No, that’s not the start of some horror movie. It actually happened last Wednesday on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, when a man walked out of the woods yelling incoherently, stormed up to a speed camera enforcement vehicle parked on the roadside and smashed its windshield with the hammer, the police said.

The Maryland State Police described him as a white male in his 50s or 60s, “possibly with a pot belly.”

The man then fled back into the woods, and the parkway was closed for several hours while investigators searched for him. The Maryland State Police said on Monday that they were still looking for him.

Let me hasten to report that I have no leads on this and that I certainly didn’t suggest any illegal action in my column last Tuesday about the spread of traffic cameras, whether speed cameras on the highway or red-light cameras at intersections. I merely asked readers to share their observations. Did I get an earful or, rather, an inbox full.

I heard from about 500 people, and the responses ran about 50 to 1 against the cameras, which supporters and the industry that markets them say enhance road safety, but critics call just a gimmick to raise money.

Among those I’m hearing from are business travelers who received camera-generated tickets in the mail from places they drove through months earlier. Most business travelers pay them because they can’t reasonably return to the place to fight the ticket. Some complained that they have no choice, as car rental companies routinely pay a camera ticket and subsequently charge the customer’s credit card.

I’ve heard from long-haul truckers worried about their drivers’ licenses, and from traffic engineers and police officers disputing camera industry claims about safety.

Many readers also note the documented increase in rear-end collisions at intersections where the fear of being flashed by a red-light camera can cause drivers to slam on brakes at the first sign of lights turning yellow.

Some people sent videos showing how yellow light timing seems to be shortened at some intersections to catch more drivers. Others pointed out that red-light cameras also routinely issue citations to drivers who are prudently making turns in intersections when the light suddenly changes.

And a surprising number of travelers wrote warnings about driving internationally, especially in Europe, where traffic cameras are even more widespread.

Some business travelers complained of receiving multiple citations on a short drive in a rental car near an airport.

“I received two speeding tickets, six minutes apart” on a stretch of road near the Phoenix airport where the speed limit was unclear, one reader, John Hristov, said.

And Dan Manor, another reader, wrote that he still remembered Phoenix for the surprise he received in the mail weeks after a short business trip: three speeding tickets, for a total of $663.

Larry Lappen, a salesman, said the last moving violation he had was in 1981 — until he recently got one in the mail for a red-light violation in a small Florida town.

“I remembered the event very well, because it seemed at the time that the yellow light duration was much shorter than normal,” he wrote.

Like others, he investigated, returning to the intersection with a stopwatch to find that the yellow light was unusually short in duration. (A yellow light should last about one full second for every 10 miles an hour of speed limit in the area, one traffic engineer wrote me.) “I was there for 45 minutes and saw three cars caught in that same dilemma zone,” Mr. Lappen wrote.

Due process is, of course, a widespread concern. David Durkee said he received a camera ticket in Colorado. “They stated it was only a $40 fine” without points on his driving record — unless he appealed, in which case points and extra costs could be added, he said. “It was made to look like forking over the cash was the only solution.”

There’s voluminous research about traffic cameras on the Web site of the National Motorists Association. The group opposes the cameras, which are typically operated by commercial vendors that get a big piece of the revenue and press municipalities for greater adoption.

“A financially viable ticket camera program can only be sustained by maintaining a travel environment that generates significant numbers of violations,” said Jim Baxter, the group’s president.

And here’s some bad news from Steven P. Scalici, a New York traffic engineer. He predicted that as technology improves, “camera detection is going to get even more stringent.” He added, “Red-light cameras have become a clear source of government income, and movements are afoot to increase that largess.”

E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesDavid T. Lender, a 25-year finance veteran with Wall Street bona fides and a flair for zippy narrative, wrote “Bull Street.”

There’s always been an unspoken rule about Wall Street thrillers: brand matters.

In this genre, an office visitor never simply takes a drink of water; he sips Sanfaustino. A trader doesn’t get nervous when his picks aren’t hitting; he begins fiddling with his Hermès tie. Bankers aren’t well dressed; they are “suited in the battle rattle of Armani pinstripes and Gucci loafers.”

But in the age of Bernard L. Madoff and the Galleon Group, when “expert networks” and “front-runners” are becoming household terms, it’s no longer enough to get the product placement right. The financial details are important, too. Three recent thrillers — all set in the seedy underbelly of the finance world and written by former financiers — are bringing Wall Street minutiae to Main Street masses.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesDavid T. Lender, a veteran of Wall Street, is now the author of Wall Street thrillers.

“Bull Street” (Brindle Publishing), was written by David T. Lender, a 25-year finance veteran with Wall Street bona fides and a flair for zippy narrative. The novel follows Richard Blum, a young associate at an investment firm, through his first months on the job. Through no fault of his own, the financier is ensnared in an insider trading ring and must spend the rest of the novel evading both the Securities and Exchange Commission and rogues inside his firm. With plenty of gunshots and chase scenes to ratchet up the suspense, it’s Michael Lewis meets Michael Bay.

Mr. Lender, a former managing director at Bank of America, does an admirable job of replicating the rapid-fire dialogue common to the deal-making world. In one scene, Blum’s boss, the investing kingpin Harold Milner, discusses a potential buyout deal with his banker:

“So, guys,” Milner said, “I can do the permanent financing once I take control. The real catch is, I need the front money to finance the tender offer to buy the company until I can put my permanent financing in place.”

“We figure you’ll need about $6 billion, including refinancing their existing debt,” Steinberg said.

“Right,” Milner said. “So where do I get that kind of money in the middle of the worst credit crunch any of us has ever seen?”

“Our partner GCG has a big balance sheet,” Steinberg said.

“I’m all ears,” Milner said.

By contrast, H.T. Narea’s entry in the financial thriller genre, “The Fund” (Minotaur Books), contains more geopolitical villainy than boardroom jousting. The book features Kate Molares, a laid-off Bear Stearns trader turned government intelligence expert who uses her financial expertise to track down a network of criminal moneymen. Mr. Narea, a former managing director and principal at JPMorgan Chase, has given his readers a sprawling book with bailout-size stakes: bomb plots, biological terrorism and attacks on the Federal Reserve of the literal, rather than the Ron Paul, variety.

Norb Vonnegut’s “The Gods of Greenwich” (Forge Books) is set in the consumption capital of Connecticut. The book follows a down-and-out hedge fund veteran who lands at Leeser Capital, a shady fund run by a man “who made Enron’s execs look like saints.” Mr. Vonnegut’s novel rings the truest of the three and is certainly the biggest name-dropper, with Amaranth Advisors, Long-Term Capital Management, AQR, Tudor, Bridgewater Associates and other members of the hedge fund pantheon making cameos.

All three thrillers carry standard disclaimers about the fictionalization of the events they describe. But finance-minded readers looking for real-life analogues will find plenty of roman à clef details for the gossip mill. “The Fund” traces a near replica of the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, complete with a Treasury secretary who badgers bank executives into carrying out “shotgun weddings for failing institutions.” In “Bull Street,” federal agents threaten to investigate Richard Blum’s father’s insurance business, an echo of the strategies used in the investigations of Michael R. Milken, the junk-bond mogul who pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 1990, and his brother, Lowell.

The traits of Steven A. Cohen, the founder of the hedge fund giant SAC Capital, seem to be especially well suited to fiction.

In “The Fund,” a money manager is described as the owner of a Damian Hirst-designed airplane called “Gold Shark Swimming in Air.” It’s a hammer-over-head reference to an actual shark-themed Hirst piece, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” which is owned by Mr. Cohen. Cy Leeser, the crooked hedge fund manager in “The Gods of Greenwich,” is described as an avid art collector who keeps his trading floor cooled to 66 degrees, reminiscent of SAC Capital’s 69-degree trading floor. An SAC spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Vonnegut, a former private wealth manager for Morgan Stanley, contends that his experience managing money for the super-rich was a “soap opera” that gave him “enough material to last 50 years.” Mr. Lender said that he had consciously based his novel’s insider-trading plot on the real-life travails of Mr. Milken and Ivan Boesky, the central figures in the 1980s insider trading ring.

“I was cutting my teeth on the Street when those scandals happened,” Mr. Lender said. “What happened in that era very heavily influenced what I wrote about.”

Most of the wealth-gawking details in these books are spot on, with only a few missteps. (Memo to Mr. Vonnegut: Not even the most zealous real estate broker calls the Meatpacking District “MePa.”) But they also lend the books an air of predictability, as the smoothest operators almost always meet ignoble ends. A pair of Ferragamo loafers, in particular, seems to be the Chekhov’s gun of financial thrillers — wear those in Chapter 1, and you’re doing 20 to life by the epilogue.

It’s true that setting a novel in a world of extravagance and glitz lowers the bar for pathos considerably. These are novels in which a sentence like “Cusack parked his beat-up BMW next to a glacier-white Bentley convertible” qualifies as Dickensian suffering.

But there is real harm done here, especially of the financial variety. Banks go under. Oil breaks $115 a barrel. And the Chinese government is called in to save the United States from economic implosion.

In fact, the true suspense in these books often ends up being the threat of macroeconomic disaster rather than greed, betrayal and espionage. During a scene in one book in which a prominent character has a violent run-in with a polar bear, it is hard not to mutter to yourself: “Well, at least it’s not another sovereign default.”

Leverage, not lawlessness, is this year’s killer plot point.

Toymakers are hoping you do, and they are hoping that you are sharing the experience with your children. Toy companies have long used nostalgia to lure adults back to their childhood favorites while updating those same toys to attract a new generation of children.

Colorforms, created by a husband and wife in their New York apartment in 1951, turns 60 this year, and University Games is using the occasion to remind parents of a popular childhood toy and to entice them to buy one for their children. And Mattel is commemorating the 40th anniversary of Uno with a yearlong marketing campaign to promote the family card game.

“Toys are always tied with nostalgia,” said Adrienne Appell, a spokeswoman for the Toy Industry Association, an industry trade group. “A lot of those purchasing decisions are being made by a parent or a grandparent. They gravitate toward toys they enjoyed as children.”

University Games plans to celebrate the Colorforms anniversary with new products, a contest for children and the re-release of two favorites: its original geometric set and a Michael Jackson dress-up set. To get the word out, Colorforms will have a big marketing push this year, including print ads and, for the first time, television commercials, said Bob Moog, president of University Games, which bought the brand in 1998.

He declined to say how much University Games would spend on marketing.

“We’re trying to say to the American public, Colorforms is still here,” Mr. Moog said. “Everything you loved about it as a child will be appealing to your children.”

•

Mr. Moog said Colorforms was one of the few branded toys that had endured for generations. “There is something about this brand that has really stuck, no pun intended,” he said.

Colorforms were created by Harry and Patricia Kislevitz, who were looking for material for an art project. Because her husband liked abstract art, they used pieces of vinyl cut into geometric shapes, Mrs. Kislevitz said.

“I put some in the bathroom; people would go into the bathroom and never come back out again,” she said. “Harry, he thought we might have something here.”

The first commercial order, for 1,000 sets, came from F. A. O. Schwarz, and other retailers soon followed. The couple expanded with other products, including paper dolls, paints and crayons, and in the 1950s began licensing popular characters like Popeye, Mickey Mouse and Barbie for the Colorforms sets.

Licensing turned out to be a smart move for Colorforms, as it became a mirror of children’s pop culture. Current licenses include Green Lantern, Transformers, Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Colorforms has more than 75 products for children, and this year will bring two new ones, an electronic paint brush called Brush With Genius and Magic Fashion Show, a dress-up set with runway models and a catwalk.

To encourage children to be creative with Colorforms, University Games is sponsoring an art contest. Prizes, to be awarded Nov. 13, include art camp scholarships and a $500 Treasury bond.

