Texans clinch AFC South with 29-17 win over Colts

HOUSTON (AP) — The Houston Texans have a message for the Indianapolis Colts:

Now we own the AFC South.

The Texans are division champions for the second straight year after beating the Colts 29-17 Sunday. Andre Johnson gained 151 yards receiving and a touchdown, Bryan Braman scored a special teams score on a blocked punt, and Shayne Graham kicked five field goals.

The Texans (12-2) grabbed their first AFC South title last season after the Colts nosedived without injured quarterback Peyton Manning. Manning is gone to Denver and rookie Andrew Luck couldn't do much against the inspired Houston defense.

The Colts (9-5) had won three straight games and needed a win to clinch a playoff berth a year after going 2-14 in 2011. Before that, they took the division seven times since Houston entered the league in 2002.

Thanks in great part to three sacks from J.J. Watt, Houston bounced back six days after an embarrassing 42-14 loss to New England on national television. The Texans will have home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs if they win out.

Luck threw for 186 yards with two touchdowns in the return to his hometown. He had led the Colts to a rookie-record six wins on drives in the fourth quarter or overtime this season, and he got the Colts within six points late in the third quarter.

But Houston's defense shut him down after that, and the Texans used Arian Foster to eat up the clock. Foster ran for a season-high 165 yards to leave him with 1,313 yards rushing, giving him his third straight year with at least 1,200.

Watt increased his AFC-leading sack total to 19 ½ — the NFL record for a season is 22 1-2 — and finished with 10 tackles. He also forced a fumble for the third straight game.

Luck was sacked five times playing behind a makeshift offensive line missing center Samson Satele (ankle) and right tackle Winston Justice (biceps).

Johnson, who has 11,008 yards receiving in his career, scored on a 3-yard reception to make it 10-0 in the first quarter. The Texans didn't score a touchdown on offense after that, but were helped by Braman's special teams effort.

Braman blocked his second punt of the season, recovered it and returned it 8 yards for his first career touchdown to make it 20-3 just before halftime.

Vick Ballard had 60 yards rushing on a Colts drive that ended with an 8-yard touchdown reception by Dwayne Allen to cut Houston's lead to 23-17 in the third quarter. Ballard finished with a career-high 105 yards rushing.

Houston couldn't do anything on its next drive and punted. But Indy sputtered, and interim coach Bruce Arians even drew an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on a punt, giving Houston the ball at the Colts 39.

Graham added a 46-yard field goal to push the lead to 26-17 and made his fifth field goal with about a minute left.

Rookie T.Y. Hilton and Luck connected on a 61-yard touchdown pass just before halftime.

Watt's forced fumble on Mewelde Moore on the Houston 1 was recovered by Tim Dobbins early in the second quarter, robbing the Colts of points. And the Colts stalled inside the red zone again and had to settle for Adam Vinatieri's 26-yard field goal to cut Houston's lead to 10-3.

The Texans had set the tone as they got to Luck early, sacking him twice on the Colts' second drive. Antonio Smith got to him first, and Watt put a move on backup tackle Jeff Linkenbach and took him down for a 15-yard loss.

On offense, Johnson was dominant. He put Houston up 10-0 when he waltzed into the end zoen for a 3-yard touchdown reception. Johnson kept things going earlier in the drive when he caught a pass, lost it and then grabbed it again just before it touched the ground for a 10-yard gain on third-and-9.

___

Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

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Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies

Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.

Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.

Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.

Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.

Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.

Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.

More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”

One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”

But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.

Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.

But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.

Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”

After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.

He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.

In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”

William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.

Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.

When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.

Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.

She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.

But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.

Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.

Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”

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Looking Ahead: Economic Reports for the Week of Dec. 17

ECONOMIC REPORTS Data to be released this week includes the current account deficit for the third quarter (Tuesday); housing starts for November (Wednesday); weekly jobless claims, final third-quarter G.D.P., existing home sales for November, the Philadelphia Fed index, and leading economic indicators for November (Thursday); and personal income and spending for November and the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index for December (Friday).

