Wall Street Journal Reports Attack by China Hackers

One day after The New York Times reported that Chinese hackers had infiltrated its computers and stolen passwords for its employees, The Wall Street Journal announced that it too had been hacked.

On Thursday, The Journal reported that it had been attacked by Chinese hackers who were trying to monitor the company’s coverage of China. It said hackers had broken into its network through computers in its Beijing bureau.

In a written statement, the business newspaper owned by News Corporation described the attack as an “ongoing issue” and said it was working closely with authorities and security specialists to clean up its systems. It said that it completed a “network overhaul” on Thursday in an effort to rid its systems of hackers.

China’s Ministry of National Defense has denied any involvement in the cyberattack at The Times or any other American corporations.

But security experts said that in 2008, Chinese hackers began targeting American news organizations as part of an effort to monitor coverage of Chinese issues.

In a report for clients in December, Mandiant, a computer security company, said that over the course of several investigations it found evidence that Chinese hackers had stolen e-mails, contacts and files from more than 30 journalists and executives at Western news organizations, and had maintained a “short list” of journalists for repeated attacks. Among those targeted were journalists who had written about Chinese leaders, political and legal issues in China and the telecom giant Huawei.

Bloomberg News, another American news organization, was targeted by Chinese hackers last year, and some computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation. The attack occurred after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, a Chinese official who is expected to become president in March.

Bloomberg has confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

The timing of the attacks on The New York Times coincided with the reporting for an investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks found digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network.

The Associated Press reported Thursday that officials in the Obama administration were considering more assertive action against Beijing to stop Chinese computer espionage campaigns.

The Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said Thursday a global effort was needed o establish “rules of the road” for cyber activity.  In her final meeting with reporters at the State Department, Mrs. Clinton addressed a question about China’s efforts to infiltrate computer systems at The New York Times. 

 “We have seen over the last years an increase in not only the hacking attempts on government institutions but also non-governmental ones,.” Mrs. Clinton said.

The Chinese, she said , "are not the only people who are hacking us." 

 In her final meeting with reporters at the State Department, Mrs. Clinton addressed a question about China’s efforts to infiltrate computer systems at The New York Times. 

 “We have seen over the last years an increase in not only the hacking attempts on government institutions but also non-governmental ones,” Mrs. Clinton said.

The Chinese, she said , "are not the only people who are hacking us." 

"There is a lot that we are working on that will be deployed in the event that we don’t get some kind of international effort under way," Mrs. Clinton added without elaborating.

The United States has been increasingly vocal about such efforts against government and private industry. In a November 2011 intelligence report, government officials specifically accused China and Russia of stealing intellectual property for economic gain.

Michael Gordon contributed reporting from Washington.

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California restricts hiring after dual-paycheck revelations

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown's administration has restricted state departments' hiring authority following revelations that hundreds of public employees were receiving pay for second state jobs in addition to their normal salaries.

Workers receiving more than one state paycheck, known in official parlance as "additional appointments," were found in a variety of departments and agencies, including the California Public Employees Retirement System and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and in several state hospitals.

The Brown administration did not ban the practice, but any such hire must now be approved by its Office of Human Resources.

"It appears that in some cases people were paid additionally for the job they were hired to do in the first place," said Assemblyman Jeff Gorell (R-Camarillo), who introduced a bill Wednesday to ban salaried state employees from holding more than one state job. "It's inappropriate at best and potentially abusive," he said.

Gorell said the proliferation of double paychecks highlights the need for more legislative oversight of the executive branch.

"It's clear that the governor and his administration don't fully understand what's happening in these agencies," he said.

Documents provided by the state controller's office show that 571 nonunion employees hold more than one position in various departments. The records do not show what those employees were paid.

The Sacramento Bee reported that dozens of state corrections officers received additional compensation beyond that of their regular jobs — some of which paid up to $20,000 per month. The paper also reported that the chief psychiatrist at Napa State Hospital, who receives an annual salary of more than $275,000, was receiving an additional $125 per hour for work as a staff psychiatrist.

