Attackers in Pakistan Kill Anti-Polio Workers

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Five Pakistani women and a man were killed on Tuesday in separate attacks on health workers participating in a national drive to eradicate polio from Pakistan.

Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

The bodies of two female workers with an anti-polio drive lay in the morgue at Jinnah Hospital in Karachi on Tuesday.

Athar Hussain/Reuters

Family members mourned the death of Nasima Bibi, a female worker with an anti-polio drive campaign in Pakistan, who was shot by gunmen on Tuesday.

The attacks forced health officials to temporarily suspend a large polio vaccination drive in Karachi, the country’s most populous city, where the disease has been making a worrisome comeback in recent years.

Saghir Ahmed, the health minister for southern Sindh Province, said he had ordered the 24,000 aid workers taking part in the campaign in Karachi to immediately stop work. It was not clear when they would resume.

The shooting represented a brutal setback to polio immunization efforts in Pakistan, one of just three countries in the world where the disease remains endemic. Pakistan accounted for 198 new cases last year — the highest rate in the world, followed by Afghanistan and Nigeria.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Taliban insurgents have repeatedly vowed to target anti-polio workers, accusing them of being spies.

In the tribal areas along the Afghan border, Taliban leaders have issued religious edicts declaring that the United States runs a spy network under the guise of vaccination programs.

That perception was strengthened after the American commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden in June 2011, when it emerged that the Central Intelligence Agency had paid a Pakistani doctor to run a vaccination program in Abbottabad, where Bin Laden was hiding, in a bid to obtain DNA evidence from his family.

Pakistani authorities arrested the doctor, Shakil Afridi, shortly after the American raid, and he has been sentenced to 33 years in prison.

Despite the negative perceptions, the government has pressed ahead with a large polio vaccination campaign, usually conducted in three-day spurts involving tens of thousands of health workers who administer medicine to children under 5.

The shootings on Tuesday came on the second day of the latest drive, which has now been called off in Karachi. After an attack on a United Nations doctor from Ghana in Karachi last July, officials were braced for some sort of militant resistance. But the extent and scale of the attacks Tuesday caught the government by surprise.

In the attacks in Karachi, three teams of health volunteers were targeted in poor neighborhoods: Landhi, Orangi and Baldia Town.

Two female aid workers were killed in an attack in Landhi, according to local news reports. In Orangi, unknown gunmen opened fire on a health team, killing one woman and a male volunteer. Another female worker was killed in nearby Baldia Town.

The Karachi neighborhoods where aid workers were targeted Tuesday are being used as safe havens by militants, who have escaped American drone strikes in North and South Waziristan tribal regions, according to police officials. Security forces regularly conduct search operations in these neighborhoods.

In the northwestern city of Peshawar, gunmen riding a motorcycle opened fire on two sisters who had volunteered to help administer polio drops, killing one.

The attacks on polio workers followed a bold Taliban assault on a major Pakistan Air Force base in Peshawar over the weekend that killed at least 15 people and a militant bomb attack in a nearby tribal village on Monday that killed another 19.

For Pakistan’s beleaguered progressives, the attack on female health workers was another sign of how the country’s extremist fringe would stoop to attack the vulnerable and minorities.

“Ahmadis, Shias, Hazaras, Christians, child activists, doctors, anti-polio workers — who’s next on the target list, Pakistan?” asked Mira Hashmi, a lecturer in film studies at the Lahore School of Economics, in a post on Twitter.

Zia ur-Rehman contributed reporting from Karachi

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Renault to Build Assembly Plant in Algeria

PARIS — Renault will sign a deal with Algeria on Wednesday to build an assembly plant near the city of Oran, giving the French automaker wider access to one of the world’s hottest car markets and a chance to further diversify beyond Europe.

The company will sign the pact, three years in the making, on the first day of a state visit by the French president, François Hollande, a Renault spokeswoman, Rochelle Chimenes, said Tuesday.

That will pave the way for the construction of a factory to build Renault and Dacia cars to serve a market that grew 50 percent in the year through October.

Mr. Hollande is embarking on a two-day visit to smooth France’s tricky relations with Algeria, a petroleum-rich country with about 37 million people. Algeria, administered as a French department in North Africa during the colonial era, won its independence in 1962 after a bloody war. France is nonetheless Algeria’s largest trading partner.

Mr. Hollande, accompanied by a legion of French government and business leaders, is scheduled to meet with his Algerian counterpart, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and to address a joint session of the country’s Parliament.

