LENS

Life without modern conveniences — heat, electricity, appliances — may seem a bit barbaric to those who take these things for granted. But for some, choosing to do without them

can be a liberating experience.

Living in a small coastal town inAlaska in a yurtwithout central heat, running wa-ter, shower, bathor toilet is one way that Brentwood

Higman and Erin McKittrick keeptheir expenses down and their lives simple, freeing them to take long treks on foot or on skis and experi-ence the world on their own terms,The Times reported.

“I’m someone who doesn’t mind giving up some level of convenience

for having an interesting experi-ence,” Ms. McKittrick told The Times.

Their 41-square-meter circularyurt is made of roofing vinyl and heavy-duty insulation to withstandthe bitter Alaskan winter, and theykeep a wood-burning stove constant-ly stoked. But the temperature inside is often below freezing.

“The walls move when it blowshard,” Mr. Higman said. “It’s a littlebit more out there in the elements.”

The couple is not alone in their will-ingness to forego a warm and cozyhome. There is a challenge posed byan environmental blogger in Seattle,a contest called Freeze Yer Buns, to lower the thermostat to 13 degrees Celsius to save on energy.

Winifred Gallagher, a behavioralscience writer who lives in a warmtown house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, told The Times she makes monthly winter visits to a one-room former schoolhouse she owns about two hours north of the city. She’llbuild a fire and go for a walk and the room will warm up to about 15degrees Celsius, but slip back to freez-ing overnight, she said.

Some renounce heat for ecologicalor financial reasons. For Ms. Gal-lagher, the motivation is more spiritual in nature. The main reason why she does the winter trips is that when your house is minus 9 degrees Celsius, “the only problem you haveis getting warm,” she said. “Focusing

on survival is right up there with a Zen retreat when it comes to clearing the mind.”

Justen Ladda, a 56-year-old sculp-tor who has lived heat-free in his loft in lower Manhattan for three decades, shrugs when the toothpaste freezes or the refrigerator shuts off because it is colder outside than it isinside.

Others just say goodbye to a 20thcentury invention that modernizedlife in the kitchen: the refrigerator.

About two years ago, Rachel Muston, a 32-year-old information-technology worker for the Canadiangovernment in Ottawa, and her hus-band Scott Young, decided to ratchet up their environmental commitment

and unplug their refrigerator for good.

“It’s been a while, and we’re prettyhappy,” Ms. Muston told The Times last year. “We’re surprised at how easy it’s been.”

Others think the no-fridge move-ment is a bit extreme. First, becauseof the complications for storing food,those without refrigerators need tobuy food in smaller quantities, whichis more expensive. Second, it is harderto keep food from going bad, whichmeans more shopping trips and moreinconvenience.

“The refrigerator was a smart advance for society,” Gretchen Wil-lis, 37, an environmentally conscious mother of four in Arlington, Texas,told The Times. “It’s silly not to haveone considering what the alternative is: drinking up a gallon of milk in oneday so it doesn’t spoil.” TOM BRADY

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS

WHAT BEGAN WITH worries

about the solvency of Greece

in the face of high deficits,

fake budget figures and low growth has

quickly become the most severe test of

the 16-nation euro zone in its 11-year his-

tory.

Anxiety about the health of the euro,

which has spread from Greece to Por-

tugal, Spain and Italy, is not simply a

crisis of debts, rating agencies and vola-

tile markets. The issue has at its heart

elements of a political crisis, because

it goes to the central dilemma of the

European Union: the continuing grip

of individual states over economic and

fiscal policy, which makes it difficult for

the union as a whole to exercise political

leadership .

On February 11, European leaders,

meeting in Brussels, promised “deter-

mined and coordinated action’’ to safe-

guard the euro but offered few details

on how they would aid Greece.

Jean-Paul Fitoussi, professor of eco-

nomics at the Institute of Political Stud-

ies in Paris, said that European leaders

had “handled this crisis very badly,”

feeding market speculation and greed.

Greece’s ratio of public debt to gross

domestic product is no higher than Ger-

many’s, and Greece has not defaulted,

he said, but European leaders have

done too little to calm the markets and

rating agencies.

While no one expects that the Euro-

pean Union will allow Greece or the oth-

ers to default or the euro zone to collapse,

European leaders and the Central Bank

will almost surely have to bend the rules

to provide guarantees or loans, if neces-

sary. But even tiding over countries in

trouble will not solve the main flaw in

the euro: the sharp divergence of na-

tional economies that share a common

currency without significant fiscal coor-

dination, let alone a single treasury.

“The challenges facing the euro zone

are very serious,” said Simon Tilford,

chief economist for the Center for Euro-

pean Reform in London. “For countries

that have become pretty uncompetitive

in the euro zone and have weak public

finances, the current environment is

ARTURO RODRIGUEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Liberation From Modern Comforts

Con tin ued on Page IV

Anxiety about the euro

is not just a problem

of debts and volatile

markets. At heart is

a political crisis.

III VI VIIWORLD TRENDS

An Afghan road’s

vertiginous show.

MONEY & BUSINESS

Europe challenges

Google’s reach.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Fighting to save

toads in the mist.

An Uneven

World of Debt

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010 Copyright © 2010 The New York Times

Supplemento al numero

odierno de la RepubblicaSped. abb. postale art. 1

legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

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Toyota Has a Lot to FixToyota has a lot of work to do to recov-

er drivers’ trust. The company has nowrecalled about three times the numberof cars it sold in the United States and Canada last year. This hardly inspires confidence in its much-vaunted manu-facturing and design prowess.

Toyota’s troubles don’t end there. Its response to thousands of complaintsabout uncontrolled acceleration inmany of its cars and trucks was dis-turbingly slow and disturbingly short on transparency. And it initially keptconsumers in the dark about problemswith brakes on its Prius hybrid, nowsubject to a separate recall.

Recalls are common in the auto in-dustry. Every automaker in the UnitedStates has faced complaints aboutsudden acceleration. Toyota vehicleshave suffered more such instances. In2008, they accounted for 52 of the 115complaints to regulators about sudden acceleration. Over the last decade, 18deaths have been associated with theproblem in Toyotas — still, only a small fraction of the 40,000 annual highwayfatalities.

Toyota has compounded these prob-lems by failing to quickly, candidly orfully own up.

In 2007, after receiving complaintsabout unintended acceleration foryears, the company determined thatfloor mats were getting caught in theaccelerator pedals of some cars. It de-cided to recall 55,000 Camrys and Lex-uses, only those with a particular typeof mat. Toyota said that mats in other models were secured by clips.

Evidently they weren’t secureenough. After a California highway pa-trolman was killed while driving a Lex-us in August — and after being proddedby the National Highway Traffic SafetyAdministration — in November, Toyotawarned drivers of some four millionToyota cars to remove driver-side mats.At the same time, Toyota claimed that the federal safety agency had found nodefects in cars where the floor mat wascompatible with the vehicle and prop-erly secured.

That was false. The safety agency is-sued a strong rebuke. Three weeks later,Toyota recalled 4.3 million vehicles andsaid it would install “smart pedals” thatwould allow drivers to brake even if the

gas pedal was pressed.There were more troubles to come.

At least since 2008, Toyota had known about a separate problem in whichsticky accelerator pedals in severalmodels kept the throttle open even afterdrivers took their foot off the gas. Toyotadecided it wasn’t a safety problem anddidn’t tell American regulators about ituntil late last year.

Last month, under pressure from thefederal safety agency, Toyota stoppedbuilding and selling eight models proneto the sticky pedal and extended a newrecall to millions of cars worldwide. Thecompany is now installing a metal pieceon the pedal to fix the problem.

Not surprisingly, many consumersare skeptical that Toyota has solvedthe issue. They are particularly skep-tical of Toyota’s assurances that theproblem has nothing to do with theelectronic throttle controls, which crit-ics claim might unexpectedly open the throttle.

Toyota might be right about this. Un-fortunately, it keeps giving consumersmore reasons not to trust it. Even in themidst of all this, it took pressure from the Japanese government to persuadethe company to recall 2010 Prius modelswith brake problems. (In January, thecompany found a software glitch that was causing brakes to momentarilylose power, but only fixed cars still in itsinventory.)

The United States government willnow have to pick up at least a small partof the tab to rebuild Toyota’s credibility.The National Highway Traffic SafetyAdministration has agreed to re-ex-amine whether electronics are playingany role in the unexpected bouts of ac-celeration. American drivers need toknow the answer, and they need some-one they can believe to tell them. Toyotahas serious work ahead — and not justto improve its quality-control process.It needs to take a serious look at how itassesses problems, make it easier forconsumers to register complaints andguarantee they are heeded. It mustprovide the federal safety agency withall relevant information to help protectAmerican drivers. And when Toyotadetermines there is a problem thatneeds to be fixed, it should tell custom-ers about it — without delay.

DOHA, QatarOne of the few pleasant surprises

of 2009 was that the world’s biggesteconomies were able to concentrateon healing themselves without anymajor wars or world-shaking politi-cal or geopolitical disruptions. Whatare the odds that 2010 will be so be-nign? I’d say quite low. No question,the world’s major economies badly

Last year was calm onthe geopolitical front.This year may not be.

E D I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M E S

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

When Economics Meets Politics

After Hitler came to power, the so-ciologist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy emigrated to the United States.

Rosenstock-Huessy began teach-ing at Harvard and converted his lec-tures into English. He noticed, though, that his students weren’t graspinghis points. His language was not the problem, it was the allusions. He usedliterary and other allusions whenhe wanted to talk about ethics, com-munity, mysticism and emotion. But none of the students seemed to get it.Then, after a few years, he switchedto sports analogies. Suddenly, every-thing made sense.

“The world in which the Americanstudent who comes to me at abouttwenty years of age really has con-fidence in is the world of sport,” hewould write. “This world encom-passes all of his virtues and experi-ences, affection and interests; there-fore, I have built my entire sociology around the experiences an Americanhas in athletics and games.”

Rosenstock-Huessy was not thelast academic to recognize thatsport organizes the moral thinkingof many young Americans. Profes-sor Michael Allen Gillespie of DukeUniversity has just written a fasci-nating essay, for an anthology called“Debating Moral Education,” on the role of sports in American ethicaltraining.

