Rupee Drops on Weakness in Indian Economy

MUMBAI — The Indian rupee began slipping lower again in currency markets on Monday after a two-day respite late last week, as further signs emerged of broad troubles in the Indian economy.

An HSBC survey of purchasing managers at manufacturers across India, released Monday, showed them to be the gloomiest they had been since March 2009, at the bottom of the global economic downturn. Businesses across the country are bracing themselves for a sharp increase in the regulated price of diesel fuel, as the rupee’s steep drop in August has driven up the Indian price of crude oil, priced in dollars and almost entirely imported.

After staying nearly steady through the morning, the rupee began sliding again by early afternoon and by late afternoon was down another 0.5 percent against the dollar, to 66.08 rupees to the dollar, bringing its losses since early May to almost 20 percent. Currency traders said that they perceived hints of modest intervention to cushion the decline by the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank, which acts through state-controlled commercial banks when it does intervene so as to camouflage its activity.

The Mumbai stock market showed signs of recovery on Monday, with the benchmark Sensex index rallying 1.43 percent by late afternoon.

Some economists say that the economic downturn may prove sharp but brief. Ajay Singh, a professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, predicted that exporters would benefit considerably from a cheaper rupee and would soon start expanding output.

Yet poor roads, restrictive labor laws and heavy regulation have left India with a manufacturing sector that, although stronger than a decade ago, still struggles to compete with China and other East Asian economies. Indian companies rely heavily on imports for materials and equipment that they cannot buy within India, and the costs of those imports are surging as the rupee falls, limiting gains in Indian competitiveness.

At Challenge Overseas, a manufacturer of trousers on the northern outskirts of Mumbai that exports mainly to the Mideast, the floor and corners of the factory were piled high over the weekend with thick gray and black rolls of fabric two meters, or six feet, long and 30 centimeters, or 12 inches, thick. But all of the fabric had been imported from China.

“Our owner goes to China every three months,” said Javeri Savia, the general manager of production. “The newer textures and weaves all come from China.”

Like many Indian factories, Challenge also lacks economies of scale: It has just 60 workers to cut, sew and iron its trousers, which sell at wholesale for about 1,000 rupees, or $15, apiece. Similar factories in China often employ several thousand workers. “When you compare with China and all of them, we are peanuts,” Mr. Savia said.

The rupee traded between 52 and 55 to the dollar until early May, when it began a gradual slide that the Indian government tried to arrest through market intervention and other measures, including raising the tax on gold imports. The rupee continued drifting down through the summer, then began falling faster in mid-August when senior government officials made it clear in speeches that they were reluctant to resort to more drastic measures to arrest the rupee’s decline, like sharp increases in interest rates or an imposition of stringent controls on moving large sums of money in and out of the country.

The rupee briefly nose-dived last Wednesday to almost 69 to the dollar, prompting the Reserve Bank of India to supply dollars from its reserves through a local bank to the country’s state-controlled oil refiners and distributors, who tend to be India’s biggest buyers of dollars so as to pay for crude oil imports. The rupee slowly crawled back above 66 to the dollar on Thursday and Friday before drifting down a little on Monday.

Paritosh Mathur, the head of fixed-income and currency trading in India for Deutsche Bank, said that volatility in the rupee’s value appeared to be diminishing. He said that he saw little chance that the rupee would return to its levels of last spring in the next two or three months, but also little chance that it would test again the lows of last Wednesday.

The HSBC index of purchasing managers’ sentiment fell to 48.5 in August, from 50.1 in July. A figure below 50 indicates a contraction in activity. Overall new orders and new export orders both declined. Purchasing managers also indicated that they were buying less material for future production and were keeping smaller inventories of finished goods on hand, apparently in anticipation of weak sales.

Leif Eskesen, HSBC’s chief economist for India and southeast Asia, cut his forecast for Indian economic output to 4 percent for the Indian fiscal year through the end of next March, from a previous forecast of 5.5 percent. He also cut his forecast for the following fiscal year to 5.5 percent, from 6.6 percent.

“The recovery is likely to prove protracted as confidence will only return reluctantly and the structural reforms will only pass through to growth very slowly,” he said in a research report.

Julian D’Souza, the South Asia director in the Mumbai office of the Conference Board, a group based in New York that issues leading economic indicators, said that many manufacturing industries were hobbled by high transport and electricity costs. But auto parts factories tend to have modern equipment and good locations close to ports.

