Naomi Gleit helps keep Facebook growing

The gig: As senior director of Facebook Inc.'s growth, engagement and mobile team, Naomi Gleit helps grow the social network's 1-billion-plus user base.

Facebook employee No. 29: Few people outside Facebook have heard of Gleit, but she's the second-longest-serving Facebook employee, after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Gleit, 29, talked her way into a job at Facebook on July 18, 2005 — her birthday. She was Facebook's 29th employee, coming on board shortly after the company hit 1 million users and before anyone had an inkling of the colossus it would become.

Dogged spirit: Unlike most other early employees who eventually dispersed to seek new fortunes, Gleit says she has no intention of leaving Facebook. She gets that tenacity from her "tiger mom," a computer programmer who ferried her to ballet, piano, karate and Chinese lessons, and her Jewish father, an immigration lawyer who took her to Hebrew school, she said. "I know it sounds completely irrational, but I had no doubt in 2005 that Facebook would be something incredible in the future," she said.

Rival social networks: Her passion for Facebook began before she was hired, when she was a Stanford undergraduate studying science, technology and society, an interdisciplinary major. She wrote her senior thesis on why Facebook beat out rival college social networking site Club Nexus at Stanford. (Club Nexus was started by Stanford student and Turkish software engineer Orkut Büyükkökten, who went on to create Orkut, Google's first attempt at a social network.) Getting in on the ground floor at Facebook made her feel like she was taking part in something bigger than herself, the same feeling she got volunteering for six months in a refugee camp in Botswana, she said.

Growing with Facebook: Gleit helped Facebook push beyond colleges to high schools and eventually to everyone. In late 2007, when the torrid growth pace temporarily cooled, Zuckerberg tapped a team of five to reignite it and asked Gleit to lead product management. It fell to the growth team to identify the obstacles to the company's momentum. In a company ruled by engineers, Gleit, who never studied programming, earned respect with her analytical approach and intuitive understanding of people. "I always believed that growth was the most important thing, the most important way to impact the company," she said. There are now more than 150 people on the team. "It's been an incredible learning experience," she said. "Each year is different."

That magic moment: Those who work closely with Gleit say part of her success early on was her ability to seize on the "magic moment" that makes users fall in love with Facebook. She made it simpler to sign up, and she helped people find friends as soon as they joined. She also helped Facebook spread quickly to new countries by enlisting users to translate the service into more than 80 languages. Gleit helps her team parachute into new markets and traverse less-familiar languages and cultures. It's something that comes from her own passion to see the world and have new experiences. She has taught on a Navajo reservation and lived in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand.

One billion users: Around noon Sept. 14, Zuckerberg gathered with Gleit and dozens of employees in front of a big screen as the number of Facebook users crossed 1 billion. "The scale was insane," she said. "But that is not the goal. When Mark talks about his vision for Facebook, he talks about being able to connect everyone in the world to the people that they care about and provide some value for them every single day."

A problem solver: Zuckerberg calls on Gleit for high-profile projects. In May 2010, when Facebook was under siege because of how it was handling users' personal information, he put Gleit in charge of simplifying privacy settings. Last year she worked on a popular feature that lets users subscribe to a News Feed without having to become Facebook friends.

Betting on mobile: Now Gleit is focused on the future: mobile devices and how they can unlock emerging markets. Gleit knew back in 2011 that people would begin to log on to Facebook from mobile devices in greater numbers than from desktops, particularly in the developing world. So she traveled to Tel Aviv to buy Snaptu, which makes software that helps people on low-tech phones access Facebook, and she brought the whole team back to Silicon Valley with her. Now Facebook is surging in popularity on mobile devices in Tokyo and Nairobi, Kenya. "I have always been interested in technology and how it can be used to improve lives," Gleit said.

jessica.guynn@latimes.com

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RIM shares dive as fee changes catch market off guard

(Reuters) – Shares of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd dropped 20 percent on Friday on fears that a new fee structure for its high-margin services segment could put pressure on the business that has set the company apart from its competitors.

The shares were still more than 80 percent above the year’s low, which was hit in September. They started to rally in November as investors began to bet that RIM’s long-awaited new BlackBerry 10 phones, to be launched in January, would turn the company around.

The services segment has long been RIM’s most profitable and accounts for about a third of total revenue. Some analysts said there was a risk that the fee changes could endanger its service ecosystem and leave the Canadian company as just another handset maker.

