Gunman Kills 20 Schoolchildren in Connecticut

Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times

Naomi Collins of Waterbury, Conn., added a candle to the memorial outside St. Rose of Lima Church. More Photos »

A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people — 20 of them children — in an attack in an elementary school in central Connecticut on Friday. Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.

Hundreds of terrified parents arrived as their sobbing children were led out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in a wooded corner of Newtown, Conn. By then, all of the victims had been shot and most were dead, and the gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, had committed suicide. The children killed were said to be 5 to 10 years old.

A 28th person, found dead in a house in the town, was also believed to have been shot by Mr. Lanza. That victim, one law enforcement official said, was Mr. Lanza’s mother, Nancy Lanza, who worked at the school. She apparently owned the guns he used.

The principal had buzzed Mr. Lanza in because she recognized him as the son of a colleague. Moments later, she was shot dead when she went to investigate the sound of gunshots. The school psychologist was also among those who died.

The rampage, coming less than two weeks before Christmas, was the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, in which a gunman killed 32 people and then himself.

Law enforcement officials said Mr. Lanza had grown up in Newtown, and he was remembered by high school classmates as smart, introverted and nervous. They said he had gone out of his way not to attract attention when he was younger.

The gunman was chillingly accurate. A spokesman for the State Police said he left only one wounded survivor at the school. All the others hit by the barrage of bullets from the guns Mr. Lanza carried — the rifle was similar to a weapon used widely by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq — died, suggesting that they were shot at point-blank range. One law enforcement official said the shootings occurred in two classrooms in a section of the single-story Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Some who were there said the shooting occurred during morning announcements, and the initial shots could be heard over the school’s public address system. The bodies of those killed were still in the school as of 10 p.m. Friday.

The New York City medical examiner’s office sent a “portable morgue” to Newtown to help with the aftermath of the shootings, a spokeswoman, Ellen Borakove, confirmed late Friday.

Law enforcement officials offered no hint of what had motivated Mr. Lanza. It was also unclear, one investigator said, why Mr. Lanza — after shooting his mother to death inside her home — drove her car to the school and slaughtered the children. “I don’t think anyone knows the answers to those questions at this point,” the official said. As for a possible motive, he added, “we don’t know much for sure.”

F.B.I. agents interviewed his brother, Ryan Lanza, in Hoboken, N.J. His father, Peter Lanza, who was divorced from Nancy Lanza, was also questioned, one official said.

Newtown, a postcard-perfect New England town where everyone seems to know everyone else and where there had lately been holiday tree lightings with apple cider and hot chocolate, was plunged into mourning. Stunned residents attended four memorial services in the town on Friday evening as detectives continued the search for clues, and an explanation.

Maureen Kerins, a hospital nurse who lives close to the school, learned of the shooting from television and hurried to the school to see if she could help.

“I stood outside waiting to go in, but a police officer came out and said they didn’t need any nurses,” she said, “so I knew it wasn’t good.”

In the cold light of Friday morning, faces told the story outside the stricken school. There were the frightened faces of children who were crying as they were led out in a line. There were the grim faces of women. There were the relieved-looking faces of a couple and their little girl.

Reporting on the Connecticut shootings was contributed by Al Baker, Charles V. Bagli, Susan Beachy, Jack Begg, David W. Chen, Alison Leigh Cowan, Robert Davey, Matt Flegenheimer, Joseph Goldstein, Emmarie Huetteman, Kristin Hussey, Thomas Kaplan,  Elizabeth Maker, Patrick McGeehan, Sheelagh McNeill, Michael Moss, Richard Pérez-Peña, Jennifer Preston, William K. Rashbaum, Motoko Rich, Ray Rivera, Liz Robbins, Emily S. Rueb, Eric Schmitt, Michael Schwirtz, Kirk Semple, Wendy Ruderman, Jonathan Weisman, Vivian Yee and Kate Zernike.

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School shooting postpones Cruise premiere in Pa.

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. premiere of the Tom Cruise action movie "Jack Reacher" is being postponed following the deadly Connecticut school shooting.

Paramount Pictures says "out of honor and respect for the families of the victims" the premiere won't take place Saturday in Pittsburgh, where "Jack Reacher" was filmed.

The premiere would've been Cruise's first U.S. media appearance since his split from Katie Holmes over the summer. It was to be more contained with select outlets covering and a location away from Hollywood or New York.

A proclamation ceremony for Cruise had been planned with Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.