"It's a scam," said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit advocacy agency. "Many people in all kinds of different jobs work for a set salary understanding that sometimes that means working long hours. Unfortunately, that's not always the culture of government."

A spokesman for the state's largest public employee union said the extra pay was for managers and other nonunion employees who are not eligible for overtime. Most unionized workers receive overtime if they put in extra hours.

A spokesman for CalPERS said it had allowed salaried workers to receive extra pay since June 2011 to help the agency launch and test a new technology project. Brad Pacheco said that using existing workers saved CalPERS an estimated $1.6 million that would have been spent to hire outside consultants and train new staff.

The human resources agency issued a statement saying that officials were "conducting a full review to determine whether there is any justification for continuing this practice."

anthony.york@latimes.com

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UK’s Prince Charles takes first “Tube” trip since 1986

LONDON (Reuters) – Four million Londoners cram onto the city’s Underground passenger railway nearly every day, but it is a rarer event for Prince Charles. He rode the British capital’s bustling commuter network on Wednesday for the first time since 1986.

The heir to the British throne and his wife Camilla took a one-stop journey from Farringdon to King’s Cross on the Metropolitan Line as part of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of a transport service affectionately known to Britons as the “Tube”.

The short journey was a rare enough event to cause some confusion at the prince’s press office, which initially said he had last ventured onto the Tube in 1979.

“This is just to let you know that it has come to our attention that The Prince of Wales has travelled on the London Underground more recently than 1979. In 1986 The Prince and Princess of Wales travelled by tube to Heathrow Airport to open Terminal 4,” a spokeswoman said in an email to media.

“We’re sorry that our previous information was incorrect. Our archives of Royal engagements prior to 1988 are not computerized and in this particular instance a search under ‘The Prince of Wales takes the Tube’ did not bring up an event which had been logged as the ‘official opening of Terminal 4′.”

(Reporting By Estelle Shirbon, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Phys Ed: Helmets for Ski and Snowboard Safety

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Recently, researchers from the department of sport science at the University of Innsbruck in Austria stood on the slopes at a local ski resort and trained a radar gun on a group of about 500 skiers and snowboarders, each of whom had completed a lengthy personality questionnaire about whether he or she tended to be cautious or a risk taker.

The researchers had asked their volunteers to wear their normal ski gear and schuss or ride down the slopes at their preferred speed. Although they hadn’t informed the volunteers, their primary aim was to determine whether wearing a helmet increased people’s willingness to take risks, in which case helmets could actually decrease safety on the slopes.

What they found was reassuring.

To many of us who hit the slopes with, in my case, literal regularity — I’m an ungainly novice snowboarder — the value of wearing a helmet can seem self-evident. They protect your head from severe injury. During the Big Air finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., this past weekend, for instance, 23-year-old Icelandic snowboarder Halldor Helgason over-rotated on a triple back flip, landed head-first on the snow, and was briefly knocked unconscious. But like the other competitors he was wearing a helmet, and didn’t fracture his skull.

Indeed, studies have concluded that helmets reduce the risk of a serious head injury by as much as 60 percent. But a surprising number of safety experts and snowsport enthusiasts remain unconvinced that helmets reduce overall injury risk.

Why? A telling 2009 survey of ski patrollers from across the country found that 77 percent did not wear helmets because they worried that the headgear could reduce their peripheral vision, hearing and response times, making them slower and clumsier. In addition, many worried that if they wore helmets, less-adept skiers and snowboarders might do likewise, feel invulnerable and engage in riskier behavior on the slopes.

In the past several years, a number of researchers have attempted to resolve these concerns, for or against helmets. And in almost all instances, helmets have proved their value.

In the Innsbruck speed experiment, the researchers found that people whom the questionnaires showed to be risk takers skied and rode faster than those who were by nature cautious. No surprise.