Algeria, which is the second-largest car market in Africa, after South Africa, is eager to reduce its dependence on the petroleum sector, which accounts for about one-third of its economy.

But restrictions on foreign investment that were enacted after the financial crisis and a failure to modernize the banking system continue to hold back the country’s economic development, according to the U.S. State Department.

Oliver Masetti, an economist at Deutsche Bank, estimates that, depending on oil prices, the Algerian economy will grow up to 2.6 percent this year and as much as 3.4 percent in 2013 — a modest increase by developing world standards.

Renault controls about 27 percent of the Algerian market, and its sales have soared about 57 percent there this year. Its Clio supermini car is the country’s best-selling model.

In Morocco, Renault opened a factory this year in Tangier to make cars for export to European and Mediterranean markets.

Renault is better diversified globally than its ailing French rival, PSA Peugeot Citroën, thanks in part to its alliance with Nissan Motor.

But it is looking for growth outside the European Union, which is gripped by recession and faces the possibility that austerity measures will mean years of stagnation.

La Tribune, a French financial daily, reported Tuesday that Mr. Hollande would raise with his hosts the possibility that the Algerian government dip into its $200 billion of foreign reserves to take a stake in Peugeot, which is undergoing a painful restructuring to stay afloat. Any such request would probably fall on deaf ears, the newspaper cited an unidentified Algerian official as saying.

Cécile Damide, a spokeswoman for Peugeot, declined to comment.

Sales of new cars in the 27-nation European Union fell 7.6 percent in the first 11 months of 2012 from a year earlier, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. Sales declined in every major market except Britain, bringing absolute sales to a level last seen in 1993.

The Algerian government will hold 51 percent of the new factory, with Renault owning the rest, the French daily newspaper Le Figaro reported Tuesday, without identifying its source.

The company declined to comment on the details, but such an arrangement would be consistent with the standard foreign investment contract in Algeria. Le Figaro also said the plant would begin operation in 2014 with annual production of about 25,000 vehicles, which could grow to 75,000.

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Security Increased at Connecticut Schools as Investigation Into Shooting Continues

As the town of Newtown buried the first young victims of last week’s slaughter at an elementary school, the authorities increased security at schools in Connecticut on Monday, a scene that was repeated across the country.

Investigators said it could take months to recreate a full account of the events preceding and during the killing spree on Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which has been sealed off as a crime scene. The Connecticut State Police on Sunday officially confirmed the identity of the killer as Adam Lanza, 20, saying he shot himself with a handgun after taking the lives of 26 other people, 20 of them first-grade students, at the school, using an assault rifle. Before going on this rampage, Mr. Lanza killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, 52, in the house they shared not far from the school, law enforcement officials said.

In briefings on Monday, Lt. J. Paul Vance, a spokesman for the Connecticut State Police, said that investigators needed to talk to many witnesses, including two adults who were wounded in the lower extremities during the shooting at the school, and to analyze every round of ammunition and every detail of the weapons. But the authorities have been reluctant to provide details about the types of evidence they have retrieved from the crime scenes. Asked about reports that the authorities were analyzing a computer hard drive taken from the home Mr. Lanza shared with his mother, Lieutenant Vance declined to comment, but he added that investigative specialists were available if needed to study such evidence.

Lieutenant Vance again emphasized that it would be a long process to deliver the answers that many longed to hear about the motive, but he said there was “no connection” between Mr. Lanza and the school, apparently countering earlier reports that Mr. Lanza had attended classes there.The authorities have said that Mr. Lanza arrived at the school with a far larger arsenal than he ultimately used. They said most of the shots were fired from a .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic carbine, a military-style assault weapon. Mr. Lanza was also carrying two semiautomatic pistols, a 10-millimeter Glock and a 9-millimeter Sig Sauer. A shotgun was found in the car. Given the extraordinary amount of firepower, Mr. Lanza was apparently prepared to kill many more people and may have been thwarted only when he heard the police arriving, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut said.

The guns were legally acquired and registered by Ms. Lanza, who had sometimes taken her son to shooting ranges, according to law enforcement officials and her friends. Mr. Lanza, who former classmates said had had a developmental disorder, lived with his mother.

Lieutenant Vance said on Sunday investigators recovered “numerous” empty 30-round magazines for the Bushmaster rifle. The .223-caliber bullet is a small, high-velocity round that has been used by Western military forces for decades, in part because it inflicts devastating wounds.

