Marxist Group Claims Attack on U.S. Embassy in Turkey

ISTANBUL — A Marxist group with a history of political violence in Turkey claimed responsibility on Saturday for a suicide bombing at the American Embassy in Ankara the day before, releasing a statement calling the United States “the murderer of the peoples of the world.”

The statement, which also denounced American foreign policy, was released by the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, and a translation was distributed by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors the communications of extremist groups. The message, which was posted on a Web site that has previously carried statements from the group, condemned Turkey’s policy of supporting Syrian rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

After conducting DNA tests, the Turkish authorities on Saturday identified the man who detonated himself at the embassy, killing himself and a Turkish embassy guard, as Ecevit Sanli, 40, also known as Alisan Sanli. Mr. Sanli was a convicted terrorist who had twice attacked government facilities in Istanbul but was released from prison under an amnesty program. Earlier Saturday, officials in the Black Sea town of Ordu said he was a resident.

The Ankara police said they had detained three people thought to have helped Mr. Sanli and had found a handgun linked to the militant group. They also released security footage from the embassy in which Mr. Sanli was shown pretending to be a courier.

The statement by the group included two photographs of Mr. Sanli. In one, he is holding an assault rifle, and a banner bearing the hammer-and-sickle symbol of communism is behind him.

The attack, coming in the wake of the attack on an American diplomatic mission y in Benghazi, Libya, by Islamic extremists in September, initially raised fears that it was the work of jihadists. That the bomber has ties to a relatively minor Marxist group is likely to challenge assumptions about the nature of international terrorism and the risks to American interests abroad. American officials, however, have not confirmed the identity of the attacker or a motive, and the United States plans to investigate.

In a statement on Saturday, Ordu officials said Mr. Sanli spent five years in prison after being arrested in 1997 for attacking a military hostel and police station in Istanbul. He was released in 2001 under an amnesty program for inmates with medical conditions, the statement said. Mr. Sanli reportedly had Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a brain disorder caused by malnutrition that he acquired during a jailhouse hunger strike.

The authorities said Mr. Sanli lobbed a hand grenade during Friday’s attack just before detonating his explosives-packed vest, suggesting that there were actually two explosions.

The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported that Mr. Sanli had fled to Germany after being released from prison, and returned to Turkey illegally only a few days before the attack by taking a boat from a Greek island across the Aegean.

The group has struck American and other Western targets in Turkey before, including during the gulf war in the early 1990s, and in its statement, the group condemned NATO’s recent deployment of Patriot missile batteries in southern Turkey to protect against cross-border strikes from Syria.

In a report published several days before the bombing, Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned that the country’s support of Syrian rebels was rallying Turkey’s extreme left.

“The country’s political landscape still bears vestiges of violent leftist movements from the 1970s, as well as deeply anti-American ultranationalism,” he wrote.

In the weeks before the attack, Turkish security forces arrested dozens of people thought to be members of the group, though human rights activists say those arrested have no links to terrorism.

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Twitter, Washington Post targeted by hackers

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Social media giant Twitter is among the latest U.S. companies to acknowledge that it is among a growing list of victims of Internet security attacks, saying that hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users. And now, The Washington Post is joining the chorus, saying that it discovered that it was the target of a sophisticated cyberattack in 2011.

Twitter said a blog post on Friday it detected attempts to gain access to its user data earlier in the week. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected.

But Twitter discovered that the attackers may have stolen user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 users they describe as ‘a very small percentage of our users.”

Nonetheless, the company reset the pilfered passwords and sent emails advising the affected users.

The online attack comes on the heels of recent hacks into the computer systems of U.S. media and technology companies, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both American newspapers reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important.

On Friday, The Washington Post disclosed in an article published on its website that it was the target of a sophisticated cyberattack, which was discovered in 2011. The company’s spokeswoman, Kris Coratti, didn’t offer any details including the duration of the attack or the origins. But according to sources that the paper quoted, who it said spoke on condition of anonymity, the intruders gained access as early as 2008 or 2009.