CORPORATE EARNINGS The following companies are scheduled to report quarterly earnings this week: Oracle (Tuesday); FedEx, General Mills and Bed Bath & Beyond (Wednesday); ConAgra Foods, Darden Restaurants, Discover Financial Services, KB Home, Rite Aid, Nike and Research in Motion and Walgreen (Friday).

IN THE UNITED STATES On Tuesday, Ron Kirk, the United States trade representative, and Rebecca Blank, the acting commerce secretary, will begin two days of talks in Washington with a Chinese delegation. Also Tuesday, a Senate Banking subcommittee will conduct a hearing about computerized trading.

On Wednesday, a Senate Banking subcommittee will conduct a hearing about consumer credit reports.

On Thursday, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety will release its 2013 list of the safest vehicles.

OVERSEAS On Monday, Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, will speak at the quarterly hearing of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee of the European Parliament.

On Thursday, the Bank of Japan will issue a decision on interest rates.

On Friday, President Vladimir Putin of Russia will attend a Russia-European Union summit meeting in Brussels.

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Google+ app for Android updated with new photo-sharing features, emoticons, GIFs and more

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With E.C.B. in Spotlight, Bundesbank Finds Itself in the Shadows

Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times

The Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, built in 1967 in Frankfurt.

FRANKFURT — The exposed-concrete slab of the Bundesbank headquarters stands like a bulwark outside the downtown financial district here, a stolid, Brutalist structure that in its sheer mass evokes not just the German central bank’s stubborn resistance to change but, above all, its obsessive commitment to crushing inflation.

Built 45 years ago, the modernist building is hardly old by European standards, yet it is a temple to tradition, embodying the ethos of this most conservative of institutions. “We are trying to keep it just the way it is,” said Reiner Bruckhaus, head of the bank’s centralized construction management division.

That starts with the granite floors, the Barcelona chairs in the lobby (designed by the Bauhaus great Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), and the grand, white Carrara marble by the elevators, and goes all the way up to the wood grid ceilings on the top floor. “You will find not even the slightest changes,” Mr. Bruckhaus said.

When the building was erected in 1967, the Bundesbank’s dominance in European monetary policy went unchallenged. But in the hazy distance of the Frankfurt skyline, significant change is evident in the outline of two towers and three cranes, the new headquarters of the European Central Bank — a visible reminder of the institution that has supplanted the Bundesbank, just as the euro replaced the German mark.

European leaders established the European Central Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt as a symbol of its status as heir to the Bundesbank. But the danger posed by Europe’s continuing debt crisis demanded improvisations at odds with the Bundesbank’s conservative teachings.

Over the summer the E.C.B.’s president, Mario Draghi, pursued an expansive policy that was anathema to the old guard, whose cause was championed by the Bundesbank’s youthful president, Jens Weidmann. He and his supporters base their views not, they say, on rigid orthodoxy but on experience gleaned from the disaster of hyperinflation and the success of adhering to a hard-money path.

In an increasingly uncomfortable pairing, the Bundesbank functions as the largest piece of the E.C.B. puzzle. With more than 9,500 full-time workers, the Bundesbank dwarfs the 1,600-strong central bank. Because of that limited staff, the E.C.B. depends on the Bundesbank to handle many of the back-office functions of the common currency.

But the European Central Bank’s influence continues to grow. Euro-zone finance ministers agreed to a deal Thursday to put 100 to 200 of their largest banks under its direct supervision.

The arranged marriage between the two banks will take enormous effort and flexibility. As its massive headquarters suggests, the Bundesbank is capable of enormous and sustained effort, but flexibility may be inimical to its nature.

Founded in 1957, the Bundesbank quickly grew into one of Germany’s most respected institutions. The rank-and-file behind Mr. Weidmann, 44, represent an unusually tight-knit group, almost like a monastic order, and they are steeped in the bank’s secular religion — often at the bank’s own school, a kind of Hogwarts for its future financial wizards, in a hilltop 12th-century castle in the town of Hachenburg.

