Dow surges 308 points on 'fiscal cliff' deal

NEW YORK — Investors poured back into the stock market on the first trading day of 2013 in a rally seen as a sigh of relief that President Obama and Congress were able to avert the so-called fiscal cliff and an immediate economic downturn.

The Dow Jones industrial average surged 308.41 points, or 2.4%, to 13,412.55 on Wednesday — the best one-day rise in more than a year. Wall Street followed rallies in European and Asian equities markets after Washington's last-minute fiscal deal late Tuesday.

The broader Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 36.23 points, or 2.5%, to 1,462.42. It was the S&P's best first-trading-day jump since 2009, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for S&P Dow Jones Indices. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index gained 92.75 points, or 3.1%, to 3,112.26.

Though Washington may have averted an immediate downturn, political leaders put off stalemates over broad spending cuts in military and social programs to reduce the country's long-term deficit.

"They turned off the bomb," said Sean Kelly, head of equity trading at Knight Capital Group. "There's still danger in the whole thing, but as of right now there's no immediate danger."

Another fight over whether to raise the country's debt ceiling, or borrowing limit, could also rattle markets in coming weeks.

Doug Cote, chief investment strategist with ING Investment Management U.S., said the rally was one of "false relief" not based on the country's longer-term deficit problems, which remain an unresolved threat.

"There's relief that something got passed that was better than the worst-case scenario," he said.

andrew.tangel@latimes.com

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Hong Kong real estate investors pursue parking spaces

HONG KONG — The hottest properties in this frenetic city have no walls, windows or even front doors. Forget condos, apartments and homes.

Real estate investors are scrambling for parking spaces.

Single slots are now selling for more than some modest Southern California homes. Witness the $288,000 paid in November for a parking place in a luxury apartment complex on Hong Kong Island. Or the $166,000 tab for a spot in a suburban development called Festival City. A space attached to an exclusive cliffside townhouse community in the ocean view neighborhood of Repulse Bay fetched $385,000 in March.

And those are just the recorded sales.

Jacinto Tong, head of Gale Well Group, a real estate investment firm, was offered $640,000 each for his two ground-floor parking spaces in an office building in the Wan Chai commercial district. He said he turned it down because he likes parking his Mercedes S500 on prime real estate near the elevator. The other spot is reserved for his driver.

"This market has gone crazy," Tong said. "These spaces aren't worth that much money."

Parking has long been a prized commodity in land-scarce Hong Kong. Tenants outnumber available slots by as much as 20 to 1 in some residential buildings, creating strong demand for spaces. But experts say the recent price explosion is the unintended fallout from a government effort to cool red-hot housing values.

Home prices in the former British colony have nearly doubled since early 2009, driven largely by wealthy buyers from mainland China. A typical 600-square-foot apartment now costs about $577,000, according to property broker Savills. Prices soar into the millions in parts of Hong Kong Island, the city's commercial and financial center.

Under pressure to slow housing costs, the Hong Kong government in the last year introduced curbs aimed at speculators. Starting in late October, a 15% "stamp duty" was levied on sales to non-permanent Hong Kong residents. A tax of 20% was imposed on properties resold within six months of purchase.

The result: Investors channeled their money into parking spaces, where the new rules did not apply.

Parking space transactions in November rose more than five-fold compared with a year earlier at 1,640, according to Centaline, one of the largest real estate firms in Hong Kong. The average price of each space sold was $92,307, up 20% from a year earlier.

"Hong Kong people always have to invest in something," said Shih Wing-ching, Centaline's chairman. "Not many were willing to pay the stamp duty, so they needed to find something else."

Naturally, Hong Kong banks offer mortgages for parking spaces. Small lenders are reportedly battling for customers with ever lower-interest loans.

Some investors are looking to flip for a quick profit. Others are looking for a steady source of rental income. At nearly $745 a month, the average cost of leasing a space in Hong Kong in 2011 was behind only London and Zurich, according to Colliers International.