The fee changes, which RIM announced on Thursday after the close, overshadowed stronger-than-expected quarterly results. The company said the new pricing structure would be introduced with the BlackBerry 10 launch, expected on January 30.

RIM said some subscribers would continue to pay for enhanced services such as advanced security. But under the new structure, some other services would account for less revenue, or even none at all.

Chief Executive Thorsten Heins tried to reassure investors in a television interview with CNBC on Friday, saying RIM’s “service revenue isn’t going away”.

He added: “We’re not stopping. We’re not halting. We’re transitioning.”

Since taking over at RIM in January, Heins has focused on shrinking the company and getting it ready to introduce its new BB10 devices, which RIM says will help it claw back ground it has lost to competitors such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics.

But the news of the new services pricing strategy came as a shock to markets, and some analysts cut their price targets on RIM stock.

RIM will not be able to sustain profitability by relying on its hardware business alone, said National Bank Financial analyst Kris Thompson, whom Thomson Reuters StarMine has rated the top RIM analyst based on the accuracy of his estimates of the company’s earnings.

Thompson downgraded RIM’s stock to “underperform” from “sector perform” and cut his price target to $ 10 from $ 15.

Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin said the move was likely about stabilizing market share: “At the moment, they need to stem the bleeding.”

He said the tiered pricing might line up better with RIM’s subscriber base as it expands in emerging economies.

RIM’s Nasdaq-listed shares were down 19.8 percent at $ 11.32 on Friday afternoon. The stock was down 19.6 percent to C$ 11.21 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

COUNTDOWN TO LAUNCH

The success of the BB10 will be crucial to the future of RIM, which on Thursday posted its first-ever decline in total subscribers. Heins said on CNBC that the company expected to ship millions of the new devices.

He cautioned that this will require heavy investment, which will reduce RIM’s cash position in its fourth and first quarters from $ 2.9 billion in its fiscal third quarter. He said, however, it would not go below $ 2 billion.

Still, doubts remain about whether RIM can pull off the transformation. Needham analyst Charlie Wolf said the BB10 would have to look meaningfully superior to its competitors for RIM to stage a comeback.

Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley said it was highly unlikely that the market would support RIM’s new mobile computing ecosystem, and he remained skeptical about the company’s ability to survive on its own.

“We believe RIM will eventually need to sell the company,” said Walkley, who cut his price target on RIM shares to $ 9 from $ 10.

Baird Equity Research analysts said BB10 faced a daunting uphill battle against products from Apple, as well as those using Google Inc’s Android operating system, and, increasingly, phones with Microsoft Corp’s Windows 8 operating system.

Baird maintained its “underperform” rating on the stock, while Paradigm Capital downgraded the shares to “hold” from “buy” on uncertainty around the services revenue model.

“RIM has gone from having one major aspect of uncertainty – BlackBerry 10 adoption – to two, given an uncertain floor on services revenue,” William Blair analyst Anil Doradla said.

RIM will have to discount BB10 devices significantly to maintain demand, Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu said.

The BlackBerry, however, still offers the security features that helped it build its reputation with big business and government, a selling point with some key customers.

Credit Suisse maintained its “neutral” rating on the stock, but not because it expected BB10 to be a big success.

“Only the potential for an outright sale of the company or a breakup keeps us at a neutral,” Credit Suisse analysts said.

Separately on Friday, ailing Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia said it had settled its patent dispute with RIM in return for payments. Nokia did not disclose detailed terms, but said the deal included a one-time payment to be booked in the fourth quarter, as well as ongoing fees, all to be paid by RIM. [ID:nL5E8NL22K]

($ 1=$ 0.98 Canadian)

(Reporting by Chandni Doulatramani in Bangalore and Allison Martell in Toronto. Additional reporting by Sinead Carew in New York; Editing by Ted Kerr, Dale Hudson, Janet Guttsman,; Lisa Von Ahn and Peter Galloway)

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State unemployment rate falls to 9.8% even as employers shed jobs

California's unemployment rate hit single-digits in November for the first time in almost four years, thanks in part to a holiday hiring surge by retailers.

The jobless rate fell to 9.8% from 10.1% in October, according to data in an overall jobs report released Friday by the state Employment Development Department.

The drop in the unemployment rate, determined in a survey of households, came even as a separate payroll survey found that employers in the state shed 3,800 jobs.

