'Right-to-work' measure passes in Michigan Legislature

Controversial "right-to-work" legislation covering public-sector employees passed the Michigan House of Representatives on Tuesday, bringing it one step closer to being signed into law.

The House passed the bill, 58 to 51, as union opponents of the measure booed inside the Capitol and an estimated 12,000 people rallied outside. The state's Senate approved the bill last week.

The House is now scheduled to vote on a right-to-work bill for private-sector employees, which would cover Michigan's auto industry. If that measure passes, Michigan would become the 24th right-to-work state, meaning unions cannot require members to pay dues as a condition of employment.

Michigan is the fourth state in the Midwest to become embroiled in labor controversy since 2010, when a slate of Republican governors were swept into statehouses across the nation. The speed with which the right-to-work measure are being passed worries some labor experts, who say that it was once unimaginable that Michigan, where 17.5% of the workforce is unionized, would become a right-to-work state.

"Michigan could prove defining," said Harley Shaiken, a labor expert at UC Berkeley. "What happens here, given the role of unions historically in Michigan, and the larger political implications of right-to-work, will mean a lot."

But even as the Rev. Jesse Jackson rallied protesters on the steps of Lansing City Hall, labor leaders were hurriedly seeking ways to reverse the legislation down the road.

Michigan can't go the way of Ohio, where a referendum last year reversed legislation that would have restricted collective bargaining. Michigan's right-to-work legislation is attached to an appropriations bill, meaning it can't be reversed by referendum. Also, it may be too risky to wait and go the way of Wisconsin, where litigation continues after a judge struck down parts of a collective bargaining law.

However, in Michigan, there is an option of a "statutory initiative," which would be permitted if opponents of the bills can collect enough signatures to equal 8% of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election, union leaders say. A so-called veto referendum could be triggered by collecting signatures equal to 5% of the votes cast.

A statutory initiative would allow voters to cast a ballot on right-to-work legisation in November 2014, when Gov. Rick Snyder, who has said he would support the legislation, will be up for reelection.

"There are multiple options for a referendum," a senior labor leader said Tuesday. "All options are on the table. This fight is far from over."

It’s unclear whether unions are promoting a referendum now to warn Snyder of the repercussions that signing the legislation would have.

Democrats including Sen. Carl Levin and Rep. John Dingell met with Snyder on Monday to urge him to veto the legislation. The governor promised to "seriously" consider their concerns, but Democrats remained worried that he would sign the bills.

“The governor has a choice: He can put this on the ballot, and let the voters make the determination, or he can jam it through a lame-duck session,” Dingell said Monday.

Snyder, a businessman before he became governor, was elected in 2010 by a landslide, beating his opponent by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. But only 35.5% of respondents said they thought he was doing an "excellent" or "good" job in a Michigan State University survey this fall, and that figure could fall as the controversy continues.

"I think this will pass, and be signed, and there will be a long struggle with the United Auto Workers and other unions,” said Kristin Dziczek, director of the labor and industry group at the Center for Automotive Research. "They’re going to focus their attentions on overturning this. I don’t think the war has even begun."

ALSO:

Obama blasts right-to-work in Michigan

Ohio votes to overturn new collective bargaining law

Protests re-ignite as Michigan right-to-work bill nears final OK

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Our Favorite Tweets Highlight Our 'Second Screen' Culture, Twitter Survey Shows

Twitter released its annual look back at the year’s most popular tweets, biggest trends and most notable moments as seen through the lens of 140-character updates. There was a lot going on, from Hurricane Sandy to Whitney Houston, but the clear standout trend: We love to talk about things on TV.

Almost all of the year’s major conversations were about sports, politics or entertainment. Twitter went wild during the the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the presidential debates and the MTV Video Music Awards. It was the second screen where we went online to root for teams and politicians and musicians.

