China Toughens Restrictions on Internet Use

HONG KONG — The Chinese government issued new rules on Friday requiring Internet users to provide their real names to service providers, while assigning Internet companies greater responsibility for deleting forbidden postings and reporting them to the authorities.

The decision came as government censors have sharply stepped up restrictions on China’s international Internet traffic in recent weeks. The restrictions are making it harder for businesses to protect commercial secrets and for individuals to view overseas Web sites that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive.

The new regulations, issued by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, allow Internet users to continue to adopt pseudonyms for their online postings, but only if they first provide their real names to service providers, a measure that could chill some of the vibrant discourse on the country’s Twitter-like microblogs. The authorities periodically detain and even jail Internet users for politically sensitive comments, such as calls for a multiparty democracy or accusations of impropriety by local officials.

Any entity providing Internet access, including over fixed-line or mobile phones, “should when signing agreements with users or confirming provision of services, demand that users provide true information about their identities,” the committee ordered.

In recent weeks, Internet users in China have exposed a series of sexual and financial scandals that have led to the resignations or dismissals of at least 10 local officials. International news media have also published a series of reports in recent months on the accumulation of wealth by the family members of China’s leaders, and some Web sites carrying such reports, including Bloomberg’s and the English- and Chinese-language sites of The New York Times, have been assiduously blocked, while Internet comments about them have been swiftly deleted.

The regulations issued Friday build on a series of similar administrative guidelines and municipal rules issued over the past year. China’s mostly private Internet service providers have been slow to comply with them, fearing the reactions of their customers. The committee’s decision has much greater legal force, and puts far more pressure on Chinese Internet providers to comply more quickly and more comprehensively, Internet specialists said.

In what appeared to be an effort to make the decision more palatable to the Chinese public, the committee also included a mandate for businesses in China to be more cautious in gathering and protecting electronic data.

“Nowadays on the Internet there are very serious problems with citizens’ personal electronic information being recklessly collected, used without approval, illegally disclosed, and even traded and sold,” Li Fei, a deputy director of the committee’s legislative affairs panel, said on Friday at a news conference in Beijing. “There are also a large number of cases of invasive attacks on information systems to steal personal electronic information, as well as lawbreaking on the Internet through swindles and through defaming and slandering others.”

Mr. Li denied that the government was seeking to prevent the exposure of corruption.

“When citizens exercise these rights according to the law, no organization or individual can use any reason or excuse to interfere, and cannot suppress them or exact revenge,” he said. “At the same time, when citizens exercise their rights, including through use of the Internet, they should stay within the bounds of the Constitution and the laws, and must not harm the legitimate rights and interests of the state, society, the collective or of other citizens.”

A spokesman for the National People’s Congress said that 145 members of the committee voted in favor of the new rules, with 5 abstaining and 1 voting against them.

The requirement for real names appeared to be aimed particularly at cellphone companies and other providers of mobile Internet access. At the news conference, an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Zhao Zhiguo, said that nearly all fixed-line services now had real-name registration, but that only about 70 percent of mobile phones were registered under real names.

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Putin to Sign Ban on U.S. Adoptions of Russian Children

MOSCOW President Vladimir V. Putin said on Thursday that he would sign into law a bill banning the adoption of Russian children by American citizens, retaliating against an American law that punishes Russians accused of violating human rights and dealing a potentially grave setback to bilateral relations.

Mr. Putin announced his decision at a meeting with senior government officials, including cabinet members and legislative leaders. The adoption ban, included in a broader law aimed at retaliating against the United States, was approved unanimously by the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Parliament, on Wednesday.

Mr. Putin also said he would sign a decree calling for improvements in Russia’s deeply troubled child welfare system that the Federation Council also adopted Wednesday. “I intend to sign the law,” Mr. Putin said, “as well as a presidential decree changing the procedure of helping orphaned children, children left without parental care, and especially children who are in a disadvantageous situation due to their health problems.”

United States officials have strongly criticized the measure and have urged the Russian government not to enmesh orphaned children in politics.

“It is misguided to link the fate of children to unrelated political considerations,” a State Department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell, said on Wednesday before Mr. Putin announced his decision.

