DealBook: Liberty Media Seeks Full Ownership of Sirius XM

Legislation Seeks to Bar N.S.A. Tactic in Encryption

Representative Rush D. Holt Jr., a New Jersey Democrat who is also a physicist, said on Friday he believed that the N.S.A. was overreaching and could hurt American interests, including the reputations of American companies whose products the agency may have altered or influenced.

“We pay them to spy,” Mr. Holt said. “But if in the process they degrade the security of the encryption we all use, it’s a net national disservice.”

Mr. Holt, whose Surveillance State Repeal Act would eliminate much of the escalation in the government’s spying powers undertaken after the 2001 terrorist attacks, was responding to news reports about N.S.A. documents showing that the agency has spent billions of dollars over the last decade in an effort to defeat or bypass encryption. The reports, by The New York Times, ProPublica and The Guardian, were posted online on Thursday.

The agency has encouraged or coerced companies to install back doors in encryption software and hardware, worked to weaken international standards for encryption and employed custom-built supercomputers to break codes or find mathematical vulnerabilities to exploit, according to the documents, disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

The documents show that N.S.A. cryptographers have made major progress in breaking the encryption in common use for everyday transactions on the Web, like Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, as well as the virtual private networks, or VPNs, that many businesses use for confidential communications among employees.

Intelligence officials say that many of their most important targets, including terrorist groups, use the same Webmail and other Internet services that many Americans use, so it is crucial to be able to penetrate the encryption that protects them. In an intense competition with other sophisticated cyberespionage services, including those of China and Russia, the N.S.A. cannot rule large parts of the Internet off limits, the officials argue.

A statement from the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., criticized the reports, saying that it was “not news” that the N.S.A. works to break encryption, and that the articles would damage American intelligence collection.

The reports, the statement said, “reveal specific and classified details about how we conduct this critical intelligence activity.”

“Anything that yesterday’s disclosures add to the ongoing public debate,” it continued, “is outweighed by the road map they give to our adversaries about the specific techniques we are using to try to intercept their communications in our attempts to keep America and our allies safe and to provide our leaders with the information they need to make difficult and critical national security decisions.”

But if intelligence officials felt a sense of betrayal by the disclosures, Internet security experts felt a similar letdown — at the N.S.A. actions.  

“There’s widespread disappointment,” said Dan Kaminsky, a prominent security researcher. “This has been the stuff of wild-eyed accusations for years. A lot of people are heartbroken to find out it’s not just wild-eyed accusations.”

Mr. Kaminsky said that there had been “a tremendous amount of good will between the cryptographic community and N.S.A. that’s built been up,” referring to experts on encryption. “That is gone,” he said.

Sascha Meinrath, the director of the Open Technology Institute, a research group in Washington, said the reports were “a startling indication that the U.S. has been a remarkably irresponsible steward of the Internet,” which he said the N.S.A. was trying to turn into “a massive platform for detailed, intrusive and unrestrained surveillance.”

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group in Washington, said the quandary posed by the N.S.A.’s efforts against encryption began with its dual role: eavesdropping on foreign communications while protecting American communications.

DealBook: Still Trailing Rivals, BlackBerry Seeks a Way Out

Strike for Day Seeks to Raise Fast-Food Pay

From New York to several Midwestern cities, thousands of fast-food workers have been holding one-day strikes during peak mealtimes, quickly drawing national attention to their demands for much higher wages.

What began in Manhattan eight months ago first spread to Chicago and Washington and this week has hit St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit and Flint, Mich. On Wednesday alone, workers picketed McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Popeye’s and Long John Silver’s restaurants in those cities with an ambitious agenda: pay of $15 an hour, twice what many now earn.

These strikes, which are planned for Milwaukee on Thursday, carry the flavor of Occupy Wall Street protests and are far different from traditional unionization efforts that generally focus on a single workplace. The national campaign, underwritten with millions of dollars from the Service Employees International Union, aims to mobilize workers — all at once — in numerous cities at hundreds of restaurants from two dozen chains.