But for now, the plan was for normalcy to return as soon as possible to schools, although students at Sandy Hook will now go to school at another building in a nearby community.

Adding to the anxiety over the first day back to school on Monday, the authorities were investigating a report of a “suspicious person” at a school in Ridgefield, Conn., “who may in fact be armed,” Lieutenant Vance said. A temporary lockdown on the school was lifted.

He also said on Monday that the faculty and staff members at Sandy Hook had done everything they could do to protect the children, and that the arrival of the emergency responders saved many more lives. “It broke our hearts when we could not save them all,” he said.

That grim fact will be in full view on Monday and in the coming days, which are not likely to become any easier for the pained families. Relatives began to claim the bodies of the dead, and on Monday the first group of funerals — of two 6-year-old children — were held.

While the police have not yet released a detailed timeline of the shooting, officials said on Sunday that Mr. Lanza on Friday first shot his mother multiple times in her home, then drove to the school armed with four weapons and a large supply of ammunition.

Some of the bullets fired inside the school, according to a law enforcement official on Sunday, “penetrated the glass windows of the classrooms and went into vehicles in the parking lot.”

In addition to multiple high-capacity magazines for the rifle, Lieutenant Vance said the gunman had brought a number of magazines for both pistols.

Collectively, he said, there were hundreds of unfired bullets.

Mr. Malloy said on Sunday that Mr. Lanza had killed himself as police officers entered the school.

“We surmise that it was during the second classroom episode that he heard responders coming and apparently, at that, decided to take his own life,” Mr. Malloy said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Over the weekend, President Obama met in Newtown with families of the victims and first responders. Later, at an interfaith service, he gave a powerful address which, while it stopped short of an explicit call for new gun controls, seemed to hint strongly at fresh efforts. Mr. Obama spoke of the four shooting massacres during his presidency and promised to “use whatever power this office holds” to prevent another. Condolences flowed into Newtown from around the world. When he made his customary Sunday appearance at the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI expressed his sorrow and said he was praying for the families of victims.

Officials did not make any public statements about Mr. Lanza’s motivation. Lieutenant Vance said on Monday that there had been no prior concerns or contacts about Mr. Lanza with law enforcement before the shooting.

A post-mortem examination of Mr. Lanza and his mother has been completed, according to a statement from Connecticut State Police on Sunday. A spokesman for the state medical examiner’s office said late Sunday that nobody had yet come forward to claim their bodies.

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RIM begins BlackBerry 10 tests with business, government clients

TORONTO (Reuters) – Research In Motion Ltd said on Monday that it had begun a “beta testing” program that allows 120 companies and government departments to try out its new BlackBerry 10 smartphones before their global launch on January 30.

The Canadian company, which is trying to reverse a sharp decline in market share for the BlackBerry, said the program would enable so-called enterprise customers in business and government to size up the BB10.

Features of the BB10 include the ability to separate personal and business information so that the user can store both without compromising security.

RIM has struggled in recent years to hold on to its base of enterprise customers, which typically pay a higher subscription fee than consumers, as their employees push to use devices such as Apple Inc’s iPhone for business as well as personal communications.

“This is a crucial step for us in getting our large enterprise customers ready to support BlackBerry 10 at the point of launch date, as opposed to post-launch date,” Bryan Lee, senior director for enterprise accounts, said in a phone interview.

RIM is providing the software and handsets at no charge, and the companies do not have to buy anything once the trial is finished.

The company plans to release its quarterly results on Thursday, and analysts expect it to report its third straight loss as it struggles to sell its older devices.

RIM made its name selling mobile email devices to bankers, lawyers and other professionals before expanding to sell phones to consumers.

The company said the BB10 testers were from financial, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, media, and distribution industries and include 64 Fortune 500 companies, as well as government departments.

Lee would not identify any of the entities, beyond Integris Health and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which have both said they are testing the new devices.

The customers have installed test versions of RIM’s new server software, which manages iPhones and devices using Google Inc’s Android software as well as BlackBerrys, and will each receive two preproduction BlackBerry 10 handsets later this week.

RIM shares were down 2.1 percent at C$ 13.59 in morning Toronto Stock Exchange trading.

The stock has rallied from September’s multiyear lows around C$ 6.50 on a wave of optimism over the new devices, but the share price is still far below mid-2008 highs of around C$ 150.

(Reporting by Alastair Sharp; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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TV network aimed at millennials set for summer

NEW YORK (AP) — Participant Media plans to launch a cable network aimed at viewers 18 to 34 years old with programming it describes as inspiring and thought-provoking.