But wearing a helmet did not increase people’s speed, as would be expected if the headgear encouraged risk taking. Cautious people were slower than risk-takers, whether they wore helmets or not; and risk-takers were fast, whether their heads were helmeted or bare.

Interestingly, the skiers and riders who were the most likely, in general, to don a helmet were the most expert, the men and women with the most talent and hours on the slopes. Experience seemed to have taught them the value of a helmet.

Off of the slopes, other new studies have brought skiers and snowboarders into the lab to test their reaction times and vision with and without helmets. Peripheral vision and response times are a serious safety concern in a sport where skiers and riders rapidly converge from multiple directions.

But when researchers asked snowboarders and skiers to wear caps, helmets, goggles or various combinations of each for a 2011 study and then had them sit before a computer screen and press a button when certain images popped up, they found that volunteers’ peripheral vision and reaction times were virtually unchanged when they wore a helmet, compared with wearing a hat. Goggles slightly reduced peripheral vision and increased response times. But helmets had no significant effect.

Even when researchers added music, testing snowboarders and skiers wearing Bluetooth-audio equipped helmets, response times did not increase significantly from when they wore wool caps.

So why do up to 40 percent of skiers and snowboarders still avoid helmets?

“The biggest reason, I think, is that many people never expect to fall,” says Dr. Adil H. Haider, a trauma surgeon and associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-author of a major new review of studies related to winter helmet use. “That attitude is especially common in people, like me, who are comfortable on blue runs but maybe not on blacks, and even more so in beginners.”

But a study published last spring detailing snowboarding injuries over the course of 18 seasons at a Vermont ski resort found that the riders at greatest risk of hurting themselves were female beginners. I sympathize.

The takeaway from the growing body of science about ski helmets is in fact unequivocal, Dr. Haider said. “Helmets are safe. They don’t seem to increase risk taking. And they protect against serious, even fatal head injuries.”

The Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, of which Dr. Haider is a member, has issued a recommendation that “all recreational skiers and snowboarders should wear safety helmets,” making them the first medical group to go on record advocating universal helmet use.

Perhaps even more persuasive, Dr. Haider has given helmets to all of his family members and colleagues who ski or ride. “As a trauma surgeon, I know how difficult it is to fix a brain,” he said. “So everyone I care about wears a helmet.”

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During Trial, New Details Emerge on DuPuy Hip

When Johnson & Johnson announced the appointment in 2011 of an executive to head the troubled orthopedics division whose badly flawed artificial hip had been recalled, the company billed the move as a fresh start.

But that same executive, it turns out, had supervised the implant’s introduction in the United States and had been told by a top company consultant three years before the device was recalled that it was faulty.

In addition, the executive also held a senior marketing position at a time when Johnson & Johnson decided not to tell officials outside the United States that American regulators had refused to allow sale of a version of the artificial hip in this country.

The details about the involvement of the executive, Andrew Ekdahl, with the all-metal hip implant emerged Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court during the trial of a patient lawsuit against the DePuy Orthopaedics division of Johnson & Johnson. More than 10,000 lawsuits have been filed against DePuy in connection with the device — the Articular Surface Replacement, or A.S.R. — and the Los Angeles case is the first to go to trial.

The information about the depth of Mr. Ekdahl’s involvement with the implant may raise questions about DePuy’s ability to put the A.S.R. episode behind it.

Asked in an e-mail why the company had promoted Mr. Ekdahl, a DePuy spokeswoman, Lorie Gawreluk, said the company “seeks the most accomplished and competent people for the job.”

On Wednesday, portions of Mr. Ekdahl’s videotaped testimony were shown to jurors in the Los Angeles case. Other top DePuy marketing executives who played roles in the A.S.R. development are expected to testify in coming days. Mr. Ekdahl, when pressed in the taped questioning on whether DePuy had recalled the A.S.R. because it was unsafe, repeatedly responded that the company had recalled it “because it did not meet the clinical standards we wanted in the marketplace.”