“You hear it in the first lecture,” said Silke Frühklug, 32, a graduate and Bundesbank employee. “You hear it in the last lecture and every day in between: price stability.”

Ms. Frühklug married a classmate and in her free time plays on the central bank’s badminton team, which on a recent evening practiced in a gymnasium on the Bundesbank campus right after the handball team. The bank also has a theater society and “hobby artists” club, which exhibits in the lobby of the headquarters. It owns apartments for workers in tight real-estate markets like Munich and here in Frankfurt. Retired employees still lunch at the cafeteria, helping to nurture the all-important continuity.

“People feel connected with the goals of the bank,” said Matthias Endres, 43, editor of the Bundesbank’s internal magazine. Like Ms. Frühklug, he married a fellow graduate from the school in Hachenburg. He has vacationed with his wife and their three children at all three of the Bundesbank getaways, on the North Sea, in the Black Forest and on a lake in Bavaria.

Mr. Endres’s wife, Simone, works part-time in the headquarters’ Money Museum, which houses some 350,000 objects, of which roughly 1,300 are on display, including the worthless bills in denominations of millions and billions from the hyperinflation of the Weimar-era and examples of commodity money, like a gold bar, a tea brick and even a preserved cow standing near the entrance, a silent bovine greeter.

Jack Ewing contributed reporting.

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7 leaving Big East to build basketball conference

The seven Big East schools that don't play FBS football are leaving behind the conference many of them founded to build a league focused on basketball.

The presidents of the seven schools made the announcement Saturday.

"Earlier today we voted unanimously to pursue an orderly evolution to a foundation of basketball schools that honors the history and tradition on which the Big East was established," the statement said. "Under the context of conference realignment, we believe pursuing a new basketball framework that builds on this tradition of excellence and competition is the best way forward."

The seven basketball schools leaving are: Georgetown, St. John's, Villanova, DePaul, Marquette, Seton Hall and Providence. Georgetown, St. John's, Seton Hall and Providence helped form the Big East, which started playing basketball in 1979. Villanova joined in 1980. The Big East didn't begin playing football until 1991.

The statement from the seven Catholic schools gave no details about their plans, such as when they want to depart and whether they will attempt to keep the name Big East.

Big East bylaws require departing members give the conference 27 months' notice, but league has negotiated early departures with several schools over the past year. Big East rules do allow schools to leave as a group without being obligated to pay exit fees.

There are also millions of dollars in NCAA basketball tournament money and exit fees collected from recently departed members that will need to be divvied up.

"The basketball institutions have notified us that they plan to withdraw from the Big East," Commissioner Mike Aresco said in a statement. "The membership recognizes their contributions over the long distinguished history of the Big East. The 13 members of the conference are confident and united regarding our collective future."

The latest hit to the Big East leaves Connecticut, also a founding member of the league, Cincinnati, Temple and South Florida — the four current members with FBS football programs — as the only schools currently in the Big East that are scheduled to be there beyond next season.

The Big East is still lined up to have a 12-team football conference next season with six new members joining, including Boise State and San Diego State for football only. Rutgers and Louisville, which both announced intentions to leave the Big East, are still expected to compete in the conference next year.

Notre Dame, which is moving to the Atlantic Coast Conference, is also expected to continue competing in the Big East next season in all sports but football and hockey.

Joining the Big East next season are Memphis, Central Florida, Houston and SMU for all sports and Boise State and San Diego State for football only.

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School Yoga Class Draws Religious Protest From Christians

T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times

Miriam Ruiz during a yoga class last week at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Encinitas, Calif. A few dozen parents are protesting that the program amounts to religious indoctrination. More Photos »

ENCINITAS, Calif. — By 9:30 a.m. at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School, tiny feet were shifting from downward dog pose to chair pose to warrior pose in surprisingly swift, accurate movements. A circle of 6- and 7-year-olds contorted their frames, making monkey noises and repeating confidence-boosting mantras.

