Attacks Resume After Israeli Assault Kills Hamas Leader

KIRYAT MALACHI, Israel — Israel and Hamas widened their increasingly deadly conflict over Gaza on Thursday, as a militant rocket killed three civilians in an apartment block in this small southern town. The deaths were likely to lead Israel to intensify its military offensive on Gaza, now in its second day of airstrikes.

In Gaza, the Palestinian death toll rose to 11 as Israel struck what the military described as medium- and long-range rocket and infrastructure sites and rocket-launching squads. The military said it had dispersed leaflets over Gaza warning residents to stay away from Hamas operatives and facilities, suggesting that more was to come.

The regional perils of the situation sharpened, meanwhile, as President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt warned on Thursday that his country stood by the Palestinians against what he termed Israeli aggression, echoing similar condemnation on Wednesday.

“The Egyptian people, the Egyptian leadership, the Egyptian government, and all of Egypt is standing with all its resources to stop this assault, to prevent the killing and the bloodshed of Palestinians,” Mr. Morsi said in nationally televised remarks before a crisis meeting of senior ministers. He also instructed his prime minister to lead a delegation to Gaza on Friday and said he had contacted President Obama to discuss strategies to “stop these acts and doings and the bloodshed and aggression.”

In language that reflected the upheaval in the political dynamics of the Middle East since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak last year, Mr. Morsi said: “Israelis must realize that we don’t accept this aggression and it could only lead to instability in the region and has a major negative impact on stability and security in the region.”

The thrust of Mr. Morsi’s words seemed confined to diplomatic maneuvers, including calls to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the head of the Arab League and President Obama.

The 120-nation Nonalignmed Movement, the biggest bloc at the United Nations, added its condemnation of the Gaza airstrikes in a statement released by Iran, the group’s rotating president and one of Israel’s most ardent foes. “Israel, the occupying power, is, once more, escalating its military campaign against the Palestinian people, particularly in the Gaza Strip,” the group’s coordinating bureau said in the statement. The group made no mention of the Palestinian rocket fire but condemned what it called “this act of aggression by the Israelis and their resort to force against the defenseless people” and demanded “decisive action by the U.N. Security Council.”

In his conversation with Mr. Obama, Mr. Morsi said, he “clarified Egypt’s role and Egypt’s position; our care for the relations with the United States of America and the world; and at the same time our complete rejection of this assault and our rejection of these actions, of the bloodshed, and of the siege on Palestinians and their suffering.”

Mr. Obama had agreed to speak with Israeli leaders, Mr. Morsi said.

The Thursday’ deaths in Kiryat Malachi were the first casualties on the Israeli side since Israel launched its assault on Gaza, the most ferocious in four years, in response to persistent Palestinian rocket fire.

Southern Israel has been struck by more than 750 rockets fired from Gaza this year that have hit homes and caused injuries. On Thursday, a rocket smashed into the top floor of an apartment building in Kiryat Malachi, about 15 miles north of Gaza. Two men and one woman were killed, according to witnesses at the scene. A baby was among the injured and several Israelis were hospitalized with shrapnel wounds after rockets hit other southern cities and towns, they said.The apartment house was close to a field in a blue-collar neighborhood and the rocket tore open top-floor apartments, leaving twisted metal window frames and bloodstains.

Nava Chayoun, 40, who lives on the second floor, said her husband, Yitzhak, ran up the stairs immediately after the rocket struck and saw the body of a woman on the floor. He rescued two children from the same apartment and afterward, she said, she and her family “read psalms.”

Isabel Kershner reported from Kiryat Malachi, Israel, and Fares Akram from Gaza. Reporting was contributed by Rina Castelnuovo from Kiryat Malachi; Mayy El Sheikh and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo; Gabby Sobelman from Jerusalem; Rick Gladstone from New York; and Alan Cowell from Paris.

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Panasonic executive: panel displays to return to profit in fourth quarter

IBARAKI, Japan (Reuters) - Panasonic Corp's panel display business should return to profit in the three months to March 31, as it decouples from Japan's struggling TV industry with stronger sales of LCD panels to makers of tablets and PCs, the head of the division said in an interview on Thursday.

"We are now making displays for more than 10 models of tablets and PCs," Yoshio Ito said at a former factory in the town of Ibaraki in Osaka, western Japan, once the hub of the company's TV production and which now serves as his headquarters and a research and development center.

Sales of small LCD panels will likely make up around 60 percent of the unit's sales in the October-March second half of the business year compared with 30 percent in the first six months, he said.

As Panasonic draws back from TVs it is looking to boost sales of smaller LCD panels used in tablet computers and mobile phones, a strategy also being pursued by local rival Sharp Corp.