But to be successful, the 60th anniversary campaign for Colorforms will have to appeal to parents as well as children, Mr. Moog said.

“Parents have been looking for activities that are self-directed and fun,” he said. “Many parents would like to have an alternative where a child can play and not be in front of a computer or a TV screen.”

Mattel is also using nostalgia to market the 40th anniversary of Uno, which was created by a barber shop owner in Ohio in 1971. Playing off the number one, Mattel started the campaign on the first of the year, or 1-1-11, with a float in the Rose Bowl parade.

“We are putting Uno in unexpected places. We want to be there first,” said Lee Ann Wong, vice president for marketing at Mattel’s games division. That meant going beyond the dining room table and updating the card game for mobile phones, social networks and video game consoles.

“What we’ve been able to do is evolve as the players evolve,” she said. “With the advances of technology, we have evolved into a multiplatform game; we are everywhere.”

•

Mattel’s retail campaign promoted products like Uno Moo for preschool children, Uno Attack for older children and Uno Roboto, which players can personalize with their names and house rules. The line also introduced decks, including a nostalgia version and another that’s waterproof, and apps for the iPad and iPhone.

Ms. Wong said the plan was to widen the target audience for Uno to include young children, college students and adults with children of their own. The campaign, called Uno for Uno, includes a “robust marketing plan,” she said, with TV and print ads and a heavy focus on social media.

“We saw immediate point-of-sale lift from that,” Ms. Wong said. “It had a nice double-digit increase.”

Mattel declined to say how much it was spending on its Uno campaign, but according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, the company spent a total of $184 million to advertise products from all of its toy lines last year.

The next phase of the marketing campaign for Uno includes a live tournament on Facebook in August. Uno has gained one million fans on Facebook in the last six months, Ms. Wong said, and Mattel wants to take advantage of that.

The tournament, a first for Mattel, begins Aug. 15 and lasts 40 days. It is free and open to players worldwide, and prizes, including a cruise, $10,000 in cash and iPads will be awarded.

“Uno is not just a simple card game,” Ms. Wong said. “That is our heritage, but we are evolving.”

Toymakers are hoping you do, and they are hoping that you are sharing the experience with your children. Toy companies have long used nostalgia to lure adults back to their childhood favorites while updating those same toys to attract a new generation of children.

Colorforms, created by a husband and wife in their New York apartment in 1951, turns 60 this year, and University Games is using the occasion to remind parents of a popular childhood toy and to entice them to buy one for their children. And Mattel is commemorating the 40th anniversary of Uno with a yearlong marketing campaign to promote the family card game.

“Toys are always tied with nostalgia,” said Adrienne Appell, a spokeswoman for the Toy Industry Association, an industry trade group. “A lot of those purchasing decisions are being made by a parent or a grandparent. They gravitate toward toys they enjoyed as children.”

University Games plans to celebrate the Colorforms anniversary with new products, a contest for children and the re-release of two favorites: its original geometric set and a Michael Jackson dress-up set. To get the word out, Colorforms will have a big marketing push this year, including print ads and, for the first time, television commercials, said Bob Moog, president of University Games, which bought the brand in 1998.

He declined to say how much University Games would spend on marketing.

“We’re trying to say to the American public, Colorforms is still here,” Mr. Moog said. “Everything you loved about it as a child will be appealing to your children.”

•

Mr. Moog said Colorforms was one of the few branded toys that had endured for generations. “There is something about this brand that has really stuck, no pun intended,” he said.

Colorforms were created by Harry and Patricia Kislevitz, who were looking for material for an art project. Because her husband liked abstract art, they used pieces of vinyl cut into geometric shapes, Mrs. Kislevitz said.

“I put some in the bathroom; people would go into the bathroom and never come back out again,” she said. “Harry, he thought we might have something here.”

The first commercial order, for 1,000 sets, came from F. A. O. Schwarz, and other retailers soon followed. The couple expanded with other products, including paper dolls, paints and crayons, and in the 1950s began licensing popular characters like Popeye, Mickey Mouse and Barbie for the Colorforms sets.

Licensing turned out to be a smart move for Colorforms, as it became a mirror of children’s pop culture. Current licenses include Green Lantern, Transformers, Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Colorforms has more than 75 products for children, and this year will bring two new ones, an electronic paint brush called Brush With Genius and Magic Fashion Show, a dress-up set with runway models and a catwalk.

To encourage children to be creative with Colorforms, University Games is sponsoring an art contest. Prizes, to be awarded Nov. 13, include art camp scholarships and a $500 Treasury bond.

But to be successful, the 60th anniversary campaign for Colorforms will have to appeal to parents as well as children, Mr. Moog said.

“Parents have been looking for activities that are self-directed and fun,” he said. “Many parents would like to have an alternative where a child can play and not be in front of a computer or a TV screen.”

Mattel is also using nostalgia to market the 40th anniversary of Uno, which was created by a barber shop owner in Ohio in 1971. Playing off the number one, Mattel started the campaign on the first of the year, or 1-1-11, with a float in the Rose Bowl parade.

“We are putting Uno in unexpected places. We want to be there first,” said Lee Ann Wong, vice president for marketing at Mattel’s games division. That meant going beyond the dining room table and updating the card game for mobile phones, social networks and video game consoles.

“What we’ve been able to do is evolve as the players evolve,” she said. “With the advances of technology, we have evolved into a multiplatform game; we are everywhere.”

•

Mattel’s retail campaign promoted products like Uno Moo for preschool children, Uno Attack for older children and Uno Roboto, which players can personalize with their names and house rules. The line also introduced decks, including a nostalgia version and another that’s waterproof, and apps for the iPad and iPhone.

Ms. Wong said the plan was to widen the target audience for Uno to include young children, college students and adults with children of their own. The campaign, called Uno for Uno, includes a “robust marketing plan,” she said, with TV and print ads and a heavy focus on social media.

“We saw immediate point-of-sale lift from that,” Ms. Wong said. “It had a nice double-digit increase.”

Mattel declined to say how much it was spending on its Uno campaign, but according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, the company spent a total of $184 million to advertise products from all of its toy lines last year.

The next phase of the marketing campaign for Uno includes a live tournament on Facebook in August. Uno has gained one million fans on Facebook in the last six months, Ms. Wong said, and Mattel wants to take advantage of that.

The tournament, a first for Mattel, begins Aug. 15 and lasts 40 days. It is free and open to players worldwide, and prizes, including a cruise, $10,000 in cash and iPads will be awarded.

“Uno is not just a simple card game,” Ms. Wong said. “That is our heritage, but we are evolving.”

Courtesy of Meetpoint.

Start

The adventure of new ventures.

Most new entrepreneurs don’t have much spare time. But beginning next fall, those with a couple of hours to kill can immerse themselves in Startup Fever, a board game that challenges players to start and build rival companies.

Competitors develop their own products and vie to win the most users. They hire engineers (“nerds”), salespeople (“suits”) and chief executives (“big suits”). If employees aren’t kept happy, they can get poached by other players. There’s no one direct path to victory; many different strategies can prevail.

Forget “life imitates art.” This is “play imitates work.” And for the game’s designer — Louis Perrochon, 43, a software engineering executive in Mountain View, Calif. –  it involved trying something he’d witnessed many times but never done himself: starting a small business.

Mr. Perrochon is the founder and sole employee of Meetpoint, a tiny company he created to produce his game. Reached by phone for an interview at a Club Med in Mexico, he deadpanned, “I own a business now. I can’t go on vacation anymore.” His family, he added, was already starting to complain.

To raise funds for the game’s artwork and manufacturing, Mr. Perrochon started a fund-raising drive on Kickstarter in April. Following a mention on TechCrunch, he quickly reached his original goal of $10,111, raising more than $30,000 from 380 donors by June 14, when the drive ended. Those who donated $60 or more have been promised a copy of the finished game and a venture capital extension pack with extra features, including a posse of lawyers.

Mr. Perrochon began designing Startup Fever in the fall and has been refining it ever since. “In the first rounds we played, the salespeople didn’t have a lot of value,” he said. His initial attempt to fix that problem backfired; he pushed too hard in the other direction. “Then for a while everybody just bought salespeople because they were so powerful,” he adds. “If you hired only salespeople you’d win. It was kind of like Groupon!”

Startup Fever is part of an entertainment genre with a name that sounds, well, less than entertaining, so-called resource-management games. Board games in this style force players to compete for finite resources, engage in commerce and think through webs of strategy. They’ve been popular in Germany for decades; in recent years, small American publishing companies, including Rio Grande Games and Mayfair Games, have been bringing English-language versions to market in the United States. The most popular, Settlers of Catan, has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide.

Mr. Perrochon says playing Settlers of Catan and similar games inspired him to create Startup Fever. (He’s still testing it; if you want to take the beta version for a spin and give feedback, you can learn more here.)

He recently started taking preorders for the game. But buyers, be warned: playing Startup Fever will not guarantee that your own start-up will succeed. “You can’t use this to teach high school kids how to start a company,” Mr. Perrochon said, laughing. “The start-up world is really, really complex, and you have to simplify things or the rules would take four years of study.” And playing the game, he added, does not mirror his own experiences creating Meetpoint, because “what I learned around creating the game was about small business and manufacturing, and what’s in the game is more about Web companies.”

“Maybe that’s the next game,” he added, laughing. “Maybe I can create an extension where you actually have to manufacture stuff in China.”

Starting his own company to bring Startup Fever to life also made it exhaustingly clear to Mr. Perrochon why most game designers team up with existing publishers, who provide upfront financing and handle administrative overhead. “It takes a lot more work than you think it will take,” he said of going it alone. “Everything is a lot more effort.”

But selling out to another company would have meant relinquishing what he has enjoyed so much about making the game: creative control. Working with a publisher, Mr. Perrochon noted, would mean that “you give away the game. If they say, ‘Hey, we don’t like Startup Fever, the Silicon Valley thing, then you end up with a zombie theme.’”

So will the experience of actually starting his own company affect the content of the game? Perhaps. It’s been “an interesting learning experience,” he said. For example, Mr. Perrochon didn’t anticipate that his home state would charge him extra just for operating a limited liability corporation. Therein, he says, lay fresh inspiration: “I’m going to make an event card that says, ‘California taxes your company: Pay $800.’”

Courtesy of Meetpoint.

Start

The adventure of new ventures.

Most new entrepreneurs don’t have much spare time. But beginning next fall, those with a couple of hours to kill can immerse themselves in Startup Fever, a board game that challenges players to start and build rival companies.

Competitors develop their own products and vie to win the most users. They hire engineers (“nerds”), salespeople (“suits”) and chief executives (“big suits”). If employees aren’t kept happy, they can get poached by other players. There’s no one direct path to victory; many different strategies can prevail.

Forget “life imitates art.” This is “play imitates work.” And for the game’s designer — Louis Perrochon, 43, a software engineering executive in Mountain View, Calif. –  it involved trying something he’d witnessed many times but never done himself: starting a small business.

Mr. Perrochon is the founder and sole employee of Meetpoint, a tiny company he created to produce his game. Reached by phone for an interview at a Club Med in Mexico, he deadpanned, “I own a business now. I can’t go on vacation anymore.” His family, he added, was already starting to complain.

To raise funds for the game’s artwork and manufacturing, Mr. Perrochon started a fund-raising drive on Kickstarter in April. Following a mention on TechCrunch, he quickly reached his original goal of $10,111, raising more than $30,000 from 380 donors by June 14, when the drive ended. Those who donated $60 or more have been promised a copy of the finished game and a venture capital extension pack with extra features, including a posse of lawyers.

Mr. Perrochon began designing Startup Fever in the fall and has been refining it ever since. “In the first rounds we played, the salespeople didn’t have a lot of value,” he said. His initial attempt to fix that problem backfired; he pushed too hard in the other direction. “Then for a while everybody just bought salespeople because they were so powerful,” he adds. “If you hired only salespeople you’d win. It was kind of like Groupon!”