The cyberattack was first reported by an independent cybersecurity blog on Friday.

“Like other companies in the news recently, we face cybersecurity threats,” Coratti was quoted as saying. “We have a number of security measures in place to guard against cyberattacks on an ongoing basis.”

According to Coratti’s comments made to the newspaper, the company worked with security company Mandiant to “detect, investigate and remediate the situation promptly at the end of 2011.”

Coratti couldn’t be reached immediately for comment by The Associated Press.

China has been accused of mounting a widespread, aggressive cyber-spying campaign for several years, trying to steal classified information and corporate secrets and to intimidate critics. The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment Saturday, but the Chinese government has said those accusations are baseless and that China itself is a victim of cyber-attacks.

“Chinese law forbids hacking and any other actions that damage Internet security,” the Chinese Defense Ministry recently said. “The Chinese military has never supported any hacking activities.”

Twitter’s director of information security, Bob Lord, said in the blog that the attack “was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident.”

“The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked,” Lord said. “For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.”

One expert said that the Twitter hack probably happened after an employee’s home or work computer was compromised through vulnerabilities in Java, a commonly used computing language whose weaknesses have been well publicized.

Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers “a toehold” in Twitter’s internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company’s system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users’ passwords.

The relatively small number of users affected suggested either that attackers weren’t on the network long or that they were only able to compromise a subset of the company’s servers, Soltani said.

Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hacking might not immediately have yielded any important secrets. But the stolen credentials could be used to eavesdrop on private messages or track which Internet address a user is posting from.

That might be useful, for example, for an authoritarian regime trying to keep tabs on a journalist’s movements.

“More realistically, someone could use that as an entry point into another service,” Soltani said, noting that since few people bother using different passwords for different services, a password stolen from Twitter might be just as handy for reading a journalist’s emails.

___

AP reporters Anne D’Innocenzio in New York, Raphael Satter in London and Didi Tang in Beijing contributed to this report.

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Why is Beckham sitting on the bench for nothing?

PARIS (AP) — David Beckham has won league championships in three countries on two continents, earns millions of dollars in endorsements and his name is practically synonymous with celebrity itself. He has his own cologne, for goodness sake. So why is he even bothering to sit on the bench for the Paris Saint-Germain football club?

His royal highness of football doesn't need the money — and he's said he'll donate his PSG salary to charity — but he does need to start thinking about life after the game. At 37, Beckham is practically a dinosaur for the sport, and he acknowledged in his welcoming press conference on Thursday that he probably won't be in the team's starting lineup.

Instead, Beckham may be beginning to put in place a plan for life after the final whistle. Ellis Cashmore, a sociologist who writes about sports and media culture at Staffordshire University, said that prolonged exposure is always useful to celebrities building empires. In that way, the deal with PSG does double work: It keeps his name in lights for longer and also garners extra attention for the charitable contribution.

"When he does stop playing, which is going to be quite soon, his overall brand appeal will inevitably decline because we will inevitably forget about this guy," he said. "I think he's probably thinking, I want to stay in the shop window for a bit longer."

But Cashmore also cautioned against being too cynical in assessing Beckham's motives: "The guy is an athlete. He wants to do what he loves to do."

Bruno Satin, an independent players' agent who was with IMG for a decade, also said that the move to PSG — even if it's to sit on the bench — is a step up for Beckham.

"For him, to be on the PSG team, it's a higher level than being on the Los Angeles Galaxy," he said. "For the world of football, for real football, the Los Angeles Galaxy is nothing on the map of football."

Some wondered if Beckham was trying to avoid the notoriously sticky fingers of the French state with his plans to donate his salary.

But Sandra Hodzic, a tax lawyer with Salans, said the deduction an individual can take on such contributions is limited. Instead, it would be smarter for PSG to directly donate the salary — and take a big tax break in the process.

