Second Illness Infects Meningitis Sufferers

Just when they might have thought they were in the clear, people recovering from meningitis in an outbreak caused by a contaminated steroid drug have been struck by a second illness.

The new problem, called an epidural abscess, is an infection near the spine at the site where the drug — contaminated by a fungus — was injected to treat back or neck pain. The abscesses are a localized infection, different from meningitis, which affects the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. But in some cases, an untreated abscess can cause meningitis. The abscesses have formed even while patients were taking powerful antifungal medicines, putting them back in the hospital for more treatment, often with surgery.

The problem has just begun to emerge, so far mostly in Michigan, which has had more people sickened by the drug — 112 out of 404 nationwide — than any other state.

“We’re hearing about it in Michigan and other locations as well,” said Dr. Tom M. Chiller, the deputy chief of the mycotic diseases branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We don’t have a good handle on how many people are coming back.”

He added, “We are just learning about this and trying to assess how best to manage these patients. They’re very complicated.”

In the last few days, about a third of the 53 patients treated for meningitis at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., have returned with abscesses, said Dr. Lakshmi K. Halasyamani, the chief medical officer.

“This is a significant shift in the presentation of this fungal infection, and quite concerning,” she said. “An epidural abscess is very serious. It’s not something we expected.”

She and other experts said they were especially puzzled that the infections could occur even though patients were taking drugs that, at least in tests, appeared to work against the fungus causing the infection, a type of black mold called Exserohilum.

The main symptom is severe pain near the injection site. But the abscesses are internal, with no visible signs on the skin, so it takes an M.R.I. scan to make the diagnosis. Some patients have more than one abscess. In some cases, the infection can be drained or cleaned out by a neurosurgeon.

But sometimes fungal strands and abnormal tissue are wrapped around nerves and cannot be surgically removed, said Dr. Carol A. Kauffman, an expert on fungal diseases at the University of Michigan. In such cases, all doctors can do is give a combination of antifungal drugs and hope for the best. They have very little experience with this type of infection.

Some patients have had epidural abscesses without meningitis; St. Joseph Mercy Hospital has had 34 such cases.

A spokesman for the health department in Tennessee, which has had 78 meningitis cases, said that a few cases of epidural abscess had also occurred there, and that the state was trying to assess the extent of the problem.

Dr. Chiller said doctors were also reporting that some patients exposed to the tainted drug had arachnoiditis, a nerve inflammation near the spine that can cause intense pain, bladder problems and numbness.

“Unfortunately, we know from the rare cases of fungal meningitis that occur, that you can have complicated courses for this disease, and it requires prolonged therapy and can have some devastating consequences,” he said.

The meningitis outbreak, first recognized in late September, is one of the worst public health disasters ever caused by a contaminated drug. So far, 29 people have died, often from strokes caused by the infection. The case count is continuing to rise. The drug was a steroid, methylprednisolone acetate, made by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. Three contaminated lots of the drug, more than 17,000 vials, were shipped around the country, and about 14,000 people were injected with the drug, mostly for neck and back pain. But some received injections for arthritic joints and have developed joint infections.

Inspections of the compounding center have revealed extensive contamination. It has been shut down, as has another Massachusetts company, Ameridose, with some of the same owners. Both companies have had their products recalled.

Compounding pharmacies, which mix their own drugs, have had little regulation from either states or the federal government, and several others have been shut down recently after inspections found sanitation problems.

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Bits Blog: Data Shows Twitter Posts That Resonate With Electorate

In Florida, voters responded most when Mitt Romney posted about education and when President Obama did the same about foreign affairs. In Ohio, Mr. Obama’s posted about gay rights, more so than any other topic, held the most traction. For Mr. Romney, it was his posts about the economy.

Twitter introduced an interactive map on Thursday showing which of the candidates’ tweets drove the most engagement — measured by the number of times the tweet was reposted or favorited — on Twitter at the national and state levels.

Nationwide, Mr. Obama’s most popular post was, “No family should have to set aside a college acceptance letter because they don’t have the money.” His second most popular post was actually a quote from Vice President Biden about women’s rights:  “VP Biden: I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people, women, that they can’t control their bodies.” Interestingly, at the state level, that post resonated most with voters in Wyoming, followed by Iowa, South Dakota and West Virginia — states where women’s rights are not considered the pivotal issue.

Mr. Romney’s most popular post was this remark on Sept. 11th: “On this most somber day, America is united under God in its quest for peace and freedom at home and across the world.” Second most popular was a comment about wealth distribution: “I am running for president to get us creating wealth again – not to redistribute it.”

In swing states, Twitter’s map tells an interesting, and sometimes counter intuitive story. According to the latest polls, Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado and Florida are still toss-ups.

In the last presidential election, the President won Virginia by seven percentage points. This year, the race is expected to be much closer. There, voters’ response was highest when the candidates posted about issues related to retirement.