You could see this even more vividly reflected in the most retweeted moments of the year. Barack Obama had the most retweeted (810,000!) message with “Four more years.” But every one of the top tweets was related to politics, sports or entertainment.

This is the second-screen culture we keep hearing about, where we take to a phone or a tablet to talk about the things we’re seeing on TV. Even when it comes to Sandy’s destruction, or Houston’s self-destruction, when news hits we no longer just digest it; we go online to disseminate, dissect and discuss it. This isn’t a new behavior, of course. It’s the water cooler writ large, all across the planet, all at once. Except instead of taking place the day after an event, Twitter and Facebook and the like let us talk about events as they happen.

Which is exactly why politics and sports, and even natural disasters, lead to so many conversation. They are unscripted moments, happening in real time, with uncertain outcomes. They tend to be full of drama and human emotion. They elicit passionate takes, which themselves elicit passionate replies (and maybe even passionate retweets).

There’s a lot of talk about Twitter remaking itself into a media company. And Twitter clearly is trying to position itself as the place people go online to talk about current events — the Discover tab in its app was more or less made just for that.

But really, just as we gave it the retweet and the hashtag, we are the ones remaking Twitter. It may be able to point out things that are going on, but we’re the ones who make things happen. If Twitter is a media company now, it’s because we’ve made it that.

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‘Lincoln’ leads Critics’ Choice Awards nominees

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Film critics love “Lincoln.” The historical drama earned a record-breaking 13 nominations for the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards.

The Broadcast Film Critics Association announced the nominees for its 18th annual awards ceremony Tuesday in Los Angeles.

“Lincoln” beat the 12 nods earned by 2010′s “Black Swan” with bids for director Steven Spielberg, star Daniel Day-Lewis and supporting actors Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones, as well as cinematography, adapted screenplay, costume design, makeup, editing, art direction, score and acting ensemble.

“Les Miserables” follows with 11 nominations and “Silver Linings Playbook” has 10. “Life of Pi” earned nine nods. “Argo,” ”Skyfall” and “The Master” each have seven.

Winners will be announced Jan. 10, 2013, at a ceremony set to be broadcast live on the CW network.

___

Online:

www.criticschoice.com

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Global Update: Hand-Held Device Locates Hot Spots of Lead Contamination

Using a hand-held scanner to map hot spots where the soil is full of lead could protect children in mining towns against brain damage, scientists at Columbia University concluded in a new study.

Touched to the ground, the device, an X-ray fluorescence scanner,can measure the soil’s lead content in less than a minute, said Alexander van Geen, a geochemist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and an author of the study, which is in the current issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. The “XRF guns,” which are often used by scrap-metal sorters, cost between $15,000 and $40,000.

His team tested the scanners in Cerro de Pasco, Peru, a town in the high Andes with mines dating back 1,400 years. Samples as close as 100 yards apart showed widely variable lead levels, so it is possible to find and mark off the areas most dangerous to young children, who get fine lead dust on their hands while playing and then put their fingers in their mouths.

“People assume the contamination is everywhere, and it’s not,” Dr. van Geen said. “It could be in one backyard and not in another.” Or, he said, in an untested playground, schoolyard, or any place where children gather.

The technology could be useful anywhere families live close to mines or smelters, which is common in Latin America and Africa, he said. Lead is a byproduct not just of lead mines, but of mining for gold, silver, copper and other metals.

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Barry Diller Sells TripAdvisor Shares

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. (AP) — Barry Diller is stepping down as chairman of TripAdvisor after selling his stake in the travel website to Liberty Interactive.

Liberty Interactive bought 4.8 million shares of TripAdvisor Inc.'s common stock from Diller and The Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation for a total of about $300 million, making it the travel website's new majority shareholder.

Shares of TripAdvisor jumped 8.2 percent to $41.55 in afternoon trading Tuesday.

Diller, a former Fox and Paramount executive, said that he's stepping down as chairman and selling his shares because he has other obligations to attend to.