In the three months to September 30, the company's audiovisual division posted a loss of 2.1 billion yen ($26 million), with sales down 7 percent from a year earlier. For the full year it cut its operating profit forecast for the unit to 36 billion yen from 121 billion yen.

Panasonic last month warned it will post a net loss of close to $10 billion in the year ending next March 31 as it writes off tax deferred assets and goodwill related to its mobile phones solar panels and small lithium batteries.

(Reporting by Tim Kelly and Reiji Murai; Editing by Michael Watson)

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Springsteen, McCartney, Kanye set for Sandy show

NEW YORK (AP) — Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band and Kanye West will hit the stage at a Superstorm Sandy benefit concert next month at Madison Square Garden.

MSG announced Thursday that Billy Joel, The Who, Alicia Keys and Jon Bon Jovi will also perform at the Dec. 12 show, dubbed "12-12-12." More performers will be announced at a later date.

Proceeds from the concert will go to the Robin Hood Relief Fund to benefit those affected by Sandy in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Sandy's assault more than two weeks ago created widespread damage and power outages throughout the area.

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Heavy Metal Rocker Now Lifts Spirits as the Yogi Raghunath

Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

Ray Cappo performing with Youth of Today.

THE packed crowd celebrating the 25th anniversary of Revelation Records at Irving Plaza in Manhattan on an October night was predominately pierced, tattooed and male. The uniform was black T-shirts for hard-core rock bands like Behemoth (“100% Satanic”), Chain of Strength (“True Till Death”) and accessories like a “Sick of It All” baseball cap.

Ray Cappo, 46, one of the label’s founders, took his place on the stage as the singer for the band Youth of Today, and shouted at the mosh pit, “It’s been 20 years but the message is still the same: Tear down the waaaalllll.”

The assembled responded with pumping one-arm salutes and staccato head jerks. Few questioned in the crowd knew that the heavy metal rocker on stage had left the Lower East Side in the late ’80s, spending six years as a celibate monk, changing his name to Raghunath and becoming famous within the yoga world for classes featuring crazy inversions, variation upon variation of headstands, arm stands, handstands: a playbook of anti-gravity poses.

Raghunath left rock in a search for a personal true north, he said in an interview. “The pleasure of fame at a young age was not what it was supposed to be,” he recalled, quickly adding that the band was not Led Zeppelin. “And it was juxtaposed with the sudden death of my father. Any idea of shelter or safety in a material world was getting dismantled.”

He found comfort in studying ancient yogi texts, meditation, chanting and long stints at an ashram in India. “My passion is how to apply ancient philosophy in the modern world,” he said. “I teach a fun class so people come. A strong acrobatic class is the best way to get New York type-A personalities on the mat, and then the class is peppered with song and chanting and philosophy and ancient sacred texts.”

The classes, playfully dubbed Flight School, developed name recognition among yogis — especially fellow teachers — and they can credit or blame Raghunath’s influence with the grade inflation on the mat these days, where open-level classes integrate a crow pose, or what children call frog, transitioning into handstands.

In early October, Raghunath taught a workshop to 40 students at House of Jai, a serene Upper East Side studio. On the surface, it is a stark contrast to the Irving Plaza gig. But in a way, Raghunath’s metamorphosis is not as stark. The Youth of Today was a loud heavy metal band, but one with a message the lead singer characterizes as one of positivity rather than nihilism. The transition to monk guru makes more sense in that context. “We were unique in trying to have a positive attitude,” Raghunath said. “It was a radical message.”

In the class, Raghunath led devotional chanting in a melodic voice, accompanied by the harmonium. Then he began demonstrating poses in slow, controlled motions: in one acrobatic maneuver, he ended up upside down on one arm with legs spread — no wall. By the end of the sequences, he was simply balancing on his head, arms and hands not touching the floor. Assisting students physically, weaving from mat to mat and laughing about the fleeting “sensual pleasure” of hitting the click button on Amazon, he repeated mantras as sweat poured down the students’ faces.

Raghunath began teaching in Los Angeles in 2002, moving in 2008 to New York, where he had attracted a cultlike following at popular studios like Pure Yoga and Kula Yoga Project. His reputation grew: New York Magazine ran his photo doing a twisted human pretzel pose, and he was one of the select elite teachers christened Lululemon ambassadors by the high-end yoga line.

Over a year ago, Raghunath made another radical move. He and his wife, Bridget, who is known as Brij, decided to leave New York City for an upstate town for the well-being of his four children (ages 15, 13, 7 and 5), he said. Catching a Flight class became a little bit like a unicorn spotting. “Watching the ridiculous asanas that he can do is a humbling experience,” said Mike Patton of New York’s Yoga Vida, where Raghunath has helped train teachers. “There’s no one like him, and then he packed up shop.”