The same was true for Wisconsin. Democrats carried the state in the last six presidential elections, but the addition of one of their own, Representative Paul D. Ryan, to Mr. Romney’s ticket has kept the race tight. There, retirement was also the issue that seemed to have the most traction on Twitter.

In Iowa, where six electoral votes are up for grabs, voters were most engaged when Mr. Obama posted about topics related to energy and the environment and when Romney posted about health care.

Nevada voters responded most to Obama’s comments on taxes. Mr. Obama’s most popular post in that state was “1,240,000 middle-class families in Nevada could face a tax increase under Mitt Romney.” Mr. Romney’s posts about education drove the highest level of engagement. “With over 60k jobs lost & the highest unemployment rate in the nation, Nevadans aren’t better off under @BarackObama,” was Mr. Romney’s most popular post.

In Colorado, women’s issues have taken center stage after women proved crucial to two Democratic victories in the 2010 races for Senate and governor. But according to Twitter’s data, Colorado voters responded in the largest numbers when Mr. Obama posted about taxes. For Mr. Romney, it was his remarks about terrorism.

If, as in the 2004 election, the race comes down to Florida, then the candidates may do well to defy conventional wisdom that retirement is all Florida voters care about. Within Florida, Mr. Romney’s posts about retirement did not resonate as well as those about education and foreign affairs. Likewise, Mr. Obama’s posts about topics relevant to retirement had less traction than his those about terrorism and foreign affairs.

Despite the perception that Twitter is just a place for East and West coasters to talk to each other, Twitter’s map shows a surprising level of engagement in states like Wyoming, Utah, Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma. The opposite proved true for New Hampshire and Vermont, where Twitter noted it was not able to collect enough data to draw conclusions.

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Modest Jobs Growth in Final Report Before Election

The economy may have some more underlying strength than earlier believed, according to the final job market report released before Tuesday’s presidential election.

The nation’s employers added 171,000 positions in October, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and more jobs than initially estimated in both August and September. Hiring was broad-based, with just about every industry except state government adding at least a handful of jobs. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 7.9 percent in October, from 7.8 percent in September, but for a good reason: more workers joined the labor force and so officially counted as unemployed.

None of this makes for a game-changer in the presidential race, analysts said. But it appeared to provide some relief for President Obama, whose campaign could have been sideswiped by bad news from the volatile monthly jobs report.

With the latest numbers, the economy finally shows a net gain of jobs under his presidency; his record had previously been weighed down by huge layoffs in his first year in office.

The report also allayed widespread suspicion that September’s plunge in the unemployment rate — to below 8 percent for the first time since the month he took office — might have been a one-month statistical fluke.

“Generally, the report shows that things are better than we’d expected and certainly better than we’d thought a few months ago,” said Paul Dales, senior United States economist for Capital Economics. “But we’re still not making enough progress to bring that unemployment rate down significantly and rapidly.”

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, said in a statement that the jobs report was evidence of the need to change the nation’s economic policies.

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill,” he said. He also noted that October’s unemployment rate of 7.9 percent was higher than the 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office in January 2009.

Economists were hopeful that once the election was over and Congress addressed the major fiscal tightening scheduled for the end of this year, job growth could speed up further.

“If we can do this kind of job growth with all the uncertainty out there, imagine if we were to clear up those tax issues and hold back the majority of tax increases that are pending at the end of the year,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “We could do much better in 2013, maybe as well as we appeared to be doing earlier this year.”

In October, the biggest job gains were in professional and business services, health care and retail trade, the Labor Department said. Government payrolls dipped slightly. State and local governments have been shedding jobs most months over the last three years.

One of the lowlights of the report was in hourly wages, which remained flat in October after showing barely any growth in the previous several months.

“Perhaps the decline in real wages is a factor here in being able to employ more people,” Mr. Ryding said. “It’s something to keep in mind when we think about creating jobs and whether we’re maybe creating the wrong sort of jobs.”

A report from the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy organization that focuses on labor issues, found that while the majority of jobs lost in the downturn were middle-income jobs, the majority of the jobs created since then have been lower-wage ones.

There have now been 25 consecutive months of jobs gains in the United States, but the increases have been barely large enough to absorb the increase in the population. A queue of about 12 million unemployed people remain waiting for work, about two out of five of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.

That is in addition to more than eight million people who are working part time but really want full-time jobs.

“I’m not just competing against all the other people who are out of work,” said Griff Coxey, 57, of Cascade, Wis., who was laid off in May from his controller job at a small business. “I’m also competing against all those people who are actually working but are underemployed.”

Like two million other idle workers, Mr. Coxey is scheduled to lose his unemployment benefits the last week of the year, when the federal extensions abruptly expire. He said he still had some savings to fall back on, but many workers do not.

Labor advocates and many economists have been urging Congress to renew the benefits as part of their discussions of the “fiscal cliff” during their postelection session. So far, though, the issue has received little attention, and analysts worry that ending extended benefits could disrupt what modest forward momentum the economy currently has.

“Federal unemployment benefits are one of the most effective stimuli we have,” said Christine L. Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.