Jackie Bergeron’s first-grade yoga class was in full swing.

“Inhale. Exhale. Peekaboo!” Ms. Bergeron said from the front of the class. “Now, warrior pose. I am strong! I am brave!”

Though the yoga class had a notably calming effect on the children, things were far from placid outside the gymnasium.

A small but vocal group of parents, spurred on by the head of a local conservative advocacy group, has likened these 30-minute yoga classes to religious indoctrination. They say the classes — part of a comprehensive program offered to all public school students in this affluent suburb north of San Diego — represent a violation of the First Amendment.

After the classes prompted discussion in local evangelical churches, parents said they were concerned that the exercises might nudge their children closer to ancient Hindu beliefs.

Mary Eady, the parent of a first grader, said the classes were rooted in the deeply religious practice of Ashtanga yoga, in which physical actions are inextricable from the spiritual beliefs underlying them.

“They’re not just teaching physical poses, they’re teaching children how to think and how to make decisions,” Ms. Eady said. “They’re teaching children how to meditate and how to look within for peace and for comfort. They’re using this as a tool for many things beyond just stretching.”

Ms. Eady and a few dozen other parents say a public school system should not be leading students down any particular religious path. Teaching children how to engage in spiritual exercises like meditation familiarizes young minds with certain religious viewpoints and practices, they say, and a public classroom is no place for that.

Underlying the controversy is the source of the program’s financing. The pilot project is supported by the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in memory of Krishna Pattabhi Jois, who is considered the father of Ashtanga yoga.

Dean Broyles, the president and chief counsel of the National Center for Law and Policy, a nonprofit law firm that champions religious freedom and traditional marriage, according to its Web site, has dug up quotes from Jois Foundation leaders, who talk about the inseparability of the physical act of yoga from a broader spiritual quest. Mr. Broyles argued that such quotes betrayed the group’s broader evangelistic purpose.

“There is a transparent promotion of Hindu religious beliefs and practices in the public schools through this Ashtanga yoga program,” he said.

“The analog would be if we substituted for this program a charismatic Christian praise and worship physical education program,” he said.

The battle over yoga in schools has been raging for years across the country but has typically focused on charter schools, which receive public financing but set their own curriculums.

The move by the Encinitas Union School District to mandate yoga classes for all students who do not opt out has elevated the discussion. And it has split an already divided community.

The district serves the liberal beach neighborhoods of Encinitas, including Leucadia, where Paul Ecke Central Elementary is, as well as more conservative inland communities. On the coast, bumper stickers reading “Keep Leucadia Funky” are borne proudly. Farther inland, cars are more likely to feature the Christian fish symbol, and large evangelical congregations play an important role in shaping local philosophy.

Opponents of the yoga classes have started an online petition to remove the course from the district’s curriculum. They have shown up at school board meetings to denounce the program, and Mr. Broyles has threatened to sue if the board does not address their concerns.

The district has stood firm. Tim Baird, the schools superintendent, has defended the yoga classes as merely another element of a broader program designed to promote children’s physical and mental well-being. The notion that yoga teachers have designs on converting tender young minds to Hinduism is incorrect, he said.

“That’s why we have an opt-out clause,” Mr. Baird said. “If your faith is such that you believe that simply by doing the gorilla pose, you’re invoking the Hindu gods, then by all means your child can be doing something else.”

Ms. Eady is not convinced.

“Yoga poses are representative of Hindu deities and Hindu stories about the actions and interactions of those deities with humans,” she said. “There’s content even in the movement, just as with baptism there’s content in the movement.”

Russell Case, a representative of the Jois Foundation, said the parents’ fears were misguided.

“They’re concerned that we’re putting our God before their God,” Mr. Case said. “They’re worried about competition. But we’re much closer to them than they think. We’re good Christians that just like to do yoga because it helps us to be better people.”