Throughout Western history,Gillespie argues, there have beenthree major athletic traditions. First,there was the Greek tradition. Greeksports were highly individualistic.There was little interest in teamwork.Instead sports were supposed to incul-cate aristocratic virtues like courage and endurance. They gave individualsa way to achieve eternal glory.

Then, there was the Roman tradi-tion. In ancient Rome, free men didnot fight in the arena. Roman sportswere a spectacle organized by thegovernment. The free Romanswatched while the slaves fought and were slaughtered. The entertain-ment emphasized the awesome pow-er of the state.

Finally, there was the British tradi-tion. In the Victorian era, elite schoolsused sports to form a hardened rulingclass. Unlike the Greeks, the Brit-ish placed tremendous emphasis on

team play and sportsmanship. If asoccer team committed a foul, it wouldwithdraw its goalie to permit the otherteam to score. The object was to incul-cate a sense of group loyalty, honor and rule-abidingness — traits thatwere important to a class trying to manage a far-flung empire.

Gillespie argues that the Americansports ethos is a fusion of these three traditions. American sport teachesthat effort leads to victory, a usefullesson in a work-oriented society.Sport also helps Americans navigate the tension between team loyalty andindividual glory. We behave like the British, but think like the Greeks, A.Bartlett Giamatti, a former baseballcommissioner, once observed.

Gillespie appreciates the waysports culture has influenced Ameri-can students. It discourages whin-ing, and rewards self-discipline. Itteaches self-control and its own formof justice, which has a more power-ful effect than anything taught in theclassroom.

But, he argues, college sports havebecome too Romanized. Seasonshave become too long and the arenastoo gargantuan. Athletes have be-come a separate gladiator class, and the recruitment process gives them an undue sense of their own worth.Spectators have been reduced toan anonymous mass of passive con-sumers of other people’s excellence.Coaches have a greater incentive to satisfy the braying crowd with victo-ries than to teach good habits.

Gillespie values sports, in otherwords, but wants to reform college

sports into something smaller andmore participatory.

I’m not so sure. I think he missessome of the virtues of big-time col-lege sports.

Several years ago, I arrived inMadison, Wisconsin, for a confer-ence. As my taxi got close to campus, I noticed people dressed in red walk-ing in the same direction. It lookedlike the gathering of a happy Mid-western cult, though, of course, it wasthe procession to a football game.

In a segmented society, big-timecollege sports are one of the fewavenues for large-scale communalparticipation. Mass college sportscross class lines. They induce largenumbers of people in a region to stop,at the same time, and share common emotional experiences.

The crowds at big-time collegesporting events do not sit passively,the way they do at a movie theater.They roar, suffer and invent chants.Mass college sports generate loyal-ties that are less harmful than eth-nic loyalties and emotional moralityplays that are at once completelymeaningless and totally consum-ing.

There are the obvious recruitingscandals and greedy coaches, but for all the sins, big-time college sportshave become emotional reactors,helping to make university townsvibrant communities. Gillespie isright to appreciate the moral power of sports. But bigness has virtues aswell as vices. Big-time college sportsare absurd, but we would miss them if they were gone.

DAVID BROOKS

The Sporting Mind

MARK J. TERRILL/ASOCIATED PRESS

need 2010 to be another quiet year, but that will require, at a minimum, thatthree major struggles — the banks vs. President Obama, China vs. Google & friends, and the world vs. Iran — can be defused with win-win compromisesrather than win-lose confrontations.

Let’s look at all three. Banks are likethe heart that pumps blood — credit— to a country’s corporate muscles.If that heart is malfunctioning, anyrecovery will be anemic. But heartsurgery is a very complex thing. You wouldn’t want yours done by a plumb-er or a politician. After all, a year ago there was a great clamor to national-ize some major banks; that would not have been a good idea. Moreover, the United States financial crisis was theresult of a broad national breakdown in ethics — from borrowers to lenders to rating agencies to lawmakers. Don’t think for a second that bank reformalone is a cure-all.

We need a new banking regulatoryregime that reduces recklessnesswithout reducing risk-taking, which isthe key to capitalism. It’s complicated.If the leading banks had any brains,they would take the initiative and offertheir own ideas. Let the administra-tion and other leading central banks

also offer their ideas, and then let’s try to forge something smart.

What the public has seen instead,though, are clueless bankers givingthemselves bonuses after being res-cued by taxpayers, while instructing lobbyists and lawmakers to resist any serious reforms. At the same time,we’ve had President Obama introduc-ing his bank proposal in a way that

seemed less intended to promote anintelligent discussion and more likean effort to use bank-bashing to boostsagging poll ratings. The administra-tion didn’t even bother to prebrief oth-er central bankers about its ideas.

A senior British Treasury officialtold me at a background briefing in Da-vos: “Even America isn’t big enough tosolve this problem on its own. ... This isa global problem. ... Be sure you under-

stand the problem before you fix it.”Banking reform has to be done

carefully so that we end up withstronger banks lending more money.If the bankers want to be pigheadedand turn this into a war with the pres-ident, or the president wants to usebank-bashing to get his mojo back,there are a few things I can absolute-ly guarantee: more uncertainty, lesslending, a slower recovery and fewernew jobs.

While the struggle between Chinaand Google appears, on the surface, tobe about Internet freedom, beneath thesurface is a much deeper problem. Asthis newspaper reported recently, 34American corporations have recentlybeen targets of hacking attacks trace-able to China. The chief executive ofone of the technology companies that was hit, who asked not to be identifiedbecause he is still debating whetherto keep doing business in China, saidthat in his case the attacks involvedattempts to vacuum up source codes,designs, business plans and anythingelse they could get their hands on. Thisindustrial espionage emanating fromChina, the C.E.O. told me, “was theworst we have seen in 25 years.”

Memo to China: You are playing

with fire. Sure, the U.S. also has itshackers, but industrial espionage onthis scale is not coming out of the U.S.If this continues, China will see more than Google run for the exit. And how many U.S. companies in the futurewill ever want to buy Chinese-madesoftware or computer systems, which might only make it easier for Beijingto penetrate their businesses? Thishacking story is huge and brewing. Ifit explodes, at a time of rising tensions over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, fastenyour seat belts.

Finally, the U.S. and its allies areabout to ratchet up pressure on Iran byunveiling a new economic-sanctionsresolution at the U.N. aimed at Iran’sRevolutionary Guards Corps and the vast network of financial institutions it controls inside Iran. If the U.N. willnot act, the U.S. and key allies intend to impose the sanctions on their own.The Revolutionary Guards have be-come the regime’s primary tool forsuppressing the popular uprisingthere and for protecting Iran’s nuclear program. If these sanctions prove in-capable of getting Iran to halt its sus-pected nuclear weapons program, thechances for a U.S. or Israeli militarystrike against Iran will grow very highbefore the end of this year.

The economics of recovery were al-ways hard, but in 2010 politics and geo-politics could make them even harder. Pray that cooler heads prevail.

College sportsare one ofAmerica’s few large-scalecommunalexperiences. Fans of OhioState’s football team.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010 III

By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — In 2008, the Chinese built an extravagant ball field that be-came known worldwide as the Bird’sNest for its lattice-like architecture.But since the Olympics, the ticketbuyers haven’t come. Right now, theBird’s Nest serves as a winter amuse-ment park known as the Happy Ice and Snow Season. In April, a promot-er may stage a celebrity rock concertto “establish China as a world leaderfor global peace and a healthier plan-et.” Or not.

After that, the government says itmay build a shopping center there.

Two summers ago, China’s Olym-pic extravaganza was recognizedworldwide, and especially here, as abarely disguised metaphor for thisnation’s rise to worldwide impor-tance. Eighteen months later, Chinais more important than its leaders could have imagined.

But Beijing’s famous Water Cubehas hoofed its way from Olympicstadium to light-show concert hall tostage for a Russian performance of “Swan Lake.” Its latest incarnation is as an indoor water park.

In the year after the Olympics, theiconic 91,000-seat Bird’s Nest hosteda Jackie Chan concert, an Italian soc-cer match, an opera and a presenta-tion of Chinese singing standards.But the local soccer team declined adeal to make it their home field, andthe only tenants now are tourists whopay $7 to visit the souvenir shop.

Outsiders may find this wasteful. After all, Atlanta’s Olympic stadiumbecame a baseball park, and Cal-gary’s Saddledome a civic fixture.

Then again, the Olympics seem tobring out profligacy in governments.Consider Athens, where 21 of the 22stadiums erected for the 2004 Olym-pics were reported last year to beunoccupied. The $14.4 billion cost of that party is being cited by some as asource of Greece’s potentially desta-bilizing fiscal troubles.

If China is different — and China is

— it is because fiscal worries on thediminutive scale of Athens hardlyregister on Beijing’s blotter. Over-building is not a prime concern. In-deed, some might call it an economicstrategy.

This is a nation of new office tow-ers and hotels and luxury apartmentcomplexes, many built on spec, manyfinanced with state-subsidized loans,or on state-subsidized property.Many are more empty than full.

Many experts agree that housing and finance are riding bubbles, and everyone expects a big reckoningsomewhere — a year? two? — downthe line. But there was a reckoning af-ter the Asia panic in 1999, and anotherreckoning in 2004, and both times thegovernment bailed out the big state-owned banks.

Indeed, the government forgavethe Agricultural Bank of China $120billion in sour loans just last Octoberwithout a peep of public protest.

Eventually, in a nation this large,someone will fill the convention cen-ter and the water park. And if not,well, build it anyway. Building cre-ates jobs, and feeds prestige, andpumps up the GDP. Here in the nationthat is too big to fail, as long as the bad loans don’t overwhelm the good, thewaste is tolerable.

“That, to me, is the essence of the Chinese strategy,” Eswar Prasad,a Cornell University professor and a former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division,said. “Just keep the machine going fast enough.”

By EDWARD WONG

HANOI, Vietnam — The archipela-go called the Paracel Islands lies in theSouth China Sea 400 kilometers off the east coast of Vietnam, a series of rocksand reefs and spits of land that, to the undiscerning eye, appear as valuableas broken coral washed up on a beach.

But that archipelago and the nearbySpratly Islands are rich in oil and nat-ural gas deposits, and so they are cov-eted by the nations that form a wide arcaround the South China Sea. China,Taiwan and Vietnam have competing claims in the Paracels, while all three and the Philippines, Malaysia andBrunei have claims on the Spratlys orthe waters surrounding them.