“That’s one area where India can start exporting,” he said.

American and European auto parts makers are already facing heavy competition from China, however, so further exports from India might fan trade tensions.

Neha Thirani Bagri contributed reporting.

Rupee Drops, and Outlook Grows Darker for India

India’s economy slowed in early summer to its weakest pace since the bottom of the global economic downturn in 2009, government statistics released Friday evening showed.

The Central Statistics Office in New Delhi said that the economy grew 4.4 percent in the quarter ended June 30, well below economists’ expectations of 4.8 percent. The quarter was the weakest since output grew 3.5 percent in the quarter that ended March 31, 2009.

The accumulating signs of economic distress — slower growth, a widening current-account deficit, higher oil prices and rising inflation in general — suggest that the monthlong fall of the Indian rupee in currency markets may be a symptom of fundamental troubles in the Indian economy and not just part of the broader difficulties experienced by Asian emerging market currencies in recent weeks.

Hints that the Federal Reserve in the United States may soon shift to a tighter monetary policy have prompted global investors to shift billions of dollars out of financial markets from São Paulo to Jakarta to Mumbai, eroding the value of local currencies in developing economies. But the Indian rupee has fallen the fastest of any emerging market currency in the last month, down 8.1 percent. Broader investor disenchantment with emerging markets has been compounded here by worries about India’s economy, the third-largest in Asia after China’s and Japan’s.

Manufacturing and mining have been hit the hardest. A court-ordered halt to most iron ore mining across India for environmental reasons has hurt steel and other sectors; state governments have been raising taxes on the sector, and broader demand has begun to falter.

“The fact is, yes, the manufacturing sector has slowed down,” said Raj K. Singh, the chairman and managing director of the Bharat Petroleum Corporation, an oil refining and marketing company that is two-thirds owned by the Indian government and is one of the country’s largest businesses.

The data was released after stock market and currency trading had ended for the day, despite government promises to stay with the regular Friday morning release. After a week of considerable volatility, the rupee and the Mumbai stock market both had showed modest gains earlier Friday.

India enjoyed annual growth of 8 to 9 percent in the years leading up to the global financial crisis but has struggled to reach 6 percent since then, despite heavy government spending and large fiscal and trade deficits.

From corner stores to corporate boardrooms, the consensus in Mumbai these days is that stagnation may continue over the next few months, although almost no one expects a steep downturn.

Sitting in his office on Friday morning in front of an abstract Indian painting in blues and yellows, Mr. Singh voiced concern about a 7.2 percent drop in nationwide diesel consumption during the first three weeks of August from a year ago. Nationwide diesel consumption was also down 5.9 percent in July from a year ago.

But heavy monsoon rains have limited the need for diesel in irrigation pumps, making the comparison less clear, Mr. Singh cautioned. Rohit Dawar, the top diesel demand expert at the Petroleum Ministry in New Delhi, said in a telephone interview that diesel consumption had been artificially inflated in July and August last year by a peculiarity in government fuel subsidies, since removed, that temporarily made it cheaper to burn diesel instead of other fuels in industrial boilers.

Even allowing for all of these factors, however, “there is a slight slowdown” in diesel demand recently, Mr. Dawar said.

Plentiful monsoon rains, a key indicator for the Indian economy for thousands of years, have produced lush fields that could yet help stabilize broader measures of the economy in the coming months and forestall a steeper slowdown. While World Bank data show that value added in agriculture is only one-sixth of the economy these days, a good harvest could still play an outsize role in limiting recent increases in food prices.

Inflation will probably remain a problem, however, given that India relies almost entirely on imported oil, which becomes more expensive with each drop of the rupee. So important is oil to India’s trade deficit that desperate bidding for scarce dollars by Indian refiners helped drive the rupee briefly to a record low on Wednesday, before the Reserve Bank of India stopped the rout that evening by arranging to transfer dollars from its reserves to oil importers.

“Prices are rising for everything — petrol is more expensive, vegetables are more expensive,” said Bharat Hirji Gada, a local shopkeeper.

India has some advantages compared with European and other Asian countries that have experienced steep economic downturns following currency declines over the last two decades. The biggest advantage may be that the Indian government has long prohibited borrowing in foreign currencies by poor or middle-class households and by small and medium-size businesses.