No new date for the premiere has been set. The movie opens Dec. 21.

Friday's massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school killed 20 children and several adults.

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Microsoft Battles Google by Hiring Political Brawler Mark Penn

SEATTLE — Mark Penn made a name for himself in Washington by bulldozing enemies of the Clintons. Now he spends his days trying to do the same to Google, on behalf of its archrival Microsoft.

Since Mr. Penn was put in charge of “strategic and special projects” at Microsoft in August, much of his job has involved efforts to trip up Google, which Microsoft has failed to dislodge from its perch atop the lucrative Internet search market.

Drawing on his background in polling, data crunching and campaigning, Mr. Penn created a holiday commercial that has been running during Monday Night Football and other shows, in which Microsoft criticizes Google for polluting the quality of its shopping search results with advertisements. “Don’t get scroogled,” it warns. His other projects include a blind taste test, Coke-versus-Pepsi style, of search results from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.

The campaigns by Mr. Penn, 58, a longtime political operative known for his brusque personality and scorched-earth tactics, are part of a broader effort at Microsoft to give its marketing the nimbleness of a political campaign, where a candidate can turn an opponent’s gaffe into a damaging commercial within hours. They are also a sign of the company’s mounting frustration with Google after losing billions of dollars a year on its search efforts, while losing ground to Google in the browser and smartphones markets and other areas.

Microsoft has long attacked Google from the shadows, whispering to regulators, journalists and anyone else who would listen that Google was a privacy-violating, anticompetitive bully. The fruits of its recent work in this area could come next week, when the Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce the results of its antitrust investigation of Google, a case that echoes Microsoft’s own antitrust suit in the 1990s. A similar investigation by the European Union is also wrapping up. A bad outcome for Google in either one would be a victory for Microsoft.

But Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., has realized that it cannot rely only on regulators to scrutinize Google — which is where Mr. Penn comes in. He is increasing the urgency of Microsoft’s efforts and focusing on their more public side.

In an interview, Mr. Penn said companies underestimated the importance of policy issues like privacy to consumers, as opposed to politicians and regulators. “It’s not about whether they can get them through Washington,” he said. “It’s whether they can get them through Main Street.”

Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman, declined to comment on Microsoft’s actions specifically, but said that while Google also employed lobbyists and marketers, “our focus is on Google and the positive impact our industry has on society, not the competition.”

In Washington, Mr. Penn is a lightning rod. He developed a relationship with the Clintons as a pollster during President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, when he helped identify the value of “soccer moms” and other niche voter groups.

As chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 campaign for president, he conceived the “3 a.m.” commercial that raised doubts about whether Barack Obama, then a senator, was ready for the Oval Office. Mr. Penn argued in an essay he wrote for Time magazine in May that “negative ads are, by and large, good for our democracy.”

But his approach has ended up souring many of his professional relationships. He left Mrs. Clinton’s campaign after an uproar about his consulting work for the government of Colombia, which was seeking the passage of a trade treaty with the United States that Mrs. Clinton, then a senator, opposed.

“Google should be prepared for everything but the kitchen sink thrown at them,” said a former colleague who worked closely with Mr. Penn in politics and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Actually, they should be prepared for the kitchen sink to be thrown at them, too.”

Hiring Mr. Penn demonstrates how seriously Microsoft is taking this fight, said Michael A. Cusumano, a business professor at M.I.T. who co-wrote a book about Microsoft’s browser war.

“They’re pulling out all the stops to do whatever they can to halt Google’s advance, just as their competition did to them,” Professor Cusumano said. “I suppose that if Microsoft can actually put a doubt in people’s mind that Google isn’t unbiased and has become some kind of evil empire, they might very well get results.”

Nick Wingfield reported from Seattle and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco.

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Russia Steps Back From Envoy’s Comments on Syria

MOSCOW — The Russian Foreign Ministry distanced itself on Friday from comments by its Middle East envoy, who was widely quoted a day earlier as saying that rebels in Syria may defeat the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, and said Russia’s insistence on a political solution to the Syrian crisis will never change.

“We have never changed our position and will not change it,” said the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Aleksandr K. Lukashevich, at a briefing. He rejected a comment made by a State Department spokesman on Thursday that Moscow had “woken up” and changed its position as dynamics shifted on the battlefield, saying “we have never been asleep.”

Mr. Lukashevich said that Russia is not carrying out any discussions with the United States about Mr. Assad’s future, shooting down widespread speculation that Russia could help arrange the president’s safe passage out of Syria. He said he had restated Russia’s insistence on a negotiated solution “hundreds of times” in recent months.

