Seized Arms Off Yemen Raise Alarm Over Iran

An Iranian dhow seized off the Yemeni coast was carrying sophisticated Chinese antiaircraft missiles, a development that could signal an escalation of Iran’s support to its Middle Eastern proxies, alarming other countries in the region and renewing a diplomatic challenge to the United States.

Among the items aboard the dhow, according to a review of factory markings on weapons and their packing crates, were 10 Chinese heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles, most of them manufactured in 2005.

The missiles were labeled QW-1M and bore stencils suggesting that they had been assembled at a factory represented by the state-owned China National Precision Machinery Import and Export Corporation, sanctioned by the United States for transfers of missile technology to Pakistan and Iran.

The Chinese missiles were part of a larger shipment interdicted by American and Yemeni forces in January, which American and Yemeni officials say was intended for the Houthi rebels in northwestern Yemen. But the presence of the missiles in the seized contraband complicates an already politically delicate case.

The shipment, which officials portray as an attempt to introduce sophisticated new antiaircraft systems into the Arabian Peninsula, has raised concerns in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen, as the weapons would have posed escalated risks to civilian and military aircraft alike.

And it has presented the Obama administration with a fresh example of Iran’s apparent transfer of modern missiles from China to insurgents in the larger regional contest between Sunni-led and Shiite-led states, in which the American military has often been entwined.

The United States has previously accused Iran, a Shiite-led theocracy, of sending weapons to the Houthis, who follow an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Saudi Arabia, an American ally, is considered the leading Sunni power in the region. Both sides have aided and equipped groups or governments they deem aligned with their interests, helping to fuel violence in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Sudan and elsewhere.

Iran has rejected the allegations as “baseless and absurd.” Neither the Iranian government nor the Chinese firm that markets QW missiles answered written requests for comment.

The government of Yemen has asked the United Nations to investigate the shipment and report the findings to the Security Council. Yemeni news media reported that United Nations experts were in Yemen last week.

The analysis of the weapons’ markings and origins was based on photographs taken when Yemeni officials briefly displayed the weapons to journalists.

Concerns over sophisticated Chinese missiles reaching Iran’s proxies have considerable regional history. They are part of both the larger worries over antiaircraft weapons set loose by conflicts across the Middle East in the past decade and the lingering frustration in Washington over China’s military aid to Iran.

In 2008, late in the Bush administration, the United States complained to China about two similar antiaircraft missiles that were recovered from Shiite militants in Iraq, according a diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks.

“We have demarched China repeatedly on its conventional arms transfers to Iran, urging Beijing to stop,” the cable noted.

The cable said the QW-1 missiles recovered in Iraq had been manufactured in China in 2003.

Like the American-made Stinger, China’s QW series is part of a class of weapons known as man-portable air-defense systems, or manpads. The cable instructed American diplomats to warn China of the “unacceptably high risk that any military equipment sold to Iran, especially weapons like manpads, that are highly sought-after by terrorists, will be diverted to nonstate actors who threaten U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as civilians across the region.”

The latest discovery of Chinese manpads came after the United States Navy detected the dhow, the Jeehan 1, as it took on cargo in an Iranian military-controlled port. The vessel then embarked on a high-seas smuggling run, according to accounts by Yemeni and American officials.

The vessel tied off on a pier in the harbor on Lesser Tunb Island, a tiny spit of land just west of the Strait of Hormuz that is claimed by both Iran and the United Arab Emirates, officials familiar with its voyage said. The island is occupied by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

After passing eastward through the strait and heading south along the Arabian Peninsula, the dhow was stopped on Jan. 23 by the American destroyer Farragut and a Yemeni boarding team off the coast of Al Ghaydah.

The dhow’s Iranian crew initially insisted the vessel was Panamanian-flagged and carried only fuel, an American official said. The military cargo, which included many ammunition crates that had been painted over with white or black paint, was found in hidden compartments, American officials said.

That cargo also included 316,000 cartridges for Kalashnikov rifles, nearly 63,000 cartridges for PK machine guns or the Dragunov series of sniper rifles, more than 12,000 cartridges for 12.7-millimeter DShK machine guns and 95 RPG-7 launchers.

The rifle cartridges were packaged in crates strongly resembling packaging used by Iran’s Defense Industries Organization, another firm under American sanction, according to James Bevan, director of Conflict Armament Research, a private arms-tracking firm that has documented the spread of Iranian ammunition in East and West Africa.