Diller will remain a director at TripAdvisor, based in Newton, Mass. He also serves as chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Liberty spent $62.50 per share. It now owns and controls 18.2 million shares of TripAdvisor's common stock and 12.8 million shares of its Class B common stock. That's about 22 percent of the equity and 57 percent of the total votes of all classes of TripAdvisor common stock.

Greg Maffei, Liberty's president and CEO, called TripAdvisor a leader in the travel industry and said the increased investment in the company will be a strong addition to Liberty's portfolio.

Liberty Interactive Corp. owns shopping websites like the QVC shopping channel and also invests in other companies.

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Latin music star Jenni Rivera believed dead in plane crash

Fans of Mexican-American singing star Jenni Rivera held a vigil Sunday night in Lynwood

MEXICO CITY — Mexican American singer Jenni Rivera, the "diva de la banda" whose commanding voice burst through the limits of regional Latin music and made her a cross-border sensation and the queen of a business empire, was believed to have died Sunday when the small jet carrying her and members of her entourage crashed in mountainous terrain.

Rivera, a native of Long Beach, was 43. Mexico's ministry of transportation did not confirm her death outright, but it said that she had been aboard the plane and that no one had survived the crash. Six others, including two pilots, also were on board.

"Everything suggests, with the evidence that's been found, that it was the airplane that the singer Jenni Rivera was traveling in," said Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, Mexico's secretary of communications and transportation. Of the crash site, Ruiz said: "Everything is destroyed. Nothing is recognizable."

Word of the accident ricocheted around the entertainment industry, with performer after performer expressing shock and grief. Fans gathered outside Rivera's four-acre estate in Encino.

"She was the Diana Ross of Mexican music," said Gustavo Lopez, an executive vice president at Universal Music Latin Entertainment, an umbrella group that includes Rivera's label. Lopez called Rivera "larger than life" and said that based on ticket sales, she was by far the top-grossing female artist in Mexico.

"Remember her with your heart the way she was," her father, Don Pedro Rivera, told reporters in Spanish on Sunday evening. "She never looked back. She was a beautiful person with the whole world."

Rivera had performed a concert in Monterrey, Mexico, on Saturday night — her standard fare of knee-buckling power ballads, pop-infused interpretations of traditional banda music and dizzying rhinestone costume changes.

At a news conference after the show, Rivera appeared happy and tranquil, pausing at one point to take a call on her cellphone that turned out to be a wrong number. She fielded questions about struggles in her personal life, including her recent separation from husband Esteban Loaiza, a professional baseball player.

"I can't focus on the negative," she said in Spanish. "Because that will defeat you. That will destroy you.... The number of times I have fallen down is the number of times I have gotten up."

Hours later, shortly after 3 a.m., Rivera is believed to have boarded a Learjet 25, which took off under clear skies. The jet headed south, toward Toluca, west of Mexico City; there, Rivera had been scheduled to tape the television show "La Voz" — Mexico's version of "The Voice" — on which she was a judge.

The plane, built in 1969 and registered to a Las Vegas talent management firm, reached 11,000 feet. But 10 minutes and 62 miles into the flight, air traffic controllers lost contact with its pilots, according to Mexican authorities. The jet crashed outside Iturbide, a remote city that straddles one of the few roads bisecting Mexico's Sierra de Arteaga national park.

Wreckage was scattered across several football fields' worth of terrain. An investigation into the cause of the crash was underway, and attempts to identify the remains of the victims had begun.

Rivera, a mother of five and grandmother of two, was believed to have been traveling with her publicist Arturo Rivera, who was not related to her, as well as with her lawyer, hairstylist and makeup artist; reports of their names were not consistent. Their identities were not confirmed by authorities. The pilots were identified as Miguel Perez and Alejandro Torres.

In the world of regional Latin music — norteño, cumbia and ranchera are among the popular niches — Rivera was practically royalty.

