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Hard-Drive Search Raises Fourth Amendment Issue

Citing the dangers of overly broad search warrants for computer hard drives, a federal appeals court has vacated the conditional guilty plea of a Tioga County man who admitted to production and possession of child pornography.

Bits Blog: Coursera, an Online Education Company, Raises Another $43 Million

Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, at the company’s offices in Mountain View, Calif. Over the next few months, Coursera plans to double its employees to about 100.

Coursera, a year-old company offering free online courses, has raised another $43 million in venture capital from investors active in both domestic and international education.

The new investors include the International Finance Corporation, the investment arm of the World Bank, and Laureate Education, an international higher education company with dozens of profit-making universities around the world, as well as GSV Capital, Learn Capital and Yuri Milner, an individual entrepreneur.

“We hope it’s enough money to get us to profitability,’’ said Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera. “We haven’t really focused yet on when that might be.’’

Coursera, based in Mountain View, Calif., previously raised $22 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; New Enterprise Associates; and the University of Pennsylvania and California Institute of Technology, two of its university partners.

Over the next few months, Coursera plans to double its employees to about 100, and expand in several areas, including mobile apps and its Signature Track offerings, which charge a fee to students who want an identity-verified certificate upon successful completion of Coursera’s free courses. Since January, when the Signature Track option was first offered in five courses, Signature Track fees have produced more than $800,000, Ms. Koller said — and in the long run, she said, such revenue may be enough to make the company sustainable.

The company also plans to invest in international expansion, through localization, translation and distribution partnerships, and techniques for blended learning, in which Coursera’s online materials are used alongside classroom sessions with a professor.

“We see great potential for using some of the Coursera materials in our universities, so there is a strategic element to this investment,’’ said Douglas L. Becker, chairman and chief executive officer of Laureate. “The I.F.C. made the largest education investment they ever made in Laureate, and they’re joining us in this investment. Coursera allows us to invest in something we see as a rising technology impacting higher education, and gives us access to their content and curriculum.”

Coursera has grown with stunning speed since it began in April 2012, with four university partners. Now, the company works with 83 educational institutions on four continents, offering about 400 free college-level courses to more than four million students from every country in the world.

But after the initial burst of enthusiasm last year about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, and their potential for democratizing higher education worldwide, this year has brought some pushback. Faculty members at several institutions have expressed concern about how the courses may change higher education, how quickly university administrators signed on to work with MOOC providers, and whether the aim is more to save money than improve the quality of education.

So far, most of the students who have completed Coursera MOOCs have been college graduates, and it is still unclear how well the format will work to help students without degrees earn college credit for their online work. Coursera has recently started to market its materials for use by public universities in blended on-campus classes. Universities that use the materials will pay licensing fees, which Coursera will share with the universities that produce the courses.

DealBook: K.K.R. Raises $6 Billion Asian Fund

HONG KONG – Kohlberg Kravis Roberts said on Wednesday that it had closed a $6 billion fund for the Asia-Pacific region, the biggest such fund to date.

K.K.R. met its fund-raising goal for its second big Asia-wide fund even as global buyout firms have faced challenges from slumping markets and emerging local competitors in China, a major focus of private equity investment in the region. But deal activity has been rising in other areas like Southeast Asia, where investors see long-term potential in the growth of consumer demand.

Globally, private equity companies raised $122 billion in new funds in the second quarter of the year, the most since the financial crisis, according to data from the research firm Preqin. RRJ Capital, based in Hong Kong, closed a $3.5 billion Asian fund in the first quarter of the year.

K.K.R., which opened its first Asian office in Hong Kong in 2005, raised a $4 billion regional fund in 2007 and a $1 billion fund focused on China in 2010. The company opened an office in Singapore last year to focus on deals in Southeast Asia, and it employs more than 100 executives in seven offices across Asia.

To date, K.K.R. has invested more than $5.5 billion in 30 companies around Asia. Companies engaged in consumer products account for 38 percent of its investment portfolio in the region by value, while technology firms account for 14 percent.

The new fund will seek to benefit from rising domestic demand in the region, focusing on companies in the consumer products, retail, health care, education and industrial sectors, K.K.R. said in a statement.

DealBook: SoftBank Raises Bid for Sprint to $21.6 Billion

Toru Hanai/ReutersA SoftBank branch in Tokyo.

9:58 p.m. | Updated

SoftBank of Japan agreed late on Monday to increase its takeover bid for Sprint Nextel to $21.6 billion, seeking to block a rival bid by Dish Network.