None of the nation’s 200,000-plus fast-food restaurants are unionized.

The strategists know they want to achieve a $15 wage, but they seem to be ad-libbing on ways to get there. Perhaps they will seek to unionize workers at dozens of restaurants, although some labor leaders scoff at that idea because the turnover rate among fast-food employees is about 75 percent a year. Or the strategists and strikers might press city councils to enact a special “living wage” for fast-food restaurants. Or perhaps by continually disrupting the fast-food marketplace from counter to counter across the country, they can get McDonald’s, KFC and others to raise wages to end the ruckus. The protests’ organizers acknowledge that yet another goal is to push Congress to raise the federal minimum wage and pressure state legislatures to raise the state minimums.

“These companies aren’t magically going to make our lives better,” said Terrance Wise, who earns $9.30 an hour after working for eight years at a Burger King in Kansas City, plus $7.40 an hour at his second job at Pizza Hut. “We can sit back and stay silent and continue to live in poverty or, on the other hand, we can step out and say something and let it be known that we need help.”

In explaining why her union is pouring dozens of organizers and significant sums into the effort, Mary Kay Henry, the S.E.I.U. president, said, “Our union’s members think that economic inequality is the No. 1 problem our nation needs to solve. We think it’s important to back low-wage workers who are willing to stand up and have the courage to strike to make the case that the economy is creating jobs that people can’t support their families on.”

The protests in Detroit on Wednesday had a particularly poignant backdrop, given that the city has declared bankruptcy. Dozens of workers, joined by members of various unions and community groups, picketed in front of McDonald’s and Taco Bell, shouting chants like, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, $7.40 has got to go” — the amount per hour many of them are paid.

Restaurant industry officials say the strikers’ demand for $15 an hour is ludicrous because it amounts to more than twice the federal minimum wage. (The median pay for fast-food workers nationwide is $9.05 an hour.) Industry officials say a $15 wage might drive many restaurants out of business and cause restaurant owners to hire fewer workers and replace some with automation — perhaps by using more computerized gadgets where customers punch in the orders themselves.

Scott DeFife, executive vice president of the National Restaurant Association, said the one-day walkouts were not really strikes, but rather public-relations-minded protests that have caused very few restaurants to close.

“It is an effort to demonize the entire industry in order to make some organizing and political points,” he said, adding that only a small percentage of restaurant jobs pay the minimum wage. He said most of those positions were held by workers younger than 25.

Jaclyn Trop contributed reporting.

Motion Picture Academy Seeks to Expand Membership

LOS ANGELES — Reversing a policy that has more closely restricted membership in the last decade, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Friday invited an unusually large group of film professionals — 276 in total, including the actors Milla Jovovich and Joseph Gordon-Levitt — to join its ranks.

The invitation list represents a sharp increase from last year, when 176 new members were invited. That number was roughly calculated to maintain the size of the group, which annually awards the Oscars, and was generally consistent with the practice since 2004, when the Academy moved to tighten its rolls by focusing heavily on credentials, including any recent Oscar nomination, in deciding whether to extend an invitation.

This year, however, the Academy — which has been concerned about a lack of diversity within its ranks, and is searching for new connections to emerging aspects of cinema — dropped a system by which each of its branches was held to a quota.

It particularly encouraged the expansion of its documentary branch, which had been one of its smallest. That branch has only 173 members, but this year it invited 42 documentarians to join, compared with just 11 last year. Among those invited were Marcel Ophuls, whose work includes “The Sorrow and the Pity,” and both Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, who directed “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.”

Other actors on a list of 22 invitees — actually fewer than the 25 invited last year — include Michael Peña, Lucy Liu, Jennifer Lopez, Charles Grodin and Jason Bateman. Among the 15 directors invited to join, an increase from last year’s 11, were Paul Feig, Benh Zeitlin and Steve McQueen.