The vessel also carried 10 SA-7 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles with two gripstocks for firing them, nearly 17,000 sticks of Iranian-made C-4 plastic explosives, 48 Russian PN-14K night vision goggles, and 10 LH80A laser range finders made, according to their placards, by the state-run Iran Electronics Industries, also under American sanction.

The original provenance of the SA-7s was not clear, though the crates they were in had stenciling in Bulgarian.

The captain and crew of the Jeehan 1 remain in Yemeni detention, and the dhow has been impounded under Yemeni custody, a Yememi official said.

An American official called the shipment “deeply disturbing” and said it “clearly appeared to violate” Security Council resolutions prohibiting Iran from exporting arms.

Two independent arms-trafficking researchers who have reviewed photographs and written a summary of the markings on the missiles and crates said the weapons appeared to be of Chinese origin.

Matthew Schroeder, an analyst for the Federation of American Scientists in Washington and the Small Arms Survey in Geneva, said that this was the first time to his knowledge that the QW-1M had left state control.

“If so, and these missiles were indeed bound for insurgents, this shipment is extremely worrisome, both from a regional security and a global counterterrorism perspective,” he said.

Unlike many older shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles seen in insurgent hands around the world, the QW-1M is believed by analysts to have a seeker head more resistant to countermeasures intended to deceive it.

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England Develops a Voracious Appetite for a New Diet

LONDON — Visitors to England right now, be warned. The big topic on people’s minds — from cabdrivers to corporate executives — is not Kate Middleton’s increasingly visible baby bump (though the craze does involve the size of one’s waistline), but rather a best-selling diet book that has sent the British into a fasting frenzy.

“The Fast Diet,” published in mid-January in Britain, could do the same in the United States if Americans eat it up. The United States edition arrived last week.

The book has held the No. 1 slot on Amazon’s British site nearly every day since its publication in January, according to Rebecca Nicolson, a founder of Short Books, the independent publishing company behind the sensation. “It is selling,” she said, “like hot cakes,” which coincidentally are something one can actually eat on this revolutionary diet.

With an alluring cover line that reads, “Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer,” the premise of this latest weight-loss regimen — or “slimming” as the British call “dieting” — is intermittent fasting, or what has become known here as the 5:2 diet: five days of eating and drinking whatever you want, dispersed with two days of fasting.

A typical fasting day consists of two meals of roughly 250 to 300 calories each, depending on the person’s sex (500 calories for women, 600 for men). Think two eggs and a slice of ham for breakfast, and a plate of steamed fish and vegetables for dinner.

It is not much sustenance, but the secret to weight loss, according to the book, is that even after just a few hours of fasting, the body begins to turn off the fat-storing mechanisms and turn on the fat-burning systems.

“I’ve always been into self-experimentation,” said Dr. Michael Mosley, one of the book’s two authors and a well-known medical journalist on the BBC who is often called the Sanjay Gupta of Britain.

He researched the science of the diet and its health benefits by putting himself through intermittent fasting and filming it for a BBC documentary last August called “Eat, Fast and Live Longer.” (The broadcast gained high ratings, three million viewers, despite running during the London Olympics. PBS plans to air it in April.)

“This started because I was not feeling well last year,” Dr. Mosley said recently over a cup of tea and half a cookie (it was not one of his fasting days). “It turns out I was suffering from high blood sugar, high cholesterol and had a kind of visceral fat inside my gut.”

Though hardly obese at the time, at 5 feet 11 inches and 187 pounds, Dr. Mosley, 55, had a body mass index and body fat percentage that were a few points higher than the recommended amount for men. “Given that my father had died at age 73 of complications from diabetes, and I was now looking prediabetic, I knew something had to change,” he added.

The result was a documentary, almost the opposite of “Super Size Me,” in which Dr. Mosley not only fasted, but also interviewed scientific researchers, mostly in the United States, about the positive results of various forms of intermittent fasting, tested primarily on rats but in some cases human volunteers. The prominent benefits, he discovered, were weight loss, a lower risk of cancer and heart disease, and increased energy.

“The body goes into a repair-and-recover mode when it no longer has the work of storing the food being consumed,” he said.

Though Dr. Mosley quickly gave up on the most extreme forms of fasting (he ate little more than one cup of low-calorie soup every 24 hours for four consecutive days in his first trial), he finally settled on the 5:2 ratio as a more sustainable, less painful option that could realistically be followed without annihilating his social life or work.

