Microsoft Battles Google by Hiring Political Brawler Mark Penn

SEATTLE — Mark Penn made a name for himself in Washington by bulldozing enemies of the Clintons. Now he spends his days trying to do the same to Google, on behalf of its archrival Microsoft.

Since Mr. Penn was put in charge of “strategic and special projects” at Microsoft in August, much of his job has involved efforts to trip up Google, which Microsoft has failed to dislodge from its perch atop the lucrative Internet search market.

Drawing on his background in polling, data crunching and campaigning, Mr. Penn created a holiday commercial that has been running during Monday Night Football and other shows, in which Microsoft criticizes Google for polluting the quality of its shopping search results with advertisements. “Don’t get scroogled,” it warns. His other projects include a blind taste test, Coke-versus-Pepsi style, of search results from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.

The campaigns by Mr. Penn, 58, a longtime political operative known for his brusque personality and scorched-earth tactics, are part of a broader effort at Microsoft to give its marketing the nimbleness of a political campaign, where a candidate can turn an opponent’s gaffe into a damaging commercial within hours. They are also a sign of the company’s mounting frustration with Google after losing billions of dollars a year on its search efforts, while losing ground to Google in the browser and smartphones markets and other areas.

Microsoft has long attacked Google from the shadows, whispering to regulators, journalists and anyone else who would listen that Google was a privacy-violating, anticompetitive bully. The fruits of its recent work in this area could come next week, when the Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce the results of its antitrust investigation of Google, a case that echoes Microsoft’s own antitrust suit in the 1990s. A similar investigation by the European Union is also wrapping up. A bad outcome for Google in either one would be a victory for Microsoft.

But Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., has realized that it cannot rely only on regulators to scrutinize Google — which is where Mr. Penn comes in. He is increasing the urgency of Microsoft’s efforts and focusing on their more public side.

In an interview, Mr. Penn said companies underestimated the importance of policy issues like privacy to consumers, as opposed to politicians and regulators. “It’s not about whether they can get them through Washington,” he said. “It’s whether they can get them through Main Street.”

Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman, declined to comment on Microsoft’s actions specifically, but said that while Google also employed lobbyists and marketers, “our focus is on Google and the positive impact our industry has on society, not the competition.”

In Washington, Mr. Penn is a lightning rod. He developed a relationship with the Clintons as a pollster during President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, when he helped identify the value of “soccer moms” and other niche voter groups.

As chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 campaign for president, he conceived the “3 a.m.” commercial that raised doubts about whether Barack Obama, then a senator, was ready for the Oval Office. Mr. Penn argued in an essay he wrote for Time magazine in May that “negative ads are, by and large, good for our democracy.”

But his approach has ended up souring many of his professional relationships. He left Mrs. Clinton’s campaign after an uproar about his consulting work for the government of Colombia, which was seeking the passage of a trade treaty with the United States that Mrs. Clinton, then a senator, opposed.

“Google should be prepared for everything but the kitchen sink thrown at them,” said a former colleague who worked closely with Mr. Penn in politics and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Actually, they should be prepared for the kitchen sink to be thrown at them, too.”

Hiring Mr. Penn demonstrates how seriously Microsoft is taking this fight, said Michael A. Cusumano, a business professor at M.I.T. who co-wrote a book about Microsoft’s browser war.

“They’re pulling out all the stops to do whatever they can to halt Google’s advance, just as their competition did to them,” Professor Cusumano said. “I suppose that if Microsoft can actually put a doubt in people’s mind that Google isn’t unbiased and has become some kind of evil empire, they might very well get results.”

Nick Wingfield reported from Seattle and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco.

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Changing of the Guard: Chinese Opposition to Labor Camps Widens

BEIJING — It is hard to say exactly which “subversive” sentiments drew the police to Ren Jianyu, who posted them on his microblog last year, although “down with dictatorship” and “long live democracy” stand out.

In the end, Mr. Ren, 25, a college graduate from Chongqing, the southwestern metropolis, was sent without trial to a work camp based on the T-shirt that investigators found in his closet: “Freedom or death,” it said.

Last year Mr. Ren was among tens of thousands of Chinese who were dumped into the nation’s vast “re-education through labor” system, a Stalinist-inspired constellation of penal colonies where pickpockets, petitioners, underground Christian church members and other perceived social irritants toil in dismal conditions for up to four years, all without trial. With as many as 190,000 inmates at any one time, it is one of the world’s largest systems of forced labor.