Before the device’s recall in mid-2010, Mr. Ekdahl and those executives all publicly asserted that the device was performing extremely well. But internal documents that have become public as a result of litigation conflict with such statements.

In late 2008, for example, a surgeon who served as one of DePuy’s top consultants told Mr. Ekdahl and two other DePuy marketing officials that he was concerned about the cup component of the A.S.R. and believed it should be “redesigned.” At the time, DePuy was aggressively promoting the device in the United States as a breakthrough and it was being implanted into thousands of patients.

“My thoughts would be that DePuy should at least de-emphasize the A.S.R. cup while the clinical results are studied,” that consultant, Dr. William Griffin, wrote.

A spokesman for Dr. Griffin said he was not available for comment.

The A.S.R., whose cup and ball components were both made of metal, was first sold by DePuy in 2003 outside the United States for use in an alternative hip replacement procedure called resurfacing. Two years later, DePuy started selling another version of the A.S.R. for use here in standard hip replacement that used the same cup component as the resurfacing device. Only the standard A.S.R. was sold in the United States; both versions were sold outside the country.

Before the device recall in mid-2010, about 93,000 patients worldwide received an A.S.R., about a third of them in this country. Internal DePuy projections estimate that it will fail in 40 percent of those patients within five years; a rate eight times higher than for many other hip devices.

Mr. Ekdahl testified via tape Wednesday that he had been placed in charge of the 2005 introduction of the standard version of the A.S.R. in this country. Within three years, he and other DePuy executives were receiving reports that the device was failing prematurely at higher than expected rates, apparently because of problems related to the cup’s design, documents disclosed during the trial indicate.

Along with other DePuy executives, he also participated in a meeting that resulted in a proposal to redesign the A.S.R. cup. But that plan was dropped, apparently because sales of the implant had not justified the expense, DePuy documents indicate.

In the face of growing complaints from surgeons about the A.S.R., DePuy officials maintained that the problems were related to how surgeons were implanting the cup, not from any design flaw. But in early 2009, a DePuy executive wrote to Mr. Ekdahl and other marketing officials that the early failures of the A.S.R. resurfacing device and the A.S.R. traditional implant, known as the XL, were most likely design-related.

“The issue seen with A.S.R. and XL today, over five years post-launch, are most likely linked to the inherent design of the product and that is something we should recognize,” that executive, Raphael Pascaud wrote in March 2009.

Last year, The New York Times reported that DePuy executives decided in 2009 to phase out the A.S.R. and sell existing inventories weeks after the Food and Drug Administration asked the company for more safety data about the implant.

The F.D.A. also told the company at that time that it was rejecting its efforts to sell the resurfacing version of the device in the United States because of concerns about “high concentration of metal ions” in the blood of patients who received it.

DePuy never disclosed the F.D.A. ruling to regulators in other countries where it was still marketing the resurfacing version of the implant.

During a part of that period, Mr. Ekdahl was overseeing sales in Europe and other regions for DePuy. When The Times article appeared last year, he issued a statement, saying that any implication that the F.D.A. had determined there were safety issues with the A.S.R. was “simply untrue.” “This was purely a business decision,” Mr. Ekdahl stated at that time.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

An earlier version of this article, in the summary, described the start of the DePuy trial incorrectly. It began last week, not this week.

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LaHood will resign as Transportation secretary

WASHINGTON — Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a former lawmaker from Illinois and the last Republican left in President Obama's first-term Cabinet, announced Tuesday he was stepping down once a replacement was confirmed.

Among those mentioned as a possible successor is Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, whose second and final term ends June 30. He has sought to establish himself as a national leader on transportation and made improving L.A.'s transit system a cornerstone of his tenure.

Villaraigosa played a key role in crafting a provision in last year's federal transportation bill designed to speed up projects around the country, including in Los Angeles. He was also one of the most prominent Latino supporters for Obama, who has been under pressure to appoint Latinos to his Cabinet. The former California Assembly speaker was chairman of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., last summer.

The mayor is traveling in South Korea; his office said he could not be reached for comment about the opening.