The most vociferous are Vietnamand its rival, China. Indeed, no issuebetween them is more emotional or

more intractable.Tensions crept up another notch last

month, after China announced plansto develop tourism in the Paracels,which the Chinese military has con-trolled since 1974.

The Vietnamese Foreign Ministryloudly denounced China’s move. Butquietly, Vietnam is pushing hard tobring more foreign players into ne-gotiations so that China will have tobargain with all Southeast Asian na-tions that have territorial claims in theSouth China Sea.

This strategy of “internationaliz-

ing’’ the issue is one that smaller Asiancountries like Vietnam may adoptmore often as they wrangle with theChinese juggernaut on many fronts.

Vietnamese officials “are interna-tionalizing the issue, and they’re doingit in a quiet way, not in a direct way,’’said Carlyle A. Thayer, a scholar ofSoutheast Asia and maritime securityat the Australian Defense Force Acad-emy. “They say they want to solve itpeacefully, but let the internationalcommunity raise the issue.’’

Analysts say a big test for this strat-egy will come this year, as Vietnam

takes over the leadership of the Asso-ciation of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean. Vietnam is likely to use its po-sition to try to persuade the countries to join territorial negotiations withChina, analysts say. In November,Vietnam held a conference in Hanoi,its capital, where 150 scholars and offi-cials from across Asia came to discussdisputes in the South China Sea.

“The kind of thing that I took awaywas that developments in the SouthChina Sea had either deteriorated orhad the potential to deteriorate,’’ saidMr. Thayer, who attended the work-shop.

China has been flexing its navalmuscle on the sea. In the past twoyears, China has detained Vietnam-ese fishermen, increased sea patrolsand warned foreign oil companiesaway from working with Vietnam. One Vietnamese news organizationhas estimated that China detained17 vessels and 210 fishermen lastyear; the fishermen have all been re-leased.

In December, the Vietnamese prime

minister signed an arms deal in Russiathat reportedly included the purchase of six diesel-electric submarines for $2billion, presumably to be used in theSouth China Sea.

Meanwhile, China has agreed tocontinue talks with Vietnam, but itis willing to discuss only joint devel-opment of the area, not sovereigntyrights. And it refuses to negotiate withall the relevant Southeast Asian na-tions in any multilateral way.

Some analysts are skeptical ofwhether Vietnam will get any traction with its new strategy, especially if itdecides to press the issue as it presidesover Asean. The association has mem-bers that have no stake in the fight, likeCambodia and Myanmar.

“Vietnam’s approach faces realobstacles,’’ said M. Taylor Fravel, apolitical scientist at the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology who has written a book on China’s territorialissues. “It is hard to see how consen-sus can be built within Asean short of amajor armed clash involving Chinese forces.’’

By DEXTER FILKINS

SAROBI, Afghanistan — Even in anation beset by war and suicide bomb-ings, you would be hard-pressed tofind anything as reliably terrifying asthe national highway through the Ka-bul Gorge.

The 64-kilometer stretch, a breath-taking chasm of mountains and cliffs between Kabul and Jalalabad, claimsso many lives so regularly that mostpeople stopped counting long ago.Cars flip and flatten. Trucks soar tothe valley floor. Buses vie for advan-tage; buses collide.

The mayhem unfolds on one of themost bewitching stretches of scenery on all the earth. The gorge, in someplaces no more than a few hundredyards wide, is framed by vertical rock cliffs that soar more than 600 meters above the Kabul River below. Mostpeople die, and most cars crash, whilezooming around one of the impossibleturns that offer impossible views of thecrevasses and buttes.

Indeed, driving on the Kabul Gorge seems a uniquely Afghan experience, a complicated dance of beauty anddeath.

“I sit right here and watch peoplecrash all day long,” said MohammedNabi, who fries fresh fish in an open-air stall along the road. “The courseof history has proved that the Afghanpeople are bullies. This is why we can-not drive safely.”

One recent week, 13 accidents unfold-ed on the road in a mere two hours, allof them catastrophic, nearly all of themfatal. The daylong drizzle made the dayslightly more calamitous than most. Atone scene, a bloodied family grieved for their kin trapped in a flattened car.At another, a minibus lay crushed be-neath the hulk of a jackknifed truck. Atstill another, the bottom of a ravine wasfilled with a car’s twisted remains.

And yet even as those accidentsspread themselves across the road-way, the cars sailed heedlessly past.Taxis and buses weaved and passedone another at bone-chilling speeds,with only millimeters separating themfrom bloody catastrophe.

“The fighting with the Taliban lasts only for a day or two, but the crashes are every day,” said Juma Gul, whoowns a fabric shop in Sarobi that looksdirectly out onto the highway. “It’s akind of theater. Sometimes, a car willfly by in the air.”

The lethality of the roadway stems from the unique mix of geography, the road itself, and the drivers’ disregard for physics.

The two-lane highway is barely wideenough for two cars to pass. On the in-side lane, less than a yard outside yourwindow, stands a wall of treeless rock that climbs upward in a nearly per-

pendicular line. A 30-centimeter ledgeguards the outside lane, behind which lies a valley floor as far as 300 meters down. For the drivers, of course, that means there is no margin for error:they go into the wall, or over the edge, or into each other.

The only note of caution is providedby children, who live in the impover-ished villages nearby. Often as young as 4 or 5, they stand bedraggled at thebends, using flattened green Spritebottles as flags, waving the driversthrough when the way is clear.

Under the circumstances, you mightimagine that drivers in the KabulGorge would proceed slowly, crawl-ing and craning their necks to guardagainst oncoming traffic whippinground the next curve. In fact, for most of history, they did.

Over the centuries, countless invad-ing forces passed through or near the gorge on their way to the Khyber Pass. Among them were a group of 17,000British troops and civilians, who were massacred as they beat a retreat from Kabul at the end of the first Anglo-Af-ghan War in 1842. Dr. William Brydon, who rode into Jalalabad on a horse,was the only European to survive.

The Kabul-to-Jalalabad road was

paved for the first time by the WestGerman government in 1960. In the1980s, it was almost entirely obliter-ated during the insurrection againstthe Soviet invasion. In the decade that followed, when the Taliban and other armed groups fought to control thecountry, the road was a blasted moon-scape. The craters were so large that taxis would disappear for minutes at a time, only to reappear as they strug-gled to climb out.

It was a tough road, and it had its owndangers — stretches of roadway often collapsed or washed away — but speedwas not among them. That changed in2006, when a European Union-backedproject finally smoothed the road allthe way through. Now Afghans could finally drive as fast as they wanted.And so the cars crash, one after theother.

Each day, the broken and bloodyarrive at the Sarobi Hospital, a small clinic in the town at the head of thegorge. Dr. Jabbar Khel himself drives the gorge several times a week. Andeach time, he said, he is filled withfear — not for his own abilities, but for those of the others.

“I have a license!” the doctor said. “I took lessons!”

A Deadly Road Show in Afghanistan

MOISES SAMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A stretch of an Afghan road between Kabul and Jalalabad has taken an untold number of lives.

SHIHO FUKADA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

In place of athletes, concerts and trinket salesmen.

In China, Empty ShellsAfter the High Jumps

Asian RivalsNow Vying Offshore

HOANG DINH NAM/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Xiyun Yang contributed research.

China has been detaining Vietnamese fishermen in a dispute over islands in the South China Sea. Fishermen unloaded a boat in Da Nang, Vietnam.

Beijing’sBird’s Nest isnow a winter

amusementpark.

Repubblica NewYork

very dangerous.”It does not help matters that the Eu-

ropean Union is undergoing a major political transition to new leaders, anew Commission and Parliament, anda new governing treaty, the LisbonTreaty, which creates a new presidentand foreign affairs chief. But even ifall these positions were filled, seriousquestions remain about whether theunion or its leading member states willtake charge before further damage isdone.

In some sense, there is a game ofchicken being played, with Greececounting on help and other countries holding back until Athens pays a steepprice for its profligacy and manipula-tion of statistics. But the delay is costly,and there are deeper structural prob-lems that few want to discuss.

Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain— known now as the PIIGS, if Irelandis included — are the weak sisters of Europe, with high structural deficitsmatched with low prospects for thekind of economic growth and produc-tivity improvements that can bringthem back to health.

The north-south split is partly geo-graphic, partly cultural, partly reli-gious and partly historical, but thesoutherners tend to be poorer and to have less competitive economies.

“The markets are having fun testingthe euro,” said Nicolas Véron, a seniorfellow at Bruegel, an economic policyresearch institute in Brussels. But themarkets are also increasing pressure on the biggest European economies,like Germany and France, to figure outways to rescue Greece. But with the Eu-ropean Union undergoing a triple po-litical transition, it is not entirely clearwhere that leadership will come from.

“Who’s in charge now?” asked An-tonio Missoroli, director of studies forthe European Policy Center in Brus-sels. “Nobody yet, and it may still taketime.”

Default for a member of the euro zone

is simply unacceptable, European offi-cials and analysts say — a country isnot a bank. At the moment, even callingin the International Monetary Fund tohelp Greece is considered too embar-rassing and not yet necessary.

More likely, they say, is a set of bi-lateral loans or loan guarantees fromricher countries like Germany.

“It’s highly unlikely Greece will beallowed to default,” Mr. Missoroli said.“But no one wants to say that out loudto take the pressure off the Greek gov-ernment.”

But it is also unprecedented, anddifficult politically, for the EuropeanUnion, or any member country, to im-pose conditions for economic adjust-ment on another member country.

Jacques Mistral, an economist at theFrench Institute for International Re-lations, said that the main actors now were Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, and theleaders and finance ministers of Ger-many and France.

“When there is a will there is a path,”Mr. Mistral said.

But summoning that will has proveddifficult in the northern tier, whichmistrusts the southerners. Greece isa prime example of the disease in the euro zone, said Mr. Tilford.

Portugal, the poorest country in theeuro zone, has been stagnating foryears, proving that membership in theeuro “is not a panacea,” he added.

Spain has relatively low debt, buthigh unemployment and weak banks.

At the same time, some northerncountries, like Germany and the Neth-erlands, are still playing “beggar thy neighbor” by their reluctance to stimu-late their own purchasing, which couldhelp weaker countries to export.

