DAMASCUS, Syria — More and more students at Damascus Uni-versity were skipping classes. The whack and thump of shelling in the distance punctuated the hum of the downtown campus. Some students walked miles to avoid the security checkpoints that choke traffic.

But classes continued at the Syr-ian capital’s flagship university. The university, where President Bashar al-Assad and many other Syrian elites completed their stud-ies, became a sanctuary for young people still preparing for a future, however uncertain, when their country would not be in the midst of a ferocious civil war.

Then, on Thursday afternoon, a mortar shell crashed into the en-gineering campus, through the or-ange canvas awning of an outdoor cafe where students were smoking, chatting and studying on a spring day, in what could have been a uni-versity scene playing out anywhere. The blast killed 10 students and in-jured 29.

With it, the war invaded a campus that, like much of Damascus, the Syrian capital, had done its best to go about its business.

The blast was deafening. Students helped carry away the dead and the injured, then filed out the gate, many holding hands and pressing cellphones to their ears to reassure worried parents.

The engineering dean vowed to reopen next week, but for some stu-dents, the attack, which came two days after a shell exploded a few hundred yards away, signaled the end of normal studies.

Roaa Salem, an architecture student, had dreamed before the war of designing artistic new build-ings and, since the crisis began, of rebuilding her damaged country. On Thursday, though, standing outside the hospital room of an in-jured friend, she said she would not return. “I know Syria needs us right now,” Salem said. “But ...” she said, her voice trailing off.

“Enough,” she said. “I give up.” ANNE BARNARD

KARACHI, Pakistan — This seaside metropolis is no stranger to gangland violence, driven for years by a motley collection of armed groups who battle over money, turf and votes.

But there is a new gang in town. Hundreds of miles from their homeland in the mountain-ous northwest, Pakistani Taliban fighters have started to flex their muscles more forcefully in parts of this vast city, and they are openly taking ground.

Taliban gunmen have mounted assaults on police stations, kill-ing scores of officers. They have stepped up extortion rackets that target rich businessmen and traders, and shot dead public health workers engaged in polio vaccination efforts.

The grab for influence and power in Karachi shows the Taliban have been able to extend their reach across Pakistan, even here in the country’s most popu-lous city, with about 20 million in-habitants. No longer can they be written off as endemic only to the country’s frontiers.

In joining Karachi’s street

wars, the Taliban are upending an established network of compet-ing criminal, ethnic and political armed groups in this city. The dif-ference is that the Taliban’s agen-da is more expansive — it seeks to overthrow the Pakistani state — and their operations are run by remote control from the tribal belt along the Afghan border.

Already, the militants have reshaped the city’s political bal-ance by squeezing one of the most prominent political machines, the Pashtun-dominated Awami National Party, off its home turf. They have scared Awami opera-tives out of town and destroyed offices, gravely undercutting the party’s chances in national elec-tions scheduled for May.

“We are the Taliban’s first en-emy,” said Shahi Syed, the party’s provincial head. “They burn my offices, they tear down my flags and they kill our people.”

The Taliban drift into Karachi actually began years ago, though much more quietly. Many fled here after a concerted Pakistani military operation in the Swat Valley in 2009. The influx has

gradually continued, officials here say, with Taliban fighters able to easily melt into the city’s population of fellow ethnic Pa-shtuns, estimated to number at least five million people.

Until recently, the militants saw Karachi as a kind of rear base, using the city to lie low or seek medical treatment, and limiting their armed activities to criminal fund-raising, like kidnapping and bank robberies.

But for at least six months now, there have been signs that their timidity is disappearing. The Taliban have become a force on the street, aggressively exerting their influence in the ethnic Pash-tun quarters of the city.

Just why the Taliban are adopt-ing such an aggressive profile in Karachi right now is unclear. Some cite the greater number of militants fleeing Pakistani mili-tary operations in the northwest; others say it may be the prod-uct of dwindling funds, as jihadi funders in the Persian Gulf states turn to the Middle East.

DECLAN WALSH and ZIA ur-REHMAN

Inside the rambling, pale-yellow Colonial-style home in a Connecticut suburb, Adam Lanza lived amid a stockpile of disparate weaponry and maca-bre keepsakes: a pair of rifles, 11 knives, a starter pistol, a bayonet, 3 samurai swords.

He saved photographs of what appeared to be a corpse smeared in blood and covered in plastic. Strewn about was a newspaper clipping that chronicled a vicious shooting at Northern Illinois Uni-versity.

In what investigators believed was his bedroom was a gun safe. Among his clothing was a mili-tary-style uniform. There was al-so a holiday card that contained a check made out to Lanza, 20, and signed by his mother. Investiga-tors suggested that the money had been intended to buy a gun.

The disturbing details of Lan-za’s possessions were disclosed on Thursday for the first time

since he car-ried out the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in N e w t o w n , Conn. The information was included in search war-

rants and related affidavits con-nected to the investigation into the Dec. 14 attack, when he killed 20 first graders, 6 educators, his mother and himself.

The inventory of the house, combined with interviews con-ducted over several weeks with law-enforcement officials and people who crossed paths with the Lanza family, afford a some-what fuller picture of the dark corners of Lanza’s mind.

After killing his mother at their home on the morning of Dec. 14, Lanza drove to the grade school

that he once attended and carried out the massacre in less than five minutes, according to the search warrant.

Stephen J. Sedensky III, the state’s attorney who is in charge of the investigation, said in a statement on Thursday that Lan-za shot his mother in the forehead with a .22-caliber rifle.

At the school, he used a Bush-master XM15-E2S semiautomat-ic rifle to fire 154 shots, the state-ment said. The police also found 10 30-round magazines for the gun, many of them partly or fully emptied.

Lanza also carried two semiau-tomatic handguns, one of which he used to kill himself. The police found a 12-gauge shotgun in the car he drove to the school.

In the home that Lanza shared with his mother, police found hun-dreds of rounds of ammunition and a panoply of weapons found in a safe and in closets. (NYT)

With Shelling, War Invades Syria Campus

Newtown Killer’s Obsessions, in Chilling Detail

Taliban Are Terrorizing Pakistani City

Adam Lanza

F R O M T H E PAG E S O F

Friday, March 29, 2013 © 2013 The New york TimesfROM THE PAGES Of

midnight in New York

AKAKI, Cyprus — As Cyprus cautiously cracked open the doors of its crisis-ridden banks on Thursday, Stelios Sofroniou, a pig farmer, fumed at being able to withdraw only 300 euros, about $385. That would buy one ton of feed, not the 30 he needed for his 15,000 increasingly hungry pigs.

“We were in the Stone Age, and now we’re entering the 19th century,” he said after visiting his branch of the Bank of Cy-prus, which opened Thursday for the first time since March 15. He cursed the strict new controls that for at least the next week will give him access to only a tiny portion of his money.

Across Cyprus, fears that the reopening could lead to a chaotic bank run gave way Thursday to conflicting emotions: relief that bank doors were at least open again, but anger over the new rules, which allow deposits but tightly ration withdrawals.

The restrictions are meant to

keep customers from draining their accounts in the wake of the bailout deal announced Monday in Brussels. European leaders hailed the deal as saving Cyprus’s teeter-ing banks — and the country as a whole — from collapse.

But the prevailing view in Cy-prus is that those leaders have mainly sought to halt a potential financial contagion by allowing it to devastate Cyprus. [Page 5]

for Sofroniou, the bailout terms

show that the European Union is driven by the same merciless forc-es now playing out in the sheds of his family farm. “The weakest pigs in the pen don’t eat,” he said. “The strong ones eat everything. This is the law of nature.”

Not since the introduction of the euro in January 1999 has a European country blocked bank depositors from having full ac-cess to their own cash. Under European Union treaties, such restrictions are normally forbid-den. But the European Commis-sion, the union’s administrative arm, issued a statement Thurs-day that the Cyprus controls were legal — though urging that they be rescinded as soon as possible. The controls were to be in place for one week, but on Thursday, the Cypriot foreign minister, Ioannis Kasoulides, said that restrictions on financial transactions would not be lifted for a month.

ANDREW HIGGINS and LIZ ALDERMAN

UNITED NATIONS — The global effort to establish a univer-sal standard to regulate the sale of conventional weapons suffered a temporary setback on Thursday after Iran, Syria and North Korea opposed the draft Arms Trade Treaty, blocking the consensus needed for passage.

The three countries, often iso-lated as pariahs for their arms and human rights records, used their rejection of the treaty to lash out at what they see as their unfair treatment.