The International Monetary Fund recently warned that soaring real estate values posed the biggest risk to Hong Kong's economy should there be a major correction.

However, unlike in the U.S. subprime fiasco, most of Hong Kong's buyers aren't highly leveraged; many deals are all cash. The local market is not subject to oversupply either. Since a market crash in 1997, the Hong Kong government has been cautious about freeing up remaining land in the largely hilly, 426-square-mile territory. As a result, Hong Kong suffers from an inadequate supply of housing, analysts say.

The lofty prices paid for parking berths are unthinkable for working-class Hong Kong residents — many of whom are finding their city painfully unaffordable. The city's wealth gap is now at a 30-year high. The credibility of the local government rests partly on its ability to shrink the divide and defuse growing animosity toward rich mainlanders.

Real estate has become a symbol of that struggle and a lightning rod for criticism. The city's leader, Leung Chun-ying, is enmeshed in a scandal over illegal additions to his mansion on Victoria Peak.

Meanwhile, a shortage of affordable housing has swollen the ranks of families living in squalid rented rooms in what are known here as subdivided apartments.

Lee Pak-shun rents a room with his mother and sister in a space barely big enough for a bunk bed and a desk in a grimy section of Mong Kok, one of the most densely populated places in the world. About 30 other people are crammed in beside them on the fifth floor of a dilapidated building. Everyone shares a single squat toilet. Rooms are divided by thin plywood.

"People go crazy living in such a small place," said Lee, a 26-year-old bakery employee, who pays $192 a month for the room — which is about half the size of a typical parking space. "It feels like the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Some people here have so much money to speculate in property and speculate in parking spaces. They're cooking something up every day."

Analysts say Hong Hong's parking space bubble is bound to burst. Developers have been releasing new spaces onto the market. Investors are also finding it harder to flip spaces because of rules in some property developments that restrict potential buyers to tenants only.

"I think this is a short-term phenomenon," said Shih, of Centaline. "It won't happen again."

Not everyone is convinced. Francis Liu, an economist at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, thinks the next big investment scheme could be taxi licenses — the costs of which have been spiraling up to $900,000.

"Mainlanders like to invest in them because they're easy to buy and sell," Liu said. "It's the same concept as parking spaces."

david.pierson@latimes.com

Special correspondent Shirley Zhao in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

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Thieves stole more than $1 million worth of Apple products during a New Years Eve heist

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Playboy Hugh Hefner marries his 'runaway bride'

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hugh Hefner's celebrating the new year as a married man once again.

The 86-year-old Playboy magazine founder exchanged vows with his "runaway bride," Crystal Harris, at a private Playboy Mansion ceremony on New Year's Eve. Harris, a 26-year-old "Playmate of the Month" in 2009, broke off a previous engagement to Hefner just before they were to be married in 2011.

Playboy said on Tuesday that the couple celebrated at a New Year's Eve party at the mansion with guests that included comic Jon Lovitz, Gene Simmons of KISS and baseball star Evan Longoria.

The bride wore a strapless gown in soft pink, Hefner a black tux. Hefner's been married twice before but lived the single life between 1959 and 1989.

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Ground Zero Volunteers Face Obstacles to Compensation

On the day the terrorists flew into the World Trade Center, the Wu-Tang Clan canceled its meeting with a record mixer named Richard Oliver, so Mr. Oliver rushed downtown from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment to help out.

He said he spent three sleepless days at ground zero, tossing body bags. “Then I went home, ate, crashed, woke up,” he said. He had left his Dr. Martens boots on the landing outside his apartment, where he said they “had rotted away.”

“That was kind of frightening,” he continued. “I was breathing that stuff.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, nothing symbolized the city’s rallying around like many New Yorkers who helped at ground zero for days, weeks, months, without being asked. Now Mr. Oliver, suffering from back pain and a chronic sinus infection, is among scores of volunteers who have begun filing claims for compensation from a $2.8 billion fund that Congress created in 2010.