But now the labor system, known by its shorthand, “laojiao,” is facing a groundswell of opposition from both inside and outside the Communist Party. Critics say the once-in-a-decade leadership transition last month, which included the demotion of the chief of the nation’s vast internal security apparatus, has created a potential opening for judicial and legal reform.

“It’s high time we demolish this unconstitutional and abusive system that violates basic human rights, fuels instability and smears the government’s image,” said Hu Xingdou, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology who frequently rails against the system that Mao Zedong created in the 1950s to take down suspected class enemies and counterrevolutionaries.

The calls for change go beyond longstanding advocates of political reform like Professor Hu. China’s national bar association is circulating an online petition that has been signed by thousands. Legal experts have convened seminars to denounce the system. And almost every day, it seems, the state-run news media, with the top leadership’s tacit support, report on hapless citizens ensnared by the arbitrary justice that the local police impose with the wave of a hand.

Mr. Ren’s case would probably have gone unnoticed if not for China’s increasingly emboldened human rights defenders, who showcased his plight on the Internet. Evidently prodded by the torrent of news coverage, Chongqing officials cut short his two-year sentence and freed him.

“It was a depressing, dreadful experience,” Mr. Ren said in a telephone interview this month, describing long days spent in the camp’s wire-coiling workshop.

Other examples abound. A migrant worker from Inner Mongolia was sent away for quarreling with an official at a restaurant. A mother from Hunan Province was given an 18-month sentence after she publicly protested that the men who had raped and forced her 11-year-old daughter into prostitution had been treated too leniently.

This month an 80-year-old Korean War veteran with Parkinson’s disease sobbed on national television as he described spending 18 months in a labor camp as punishment for filing local corruption complaints.

People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, took aim at the system last month, saying it had become “a tool of retaliation” for local officials. In October the head of a government judicial reform committee noted a broad consensus in favor of addressing the system’s worst abuses.

And in a widely circulated recent essay, the vice president of the Supreme People’s Court, Jiang Bixin, argued that the government must act within the law if it is to survive. “Only with constraints on public power can the rights and freedoms of citizens be securely realized,” he wrote.

China’s incoming president, Xi Jinping, has not yet weighed in on the issue, but reform advocates are encouraged by a speech he gave this month talking up the widely ignored protections afforded by China’s Constitution, which include freedom from unlawful detention and the right to an open trial. “We must establish mechanisms to restrain and supervise power,” Mr. Xi said.

Until now, China’s powerful security establishment has staved off any erosion of its authority, warning of calamity if the police lose their ability to detain perceived troublemakers without the interference of judges or defense lawyers.

The Ministry of Public Security has other reasons to preserve the status quo. The system, which employs tens of thousands of people, is a gold mine for local authorities, who earn money from the goods produced by detainees. Officials also covet the bribes offered to reduce sentences, critics say, and the payments families make to ensure a loved one is properly fed while in custody.

Patrick Zuo contributed research.

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News Analysis: A Federal Reserve That Is Focused on the Value of Clarity

The Federal Reserve’s decision on Wednesday to announce specific economic objectives for its policies would have stunned and dismayed earlier generations of central bankers, who regarded secrecy as a virtue and obfuscation as a prized technique for manipulating financial markets.

“Since I’ve become a central banker, I’ve learned to mumble with great coherence,” Alan Greenspan, a former Fed chairman, told reporters in 1987. “If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.”

But a greater appreciation for the virtues of transparency has been one of the most important shifts in central banking in recent decades. It is a response to public demands for increased accountability and an embrace of economic research on monetary policy that finds speaking clearly is more effective than mumbling. The Fed’s vice chairwoman, Janet Yellen, last month described the result as a “revolution.”

Until recently, the Fed under Mr. Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, were tentative participants in this revolution. Mr. Bernanke spoke often about the need to speak clearly, but there were few tangible changes.

It now appears that he was simply busy dealing with a financial crisis. Over the last two years, Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues have announced a series of changes intended to increase the transparency of the Fed’s decision-making. Some of those moves have also transformed the way those decisions are made and, the Fed hopes, increased the power of its efforts to revive the economy.

Several of those changes were tied together by Wednesday’s announcement that the Fed would hold short-term interest rates near zero as long as the unemployment rate remained above 6.5 percent and inflation remained under control.