“The recovery is still fragile,” she said, “and to pull that amount of income and expenditure out of the economy — particularly at a time when people thinking about the holiday season — will have a significant impact on not just those individuals and their families but the economy as a whole.”

Friday’s jobs report was unlikely to affect policy from the Federal Reserve, which has pledged open-ended stimulus until the job market improves “substantially.”

“The Fed desires both a substantial and sustainable improvement in labor market conditions and is likely to read recent payroll growth as a positive step in the right direction, but just one step in a longer journey,” said Michael Gapen, director of United States research and global asset allocation at Barclays Capital.

The jobs snapshot for October was based on surveys conducted too early in the month to capture work disruptions across the East Coast caused by Hurricane Sandy. Economists expect that businesses and employment will resume their normal activity by the next jobs survey, in mid-November, and that some industries are likely to show an increase in hiring because of the storm.

“We had a lot of lost hours worked and production stuff still delayed, but much of that will be offsets by hiring of emergency workers, government workers and construction, to do all that emergency fixing,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial.

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Arthur R. Jensen, Who Set Off Debate on I.Q., Dies

Arthur R. Jensen, an educational psychologist who ignited an international firestorm with a 1969 article suggesting that the gap in intelligence-test scores between black and white students might be rooted in genetic differences between the races, died on Oct. 22 at his home in Kelseyville, Calif. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an emeritus professor in the Graduate School of Education.

Professor Jensen was deeply interested in differential psychology, a field whose central question — What makes people behave and think differently from one another? — strikes at the heart of the age-old nature-nurture debate.

Because of his empirical work in the field on the quantification of general intelligence (a subject that had long invited a more diffuse, impressionistic approach), he was regarded by many colleagues as one of the most important psychologists of his day.

But a wider public remembered him almost exclusively for his 1969 article “How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Achievement?” Published in The Harvard Educational Review, a scholarly journal, the article quickly became — and remains even now — one of the most controversial in psychology.

In the article, Professor Jensen posited two types of learning ability. Level I, associative ability, entailed the rote retention of facts. Level II, conceptual ability, involved abstract thinking and problem-solving. This type, he argued, was roughly equivalent to general intelligence, denoted in psychology by the letter “g.”

In administering I.Q. tests to diverse groups of students, Professor Jensen found Level I ability to be fairly consistent across races. When he examined Level II ability, by contrast, he found it more prevalent among whites than blacks, and still more prevalent among Asians than whites.

Drawing on these findings, Professor Jensen argued that general intelligence is largely genetically determined, with cultural forces shaping it only to a small extent. For this reason, he wrote in 1969, compensatory education programs like Head Start are doomed to fail.

While some observers praised Professor Jensen as a scientist unafraid to go where the data led him, others called him a racist. He continued to be heckled at speaking engagements throughout his career. He was burned in effigy on some college campuses and received death threats; for a time, he was accompanied by bodyguards.

The idea that intelligence cleaved along racial lines quickly became known as Jensenism, and its merits were the subject of heated public discussion for years afterward. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, devoted much of his 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” to criticizing Professor Jensen’s claims.

More recently, Professor Jensen’s ideas about race and the heritability of intelligence were cited approvingly in “The Bell Curve,” the 1994 book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray that engendered renewed debate on the subject.

Today, some psychologists say that Professor Jensen’s work has been misunderstood. In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Douglas Detterman, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University who edits the journal Intelligence, said: “If you look at the Harvard Educational Review paper, he discusses race very little in that paper, but he did say that it’s a possibility that there are genetic differences among racial groups. And that was not a very popular idea when that paper came out.”

Professor Detterman, who in 1998 devoted a special issue of Intelligence to Professor Jensen’s work, added: “When he wrote that paper, probably a large portion of psychologists wouldn’t have believed that there was a hereditary basis for intellectual ability. Now, there’s very little argument about that in the field. Whether there are differences between races is another thing altogether.”

Arthur Robert Jensen was born in San Diego on Aug. 24, 1923. An accomplished clarinetist, he considered pursuing a career as an orchestra conductor before taking a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Berkeley, followed by a master’s in the field from San Diego State College and a Ph.D. from Columbia. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1958.

Professor Jensen’s wife, Barbara, died before him. Survivors include a daughter, Bobbi Morey.

Among his books are “Genetics and Education” (1972), “Educability and Group Differences” (1973), “The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability” (1998) and “Clocking the Mind: Mental Chronometry and Individual Differences” (2006).

Even psychologists who disagree with Professor Jensen’s conclusions defend him against charges of racism.

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Arthur R. Jensen, Who Set Off Debate on I.Q., Dies

Arthur R. Jensen, an educational psychologist who ignited an international firestorm with a 1969 article suggesting that the gap in intelligence-test scores between black and white students might be rooted in genetic differences between the races, died on Oct. 22 at his home in Kelseyville, Calif. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an emeritus professor in the Graduate School of Education.