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With E.C.B. in Spotlight, Bundesbank Finds Itself in the Shadows

Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times

The Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, built in 1967 in Frankfurt.

FRANKFURT — The exposed-concrete slab of the Bundesbank headquarters stands like a bulwark outside the downtown financial district here, a stolid, Brutalist structure that in its sheer mass evokes not just the German central bank’s stubborn resistance to change but, above all, its obsessive commitment to crushing inflation.

Built 45 years ago, the modernist building is hardly old by European standards, yet it is a temple to tradition, embodying the ethos of this most conservative of institutions. “We are trying to keep it just the way it is,” said Reiner Bruckhaus, head of the bank’s centralized construction management division.

That starts with the granite floors, the Barcelona chairs in the lobby (designed by the Bauhaus great Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), and the grand, white Carrara marble by the elevators, and goes all the way up to the wood grid ceilings on the top floor. “You will find not even the slightest changes,” Mr. Bruckhaus said.

When the building was erected in 1967, the Bundesbank’s dominance in European monetary policy went unchallenged. But in the hazy distance of the Frankfurt skyline, significant change is evident in the outline of two towers and three cranes, the new headquarters of the European Central Bank — a visible reminder of the institution that has supplanted the Bundesbank, just as the euro replaced the German mark.

European leaders established the European Central Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt as a symbol of its status as heir to the Bundesbank. But the danger posed by Europe’s continuing debt crisis demanded improvisations at odds with the Bundesbank’s conservative teachings.

Over the summer the E.C.B.’s president, Mario Draghi, pursued an expansive policy that was anathema to the old guard, whose cause was championed by the Bundesbank’s youthful president, Jens Weidmann. He and his supporters base their views not, they say, on rigid orthodoxy but on experience gleaned from the disaster of hyperinflation and the success of adhering to a hard-money path.

In an increasingly uncomfortable pairing, the Bundesbank functions as the largest piece of the E.C.B. puzzle. With more than 9,500 full-time workers, the Bundesbank dwarfs the 1,600-strong central bank. Because of that limited staff, the E.C.B. depends on the Bundesbank to handle many of the back-office functions of the common currency.

But the European Central Bank’s influence continues to grow. Euro-zone finance ministers agreed to a deal Thursday to put 100 to 200 of their largest banks under its direct supervision.

The arranged marriage between the two banks will take enormous effort and flexibility. As its massive headquarters suggests, the Bundesbank is capable of enormous and sustained effort, but flexibility may be inimical to its nature.

Founded in 1957, the Bundesbank quickly grew into one of Germany’s most respected institutions. The rank-and-file behind Mr. Weidmann, 44, represent an unusually tight-knit group, almost like a monastic order, and they are steeped in the bank’s secular religion — often at the bank’s own school, a kind of Hogwarts for its future financial wizards, in a hilltop 12th-century castle in the town of Hachenburg.

“You hear it in the first lecture,” said Silke Frühklug, 32, a graduate and Bundesbank employee. “You hear it in the last lecture and every day in between: price stability.”

Ms. Frühklug married a classmate and in her free time plays on the central bank’s badminton team, which on a recent evening practiced in a gymnasium on the Bundesbank campus right after the handball team. The bank also has a theater society and “hobby artists” club, which exhibits in the lobby of the headquarters. It owns apartments for workers in tight real-estate markets like Munich and here in Frankfurt. Retired employees still lunch at the cafeteria, helping to nurture the all-important continuity.

“People feel connected with the goals of the bank,” said Matthias Endres, 43, editor of the Bundesbank’s internal magazine. Like Ms. Frühklug, he married a fellow graduate from the school in Hachenburg. He has vacationed with his wife and their three children at all three of the Bundesbank getaways, on the North Sea, in the Black Forest and on a lake in Bavaria.