Critics like Mr. Fitoussi are left won-dering why the crisis was ever allowed to expand to this point. “This is much ado about nothing,” he said.

“But the nothing can ruin the wholeproject. I don’t think the euro is in dan-ger. But the leaders are taking too muchtime.”

By VIKAS BAJAJ

and KEITH BRADSHER

MUMBAI, India — While risinggovernment debt is a growing con-cern in Europe and the United States,Asia’s economies remain remarkablyresilient, even buoyant, underscoringhow economic might is shifting from West to East.

China has been repaying some ofwhat little foreign debt it owes, even aseconomists wonder whether Greecewill require an international bailoutand ask how long the United States can sustain record budget deficits.“We took a pass on the economic cri-sis,” said Philip S. Carmichael, presi-dent of Asian operations at Haier,China’s biggest appliance maker.

Even the Asian economies thathave shrunk during the recession,like Malaysia and Cambodia, es-caped the worst ravages — with the notable exception of Japan, Asia’sfirst industrialized country. Because of the Asian financial crisis of 1997,many Asian countries have beenmore conservative about borrowing and spending over the last decadethan Western nations, which went on a debt binge during the good timesand continued to increase their bor-rowing during the recession to try to turn around their economies.

Many economists say countrieshave to spend during recessions, in-creasing deficits and debts. But in-vestors and economists alike worry about the long-term effect of mam-moth debt on the vitality of Europeand the United States. The longer ittakes Western capitals to confronttheir overspending, the higher andmore rapid Asia’s rise will be, manyeconomists say.

Even though Asian stock markets have fallen this month, analysts say

there is no obvious Asian equivalentto, say, Greece. Investors see little riskof default among even heavily indebt-ed countries like India and Japan.

In India, the government’s debt isnearly 80 percent of the gross domes-tic product, but it owes more than 90percent of that money to its own citi-zens. Of the rest, a big chunk is heldby agencies like the World Bank,which, are not likely to press for quickrepayment.

Compared to Greece, “the threat ofthese two defaulting is nowhere close,and the reason is that, thanks to highdomestic savings rates, their debt isalmost all domestically financed,”said Kim Eng Tan, a sovereign debt analyst in the Singapore office ofStandard and Poor’s.

“If you sell bonds to your owncitizens, and you do it in your owncurrency, you don’t have much of aproblem,” said Ajay Kapur, the chiefglobal strategist for Mirae Asset, abig South Korean financial services company.

China has been repaying some ofits small external debt as it comesdue, a luxury that a country withmore than $2 trillion in foreign re-serves can afford.

China showed a government bud-get surplus for the first 11 months of last year, but Western economistsstill expect a small deficit for the en-tire year because agencies tend to goon spending binges every December

to avoid returning unspent money.A few smaller Asian nations have

had difficulties in the last year and a half. But they have been hurt moreoften by political strains than by eco-nomic troubles. The Asian countryhurt the most by the global finan-cial crisis was arguably Mongolia,where a steep but temporary decline in world copper prices prompted the government to obtain a $224 million I.M.F. loan in March.

Though the risk of a full-blown sov-ereign debt crisis in Asia may seemremote, economists say there are oth-er reasons that investors and policymakers should be concerned about high deficits.

In India, the growing fiscal deficit — which reached 8 percent of G.D.P.last year, up from 3.3 percent in 2008— could damp growth by making itharder and more expensive for cor-porations and individuals to borrowmoney, said Ila Patniak, a senior fel-low at the National Institute of PublicFinance and Policy in New Delhi.

China, like India, has internal con-flicts — between rural and urbanpopulations and between Beijingand the disparate governments in theprovinces — that make fiscal policymore difficult.

But the debt problems faced byAsian nations are neither as immedi-ate nor as far-reaching as the grow-ing debt in Europe and the UnitedStates.

WASHINGTON — For decades— through political upheaval andwars and wild bouts of deficits orinflation — the debt of the UnitedStates has always been rated AAA,

the gold standard ofcreditworthiness by which all nations arecompared.

That was true be-fore President Obama published his budget

recently, with its projections of hugeAmerican deficits over the nextdecade and beyond. Astoundinglyor not, it was as true after those es-timates were published. Of course, had it been the United States WidgetCompany projecting red ink as far asthe eye could see, no one would lendit a dime.

The closest thing Washington gotto a warning came from Moody’s, aninvestor service that rates the sover-eign debt of nations: Without actionto cut the deficit or a faster-than-expected recovery, the projectionsfor the decade “will at some point putpressure on the triple-A governmentbond rating.”

Nobody blinked — not Congress,not the White House, not the inves-tors around the world who keep buy-ing Treasury bonds to finance thisyear’s $1.6 trillion shortfall, at lowinterest rates.

What explains this oddity? Whyis the world betting that the UnitedStates will overcome its politicaldeadlock and solve its problems —

believing, it seems, in the truth ofChurchill’s biting quip that Americawill always do the right thing, afterexhausting every other alternative?And how long can this aura of invin-cibility last?

Maybe a long, long time. One of themany things that makes the UnitedStates different is that it prints theworld’s most important currencyand can always print more — onereason investors in government debtremain confident they will be repaid,even if in dollars devalued by infla-tion or by changing exchange rates.

There is also value in being theone nation on which the world stilldepends for security. That helps ex-plain why foreign investors, includ-ing China, can denounce Americanpoliticians, Wall Street bankers andsleepwalking regulators for creatingthe current mess — and still buy atthe next Treasury auction.

This paradox of American finan-cial exceptionalism was unusu-ally clear recently. When the stockmarket shuddered on February 4because of worries about nationaldefaults, it wasn’t Washington’smountain of debt that got everyonerattled. It was the plight of a handfulof profligate spenders in Europe —notably Greece, Spain and Portugal— whose comparative foothills ofdebt suddenly made them dubiouscredit risks.

Each of those countries knows themeaning of “imperial overstretch.”But it’s been a few centuries since

Madrid and Lisbon were centers ofvast empires, and a lot longer for theGreeks. What brought them downthis time was not global ambition butlocal gridlock, in which politicianscould not, or would not, cut spendingat a time of high unemployment andsocial need. Making things worse,they now are on the euro — meaningthey can no longer print their own

way out of the problem, either. And itis unclear whether their partners inthe euro bloc can afford either to bailthem out or to let them default.

“They have no easy option,” saidProfessor Simon Johnson of M.I.T.’sSloan School of Management. “Theycan cut spending or raise taxes.”

Their problems may be minor com-pared to those of Japan, a battered

economic superpower that printsits own currency and whose news-papers, two decades ago, regularlypublished charts projecting when Ja-pan might overtake America as theworld’s biggest economy. The papersstill run such charts, but now thequestion is when China will overtakeJapan for the No. 2 spot (likely laterthis year).

Today, like Toyota, Japan’s gov-ernment is having a braking prob-lem — it can’t figure out how to slowspending on a rapidly aging popu-lation, and like everyone else hasreacted to recession by hitting thespending accelerator.

But unlike America, Japan isno longer considered so indispen-sible. For a quarter of a century ithad a AAA rating, then lost it. NowStandard and Poor’s warns it mayfurther downgrade Japan because ithas failed “to stem fiscal and defla-tionary pressures.” In 1990, sinkingso low was unthinkable in Japan,which poses a question: What aboutAmerica in 2030? Can the unthink-able occur here, too?

Jeffrey Garten, the former deanof the Yale School of Management,doesn’t dismiss such possibilities.“Something’s changed,” he said.“The financial crisis created sucha sense of uncertainty about every-one’s assumptions that our relativedecline is now acknowledged. Thepossibility that the United Statesmay not be the world’s unques-tionably best credit risk is nowdiscussed. And that’s significant,because so much of this is psycho-logical.”

REUTERS

As some European nations stagger, China is repaying what littleforeign debt it owes. A worker in Shanghai.

CHIP EAST/REUTERS

DAVID

SANGER

ESSAY

The Big Debtor

The World Still Bets On

Crisis in Euro Zone Moves From Financial to Political

With Barely

A Shrug, Asia

Shoulders

Its Own DebtFrom Page I

“Uncle Sam,” in front of the New York Stock exchange, asks peopleif they can “spare a trillion.”

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010 V

By MARK LEIBOVICH

WASHINGTON — Without leaving home, Sarah Palin will be able to reachmuch of her political base, courtesy of a soon-to-be-built television studio inher living room paid for by her newest media patron, Fox News. From herhouse in Wasilla, Alaska, Ms. Palinalso sends missives to 1.3 million Fa-cebook “fans,” writes newspaper col-umns, Tweets and signs copies of her book .

She reads daily e-mail briefings on domestic and foreign policy from asmall group of advisers who remainedloyal after her tumultuous vice presi-dential campaign in 2008. And thoughshe has fashioned an image as anantiestablishment conservative, shealso speaks regularly to a bipartisannobility of Washington insiders whohave helped enrich her financiallyand position her on the national politi-cal stage.

Ms. Palin is becoming increasingly vocal and visible. One recent weekend,she delivered a paid speech to the Sali-na, Kansas, Chamber of Commerce on Friday night, headlined a national TeaParty convention in Nashville on Sat-urday (“How’s that hopey-changeything workin’ out for you?” she asked in the speech, in a dig at PresidentObama), and appeared on behalf ofthe re-election campaign of Gover-nor Rick Perry of Texas in Houston on Sunday.

Her growing cast of advisers andsupport system could be working inthe service of any number of goals: a presidential run, a de facto role as the leader of the anti-tax Tea Party move-ment, a lucrative career as a rovingmedia entity — or all of the above. Ms. Palin represents a new breed of un-elected public figure operating in anenvironment in which politics, newsmedia and celebrity are fused as nev-er before. Whether she ever runs foranything else, Ms. Palin has alreadyachieved a status that has become anend in itself: a wide online audience, a staff to guide her, an enormous incomeand none of the bother or accountabil-ity of having to govern or campaign foroffice.

“Few public figures not in officehave leveraged the nexus betweenmedia and political positioning asSarah Palin has,” said the Wash-ington lawyer Robert Barnett (whonegotiated, among other things, Ms.Palin’s lucrative deal with Fox News, an arrangement with the Washington Speaker’s Bureau that pays her a re-ported $100,000 a speech, and a dealwith Harper Collins to write her mem-oir, “Going Rogue,” which has already earned her millions of dollars).