Startup Fever is part of an entertainment genre with a name that sounds, well, less than entertaining, so-called resource-management games. Board games in this style force players to compete for finite resources, engage in commerce and think through webs of strategy. They’ve been popular in Germany for decades; in recent years, small American publishing companies, including Rio Grande Games and Mayfair Games, have been bringing English-language versions to market in the United States. The most popular, Settlers of Catan, has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide.

Mr. Perrochon says playing Settlers of Catan and similar games inspired him to create Startup Fever. (He’s still testing it; if you want to take the beta version for a spin and give feedback, you can learn more here.)

He recently started taking preorders for the game. But buyers, be warned: playing Startup Fever will not guarantee that your own start-up will succeed. “You can’t use this to teach high school kids how to start a company,” Mr. Perrochon said, laughing. “The start-up world is really, really complex, and you have to simplify things or the rules would take four years of study.” And playing the game, he added, does not mirror his own experiences creating Meetpoint, because “what I learned around creating the game was about small business and manufacturing, and what’s in the game is more about Web companies.”

“Maybe that’s the next game,” he added, laughing. “Maybe I can create an extension where you actually have to manufacture stuff in China.”

Starting his own company to bring Startup Fever to life also made it exhaustingly clear to Mr. Perrochon why most game designers team up with existing publishers, who provide upfront financing and handle administrative overhead. “It takes a lot more work than you think it will take,” he said of going it alone. “Everything is a lot more effort.”

But selling out to another company would have meant relinquishing what he has enjoyed so much about making the game: creative control. Working with a publisher, Mr. Perrochon noted, would mean that “you give away the game. If they say, ‘Hey, we don’t like Startup Fever, the Silicon Valley thing, then you end up with a zombie theme.’”

So will the experience of actually starting his own company affect the content of the game? Perhaps. It’s been “an interesting learning experience,” he said. For example, Mr. Perrochon didn’t anticipate that his home state would charge him extra just for operating a limited liability corporation. Therein, he says, lay fresh inspiration: “I’m going to make an event card that says, ‘California taxes your company: Pay $800.’”

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.

Friday’s jobs report clearly indicates that the economy remains weak, yet the pressure to reverse stimulus and begin tightening fiscal and monetary policy has become overwhelming.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

The Federal Reserve has already ended its policy of quantitative easing, and many of its regional bank presidents are demanding higher interest rates to forestall inflation. Republicans and Democrats in Congress appear to agree that large spending cuts must accompany a rise in the debt limit, which will be hit on Aug. 2 if Congress doesn’t act.

Some economists are getting very nervous. With the economy in a fragile state, it may not take much to bring on another recession. Even a small amount of fiscal or monetary tightening may be enough to do that.

It is starting to look like 1937 all over again. As the table below indicates, the economy made a significant recovery after hitting bottom in 1932, when real gross domestic product fell 13 percent. The contraction moderated considerably in 1933, and in 1934 growth was robust, with real G.D.P. rising 11 percent. Growth was also strong in 1935 and 1936, which brought the unemployment rate down more than half from its peak and relieved the devastating deflation that was at the root of the economy’s problems.

Historical Statistics of the United States

By 1937, President Roosevelt and the Federal Reserve thought self-sustaining growth had been restored and began worrying about unwinding the fiscal and monetary stimulus, which they thought would become a drag on growth and a source of inflation. There was also a strong desire to return to normality, in both monetary and fiscal policy.

On the fiscal side, Roosevelt was under pressure from his Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, to balance the budget. Like many conservatives today, Mr. Morgenthau worried obsessively about business confidence and was convinced that balancing the budget would be expansionary. In the words of the historian John Morton Blum, Mr. Morgenthau said he believed recovery “depended on the willingness of business to increase investments, and this in turn was a function of business confidence,” adding, “In his view only a balanced budget could sustain that confidence.”

Roosevelt ordered a very big cut in federal spending in early 1937, and it fell to $7.6 billion in 1937 and $6.8 billion in 1938 from $8.2 billion in 1936, a 17 percent reduction over two years.

At the same time, taxes increased sharply because of the introduction of the payroll tax. Federal revenues rose to $5.4 billion in 1937 and $6.7 billion in 1938, from $3.9 billion in 1936, an increase of 72 percent. As a consequence, the federal deficit fell from 5.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1936 to a mere 0.5 percent in 1938. The deficit was just $89 million in 1938.

At the same time, the Federal Reserve was alarmed by inflation rates that were high by historical standards, as well as by the large amount of reserves in the banking system, which could potentially fuel a further rise in inflation. Using powers recently granted by the Banking Act of 1935, the Fed doubled reserve requirements from August 1936 to May 1937. Higher reserve requirements restricted the amount of money banks could lend and caused them to tighten credit.

This combination of fiscal and monetary tightening – which conservatives advocate today – brought on a sharp recession beginning in May 1937 and ending in June 1938, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Real G.D.P. fell 3.4 percent in 1938, and the unemployment rate rose to 12.5 percent from 9.2 percent in 1937.

Economists are still debating the precise causes of the 1937-8 recession. While most say they believe that fiscal tightening is primarily to blame, some disagree. Perhaps it would have been positive if tightening was confined to the spending side of the budget, without the large increase in taxes. Maybe the fiscal contraction would have been benign if the Fed hadn’t tightened monetary policy simultaneously.

Given President Obama’s endorsement of large budget cuts, the only question now appears to be how much fiscal policy will tighten and how fast. If it is back-loaded and mainly involves cuts in transfer programs, the impact on growth may be modest. But if – as I suspect Republicans will demand – the spending cuts are front-loaded and involve reductions in government consumption and investment spending, the impact could be severe.

While it’s unlikely that the Fed will repeat its error of 1936-7 and raise reserve requirements or the federal funds rate, it has already begun de facto tightening by moving from monetary stimulus to a more neutral stance. Moreover, with interest rates on Treasury bills hovering near zero, there is little it can do to stimulate growth on the monetary side.

While the odds of another recession are still low, they are increasing. Given the economy’s fragility, policy makers need to be very careful, because it may take only a small misstep on either the monetary or fiscal side to tip the balance. The experience of 1937-38 should be a warning.

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.

Friday’s jobs report clearly indicates that the economy remains weak, yet the pressure to reverse stimulus and begin tightening fiscal and monetary policy has become overwhelming.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

The Federal Reserve has already ended its policy of quantitative easing, and many of its regional bank presidents are demanding higher interest rates to forestall inflation. Republicans and Democrats in Congress appear to agree that large spending cuts must accompany a rise in the debt limit, which will be hit on Aug. 2 if Congress doesn’t act.

Some economists are getting very nervous. With the economy in a fragile state, it may not take much to bring on another recession. Even a small amount of fiscal or monetary tightening may be enough to do that.

It is starting to look like 1937 all over again. As the table below indicates, the economy made a significant recovery after hitting bottom in 1932, when real gross domestic product fell 13 percent. The contraction moderated considerably in 1933, and in 1934 growth was robust, with real G.D.P. rising 11 percent. Growth was also strong in 1935 and 1936, which brought the unemployment rate down more than half from its peak and relieved the devastating deflation that was at the root of the economy’s problems.

Historical Statistics of the United States

By 1937, President Roosevelt and the Federal Reserve thought self-sustaining growth had been restored and began worrying about unwinding the fiscal and monetary stimulus, which they thought would become a drag on growth and a source of inflation. There was also a strong desire to return to normality, in both monetary and fiscal policy.

On the fiscal side, Roosevelt was under pressure from his Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, to balance the budget. Like many conservatives today, Mr. Morgenthau worried obsessively about business confidence and was convinced that balancing the budget would be expansionary. In the words of the historian John Morton Blum, Mr. Morgenthau said he believed recovery “depended on the willingness of business to increase investments, and this in turn was a function of business confidence,” adding, “In his view only a balanced budget could sustain that confidence.”

Roosevelt ordered a very big cut in federal spending in early 1937, and it fell to $7.6 billion in 1937 and $6.8 billion in 1938 from $8.2 billion in 1936, a 17 percent reduction over two years.

At the same time, taxes increased sharply because of the introduction of the payroll tax. Federal revenues rose to $5.4 billion in 1937 and $6.7 billion in 1938, from $3.9 billion in 1936, an increase of 72 percent. As a consequence, the federal deficit fell from 5.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1936 to a mere 0.5 percent in 1938. The deficit was just $89 million in 1938.

At the same time, the Federal Reserve was alarmed by inflation rates that were high by historical standards, as well as by the large amount of reserves in the banking system, which could potentially fuel a further rise in inflation. Using powers recently granted by the Banking Act of 1935, the Fed doubled reserve requirements from August 1936 to May 1937. Higher reserve requirements restricted the amount of money banks could lend and caused them to tighten credit.

This combination of fiscal and monetary tightening – which conservatives advocate today – brought on a sharp recession beginning in May 1937 and ending in June 1938, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Real G.D.P. fell 3.4 percent in 1938, and the unemployment rate rose to 12.5 percent from 9.2 percent in 1937.

Economists are still debating the precise causes of the 1937-8 recession. While most say they believe that fiscal tightening is primarily to blame, some disagree. Perhaps it would have been positive if tightening was confined to the spending side of the budget, without the large increase in taxes. Maybe the fiscal contraction would have been benign if the Fed hadn’t tightened monetary policy simultaneously.

Given President Obama’s endorsement of large budget cuts, the only question now appears to be how much fiscal policy will tighten and how fast. If it is back-loaded and mainly involves cuts in transfer programs, the impact on growth may be modest. But if – as I suspect Republicans will demand – the spending cuts are front-loaded and involve reductions in government consumption and investment spending, the impact could be severe.

While it’s unlikely that the Fed will repeat its error of 1936-7 and raise reserve requirements or the federal funds rate, it has already begun de facto tightening by moving from monetary stimulus to a more neutral stance. Moreover, with interest rates on Treasury bills hovering near zero, there is little it can do to stimulate growth on the monetary side.

While the odds of another recession are still low, they are increasing. Given the economy’s fragility, policy makers need to be very careful, because it may take only a small misstep on either the monetary or fiscal side to tip the balance. The experience of 1937-38 should be a warning.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated PressPresident Obama at his news briefing on Monday on the nation’s deficit. Mr. Obama has called for ending a variety of tax loopholes.

As the White House and Congress wrangle over raising the debt ceiling and reducing the federal deficit, tax loopholes would seem to be an easy target for compromise.

President Obama has talked about eliminating breaks for partners at hedge funds and private equity firms — along with corporate jet owners, oil companies and others taking advantage of quirks in the tax codes.

Here’s another little-known group of tax code beneficiaries that he might want to add to the list: day traders and speculators who buy and sell futures contracts.

For years, futures contracts, which are essentially bets on the price of commodities, stock indexes and the like, have received a more favorable tax treatment than stocks. A trader who buys and sells an oil contract in less than a year — even in a matter of minutes — pays no more than a 23 percent tax on the profits.

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Compare that with the bill for flipping shares of Google, General Electric or even a diversified mutual fund in the same time period. Those short-term investment gains are treated like ordinary income, meaning the rate can run as high as 35 percent.

“There are so many ways to attack the logic of it,” Warren E. Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, said in an interview on Monday about of the futures tax break. “It doesn’t make sense.”

What does the tax loophole cost the federal government? Each year, the United States gives up roughly $2 billion in lost revenue, according to the Congressional Research Service, a federal agency.