“Our earliest antecedents,” Dr. Mosley argued, “lived a feast-or-famine existence, gorging themselves after a big hunt and then not eating until they scored the next one.” Similarly, he explained, temporary fasting is a ritual of religions like Islam and Judaism — as demonstrated by Ramadan and Yom Kippur. “We shouldn’t have a fear of hunger if it is just temporary,” he said.

What Dr. Mosley found most astounding, however, were his personal results. Not only did he lose 20 pounds (he currently weighs 168 pounds) in nine weeks, but his glucose and cholesterol levels went down, as did his body fat. “What’s more, I have a whole new level of energy,” he said.

The documentary became an instant hit, which in turn led Mimi Spencer, a food and fashion writer, to propose that they collaborate on a book. “I could see this was not a faddish diet but one that was sustainable with long-term health results, beyond the obvious weight-loss benefit,” said Ms. Spencer, 45, who has lost 20 pounds on the diet within four months and lowered her B.M.I. by 2 points.

The result is a 200-page paperback: the first half written by Dr. Mosley outlining the scientific findings of intermittent fasting; the second by Ms. Spencer, with encouraging text on how to get through the first days of fasting, from keeping busy so you don’t hear your rumbling belly, to waiting 15 minutes for your meal or snack.

She also provides fasting recipes with tantalizing photos like feta niçoise salad and Mexican pizza, and a calorie counter at the back. (Who knew a quarter of a cup of balsamic vinegar added up to a whopping 209 calories?)

In London, the diet has taken off with the help of well-known British celebrity chefs and food writers like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who raved about it in The Guardian after his sixth day of fasting, having already lost eight pounds. (“I feel lean and sharper,” he wrote, “and find the whole thing rather exhilarating.”)

The diet is also particularly popular among men, according to Dr. Mosley, who has heard from many of his converts via e-mail and Twitter, where he has around 24,000 followers. “They find it easy to work into their schedules because dieting for a day here and there doesn’t feel torturous,” he said, adding that couples also particularly like doing it together.

But not everyone is singing the diet’s praises. The National Health System, Britain’s publicly funded medical establishment, put out a statement on its Web site shortly after the book came out: “Despite its increasing popularity, there is a great deal of uncertainty about I.F. (intermittent fasting) with significant gaps in the evidence.”

The health agency also listed some side effects, including bad breath, anxiety, dehydration and irritability. Yet people in London do not seem too concerned. A slew of fasting diet books have come out in recent weeks, notably the “The 5:2 Diet Book” and “The Feast and Fast Diet.”

There is also a crop of new cookbooks featuring fasting-friendly recipes. Let’s just say, the British are hungry for them.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 2, 2013

A previous version of this article referred incorrectly to the national health care body in Britain. It is the National Health Service, not the National Health System.

In addition, a previous version referred imprecisely to the Balsamic ingredient that has 209 calories in a quarter cup. It is Balsamic vinegar dressing, not Balsamic vinegar.

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Off the Shelf: Bretton Woods Monetary Agreement, Examined in a New Book

“DOWNTON ABBEY” has tapped our inner Anglophile on a wide front. But Americans were not so besotted with Britain in the first half of the 20th century, when it was a powerhouse of international trade. Until World War II, Britain ran international finance to its liking, and Americans were thirsting to chop it down to size. We need to understand that to grasp the importance of the Bretton Woods monetary conference.

Representatives of some 44 nations gathered in July 1944 at Bretton Woods, a resort spot in New Hampshire, to hammer out a world monetary system, replacing the gold standard that had failed so woefully. But only two nations mattered: Britain and the United States.

In “The Battle of Bretton Woods” (Princeton University Press, $29.95), Benn Steil, a senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, describes that effort from its roots and projects its effect on today’s conflicts among the dollar, the euro and the Chinese renminbi. Although America’s global dominance has long since melted away, no substitute is yet strong enough to shove the dollar aside, in part because of Bretton Woods.

Britain entered the conference exhausted and broke, crippled by the war. It desperately needed flexible exchange rates to rekindle its vital exports to pay for the imports it required to live. It clung to a privileged access to trading with its empire, one-fourth of the Earth’s land and people.

America was unscathed at home and far stronger in 1945 than in 1941. Owner of the bulk of the world’s gold bullion, a stunning 20,000 metric tons, the United States wanted to emerge from World War II with fixed conversion rates assured by a dollar tied to gold. And it went without saying that it was bent on becoming the globe’s financial capital.