“In the given situation, we are not talking about the fate of leaders, we are talking about the fate of people,” he said.

Mr. Lukashevich was seeking to calm speculation sparked on Thursday, when Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov told the Public Chamber, a Kremlin advisory group, that it was “impossible to rule out a victory of the Syrian opposition,” in comments that were immediately made public by Russian wire services.

The statement appeared to signal a turn in the nearly two-year-old conflict and was seen in the West as evidence that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was losing politically as well as militarily

An earlier statement from the Foreign Ministry which was published on its Web site on Friday, said that Mr. Bogdanov “has not given any announcements or special interviews to journalists in recent days,” suggesting that his comments were given informally and not meant for publication.

It also framed his comments about rebel gains differently, saying he was simply repeating — and not confirming — the rebels’ claims about military advances.

“In this context, Mr. Bogdanov once more underlined the principled Russian position about the necessity of a political solution” to the crisis, the statement said. It did not deny that Mr. Bogdanov made the extensive comments, which were disseminated by Russian news agencies which were present at the hearing.

Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, said that to the best of his knowledge, the comments represented an “expert assessment” of events on the ground in Syria, but weren’t intended for publication.

“The only conclusion we can make is that the Russian Foreign Ministry is very realistic about what is happening there,” he said. “There are no illusions about the trend. But we can understand the Russian position has not changed.”

In his briefing on Friday, Mr. Lukashevich also said Russia has been working with Ukraine to ensure the safety of Ankhar Kochneva, a Ukrainian journalist and translator who was captured two months ago by a Syrian militant group. Her captors have threatened to kill her unless they receive a ransom of $50 million, according to Ukrainian news sources.

In a video posted on the Internet last month, Ms. Kochneva was filmed saying she worked for Russian intelligence services, although it is not clear whether she spoke voluntarily.

Mr. Lukashevich noted that Ms. Kochneva’s captors had posted a video on YouTube on Thursday threatening to attack Russian and Ukrainian diplomatic missions and he said Russia will take all necessary measures to protect its diplomats. A spokesman at the Russian Embassy in Damascus told Interfax on Thursday that he saw no sharp deterioration in conditions and it is not yet necessary to evacuate personnel.

Ukraine has announced it is beefing up security at its facility in Damascus, and a Foreign Ministry spokesman this week called on the Syrian government to “take more active and effective measures to secure the release of the kidnapped Ukrainian woman.”

“We’re expecting concrete results,” said the spokesman, Oleksandr Dykusarov, according to the Interfax news service.

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Sweet and Lowe: How a captivating Twitter feed sealed Rob Lowe’s comeback

By Virginia Heffernan

@RobLowe follows 135 people on Twitter. Among them is not @HilaryASwank, the Oscar-winning ex-wife of his brother, @ichadlowe.

@RobLowe does, however, follow @ikimlowe, the new wife of his brother, who helpfully identifies herself on the site as “wife of @ichadlowe.” Would @HilaryASwank, a formidable actor who does not use Twitter very often, have consented to live in her lesser-known husband’s Twitter shadow? Perhaps not. Perhaps that’s why they div—

But what am I doing? This is where Twitter can lead a person: to deranged, speculative pointless nosiness. To mindlessly customizing a version of Us Weekly magazine by reading between the Twitter lines of who follows whom, who tags whom, who seeks whose attention with tags and hashtags.

So forget that. I’m just going to keep following @RobLowe. His Twitter feed is one for the ages, and he’s on a tear, having just hit half a million followers. And I swear I follow Rob Lowe for the epigrams and jokes—why else?—though, yes, I once had a poster of the matinee idol from “St. Elmo’s Fire” on my wall. (But only because I learned that science had proven that he and Jaclyn Smith were the most perfectly symmetrical, beautiful humans ever to exist—and who ever would exist. It was a duty of citizenship in the human race to have a poster!)

Not long after “St. Elmo’s Fire,” @RobLowe, the record reflects, had a speedy fall after an early-adopter DIY sex tape (1988! Paris Hilton’s was not ’til 2003!). As Lowe’s first-rate autobiography reports, this was part of a bigger personal unraveling into promiscuity and dissipation on an NBA/Lohan scale. Eventually Lowe found deliverance in sobriety (which he names as one of his interests on Twitter) and the love of a good woman, @Sheryl_Lowe (business) or @Sheryllowe61 (personal).