Her father was a noted singer of the Mexican storytelling ballads known as corridos. In the 1980s he launched the record label Cintas Acuario. It began as a swap-meet booth and grew into an influential and taste-making independent outfit, fueling the careers of artists such as the late Chalino Sanchez. Jenni Rivera's four brothers were associated with the music industry; her brother Lupillo, in particular, is a huge star in his own right.

Born on July 2, 1969, Rivera initially showed little inclination to join the family business. She worked for a time in real estate. But after a pregnancy and a divorce, she went to work for her father's record label and found her voice, literally and figuratively.

She released her first studio album in 2003, when she was 34.

Her path had not been easy, but rather than running from it, she wrote it into her music — domestic violence; struggles with weight; raising her children alone, or "sin capitan," without a captain. She was known for marathon live shows that left audiences exhilarated and exhausted; by the fifth hour of one recent performance, she was drinking straight from a tequila bottle and launching into a cover of "I Will Survive."

In a witty and sometimes baffling stew of Spanish and English, she sang about her three husbands, about drug traffickers, in tribute to her father, in tribute to her gynecologist.

She became, in a most unlikely way, a feminist hero among Latin women in Mexico and the United States and a powerful player in a genre of music dominated by men and machismo. Regional Mexican music styles had long been seen as limiting to artists, but Rivera shrugged off the labels and brought traditional-laced music — some of which sounded perilously close to polka — to a massive pop audience.

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PlayStation-Controlled DIY Tank May Be the Wildest Weapon Yet in the Syria War

Syria’s rebels may have taken the concept of a videogame a tad too far. A homemade rebel tank has recently been seen rolling down the road like a post-apocalyptic battle wagon — and armed with a machine gun controlled like it’s a PlayStation.

The Sham II — reportedly so named after ancient Syria — is also ready to be added to the rebels’ growing arsenal of DIY weapons. According to the AFP, a rebel engineer based near the city of Aleppo spent a month building the armored vehicle around a re-purposed car chassis, added cameras to it, and then hooked up a machine gun to a PlayStation controller and a TV screen inside. Four meters long and two meters wide, the vehicle is now readying to “join the fray in Aleppo as part of the Saad Benmoaz battalion of the Al-Ansar brigade.”

It’s the gun that makes it into a proper fighting vehicle, if on the crude side. The machine gun appears to be a 7.62 millimeter PKM with a camera hooked onto it. This gun and its camera are also controlled by a game controller from inside the truck. The driver, meanwhile, has a TV screen linked to three cameras mounted to Sham II’s front with a fourth camera in the back. Protecting both the driver and gunner are 2.5 centimeters of steel plating, which can’t resist rounds from tanks or rocket-propelled grenades but is reportedly able to withstand fire from a 23-millimeter cannon.

“Not including from the gun, the vehicle costs about $10,000,” a rebel named Abud, whose brother built the vehicle, told the AFP.

But it’s hard to say how effective the machine really is at resisting bullets. If the armor is sloppily built, it risks being knocked out by “spall.” That’s what happens when a piece of armor is hit by a projectile of sufficient power, and the armor is strong enough to stop the round from penetrating, but is still hit with enough force to cause a concussive blast wave to detach shards of material from the armor’s interior side. The blast wave then propels that material through the interior of the vehicle at incredibly high speeds. That can be very lethal to passengers and crew, and means that bad armor can often be worse than no armor at all.

The Sham II is also reportedly an upgrade to an even cruder predecessor. The first Sham has already seen combat, but only had enough armor to protect the driver. Syria’s rebels aren’t the only insurgents building crude, homemade armored trucks, either. Mexican drug cartels use them, often F-150s and semi-trucks re-purposed with steel plates, firing ports and room for passengers.