Representing America at Bretton Woods was Harry Dexter White, an economics professor who had joined the Treasury as an adviser in 1934. By dint of intellect and hard work, he became grudgingly accepted as its ranking expert on international finance. He labored as the brains buttressing the Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, who described himself as “just a farmer,” albeit a close gentleman-farmer friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Morgenthau presided at Bretton Woods but White ran the show.

Dr. Steil presents evidence that White was also an informant for the Soviet Union, a starry-eyed admirer of what he saw as its remarkable economic success. For years, Dr. Steil says, White provided documents to the Soviets and favored their side in policy debates. In 1948, White fended off the House Un-American Activities Committee, denying that he was a Communist. A more adverse light was shed on his activities when wartime codes were broken years after his death. Dr. Steil is more convinced of the espionage claims surrounding White than some historians who see his actions as more innocent. There is no sign that his interest in the Soviets affected his work at Bretton Woods.

Taking Britain’s part at the 1944 conference was the celebrated John Maynard Keynes, who knew full well that war had reduced Britain to a hapless debtor, obliged to accept whatever the United States offered. The book confirms that Keynes was an intellectual giant with flawless intuition for finance, but it also exposes his caustic criticisms of lesser men and his tin ear for workaday diplomacy. The Americans considered him too bright for his britches and bottled him up at every opportunity.

White had prepared so well that the actual conference was well-orchestrated, everything the Americans wanted. “Now the advantage is ours here, and I personally think we should take it,” Morgenthau said to White, who fully agreed. As White said, “If the advantage was theirs, they would take it.”

The Americans wanted free trade and open markets; they feared postwar inflation. Bretton Woods helped by providing for stable but convertible currencies, tied within limits to the dollar and ultimately to gold. It also created the International Monetary Fund, a money pool from which nations with trade deficits could borrow to satisfy international accounts. And it set up what became the World Bank, initially focused on rebuilding Europe, and later on the developing world. Britain lost out on looser exchange rates, and its imperial trade preferences were doomed.

On item after item, Keynes found a stone wall. What Dr. Steil calls his “most tangible legacy” from Bretton Woods was pathetic. Norway moved to abolish the Bank for International Settlements for cooperating with the Nazis, a motion that Keynes vehemently opposed. The delegates eventually agreed that the bank would be “liquidated at the earliest possible moment.” The bank is still in business today.

Keynes ended up having to play an impossible hand. In 1945, he was left to sell Parliament on accepting arrangements that he had exhausted himself resisting. Four months later, he was dead. History later vindicated his advocacy of flexible exchange rates. The Bretton Woods system, not fully in effect till 1961, died only a decade later when President Richard M. Nixon ended the gold standard. The United States was running such large international deficits, paying out so many dollars, that not even Fort Knox had enough gold.

“The Battle of Bretton Woods” should become the gold standard on its topic. The details are addictive. But be warned: the book is dense. Every skirmish, every exchange — and the book gets into hundreds of thems — was presumably meaningful to the participants. But while some episodes mattered much, many did not. The author is no Robert Caro, who in his multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson delves into minute details but also explains their larger significance.

Perhaps that is what is missing here — an unmistakable voice, a sense that this rich history is told by one mind. Mr. Caro is known for working on his own, with the assistance of his wife. In his acknowledgments, Dr. Steil thanks 10 research assistants and an advisory panel of 18 luminaries. The book sometimes reads like a succession of brilliant but loosely connected graduate seminar papers — an assemblage, a very fine one, but an assemblage nevertheless.

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India Ink: Image of the Day: March 1

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Well: A Rainbow of Root Vegetables

This week’s Recipes for Health is as much a treat for the eyes as the palate. Colorful root vegetables from bright orange carrots and red scallions to purple and yellow potatoes and pale green leeks will add color and flavor to your table.

Since root vegetables and tubers keep well and can be cooked up into something delicious even after they have begun to go limp in the refrigerator, this week’s Recipes for Health should be useful. Root vegetables, tubers (potatoes and sweet potatoes, which are called yams by most vendors – I mean the ones with dark orange flesh), winter squash and cabbages are the only local vegetables available during the winter months in colder regions, so these recipes will be timely for many readers.

Roasting is a good place to begin with most root vegetables. They sweeten as they caramelize in a hot oven. I roasted baby carrots and thick red scallions (they may have been baby onions; I didn’t get the information from the farmer, I just bought them because they were lush and pretty) together and seasoned them with fresh thyme leaves, then sprinkled them with chopped toasted hazelnuts. I also roasted a medley of potatoes, including sweet potatoes, after tossing them with olive oil and sage, and got a wonderful range of colors, textures and tastes ranging from sweet to savory.