Doing so would have an added benefit for the club: UEFA, the governing body for European football, mandates that clubs break even. The donation could allow PSG to essentially write off Beckham's entire salary — a huge help for a team notorious for mega-contracts.

Beckham, meanwhile, would be better off trying to avoid becoming a French tax resident at all. So far, Hodzic said, he is making all the right moves: His family is staying in London, he plans to live only part-time in the country for less than six months, and his primary source of income —whether or not he donates his salary — isn't being earned in France.

Beckham's agent did not return calls for comment on specifics of the contract.

Still, the charitable contribution has raised the question about what Beckham is getting out of the deal. For one, he likely is still getting a cut of rights to his image. Jerseys with his name on them were already selling out at the PSG store on the Champs-Elysees on Friday.

Cashmore, who wrote a book called "Beckham," calls him a "marketing phenomenon" and estimates that about 70 percent of Beckham's income comes from endorsement deals — with Adidas, for instance. That makes salary almost irrelevant — especially for a man estimated by the Sunday Times Rich List to be worth 160 million pounds ($253 million).

But the football feeds the endorsements, Cashmore says.

"It makes an awful lot of business sense to perpetuate, to prolong his active competitive football career," he said, especially with a team that's doing fairly well this year. "It makes an awful lot of sense for him to showcase himself because it will generate more income from his various other sponsorship and licensing activities."

But certainly this move, as any at this late-stage in his playing career, is being made with an eye on what will come next. Cashmore said that when Beckham signed with the L.A. Galaxy, there was an understanding that he would eventually become an ambassador for American soccer. That plan clearly fell by the wayside — perhaps because Major League Soccer decided it was just too expensive to keep on the star after his presence on American soil failed to generate more interest in the game.

It's possible, Cashmore said, that Beckham is looking for a similar deal after his stint at PSG, which is Qatari-owned. The tiny, wealthy nation is hosting the World Cup in 2022, and Beckham's contract with PSG will establish a relationship with it; from there, a role as, say, an ambassador for the tournament would seem more natural.

"For his after-career conversion, it's important to have links with major actors in the world of sports," said Satin. And Qatar is certainly one. It has poured money into PSG, drawing major names like striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic. It also funds the satellite network Al Jazeera, which could provide Beckham with a platform. And then there's the World Cup.

In the end, though, Satin said the clue to Beckham's thinking may be as simple as the eternal draw of Paris.

"PSG has become a glamorous club, a pretty nice club in a beautiful city," said Bruno Satin, an agent. "It's just two hours on the Eurostar (train) from London."

____

AP Sports Writer Rob Harris contributed to this report from London.

____

Follow Sarah DiLorenzo at http://www.twitter.com/sdilorenzo

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Lafayette, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

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Strategies: World Economy Is Far From Safe, a Canadian Economist Says

WHEN you see a car being driven firmly within its lane and well under the speed limit, there’s nothing to worry about.

Or is there?

If you’re David A. Rosenberg, the glass-half-empty economist, there most certainly is. He says the world economy is like that car. And where others see stability and recovery, he sees “a car being driven by a drunk, lurching from side to side on the road, narrowly avoiding the ditches each time.”

At this particular moment, he says, the car happens to be in the middle of the road. But he can’t help but ask, “Is that because the driver has sobered up, or is it because the car is just passing through the middle on its way to the ditch on the other side?”

Mr. Rosenberg isn’t certain of the answer. But despite the cheer pervading the stock market and the relatively upbeat perspective of most economists, he says he isn’t convinced that the car will remain safely out of those ditches.

Formerly the chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch, and now proudly back in his native Canada as chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff in Toronto, Mr. Rosenberg writes a market newsletter that is always provocative, often cantankerous and frequently out of step with the Wall Street consensus. He has been called a “permabear,” a label that he says is exaggerated but not entirely without merit.

“I’d say I’m as pragmatic as possible and not locked into one position,” he says, “but I do understand that I have a much better record forecasting rain than in predicting the return of sunshine.”