The thing is, the rebels also have real tanks captured from Assad’s army. Those have been used in recent weeks to repeatedly shell regime troops and bases, as the rebels continue seizing territory, particularly in Syria’s north. On Sunday, a rebel group comprised of Islamic extremists reportedly captured a major military base to the west of Aleppo — the last base to the city’s west that was still under Assad’s control. But the war isn’t over yet, and the rebels need every piece of equipment they can get their hands on; which apparently now includes a meatspace videogame.

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Black women battle obesity with dialogue, action

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nicole Ari Parker was motivated by frustration. For Star Jones, it was a matter of life or death. Toni Carey wanted a fresh start after a bad breakup.

All three have launched individual campaigns that reflect an emerging priority for African-American women: finding creative ways to combat the obesity epidemic that threatens their longevity.

African-American women have the highest obesity rate of any group of Americans. Four out of five black women have a body mass index above 25 percent, the threshold for being overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, nearly two-thirds of Americans overall are in this category, the CDC said.

Many black women seem to not be be bothered that they are generally heavier than other Americans.

Calorie-rich, traditional soul food is a staple in the diets of many African-Americans, and curvy black women are embraced positively through slang praising them as “thick” with a “little meat on their bones,” or through songs like the Commodore’s “Brick House” or “Bootylicious” by Destiny’s Child. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post earlier this year found that 66 percent of overweight black women had high self-esteem, while 41 percent of average-sized or thin white women had high self-esteem.

Still, that doesn’t mean black women reject the need to become healthier.

Historically black, all-female Spelman College in Atlanta is disbanding its NCAA teams and devoting those resources to a campus-wide wellness program. In an open letter announcing Spelman’s “wellness revolution,” president Beverly Daniel Tatum cited a campus analysis that found many of Spelman’s 2,100 students already have high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes or other chronic ailments.

“Spelman has an opportunity to change the health trajectory of our students and, through their influence, the communities from which they come,” Tatum’s letter said.

Jones, who underwent open heart surgery in 2010 at age 47 and now urges awareness about heart disease among black women, was met by an overflow crowd earlier this year when she convened a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation panel on black women and obesity.

“We have to get ourselves out of being conditioned to think that using soft words so we don’t hurt peoples’ feelings is doing them any favor,” Jones said. “Curvy, big-boned, hefty, full-figured, fluffy, chubby. Those are all words designed to make people feel better about themselves. That wasn’t helpful to me.”

Jones once embraced being large and fabulous, at 5 feet 5 inches tall and 300 pounds. But under that exterior, she said, she was morbidly obese, suffering from extreme fatigue, nausea, lightheadedness, heart palpitations and blurred vision. The attorney and TV personality also had gastric bypass surgery in 2003.

Now, she advises women to make simple changes such as reducing salt intake, exercising 30 minutes a day, quitting smoking, controlling portion sizes and making nutritious dietary choices.

Nutritionist and author Rovenia M. Brock, known professionally as Dr. Ro, agrees with Jones. She said getting active is only about 20 percent of the fight against obesity. The rest revolves around how much people eat.

“Our plates are killing us,” she said.

Brock said “food deserts,” or urban areas that lack quality supermarkets, are a real obstacle. She suggested getting around that by carpooling with neighbors to stores in areas with higher-quality grocery options or buying food in bulk. She also suggested growing herbs and vegetables in window-box gardens.

“Stop focusing on what’s not there, or what you think is not there,” Brock said. “We have to get out of this wimpy, ‘woe is me’ mentality.”

While first lady Michelle Obama has encouraged exercise through her “Let’s Move” campaign targeting childhood obesity, the spark for this current interest among black women may have been comments last year by Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, who observed publicly that women must stop allowing concern about their hair to prevent them from exercising.

Some black women visit salons as often as every two weeks, investing several hours and anywhere from $ 50 to hundreds of dollars each visit — activity that, according to the Black Owned Beauty Supply Association, helps fuel a $ 9 billion black hair care and cosmetics industry.