Foreign debt has been concentrated among blue-chip companies and wealthy individuals. Many of these loans are to borrowers whose revenue is largely denominated in dollars, limiting their currency exposure, said Haseeb A. Drabu, the chief economist for the Essar Group, one of India’s heavy industry giants.

“The bulk of it would be hedged,” he said.

Neha Thirani Bagri contributed reporting.

Publisher Drops Book Deal With TV Chef Paula Deen

But on Friday, its publisher, Random House, said it would not publish the cookbook, and would cancel a five-book contract it signed with Ms. Deen last year.

The book deal was one of the last remaining lucrative business relationships for the embattled celebrity chef. Its cancellation came on a day when Sears, Kmart and J. C. Penney announced that they would stop selling products, including cookbooks, branded with her name.

Since last week, the Food Network, Smithfield Foods, Walmart, Target, Caesars Entertainment, QVC and the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk have decided to suspend or sever ties with Ms. Deen after her admission in a legal deposition that she had used racist language in the past and allowed racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic jokes in one of her restaurants. Ms. Deen was deposed on video as part of a discrimination lawsuit filed last year by a former employee.

Her frantic efforts to stanch the flow of negative opinion by defending herself on the “Today” show and posting apologetic videos on YouTube have rallied many of her admirers. They have threatened boycotts of Walmart, created a “We Support Paula Deen” Facebook page that has well over half a million “likes,” and started a campaign to flood the Food Network offices with empty butter wrappers, a symbol of Ms. Deen’s indulgent cooking style.

But these efforts have not, apparently, made a difference to Ms. Deen’s corporate partners.

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, said in a statement Friday afternoon, “After careful consideration, Ballantine Books has made the difficult decision to cancel the publication of ‘Paula Deen’s New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up.’ “

The book, co-written by Melissa Clark, a dining columnist for The New York Times, was to feature lighter fare than the fat- and sugar-laden recipes Ms. Deen has promoted in previous books and on her television shows.

A person with knowledge of Random House’s decision to cancel the contract said, “When Walmart, Target and J. C. Penney all announced they are discontinuing their Paula Deen business, including books, it is awfully tough to stay the course of a publication. It was a business decision.”

Ms. Deen has published 14 cookbooks, starting in 1998 with “The Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook.” Together, they have sold more than eight million copies.

But many of the sales outlets that normally sell thousands of Ms. Deen’s books — like Walmart, Target, Kmart and QVC — would have refused to carry the new one.

Random House would not disclose the amount Ms. Deen was to be paid, but a person with knowledge of the contract said it involved millions of dollars. It is unclear whether Ms. Deen will have to return any of it, or whether a clause in the contract would allow the publisher to cancel the pact because of Ms. Deen’s behavior.

“That’s why God invented lawyers,” said Mr. Applebaum.

On Thursday, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk said it was suspending its use of Ms. Deen as a spokeswoman for the drug. The company, which has the top-selling portfolio of diabetes medications in the United States, has reached out vigorously to black Americans in its marketing and medical sponsorships.

Ms. Deen began a multiplatform campaign to promote the drug on the same day last year she revealed she had Type 2 diabetes. That set off public criticism that she had misserved her audience. She had received the diagnosis two years earlier, yet had continued to promote recipes high in sugar and fat.

Didra Brown Taylor, the executive director of the Beautyshop Project, a national diabetes screening initiative that offers free blood tests in hair salons in low-income neighborhoods, said that Ms. Deen’s conflict of interest was noted by program participants at the time, and that the current crisis had confirmed many in their beliefs that Ms. Deen might be more opportunistic than honest.

“She was cooking food that a diabetic would not eat,” Ms. Taylor said. “And to profit from that and then to profit from a diabetes drug, that’s hypocrisy.”

She said African-Americans were unlikely to forget Ms. Deen’s more recent admission that she used racial epithets. “It’s more than a rumor,” Ms. Taylor said. “She can’t say that she didn’t say it.”

Leslie Kaufman contributed reporting.

Food Network Drops Paula Deen

A network spokeswoman said it would not renew Ms. Deen’s contract when it expired at the end of June. Ms. Deen has faced a volley of criticism this week over her remarks in a deposition for a discrimination lawsuit by a former employee. In the document, she admitted she had used racial epithets, tolerated racist jokes and condoned pornography in the workplace.