Kevin Tsujihara, recently named chief executive of Warner Bros., was perhaps the best-known of the 17 executives invited to join. In a twist, Neil Meron, who was a producer of this year’s Oscar telecast and whose film credits include “Hairspray” and “The Bucket List,” was invited to join as a member at large rather than as a producer.

Jason Blum, whose credits include “The Purge” and “Paranormal Activity,” was among nine producers invited to join, a decline from the 12 who were invited to join last year.

The short films and features animation branch sharply increased its invitations, to 19 from 11. Among those invited this year was Matt Groening, whose feature film credits include “The Simpsons Movie.”

DealBook: As Bond Market Tumbles, Pimco Seeks to Reassure Investors

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Bits Blog: Google Seeks Permission to Publish Data on Security Requests

Jeff Chiu/Associated Press Google’s motion with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday is the company’s latest move to control the public relations crisis that has resulted from revelations of government Internet surveillance.

Google on Tuesday filed a motion with the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, asking permission to publish data on national security requests that were made to it and authorized by the court.

The motion is the company’s latest move to control the public relations crisis that has resulted from revelations of government Internet surveillance. It is an escalation of Google’s efforts to publish the data. Last week, it sent a letter to the director of the F.B.I. and the director of national intelligence, asking for the same thing.

By law, recipients of national security requests are not allowed to acknowledge their existence. But with the permission of the government, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple have in the last few days published aggregate numbers of national security and criminal requests, including those authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Google has not, because it said that would be less transparent than what it had already published. Its transparency report has since 2010 broken out requests by type, and if it agreed to the same terms the other companies did, it would not be able to publish the report that way in the future.

In the motion, Google argued that it had a First Amendment right to publish a range of the total number of requests and the number of users or accounts they cover.

Google said that its executives had responded to allegations — that it cooperated with the government in Internet surveillance — as best they could, given the government’s restraints on discussing them. But the company said that it wanted to do more for the sake of its reputation, business and users, and for the sake of public debate.

“Google’s reputation and business has been harmed by the false or misleading reports in the media, and Google’s users are concerned by the allegations,” the motion said. “Google must respond to such claims with more than generalities.”

The tech companies have been pressing to be able to publish the number of government requests largely to prove that the requests cover a tiny fraction of users. Though the other companies said they were also pushing the government for permission to publish more detailed data, they said the aggregate numbers were useful to control speculation by setting a ceiling on the number of requests.

Other tech companies affected by the government’s surveillance program, called Prism, have considered going to the secret court, an option that is still on the table, according to two people briefed on the discussions. So far, the companies have been individually negotiating with the government instead of acting in concert.

Still, even if they are allowed to publish more detailed numbers, it would leave many questions unanswered, including details of how Prism works. Also, the number of people affected by FISA requests could be much larger than the number of requests, because once the government makes a broad request, it can add individuals and additional search queries for a year.

Google’s motion also revealed that two of its top lawyers, Kent Walker and Richard Salgado, have security clearance, which FISA requires for handling classified legal orders and materials. It was filed on behalf of the company by Albert Gidari, a partner at the law firm Perkins Coie who has earned a reputation in tech and legal circles as the go-to man on surveillance law.

Transplant vote seeks medical and legal balance

PITTSBURGH (AP) - Faced with a federal judge's order in the heart-wrenching cases of two terminally ill children seeking lung transplants, a national review board sought a balance that will keep such decisions in the hands of doctors, not lawyers or judges.

DealBook: In Stock Offering, Coty Seeks Up to $1 Billion

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for CotyCoty makes several celebrity-branded perfumes, including one by Katy Perry.

Coty sees plenty of investor appetite for celebrity-branded cosmetics, disclosing on Tuesday that it was hoping to raise as much as $1 billion from its forthcoming initial public offering.

It now plans to sell 57.1 million shares at $16.50 to $18.50 apiece, according to an amended prospectus filed on Tuesday. At the midpoint of that range, the company would be valued at about $6.7 billion.