Sweet winter vegetables also pair well with spicy seasonings. I like to combine sweet potatoes and chipotle peppers, and this time in a hearty lentil stew that we enjoyed all week.

Here are five colorful and delicious dishes made with root vegetables.

Spicy Lentil and Sweet Potato Stew With Chipotles: The combination of sweet potatoes and spicy chipotles with savory lentils is a winner.

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Roasted Carrots and Scallions With Thyme and Hazelnuts: Toasted hazelnuts add a crunchy texture and nutty finish to this dish.

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Carrot Wraps: A vegetarian sandwich that satisfies like a full meal.

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Rainbow Potato Roast: A multicolored mix that can be vegan, or not.

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Leek Quiche: A lighter version of a Flemish classic.

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Ireland Seeks Easing of Its Debt Terms

DUBLIN — Ireland has been widely praised as the good pupil of the euro zone’s austerity school of thought. Now it wants to be rewarded.

Ireland, whose banking crisis required it to receive a bailout of €85 billion, or $110 billion, by international lenders in 2010, is pressing for the right to ease the payback terms of billions of euros of debt it incurred in that process. It is also pushing other European capitals to stick to a promise made last year that the euro zone’s bailout fund could eventually be used to prop up struggling banks directly, relieving governments of that burden.

Ireland’s proposals are likely to come up when European finance ministers begin two days of meetings in Brussels on Monday.

The issue is significant because it could have a decisive impact on the ability of a fragile Irish economy to emerge from the crisis, officials say. And within European politics, a new relief package would be significant because Ireland is the only bailed-out euro zone country so far that in hewing to the harsh austerity terms of its rescue has shown clear, if early, signs of an economic recovery.

Since 2008 the country has come up with spending cuts and tax increases totaling 18 percent of its gross domestic product. But unemployment remains high and households remain weighed down with debt, a legacy of the real estate crash that was the main cause of the banks’ troubles.

And yet, visiting Dublin on Thursday, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, said that Ireland had “turned the corner,” proving that the international rescue programs put together by the euro zone and the International Monetary Fund “can work and that there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

Ireland is pressing an issue raised at a European Union summit meeting last June, when leaders promised that the euro zone’s bailout fund would eventually be able to lend directly to troubled banks, once a more centralized banking system was in place for the 17-nation euro zone.

At the time the deal was seen as significant because it could alleviate the debt burdens that bank bailouts had placed on the governments of Ireland and Spain, among others. But in subsequent months, the finance ministers of Germany, Finland and the Netherlands sought to dilute the agreement, arguing that it referred only to new bank rescues and not to so-called historic or legacy assets.

In addition to direct help for its banks, Ireland is also pressing for longer maturity dates on its international loans. Mr. Barroso, asked by reporters Thursday about Ireland’s proposals, said that the European Commission — the administrative arm of the Union — “has been arguing for rewards to those who are the good performers in terms of the programs.”

He cited Ireland and another bailed-out euro member, Portugal, as the members “we have a positive attitude toward.”

Under Ireland’s definition, its “dead banks,” which were crushed by the weight of bad debt incurred in the property and credit bubble, would not qualify. These include Irish Bank Resolution Corp., which took over Anglo Irish Bank, and the Irish Nationwide Building Society.

But banks that still operate but have been recapitalized by the state could receive help.

Michael Noonan, the Irish finance minister, said there was “a distinction being drawn between the word ‘legacy’ and the word ‘retrospective.”’

“If you have a dead bank there are legacy issues, and we are not negotiating for anything broadly to be done for Anglo Irish-I.B.R.C.,” Mr. Noonan said.

He said that about €28 billion was invested in banks that were still trading, and that this was debt his government would like the euro zone bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, to assume.

Though no direct recapitalization of banks from that fund is likely to take effect before the end of the year, a promise that Ireland could receive such help could bolster market confidence. That might aid Ireland’s effort to emerge from the bailout program and return to the bond markets fully next year.

Alan Barrett, head of the economic analysis division at Ireland’s Economic and Social Research Institute, said there were several factors that could derail the government’s plans. These include a lack of domestic economic demand, the weakness of vital export markets including the euro zone, and the appreciation of the euro against the currency of Ireland’s neighbor and key trading partner, Britain.