Professor Jensen was deeply interested in differential psychology, a field whose central question — What makes people behave and think differently from one another? — strikes at the heart of the age-old nature-nurture debate.

Because of his empirical work in the field on the quantification of general intelligence (a subject that had long invited a more diffuse, impressionistic approach), he was regarded by many colleagues as one of the most important psychologists of his day.

But a wider public remembered him almost exclusively for his 1969 article “How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Achievement?” Published in The Harvard Educational Review, a scholarly journal, the article quickly became — and remains even now — one of the most controversial in psychology.

In the article, Professor Jensen posited two types of learning ability. Level I, associative ability, entailed the rote retention of facts. Level II, conceptual ability, involved abstract thinking and problem-solving. This type, he argued, was roughly equivalent to general intelligence, denoted in psychology by the letter “g.”

In administering I.Q. tests to diverse groups of students, Professor Jensen found Level I ability to be fairly consistent across races. When he examined Level II ability, by contrast, he found it more prevalent among whites than blacks, and still more prevalent among Asians than whites.

Drawing on these findings, Professor Jensen argued that general intelligence is largely genetically determined, with cultural forces shaping it only to a small extent. For this reason, he wrote in 1969, compensatory education programs like Head Start are doomed to fail.

While some observers praised Professor Jensen as a scientist unafraid to go where the data led him, others called him a racist. He continued to be heckled at speaking engagements throughout his career. He was burned in effigy on some college campuses and received death threats; for a time, he was accompanied by bodyguards.

The idea that intelligence cleaved along racial lines quickly became known as Jensenism, and its merits were the subject of heated public discussion for years afterward. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, devoted much of his 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” to criticizing Professor Jensen’s claims.

More recently, Professor Jensen’s ideas about race and the heritability of intelligence were cited approvingly in “The Bell Curve,” the 1994 book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray that engendered renewed debate on the subject.

Today, some psychologists say that Professor Jensen’s work has been misunderstood. In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Douglas Detterman, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University who edits the journal Intelligence, said: “If you look at the Harvard Educational Review paper, he discusses race very little in that paper, but he did say that it’s a possibility that there are genetic differences among racial groups. And that was not a very popular idea when that paper came out.”

Professor Detterman, who in 1998 devoted a special issue of Intelligence to Professor Jensen’s work, added: “When he wrote that paper, probably a large portion of psychologists wouldn’t have believed that there was a hereditary basis for intellectual ability. Now, there’s very little argument about that in the field. Whether there are differences between races is another thing altogether.”

Arthur Robert Jensen was born in San Diego on Aug. 24, 1923. An accomplished clarinetist, he considered pursuing a career as an orchestra conductor before taking a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Berkeley, followed by a master’s in the field from San Diego State College and a Ph.D. from Columbia. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1958.

Professor Jensen’s wife, Barbara, died before him. Survivors include a daughter, Bobbi Morey.

Among his books are “Genetics and Education” (1972), “Educability and Group Differences” (1973), “The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability” (1998) and “Clocking the Mind: Mental Chronometry and Individual Differences” (2006).

Even psychologists who disagree with Professor Jensen’s conclusions defend him against charges of racism.

Read More..

Sony, Sharp and Panasonic Report Significant Losses

TOKYO — After years of bets gone wrong and lost opportunities, three of Japan’s consumer electronics giants are showing some signs of faltering.

In the most dire warning, Sharp forecast on Thursday a 450 billion yen ($5.6 billion) full-year loss and warned that it had “material doubts” about its ability to survive.

On the same day, Panasonic’s shares lost a fifth of their value in Tokyo after the company forecast a 765 billion yen ($9.6 billion) annual net loss from write-downs in its solar-power, battery and mobile handset businesses.

And Sony, perhaps the best positioned of the companies, posted a net loss of 15.5 billion yen ($194 million) for the quarter on Thursday and warned of falling sales in almost every product it sells.

“We have a lot of great technology which we want to tap to revive and generate profit, but the company does not have that vitality,” Takashi Okuda, Sharp’s chief executive, told reporters after the company posted a net loss of 249 billion yen ($3.1 billion) for the three months to September. The loss was far larger than expected.

In a statement, the company said it had a “serious negative operating cash flow” which raised “serious doubts” about its ability to continue as a going concern, and said it was taking steps, including pay cuts, voluntary redundancies and asset sales, to generate cash flow.

While Sharp is in the most serious trouble, the three companies’ woes are similar at the core.

All three make good quality, even cutting-edge products — but so do their overseas competitors, usually at lower prices. None of the three have managed to generate the brand pizazz of Apple, or the marketing muscle of Samsung Electronics. In addition, a stubbornly strong yen continues to sap their competitiveness, while Japan’s territorial dispute with China has hurt sales there.

The scale of the losses is the result of specific missteps, from huge investments in the wrong technologies to a reluctance to exit loss-making businesses. A manufacturing bubble here in the mid-2000s — fed partly by an unusually weak currency and Americans flush with cash from rising home prices — masked continued weaknesses in their business models and spurred the companies to take big bets that backfired.