Internally, however, Obama administration officials have been debating how strongly to respond to the adoption ban, and are trying to assess the potential implications for other aspects of the relationship with Russia. The United States, for example, now relies heavily on overland routes through Russia to ship supplies to military units in Afghanistan, and has enlisted Russia’s help in containing Iran’s nuclear program. The former cold war rivals also have sharp disagreements, notably over the civil war in Syria.

Until Thursday, these larger considerations, along with the possibility that Mr. Putin might veto the adoption bill, seemed to forestall a more forceful response from Washington.

The ban is set to take effect on Tuesday, and some senior officials in Moscow said they expected it to have the immediate effect of blocking the departure of 46 children whose adoptions by American parents were nearly completed. Adoption agency officials in the United States who work regularly with Russian orphanages said they expected the number of families immediately affected by the ban to be far larger, about 200 to 250 who have already identified a child that they planned to adopt.

Since Mr. Putin returned to the presidency in May, Russian officials have used a juggernaut of legislation and executive decisions to curtail the United States’ influence and involvement in Russia, undoing major partnerships that began after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The adoption ban, however, is the first step to take direct aim at the American public and would effectively undo a bilateral agreement on international adoptions that was ratified this year and took effect Nov. 1. That agreement called for heightened oversight in response to several high-profile cases of abuse and deaths of adopted Russian children in the United States.

About 1,000 Russian children were adopted in 2011 by parents from the United States, which leads in adoptions here, and more than 45,000 such children have been adopted by American parents since 1999.

Pavel A. Astakhov, Russia’s child rights commissioner and a major proponent of the ban, said the 46 pending adoptions would be blocked regardless of previous agreements, and he expressed no regrets over the likely emotional turmoil for the families involved.

“The children who have been chosen by foreign American parents — we know of 46 children who were seen, whose paperwork was processed, who came in the sights of American agencies,” Mr. Astakhov said in his statement. “They will not be able to go to America, to those who wanted to see them as their adopted children. There is no need to go out and make a tragedy out of it.”

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Net loss: Brooklyn fires coach Avery Johnson

NEW YORK (AP) — Avery Johnson was fired Thursday as coach of the Brooklyn Nets, who have fallen to .500 in their season of new surroundings and elevated expectations.

General manager Billy King announced the dismissal in a statement. Assistant P.J. Carlesimo will coach the Nets at home Friday against Charlotte, according to someone with knowledge of the plans. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because details were to be provided at a news conference later in the day.

"The Nets ownership would like to express thanks to Avery for his efforts and to wish him every success in the future," owner Mikhail Prokhorov said in a statement.

After a strong start to their first season in Brooklyn, the Nets have lost 10 of 13 games to fall well behind the first-place New York Knicks, the team they so badly want to compete with in their new home.

But after beating the Knicks in their first meeting Nov. 26, probably the high point of Johnson's tenure, the Nets went 5-10 and frustrations have been mounting.

The Nets were embarrassed by Boston on national TV on Christmas, then were routed by Milwaukee 108-93 on Wednesday night for their fifth loss in six games.

Star guard Deron Williams recently complained about Johnson's offense, and Nets CEO Brett Yormark took to Twitter after the loss to Celtics to voice his displeasure with the performance.

Brooklyn started the season 11-4, winning five in a row to end November, when Johnson was Eastern Conference coach of the month. But he couldn't do anything to stop this slump, one the Nets never anticipated after a $350 million summer spending spree they believed would take them toward the top of their conference.

Johnson has been the Nets' coach for a little more than two seasons. He went 60-116 with the Nets, who moved from New Jersey to Brooklyn to start the 2012-13 season. Johnson coached the Dallas Mavericks to a spot in the NBA Finals in 2006.

This is the NBA's second coaching change this season following the dismissal of Mike Brown by the Los Angeles Lakers.

Johnson arrived in New Jersey with a 194-70 record, a .735 winning percentage that was the highest in NBA history, but had little chance of success in his first two seasons while the Nets focused all their planning on the move to Brooklyn.

They looked to make a splash this summer when they re-signed Williams and fellow starters Gerald Wallace, Brook Lopez and Kris Humphries, traded for Atlanta All-Star Joe Johnson, and added veteran depth with players such as Reggie Evans, C.J. Watson and Andray Blatche.

Johnson didn't have a contract beyond this season but seemed to have the confidence of Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire who before the season said he had faith in "the Avery defense system."