Under the revised terms of the complex transaction, SoftBank agreed to shift over about $1.5 billion earmarked for Sprint itself to the company’s shareholders instead. Existing investors can now sell their shares at $7.65 apiece, up nearly 5 percent from the first offer.

All told, the new offer is valued at about $7.48 a share, up almost 19 percent from the original bid. SoftBank would own about 78 percent of Sprint if the deal is approved.

Sprint added that it had ended sales talks with Dish, which surprised many in April by offering $25.5 billion for all of the cellphone service provider, or about $7 a share. In a statement, Sprint said Dish had failed to put forward an acceptable formal bid despite weeks of conducting due diligence.

The new proposal by SoftBank, cobbled together largely over the weekend, is aimed at preserving SoftBank’s biggest gamble: buying control of Sprint to challenge the existing titans of the American cellphone market, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Its plans included infusing Sprint with billions of dollars to build out a nascent high-speed data network.

SoftBank reiterated that it intended to invest $1.9 billion in Sprint if its deal closed, in addition to the $3.1 billion it already invested into the company.

The Japanese company has been frustrated by the emergence of Dish as a bidder, which has sought to stymie that plan on a number of fronts. Led by Charles W. Ergen, Dish network’s chairman, has contended that its deal would create a new behemoth that could offer a variety of wireless services, like cellphone coverage and satellite TV.

Shares in Sprint have traded above SoftBank’s previous offer, the result of investor dissatisfaction. The company’s stock closed on Monday at $7.18, before the new proposal was revealed.

SoftBank is betting that its improved offer will knock out its rival. Among its advantages is the speed with which the deal can be closed: SoftBank expects to close the transaction early next month, while Dish would most likely need months to complete its bid.

“The amended agreement announced today delivers more upfront cash to Sprint stockholders, while still achieving our goal of creating a well-capitalized Sprint that is better positioned to bring meaningful competition to the U.S. market,” Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s chief executive, said in a statement.

The deal has been approved by a special committee of Sprint’s board. A vote on the proposed sale has been rescheduled from Wednesday to June 25.

The offer may be enough to win over Sprint investors who were skeptical of the previous bid. Paulson & Company, the hedge fund that is the company’s second-biggest shareholder, said in a statement that it would support the new SoftBank offer.

Still, Dish has until June 18 to propose an acceptable “best and final” bid. The amended agreement with SoftBank puts in place a number of additional restrictions, including forcing Dish to present fully committed financing and the adoption of defenses that would limit a hostile bid.

British Study Raises Warning on Scottish Banks

LONDON — An independent Scotland could find its banks too big to rescue in the event of another crisis, according to a British government report that compares the Scottish financial sector to those of debt-laden Iceland and Cyprus.

The document, to be published Monday, is the latest of three studies by the British government meant to sway opinion in Scotland ahead of next year’s planned referendum there on independence.

Last month the British government suggested that an independent Scotland would not be able to keep the pound sterling and would have to either adopt its own currency or embrace the euro.

The new study, a summary of which was made available ahead of publication, highlights the size of Scotland’s banking sector — much of which had to be rescued by British taxpayers after the financial crash — relative to the rest of the Scottish economy. The sector stands at 1,254 percent of Scotland’s gross domestic product, compared with banking assets in Britain worth 492 percent of G.D.P., the Treasury document says.

“By way of comparison, before the crisis that hit Cyprus in March 2013, its banks had amassed assets equivalent to around 700 percent of its G.D.P. — a major contributor to the cause and impact of the financial crisis in Cyprus and the ability of the Cypriot authorities to prevent the systemic effects when it hit,” the study says.

The document adds that by the end of 2007 Icelandic banks had amassed consolidated assets equivalent to 880 percent of Icelandic G.D.P.

It cites the verdict of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which said that “the banks grew to be too big for the Iceland government to rescue.

“Banking in these circumstances became very dangerous when the global financial crisis deepened,” it said.

The study says that “a serious banking crisis in an independent Scotland could pose a significant risk to Scottish taxpayers,” with the potential economic fallout amounting to about 65,000 pounds ($98,600) per capita.

The paper concludes that Scottish banks could either have to accept higher risks and costs associated with volatility or restructure and diversify their assets.

John Swinney, finance secretary of the Scottish government, which supports independence, dismissed that document as “a discredited, feeble attempt to undermine confidence in Scotland’s ability to be a successful independent country” adding that “it will not work.”