Now that his family is settled, Raghunath is back on the circuit. His yoga career is being helped by YAMA Talent (Yoga Artists Management Agency), which is like the Creative Artists Agency for yoga stars. The concept may be anathema to yoga-world purists, but on deck is an embryonic clothing line starting with T-shirts. Next year, there will be two pilgrimages to India, an upstate retreat and continued training of teachers.

Ava Taylor of the agency explained that it has software to keep track of Raghunath bookings and it has worked on a sorely needed update of his Web site, which made its debut in May. “I’m not the most organized person, so with YAMA it’s like having a personal assistant so I can teach,” Raghunath said.

An online series of live Webcam experiences of Raghunath teaching will be introduced soon, with devotional chanting, lectures on philosophy and nutrition, music tutorials and his calling card, crazy poses.

At the House of Jai workshop, Misa Watanabe, visiting from Tokyo, suggested that the yogi’s appeal is broad. “I cannot believe I took a class with him,” she said, seeming surprised when asked how she knew about him. “YouTube,” she answered. Ms. Watanabe shyly went up to Raghunath and asked for a photo. He flashed a charismatic high-voltage grin, equal parts rock star and guru. Then he dashed to catch his flight to India.

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Israelis Kill Hamas Military Commander in Gaza

Reuters

Palestinians extinguished a fire after an Israeli airstrike on a car carrying Ahmed al-Jabari, who ran Hamas's military wing, on Wednesday in Gaza City.

GAZA — The Israeli military carried out multiple airstrikes in Gaza on Wednesday and blew up a car carrying the commander of the Hamas military wing, making him the most senior official of the group to be killed by the Israelis since their invasion of Gaza four years ago. Hamas announced that Israel would “pay a high price.”

The death of the commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, 52, who was on Israel’s most-wanted list of Palestinian militants, was confirmed by Hamas and Israeli officials. The Israeli military said it had ordered the airstrikes as part of a response to days of rocket fire launched from Gaza into Israeli territory.

Mr. Jabari’s death signaled a further escalation in the renewed hostility between Israel and Hamas, the militant organization regarded by Israel as a terrorist group sworn to Israel’s destruction. The Israeli attacks could also further complicate Israel’s fragile relations with Egypt, where the new government has established closer ties with Hamas and had been acting as a mediator to restore calm between Israel and Gaza-based militant groups.

Hamas reacted furiously, saying in a statement that it considered the Israeli attacks to be the basis for a “declaration of war” against Israel. A spokesman for Hamas, Fawzi Barhoum, said the Israelis had “committed a dangerous crime and broke all redlines,” and that “the Israeli occupation will regret and pay a high price.”

Military officials in Israel, which announced responsibility for the death of Mr. Jabari, later said in a statement that their forces had carried out additional airstrikes in Gaza targeting what they described as “a significant number of long-range rocket sites” owned by Hamas that had stored rockets capable of reaching 25 miles into Israel. The statement said the airstrikes had dealt a “significant blow to the terror organization’s underground rocket-launching capabilities.”

Yisrael Katz, a minister from Israel’s governing Likud Party, issued a statement saying that the operation had sent a message to the Hamas political leaders in Gaza “that the head of the snake must be smashed. Israel will continue to kill and target anyone who is involved in the rocket attacks.”Hamas and medical officials in Gaza said both Mr. Jabari and a companion were killed by the airstrike on his car in Gaza City. Israeli news media said the companion was Mr. Jabari’s son, but there was no immediate confirmation.

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that Mr. Jabari had been targeted because he “served in the upper echelon of the Hamas command and was directly responsible for executing terror attacks against the state of Israel in the past number of years.”

The statement said the purpose of the attack was to “severely impair the command and control chain of the Hamas leadership as well as its terrorist infrastructure.”

The statement did not specify how the Israelis knew Mr. Jabari was in the car but said the operation had been “implemented on the basis of concrete intelligence and using advanced capabilities.”

Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007, a year after the Israelis withdrew from the territory captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. But Israeli forces went back into Gaza in the winter of 2008-09 in response to what they called a terrorist campaign by Palestinian militants there to launch rockets into Israel. The three-week military campaign killed as many as 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, and was widely condemned internationally.

Israel has long said it would hold Hamas responsible for attacks launched from Gaza on its forces and population, regardless of which group was behind them. Like the United States and Europe, Israel defines Hamas as a terrorist organization. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Mr. Jabari became the acting leader of the Hamas military wing after Israel had severely wounded Muhammad Deif, the top commander, in an assassination attempt in 2003. Mr. Jabari had survived several previous Israeli raids. In 2004, Israeli planes attacked his house killing one of his sons and three other relatives.

Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency, considered Mr. Jabari responsible for what it called “all anti-Israeli terror activity” emanating from Gaza.

He was also known for having played a major role in negotiations that led to the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Gaza militants in a cross-border raid in 2006. Mr. Jabari personally escorted Mr. Shalit to a handover to Egyptian intermediaries last year as part of a prisoner exchange for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Video of the handoff to Egypt showed Mr. Jabari standing near Mr. Shalit.

Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military, acknowledged Mr. Jabari’s role in that prisoner exchange during a conference call with journalists on Wednesday announcing the airstrike on Mr. Jabari’s car. She also said Mr. Jabari had “a lot of blood on his hands.”

Fares Akram reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.

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Facebook stock jumps as share lockup expires

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Shares of Facebook Inc jumped as much as 11.2 percent on Wednesday, even as the biggest block of shares held by insiders became eligible for sale for the first time since the social media company's disappointing debut in May.

Facebook shares were up 8.8 percent at $21.60 in heavy mid-day trading on the Nasdaq, off an earlier high at $22.09.

"While the lockup is expiring, there is nothing requiring anybody to sell," said Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Group in Bedford Hills, New York. "Given the low price, these long-term holders are deciding to hold the stock, and that is lifting it here as the fear of the expiration subsides."

Roughly 800 million Facebook shares were eligible for sale on Wednesday after restrictions on insider selling were lifted on the biggest block since the May initial public offering.

The lockup expiration greatly expands the 921-million-share "float" available for trading on the market until now.

"We've seen this before with other lockups. People sell them leading up to the lockup period expiring, and then they have a bit of a relief rally," said Ryan Jacob, chief executive of the Jacob Funds, which does not own Facebook shares.

The world's No. 1 online social network, became the only U.S. company to debut with a market value of more than $100 billion. But its value has dropped nearly 50 percent since the IPO on concerns about money-making prospects over the long term.

Insider trading lockup provisions started to expire in August, and the rolling expirations have added to the pressure on the stock.

Restrictions on insider selling have expired in waves. A limitation on more than 200 million shares expired on October 29.

COST OF SHORTING

Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser said he did not expect Facebook insiders to sell all of their shares as the lockups expired.

"I would expect heavy volumes over the next few weeks, but not undigestible volumes," said Wieser. By his estimate, roughly 486 million of the nearly 800 million newly freed Facebook shares will be sold.

There is some evidence the heavy interest in "shorting" the stock was dissipating, given the poor performance since it first sold shares in May. Investors who believe a stock will fall can bet against it by shorting the stock - that is, borrowing it and selling it in the hopes it will decline.

According to Markit, a financial information services company, about 28 percent of the shares available for short-selling were being borrowed for that purpose, down from a high of more than 80 percent in early August.

Similarly, SunGard's Astec Analytics, which also tracks interest in shorting, noted that the cost of borrowing Facebook shares is down more than 50 percent since the beginning of the month.

"Everything would seem to indicate the market is losing its appetite to short Facebook," wrote Karl Loomes, market analyst at Astec.

The cost of shorting Facebook has declined to 0.18 percent on an annualized basis, Astec said on Wednesday. By contrast, shortly after the IPO, the cost to short the stock ranged from 40 percent to 50 percent annually.

"It's become somewhat of a controversial stock. It always adds fuel to the fire if you have a sizable short position," said Stephen Massocca, managing director at Wedbush Morgan in San Francisco.

"But the unlock is not new news. It doesn't mean everyone is going to sell, and it doesn't mean every order is going to come in today."

Facebook, with roughly 1 billion users, has faced a tough reception on Wall Street amid concerns about its slowing revenue growth and nascent advertising efforts on mobile devices.

But the company delivered better-than-expected third-quarter results on October 23 and revealed that 14 percent of its advertising revenue is now from mobile ads, reassuring some investors it was beginning to figure out how to earn money from smartphone and tablet users.

"They had a pretty good quarter. I think a lot of investors, though, are waiting to see some consistency in the results," said Jacob.

Several members of Facebook's senior management have sold millions of dollars' worth of shares in recent weeks through pre-arranged stock trading plans as lockup restrictions expired.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg has sold roughly 530,000 shares this month, netting just over $11 million, though she still owns roughly 20 million vested shares in Facebook.

In August, Facebook board member Peter Thiel sold roughly $400 million worth of Facebook stock, the majority of his stake, when an earlier phase of lockup restrictions expired.

Facebook's 28-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has pledged not to sell any shares before September 2013.

(Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Matthew Lewis)

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Petraeus affair and the role of biographers

NEW YORK (AP) — The affair between retired Army Gen. David Petraeus and author Paula Broadwell is but an extreme example of the love/hate history between biographers and their subjects.

Even before their outing led to Petraeus' resignation as CIA director, Broadwell had been criticized for the rosy tone of "All In," which The Associated Press described in 2011 as "part hagiography and part defense" of his strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as long as biographies are written by and about human beings, scientific precision will remain an ideal. The stories of famous women and men often are colored by rapture and disenchantment, confusion and bias.

"As with psychiatrists, same with biographers, you shouldn't sleep with your subject," Blake Bailey, the prize-winning biographer of authors John Cheever and Richard Yates, said with a laugh.

"The ideal case is to have no assumptions. ... But it is possible to write a great book and have strong opinions. ('Eminent Victorians' author) Lytton Strachey, the father of all modern biographers, had a very distinctive voice and a very distinctive perspective — a person looking down from the world at a great distance, quite disparagingly, but with vast humor that informs every word."

Broadwell conducted extensive interviews with both critics and supporters of Petraeus, but the finished story was overwhelmingly positive. She is far from alone in allowing personal or professional regard to shape a biography, especially when the subject cooperates. Flattering books come out all the time, whether a biography of Dick Cheney by Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes or Chris Matthews' "Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero."

Years spent together, as Broadwell had with Petraeus in Afghanistan, can make the biographer's experience intensely personal, whether sexual or not. Walter Isaacson did not avoid the unpleasant side of Steve Jobs, but acknowledged he had bonded strongly with the dying Apple CEO. Doris Kearns Goodwin was an aide to Lyndon Johnson who sometimes took notes while the ex-president lay in her bed, a relationship that she called platonic and described in her book on him, "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream."

Some relationships end in court. Jimmy McDonough spent years working on an authorized biography of Neil Young, only to have Young withdraw support and attempt to stop publication, leading to mutual lawsuits and delay in the release of "Shakey," which came out in 2002. Some biographers seem energized by perceived sins, like the late Albert Goldman and his takedowns of Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Others use scholarship to build up or pick apart a figure from the distant past. Jon Meacham's new biography of Thomas Jefferson praises him as a subtle and effective politician, while a competing book, Henry Wiencek's "Master of the Mountain," faults Jefferson as a calculating slave holder who tolerated brutality.

David McCullough has likened the biographer's choice to picking a roommate, one you must live with for years. McCullough himself abandoned a Picasso book out of distaste for the painter's private life and chose men he related to for his two Pulitzer Prize winning presidential biographies, Harry Truman and John Adams. Former JFK aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. won a Pulitzer for "A Thousand Days," his book on the Kennedy administration. But his reverence for the late president led Gore Vidal to dismiss "A Thousand Days" as a "political novel."

Biography often is the art of reconciling opposites. Robert Caro, the prize-winning biographer of New York municipal builder Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, has taken on men who have both inspired and dismayed him. A former investigative journalist, Caro sees his job as collecting as much information as possible and only then forming opinions. There is no such thing as "objective truth," he says, but there are enough "objective facts" to bring you close.

For his Moses and Johnson books, Caro has relied upon countless documents and interviews. He has labeled his Johnson series, begun soon after the president's death and still going, as a narrative of darkness and light, of the basest cruelty and the noblest achievement. His Moses book, "The Power Broker," was another epic of greatness and destruction and even more complicated to write because he actually interviewed Moses.

"You were awed by seeing the scope of his vision as he talked about it to you and explained it to you. You see him standing in front of this map, with a yellow pencil and sharp point, just gesturing toward this tri-state area that he sees as one entity and has a vision for it," says Caro, whose book was harshly criticized by Moses, but won the Pulitzer in 1975 and is now standard reading.

"But I was simultaneously talking to the people he had displaced, hounded them out of their homes. You have to show both of these things, his genius and its effect on people."

Authors have followed paths they never imagined before starting a book or encountering the subject. Edmund Morris was a prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, but the chance to write about a living president led him to take unusual license. Granted years of access to Ronald Reagan, Morris was left so mystified that he inserted a fictionalized version of himself into the book, "Dutch," as a way of making sense out of the president.

Jane Leavy, author of a well-regarded biography on Mickey Mantle, said she had a hard time starting the book because of her childhood worship for the New York Yankees star. She decided the best way to move ahead was to acknowledge up front her memories, and map out the life of the flawed and troubled man she came to know and to hear about.

"He was multidimensional and far more complicated than the hagiographic biographies I read in school or the dark stories about him being a womanizer and an offensive drunk," she says. "No one is one way or another. The fact he was horrible to his wife doesn't invalidate his skill. So the task became why he treated people the way he did. And that's the biographer's job."