Ms. Palin is quietly assembling the infrastructure of an expanding politi-cal operation. In addition to her long-time spokeswoman, Meghan Staple-ton, Ms. Palin’s closest aides include

members of the staff of her formerrunning mate, Senator John McCain. Her current operations chief, JasonRecher, was a loyal lieutenant on Ms. Palin’s campaign plane.

Ms. Palin has also enlisted policycounselors to guide her through theareas in which many deemed her to belacking in 2008. Randy Scheunemann,a foreign policy adviser to Mr. McCainwho clashed with the campaign lead-ership, contributes to a daily briefing prepared by Kim Daniels, a Maryland lawyer who did legal work in Alaskafor the McCain campaign. Mr. Sch-eunemann is known as a conservativehawk on foreign affairs, in keepingwith what many Palin-watchers haveviewed as her steady shift to the right.

“She used to be a moderate Repub-lican in Alaska, but I think all of these attacks have hardened her and made her absolutely more conservative,”said John Coale, a Washington lawyerand longtime Democratic fund-raiser who helped Ms. Palin set up her politi-cal action committee.

As she jumps more into the nationalpolitical swamp, Ms. Palin is proving as divisive in Republican circles asshe was within the fractious McCaincampaign.

Her scheduled appearance in Nash-ville on Saturday incited cries of “sell-out” from other Tea Party factionsthat objected to the high cost of ticketsto the convention ($549).

In some ways, Palin-watchers say,the question of Ms. Palin’s ambitions and abilities remain as much a mys-tery now as when she first stormed the national consciousness 18 months ago.They warn against any notion that she has any grand plan beside keepingfaith that God would help her recog-nize “the next open door” (a favoritePalin refrain).

“I think if Sarah has a passion, it’sthat she really believes that there isa silent majority out there that shewants the folks in Washington to know

about,” said Kristan Cole, a friend inWasilla.

Ms. Palin, who declined to comment for this article, is scarcely seen aroundher hometown these days, residentssaid. And since leaving office last year,she is silent on state political matters.

“She has expanded her house andturned it into a compound,” said Re-becca Braun, who edits the nonpar-tisan Alaska Budget Report. “She isbasically invisible in Alaska but as big a celebrity as Princess Di everywhere else.”

By IAN URBINA

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Ata fly-infested clinic hastily erectedalongside the rubble of the only tuber-culosis sanatorium in this country,Pierre-Louis Monfort is a lonely man in a crowded room.

Haiti has the highest tuberculosisrate in the Americas, and health ex-perts say it is about to drastically in-crease.

But amid the ramshackle remainsof the hospital where the country’smost infected patients used to live, Mr.Monfort runs the clinic alone, facing a vastness of unmet need that is as clearas the desperation on the faces around the room.

“I’m drowning,” said Mr. Monfort,52, flanked by a line of people wait-ing for pills as he emptied a bedpanfull of blood. All of the hospital’s 50other nurses and 20 doctors died in the earthquake or have refused to returnto work out of fear for the building’ssafety or preoccupation with theirown problems, he said. Mr. Monfortjoked that the earthquake had earnedhim a promotion from a staff nurse at the sanatorium to its new executivedirector.

In normal times, Haiti sees about30,000 new cases of tuberculosis each year. Among infectious diseases, it isthe country’s second most commonkiller, after AIDS, according to theWorld Health Organization.

The situation has gone from bad toworse because the earthquake setoff a dangerous diaspora. Most of the sanatorium’s several hundred surviv-ing patients fled and are now living inthe densely packed tent cities whereexperts say they are probably spread-ing the disease. Most of these patientshave also stopped taking their dailyregimen of pills, thereby heighten-ing the chance that there will be anoutbreak of a strain resistant to treat-ment, experts say.

At the city’s General Hospital, Dr.Megan Coffee said, “This right here iswhat is going to be devastating in sixmonths,” and she pointed to severaltuberculosis patients thought to havea resistant strain of the disease whowere quarantined in a fenced-off bluetent. “Someone needs to go and help Monfort, or we are all going to be in big trouble.”

A further complica-tion is that definitivelydiagnosing tuberculosistakes weeks. So doctorsare instead left to rely onconspicuous symptomslike night sweats, severecoughing and weight loss.“But look around,” Dr. Cof-fee said. “Everyone is thin, everyone is coughing fromthe dust and everyone issweating from the heat.”

Dr. Richar D’Meza, thecoordinator for tuberculo-sis for the Haitian Minis-try of Health, said his of-fice and the World HealthOrganization had begunstockpiling tuberculosismedicines. “We are veryconcerned about a resis-tant strain, but we are alsogetting ready,” he said,adding that he is assem-bling medical teams to be-gin entering tent camps to survey for the disease.

“This will begin soon,”he said. “We will get help to these people soon.”

For Mr. Monfort, it is not soon enough. He scavengesthe rubble daily for medi-cines and needles. He ster-ilizes needles using bleach and then reuses the bleach to clean the floors.

In his cramped clinic,eight of the sickest andmost contagious patientslay on brown- and red-stained beds. He said he had lost count of how many more were sleeping inother pockets alongside the hospital.Hundreds come daily to pick up medi-cine.

Outside the clinic, the air is thickwith the sickening smell of rottingbodies. Occasionally a breeze carried a waft of char from small cooking fires nearby.

“These people are dying and in painhere,” he said. “And no one seems tocare.”

The dire scene at Mr. Monfort’sclinic speaks to a larger concern: ashospitals and medical staff are over-run by people with acute conditions,patients who were previously getting

treatment for cancer, H.I.V. and other chronic or infectious diseases havebeen pushed aside and no longer haveaccess to care.

At the Champ de Mars, Jean-Bap-tiste Renauld sat on a curb, one shoemissing, his blue polo shirt torn, hishead cupped in his hands. “I have TB,and I am also supposed to get dialysisevery other day,” he said, explainingthat he was a doctor’s assistant before the earthquake and meticulous about his treatments. “I have not had dialy-sis in three weeks, and I feel my bloodis rotting from inside.”

Waving his hand over a sea of tents and tarpaulins, he added, “It is likethis country.”

By JOHN LELAND

BAGHDAD — At the end of a week that included two spectacular bomb attacks, Ali al-Nijar left his hometo talk about poetry. Mr. Nijar, aretired professor of agriculture,was squeezed in among 60 othersat a weekly literary salon on Bagh-dad’s Mutanabi Street, one of about a dozen salons that have sprung uparound the city in the last two years as violence has dropped.

“This is a product of freedom,” Mr. Nijar said, waiting for the featuredspeakers to arrive. The topic for the week was a poet named Abdul Wa-hab al-Bayati, one of the foundersof modern Iraqi poetry. “Of course, there is fear in the city right now,”Mr. Nijar said. “But people don’tcare about the bombings. I know the risk I’m taking, but I don’t care.”

For centuries salons were a vitalpart of Iraqi intellectual life, places where people of different classes or sects met to discuss culture, litera-ture or ideas. At one time Baghdadhad more than 200 salons, about aquarter of them run by Jews, saidTariq Harb, a lawyer who is a regu-lar at several salons and hosts hisown.

But during Saddam Hussein’spresidency, the salons dwindledaway or went underground, as peo-ple objected to government control or feared the presence of govern-ment spies. In the sectarian violencethat followed the 2003 American-ledinvasion, people were often afraid tomeet in public.

Safia al-Souhail started her salon last April, after a level of peace had come to the city. It meets one after-noon a month at her home and ends after dark, which would have beenunthinkable during the height ofsectarian violence.

After the recent bombings, about 80 people gathered in a long reedstructure known as a mudhif, mod-eled after the architecture of themarshes of southern Iraq. Ms. Sou-hail, a member of Parliament whois running for re-election with oneof the Shiite alliances, worked theroom, shaking hands and welcom-ing guests, including several politi-cal figures.

“Here you have the top of Iraqi

society,” said Majeed H. al-Azawi, a friend of Ms. Souhail’s and a mem-ber of the salon’s board, pointing out people in the crowd: a few members of Parliament, historians, academ-ics, lawyers and writers. “This areais very safe, but many of the salons are outside this area.”

The topic for the day was theImam Hussein and his daughter,Zainab, founding figures in Shiitehistory.

Members of Ms. Souhail’s staffpassed tea and a hot porridge calledharisa, a traditional dish duringcommemorations of the imam.

“Gandhi said he learned from Hus-sein to be subject to injustice, and yethe won,” the first speaker, Ali al-Al-laq, a Parliament member from the Dawa Party, told the audience.

The crowd included Shiite and

Sunni clerics, women with and with-out head scarves, and even womensmoking cigarettes, a taboo in Iraqi public life. Ms. Souhail did not cover her head.

Athmar Shaker Majead, manager of the women’s research unit at the College of Education for Women,watched from the center of the mu-dhif. She is a regular at Ms. Souhail’s salons, she said.

“Salons are an icon for Iraqis,” she said. “Iraqis like to repeat what their ancestors used to do. We use such sa-lons to strengthen our will and faceour circumstances.”

After the attacks of recent months that destroyed several governmentand commercial buildings and killedhundreds, she said that there was a growing sense of fear in the capital,but that it would strengthen ratherthan end the salons. “We are a living nation, not a dead nation, and that’swhat these are about,” she said.“Cultural activities will not disap-pear, despite the fear.”

Palin: Vocal and Ready, but for What?

PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRED R. CONRAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Amid the rubble of the sanitorium in Port-au-Prince, Pierre-Louis Monfort, middle, struggles to help patients.

STEPHEN CROWLEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A poster of Sarah Palin on a balcony at the Tea Party Convention, one of her many recent speaking engagements.

A crossroads ofcultures and ideas,meeting weekly.

Where Fear Still Rules,Speaking Freely in Iraq

In Hospital’s Ruins,Fighting a TB Crisis

Repubblica NewYork

M O N E Y & B U S I N E S S

VI MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010

By ERIC PFANNER

Google has a problem in China. But it mayhave bigger headaches in Europe.

On issues as varied as privacy, copyrightprotection and the dominance of Google’s In-ternet search engine, the company is clashing with lawmakers, regulators and consumer ad-vocates. And the fights are escalating acrossWestern Europe.