The as-yet-unnamed network is set to start next summer with an initial reach of 40 million subscribers, the company announced Monday.

Targeting so-called millennials, Participant is developing a program slate with such producers as Brian Graden, Morgan Spurlock and Brian Henson of The Jim Henson Company.

Evan Shapiro, who joined Participant in May after serving as President of IFC and Sundance Channel, will head the new network.

Parent company Participant Media has produced a number of fiction and nonfiction films including "Charlie Wilson's War," ''An Inconvenient Truth" and Steven Spielberg's current biopic "Lincoln."

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John Rosen, Doctor Who Pushed to Prevent Lead Poisoning, Dies at 77

Dr. John F. Rosen, a pediatrician whose discovery of high levels of lead poisoning among the New York City children he treated propelled him to campaign for a national effort to prevent the condition, died on Dec. 7 in Greenwich, Conn. He was 77.

The cause was colon cancer, his wife, Margaret, said.

When he arrived at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx in 1969, Dr. Rosen was mainly interested in how children’s bodies absorb calcium. But within a few years, concerned about the levels of lead he was seeing in his young patients and knowing that lead poisoning diminished mental capacities irreversibly, he embarked on a mission. Dr. Rosen helped establish one of the nation’s first and largest clinics for the treatment of lead poisoning; he personally supervised the treatment of 30,000 children. In one advance, he developed X-ray techniques for measuring lead in children’s bodies.

He went on to push New York City to adopt stricter standards for removing lead paint from tens of thousands of older buildings. (The use of lead paint had been outlawed in 1978.) In 1991 he led a committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta that lowered the threshold at which children are considered to be poisoned by lead, to 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood from 60 micrograms.

But even that threshold was too high, Dr. Rosen believed, and he immediately began lobbying to reduce it further. This year, the C.D.C. halved it to 5 micrograms. The change could not help those who had lead in their bodies, but it sounded an alarm that even infinitesimal quantities of lead could be dangerous.

“It’s about time,” Dr. Rosen said.

He cited his own and others’ studies showing that lead poisoning harms a person’s ability to think and plan, as well as physical coordination. For a child with an I.Q. of 85, he said, lead exposure “could mean the difference between a menial job in a fast-food restaurant or a meaningful career.”

Dr. Rosen’s ambition was to eventually eradicate lead poisoning by eliminating exposure to lead altogether, in the manner that vaccines reduced the incidence of polio to almost none. He served on committees of the National Academy of Sciences and urged spending tens of billions of dollars to remove old lead paint from tens of millions of homes, calculating that lead exposure harmed far more children than asbestos.

Landlords and some government officials disputed the need for such a large-scale effort, arguing that lead poisoning had dropped sharply in recent decades as lead was removed from gasoline and that the use of lead paint had abated.

Dr. Rosen often testified in suits against property owners, leading some to suggest that his crusade was motivated by the prospect of personal financial gain from payments by plaintiffs’ lawyers.

He also had critics in the news media. In 2003 Andrew Wolf, then a columnist for The New York Sun, argued that the war against lead poisoning had been won and accused Dr. Rosen of practicing political, not medical, science. In 1992, Newsday questioned whether he was a “well-meaning prophet or merely an alarmist.”

Dr. Rosen replied: “I am not an alarmist. I cannot keep quiet when kids’ futures are at stake.”

John Friesner Rosen was born in Manhattan on June 3, 1935. His parents volunteered for civil rights and leftist causes and traveled to China to meet with Chou En-lai before President Richard M. Nixon’s historic trip there in 1972.

Dr. Rosen graduated from Harvard and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, did his residency at the Columbia-affiliated Babies Hospital and became a researcher at Rockefeller University. He moved on to Montefiore, where he became a pediatrics professor and head of environmental sciences at its Children’s Hospital. His focus was underprivileged children living in substandard housing.

In one instance, he encountered two young sisters who had made repeated visits to the hospital with very high levels of lead in their blood. He decided to accompany them home, but the home, he discovered, had been inspected and the paint found safe. He then accompanied them to a park, where they climbed up and down a fence. It was covered with lead paint.

Dr. Rosen started his lead clinic in the early 1970s. He later opened “safe houses,” where families could come while lead paint was removed from their homes. When lead paint was discovered in a Manhattan elementary school in 1992, he spoke out, calling the school “a toxic dump.” It was closed for a cleanup.