Achieving consensus among all 193 member states of the United Nations is considered a monu-mental task, but it was hoped that it would be possible because so many countries supported the idea of trying to regulate the $70 billion annual industry at the root of much death and destruction.

The treaty would require states exporting conventional weapons to develop criteria that would link exports to avoiding human rights abuses, terrorism and organized crime.

After Iran and North Korea vot-ed against the draft treaty, Peter Woolcott, the Australian ambas-sador who was the president of the treaty conference, suspended the meeting. When it resumed, Syria voted against the treaty as well.

Without consensus, it was ex-pected that the treaty would be sent to the General Assembly as early as next week for approval. That is considered a weaker but no less binding manner of getting the treaty passed. (NYT)

Kenya Panel Fights New VoteKenya’s besieged election commission,

accused of bungling this month’s presiden-tial vote, fired back in court in Nairobi on Thursday, saying that even if there were a few irregularities, canceling the entire elec-tion and calling for a new one would be even worse. Kenya’s Supreme Court has been asked to decide the disputed election in which Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Kenya’s first president, was declared the winner, clear-ing the majority threshold by a margin of less than one-tenth of a percent. (NYT)

Force to Pursue Congo RebelsThe United Nations Security Council au-

thorized a new “intervention brigade” for the Democratic Republic of Congo on Thursday with an unprecedented mandate to take military action against rebel groups to help bring peace to the eastern portion of the country. The resolution directs the bri-gade to carry out offensive operations alone or with Congolese Army troops to neutral-ize and disarm armed groups. (AP)

Judge Alters Pistorius’s BailA judge on Thursday eased the unusu-

ally tight bail restrictions on Oscar Pisto-rius, the double amputee Olympic runner who is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on Feb. 14 in one of the most sensational cases in South Africa’s re-

cent judicial history. On Thursday, Judge Bert Bam said the restrictions imposed ear-lier by a magistrate were unfair and un-warranted. Bam said Pistorius, 26, was “en-titled to use his passport to travel outside” South Africa and no longer needed to report to a probation officer. (NYT)

Mandela Is Hospitalized AgainFormer President Nelson Mandela of

South Africa was readmitted to the hospital overnight because of a recurring lung infec-tion, President Jacob Zuma said on Thurs-day, appealing to people around the world to pray for Mandela. It was the third time in four months that Mandela, 94, had been hos-pitalized. (NYT)

Conflicting Emotions as Banks Reopen in CyprusU.N. Arms Treaty Suffers a Setback

In Brief

AngeLos TzorTzinis for The new York Times

fears of a bank run gave way to relief and anger in Cyprus.

WASHINGTON — The Ameri-can military on Thursday carried out a rare long-range mission over the Korean Peninsula, sending two nuclear-capable B-2 stealth bombers on a practice bombing sortie over South Korea, under-scoring Washington’s commit-ment to defend its ally amid rising tensions with North Korea.

The two B-2 Spirit bombers demonstrated the United States’ ability to “conduct long-range, precision strikes quickly and at

will,” the American command in Seoul said.

This mission was the first time the B-2s were launched toward the Korean Peninsula on a non-stop, round-trip mission from the United States. The bombers dropped inert munitions on a range off South Korea’s coast.

While the mock bombing run was part of a planned joint exer-cise between South Korean and American forces, it came at a time of rising rhetorical tension with

the North. At a Pentagon news conference on Thursday, senior officials made clear that the mis-sion was intended to serve as a de-terrent to North Korea — and to reassure allies South Korea and Japan.

In response, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un convened an urgent operational meeting of his Korean People’s Army’s top com-mand early friday.

THOM SHANKER and CHOE SANG-HUN

U.S. Stealth Bombers Run Practice Sorties in South Korea

INteRNAtIoNAl Friday, March 29, 2013 2

WASHINGTON — As they ex-plore possible fiscal deals, Presi-dent Obama and Congressional Republicans have quietly raised the idea of broad systemic chang-es to Medicare that could produce significant savings and end the polarizing debate over Republican plans to privatize the insurance program for older Americans.

While the two remain far apart on new tax revenue, recent state-ments from both sides show pos-sible common ground on curbing the costs of Medicare.

Obama has assured House and Senate Republicans that he could support specific cost-saving changes to Medicare and deliver Democratic votes, though only as part of a “balanced” package that included additional revenues.

Several changes are likely to be in his annual budget, which will be released on April 10.

In particular, participants say, Obama told House Republicans that he was open to combining Medicare’s coverage for hospitals

and doctor services. That would create a single deductible that could increase out-of-pocket costs for many future beneficiaries, but also could pay for a cap on their to-tal expenses and reduce the need to buy Medigap supplementary insurance.

Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican, proposed much the same in a speech in february. “We should begin by ending the arbi-trary division between Part A, the hospital program, and Part B, the doctor services,” he said. “We can create reasonable and predictable levels of out-of-pocket expenses without forcing seniors to rely on Medigap plans.”

While Cantor’s proposal got little attention at the time, its echo by Obama hints at a new route to-ward compromise.

At a time when retiring baby boomers and mounting medical prices have made federal health care spending the biggest single driver of the nation’s rising debt, the House budget from Rep. Paul

D. Ryan Jr., R-Wis., would trans-form Medicare into a voucherlike system known as premium sup-port, which Obama and Demo-crats adamantly oppose. But Cantor, like Obama, is suggesting cost-saving changes within the existing Medicare program.

Obama’s openness to Medicare changes seemed to be news to many Republicans, even though he proposed detailed ideas in 2011. Republicans accuse Obama of opposing changes in entitlement spending while focusing on rais-ing taxes, an attack that ignores his proposals but reflects how lit-tle Obama has talked about them.

Still, the same hurdle to compro-mise stands: The president and his party will not support even his Medicare proposals unless Republicans agree to raise taxes on the wealthy and some corpo-rations. Without that trade-off, common ground on Medicare will remain unplowed.

JACKIE CALMES and ROBERT PEAR

BAKERSfIELD, Calif. — A malady that has been killing hon-eybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drasti-cally in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 per-cent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

A conclusive explanation has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disor-der, but beekeepers and some researchers say there is grow-ing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neo-nicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.

The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they are open to further stud-ies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.

“They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in fairview, Mont. “Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy.”

In a show of concern, the En-vironmental Protection Agency recently sent its acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions.

In the valley, where 1.6 million

hives of bees just finished pollinat-ing an endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently were losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has brought far greater losses.

The federal Agriculture Depart-ment is to issue its own assess-ment in May.

The impact is not limited to bee-keepers. The Agriculture Depart-ment says a quarter of the Ameri-can diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. few-er bees means smaller harvests and higher food prices.

MICHAEL WINES

New York is poised to become the largest American city to man-date that companies provide paid time off for sick employees, bol-stering a national movement that has been resisted by wary busi-ness leaders.

A legislative compromise reached Thursday represents a raw display of political muscle by a coalition of labor unions and lib-eral activists who overcame fierce objections from New York Mayor

Michael R. Bloomberg and his al-lies in the corporate world.

The deal required a conces-sion from a leading candidate to succeed Bloomberg. Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, had single-handedly blocked ac-tion on the sick-leave issue for three years.

The legislation would eventual-ly force companies with at least 15 employees to give full-time work-ers 5 compensated days off when

they are ill, a requirement that ad-vocates said would allow much of the city’s labor force to stay home from work without fear of losing a day’s wage. The advocates said the legislation would provide paid sick leave for one million New Yorkers who do not have such benefits. The mandate would not take effect until spring 2014, and for the first 18 months, it would ap-ply only to businesses with 20 or more employees. (NYT)

obama Renews Call For Gun Restrictions

With resistance to tougher gun laws stiffening in Congress, a visibly frustrated President Obama on Thursday implored lawmakers and the nation not to lose sight of the horrors of the school massacre in New-town, Conn. “The notion that two months or three months after something as horrific as what happened in Newtown happens and we’ve moved on to other things?” Obama said at the White House, surrounded by relatives and friends of vic-tims of gun violence. “That’s not who we are.” Gun control mea-sures will come up for a vote in the Senate early in April, but a filibuster threat is growing. Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, has said a ban on certain semiautomatic weapons is vir-tually assured of defeat. (NYT)

Chief Justice Revives Marriage law Debate

Two years after President Obama decided that his admin-istration would no longer de-fend the Defense of Marriage Act, that decision has taken on new prominence after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ac-cused Obama from the bench on Wednesday of not having “the courage of his convictions” for continuing to enforce the law even after concluding that it vi-olated constitutional equal pro-tection guarantees. Leaders in the fight came to accept the de-cision “because without enforce-ment, there’s no means to chal-lenge the law” in court. (NYT)

Ailing Boston Mayor Will Not Run Again

At an emotional announce-ment Thursday inside Faneuil Hall, Thomas M. Menino, the only mayor for an entire gen-eration of Bostonians, told a standing-room only crowd: “I am here with the people I love, to tell the city I love, that I will leave the job that I love.” Meni-no, 70, the city’s longest-serving mayor with 20 years in office, said he was not up for the rig-ors of the job after illnesses that left him hospitalized for two months last year. (NYT)

Medicare Shift May Lead Way to Budget Pact

Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry

New York City Clears Path for a Bill on Paid Sick Leave

In Brief

NAtIoNAl Friday, March 29, 2013 3

The most widely followed ba-rometer of the United States stock market rose to a new high on Thursday, exceeding its 2007 peak, while most of the rest of the world could only look on in envy.