But proving they were there and eligible for the money is turning out to be its own forbidding task.

The other large classes of people who qualify — firefighters, police officers, contractors, city workers, residents and students — have it relatively simple, since they are more likely to have official work orders, attendance records and leases to back them up. But more than a decade later, many volunteers have only the sketchiest proof that they are eligible for the fund, which is expected to make its first awards early this year. (A separate $1.5 billion treatment fund also was created.)

They are volunteers like Terry Graves, now ill with lung cancer, who kept a few business cards of people she worked with until 2007, then threw them away. Or Jaime Hazan, a former Web designer with gastric reflux, chronically inflamed sinuses and asthma, who managed to dig up a photograph of himself at ground zero — taken from behind.

Or Mr. Oliver, who has a terse two-sentence thank-you note on American Red Cross letterhead, dated 2004, which does not meet the requirement that it be witnessed or sworn.

“For some people, there’s great records,” said Noah H. Kushlefsky, whose law firm, Kreindler & Kreindler, is representing volunteers and others who expect to make claims. “But in some respects, it was a little bit of a free-for-all. Other people went down there and joined the bucket brigade, talked their way in. It’s going to be harder for those people, and we do have clients like that.”

As documentation, the fund requires volunteers to have orders, instructions or confirmation of tasks they performed, or medical records created during the time they were in what is being called the exposure zone, including the area south of Canal Street, and areas where debris was being taken.

Failing that, it will be enough to submit two sworn statements — meaning the writer swears to its truth, under penalty of perjury — from witnesses describing when the volunteers were there and what they were doing.

Proving presence at the site might actually be harder than proving the illness is related to Sept. 11, since the rules now allow a host of ailments to be covered, including 50 kinds of cancer, despite an absence of evidence linking cancer to ground zero.

A study by the New York City health department, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found no clear association between cancer and Sept. 11, though the researchers noted that some cancers take many years to develop.

Unlike the original compensation fund, administered by Kenneth Feinberg, which dealt mainly with people who were killed or maimed in the attack, “This one is dealing with injuries that are very common,” said Sheila L. Birnbaum, a former mediator and personal injury defense lawyer, who is in charge of the new fund. “So it’s sort of a very hard process from the fund’s point of view to make the right call, and it requires some evidence that people were actually there.”

Asked how closely the fund would scrutinize documents like sworn statements, Ms. Birnbaum said she understood how hard it was to recreate records after a decade, and was going on the basic assumption that people would be honest.

In his career as a record mixer, Mr. Oliver, 56, has been associated with 7 platinum and 11 gold records, and 2 Grammy credits, which now line the walls of his condominium in College Point, Queens. He said he first got wind of the Sept. 11 attacks from a client, the Wu-Tang Clan. “One of the main guys called me: ‘Did you see what’s on TV? Because our meeting ain’t going to happen,’ ” he recalled.

Having taken a hazmat course after high school, he called the Red Cross and was told they needed people like him. “I left my soon-to-be-ex-wife and 1-year-old son and went down,” he said. “I came back three days later,” after surviving on his own adrenaline, Little Debbie cakes handed out to volunteers and bottled water. After working for three days setting up a morgue, he was willing to go back, he said, but “they said we have trained people now, thank you very much for your service.”

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Hong Kong real estate investors pursue parking spaces

HONG KONG — The hottest properties in this frenetic city have no walls, windows or even front doors. Forget condos, apartments and homes.

Real estate investors are scrambling for parking spaces.

Single slots are now selling for more than some modest Southern California homes. Witness the $288,000 paid in November for a parking place in a luxury apartment complex on Hong Kong Island. Or the $166,000 tab for a spot in a suburban development called Festival City. A space attached to an exclusive cliffside townhouse community in the ocean view neighborhood of Repulse Bay fetched $385,000 in March.