A longtime ally and another former Assembly speaker, Fabian Nuñez, would not confirm whether Villaraigosa had been approached about a Cabinet position but said he believed the mayor would, if one was offered, serve his full term.

"He has his two feet solidly placed on the ground," Nuñez said, adding that Villaraigosa feels he would "have an obligation to finish out his term as mayor. That's first and foremost."

The White House declined to discuss potential Cabinet nominees, but former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm also has been mentioned as a replacement. Like Villaraigosa, Granholm was a key surrogate for Obama and a speaker at the last Democratic convention.

In a note to department staff, LaHood said he would remain until he was officially replaced to ensure "a smooth transition for the department and all the important work we still have to do."

The former seven-term congressman from Peoria, Ill., has led the department since 2009, but stated in 2011 that he did not plan to serve in the president's second term and would retire from public service. The president has another Republican on deck for his second term — former Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, whom Obama has nominated to lead the Pentagon. The other Republican in Obama's first-term Cabinet, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, left in 2011.

Despite his party affiliation, LaHood's views were often out of step with those of his former Republican colleagues, and his appointment did little to boost the president's standing with the opposition.

In his note, LaHood named among his top accomplishments his work to reduce distracted driving and combat pilot fatigue. He also listed his support for high-speed rail and more than $50 billion spent on transportation projects as part of the president's stimulus measure, a program reviled by Republicans, who see it as an example of wasteful federal spending.

"We helped jump-start the economy and put our fellow Americans back to work," LaHood wrote. "Our achievements are significant."

In an interview, LaHood said the biggest battle for his successor would not be over policy but money. The new secretary will have to find a way to fund highway construction and maintenance when the federal 18.4-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax isn't bringing in as much as it used to because vehicles are more fuel-efficient. There is strong opposition to raising the tax, which was last increased in 1993.

LaHood had pushed a five-year transportation funding bill, but had to settle for a two-year bill.

"The funding is the big question. Everyone knows what needs to be done in transportation in America. But the debate will be how to pay for it," LaHood said. "The American people are way, way ahead of the politicians on this. They're ready to have their potholes fixed … and they know it takes resources."

kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com

Richard Simon in Washington, Jon Hilkevitch in Chicago and Cathleen Decker in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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New BlackBerry to Be ‘Most Comprehensive in Mobile History’

RIM is finally ready with its answer to Apple’s iPhone and the many Android smartphones. After months of delays, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, along with others from the company, will take the stage Wednesday in New York to unveil the final version of BlackBerry 10, the next version of RIM’s phone software, and the phones that will run it.

“We expect tomorrow to really be the kickoff for the introduction of Blackberry 10,” RIM’s Chief Marketing Officer Frank Boulben told ABC News in a phone interview. “We have been engaged for quite a period of time with the two main constituents — the carriers and the developers — and we’ve already said we are in the labs of more than 150 carriers around the world.”

Column: BlackBerry Burden: What RIM Must Do to Come Back

With more than 150 wireless carriers around the world planning to offer the latest BlackBerry, Boulben says it will be the most “comprehensive launch,” not only for the company, but in the history of the mobile industry.

“This makes it the most comprehensive launch in mobile history. There has never been a platform launching with that many carriers,” he said. When the iPhone 5 made its debut in September it actually had more — Apple said there would be 240 carriers by December. But Boulben points out that BlackBerry 10 is an entirely new operating system that doesn’t share a single line of code with previous BlackBerry software; the iPhone 5 and iOS 6, by contrast, was essentially an upgrade.

At Wednesday’s event the company will show its new handsets in detail. RIM is expected to release a touch-screen device called the Z10 and another with a physical keyboard. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon have said they will carry devices that run the new software. Boulben also said RIM will highlight major differences between BlackBerry 10 and the other leading mobile phone platforms.

“We are highly differentiated in four areas,” Boulben said. The first is with communications — RIM has designed the software around a messaging hub and new multitasking features. The second: the touch keyboard, which predicts words as you are typing them. Lastly, RIM says its BlackBerry Messenger and its BlackBerry Balance feature, which separates work from personal uses on the phone, set it apart.