When the global financial crisis brought that boom to an end in 2008, the three were saddled with excess capacity, bloated work forces and investments that they could hardly hope to recoup. And their refusal to make a big enough departure from the ways of their glory years is now making a comeback difficult.

“Many investors are longing for reforms that will let all of the pus out,” Yuji Fujimori, technology analyst at Barclays Capital in Tokyo, said in a recent note to clients.

Sharp’s stumble, in many ways, has been the most humbling. It was the biggest beneficiary of the manufacturing bubble: from 2000 to 2007, its profits jumped 150 percent. Sharp’s high-end Aquos liquid-crystal display televisions — which it manufactured at state-of-the-art factories in Kameyama, in western Japan — were a runaway hit in the nascent flat-panel market. The spinoff Aquos cellphone topped Japanese sales rankings. Sharp’s solar batteries also sold briskly, helped by a bubble in green technologies.

The company’s success during this period seemed to validate Japan’s penchant for manufacturing their most important products in-house. In advertisements, Sharp showed off its cutting-edge factories.

But even before the financial crisis, analysts were warning of an impending crash in prices of flat-panel televisions, which were fast becoming commodities that cheap upstarts could emulate. In 2008, the iPhone made its debut in Japan, the end of an era for Japanese-style cellphones. Chinese upstarts were starting to flood global markets with cheap solar panels and batteries. In consumer electronics, outsourced manufacturing became the norm.

Still, Sharp did not change course. It built a new factory in Sakai, Japan, which could make 6 million large LCD panels a year — more than the size of the global market at the time. Sharp missed the smartphone wave, and its cellphone sales in Japan halved from 2007 to 2012. And in late 2011, the solar bubble burst, driving many solar power companies into bankruptcy and Sharp’s solar batteries business into the red. The unit has not turned a profit since.

Now, the Kameyama factories no longer make televisions but panels for Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

Panasonic, for its part, also bet heavily on plasma televisions in 2003, pouring some 600 billion yen into a series of factories in Amagasaki, not far from Sharp’s own plant. It also bet on solar panels and rechargeable batteries, buying Sanyo in 2009.

But with plasma now a fading technology and solar power struggling, Panasonic is saddled with major losses. Last year, it announced that a factory in Amagasaki was closing, less than two years after it opened.

Kazuhiro Tsuga, who took the helm at Panasonic this year, was blunt in describing his company’s predicament. “We are among the losers in consumer electronics," he told a news conference on Wednesday. He now promises to shift the company away from money-losing televisions and gadgets.

Of the three, Sony now seems the most prescient. Its executives have preached the power of networks and content since the 1990s, building up a vast catalog of music and movies to lure users to their devices. Sony has also moved to slash costs and jobs and sell off some unprofitable businesses, refocusing the company on digital cameras and imaging technology, video games and mobile devices. This quarter, the sale of its chemical products business, which made materials for LCDs and optical discs, helped alleviate losses. Sony is now making a push into the medical field with an investment in the endoscope maker Olympus.

Internal squabbling has quashed its efforts to marry its hardware and software, however, and it refuses to abandon one of its biggest money-losers, its television business, which has bled red ink for eight consecutive years.

“We intend to hunker down and build a profitable business,” Masaru Kato, Sony’s chief financial officer, told a news conference Thursday. “And where we can, we will chase new markets.”

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Guinea-Bissau, After Coup, Is Drug-Trafficking Haven

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Guinea-Bissau soldiers patrolled a street in the capital, Bissau, on Oct. 21 after dissident soldiers raided an army barracks in an apparent attempt to topple the military junta.

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau — When the army ousted the president here just months before his term was to expire, a thirst for power by the officer corps did not fully explain the offensive. But a sizable increase in drug trafficking in this troubled country since the military took over has raised suspicions that the president’s sudden removal was what amounted to a cocaine coup.

The military brass here has long been associated with drug trafficking, but the coup last spring means soldiers now control the drug racket and the country itself, turning Guinea-Bissau in the eyes of some international counternarcotics experts into a nation where illegal drugs are sanctioned at the top.

“They are probably the worst narco-state that’s out there on the continent,” said a senior Drug Enforcement Administration official in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his work in the region. “They are a major problem.”

Since the April 12 coup, more small twin-engine planes than ever are making the 1,600-mile Atlantic crossing from Latin America to the edge of Africa’s western bulge, landing in Guinea-Bissau’s fields, uninhabited islands and remote estuaries. There they unload their cargos of cocaine for transshipment north, experts say.

The fact that the army has put in place a figurehead government and that military officers continue to call the shots behind the scenes only intensifies the problem.

The political instability continued as soldiers attacked an army barracks on Oct. 21, apparently in an attempt to topple the government. A dissident army captain was arrested on an offshore island on Oct. 27 and accused of being the organizer of the countercoup attempt. Two critics of the government were also assaulted and then left outside the capital.