Mr. Swinney said that he had viewed a leaked draft of the paper and that much of it “seems to be based on a flawed, outdated view of the world which takes no account of the substantial banking reforms which have been ongoing across Europe since 2008.”

The Treasury’s study counted Scottish banks as all those registered in Scotland, including the Royal Bank of Scotland — but excluding NatWest, which is part of the group but is registered in London, and excluding assets of RBS’s foreign subsidiaries.

Bank of Scotland, which is part of the Lloyds Banking Group, is included as a Scottish institution as it is registered in Scotland.

Untangling Scotland’s banks from the broader British financial sector would be a highly complex task were Scots to vote for independence, because both RBS and Lloyds Banking Group were bailed out by British taxpayers after the financial crash.

The British government owns 80 percent of RBS and 40 percent of Lloyds, which are both run from London. That would almost inevitably require some changes in ownership in the event of independence.

Nevertheless the Treasury’s study argues that the total support provided to RBS in 2008 would have been the equivalent of 211 percent of Scotland’s G.D.P. By contrast the total British interventions across the whole banking sector were 76 percent of the country’s G.D.P.

The document also adds that any attempt at shared regulatory arrangements between an independent Scotland and the continuing United Kingdom would be “significantly more complex than those that currently exist” and would be likely to increase the costs for firms of complying with this regulation.

Fwd.Us Raises Uproar With Advocacy Tactics

Fwd.Us, the new nonprofit advocacy group created by Mr. Zuckerberg and several technology executives and investors to push for an overhaul of immigration law, has bankrolled television ads endorsing the conservative stands taken by three lawmakers, prompting an outcry from liberal groups and a call to withhold advertisements from Facebook.

The uproar, some say, will be a lesson for Silicon Valley companies as they try to influence emotional political issues like immigration. But the group’s supporters brashly say they were ready for the reaction.

“Our advertising decisions are being made by a very smart team of political operatives who know that passing major reform will require some different and innovative tactics,” Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist with Accel Partners and a contributor to the cause, said in an e-mailed statement. “I’m proud to support Fwd.Us as they work to pass comprehensive immigration reform.”

The group has faced the most vocal criticism for television advertisements sponsored by its two subsidiaries, which are known as Americans for Conservative Action and Council for American Job Growth. One of those spots takes swipes at President Obama’s health policies. Another lauds the Keystone XL pipeline, fiercely opposed by many environmental groups.

Those TV spots, which ran in several states for a week, prompted strong reaction from a coalition of liberal organizations that includes the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters and MoveOn.org. They announced earlier this week that they would suspend buying advertisements on Facebook, which they acknowledged was meant to send a message and would have little economic impact on the company.

Cathy Duvall, director of strategic partnerships at the Sierra Club, said her group was especially disappointed to see the technology industry adopt a strategy that was more typical of old-fashioned, brass-knuckled Washington lobbying.

“When the ads came out they were politics as usual and divisive and pitting one issue against another,” Ms. Duvall said. “We were really surprised that Silicon Valley would be moving into the political space by doing the worst of business-as-usual politics.”

Fwd.Us, like other industry-backed interest groups, has said very little about how much money it has raised and from whom, except to name contributors on its Web site. It would say only that it spent in the “seven figures” on the television spots.

The ads are particularly surprising considering some of the other backers. John Doerr, a venture capitalist, is known for his investments in clean technology companies, and his wife, Ann, has been a major donor to environmental causes.

Reid Hoffman has described himself as “progressive” in an essay posted recently on LinkedIn, a company that he founded.

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, in 2010 backed an effort not to roll back California’s global warming law. None of them returned calls and e-mails requesting comment for this article, referring instead to Fwd.Us operatives in Washington.

“We recognize that not everyone will always agree with or be pleased by our strategy,” said Kate Hansen, a spokeswoman for Fwd.Us. “Fwd.Us remains totally committed to support a bipartisan policy agenda that will boot the knowledge economy, including comprehensive immigration reform.”

For his part, Mr. Zuckerberg has covered his political bases. He recently held a fund-raiser for Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., and Facebook has hired several former White House and Congressional aides to work in its Washington office.

Mr. Zuckerberg has declined requests to be interviewed about Fwd.Us.

Jim Manley, a former chief spokesman for Senate majority leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said that the ads may have achieved their goal, but that Mr. Zuckerberg should learn from the negative reaction.