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I Was Misinformed: The Time She Tried Viagra

I have noticed, in the bragging-rights department, that “he doesn’t need Viagra” has become the female equivalent of the male “and, I swear, she’s a real blonde.” Personally, I do not care a bit. To me, anything that keeps you happy and in the game is a good thing.

But then, I am proud to say, I was among the early, and from what I gather, rare female users.

It happened when the drug was introduced around 1998. I was 50, but after chemotherapy for breast cancer — and later, advanced ovarian cancer — I was, hormonally speaking, pretty much running on fumes. Whether this had diminished my sex drive I did not yet know. One may have Zorba-esque impulses when a cancer diagnosis first comes in; but a treatment that leaves you bald, moon-faced and exhausted knocks that out of your system pretty fast.

But by 1998, the cancer was gone, my hair was back and I was ready to get back in the game. I was talking to an endocrinologist when I brought up Viagra. This was not to deal with the age-related physical changes I knew it would not address, it was more along the feminist lines of equal pay for equal work: if men have this new sex drug, I want this new sex drug.

“I know it’s supposed to work by increasing blood flow,” I told the doctor, “But if that’s true for men, shouldn’t it be true for women, too?”

“You’re the third woman who asked me that this week,” he said.

He wrote me a prescription. I was not seeing anyone, so I understood that I would have to do both parts myself, but that was fine. I have a low drug threshold and figured it might be best the first time to fly solo. My memory of the directions are hazy: I think there was a warning that one might have a facial flush or headaches or drop dead of a heart attack; that you were to take a pill at least an hour before you planned to get lucky, and, as zero hour approached, you were supposed to help things along by thinking beautiful thoughts, kind of like Peter Pan teaching Wendy and the boys how to fly.

But you know how it is: It’s hard to think beautiful thoughts when you’re wondering, “Is it happening? Do I feel anything? Woof, woof? Hello, sailor? Naaah.”

After about an hour, however, I was aware of a dramatic change. I had developed a red flush on my face; I was a hot tomato, though not the kind I had planned. I had also developed a horrible headache. The sex pill had turned into a bad joke: Not now, honey, I have a headache.

I put a cold cloth on my head and went to sleep. But here’s where it got good: When I slept, I dreamed; one of those extraordinary, sensual, swimming in silk sort of things. I woke up dazed and glowing with just one thought: I gotta get this baby out on the highway and see what it can do.

A few months later I am fixed up with a guy, and after a time he is, under the Seinfeldian definition of human relations (Saturday night date assumed) my official boyfriend. He is middle aged, in good health. How to describe our romantic life with the delicacy a family publication requires? Perhaps a line from “Veronika, der Lenz ist da” (“Veronica, Spring Is Here”), a song popularized by the German group the Comedian Harmonists: “Veronika, der Spargel Wächst” (“Veronica, the asparagus are blooming”). On the other hand, sometimes not. And so, one day, I put it out there in the manner of sport:

“Want to drop some Viagra?” I say.

Here we go again, falling into what I am beginning to think is an inevitable pattern: lying there like a lox, or two loxes, waiting for the train to pull into the station. (Yes, I know it’s a mixed metaphor, but at least I didn’t bring in the asparagus.) So there we are, waiting. And then, suddenly, spring comes to Suffolk County. It’s such a presence. I’m wondering if I should ask it if it hit traffic on the L.I.E. We sit there staring.

My reaction is less impressive. I don’t get a headache this time. And romantically, things are more so, but not so much that I feel compelled to try the little blue pills again.

Onward roll the years. I have a new man in my life, who is 63. He does have health problems, for which his doctor prescribes an E.D. drug. I no longer have any interest in them. My curiosity has been satisfied. Plus I am deeply in love, an aphrodisiac yet to be encapsulated in pharmaceuticals.

We take a vacation in mountain Mexico. We pop into a drugstore to pick up sunscreen and spot the whole gang, Cialis, Viagra, Levitra, on a shelf at the checkout counter. No prescription needed in Mexico, the clerk says. We buy all three drugs and return to the hotel. I try some, he tries some. In retrospect, given the altitude and his health, we are lucky we did not kill him. I came across an old photo the other day. He is on the bed, the drugs in their boxes lined up a in a semi-circle around him. He looks a bit dazed and his nose is red.

Looking at the picture, I wonder if he had a cold.

Then I remember: the flush, the damn flush. If I had kids, I suppose I would have to lie about it.

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Major Retailers Start Selling Financial Products, Challenging Banks

On a recent shopping trip to Costco, Lilly Neubauer picked up paper towels, lentils, carrots — and a home mortgage.