The nominal record set by the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is the latest sign that the American economy is recovering some of the strength it had before the financial collapse of 2008.

It has been a little more than three weeks since the Dow Jones industrial average hit a milestone high, also set in October 2007, but the S. & P. is considered more representative of the breadth of American stocks.

The S. & P. reached its new nominal high after several days of flirting with the record as in-vestors struggled with the tur-moil caused by Cyprus’s banking

crisis. The index rose 10 percent in the first quarter.

Meanwhile, stock markets in nearly every other large econo-my around the world are still well below their previous records. An index of the entire world’s stock market, without the United States, is still down about 29 per-cent from the level it hit in 2007, according to an analysis done by Ned Davis Research. Only some smaller nations, such as Denmark, Mexico and Colombia, have fully recovered their losses.

American workers have learned that the stock market’s performance is not always a good gauge of the underlying econo-my’s strength. Unemployment has remained stubbornly high at the same time that share prices have risen since bottoming out in March 2009. Even with the record

level, the S. & P. 500 is still not back to its 2007 level when infla-tion is taken into account.

Still, the performance of the American stock market would have seemed improbable during the depths of the crisis, given that it was the financial markets in the United States that led the global economy into recession. Strate-gists and economists have said that the divergence since then is largely a result of the relative speed with which the U.S. gov-ernment and corporate sector responded to the causes of the 2008 crisis.

“The U.S. addressed the prob-lems of the financial crisis faster and with much more ferocity than the rest of the world,” said Ed-ward M. Clissold, a market strat-egist at Ned Davis Research.

NATHANIEL POPPER

American Express customers trying to gain access to their on-line accounts Thursday were met with blank screens or an ominous ancient type face. The company confirmed that its Web site had come under attack.

The assault, which took Ameri-can Express offline for two hours, was the latest in an intensifying campaign of unusually powerful attacks on American financial institutions that began last Sep-tember and have taken dozens of them offline intermittently, cost-ing millions of dollars.

The culprits of these attacks, officials and experts say, appear intent on disabling financial transactions and operations.

Corporate leaders have long feared online attacks aimed at

financial fraud or economic es-pionage, but now a new threat has taken hold: attackers, possi-bly with state backing, who seem bent on destruction.

“Nations are actively testing how far they can go before we will respond,” said Alan Paller, direc-tor of research at the SANS In-stitute, a cybersecurity training organization.

Security experts who studied the attacks said that it was part of the same campaign that took down the Web sites of JPMor-gan Chase, Wells fargo, Bank of America and others over the last six months. A group that calls it-self the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cy-ber fighters has claimed respon-sibility for those attacks.

The group says it is retaliating

for an anti-Islamic video posted on YouTube last fall. But Ameri-can intelligence officials and industry investigators say they believe the group is a convenient cover for Iran. Just how tight the connection is, or whether the group is acting on direct orders from the Iranian government, is unclear. Government officials and bank executives have failed to produce a smoking gun.

Representatives of American Express confirmed that the com-pany was under attack Thurs-day, but said that there was no evidence that customer data had been compromised. A represen-tative of the f.B.I. did not respond to a request for comment.

DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTH

WASHINGTON — Seeking to address national security con-cerns, Sprint Nextel and Soft-Bank, its Japanese suitor, are expected to enter an agreement with American law enforcement officials that will restrict the com-bined company’s ability to select suppliers for its telecommunica-tions equipment and systems, government officials said on Thursday.

The agreement would allow na-tional security officials to monitor changes to the company’s system

of routers, servers and switches, among other equipment and pro-cesses, the officials said. It would also let them keep a close watch on the extent to which Sprint and SoftBank use equipment from Chinese manufacturers, particu-larly Huawei Technologies. The government officials spoke about the possible agreement on the condition of anonymity because negotiations are continuing.

While common to most tech-nology investments in the United States by foreign companies,

such agreements have come into sharper focus recently because of accusations by U.S. government officials of espionage by foreign countries.

SoftBank and Sprint have al-ready assured members of Con-gress that they will not integrate equipment made by Huawei into Sprint’s systems in the United States and will replace Huawei equipment in the network of Clearwire, a discount cellphone company that Sprint is seeking to buy. EDWARD WYATT

S.& P. Index Surpasses High Point of 2007

Corporate Cyberattackers Strive to Destroy Data

Sprint Nears U.S. Deal to Limit Use of Chinese Suppliers

oNlINe: MoRe PRICeS AND ANAlYSIS

Information on all United States stocks, plus bonds, mu-

tual funds, commodities and for-eign stocks along with analysis of industry sectors and stock indexes: nytimes.com/markets

CoMMoDItIeS/BoNDS

GOLD

D 11.40

$1,594.80

10-YR. TREAS. YIELD

unch. 0.65

1.85% $97.23

CRUDE OIL

U

the markets

14,578.54

6,411.74

12,335.96

12,749.90

52.38 0.36%

DJIA

U

24.18 0.38%

FTSE 100

U

157.83 1.26%

NIKKEI 225

D

50.25 0.40%

TSX

U

11.00 0.34%

NASDAQ

3,267.52

U

6.22 0.08%

DAX

7,795.31

U

165.19 0.74%

317.80 0.57%

HANG SENG

BOVESPA

22,299.63

56,352.09

D

U

6.34 0.41%

S&P 500

1,569.19

U

19.78 0.53%

CAC 40

3,731.42

U

64.96 2.82%

SHANGHAI

2,236.30D

Market holiday

BOLSA

eURoPe

ASIA/PACIFIC

AMeRICAS

BRITAIN

JAPAN

CANADA

GERMANY

HONG KONG

BRAZIL

FRANCE

CHINA

MEXICO

FOREIGN EXCHANGE Fgn.currency Dollarsin inDollars fgn.currency

Australia (Dollar) 1.0408 .9608Bahrain (Dinar) 2.6527 .3770Brazil (Real) .4947 2.0213Britain (Pound) 1.5192 .6582Canada (Dollar) .9842 1.0161China (Yuan) .1609 6.2143Denmark (Krone) .1719 5.8173Dom. Rep. (Peso) .0244 41.0000Egypt (Pound) .1470 6.8030Europe (Euro) 1.2818 .7802Hong Kong (Dollar) .1288 7.7623Japan (Yen) .0106 94.1100Mexico (Peso) .0810 12.3508Norway (Krone) .1712 5.8421Singapore (Dollar) .8062 1.2404So. Africa (Rand) .1087 9.1985So. Korea (Won) .0009 1113.1Sweden (Krona) .1534 6.5172Switzerland (Franc) 1.0533 .9494

Source: Thomson Reuters

BUSINeSS Friday, March 29, 2013 4

WASHINGTON — They came to an opening night beer blast at the National Air and Space Muse-um, 4,000 strong in baseball caps and T-shirts, to look at the Wright Brothers’ airplane and drink Citi-zen by DC Brau, which also makes a wryly named hometown brew, Corruption.

Craft beer brewers marched on Washington this week for their industry’s first conference in the nation’s capital. They were there to engage in a local pastime that goes pint in hand with drinking: lobbying. Hundreds of small-scale brewers met with Congressional staff members to press for a tax cut that they say would make it easier for them to brew more beer and hire more workers.

“for every 31 gallons that we brew, $7 goes to Uncle Sam,” said Jeff Hancock, a co-founder of DC Brau, one of five craft breweries that have opened in the District of

Columbia and its close suburbs in the last two years, joining dozens more in the rest of Virginia and Maryland. Washington is just one of many places where craft brew-ing is booming.

“We are the victims of our own success,” said Patrick Con-way, owner of the Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland. “We’re always being courted by

distributors,” he said. “It’s not our intention to sell in every state, but we are flattered.”