“He is finding out it can be very, very problematic to get your company involved in hot-button social issues,” said Mr. Manley, who now directs the communications practice at the Washington lobbying and public relations firm Quinn Gillespie. “There is going to be blowback. You are going to pay a price for it.”

Fwd.Us has been openly criticized by others in Silicon Valley. Josh Miller, founder of a start-up called Branch, denounced what he called the group’s “questionable lobbying practices” and said he was disappointed that the group had not been transparent about its intentions.

“More discouragingly, the leaders of the technology industry (and of FWD.us) have built their careers on bringing meaningful change to the world,” he wrote in a BuzzFeed opinion piece. “They should be doing the same in Washington.”

Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who finances some of the same clean energy companies as Mr. Doerr’s firm and who was once a major partner at Mr. Doerr’s investment firm, said on Twitter over the weekend: “Will Fwd.us prostitute climate destruction & other values to get a few engineers hired & get immigration reform?”

One advocacy group called CredoAction, based in San Francisco, tried to use Facebook ads to draw attention to the Keystone XL pipeline TV spot sponsored by Fwd.Us. The ads were prohibited by Facebook officials, because the company’s terms of service prohibit using Mr. Zuckerberg’s image in another organization’s ad. A coalition of organizations has also created a Facebook group to agitate against Fwd.Us.

Still, others say the ads signal a calculated pragmatism. Fwd.Us is led by experienced political operatives, including Joe Lockhart, a former Clinton Administration official, and Rob Jesmer, a former Republican Senate political adviser. One executive involved in the effort said the advertisements were vetted with executives backing it — and that the executives realized before they were shown that they might alienate certain liberal audiences. But the group made a decision to back both Democrats and Republicans who support the immigration bill in order to get it passed.

“We did not just fall off the turnip truck,” the executive said. “There are a lot of people involved in these organizations that have been involved in politics for a really long time.”

The group e-mailed statements from prominent backers, including a former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, who argued that Fwd.Us needs to be “disruptive” in politics, as in commerce.

“In order to push Washington to do something different and pass major legislation like comprehensive immigration reform, groups like Fwd.Us can’t just do the same thing and expect different results,” he said. “As part of our work, we’re using a wide variety of tactics, some of which may ruffle some feathers, but we believe the passage of the bill will be worth it.”

DealBook: Apple Raises $17 Billion in Record Debt Sale

Eric Risberg/Associated PressTimothy Cook, the chief of Apple.

With a $145 billion cash hoard, Apple could acquire Facebook, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo — and still have more than $10 billion left over.

Despite its uncommonly flush balance sheet, Apple borrowed money on Tuesday for the first time in nearly two decades. In a record bond deal, the company raised $17 billion, according to a person briefed on the deal, paying interest rates that rival those of debt issued by the United States Treasury.

Apple’s corporate-finance maneuver raises a riddle: Why would a company with so much cash even bother to issue debt?

The answer has a lot to do with the frenzied state of the bond markets. Companies are issuing hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to exploit historically low interest rates and strong investor demand for bonds as an alternative to money market funds and Treasury bills that paying virtually nothing.

“If you look at these big companies like Apple and Microsoft doing these big, low-cost bond offerings, it’s a way for them to raise money in an effort to create better returns for their shareholders,” said Steven Miller, a credit analyst at S&P Capital IQ. “The bond markets are practically begging these corporations to issue debt because of how cheap it is to raise money.”

But Apple’s move also reflects the challenges of a highly successful business with a flagging stock price. In an effort to assuage a growing chorus of concerned and disappointed Apple investors, the company is issuing bonds to help finance a $100 billion payout to its shareholders. It will distribute most of that amount over the next two and a half years in the form of paying increased dividends and buying back its stock.

While Apple’s shareholders and analysts welcome the company’s financial tactics, they say that the maker of iPhones, iPads and iMacs must continue to innovate and fend off increasing competition.

“This is a substantial return of cash, and it’s the right thing to do on many levels,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “But, ultimately, the company has to execute. This is no substitute for that.”

By raising cheap debt for the shareholder payouts, Apple will also avoid a potentially big tax hit. About two-thirds of Apple’s cash — about $102 billion — sits overseas in lower-tax jurisdictions. If it returned some of that cash to the United States to reward its investors, the company could have significant tax consequences.