Some predicted the Nets would finish as high as second in the East behind defending champion Miami, and the projections seemed warranted when the Nets started quickly amid much fanfare. But all the good publicity faded in recent weeks once the losing started.

Williams, who has struggled this season, stirred the waters when he expressed his preference for the offense he ran under Jerry Sloan in Utah before a loss to the Jazz. Williams and Johnson, nicknamed "Brooklyn's Backcourt" and expected to be one of the best in the NBA, have shot poorly and rarely meshed.

The Nets were embarrassed near the end of their 93-76 loss to Boston, when fans exited early amid a chant of "Let's go Celtics!"

"Nets fans deserved better," Yormark tweeted after the game. "The entire organization needs to work harder to find a solution. We will get there."

Not under Johnson, though.

The Nets should be able to entice a big-name coach with Prokhorov's billions and the chance to play in a major market at Barclays Center, the $1 billion arena that has drawn praise in the city and from visiting teams.

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Books: From Bang to Whimper: A Heart Drug’s Story

On June 23, 2005, American medicine managed to take a small step forward and a giant step backward at precisely the same time, with government approval of the first medication to be earmarked for a specific racial group. It was BiDil, a drug designed to treat heart failure in blacks.

Enthusiasts hailed BiDil’s approval by the Food and Drug Administration as a landmark event in the nascent field of pharmacogenomics, which aims to create drugs tailored to fit an individual’s genetic makeup as precisely as a bespoke suit drapes its owner’s shoulders. Critics just winced and clocked one more misstep in medicine’s long history of race-related disasters.

You would think that the elucidation of the human genome would have cleared up most of the hoary untruths surrounding race and health. But as Jonathan Kahn makes clear in his worthy if convoluted review of the events surrounding the birth of BiDil, the genome has in many respects only made things worse.

It has been clear for decades that race has minimal relevance to the body’s inner workings. Research has repeatedly shown that the biologic variations among individuals of the same race are reliably great enough for race to retain little utility as a biologic predictor. You might as well sort people by height. Or, in the words of an editorial writer for Nature Biotechnology in 2005, “Pooling people in race silos is akin to zoologists grouping raccoons, tigers and okapis on the basis that they are all stripy.”

But old misconceptions die hard, particularly for entrepreneurs eagerly awaiting cash bonanzas from the genomic revolution.

Race may be irrelevant; it may be, as Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, put it, “a weak and imperfect proxy” for genetic differences. But it is also a familiar concept — and asking people what race they are is substantially cheaper than genotyping them.

So in a peculiar paradox, race has come to serve in some circles as a crude surrogate for genetic analysis until actual genomic medicine comes along — a temporary bridge from now to later, known to be flawed but still a quasi-legitimate stand-in for the real thing.

Against this background unfolds the story of BiDil, a drama of greed and good intentions.

Several observations prompted the drug’s development. Among them was the common assertion from the last century that blacks with heart failure were more likely to die than whites. (Mr. Kahn does an impressive job of researching and debunking this statistic.) Then there was the belief that blacks often reacted badly to some of the newer drugs used for treating heart failure, and the results of a study dating from the 1980s suggesting that many black patients did well with two old standby drugs.

Those two drugs were (and are) on sale as generics, costing pennies a pill. But just suppose they were combined into a single pill that could be then specifically marketed to patients who just happened to be thought in particular need of effective medication? Now there was a pharmacologic and marketing plan that would extend a lucrative new patent for decades.

And so it came to pass that a collection of eager investors and some of the nation’s foremost cardiologists smiled on the results of an industry-sponsored trial performed on self-identified black subjects with heart failure: The two cheap drugs combined into the not-so-cheap BiDil reduced mortality by 40 percent compared with placebo. This figure was impressive enough to end the trial early and speed BiDil to market.

How did whites do on BiDil? Nobody bothered to check.

Mr. Kahn deserves credit for teasing out all the daunting complexities behind these events, including the details of genetic analysis, the perils of racial determinations and the minutiae of patent law. Unfortunately, though, he suffocates his powerful subject in a dry, repetitive, ponderous read.

A law professor with a doctorate in history and longstanding interest in race issues, Mr. Kahn trudges a partisan path through the drama in which he himself was a player. (He testified before an F.D.A. advisory committee that BiDil should be approved without racial qualifications.)

