Japan Finds Swelling in Second Boeing 787 Battery

TOKYO (Reuters) - Cells in a second lithium-ion battery on a Boeing Co 787 Dreamliner forced to make an emergency landing in Japan last month showed slight swelling, a Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB) official said on Tuesday.

The jet, flown by All Nippon Airways Co, was forced to make the landing after its main battery failed.

"I do not know the exact discussion taken by the research group on the ground, but I heard that it is a slight swelling (in the auxiliary power unit battery cells). I have so far not heard that there was internal damage," Masahiro Kudo, a senior accident investigator at the JTSB said in a briefing in Tokyo.

Kudo said that two out of eight cells in the second battery unit showed some bumps and the JTSB would continue to investigate to determine whether this was irregular or not.

The plane's auxiliary power unit (APU) powers the aircraft's systems when it is on the ground. National Transportation Safety Board investigators in the United States are probing the APU from a Japan Airlines plane that caught fire at Boston's Logan airport when the plane was parked.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Authority grounded all 50 Boeing Dreamliners in commercial service on January 16 after the incidents with the two Japanese owned 787 jets.

The groundings have cost airlines tens of millions of dollars, with no solution yet in sight.

Boeing rival Airbus said last week it had abandoned plans to use lithium-ion batteries in its next passenger jet, the A350, in favor of traditional nickel-cadmium batteries.

Lighter and more powerful than conventional batteries, lithium-ion power packs have been in consumer products such as phones and laptops for years but are relatively new in industrial applications, including back-up batteries for electrical systems in jets.

(Reporting by Mari Saito; Editing by Richard Pullin)

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National Briefing | South: Abortion Curbs Clear Senate in Arkansas

The State Senate voted 25 to 7 on Monday to ban most abortions 20 weeks into a pregnancy. The measure goes back to the House to consider an amendment that added exceptions for rape and incest. The legislation is based on the belief that fetuses can feel pain 20 weeks into a pregnancy, and is similar to bans in several other states. Opponents say it would require mothers to deliver babies with fatal conditions. Gov. Mike Beebe has said he has constitutional concerns about the proposal but has not said whether he will veto it.

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National Briefing | South: Abortion Curbs Clear Senate in Arkansas

The State Senate voted 25 to 7 on Monday to ban most abortions 20 weeks into a pregnancy. The measure goes back to the House to consider an amendment that added exceptions for rape and incest. The legislation is based on the belief that fetuses can feel pain 20 weeks into a pregnancy, and is similar to bans in several other states. Opponents say it would require mothers to deliver babies with fatal conditions. Gov. Mike Beebe has said he has constitutional concerns about the proposal but has not said whether he will veto it.

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China’s Army Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.

This 12-story building on the outskirts of Shanghai is the headquarters of Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army. China’s defense ministry has denied that it is responsible for initiating digital attacks.

On the outskirts of Shanghai, in a run-down neighborhood dominated by a 12-story white office tower, sits a People’s Liberation Army base for China’s growing corps of cyberwarriors.

The building off Datong Road, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlors and a wine importer, is the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398. A growing body of digital forensic evidence — confirmed by American intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the army unit for years — leaves little doubt that an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around the white tower.

An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area.

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”

Other security firms that have tracked “Comment Crew” say they also believe the group is state-sponsored, and a recent classified National Intelligence Estimate, issued as a consensus document for all 16 of the United States intelligence agencies, makes a strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army officers or are contractors working for commands like Unit 61398, according to officials with knowledge of its classified content.

Mandiant provided an advance copy of its report to The New York Times, saying it hoped to “bring visibility to the issues addressed in the report.” Times reporters then tested the conclusions with other experts, both inside and outside government, who have examined links between the hacking groups and the army (Mandiant was hired by The New York Times Company to investigate a sophisticated Chinese-origin attack on its news operations, but concluded it was not the work of Comment Crew, but another Chinese group. The firm is not currently working for the Times Company but it is in discussions about a business relationship.)

While Comment Crew has drained terabytes of data from companies like Coca-Cola, increasingly its focus is on companies involved in the critical infrastructure of the United States — its electrical power grid, gas lines and waterworks. According to the security researchers, one target was a company with remote access to more than 60 percent of oil and gas pipelines in North America. The unit was also among those that attacked the computer security firm RSA, whose computer codes protect confidential corporate and government databases.