Lowe also evidently found something in Twitter. As his career has done more than rebound—it has fully realized itself, with his comic-stilted-earnest-inimitable performances on “The West Wing,” “Brothers & Sisters” and, now, “Parks and Recreation”—he has built a sturdy and complementary Twitter feed.

Lowe’s Twitter presence seals his comeback. It is freewheeling, wide-ranging and among his best work. The onetime incorrigible gadfly, who might have died outside the Viper Room like River Phoenix or been left howling at the moon like Charlie Sheen, now knows who he is, has a gift for observational humor and lives his life with something that looks like joy.

Lowe recently retweeted this observation from the Telegraph’s Damian Thompson:

More:

Another Lowe tweet:

Which of us–especially those of us who were born in the 1960s–doesn’t feel like saying that aloud every year?

And speaking of Lowe’s vintage, it’s appealing that he’s not afraid to use our generation’s corny locutions on young-skewing Twitter. As he put it recently:

The merciless “pumped” kills me. Do people never leave the slang (or bands?) of their 20s? Lowe is big on “dude,” too.

At the same time, Lowe seems to enjoy aging:

He wrote this last month, referring to Chris Traeger, his character on “Parks and Recreation,” who exercises without cease, gunning for eternal life. In Traeger’s intense specificity—his needs in beverages, for example, are so idiosyncratic as to require paragraphs of instructions—he is a perfect new-sitcom archetype. One thing he is not is cool.

And neither is Lowe cool in his Twitter feed. Often he is sending out blessings to his followers or his family, or reveling in mere existence, with the hashtag #LoveLife. Lowe’s autobiography makes clear that the Handsome Man, a cultural slot in which he found himself early on, invites way too much resentment if he doesn’t start spoofing himself with gusto. It’s imperative he find the joke in life, and the dignity in himself, or he’ll yield to prettiness and silliness, as well as drugs and sex tapes.

Look on that @RobLowe Twitter feed, and learn from it, ye handsome millennials!

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Sitar maker: Ravi Shankar's legacy inspires others

NEW DELHI (AP) — The walls of Sanjay Sharma's music shop are lined with gleaming string instruments and old photographs of legendary musicians.

Beatles George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Indian classicial musicians Zakir Hussain, Shiv Kumar Sharma and Vishwamohan Bhatt. And the man who brought these two very different musical worlds together: Ravi Shankar.

Like his grandfather and father before him, Sharma built, tuned and repaired instruments for the sitar virtuoso, who introduced Westerners to Indian classical music, and through his friendship with Harrison became a mainstay of the 1960s counterculture scene.

From his tiny shop tucked into the crowded lanes of central Delhi's Bhagat Singh market, Sharma traveled the world with Shankar. Late in the maestro's life, as his health and strength flagged, he even designed a smaller version of the instrument that allowed him to keep playing.

Shankar, who died Tuesday at age 92, was "a saint, an emperor and lord of music," Sharma says in a tribute posted to the website of his sought-after shop, Rikhi Ram's Music.

"When I opened my eyes there was him," says Sharma, 44, surrounded by display cases full of sitars, sarangis (a stringed instrument played with a violin-like bow), guitars, tabla drums and sarods, a deeply resonating instrument played by plucking the strings.

Shankar "was music and music was him," he says.

Sharma's grandfather started the business in 1920 in the northern city of Lahore, now in Pakistan. He met a young Ravi Shankar at a concert there in the 1940s. Following the India-Pakistan partition and the relocation of the shop to New Delhi, the family began making sitars for Shankar in the 1950s.

By then, the musician was already famous in India and beginning to collaborate with some of the greats of Western music, including violinist Yehudi Menuhin and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.

The Beatles visited in 1966 and bought instruments, memorialized in some of the many photographs that line the shop's walls. Another shows Shankar's daughter and the heir of his sitar legacy, Anoushka Shankar. But there is no picture of another Shankar daughter, American singer Norah Jones, who was estranged from her father.

Sharma's own father succeeded his grandfather as the supplier of Shankar's sitars. And then Sharma himself in the 1980s.

The bedroom-sized shop has two counters, one for conducting business and one for working on instruments under the beam of a large work lamp. Wood shavings and dust cover the floor of a workshop at the back.

As he chatted with visiting Associated Press journalists on Thursday, Sharma worked on a sitar, peering through his glasses as he used a mallet to hammer in a new fret. He plucked the strings, and as the sound resonated around the room, he leaned close in to the instrument and listened intently to the vibrations. Satisfied with the results, he moved on to the next fret.