“The state showed a very significant and encouraging drop in the unemployment rate,” said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at the Fermanian Business and Economic Institute at Point Loma Nazarene University. “A fall below 10% is welcome news.”

For months, economic forecasts have said the unemployment rate wouldn’t fall to single digits until at least next year.

Both surveys in the report provide a mixed view, though, of what is still a fragile economic recovery in the state.

For instance, the state's labor force -- the number of people who are able to work and either have a job or are looking for one -- grew by 34,100 people in November. That typically indicates that job seekers feel encouraged to resume looking for work again.

“The good news in California was that we saw more people looking for work and more people getting jobs,” Reaser said. “But the bad news was that the nonfarm payroll survey, which is usually the more reliable source, showed a small drop in employment ... and comes as quite a disappointment.”

The payroll survey of employers showed that the biggest drop in jobs -- 11,000 -- came in the education and health services sector. The manufacturing sector lost 8,900 positions. The biggest gains offsetting most losses came in retail, which added 15,900 jobs.

The disparity between the falling unemployment rate and the drop in payroll jobs reflects the fact that the two are derived from different surveys: The unemployment rate is calculated from a survey of a small number of households, while the payroll job data come from a more thorough survey of businesses that report on changes in their monthly payrolls.

Other economists were skeptical of November’s reports, particularly losses reported in the healthcare and professional and business services sectors.

“Over the last year, [these sectors] have been very strong,” said Christopher Thornberg, founding principal at Beacon Economics, a Los Angeles consulting firm. “Why should it turn on a dime?”

Thornberg pointed out that healthcare has been resilient, expanding even through the economic recession.

He said he expects November’s job report to be revised early next year and the loss in payroll jobs will probably be reversed.

“The truth is, [the report] is not as good as what the household survey says, but it’s not as bad as the payroll survey,” Thornberg said. “None of this should be a surprise to us. California’s economy has clearly been gaining strength.”

In recent months, employers in the retail trend industry have beefed up payrolls as the 2012 holiday shopping season shapes up to be the strongest in years. The trade, transportation and utilities sector notched the largest over-the-month increase, as a group adding 12,900 jobs. The sector includes retail jobs.

The next-largest gain was in leisure and hospitality, which added 3,300 jobs. Construction, aided by a housing recovery that is slowly unfolding, notched a gain of 1,700 jobs last month.

Esmael Adibi, director of the A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Research at Chapman University, called the report a “mixed bag.”

“Overall, yes, unemployment went down,” Adibi said. “Some people will see that as good news, but the question will be: Is this downtick going to be sustainable?”

Adibi said that even though the job figures are adjusted for seasonal hiring, he predicted that much of the retail hiring that has occurred in recent months will be temporary. Furthermore, losses in professional and business services suggest that firms are holding out on hiring until the so-called fiscal cliff crisis is resolved.

The fiscal cliff refers to the tax hikes and government spending cuts set to kick in Jan. 2 if Congress and the White House don't reach a deal to resolve those issues.

Economists have said that if the fiscal cliff is not avoided, the country will be pushed back into recession.

“If firms are worried about a significant slowdown, they’re not going to commit themselves to hiring people,” Adibi said.

Over the year, California has added 268,600 nonfarm jobs, an annualized growth rate of 1.9%. That's a faster pace than the nation as a whole, which has grown at an annual rate of about 1.4%.

The Golden State’s unemployment rate, still the third-highest in the nation, has fallen 1.5 percentage points since November 2011.

The state also reported that October’s job gains were revised slightly downward to 38,800 jobs net new jobs instead of the 45,800 originally reported last month.

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ricardo.lopez2@latimes.com

Follow Ricardo Lopez on Twitter.

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PSY's 'Gangnam Style' reaches 1B views on YouTube

NEW YORK (AP) — Viral star PSY has reached a new milestone on YouTube.

The South Korean rapper's video for "Gangnam Style" has reached 1 billion views, according to YouTube's own counter. It's the first time any clip has surpassed that mark on the streaming service owned by Google Inc.

It shows the enduring popularity of the self-deprecating video that features Park Jae-sang's giddy up-style dance moves. The video has been available on YouTube since July 15, averaging more than 200 million views per month.

Justin Bieber's video for "Baby" held the previous YouTube record at more than 800 million views.