Contacted Monday, officials at the Chinese embassy in Washington again insisted that their government does not engage in computer hacking, and that such activity is illegal. They describe China itself as a victim of computer hacking, and point out, accurately, that there are many hacking groups inside the United States. But in recent years the Chinese attacks have grown significantly, security researchers say. Mandiant has detected more than 140 Comment Crew intrusions since 2006. American intelligence agencies and private security firms that track many of the 20 or so other Chinese groups every day say those groups appear to be contractors with links to the unit.

While the unit’s existence and operations are considered a Chinese state secret, Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that the Mandiant report was “completely consistent with the type of activity the Intelligence Committee has been seeing for some time.”

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Nestlé Pulls 2 Products in Horse Meat Scandal

LONDON — First centered on Britain and Ireland, the scandal over beef products adulterated with horse meat escalated across continental Europe on Tuesday after Nestlé, one of the world’s best-known food companies, said it was removing pasta meals from store shelves in Italy and Spain.

Before the announcement late Monday, the crisis had already spread, with perhaps a dozen countries caught up in product recalls, but the involvement of Nestlé marks another significant act in a fast-moving drama which is forcing Europeans to question the contents of their meals.

Nestlé, which is based in Switzerland, said it had increased testing after the discoveries of horse meat in British foods and found “traces” of horse DNA in two products made with beef supplied by a German company named as H.J. Schypke.

The levels were above the 1 percent threshold used by the British Food Standards Agency  as an indicator of adulteration in testing being conducted by Britain’s food industry and therefore the products would be withdrawn, Nestlé said in a statement.

“There is no food safety issue, but the mislabeling of products means they fail to meet the very high standards consumers expect from us,” Nestlé added.

Two chilled pasta products, Buitoni Beef Ravioli and Beef Tortellini are being taken off supermarket shelves in Italy and Spain immediately. Meanwhile, Lasagnes à la Bolognaise Gourmandes, a frozen meat product made for the catering trade in France, will also be withdrawn and replaced with product made from 100 percent beef.

Nestlé knows only too well the importance of its brand image, having once been the object of a boycott after being embroiled in a controversy over the marketing of baby milk in developing countries.

Although the current horse meat crisis has been seen mainly as an issue of fraud and mislabeling it emerged last week that a powerful equine painkiller, phenylbutazone – or bute – may have entered the food chain.

Eight horses slaughtered for food in Britain tested positive for the drug. Six of those carcasses had already been exported to France for use in human food.

In Britain, food manufacturers have embarked on a huge program of tests of food to try to stem a crisis of confidence in products originating in a long and bewilderingly complex supply  chain.

Last Friday, the British Food Standards Agency released the results of 2,501 tests conducted on beef products by the British food industry, of which 29 contained more than 1 percent horse meat.

But, just as that information was released, it emerged separately that food intended for school meals had also contained horse meat and a blame game has erupted between politicians and supermarket bosses over where responsibility ultimately lies.

The European Union has also announced an increase in food testing though there are growing calls for more regulation at a European level. Though tough traceability rules for fresh beef products were introduced after the crisis over mad cow disease more than a decade ago, a similar regime is not in place for processed food.

“What has been discovered in recent days is large-scale fraud,”  said Richard Seeber, the coordinator for the center-right group  in the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee of the European Parliament. “This is a clear breach of current European food labeling rules. This is why the first thing we need is more controls and better enforcement of the existing rules.”

Glenis Willmott, the leader of the British Labour Party’s members of the European Parliament, said that the response of the E.U.’s executive, the European Commission, had been totally inadequate.

“The horse meat scandal should result in a Europe-wide comprehensive legislation on ‘origin labeling’ for all meat in processed foods, and a better E.U. enforcement procedure,” Ms. Willmott said.

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Allure of Self-Insurance Draws Concern Over Costs

WASHINGTON — Federal and state officials and consumer advocates have grown worried that companies with relatively young, healthy employees may opt out of the regular health insurance market to avoid the minimum coverage standards in President Obama’s sweeping law, a move that could drive up costs for workers at other companies.

Companies can avoid many standards in the new law by insuring their own employees, rather than signing up with commercial insurers, because Congress did not want to disrupt self-insurance arrangements that were seen as working well for many large employers.