It takes 15 months for a sitar to be ready for use. The actual crafting of the instrument from red cedar and hollowed-out, dried pumpkins takes three months. Then, it is left untouched to go through what is called "Delhi seasoning," in which the extremes of New Delhi's climate — blistering summer, followed by a brief monsoon, and a near-freezing, three-month winter — work their magic.

In 2005, a serious bout of pneumonia left Shankar with a frozen left shoulder.

"He was growing old and he wanted to experiment and change the instrument" so he could continue playing, Sharma says.

Sharma, a large, balding man, created what he calls the "studio sitar," a smaller version of the instrument. But holding it was still difficult. So Sharma went to a Home Depot near Shankar's San Diego, California-area home and bought some supplies to build a detachable stand.

The musician was thrilled. Sharma says Shankar told him, "Your father was a brilliant sitar maker, but you are a genius."

Shankar was performing in public until a month before his death. Despite ill health, he appeared re-energized by the music, Sharma said.

Now, as Sharma mourns the giant of Indian music, he also worries about the future of the art itself. He sees traditional Indian instruments gradually losing their place in their own country to zippy, electronic Bollywood music.

"We are losing the originality and the core of our Indian music," says Shankar, himself a trained Hindustani classical musician who plays the sitar and tabla, the Indian pair-drums.

At the same time, Shankar's work as a global ambassador of music has borne fruit, Sharma says: "Because the music has gone to the West, we're getting lots of new musical aspirants from the Western countries."

When jazz artist Herbie Hancock was in New Delhi a few years ago, he stopped by Sharma's shop to buy a sitar.

And in one of the shop's display windows gleams a newly crafted sitar made of teak.

"That," Sharma said, "is for Bill Gates."

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The New Old Age Blog: Hospital Alarms Fail to Prevent Injury, Study Finds

When it comes to protecting older people from falls, it can take a long time to figure out what helps and sometimes an even longer time to take action against things that were supposed to help but don’t.

A case in point: the so-called safety rails on hospital and nursing home beds. Their hazards, as The New Old Age reported more than two years ago, are well documented. They are intended to keep sick, drugged or confused people from climbing or falling out of bed. What they actually do is make falls more dangerous; they also trap patients between the rails and the mattress until they asphyxiate, causing hundreds of deaths annually.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is finally investigating these hazards, with findings due soon.

Alarms — sensors that alert aides or nurses when someone at risk of falling attempts to get out of bed or up from a chair or toilet — sound better, right? Lots of health care facilities thought so.

Use of these alarms has increased “over the past 10 or 15 years as the problems of physical restraints and bed rails became better known,” said Ronald Shorr, who directs geriatric research at the V.A. Medical Center in Gainesville, Fla. “This was the next wave in fall prevention.”

The trouble is, hospital bed alarms don’t appear to reduce falls, according to the study that Dr. Shorr just published in The Annals of Internal Medicine.

Lots of patients, of all ages, fall in hospitals, and about a quarter of those falls cause injuries. They also cost hospitals money, because Medicare will no longer reimburse facilities for treating injuries from falls that in theory shouldn’t have happened.

Though there aren’t statistics on the number of systems, it is rare these days to find a large hospital that doesn’t use alarms, in some cases built right into the beds.

Yet “their efficacy hadn’t been established,” Dr. Shorr told me in an interview. The few studies that reported reduced falls from alarms were small, lacked control groups, or didn’t continue for very long. Dr. Shorr and his colleagues set out to remedy those shortcomings.

Over 18 months, they documented falls among patients in 16 medical and surgical units, with a combined 349 beds, at Methodist Healthcare-University Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. Half those units were randomly designated “usual care.” In the other eight, the “intervention” units, Dr. Shorr and study coordinator Michelle Chandler held repeated education sessions to explain the alarms — in this case, flexible pads made by Bed-Ex and widely-used — and demonstrate their use in beds and on chairs and commode seats.

Ms. Chandler visited the intervention units daily — the staff started calling her “Mrs. Falls” — and even brought fresh alarm pads and help set them up to encourage their use.

The intervention worked, in that those units used the alarms far more often. But when the researchers tallied up the falls among the 27,672 patients (half of them over age 63) in these units — controlling for many variables, including not only demographic factors but staffing levels and psychotropic drug regimens — they found the alarms had no significant effect.