The new policy quantifies the goals that the Fed formally articulated for the first time in a statement in January. It extends the Fed’s recent willingness to forecast the level of interest rates. It will require the Fed to publish a consensus forecast of inflation for the first time. And it was announced on Wednesday, Mr. Bernanke said, in part because he was scheduled to hold a news conference, another of his innovations.

The Fed’s push to speak more clearly is partly motivated by political considerations. During the prosperous 1990s, the success of monetary policy was its own justification. After a financial crisis that the Fed failed to avert or predict, in the fourth year of a recovery that continues to disappoint, the Fed has no better defense than to explain what it is doing as clearly as possible.

It is primarily the result, however, of taking research seriously. While some economists, notably Milton Friedman, long argued that transparency would fortify the Fed’s independence, the economic case crystallized more recently.

“It was an article of faith in central banking that secrecy about monetary policy decisions was the best policy,” Ms. Yellen recalled in a recent speech.

Absurd as it may seem now, until the mid-1990s, the Fed did not announce changes in its benchmark interest rate. It let the movement speak for itself.

Ms. Yellen and her colleagues have now concluded that transparency actually enhances the impact of the Fed’s policies, particularly in the current circumstance. The Fed cannot push short-term rates below zero, but it still can reduce long-term rates, which are based on the expected level of short-term rates over the life of a loan, by persuading investors that those rates will remain near zero.

The Fed first experimented with this approach in 2003, when it announced that it would keep its benchmark rate at 1 percent for a “considerable period.”

In recent years, since pushing rates nearly to zero in December 2008, the Fed has steadily elaborated on that idea. It promised to keep rates near zero for an “extended period.” Then it announced a series of specific timetables, most recently promising in September to hold rates near zero at least until mid-2015.

Mr. Bernanke said on Wednesday that he did not expect the change to an unemployment rate peg to have a significant short-term impact. The Fed still expects to start raising rates no earlier than the second half of 2015. For now, the central bank is simply clarifying its reasons.

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HealthBridge Managemant Ordered to Reinstate Striking Workers

A federal judge in Hartford has ordered a Connecticut nursing home chain to reinstate nearly 600 workers who have been on strike since July 3, and to rescind the pension and health care cuts it had imposed.

Judge Robert N. Chatigny of the United States District Court in Connecticut ruled on Tuesday night that the nursing homes’ owner, HealthBridge Management, had broken the law by refusing to bargain in good faith and by imposing the cuts before a true negotiating impasse had been reached.

Judge Chatigny issued an injunction that ordered HealthBridge to reinstate the workers by next Monday, even if it means ousting hundreds of the replacement workers hired to run the nursing homes after the strike began.

“Everybody is quite happy about the decision,” said Vern Scatliffe, a nurse’s aide, as he picketed outside Danbury Health Care Center, one of the five nursing homes — the others are in Milford, Newington, Stamford and Westport — where the workers walked out to protest the cuts HealthBridge had imposed. “The judge’s order is a big relief to me. I can now go back to work and earn my living again.”

Saying the company was disappointed by the judge’s decision, Lisa Crutchfield, a HealthBridge spokeswoman, said it had filed an appeal with the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, asking it to overturn the injunction.

“We are acting in the best interests of our residents — their well-being is paramount to us,” she said. Ms. Crutchfield said the order to reinstate the strikers would “expose residents to the very people who sought to do them harm” during the walkout. HealthBridge has accused the strikers of several acts of sabotage, including changing the names on several patients’ doors and wheelchairs and switching the names of some residents in Alzheimer’s units.

Deborah Chernoff, a spokeswoman for the strikers’ union, the New England Health Care Employees Union, said it had opposed any sabotage. She suggested that the allegations themselves were suspicious, noting that they were first made two weeks after the strike began.

The strike began after HealthBridge declared the negotiations deadlocked and then imposed changes that included freezing the workers’ pensions, requiring many to pay at least $6,000 more a year for family health coverage and eliminating six paid sick days and a week’s vacation for many workers.

Two weeks after the strike began, the striking employees, who belong to a branch of the Service Employees International Union, offered to return to work, but the company refused to take them back. Judge Chatigny said it was “just and proper” to reinstate them “because there is a pressing need to restore the status quo” from before the company made the changes, which he found to be illegal.