While Ms. Neubauer, 27, said she was surprised to find the warehouse club selling financial products, she and her husband saved about $200 a month by refinancing there this year. She also bought home insurance from Costco, she said, again because it was cheaper there.

“It opened us up to the fact that Costco is more than toilet paper,” said Ms. Neubauer, who lives in Dallas.

As the nation’s largest banks stay stingy with credit and a growing portion of the population has no bank at all, major retailers are stepping into the void. Customers can now withdraw cash at an A.T.M. with a prepaid card from Walmart, take out a loan at Home Depot for a kitchen renovation or kick-start a new venture with a small-business loan from Sam’s Club. This year, Walmart even started to test selling a life insurance policy.

Consumer advocates are torn about the growth of this shadow banking industry. Financial products are making it into the hands of people who otherwise might not qualify for them, but these products are not always subject to the same regulations as bank products are. And to turn a profit, retailers generally have to charge more to people with poor credit or none at all.

“These products can come with high fees and few real protections,” said Norma P. Garcia, a senior lawyer with Consumers Union.

For the retailers, banking products are not huge profit centers but a business strategy, meant to put money into customers’ hands and get them buying more.

“You’ve got to remember, Walmart is intended to be a one-stop shop,” said Charles M. Holley Jr., the company’s chief financial officer.

Retailers were once interested in actually becoming banks. Sears, in the 1980s, tried a “socks and stocks” strategy that included acquiring the Dean Witter brokerage firm. And Wal-Mart Stores sought a banking charter for almost a decade before finally abandoning the quest in 2007.

While supermarket chains have leased space to bank branches for years, they are now offering their own products or teaming with small financial firms to do an end run around big banks. While the banks are likely to bristle at such competition, supporters of the retailers say the stores are stepping into areas that banks have abandoned.

“The banks kind of dropped the ball, and in my mind, and in the consumers’ mind, they left it open for different approaches,” said Robert L. Phillips, a professor at Columbia Business School.

Part of the lure is the so-called underbanked population — people who use few, if any, bank services. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimates that roughly 10 million households in the United States do not use a bank, up from nine million three years ago. And the agency says 24 million more households have a bank account but still use nonbank financial services, like prepaid cards.

Mr. Holley said that 20 to 25 percent of Walmart customers were unbanked.

“The more kinds of services we can offer our core customer like that, the better for them,” he said.

Last month, Walmart unveiled a prepaid card with American Express. The card operates much like a debit card except that it is not attached to a bank account. It comes with free customer-service telephone support, and fees are relatively low, but the account is not backed by the F.D.I.C.

Frustrated with the fees charged by her bank, Nancy Fry, a real estate broker in Logan, Utah, bought a prepaid card from Walmart this year. But this was even worse, she said — she was charged $3 every time she loaded money onto the card. “I really don’t have very much money and can’t afford these fees,” she said.

Consumer advocates complain that prepaid cards are loosely regulated and can cannibalize the money put on them. Consumer lawyers have pushed for greater disclosure of fees and more stringent regulation of the card providers. The government is expected to issue new rules this year.  

Walmart began to test selling a one-year MetLife life insurance policy this year, and customers can wire money or pay bills at any Walmart store.

Costco is also courting customers who are fed up with their banks. “A lot of members think their bank fees are too high, or the trust level has gone down over the years, or they’re having issues with debit and credit cards,” said Jay Smith, Costco’s director of business and financial services.

Costco sells auto and homeowners’ insurance, offers credit card processing for small businesses and began making mortgages in late 2010. It does not make money on the mortgages, which are offered by small lenders, Mr. Smith said. The idea is to get people to renew their store memberships, where Costco makes a large chunk of its profit.

Home Depot, whose customers are mainly homeowners, is trying to increase sales by extending credit to people who would otherwise have trouble getting it. Last year, the company began offering loans of up to $40,000, and this year it extended its no-interest credit card payment terms. “We have the ability to get credit to consumers in this tight credit market, and we wanted people to take advantage of that in a market where people don’t have access to home-equity lines of credit like they used to,” said Dwaine Kimmet, Home Depot’s treasurer and vice president for financial services.

Mr. Kimmet said the loans were especially useful for people who needed emergency items, like a water heater, though shoppers use them for other home décor projects as well.

They are also helpful for Home Depot, whose sales growth has been squeezed by the housing crisis.

Mr. Kimmet said the store loans, unlike home-equity lines of credit, did not require collateral, meaning Home Depot could not seize someone’s house for a failure to pay.

The interest rate on Home Depot’s credit card is higher than that on a typical credit card — 18 percent to 27 percent, depending on credit score, compared with an average of 14.59 percent, according to Bankrate. But Mr. Kimmet said the retailer offered cards to people with credit scores as low as 600, below what many lenders accept.