Patients in the units that used alarms more heavily fell just as often as patients in the control units that used alarms much less frequently. (The numbers: 5.62 falls per 1,000 patient-days, a measure of how many people spent how long in the hospital, versus 4.56 falls in the control units, not a statistically significant difference.)

There were no fewer injuries in the more-alarmed units, nor any less use of physical restraints.

There were likely higher costs, though. A Bed-Ex monitor and cables cost about $350 at the time, and each disposable sensor pad cost $23.

Why didn’t the alarms help? Dr. Shorr hypothesized that the staff developed what he called alarm fatigue. “How many times a week do you hear a car alarm go off?” he asked. “You become desensitized.”

But it is also possible, he said, that when the alarms sounded and the nurses scampered, “the patients who weren’t alarmed fell more often.”

My own 2 cents: If an alarm sounds when someone stirs, is any hospital or nursing home so well-staffed that someone can materialize within seconds? Does a staff become less vigilant when patients have alarms and are presumed – wrongly, it seems – to be safer?

Nursing homes also frequently use alarms, and while this hospital data might not apply in another setting, Dr. Shorr said his findings made him skeptical about their effectiveness there, too.

So we probably shouldn’t feel reassured about our elders’ safety when they are in a hospital, alarms or no alarms. Even younger people, recovering from surgery and feeling the effects of anesthesia or sedatives, can and do fall.

“The more eyes on your loved one, the better,” said Dr. Shorr. “And it’s best if they’re your eyes.”

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Russian Envoy Says Syrian Leader Is Losing Control

MOSCOW — Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, Russia’s top envoy for Syria, said on Thursday that President Bashar al-Assad’s government was losing control of the country and might be defeated by rebel forces.

“Unfortunately, it is impossible to exclude a victory of the Syrian opposition,” he said — the clearest indication to date that Russia believed Mr. Assad, a longtime strategic ally, could lose in a civil war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

“We must look squarely at the facts and the trend now suggests that the regime and the government in Syria are losing more and more control and more and more territory,” said Mr. Bogdanov, in remarks to Russia’s Public Chamber carried by Russian news agencies.

Russia, Mr. Bogdanov said, is preparing to evacuate its citizens — a complex task, since for decades, Russian women have married Syrian men sent to study in Russia and returned home with them to raise families. It was the first time an official at Mr. Bogdanov’s level had announced plans for an evacuation, which sent a clear message to Damascus that Russia no longer holds out hope that the government can prevail.

As the Russian official spoke, fresh evidence emerge of the intensity of the battle and its proximity to the capital, Damascus.

Syrian state media and anti-government activists reported that at least 16 people had been killed when a car bomb exploded near a school in the town of Qatana, southwest of the capital, on Thursday.

The bomb wounded more than 20 people, leaving some in critical condition, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict through a network of activists. Government forces still hold sway in Qatana, a town with a Sunni Muslim majority and Christian minority, Agence France-Presse reported.

The number of car bombs in residential areas appears to have increased in recent weeks, hitting neighborhoods perceived as housing many government supporters as well as others considered sympathetic to the uprising.

Agence France-Press also reported that Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim al-Shaar was wounded in a bomb attack on his ministry on Wednesday. But he was not seriously hurt, the agency said, quoting an unidentified security source who said that the bombing was believed to have been carried out by a saboteur because only official vehicles can approach the building.

Mr. Shaar was injured in an earlier bombing on July 18 that killed four senior security officials at a Damascus headquarters. Russia is eager to protect its strategic interests in Syria, including a naval facility at the port of Tartus, and has been meeting frequently with opposition delegations, presumably laying the groundwork for a possible transition. In his remarks to the Public Chamber, a Kremlin advisory group, Mr. Bogdanov said he believed that half the Russian citizens living in Syria support the rebels.

“Moreover, some of the people coming here as part of opposition coalitions have Russian passports,” he said.

Russia has cast its stance on Syria as a principled stand against Western-led intervention — a passionate topic for President Vladimir V. Putin, who feels Russia was deceived into supporting a no-fly zone in Libya that ultimately led to a military campaign that led to the overthrow of Col. Moammar el-Qadaffi. In recent days, Moscow has been adamant that its fundamental position has not changed.

For many months, the Russian authorities have resisted Western pressure on Moscow to persuade the Syrian leader to step down. Though Russia has said it supports the creation of a transitional government, it has been at odds with the West on whether Mr. Assad — and his ally Iran — would have a voice in it.