Dr. Rosen lived in Stamford, Conn. His first marriage, to Katharine Lardner, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Margaret Hiatt; two children from his first marriage, Carlo, a physician, and Ellis Lesser; a daughter from his second marriage, Emily Reilly; and nine grandchildren.

Dr. Rosen’s concerns about lead poisoning went beyond residents of low-income housing. In 1988, he warned against eating Florida grapefruits because they had been sprayed with lead arsenate to speed ripening. Two years later, he reported seeing 30 or 40 cases of lead poisoning each year among children of wealthy people who had bought and restored brownstones.

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DealBook: Sprint Reaches Deal to Buy Out Clearwire

Sprint announced on Monday that it had reached an agreement to buy the nearly 50 percent stake in Clearwire that it did not already own for $2.97 a share — a bump up from the $2.90 a share that was offered on Thursday.

The improved $2.2 billion offer, Sprint said, represents a premium of 128 percent over Clearwire’s stock price in early October before speculation emerged — following SoftBank‘s investment in Sprint — that Sprint would seek to buy out the wireless network operator.

Sprint already owns 51.7 percent of Clearwire. Buying the rest would give it full control over spectrum that it could use to build out its network.

Sprint is able to complete the deal thanks to cash from SoftBank of Japan, which agreed in October to a $20.1 billion transaction to gain majority control of the American telecommunications company, which lags far behind the market leaders, AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

The deal would allow Sprint to expand its Long-Term Evolution network, which is based upon the same data standard used by the newest generation of smartphones. Clearwire owns spectrum that is similar to what SoftBank uses in Japan, potentially giving the newly strengthened Sprint more clout in ordering the latest devices.

The chief executive of Sprint, Dan Hesse, said in a statement: “Today’s transaction marks yet another significant step in Sprint’s improved competitive position and ability to offer customers better products, more choices and better services. Sprint is uniquely positioned to maximize the value of Clearwire’s spectrum and efficiently deploy it to increase Sprint’s network capacity.”

SoftBank added in a statement that it supports the deal, which it believes will improve the landscape for American cellphone service.

Clearwire’s board approved the offer based on the recommendation of a special committee of directors not appointed by Sprint. Clearwire also has commitments from Comcast, Intel and Bright House Networks, which collectively own 13 percent of the voting shares, to support the deal.

Some of Clearwire’s minority shareholders believed that the company should hold out for a higher price, with one analyst calling for at least $5 a share. One of these investors, Crest Financial, said that it would try to block Sprint’s deal with Softbank if the earlier offer of $2.90 a share went through.

And another, Mount Kellett, had argued that based on what AT&T paid for roughly similar spectrum, Sprint should be paying at least four times as much.

But Sprint argued privately that its previous bid valued the network operator’s spectrum at about the same level that Verizon paid for spectrum that it acquired from cable companies, according to a person briefed on the matter. And Clearwire’s spectrum, Sprint claimed, is of lower quality and therefore less valuable, meaning that the company was effectively paying more than Verizon did.

Clearwire has struggled to to join the ranks of the biggest American cellphone service providers, despite bringing on big-name investors. Some of its previous stakeholders, including Google and Time Warner Cable, chose to sell off their holdings for a fraction of their purchase prices.

Agreeing to the deal announced Monday will help shore up Clearwire’s finances, at a time when it projected having enough cash to last a year or so and still faces significant debt obligations. Sprint has pledged to provide up to $800 million in interim financing to the network operator.

Citigroup and the law firms of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and King & Spalding advised Sprint. The Raine Group acted as financial adviser to SoftBank and Morrison Foerster acted as counsel to SoftBank.

Evercore Partners and the law firm Kirkland & Ellis advised Clearwire. Centerview Partners acted as financial adviser and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Richards, Layton & Finger acted as counsel to Clearwire’s special committee. Blackstone Advisory Partners advised Clearwire on restructuring matters. Credit Suisse acted as financial adviser and Gibson Dunn & Crutcher acted as counsel to Intel.

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The Lede Blog: Sunday Coverage of Newtown School Shooting

Two days after the massacre at a school in Newtown, Conn., a shattered community headed off to church in the misty rain, only to have one service interrupted by death threats that forced the evacuation of the church during noon Mass. Investigators continued their struggle to understand what could have prompted Adam Lanza’s rampage. There were reports that at least one child’s funeral would be held today. President Obama is to travel to Newtown today, where he plans to meet with first responders and families who lost loved ones and speak at a 7 p.m. interfaith service.