The new filing suggests Coty is one step closer to becoming a publicly traded company, a year after it tried and failed to buy its much bigger rival, Avon Products. Despite having the backing of its wealthy parent, the German conglomerate Joh. A. Benckiser, and Berkshire Hathaway, Coty was unable to coax the embattled Avon into a deal.

Days after withdrawing its bid, Coty filed for an initial public offering, but whipsawing markets kept the sale on ice until the recent boom in stock prices.

Over its 108 years, Coty has grown from perfumes into a global purveyor of fragrances and high-end nail polishes, with products endorsed by the likes of Beyoncé, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jennifer Lopez. It has posted three years of consecutive sales growth, reporting $4.6 billion in revenue last year.

The company reported only a tiny rise in revenue growth for the nine months ended March 31, at $3.59 billion. But profit has jumped considerably in that period: Coty earned $258.1 million, up more than fourfold from the period a year earlier.

All shares being sold in the offering will come from Coty’s three main shareholders: Joh. A. Benckiser, the main investment vehicle of Germany’s wealthy Reimann family, and the investment firms Berkshire Partners and Rhone Capital.

The offering is being led by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley.

Public-Private Effort Seeks to Expedite Discovery of Autism Drugs

Under a contract with the institute, U.C.L.A. will form a network of researchers at other academic centers that will try to identify promising new and older drug compounds quickly, and conduct early tests to see if they merit additional investment.

The program, part of the “Fast Fail” initiative at the institute, aims to determine within weeks whether a drug works, rather than the years it traditionally takes to evaluate a new drug.

“The whole idea is just getting much better in these early phases at identifying drugs that are going to be efficacious and safe, and thereby greatly speeding the development of effective new therapies and reducing the overall cost,” said Dr. James McCracken, who is leading the effort at U.C.L.A. as director of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

The number of diagnosed cases of autism, Asperger’s syndrome and related disorders in children has been growing in recent years, largely because of increased awareness. A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Health Resources and Services Administration concluded that one in 50 children aged 6 to 17 had been found to have autism or a related disorder, a 72 percent increase since 2007.

Although more cases are being diagnosed, no drugs are approved to treat the core symptoms of the disorders, which are characterized by delays in developing effective communication and social skills. Other drugs often prescribed to people with the disorders treat difficult behaviors like aggressiveness, hyperactivity and irritability.

Dr. McCracken said developing effective treatments had been difficult because the underlying causes were poorly understood until the last few years, and some prominent efforts had failed. In 2004, the experimental drug secretin, developed by RepliGen, did not show that it worked in an advanced clinical trial, disappointing parents of children with autism who had placed their hopes in the drug.

Several major drug companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, have scaled back their research in the neurosciences because of the high failure rate, Dr. McCracken said.

Developing drugs to treat neurological disorders is difficult, in part because brain science is still evolving. The field is littered with drugs that scientists had hoped would be effective against diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia but that performed poorly in clinical trials.

Despite the setbacks, scientific advances in understanding the genetic underpinnings of autism have accelerated, leaving the door open for new drug discoveries, said Robert H. Ring, vice president of translational research at Autism Speaks, a patient advocacy group.

“Autism spectrum disorder is the brave new world of medicine development, and most companies out there — despite a lot of the retraction you’re seeing — they do recognize autism as a clear area of opportunity,” said Mr. Ring, who serves on a committee that helps select which compounds the U.C.L.A. program will test.

Some companies are pursuing treatments. Seaside Therapeutics, a private company in Cambridge, Mass., is developing drugs to treat autism and a form of mental retardation known as fragile X syndrome in a partnership with Roche.

“The approach that people have taken over the years is, ‘This person looks anxious, I’ll give them a drug I use to treat anxiety,’ ” said Dr. Randall L. Carpenter, a co-founder of Seaside and its chief executive. “We hope to treat the underlying molecular abnormality.”

