Tech Giants, Learning the Ways of Washington, Brace for More Scrutiny

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Nadine Wolf demonstrated against online piracy legislation a year ago in New York. The measures were defeated.

SAN FRANCISCO — Silicon Valley lobbied hard in Washington in 2012, and despite some friction with regulators, fared fairly well. In 2013, though, government scrutiny is likely to grow. And with this scrutiny will come even greater efforts by the tech industry to press its case in the nation’s capital and overseas.

In 2012, among other victories, the industry staved off calls for federal consumer privacy legislation and successfully pushed for a revamp of an obscure law that had placed strict privacy protections on Americans’ video rental records. It also helped achieve a stalemate on a proposed global effort to let Web users limit behavioral tracking online, using Do Not Track browser settings.

But this year is likely to put that issue in the spotlight again, and bring intense negotiations between industry and consumer rights groups over whether and how to allow consumers to limit tracking.

Congress is likely to revisit online security legislation — meant to safeguard critical infrastructure from attack — that failed last year. And a looming question for Web giants will be who takes the reins of the Federal Trade Commission, the industry’s main regulator, this year. David C. Vladeck, the director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, has resigned, and there have been suggestions that the chairman of the commission itself, Jon Leibowitz, will step down.

The agency is investigating Google over possible antitrust violations and will subject Facebook to audits of its privacy policy for the next 20 years. Its next steps could serve as a bellwether of how aggressively the commission will take on Web companies in the second Obama administration.

“Now that the election is over, Silicon Valley companies each are thinking through their strategy for the second Obama administration,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and a former White House privacy official. “The F.T.C. will have a new Democratic chairman. A priority for tech companies will be to discern the new chair’s own priorities.”

In early 2012, an unusual burst of lobbying by tech companies helped defeat antipiracy bills, which had been backed by the entertainment industry. Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google feared that the bills would force them to police the Internet.

At the end of the year, Silicon Valley also got its way when the Obama administration stood up against a proposed global treaty that would have given government authorities greater control over the Web.

The key to the industry’s successes in 2012 was simple: it expanded its footprint in Washington just as Washington began to pay closer attention to how technology companies affect consumers. “Privacy and security became top-tier important policy issues in Washington in 2012,” said David A. Hoffman, director of security policy and global privacy officer at Intel.

“Industry has realized it is important to be engaged,” he continued, “to make sure government stakeholders are fully informed and educated about the role that new technology plays and to make sure any action taken doesn’t unnecessarily burden the innovation economy while still protecting individual trust in new technology.”

At the end of 2012, tech companies were on track to have spent record amounts on lobbying for the year. In the first three quarters, they spent close to $100 million, which meant that they were likely to surpass the $127 million they spent on lobbying in 2011, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based nonpartisan group that tracks corporate spending. Even the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz hired a lobbyist in Washington: Adrian Fenty, a former mayor of the city.

Technology executives and investors also made generous contributions in the 2012 presidential race, luring both President Obama and Mitt Romney to Northern California for fund-raisers and nudging them to speak out on issues like immigration overhaul and lower tax rates.

In a blog post in November, the center said Silicon Valley’s lobbying expenditures have ballooned in recent years, even as spending by other industries has fallen.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the federal agency headed by Jon Leibowitz. He is chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, not of its Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Read More..

Hispanic Pregnancies Fall in U.S. as Women Choose Smaller Families

ORLANDO, Fla. — Hispanic women in the United States, who have generally had the highest fertility rates in the country, are choosing to have fewer children. Both immigrant and native-born Latinas had steeper birthrate declines from 2007 to 2010 than other groups, including non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Asians, a drop some demographers and sociologists attribute to changes in the views of many Hispanic women about motherhood.

As a result, in 2011, the American birthrate hit a record low, with 63 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, led by the decline in births to immigrant women. The national birthrate is now about half what it was during the baby boom years, when it peaked in 1957 at 122.7 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

The decline in birthrates was steepest among Mexican-American women and women who immigrated from Mexico, at 25.7 percent. This has reversed a trend in which immigrant mothers accounted for a rising share of births in the United States, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. In 2010, birthrates among all Hispanics reached their lowest level in 20 years, the center found.

The sudden drop-off, which coincided with the onset of the recession, suggests that attitudes have changed since the days when older generations of Latinos prized large families and more closely followed Roman Catholic teachings, which forbid artificial contraception.

Interviews with young Latinas, as well as reproductive health experts, show that the reasons for deciding to have fewer children are many, involving greater access to information about contraceptives and women’s health, as well as higher education.

When Marucci Guzman decided to marry Tom Beard here seven years ago, the idea of having a large family — a Guzman tradition back in Puerto Rico — was out of the question.