PSY wasn't just popular on YouTube, either. Earlier this month Google announced "Gangnam Style" was the second highest trending search of 2012 behind Whitney Houston, who passed away in February.

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About New York: One Boy’s Death Moves State to Action to Prevent Others

Prompted by the death of a 12-year-old Queens boy in April, New York health officials are poised to make their state the first in the nation to require that hospitals aggressively look for sepsis in patients so treatment can begin sooner. Under the regulations, which are now being drafted, the hospitals will also have to publicly report the results of their efforts.

The action by New York has elated sepsis researchers and experts, including members of a national panel who this month formally recommended that the federal government adopt standards similar to what the state is planning.

Though little known, sepsis, an abnormal and self-destructive immune response to infection or illness, is a leading cause of death in hospitals. It often progresses to severely low blood pressure, shock and organ failure.

Over the last decade, a global consortium of doctors, researchers, hospitals and advocates has developed guidelines on early identification and treatment of sepsis that it says have led to significant drops in mortality rates. But first hints of the problem, like a high pulse rate and fever, often are hard for clinicians to tell apart from routine miseries that go along with the flu or cold.

“First and foremost, they need to suspect sepsis,” Dr. Mitchell M. Levy, a professor at Brown University School of Medicine and a lead author of a paper on the latest sepsis treatment guidelines to be published simultaneously next month in the United States in a journal, Critical Care Medicine, and in Europe in Intensive Care Medicine.

“It’s the most common killer in intensive care units,” Dr. Levy said. “It kills more people than breast cancer, lung cancer and stroke combined.”

If started early enough, the treatment, which includes antibiotics and fluids, can help people escape from the drastic vortex of sepsis, according to findings by researchers working with the Surviving Sepsis Campaign, the global consortium. The tactics led to a reduction of “relative risk mortality by 40 percent,” Dr. Levy said.

Although studies of 30,000 patients show that the guidelines save lives, “the problem is that many hospitals are not adhering to them,” said Dr. Clifford S. Deutschman, director of the sepsis research program at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine.

About 300 hospitals participate in the study, and the consortium has a goal of having 10,000. “The case is irrefutable: if you take these sepsis measures, and you build a program to help clinicians and hospitals suspect sepsis and identify it early, that will mean more people will survive,” Dr. Levy said.

At a symposium in October, the New York health commissioner, Dr. Nirav R. Shah, said that he would require state hospitals to adopt best practices for early identification and treatment of sepsis. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo intends to make it a major initiative in 2013, said Josh Vlasto, a spokesman for the governor. “The state is taking unprecedented measures to prevent and effectively treat sepsis in health care facilities across the state and is looking at a wide range of additional measures to better protect patients,” Mr. Vlasto said.

In April, Rory Staunton, a sixth grader from Queens, died of severe septic shock after he became infected, apparently through a cut he suffered while playing basketball. The severity of his illness was not recognized when he was treated in the emergency room at NYU Langone Medical Center. He was sent home with a diagnosis of an ordinary bellyache. Hours later, alarming laboratory results became available that suggested he was critically ill, but neither he nor his family was contacted. For an About New York column in The New York Times, Rory’s parents, Ciaran and Orlaith Staunton, publicly discussed their son’s final days. Their revelations prompted doctors and hospitals across the country to seek new approaches to heading off medical errors.

In addition, Commissioner Shah in New York convened a symposium on sepsis, which included presentations from medical experts and Rory’s parents.

At the end of the meeting, Dr. Shah said that he had listened to all the statistics on the prevalence of the illness, and that one had stuck in his memory: “Twenty-five percent,” he said — the portion of the Staunton family lost to sepsis.

He said he would issue new regulations requiring hospitals to use best practices in identifying and treating sepsis, actions that, he said, he was taking “in honor of Rory Staunton.”

The governor’s spokesman, Mr. Vlasto, said that “the Staunton family’s advocacy has been essential to creating a strong public will for action.”

Dr. Levy said New York’s actions were “bold, pioneering and grounded in good scientific evidence,” adding, “The commissioner has taken the first step even before the federal government.”

Dr. Deutschman said that initiatives like those in New York were needed to overcome resistance among doctors. “You’re talking about a profession that has always prided itself on its autonomy,” he said. “They don’t like to be told that they’re wrong about something.”