And while Ireland’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product has been forecast as peaking soon at around 120 percent and then begin to fall, Mr. Barrett estimated that there was still a 30 percent chance that this would not happen. “We are basically of the view that this is a fairly unstable situation,” he said.

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Croatia Withdrawing Soldiers from U.N. Force on Israel-Syria Frontier

Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic of Croatia said Thursday that his country would withdraw its soldiers from a United Nations peacekeeping force in the Golan Heights following reports that Croatia was funneling weapons to antigovernment fighters in Syria.

Croatia has nearly 100 soldiers serving with the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, which is responsible for maintaining the fragile calm between Israeli and Syrian troops at the demilitarized zone along Syria’s Golan frontier that was established after a cease-fire ended the 1973 war.

The decision to withdraw the soldiers from the area came after The New York Times reported on Monday that Saudi Arabia had underwritten a large purchase of infantry arms in Croatia. Croatia has denied selling weapons to either Saudi Arabia or the Syrian rebels. But Mr. Milanovic said that reports of the sales had put Croatian soldiers at risk and that he was compelled to withdraw them because their safety could no longer be assured.

“We can deny over and over again, but everyone has already read these reports and our soldiers are no longer safe. We want them to return home safe and sound,” he told a cabinet meeting in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Citing the Times report, he said, “We can’t be sure if someone will take action against our units after the release of the information.”

According to United States and Western officials, in December arms left over from the Balkan wars of the 1990s began to reach rebels battling the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, via Jordan.

Since then, officials said, several planeloads of weapons had left Croatia. Yugoslav weapons previously unseen in the conflict, including recoilless guns, assault rifles and machine guns, began to appear in videos posted by Syrian rebels on YouTube.

The infusion of arms appeared to signify a more activist approach to helping Syria’s armed opposition, and as a counterweight to Iranian support for the Assad government.

Before the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, Croatia had relatively strong political and economic ties to Damascus. But analysts said that Croatia, which is to join the European Union this year, had since firmly sided with the rebels, abiding by European Union sanctions against Damascus, offering financial aid to Syrian refugees and recognizing the Syrian opposition as the only legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

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First Lady Announces Public-Private Plan to Bolster Physical Education

CHICAGO — As part of her campaign to curb childhood obesity, Michelle Obama on Thursday announced an ambitious plan to increase physical education in the country’s public schools with the help of private companies.

Jeff Haynes/Reuters

Michelle Obama spoke in Chicago on Thursday about her plan to increase physical activity in schools.

Under the $70 million program, the first public-private partnership of its kind, schools will be able to apply for grants to assess and improve their health and physical education programs, with the goal of getting children to exercise an hour a day.

“This is an earth-shattering awesomely inspiring day,” Mrs. Obama said in an emotional speech announcing the program in her hometown. “I grew up just a few miles from where we are today, over on the South Side.” She said that even though “my family certainly wasn’t rich, our neighborhood was barely middle class,” back then “being active was a way of life.” She recalled doing double Dutch on jump-ropes and going to summer camp.

“Where would I have been without those activities that kept be busy and safe and off the streets?” she said.

The program is supported by Nike, which will provide $50 million over five years to help schools and communities set up programs and spaces to get children to exercise. Other groups, including the GENYOUth Foundation, ChildObesity180, Kaiser Permanente and the General Mills Foundation, will give a combined $20 million for grants, training and other resources to help develop exercise programs and other health programs in schools.

All the money will be offered through Let’s Move Active Schools, Mrs. Obama ‘s new initiative. It will be administered through the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition, the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation.

“This is a huge deal for me,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who appeared with Mrs. Obama. “When students have a chance to play and be active, they do better academically. This needs to become the norm.”

Mr. Duncan said he hoped the initiative would spread to 50,000 schools over the next five years. Schools will be able to sign up at LetsMoveSchools.org, where they will be directed to training programs.

Mrs. Obama, who is on a three-city, two-day tour to promote her Let’s Move initiative to reduce childhood obesity, was joined in Chicago by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, as well as the athletes Serena Williams, Gabrielle Douglas, Allyson Felix, Bo Jackson, Colin Kaepernick, Sarah Reinertsen, Ashton Eaton, Paul Rodriguez and Dominique Dawes, and the personal trainer Bob Harper. Ms. Williams said the program “has Serena written all over it.”

Mr. Duncan said that Mrs. Obama’s support would help bring a similar attention to exercise that she had to school lunches. “She brings voice, she brings power, she brings tremendous personal passion,'’ he said. “She speaks from experience.”