“We thought one, maybe two,” said Ms. Guzman Beard, who gave birth to a daughter, Attalai, four years ago.

Asked whether Attalai might ever get her wish for a little brother or sister, Ms. Guzman Beard, 29, a vice president at a public service organization, said: “I want to go to law school. I’m married. I work. When do I have time?”

The decisions were not made in a vacuum but amid a sputtering economy, which, interviewees said, weighed heavily on their minds.

Latinos suffered larger percentage declines in household wealth than white, black or Asian households from 2005 to 2009, and, according to the Pew report, their rates of poverty and unemployment also grew more sharply after the recession began.

Prolonged recessions do produce dips in the birthrate, but a drop as large as Latinos have experienced is atypical, said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution. “It is surprising,” Mr. Frey said. “When you hear about a decrease in the birthrate, you don’t expect Latinos to be at the forefront of the trend.”

D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center and an author of the report, said that in past recessions, when overall fertility dipped, “it bounced back over time when the economy got better.”

“If history repeats itself, that will happen again,” she said.

But to Mr. Frey, the decrease has signaled much about the aspirations of young Latinos to become full and permanent members of the upwardly mobile middle class, despite the challenges posed by the struggling economy.

Jersey Garcia, a 37-year-old public health worker in Miami, is in the first generation of her family to live permanently outside of the Dominican Republic, where her maternal and paternal grandmothers had a total of 27 children.

“I have two right now,” Ms. Garcia said. “It’s just a good number that I can handle.”

“Before, I probably would have been pressured to have more,” she added. “I think living in the United States, I don’t have family members close by to help me, and it takes a village to raise a child. So the feeling is, keep what you have right now.”

But that has not been easy. Even with health insurance, Ms. Garcia’s preferred method of long-term birth control, an IUD, has been unaffordable. Birth control pills, too, with a $50 co-payment a month, were too costly for her budget. “I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “So what I’ve been doing is condoms.”

According to research by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the overwhelming majority of Latinas have used contraception at some point in their lives, but they face economic barriers to consistent use. As a consequence, Latinas still experience unintended pregnancy at a rate higher than non-Hispanic whites, according to the institute.

And while the share of births to teenage mothers has dropped over the past two decades for all women, the highest share of births to teenage mothers is among native-born Hispanics.

“There are still a lot of barriers to information and access to contraception that exist,” said Jessica Gonzáles-Rojas, 36, the executive director of the institute, who has one son. “We still need to do a lot of work.”

Read More..

Hispanic Pregnancies Fall in U.S. as Women Choose Smaller Families

ORLANDO, Fla. — Hispanic women in the United States, who have generally had the highest fertility rates in the country, are choosing to have fewer children. Both immigrant and native-born Latinas had steeper birthrate declines from 2007 to 2010 than other groups, including non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Asians, a drop some demographers and sociologists attribute to changes in the views of many Hispanic women about motherhood.

As a result, in 2011, the American birthrate hit a record low, with 63 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, led by the decline in births to immigrant women. The national birthrate is now about half what it was during the baby boom years, when it peaked in 1957 at 122.7 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

The decline in birthrates was steepest among Mexican-American women and women who immigrated from Mexico, at 25.7 percent. This has reversed a trend in which immigrant mothers accounted for a rising share of births in the United States, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. In 2010, birthrates among all Hispanics reached their lowest level in 20 years, the center found.

The sudden drop-off, which coincided with the onset of the recession, suggests that attitudes have changed since the days when older generations of Latinos prized large families and more closely followed Roman Catholic teachings, which forbid artificial contraception.

Interviews with young Latinas, as well as reproductive health experts, show that the reasons for deciding to have fewer children are many, involving greater access to information about contraceptives and women’s health, as well as higher education.

When Marucci Guzman decided to marry Tom Beard here seven years ago, the idea of having a large family — a Guzman tradition back in Puerto Rico — was out of the question.

“We thought one, maybe two,” said Ms. Guzman Beard, who gave birth to a daughter, Attalai, four years ago.

Asked whether Attalai might ever get her wish for a little brother or sister, Ms. Guzman Beard, 29, a vice president at a public service organization, said: “I want to go to law school. I’m married. I work. When do I have time?”

The decisions were not made in a vacuum but amid a sputtering economy, which, interviewees said, weighed heavily on their minds.

Latinos suffered larger percentage declines in household wealth than white, black or Asian households from 2005 to 2009, and, according to the Pew report, their rates of poverty and unemployment also grew more sharply after the recession began.

Prolonged recessions do produce dips in the birthrate, but a drop as large as Latinos have experienced is atypical, said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution. “It is surprising,” Mr. Frey said. “When you hear about a decrease in the birthrate, you don’t expect Latinos to be at the forefront of the trend.”