The judge acted only after the National Labor Relations Board’s office in Hartford sought an injunction.

David Pickus, president of the strikers’ union, said, “This ruling is a decisive victory for workers and a sign that HealthBridge cannot get away with its unfair and illegal treatment of its employees.”

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HealthBridge Managemant Ordered to Reinstate Striking Workers

A federal judge in Hartford has ordered a Connecticut nursing home chain to reinstate nearly 600 workers who have been on strike since July 3, and to rescind the pension and health care cuts it had imposed.

Judge Robert N. Chatigny of the United States District Court in Connecticut ruled on Tuesday night that the nursing homes’ owner, HealthBridge Management, had broken the law by refusing to bargain in good faith and by imposing the cuts before a true negotiating impasse had been reached.

Judge Chatigny issued an injunction that ordered HealthBridge to reinstate the workers by next Monday, even if it means ousting hundreds of the replacement workers hired to run the nursing homes after the strike began.

“Everybody is quite happy about the decision,” said Vern Scatliffe, a nurse’s aide, as he picketed outside Danbury Health Care Center, one of the five nursing homes — the others are in Milford, Newington, Stamford and Westport — where the workers walked out to protest the cuts HealthBridge had imposed. “The judge’s order is a big relief to me. I can now go back to work and earn my living again.”

Saying the company was disappointed by the judge’s decision, Lisa Crutchfield, a HealthBridge spokeswoman, said it had filed an appeal with the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, asking it to overturn the injunction.

“We are acting in the best interests of our residents — their well-being is paramount to us,” she said. Ms. Crutchfield said the order to reinstate the strikers would “expose residents to the very people who sought to do them harm” during the walkout. HealthBridge has accused the strikers of several acts of sabotage, including changing the names on several patients’ doors and wheelchairs and switching the names of some residents in Alzheimer’s units.

Deborah Chernoff, a spokeswoman for the strikers’ union, the New England Health Care Employees Union, said it had opposed any sabotage. She suggested that the allegations themselves were suspicious, noting that they were first made two weeks after the strike began.

The strike began after HealthBridge declared the negotiations deadlocked and then imposed changes that included freezing the workers’ pensions, requiring many to pay at least $6,000 more a year for family health coverage and eliminating six paid sick days and a week’s vacation for many workers.

Two weeks after the strike began, the striking employees, who belong to a branch of the Service Employees International Union, offered to return to work, but the company refused to take them back. Judge Chatigny said it was “just and proper” to reinstate them “because there is a pressing need to restore the status quo” from before the company made the changes, which he found to be illegal.

The judge acted only after the National Labor Relations Board’s office in Hartford sought an injunction.

David Pickus, president of the strikers’ union, said, “This ruling is a decisive victory for workers and a sign that HealthBridge cannot get away with its unfair and illegal treatment of its employees.”

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At War Blog: Ending a Life, and a Part of Yourself, For the First Time

Two hundred meters was all that separated me from an insurgent carrying an AK-47. I sat in a dilapidated brown leather chair, recessed in the shadows of a second-story room in the government complex of Falluja, Iraq. My sights were perfectly centered as I perched my elbows on the desk in front of me. The clear tip traced the center of his chest. He crept around a corner of a mud wall and slowly moved toward our position. Fear built inside me. I hesitantly began to pull the trigger of my M-16.

I was scared, to say the least. It was the first time my training would be tested. I heard my rifle crack as I fired. The weapon’s recoil nudged my shoulder, and he crumpled to the ground. The aroma of gunpowder filled the room. I fired two more rounds into his motionless body, then stared in amazement as his body lay lifeless, his black and red scarf astray. The sun rose across the city’s skyline. I was 19.

For me, the 10th of November is special. It is the Marine Corps’s birthday, a day for celebrating camaraderie. But it is also the day, eight years ago, when I was pinned down in the relentless firefights of Operation Phantom Fury. It is the day when I took a person’s life for the first time.

These two drastically different events make for mixed emotions at that time of year. In 2004, fighting in a large-scale attack on the corps’s birthday was thrilling. I’d be lying if I said that I am not still motivated by the memory. What better way to celebrate 229 years of decorated service than to take part in writing the corps’s next chapter? But I also feel as though I lost a part of myself that day.