Mr. Endres’s wife, Simone, works part-time in the headquarters’ Money Museum, which houses some 350,000 objects, of which roughly 1,300 are on display, including the worthless bills in denominations of millions and billions from the hyperinflation of the Weimar-era and examples of commodity money, like a gold bar, a tea brick and even a preserved cow standing near the entrance, a silent bovine greeter.

Jack Ewing contributed reporting.

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Sony’s PlayStation 4 could lose to the next Xbox before it’s even released

I love all game consoles equally. My Xbox 360 is used equally as much as my PlayStation 3. The Wii — oh, I’ll just leave it at that. The current generation of consoles is all but over — 10-year life cycle be damned — and new consoles are rumored to be coming next fall. If not next fall, then in 2014. Whatever is the case, Sony (SNE) can’t afford to lag in third place again. Sure, the Xbox 360 and PS3 are neck-in-neck in global lifetime sales, and the Xbox 360 did have a one year head start, but coming off the disappointing PS Vita, “confidence is less high” that Sony will deliver a console next year in time to compete with Microsoft (MSFT), according to Kotaku.

[More from BGR: Has the iPhone peaked? Apple’s iPhone 4S seen outselling iPhone 5]

I want a new console just as much as any other gamer. There’s a reason people are still pouncing on those Wii U consoles and flipping them on eBay. Six years is unusually long for a console to still be kicking around.

[More from BGR: Apple execs said to be ‘seething’ over Google Maps praise]

According to the well-informed Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku, the game blog that first broke news on the next-gen Xbox, Microsoft’s “Durango” is ”on the mark” and “Sony appears to inspire less confidence…due to the on-and-off troubles of the PlayStation 3 and the struggles of the Vita vs. how much lost confidence is due to any problems looming for PS4.“

Totilo says “confidence is high that the next Xbox will be out in time for next Christmas” and confidence is low that the PS4 will be right there on store shelves next to it.

The “on-and-off troubles of the PlayStation 3″ Totilo is referring to is the anchor that’s weighed the console down since launch: tougher development due to the Cell processor and less available RAM – 256MB vs. 512MB in the Xbox 360.

In the months before the PS3′s launch in 2006, Sony said the console would be the most powerful console ever created, and here we are six years later and multi-platform games on the console consistently end up being buggier and uglier than on the Xbox 360 in many cases. Cases in point: Skyrim, Mass Effect 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

Sony’s in a rut right now. It has the chops to build beautiful and powerful hardware that’s a developer’s dream (ex: PS Vita), but at the same time, it’s always launching after the competition nowadays.

If Sony’s learned any lessons in the last half a decade, it better apply them to the PS4. The console needs to offer next-level processing and graphics. It needs to be backward-compatible with PS3 games and play Blu-ray discs. It should be small and quiet. It should have a strong online platform, support a greater array of apps and most importantly be easy for developers to program for.

Game exclusives will always be important, but now that games are million-dollar productions, multi-platform will be where developers hope to reap back their costs.

With Microsoft said to be preparing an “Xbox 720″ and an “Xbox Lite,” Sony can’t make the mistake of launching late or pricing the console too high. A launch in spring of 2014 would mean Sony will miss Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the two biggest shopping days of the year that bring in massive sales.  Ceding sales and market share to Microsoft and Nintendo by launching late would be disastrous.

The PS3 screwed up too many times. At this point, the PS4 needs to be perfect out of the door.

This article was originally published by BGR

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Panetta Orders Deployment of U.S. Antimissile Units in Turkey

Manu Brabo/Associated Press

An injured woman was taken to a hospital in a rebel-controlled area of Aleppo on Friday.

INCIRLIK AIR BASE, Turkey — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta signed an official deployment order on Friday to send 400 American military personnel and two Patriot air defense batteries to Turkey as its tensions intensify with neighboring Syria, where government forces have increasingly resorted to aerial attacks, including the use of ballistic missiles, to fight a spreading insurgency.