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DealBook: Heinz Case May Involve a Side Bet in London

Regulators have escalated an investigation into suspicious trades placed ahead of the $23 billion takeover of H. J. Heinz, focusing on a complex derivative bet routed through London, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The development builds on a recent regulatory action mounted against a Goldman Sachs account in Switzerland that bought Heinz options contracts. It also comes a week after the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it opened a criminal inquiry.

An unusual spike in trading volume in Heinz options a day before the deal was announced first attracted investigators. The Securities and Exchange Commission is also examining fluctuations in ordinary stock trades. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street’s self-regulatory group, recently referred suspicious stock trades to the S.E.C., a person briefed on the matter said.

Now the S.E.C. is looking into a more opaque corner of the investing world, examining a product known as a contract-for-difference, a derivative that allows investors to bet on changes in the price of stocks without owning the shares. Such contracts are not regulated in the United States, but are popular in Britain. Regulators there recently opened an inquiry into the Heinz trades, one of the people briefed on the matter said.

The expansion of the Heinz investigation illustrates the growing challenges facing American regulators. Charged with policing the American exchanges, authorities increasingly find themselves having to hunt through a dizzyingly complex global marketplace.

After a number of prominent crackdowns on insider stock trading, a campaign that scared the markets, investors are seeking subtler and more sophisticated tools to seize on confidential tidbits. Trading operations also flocked overseas, a careful move that forces the S.E.C. to navigate a maze of international regulations before identifying suspect traders.

The Heinz case illustrates the shift, as the S.E.C. relies on Swiss authorities to expose the trader behind the Heinz options bets.

The suspicious options trades were routed through a Goldman Sachs account in Zurich, where laws prevent the firm from sharing details of the account holder’s identity. In a complaint filed two weeks ago, the S.E.C. froze the account of “one or more unknown traders.” A federal judge upheld that freeze last week, a move that will prevent the traders from spending their winnings or moving the money.

The series of well-timed options trades, bets that produced $1.7 million in potential profits, came just a day before Berkshire Hathaway and the investment firm 3G Capital announced that they had agreed to buy the ketchup maker. News of the deal sent the company’s shares, and the value of the options contracts, soaring.

The S.E.C. called the trading “highly suspicious,” given that there was scant options trading in Heinz in previous months.

“Irregular and highly suspicious options trading immediately in front of a merger or acquisition announcement is a serious red flag,” Daniel M. Hawke, head of the commission’s market abuse unit, said recently.

While the identity remains a secret, the account holder is a Goldman private wealth management client, according to a person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak on the record. Goldman executives in Zurich know the identity of the person, but laws prohibit those executives from sharing the name with American regulators and even Goldman executives outside of Switzerland.

Finma, the Swiss regulator, is the gatekeeper for American regulators. The S.E.C. contacted Finma in an effort to learn more about the trading, and the Swiss regulator has promised to help. It could take weeks to identify the traders.

Goldman has hired outside counsel to advise it on the situation, according to people briefed on the situation who were not authorized to speak on the record. The bank, which is not accused of wrongdoing, is cooperating with the investigation.

An S.E.C. spokesman declined to comment.

The agency’s inquiry may cast a cloud over the Heinz deal. After the traders are identified, the focus will turn to the insiders who had information on the deal and could have leaked details. Dozens of people had confidential information about the deal, including bankers, lawyers and executives for both the buyers and the seller.

As the agency continues to build its case against the options trades, it also is examining suspicious contracts-for-difference.

Investors increasingly favor the contracts because they require little capital investment and can be traded on margin. They are popular on the London Stock Exchange, where regulators are now focusing some attention.

In essence, the derivatives contracts are a side bet on the price of a stock. They have drawn criticism for being opaque, in part because users are not actually trading the shares of a company, but rather a contract linked to those shares.

Regulators have examined the use of the contracts before when accusations of insider trading have arisen. In 2008, the British Financial Services Authority fined an investor for market abuse, saying the investor had used a contract-for-difference to profit from inside information on the Body Shop, a retailer. The person was making a bet in this case that the shares would fall in value.

Despite the focus on such complex products in the Heinz case, the S.E.C. is also examining more mundane activity in equity trades ahead of the deal.

Finra is helping the agency build its investigation. The group’s Office of Fraud Detection and Market Intelligence is coordinating with the S.E.C.

A Finra official declined to comment on Wednesday.

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/28/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Heinz Case May Involve A Side Bet In London.