In an interview during a health conference in Washington last week, Benjamin said the damage sweat can inflict on costly hairstyles can affect women’s willingness to work out, and she hopes to change that. She goes to beauty industry conferences to encourage stylists to create exercise-friendly hairdos.

“I wouldn’t say we use it as an excuse, we use it as a barrier,” Benjamin said. “And that’s not one of the barriers anymore. We’re always going to have problems with balancing our lives, but we could take that one out.”

Parker, an actress who starred in “A Streetcar Named Desire” on Broadway earlier this year, understands this dilemma well. Out of personal frustration over maintaining both her workout and her hair, she created “Save Your Do” Gymwrap — a headband that can be wrapped around the hair in a way that minimizes sweat and preserves hairstyles.

“Not just as a black woman, but as a woman, since the beginning of time, beauty has been our responsibility,” Parker said in an interview. Because of that, she said, exercise has become linked with vanity instead of health.

“We’ve turned exercise into a weight-loss regimen,” Parker said. “No. Exercise is about being grateful for the body you have and sustaining the life you have. … Take all the hype out of the exercise and think of it as brushing your teeth.”

With their mutual family histories of diabetes and high blood pressure in mind, Carey, 28, and her sorority sister Ashley Hicks, 29, co-founded the running club Black Girls Run. Carey also considered it a new beginning after a bad breakup and a move across country. Since 2009, Black Girls Run has amassed 52,000 members who serve as a support system for runners.

Black Girls Run has about 60 groups nationwide that coordinate local races in Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C, Houston and Greensboro, N.C. Most groups run at least five times a week. Next month, the national running club will take its first “Black Girls Run — Preserve the Sexy” tour to cities with high obesity rates. The tour includes health and fitness clinics with information on nutrition, hair maintenance and running gear.

“We found that when you want to get healthy and when you want to be active, it’s intimidating,” Carey said. “You don’t know where to start. There’s a little coaxing that has to go along with that.”

Parker said once African-American women place value on their bodies and longevity, everything else will follow. It costs her nothing, she said, to walk around an outdoor track with her husband, actor Boris Kodjoe, or run up and down stairs at home with her headphones.

“One good step breeds another one,” Parker said. “You’re going to have one less margarita, one less scoop of Thanksgiving macaroni … and yet you’re not doing anything fanatical or dramatic.”

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Doping at U.S. Tracks Affects Europe’s Taste for Horse Meat

PARIS — For decades, American horses, many of them retired or damaged racehorses, have been shipped to Canada and Mexico, where it is legal to slaughter horses, and then processed and sold for consumption in Europe and beyond.

Christinne Muschi for The New York Times

A slaughterhouse in Saint-André-Avellin, Quebec, where meat is processed for sale in Europe.

Lately, however, European food safety officials have notified Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses of a growing concern: The meat of American racehorses may be too toxic to eat safely because the horses have been injected repeatedly with drugs.

Despite the fact that racehorses make up only a fraction of the trade in horse meat, the European officials have indicated that they may nonetheless require lifetime medication records for slaughter-bound horses from Canada and Mexico, and perhaps require them to be held on feedlots or some other holding area for six months before they are slaughtered.

In October, Stephan Giguere, the general manager of a major slaughterhouse in Quebec, said he turned away truckloads of horses coming from the United States because his clients were worried about potential drug issues. Mr. Giguere said he told his buyers to stay away from horses coming from American racetracks.

“We don’t want them,” he said. “It’s too risky.”

The action is just the latest indication of the troubled state of American racing and its problems with the doping of horses. Some prominent trainers have been disciplined for using legal and illegal drugs, and horses loaded with painkillers have been breaking down in arresting numbers. Congress has called for reform, and state regulators have begun imposing stricter rules.

But for pure emotional effect, the alarm raised in the international horse-meat marketplace packs a distinctive punch.