“We are continuing to generate significant cash offshore and repatriating this cash would result in significant tax consequences under current U.S. tax law,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple chief financial officer, during an earnings call last week.

In some ways, the bond issue on Tuesday was made necessary by Apple’s tax strategies.

“They have been so successful with their tax planning that they’ve created a new problem,” said Martin A. Sullivan, chief economist at Tax Analysts, a publisher of tax information. “They’ve got so much money offshore.”

The $17 billion debt sale by Apple is the largest on record, surpassing a $16.5 billion deal from the drugmaker Roche Holding in 2009. Apple joins a parade of large companies issuing debt with astonishingly low yields. Last week, the shoe company Nike sold bonds that mature in 10 years that yielded only 2.27 percent. Last July, Bristol-Myers issued five-year debt yielding 1.06 percent. In November, Microsoft set the record for the lowest yield on a five-year bond, issuing the debt at 0.99 percent.

Despite Apple’s $145 billion cash pile, the credit-ratings agencies did not award the company their coveted triple-A rating, citing increased competition and a concern that its future product offerings could disappoint. Moody’s Investors Service gave the company its second-highest rating, AA1, as did Standard & Poor’s, rating the company AA+. (The four companies awarded the highest credit ratings by both Moody’s and S.&P. are Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson and Automatic Data Processing.)

“There are inherent long-run risks for any company with high exposure to shifting consumer preferences in the rapidly evolving technology and wireless communications sectors,” wrote Gerald Granovsky, a Moody’s analyst.

Apple’s less-than-perfect rating did not drive away bond investors on Tuesday. The offering generated investor demand well in excess of the $17 billion raised, according to person briefed on the deal. Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank led the sale of the issuance.

Desperate for returns in a yield-starved world, all types of investors — including individual, pension funds and mutual funds — are snapping up corporate debt. The demand appears to be insatiable: this year, through last Wednesday, a record $55 billion has flowed into mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that invest in corporate debt with high-quality ratings, according to the fund data provider Lipper.

The last time Apple sold debt was in 1996, when the Internet was in its infancy and sales of Apple’s niche computers were struggling. Facing an uncertain future and struggling with a weak balance sheet, Apple had a junk credit rating and was paying 6.5 percent on its debt.

DealBook: China’s Push to Cool Down Housing Raises Questions

Kim Kyung-Hoon/ReutersA man looks around a miniature of new apartment complex at a showroom in Beijing.

Chinese shares fell the most in two years on Monday as the Shanghai stock exchange’s property index tumbled 9.25 percent. Late on Friday, China’s State Council had announced a new set of policies designed to cool down the housing market.

Economic data released in the last few days has called into question the strength of China’s recovery. It may be that Beijing is so confident in the health of the economy that it can afford to squeeze the real estate sector harder. Or it may be that the government is so concerned about the social implications of a resurgent property market and the effect that real estate may have on the effort to rebalance the economy toward consumption from investment, that it is willing to take that risk.

The new rules include a 20 percent tax on gains from a sale, higher down payments and mortgage rates, and requirements that cities set annual price easing targets. The announcement was met with both skepticism and criticism.

This latest round of real estate controls is the ninth in the last 10 years, yet prices have increased markedly, and some on the Internet questioned the legality of levying taxes through administrative means and called for much more transparency and accountability in how the government might spend the proceeds.

Clearly investors are spooked, though as Yao Wei, chief economist at Societe Generale CIB wrote, according to Reuters:

“The actual impact of the new policy can be very severe or not severe at all, depending on implementation. But the wording is unexpectedly harsh. … In three months time, the impact may not be big at all. But it has stirred very high negative expectations.”

The announcement on Friday spurred a surge in existing home transactions. Some analysts, and most of the people with whom I have spoken, expect the tax to have the perverse effect of driving up the price of existing homes, as buyers will have to cover most of the tax, and pushing more of the sale into a side contract to hide both the true price and gains from the government.

The real estate market in China is already quite distorted, and these repeated rounds of repressive policies may be just layering on more distortions. But the changes required for a more rational housing market are so difficult that in the near term it is easier to try to manage through administrative fiat.

Christian Hartmann/ReutersZhang Xin, chief executive of Soho China.

In a bit of good timing for CBS, this week’s “60 Minutes” had two segments on Chinese real estate. The first was an interview with the billionaire developer Zhang Xin, chief executive of Soho China. “China’s Real Estate Bubble,” the second segment, examines the phenomenon of “Ghost Cities” that many China bears have highlighted over the last several years, complete with visits to the same empty malls and developments that we have been hearing about for years.