The availability of proven therapies should move treatment of sepsis into a new era, experts say, comparing it to how heart attacks were handled not long ago. People arriving in emergency rooms with chest pains were basically put to bed because not much could be done for them, said Dr. Kevin J. Tracey, the president of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System. Dr. Tracey, a neurosurgeon, has made major discoveries about the relationship between the nervous system and the runaway immune responses of sepsis.

If physicians and nurses were trained to watch for sepsis, as they now routinely do for heart attacks, many of its most dire problems could be headed off before they got out of control, he said. The Stauntons have awakened doctors and nurses to the possibility of danger camouflaged as a stomach bug.

“We are with sepsis where we were with heart attack in the early 1980s,” Dr. Tracey said.

“If you don’t think of it as a possibility, this story can happen again and again. This case could change the world.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

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Herbalife to answer 'pyramid scheme' claim; stock slide continues

With its three-day stock plunge accelerating Friday, Herbalife Ltd. said it will defend itself against a hedge fund manager’s accusations that the business is a “pyramid scheme” – but the company said its response won't come until next month.

The Los Angeles maker of nutritional products said Friday that it will wait until the week of Jan. 7 to host an event for analysts at which it will respond to the “distorted, outdated and inaccurate information” alleged by moneyman Bill Ackman.

Ackman, who founded Pershing Square Capital Management, says Herbalife rewards its sales representatives more for recruiting distributors than for selling products. The compensation structure, he says, leaves millions of small-scale sellers making next to nothing while an elite few rake in huge paydays.

Ackman called Herbalife “the best-managed pyramid scheme in the history of the world” – allegations he spelled out in a multimedia presentation delivered Thursday to a full house in New York and streamed live online.

Herbalife's stock price has plummeted since Ackman indicated Wednesday that he is “shorting” the stock. In a short sale, an investor borrows stock and immediately sells it, intending to eventually return the shares to the original owner after buying them back at a lower price.

The company's shares were trading late in trading day Friday at about $27 a share, down 36% from their closing price Tuesday.

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New York Stock Exchange operator agrees to be sold for $8.2 billion

A flag flies on the facade of the New York Stock Exchange. (Richard Drew / Associated Press / December 20, 2012)

By Andrew Tangel

December 20, 2012, 6:30 a.m.

NYSE Euronext, operator of the New York Stock Exchange, has agreed to sell itself to the IntercontinentalExchange in an acquisition that would reshape Wall Street.

ICE, a 12-year-old electronic exchange operator based in Atlanta, will pay $33.12 a share for NYSE Euronext in a stock-and-cash deal worth $8.2 billion.

The companies announced the acquisition early Thursday, saying both of their boards or directors unanimously approved the deal. The acquisition is slated to close in the second half of 2013, pending the blessing of U.S. and European regulators and both companies' shareholders.

Quiz: How much do you know about the 'fiscal cliff'?

"This transaction leverages the strength of our iconic brand and the value we have created in our global equity and derivatives franchises -- positioning the business for solid long-term growth and development," Duncan Niederauer, chief executive of NYSE Euronext, said in a statement.

Although the New York Stock Exchange is the most public window into Wall Street, the Big Board's share of equities trading has declined sharply in recent years, as NYSE Euronext has expanded its trading venues in an increasingly electronic and fragmented marketplace.

Founded in 2000, ICE has grown into a leading venue for commodities and energy futures exchanges and derivatives clearinghouses.

NYSE Euronext's stock closed at $24.05 a share, with a market cap of $5.84 billion. The NYSE's stock was surging $10 a share, or 42%, in pre-market trading.

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Heart joins select class with Rock Hall induction

NEW YORK (AP) — The journey to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame can be a long and winding road for some acts. For Heart, it took more than a decade, and sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson admitted they were losing hope.

"(The) running joke in the band was (we) would never get in," Ann said.

But all that changed when the group made the class of 2013, announced this month.

"Well, it just goes to show you that just when you think you know the shape of rock 'n' roll, it changes shape on you," Ann said. "This is really more than thrilling."

Her younger sister, Nancy, was glad the speculation over whether they'd make it was finally put to rest.

"We feel like we deserve it, so we're happy to be here," Nancy said.