With overall beer sales up 1 percent in 2012 af-ter shrinking by about the same margin in 2011, most of the growth has been among specialty brew-ers.

Their share of the market grew to 6.5 percent in 2012 from 5.7 per-cent in 2011. The $10.2 billion spent on craft beer represented 10.2 per-cent of money spent on all beer in 2012. ANDREW SIDDONS

NICOSIA, Cyprus — Shaking his head in disgust, Stavros Agro-tis, an independent financial ex-ecutive, peered Thursday at the stock chart of Bank of Cyprus on his computer screen — a bright red line sloping sharply down-ward, before it stopped trading altogether in recent days.

“The screen says 20 cents, but according to the troika it’s zero,” he said angrily. He was referring to the trio of international lenders — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary fund — that devised the tough new pro-gram that requires shareholders, bondholders and depositors to share with European taxpayers the cost of bailing out Cyprus’s two biggest banks and prevent-ing the government from going bankrupt.

“We were a member of the Eu-ropean family,” he said. “Now it seems they want to push us out of the euro.”

for 20 years, Agrotis was a stockbroker at Bank of Cyprus, and until the shares were recently wiped out, he and his family had much of their wealth tied up in the bank via shares, bonds, retire-ment funds and — now — frozen deposits. Under terms of the bail-out, shareholders’ equity in the bank has been eliminated.

While Agrotis and his compatri-

ots may be feeling enormous pain, the broader reaction by investors in Europe and beyond was more or less muted on Thursday. for the broader world of finance, the prevailing view seems to be that the implosion of this tiny island economy of $25.6 billion need not wreak broader market havoc.

Within Cy-prus, though, frustration is flaming into full rage. Some establishment figures are openly dis-cussing the op-tion of leaving the euro cur-rency union and defaulting

on the country’s loans.“Europe has destroyed our

banking system; now we need to consider all our options,” said Nicholas Papadopoulos, the chairman of the Cypriot Parlia-ment’s finance committee.

Like Papadopoulos, Agrotis is no one’s version of an extremist. He is solid member of Cyprus’s financial establishment, and his ancestors were founders of Cy-prus’s most venerable financial institutions.

So convinced was he that Bank of Cyprus was too big to fail that Agrotis even increased his stake,

buying additional shares as the stock hit new low after new low.

Now he is groping for answers.Turning from the carnage on

his computer screen, Agrotis rubbed at eyes bloodshot from the many sleepless nights he had spent poring over economic pa-pers, analysts’ reports and politi-cal histories. All part of a fruitless search for a theory or precedent that might explain the terrible predicament that had fallen upon him and his countrymen.

On a computer screen, the down-ward fever chart is the symbol of loss in the world of money, equally understood by the day trader in his living room or the globetrot-ting hedge fund investor.

But for Agrotis and many oth-ers in this tiny country of fewer than a million people, Bank of Cy-prus’s plunging chartline means much more than the mere evis-ceration of a lifetime’s savings.

“There is an arrogance in the behavior of Europe’s leaders that reminds me of the behavior that started two world wars,” said Agrotis, pointing out that World War I began as a spat between Russia, Germany and Britain over a tiny sliver of the Balkans. “The next war starts here in little Cyprus.”

Hyperbole, probably. But Cy-priots are staring into an abyss.

LANDON THOMAS Jr.

Surging Craft Brewers Ask Congress for Tax Cut

In Cyprus, Savers Feel the Pain of a Bailout

Stocks that moved substantially or traded heavily on Thursday:

PVH Corp., down $5.98 at $106.81. The clothing company’s Warnaco ac-quisition will need more investments, which will weigh on its earnings.

Signet Jewelers Ltd., up $3.73 at $67. The owner of Kay and Jared jewelry stores said its fourth-quarter net in-come rose 10 percent on higher sales.

Synnex Corp., down $3.88 at $37. The high-tech contractor forecast fiscal second-quarter earnings below what Wall Street analysts were expecting.

Research In Motion Ltd., down 12 cents at $14.45. The smartphone mak-er surprised Wall Street by returning to profitability and shipping more Black-Berry 10 phones than expected.

Fred’s Inc., down 42 cents at $13.68. The discount store operator said its fourth-quarter net income fell 33 per-cent on higher costs and cautious con-sumer spending.

TrovaGene Inc., up 16 cents at $6.26. The maker of molecular disease-de-tecting tests debuted a urine-based test for human papilloma virus, a sexu-ally transmitted virus.

Five Below Inc., down $1.27 at $37.89. The retailer, which sells items for under $5, said its fourth-quarter net income rose, but its outlook came in under analysts’ expectations. (aP)

Stocks on the Move

stavros Agrotis

Most Active, GAiners And Losers % VolumeStock(TICKER) Close Chg Chg (100)

10MoSTACTIVEBlackBerry (BBRY) 14.44 ◊0.12 ◊0.8 1069659Bank of Am (BAC) 12.18 ◊0.05 ◊0.4 908077Microsoft (MSFT) 28.61 +0.24 +0.8 554535Sprint Nex (S) 6.21 +0.17 +2.8 535343Boston Sci (BSX) 7.81 +0.16 +2.1 491603Sirius XM (SIRI) 3.08 0.00 0.0 468168AT&T Inc (T) 36.69 +0.07 +0.2 361289MGIC Inves (MTG) 4.95 +0.35 +7.6 354247Intel Corp (INTC) 21.83 0.00 0.0 333365Dollar Gen (DG) 50.58 ◊0.37 ◊0.7 332809

10TopGAInERS

Repros (RPRX) 16.10 +6.97 +76.3 100409Birner (BDMS) 23.03 +5.03 +27.9 5Parame (PAMT) 20.05 +3.17 +18.8 8034Tufco (TFCO) 5.10 +0.55 +12.1 5Collab (JACQ) 10.00 +1.00 +11.1 1Pinnac (PF) 22.21 +2.21 +11.1 245400MGC Di (MGCD) 6.99 +0.69 +11.0 152First (INBK) 25.60 +2.50 +10.8 57River (RIVR) 21.50 +2.07 +10.7 18Contin (CUO) 17.65 +1.65 +10.3 3

10TopLoSERS

Nautil (NMAR) 5.60 ◊1.62 ◊22.4 15Global (GAI) 8.67 ◊2.29 ◊20.9 1028Accele (AXDX) 7.27 ◊1.25 ◊14.7 4423Beasle (BBGI) 5.90 ◊0.74 ◊11.1 163SYNNEX (SNX) 37.00 ◊3.88 ◊9.5 5279Atossa (ATOS) 8.75 ◊0.80 ◊8.4 2093Vangua (VHS) 14.87 ◊1.18 ◊7.4 4327Exa Co (EXA) 9.52 ◊0.68 ◊6.7 1259NASB F (NASB) 21.05 ◊1.50 ◊6.7 135Ruckus (RKUS) 21.00 ◊1.44 ◊6.4 4575

% VolumeStock(TICKER) Close Chg Chg (100)

% VolumeStock(TICKER) Close Chg Chg (100)

Source: Thomson Reuters

ChrisTopher gregorY/The new York Times

The brewers’ conference was held at the national Air and space museum.

BUSINeSS Friday, March 29, 2013 5

A television commercial break during the Super Bowl. The world record for a woman to run a mile. The time it took to board my flight.

These are among the many things that last longer than a total solar eclipse.

So taking a 37-hour journey from my home in Pennsylvania to north Queensland, Australia, to view such a fleeting event may not seem like a natural vacation, especially not with your family in tow. But the promise of a prime viewing spot was all it took for me, an astronomy enthusiast, to book a trip last November.

I would be joining the legions of people you could call astro-tourists, who, undaunted by the prospect of a cloudy day, travel extraordinary distances for the opportunity to glimpse the latest ex-orbital phenomena.

“It really is an amazing visual experience that can become a life-changer for some people,” said Paul Maley, a retired NASA engi-neer who organizes eclipse trips with Ring of fire Expeditions, one of dozens of operators that cater to astrotourists. “People get differ-ent things out of it, and even after seeing more than 40 eclipses, I’m still surprised by how people re-act. One guy on a trip to Indonesia was so freaked out he hyperven-tilated. We had to get him a paper bag.”

Though I hoped it wouldn’t come to that for my daughters, Lucy, 11, and Alice, 8, or my wife, Kimberly, I did want us to share a life-altering experience. This par-ticular one was visible only in far north Queensland.

We arrived at our destination, Port Douglas, a few days before the eclipse. It was sunny and warm. The town, then in the off-season, buzzed as it would amid an Australian summer. The com-ing eclipse dominated local chat-

ter online, on the air and on the streets.