While that number may seem insignificant against the backdrop of the country’s $55 trillion debt load, tax inequities like this start to add up when considered collectively. Based on data from the Office of Management and Budget, the United States could put another $20 billion in its coffers over 10 years if it taxed the investment gains of hedge funds and private equity executives as ordinary income. The so-called carried interest is treated like capital gains, which is taxed at a much lower rate. The corporate jet break amounts to about $2 billion to $3 billion in a decade.

Perhaps the tax break on futures contracts wouldn’t be so irksome if it simply helped farmers protecting the value of their corn crops, airlines dealing with the rising cost of oil or even individuals hedging the risks in their portfolio.

But the biggest beneficiaries seem to be day traders and speculators. Long-term investors account for only 20 percent of the activity in the commodities future market, according to a report published last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the industry regulator.

When I called Robert Green, a tax specialist whose clients include traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the hub of commodities futures contracts, he seemed genuinely taken aback.

“I’ve been dreading getting a call like this,” he said, apparently worried that any publicity of the tax break could put pressure on lawmakers to revisit the rule. “No one has shot something across the bow.”

Still, he acknowledged that it would be hard for President Obama to justify lower tax rates “to benefit futures traders and commodities exchanges in his home state, while pushing hard to raise taxes on securities hedge fund managers — often in Connecticut and New York City.”

The genesis of the tax break on futures goes back to 1981, when the government tried to close another tax loophole. At the time, some big investors were using the contracts to skirt taxes by creating what was called a straddle transaction, which allowed investors to roll over their profits into the next year. So a rule was written that forced traders to mark their positions to market and pay taxes on unrealized gains.

In an effort to appease the investment community, a break was offered by Dan Rostenkowski, a Democrat from Chicago who was then the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and later went to prison for corruption. In part, the break was meant to offset the risks associated with paying taxes on paper profits. He persuaded Congress that traders should pay a blended rate, paying 60 percent of the long-term capital gains rate and 40 percent of the ordinary income rate. Today, the combination amounts to about 23 percent, assuming the top tax bracket for ordinary income is 35 percent and the long-term capital gains rate is 15 percent.

The break has been on the chopping block in recent years. In his budget proposals for 2010 and 2011, President Obama recommended ending the special tax treatment for dealers of futures contracts, although not for all investors. But the plans lost momentum and neither was incorporated into the final budgets.

Eric J. Toder, an economist at the Tax Policy Center, a research organization, said that the tax break might have made sense a generation ago when the market was mainly investors protecting their long-term profits. But with speculators betting on short-term price movements, the loophole is just that — a loophole.

“It seemed like a reasonable compromise at the time to stop the straddle transactions,” Mr. Toder said. “In retrospect, if the trading is so short term, it seems a little silly to give them preferential treatment.”

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated PressPresident Obama at his news briefing on Monday on the nation’s deficit. Mr. Obama has called for ending a variety of tax loopholes.

As the White House and Congress wrangle over raising the debt ceiling and reducing the federal deficit, tax loopholes would seem to be an easy target for compromise.

President Obama has talked about eliminating breaks for partners at hedge funds and private equity firms — along with corporate jet owners, oil companies and others taking advantage of quirks in the tax codes.

Here’s another little-known group of tax code beneficiaries that he might want to add to the list: day traders and speculators who buy and sell futures contracts.

For years, futures contracts, which are essentially bets on the price of commodities, stock indexes and the like, have received a more favorable tax treatment than stocks. A trader who buys and sells an oil contract in less than a year — even in a matter of minutes — pays no more than a 23 percent tax on the profits.

DealBook Column

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Compare that with the bill for flipping shares of Google, General Electric or even a diversified mutual fund in the same time period. Those short-term investment gains are treated like ordinary income, meaning the rate can run as high as 35 percent.

“There are so many ways to attack the logic of it,” Warren E. Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, said in an interview on Monday about of the futures tax break. “It doesn’t make sense.”

What does the tax loophole cost the federal government? Each year, the United States gives up roughly $2 billion in lost revenue, according to the Congressional Research Service, a federal agency.

While that number may seem insignificant against the backdrop of the country’s $55 trillion debt load, tax inequities like this start to add up when considered collectively. Based on data from the Office of Management and Budget, the United States could put another $20 billion in its coffers over 10 years if it taxed the investment gains of hedge funds and private equity executives as ordinary income. The so-called carried interest is treated like capital gains, which is taxed at a much lower rate. The corporate jet break amounts to about $2 billion to $3 billion in a decade.

Perhaps the tax break on futures contracts wouldn’t be so irksome if it simply helped farmers protecting the value of their corn crops, airlines dealing with the rising cost of oil or even individuals hedging the risks in their portfolio.

But the biggest beneficiaries seem to be day traders and speculators. Long-term investors account for only 20 percent of the activity in the commodities future market, according to a report published last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the industry regulator.

When I called Robert Green, a tax specialist whose clients include traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the hub of commodities futures contracts, he seemed genuinely taken aback.

“I’ve been dreading getting a call like this,” he said, apparently worried that any publicity of the tax break could put pressure on lawmakers to revisit the rule. “No one has shot something across the bow.”

Still, he acknowledged that it would be hard for President Obama to justify lower tax rates “to benefit futures traders and commodities exchanges in his home state, while pushing hard to raise taxes on securities hedge fund managers — often in Connecticut and New York City.”

The genesis of the tax break on futures goes back to 1981, when the government tried to close another tax loophole. At the time, some big investors were using the contracts to skirt taxes by creating what was called a straddle transaction, which allowed investors to roll over their profits into the next year. So a rule was written that forced traders to mark their positions to market and pay taxes on unrealized gains.

In an effort to appease the investment community, a break was offered by Dan Rostenkowski, a Democrat from Chicago who was then the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and later went to prison for corruption. In part, the break was meant to offset the risks associated with paying taxes on paper profits. He persuaded Congress that traders should pay a blended rate, paying 60 percent of the long-term capital gains rate and 40 percent of the ordinary income rate. Today, the combination amounts to about 23 percent, assuming the top tax bracket for ordinary income is 35 percent and the long-term capital gains rate is 15 percent.

The break has been on the chopping block in recent years. In his budget proposals for 2010 and 2011, President Obama recommended ending the special tax treatment for dealers of futures contracts, although not for all investors. But the plans lost momentum and neither was incorporated into the final budgets.

Eric J. Toder, an economist at the Tax Policy Center, a research organization, said that the tax break might have made sense a generation ago when the market was mainly investors protecting their long-term profits. But with speculators betting on short-term price movements, the loophole is just that — a loophole.

“It seemed like a reasonable compromise at the time to stop the straddle transactions,” Mr. Toder said. “In retrospect, if the trading is so short term, it seems a little silly to give them preferential treatment.”

The $4,873 they raised, mostly from small donations, will pay their travel, food, lab and equipment expenses to study the elegant quail this fall in Mexico.

“Each radio transmitter costs $135,” said Dr. Gee, interim manager of the Robert J. Bernard Biological Field Station in Claremont, Calif. “The receiver used to track birds is $1,000 to $2,000.”

As research budgets tighten at universities and federal financing agencies, a new crop of Web-savvy scientists is hoping the wisdom — and generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue. While nonprofit science organizations and medical research centers commonly seek donations from the public, Dr. Calkins, an adjunct professor of biology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and Dr. Gee may have been the first professional scientists to use a generic “crowd funding” Web site to underwrite basic research.

In May 2010, neither had the principal investigator status required to apply through their institutions for a National Science Foundation grant. But they were eager to begin collecting data about the behavior, appearance, distribution, habitat selection and phylogenic position of the least-studied quail species in the Callipepla genus.

Dr. Calkins, who has published research papers and poetry, turned to the community of artists and microphilanthropists at Kickstarter.com. Her plea to potential backers on the site: “By contributing to this project you will support a study of this little known species as we examine its behavior and evolution in its natural habitat, a space encroached upon by both urban sprawl and tension surrounding narcotics trafficking.”

Web sites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and RocketHub are an increasingly popular way to bankroll creative projects — usually in film, music and visual arts. It is not very likely that anyone imagined they would be used to finance scientific research. And it is unclear what problems this odd pairing might beget.

Most crowd funding platforms thrive on transparency and a healthy dose of self-promotion but lack the safeguards and expert assessment of a traditional review process. Instead, money talks: The public decides which projects are worth pursuing by fully financing them. Kickstarter takes a 5 percent cut when those projects meet or exceed their fund-raising goals. When pledges fall short of a goal, donors pay nothing. The money can come from anywhere — the biggest backers of the quail project were ranchers and hunters.

“Both of us had some hesitation,” Dr. Gee said. “We were sort of afraid we’d lose some legitimacy in the eyes of other scientists. It’s not a peer-reviewed process. I was just ready to do anything it took to do my research.”

For Dr. Calkins and Dr. Gee, who received their Ph.D.’s in 2001 and 2003, respectively, crowd funding is just one more way to scrape together a patchwork of funding and incremental bits of research aimed at larger goals. “I have had to be opportunistic about keeping my research going,” Dr. Gee wrote in an e-mail. “I collect data guerrilla style — when and where I can! I think my story is typical.”

Ten years ago, Andrea Gaggioli wanted to conduct research on virtual reality and neural rehabilitation. But, he said, “in Italy it’s almost impossible to get funded if you are under 30.”

Now 37 and a psychology and technology researcher at Catholic University of Milan, Dr. Gaggioli talks to anyone who will listen about his Open Genius Project, a crowd funding initiative he hopes will provide seed money for breakthrough research. Dr. Gaggioli plans to set up a peer review process to “separate garbage from good science.” But his crowd funding dream itself needs funds before it can begin accepting proposals.

“I think people will invest in projects that are carried out by young people who have no other possibilities to put forward their ideas,” Dr. Gaggioli said.

Cancer Research UK, a London-based charity, took a Web page from the microfinance site Kiva when it started its MyProjects initiative in September 2008. “The basic premise was to let people choose which cancers they want to beat,” said Ryan Bromley, the charity’s online communities manager.

In the crowd funding genus, MyProjects is a different species from Kickstarter. All projects on the site have been vetted by scientists and already receive financing from Cancer Research UK. And the funds are guaranteed regardless of whether the MyProjects goal is reached. Mr. Bromley calls it “substitutional funding.”

“We’re trying to attract people to fund-raise in a different way that we haven’t done before,” he said.

The $4,873 they raised, mostly from small donations, will pay their travel, food, lab and equipment expenses to study the elegant quail this fall in Mexico.

“Each radio transmitter costs $135,” said Dr. Gee, interim manager of the Robert J. Bernard Biological Field Station in Claremont, Calif. “The receiver used to track birds is $1,000 to $2,000.”

As research budgets tighten at universities and federal financing agencies, a new crop of Web-savvy scientists is hoping the wisdom — and generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue. While nonprofit science organizations and medical research centers commonly seek donations from the public, Dr. Calkins, an adjunct professor of biology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and Dr. Gee may have been the first professional scientists to use a generic “crowd funding” Web site to underwrite basic research.

In May 2010, neither had the principal investigator status required to apply through their institutions for a National Science Foundation grant. But they were eager to begin collecting data about the behavior, appearance, distribution, habitat selection and phylogenic position of the least-studied quail species in the Callipepla genus.

Dr. Calkins, who has published research papers and poetry, turned to the community of artists and microphilanthropists at Kickstarter.com. Her plea to potential backers on the site: “By contributing to this project you will support a study of this little known species as we examine its behavior and evolution in its natural habitat, a space encroached upon by both urban sprawl and tension surrounding narcotics trafficking.”

Web sites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and RocketHub are an increasingly popular way to bankroll creative projects — usually in film, music and visual arts. It is not very likely that anyone imagined they would be used to finance scientific research. And it is unclear what problems this odd pairing might beget.