Some 138,000 horses were sent to Canada or Mexico in 2010 alone to be turned into meat for Europe and other parts of the world, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Organizations concerned about the welfare of retired racehorses have estimated that anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the population sent for slaughter may have performed on racetracks in the United States.

“Racehorses are walking pharmacies,” said Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a veterinarian on the faculty of Tufts University and a co-author of a 2010 article that sought to raise concerns about the health risks posed by American racehorses. He said it was reckless to want any of the drugs routinely administered to horses “in your food chain.”

Horses being shipped to Mexico and Canada are by law required to have been free of certain drugs for six months before being slaughtered, and those involved in their shipping must have affidavits proving that. But European Commission officials say the affidavits are easily falsified. As a result, American racehorses often show up in Canada within weeks — sometimes days — of their leaving the racetrack and their steady diets of drugs.

In October, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Health and Consumers found serious problems while auditing the operations of equine slaughter facilities in Mexico, where 80 percent of the horses arrive from the United States. The commission’s report said Mexican officials were not allowed to question the “authenticity or reliability of the sworn statements” about the ostensibly drug-free horses, and thus had no way of verifying whether the horses were tainted by drugs.

“The systems in place for identification, the food-chain information and in particular the affidavits concerning the nontreatment for six months with certain medical substances, both for the horses imported from the U.S. as well as for the Mexican horses, are insufficient to guarantee that standards equivalent to those provided for by E.U. legislation are applied,” the report said.

The authorities in the United States and Canada acknowledge that oversight of the slaughter business is lax. On July 9, the United States Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to an Ohio feedlot operator who sells horses for slaughter. The operator, Ronald Andio, was reprimanded for selling a drug-tainted thoroughbred horse to a Canadian slaughterhouse.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had tested the carcass of the horse the previous August and found the anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone in the muscle and kidney tissues. It also discovered clenbuterol, a widely abused medication for breathing problems that can build muscle by mimicking anabolic steroids.

Because horses are not a traditional food source in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration does not require human food safety information as it considers what drugs can be used legally on horses. Patricia El-Hinnawy, a spokeswoman for the agency, said agency-approved drugs intended for use in horses carried the warning “Do not use in horses intended for human consumption.”

She also said the case against Mr. Andio remained open.

“On the warning letter, the case remains open and no further information can be provided at this time,” Ms. El-Hinnawy said.

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The Media Equation: For Wall Street Journal, Leadership at a Crossroads

Betting against Rupert Murdoch hasn’t gone very well for many people, including me. When he bought The Wall Street Journal in 2007 and brought in a trusted associate, Robert Thomson from The Times of London, I said that he might ruin one of the country’s most important newspapers.

That did not happen. Mr. Thomson’s version of The Journal, with a stronger focus on general news, a beefed-up Saturday edition and a luxury magazine, has been a hit with readers. It may not have the literary majesty of its previous incarnation, but the new bosses made it clear that was hardly a priority.

The Journal has added subscribers to become the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation and has reached a new group of advertisers outside the narrow confines of business. The financial results are tougher to know, but they won’t remain opaque for long. Early next year, News Corporation will split into two companies, with the entertainment assets bundled into the Fox Group and the publishing assets separated into a division that will retain the News Corporation name.

Mr. Murdoch will be able to invest in print without riling investors, but the publishing operation will no longer be connected to billions in revenue from hits like “Avatar,” “American Idol” and Fox News, making the challenge of running it a steep one.

That challenge will fall to Mr. Thomson, an entrepreneurial editor, but not someone who has overseen a sprawling publishing operation that includes broadcast properties in Australia along with newspapers there and in Britain as well as The New York Post, Dow Jones Newswires, and, of course, The Journal.

Making a splash in the slow-growth print businesses will be tough — the publishing arm of News Corporation is estimated to account for 24 percent of the revenue, but only 11 percent of the profits.

Which brings us to whom and what Mr. Thomson is leaving behind at The Journal and Dow Jones, the linchpin of the publishing division.