The day before the eclipse, how-ever, the horizon above the Coral Sea was filled with puffy clouds.

I had to decide: Should we stick it out and hope for a break in the clouds, or shoot inland to try to find clear skies? I sensed we had to go, and Kimberly and the girls gamely agreed. Without a peep of protest, we packed into the car and set out for Mareeba.

We drove in darkness and rain along slow, twisting roads, arriv-ing before midnight. The show started around 6:30 a.m. A mod-est bite on the left of the sun grew, turning it into a deep crescent. As the sun was shrinking to a sliver, the air grew cooler and the terrain took on a darker hue. Someone nearby pointed up and shouted “Venus!” The planet shone bright-ly as we rotated into the Moon’s shadow. Other stars emerged, no longer outshone by the sun.

Then, the sun swiftly became a mere pinprick before the moon completely — and perfectly — blotted it out. A bright halo, shim-mering and alive, was the only indication of its existence. It grew dark, and the birds around us hushed. People gasped. I looked at

Kimberly and the girls on their blan-ket; they sat there watching, their mouths hanging open.

I realized how inadequate all the photos I’ve seen of an eclipse are. Many people say they feel small and insignificant when observing the universe in all its vastness. But I felt connected to the cosmos, part of a perfect ma-

chine.Totality — the time that the sun

is completely blocked — lasted for nearly two minutes, and seemed to end as quickly as it began. The sun re-emerged, first as a bright dot on the edge of the halo that gave the illusion of a diamond ring. Sunlight fell back on us; the birds resumed chirping. Everyone breathed loudly and applauded.eYeS oN tHe HeAVeNSKenya A major total solar eclipse will cross the African continent Nov. 3, with Kenya being the opti-mal viewing point. Totality will be brief, but you’ll be able to fold in plenty of other adventures while in Kenya. Sky & Telescope maga-zine (skyandtelescope.com) is sponsoring a weeklong tour at $5,695 for a double and $6,389 for single occupancy.Desert near la Serena, Chile This is a dark-sky site, far away from the light pollution from urban and suburban locations that can wipe out the Milky Way and make most nebula, galaxies and star clusters impossible to see.Alaska The state is a prime view-ing location for the aurora borea-lis, which generates some of the most astonishing astronomical experiences. ERIC ADAMS

Charter flight passengers are more likely to slow down airport screening than scheduled passengers, suggests a study of a European regional airport by Kirschenbaum Consulting, an Israel-based security firm.

Among the findings: a lower percentage of sched-uled passengers among those interviewed carried prohibited items compared with charter passengers, and a lower percentage of scheduled passengers than charter passengers needed to be re-examined by secu-rity employees. TANYA MOHN

Stepping into a Jack Spade store, you might wonder who the fabulous, well-traveled gent was who lived there. The clothing store pulls off a deft, eclectic, lived-in

look.Steven Scla-

roff, the New York-based in-terior designer who decorated many of the brand’s stores, has trekked to many an an-tiques dealer, mall and vin-tage shop in

cities around the country, to find these furnishings. Along the way, he has picked up a few tricks for antique-hunting as well as an item or two for his own home.Q. Say you’re headed to Los Ange-les. How do you find vintage stores in the area?A. Before you go, search online for antique malls, vintage shops, dealers in the city. It’s as simple as Googling those words and seeing what comes up. Many businesses are still not on the Web, so Yelp is an excellent resource. And before you leave, make sure you measure the space in your house you want to furnish.Q. Do you hit up flea markets?A. I do, if they’re going on the weekend I’m there. But many times they’re not, so I check out antique malls, which often have the same dealers.Q. How do you navigate antique malls? They can be enormous.A. Be open to rummaging. The upside is, you can find something great on the cheap. The downside is that you have to look through a lot stuff you can’t believe has a price tag.Q. Any other cities particularly great for antiquing?A. Chicago has a bunch of great re-sources. In terms of antique malls, there’s Chicago Antique Centre and Broadway Antique Market, which mostly focuses on midcen-tury stuff.Q. How do you get these purchases back home?A. Dealers can give you a truck-ing company’s name or arrange shipping for you. Otherwise, you can ship things as large as a chair from the local UPS. It’s not cheap, but not crazy expensive, either. EMILY BRENNAN

Airport Checkpoint Delays

Antique Hunters Go in With Plan

Packing the Family for a Solar Eclipse

steven sclaroff

riCk Bowmer/AssoCiATed press

eriC AdAms for The new York Times

kimberly, Alice, 8, and Lucy Adams, 11, watched the eclipse through special glasses, before totality while visiting Australia.

tRAVel Friday, March 29, 2013 6

Have you heard the one about the little ter-mite that could, and did, take on a desert and turn it green? At least a little greener, except for those spots.

The reddish barren spots are called fairy circles. They dot a narrow belt of desert stretching from Angola through Namibia into northern South Africa. To the Himba people who live in the region, that’s just how it is, they tell anthropologists; the circles are “footprints of the gods.”

New research may now have yielded a more credible explanation for the fairy circles as examples of natural ecosystem engineer-ing by a particular species of sand termites, Psammotermes allocerus. A German scien-

tist reported on Thursday that most likely these industrious termites were the agents for making much of their desert home an oa-sis of permanent grassland.

In an article in the journal Science, Nor-bert Juergens, a professor of ecology at the University of Hamburg, said these termites “match the beaver with regard to intensity of environmental change, but surpass it with re-gard to the spatial dimension of their impact.”

Last year, Walter R. Tschinkel, a biologist at florida State University, published an analysis of aerial and satellite photography and other research to describe the number, size and dynamics of these formations. Some are as small as six feet in diameter and never grow much bigger. The largest ones can be at least 40 feet across.

But Tschinkel had first assumed that ter-mites were implicated and went looking for nests of a different species, harvester ter-mites, without success. He finally concluded that no other termites had been associated with the circles, and seemed resigned to a mystery unsolved.

In a critique, Tschinkel said the paper by “Jurgens has made the common scientific er-ror of confusing correlation (even very strong correlation) with causation.”

Juergens said Tschinkel was “looking for the wrong termites and you could easily over-look the ones that were actually living” deep beneath the surface of the red sandy spots, feasting on grass roots to keep the patches of land free of vegetation. In this way, the soil is better able to absorb rainfall quickly. The ab-sence of vegetation at the site also means that rainwater is not lost through transpiration, the evaporation of water from plants.

The absorbed water, the scientists ex-plained, spreads evenly in the sandy soil, which explains the circular patterns. This nourishes the surrounding grassland. And the termites keep chomping the roots of new shoots from beneath the inner circle, prevent-ing new vegetation from disrupting their eco-system. JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Mysterious Circles Dotting a Desert May Be the Work of Termites

ACROSS 1 Verbal shrug 4 Beat 9 Greets the good

guy, maybe14 Pointy-headed

sort?15 Whom Turkey’s

Weeping Rock is said to represent

16 Cliff hanger?17 One of two in a

plane19 Autodom’s ZR1,

for one20 Writer Moore or

Moorehead21 Where people

drop off on the line?

23 Killer bees, e.g.25 Brother26 Cackling loon

with a white coat31 Steam up34 Dungeons &

Dragons weapon35 With 40-Across,

“Inside ___” (postgame show)

36 Goal for many a 26- or 43-Across

40 See 35-Across41 Its products

often have Allen wrenches included

42 Dueling count

43 Mighty heavy

47 “My Name Is Earl” co-star Suplee

48 One working on steps

52 Means of dropping a line

56 Victimizer of Cassio

57 “I Know Who Killed Me” star, 2007

58 Offensive play in 35-/40-Across

60 “That’s ___!” (“Don’t!”)