Taking someone’s life brings you to the darkest side of yourself. There are nights when I see the faces of people I killed. There are days when I get lost in vivid memories of violent combat for minutes at a time. But it also leaves you emotionally numb. In the last eight years, I have not been able to cry unless I am reminiscing about Falluja. It is as if my brain created a space where feelings were lost or delayed. And when I did feel emotions after killing, it was often the sense of relief that I was not on the receiving end – an emotion that might readily, but incorrectly, be interpreted as satisfaction.

It was easy then to fall back on the powerful logic that it was either me or them, or worse yet, one of my fellow Marines. But that logic leaves questions with no easy answers. Did I in some ways come to enjoy killing? Was the loss of a life, and my innocence, worth it?

Pulling the trigger for the first time was beyond difficult. But the more I had to do it, the easier it became. With each passing trigger pull I lost more and more of my innocence. In fact, I actually started to get used to “slaying bodies,” as we called killing the enemy back then. And as more and more of my comrades were injured or killed, the sweeter the revenge began to taste. Looking back on it now, I feel bad that I did not feel bad.

Taking someone’s life changes you whether you like to admit it or not. It took me a long time to notice and admit the changes in me. It is something most people will never have to do. I am envious of those people. I look back on taking an insurgent’s life and can’t help but think I went a little crazy from doing so. I wonder from time to time what I was like before that day many years ago. But I also realize I will never be that person again.

I cannot be alone. In the wake of a suicide epidemic among veterans and active-duty troops, there must be others dealing with these demons. There must be other combat veterans caught in a moral struggle over their wartime actions.

Despite pondering these thoughts for many years, I chose to re-enlist in 2006 knowing for sure that I would go to Afghanistan. Part of me wanted the rush that combat gave me. After being so close to death, things that once excited you have a way of losing their thrill when you return home. I wanted to feel alive again. Strangely, that involved surrounding myself with the threat of death.

Afghanistan was very different from Iraq. The Taliban were very persistent in recovering their wounded. My squad fired thousands of rounds, but the most we ever saw was blood spatter and entrails. No dead bodies. No proof that we killed anyone.

The firefights were intense. Some of them lasted hours. The enemy mastered complex ambushes and attacked us from multiple locations at once, which truly tested my leadership. The fear was real. The bullets were real. I loved it, and with time, my men did too.

At the beginning of our deployment to Afghanistan, I was the only one in my squad with combat experience. The first time we took fire, my men briefly froze, just as I did years earlier. Looking at their faces I could see the fear as they struggled to accept our reality. But within seconds of the first rounds’ hitting our position, their training kicked in and we not only suppressed but also maneuvered on the enemy. The pride I felt watching my men execute their training was immeasurable.

After our first encounter with the enemy I knew they had felt what I had felt, and wanted to feel again. It was all they talked about. And when we went for days without enemy contact, my men would talk about how they missed the rush.

I was lucky enough to bring all of my men home from Afghanistan. Even now, two years later, we still joke about missing the firefights. Though I left the Marine Corps last month after nearly 10 years of service, I will still share with my men the memories of being pinned down in alleyways, the sound of bullets whizzing past our heads and the stench of death.

And so I am left with a raging conflict of emotions and memories. I wonder what life will be like without the thrill of combat or the agony of taking a human life. I’m sure I will become nostalgic watching videos and reminiscing over old photos. But more than anything, I worry about the part of me that I lost and whether I will find it somewhere down the line.

Thomas James Brennan is a reporter for The Robesonian in Lumberton, N.C. Before being medically retired this fall, he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, and is a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. Follow him on Twitter at @thomasjbrennan.

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State of the Art: Google Maps App for iPhone Goes in the Right Direction - Review

It was one of the biggest tech headlines of the year: in September, Apple dropped its contract with Google, which had always supplied the data for the iPhone’s Maps app. For various strategic reasons, Apple preferred to write a new app, based on a new database of the world that Apple intended to assemble itself.

As everybody knows by now, Apple got lost along the way. It was like a 22-car pileup. Timothy Cook, Apple’s chief executive, made a quick turn, publicly apologizing, firing the executive responsible and vowing to fix Maps. For a company that prides itself on flawless execution, it was quite a detour.

Rumors swirled that Google would create an iPhone app of its own, one that would use its seven-year-old, far more polished database of the world.

That was true. Today, Google Maps for the iPhone has arrived. It’s free, fast and fantastic.