The stakes are high — potentially higher for Google than anything that happens in China— because Google’s operations in Europe areso much larger and more lucrative. In Britainalone, Google has roughly 10 times its estimat-ed sales in China. Across most of the Continent,Google is by far the most popular search engine,with a substantially larger market share overits rivals than it has over those in the UnitedStates.

Google’s border-straddling scale and itsbrash ambitions raise alarms with some Euro-pean politicians.

The government of Prime Minister SilvioBerlusconi of Italy has proposed a law making online video services like YouTube liable for in-vasions of privacy, violations of copyright and other transgressions that occur in user-gener-ated content. Meanwhile Google is contesting a copyright lawsuit from Mediaset, Mr. Berlusco-ni’s family company, which is the largest com-mercial television broadcaster in the country.

“It’s a full-scale battle against Google in Ita-ly,” said Paolo Brini, a spokesman based in Pe-rugia for ScambioEtico, a group that campaignsfor civil liberties online.

In Germany, the minister of justice, Sabine

Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, complainedrecently about Google’s instinct for “pressingahead” and its “megalomania.” She said thecompany was tearing down privacy protec-tions.

“On the whole, I see a giant monopoly devel-oping, largely unnoticed, similar to Microsoft,” she said in an interview with the magazine DerSpiegel. A spokesman later clarified that shehad not meant to express an opinion on antitrustmatters, which are outside her jurisdiction.

Google says that ordinary Europeans do nothave similar fears. It says the complaints arefrom competitors like Microsoft and mediacompanies whose longtime business models arethreatened by technological change.

“We love being in Europe, and we have manyusers across many countries who enjoy ourproducts,” the company, which threatened re-cently to withdraw from China in response to anattack on its computer systems, said in a state-ment. “Our popularity means some people willcomplain. The important thing for us is to do the right thing, and that means not locking our us-ers into our products and working well with our partners.”

Google’s most immediate challenges may bein Italy. This month, a decision is expected ina trial in Milan, where four Google executives were charged with defamation and privacyviolations in a case involving videos posted ona Google Web site that showed the bullying of a boy with autism.

The company says a guilty verdict mightrequire it to edit content on YouTube before itis posted, which it says would be incompatible

with the open spirit of the Internet, as well asEuropean Union guidelines.

Prosecutors say Google was too slow to re-move the video.

On another front, Italian authorities lastsummer raided the company’s offices in Milan,opening an investigation of Google News, whichdisplays excerpts from online news articles.Italian publishers contend that Google Newsviolates their copyrights, but say they cannotremove their articles from the service withoutslipping in Google’s search rankings, whichwould cost them ad revenue. Google says thereis no such link between Google News and thesearch engine.

German newspaper and magazine publish-ers have complained to their government, say-ing that all of their Web sites together earn only about 100 million euros a year from advertising, while Google generates an estimated 1.2 billion euros from search advertising in Germany.

The European Commission in Brussels haspushed Google and other American Internetcompanies to shorten the period for which theyretain consumer data.

But Google has largely avoided run-ins withthe commission’s powerful competition arm .With a new commission set to take office, rivalsof Google, including Microsoft, are stepping uptheir lobbying efforts.

“Whenever you have a company that hasmore than a 90 percent market share in a keymarket, it is inevitable that people will havequestions to ask,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s gen-eral counsel, told reporters in Brussels recently. “We say that with some experience.”

By HEATHER TIMMONS

MUMBAI — In New York and London, wom-en remain scarce among top bankers despitedecades of struggle to climb the corporate lad-der. But in India’s relatively young financial in-dustry, women not only are some of the top dealmakers, they are often running the show.

HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scot-land, UBS and Fidelity International in Indiaare run by women. So is the country’s second-biggest bank, Icici Bank, and its third-largest,Axis Bank. Women head investment bankingoperations at Kotak Mahindra and JPMorganChase and the equities division of Icici. Half of the deputy governors at the Reserve Bank of In-dia are women.

In a country where parents in some areas stillprize boys over girls; where overall female lit-eracy rates are poor; and Sania Mirza, a top ten-nis player, said this month that she would quitplaying after marriage, the banking industry’swealth of women in management may seemsurprising. But women in the industry, manyof whom have also worked in London and New York, say India provided the right combination of supportive, mostly male, managers and adiverse work environment that did not require them to be “one of the boys” to succeed.

This “isn’t a golf-playing, beer-drinking homo-geneous culture,” said Naina Lal Kidwai, group

managing director and country head of HSBC inIndia and a former head of Morgan Stanley’s in-vestment bank in India. Male bankers and man-agers run the gamut from devoutly religious to devoted family men to late-night socialites.

Women “could join the workplace on their ownterms,” Ms. Kidwai said. “You still have to net-work, you still have to work hard, but that made it easier.”

That means India is with-out an old Wall Street staple: Women who feel they mustact like the stereotypical malebanker to advance. There are no swaggering “masters ofthe universe” in this group.Top female managers regu-larly wear saris and talkopenly about their childrenand husbands.

These women handle many of India’s biggest deals — raising $9.7 billion for the power com-pany NTPC or negotiating Vodafone Group’s purchase of an $11.1 billion stake in Hutchison Essar.

Almost all of them are in their 40s and 50s, are from wealthy backgrounds, went to excellent schools in India and abroad, and graduated at the top of their classes before excelling at the bank they joined. So they often enjoy the same

status as the men who were their competition and their banking clients.

Banking may be more of a meritocracy thanother professions, women in the business say,because there is an easy way to keep score: Lookat the bottom line.

“You got your next big challenge based onyour performance and your potential, notwhether you were male or female,” said Chanda

Kochhar, chief executive of Icici Bank, where women make up 40percent of the senior manage-ment. Mrs. Kochhar has been atthe bank for her entire 25-year career, moving from corporateto retail banking, then direct-ing the international businessbefore becoming chief financialofficer.

Bosses sometimes gravitate toward women in India because they think“women are less corruptible, more straightfor-ward and above board most of the time,” said K.Sudarshan, managing partner, India, for EMA.

At the same time, women in banking in Indiasay they have always felt more pressure thanmen.

“Always, that is a given,” Ms. Kidwai said. “It was very clear we had to perform better andwork harder.”

By ANDREW POLLACK

REDWOOD CITY, California — The new movie“Extraordinary Measures” is based on the true story of a father who starts a company to develop a treatment for the rare genetic disease threaten-ing to kill two of his children before they turn 10.

Now, a Silicon Valley start-up is making thebold claim that it can help eradicate that disease and more than 100 others by alerting parents-to-be who have the carrier genes.

The company, Counsyl, is selling a test thatit says can tell couples whether they are at risk of having children with a range of inherited dis-eases, including cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, spinalmuscular atrophy, sickle cell disease and Pompe disease (the one afflicting the children in themovie).

Once informed, Counsyl says, couples can takesteps like using in vitro fertilization with genetic testing of the embryos to avoid bearing children who would have the diseases, many of which are incurable and fatal in childhood.

Some genetic testing of prospective parents isdone now, but only for a few diseases like cysticfibrosis and Tay-Sachs, and only for certain eth-nic groups. Each test can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Counsyl’s test, which analyzes DNA fromsaliva samples, costs $349 for an individual or$698 for a couple. Similar tests from others areon the way, experts say. New technology couldmake possible widespread screening for the risk of passing on rare diseases, something that was simply not practical before.

“As a genetic counselor, I’ve been waiting for this for a really long time,” said Elena Ashki-nadze, who does prenatal genetic counseling at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in NewBrunswick, New Jersey.

But some experts caution that it is too soon to know how accurate Counsyl’s test actually is,in part because neither the company nor anyoutside reviewer has published papers on its ap-proach and results.

And some experts say the company’s Web site overstates the case. The company calls its prod-uct the Universal Genetic Test, for example, eventhough there are thousands of genetic diseases, not just the 100 Counsyl tests detect.

“Everyone hopes there is a test that will pro-vide a perfect baby, but the reality is that thatsingle magic bullet doesn’t exist,” said Dr. JoeLeigh Simpson, a geneticist and obstetrician and dean at Florida International University College of Medicine.

Still, Counsyl executives say the company,which has been operating quietly for a fewmonths, has already administered thousands of the tests. The test is already offered by more than100 fertility clinics around the country, and Coun-syl says some insurers are paying for it.

Some experts say that such screening couldsave countless parents from heartache, and soci-ety from the millions of dollars it can cost to care for even one severely ill person over a lifetime.

But some experts foresee new issues. So manypeople would be carriers for at least one disease that genetic counselors might be overloaded.Some critics, meanwhile, say such testing is astep toward designer babies, in which parentschoose the traits of their children.

There is even some concern that having fewer babies born with these diseases will mean a re-duced effort to develop treatments.

Samantha Stack of Seattle had one perfectlyhealthy daughter, but her second daughter diedlast April, at 7 weeks old, from spinal muscular at-rophy. She and her husband had not known theywere both carriers of a genetic mutation linkedto that disease.

She has become an evangelist for Counsyl, par-ticipating in sales calls and talking to patients.She has been given stock options.

“I wish this test was available a couple of years ago,” she said. “It might have saved my family the heartbreak we had.”

In Europe, Unease With Google’s Power Grows

ARBEITSKREIS VORRATSDATENSPEICHERUNG

PETER DASILVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Counsyl screens for more than 100 genetic diseases, like cystic fibrosis.

Handling the big deals, without the male swagger.

Gene TestingFor the Masses

Female Bankers in India Have an Opportunity to Compete

Europe is pushingto reduce the timethat consumerinformation canbe stored online.A protest in Berlin against companiesthat store data.

Repubblica NewYork

S C I E N C E & T E C H N O L O GY

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010 VII

By CORNELIA DEAN

This is a story about a waterfall,the World Bank and 4,000 homelesstoads.

Maybe the story will have a happy ending, and the bright-golden spray toads, each so small it could easily sit on a dime, will return to the African gorge where they once lived, in thespray of a waterfall on the KihansiRiver in Tanzania.

The river is dammed now, courtesyof the bank. The waterfall is 10 per-cent of what it was. And the toads are now extinct in the wild.