Most crowd funding platforms thrive on transparency and a healthy dose of self-promotion but lack the safeguards and expert assessment of a traditional review process. Instead, money talks: The public decides which projects are worth pursuing by fully financing them. Kickstarter takes a 5 percent cut when those projects meet or exceed their fund-raising goals. When pledges fall short of a goal, donors pay nothing. The money can come from anywhere — the biggest backers of the quail project were ranchers and hunters.

“Both of us had some hesitation,” Dr. Gee said. “We were sort of afraid we’d lose some legitimacy in the eyes of other scientists. It’s not a peer-reviewed process. I was just ready to do anything it took to do my research.”

For Dr. Calkins and Dr. Gee, who received their Ph.D.’s in 2001 and 2003, respectively, crowd funding is just one more way to scrape together a patchwork of funding and incremental bits of research aimed at larger goals. “I have had to be opportunistic about keeping my research going,” Dr. Gee wrote in an e-mail. “I collect data guerrilla style — when and where I can! I think my story is typical.”

Ten years ago, Andrea Gaggioli wanted to conduct research on virtual reality and neural rehabilitation. But, he said, “in Italy it’s almost impossible to get funded if you are under 30.”

Now 37 and a psychology and technology researcher at Catholic University of Milan, Dr. Gaggioli talks to anyone who will listen about his Open Genius Project, a crowd funding initiative he hopes will provide seed money for breakthrough research. Dr. Gaggioli plans to set up a peer review process to “separate garbage from good science.” But his crowd funding dream itself needs funds before it can begin accepting proposals.

“I think people will invest in projects that are carried out by young people who have no other possibilities to put forward their ideas,” Dr. Gaggioli said.

Cancer Research UK, a London-based charity, took a Web page from the microfinance site Kiva when it started its MyProjects initiative in September 2008. “The basic premise was to let people choose which cancers they want to beat,” said Ryan Bromley, the charity’s online communities manager.

In the crowd funding genus, MyProjects is a different species from Kickstarter. All projects on the site have been vetted by scientists and already receive financing from Cancer Research UK. And the funds are guaranteed regardless of whether the MyProjects goal is reached. Mr. Bromley calls it “substitutional funding.”

“We’re trying to attract people to fund-raise in a different way that we haven’t done before,” he said.

The task requires hardly any thought. But as Dr. Brooks points out, training a robot to do it is a vastly harder problem for artificial intelligence researchers than I.B.M.’s celebrated victory on “Jeopardy!” this year with a robot named Watson.

Although robots have made great strides in manufacturing, where tasks are repetitive, they are still no match for humans, who can grasp things and move about effortlessly in the physical world.

Designing a robot to mimic the basic capabilities of motion and perception would be revolutionary, researchers say, with applications stretching from care for the elderly to returning overseas manufacturing operations to the United States (albeit with fewer workers).

Yet the challenges remain immense, far higher than artificial intelligence hurdles like speaking and hearing.

“All these problems where you want to duplicate something biology does, such as perception, touch, planning or grasping, turn out to be hard in fundamental ways,” said Gary Bradski, a vision specialist at Willow Garage, a robot development company based here in Silicon Valley.

“It’s always surprising, because humans can do so much effortlessly.”

Now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the Pentagon office that helped jump-start the first generation of artificial intelligence research in the 1960s, is underwriting three competing efforts to develop robotic arms and hands one-tenth as expensive as today’s systems, which often cost $100,000 or more.

Last month President Obama traveled to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to unveil a $500 million effort to create advanced robotic technologies needed to help bring manufacturing back to the United States. But lower-cost computer-controlled mechanical arms and hands are only the first step.

There is still significant debate about how even to begin to design a machine that might be flexible enough to do many of the things humans do: fold laundry, cook or wash dishes. That will require a breakthrough in software that mimics perception.

Today’s robots can often do one such task in limited circumstances, but researchers describe their skills as “brittle.” They fail if the tiniest change is introduced. Moreover, they must be reprogrammed in a cumbersome fashion to do something else.

Many robotics researchers are pursuing a bottom-up approach, hoping that by training robots on one task at a time, they can build a library of tasks that will ultimately make it possible for robots to begin to mimic humans.

Others are skeptical, saying that truly useful machines await an artificial intelligence breakthrough that yields vastly more flexible perception.

The limits of today’s most sophisticated robots can be seen in a towel-folding demonstration that a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley, posted on the Internet last year: In spooky, anthropomorphic fashion, a robot deftly folds a series of towels, eyeing the corners, smoothing out wrinkles and neatly stacking them in a pile.

It is only when the viewer learns that the video is shown at 50 times normal speed that the meager extent of the robot’s capabilities becomes apparent. (The students acknowledged this spring that they were only now beginning to tackle the further challenges of folding shirts and socks.)

Even the most ambitious and expensive robot arm research has not yet yielded impressive results.

In February, for example, Robonaut 2, a dexterous robot developed in a partnership between NASA and General Motors, was carried aboard a space shuttle mission to be installed on the International Space Station. The developers acknowledged that the software required by the system, which is humanoid-shaped from the torso up, was unfinished and that the robot was sent up then only because a rare launching window was available.

“We’re in a funny chicken-and-egg situation,” Dr. Brooks said. “No one really knows what sensors or perceptual algorithms to use because we don’t have a working hand, and because we don’t have a grasping strategy nobody can figure out what kind of hand to design.”

Dr. Brooks is also tackling the problem: In 2008 he founded Heartland Robotics, a Boston-based company that is intent on building a generation of low-cost robots.

And the three competing efforts to develop robotic arms and hands with Darpa financing — at SRI International, Sandia National Laboratories and iRobot — offer some reasons for optimism.

The task requires hardly any thought. But as Dr. Brooks points out, training a robot to do it is a vastly harder problem for artificial intelligence researchers than I.B.M.’s celebrated victory on “Jeopardy!” this year with a robot named Watson.

Although robots have made great strides in manufacturing, where tasks are repetitive, they are still no match for humans, who can grasp things and move about effortlessly in the physical world.

Designing a robot to mimic the basic capabilities of motion and perception would be revolutionary, researchers say, with applications stretching from care for the elderly to returning overseas manufacturing operations to the United States (albeit with fewer workers).

Yet the challenges remain immense, far higher than artificial intelligence hurdles like speaking and hearing.

“All these problems where you want to duplicate something biology does, such as perception, touch, planning or grasping, turn out to be hard in fundamental ways,” said Gary Bradski, a vision specialist at Willow Garage, a robot development company based here in Silicon Valley.

“It’s always surprising, because humans can do so much effortlessly.”

Now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the Pentagon office that helped jump-start the first generation of artificial intelligence research in the 1960s, is underwriting three competing efforts to develop robotic arms and hands one-tenth as expensive as today’s systems, which often cost $100,000 or more.

Last month President Obama traveled to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to unveil a $500 million effort to create advanced robotic technologies needed to help bring manufacturing back to the United States. But lower-cost computer-controlled mechanical arms and hands are only the first step.

There is still significant debate about how even to begin to design a machine that might be flexible enough to do many of the things humans do: fold laundry, cook or wash dishes. That will require a breakthrough in software that mimics perception.

Today’s robots can often do one such task in limited circumstances, but researchers describe their skills as “brittle.” They fail if the tiniest change is introduced. Moreover, they must be reprogrammed in a cumbersome fashion to do something else.

Many robotics researchers are pursuing a bottom-up approach, hoping that by training robots on one task at a time, they can build a library of tasks that will ultimately make it possible for robots to begin to mimic humans.

Others are skeptical, saying that truly useful machines await an artificial intelligence breakthrough that yields vastly more flexible perception.

The limits of today’s most sophisticated robots can be seen in a towel-folding demonstration that a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley, posted on the Internet last year: In spooky, anthropomorphic fashion, a robot deftly folds a series of towels, eyeing the corners, smoothing out wrinkles and neatly stacking them in a pile.

It is only when the viewer learns that the video is shown at 50 times normal speed that the meager extent of the robot’s capabilities becomes apparent. (The students acknowledged this spring that they were only now beginning to tackle the further challenges of folding shirts and socks.)

Even the most ambitious and expensive robot arm research has not yet yielded impressive results.

In February, for example, Robonaut 2, a dexterous robot developed in a partnership between NASA and General Motors, was carried aboard a space shuttle mission to be installed on the International Space Station. The developers acknowledged that the software required by the system, which is humanoid-shaped from the torso up, was unfinished and that the robot was sent up then only because a rare launching window was available.

“We’re in a funny chicken-and-egg situation,” Dr. Brooks said. “No one really knows what sensors or perceptual algorithms to use because we don’t have a working hand, and because we don’t have a grasping strategy nobody can figure out what kind of hand to design.”

Dr. Brooks is also tackling the problem: In 2008 he founded Heartland Robotics, a Boston-based company that is intent on building a generation of low-cost robots.

And the three competing efforts to develop robotic arms and hands with Darpa financing — at SRI International, Sandia National Laboratories and iRobot — offer some reasons for optimism.

Net income was $322 million, or 28 cents a share, compared with $136 million, or 13 cents, a year earlier, Alcoa reported after the markets closed. Sales gained 27 percent to $6.59 billion, exceeding the $6.31 billion average estimate of seven analysts in the Bloomberg survey.

Earnings, excluding $38 million in restructuring and debt tender offer costs and other one-time items, were $364 million, or 32 cents a share, missing the 33-cent average estimate of 14 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

“The market should be pleased that Alcoa is showing these strong year-over-year trends,” Jorge Beristain, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, said on Bloomberg TV. “They are managing to hold the line on costs.”

Alcoa’s chief executive, Klaus Kleinfeld, reiterated his forecast for global demand to increase by 12 percent in 2011 and double by the end of the decade as Asian countries build more offices and buy more aircraft, cars and trains.

“Although the economic recovery is uneven, the overall outlook for Alcoa — and for aluminum — remains positive,” Mr. Kleinfeld said in a statement. “Demand for aluminum continues to rise and so does growth in our major markets.”

Alcoa, traditionally the first company in the Dow Jones industrial average to report earnings, was little changed in after-hours trading.

Aluminum prices have advanced in the last year in London as demand soared from Chinese and American automotive and aerospace sectors. Aluminum spot prices on the London Metal Exchange averaged $2,600 a metric ton in the second quarter, 24 percent more than a year earlier.

Net income was $322 million, or 28 cents a share, compared with $136 million, or 13 cents, a year earlier, Alcoa reported after the markets closed. Sales gained 27 percent to $6.59 billion, exceeding the $6.31 billion average estimate of seven analysts in the Bloomberg survey.

Earnings, excluding $38 million in restructuring and debt tender offer costs and other one-time items, were $364 million, or 32 cents a share, missing the 33-cent average estimate of 14 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

“The market should be pleased that Alcoa is showing these strong year-over-year trends,” Jorge Beristain, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, said on Bloomberg TV. “They are managing to hold the line on costs.”

Alcoa’s chief executive, Klaus Kleinfeld, reiterated his forecast for global demand to increase by 12 percent in 2011 and double by the end of the decade as Asian countries build more offices and buy more aircraft, cars and trains.

“Although the economic recovery is uneven, the overall outlook for Alcoa — and for aluminum — remains positive,” Mr. Kleinfeld said in a statement. “Demand for aluminum continues to rise and so does growth in our major markets.”

Alcoa, traditionally the first company in the Dow Jones industrial average to report earnings, was little changed in after-hours trading.

Aluminum prices have advanced in the last year in London as demand soared from Chinese and American automotive and aerospace sectors. Aluminum spot prices on the London Metal Exchange averaged $2,600 a metric ton in the second quarter, 24 percent more than a year earlier.

Adrian Bradshaw/European Pressphoto AgencyCandy from Hsu Fu Chi International, a Chinese confectioner, and Nestlé, the Swiss food giant.