The Food Network statement did not elaborate on its reasons for dropping her, but a person close to the network said its shows featuring her sons, Jamie and Bobby, would not be affected. Ms. Deen currently has three regular programs on the network, including “Paula’s Best Dishes.”

Those shows were part of a small culinary business empire run by Ms. Deen, 66, who has produced numerous cookbooks, lent her name to household products from butter to mattresses, and served as a spokeswoman for Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Smithfield Foods. She and her sons own and operate The Lady and Sons restaurant in Savannah, Ga. Her magazine “Cooking with Paula Deen,” has a circulation of nearly one million, her Web site says.

In her first video on Friday, posted on YouTube and later removed, Ms. Deen, near tears, said: “I want to apologize to everybody for the wrong that I’ve done. I want to learn and grow from this. Inappropriate and hurtful language is totally, totally unacceptable.”

In a longer video posted later in the afternoon, she appeared more composed. “Your color of your skin, your religion, your sexual preference does not matter,” she said.

She added: “I was wrong, yes, I’ve worked hard, and I have made mistakes, but that is no excuse and I offer my sincere apology to those that I have hurt, and I hope that you forgive me because this comes from the deepest part of my heart.”

In yet a third video on YouTube, posted Friday afternoon, Ms. Deen apologized to Matt Lauer, the host of “Today,” for not appearing for a scheduled exclusive interview earlier in the day. She had agreed to the interview, extensively promoted by NBC News, to address the uproar generated by her deposition.

Clearly irritated by the absence of Ms. Deen, a regular guest on the show, Mr. Lauer told viewers that she had spoken with him on Thursday, agreed to an “open and candid” discussion and had flown to New York City. But in the morning, he said, she had her representatives cancel, citing exhaustion.

Ms. Deen has managed to offend even her most uncritical fans before, most recently in January 2012 when she announced she had Type 2 diabetes on the same day she endorsed the diabetes drug Victoza and a lucrative collaboration with Novo Nordisk, the drug’s manufacturer. Because she had built her career on a no-holds-barred approach to sugar and fat (creating recipes like a cheeseburger patty sandwiched between two doughnuts and a Better than Sex cake made with cake mix, pudding mix, and heavy cream), she was roundly criticized for encouraging an unhealthy diet for others, hiding her illness and then trying to profit from it.

On Thursday, criticism of her racial remarks mounted on Twitter — even spawning a sarcastic hashtag, #paulasbestdishes — and on Ms. Deen’s own Facebook page.

The lawsuit against her was filed in March 2012 by Lisa T. Jackson, the general manager of Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House, a restaurant that Ms. Deen owned with her brother, Earl (Bubba) Hiers. Ms. Jackson, who is white, said that her father was Sicilian, with dark skin, and that she had suffered prejudice as a result.

In the deposition, Ms. Deen said that she had used a racial slur in the past, though not in the restaurant, but that she and her family did not tolerate prejudice. “Bubba and I, neither one of us, care what the color of your skin is” or what gender a person is, she said. “It’s what’s in your heart and in your head that matters to us.”

She also stated that “most jokes” are about Jews, gay people, black people and “rednecks.”

“I can’t, myself, determine what offends another person,” she said.

Target Cuts Outlook as Profit Drops 26%

NEW YORK — Target Corp. reported a 29 percent drop in first-quarter profit as unusually cool spring weather and financial pressures chilled customers' appetite for spending.

The company, based in Minneapolis, also on Wednesday cut its annual profit outlook, sending its stock down.

Target is the latest in a string of companies including rival Wal-Mart Stores Inc. that say bad weather and financial pressures like the higher payroll tax have squeezed business in the first couple months of the year.

While chilly weather was a big factor in depressing sales of spring clothing and other seasonal goods, Target said that a yo-yo economic recovery has continued to make shoppers stick to shopping lists and plan their spending.

"We remain cautiously optimistic about both the macroeconomic environment and consumer behavior," Gregg Steinhafel, chairman, president and CEO, told investors in a call after the earnings report. "Both of these business drivers continue to reflect slow, uneven growth and ongoing cross-current of positive and negative indicators, just as they have for the past few years."

In fact, while the housing market is showing signs of recovery and claims for unemployment insurance have been declining, shoppers, particularly younger customers, are still facing a weak job market, Steinhafel said.