But 4,000 of them live in the Bronx and Toledo, Ohio, where scientistsat the Wildlife Conservation Societyand the Toledo Zoo are keeping them alive in hopes, somehow, of return-ing them to the wild. This month, the Bronx Zoo will formally open a small exhibit displaying the toads in itsReptile House.

Meanwhile, though, the toads em-body the larger conflicts betweenconservation and economic develop-ment and the complexity of trying to preserve and restore endangeredspecies to the wild. Their story alsoraises questions about how mucheffort should go to save any one spe-cies.

These issues are particularlypressing for frogs, toads and otheramphibians, whose populations areplunging worldwide in the face of fac-tors like habitat loss, climate changeand disease. Jennifer B. Pramuk, thecurator of herpetology at the BronxZoo, said at least 120 species van-ished in recent years.

“It’s probably much higher thanthat,” said Dr. Pramuk, a leader inthe toad effort. “There are areas ofSouth America where all the amphib-ian fauna are wiped out.”

The spray toads, Nectophrynoides asperginis, were unknown to science until 1998, when they were found liv-ing on less than 2 hectares, perhaps the smallest known range of any

vertebrate. They are unusual in that they do not lay eggs. The baby toads emerge fully formed, each one small enough to fit on the head of a pin.

When the toads were first de-scribed, as many as 20,000 lived inthe misty waterfall tract on the Ki-hansi, climbing mossy plants andfeeding on small insects. But thegovernment of Tanzania, with a loanfrom the World Bank, was alreadyplanning a dam upstream.

When the dam opened in 2000, theflow of water to the dam fell by 90percent, and mist-dependent nativeplants gave way to invasive species.Within months, the toad populationplummeted. When the survivorscontracted a fungal disease calledchytrid, the toad population fellagain.

The species was in imminent dan-ger of disappearing. So the conser-vation society responded by sending in Jason Serle, a wild-animal keeper at the time, and Tim Davenport, afield programs director in Tanzania. Along with Tanzanian scientists and conservation officials, they spent aday at the gorge, collecting 499 toads and putting them in plastic bags withdamp moss.

“It was get on the plane, collectthem, get back,” said Jim Breheny,

the director of the Bronx Zoo.The Bronx Zoo sent toads to five

other zoos in the United States, butonly one of them, the Toledo Zoo,managed to keep them alive, as didthe Bronx Zoo.

“No one had kept anything in that genus in captivity,” Dr. Pramuk said. “It was very difficult for us to figure out what they needed.”

Alyssa Borek, a zookeeper in theBronx, produced a safe food supplyby breeding tiny bugs like fruit flies,wood lice and weevils in plastic shoe-boxes and other containers filledwith cocoa matting, beans and alder leaves that she gathers on the zoogrounds.

Ms. Borek learned so much thatshe wrote a husbandry guide for the species; Dr. Pramuk said it wouldbe useful for anyone raising frogs or toads. In fact, working with the As-sociation of Zoos and Aquariums,the Bronx and Toledo Zoos will offer their 10th course on toad husbandryat the Toledo Zoo in April.

As the effort of raising the toadsin the zoos progressed, their num-bers in Tanzania declined until lastNovember, when the InternationalUnion for Conservation of Natureand Natural Resources, which main-tains listings of endangered species worldwide, declared the toad extinctin the wild.

That finding presented the nexthurdle: reintroducing the toads tothe wild. There is “at least the poten-tial for a viable restoration program,”Mr. Breheny, the Bronx Zoo director, said.

In computing, the vision alwaysprecedes the reality by a decade or more. The pattern has held true from the personal computer to the Internet, as it takes time, brainpower

and investment to conquer the scien-tific and economicobstacles to nudging a game-changing technology toward the mainstream.

The same pattern, according to sci-entists in universities and corporatelaboratories, is unfolding in the field ofsensor-based computing. Years ago,enthusiasts predicted the coming of“smart dust” — tiny digital sensors,strewn around the globe, gathering allsorts of information and communicat-ing with powerful computer networksto monitor, measure and understandthe physical world in new ways. Butthis intriguing vision seemed pluckedfrom the realm of science fiction.

Smart dust, to be sure, remains a ways off. But technology’s virtuouscycle of smaller, faster and cheaper has reached the point that experts say sensors may soon be powerfulenough to be the equivalent of tinycomputers. Some ambitious sensor research projects provide a glimpse of where things are headed.

Last year, Hewlett-Packard began a project it grandly calls “CentralNervous System for the Earth,” a 10-year initiative to embed up to a trillion pushpin-size sensors around the globe. H.P. researchers, combin-ing electronics and nanotechnologyexpertise, announced in Novemberthat they had developed sensors withaccelerometers that were up to 1,000times more sensitive than the com-mercial motion detectors used in Nin-tendo Wii video game controllers and some smartphones.

The use of accelerometers in con-sumer products points to the chang-ing economics of sensors, notes Peter Hartwell, a senior researcher at H.P.Labs. In the 1980s, accelerometers began to be used in automobiles, todetect crashes so that air bags would inflate. That was a specialized, costly application of motion sensing. But to-day’s low-cost sensors, Mr. Hartwellsays, are opening the door to wide-spread use, linking the physical world to computing as never before.

In places like desktops and datacenters, computing power marches ahead relentlessly. “But it is still as ifthe computer is a brain that is blind,deaf and dumb to its surroundings,”Mr. Hartwell says. “Closing that gap is what the sensor revolution is allabout.”

Microchip-equipped sensors can

be designed to monitor and measure not only motion, but also tempera-ture, chemical contamination or bio-logical changes. The applications for sensor-based computing, expertssay, include buildings that managetheir own energy use, bridges that sense motion and metal fatigue to tellengineers they need repairs, carsthat track traffic patterns and reportpotholes, and fruit and vegetable shipments that tell grocers when theyripen and begin to spoil.

Power consumption has long been the weakness of sensor-based com-puting. Smart dust, observed JoshuaSmith, a principal engineer at Intel Labs in Seattle, proved impossiblebecause the clever sensors neededbatteries. Instead of dust, he said, the sensor nodules would be the size of grapefruits.

But the power barrier, Mr. Smith says, is rapidly eroding. Advances insensor chips are delivering predict-able, rapid progress in the amount of data processing that can be done perunit of energy. That, he said, expands the potential data workloads that sen-

sors can handle and the distance over which they can communicate — with-out batteries.

At Intel, Mr. Smith is doing sensor research that builds on commercialRFID technology (for remote identi-fication) and adds an accelerometer and a programmable chip — in a package measured in millimeters.

Its power, he explains, can come from either a radio-frequency reader, as in RFID, or the ambient radio power from television, FM radio and WiFi networks. (For the latter, Intel is developing “power-harvesting cir-cuits,” he adds.)

“The ability to eliminate batteries for these sensors brings the vision of smart dust closer to reality,” Mr. Smith says.

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to recall past events orimagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the

metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized theflow of time.

As they thoughtabout years gone by, participants leaned

slightly backward, while in fantasiz-ing about the future, they listed to the fore.

“When we talk about time, we of-ten use spatial metaphors like ‘I’mlooking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conductedthe study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take anabstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in bodymovements.”

The new study, published in Janu-ary in the journal Psychological Sci-ence, is part of the immensely popu-lar field called embodied cognition,the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.

“How we process information is re-lated not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmannof the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”

In one recent study at Yale Univer-sity, researchers divided 41 college students into two groups and casually asked the members of Group A to holda cup of hot coffee, those in Group B to hold iced coffee.

The students were then ushered into a testing room and asked to evaluate the personality of an imagi-nary individual based on a packet of information.

Students who had recently been cradling the warm beverage were far

likelier to judge the fictitious charac-ter as warm and friendly than were those who had held the iced coffee.

In a report published last August inPsychological Science, Dr. Jostmannand his colleagues learned, for exam-ple, that when students were told thata particular book was vital to the cur-riculum, they judged the book to bephysically heavier than those told thebook was ancillary to their studies.

The researchers wanted to knowwhether the sensation of weightiness might influence people’s judgments more broadly.

In a series of experiments, studyparticipants were asked to answerquestionnaires that were attachedto a metal clipboard with a compart-ment on the back capable of holding papers. In some cases the compart-ments were left empty, and so the clip-board weighed only 0.6 kilograms.In other cases the compartmentswere filled, for a total clipboard package of 1 kilogram. Participants

stood with either a light or heavy clipboard cradled in their arm, filling out surveys. In one, they were askedto estimate the value of six unfamil-iar foreign currencies. In another,students indicated how important they thought it was that a universitycommittee take their opinions into account when deciding on the sizeof foreign study grants. For a third experiment, participants were askedhow satisfied they were with (a) the city of Amsterdam and (b) the mayor of Amsterdam.

Students holding the heavier clip-board judged the currencies to bemore valuable than did those with thelightweight boards. Participants withweightier clipboards insisted that students be allowed to weigh in on the university’s financial affairs. Those holding the more formidable boardadopted a more rigorous mind-set, and proved more likely to consider the connection between the livabilityof Amsterdam and the effectiveness

of its leader. “The issue of how humans view

gravity is evolutionarily useful,” saidDr. Jostmann.

“Something heavy is something you should take care of,” he contin-ued. “Heavy things are not easily pushed around, but they can easily push us around.” They are weighty affairs in every tine of the word.

Saving Tiny, Homeless Toads

JULIE LARSEN MAHER/WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY’S BRONX ZOO

ALYSSA BOREK/WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY’S

BRONX ZOO

JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Peter Hartwell of H.P. says sensorswill change how computersperceive their surroundings.

SERGE BLOCH

NATALIE

ANGIER

ESSAY

STEVE

LOHR

ESSAY

New World of Details

Through Mini Sensors

Abstract Thoughts? Body Takes Them Literally

Spray toads thrived in the mist of a waterfall in Tanzania before a dam project altered their habitat. There are 4,000 survivors in two American zoos, but they are now extinct in the wild.

Repubblica NewYork

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010

By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH

At the end of “La Bohème,” as Puc-cini envisioned the opera, the frailseamstress Mimi dies in bed in a gar-ret overlooking the rooftops of Paris. As seen live on Swiss television inSeptember, she boarded an empty bus from a curb outside a shopping mall.Then the bus pulled away, pursued for a time by her stricken lover Rodolfountil he collapsed on the pavement.