7:11 p.m. | Updated

HONG KONG — Nestlé, the Swiss food company, said on Monday that it had agreed to pay $1.7 billion for a 60 percent stake in a big Chinese confectioner.

The deal is one of the biggest ever by a foreign company in China.

Best known for its instant coffee brands, bottled drinks and baby foods, Nestlé is teaming up with Hsu Fu Chi International, a maker of chocolate, candies and pastries popular in China, to create a joint venture that Nestlé said would “greatly reinforce” its presence in China.

Under the terms of the deal, Nestlé will pay 4.35 Singaporean dollars, or $3.56, a share for a 43.5 percent stake in Hsu Fu Chi, which is based in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan but is listed on the Singapore stock exchange.

The remaining 56.5 percent will be held by the founding Hsu family, which intends to sell some of that stake to Nestlé and ultimately retain 40 percent. Hsu Fu Chi’s current chief executive, Hsu Chen, will head the joint venture.

The offer price is 8.7 percent above Hsu Fu Chi’s closing price on July 1, the final trading day before the company disclosed that it was in talks with potential partners.

For the deal to proceed, a majority of Hsu Fu Chi’s independent shareholders — representing at least 75 percent of independently held shares — have to accept the offer, though Nestlé said it had already secured the agreement of the largest independent shareholders.

If approved by shareholders and Chinese regulators, the deal will cost Nestlé about 2.1 billion Singapore dollars ($1.7 billion).

With 2010 sales worth 669 million Swiss francs ($800 million), Hsu Fu Chi is a leading manufacturer and distributor of confectionery products in China, Nestlé said in a statement, adding that Hsu Fu Chi’s large portfolio of affordable products fit “perfectly into Nestlé’s global portfolio.”

The Swiss company has been present in China for more than 20 years and operates 23 factories and two research centers in the country. Its sales in China totaled 2.8 billion Swiss francs, or $3.34 billion, last year.

The proposed partnership with Hsu Fu Chi “demonstrates our long-term commitment to China and enhances our ability to grow our portfolio of international and local brands in this dynamic market,” Paul Bulcke, the chief executive of Nestlé, said in the statement.

The deal highlights the keen desire of many Western retailers and consumer goods companies to expand in China, whose 1.3 billion consumers are growing ever more able and willing to spend money on goods.

An attempt by Coca-Cola to acquire the Chinese juice maker Huiyuan was blocked by regulators two years ago, but that has not stopped foreign companies from seeking partnerships with local players.

In May, Yum Brands, the company behind Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut, announced plans to raise its stake to more than 90 percent in Little Sheep, which operates hundreds of hot pot restaurants throughout China.

In April, Nestlé signed a partnership with the Yinlu Foods Group, which makes ready-to-drink peanut milk and ready-to-eat canned rice porridge, also taking a 60 percent stake in the new venture and keeping the Yinlu chairman, Chen Qingyuan, to lead the business.

The price of that transaction was not disclosed, but Yinlu and Hsu Fu Chi are comparable in terms of annual sales.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

Adrian Bradshaw/European Pressphoto AgencyCandy from Hsu Fu Chi International, a Chinese confectioner, and Nestlé, the Swiss food giant.

7:11 p.m. | Updated

HONG KONG — Nestlé, the Swiss food company, said on Monday that it had agreed to pay $1.7 billion for a 60 percent stake in a big Chinese confectioner.

The deal is one of the biggest ever by a foreign company in China.

Best known for its instant coffee brands, bottled drinks and baby foods, Nestlé is teaming up with Hsu Fu Chi International, a maker of chocolate, candies and pastries popular in China, to create a joint venture that Nestlé said would “greatly reinforce” its presence in China.

Under the terms of the deal, Nestlé will pay 4.35 Singaporean dollars, or $3.56, a share for a 43.5 percent stake in Hsu Fu Chi, which is based in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan but is listed on the Singapore stock exchange.

The remaining 56.5 percent will be held by the founding Hsu family, which intends to sell some of that stake to Nestlé and ultimately retain 40 percent. Hsu Fu Chi’s current chief executive, Hsu Chen, will head the joint venture.

The offer price is 8.7 percent above Hsu Fu Chi’s closing price on July 1, the final trading day before the company disclosed that it was in talks with potential partners.

For the deal to proceed, a majority of Hsu Fu Chi’s independent shareholders — representing at least 75 percent of independently held shares — have to accept the offer, though Nestlé said it had already secured the agreement of the largest independent shareholders.

If approved by shareholders and Chinese regulators, the deal will cost Nestlé about 2.1 billion Singapore dollars ($1.7 billion).

With 2010 sales worth 669 million Swiss francs ($800 million), Hsu Fu Chi is a leading manufacturer and distributor of confectionery products in China, Nestlé said in a statement, adding that Hsu Fu Chi’s large portfolio of affordable products fit “perfectly into Nestlé’s global portfolio.”

The Swiss company has been present in China for more than 20 years and operates 23 factories and two research centers in the country. Its sales in China totaled 2.8 billion Swiss francs, or $3.34 billion, last year.

The proposed partnership with Hsu Fu Chi “demonstrates our long-term commitment to China and enhances our ability to grow our portfolio of international and local brands in this dynamic market,” Paul Bulcke, the chief executive of Nestlé, said in the statement.

The deal highlights the keen desire of many Western retailers and consumer goods companies to expand in China, whose 1.3 billion consumers are growing ever more able and willing to spend money on goods.

An attempt by Coca-Cola to acquire the Chinese juice maker Huiyuan was blocked by regulators two years ago, but that has not stopped foreign companies from seeking partnerships with local players.

In May, Yum Brands, the company behind Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut, announced plans to raise its stake to more than 90 percent in Little Sheep, which operates hundreds of hot pot restaurants throughout China.

In April, Nestlé signed a partnership with the Yinlu Foods Group, which makes ready-to-drink peanut milk and ready-to-eat canned rice porridge, also taking a 60 percent stake in the new venture and keeping the Yinlu chairman, Chen Qingyuan, to lead the business.

The price of that transaction was not disclosed, but Yinlu and Hsu Fu Chi are comparable in terms of annual sales.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

The claims came a day after the crisis deepened with reports that two Murdoch newspapers may have bribed police officers or used other potentially illegal methods to obtain information about Queen Elizabeth II as well as Mr. Brown.

At the same time, two former journalists for The News of the World — the newspaper at the epicenter of the scandal, which the Murdoch family closed last weekend — said that police officers had been bribed to use restricted cellphone-tracking technology to pinpoint the location of people sought by the papers in their pursuit of scoops.

Since flying to Britain over the weekend, Mr. Murdoch has assumed command of damage control efforts at his London headquarters amid a torrent of new revelations, including reports that newsroom malpractice extended far beyond The News of the World to two other newspapers in his British stable — The Sunday Times, an upmarket broadsheet, and The Sun, the country’s highest-selling daily tabloid.

On Tuesday, Mr. Brown accused The Sunday Times — owned by News International, the British subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation — of employing “known criminals” to gather personal information on his bank account, legal files and “other files — documentation, tax and everything else.”

“I think that what happened pretty early on in government is that the Sunday Times appear to have got access to my building society account, they got access to my legal files, there is some question mark about what happened to other files — documentation, tax and everything else,” Mr. Brown, who was Britain’s Labour prime minister from 2007 to 2010 after serving for a decade as chancellor of the Exchequer, told the BBC on Tuesday.

“I’m shocked, I’m genuinely shocked, to find that this happened because of their links with criminals, known criminals, who were undertaking this activity, hired by investigators working with the Sunday Times,” Mr. Brown said.

Mr. Brown added: “I just can’t understand this — if I, with all the protection and all the defenses and all the security that a chancellor of the Exchequer or a prime minister has, am so vulnerable to unscrupulous tactics, unlawful tactics, methods that have been used in the way we have found, what about the ordinary citizen?”

The Guardian newspaper reported earlier that Mr. Brown’s bank, Abbey National, alerted him that someone acting for The Sunday Times had posed in his name — a practice commonly referred to as identity theft, or blagging — to obtain details of his account six times in 2000, when he was chancellor. The BBC said that the effort was made as part of an inquiry by the paper into allegations that Mr. Brown had bought a property in his native Scotland at below-market value, something Mr. Brown has strongly denied.

But the most damaging aspect of the affair involving Mr. Brown related to his son Fraser, now five years old, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. Mr. Brown told the BBC on Tuesday that he had never publicly discussed his son’s medical condition. But a person close to Mr. Brown said on Monday he believed that The Sun gained access to his son’s medical records for an article about his illness that ran in November 2006, four months after the boy’s birth.

Mr. Brown said on Tuesday that he and his wife Sarah were “in tears” when they learned that details of the health issue were going to appear in the newspaper.

The BBC, quoting its sources, said the information about the boy’s condition had been obtained first by The Sunday Times, and passed to The Sun. Mr. Brown said that Rebekah Brooks, then The Sun’s editor and now News International’s chief executive, called him to tell them that the tabloid knew of the boy’s condition, which they had believed was something known only to themselves and medical professionals who were caring for their son.

John F. Burns and Jo Becker reported from London and Alan Cowell from Paris. Ravi Somaiya, Don van Natta and Graham Bowley contributed reporting from London.

The claims came a day after the crisis deepened with reports that two Murdoch newspapers may have bribed police officers or used other potentially illegal methods to obtain information about Queen Elizabeth II as well as Mr. Brown.

At the same time, two former journalists for The News of the World — the newspaper at the epicenter of the scandal, which the Murdoch family closed last weekend — said that police officers had been bribed to use restricted cellphone-tracking technology to pinpoint the location of people sought by the papers in their pursuit of scoops.

Since flying to Britain over the weekend, Mr. Murdoch has assumed command of damage control efforts at his London headquarters amid a torrent of new revelations, including reports that newsroom malpractice extended far beyond The News of the World to two other newspapers in his British stable — The Sunday Times, an upmarket broadsheet, and The Sun, the country’s highest-selling daily tabloid.

On Tuesday, Mr. Brown accused The Sunday Times — owned by News International, the British subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation — of employing “known criminals” to gather personal information on his bank account, legal files and “other files — documentation, tax and everything else.”

“I think that what happened pretty early on in government is that the Sunday Times appear to have got access to my building society account, they got access to my legal files, there is some question mark about what happened to other files — documentation, tax and everything else,” Mr. Brown, who was Britain’s Labour prime minister from 2007 to 2010 after serving for a decade as chancellor of the Exchequer, told the BBC on Tuesday.

“I’m shocked, I’m genuinely shocked, to find that this happened because of their links with criminals, known criminals, who were undertaking this activity, hired by investigators working with the Sunday Times,” Mr. Brown said.

Mr. Brown added: “I just can’t understand this — if I, with all the protection and all the defenses and all the security that a chancellor of the Exchequer or a prime minister has, am so vulnerable to unscrupulous tactics, unlawful tactics, methods that have been used in the way we have found, what about the ordinary citizen?”

The Guardian newspaper reported earlier that Mr. Brown’s bank, Abbey National, alerted him that someone acting for The Sunday Times had posed in his name — a practice commonly referred to as identity theft, or blagging — to obtain details of his account six times in 2000, when he was chancellor. The BBC said that the effort was made as part of an inquiry by the paper into allegations that Mr. Brown had bought a property in his native Scotland at below-market value, something Mr. Brown has strongly denied.

But the most damaging aspect of the affair involving Mr. Brown related to his son Fraser, now five years old, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. Mr. Brown told the BBC on Tuesday that he had never publicly discussed his son’s medical condition. But a person close to Mr. Brown said on Monday he believed that The Sun gained access to his son’s medical records for an article about his illness that ran in November 2006, four months after the boy’s birth.

Mr. Brown said on Tuesday that he and his wife Sarah were “in tears” when they learned that details of the health issue were going to appear in the newspaper.