Dr. McCracken said the program would identify four to eight compounds and run them through small trials in humans, testing how the drugs are absorbed and how they affect brain wave patterns that scientists say they believe are linked to autism.

“It’s taken a really long time to kind of crack open and begin to understand part of the disorder of brain biology that underpins autism,” Dr. McCracken said. “This is, to me, the most exciting time because we understand so much more than we did even five or 10 years ago.”

F.D.A. Seeks to Toughen Defibrillator Regulations

In one case, a nurse was trying to hook up a defibrillator to a patient in cardiac arrest when its electronic screen read “memory full” and then shut down, according to one example provided by the F.D.A. The patient soon died. In another case, a software defect caused the device to show an “equipment disabled” message. That patient also died.

The devices, which can be found in malls, airports, casinos and churches in addition to medical settings, re-establish cardiac rhythms in patients whose hearts have abruptly stopped or lost their regular beats. Such cardiac arrests kill as many as 400,000 people a year in the United States, according to the American Heart Association, more deaths than caused by Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and accidents combined.

There have been 45,000 reports of the devices failing or malfunctioning since 2005, agency officials said. The vast majority of them were due to manufacturing problems, officials said, but some were because of improper maintenance, like battery failure. Manufacturers have recalled the devices 88 times in that period.

The problems led the agency to propose a change that would allow it to more closely monitor how the devices — known as automated external defibrillators, or A.E.D.’s — are designed and made. There are about 2.4 million of them in public places across the country.

Dr. William Maisel, chief scientist at the F.D.A.’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a conference call with reporters on Friday, “We think tens of thousands of adverse events is too many and 88 recalls is too many.”

On Friday, the agency issued an order that, if made official after a public comment period, would require manufacturers to submit details of their designs and the controls they use in buying defibrillator components, many of which are produced abroad. Regulators would also be able to inspect manufacturers’ factories.

Normally, for devices regulated under this framework, manufacturers would have to conduct costly and time-consuming clinical trials, but Dr. Maisel said that most of the manufacturers have already collected the data that such trials would produce, and that only a couple would need to carry out such studies.

After a 90-day public comment period, companies will have another 90 days to file their paperwork. The agency will give companies an additional 15 months to comply with the changes. An F.D.A. official said she expected the process to be complete by the end of 2014.

A spokeswoman for Philips, one of the manufacturers, said the change would not interrupt distribution, but she added that the company needed to review the F.D.A. order before commenting on whether future supplies would be affected.

Another major manufacturer, Physio-Control, in Washington State, said in a statement that it was “extremely confident in our ability to meet these new regulations, if adopted.” A spokesman said the change would be more difficult for smaller manufacturers, because more resources would be required to follow the rules.

Death rates from cardiac arrests have changed little since the 1980s, when defibrillators first became widely available to the public. Experts say those statistics could improve if more of the devices were accessible to more people. Bystanders use them in just 5 percent of cardiac arrests, according to data from the Emory University School of Medicine, in part because patients usually become ill in private homes where there are no defibrillators.

Dr. Mickey Eisenberg, the emergency medical services director for King County in Seattle, said he worried the changes would hinder innovation, which he said was critical to better use of the devices and could lead to fewer deaths. The price of defibrillators, which cost $1,000 to $2,000, needs to drop, he said, to make them affordable for home use, a bit like a fancy smoke detector.

“A.E.D.’s in public places will never solve the problem,” he said. “They need to become consumer items, to enter people’s bedrooms and homes.”

Even for manufacturers that would not be required to conduct clinical trials, the cost of complying with the new regulations would rise to about $220,000 from about $5,000, according to Dr. Maisel. He said that companies with multiple models would have to pay that money only once, and that the sum could also be applied to subsequent versions.

Elliot Fisch, the president of Atrus, which provides defibrillator location information to dispatch agencies during cardiac arrest calls, said cost increases could be passed on to the consumer and make the devices less affordable. He said survival rates have improved sharply in recent years in Seattle, in part because defibrillators are more easily accessible.