D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center and an author of the report, said that in past recessions, when overall fertility dipped, “it bounced back over time when the economy got better.”

“If history repeats itself, that will happen again,” she said.

But to Mr. Frey, the decrease has signaled much about the aspirations of young Latinos to become full and permanent members of the upwardly mobile middle class, despite the challenges posed by the struggling economy.

Jersey Garcia, a 37-year-old public health worker in Miami, is in the first generation of her family to live permanently outside of the Dominican Republic, where her maternal and paternal grandmothers had a total of 27 children.

“I have two right now,” Ms. Garcia said. “It’s just a good number that I can handle.”

“Before, I probably would have been pressured to have more,” she added. “I think living in the United States, I don’t have family members close by to help me, and it takes a village to raise a child. So the feeling is, keep what you have right now.”

But that has not been easy. Even with health insurance, Ms. Garcia’s preferred method of long-term birth control, an IUD, has been unaffordable. Birth control pills, too, with a $50 co-payment a month, were too costly for her budget. “I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “So what I’ve been doing is condoms.”

According to research by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the overwhelming majority of Latinas have used contraception at some point in their lives, but they face economic barriers to consistent use. As a consequence, Latinas still experience unintended pregnancy at a rate higher than non-Hispanic whites, according to the institute.

And while the share of births to teenage mothers has dropped over the past two decades for all women, the highest share of births to teenage mothers is among native-born Hispanics.

“There are still a lot of barriers to information and access to contraception that exist,” said Jessica Gonzáles-Rojas, 36, the executive director of the institute, who has one son. “We still need to do a lot of work.”

Read More..

Tech Giants, Learning the Ways of Washington, Brace for More Scrutiny

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Nadine Wolf demonstrated against online piracy legislation a year ago in New York. The measures were defeated.

SAN FRANCISCO — Silicon Valley lobbied hard in Washington in 2012, and despite some friction with regulators, fared fairly well. In 2013, though, government scrutiny is likely to grow. And with this scrutiny will come even greater efforts by the tech industry to press its case in the nation’s capital and overseas.

In 2012, among other victories, the industry staved off calls for federal consumer privacy legislation and successfully pushed for a revamp of an obscure law that had placed strict privacy protections on Americans’ video rental records. It also helped achieve a stalemate on a proposed global effort to let Web users limit behavioral tracking online, using Do Not Track browser settings.

But this year is likely to put that issue in the spotlight again, and bring intense negotiations between industry and consumer rights groups over whether and how to allow consumers to limit tracking.

Congress is likely to revisit online security legislation — meant to safeguard critical infrastructure from attack — that failed last year. And a looming question for Web giants will be who takes the reins of the Federal Trade Commission, the industry’s main regulator, this year. David C. Vladeck, the director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, has resigned, and there have been suggestions that the chairman of the commission itself, Jon Leibowitz, will step down.

The agency is investigating Google over possible antitrust violations and will subject Facebook to audits of its privacy policy for the next 20 years. Its next steps could serve as a bellwether of how aggressively the commission will take on Web companies in the second Obama administration.

“Now that the election is over, Silicon Valley companies each are thinking through their strategy for the second Obama administration,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and a former White House privacy official. “The F.T.C. will have a new Democratic chairman. A priority for tech companies will be to discern the new chair’s own priorities.”

In early 2012, an unusual burst of lobbying by tech companies helped defeat antipiracy bills, which had been backed by the entertainment industry. Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google feared that the bills would force them to police the Internet.

At the end of the year, Silicon Valley also got its way when the Obama administration stood up against a proposed global treaty that would have given government authorities greater control over the Web.

The key to the industry’s successes in 2012 was simple: it expanded its footprint in Washington just as Washington began to pay closer attention to how technology companies affect consumers. “Privacy and security became top-tier important policy issues in Washington in 2012,” said David A. Hoffman, director of security policy and global privacy officer at Intel.

“Industry has realized it is important to be engaged,” he continued, “to make sure government stakeholders are fully informed and educated about the role that new technology plays and to make sure any action taken doesn’t unnecessarily burden the innovation economy while still protecting individual trust in new technology.”

At the end of 2012, tech companies were on track to have spent record amounts on lobbying for the year. In the first three quarters, they spent close to $100 million, which meant that they were likely to surpass the $127 million they spent on lobbying in 2011, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based nonpartisan group that tracks corporate spending. Even the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz hired a lobbyist in Washington: Adrian Fenty, a former mayor of the city.

Technology executives and investors also made generous contributions in the 2012 presidential race, luring both President Obama and Mitt Romney to Northern California for fund-raisers and nudging them to speak out on issues like immigration overhaul and lower tax rates.