A big hurdle for many low-price retailers has been tax changes. An increase in the payroll tax of two percentage points, which took effect Jan. 1, means that take-home pay for a household earning $50,000 a year has been sliced by $1,000.

Target said Wednesday that three-quarters of its customers surveyed were aware of this year's payroll tax increase. Among those, a majority have noticed the impact of the tax increase on their paychecks and indicate it's affecting their spending.

Still, Target, whose sales growth has been uneven since the recession, remains confident in its strategies to attract shoppers.

Target has reached out to customers with two big growth initiatives. It has been offering a larger selection of food and also a program, started in 2010, that gives shoppers a 5 percent discount when they pay with Target-branded credit and debit cards.

At the same time, Target continues to team up with new designers for limited-time partnerships. Earlier this month, Target announced its latest designer collaboration, with Phillip Lim. The collection is due out in September.

Last year, Target expanded into urban markets using smaller versions of its big-box stores in Seattle, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Target also started to expand into Canada earlier this year, its first foray outside the U.S. The company is opening the stores in waves that should add up to about 125 stores at locations once owned by Canadian retailer Zellers by the end of the year. During the first quarter, it opened 24 stores in Canada, and plans to open 20 more later in the second quarter.

Target said it earned $498 million, or 77 cents per share, for the three months ended May 4. That compares with $697 million, or $1.04 per share, a year earlier.

Excluding items related to its Canadian expansion and retirement of certain debt, the company earned $1.05 per share.

Sales rose 1 percent to $16.71 billion.

Analysts had expected earnings of 95 cents per share on revenue of $16.82 billion.

Revenue at stores open at least a year slipped 0.6 percent as the number of transactions fell 1.9 percent. That's considered an important measure of retail performance because it strips out the effect of stores that open or close during the year.

Target says that measure should improve to anywhere from a 2 percent to 3 percent gain in the current quarter. And while traffic should improve, it will continue to be challenging, Target told investors.

Target expects that adjusted earnings per share will be in a range between $1.09 and $1.19 for the current quarter.

For the full year, the company now expects $4.70 per share to $4.90 per share. That's down from its original guidance of $4.85 per share to $5.05 per share.

Analysts had forecast $1.11 per share for the second quarter and $4.63 per share for the year.

The results come a week after Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, reported that its first-quarter profit edged up just slightly, and the company struggled with a sales malaise in its namesake business.

Revenue at stores open at least year at its namesake U.S. business dropped 1.4 percent, the first decline since the second quarter of 2011.

Wal-Mart also offered a quarterly profit outlook that came below Wall Street's projections. Wal-Mart blamed a litany of factors affecting its budget-conscious customers, including a payroll tax increase, delayed tax refunds, job worries and bad weather. The company did say that sales this month have been rebounding.

Target's stock dropped 4 percent, or $2.86, to close at $68.40 Wednesday.

NBC Saves ‘Community,’ but Drops Two Other Series

Against all expectations, NBC renewed its quirky comedy “Community” on Friday night, at the same time that it quietly pulled the plug on the eventually ill-named “Smash.”

The network also announced a few more new shows, bringing its total for the new television season to 13, one more than ABC has picked up — so far.

“Community” surely benefited from having NBC as one of its owners, but the comedy seemed to find some new legs late in its run this season. It has been written off after the departure of its creator Dan Harmon.

For “Smash,” it was simply a story of a promising idea that could not survive a disappointing execution. Though close to the heart of the head of NBC programming, Robert Greenblatt, the show tried to retrofit this season and sank quickly. NBC also dropped the comedy “The New Normal.”

But it kept up the announcements of new shows, adding another comedy and two more dramas. The comedy “Welcome to the Family” is a broad sitcom about a teenage couple who wind up pregnant and are forced to mix their Anglo and Hispanic families.

NBC is known to be high on the drama “The Blacklist,” which has an odd premise: one of the most wanted men in America is arrested and promises to help law enforcement but only by working with one obscure F.B.I. agent. James Spader stars.

The other drama, “The Night Shift,” is an homage of sorts to “E.R.,” telling stories about the graveyard shift at a hospital.

NBC will also offer a limited series “Dracula,” with Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the king vampire. And though announced long ago, NBC’s highest-profile new comedy will have Michael J. Fox playing a version of himself, a dad with Parkinson’s in “The Michael J. Fox Show.”