He heads bravely into many statistical thickets, but omits relevant clinical data; he repeatedly refers to the trial that led to BiDil’s approval, for instance, but I could find its numerical findings nowhere in the book and had to look them up. In a story that fairly drips with potential human interest, he offers the reader not one sip.

The issues raised on every page are so important and so thought-provoking that it would be irresponsible to warn interested readers away. Still, it would be almost as irresponsible to misrepresent the difficulty of the journey.

As it happens, BiDil itself has had a remarkably inglorious career. Despite its much-trumpeted release, patients did not request the medication, and practicing doctors did not prescribe it.

NitroMed, the company that developed it, sponsored no further studies and failed in 2009.

The drug still lingers on the market; Mr. Kahn writes that BiDil may be resurrected in sustained-release form — that other time-honored technique for wringing a few more years from a drug’s patent.

For a parable of early 21st-century medicine, as it treads water between past and future and never hesitates to reach for a buck, it doesn’t get much better than BiDil.

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Reid Says a Deal Is Unlikely Before the Fiscal Deadline

WASHINGTON — Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, warned Thursday morning that there was scant time to put together a Congressional deal to avert the impending fiscal crisis and that no resolution was in sight.

“I have to be very honest,” Mr. Reid said as the Senate convened Thursday in an unusual session between Christmas and New Year’s Day. “I don’t know time-wise how it can happen now.”

Mr. Reid offered his pessimistic assessment shortly before President Obama, cutting his vacation short, arrived back in Washington on Air Force One. White House officials said that before leaving Hawaii, Mr. Obama had spoken separately by phone with each of the four Congressional leaders about the status of negotiations, but they gave no details of the discussion.

On the Senate floor, Mr. Reid excoriated House Republicans for failing to consider a Senate-passed measure that would extend lower tax rates on household income up to $250,000. He urged House members, who remained away from Washington, to return to the Capitol to put together at least a modest deal to avoid the more than half-a-trillion dollars in automatic tax increases and spending cuts set to begin in January.

“The American people are waiting for the ball to drop,” Mr. Reid said, “but it’s not going to be a good drop.”

House Republicans planned a midafternoon conference call among members to discuss, among other things, their possible return this weekend; members were told they would be given 48 hours’ notice before any impending return. Republican senators were also planning to convene at the Capitol — normally somnolent during Christmas week — to strategize.

A spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, confirmed that he had spoken with the president, and said that Mr. McConnell was “happy to review what the president has in mind.” But the spokesman, Don Stewart, said Senate Democrats had not come ahead with a plan.

“When they do, members on both sides of the aisle will review the legislation and make decisions on how best to proceed,” Mr. Stewart said.

Mr. Reid said that absent a move from Republicans, the Senate would move forward this week on the national security measure concerning espionage, as well as a bill to help states that have suffered hurricane damage, with multiple votes possible.

“We are here in Washington working,” Mr. Reid said, “while the members of the House of Representatives are out watching movies and watching their kids play soccer and basketball and doing all kinds of things. They should be here.”

Senators, frustrated, pessimistic and in some cases downright miserable, returned to Washington with no clear fiscal agenda. Senator Ben Nelson, a retiring Democrat of Nebraska, arrived shortly after midnight on Thursday on a flight that was delayed more than four hours. As he walked through the airport, he lamented the deteriorating political comity that he has observed during two terms in the Senate and two terms as a Democratic governor of a conservative state.

“There are folks who are elected who have come here with an agenda to do nothing and want to stop everything,” Mr. Nelson said in an interview. “It may be the new norm – blocking everything.”

For Mr. Nelson, who decided against seeking a third term, the looming fiscal crisis would be the final legislative act of a political career built around a bipartisan voting record. He said he was not confident that a real deal could be reached that would be acceptable to both sides, considering that Congress is filled with many people “who didn’t accept the 2008 presidential election and haven’t accepted the 2012 election either.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

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Lübeck Journal: Museum Seeks to Update Thomas Mann for Age of Texting

Gordon Welters for The New York Times

As the Buddenbrookhaus, a museum about Thomas Mann, prepares to grow, it aims to make a formidable writer more accessible.