Boulben would not address specifically how much market share RIM is hoping to gain back in the U.S., having lost the lead it had in the last decade. According to Kantar Worldpane ComTech’s data released in November 2012, the BlackBerry brand only had 1.6 percent of the American smartphone market. The iPhone had 48.1 percent of the market and Android had 46.7.

“It’s a change in smartphone experience — the dominant paradigm, introduced six years ago, was great and revolutionary at the time. But six years is a long time for a technology cycle, with a new user experience with a clear focus we have the opportunity to take market share back,” Boulben said.

RIM CMO: BlackBerry 10 Will Make Others Look Outdated

While RIM is of course bullish about its new products, it faces one big challenge it might not be able to control: apps. While the platform might be innovative, it will trail behind the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in variety of apps. Boulben says the momentum around apps is strong and that Wednesday the BlackBerry World store will launch with 70,000 new apps.

RIM BlackBerry 10 Launch

Apps that worked on previous BlackBerry 7 devices won’t work on the BlackBerry 10 platform, since it is completely new. Analysts say that apps are bound to be the pain point for the platform, but it’s not too late to rule out RIM from taking back at least some of what it has lost.

“Given the speed that the market is moving, it’s hard to be dismissive of RIM given the strength of their brand and continued loyalty of many users,” Michael Gartenberg, Gartner Research Director, told ABC News. “It will be important for RIM to show tomorrow how they’ve evolved the BlackBerry to meet the challenges of other platforms and at the same time show positive differentiation.”

And that seems to be exactly RIM’s plan. “The time was right to switch to a new platform, one that will allow us to continue true to our DNA but also take it to the next level,” Boulben said. “It is a major undertaking for the company. It has been two years in the making, but we are ready.”

RIM’s BlackBerry 10 event begins at 10:00 a.m. ET on Jan. 30, 2013. ABC News will be reporting on the news throughout the day.

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Muse to play anniversary gig for War Child charity

LONDON (Reuters) – British rock band Muse will headline a gig in London next month to mark the 20th anniversary of War Child, a charity that aims to protect young victims of conflicts around the world.

The gig on February 18 at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire will be the fifth time War Child has staged a concert in association with the BRIT Awards, Britain’s top pop honors which take place this year at the O2 Arena on February 20.

War Child is to receive the inaugural Special Recognition Award at the ceremony, while Muse has been nominated for best British group and best British live act.

Muse’s song “Survival” was chosen as the official song for the Olympic Games in London last year.

The BRIT Awards Concerts at the 2,000-capacity Empire have raised more than 600,000 pounds ($ 945,000) for War Child and included performances from Coldplay, The Killers, Blur and Kasabian.

“We are proud to have a continuing association with War Child, who have been doing amazing work over the last 20 years,” said Muse lead singer Matt Bellamy.

“It’s great to see their efforts being recognized at this year’s BRITs and we are really looking forward to playing this special show for them,” he added in a statement.

War Child UK says it has changed and saved the lives of some 800,000 children in war-affected countries including Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Iraq.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White)

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Super Bowl — At Media Day, Spotlight on Head Injuries Grows

NEW ORLEANS — It has become a staple of Super Bowl week, as much a part of the pregame to the N.F.L.’s biggest event as the annual media day: a discussion of how football is being affected by head injuries and the mounting evidence that long-term brain damage can be linked to injuries sustained on the field.

Years ago, players rarely spoke about the issue and league officials dismissed suggestions that on-field injuries could lead to life-altering health problems. Now, however, the league is facing lawsuits from thousands of former players, rules are being instituted in an attempt to diminish injuries on the field and even President Obama has said that the way football is played will have to change. This week, Bernard Pollard, a hard-hitting safety for the Baltimore Ravens, created a stir by saying that the N.F.L. would not exist in 30 years because of the rules changes designed with safety in mind, but that he also believed there would be a death on the field at some point.