“The new health care law created powerful incentives for smaller employers to self-insure,” said Deborah J. Chollet, a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research who has been studying the insurance industry for more than 25 years. “This trend could destabilize small-group insurance markets and erode protections provided by the Affordable Care Act.”

It is not clear how many companies have already self-insured in response to the law or are planning to do so. Federal and state officials do not keep comprehensive statistics on the practice.

Self-insurance was already growing before Mr. Obama signed the law in 2010, making it difficult to know whether the law is responsible for any recent changes. A study by the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute found that about 59 percent of private sector workers with health coverage were in self-insured plans in 2011, up from 41 percent in 1998.

But experts say the law makes self-insurance more attractive for smaller employers. When companies are self-insured, they assume most of the financial risk of providing health benefits to employees. Instead of paying premiums to insurers, they pay claims filed by employees and health care providers. To avoid huge losses, they often sign up for a special kind of “stop loss” insurance that protects them against very large or unexpected claims, say $50,000 or $100,000 a person.

Such insurance serves as a financial backstop for the employer if, for example, an employee is found to have cancer, needs an organ transplant or has a premature baby requiring intensive care.

In a report to clients last year, SNR Denton, a law firm, wrote, “Faced with mandates to offer richer benefits with less cost-sharing, small and midsize employers in particular are increasingly considering self-insuring.”

Officials from California, Maine, Minnesota, Utah, Washington and other states expressed concern about the potential proliferation of these arrangements at a recent meeting of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

Stop-loss insurers can and do limit the coverage they provide to employers for selected employees with medical problems. As a result, companies with less healthy work forces may find self-insuring more difficult.

Christina L. Goe, the top lawyer for the Montana insurance commissioner, said that stop-loss insurance companies were generally “free to reject less healthy employer groups because they are not subject to the same restrictions as health insurers.”

Insurance regulators worry that commercial insurers — and the insurance exchanges being set up in every state to offer a range of plan options to consumers — will be left with disproportionate numbers of older, sicker people who are more expensive to insure.

That, in turn, could drive up premiums for uninsured people seeking coverage in the exchanges. Since the federal government will subsidize that coverage, it, too, could face higher costs, as would some employees and employers in the traditional insurance market.

Large employers with hundreds or thousands of employees have historically been much more likely to insure themselves because they have cash to pay most claims directly.

Now, employee benefit consultants are promoting self-insurance for employers with as few as 10 or 20 employees.

Raeghn L. Torrie, the chief financial officer of Autonomous Solutions, a developer of robotic equipment based in Petersboro, Utah, said her business started a self-insured health plan for its 44 employees on Jan. 1 as a way to cope with the uncertainties created by the new law.

“We have a pretty young, healthy group of employees,” she said.

In Marshfield, Mo., J. Richard Jones, the president of Label Solutions, an industrial label-printing company with 42 employees, said he switched to a self-insurance plan this year “to hold down costs that were going up because of government regulation under Obamacare.”

The Township of Freehold, N.J., made a similar decision in January to gain more control over benefits and costs for its 260 employees.

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Well: Health Effects of Smoking for Women

The title of a recent report on smoking and health might well have paraphrased the popular ad campaign for Virginia Slims, introduced in 1968 by Philip Morris and aimed at young professional women: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Today that slogan should include: “…toward a shorter life.” Ten years shorter, in fact.

The new report is one of two rather shocking analyses of the hazards of smoking and the benefits of quitting published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine. The data show that “women who smoke like men die like men who smoke,” Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, a professor of health and health care at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

That was not always the case. Half a century ago, the risk of death from lung cancer among men who smoked was five times higher than that among women smokers. But by the first decade of this century, that risk had equalized: for both men and women who smoked, the risk of death from lung cancer was 25 times greater than for nonsmokers, Dr. Michael J. Thun of the American Cancer Society and his colleagues reported.

Today, women who smoke are even more likely than men who smoke to die of lung cancer. According to a second study in the same journal, women smokers face a 17.8 times greater risk of dying of lung cancer than women who do not smoke; men who smoke are at 14.6 times greater risk to die of lung cancer than men who don’t. Women who smoke now face a risk of death from lung cancer that is 50 percent higher than the estimates reported in the 1980s, according to Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto and his colleagues.