And those are just the recorded sales.

Jacinto Tong, head of Gale Well Group, a real estate investment firm, was offered $640,000 each for his two ground-floor parking spaces in an office building in the Wan Chai commercial district. He said he turned it down because he likes parking his Mercedes S500 on prime real estate near the elevator. The other spot is reserved for his driver.

"This market has gone crazy," Tong said. "These spaces aren't worth that much money."

Parking has long been a prized commodity in land-scarce Hong Kong. Tenants outnumber available slots by as much as 20 to 1 in some residential buildings, creating strong demand for spaces. But experts say the recent price explosion is the unintended fallout from a government effort to cool red-hot housing values.

Home prices in the former British colony have nearly doubled since early 2009, driven largely by wealthy buyers from mainland China. A typical 600-square-foot apartment now costs about $577,000, according to property broker Savills. Prices soar into the millions in parts of Hong Kong Island, the city's commercial and financial center.

Under pressure to slow housing costs, the Hong Kong government in the last year introduced curbs aimed at speculators. Starting in late October, a 15% "stamp duty" was levied on sales to non-permanent Hong Kong residents. A tax of 20% was imposed on properties resold within six months of purchase.

The result: Investors channeled their money into parking spaces, where the new rules did not apply.

Parking space transactions in November rose more than five-fold compared with a year earlier at 1,640, according to Centaline, one of the largest real estate firms in Hong Kong. The average price of each space sold was $92,307, up 20% from a year earlier.

"Hong Kong people always have to invest in something," said Shih Wing-ching, Centaline's chairman. "Not many were willing to pay the stamp duty, so they needed to find something else."

Naturally, Hong Kong banks offer mortgages for parking spaces. Small lenders are reportedly battling for customers with ever lower-interest loans.

Some investors are looking to flip for a quick profit. Others are looking for a steady source of rental income. At nearly $745 a month, the average cost of leasing a space in Hong Kong in 2011 was behind only London and Zurich, according to Colliers International.

The International Monetary Fund recently warned that soaring real estate values posed the biggest risk to Hong Kong's economy should there be a major correction.

However, unlike in the U.S. subprime fiasco, most of Hong Kong's buyers aren't highly leveraged; many deals are all cash. The local market is not subject to oversupply either. Since a market crash in 1997, the Hong Kong government has been cautious about freeing up remaining land in the largely hilly, 426-square-mile territory. As a result, Hong Kong suffers from an inadequate supply of housing, analysts say.

The lofty prices paid for parking berths are unthinkable for working-class Hong Kong residents — many of whom are finding their city painfully unaffordable. The city's wealth gap is now at a 30-year high. The credibility of the local government rests partly on its ability to shrink the divide and defuse growing animosity toward rich mainlanders.

Real estate has become a symbol of that struggle and a lightning rod for criticism. The city's leader, Leung Chun-ying, is enmeshed in a scandal over illegal additions to his mansion on Victoria Peak.

Meanwhile, a shortage of affordable housing has swollen the ranks of families living in squalid rented rooms in what are known here as subdivided apartments.

Lee Pak-shun rents a room with his mother and sister in a space barely big enough for a bunk bed and a desk in a grimy section of Mong Kok, one of the most densely populated places in the world. About 30 other people are crammed in beside them on the fifth floor of a dilapidated building. Everyone shares a single squat toilet. Rooms are divided by thin plywood.

"People go crazy living in such a small place," said Lee, a 26-year-old bakery employee, who pays $192 a month for the room — which is about half the size of a typical parking space. "It feels like the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Some people here have so much money to speculate in property and speculate in parking spaces. They're cooking something up every day."

Analysts say Hong Hong's parking space bubble is bound to burst. Developers have been releasing new spaces onto the market. Investors are also finding it harder to flip spaces because of rules in some property developments that restrict potential buyers to tenants only.

"I think this is a short-term phenomenon," said Shih, of Centaline. "It won't happen again."