In a blog post in November, the center said Silicon Valley’s lobbying expenditures have ballooned in recent years, even as spending by other industries has fallen.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the federal agency headed by Jon Leibowitz. He is chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, not of its Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Read More..

Laos May Bear Cost of Planned Chinese Railroad

OUDOM XAI, Laos — Wang Quan, the new Chinese owner of a hotel in this farm town tucked into the tropical mountains of northern Laos, is hoping that the first of 20,000 Chinese workers will arrive here soon to start construction on a new railroad.

The Chinese-financed railway is to snake its way through dozens of tunnels and bridges, eventually linking southern China to Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, and then on to the Bay of Bengal in Myanmar, significantly expanding China’s already enormous trade with Southeast Asia.

But Mr. Wang may have to wait a little longer to make his fortune from all the Chinese expected to descend on this obscure corner of Laos about 50 miles from the nearest border with China. Even though the project has run into some serious objections from international development organizations, most experts expect it to go ahead anyway. That is because China considers it vital to its strategy of pulling Southeast Asia closely into its orbit and providing Beijing with another route to transport oil from the Middle East.

The crucial connection would run through Oudom Xai between Kunming, the capital of China’s southern province of Yunnan, and the Laotian capital, Vientiane.

“China wants a fast-speed rail — Kunming to Vientiane,” George Yeo, a former foreign minister of Singapore, said in a recent speech to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Business Club in Bangkok.

Mr. Yeo, chairman of Kerry Logistics Network, a major Asian freight and distribution company, is considered one of the best-informed experts on the expansion of new Asia trading routes. “The big objective is Bangkok,” he said. “It’s a huge market, lots of opportunities. From there, Bangkok to Dawei in Myanmar — that will enable China to bypass the Malacca Straits,” a potential choke point between the Indian Ocean and China’s east coast.

But China is not particularly interested in sharing much of the wealth the railroad would generate. Most of the benefits, critics say, would flow to China while most of the costs would be borne by the host nation. The price tag of the $7 billion, 260-mile rail project, which Laos will borrow from China, is nearly equal to the tiny $8 billion in annual economic activity in Laos, which lacks even a rudimentary railroad and whose rutted road system is largely a leftover from the French colonial era.

In mid-November, when Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China visited Vientiane for a summit meeting of European and Asian leaders, he was expected to attend a groundbreaking for the railroad. The ceremony did not take place.

An assessment of the rail project by a consultant for the United Nations Development Program said the terms of the financing offered by China’s Export-Import Bank were so onerous they put Laos’s “macroeconomic stability in danger.” At the same time, construction through northern Laos would turn the countryside into “a waste dump,” the consultant’s report said. “An expensive mistake” if signed under the terms offered, the report concluded. As collateral for the loan, Laos was bound to provide China with minerals, including potash and copper.

Other international donors echoed the findings. “Partners, including the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, expressed concern, and the International Monetary Fund was here and said, ‘You have to be very careful,’ ” said an Asian diplomat briefed on the reservations expressed to the Laotian government.

Nonetheless, the National Assembly has approved the project as part of a much broader trans-Asian rail agreement signed by nearly 20 Asian countries in 2006. While the workings of the Communist Party that runs Laos are extremely opaque, diplomats here said, the project is most strongly backed by the pro-China deputy prime minister, Somsavat Lengsavad. Efforts to interview Mr. Somsavat were unsuccessful.

China’s exploding trade with Southeast Asia reached nearly $370 billion in 2011, double that of the United States in the same year. By 2015, when the Southeast Asian countries aim to have completed an economic community, China projects that its trade with the region will equal about $500 billion.

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DealBook Column: Hold Your Applause, Please, Until After the Toasts

Gentlemen, ladies, please take your seats.

It is time for DealBook’s annual “Closing Dinner,” where we toast — and more important, roast — the deal makers of 2012 (and some of the still-hammering-out-the-fiscal-cliff-deal makers).

This year’s dinner is in Washington so that some of esteemed attendees can run back for negotiations.

We have a number of Wall Street deal makers at the front table: Jamie Dimon, Lloyd C. Blankfein and Warren E. Buffett. They may have an easier time negotiating than some of our elected officials because, as Mr. Buffett likes to say, “My idea of a group decision is to look in the mirror.”

Across the way is Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital. We sat him next to Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, so they could get to know each other a little better. Steve, a little advice: don’t let Preet borrow your cellphone.

Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs banker who wrote a tell-all called “Why I Left Goldman Sachs,” is here. Mr. Smith managed to wangle a reported $1.5 million payday from his publisher, but his book sold poorly and his publisher was left with a huge loss. Nice to see you learned something from your years in banking, Greg.