Other retailers are also trying to make it easier for people to qualify for financial products. Office Depot and Sam’s Club offer loans backed by the government’s Small Business Administration, and both involve quick, one-page initial applications. More than 1,000 Sam’s Club members have used the program since its introduction two years ago, the company said.  

When Kent Prater was about to open a restaurant in Lumberton, N.C., he searched online for loans backed by the Small Business Administration and found that Sam’s Club sold them. He applied online for a $25,000 loan and was approved for a $10,000 loan, with an interest rate of about 10 percent. With a bank, “I think it would probably be a little bit more difficult, because of the environment — the economy and the regulatory environment,” said Mr. Prater, who opened Thai Chili last month.

Paco Underhill, who researches shopper behavior as founder and chief executive of Envirosell, said retailers offering financial products was only the beginning.

“The banks are going to scream bloody murder when retailers try to obtain banking charters,” he said. “But it’s not hard for a retail organization to look across the landscape and say, ‘Who are my customers, and what else could I be selling them?’ ”

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Top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Is Linked to Petraeus Scandal

PERTH, Australia — Gen. John R. Allen, the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has become ensnared in the scandal over an extramarital affair acknowledged by David H. Petraeus, a former general. General Allen is being investigated for what a senior defense official said early Tuesday was “inappropriate communication” with Jill Kelley, a woman in Tampa, Fla., who was seen by Mr. Petraeus’s lover as a rival for his attentions.

Chuck Burton/Associated Press

F.B.I. agents carried boxes and a computer from the home of Paula Broadwell on Tuesday.

In a statement released to reporters on his plane en route to Australia early Tuesday, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said that the F.B.I. on Sunday had referred “a matter involving” General Allen to the Pentagon.

Mr. Panetta turned the matter over to the Pentagon’s inspector general to conduct an investigation into what a defense official said were 20,000 to 30,000 pages of documents, many of them e-mails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley, who is married and has children.

A senior law enforcement official in Washington said on Tuesday that F.B.I. investigators, looking into Ms. Kelley’s complaint about anonymous e-mails she had received,  examined all of her e-mails as a routine step.

“When you get involved in a cybercase like this, you have to look at everything,” the official said, suggesting that Ms. Kelley may not have considered that possibility when she filed the complaint. “The real question is why someone decided to open this can of worms.”

The official would not describe the content of the e-mails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley or say specifically why F.B.I. officials decided to pass them on to the Defense Department. “Generally, the nature of the e-mails warranted providing them to D.O.D.,” he said.

Under military law, adultery can be a crime.

The defense official on Mr. Panetta’s plane said that General Allen, who is also married, told Pentagon officials he had done nothing wrong. Neither he nor Ms. Kelley could be reached for comment early Tuesday. Mr. Panetta’s statement praised General Allen for his leadership in Afghanistan and said that “he is entitled to due process in this matter.”

A senior Defense Department official said General Allen has denied having an extramarital affair with Ms. Kelley. But the official said the content of some of the e-mails “was of a flirtatious nature; some were of an affectionate nature.”

“That is what makes the e-mails potentially inappropriate,” the official said, adding that it was unclear whether the tone of flirtation was from General Allen to Ms. Kelley or from Ms. Kelley to General Allen, or both. 

The official said he had not read the e-mails but had been briefed on the content, and he said that they did not contain anything inappropriate regarding operations or security. Pentagon officials cautioned against making too much of the number of documents, since some might be from e-mail chains, or brief messages printed out on a whole page, or simply copies of messages sent to other people.

The Pentagon inspector general’s investigation opens up what could be a widening scandal into two of the most prominent generals of their generation: Mr. Petraeus, who was the top commander in Iraq and Afghanistan before he retired from the military and became director of the C.I.A., only to resign on Friday because of the affair, and General Allen, who also served in Iraq and now commands 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan.

Although General Allen will remain the commander in Afghanistan, Mr. Panetta said that he had asked President Obama to delay the general’s nomination to be the commander of American forces in Europe and the supreme allied commander of NATO, two positions he was to move into after what was expected to be easy confirmation by the Senate. Mr. Panetta said in his statement that Mr. Obama agreed with his request.

Gen. Joseph A. Dunford, the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps who was nominated last month by Mr. Obama to succeed General Allen in Afghanistan, will proceed as planned with his confirmation hearing. In his statement, Mr. Panetta urged the Senate to act promptly on his nomination.

The National Security Council spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr. Obama also believes that the Senate should swiftly confirm General Dunford.

Scott Shane and Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.

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