Now, there are two parts to a great maps app. There’s the app itself — how it looks, how it works, what the features are. In this regard, few people complain about Apple’s Maps app; it’s beautiful, and its navigation mode for drivers is clear, uncluttered and distraction-free.

But then there’s the hard part: the underlying data. Apple and Google have each constructed staggeringly complex databases of the world and its roads.

The recipe for both companies includes map data from TomTom, satellite photography from a different source, real-time traffic data from others, restaurant and store listings from still more sources, and so on. In the end, Apple says that it incorporated data from at least 24 different sources.

Those sources always include errors, if only because the world constantly changes. Worse, those sources sometimes disagree with one another. It takes years to fix the problems and mesh these data sources together.

So the first great thing about Google’s new Maps is the underlying data. Hundreds of Google employees have spent years hand-editing the maps, fixing the thousands of errors that people report every day. (In the new app, you report a mistake just by shaking the phone.) And since 2006, Google’s Street View vehicles have trawled 3,000 cities, photographing and confirming the cartographical accuracy of five million miles of roads.

You can sense the new app’s polish and intelligence the minute you enter your first address; it’s infinitely more understanding. When I type “200 W 79, NYC,” Google Maps drops a pin right where it belongs: on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Apple’s Maps app, on the other hand, acts positively drunk. It asks me to clarify: “Did you mean 200 Durham Road, Madison, CT? Or 200 Madison Road, Durham, CT?”

Um, what?

And then there’s the navigation. Lots of iPhone owners report that they’ve had no problem with Apple’s driving instructions, and that’s great. But I’ve been idiotically misdirected a few times — and the trouble is, you never know in advance. You wind up with a deep mistrust of the app that’s hard to shake. Google’s directions weren’t great in the app’s early days either, and they’re still not always perfect. But after years of polishing and corrections, they’re right a lot more often.

The must-have features are all here: spoken driving directions, color-coded real-time traffic conditions, vector-based maps (smooth at any size). But the new app also offers some incredibly powerful, useful features that Apple’s app lacks.

Street View, of course, lets you see a photograph of a place, and even “walk” down the street in any direction. Great for checking out a neighborhood before you go, scoping out the parking situation or playing “you are there” when you read a news article.

Along with driving directions, Google Maps gives equal emphasis to walking directions and public transportation options.

This feature is brilliantly done. Google Maps displays a clean, step-by-step timeline of your entire public transportation adventure. If you ask for a route from Westport, Conn., to the Empire State Building, the timeline says: “4:27 pm, Board New Haven train toward Grand Central Terminal.” Then it shows you the names of the actual train stops you’ll pass. Then, “5:47 pm, Grand Central. Get off and walk 2 min.” Then, “5:57 pm, 33rd St: Board the #6 Lexington Avenue Local towards Brooklyn Bridge.” And so on.

Even if public transportation were all it did, Google Maps would be one of the best apps ever. (Apple kicks you over to other companies’ apps for this information.)

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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Another Look at a Drink Ingredient, Brominated Vegetable Oil

James Edward Bates for The New York Times

Sarah Kavanagh, 15, of Hattiesburg, Miss., started an online petition asking PepsiCo to change Gatorade’s formula.

Sarah Kavanagh and her little brother were looking forward to the bottles of Gatorade they had put in the refrigerator after playing outdoors one hot, humid afternoon last month in Hattiesburg, Miss.

But before she took a sip, Sarah, a dedicated vegetarian, did what she often does and checked the label to make sure no animal products were in the drink. One ingredient, brominated vegetable oil, caught her eye.

“I knew it probably wasn’t from an animal because it had vegetable in the name, but I still wanted to know what it was, so I Googled it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “A page popped up with a long list of possible side effects, including neurological disorders and altered thyroid hormones. I didn’t expect that.”

She threw the product away and started a petition on Change.org, a nonprofit Web site, that has almost 200,000 signatures. Ms. Kavanagh, 15, hopes her campaign will persuade PepsiCo, Gatorade’s maker, to consider changing the drink’s formulation.

Jeff Dahncke, a spokesman for PepsiCo, noted that brominated vegetable oil had been deemed safe for consumption by federal regulators. “As standard practice, we constantly evaluate our formulas and ingredients to ensure they comply with federal regulations and meet the high quality standards our consumers and athletes expect — from functionality to great taste,” he said in an e-mail.