Click to read Saturday’s live updates on The Lede of the school shooting. Click to read Friday’s live updates.

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Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies

Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.

Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.

Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.

Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.

Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.

Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.

More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”

One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”

But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.

Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.

But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.

Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”

After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.

He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.

In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”

William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.

Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.

When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.

Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.

She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.

But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.

Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.

Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”

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As Gold Is Spirited Out of Afghanistan, Officials Wonder Why

Zalmai for The New York Times

A Kabul jewelry shop. Officials are concerned about gold being flown out of Afghanistan.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Packed into hand luggage and tucked into jacket pockets, roughly hewed bars of gold are being flown out of Kabul with increasing regularity, confounding Afghan and American officials who fear money launderers have found a new way to spirit funds from the country.

Most of the gold is being carried on commercial flights destined for Dubai, according to airport security reports and officials. The amounts carried by single couriers are often heavy enough that passengers flying from Kabul to the Persian Gulf emirate would be well advised to heed warnings about the danger of bags falling from overhead compartments. One courier, for instance, carried nearly 60 pounds of gold bars, each about the size of an iPhone, aboard an early morning flight in mid-October, according to an airport security report. The load was worth more than $1.5 million.

The gold is fully declared and legal to fly. Some, if not most, is legitimately being sent by gold dealers seeking to have old and damaged jewelry refashioned into new pieces by skilled craftsmen in the Persian Gulf, said Afghan officials and gold dealers.

But gold dealers in Kabul and current and former Kabul airport officials say there has been a surge in shipments since early summer. The talk of a growing exodus of gold from Afghanistan has been spreading among the business community here, and in recent weeks has caught the attention of Afghan and American officials. The officials are now puzzling over the origin of the gold — very little is mined in Afghanistan, although larger mines are planned — and why so much appears to be heading for Dubai.

“We are investigating it, and if we find this is a way of laundering money, we will intervene,” said Noorullah Delawari, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank. Yet he acknowledged that there were more questions than answers at this point. “I don’t know where so much gold would come from, unless you can tell me something about it,” he said in an interview. Or, as a European official who tracks the Afghan economy put it, “new mysteries abound” as the war appears to be drawing to a close.

Figuring out what precisely is happening in the Afghan economy remains as confounding as ever. Nearly 90 percent of the financial activity takes place outside formal banks. Written contracts are the exception, receipts are rare and statistics are often unreliable. Money laundering is commonplace, say Western and Afghan officials.

As a result, with the gold, “right now you’re stuck in that situation we usually are: is there something bad going on here or is this just the Afghan way of commerce?” said a senior American official who tracks illicit financial networks.

There is reason to be suspicious: the gold shipments track with the far larger problem of cash smuggling. For years, flights have left Kabul almost every day carrying thick wads of bank notes — dollars, euros, Norwegian kroner, Saudi Arabian riyals and other currencies — stuffed into suitcases, packed into boxes and shrink-wrapped onto pallets. At one point, cash was even being hidden in food trays aboard now-defunct Pamir Airways flights to Dubai.

Last year alone, Afghanistan’s central bank says, roughly $4.5 billion in cash was spirited out through the airport. Efforts to stanch the flow have had limited impact, and concerns about money laundering persist, according to a report released last week by the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

The unimpeded “bulk cash flows raise the risk of money laundering and bulk cash smuggling — tools often used to finance terrorist, narcotics and other illicit operations,” the report said. The cash, and now the gold, is most often taken to Dubai, where officials are known for asking few questions. Many wealthy Afghans park their money and families in the emirate, and gold dealers say more middle-class Afghans are sending money and gold — seen as a safeguard against economic ruin — to Dubai as talk of a postwar economic collapse grows louder.

But given Dubai’s reputation as a haven for laundered money, an Afghan official said that the “obvious suspicion” is that at least some of the apparent growth in gold shipments to Dubai is tied to the myriad illicit activities — opium smuggling, corruption, Taliban taxation schemes — that have come to define Afghanistan’s economy.

There are also indications that Iran could be dipping into the Afghan gold trade. It is already buying up dollars and euros here to circumvent American and European sanctions, and it may be using gold for the same purpose.

Yahya, a dealer in Kabul, said other gold traders were helping Iran buy the precious metal here. Payment was being made in oil or with Iranian rials, which readily circulate in western Afghanistan. The Afghan dealers are then taking it to Dubai, where the gold is sold for dollars. The money is then moved to China, where it was used to buy needed goods or simply funneled back to Iran, said Yahya, who like many Afghans uses a single name.

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