From April to July there were at least 20 landings in Guinea-Bissau of small planes that United Nations officials suspected were drug flights — traffic that could represent more than half the estimated annual cocaine volume for the region. The planes need to carry a one-and-a-half-ton cargo to make the trans-Atlantic trip viable, officials say. Europe, already the destination for about 50 tons of cocaine annually from West Africa, United Nations officials say, could be in for a far greater flood.

Was the military coup itself a diversion for drug trafficking? Some experts point to signs that as the armed forces were seizing the presidency, taking over radio stations and arresting government officials, there was a flurry of drug activity on one of the islands of the Bijagós Archipelago, what amounted to a three-day offloading of suspicious sacks.

That surreptitious activity appears to have been simply a prelude.

“There has clearly been an increase in Guinea-Bissau in the last several months,” said Pierre Lapaque, head of the regional United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for West and Central Africa. “We are seeing more and more drugs regularly arriving in this country.”

Mr. Lapaque called the trafficking in Guinea-Bissau “a major worry” and an “open sore,” and, like others, suggested that it was no coincidence that trafficking had spiked since the coup.

Joaquin Gonzalez-Ducay, the European Union ambassador in Bissau, said: “As a country it is controlled by those who formed the coup d’état. They can do what they want to do. Now they have free rein.”

The senior D.E.A. official said, “People at the highest levels of the military are involved in the facilitation” of trafficking, and added: “In other African countries government officials are part of the problem. In Guinea-Bissau, it is the government itself that is the problem.”

United Nations officials agree. “The coup was perpetrated by people totally embedded in the drugs business,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the political environment here.

The country’s former prosecutor general, Octávio Inocêncio Alves, said, “A lot of the traffickers have direct relationships with the military.”

The civilian government and the military leadership that sits watchfully in its headquarters in an old Portuguese fort at the other end of town reject the United Nations drug accusations.

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Live Coverage: Burdens of Storm’s Damage Ease Slightly

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State-by-State Guide

A look at the devastation caused in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy from North Carolina to New England.

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DealBook: Stocks Little Changed as Market Reopens

The major stock indexes were little changed in light trading on Wednesday morning as the market reopened after a two-day shutdown caused by Hurricane Sandy.

A bevy of TV news crews and camera-toting tourists thronged the New York Stock Exchange for the opening, but the trading floor betrayed little that was unusual.

A small crowd enveloped Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City as he briefly stepped onto the floor to greet exchange workers. He later took to the balcony overlooking the pits to ring the opening bell, flanked by Duncan L. Niederauer, the chief executive of NYSE Euronext, and Robert Steel, a deputy mayor.

As the familiar clang rang through the hall for the first time this week, a small cheer erupted from the floor.

The dozen staffers at “the ramp,” an important N.Y.S.E. nerve center on the floor, scanned a wall of monitors to check on market activity.

Hurricane Sandy Multimedia

Milling about the floor was Lawrence E. Leibowitz, NYSE Euronext’s chief operating officer, checking on the state of operations. It was his second straight day at the exchange, having slept there overnight after wading from his home to Wall Street.

“There have been very few, very isolated problems,” Mr. Leibowitz said. He pointed to blank monitors that were shut off because the data provider was delivering incorrect market data.

“If that’s the worst of our problems,’ he added, “we’re in good shape.”

Mr. Niederauer seemed pleased as well. Wednesday was his first day back at the exchange since last week, having worked remotely because he could not come into the city.

“We’re pleased to see the turnout of staff,” he said, with many market makers being nearly fully represented.

He said many technical issues had been resolved, though technicians from Verizon were on hand to patch spotty communications and network connections. Many trading firms resorted to sharing working Internet and phone lines, while specialists ducked outside to get cellphone service unavailable on the floor.

At midday, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 0.11 percent, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was 0.16 percent lower and the Nasdaq composite index was off 0.55 percent.

Several specialists said that in some ways, the morning had been easier than expected. Commuting was smoother, they said, with little traffic on the roads. And the exchange provided special dispensation to park on nearby streets.

Jonathan D. Corpina, a senior managing partner at Meridian Equity Partners, came armed with a flashlight to navigate the darkened streets of Lower Manhattan. But he found it easy to find the exchange, which was illuminated thanks to backup generators, and dive into work.

“We’re here filling orders, and it’s business as usual,” he said.

Another trader, Peter Costa, said he had noticed little that was out of the ordinary, except perhaps slightly lower volume.

“To me, this feels like a Monday,” he said, “but on a Wednesday.”

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Q & A: Why Does Some Hair Frizz When It’s Humid?

Q. Why does some hair frizz when it’s humid?

A. Counterintuitively, your hair may be too dry when it meets humid air, suggested Dr. Andrew Avarbock, a dermatologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

“Hair is composed primarily of lipids, water and a protein called keratin, important for hair strength and structure,” Dr. Avarbock said. “Alterations in these components affect the quality of hair. People with dry hair are the ones who mainly experience the frizz in humid weather. When it’s humid outside, dry or porous hair soaks up the excess water in the air, which alters interactions between keratin proteins.”