61 Flip

62 Secured

63 Track lineup

64 The out crowd?

65 “Annie” characters

DOWN 1 ___ President

2 Many a booted ruler

3 One who might do the heavy lifting

4 “Larry’s Country Diner” channel

5 Greeted the bad guy, maybe

6 Churn

7 Strauss wrote a concerto in D for it

8 Doing good

9 Spineless response to pressure

10 Examine as a wolf would

11 One preparing an oil pan?

12 ___ bread

13 Forward-thinking type

18 Protective cover

22 Act the coxcomb

24 Real character

27 Strong proof

28 R. J. Reynolds brand

29 What’s under an arch

30 Fox ratings

31 Stiff bristles

32 ___ Matsuhisa, celebrity chef and restaurateur

33 Small cannon balls

37 Ottoman relative

38 Capital ENE of Fiji

39 Wine colorer

44 Second-simplest hydrocarbon

45 They may be found in preserves, informally

46 Part of the total

49 Mooch

50 Impel

51 Natural life support system

52 Tire

53 Isle near Mull

54 Strong-smelling, say

55 Supervising

59 Pop-ups, e.g.

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE

PUZZLE BY JOSH KNAPP

3/29/13 (No. 0329)

A S O F SC A T H E VA T SD O NH O O T H E R B R I NYDE F E R T R I P S L I E DD A R K S T A R P O E T E

O H S T O R E A D O RS T O V E R E S O R TP A V E R E C U R P U MAA M E R I C A NC I T I Z E N SS PA N N O T O N I N D O

S T E E L E U P T O NC A L I E N D O O R CA B A L L N A T I O N A L

MD C I V S P I RI T D I CT AE D N A A R E S O E NJ O YN E E GA S S E S S A N S

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14 15 16

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26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59

60 61 62

63 64 65

For answers, call 1-900-289-CLUE (289-2583), $1.49 a minute;or, with a credit card, 1-800-814-5550.Online subscriptions: Today’s puzzle and more than 5,000 past puzzles, nytimes.com/crosswords ($39.95 a year).Annual subscriptions are available for the best of Sunday crosswords from the last 50 years: 1-888-7-ACROSS.Read about and comment on each puzzle: nytimes.com/wordplay.

Crosswords for young solvers: nytimes.com/learning/xwords.

CRoSSWoRD Edited By Will Shortz

n. Juergens

A view of fairy circles in namibia. The largest can be at least 40 feet across.

JoURNAl Friday, March 29, 2013 7

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Earlier this month, during one of his new across-the-aisle good-will tours, President Obama pleaded with Senate Republicans to ease up on their record number of filibusters of his nominees. He might as well have been talk-ing to one of the statues in the Capitol. Repub-licans have made it clear that erecting hurdles for Obama is, if anything, their overriding leg-islative goal.

There is no historical precedent for the num-ber of cabinet-level nominees that Republicans have blocked or delayed in the Obama adminis-tration. Chuck Hagel became the first defense secretary nominee ever filibustered. John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, was the subject of an epic filibuster by Sen. Rand Paul. Kathleen Sebelius and John Bryson, the secretaries of health and human services and commerce, were subjected to 60-vote confirmation mar-gins instead of simple majorities.

Jacob Lew, the Treasury secretary, was bar-raged with 444 written questions, mostly from Republicans, more than the previous seven nominees for that position combined. Many were ridiculous and had nothing to do with Lew’s fitness for office, such as a demand to explain the Treasury’s social media policies.

Gina McCarthy, the nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, is being blocked by Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri until he gets the answers he wants on a local levee proj-ect. And Thomas Perez, nominated to be labor secretary, is being held up by Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, who is angry about the Justice Department’s enforcement of voting rights

laws. By comparison, there were four filibus-ters of cabinet-level positions during George W. Bush’s two terms, and one under President Ronald Reagan.

There have also been several impediments to executive-branch nominees beneath the cabinet level, the most troubling being that of Richard Cordray, whom Obama has renomi-nated to lead the Consumer financial Pro-tection Bureau. Because the bureau cannot properly run without a full-time director, Re-publicans intend to nullify many of its powers by blocking Cordray for the second time.

Obama’s judicial nominees are also waiting for exceptionally long periods to be confirmed. The average wait for circuit and district judges under Obama has been 227 days, compared with 175 days under Bush.

Last week, the Senate confirmed Richard Taranto as an appellate judge 484 days after his first nomination. (Republicans refused to confirm him in an election year.)

Last week, Caitlin Halligan, another appeals court nominee, had to withdraw from consider-ation after Republicans filibustered her for the second time, on the flimsy pretext that she was a legal activist. Republicans clearly don’t want any of Obama’s judges on the important Unit-ed States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to which she was nominated, and the president needs to be more aggressive about filling the four vacancies on the court.

Democrats could put a stop to this malicious behavior by changing the Senate rules and prohibiting all filibusters on nominations.

Cairo’s Tahrir Square once symbolized the hope Egyptians felt when they overthrew Hosni Mubarak and began building a democ-racy. But the iconic rallying point for protest-ers has today come to symbolize the terror and contempt women increasingly face since the Muslim Brotherhood came to power and the country descended into turmoil.

Assaults and gang rapes of women in Tah-rir have become so common that the square is now a no-go zone for women. There are no official statistics. But according to an account in The Times on Tuesday, at least 18 incidents were reported on Jan. 25, the second anniver-sary of the revolution, during a demonstration against the new Islamist-led government.

Six women were hospitalized, one was stabbed in the genitals and another required a hysterectomy. Hania Moheeb, 42, a journalist, told how a group of men had surrounded her in Tahrir, stripped off her clothes and violated her for almost an hour.

The scandal is not just that such violence happens. The women are being blamed by con-servative Islamists for bringing the assaults on themselves. As Adel Abdel Maqsoud Afifi, a po-lice general and lawmaker, said, “Sometimes, a girl contributes 100 percent to her own raping

when she puts herself in these conditions.”Such twisted thinking is not only hateful in

itself but is designed to keep women out of poli-tics and power. If President Mohamed Morsi, his Islamist-led government and opposition political leaders do not speak out to condemn the attacks and bring assailants to justice, they are complicit in the crimes.

In the Mubarak era, the omnipresent police kept sexual violence out of prominent public sites and public view. Since the police withdrew from Tahrir Square and other places, sexual assaults have grown bolder and more violent. This month, when a United Nations conference adopted guidelines for ending violence against women, the Brotherhood condemned the state-ment, saying it would undermine Islamic eth-ics and lead to the disintegration of society.

Because Egypt is a leader in the Arab world, what it does and says about women and their relationship to Islam matters a lot. The Broth-erhood says it is committed to the rule of law and equal rights, but unless those concepts are applied in ways that let women live their lives safely and as true partners and citizens along-side men, they are just slogans and a surefire guarantee of persistent hostility and contro-versy in a country that can ill afford either.

So, about that fiscal crisis — the one that would, any day now, turn us into Greece. Greece, I tell you: Never mind.

Over the past few weeks, there has been a re-markable change of position among the deficit scolds who have dominated economic policy debate for more than three years. Suddenly, the argument has changed: It’s not about the crisis next month; it’s about the long run, about not cheating our children.

There’s just one problem: The new argu-ment is as bad as the old one. Yes, we are cheat-ing our children, but the deficit has nothing to do with it.

Contrary to almost everything you read in the papers or see on TV, debt doesn’t directly make our nation poorer; it’s essentially money we owe to ourselves. Deficits would indirectly be making us poorer if they were either leading to big trade deficits, increasing our overseas borrowing, or crowding out investment, reduc-ing future productive capacity. But they aren’t. Trade deficits are down, not up, while business investment has recovered fairly strongly. And the main reason businesses aren’t investing more is inadequate demand. They’re sitting on lots of cash because there’s no reason to ex-pand capacity when you aren’t selling enough to use the capacity you have.

Yet there is a lot of truth to the charge that we’re cheating our children. How? By neglect-ing public investment and failing to provide jobs. You don’t have to be a civil engineer to realize that America needs more and better infrastructure, but the latest “report card” from the American Society of Civil Engineers — with its tally of deficient dams, bridges, and more, and its overall grade of D+ — still makes startling and depressing reading. And right now — with vast numbers of unemployed con-struction workers and vast amounts of cash sitting idle — would be a great time to rebuild our infrastructure. Yet public investment has actually plunged since the slump began.

Or what about investing in our young? We’re cutting back there, too, having laid off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers and slashed the aid that used to make college af-fordable for children of less-affluent families.

Last but not least, think of the waste of hu-man potential caused by high unemployment among younger Americans.