His record bears that out. Mr. Rosenberg correctly called the start of the last two recessions. But he was late in recognizing the strength of what has become a long bull market. In May 2009, when the stock market was in an early stage of its climb, his worries about the economy made him resolutely bearish on stocks. “I’d lock in my gains right now,” he told me then.

But his clients have generally done very well if they’ve followed his cautious advice, which called for buying fixed-income securities early in the bond market’s long boom. His mantra is “safety and income at a reasonable price.”

For a gimlet-eyed perspective on the current stock market joy, I called him last week and asked him what, exactly, has been propelling shares higher.

His answer, in two words, was “the Fed” — the Federal Reserve and its monthly $85 billion purchases of bonds and mortgage-backed securities, which are being piled on top of a balance sheet that swelled to a gargantuan $3 trillion last week.

Other analysts have pointed to a recent surge in stock mutual fund purchases by individuals, as opposed to the big institutional investors like pension funds, endowments and other money managers. The earnings season has been reasonably strong, and, at least in recent weeks, there has been no outright global economic disaster emanating from Washington, the euro zone, Tokyo or the oil fields of the Middle East.

These factors are all relevant, he allows, but they pale next to the direct and powerful relationship between the growth of the Fed’s balance sheet and the stock market.

The Fed’s control of short-term interest rates has always had a major impact on the markets, and the adage “Don’t fight the Fed” is a bit of Wall Street wisdom that has stood up for decades. But since the Fed lowered its benchmark Fed funds rate to near zero in December 2008, short-term rates have ceased to be a meaningful indicator because they cannot be lowered any further.

Instead, to provide further monetary stimulus to the economy, the Fed has embarked on a series of quantitative-easing measures — direct purchases of financial assets.

Mr. Rosenberg says his calculations show that there is now an 85 percent correlation between the growth of that Fed balance sheet and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. If that relationship continues — and he’s not certain that it will — the market could keep rallying, though he says he believes it’s due for a correction. On Wednesday, the Fed reiterated its pledge to keep interest rates low and to keep making asset purchases for what effectively will be many months to come.

The Fed’s expansionary policies are contingent on weakness in the labor market and the overall economy. Well, the unemployment rate in January rose to 7.9 percent, the Labor Department announced on Friday. And the Fed says that as long as inflation is below 2.5 percent — and it is well below that level now — and unemployment is above 6.5 percent, it will keep rates ultralow. In addition, the gross domestic product declined at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the last quarter of 2012, the first decline recorded since 2009.

MR. ROSENBERG says he does not believe that we are in a recession now but that we are very close to one. “Anemic growth is my baseline scenario,” he says. A shock could undermine the economy. And there is no assurance, of course, that the Fed can keep propping up equity asset prices.

So he advises that for diversification alone, investors should keep holding onto bonds and other carefully selected fixed-income instruments; in addition, there is a great likelihood that inflation will stay low and longer-term rates will be constrained, which would be beneficial for fixed-income prices.

He recommends playing the equity markets cautiously by seeking high-dividend-paying stocks of well-managed companies. At the moment, he says, those include Blackstone, the asset manager; Merck, the drug maker; and Yahoo, the Internet portal, among United States stocks. And he suggests that United States citizens hedge their bets by keeping 20 percent of their assets in Canada, which, he says, is fiscally sound and is likely to have higher growth and lower inflation than its southern neighbor. He advises holding Brookfield Infrastructure, which owns and manages utilities, energy and timber assets, and Crescent Point Energy, an oil and gas exploration company.

Above all else, he says, preserve your assets and your safety. Watch out for reckless behavior in the economy as well as on the roads. You never know what is about to come hurtling your way.

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This Week’s Social Media Power Rankings: The Return of Swatch

The social media sphere is an increasingly noisy place, especially for brands. But hiding somewhere in the static are strong signals from companies reaching their customers in innovative ways. The Social Business Index from the Dachis Group provides a (free) real-time ranking of more than 30,000 global brands based on their social performance. Every week we’re taking a tally of who’s getting heard, what they’re saying, and why it matters.