The BBC, quoting its sources, said the information about the boy’s condition had been obtained first by The Sunday Times, and passed to The Sun. Mr. Brown said that Rebekah Brooks, then The Sun’s editor and now News International’s chief executive, called him to tell them that the tabloid knew of the boy’s condition, which they had believed was something known only to themselves and medical professionals who were caring for their son.

John F. Burns and Jo Becker reported from London and Alan Cowell from Paris. Ravi Somaiya, Don van Natta and Graham Bowley contributed reporting from London.

As investors fretted about a new wave of financial instability, the euro slumped to its lowest level since March and borrowing costs rose again for Europe’s weaker economies.

At the opening, the Dow Jones industrial average shed just a handful of points, off 9.38 to 12,496.38. The Standard Poor’s 500-stock index lost 2.26 points to 1,317.23.

European indexes, after declining sharply in morning trading, regained some ground in the afternoon. The Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, was down 1.20 percent. The FTSE 100 index in London slid 1.16 percent.

In the day’s most dramatic action, the main Italian stock market index slid more than 4 percent in morning trading, before bouncing most of the way back, after Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti returned to Rome early from a meeting of euro zone officials to take charge of discussions on new austerity measures and the government successfully sold one-year debt.

Mr. Tremonti is held up by many investors as being instrumental to Italy’s bid for market credibility. Silvio Berlusconi, the embattled prime minister, led investors to ditch Italian debt last week when he suggested Mr. Tremonti might be forced out of the government.

Italy has begun moving into the front of investors’ consciousness, but the question of how to aid Greece remains unsolved. In a letter to Jean-Claude Juncker, the Eurogroup president, the Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou complained that market turmoil was undermining his government’s efforts at economic reform, and called for “collective forceful decisions” from his European partners.

European finance officials met for six hours Monday in Brussels but failed to resolve a long-running dispute over private sector involvement in a second bailout for Greece.

“If Europe does not make the right, collective, forceful decisions now, we risk new, and possibly global, market calamities due to a contagion of doubt that could engulf our common union,” Mr. Papandreou wrote.

Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank in London, wrote in a research note that Greece was not the euro zone’s main problem. “Instead, the massive contagion from the small periphery to the big bond markets of Italy and Spain in the last four trading days has turned into the real problem,” he said.

Asian shares were down across the board. The Tokyo benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average fell 1.4 percent. The main Sydney market index, the SP/ASX 200, fell 1.9 percent, In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng index fell 3.1, and in Shanghai the composite index fell 1.7 percent.

Data released Tuesday showed that bank lending in China had remained more buoyant than expected in June, fanning expectations that Beijing may tighten lending requirements or raise interest rates again in its battle to contain inflation.

The Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa said that global economic growth was “slowing somewhat,” Reuters reported from Tokyo. “The U.S. economy faces severe balance sheet adjustments, and sovereign problems pose a risk to Europe,” he said.

Also on Tuesday, Moody’s issued a list of Chinese companies that raised “red flags” at the ratings agency because of possible governance or accounting risks, causing the shares of those companies to tumble.

New York crude oil futures fell 1.2 percent to $94.02 a barrel.

The euro slumped, falling to $1.3918 from $1.4029 late Monday. The dollar fell to 79.59 yen from 80.26 yen, signaling that Japanese investors were becoming more risk averse and repatriating overseas funds.

The worries about Italy have further shaken already fragile global market sentiment. Even though Italy retains solid debt ratings, a sound banking system and a relatively small budget deficit compared to the size of its economy, it is plagued with high debt, feeble growth and political paralysis.

The jitters prompted the Italian stock market regulator on Monday to impose emergency rules against short selling after shares in Italian banks slumped for a fifth straight session.

The cost of insuring Italy’s sovereign debt against default surged to an all-time high, and the interest on its 10-year bond leaped to 5.8 percent before falling back.

“The current escalation of the euro area periphery crisis is the third period in which the problems facing Greece, Ireland and Portugal have seriously threatened more serious contagion in the euro area,” Paul Robinson, an analyst at Barclays Capital, wrote in a note.

As grave as the situation is, however, he added, “the previous episodes during which Spain and Italy were significantly affected proved temporary, and the situation facing both economies is far less serious than in Greece’s case.”

Bettina Wassener reported from Hong Kong. Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting from Athens.

As investors fretted about a new wave of financial instability, the euro slumped to its lowest level since March and borrowing costs rose again for Europe’s weaker economies.

At the opening, the Dow Jones industrial average shed just a handful of points, off 9.38 to 12,496.38. The Standard Poor’s 500-stock index lost 2.26 points to 1,317.23.

European indexes, after declining sharply in morning trading, regained some ground in the afternoon. The Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, was down 1.20 percent. The FTSE 100 index in London slid 1.16 percent.

In the day’s most dramatic action, the main Italian stock market index slid more than 4 percent in morning trading, before bouncing most of the way back, after Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti returned to Rome early from a meeting of euro zone officials to take charge of discussions on new austerity measures and the government successfully sold one-year debt.

Mr. Tremonti is held up by many investors as being instrumental to Italy’s bid for market credibility. Silvio Berlusconi, the embattled prime minister, led investors to ditch Italian debt last week when he suggested Mr. Tremonti might be forced out of the government.

Italy has begun moving into the front of investors’ consciousness, but the question of how to aid Greece remains unsolved. In a letter to Jean-Claude Juncker, the Eurogroup president, the Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou complained that market turmoil was undermining his government’s efforts at economic reform, and called for “collective forceful decisions” from his European partners.

European finance officials met for six hours Monday in Brussels but failed to resolve a long-running dispute over private sector involvement in a second bailout for Greece.

“If Europe does not make the right, collective, forceful decisions now, we risk new, and possibly global, market calamities due to a contagion of doubt that could engulf our common union,” Mr. Papandreou wrote.

Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank in London, wrote in a research note that Greece was not the euro zone’s main problem. “Instead, the massive contagion from the small periphery to the big bond markets of Italy and Spain in the last four trading days has turned into the real problem,” he said.

Asian shares were down across the board. The Tokyo benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average fell 1.4 percent. The main Sydney market index, the SP/ASX 200, fell 1.9 percent, In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng index fell 3.1, and in Shanghai the composite index fell 1.7 percent.

Data released Tuesday showed that bank lending in China had remained more buoyant than expected in June, fanning expectations that Beijing may tighten lending requirements or raise interest rates again in its battle to contain inflation.

The Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa said that global economic growth was “slowing somewhat,” Reuters reported from Tokyo. “The U.S. economy faces severe balance sheet adjustments, and sovereign problems pose a risk to Europe,” he said.

Also on Tuesday, Moody’s issued a list of Chinese companies that raised “red flags” at the ratings agency because of possible governance or accounting risks, causing the shares of those companies to tumble.

New York crude oil futures fell 1.2 percent to $94.02 a barrel.

The euro slumped, falling to $1.3918 from $1.4029 late Monday. The dollar fell to 79.59 yen from 80.26 yen, signaling that Japanese investors were becoming more risk averse and repatriating overseas funds.

The worries about Italy have further shaken already fragile global market sentiment. Even though Italy retains solid debt ratings, a sound banking system and a relatively small budget deficit compared to the size of its economy, it is plagued with high debt, feeble growth and political paralysis.

The jitters prompted the Italian stock market regulator on Monday to impose emergency rules against short selling after shares in Italian banks slumped for a fifth straight session.

The cost of insuring Italy’s sovereign debt against default surged to an all-time high, and the interest on its 10-year bond leaped to 5.8 percent before falling back.

“The current escalation of the euro area periphery crisis is the third period in which the problems facing Greece, Ireland and Portugal have seriously threatened more serious contagion in the euro area,” Paul Robinson, an analyst at Barclays Capital, wrote in a note.

As grave as the situation is, however, he added, “the previous episodes during which Spain and Italy were significantly affected proved temporary, and the situation facing both economies is far less serious than in Greece’s case.”

Bettina Wassener reported from Hong Kong. Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting from Athens.

The company said it would divide responsibilities for its business into three global regions: Asia, the Americas and a region containing Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Starbucks, the coffee giant, now has two units, the United States and international.

Three company executives have been appointed to lead the new regions.

Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, said the change would help maximize its opportunities in growing markets like China, Brazil and India.

Starbucks, which is based in Seattle, has nearly 11,000 stores in North America and almost 6,000 elsewhere.

It had a major slump in the recession after changing consumer habits and a rapid overexpansion. It slowed growth, cut jobs, closed stores and reorganized. Sales in cafes have rebounded, and the company is expanding its overseas and consumer products businesses.

The United States still generates most of its revenue. Nearly three-fourths of the $10.7 billion Starbucks brought in during its most recent fiscal year was from the United States. But Mr. Schultz said international business eventually would produce at least half the company’s revenue.

Starbucks is one of many consumer products companies looking overseas for growth as the middle class expands abroad. One of the biggest prizes in pure growth is China, Mr. Schultz said in an interview. Starbucks said it also planned to expand in India this fiscal year and in Vietnam the next year.

John Culver, who leads the company’s international business, will be president of the China and Asia Pacific region.

Cliff Burrows, president of Starbucks United States, will head the Americas region, which encompasses the United States, Canada, Mexico and Central and South America.

Michelle Gass, president of Seattle’s Best Coffee, was named president of Starbucks’ Europe, Africa and Middle East region.

Other changes announced Monday include transferring responsibility for Seattle’s Best to Jeff Hansberry, head of the company’s global consumer products and food service business. Annie Young-Scrivner, global chief marketing officer, will also oversee its Tazo tea business.

Starbucks said it would continue to push its consumer products, such as Via instant coffee, under the new management structure.

The company said the transition would be complete by September.

Justin Maxon/The New York TimesJudge Jed S. Rakoff

“A funny thing happened on the way to this forum.”

So opened the latest ruling from the ever-lively Judge Jed. S. Rakoff, a federal judge in Manhattan.

Judge Rakoff said on Monday that Rajat K. Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs and Procter Gamble director, can proceed with a lawsuit that accuses the Securities and Exchange Commission of violating his constitutional rights.

In March, the S.E.C. filed an unusual civil administrative proceeding against Mr. Gupta that accused him of leaking secret board discussions to Raj Rajaratnam, the head of the Galleon Group hedge fund, who was convicted of insider-trading crimes in May.

Mr. Gupta’s lawyers fired back at the S.E.C., filing a lawsuit asking to move the case to federal court. The complaint said that the S.E.C.’s administrative action denied Mr. Gupta the right to a jury trial and treated him differently than the more than two dozen other Galleon-related defendants who were all sued in federal court. (The administrative proceeding is being heard before an S.E.C. administrative law judge in Washington.)

Seokyong Lee/Bloomberg NewsRajat K. Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs and Procter Gamble director accused of leaking confidential information about those companies.

Judge Rakoff sympathized with the argument by Mr. Gupta that the S.E.C. potentially violated his constitutional rights under the Equal Protection Clause.

“We have the unusual case where there is already a well-developed public record of Gupta being treated substantially disparately from 28 essentially identical defendants, with not even a hint from the S.E.C., even in their instant papers, as to why this should be so,” Judge Rakoff said.

Judge Rakoff takes the S.E.C. to task throughout the opinion. He calls the agency’s decision to file the administrative proceeding against Mr. Gupta a “seeming exercise in forum-shopping.” He also says that the complaint suggests that the S.E.C. took a “cavalier approach” in approving the administrative proceeding.

“We are reviewing the decision and will proceed in a manner that maintains the commission’s authority to best serve the interests of investors and the integrity of the markets,” an S.E.C. spokesman said.

Judge Rakoff also noted that the S.E.C. had delayed Mr. Gupta’s hearing, which was originally scheduled for July 18, for six months. This will give him “ample opportunity” to decide whether the S.E.C. violated Mr. Gupta’s constitutional rights, the judge said.