And why are we shortchanging the future so dramatically and inexcusably? Blame the deficit scolds, who weep crocodile tears over the supposed burden of debt on the next gen-eration, but whose constant inveighing against the risks of government borrowing has done far more to cheat our children than deficits ever did.

fiscal policy is, indeed, a moral issue, and we should be ashamed of what we’re doing to the next generation’s economic prospects. But our sin involves investing too little, not borrowing too much — and the deficit scolds, for all their claims to have our children’s interests at heart, are actually the bad guys in this story.

e d i t o r i a l s o f t h e t i m e s

Malicious Obstruction in the Senate

Terror in Tahrir Square

PAUl KRUGMAN

Cheating Our Children

oPINIoN Friday, March 29, 2013 8

Sharapova in FinalMaria Sharapova swept the

first 10 points, then hardly let up at the Sony Open in Key Bis-cayne, Fla., on Thursday, beat-ing Jelena Jankovic, 6-2, 6-1. Sharapova completed a career Grand Slam by winning the French Open last year but has never won this tournament. She will face Serena Williams or Agnieszka Radwanska. Andy Murray advanced to the men’s semifinals by beating Marin Cil-ic, 6-4, 6-3. (AP)

Iginla Picks PenguinsJarome Iginla, the Calgary

Flames’ all-time leading goal scorer, is now a Pittsburgh Pen-guin. Iginla, the top prize in the N.H.L. trade market, had a no-trade clause that let him choose his destination from teams that made offers. Shortly be-fore midnight on Wednesday, he chose the Penguins and Sidney Crosby. (AP)

WeAtHeRhigh/low temperatures for the 21 hours ended at 4 p.m. yesterday, Eastern time, and precipitation (in inches) for the 18 hours ended at 1 p.m. yesterday. Expected conditions for today and tomorrow.

Weather conditions: c-clouds, F-fog, h-haze, i-ice, Pc-partly cloudy, r-rain, S-sun, Sh-showers, Sn-snow, SS-snow showers, T-thunderstorms, Tr-trace, W-windy.

U.S. CItIeS Yesterday Today Tomorrowalbuquerque 71/ 47 0 71/ 46 Pc 72/ 46 Satlanta 61/ 36 0 64/ 49 Pc 65/ 54 cBoise 67/ 43 0 66/ 42 Pc 67/ 40 PcBoston 48/ 38 Tr 52/ 36 Pc 52/ 35 PcBuffalo 38/ 33 Tr 42/ 28 c 47/ 31 Pccharlotte 58/ 27 0 62/ 41 S 64/ 50 cchicago 49/ 28 0 52/ 32 S 56/ 38 Pccleveland 43/ 34 0 42/ 30 c 50/ 39 Pcdallas-Ft. Worth 71/ 51 0.01 72/ 60 c 77/ 64 Tdenver 61/ 32 0 66/ 41 Pc 65/ 33 Pcdetroit 53/ 31 0 47/ 28 Pc 53/ 40 Pc

houston 71/ 54 0 75/ 60 c 77/ 60 PcKansas city 60/ 36 0 60/ 45 c 64/ 40 cLos angeles 72/ 55 0 72/ 56 Pc 71/ 53 PcMiami 74/ 53 0 76/ 62 S 78/ 66 SMpls.-St. Paul 43/ 25 0 46/ 37 Pc 48/ 29 ShNew york city 51/ 37 Tr 54/ 38 Pc 56/ 40 SOrlando 72/ 38 0 74/ 48 S 79/ 55 SPhiladelphia 49/ 35 Tr 56/ 35 Pc 58/ 38 SPhoenix 87/ 60 0 87/ 63 S 88/ 62 SSalt Lake city 69/ 44 0 67/ 44 Pc 66/ 44 PcSan Francisco 67/ 55 0.01 65/ 48 Pc 64/ 49 cSeattle 60/ 45 0.11 62/ 44 Pc 64/ 43 PcSt. Louis 56/ 36 0 54/ 43 c 60/ 47 cWashington 50/ 40 Tr 54/ 37 Pc 57/ 42 S

FoReIGN CItIeS Yesterday Today Tomorrowacapulco 93/ 74 0 90/ 71 S 90/ 71 Sathens 64/ 54 0.14 64/ 53 Pc 71/ 58 PcBeijing 55/ 37 0 54/ 34 c 47/ 34 SBerlin 36/ 28 0.14 37/ 27 Sn 40/ 28 cBuenos aires 79/ 50 0 81/ 61 S 81/ 63 Pccairo 82/ 61 0 85/ 61 S 87/ 66 Pc

cape Town 73/ 59 0.05 68/ 57 Sh 75/ 60 Shdublin 37/ 28 0.02 41/ 30 Pc 42/ 33 PcGeneva 45/ 39 0.40 48/ 43 Sh 54/ 40 rhong Kong 72/ 70 0.40 80/ 70 T 77/ 72 TKingston 90/ 79 0.02 84/ 74 Pc 85/ 73 PcLima 77/ 66 0 83/ 65 c 82/ 65 cLondon 41/ 28 0 43/ 28 Pc 43/ 29 PcMadrid 61/ 52 Tr 57/ 46 r 63/ 43 PcMexico city 80/ 53 0 88/ 56 S 87/ 58 PcMontreal 48/ 34 0 45/ 30 Pc 46/ 34 PcMoscow 34/ 10 0 34/ 14 S 31/ 25 cNassau 72/ 66 0 77/ 65 S 78/ 66 SParis 43/ 34 0 45/ 35 c 45/ 29 cPrague 37/ 25 0.14 39/ 25 c 44/ 30 Pcrio de Janeiro 84/ 72 0.12 80/ 69 r 82/ 71 Pcrome 59/ 50 0.15 64/ 55 Sh 64/ 51 ShSantiago 81/ 54 0 85/ 52 S 83/ 52 PcStockholm 41/ 23 0 36/ 24 S 36/ 23 PcSydney 93/ 72 0.02 75/ 55 Pc 80/ 61 PcTokyo 66/ 48 0 62/ 46 c 52/ 49 cToronto 45/ 32 0.01 44/ 29 c 47/ 32 PcVancouver 57/ 45 0.02 56/ 42 Pc 58/ 44 PcWarsaw 37/ 25 0 37/ 28 Sn 38/ 26 c

In BriefIt took winning a national title

for Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim to get over a late-shot loss to Indi-ana the last time the schools faced off in the N.C.A.A. tournament.

This meeting, 26 years later, was never close enough to come down to the final seconds, thanks mostly to Boeheim’s trademark 2-3 zone defense. Now he has the Orange one victory from getting back to the final four.

Limiting Indiana to its lowest output of the season while forc-ing 19 turnovers and compiling 10 blocks, fourth-seeded Syracuse used Michael Carter-Williams’ 24 points to upset the No. 1 seed Hoosiers, 61-50, Thursday night to reach the East Regional final.

After getting past preseason No. 1 Indiana, Syracuse (29-9) will face No. 3 seed Marquette on Saturday night in an all-Big East matchup for a berth in the final four.

Syracuse lost at Marquette 74-71 during the Big East regular sea-son on feb. 25.

Boeheim entered Thursday with 50 wins in the tournament, fourth-most in history, and more than 900 victories overall, and so much of that success has been built thanks to his unusual zone defense, 40 minutes of a puzzle for opponents to try to solve.

Indiana, like most teams out-side the Big East, isn’t used to seeing that sort of thing, and it showed right from the outset. It didn’t matter that Indiana ranked third in the country this season in scoring, putting up 79.5 points per game while making 48.6 percent of its shots.MARQUette 71, MIAMI 61 Af-ter sweating through a pair of edge-of-your-seat comebacks,

Marquette’s first Sweet 16 victory in a decade was as straight and smooth as the 15-foot step-back jumper that Vander Blue nailed at the end of the first half.

It helped that the Golden Eagles ran into an out-of-sorts Miami team that, in an echo of its bus ride to the Verizon Center in Wash-ington, was able to make as much headway as a frustrated commut-er in rush-hour traffic.

Marquette is in the Elite Eight for the first time since 2003, get-ting there with an emphatic 71-61 win over Miami on Thursday. The Golden Eagles were never threat-ened after taking a double-digit lead in the first half, quite the con-

trast from their rallies that beat Davidson by one and Butler by two earlier in the tournament.

“It’s fantastic. It feels good not to have to worry about, are you going to lose on a last-second shot or are you going to win on a last-second shot?” said Jamil Wilson, who had 16 points and eight rebounds. “To have a cushion like that, these guys played with tremendous heart, and we did it all game.”oHIo StAte 73, ARIZoNA 70 LaQuinton Ross hit the tiebreak-ing 3-pointer with 2 seconds to play, and Ohio State advanced to the brink of its second straight fi-nal four appearance with a 73-70 victory over Arizona on Thursday in Los Angeles.

Ross, the Buckeyes’ remark-able reserve, scored 14 of his 17 points in the second half for the second-seeded Buckeyes (29-7), who rallied from an early 11-point deficit and weathered the sixth-seeded Wildcats’ late charge for their 11th consecutive victory since mid-february.

Deshaun Thomas scored 20 points for Ohio State, and Aaron Craft added 13 before ceding the Buckeyes’ final shot to Ross. Craft hit an awfully similar 3-pointer against Iowa State last Sunday to send the Buckeyes forward.

