Russian Acquittal Escalates Human Rights Feud With U.S.

MOSCOW — A judge issued an acquittal on Friday of the only official to have gone to trial in Russia in the case of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer whose death in prison three years ago inspired the United States Congress to pass a law addressing human rights abuses in Russia.

The official, Dr. Dmitry Kratov, the former head of the medical service at Butyrka Prison, where Mr. Magnitsky had been held, was accused of negligence for refusing repeated requests for treatment for a life-threatening illness.

Charges against another doctor had been dismissed earlier, elevating the significance of Dr. Kratov’s trial, coming just weeks after Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, which was critical of the Russian courts for failing to prosecute any suspects in the lawyer’s death.

But far from pursuing the case, prosecutors announced at a hearing on Monday that they would no longer press for a conviction and instead asked the judge, Tatiana Neverova, to acquit Dr. Kratov.

That reversal came four days after President Vladimir V. Putin said at a news conference that Mr. Magnitsky had died of natural causes, a statement that a lawyer for the family said had sent a message to prosecutors to drop the case.

In granting the prosecutor’s request for an acquittal, Judge Neverova also indicated that Dr. Kratov could sue the government for damages under a Russian law related to illegal prosecution, Interfax reported. Dr. Kratov told journalists at the Tverskoi Court that he had not decided whether to sue.

The judge said she had seen no evidence in the course of the proceedings incriminating Dr. Kratov or convincing her that any connection existed between his actions and Mr. Magnitsky’s death, Interfax reported.

Dr. Kratov was the only person on a list of 60 Russian officials implicated in the Magnitsky case by the United States Helsinki Commission to have stood trial in Russia. Fewer than 1 percent of suspects are acquitted in Russian criminal trials.

Nikolai Gorokhov, a lawyer representing the Magnitsky family, said that Dr. Kratov had signed documents refusing Mr. Magnitsky’s request to be moved to an infirmary and that he had been aware of a diagnosis of pancreatitis and gallstones five days before Mr. Magnitsky death.

In the United States, the Magnitsky Act bans suspects like Dr. Kratov from entering the country and freezes assets in the American banking system.

In retaliation, Mr. Putin signed the Dmitri Yakovlev Act on Friday, named for a Russian child adopted in the United States who died after being forgotten in a hot car. The law bans Americans from adopting Russian orphans because of cases of abuse like Dmitri’s.

Mr. Magnitsky’s employer, the hedge fund Hermitage Capital, issued a statement Friday calling the ruling “a total miscarriage of justice.”

“There is no doubt that people responsible for Magnitsky’s death are being protected by the president of Russia,” the statement said. “Now that President Putin is personally involved in the obstruction of justice in a major case of extrajudicial killing, he will have to face the consequences of his actions.”

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NHL makes new offer; lockout enters critical stage

NEW YORK (AP) — The NHL made a new proposal to the players' association, hoping to spark talks to end the long lockout and save the hockey season.

Deputy commissioner Bill Daly said Friday the league made its offer Thursday and was waiting for a response. The sides haven't met in person since a second round of talks with a federal mediator broke down Dec. 13.

The lockout has reached its 104th day, and the NHL said it doesn't want a season of less than 48 games. To make that possible, a deal likely must be reached by mid-January.

"We delivered to the union a new, comprehensive proposal for a successor CBA," Daly said in a statement Friday. "We are not prepared to discuss the details of our proposal at this time. We are hopeful that once the union's staff and negotiating committee have had an opportunity to thoroughly review and consider our new proposal, they will share it with the players. We want to be back on the ice as soon as possible."

The union didn't immediately respond to a request for a comment.

The lockout has reached a critical stage, threatening to force a complete cancellation of a season for the second time in eight years. All games through Jan. 14, plus the Winter Classic and the All-Star game already have been called off. The next round of cuts could claim the entire schedule.

The NHL is the only North American professional sports league to cancel a season because of a labor dispute, losing the 2004-05 campaign to a lockout. A 48-game season was played in 1995 after a lockout stretched into January.