In fact, about 10 percent of drinks sold in the United States contain brominated vegetable oil, including Mountain Dew, also made by PepsiCo; Powerade, Fanta Orange and Fresca from Coca-Cola; and Squirt and Sunkist Peach Soda, made by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

The ingredient is added often to citrus drinks to help keep the fruit flavoring evenly distributed; without it, the flavoring would separate.

Use of the substance in the United States has been debated for more than three decades, so Ms. Kavanagh’s campaign most likely is quixotic. But the European Union has long banned the substance from foods, requiring use of other ingredients. Japan recently moved to do the same.

“B.V.O. is banned other places in the world, so these companies already have a replacement for it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “I don’t see why they don’t just make the switch.” To that, companies say the switch would be too costly.

The renewed debate, which has brought attention to the arcane world of additive regulation, comes as consumers show increasing interest in food ingredients and have new tools to learn about them. Walmart’s app, for instance, allows access to lists of ingredients in foods in its stores.

Brominated vegetable oil contains bromine, the element found in brominated flame retardants, used in things like upholstered furniture and children’s products. Research has found brominate flame retardants building up in the body and breast milk, and animal and some human studies have linked them to neurological impairment, reduced fertility, changes in thyroid hormones and puberty at an earlier age.

Limited studies of the effects of brominated vegetable oil in animals and in humans found buildups of bromine in fatty tissues. Rats that ingested large quantities of the substance in their diets developed heart lesions.

Its use in foods dates to the 1930s, well before Congress amended the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to add regulation of new food additives to the responsibilities of the Food and Drug Administration. But Congress exempted two groups of additives, those already sanctioned by the F.D.A. or the Department of Agriculture, or those experts deemed “generally recognized as safe.”

The second exemption created what Tom Neltner, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ food additives project, a three-year investigation into how food additives are regulated, calls “the loophole that swallowed the law.” A company can create a new additive, publish safety data about it on its Web site and pay a law firm or consulting firm to vet it to establish it as “generally recognized as safe” — without ever notifying the F.D.A., Mr. Neltner said.

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Another Look at a Drink Ingredient, Brominated Vegetable Oil

James Edward Bates for The New York Times

Sarah Kavanagh, 15, of Hattiesburg, Miss., started an online petition asking PepsiCo to change Gatorade’s formula.

Sarah Kavanagh and her little brother were looking forward to the bottles of Gatorade they had put in the refrigerator after playing outdoors one hot, humid afternoon last month in Hattiesburg, Miss.

But before she took a sip, Sarah, a dedicated vegetarian, did what she often does and checked the label to make sure no animal products were in the drink. One ingredient, brominated vegetable oil, caught her eye.

“I knew it probably wasn’t from an animal because it had vegetable in the name, but I still wanted to know what it was, so I Googled it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “A page popped up with a long list of possible side effects, including neurological disorders and altered thyroid hormones. I didn’t expect that.”

She threw the product away and started a petition on Change.org, a nonprofit Web site, that has almost 200,000 signatures. Ms. Kavanagh, 15, hopes her campaign will persuade PepsiCo, Gatorade’s maker, to consider changing the drink’s formulation.

Jeff Dahncke, a spokesman for PepsiCo, noted that brominated vegetable oil had been deemed safe for consumption by federal regulators. “As standard practice, we constantly evaluate our formulas and ingredients to ensure they comply with federal regulations and meet the high quality standards our consumers and athletes expect — from functionality to great taste,” he said in an e-mail.

In fact, about 10 percent of drinks sold in the United States contain brominated vegetable oil, including Mountain Dew, also made by PepsiCo; Powerade, Fanta Orange and Fresca from Coca-Cola; and Squirt and Sunkist Peach Soda, made by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

The ingredient is added often to citrus drinks to help keep the fruit flavoring evenly distributed; without it, the flavoring would separate.

Use of the substance in the United States has been debated for more than three decades, so Ms. Kavanagh’s campaign most likely is quixotic. But the European Union has long banned the substance from foods, requiring use of other ingredients. Japan recently moved to do the same.

“B.V.O. is banned other places in the world, so these companies already have a replacement for it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “I don’t see why they don’t just make the switch.” To that, companies say the switch would be too costly.

The renewed debate, which has brought attention to the arcane world of additive regulation, comes as consumers show increasing interest in food ingredients and have new tools to learn about them. Walmart’s app, for instance, allows access to lists of ingredients in foods in its stores.