After controlling for age, body weight, education level and alcohol use, the new analysis found something else: men and women who continue to smoke die on average 10 years sooner than those who never smoked.

Dramatic progress has been made in reducing the prevalence of smoking, which has fallen from 42 percent of adults in 1965 (the year after the first surgeon general’s report on smoking and health) to 19 percent in 2010. Yet smoking still results in nearly 200,000 deaths a year among people 35 to 69 years old in the United States. A quarter of all deaths in this age group would not occur if smokers had the same risk of death as nonsmokers.

The risks are even greater among men 55 to 74 and women 60 to 74. More than two-thirds of all deaths among current smokers in these age groups are related to smoking. Over all, the death rate from all causes combined in these age groups “is now at least three times as high among current smokers as among those who have never smoked,” Dr. Thun’s team found.

While lung cancer is the most infamous hazard linked to smoking, the habit also raises the risk of death from heart disease, stroke, pulmonary disease and other cancers, including breast cancer.

Furthermore, changes in how cigarettes are manufactured may have increased the dangers of smoking. The use of perforated filters, tobacco blends that are less irritating, and paper that is more porous made it easier to inhale smoke and encouraged deeper inhalation to achieve satisfying blood levels of nicotine.

The result of deeper inhalation, Dr. Thun’s report suggests, has been an increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., and a shift in the kind of lung cancer linked to smoking. Among nonsmokers, the risk of death from C.O.P.D. has declined by 45 percent in men and has remained stable in women, but the death rate has more than doubled among smokers.

But there is good news, too: it’s never too late to reap the benefits of quitting. The younger you are when you stop smoking, the greater your chances of living a long and healthy life, according to the findings of Dr. Jha’s international team.

The team analyzed smoking and smoking-cessation histories of 113,752 women and 88,496 men 25 and older and linked them to causes of deaths in these groups through 2006.

Those who quit smoking by age 34 lived 10 years longer on average than those who continued to smoke, giving them a life expectancy comparable to people who never smoked. Smokers who quit between ages 35 and 44 lived nine years longer, and those who quit between 45 and 54 lived six years longer. Even quitting smoking between ages 55 and 64 resulted in a four-year gain in life expectancy.

The researchers emphasized, however, that the numbers do not mean it is safe to smoke until age 40 and then stop. Former smokers who quit by 40 still experienced a 20 percent greater risk of death than nonsmokers. About one in six former smokers who died before the age of 80 would not have died if he or she had never smoked, they reported.

Dr. Schroeder believes we can do a lot better to reduce the prevalence of smoking with the tools currently in hand if government agencies, medical insurers and the public cooperate.

Unlike the races, ribbons and fund-raisers for breast cancer, “there’s no public face for lung cancer, even though it kills more women than breast cancer does,” Dr. Schroeder said in an interview. Lung cancer is stigmatized as a disease people bring on themselves, even though many older victims were hooked on nicotine in the 1940s and 1950s, when little was known about the hazards of smoking and doctors appeared in ads assuring the public it was safe to smoke.

Raising taxes on cigarettes can help. The states with the highest prevalence of smoking have the lowest tax rates on cigarettes, Dr. Schroeder said. Also helpful would be prohibiting smoking in more public places like parks and beaches. Some states have criminalized smoking in cars when children are present.

More “countermarketing” of cigarettes is needed, he said, including antismoking public service ads on television and dramatic health warnings on cigarette packs, as is now done in Australia. But two American courts have ruled that the proposed label warnings infringed on the tobacco industry’s right to free speech.

Health insurers, both private and government, could broaden their coverage of stop-smoking aids and better publicize telephone quit lines, and doctors “should do more to stimulate quit attempts,” Dr. Schroeder said.

As Nicola Roxon, a former Australian health minister, put it, “We are killing people by not acting.”

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Well: Health Effects of Smoking for Women

The title of a recent report on smoking and health might well have paraphrased the popular ad campaign for Virginia Slims, introduced in 1968 by Philip Morris and aimed at young professional women: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Today that slogan should include: “…toward a shorter life.” Ten years shorter, in fact.