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IHT Rendezvous: Eve Best Returns to the Globe, This Time as a Director

LONDON — The recent press conference announcing the 2013 season at Shakespeare’s Globe on one level seemed like variations on an ongoing theme.

A onetime Falstaff at this address, Roger Allam, is returning to open the season as Prospero in “The Tempest,” directed by Jeremy Herrin, while the perennial favorite, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will be seen in May in a new staging, this time from the Globe’s artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole. The 2011 Olivier winner Michelle Terry (“Tribes”) will play Titania.

The international season that so galvanized the space for six weeks last spring will return in a greatly pared-down form, and there will be three new plays, including one, “Blue Stockings” by Jessica Swale, that tells of the first female students at Cambridge University.

But it’s the last in the trio of supernaturally charged Shakespeares that promises to break fresh theatrical ground. In what represents her first-ever stab (you’ll forgive the word in context) at directing, the much-laureled actress Eve Best will stage a new production in June of “Macbeth.” Joseph Millson and Samantha Spiro have signed on as the murderous couple at the play’s black, bleak heart.

What prompted one of the most accomplished stage performers of her generation (an actress with an Olivier Award and two Tony nominations) to make the shift? The answer was arrived at via a lengthy phone call to a remote island in Denmark, where Ms. Best, 41, is currently filming “Someone You Love” for the director Lars von Trier’s Zentropa production group. This film’s specific director is Pernille Fischer Christensen.

To hear Ms. Best describe it, she thought her time at the Globe was finished, at least for a while, following a triumphant 2011 production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which she played Beatrice opposite Charles Edwards’s no less witty and scintillating Benedick. (That staging opened within days of a contrasting commercial production of the same play, with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and trumped its starrier competitor hands down.)

“I love the Globe so much,” Ms. Best recalled, “and wanted any excuse to spend some time there, having played Beatrice which was just my most favorite part ever. But I did think I was sort of running out of parts to play for a little while until I get into the world of Cleopatra and those kinds of parts” — that’s to say, Shakespeare’s more senior women.

But all that was before Mr. Dromgoole surprised Ms. Best with an offer to take on the directing of the Shakespeare tragedy in which she had made her Globe debut in 2001, opposite Jasper Britton.

“I put myself forward to direct something thinking that they might say yes in a couple of years and that if they did say yes they might start me off with something light or something simpler or more obscure,” she said.

“I was not prepared for them to turn around and say, ‘Yes, all right, and what about “Macbeth?”’ Ms. Best continued, delight evident in her voice. “It took me back. My first response was: ‘Absolutely no way; you must be kidding!’”

The play is particularly challenging at the Globe. Open to the elements, the theater is a tricky fit for a text suffused with darkness, and it can be hard to focus the gathering intensity of the Macbeths’ toxic rise and fall.

“We are in the broad daylight and the open air,” Ms. Best acknowledged, “and that particular circular shape is certainly going to have a significant effect on the kind of production ours is. We can’t set it in the dark with candles, so we just have to embrace what it is that the Globe will give us: I’m very interested in just seeing the play as clearly as we possibly can and focusing on the human relationships within it.”

Mr. Dromgoole for his part said he thought Ms. Best would be able to meet the play head-on without lots of additional mumbo jumbo. “I wanted someone who I thought could just let [“Macbeth”] play itself rather than forcing it down a tunnel of darkness.”

As it happens, Ms. Best has firsthand knowledge of both central roles. In addition to acting Lady Macbeth at the Globe, she participated in workshops of the play in New York with the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in which she played the title role opposite Mr. Cumming’s Lady. Mr. Cumming is soon to open his own solo take on the play on Broadway.

(For those collecting “Macbeths,” the West End is now hosting the film actor James McAvoy in a modern-dress, gory, commendably visceral version. That one, at the Trafalgar Studios, will have finished roughly two months before Ms. Best’s begins.)

“What’s really lovely about this play — and all Shakespeare plays obviously — is that they are so magnificently and eminently flexible,” said Ms. Best, who was sounding in no way deterred by other productions arriving before hers. “They can encompass 6 or 8 or 10 productions all going on at the same time, all equally fascinating, all equally interesting, with all kinds of different approaches.”

Nor was she sounding spooked by a famously hexed play that has on occasion brought disaster in its wake. Whereas theater lore, for instance, often insists that those involved with this text refer to it as “the Scottish play,” Ms. Best was having none of that.

“I’ve been saying it like mad,” she said. “If we’re going to be working on it for two months, life’s too short to be worried.”

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