Mark Lyons’ acrobatic three-point play for the Wildcats (27-8) had tied it with 21.8 seconds left.Craft dribbled down the clock and gave it to Ross, who coolly drilled his second 3-pointer and set off a wild celebration in the Ohio State section of the Arizona-dominated crowd. On Saturday, Ohio State will face Wichita State, a 72-58 winner over La Salle on Thursday night. (AP)

Stifling Defense Lifts Syracuse Over Indiana

ALeX BrAndon/AssoCiATed press

syracuse guard Brandon Triche shoots over indiana’s Jordan hulls on Thursday.

N.H.l. SCoReSWEDNESDAY’S LATE GAMEScalgary 4, colorado 3San Jose 4, anaheim 0THURSDAYislanders 4, Philadelphia 3, SOFlorida 5, Buffalo 4, SOToronto 6, carolina 3Pittsburgh 4, Winnipeg 0Ottawa 3, rangers 0Phoenix 7, Nashville 4Los angeles 4, St. Louis 2

WEDNESDAY’S LATE GAMESSacramento 105, Golden State 98Nets 111, Portland 93THURSDAYMilwaukee 113, L.a. Lakers 103indiana 103, dallas 78

N.B.A. SCoReS

SPoRtS Friday, March 29, 2013 9

The document was named Let-terOfLife. Robbie Rogers, a for-mer member of the United States national team and a professional soccer player in England, wrote it one night last December. When he finished, he saved it on the main screen of his laptop and it stayed there, for nearly three months, while Rogers pondered it, ignored it and agonized over whether he could make it public.

finally, on feb. 15, after getting a push from several of his closest friends — “I was talking about it again and they told me, ‘Post it, or shut up about it!’ ” Rogers said through a laugh — he did just that. Rogers uploaded LetterOfLife to his blog and revealed that he was gay. “football hid my secret,” he wrote. “I realized I could only truly enjoy my life once I was hon-est.” He also announced that he was retiring from soccer, despite being only 25.

In the weeks since, there has been a growing wonder about whether Rogers would consider continuing his career, making him the first openly gay male athlete to play in a major American team sport. Rogers said he understands the questions. There are a handful of individual athletes, like the box-er Orlando Cruz, who have come out as gay while still active in their sports. And there have been sev-eral team sport athletes, such as the N.f.L.’s Esera Tualolo and bas-

ketball’s John Amaechi, who came out after they were retired.

But even as the United States’ sensibilities toward gay rights have evolved, a gay male athlete has yet to come out while still go-ing to work in the charged lock-er-room environment of major professional team sports. Given the evolving feelings around gay rights, it seems inevitable the barrier will be broken and, to many, Rogers would be the perfect one to do it. Rogers does not rule out the possi-bility. But, he added quickly, it is not a pri-ority for him. Hopefully, he said, “people will understand that I need to be a little selfish about this.”

Unlike some gay athletes who had been out to friends and fam-ily for years before coming out publicly, Rogers kept his sexual-ity a secret from everyone. His parents did not know. His brother and three sisters did not know. His best friends did not know.

“I’m a Catholic, I’m a conserva-tive, I’m a footballer and I’m gay,” he said, trying to describe his fear. “Imagine living all that time with just a cramp in your stomach. I

kept thinking, I hope I don’t do something that makes people wonder, is Robbie gay?”

He added: “I was never close to coming out before. Never. I never went to any gay bars, never hooked up with a guy. It was so un-healthy and so bad that I felt this way. Two years ago, I would have thought that I would never come out during my entire life.”

Rogers is still figuring out what comes next for him. He has been accepted to a program at the London College of fashion and is the co-owner of a fashion brand, Halsey. He plans to do charity work and travel some, but is not yet sure what his long-term future will hold.

To be honest, he said, the uncer-tainty does not bother him. Maybe he will become the first openly gay soccer player to break the mold. Maybe he will never play again. Right now, he simply feels relief that he was finally able to show the world the words he wrote one night while in bed.

for years, he thought he would die with his secret. Now, he has found the liberation that comes with sharing his LetterOfLife.

“I’ve played in Olympics and won championships and all that,” he said, “but I’ve told people, for-get all of that: telling my family was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. And posting that letter was second.” SAM BORDEN

Soccer Player Looks Ahead After Coming Out

Scene Stealer Isn’t Ready to Relinquish the SpotlightSetback for Santana

Johan Santana will be making $25.5 million in the sixth, and fi-nal, year of his contract with the Mets but he will not throw a sin-gle pitch this season and it is un-clear if he will pitch again. San-tana, 34, a two-time Cy Young award winner, will spend the entire season rehabilitating a new tear in his pitching shoul-der, which Mets General Man-ager Sandy Alderson disclosed Thursday evening. (NYT)

N.B.A. Reviews CallThe N.B.A. informed the Min-

nesota Timberwolves on Thurs-day the referees should have called the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant for a foul on a potential game-tying 3-pointer at the buzzer Wednesday night. The Lakers’ 120-117 win will remain. (AP)

ARLINGTON, Tex. — The team from so-called Dunk City had yet to rattle a rim or shake a backboard, and about 2,000 fans at Cowboys Stadium appeared bored as they watched a practice filled with drills of floating jump-ers, entry passes and free throws.

finally, the florida Gulf Coast Eagles gathered around Coach Andy Enfield at midcourt and then reorganized into two lines facing the same basket. five minutes later, they reminded everyone how they had become the pledges crashing this South Region party of storied basketball fraternities.

Lob passes led to tomahawk jams. Ricochets off the glass were finished off as windmill dunks. Even the Eagles’ botched at-tempts were spectacular, eliciting oohs and aahs. By the time that Chase fieler tossed a bounce pass toward the hoop, grabbed the ball

as he gained momentum, thread-ed it between his legs and threw down a jarring dunk, florida Gulf Coast had recaptured the crowd’s imagination. “Dunk City in the house!” someone shouted.

The Eagles still embraced the underdog role Thursday, but they looked and sounded as if they had shaken off the stardust from vic-tories over Georgetown and San Diego State as they prepared for friday night’s game against third-seeded florida.

“We did make history,” guard Brett Comer said. “No. 15 seed has done this. We feel like we shocked the world. We’re going to prepare for florida the same way. We didn’t come just to play one game or two games. We’re coming out to compete and go as far as we can.”

Enfield said the Eagles were refocused and taking a business-like approach to their improbable

appearance in the Round of 16, as if sharing a stage with elite pro-grams like Kansas, Michigan and florida was familiar turf.

No. 1 seed Kansas faces fourth-seeded Michigan in friday night’s first game, and win or lose, fans of those two teams are expected to jump on the Eagles’ bandwagon. “Those guys are like rock stars,” said LeRoy Aikens, a Michigan fan. “A 15 seed in the Sweet 16, that’s history.”

The Gators have been cast as spoilers, a role they have relished before. Last year, florida ousted 15th-seeded Norfolk State.

“I don’t view it that way,” flor-ida Coach Billy Donovan said. “florida Gulf Coast would like to advance in the tournament as much as we would. The name of the game right now is to try to sur-vive and move on.”

TOM SPOUSTA

robbie rogers

N.B.A. StANDINGS

In Brief

eASteRN CoNFeReNCe

ATLANTIC W L Pct GBx-Knicks 44 26 .629 —x-Nets 42 29 .592 2{

Boston 37 34 .521 7{

Philadelphia 28 43 .394 16{

Toronto 26 45 .366 18{

SoUTHEAST W L Pct GBy-Miami 56 15 .789 —x-atlanta 40 32 .556 16{

Washington 26 45 .366 30Orlando 18 54 .250 38{

charlotte 17 54 .239 39

CENTRAL W L Pct GBx-indiana 46 27 .630 —x-chicago 39 31 .557 5{

Milwaukee 35 36 .493 10detroit 24 48 .333 21{

cleveland 22 48 .314 22{

WeSteRN CoNFeReNCe

SoUTHWEST W L Pct GBx-San antonio 54 17 .761 —x-Memphis 47 24 .662 7houston 39 32 .549 15dallas 35 37 .486 19{

New Orleans 25 47 .347 29{

NoRTHWEST W L Pct GBx-Oklahoma city 53 19 .736 —x-denver 49 24 .671 4{

Utah 36 36 .500 17Portland 33 38 .465 19{

Minnesota 25 45 .357 27

PACIFIC W L Pct GBx-L.a. clippers 49 23 .681 —Golden State 41 32 .562 8{

L.a. Lakers 37 36 .507 12{

Sacramento 26 46 .361 23Phoenix 23 49 .319 26

x-clinched playoff spoty-clinched division

SPoRtS JoURNAl Friday, March 29, 2013 10