Mr. Bogdanov said on Thursday that Russia’s stance has been deliberately distorted in the Western media, an effort “intended to weaken our influence” in the Middle East, and that third-party governments have strengthened rebel forces by providing weapons.

“Massive supply of modern armaments have pushed the Syrian rebels to stake their hopes on force,” leading to “an acceleration of the spiral of violence,” he said.

Leonid Medvedko, a political analyst who covered Syria for Soviet news services, said officials have so far been reluctant to declare an evacuation of Russian citizens “because there are technical questions, political questions — because it will mean we are fully giving up Syria.”

“It is a humanitarian step, but each humanitarian step has a political meaning,” he said.

From the first, Russia has taken the view that Mr. Assad’s departure would usher in a long and chaotic process of fragmentation in Syria, but most experts this week said they were braced for the beginning of that process. Mr. Medvedko, the former journalist, said he expected Syria to split into four parts that would be home to distinct ethnic and religious groups, much as Yugoslavia did in the 1990s.

Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of Russia in Global Affairs and head of an influential policy group, said that even if Mr. Assad left the country, his countrymen will keep fighting.

“The prevailing view is that it will be complete and desperate chaos,” said Mr. Lukyanov. “To remove Assad will not mean settlement of the Syrian conflict. You can remove him — I don’t know in which way — but what will you do to 300,000 Alawites? They will be fighting for their lives, not for power anymore,” he said, referring to the minority sect that rules the country.

Anne Barnard contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

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Familiar names line up for Golden Globe noms

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — A familiar lineup of Hollywood awards contenders are expected among Golden Globe nominations, whose prospects include past Oscar winners Daniel Day-Lewis, Helen Mirren, Robert De Niro and Sally Field.

Nominations come out Thursday morning for the 70th Globes ceremony, Hollywood's second-biggest film honors after the Academy Awards.

Among potential contenders are two-time Oscar winners Day-Lewis and Field for Steven Spielberg's Civil War saga "Lincoln," whose Globe possibilities also include past Oscar recipient Tommy Lee Jones.

Two-time Oscar winner De Niro is in the running for the lost-soul romance "Silver Linings Playbook," along with the film's lead performers, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.

The field of contenders is loaded with other Oscar recipients such as Mirren and Anthony Hopkins for "Hitchcock," Philip Seymour Hoffman for "The Master," Helen Hunt for "The Sessions," Marion Cotillard for "Rust and Bone," Russell Crowe for "Les Miserables" and Alan Arkin for "Argo."

One of the year's big action hits, the James Bond adventure "Skyfall," could bring the latest Globe nomination for past Oscar winner Javier Bardem, who elevates his super-villain role into one of the year's most entertaining performances.

Presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a relatively small group of about 90 reporters covering Hollywood for overseas outlets, the Globes sometimes single out newcomers to Hollywood's awards scene. Hilary Swank's Globe win for 1999's "Boys Don't Cry" helped put her on the map on the way to winning her first Oscar.

The possibilities this time include veteran French performers Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, who star as an elderly couple in "Amour," and first-time actors Quvenzhane Wallis and Dwight Henry for the low-budget critical darling "Beasts of the Southern Wild."

Globe acting winners often go on to receive the same prizes at the Oscars. All four Oscar winners last season — lead performers Meryl Streep of "The Iron Lady" and Jean Dujardin of "The Artist" and supporting players Octavia Spencer of "The Help" and Christopher Plummer of "Beginners" — won Globes first.

The Globes have a spotty record predicting which films might go on to earn the best-picture prize at the Academy Awards, however.

The Globes feature two best-film categories, one for drama and one for musical or comedy. Last year's Oscar best-picture winner, "The Artist," preceded that honor with a Globe win for best musical or comedy.

But in the seven years before that, only one winner in the Globe best-picture categories — 2008's "Slumdog Millionaire" — followed up with an Oscar best-picture win.

Along with 14 film prizes, the Globes hand out awards in 11 television categories.

Jodie Foster, a two-time Oscar and Globe winner for "The Accused" and "The Silence of the Lambs," will receive the group's Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement at the Jan. 13 ceremony.

Tina Fey, a two-time Globe TV winner for "30 Rock," and Amy Poehler, a past nominee for "Parks and Recreation," will host the show, which airs live on NBC.

Fey and Poehler follow Ricky Gervais, who was host the last three years and rubbed some Hollywood egos the wrong way with sharp wisecracks about A-list stars and the foreign press association itself.