RELATED: This Week’s Social Media Power Rankings: Cisco Has a Warrior

As you can see, there wasn’t much movement in the top 10. But if you look at number 17, you’ll see Diageo had the biggest jump this week. If that name doesn’t sound familiar, it’s the company that owns more familiar brands like Guiness, Johnnie Walker and Ketel One. So props to them and our livers—now let’s look at what happened outside the top 20:

RELATED: This Week’s Social Media Power Rankings: Cheers to Heineken

“Cisco’s rise in the Social Business Index this week was supported by the social efforts behind ‘the world’s largest classroom.’” Lizzie Steen of the Dachis Group told us. What she’s referring to is the  The Cisco Networking Academy— a public/private program that provides technology and career education to more than four million students across 10,000 academies in 165 countries.  And that sounds serious, but as Steen points out, part of its success is there’s an emphasis on fun. Steen writes: 

Two engineers, Ian and Dan, set up two servers and decorated them with flower lights while studying for their certification from Cisco. The photo received more than 1,200 likes and 186 shares from the the site’s 460 thousand fans.  Overall, the CNA page has balanced a dense subject matter with a collaborative and fun posts, making the learning process more global and human.

Swatch proved that it’s never too early to start prepping for Valentine’s Day.  As the Dachis Group’s Joe Pinaire points out, their very popular True Love (has nothing to hide) campaign and its new A la Folie watch contributed to Swatch’s boost this week. “From Taiwan to Chile, the brand has leveraged countless regional Facebook presences to let their fans know the clock is ticking on the seasonal special,” Pinaire told us. “And fans have taken to this messaging, as the brand’s bevy of original and creative photo content has garnered love from around the globe,” he added. That photo content was specified and regionalized for their fans,  featuring pictures of a Spanish store floor redesign promoting the watch and the watch thriving in the hustle of Vienna city-life and the new O’Hare airport store. “Swatch also launched a Twitter contest using their global handle (@swatch), encouraging Belgian, Dutch, English, Spanish, and Swiss fans to declare their #TrueLove (because it has nothing to hide–right?) in exchange for a chance to win the seasonal watch and a travel voucher.” And if there’s something people love more than Valentine’s Day, it’s a free contest.

So, no cheating, but do you know how many Facebook fans Intel and its Ultrabooks have? Over 16.5 million. That also means a lot of social media juice. “Last week, the Ultrabook took in the sights in New York City and Paris. In New York, an Ultrabook posed within view of the inimitable Empire State Building with the caption, ‘Empire State of Mind’, showing off its amazing form factor and the Intel i7 chip that powers it,” the Dachis Group’s Charles Lim told us.  The photo generated more than 130 thousand likes, 1,600 comments and six thousand shares—it’s a photo of a computer people.  Lim explains:

Like car lovers, electronics enthusiasts react positively to photos of gear that they already own or would like to own. This is because electronics, like cars, are aspirational and functional and inspire lust and passion.  It also helped that the photo was a shout-out to the cultural hub of America.  …

These posts are well tuned to a global brand campaign that appeals the traveler, gets local voices involved, inspires contests and instills the notion that the Ultrabook can go anywhere you go.

Methodology: A project of the Dachis Group, a social business professional services group, the Social Business Index analyzes the conversations on social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others. The index, which currently covers approximately 25,0000 companies and 27,000 brands, detects behaviors and activities exhibited by these companies and analyzes their execution and effectiveness at driving outcomes such as brand awareness, brand love, mind share, and advocacy. The Atlantic Wire takes a snapshot of the rankings at the end of the day on Sundays.

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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NFL's Goodell: Proper tackling, HGH key issues

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says the league needs to make football safer by doing more to eliminate blows to the head and knees and by suspending players for illegal hits.