Saimir Pirgu, the young Albaniantenor who sang Rodolfo, found thattears came naturally. “When thosedoors closed, they weren’t the doors of the bus, but the doors of life,” Mr. Pir-gu said recently in New York, wherehe was making his debut as the happy-go-lucky Rinuccio in the Puccini triple bill “Il Trittico.” “Everybody cried. Icried.”

And how weird was it to have peoplestanding centimeters away from theaction? “You really get into your rolewhen spectators are standing rightnext to you, some of them in tears,some of them picking their noses,” Mr. Pirgu said. “I’ve never had such anadrenaline rush in my life.”

Wildly popular, “La Bohème imHochhaus” (“A High-Rise Bohème”)was the third foray by Schweizer Fern-sehen, the Swiss national network,into prime-time opera programming.The first came in March 2007, with“The Magic Flute” on two channels,

coupling a conventional telecast ofthat Mozart singspiel from the stage ofthe Zurich Opera House on one chan-nel with simultaneous live backstage reports on another.

In September 2007 the camerasrolled for the more radical experiment“Traviata im Hauptbahnhof,” carried live from the main train station of Zu-rich. Viewers who wouldn’t know Bo-ris Godunov from Aida stayed gluedto their television sets. Helping them along were plot updates as well as doc-

umentary interludes. The prime mover of the series was

Thomas Beck. As director of mu-sic and dance for Swiss television,his mandate was to produce timelydocumentary segments for a 45-to-90-minute time slot every Sundayevening.

“I was always convinced that opera in prime time had huge emotional po-tential,” Mr. Beck said recently. “ For‘Flute’ we were hoping for perhaps a

12-to-15 percent market share on thefirst channel and 5 to 8 percent on thesecond channel. We never dreamedwe would double those expecta-tions.”

For the later shows the numberswere in the 30-to-40 percent range.

Many have tried to package operafor the masses. Epic summer opera at the Roman arena in Verona has been a staple for nearly a century in Italy.Every so often an opera shows up intheaters as a feature film. But as amass medium, television is in anotherleague.

As expected, howls of purist indig-nation were heard, but not many. AsMr. Pirgu sees it, this is “opera for ev-eryone.”

“If my mother went to the opera tosee ‘La Bohème,’ she wouldn’t un-derstand it, and she’s the mother of a tenor,” he said. “This she understoodperfectly.”

So what else is in the works? InZurich, the idea has been floated of a “Carmen Downtown,” set in a work-ing-class neighborhood, with localchildren drafted into the chorus. Alex-ander Pereira, director of the ZurichOpera House, has no doubt that the for-mula has caught on. “It would be easy to put on an ‘Aida’ in the zoo or ‘Barber of Seville’ in some Italian hill town,” hesaid. “I think the series could go on for quite a while.”

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

Martin Scorsese’s dark, twisty de-tective thriller “Shutter Island” is set in 1954, in the full flowering of whatW.H. Auden had, just a few years ear-lier, called the Age of Anxiety. “I don’t know, maybe I’m stuck in that time,” Mr. Scorsese said recently, soundinga little weary as he talked about a filmthat “started out as an entertainment,though I guess I don’t really know how to do that,” he said. “It always seems tobecome something else.”

“‘The Departed’ was that way too,” he added. He is 67 now, and has had, byany measure, as satisfying a decadeas a filmmaker of his age and experi-ence can reasonably expect.

Three years ago “The Departed”won him his first Oscar, after morethan four decades of moviemaking; hecan afford to rest. But he is still, it ap-pears, determined to continue makingthe kind of film that will, like “ShutterIsland,” become “something else.”

Based on an exceptionally tricky2003 mystery novel by Dennis Lehane,“Shutter Island” wears its something-elseness proudly, even defiantly. It’s atrue oddity, an outlier, as isolated andenigmatic as the gloomy, rain-whippedisland on which the action takes place.The hero, a federal marshal namedTeddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio),is a tormented soul. Teddy’s emotion-al troubles manifest themselves, formost of the film, as very bad dreams— many of them about his dead wife — and migraines.

“When I read the script,” Mr. Scors-ese said, “I was just taken by the char-acter, felt very empathetic with him.”

Teddy, accompanied by his curi-ously passive partner, Chuck (MarkRuffalo), is on Shutter Island to inves-tigate a disappearance. This unpre-possessing chunk of rock in BostonHarbor, houses an asylum for thecriminally insane, one of whom hassomehow managed to vanish fromher cell. We learn early on that Teddymight have other agendas: the manhe believes killed his wife may be aninmate there, and he’s suspicious ofthe motives of the asylum’s psychiat-ric staff .

What makes “Shutter Island” feel sopeculiar for this director to have made

isn’t the troubled protagonist, or thedetective-movie plot mechanics. It’sthe claustrophobia, the tight, hermet-ic, locked-down structure that’s sounusual for Mr. Scorsese, whose films are generally a lot more expansive. AsMr. DiCaprio, who has starred in allfour of the nondocumentary featuresMr. Scorsese has directed since 2002, explained, “With scripts like ‘Gangsof New York’ and ‘The Aviator’ there’s a little more flexibility, certain things that can be done to reshape the charac-ter, but in scripts like ‘Shutter Island’

there are too many interlocking seg-ments. If you take one piece out, thestory starts to fall apart.”

Most of the film was shot at an aban-doned mental institution in Medfield, Massachusetts, which had, Mr. Scors-ese said, “the feeling of a trap, a laby-rinth — a labyrinth of the mind, which is what I wanted.”

Mr. Scorsese’s movies have alwaysbeen fueled by nervous energy andhuge uprushes of adrenaline, and it’snearly impossible to imagine him do-ing without some kind of emotionalturbulence, even if he has to induce it by sheer force of will. Or stimulantsmay sometimes be required. With Mr. Scorsese’s filmmaking, the drugs ofchoice are primarily the memory ofold movies.

“I love memory,” he said, “I mean,I’m a preservationist.” So when hetalks about “Shutter Island,” he alsoinevitably needs to speak of remem-bered films like those of JacquesTourneur, who made the doomy, com-plex noir “Out of the Past” (1947).

“I like watching ‘Out of the Past’ re-peatedly,” he said, “because I neverknow quite where I am in it, I don’tknow what’s the beginning, the middleor the end.”

That nervous sense of not knowing exactly where you are, beginning,middle or end, seems somehow vitally important to Mr. Scorsese, who, al-though closer to the end of his career, has for the past decade been making movies with the jittery vigor of a be-ginner, trying on different genres,different sounds, different actors(with Mr. DiCaprio as a constant) in

a valiant attempt to keep himself suf-ficiently disoriented to create his kind of something else.

He finds a way to remain chargedup, by any means necessary, even if itinvolves making a film as relentlesslyand baroquely interior as “Shutter Is-

land,” which has the nightmare archi-tecture of a Piranesi prison. Whatever works. And what works for Mr. Scors-ese, usually, is some form of unease.He may or may not be stuck in the ’50s, but for him it’s always, one way or an-other, an age of anxiety.

By PATRICK HEALY

This season on Broadway sometheatergoers and critics have beenasking whether musicals have be-come increasingly cost-consciouswith their visual artistry, and withmixed results.

The four major musical revivals sofar this season — “Bye Bye Birdie,’’ “Finian’s Rainbow,’’ “Ragtime’’and “A Little Night Music’’ — were dismissed by some critics for stage design that seemed thinly conceivedor even flimsy.

Even the most commercially suc-cessful recent productions ofmusicals — “Billy Elliot: TheMusical,’’ “Hair’’ and “West Side Story’’ — lean to thestripped-down .

The drift toward smaller-is-better Broadway musicalswill continue to be scrutinizedthrough the spring, as produc-ers and directors weigh wheth-er scaled-down productionslike “Hair,’’ which recouped its $5.8 million capitalization infive months, are a smarter way to go in this economy than ex-travaganzas like “Spider-man:Turn Off the Dark,’’ which de-layed its February previewsbecause of difficulty raisingmoney for its estimated budget of $50 million.

Robert Longbottom, thedirector and choreographer of theRoundabout Theater Company’srevival of “Bye Bye Birdie,’’ whichclosed in January, called the show’sscenery and costumes first-rate, but acknowledged that working withinconfines had been challenging.

“Sometimes — if you find you don’thave the funds to have all the bricksand mortar to do every scene in ev-ery way you want — you have to becreative,’’ he said.

For some Broadway veterans,however, the recent spate of austere production values often feels like adisappointing concession to the in-creasing expense of producing onBroadway .

“The smaller scale of musicals isall about money, I believe,’’ said Hal Prince, who has directed large-scaleworks like “A Little Night Music”and “Follies.”

“When I directed the original ‘Fol-lies’ and ‘Little Night Music,’ I didn’treally worry about those musicalsrecouping, and no one put pressure on me to worry about it,’’ Mr. Princecontinued. “That’s not as true today.And I’m not sure the environmentexists today to mount huge workswith the calmness and confidencethat we did decades ago.’’

One of the most commercially suc-cessful new musicals, “Billy Elliot,’’ which recouped its $18 million capi-talization in 14 months, takes placelargely in a community center dancehall .

“I was a neophyte as a producer,and basically didn’t put any budget restrictions on the creative vision,’’ said Eric Fellner, the lead producerof “Billy Elliot,’’ which won the Tonyin June for best musical. “It is an ex-pensive show, yes, but what made itsuccessful — and what makes manymusicals successful — is the quality and emotional depth of a story, bril-liantly conceived characters and thebeauty of a show’s music.’’

Scorsese Finds a New ‘Something Else’

TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

‘‘I love memory,’’ Martin Scorsese says. ‘‘I’m a preservationist.’’

‘Shutter Island’ evokes a ‘feeling of a trap, a labyrinth.’

As one performer says, it’s ‘opera for everyone.’

Staging Broadway, Without Show-Stopping Scenery

Opera Holds Swiss Television Audiences Captive SEVERIN NOWACKI/SCHWEIZER FERNSEHEN

“La Bohème,” withSaimir Pirgu and

Maya Boog, is one of several operas

that have beenstaged in modern

settings and shown on television in

Switzerland.

SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES

David Alvarez in “Billy Elliot: The Musical.” Some of the show’s dance scenes involve no more than a chair or an empty stage.

Repubblica NewYork