The new report is one of two rather shocking analyses of the hazards of smoking and the benefits of quitting published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine. The data show that “women who smoke like men die like men who smoke,” Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, a professor of health and health care at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

That was not always the case. Half a century ago, the risk of death from lung cancer among men who smoked was five times higher than that among women smokers. But by the first decade of this century, that risk had equalized: for both men and women who smoked, the risk of death from lung cancer was 25 times greater than for nonsmokers, Dr. Michael J. Thun of the American Cancer Society and his colleagues reported.

Today, women who smoke are even more likely than men who smoke to die of lung cancer. According to a second study in the same journal, women smokers face a 17.8 times greater risk of dying of lung cancer than women who do not smoke; men who smoke are at 14.6 times greater risk to die of lung cancer than men who don’t. Women who smoke now face a risk of death from lung cancer that is 50 percent higher than the estimates reported in the 1980s, according to Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto and his colleagues.

After controlling for age, body weight, education level and alcohol use, the new analysis found something else: men and women who continue to smoke die on average 10 years sooner than those who never smoked.

Dramatic progress has been made in reducing the prevalence of smoking, which has fallen from 42 percent of adults in 1965 (the year after the first surgeon general’s report on smoking and health) to 19 percent in 2010. Yet smoking still results in nearly 200,000 deaths a year among people 35 to 69 years old in the United States. A quarter of all deaths in this age group would not occur if smokers had the same risk of death as nonsmokers.

The risks are even greater among men 55 to 74 and women 60 to 74. More than two-thirds of all deaths among current smokers in these age groups are related to smoking. Over all, the death rate from all causes combined in these age groups “is now at least three times as high among current smokers as among those who have never smoked,” Dr. Thun’s team found.

While lung cancer is the most infamous hazard linked to smoking, the habit also raises the risk of death from heart disease, stroke, pulmonary disease and other cancers, including breast cancer.

Furthermore, changes in how cigarettes are manufactured may have increased the dangers of smoking. The use of perforated filters, tobacco blends that are less irritating, and paper that is more porous made it easier to inhale smoke and encouraged deeper inhalation to achieve satisfying blood levels of nicotine.

The result of deeper inhalation, Dr. Thun’s report suggests, has been an increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., and a shift in the kind of lung cancer linked to smoking. Among nonsmokers, the risk of death from C.O.P.D. has declined by 45 percent in men and has remained stable in women, but the death rate has more than doubled among smokers.

But there is good news, too: it’s never too late to reap the benefits of quitting. The younger you are when you stop smoking, the greater your chances of living a long and healthy life, according to the findings of Dr. Jha’s international team.

The team analyzed smoking and smoking-cessation histories of 113,752 women and 88,496 men 25 and older and linked them to causes of deaths in these groups through 2006.

Those who quit smoking by age 34 lived 10 years longer on average than those who continued to smoke, giving them a life expectancy comparable to people who never smoked. Smokers who quit between ages 35 and 44 lived nine years longer, and those who quit between 45 and 54 lived six years longer. Even quitting smoking between ages 55 and 64 resulted in a four-year gain in life expectancy.

The researchers emphasized, however, that the numbers do not mean it is safe to smoke until age 40 and then stop. Former smokers who quit by 40 still experienced a 20 percent greater risk of death than nonsmokers. About one in six former smokers who died before the age of 80 would not have died if he or she had never smoked, they reported.

Dr. Schroeder believes we can do a lot better to reduce the prevalence of smoking with the tools currently in hand if government agencies, medical insurers and the public cooperate.

Unlike the races, ribbons and fund-raisers for breast cancer, “there’s no public face for lung cancer, even though it kills more women than breast cancer does,” Dr. Schroeder said in an interview. Lung cancer is stigmatized as a disease people bring on themselves, even though many older victims were hooked on nicotine in the 1940s and 1950s, when little was known about the hazards of smoking and doctors appeared in ads assuring the public it was safe to smoke.

Raising taxes on cigarettes can help. The states with the highest prevalence of smoking have the lowest tax rates on cigarettes, Dr. Schroeder said. Also helpful would be prohibiting smoking in more public places like parks and beaches. Some states have criminalized smoking in cars when children are present.

More “countermarketing” of cigarettes is needed, he said, including antismoking public service ads on television and dramatic health warnings on cigarette packs, as is now done in Australia. But two American courts have ruled that the proposed label warnings infringed on the tobacco industry’s right to free speech.

