linings Playbook” were distributed by Weinstein Co.

“Broken City” was distributed by 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp.

“Les Miserables” and “Mama” were distributed by Universal Pictures, a unit of Comcast Corp.

(Reporting By Lisa Richwine and Chris Michaud; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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The Week: A Roundup of This Week’s Science News

“Science,” a colleague once said at a meeting, “is a mighty enterprise, which is really rather quite topical.” He was so right: as we continue to enhance our coverage of the scientific world, we always aim to keep the latest news front and center.

His observation seemed like a nice way to introduce this column, which will highlight the week’s developments in health and science news and glance at what’s ahead. This past week, for instance, the mighty enterprise of science addressed itself to such newsy topics as the flu (there’s still time to get vaccinated!), and mental illness and gun control.

In addition to the big-headline stories that invite wisdom from scientists, each week there is a drumbeat of purely scientific and medical news that emerges from academic journals, fieldwork and elsewhere. These developments, from the quirky to the abstruse, often make their way into the daily news cycle, depending on the strength of the research behind them. (Well, that’s how we judge them, anyway.)

Many discoveries are hard to unravel. “In a way, science is antithetical to everything that has to do with a newspaper,” the same colleague observed. “You couldn’t imagine anything less consumer-friendly.”

Let’s aim to fix that. Below, a selection of the week’s stories.

DEVELOPMENTS

Health

Strange, but Effective

People with a bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile — which kills 14,000 Americans a year — have a startling cure: a transplant of someone else’s feces into their digestive system, which introduces good bacteria that the gut needs to fight off the bad. For some people, antibiotics don’t fix this problem, but an infusion of diluted stool from a healthy person seems to do the trick.

Genetics

Dig We Must

Hillery Metz and Hopi Hoekstra/Harvard University

Evolutionary biologists at Harvard took a tiny species of deer mice, known for building elaborate burrows with long tunnels, and bred it with another species of deer mice, which builds short-tunneled burrows. Comparing the DNA of the original mice with their offspring, the biologists pinpointed four regions of genetic code that help tell the mice what kind of burrow to construct.

Aerospace

Launch, Then Inflate

Uncredited/Bigelow Aerospace, via Associated Press

NASA signed a contract for an inflatable space habitat — roughly pineapple-shaped, with walls of floppy cloth — that will ideally be appended to the International Space Station in 2015. NASA aims to use the pod to test inflatable technology in space, but the company that builds these things, Bigelow Aerospace, has bigger ambitions: think of a 12-person apartment and laboratory in the sky, with two months’ rent at north of $26 million.

Biology

What’s Green and Flies?

Jodi Rowley/Australian Museum

National Geographic reported on an Australian researcher working in Vietnam who discovered a great-looking new species of flying frog. Described as having flappy forearms (the better for gliding), the three-and-a-half-inch-long frog likes to “parachute” from tree to tree, Jodi Rowley, an amphibian biologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, told the magazine. She named it Helen’s Flying Frog, for her mother.

Privacy

That’s Joe’s DNA!

People who volunteer their genetic information for the betterment of science — and are assured anonymity — may find that their privacy is not a slam dunk. A researcher who set out to crack the identities of a few men whose genomes appeared in a public database was able to do so using genealogical Web sites (where people upload parts of their genomes to try to find relatives) as well as some simple search tools. He was trying to test the database’s security, but even he did not expect it to be so easy.

Genetics

An On/Off Switch for Disease

Geneticists have long puzzled over what it is that activates a disease in one person but not in another — even in identical twins. Now researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who studied people with rheumatoid arthritis have identified a pattern of chemical tags that tell genes whether to turn on or not. In rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system attacks the body, and it is thought the tags enable the attack.

Planetary Science

That Red Planet

Everybody loves Mars, and we’re all secretly hoping that NASA’s plucky little rover finds evidence of life there. Meanwhile, a separate NASA craft — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been looping the planet since 2006 — took some pictures of a huge crater that looks as if it once held a lake fed by groundwater. It is too soon to say if the lake held living things, but NASA’s news release did include the happy phrase “clues to subsurface habitability.”

COMING UP

Animal Testing

Retiring Chimps

Emily Wabitsch/European Pressphoto Agency

A lot of people have strong feelings about the use of chimpanzees in biomedical and behavioral experiments, and the National Institutes of Health has been listening. On Tuesday, the agency is to release its recommendations for curtailing chimp research in a big way. This will be but a single step in a long process and it will apply only to the chimps the agency owns, but it may well stir big reactions from many constituencies.

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On the Road: A Farewell to ‘Nudity’ at Airport Checkpoints

TRULY bad ideas never die, in my opinion. So I wasn’t surprised to hear that, while the Transportation Security Administration says it is removing those much-reviled backscatter body-imaging scanners from airport checkpoints, the machines will be stored “until they can be redeployed to other mission priorities.”

I say, goodbye and good riddance to the scanners, which critics have called virtual strip-search machines. The T.S.A. wasn’t being specific about where the machines might be reused, but the federal government oversees transportation security in a variety of places, including train stations.

For years, critics have insisted that the images displayed by the backscatter machines (so named because of the way their X-ray waves are reflected off a body) are unacceptably detailed and graphic. But the T.S.A. has said it was working on privacy protections for those images.

Now, under pressure from Congress, the T.S.A. says that all 174 of the machines in use at airport security checkpoints will be removed by June 1. And the reason is that the manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems, a division of OSI Systems Inc., would fail to meet a Congressional deadline of June 1 requiring that all airport body-imaging machines be fitted with software that “produces a generic image of the individual being screened.”