At media day Tuesday, players reacted to the comments made by Pollard and Obama, with some agreeing with Pollard that recent rules changes would change the sport to such an extent that it would be less entertaining and lead to a loss of popularity. Pollard stood by his comments. He added, however, that while he was comfortable with the physical risk he was taking by playing football, he was not sure he would want future generations, including his 4-year-old son, to follow his example.

“My whole stance right now is that I don’t want him to play football,” Pollard said. “Football has been good to me. It has been my outlet. God has blessed me with a tremendous talent to be able to play this game. But we want our kids to have things better than us.”

He said he did not want his son to go through the aches and pains caused by the physicality of the game.

“You keep playing football, you’re going to have your injuries, no one is exempt from that,” he said. “You’re going to have concussions. You’re going to have broken bones. That’s going to happen. But I think for the most part, we know what we signed up for.”

The sentiment was echoed by Baltimore quarterback Joe Flacco. “I play the game and I understand that I’m going to get hit,” Flacco said. “Just because they fine the guys is not going to stop them from hitting me. I find it tough to fine people who are doing their job.”

In a recent interview with The New Republic, Obama expressed concern about on-field injuries, though he added that N.F.L. players were grown men who are “well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies.”

The president added: “I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.”

While many current players seem focused on rules changes and how they will affect the nature of the game, more than 4,000 former N.F.L. players have filed a lawsuit against the league, contending that it knew hits to the head could lead to long-term brain damage but did not share that information with players. The judge in the case said Tuesday that she would hear oral arguments April 9 regarding the league’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The family of Junior Seau, a former star linebacker who shot and killed himself last year, has also sued the N.F.L., claiming it failed to inform players about the risks of brain injury.

Pollard’s counterparts on the San Francisco 49ers, safeties Dashon Goldson and Donte Whitner, considered one of the hardest-hitting tandems in the N.F.L., thought the key was not removing big hits, but making sure the hits that are delivered are legal.

“You can be vicious and you can hit people hard, but do it the right way,” Whitner said. “For the most part, you know what you can and cannot do. Do you want to go out there and do the right things or do you want to make that big hit to gain a big name? That’s what it comes down to.”

Ravens guard Marshal Yanda said he thought the topic was so personal for Pollard because of the unique nature of being a hard-hitting defensive back, one of the positions most affected by the league’s attempts to increase player safety.

“I think Bernard is frustrated because he plays a tough position where it’s a bang-bang play and he’s getting fined,” Yanda said. “That’s a tough deal as far as him playing football his whole life knowing how to play one way and then all of a sudden you have to change.”

One of the few people to disagree entirely with Pollard’s view that skewing the rules to protect offensive players would harm the league was Warren Sapp, a retired defensive tackle who at one point went by the Twitter handle @QBKilla. He said a desire for points would always result in defenses being limited.

“They like points,” Sapp said. “I like it too. You’re going to have to make some key stops here and there but it’s an offensive game, no doubt about it.”

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Media Decoder Blog: CNN President Tries to Repeat Success in A.M. News

Two decades ago, a young producer named Jeff Zucker helped a down-on-its-luck “Today” show regain its ratings mojo and start what became a 16-year winning streak. More recently, he was a sounding board for Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, as Mr. Sherwood’s “Good Morning America” finally ended the “Today” show’s streak.

Now, Mr. Zucker is assembling a new morning show for CNN, the first of several building blocks for the ailing cable news channel. On Tuesday, he hired Chris Cuomo, a former news anchor on “G.M.A.,” to be a co-anchor of the new unnamed show, and is expected to begin in the spring. Mr. Zucker wants to pair Mr. Cuomo with Erin Burnett, another veteran of the morning shift.

Mr. Zucker, who formally took over CNN Worldwide last week after his appointment as president last November, declined an interview request. But his decision to scrap “Starting Point,” CNN’s morning show, and start over turned heads in the television industry on Tuesday. Agents and anchors said it conveyed the message that “he’s not wasting any time.”