Health insurers, both private and government, could broaden their coverage of stop-smoking aids and better publicize telephone quit lines, and doctors “should do more to stimulate quit attempts,” Dr. Schroeder said.

As Nicola Roxon, a former Australian health minister, put it, “We are killing people by not acting.”

Read More..

Tech Industry Sets Its Sights on Gambling

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Cesar Miranda, left, and his brother, Edgar, working on their claw crane game in San Jose, Calif.

SAN FRANCISCO — Look out Las Vegas, here comes FarmVille.

Silicon Valley is betting that online gambling is its next billion-dollar business, with developers across the industry turning casual games into occasions for adults to wager.

At the moment these games are aimed overseas, where attitudes toward gambling are more relaxed and online betting is generally legal, and extremely lucrative. But game companies, from small teams to Facebook and Zynga, have their eye on the ultimate prize: the rich American market, where most types of real-money online wagers have been cleared by the Justice Department.

Two states, Nevada and Delaware, are already laying the groundwork for virtual gambling. Within months they will most likely be joined by New Jersey.

Bills have also been introduced in Mississippi, Iowa, California and other states, driven by the realization that online gambling could bring in streams of tax revenue. In Iowa alone, online gambling proponents estimated that 150,000 residents were playing poker illegally.

Legislative progress, though, is slow. Opponents include an influential casino industry wary of competition and the traditional antigambling factions, who oppose it on moral grounds.

Silicon Valley is hardly discouraged. Companies here believe that online gambling will soon become as simple as buying an e-book or streaming a movie, and that the convenience of being able to bet from your couch, surrounded by virtual friends, will offset the lack of glittering ambience found in a real-world casino. Think you can get a field of corn in FarmVille, the popular Facebook game, to grow faster than your brother-in-law’s? Five bucks says you cannot.

“Gambling in the U.S. is controlled by a few land-based casinos and some powerful Indian casinos,” said Chris Griffin, chief executive of Betable, a London gambling start-up that handles the gaming licenses and betting mechanics of the business for developers. “What potentially becomes an interesting counterweight is all of a sudden thousands of developers in Silicon Valley making money overseas and wanting to turn their efforts inward and make money in the U.S.”

Betable has set up shop in San Francisco, where 15 studios are now using its back-end platform. “This is the next evolution in games, and kind of ground zero for the developer community,” Mr. Griffin said.

Overseas, online betting is generating an estimated $32 billion in annual revenue — nearly the size of the United States casino market. Juniper Research estimates that betting on mobile devices alone will be a $100 billion worldwide industry by 2017.

“Everyone is really anticipating this becoming a huge business,” said Chris DeWolfe, a co-founder of the pioneering social site Myspace, who is throwing his energies into a gaming studio with a gambling component backed by, among others, the personal investment funds of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, and Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman.

As companies eagerly wait for the American market to open up, they are introducing betting games in Britain, where Apple has tweaked the iPhone software to accommodate them. Facebook began allowing online gambling for British users last summer with Jackpotjoy, a bingo site; deals with other developers followed in December and this month.

Zynga, the company that developed FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Words With Friends and many other popular casual games, is advertising the imminent release of its first betting games in Britain. “All your favorite Zynga game characters will be there, except this time they’ll have real money prizes to offer you,” an ad says. “Play online casino games for pennies and live the dream!”

Mr. DeWolfe’s studio, SGN, is also on the verge of starting its first real-money games in Britain. “Those companies that have a critical mass of users that are interested in playing real-money games are going to be incredibly valuable,” he said.

Mark Pincus, the chief executive of Zynga, said the company was just following the market. “There is no question there is great interest from all kinds of people in games of chance, whether it is for real money or virtual rewards,” he said. Zynga, which has missed revenue expectations in the last year, is making gambling a centerpiece of its new strategy. It has just applied to Nevada for a gambling license.

Casual gaming first blossomed on Facebook’s Web site, where players could readily corral friends into their games. It is now being rethought for mobile devices, so people can play in brief snippets as they wait for a bus or a sandwich.

Some games mimic the slots and poker found in casinos; others emphasize considerably more creativity. The vast majority of casual game players play at no charge. A small number buy virtual objects in the game to speed their play or increase their status.