Conn. Tribal Court Drops Mandatory Bar Exam

One of Connecticut's tribal courts is seeking to significantly increase the number of lawyers who practice before it -- by getting rid of a mandatory bar exam.

The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Court has required a written exam for nearly 20 years. The idea behind the test, Chief Judge Thomas Londregan said, was to make sure lawyers knew the differences between the law in state court and tribal court.

But the exam was having an unintended consequence. To ensure that new lawyers were aware of the differences between state and tribal laws and court protocols, the test morphed from a short open-book test to a two-hour ordeal. As a result, fewer people were passing the test and fewer people were sitting for it.

"We have 33 titles of law spanning two full volumes, so it just started to became a daunting task to read and prepare for a written exam," Londegran said.

"There were a lot of lawyers who wanted to practice here but they did not want to spend the time to study for another bar exam," he said. "They did that once in their career and they didn't have the desire to do that again after 10 or 20 years of practicing law. And quite frankly, I don't blame them."

He expects to see more new lawyers now.

Ed Gasser, who is president of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Court Bar Association, and runs an insurance defense practice in Avon, said the high bar exam failure rate was causing the small tribal bar to stagnate. While the overall Connecticut Bar Exam pass rate last year for the much more involved, two-day test was 77 percent, the tribal bar exam passage rate was less than 50 percent.

"I'm not saying we don't have great lawyers practicing, we do," he said, referring to the tribal bar. "But having more lawyers in tribal court would be beneficial."

With the impediment of a written exam removed, he expects the number of attorneys who practice before the court to increase by 50 percent. Instead of 200 lawyers arguing cases in the court, there could soon be 300, Gasser said.

"I think that would be a good thing," he said. "I know a number of very good attorneys who have said they won't practice before the tribal court because the bar exam has become so difficult."

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Samsung Drops Action to Block Apple in Europe

PARIS — Samsung said Tuesday that it had dropped its request for a ban on sales of certain Apple phones and tablet computers in Europe, a sharp tactical turn in a patent war that the companies have been fighting on multiple fronts around the world.

Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, had been seeking injunctions in a number of countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, contending that Apple, Samsung’s biggest rival in the smartphone market, had infringed on Samsung patents.

The move came only a day after a ruling in a related case in San Francisco, where a U.S. District Court judge rejected a request by Apple, which is based in California, for an injunction to block sales of certain Samsung devices. The decision followed a previous jury ruling that Samsung had violated Apple patents.

After the latest twist in the European case, Samsung said it had acted “in the interest of protecting consumer choice.” Analysts said other factors might have been in play, including a possible nudge from the European Commission.

In January, the commission opened a formal antitrust investigation of Samsung’s terms for licensing patents covering wireless technologies. Under a previous agreement, Samsung had pledged to make the patents available to competitors on “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms.

“The scope of what was withdrawn precisely matches the area in which the European Commission has been investigating,” said Florian Müller, a patent consultant in Germering, Germany. “It’s not just that the plot is thickening; in my view, there can be no other plausible view than that there is pressure from Brussels.”

The commission had said previously that it was concerned about possible abuse of patents like the ones at issue in the Apple-Samsung injunction request, those covering technologies needed for a device to function. Without some of these “standard essential patents” from Samsung, for example, phones cannot connect to high-speed wireless networks.

“Regulators have been saying, if the patent holders try to abuse these patents, then they are going to get in trouble,” Mr. Müller said.

The commission declined to comment directly on whether there might be a link between Samsung’s announcement Tuesday and the antitrust case in Brussels. “We take note of this development,” said Antoine Colombani, the spokesman for the E.U. competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia. “Our investigation is ongoing.”

Samsung, meanwhile, said it could not comment on the proceedings. It said it was “fully co-operating with the European Commission.”

“Samsung remains committed to licensing our technologies on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, and we strongly believe it is better when companies compete fairly in the marketplace, rather than in court,” it said in a statement.

There has been speculation that Samsung and Apple have been in talks to try to reach a settlement, though the broad scale of the litigation between the two companies, with lawsuits seeking sales bans or damages continuing on several continents, could make that challenging.

“We cannot comment on details of ongoing legal proceedings, but we believe a commercial resolution is achievable,” Samsung said in a statement.

Alan Hely, a spokesman for Apple, declined to comment.