“If this is going to increase costs to where it becomes prohibitive for organizations to purchase them, that’s not good, because the biggest problem is access,” he said.

But Dr. Gordon Tomaselli, chief of cardiology at Johns Hopkins University and a past president of the American Heart Association, said the F.D.A.’s move could boost confidence in the devices and encourage their use.

“People already have a lack of comfort in using these devices,” he said. “If word is out there that they don’t work anyway, people will be even more reluctant to do something that they were pretty nervous about to begin with.”

World-Traveling Prosecutor Seeks Diverse Experiences

Elizabeth Hathaway began traveling when she was in high school, with a stay in Japan. Here she's at the Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru.
Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Hathaway

Hathaway, here at Machu Picchu, says she and her husband look for a "native experience."
Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Hathaway

When Elizabeth Hathaway moved from Los Angeles to Atlanta six years ago to become the Assistant U.S. Attorney and deputy chief of narcotics, she viewed the change as a great career opportunity and a chance to experience a different culture. Hathaway had never lived in the Southeast.

But she has traveled to 23 different countries on six continents. Along the way, she's seen wild animals in Africa, been to the Oscars and walked the streets of Jericho.

"I always loved traveling and I like to experience different cultures," she said.

She recently discussed her yen to wander with the Daily Report.

Are you a California native?

No, I was brought up in upstate New York. After law school, I had a job offer from a firm in L.A. and realized I could live somewhere without a winter. I was there for 10 years.

Lots of people live in L.A. and never get to the Oscars. How did you manage it?

Our firm represented the Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences], which gave me the opportunity to apply to become a seat filler. The Academy wants the audience always to look full, so people fill the seats for stars. Believe it or not, you have to go to the venue and practice how to fill a seat. All the seat changes take place during the commercials, so you have to move really fast.

Tell us all the details. Did you get to meet stars, have a makeover and rent jewelry?

We were told that if you had to ask whether your outfit was dressy enough, it wasn't, so I rented a silver gown. I got up really early in the morning and had my hair done, but I didn't rent jewelry. I'm not sure jewelers do that for just anybody.

You wait in line until you are needed. I started out in a front row, center seat, but then Uma Thurman showed up right before the show, so I had to leave. Later I think I filled Val Kilmer's seat. It's exciting because you get to see up close all the actors you've seen on the big screen. I was directly in front of Sophia Loren, who is stunning, and Robin Williams was on the end of my row. I told him I was a big fan and he was very friendly.

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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.

Commission Seeks Pay Increases for Conn. State Judges

Even as the state Legislature met in special session last week to deal with the state's budget crisis, lawmakers received a request for new expenditures.

A committee studying judicial compensation in Connecticut has proposed raises of 5.3 percent for state judges for each of the next four fiscal years. The plan would increase Superior Court judges' annual pay from current salaries of $146,800 to $180,483 over the four-year period -- an overall increase of about 23 percent. Pay for Appellate Court judges and Supreme Court justices would increase by a similar percentage, and judge trial referees, who handle many Superior Court cases, would see their per diem pay rise from $220 to $270.

The proposal from the Commission on Judicial Compensation now goes to the Legislature, whose regular session begins in January. Some lawmakers are already on record as saying that given the state's looming budget deficit -- in the hundreds of millions of dollars for this fiscal year alone -- it's the wrong time to boost the pay of some of the state's highest-salaried employees.

"The Commission is aware of the state's financial situation, which has changed for the worse since the Commission began its work" in October, according to a draft of the panel's report. "We understand that to some people, the budget situation is the beginning and end of the discussion and that there should be no consideration of raises."

The 12-member commission noted that Connecticut judges had not received raises since 2007, and stated that even before that their pay increases were not keeping up with inflation. "The judges began falling behind in 2002," the commission stated. "For every year since that time, their salaries were less than they would have been if they had received the same raises as other state employees. Nothing in this proposal will make them whole for a decade of disparities. Those dollars are gone forever. If the Commission were to cure the historical difference in raises between judges and other state employees, the proposed increases would have been higher."