Tech executives expect an equally small number to play for real money but believe they will bet heavily, making them much more valuable to the gaming companies. By Betable’s estimate, the lifetime value of a casual player is $2 versus $1,800 for a real-money player.

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India Ink: Thomas Friedman Answers Your Questions

New York Times op-ed columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman recently wrapped up a week-long trip to India, where he met with business executives, government ministers and other officials, entrepreneurs and development groups. Even as India’s economy has slowed considerably, Mr. Friedman remains a big believer in what he calls the “miracle of India.’’

Earlier we asked India Ink readers for their questions for Mr. Friedman about India’s changing role in the world economy. Here are his answers to a select few:

By far the most popular reader question was: Is the world still flat?

I wrote the “World Is Flat” in 2004.

I have to confess, I now realize the book was wrong. The world is so much flatter than I thought.

When I wrote “The World Is Flat,” Facebook didn’t exist, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking place, LinkedIn was a prison, applications were what you sent to college, Big Data was a rap star and Skype was a typo. All of that came after I wrote “The World Is Flat.”

And so what it tells you is all those trends have actually taken us from a connected world to what we’re now in, which is a hyper-connected world. It’s a difference of degree. It’s a difference in kind.

I believe it is changing every job, every industry and every market.

The trends I identified have only intensified in every direction, enabling individuals to complete, connect and collaborate so much faster, farther cheaper and deeper.

Venkat from N. J. said: The globalization of business is basically finding a way to justify exploitation of labor, resulting in an enormous concentration of wealth in fewer hands. The majority of labor working for low-end manufacturing work in pathetic conditions, while workers in the U.S. face layoffs, particularly the elderly. Who is paying for this social cost, and should globalization be regulated, somehow?

The first thing you need to understand about globalization is that it is everything and its opposite. So it is take it with one hand and give it with another hand.

On the one hand it is automating more things faster. On the other hand I met with young Indian entrepreneurs who are leveraging the cloud, open-source tools and very small amounts of capital, and are able to invent companies that can complete globally like never before.

So, who is the exploiter and who is the exploitee in this system? If horses could vote, there never would have been cars.

What we’re getting here is rapid change. The question the reader raises, though, is a very important one, because something has changed which we have not figured out how to adjust to. This is a point that Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make in their book “The Race Against the Machine,” which I wrote my last column about.

The point they make is that over the last 200 hundred years, three things grew together: productivity, median income and employment. Whether you were an Indian or an American, productivity grew, median income grew and employment grew, and inequality tended to shrink.

That’s a good thing.

Once we hit the flattening of the world, and now the hyper-flattening of the world, those three things are splitting apart. And that’s what the reader is, rightly, concerned about.

I’m concerned about it too.

So what happens when the world gets this hyper-connected? Well, first of all, the returns to education grow enormously. To be able to use these new technologies properly, you need to be educated.

In America today, unemployment for people with four-year college degrees is 3.6 percent, basically nothing. Unemployment for someone who dropped out of high school is now infinity. I exaggerate but you get the point.
It’s called skills-bias polarization.

If you want to have a factory job in America today, doing high-end manufacturing, you need to know algebra and calculus. It’s not just a repetitive motion any more, you need to program the robot.

Second thing is the returns to capital are so much more than the returns to labor. If I have a lot of capital and I can buy a lot of machines, the returns are so much more than if I hire a lot of people.

The third thing causing this phenomenon is in a hyper-connected world, the returns to superstar talent are just staggering. If you are, say, Madonna, well, every Indian kid who has an iPad can now download your songs. That wasn’t the case 10 years ago. You couldn’t reach this market.

So all three of these things are creating much bigger income gaps, much lower employment for people with lower skills, yet much higher productivity and great wealth for owners of capital.

That’s the big change.

The challenge for every developed and developing society is how do you maintain a middle class in such a world. That’s what I’m thinking about for the topic of my next book.

D.C. Agrawal from Princeton, New Jersey, asks: “How would you rate India on governance and public institutional structures compared to other democratic countries?’’

Let’s look at the countries I visited in the last six months: India, China and Egypt. India in my mind has relatively weak governance in terms of delivering services, but a very strong civil society — very vibrant active, social movements, whether it’s Anna Hazare or reaction to the rape case.