LÜBECK, Germany — The latest sensation from the literary lion Thomas Mann is more than a century old and runs over 500 characters, not pages, long.

In one of a trove of 81 recently discovered postcards, Mr. Mann rhapsodized to his older brother, Heinrich, about yogurt, “tasty and lightly laxative,” and fretted over the healthiness of decaffeinated coffee. Zippy, chatty and refreshingly accessible, the messages soften the image of a titan of letters known for lengthy and difficult masterpieces like “The Magic Mountain” and the family saga “Buddenbrooks.”

A batch of the postcards, written between 1901 and 1928 and found by Heinrich’s grandchildren among his daughter’s effects, scroll down a giant flat-screen monitor here at the Buddenbrookhaus museum, set in the speech-bubble shape familiar from text messages. As officials prepare to expand the museum next year, they are wrestling with the question of how to make this Nobel-winning author of weighty tomes approachable to coming generations weaned on Twitter messages and status updates.

The prototype is just a brisk stroll away, past the brick Gothic marvels of this Hanseatic city at the Günter Grass-Haus, spotlighting another Nobel laureate. There, visitors vote on a touchscreen for possible coming exhibitions about Mr. Grass, author of “The Tin Drum” and at 85 still a magnet for controversy. “Sexuality” and “Grass as soldier” tied for the top spot on a recent afternoon. “The poet Grass” was last.

“In Germany, people experience museums passively,” said Jörg-Philipp Thomsa, head of the Grass museum, while demonstrating how to operate a giant tablet computer the size of a kitchen table.

Pictures of Mr. Grass grew, shrank and swiveled beneath Mr. Thomsa’s fingers as he searched for the Smurfs, the cartoon characters. The little blue fellows, he explained, were there because they represented the Polish labor movement Solidarity in Mr. Grass’s novel “The Rat.” Also, children like them.

“The goal is to awaken interest in Grass’s work, which is often seen as difficult,” Mr. Thomsa said.

But the latest gadgets are only one piece of the puzzle. For many readers, the sense of connection to the work and the author is the ultimate draw, like taking a walking tour of Dublin locations that Joyce featured in “Ulysses.”

“There has to be something about the place, something extraordinary you can’t find on the Internet,” said Holger Pils, head of the Buddenbrookhaus. “The need for the experience of the place is growing because everything else is two-dimensional.”

In some ways the Manns are perfect for a gossipy, confessional era. The brothers are like a German version of the Brontë sisters with a dash of Cain and Abel, nonviolent but still rivalrous. The family history includes prosperity and power, a fall from grace, sibling strife, suicide and scandal. “The Blue Angel,” adapted from Heinrich Mann’s novel “Small Town Tyrant,” is a cinema classic that made Marlene Dietrich a star.

Germans remain particularly fascinated by “Buddenbrooks,” a goliath of German literature, like “Middlemarch” in Britain or “War and Peace” in Russia. The novel chronicles the decline of a merchant family based on the Manns. Most of the action in the book plays out in a fictional version of the house on Mengstrasse where the author’s grandparents lived, now home to the museum.

The baroque facade of the old patrician house still faces St. Mary’s Church, where, in the book’s opening pages, “the wind whistled in the nooks around its massive Gothic corners.” On a recent winter evening, guests gathered in the vaulted cellar, nibbling on red and white meringues like ones described in the novel, to listen as an actor with a deep, soothing voice read the book’s famous Christmas scene.

They paid 65 euros, or about $86, for dinner and a tour of landmarks from the lives and works of the brothers.

“The characters in the novel are strongly bound to the real people, the reality of this great literature,” said Thomas Katschewitz, 52, as the tour stopped to drink mulled wine and listen to an organ grinder play in front of the brothers’ old school.

For a city of 212,000, Lübeck has an exceptional literary tradition. The main public library is nearly 400 years old. Bernd Hatscher, the library’s director, showed off a copy of the “Rudimentum Novitiorum,” a history of the world with vividly colored maps printed in Lübeck in 1475.

Lübeck was home to the 19th-century poet Emanuel Geibel, whose poetry volume ran through 100 editions just during his lifetime; the novelist Ida Boy-Ed, an early supporter of the young Thomas Mann; and the radical Jewish writer Erich Mühsam, killed by the SS at the Oranienburg concentration camp. Lübeck suffered significant damage in World War II bombing raids, including to the Buddenbrookhaus, but its literary reputation has not ebbed.