Since their seminal 1976 release "Dreamboat Annie" that spawned the classic hits "Magic Man," and "Crazy on You," the band went on the sell more than 30 million albums worldwide. They took time off in the 1990s so Nancy, then married to director Cameron Crowe, could raise her family, but have been performing and touring for the last several years. This year, they released their 14th studio album, "Heart Fanatic," and also released the book "Kicking and Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock & Roll." Their most recent tour resumes on Jan. 25 in Worcester, Mass.

With their induction, they are part of only a few rock bands in the hall fronted by women (others include Jefferson Airplane with lead singer Grace Slick. Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie with Fleetwood Mac, and Chrissie Hynde with the Pretenders).

Neither sister feels she was an inspiration to other women that eventually played in rock 'n' roll bands.

"Boys invented rock to get girls, so when girls came into it they had to make a new universe," Ann joked, before adding: "I'm just looking forward to the time when we don't have to have a gender designation on music. To me, that will really be the time when we've done something."

The 28th Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony will be held in Los Angeles on April 18. Other acts who will be part of the 2013 class are Rush, Donna Summer, Randy Newman, Public Enemy and Albert King.

They're proud to be among the more senior rock acts still touring today (Ann is 62; Nancy is 58).

"Rock 'n' roll does not have an age limit as long as it's authentic. Rock and roll is just as beautiful as when Keith Richards plays it as jazz would be when Thelonious Monk would play it," said Ann. "But the key to all that is that it has to be the real deal. It can't be some old washed up dudes thinking ... 'Let's go out and do it some more.' No. It has to still be vital."

____

Online:

www.heart-music.com

www.rockhall.com

____

Derrik J. Lang contributed to this report from Los Angeles.

__

John Carucci covers entertainment for The Associated Press. Follow him at —http://www.twitter.com/jcarucci_ap

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U.N. Suspends Polio Campaign in Pakistan After Killings of Workers

B.K. Bangash/Associated Press

A Pakistani woman administered polio vaccine to an infant on Wednesday in the slums of Islamabad. Militants have killed nine polio workers this week.

LAHORE, Pakistan — The front-line heroes of Pakistan’s war on polio are its volunteers: young women who tread fearlessly from door to door, in slums and highland villages, administering precious drops of vaccine to children in places where their immunization campaign is often viewed with suspicion.

Now, those workers have become quarry. After militants stalked and killed eight of them over the course of a three-day, nationwide vaccination drive, the United Nations suspended its anti-polio work in Pakistan on Wednesday, and one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health campaigns has been plunged into crisis.

The World Health Organization and Unicef ordered their staff members off the streets, while government officials reported that some polio volunteers — especially women — were afraid to show up for work.

At the ground level, it is those female health workers who are essential, allowed privileged entrance into private homes to meet and help children in situations denied to men because of conservative rural culture. “They are on the front line; they are the backbone,” said Imtiaz Ali Shah, a polio coordinator in Peshawar.

The killings started in the port city of Karachi on Monday, the first day of a vaccination drive aimed at the worst affected areas, with the shooting of a male health worker. On Tuesday four female polio workers were killed, all gunned down by men on motorcycles in what appeared to be closely coordinated attacks.

The hit jobs then moved to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which, along with the adjoining tribal belt, constitutes Pakistan’s main reservoir of new polio infections. The first victim there was one of two sisters who had volunteered as polio vaccinators. Men on motorcycles shadowed them as they walked from house to house. Once the sisters entered a quiet street, the gunmen opened fire. One of the sisters, Farzana, died instantly; the other was uninjured.

On Wednesday, a man working on the polio campaign was shot dead as he made a chalk mark on the door of a house in a suburb of Peshawar. Later, a female health supervisor in Charsadda, 15 miles to the north, was shot dead in a car she shared with her cousin.

Yet again, Pakistani militants are making a point of attacking women who stand for something larger. In October, it was Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl advocate for education who was gunned down by a Pakistani Taliban attacker in the Swat Valley. She was grievously wounded, and the militants vowed they would try again until they had killed her. The result was a tidal wave of public anger that clearly unsettled the Pakistani Taliban.

In singling out the core workers in one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health initiatives, militants seem to have resolved to harden their stance against immunization drives, and declared anew that they consider women to be legitimate targets. Until this week, vaccinators had never been targeted with such violence in such numbers.

Government officials in Peshawar said that they believe a Taliban faction in Mohmand, a tribal area near Peshawar, was behind at least some of the shootings. Still, the Pakistani Taliban have been uncharacteristically silent about the attacks, with no official claims of responsibility. In staying quiet, the militants may be trying to blunt any public backlash like the huge demonstrations over the attack on Ms. Yousafzai.