Jonathan Anderson of Emerging Advisors Group is out with a provocative report about those ghost cities. In “Hurray for Ghost Cities,” Mr. Anderson argues that these wasted investments are not really a big deal, adding that it might be better that the money was blown on developments rather than even more excess manufacturing.

Tom Miller is also mostly dismissive of the “Ghost Cities problem” in his excellent new book “China’s Urban Billion.” In one chapter, Mr. Miller writes:

The truth of the matter is that China is not building too many apartments, and a handful of empty urban districts are not evidence of a giant property bubble. Chinese property investment may be inefficient, but it is sustained by a huge, growing and sustainable demand for new housing. …

China’s current modern housing stock, defined as homes with individual bathrooms and kitchens, is around 150 million units. But 200 million migrant workers currently live in dormitories or slum housing. If one believes that the urban poor deserve to live in proper flats, the corollary is that Chinese cities actually have a significant shortage of housing – somewhere in the region of 70 million units. China is not building too many new apartments; it is building too few.

I do not mean to completely dismiss some of the dangerous imbalances that have been building in certain property markets across China. But China is not one real estate market, and taking a binary boom-or-bust view about the “China market” is likely a mistake.

The Financial Times examined the diverging markets last week, writing:

China takes bifurcation to a new extreme. Not only are housing prices in the biggest cities moving in a different direction to those in smaller centers, there is also a glaring discrepancy in the amount of development being undertaken.

The country’s main metropolises – Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, which each have populations of more than 10 million – suffer from chronic shortages of housing for low- to middle-income residents. By contrast, scores of smaller cities with populations of up to 3 million face an increasingly severe oversupply.

This is why a simple description of China’s housing market as a “bubble” misses the point. Does “bubble” refer to the soaring prices in the biggest cities, where only the wealthy can afford homes? Or does it refer to the row upon row of empty apartment blocks in the smaller cities?

One of the crucial questions, for which very smart people offer very different answers, is can bubbles burst in certain areas without bringing down the whole economy?

Regardless of how that question is answered, we should perhaps give China’s leaders some credit for acknowledging potential bubbles and taking steps to rein them in. What might have been different if American policy makers had recognized and tried to manage the risks of a housing bubble in 2005, 2006 or 2007?

LA Commission seeks raises for judges

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - The state Judicial Compensation Commission has recommended a multiyear pay raise plan for Louisiana's judges.

Conn. Public Sector Attorneys to Get First Raises Since 2009

A recent national study has found that pay for prosecutors and public defenders has barely budged since 2004. The situation is only a little better in Connecticut, where the public sector attorneys last got a raise in 2009.

But that's about to change. Next summer, Connecticut prosecutors and public defenders are slated to receive a 3 percent raise, adding about $1,850 annually to the current entry level salary of $61,900. Veterans with 10 years experience will see salaries increase from about $91,600 to about $94,000.

Jack Doyle, a prosecutor and president of the Connecticut Association of Prosecutors, the bargaining unit for the 250 prosecuting attorneys in the state, calls the raise overdue. He notes that other state workers have, overall, averaged 3.5 percent annual pay increases over the past decade.

"I can tell you prosecutors do believe they are underpaid and undercompensated, based on their jobs and what they do," Doyle said. "We don't get compensatory time or overtime or extra duty pay that police get. At the same time, prosecutors have been threatened, harassed and even attacked."

The issue of salaries for court personnel recently came to a head in Connecticut when Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers requested an 11 percent pay raise for judges next July, followed by 5.5 percent increases in each of the next three years. Her proposal, which was met with sharp questions by a newly formed Judicial Compensation Review Board, calls for Superior Court judges to go from earning $146,780 currently to $191,890 in 2017.

Rogers notes that Connecticut judges have not had a pay increase in five years and that their current salaries rank them 45th nationally, when adjusted for the cost of living. She says comparatively low salaries are driving experienced judges out of the court system and making it harder to attract top-notch lawyers to the bench.

The recent study, by the National Association for Law Placement, makes the same argument about low pay and the ability to attract and retain public sector lawyers. After all, the study notes, the starting median salary at private firms with 50 or more lawyers is about $80,000. And some large firms continue to pay $160,000 to new associates, the NALP said.