Brominated vegetable oil contains bromine, the element found in brominated flame retardants, used in things like upholstered furniture and children’s products. Research has found brominate flame retardants building up in the body and breast milk, and animal and some human studies have linked them to neurological impairment, reduced fertility, changes in thyroid hormones and puberty at an earlier age.

Limited studies of the effects of brominated vegetable oil in animals and in humans found buildups of bromine in fatty tissues. Rats that ingested large quantities of the substance in their diets developed heart lesions.

Its use in foods dates to the 1930s, well before Congress amended the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to add regulation of new food additives to the responsibilities of the Food and Drug Administration. But Congress exempted two groups of additives, those already sanctioned by the F.D.A. or the Department of Agriculture, or those experts deemed “generally recognized as safe.”

The second exemption created what Tom Neltner, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ food additives project, a three-year investigation into how food additives are regulated, calls “the loophole that swallowed the law.” A company can create a new additive, publish safety data about it on its Web site and pay a law firm or consulting firm to vet it to establish it as “generally recognized as safe” — without ever notifying the F.D.A., Mr. Neltner said.

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Google Releases Maps App for iPhone as Apple Regroups

The return of a Google-powered maps application to the iPhone may make it easier for Apple’s customers to find their way. But it will not relieve Apple of the pressure to bring its own maps service up to snuff.

The release of the new Google Maps app for the iPhone, expected in Apple’s App Store on Thursday, does put to rest most of the conspiracy theorizing that began when Apple stopped bundling Google’s mapping service with the latest operating system for the iPhone and iPad, released in September. Apple did that because it was determined to own an increasingly critical feature of its devices, but the move seemed premature, as flaws in the company’s new service led to unusual public embarrassment.

Mobile analysts wondered whether Google would create an app for the iPhone or allow Apple, its rival, to flail around without a service on its devices that so many people rely on. After all, any long-term fallout for the iPhone could, in theory, benefit Google by making its own Android mobile operating system, which includes Google Maps, more attractive to customers.

Analysts also questioned whether Apple would approve the distribution of a Google Maps app through its App Store or hold it up, as it has some previous Google apps, to help Apple Maps.

That speculation is over. By making a high-quality maps app for the iPhone, it appears Google has put creating the biggest possible audience for its maps service above trying to undermine Apple’s product. “They’re more interested in owning the relationship with customers in any way they can,” said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner.

Apple and Google representatives declined to discuss the app.

Marc Prioleau, a consultant on strategy, mergers and acquisitions in the maps and location services fields, said the release of the Google Maps app did not lessen the daunting challenge for Apple of making a maps service that is competitive with Google’s, a process that could take years.

“I don’t think it helps them, except in the sense that the iPhone stops having the thorn in its side of lacking the best mobile map app out there,” he said. “The fact that it’s Google means they’re back to the same position.”

Because of the sheer volume of data contained in Apple Maps, it is hard to judge how much Apple has improved the service since releasing it, Mr. Prioleau said.

But the bar is very high. “You can get 98 percent of stuff on maps right, and people who use it will remember the 2 percent you got wrong until they die,” he said.

Ms. Milanesi, the Gartner analyst, said she did not think Apple had lost a significant number of sales as a result of the deficiencies in Apple Maps, because its customers had shown a willingness in the past to overlook shortcomings in maps. When Apple used to bundle the Google Maps service with the built-in maps app on the iPhone, for instance, the service lacked turn-by-turn navigation, a feature that was available on other mobile devices, including Google’s.

“People were putting up with something that wasn’t as good as Android,” Ms. Milanesi said.

While Google is often criticized by reviewers for producing software and devices that are less polished than Apple’s, the Apple Maps fiasco illustrated how Google has the upper hand in some Internet services. The company has a multiyear head start on Apple in maps, and a huge team of employees dedicated to correcting the errors that can plague location data for businesses and other points of interest.

When Apple Maps came out, iPhone users quickly began identifying misplaced landmarks, incorrect addresses and other problems. The problems led to an unusual public apology by Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, in which he recommended that people use competing maps services while the company improved Apple Maps.

This week, local police in Australia issued a warning about Apple Maps after assisting several motorists who were led astray in hot, desolate areas without water. Apple corrected the error on its Australian map, and the police reportedly issued a separate warning about incorrect directions from Google Maps.

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