The announcement by Samsung does not end litigation between the two companies in Europe. Samsung said it planned to pursue lawsuits seeking damages from Apple for what it contends is patent infringement.

Apple and Samsung have also been battling over other patents, covering nonessential features of their devices, like design.

Apple, too, has previously secured bans on the sale of certain Samsung products. Last year, for example, a court in Düsseldorf ruled that Samsung could not sell one of its Galaxy tablet devices in Germany because it bore too close a resemblance to the iPad 2 from Apple.

While some analysts cited regulatory pressure as a possible reason for Samsung’s decision Tuesday, others said the company might have decided that the lawsuits were simply a distraction. Samsung’s phones, especially its Galaxy S3, have been selling well.

In the third quarter, the S3 surpassed the iPhone 4S to become the world’s best-selling smartphone, according to Strategy Analytics, a research firm.

“Maybe the market was telling them that they were succeeding and their time was better spent promoting sales of their product,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research.

James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels.

Pennsylvania Bar Passage Rate Drops

Pennsylvania's July 2012 bar examination results are showing the worst passage rate in the past five years, and a few law schools had the passage rates of their graduates drop by a few percentage points.

New Enrollment Drops Again in U.S. Graduate Schools

New enrollment in graduate schools fell last year for the second consecutive year, according to a report from the Council of Graduate Schools.

The declines followed surges in enrollment in 2008 and 2009 as many unemployed workers sought a haven during the recession. Financial considerations probably played a role in the shift. Students may be dissuaded from continuing their education in part because of the increasing debt burden from their undergraduate years.

Additionally, state budget cuts are forcing public institutions to reduce aid for graduate students, who in some disciplines have traditionally been paid to attend postgraduate programs.

The number of students enrolled in master’s and doctoral programs (excluding law and certain other first professional degrees like M.D.’s) declined by 1.7 percent from the fall of 2010 to fall 2011.

Among American citizens and permanent residents, matriculation fell by 2.3 percent. In contrast, temporary residents increased their enrollment by 7.8 percent.

Temporary residents made up 16.9 percent of all students in American graduate schools, and that figure has been growing as foreign governments pay for more of their citizens to obtain education in the United States, particularly in technical areas. Temporary residents represented 45.5 percent of all students enrolled in engineering graduate programs in the United States, and 42.4 percent of those in American mathematics and computer science graduate programs.

The changes in 2011 varied by discipline, with education having the biggest drop-off in new graduate enrollment at 8.8 percent.

“The states are in financial stress,” said Debra Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. “The school systems especially are in financial stress. Teachers are no longer being provided time off to get graduate degrees, and schools are no longer funding principals to go back and get principal certificates.”

The next sharpest decline was in programs for arts and humanities, where new graduate enrollment fell by 5.4 percent, perhaps reflecting that career prospects for such graduates are becoming more limited as colleges lay off even tenured faculty members in these areas.

Health sciences, on the other hand, experienced a big increase in enrollment. The health care industry has been hiring consistently and robustly during the recession and the weak recovery.

The number of new graduate students studying health care rose by 6.4 percent, which was slightly slower growth than the average in the last decade. The average annual change in new graduate enrollment in health sciences from 2001 to 2011 was 9.8 percent.

Enrollment showed more tepid growth in business, which was up by 2.6 percent, and in mathematics and computer sciences, up by 1.6 percent.

While overall enrollment for graduate school declined, the number of applications rose by 4.3 percent. It was the sixth consecutive increase in application volume.

The Council of Graduate Schools did not have data on how many schools the typical applicant applies to, so it was unclear if there were more people applying in 2011 than in the previous year. But there was an increase in the number of people taking the Graduate Record Examinations (G.R.E.), a test that many graduate schools require as part of student applications.

As the number of grad school applications has risen, the share of those applications leading to offers of admission has been falling. In 2007, the acceptance rate across all master’s and doctoral programs was 44.6 percent, whereas in 2011 it was 40.8 percent.

Women continued to outnumber men in the nation’s postgraduate programs, 58 percent to 42 percent, in the 2011 report.

The Council of Graduate Schools, a membership organization for institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada, based its findings on an annual survey of American graduate schools. The latest report reflected the responses from 655 institutions, which collectively award 81 percent of the master’s degrees and 92 percent of the doctorates each year.