Not everyone is convinced. Francis Liu, an economist at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, thinks the next big investment scheme could be taxi licenses — the costs of which have been spiraling up to $900,000.

"Mainlanders like to invest in them because they're easy to buy and sell," Liu said. "It's the same concept as parking spaces."

david.pierson@latimes.com

Special correspondent Shirley Zhao in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

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Lunar New Year celebrants get no rest after Western holidays

At her store in Chinatown, Tracy Tieu replaces red and green Christmas trinkets with red and gold Lunar New Year decorations as she greets shoppers fresh from Las Vegas.

A mother strokes a jade dragon leaping from a dark wood emblem. A man and his wife unfurl scrolls bearing symbols of wealth. A student buys assorted little Buddhas, lining them up by belly size.

Inside the shop, Wing Ha Hing Gifts & Arts, Asian travelers this past weekend talk about how many aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents they expect to host at noisy family gatherings.

One new year celebration may have ended — but for many Southern Californians the bustle of preparing for the Lunar New Year continues full force, with no time for holiday fatigue.

"We can't afford it," Tieu says. "We go with the season.... I order supplies six months in advance."

At crowded shopping plazas in Los Angeles' Chinatown and Koreatown, the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County's Little Saigon, seasonal foods line bakery shelves, holiday music plays on open-air speakers and Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese consumers are spending big — yet again — on their most important annual celebration.

The Year of the Snake begins Feb. 10. Those born under this sign are believed to have a good temper and strong passion, but can be suspicious.

The Lunar New Year is a time when debts are paid, arguments are laid to rest, hair is cut and homes are painted and polished and rituals are followed to sweep away ill fortune and welcome good luck. Doors and windows are decorated with themed images of happiness, prosperity and longevity, and incense is lighted in temples to pay respect to ancestors.

In the narrow, colorful shop her father opened in 1990, Tieu is surrounded by flowers, feng shui diaries, floating lotus candles and other traditional gifts.

Regina Gomez, a Chinese American from Nevada, was one of those hunting for bargains along Chinatown's main drag Sunday. She stopped at Tieu's store to prepare for the coming festivities. "When we buy for entertainment, it's better to buy for it here. It's less," she says, browsing with her kids, Shelby and Brittany. "I came to L.A. for Christmas and knew I should take a look before going home."

On the first morning of the new year, as everyone exchanges gifts and good wishes, Tieu plans to pass out crisp dollar bills in lucky red envelopes to some 20 nieces and nephews. "I have to give each of them at least $20 – anything smaller just isn't acceptable."

"It doesn't matter what we do or how much we gave for the previous holidays," adds Angie Tieu, her younger sister. "We have to remember the Lunar New Year, it's tradition, and we must spend."

On top of the financial costs, the extended holiday season carries health costs, said Calvin Ho, founder of the Plaid Bag Connection, a blog exploring the links between Asian groups outside their ethnic homeland. "We've been eating since the Moon Festival" in September "to Halloween, to Thanksgiving to Christmas and forward. Everyone overindulges because it's impossible not to."

Ho, who doesn't eat fried foods, says "with the holidays it's really hard to avoid it."

"Everything involves family," he said. "And when you are making multiple visits to different members of family day after day, you must sit down and share a meal. I get all my cravings in and it'll last until next fall."

Visiting Chinatown with her husband on Sunday, Elisa Aquino, who is half-Chinese, said she intends to serve dim sum dishes when she invites friends and relatives to her Carson home. "We go for a bang. High impact, lots of songs, lots of jokes.... I'm not cooking. We order," she adds.

Stephanie Yuan, working a souvenir kiosk nearby, said sales are brisk post-Christmas. "We are sold out of snake lucky charms," she says proudly, noting that the item features the animal highlighted in the 2013 Chinese zodiac.