With stars sharing drinks and dinner, the Globes have a reputation as one of Hollywood's loose and unpredictable awards gatherings. Winners occasionally have been off in the restroom when their names were announced, and there have been moments of onstage spontaneity such as Jack Nicholson mooning the crowd or Ving Rhames handing over his trophy to fellow nominee Jack Lemmon.

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Online:

http://www.goldenglobes.org

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Another Look at a Drink Ingredient, Brominated Vegetable Oil

James Edward Bates for The New York Times

Sarah Kavanagh, 15, of Hattiesburg, Miss., started an online petition asking PepsiCo to change Gatorade’s formula.

Sarah Kavanagh and her little brother were looking forward to the bottles of Gatorade they had put in the refrigerator after playing outdoors one hot, humid afternoon last month in Hattiesburg, Miss.

But before she took a sip, Sarah, a dedicated vegetarian, did what she often does and checked the label to make sure no animal products were in the drink. One ingredient, brominated vegetable oil, caught her eye.

“I knew it probably wasn’t from an animal because it had vegetable in the name, but I still wanted to know what it was, so I Googled it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “A page popped up with a long list of possible side effects, including neurological disorders and altered thyroid hormones. I didn’t expect that.”

She threw the product away and started a petition on Change.org, a nonprofit Web site, that has almost 200,000 signatures. Ms. Kavanagh, 15, hopes her campaign will persuade PepsiCo, Gatorade’s maker, to consider changing the drink’s formulation.

Jeff Dahncke, a spokesman for PepsiCo, noted that brominated vegetable oil had been deemed safe for consumption by federal regulators. “As standard practice, we constantly evaluate our formulas and ingredients to ensure they comply with federal regulations and meet the high quality standards our consumers and athletes expect — from functionality to great taste,” he said in an e-mail.

In fact, about 10 percent of drinks sold in the United States contain brominated vegetable oil, including Mountain Dew, also made by PepsiCo; Powerade, Fanta Orange and Fresca from Coca-Cola; and Squirt and Sunkist Peach Soda, made by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

The ingredient is added often to citrus drinks to help keep the fruit flavoring evenly distributed; without it, the flavoring would separate.

Use of the substance in the United States has been debated for more than three decades, so Ms. Kavanagh’s campaign most likely is quixotic. But the European Union has long banned the substance from foods, requiring use of other ingredients. Japan recently moved to do the same.

“B.V.O. is banned other places in the world, so these companies already have a replacement for it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “I don’t see why they don’t just make the switch.” To that, companies say the switch would be too costly.

The renewed debate, which has brought attention to the arcane world of additive regulation, comes as consumers show increasing interest in food ingredients and have new tools to learn about them. Walmart’s app, for instance, allows access to lists of ingredients in foods in its stores.

Brominated vegetable oil contains bromine, the element found in brominated flame retardants, used in things like upholstered furniture and children’s products. Research has found brominate flame retardants building up in the body and breast milk, and animal and some human studies have linked them to neurological impairment, reduced fertility, changes in thyroid hormones and puberty at an earlier age.

Limited studies of the effects of brominated vegetable oil in animals and in humans found buildups of bromine in fatty tissues. Rats that ingested large quantities of the substance in their diets developed heart lesions.

Its use in foods dates to the 1930s, well before Congress amended the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to add regulation of new food additives to the responsibilities of the Food and Drug Administration. But Congress exempted two groups of additives, those already sanctioned by the F.D.A. or the Department of Agriculture, or those experts deemed “generally recognized as safe.”

The second exemption created what Tom Neltner, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ food additives project, a three-year investigation into how food additives are regulated, calls “the loophole that swallowed the law.” A company can create a new additive, publish safety data about it on its Web site and pay a law firm or consulting firm to vet it to establish it as “generally recognized as safe” — without ever notifying the F.D.A., Mr. Neltner said.

About 10,000 chemicals are allowed to be added to foods, about 3,000 of which have never been reviewed for safety by the F.D.A., according to Pew’s research. Of those, about 1,000 never come before the F.D.A. unless someone has a problem with them; they are declared safe by a company and its handpicked advisers.

“I worked on the industrial and consumer products side of things in the past, and if you take a new chemical and put it into, say, a tennis racket, you have to notify the E.P.A. before you put it in,” Mr. Neltner said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency. “But if you put it into food and can document it as recognized as safe by someone expert, you don’t have to tell the F.D.A.”

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