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Netflix blames Amazon for Christmas Eve outage

NEW YORK (Reuters) – An outage at one of Amazon‘s web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc‘s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas Day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.

The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray DVD players.

Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, California, has 30 million streaming subscribers worldwide, of which more than 27 million are in the Americas region that was exposed to the outage and could have potentially been affected, Evers said.

Evers said the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services‘ cloud computing center in Virginia and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored before 8:00 a.m. PST Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users by 11:00 p.m. PST on Monday.

The event marks the latest in a series of outages from Amazon Web Services, with one occurring in April of last year that knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare.

“We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented,” Evers of Netflix said.

“We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night,” he added.

Officials at Amazon Web Services were not available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company’s contracts with Amazon.

(Reporting by Sam Forgione; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz and Matt Driskill)

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Red Sox get All-Star closer Hanrahan from Pirates

BOSTON (AP) — The Red Sox have acquired All-Star closer Joel Hanrahan from the Pittsburgh Pirates in a six-player deal.

Boston completed the trade Wednesday, also receiving infielder Brock Holt. The Red Sox gave up right-handers Mark Melancon and Stolmy Pimentel, infielder Ivan DeJesus Jr. and first baseman-outfielder Jerry Sands.

Over the past two seasons, the right-handed Hanrahan had 76 saves, fourth most in the National League, and a 2.24 ERA. Last season, he was 5-2 with a 2.72 ERA and 36 saves.

Holt spent most of last season at Double-A Altoona, then hit .292 in 24 games with the Pirates, all in September.

Melancon was 0-2 with a 6.20 ERA in 41 relief appearances in his only season with Boston. Pimentel spent the season at Double-A Portland. Sands and DeJesus were obtained in a trade that sent Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Aug. 25.

The Red Sox also announced the signing of free agent shortstop Stephen Drew, who agreed to a one-year contract early last week. That reported $9.5 million deal was contingent on the former Oakland Athletic and Arizona Diamondback passing a physical.

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Study Finds Modest Declines in Obesity Rates Among Young Children From Poor Families

A new national study has found modest declines in obesity among 2- to 4-year-olds from poor families, a dip that researchers say may indicate that the obesity epidemic has passed its peak among this group.

The study, by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drew on the height and weight measurements of 27 million children who were part of the federal Women, Infants and Children program, which provides food subsidies to low-income mothers and their children up to the age of 5.

The study was based on data from 30 states and the District of Columbia and covered the years from 1998 to 2010. The share of children who were obese declined to 14.9 percent in 2010, down from 15.2 percent in 2003, after rising between 1998 and 2003. Extreme obesity also declined, dropping to 2.07 percent in 2010 from 2.22 percent in 2003. The study was published Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

The report defined a 3-year-old boy of average height, almost 3 feet 2 inches tall, as being obese when he weighed 37 pounds or more. The same boy was categorized as being extremely obese when he weighed 44 pounds or more.

“The declines we’re presenting here are pretty modest, but it is a change in direction,” said Heidi M. Blanck, one of the study’s authors and the acting director of the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity at the disease centers. “We were going up before. And this data shows we’re going down. For us, that’s pretty exciting.”

The findings were another sign that one of the nation’s seemingly intractable health problems may be reversing course, at least among children. Single interventions like school exercise programs have not worked, and public health experts now say that only a broad set of policy measures has a chance of success.

Over the past year, several major cities, including Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia, have reported obesity declines among some parts of their student populations.

The new study was one of the first to document a national decline in obesity among young children from low-income families. Researchers say that is particularly meaningful in a population that is disproportionately at risk. Twenty percent of poor children are obese, compared with about 12 percent of children from more affluent families, according to the centers.

It is unclear what drove the decline, but Dr. Blanck offered hypotheses. Breast-feeding, which often leads to healthier weight gain for young children, has increased since 2000. The percentage of 6-month-olds still being breast-fed increased to 47.7 percent among children born in 2009, up from 34.2 percent among children born in 2000.

Breast-feeding of infants from low-income families has risen over the years. In 1980, only 28 percent of infants from those families had ever been breast-fed, compared with 66 percent in 2011.