The T.S.A. sounded pretty blunt in pointing a finger at the manufacturer. “Rapiscan was unable to fulfill their end of the contract” and develop the required privacy software, the agency said.

In a statement, Deepak Chopra, the chief executive of OSI Systems, noted the company’s longstanding “close relationship with the security agency,” and added, “We look forward to continuing to provide leading-edge technologies and services to the T.S.A.”

Of course, removing all Rapiscan machines (the T.S.A. had already taken 76 out of service last year) does not mean the end of the airport body-imaging machines. Nor does it mean the end of the widely disliked checkpoint drill of divesting yourself of all possessions, even handkerchiefs, and standing at attention, arms raised like an arrested bandit, while an electronic scanner buzzes over your body and a screener surveys the image.

Including the soon-to-be-gone Rapiscan machines, there are 843 body-scanners now in use at checkpoints in about 200 airports in the United States. But the majority of those machines, made by a unit of L-3 Communications Inc., employ millimeter-wave technology, which uses radio frequency waves to inspect a body. The Rapiscan machines use low-intensity X-ray beams.

In 2010, the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the T.S.A.’s overseer, the Department of Homeland Security, calling for suspension of the use of body scanners that create “a physically invasive strip-search.” Meanwhile, criticism in Congress continued to mount.

L-3 had adopted software for its millimeter-wave machines that addressed the naked body image concerns. Rather than displaying the image of an individual’s naked body, the L-3 machines depict any foreign object on a person and display only a generic body outline, similar to the police chalk outline of a body at a homicide scene.

The imminent end of the Rapiscan backscatter machines — which cost about $180,000 each — would also seem to resolve the issue of safe levels of radiation doses that some critics raised about the technology. The T.S.A. repeated Monday that safety studies have shown those radiation concerns to be unwarranted.

The T.S.A. also stressed that the Rapiscan machines are being removed only because of the Congressional deadline on the image software and not for any safety reasons. “All equipment met its security mission,” David Castelveter, an agency spokesman, said on Monday.

The agency said that most of the backscatter units will be replaced with millimeter-wave units. The agency has about 60 millimeter-wave machines on order, which are about the same price as the Rapiscan machines, and is expected to buy more. Under the agreement, Rapiscan will bear the expense of removing its backscatter units from checkpoints and storing them until they can put to use elsewhere.

OSI said last week that it has not sold any Rapiscan machines to the T.S.A. in the 2012 and 2013 fiscal years and that it has about $5 million in orders that will now be “debooked.” But taxpayers have spent over $45 million on the Rapiscan machines now in the T.S.A.’s hands.

As to the future of those machines, Representative Bennie G. Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who is ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement, “I want to make clear that if these machines cannot be altered to prevent the photographing of nude images, the American public must be assured that these machines will not be used in any other public federal facility.”

E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com

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Detainees in Afghanistan still being tortured, U.N. reports

KABUL, Afghanistan — Suspected insurgents continue to be tortured at numerous Afghan detention facilities, the United Nations reported Sunday.

More than half of the 635 detainees questioned by U.N. investigators in the 12 months ending in October were ill-treated or tortured, including being subjected to severe beatings or electric shocks, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said.

The allegations, which the Afghan government calls "exaggerated," are likely to complicate discussions about the handling of detainees, a source of debate between the United States and Afghanistan as the countries prepare for the departure of most foreign troops next year.

Many of the suspected fighters who end up in Afghan custody are captured by U.S. and allied troops. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led force said it has suspended the transfer of detainees to the facilities identified in the U.N. report and is working with Afghan authorities to address abuses.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has frequently maintained that the handling of detainees is a question of national sovereignty. During discussions with President Obama this month, he reiterated his demand that all Afghan prisoners be turned over to Afghan authorities.

In a written response accompanying the U.N. report, the Afghan government said it had taken steps to ensure the lawful treatment of detainees, including issuing policy directives, increasing training and monitoring, and reassigning personnel.

Though it conceded that some abuses were possible, the government said insurgents were coached to say they had been mistreated if captured.

Jan Kubis, who heads the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, acknowledged Afghan government efforts, which he said had yielded some positive results. "But the system isn't robust enough to eliminate ill-treatment of detainees," Kubis said in a statement. "Clearly more needs to be done to end and prevent torture."

The U.N. said allegations of torture decreased at some facilities after it issued a report in 2011 alleging widespread abuses in the Afghan detention system. The decrease corresponded with the suspension of NATO transfers to some facilities and increased monitoring, including by the NATO force, the new report said. But when foreign troops resumed transfers to those facilities and reduced monitoring, a resumption of abuses was observed.

Abuses appeared particularly prevalent at 34 facilities operated by the Afghan National Police, the border police and the National Directorate of Security, the country's intelligence agency, the study said.

Investigators found that the number of detainees in police custody who had been subjected to torture or ill-treatment increased from 35% in 2011 to 43% last year, while the prevalence of abuse at intelligence facilities dropped from 46% to 34%.

In all, 14 methods of abuse were documented. The report said evidence of torture occurred most frequently at facilities in the southern province of Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban insurgency.

U.N. investigators received what they described as credible reports about the disappearance of 81 people who were arrested by Kandahar police between September 2011 and October 2012. They were also told about the reported existence of several unofficial detention sites and said some detainees held by intelligence officials were hidden from international observers — allegations denied by the intelligence agency.

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

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