Timothy F. Geithner and Ben S. Bernanke are sitting at the dais this year, as is Mario Draghi. Strangely, they are playing Monopoly under the table with real dollar bills. (I heard Mr. Bernanke tell Mr. Draghi, “We can always print more.”)

The board of Hewlett-Packard is at the table at the back. Senator Harry Reid and Senator Mitch McConnell, whatever you do, don’t ask Meg Whitman for pointers on how to make the numbers work.

We’re pleased that Speaker John Boehner also decided to join us this year. We had asked him to invite some other senior members of his caucus, but as you can see from the empty seats at his table, none of them were willing to join him. So we’ve stuck him next to Vikram Pandit.

Mitt Romney just arrived and is sitting at the table sponsored by the Private Equity Growth Capital Council. He is with some of his supporters, among them Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors and the Koch Brothers. And yes, Mitt, there is a hidden video camera in the floral arrangement in front of you.

Finally, a quick thank you to the folks from Barclays and UBS. Their teams who got caught up in the Libor scandal agreed to pay for tonight’s dinner. Apparently, there is some dispute with the caterer, however, because the bankers are trying to set the rate. (Rimshot.)

And now, before the humor runs out (if it hasn’t already), onto the official toasts and roasts of 2012:

TURNAROUND OF THE YEAR Robert H. Benmosche, A.I.G.’s chief executive, take a bow. The bailout of your company at the height of the financial crisis will probably never be popular, but it will be profitable. (And it should be a bit more popular, too.)

The Treasury Department sold its last shares in the company in 2012, racking up a profit of $22.7 billion for taxpayers. Mr. Benmosche, a tough-talking executive who at one point early in his tenure at A.I.G. threatened to quit because of efforts by the government to meddle in the business, revived a company that had been left for dead. Most of the media, the pundits and the speculators got it wrong. You got it right. We do all owe you a thank you.

LEADERSHIP LESSON: JAMIE DIMON Mr. Dimon, the biggest failure of your career happened in 2012 with the loss of more than $5 billion by a group of your traders, including one known as the “London Whale.” Many C.E.O.’s would have lost their jobs and certainly would not be given a toast.

But you did something most executives would not have done: you admitted to the mistake. In an age when it’s almost de rigueur on Wall Street to hide problems, obfuscate and shade the truth, you told it how it was: “We have egg on our face, and we deserve any criticism we get.”

That’s not to say the situation was handled perfectly; the lack of details about the loss and your continued pushback against regulations raised more questions than answers. But your insistence that “We made a terrible, egregious mistake” is a lesson in leadership for your peers.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: MARIO DRAGHI Mr. Draghi, the economist and former Goldman Sachs banker turned president of the European Central Bank, nearly single-handedly saved the euro zone in 2012. In a master stroke, he said: “Within our mandate, the E.C.B. is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro.”

That sentence will go down in history for the confidence it inspired in the markets and in countries like Greece, Spain and Italy that were thought to be on the precipice. Through behind-the-scenes shuttle diplomacy with leaders like Angela Merkel of Germany and Mario Monti of Italy, Mr. Draghi was able to convince reluctant politicians that it was in his purview to start buying up bonds if a country needed help — and requested it. So far, his comments alone have served as a remarkable backstop; no country has sought his help.

A BOARD IN NEED OF HELP, AGAIN Bashing the board of Hewlett-Packard is becoming boring. Its members, who have routinely turned over, had another tough year.

The company’s stock fell about 45 percent. H.P. disclosed that its $11.7 billion acquisition of Autonomy, in which it paid an 80 percent premium, had turned out to be a mess (which wasn’t exactly a secret) — or worse, a fraud. But in a strange twist, perhaps trying to remove some of the blame for the disaster of a deal, the board attributed at least $5 billion of the write-down of the deal simply to accounting chicanery.

Some have questioned H.P.’s math. Perhaps some of the write-down is the result of accounting problems, but $5 billion? C’mon. Hewlett’s board, however, still has some friends: It has paid an estimated $81 million to Wall Street to help orchestrate some its failed deals in recent years.

SEEKING FACEBOOK ‘FRIENDS’ Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., has been attending our “Closing Dinner” for years. (He wore Adidas flip-flops to his first.) Back then, he was the “It” boy — the one everyone in the room wanted to “friend.” This year, after Facebook pursued its I.P.O., some investors want to “unfriend” him.

As everyone knows, the market has not been kind to Facebook shares, which were sold at $38 a share and at one point this year dropped by half. The good news is that Facebook’s shares have rebounded and are now at about $26 a share; the bad news is that long-term shareholders are still down about 30 percent.

With questions about Facebook’s privacy policies and mobile strategy still at the fore, Mr. Zuckerberg has some work to do. Hopefully, when we reconvene next year, more investors will want to sit at your table. (My apologies for sticking you next to Andrew Mason of Groupon.)