CNN is one of the most valuable brands in the world, but its ratings in the United States have collapsed in the face of competition from other cable channels and the Internet. “Starting Point,” for example, had just 234,000 viewers on a typical morning in 2012, the channel’s lowest total viewer number in that time slot in more than a decade. Of those, just 96,000 were between the ages of 25 and 54, the group that cable news advertisers try to reach.

For Mr. Zucker, who rose from “Today” to run all of NBC Universal in the 2000s, before being replaced when Comcast took control of the company two years ago, the chance to turn around CNN’s morning ratings represents a test: long after leaving “Today,” can he revitalize another morning show for another network?

TMZ first reported Mr. Cuomo’s impending move on Monday night. He wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, “I have a great chance to be the first word on what matters to you every morning.”

His brother, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, said in a radio interview that CNN was a better fit than ABC. “He’ll be on every day, so there will be a certain relevance to what he’s doing,” Governor Cuomo said.

Chris Cuomo has been a co-anchor of the weekly ABC newsmagazine “20/20” for the last three years. David Muir, the anchor of ABC’s weekend “World News,” will add “20/20” to his duties now. Mr. Cuomo, who previously spent three years as the news anchor on “G.M.A.,” was in the running for the co-host job on that show when Diane Sawyer left for the evening newscast “World News” in 2009. But the job went instead to George Stephanopoulos.

At CNN, a unit of Time Warner, Mr. Cuomo will have a new opportunity to lead a morning newscast. As it seeks a bigger audience in the mornings, however, CNN risks irritating the audience it already has by making sweeping changes. That happened 12 months ago when it gave up on a 10-year-old show, “American Morning,” and created “Starting Point.”

Soledad O’Brien, the anchor for the last 12 months, has been widely praised for her political interviews despite the program’s relatively low ratings. The show’s defenders say it never received the internal support and the external marketing it had been promised. They imply that it was not given a chance to succeed. Its detractors, however, say it was a bland copy of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” a show that, coincidentally, Mr. Zucker supported when he ran NBC Universal.

A CNN spokeswoman said in an e-mail Tuesday, “Soledad is very important to the network, and we’re discussing various options with her.”

Pairing Ms. Burnett with Mr. Cuomo would create another hole in CNN’s weekday schedule. Ms. Burnett is best known for her years at CNBC, where she and Mark Haines were at the helm of the midmorning markets newscast “Squawk on the Street” from 2005 to 2011. She is now the anchor of the 7 p.m. hour on CNN. But the hour has suffered like “Starting Point” and the rest of the channel’s schedule. CNN declined to comment on Ms. Burnett’s status on Tuesday.

Mr. Cuomo is the third prominent name from ABC to be hired by CNN in the last year. The first was John Berman, a longtime ABC correspondent, who now co-hosts “Early Start,” the predawn newscast that precedes “Starting Point.” The second was Jake Tapper, the chief White House correspondent for ABC.

Mr. Zucker had a role in signing Mr. Tapper, who will begin anchoring a daily program for CNN this year. Now Mr. Zucker is figuring out where Mr. Tapper and CNN’s other hosts belong on the schedule. Associates say Mr. Zucker wants both the daytime and prime time programs to be more entertaining and less dependent on the daily drip-drip-drip of stories about politics and overseas conflicts.

On Tuesday, Mark Whitaker, the managing editor of CNN Worldwide, stepped down, stating in an e-mail to staff members that Mr. Zucker “deserves his own team and management structure and the freedom to communicate one clear vision to the staff.” Mr. Whitaker was a top lieutenant of Jim Walton, Mr. Zucker’s predecessor.

The announcement last week of the hiring of the sports reporter Rachel Nichols from ESPN was a hint of what is to come under Mr. Zucker. He said in a statement then that Ms. Nichols would host a weekend sports program and called her hiring “an important step in expanding the range of programming and storytelling on CNN.”

Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting.

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