During his annual news conference two days before the Super Bowl, Goodell also said Friday he wants a "new generation" of the Rooney Rule because "we didn't have the outcomes we wanted" when none of 15 recent coach and general manager jobs were given to a minority candidate.

Goodell hopes and expects testing for human growth hormone to start next season, even though the league and the players' union are still at an impasse after 18 months of back-and-forth.

He vowed to be "relentless" about keeping pay-for-pain bounties out of the game.

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Well: Gluten-Free Muffin Recipes

For people who need to eliminate gluten from their diet, baking becomes a challenge. Beginners often find gluten-free baked goods too dense. Even the Recipes for Health columnist Martha Rose Shulman didn’t like the flavor of a commercial gluten-free flour mix, which left her gluten-free cookies and tart-shells with a strong taste of bean flour. As a result, she created her own gluten-free mix for baking muffins. She writes:

My son Liam still doesn’t know that the muffins he has been devouring all week are gluten-free.

I put together my own gluten-free flour mix, one without bean flour, and turned to America’s favorite Gluten-Free Girl, Shauna James Ahem, for guidance. I was already thinking about making muffins, and I wanted a mix that could replace the whole wheat flour I usually use in conjunction with other grains or flours. Her formula for a whole-grain flour mix is simple – 70 percent ground gluten-free grain like rice flour, millet flour, buckwheat flour or teff (the list on her site is a long one) and 30 percent starch like potato starch, cornstarch or arrowroot.

For this week’s recipes, I used what I had, which was brown rice flour, potato starch and cornstarch – 20 percent potato starch and 10 percent cornstarch — and that’s the basis for the nutritional analyses of this week’s recipes. I used this mix in conjunction with a gluten-free meal or flour, so the amount of pure starch in the batters is much less than 30 percent.

When you bake anything it is much simpler and results are more consistent if you use grams and scale your ingredients. This is especially true with gluten-free baking, since you are working with grain and starch formulas. Digital scales are not expensive and I urge you to switch over to this method if you like to bake. I have given approximate cup measures so the recipes will work both ways, but scaling is more accurate.

Here are five ways to bake gluten-free muffins:

Gluten-Free Banana Chocolate Muffins: These dark chocolate muffins taste more extravagant than they are.

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Gluten-Free Cornmeal, Fig and Orange Muffins: A sweet and grainy cornmeal mixture makes for a delicious muffin.

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Gluten-Free Whole Grain Cheese and Mustard Muffins: A savory muffin with a delicious strong flavor.

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Gluten-Free Buckwheat, Poppy Seed and Blueberry Muffins: The buckwheat flour is high-fiber and makes a dark, richly-flavored muffin.

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Gluten-Free Cornmeal Molasses Muffins: Strong molasses provides a good source of iron in an easy-to-make muffin.

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Google Submits Proposal in Bid to Resolve E.U. Antitrust Case

BRUSSELS — E.U. officials said Friday that Google had submitted proposals aimed at ending a three-year antitrust case focused on its hugely popular online search service, but the offer did not prevent rivals from seeking to prolong its legal entanglements.

After filing a new complaint against Google this past week, Icomp, an industry group backed by Microsoft, urged European regulators on Friday to approach the company’s proposal with caution.

“To be seen as a success, any settlement must include specific measures to restore competition and allow other parties to compete effectively on a level playing field,” David Wood, legal counsel for Icomp, said in a statement.

Michael Weber, chief executive of an online mapping service called hot-map.com, a member of Icomp based in Germany, said he hoped the offer by Google was “enough to restore competition,” but “if not, we will take into account all legal options we have and we won’t hesitate to use them.”

If they remain dissatisfied, critics of Google in Europe can sue the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, at the General Court of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg for failing to push hard enough for an effective solution. Such cases can take years to reach a final judgment.