Mr. Thomson’s promotion will put the newspaper in the hands of Gerard Baker, his deputy who will succeed him as managing editor, and Lex Fenwick, the publisher of The Journal and chief executive of Dow Jones. The celebration of the next era was commemorated in a video that was posted online minutes after it happened last Monday. In it, Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Baker are seen popping the cork on a bottle of Champagne, which Mr. Murdoch promptly poured on Mr. Baker’s head as Mr. Thomson looked on. (Mr. Baker, who is Catholic, made the sign of the cross after his bubbly baptism.)

The celebration clanked a bit — Champagne in the newsroom is usually reserved for Pulitzer victories, something that hasn’t happened in five years on the news side at The Journal. But it clanked for another reason. Many people, including the dozen or so current and former employees I spoke with (who did not want to be identified criticizing their bosses, past or present), worry over Mr. Thomson’s departure because they think Mr. Baker and Mr. Fenwick are not up to their roles.

With a background as a neoconservative columnist from Britain, Mr. Baker shares Mr. Thomson’s politics, but little of his managerial experience or his history of reinventing newsrooms. Mr. Baker was a columnist at The Times of London and its United States editor and also worked as the Washington bureau chief of The Financial Times. His antipathy for the current administration was memorialized in an appearance on Fox News during which he satirized the president as a false messiah.

After three years as a deputy managing editor of The Journal, Mr. Baker has no initiatives to call his own and little constituency in the newsroom. On Tuesday, the day after he was appointed, he walked the halls of the newspaper and for the reporters I spoke with, seeing him out and about was a startling sight.

When he moved to The Journal in 2009, Mr. Baker was, by dint of interest and skill set, a columnist and pundit and, as I have written here in the past, he hasn’t been shy about imposing his political and religious views on news coverage. (This tendency remains strong, according to current employees.)

The irony of bemoaning the replacement of Mr. Thomson, a man they once feared, was not lost on many of the people I talked to. Mr. Baker’s succession became clear when Alan Murray, a longtime Journal editor whom many considered to be in the running for the job, said in November that he was leaving to become president of the Pew Research Center. Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Thomson obviously trust Mr. Baker, but he has little experience in running a big news enterprise full of many kingdoms and has yet to impress a deeply skeptical newsroom.

Mr. Fenwick has certainly played in the big leagues before, when he ran Bloomberg L.P. A flamboyant and hard-driving executive from the “Glengarry Glen Ross” school of management, he is feared by the executives who work for him, at least the ones who remain after a purge that made room for loyalists he brought over from his 25-year tenure at Bloomberg.

After arriving at the beginning of the year to replace Les Hinton, who had become embroiled in the hacking scandal in Britain, he dismantled the executive suite, ordering that managers leave their offices for an open floor plan that mirrored the environment at Bloomberg. Unfortunately for his new employer, he has also replicated a management approach that came to be seen as counterproductive. In his final years there, his portfolio was diminished, and in 2008, he lost his role as chief executive of the entire organization and was put in charge of Bloomberg Ventures.

He is leading the effort to make Dow Jones a player in the financial data business by developing a proprietary Web product to compete with Reuters and Bloomberg, instead of having the company’s information carried on those competitors’ terminals. Although deferential to Mr. Thomson, he habitually berates and bullies people who work for him in very public settings, according to other senior executives who have witnessed the tirades. An expansive Reuters article in October suggested that Mr. Fenwick was erratic, profane and hard to work for, and many of the people I’ve spoken with at The Journal say the account was all too accurate. And he is now in the indelicate position of reporting to Mr. Thomson, who had reported to him.

Mr. Murdoch’s choices for his new company pose a risk for The Journal, its employees and readers, like me, who still treasure the paper. And these are the men Mr. Murdoch has picked. Would I bet against them? Perhaps, but that would just be speculation. Mr. Murdoch has already bet his company on them.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

twitter.com/carr2n

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