New prosecutors and public defenders in Connecticut make nearly $12,000 more than the national median of $50,000, according to the NALP. After 10 years, Connecticut pay increases to $91,627, while the national average is $76,000. In Connecticut, someone with 20 years' experience caps out at $129,000; the NALP did not provide a comparable figure.

While Connecticut salaries are significantly higher than the national average in raw dollars, the NALP does not factor in the cost of living in each state, as the judges' rankings do.

LAW SCHOOL COSTS

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With Raises in Place, No Stipends for N.Y. Judges

Chief Administrative Judge A. Gail Prudenti on Monday told New York Supreme Court justices that the $10,000 stipends paid in recent years in lieu of a pay raise will not be continued, confirming what many of the judges had already assumed.

I.A.T.A. Raises Profit Outlook for World’s Airlines

IATA, which represents about 80 percent of global carriers, now expects the $630 billion airline industry to make a net profit of $4.1 billion this year, up from an earlier forecast of $3 billion but still less than half the $8.4 billion achieved in 2011.

IATA also said in its first forecast for 2013 that industry profits will rise further next year to $7.5 billion, helped by passenger traffic expansion of 4.5 percent and cargo expansion of 2.4 percent as global economic growth quickens to 2.5 percent from an expected 2.1 percent this year.

Profit margins will remain razor-thin at 1.1 percent in 2013 versus an expected 0.6 percent in 2012, the association added.

"The outlook improvement is due to airlines performing better in a difficult environment," Tony Tyler, IATA's director general and CEO said in a statement.

"The European sovereign debt crisis lingers on. China continues to moderate its growth and the impact of recent quantitative easing in Japan and the U.S. will take time to yield growth," he added.

The Geneva-based body said aircraft flew on average 79.3 percent full in the first eight months of this year with passenger demand increasing by 1.4 percentage points ahead of capacity.

"The fact that there are fewer spare seats on flights than would be expected at this point of the business cycle, when lower demand and rising aircraft deliveries tend to lower the proportion of seats sold, suggests airlines have resisted the temptation to win back revenue by increasing capacity," the association said.

ASIA, MIDDLE EAST

IATA's improved outlook is a boost for Asian airlines that have been plagued by weak earnings. In August, the world's largest air freight carrier, Cathay Pacific Airways, posted its worst first-half loss since 2003, hurt by high fuel costs, weak cargo demand and fewer premium passengers.

"Despite a slowdown in the Chinese economy, Chinese domestic demand is still growing at nearly 10 percent," Tyler said. "The demand for regional and long-haul travel has held up better than expected in the face of economic uncertainty."

Australia's Qantas Airways also posted a full-year net loss of A$244 million ($253.74 million) for the first time in 17 years and cancelled orders for 35 Boeing Dreamliner jets to cut costs.

Although Singapore Airlines Ltd, the world's No.2 carrier by market value, posted a net profit of S$78 million ($63.59 million) for the quarter ended June, it warned that profits at its cargo and passenger units remain under pressure.

North American carriers are expected to boost profits to $1.9 billion this year from $1.3 billion in 2011, after extensive restructuring. Asian profits of $2.3 billion continue to drive most of the industry's growth although they will be down from last year's $5.3 billion.

Europe, mired in an ongoing debt crisis, is expected to suffer wider-than-previously-expected losses of $1.2 billion.

Middle Eastern carriers gained market share during the first eight months of the year, with passenger traffic rising 17.1 percent and cargo demand increasing 14 percent from a year ago.

"The region's carriers continue to expand their long-haul market share with connections through their expanding hubs, IATA said.

Emirates Airline and other Middle Eastern carriers had a 11.5 percent share of international passenger traffic in August this year, up from 4.8 percent in 2002, according to IATA data.

The share could rise further as Emirates last month signed a deal where Australia's Qantas Airways agreed to use Dubai instead of Singapore as its hub for European flights from March 2013. Under the deal, Qantas will also end a 17-year old alliance with British Airways.

Globally, IATA raised its forecast for passenger demand despite weak confidence in Europe, but pushed its forecast for cargo into the red. The economically sensitive sector is expected to see a 0.4 percent contraction in 2012 instead of 0.3 percent growth as previously forecast.

About 40 percent by value of internationally shipped goods go by air and cargo demand is seen as a barometer for world trade and the health of the economy.

IATA represents some 240 airlines that in turn account for 84 percent of global air traffic.

(Additional reporting by Tim Hepher in PARIS; Editing by Matt Driskill)