"Here, you buy this one," she tells passing tourists, pointing to an Asian version of the Cheshire cat, complete with battery-operated paw, happy face and money pouch. On its white ceramic body is the Chinese character for $1 million. "It will lead you to a good way."

Merchants like Yuan and Thanh Ly, of neighboring Tambaba Fashion, can't take Lunar New Year off. "It's the day to sell," Ly says, folding traditional dresses made in Vietnam and Hong Kong. "We would like to have a vacation but we think about our living first. Some people buy last-minute."

Kevin Vong of Fresno isn't one of those. Outside Lien Hoa BBQ, he loads his truck with a whole roast pig, costing $195, carting it to a gathering to pray for the souls of his ancestors. He does this at the end of the Western new year, then again at the Lunar New Year. "I do not forget," he says. "I want someone doing that for me later. Years later."

anh.do@latimes.com

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Zynga carries out planned games shutdown, including “Petville”

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Social games publisher Zynga Inc confirmed on Monday that it has carried out 11 of the planned shutdowns of 13 game titles, with “Petville” being the latest game on which it pulled the plug.

Zynga in October said it would shut down 13 underperforming titles after warning that its revenues were slowing as gamers fled from its once-popular titles published on the Facebook platform in large numbers and sharply revised its full-year outlook.

The San Francisco-based company announced the “Petville” shutdown two weeks ago on its Facebook page. All the 11 shutdowns occurred in December.

The 11 titles shut down or closed to new players include role-playing game “Mafia Wars 2,” “Vampire Wars,” “ForestVille” and “FishVille.”

“In place of ‘PetVille,’ we encourage you to play other Zynga games like ‘Castleville,’ ‘Chefville,’ ‘Farmville 2,’ ‘Mafia Wars’ and ‘Yoville,’” the company told players on its ‘PetVille’ Facebook page. “PetVille” players were offered a one-time, complimentary bonus package for virtual goods in those games.

“Petville,” which lets users adopt virtual pets, has 7.5 million likes on Facebook but only 60,000 daily active users, according to AppData. About 1,260 users commented on the game’s Facebook page, some lamenting the game’s shutdown.

Zynga has said it is shifting focus to capture growth in mobile games. It also applied this month for a preliminary application to run real-money gambling games in Nevada.

Zynga is hoping that a lucrative real-money market could make up for declining revenue from games like “FarmVille” and other fading titles that still generate the bulk of its sales.

Zynga shares were up 1 percent at $ 2.36 in afternoon trade on Monday on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting By Malathi Nayak; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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Armstrong better, Green Day to resume tour in 2013

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Green Day is going back on the road.

The Grammy-winning punk band announced new tour dates Monday.

The band canceled the rest of its 2012 club schedule and postponed the start of a 2013 arena tour after singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong's substance abuse problems emerged publicly in September when he had a profane meltdown on the stage of the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas. The band's rep announced later that Armstrong was headed to treatment for substance abuse.

"I just want to thank you all for the love and support you've shown for the past few months," Armstrong told fans in a statement Monday. "Believe me, it hasn't gone unnoticed and I'm eternally grateful to have such an amazing set of friends and family. I'm getting better every day. So now, without further ado, the show must go on."

The tour is scheduled to begin March 28 at the Allstate Arena in the Chicago area. Tickets for postponed shows will be honored on the new dates, and refunds will be available for canceled shows.

"We want to thank everyone for hanging in with us for the last few months," the band said. "We are very excited to hit the road and see all of you again, though we regret having to cancel more shows."

The band released their most recent album, "Tre," on Dec. 11, more than a month ahead of schedule.

___

Online:

http://www.greenday.com/

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F.D.A. Approves Sirturo, a New Tuberculosis Drug

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Monday that it had approved a new treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis that can be used as an alternative when other drugs fail.

The drug, to be called Sirturo, was discovered by scientists at Janssen, the pharmaceuticals unit of Johnson & Johnson, and is the first in a new class of drugs that aims to treat the drug-resistant strain of the disease.