China has a very muscular government, in terms of delivering infrastructure and education, but a very weak civil society, although it is getting stronger. And Egypt has a very flabby, overweight government and a very weak civil society. That’s why when the government collapsed — you got the Muslim Brotherhood taking advantage of the revolution, not strong-rooted democratic movements.

I think India’s governance will improve. The government here is not utterly ineffective. It does do some things very well, but clearly it has weaknesses around policing, infrastructure building and providing consistent education. It holds elections very well, it does the census very well.

Let’s remember it is still a billion people. I don’t want to be too hard on it, but people want more, they want better.

India today has, because of hyper-connection of the world, and diffusion of technology, experienced the pushing down to lower and lower income levels more technology empowerment and education. That’s why India today seems like it has a 300 million-person middle class and a 300 million-person virtual middle class.

These are people who now have available to them, whether it’s a cell phone or other technologies, things that you would normally have to have a middle-class income to have. And they have access to certain learning opportunities.

So they’re actually in their minds middle class, thinking like middle class and putting middle-class demands on the government. I think the young woman who was raped in this terrible tragedy was a member of that virtual middle class – the tools she had, what she was doing, expectations of the government.

That’s a big change. It’s putting more pressure on the government. And the government will eventually respond because it has to.

Jason Richardson-White from Bethlehem, Georgia, said: Studies indicate that equal treatment between the sexes is important to slowing the birth rate. I don’t see that globalization is contributing significantly to that end in India. An argument can be made that globalization has made it possible for the people who are most likely to start egalitarian families to leave India for the West?

First let me make a general response:

I did not invent globalization. I promise you. I just wrote about it.

I wrote about the upsides and the downsides. I didn’t start it and I can’t stop it. I have my own problems with it.

Having said that, I profile in my column an N.G.O. that is providing cell phone-based SMS messaging to alert women about their menstrual cycle, on when exactly they are fertile and when they should not be having unprotected sex, if they want to do family planning.

This is totally based on cloud computing. Without globalization it doesn’t exist. It allows a woman in a remote place to do this. There’s privacy to it. You do one interview on the phone to set it up.

People need to keep in mind, globalization giveth and globalization taketh. The biggest revolution about to hit India, in the next two years, is distance learning. Any woman from any village who knows English will be able to take courses from Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T.

Do you know what this means for women in conservative families, who don’t want them to go to school? It’s going to be a revolution. I’m very excited about the kind of educational empowerment that is going to be coming the way of Indian women that will give them greater earning power, greater control over their own bodies and greater ability to negotiate with their sexual partners.

Anand Kumar from Chicago, Illinois, asks: Tom, China may not be loved in the West, but is respected and admired for its accomplishments. How do you think India ranks on the loved vs. respected and admired spectrum?

What an interesting question.

I think India’s brand remains very strong around the world. I appreciate India’s democracy.

What if 1 billion 50 million Indians were living like Syria today? The whole world would be different. Literally, the whole world would feel different today.

So to me India is a miracle. One billion fifty million people holding free and fair elections, just about every day, in the country. We now take it for granted because it has gone on for so long. I think it’s amazing.

I can’t generalize about the whole world, but I’m still enormously optimistic about what I see here.

Zaigum Kashmiri from Clarence, New York, asks: Tom, I know you are an Indophile and write great things about India. But, honestly, how can anybody be hopeful about India’s economic and social progress, keeping in view the lawlessness, dysfunctional government, corrupt police, a huge incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy and poverty?

I think the important thing to always remember when you look at India is not the snapshot, but the slope of the change.

If you take a snapshot, those will be some of the things you see.

But if you came with me to my meeting with NASSCOM [National Association of Software and Services Companies, India's technology industry association] this week, you’d see eight young entrepreneurs leveraging the flat world to start global businesses that not only contribute to the world but that make Indians unpoor.

They’re amazing.

So you always have to keep these things in balance. What excites me most about India today is the trend line. Every time I come here, I see more and more Indians starting things, collaborating on things and inventing things to make Indians unpoor. And to me that’s the most important thing you have to keep in mind.

By the way, everything the reader cited there, you could say that about America. We have all that, plus guns.

No country is a paradise. Everyone is a work in progress. You have to think about where the thrust is.

I’d like to think that with all our problems in America, we’re still tilted in a positive direction. I’d like to say the same about India.

(Interview has been lightly edited and condensed.)

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