The American batteries will be part of a broader push to strengthen Turkey’s defenses that will include the deployment of four other Patriot batteries — two from Germany and two from the Netherlands. Each battery contains multiple rounds of guided missiles that can intercept and destroy other missiles and hostile aircraft flying at high speeds.

Mr. Panetta’s deployment order, the result of NATO discussions last week, represents the most direct American military action so far to help contain the Syrian conflict and minimize its risk of spilling across the 550-mile border with Turkey, a NATO member that is housing more than 100,000 Syrian refugees and providing aid to the Syrian rebels trying to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

Tensions between Turkey and Syria have escalated in recent months as Syrian forces have bombed rebel positions along the border and occasionally lobbed artillery rounds into Turkish territory. The Turks have also grown increasingly alarmed that Mr. Assad’s forces could fire missiles into Turkey.

News of the Patriot deployment order came as antigovernment activists inside Syria reported fresh mayhem, including an unconfirmed rebel claim to have downed a government warplane attacking insurgent positions near the international airport in Damascus, the capital.

In Moscow, meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry sought to distance itself from comments a day earlier by its Middle East envoy that the Syrian rebels might defeat Mr. Assad, a longstanding Kremlin ally and arms client. A ministry spokesman, Aleksandr K. Lukashevich, said Russia remained committed to a political solution in Syria.

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

All six Patriot units deployed in Turkey will be under NATO’s command and are scheduled to be operational by the end of January, according to officials in Washington.

George Little, the Pentagon spokesman, said Mr. Panetta signed the order as he flew from Afghanistan to this air base in southern Turkey, close to the Syrian border.

“The United States has been supporting Turkey in its efforts to defend itself,” Mr. Little said.

The order “will deploy some 400 U.S. personnel to Turkey to support two Patriot missile batteries,” Mr. Little added, and the personnel and Patriot batteries will arrive in Turkey in the coming weeks. He did not specify their deployment locations.

After landing at Incirlik on Friday, Mr. Panetta told a gathering of American Air Force personnel of his decision to deploy the Patriots.

He said the United States was working with Turkey, Jordan and Israel to monitor Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons, and warned of “serious consequences” if Syria used them, but he did not offer any specifics.

“We have drawn up plans for presenting to the president,” Mr. Panetta said. “We have to be ready.”

Turkey’s worries about vulnerability to Syrian missiles, including Scuds that might be tipped with chemical weapons, were heightened recently by intelligence reports that Syrian troops had mixed small amounts of precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, at one or two storage sites, and loaded them into artillery shells and airplane bombs.  “Their arsenal of chemical weapons has been configured for use at a moment’s notice,” Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview on Friday.  Mr. Panetta, however, said this week that intelligence about chemical weapons activity in Syria had “leveled off.”

Recent Scud missile attacks by Mr. Assad’s forces against rebels in northern Syria have only added to Turkey’s concerns. The Scud missiles were armed with conventional warheads, but the attacks showed that the Assad government was prepared to use missiles as it struggled to slow rebel gains.

With the nearly two-year-old Syrian conflict entering its second winter and many thousands of people struggling for food and warmth in cities ruined by protracted fighting, the humanitarian costs seemed to be mounting.

An activist in Syria’s central province of Homs, who identified himself as Abu Ourouba, said the town of Houla — where the United Nations confirmed in May that Syrian troops had killed more than 100 people, including at least 32 children — was facing a catastrophe.

“Houla has been besieged from all directions for the past 10 days,” he said. “Until now, not even one loaf of bread has entered Houla. The food that was available is beginning to run out very quickly. Most children don’t have milk anymore. The kids are at risk of dying from hunger,” Shelling along access routes means that no one can walk “unless they crawl” to avoid hundreds of strikes from tanks, warplanes and rocket launchers, the activist said.

Thom Shanker reported from Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, and Michael R. Gordon from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt from Washington; Anne Barnard, Hania Mourtada and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon; Alan Cowell from London; and Ellen Barry from Moscow.

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