Tuberculosis is a highly infectious disease that is transmitted through the air and usually affects the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body, including the brain and kidneys. It is considered one of the world’s most serious public health threats. Although rare in the United States, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is a growing problem elsewhere in the world, especially in poorer countries. About 12 million people worldwide had tuberculosis in 2011, according to Johnson & Johnson, and about 630,000 had multidrug-resistant TB.

A study in September in The Lancet found that almost 44 percent of patients with tuberculosis in countries like Russia, Peru and Thailand showed resistance to at least one second-line drug, or a medicine used after another drug had already failed.

Treating drug-resistant tuberculosis can take years and can cost 200 times as much as treating the ordinary form of the disease

“This is quite a milestone in the story of therapy for TB,” Dr. Paul Stoffels, the chief scientific officer at Johnson & Johnson, said in an interview. He said the approval was the first time in 40 years that the agency had approved a drug that attacked tuberculosis in a different way from the current treatments on the market. Sirturo works by inhibiting an enzyme needed by the tuberculosis bacteria to replicate and spread throughout the body.

Sirturo, also known as bedaquiline, would be used on top of the standard treatment, which is a combination of several drugs. Patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis often must be treated for 18 to 24 months.

Even as it announced the approval, however, the F.D.A. also issued some words of caution.

“Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis poses a serious health threat throughout the world, and Sirturo provides much-needed treatment for patients who have don’t have other therapeutic options available,” Edward Cox, director of the office of antimicrobial products in the F.D.A.’s center for drug evaluation and research, said in a statement. “However, because the drug also carries some significant risks, doctors should make sure they use it appropriately and only in patients who don’t have other treatment options.”

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen opposed approval in a letter to the F.D.A. in mid-December, saying that the results of a limited clinical trial showed that patients using bedaquiline were five times as likely to die than those on the standard drug regimen to treat the disease.

“Given that bedaquiline belongs to an entirely new class of drugs, it is entirely feasible that death in some cases was due to some unmeasured toxicity of the drug,” the letter said.

Sirturo carries a so-called black box warning for patients and health care professionals that the drug can affect the heart’s electrical activity, which could lead to an abnormal and potentially fatal heart rhythm. The warning also notes deaths in patients treated with Sirturo. Nine patients who received Sirturo died compared with two patients who received a placebo. Five of the deaths in the Sirturo group and all of the deaths in the placebo arm seemed to be related to tuberculosis, but no consistent reason for the deaths in the remaining Sirturo-treated patients could be identified.

Doctors Without Borders and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, both active in the fight against tuberculosis and other global diseases, applauded the F.D.A.’s decision.

Jan Gheuens, interim director of the TB Program for the Gates Foundation, called it a “long-awaited event” and said the fight against TB had not benefited from new drugs in the way H.I.V. had. Beyond the benefits of the drug itself, he said the quick approval process could be a model for other drugs sorely needed in the developing world.

He also suggested, however, that more trials should be conducted to get a better understanding of the side effects that led to the black box warning.

The F.D.A. approved bedaquiline under an accelerated program that allows the agency to conditionally approve drugs that are viewed as filling unmet medical needs with less than the usual evidence that they work. The drug’s approval was based on studies that showed it killed bacteria more quickly than a control group taking the standard regimen, but it did not measure whether in the end patients actually fared better on bedaquiline. Johnson & Johnson will conduct larger clinical trials to investigate whether the drug performs as predicted.

In a statement responding to Public Citizen’s letter, a spokeswoman for Johnson & Johnson said the company was committed to supporting appropriate use of Sirturo and would “work to ensure Sirturo is used only where treatment alternatives are not available.”

Dr. Stoffels said the hope was that other new tuberculosis drugs would also be approved that, when used in combination with bedaquiline, could shorten and simplify the current standard of treatment. “That is still a long time away,” he acknowledged, but “this is a first step in a new regimen for TB.”

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