The outcome is swelling of the hair and breaks in its outer layer, called the cuticle, he said, resulting in the appearance of frizz.

“If hair is well moisturized, then environmental changes, such as in humidity, will have less impact on it,” Dr. Avarbock said.

Some kinds of hair are more prone to becoming frizzy, he said, including hair damaged by overheating, chemicals for coloring and permanent waves or vigorous brushing. Overuse of shampoos and alcohol-based gels and sprays also promotes drying.

Hair products that moisturize the hair, like conditioners, can help prevent frizz, as can more gentle treatment over all. Both hair and skin “need moisturizer to maintain water content for an optimal appearance,” Dr. Avarbock said. C. CLAIBORNE RAY

Readers may submit questions by mail to Question, Science Times, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018, or by e-mail to question@nytimes.com.

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Q & A: Why Does Some Hair Frizz When It’s Humid?

Q. Why does some hair frizz when it’s humid?

A. Counterintuitively, your hair may be too dry when it meets humid air, suggested Dr. Andrew Avarbock, a dermatologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

“Hair is composed primarily of lipids, water and a protein called keratin, important for hair strength and structure,” Dr. Avarbock said. “Alterations in these components affect the quality of hair. People with dry hair are the ones who mainly experience the frizz in humid weather. When it’s humid outside, dry or porous hair soaks up the excess water in the air, which alters interactions between keratin proteins.”

The outcome is swelling of the hair and breaks in its outer layer, called the cuticle, he said, resulting in the appearance of frizz.

“If hair is well moisturized, then environmental changes, such as in humidity, will have less impact on it,” Dr. Avarbock said.

Some kinds of hair are more prone to becoming frizzy, he said, including hair damaged by overheating, chemicals for coloring and permanent waves or vigorous brushing. Overuse of shampoos and alcohol-based gels and sprays also promotes drying.

Hair products that moisturize the hair, like conditioners, can help prevent frizz, as can more gentle treatment over all. Both hair and skin “need moisturizer to maintain water content for an optimal appearance,” Dr. Avarbock said. C. CLAIBORNE RAY

Readers may submit questions by mail to Question, Science Times, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018, or by e-mail to question@nytimes.com.

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F.C.C. Details Cellphone Problems

WASHINGTON — Cellphone calls in the Northeast region were continuing to fail Wednesday because one-quarter of the transmission sites in areas ravaged by Hurricane Sandy were knocked out and many of those are not expected to come back online for several days at least, government officials said.

The Federal Communications Commission also said “a small number” of 911 service centers — the sites that receive emergency calls and link them with first responders — also were out of service after the storm, the second time in recent months that 911 service has suffered weather-related failures. Many emergency calls were rerouted, officials said, to call centers that survived the storm.

“Our assumption is that communication outages could get worse before they get better,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday afternoon. “I want to emphasize that the storm is not over,” he said, referring to both the weather and the facilities.

Verizon Wireless said Wednesday that 6 percent of its cell sites remained down in storm-affected areas, although all of its switching and data centers “are functioning normally.” T-Mobile issued a statement saying that roughly 20 percent of its network in New York City was out of service, as was up to 10 percent of its network in Washington.

AT&T declined to specify the status of its systems on Wednesday. All of the companies said they were working to assess and repair the damaged networks.

Some of the emergency calls that were affected by the storm were rerouted to new 911 service centers without electronic location information, which tells the operator where the call originated. This means public safety officials must rely on callers for details about where an emergency was occurring, Mr. Genachowski said.

F.C.C. officials declined to identify where the affected 911 centers were located, or which phone companies were responsible for servicing them.

Roughly one-quarter of the residents of the 10 states that were affected by the storm also lost cable television and broadband Internet service, killing most or all of the connections that millions of consumers were relying on for information.

Few radio broadcasters were affected by the storm, said David Turetsky, the chief of the F.C.C.’s public safety and homeland security bureau. Three stations received F.C.C. permission to broadcast at higher power levels, and one station relocated its transmissions on the broadcast spectrum because of damage to its radio tower.

The F.C.C. activated its disaster reporting information system during the storm, a voluntary system through which wireless, landline, broadcast, satellite and cable TV companies can report the status of their systems. Based on those reports, and its own on-the-ground assessments, the F.C.C. knows where the problems are and which companies are responsible for addressing them, but officials declined on Tuesday to make that information public.

In its manual for use of the disaster system, the F.C.C. says that the information “is sensitive for national security and/or commercial reasons” and therefore will be treated as “presumptively confidential.”

Similar storm-related 911 failures have been the subject of previous F.C.C. scrutiny. The commission is currently in the middle of a formal inquiry into the causes of widespread failures of 911 networks in June resulting from the derecho, a violent wind and thunderstorm.