Female polio workers here make for easy targets. They wear no uniform but are readily recognizable, with clipboards and refrigerated vaccine boxes, walking door to door. They work in pairs — including at least one woman — and are paid just over $2.50 a day. Most days one team can vaccinate 150 to 200 children.

Faced with suspicious or recalcitrant parents, their only weapon is reassurance: a gentle pat on the hand, a shared cup of tea, an offer to seek religious assurances from a pro-vaccine cleric. “The whole program is dependent on them,” said Mr. Shah, in Peshawar. “If they do good work, and talk well to the parents, then they will vaccinate the children.”

That has happened with increasing frequency in Pakistan over the past year. A concerted immunization drive, involving up to 225,000 vaccination workers, drove the number of newly infected polio victims down to 52. Several high-profile groups shouldered the program forward — at the global level, donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations and Rotary International; and at the national level, President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa, who have made polio eradication a “personal mission.”

On a global scale, setbacks are not unusual in polio vaccination campaigns, which, by dint of their massive scale and need to reach deep inside conservative societies, end up grappling with more than just medical challenges. In other campaigns in Africa and South Asia, vaccinators have grappled with natural disaster, virulent opposition from conservative clerics and sudden outbreaks of mysterious strains of the disease.

Declan Walsh reported from Lahore, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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Stocks fall as sides snipe in `cliff' talks

Stocks dipped Wednesday, recording their first loss of the week. President Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress sniped at each other, and a deadline to avoid sweeping tax increases and government spending cuts drew closer.

General Motors stock surged after the government announced plans to sell its ownership stake in the company.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 98.99 points, or 0.7 percent, at 13,251.97. The Standard & Poor's 500 index dropped 10.98 points, or 0.8 percent, to 1,435.81. The Nasdaq composite index fell 10.17, or 0.3 percent, to 3,044.36.

Obama said that he and House Speaker John Boehner were “pretty close” to a deal to avoid the tax increases and spending cuts, a combination known as the “fiscal cliff.” The two sides have exchanged proposals this week.

But the president also said that congressional Republicans keep finding “ways to say no as opposed to finding ways to say yes.” He said the nation deserves compromise in the aftermath of the Connecticut school shooting.

Boehner, speaking to reporters for less than a minute and in a defiant tone, called on Obama to offer a deficit-cutting plan balanced between spending cuts and tax increases.

He predicted that the House would pass his backup plan, which calls for extending decade-old tax cuts for Americans making less than $1 million per year. The White House has rejected that plan.

The S&P 500 index had gained more than 2 percent over the previous two days in part because of optimism about a deal taking shape. The optimism seemed to melt on Wednesday, and stocks finished near their lows for the day.

GM soared $1.69, or 6.6 percent, to $27.18 after the company said it would spend $5.5 billion to buy 200 million shares of its own stock back from the federal government.

The government pledged to sell the other 300 million GM shares it owns on the open market and shed its entire ownership stake in 12 to 15 months. The government got GM stock as part of a 2009 bailout.

U.S. builders broke ground on fewer homes in November after starting work in October at the fastest pace in four years. Superstorm Sandy probably distorted the totals in the Northeast.

The Commerce Department said builders began construction of houses and apartments at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 861,000. That was 3 percent less than October's annual rate of 888,000, the fastest since July 2008.

Materials stocks fell just 0.5 percent, less than the rest of the market. Industrials fell 0.7 percent. Elsewhere on Wall Street, telecommunications stocks and health care stocks fared the worst, down 1.2 percent and 1.1 percent respectively.

Oracle, which makes software for businesses, jumped $1.21, or 3.7 percent, to $34.09 after reporting stronger earnings as companies splurged on software and other technology.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell 0.02 percentage point to 1.80 percent. The price of oil climbed $1.58, or 1.8 percent, to $89.51 per barrel.

Among other stocks in the news:

— FedEx gained 84 cents, or 0.9 percent, to $93.20. The world's No. 2 package delivery company lowered its economic forecast for the United States but said it was more confident in its own ability to increase earnings.

— Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia gained 7cents to $2.65. It fell during the day to $2.30, a three-year low, after CEO Lisa Gersh stepped down after less than a year on the job.

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