Dr. Blanck also pointed to changes in the environment, like those documented in a report about food marketing practices released by the Federal Trade Commission on Friday.

The agency found that the amount of money spent on food marketing to children declined by nearly 20 percent from 2006 to 2009, with the biggest drop in television advertising. The total spent on food advertising to youths in 2009 was $1.79 billion, the report said.

The report, based on data from 48 major food and beverage marketers, also found that cereals marketed to children ages 2 to 11 had about a gram less sugar per serving in 2009 than in 2006 and slightly more whole grain.

Marketing to children of the most sugary cereals — those with 13 grams or more sugar per serving — was virtually eliminated between 2006 and 2009, according to the report.

But drinks marketed to children still averaged more than 20 grams of added sugar per serving, the report found. Most of the improvements in beverages in the time period were in those sold in schools, the report said.

Dr. Blanck said she was hopeful that several national programs begun in the past few years would help extend the early declines. One initiative, Let’s Move! Child Care, initiated by Michelle Obama’s office, helps child care centers serve healthier food and include physical activity throughout day.

Changes in the foods that are subsidized in the Women, Infants and Children program, like less financing for fruit juice and more for fruits and vegetables, may also help, she said.

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Murderous Policewoman Leaves an Afghan Trail of Mystery

KABUL, Afghanistan — Sergeant Nargis went to work Monday with murder on her mind.

By the end of the morning, she would succeed, becoming responsible for this year’s 62nd insider killing, in which Afghan security forces have killed American or other coalition personnel. Such killings have greatly increased this year, but Sergeant Nargis’s killing of an American police adviser, Joseph Griffin, 49, of Mansfield, Ga., ranks among the strangest.

Was she an Iranian agent, as Afghan officials suggested on Tuesday after they found her Iranian passport at home? Was she mentally ill, as some police interrogators said privately and other Afghan officials speculated publicly?

The first theories, that she was either a jilted lover or a Taliban infiltrator, were firmly rejected by the authorities on Tuesday, but even her interrogators were left perplexed by her motives.

Making the case even stranger was her job: a uniformed police officer attached to the Interior Ministry’s legal and gender equality unit, what would normally be seen as a plum job, one that is entirely underwritten by international aid, both American and European, earmarked specifically for women’s rights issues.

All she would tell her interrogators was that she went to work aiming to kill someone important, and that she did not much care who, officials said.

“I was myself asking her, trying to make her talk about what could make her do such a thing, and all she would say was she wanted to kill a high official,” said Gen. Mohammad Zaher, the director of the criminal investigation division of the Police Department in Kabul Province, who attended her interrogations after her arrest on Monday. What she would not say, however, was why she had done it, he said. “We just don’t know.”

Her first stop was the Interior Ministry compound in downtown Kabul, where her own office was located. General Zaher said she told questioners that she had prowled the compound looking for someone important enough to kill.

“She saw two foreign women on the grounds of the M.O.I., and thought of killing them,” he said. They were foreign aid workers who had been gathering warm clothing for refugee children and were looking for police assistance in distributing it. “She said she thought they were not worth killing.”

So instead she went down the street and around the corner, about half a mile away, to the sprawling compound that includes the Kabul police headquarters and the Kabul governor’s office.

There, according to Afghan officials and to what they said was her own confession, she gained access by hiding her weapon on her body — women are searched much less thoroughly because of cultural norms, and only by other women, who are often in short supply. As an official of the gender unit at the ministry, she probably had experience carrying out such searches herself and would know how to evade them.

Afghan security officials themselves have a well-founded fear of attacks by their own forces — “green on green,” or Afghan on Afghan, attacks have been even more common lately than attacks on foreign forces, with at least 14 Afghan police officers killed in such episodes in the past week. So even a uniformed police officer could not easily gain access to a building where she was not assigned.

According to the general’s account, she first went to the restroom inside police headquarters, where she removed the gun from under her clothing and put it in her uniform pocket, where it would be more accessible. She then tried to get into the Kabul governor’s office, but was turned away by guards there because she had no appointment. Next she tried the Kabul police chief’s office, and again was turned away. She told interrogators she wanted to kill either of them.

Sergeant Nargis went downstairs to the ground floor, determined to kill someone immediately now that her gun was no longer hidden and she would be caught with it if she tried to leave.

Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting.

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