“From isolated breakdowns in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Pennsylvania to systemic failures in Northern Virginia and West Virginia, it appears that a significant number of 911 systems and services were partially or completely down for several days,” the F.C.C. said in statements related to that inquiry.

Roughly one million people in Northern Virginia were affected by 911 failures in June, which primarily occurred in systems managed by Verizon. Company officials said before this week’s storm that they had made a number of improvements to their emergency systems and backups that would help them maintain service during the storm.

The commission collected public comments on the 911 failures over the summer, but it has yet to report its findings.

Brian X. Chen contributed reporting from New York.

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Routines Restart, if With Less Power and Public Transit

Still hobbled by power failures and waterlogged transit, the New York region started to restore some transportation services on Wednesday as it struggled to return to daily life during a daunting period of recovery.

The extent of the challenge was apparent during the morning commute, which quickly froze to gridlock. People who normally took the subway or regional rail lines were forced into taxis or their own cars, clogging the streets. Drivers reported delays of hours, with vehicles lined up at the major crossings and at parking garages.

But the transportation situation could soon improve. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Wednesday afternoon that limited service would be restored to two commuter rail lines for the city’s suburbs — the Metro-North Railroad and the Long Island Rail Road — starting at 2 p.m. He also said limited subway service would resume starting on Thursday, with a bus bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but no service below 34th Street.

Mr. Cuomo said a major problem continued to be water in the subway tunnels, as well as in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which connects Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Getting water out of the tunnels, he said, was “one of the main orders of business.”

More than 4,000 cabs, which for the moment could be shared among harried commuters, offered another partial lifeline to those cut off by the continued suspension of subway service. Some ferries were expected to be crossing between New Jersey and Manhattan.

In a briefing, Mr. Cuomo said that the Queens-Midtown Tunnel was still closed, contributing to the high volume of traffic, and that traffic signals were still out. Power restoration was being worked on. The greatest challenge was on Long Island, and utility workers were being brought in from upstate to help.

“These are significant challenges,” he said.

But in other ways the city slowly went back to business. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg rang the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange after a two-day closing, the first for weather-related reasons since 1888, as Wall Street and other businesses began to shake off the storm and return to work.

Newark Liberty International Airport opened at 7 a.m., and Kennedy International Airport also resumed operations, but many airlines were still working on a limited basis. La Guardia Airport, which sustained damage, remained closed.

State courtrooms in the city were also reopening. Connecticut, New Jersey and New York began reopening many closed roads and bridges on Tuesday.

Yet schools, parks and East River tunnels remained closed in the city, and many residents up and down the mid-Atlantic still stumbled through their morning routines with candles, flashlights or in darkness.

Amtrak said it would provide modified Northeast Regional service from Newark to points south.

President Obama approved disaster declarations for New York and New Jersey, making them eligible for federal assistance for rebuilding.

On Wednesday, the president started a tour of storm-hit areas with Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

The two shook hands at the bottom of the stairs at Mr. Obama’s plane, and the president patted the governor on the back several times. Craig Fugate, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, also shook hands with Mr. Christie.

Mr. Christie and Mr. Obama talked to each other as they walked to Marine One, the president’s helicopter, for the brief ride to the storm-damaged area. Mr. Obama gestured to Mr. Christie to board the helicopter first.

“All of us have been shocked by the force of mother nature,” the president said in remarks before the trip. He promised “all available resources” for recovery efforts.

In Hoboken, N.J., a city of 50,000 people across the Hudson River from Manhattan, local officials issued dire warnings about thousands of people stranded by flooding, and the National Guard began moving in on Wednesday morning to try to rescue them.

“Keep an eye out, go down to the lowest possible floor, but do not go outside,” the city said on its Facebook page. “Signal to get their attention.”

Reporting on the storm was contributed by Peter Applebome, Charles V. Bagli, Nina Bernstein, Joseph Berger, Russ Buettner, John H. Cushman Jr., David W. Dunlap, Theo Emory, Ann Farmer, Sheri Fink, Emma Fitzsimmons, Lisa W. Foderaro, Joseph Goldstein, J. David Goodman, Michael M. Grynbaum, Danny Hakim, David M. Halbfinger, Christine Hauser, Anemona Hartocollis, Winnie Hu, Jon Hurdle, Kristin Hussey, Thomas Kaplan, Mark Landler, John Leland, Eric Lipton, Elizabeth Maker, Andrew Martin, Cynthia McCloud, Patrick McGeehan, Colin Moynihan, Sarah Maslin Nir, Sharon Otterman, Amisha Padnani, Michael Powell, Julia Preston, William K. Rashbaum, Ray Rivera, Liz Robbins, Sam Roberts, Wendy Ruderman, Marc Santora, Michael S. Schmidt, John Schwartz, Nate Schweber, Mosi Secret, Katharine Q. Seelye, Kirk Semple, Kim Severson, Michael D. Shear, Brian Stelter, Kate Taylor, Joyce Wadler, Timothy Williams, Michael Wilson and Steven Yaccino.

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