Google managed to reach one settlement Friday. In France, it agreed to pay €60 million, or $82 million, into a fund to help French media develop their presence on the Internet, the president’s office said. Publishers in France had been pushing for Google to pay them licensing fees for the headlines and summaries of articles in its search engines.

The new antitrust complaint by Icomp, filed Thursday, claimed the search giant was using exclusive agreements to discourage advertisers and publishers from using competing advertising platforms and search services like Bing and Yahoo.

Neither the company nor European officials were willing Friday to describe the settlement proposals. But it had been expected that Google would offer revisions to the way it conducts its online search business in Europe to address regulators’ concerns that the company’s activities were unfair to other Web publishers and its online competitors.

The two parties are still negotiating the terms of the proposed settlement, and a final agreement between Google and the commission is expected in the coming week, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who was not authorized to speak publicly before an agreement was reached.

The commission has taken a tougher line with Google than the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which decided in January, after a 19-month inquiry into how the company operated its search engine, that Google had not broken antitrust laws.

Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner and top E.U. antitrust official, has been formally investigating Google since November 2010. He has insisted that Google make changes to the most sensitive area of its business, online search.

If Mr. Almunia ultimately accepts Google’s offer, the company will avoid further investigation that could lead to a fine of as much as 10 percent of its annual global sales, which came to about $50 billion last year. Google would also avoid a guilty finding that could restrict its activities in Europe.

“We continue to work cooperatively with the commission,” Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, said Friday.

Antoine Colombani, a spokesman for Mr. Almunia, said at a news conference Friday that Google had sent “a detailed proposal,” which the commission was analyzing before taking further steps.

But there is no formal timeline in European antitrust cases, which means that negotiations could continue.

“I can’t anticipate the timing or the substance of the analysis,” Mr. Colombani said.

Mr. Almunia could still take a far more confrontational stance with Google by sending the company a statement of objections, which is the European equivalent of formal antitrust charges. But that is something Mr. Almunia has been eager to avoid because he favors nonlitigious solutions to antitrust problems, particularly in the fast-moving technology field, to prevent cases from dragging on for years.

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Two More Pakistani Polio Workers Killed

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A roadside bomb killed two polio workers in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday, in the third such attack this week on workers struggling to immunize children against the crippling disease.

The explosion struck as the two workers, with a United Nations-backed campaign, were traveling by motorcycle near Parachinar in the Kurram District, near the border with Afghanistan.

It was the first such attack on health workers in that area, said a senior local official speaking by phone on the condition of anonymity, offering further evidence that a Taliban-led campaign of violence and intimidation against polio workers is spreading across northwestern Pakistan.

Despite an internationally supported campaign to halt polio in Pakistan, infection rates have soared across the country in the past year, coinciding with a wave of militant attacks against the poorly protected workers at the heart of the effort. Some militants accuse polio workers of using vaccination as a cover to spy on behalf of the United States — a claim that has been fueled by the revelation that the C.I.A. used a vaccination drive as cover for the effort to find Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in early 2011.

The violence has badly affected vaccination efforts, which involve tens of thousands of health workers who repeatedly administer cheap oral vaccines to children under 5.

Nine polio workers were killed in a string of attacks across the country in December. On Tuesday, suspected militants fatally shot a police officer who had been escorting female polio workers in the Swabi District, 50 miles east of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province.

The shooting prompted officials to suspend the campaign in Swabi, but they pressed ahead in other parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the adjoining tribal belt. Another polio worker was wounded by a man with an ax in an unrelated episode on Tuesday.

It was unclear, however, whether the latest killings were directly related to the polio campaign. The Kurram District has a history of violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and the local official said it was unclear whether the explosion targeted the two workers for their links to the polio campaign or for their religious affiliation.

Violence against polio workers is not confined to the turbulent northwest. United Nations workers in Karachi, the port city on the Arabian Sea, have also suffered attacks that have set back efforts to wipe the disease from the city, Pakistan’s most populous.

Pakistan is one of three countries, along with Nigeria and Afghanistan, where polio remains endemic.

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