YAHOO FINALLY GETS IT RIGHT For nearly the last five years, if not decade, Yahoo had clearly lost its luster. It went through a series of C.E.O.’s, its best engineers left to work at Google and Facebook, and its stock had tanked.

Enter Daniel S. Loeb, the activist investor. He saw value where others didn’t. He also used some clever powers of persuasion to get on the company’s board: He ousted Scott Thompson, Yahoo’s new chief (remember him?) for lying on his résumé by saying he had a computer science degree when, in truth, he had an accounting degree. That sleuthing, and the ensuing embarrassment for the board, gave Mr. Loeb an opening to get his slate of directors on the board.

But most important, once he got on the board, he did something nobody expected: He hired Marissa Mayer, a true Silicon Valley star from Google, to run the company. The jury is still out on the company’s future, but for the first time in ages, people are talking about the company as if it actually has a future. Kudos.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/01/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Hold Your Applause Until After The Toasts.

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Hispanic Pregnancies Fall in U.S. as Women Choose Smaller Families

ORLANDO, Fla. — Hispanic women in the United States, who have generally had the highest fertility rates in the country, are choosing to have fewer children. Both immigrant and native-born Latinas had steeper birthrate declines from 2007 to 2010 than other groups, including non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Asians, a drop some demographers and sociologists attribute to changes in the views of many Hispanic women about motherhood.

As a result, in 2011, the American birthrate hit a record low, with 63 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, led by the decline in births to immigrant women. The national birthrate is now about half what it was during the baby boom years, when it peaked in 1957 at 122.7 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

The decline in birthrates was steepest among Mexican-American women and women who immigrated from Mexico, at 25.7 percent. This has reversed a trend in which immigrant mothers accounted for a rising share of births in the United States, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. In 2010, birthrates among all Hispanics reached their lowest level in 20 years, the center found.

The sudden drop-off, which coincided with the onset of the recession, suggests that attitudes have changed since the days when older generations of Latinos prized large families and more closely followed Roman Catholic teachings, which forbid artificial contraception.

Interviews with young Latinas, as well as reproductive health experts, show that the reasons for deciding to have fewer children are many, involving greater access to information about contraceptives and women’s health, as well as higher education.

When Marucci Guzman decided to marry Tom Beard here seven years ago, the idea of having a large family — a Guzman tradition back in Puerto Rico — was out of the question.

“We thought one, maybe two,” said Ms. Guzman Beard, who gave birth to a daughter, Attalai, four years ago.

Asked whether Attalai might ever get her wish for a little brother or sister, Ms. Guzman Beard, 29, a vice president at a public service organization, said: “I want to go to law school. I’m married. I work. When do I have time?”

The decisions were not made in a vacuum but amid a sputtering economy, which, interviewees said, weighed heavily on their minds.

Latinos suffered larger percentage declines in household wealth than white, black or Asian households from 2005 to 2009, and, according to the Pew report, their rates of poverty and unemployment also grew more sharply after the recession began.

Prolonged recessions do produce dips in the birthrate, but a drop as large as Latinos have experienced is atypical, said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution. “It is surprising,” Mr. Frey said. “When you hear about a decrease in the birthrate, you don’t expect Latinos to be at the forefront of the trend.”

D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center and an author of the report, said that in past recessions, when overall fertility dipped, “it bounced back over time when the economy got better.”

“If history repeats itself, that will happen again,” she said.

But to Mr. Frey, the decrease has signaled much about the aspirations of young Latinos to become full and permanent members of the upwardly mobile middle class, despite the challenges posed by the struggling economy.

Jersey Garcia, a 37-year-old public health worker in Miami, is in the first generation of her family to live permanently outside of the Dominican Republic, where her maternal and paternal grandmothers had a total of 27 children.

“I have two right now,” Ms. Garcia said. “It’s just a good number that I can handle.”

“Before, I probably would have been pressured to have more,” she added. “I think living in the United States, I don’t have family members close by to help me, and it takes a village to raise a child. So the feeling is, keep what you have right now.”

But that has not been easy. Even with health insurance, Ms. Garcia’s preferred method of long-term birth control, an IUD, has been unaffordable. Birth control pills, too, with a $50 co-payment a month, were too costly for her budget. “I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “So what I’ve been doing is condoms.”

According to research by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the overwhelming majority of Latinas have used contraception at some point in their lives, but they face economic barriers to consistent use. As a consequence, Latinas still experience unintended pregnancy at a rate higher than non-Hispanic whites, according to the institute.

And while the share of births to teenage mothers has dropped over the past two decades for all women, the highest share of births to teenage mothers is among native-born Hispanics.