Commission chair Tim Fisher, of McCarter & English, acknowledged there were differences of opinion among members over the size of the raises. "While some commission members thought our recommendations should be higher and there were those who said they should be lower, all of us were comfortable with the final numbers we are presenting in our report," Fisher said.

NO LEGISLATIVE INFLUENCE

The commission members divided up into sub-groups, which researched different factors that went into deciding on a proposed increase. Those factors included: the overall economic climate in the state; the state's ability to pay for the increases; the inflation rate; the history of raises for other state employees; comparisons with the judges in federal courts and judges in other states; compensation for other attorneys in the public and private sectors; and the state's interest in attracting highly qualified and experienced attorneys to serve as judges.

Members then met last week to hash out their differences and to unanimously approve the recommendations. Under the statute that created the commission, the Legislature was not involved in the process. "No one from the Legislature sought to influence or had any influence on our decisions," said Fisher, who declined to predict whether the proposal will be approved by lawmakers.

Under the commission's analysis, the pay raise proposal would cost the state an additional $2 million in the upcoming fiscal year, with that number increasing by an additional $2 million in each of the following three years. The commission stated that Connecticut ranks 46th in the nation in judicial pay, when cost of living is factored in. It noted that inflation has increased by more than 13 percent since judges last received raises.

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Sandusky Seeks to Delay Trial; McQueary Files Writ Against Penn State

Jerry Sandusky?s attorney, Joseph Amendola, filed a motion for continuance Tuesday seeking to delay the start of his client?s sex-abuse trial.

As Sales Fall, Allergan Seeks a Buyer for Lap-Band

The falling sales “do not fit the profile of a high-growth company like Allergan,” David E. I. Pyott, the company’s chief executive, told analysts Tuesday morning on a call announcing the company’s third-quarter financial results.

In an interview, Mr. Pyott said Allergan had already hired an investment banking firm, which he would not name, and was sending letters to other medical device companies and private equity firms seeking a buyer for its obesity business, which also includes a balloonlike device that is not approved in the United States but is used in some other countries.

The Lap-Band, a silicone ring that is wrapped around the stomach and can be inserted in an outpatient procedure, once appeared to have a bright future as a less drastic, if less effective, alternative to gastric bypass, which involves rerouting the digestive tract.

But Allergan’s obesity business sales have fallen from a peak of $296 million in 2008 to an expected $160 million this year. In the third quarter, the sales fell by 25 percent to $37.4 million from a year earlier.

The obesity business, while still profitable, represents less than 3 percent of total product sales for Allergan, which is known most for its Botox treatment for wrinkles, migraine headaches and other conditions.

Although one-third of American adults are obese, the number of weight loss surgeries in the United States — about 160,000 a year — has stopped growing, largely because of the economy, Mr. Pyott said. Many patients pay out of pocket for weight loss surgery, and even when the procedure is covered by insurance, there can be a co-payment of thousands of dollars.

Mr. Pyott said Allergan had made progress in the last year in lowering barriers to insurance coverage, but it was not sufficient to reverse the decline in sales of the Lap-Band.

But gastric banding has also lost market share among weight loss surgeries, falling to about one-third from 44 percent a year ago, Mr. Pyott said. Lap-Band has most of the market among bands, although Johnson & Johnson also sells such a product.

Gaining in popularity has been sleeve gastrectomy, which involves cutting out part of the stomach. It is considered midway between banding and bypass in terms of both effectiveness and the degree of invasiveness of the surgery.

Dr. Marc Bessler, director of the center for metabolic and weight loss surgery at Columbia University, said that Lap-Band had lost some luster among bariatric surgeons because studies suggested it was not effective in the long run for one-third to two-thirds of patients.

“You had data coming out that 10-year outcomes are not what we were expecting,” Dr. Bessler said.