It is still possible this dispute could eventually be settled in the courts if the sides can't reach a deal on their own.

The NHL filed a class-action suit this month in U.S. District Court in New York in an effort to show its lockout is legal. In a separate move, the league filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, contending bad-faith bargaining by the union.

Those moves were made because the players' association took steps toward potentially filing a "disclaimer of interest," which would dissolve the union and make it a trade association. That would allow players to file antitrust lawsuits against the NHL.

Union members voted overwhelmingly to give their board the power to file the disclaimer by Jan. 2. If that deadline passes, another authorization vote could be held to approve a later filing.

Negotiations between the NHL and the union have been at a standstill since talks ended Dec. 6. One week later, the sides convened again with federal mediators in New Jersey, but still couldn't make progress.

The sides have been unable to reach agreement on the length of the new deal, how long individual player contract can be, and the variance in salary from year to year. The NHL is looking for an even split of revenues with players. In its previous offer this month, the league agreed to increase its amount of deferred payments from $211 million to $300 million.

The NHL pulled all previous offers off the table after the union didn't agree to terms on its last proposal without negotiation.

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Surgery Returns to NYU Langone Medical Center

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Senator Charles E. Schumer spoke at a news conference Thursday about the reopening of NYU Langone Medical Center.

NYU Langone Medical Center opened its doors to surgical patients on Thursday, almost two months after Hurricane Sandy overflowed the banks of the East River and forced the evacuation of hundreds of patients.

While the medical center had been treating many outpatients, it had farmed out surgery to other hospitals, which created scheduling problems that forced many patients to have their operations on nights and weekends, when staffing is traditionally low. Some patients and doctors had to postpone not just elective but also necessary operations for lack of space at other hospitals.

The medical center’s Tisch Hospital, its major hospital for inpatient services, between 30th and 34th Streets on First Avenue, had been closed since the hurricane knocked out power and forced the evacuation of more than 300 patients, some on sleds brought down darkened flights of stairs.

“I think it’s a little bit of a miracle on 34th Street that this happened so quickly,” Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said Thursday.

Mr. Schumer credited the medical center’s leadership and esprit de corps, and also a tour of the damaged hospital on Nov. 9 by the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, W. Craig Fugate, whom he and others escorted through watery basement hallways.

“Every time I talk to Fugate there are a lot of questions, but one is, ‘How are you doing at NYU?’ ” the senator said.

The reopening of Tisch to surgery patients and associated services, like intensive care, some types of radiology and recovery room anesthesia, was part of a phased restoration that will continue. Besides providing an essential service, surgery is among the more lucrative of hospital services.

The hospital’s emergency department is expected to delay its reopening for about 11 months, in part to accommodate an expansion in capacity to 65,000 patient visits a year, from 43,000, said Dr. Andrew W. Brotman, its senior vice president and vice dean for clinical affairs and strategy.

In the meantime, NYU Langone is setting up an urgent care center with 31 bays and an observation unit, which will be able to treat some emergency patients. It will initially not accept ambulances, but might be able to later, Dr. Brotman said. Nearby Bellevue Hospital Center, which was also evacuated, opened its emergency department to noncritical injuries on Monday.

Labor and delivery, the cancer floor, epilepsy treatment and pediatrics and neurology beyond surgery are expected to open in mid-January, Langone officials said. While some radiology equipment, which was in the basement, has been restored, other equipment — including a Gamma Knife, a device using radiation to treat brain tumors — is not back.

The flooded basement is still being worked on, and electrical gear has temporarily been moved upstairs. Mr. Schumer, a Democrat, said that a $60 billion bill to pay for hurricane losses and recovery in New York and New Jersey was nearing a vote, and that he was optimistic it would pass in the Senate with bipartisan support. But the measure’s fate in the Republican-controlled House is far less certain.

The bill includes $1.2 billion for damage and lost revenue at NYU Langone, including some money from the National Institutes of Health to restore research projects. It would also cover Long Beach Medical Center in Nassau County, Bellevue, Coney Island Hospital and the Veterans Affairs hospital in Manhattan.

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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)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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