“There are still a lot of barriers to information and access to contraception that exist,” said Jessica Gonzáles-Rojas, 36, the executive director of the institute, who has one son. “We still need to do a lot of work.”

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Hispanic Pregnancies Fall in U.S. as Women Choose Smaller Families

ORLANDO, Fla. — Hispanic women in the United States, who have generally had the highest fertility rates in the country, are choosing to have fewer children. Both immigrant and native-born Latinas had steeper birthrate declines from 2007 to 2010 than other groups, including non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Asians, a drop some demographers and sociologists attribute to changes in the views of many Hispanic women about motherhood.

As a result, in 2011, the American birthrate hit a record low, with 63 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, led by the decline in births to immigrant women. The national birthrate is now about half what it was during the baby boom years, when it peaked in 1957 at 122.7 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

The decline in birthrates was steepest among Mexican-American women and women who immigrated from Mexico, at 25.7 percent. This has reversed a trend in which immigrant mothers accounted for a rising share of births in the United States, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. In 2010, birthrates among all Hispanics reached their lowest level in 20 years, the center found.

The sudden drop-off, which coincided with the onset of the recession, suggests that attitudes have changed since the days when older generations of Latinos prized large families and more closely followed Roman Catholic teachings, which forbid artificial contraception.

Interviews with young Latinas, as well as reproductive health experts, show that the reasons for deciding to have fewer children are many, involving greater access to information about contraceptives and women’s health, as well as higher education.

When Marucci Guzman decided to marry Tom Beard here seven years ago, the idea of having a large family — a Guzman tradition back in Puerto Rico — was out of the question.

“We thought one, maybe two,” said Ms. Guzman Beard, who gave birth to a daughter, Attalai, four years ago.

Asked whether Attalai might ever get her wish for a little brother or sister, Ms. Guzman Beard, 29, a vice president at a public service organization, said: “I want to go to law school. I’m married. I work. When do I have time?”

The decisions were not made in a vacuum but amid a sputtering economy, which, interviewees said, weighed heavily on their minds.

Latinos suffered larger percentage declines in household wealth than white, black or Asian households from 2005 to 2009, and, according to the Pew report, their rates of poverty and unemployment also grew more sharply after the recession began.

Prolonged recessions do produce dips in the birthrate, but a drop as large as Latinos have experienced is atypical, said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution. “It is surprising,” Mr. Frey said. “When you hear about a decrease in the birthrate, you don’t expect Latinos to be at the forefront of the trend.”

D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center and an author of the report, said that in past recessions, when overall fertility dipped, “it bounced back over time when the economy got better.”

“If history repeats itself, that will happen again,” she said.

But to Mr. Frey, the decrease has signaled much about the aspirations of young Latinos to become full and permanent members of the upwardly mobile middle class, despite the challenges posed by the struggling economy.

Jersey Garcia, a 37-year-old public health worker in Miami, is in the first generation of her family to live permanently outside of the Dominican Republic, where her maternal and paternal grandmothers had a total of 27 children.

“I have two right now,” Ms. Garcia said. “It’s just a good number that I can handle.”

“Before, I probably would have been pressured to have more,” she added. “I think living in the United States, I don’t have family members close by to help me, and it takes a village to raise a child. So the feeling is, keep what you have right now.”

But that has not been easy. Even with health insurance, Ms. Garcia’s preferred method of long-term birth control, an IUD, has been unaffordable. Birth control pills, too, with a $50 co-payment a month, were too costly for her budget. “I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “So what I’ve been doing is condoms.”

According to research by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the overwhelming majority of Latinas have used contraception at some point in their lives, but they face economic barriers to consistent use. As a consequence, Latinas still experience unintended pregnancy at a rate higher than non-Hispanic whites, according to the institute.

And while the share of births to teenage mothers has dropped over the past two decades for all women, the highest share of births to teenage mothers is among native-born Hispanics.

“There are still a lot of barriers to information and access to contraception that exist,” said Jessica Gonzáles-Rojas, 36, the executive director of the institute, who has one son. “We still need to do a lot of work.”

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DealBook: Questions Remain Over Hewlett's Big Charge on Autonomy Acquisition

The $5 billion fight over accusations of improper accounting brought by Hewlett-Packard shows no sign of abating.

In November, H.P. took a charge of $8.8 billion as it wrote down its acquisition of Autonomy, a British software company that it acquired in 2011. H.P. said that “more than $5 billion” of the charge was related to accounting and disclosure abuses at Autonomy. H.P. added that a senior executive at Autonomy pointed to the questionable practices after Mike Lynch, Autonomy’s founder and former chief executive, left H.P.

Mr. Lynch denied the charges. In November, he said the accounting moves H.P. highlighted were legitimate under international accounting rules, and he demanded that the company be more specific in how it arrived at the $5 billion number.