One study in Europe, for instance, published in The Archives of Surgery last year, reported that over 12 years, 60 percent of patients needed another operation, often to remove the band, because of complications or lack of weight loss. Allergan has said that techniques have improved since the patients in that study received their bands.

In 2011, Allergan succeeded in getting the Food and Drug Administration to approve use of the Lap-Band for patients with lower weight than had been previously required. But that did not bolster sales, in part because of difficulty getting insurance to pay.

The company dropped efforts to get the Lap-Band approved for use in teenagers after controversy arose about the product’s safety.

There have been news reports about problems, including deaths, from the band.

Allergan said its overall product sales for the third quarter rose 6.1 percent from a year earlier to $1.39 billion. Earnings per share, after adjustments, rose to $1.06 from 92 cents.

Sandusky Seeks to Delay Trial; McQueary Files Writ Against Penn State

Jerry Sandusky?s attorney, Joseph Amendola, filed a motion for continuance Tuesday seeking to delay the start of his client?s sex-abuse trial.

Greece Seeks Taxes From Investors in London Property

Real estate agents recall sifting the listings for some of the most prestigious, and expensive, properties in South Kensington, a favored area for London’s international set.

But the house hunter, Lavrentis Lavrentiadis, never made a purchase in the spring of 2011, agents say. Within months his failing institution, a small lender known as Proton Bank, was seized. The Greek government, suspecting that Mr. Lavrentiadis may have moved money out of the country, is now investigating his activities to determine whether he engaged in fraud and money laundering.

Greece, heavily in debt and desperate to track down money wherever it can, is leaving no stone unturned.

Mr. Lavrentiadis has denied the accusations, and his lawyer did not respond to questions about any interest his client might have had in London properties. But the Greek banker’s rumored flirtation with this city’s prime real estate market, and the frenzy it stirred among sales agents, is telling.

At the request of the Athens government, the British financial authorities recently handed over a detailed list of about 400 Greek individuals who have bought and sold London properties since 2009.

The list, closely guarded, has not been publicly disclosed. But Greek officials are examining it to determine whether the people named — who they say include prominent businessmen, bankers, shipping tycoons and professional athletes — have deceived the tax authorities by understating their wealth.

“These people have money and they are known — but it is not clear yet if they have violated any laws,” said Haris Theoharis, an official in the Greek Finance Ministry. Tax investigators have been examining the list to see whether there is any overlap between those who bought London properties and those already identified as being tax cheats.

The Greek government, under pressure from its international lenders to raise 13.5 billion euros ($17.4 billion) through tax increases and spending cuts, is intent on making the well-heeled share the burden. Studies have shown that the country may be forgoing as much as 30 billion euros a year in uncollected taxes, with a significant portion of that amount having been shipped out of the country as the affluent seek shelter from Greece’s financial storm.

This week, the government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras opened an investigation into the bank accounts of more than 30 Greek politicians to determine whether they should be charged with tax evasion and the illegal accumulation of wealth.

The politicians on the list included the president of the Greek Parliament, Evangelos Meimarakis, creating an embarrassing distraction for Mr. Samaras’s coalition government. Mr. Meimarakis is a former defense minister who has also been implicated in accusations concerning a money-laundering network said to involve two other former ministers.

London, long a magnet for foreign real estate investors, has become a special focus for Greek officials trying to track down money taken from the country.

Bankers say that accounts in Singapore and even in the country of Georgia have become favorite destinations for fleeing funds, more so than the traditional haven of Switzerland, because the looser rules and regulations of those countries about accepting large sums of foreign money. But while Singapore and Switzerland have been reluctant to divulge information about its Greek clientele, the British government has been more cooperative in sharing its real estate records.

There is an air of desperation to this Athens fund-raising drive, which includes leasing out empty Greek islands and even putting up for sale the former residence of the Greek consul general in the tony London neighborhood of Holland Park. But with Greece’s membership in the euro at stake, every conceivable revenue-raising strategy is being pursued, even if it remains unclear how successful it will be.