H.P. on Thursday released its annual report for its 2012 fiscal year, noting that the United States Justice Department “had opened an investigation relating to Autonomy.”

The report discusses the methodology it employed when making the $8.8 billion charge, but it did not break out exactly how the purported accounting improprieties were behind $5 billion of that charge.

Mr. Lynch seized on that. In a statement on Friday, he said H.P.’s report had “failed to provide any detailed information on the alleged accounting impropriety, or how this could possibly have resulted in such a substantial write-down.”

This accounting rabbit hole has real world consequences.

Hewlett-Packard, led by the company’s chief executive, Meg Whitman, has proceeded with a feisty certainty since the outset of this spat. If the $5 billion figure is not ultimately substantiated, shareholders may doubt H.P. management’s judgment. Also, annual reports are supposed to be exactly the place that investors can go to get their questions answered.

The fact that the $5 billion part of H.P.’s case is not repeated there should give shareholders pause. The report avoids words and phrases that would help a reader understand just how much of an effect the supposed improprieties had. The report says lower financial projections for Autonomy contributed to the write-down. In one part, it said those financial projections “incorporate” H.P.’s analysis of what it believed to be improper accounting. In another section, the report says the changed financial projections were “driven” by the purported abuses.

That sort of language led Mr. Lynch to say in his statement on Friday that “H.P. is backtracking.”

H.P., however, says it is doing nothing of the sort. In a statement released after Mr. Lynch’s on Friday, the company said, “As we have said previously, the majority of this impairment charge, more than $5 billion, is linked to serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations.”

The statement also appeared to respond to the criticism that more details about the $5 billion should have appeared in the annual report. H.P. said the report “is meant to provide the necessary overview of H.P.’s financial condition, including our audited financial statements, which is what our filing does.” The company added, “We continue to believe that the authorities and the courts are the appropriate venues in which to address the wrongdoing discovered at Autonomy.”

Sifting through the Autonomy weeds could obscure the bigger question: was everything above board at Autonomy? H.P. may have overstated the impact of what it calls improprieties in the charge. But Autonomy may still have had unreliable numbers that overstated its value at the time of its acquisition.

Mr. Lynch says the poor performance of Autonomy once it was part of H.P. was a result of H.P.’s mismanagement. But it could also have been because the new owners were not benefiting from the accounting that they have since questioned.

In some ways, the most intriguing detail in this mystery is the supposed whistle-blower who brought the accounting issues to management’s attention. This person may have been able to show how what he or she believed to be chicanery was hidden from the accounting firms that checked Autonomy’s books.

H.P. has enough performance problems that its executives will probably see the Autonomy issue as a distraction and shareholders may get little extra detail. By the sounds of it, that probably will not satisfy Mr. Lynch.

“It is time for Meg Whitman to stop making allegations and to start offering explanations,” is how he signed off his Friday statement.

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Pakistani Militants Gun Down 7 Aid Workers

Fayaz Aziz/Reuters

An injured driver survived an ambush by gunmen in Swabi district, Pakistan, on Tuesday.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Continuing a militant campaign of violence against aid workers in Pakistan, gunmen on Tuesday shot dead seven Pakistani teachers and health workers, six of them women, police officials said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. But the shooting, in the Swabi district of the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, fit a pattern of militant attacks against charity and aid workers across the country in recent weeks that officials have attributed to the Pakistani Taliban. The militant offensive has brought a wave international outrage, particularly because it has focused on vaccination and health workers in a country where polio and measles have made troubling gains.

The attack on Tuesday, near the village of Sher Afzal Banda, was conducted by two men on a motorcycle who opened fire on a van bringing the workers home, the police said. The dead worked for the private Pakistani aid group Support With Working Solution, which works in the health and education sectors.

“They opened fire and killed six females and one male,” said Javed Akhtar, the executive director of the aid group, in a telephone interview. “One child, aged 7 to 8 years, miraculously survived.” His group started out in 1991 and in conjunction with other aid groups has focused on Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province and on South Waziristan in the tribal region, both deeply affected by both poverty and militancy.

Five of the dead were young women who worked as teachers at a primary-level school the charity ran in the area, Mr. Akhtar said. The other two were health workers.

Mr. Akhtar said that no prior warning or threat had been given to his organization by militants. But he and a wide range of Pakistani officials believed that the attack was part of the broader Pakistani Taliban campaign against aid workers.

Last month, at least eight Pakistani volunteers in an internationally supported polio vaccination drive were killed by militants across the country. Senior militants leaders have long accused vaccination drives of being a cover for government and international espionage and regularly threatened workers and officials involved in the effort, though never before to such deadly effect.

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