The lengthy postponement in the proceeding raises questions about the fate of Mr. Gupta, the most prominent business executive ensnared by the government’s insider-trading crackdown. The United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, which has been investigating Mr. Gupta’s role in the case for at least three years, named Mr. Gupta a co-conspirator of Mr. Rajaratnam’s but has not charged him criminally.

Gary P. Naftalis, a lawyer for Mr. Gupta, has called the S.E.C.’s case “totally baseless.”

Monday’s decision is the latest in a series of rulings in which Judge Rakoff has criticized the S.E.C.’s actions. In March, Judge Rakoff chafed at the agency’s practice of allowing defendants to settle cases “without or admitting or denying wrongdoing,” describing the practice as treating the court as a “rubber stamp.” And last year, in approving a deal between the S.E.C. and Bank of America over its acquisition of Merrill Lynch, he called the settlement as “half-baked justice.”

Mr. Gupta’s case is the latest major proceeding that Judge Rakoff has welcomed into his courtroom in recent weeks. Earlier this month he agreed to hear the billion-dollar action brought against the owners of the New York Mets baseball team by the trustee seeking to recover money for victims of Bernard L. Madoff’s fraud. That lawsuit was originally brought in bankruptcy court, but Judge Rakoff took control of the case.

Rakoff’s Ruling in Favor of Gupta

But travelers who have flown within Europe lately often took away a different impression — that airline tickets were surprisingly inexpensive, especially compared with prices to fly within the United States.

A one-way ticket between Edinburgh and Dublin, for instance, can cost as little as $40. A one-way ticket from New York to Washington, about the same distance, starts at $65. Both prices, which vary depending on the travel date, include taxes and unavoidable fees, but not baggage and other optional charges.

While it is tough to do a statistically rigorous comparison, especially since the European Union does not collect fare data for its 27 members, there is little doubt that ticket prices have fallen sharply within Europe, despite higher fuel costs, because of an explosion of competition from low-fare airlines like easyJet and Ryanair. Although Southwest Airlines and other carriers have put similar pressure on prices within the United States, anecdotal data suggests that it is still generally more expensive to fly between major cities in America than it is to fly between cities in Europe.

“Even after taxes, you see a better fare per mile in the European Union than you do in the United States,” said Mark Milke, a director at the Fraser Institute, a public policy research group in Calgary, Alberta, who published a paper last year comparing the lowest fares available on a sample set of routes.

Using that data, Mr. Milke calculated that airline passengers traveling within a single country in Europe last year were paying about 11 cents a mile, including taxes and fees, or 14 cents a mile to fly between two European countries. In the United States, by contrast, passengers were paying about 23 cents a mile.

Since these figures were based on a limited number of case studies, results from a wider set of data would probably vary. In fact, the Air Transport Association, the airlines’ trade group, calculates that domestic tickets in the United States cost about 16 cents a mile, excluding taxes, or at least 19 cents a mile with taxes (using the group’s estimate that taxes add 20 percent to the price of a ticket).

Carlos Mestre, deputy head of the European Commission’s transport unit, said the European Union did not collect data from airlines that would enable it to calculate a similar cost per mile. But based on information the commission has gathered, it has published numerous reports that say airfares have decreased significantly since the late 1990s, when the European Union began allowing airlines to fly freely among member countries.

“Prices have gone down quite dramatically,” Mr. Mestre said, explaining that the rapid expansion of low-fare carriers has increased competition on many routes that were once dominated by a single national airline. The number of routes within Europe has also increased 140 percent from 1992 to 2010.

Low-fare airlines now carry more than a third of all passengers traveling within Europe, forcing older competitors to lower prices, especially on popular routes.

“In Europe, there has been an awful lot more competition in the last 10 years,” said Brian Pearce, chief economist for the International Air Transport Association. “That has led to a lot more choice for passengers as well as it being cheaper to travel.”

Mr. Pearce said European travelers had benefited from the fact that many large cities had multiple airports, allowing newer airlines access to these markets. That is not so much the case in the United States, where airlines like Southwest have fought to obtain scarce takeoff and landing slots in congested cities like New York.

European airlines also face more competition than their American counterparts from other forms of transportation, particularly Europe’s robust rail network.

That competition is likely to increase in the coming years, since the European Commission recently announced an initiative to standardize the information on rail schedules and prices across member countries, making it easier for travelers to compare the cost of airlines versus the train between two cities. On some routes, ferries could be part of that comparison.

Steve Lott, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, said the shorter distances between cities in Europe was another factor influencing the competitive landscape.

“What type of model capitalizes on frequent short-distance flights?” he said. “Low-fare airlines.”

Those shorter distances also mean that driving is a viable option for many trips within Europe, especially now that border controls have been lifted, creating further competition for European carriers, Mr. Lott said.

Some analysts also note that Europe is going through a competitive phase that already took place in the United States after airline deregulation in the 1970s.

“They’re earlier in a process the U.S. experienced a while ago,” William S. Swelbar, a research engineer with the M.I.T. International Center for Air Transportation, said, noting that when adjusted for inflation, the average domestic fare in the United States has declined more than 50 percent since deregulation.

“We have a maturing market and maturing airlines,” he said. “As a result we’re seeing prices go up.”

Others argue that regulatory policies in the United States favor established airlines, stifling competition and making it harder for new carriers to enter the market and succeed.

Mr. Milke is among those who say they believe that rules prohibiting foreign-owned airlines from operating in the United States — for example, allowing Aer Lingus to fly passengers from Boston to Chicago — keeps ticket prices higher than they would be if this restriction were dropped.

“Low fares are the result of the removal of barriers to competition,” he said. “With lower prices, people travel a lot more, and that creates jobs.”

SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon said Monday that it would back a California ballot initiative that would roll back a new state law that forces more online retailers to collect sales tax.

Amazon’s decision to support the proposed referendum pits the world’s biggest online retailer against the state government, which is looking for ways to raise additional revenue to cover budget shortfalls.

The California legislature last month passed a law, now in effect, requiring online retailers to collect sales tax just like merchants physically located in the state. The law was intended to close a loophole that let online retailers sell their wares but not collect and pay sales tax to the state.

Two weeks ago, Amazon, hoping it could comply with the new law and still avoid collecting taxes, severed ties with thousands of California businesses whose Web sites linked to products on its site. California officials say that move does not free it of this year’s tax obligation, estimated at $83 million.

“At a time when businesses are leaving California, it is important to enact policies that attract and encourage business, not drive it away,” said Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president of public policy. He also called Amazon’s antisales tax position “a referendum on jobs and investment in California.”

Evan Westrup, a spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown, said Monday that, “Amazon should be spending less time punishing its affiliates, threatening lawsuits and collecting signatures and more time doing what every other retailer does in California every day.”

The collection of online sales tax by states facing budget deficits is an issue that threatens to spill across the country. Amazon has been at loggerheads in various states. The company has severed ties with affiliates in some states, including Illinois, and is in the process of closing a warehouse in Texas.

Amazon currently collects sales tax in New York, even though it says it does not have a physical presence in the state. But it is challenging the state’s law as unconstitutional.

Legally, Californians are still responsible for sales tax even when retailers do not collect it. When filing their tax forms, residents are supposed to declare what they owe in so-called use tax. Most don’t, and the state argues that the growth of online shopping is leading to an ever greater loss of revenue.

The state Board of Equalization, California’s tax collector, estimates the unpaid taxes at $1.15 billion in the last fiscal year, and estimates it will grow to almost $1.2 billion this year and $1.27 billion in 2012.

At the heart of the issue is what constitutes a company’s physical presence. The new California law expands the definition of physical presence to potentially include Amazon subsidiaries, like an office in Cupertino that designs the Kindle book reader and another in Studio City that handles online advertising.

Under the law, if Amazon fails to pay any taxes owed to California, it would be required to pay penalties and interest, like any other tax scofflaw. Its first payment would be due by Oct. 31.

 Amazon says it supports a simplified sales tax structure that would be applied evenly across the country, which would require cooperation from federal and state governments. Some state officials say the issue is about more than just tax revenue. They say it’s about fairness to local retailers competing against Amazon but with the added cost to consumers of sales tax.

Supporters of the proposed initiative must now gather around 505,000 signatures to qualify it for the ballot, according to the secretary of state. A vote could occur during the next statewide election in February 2012.

“Where does Amazon plan to collect these signatures — in front of bricks and mortar retailers that collect sales tax everyday?” asked Mr. Westrup.

Matthew Staver/Bloomberg NewsJonathan Grayer, former chief executive of Kaplan Inc.

Jonathan N. Grayer, the former chief executive of the education company Kaplan Inc., formed an investment partnership with the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Company in early 2010. Now, after looking at 350 companies over the last year and a half, they have done their first deal.

Their venture, named Weld North, has acquired Education2020, an education software company based in Scottsdale, Ariz. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but people briefed on the transaction said the purchase price was about $50 million.

Despite the deal’s small size, it underscores the keen interest of private equity firms in for-profit education.

Education2020, which is known as E2020, provides online courses across 43 states in subjects ranging from algebra to earth science to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Its products focus on so-called credit recovery, the fastest-growing segment of the online education sector. The credit recovery market serves students who have fallen behind and need to take additional courses to graduate.

These self-paced online classrooms provide a solution for budget-constrained schools that are under pressure to raise their graduation rates but cannot afford to hold additional classes.

“Credit recovery helps students who have gotten behind get back on track,” said Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Vienna, Va. ”It also gives the school a more cost-effective solution to helping students get to graduation.”

In an interview, Mr. Grayer said that Weld North would look to use E2020’s credit recovery platform to expand into the core market for online education. An estimated one million students in kindergarten through 12th grade took an online course during the 2007-8 school year, up 47 percent from the previous year, according to the Sloan Consortium, another online-education advocacy group.

“The cost pressures of our current education system are requiring an evolution to a more digital learning place,” Mr. Grayer said. “We plan to develop products that serve that need.”

Critics of online education question the efficacy of virtual coursework and argue that online classes do not compare to learning from a teacher in a classroom. In 2009, the United States Department of Education said that policy makers “lack scientific evidence of the effectiveness” of online classes.

Mr. Grayer acknowledges the quality of online coursework is an important issue and that E2020, as it continues to expand its product offerings, should be held to the highest standards.

Among the largest players in the credit recovery area is NovaNet, a subsidiary of Pearson, the British media company. Another company, Plato Learning, was recently purchased by Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, for $143 million.

Private equity firms have been very active in the for-profit education sector. Earlier this month Providence Equity Partners agreed to pay about $1.6 billion for Blackboard, a maker of course management software for universities.

Mr. Grayer, 46, left Kaplan, a unit of The Washington Post Company, after 17 years. He is credited with transforming Kaplan from a money-losing test-prep to a for-profit education giant that last year generated 62 percent of The Washington Post Company’s total sales.

Sari Factor, a Weld North managing director who ran the K-12 division at Kaplan under Mr. Grayer, will be E2020’s chief.

K.K.R. has backed Weld North — which is named after Mr. Grayer’s freshman dormitory at Harvard College — with a commitment of several hundred million dollars.

The News Corporation announced that it was prepared to submit its offer for the 61 percent of BSkyB it does not already own to the country’s Competition Commission, an independent group that considers mergers and acquisitions within the United Kingdom. The company had previously offered to spin off the Sky News channel to avoid referral to the commission, but now says it wants to keep Sky News and take its chances with the regulator.

“News Corporation is ready to engage with the Competition Commission on substance,” the company said in a statement, adding that it “continues to believe that, taking into account the only relevant legal test, its proposed acquisition will not lead to there being insufficient plurality in news provision in the U.K.”

The announcement gives the deal some breathing room, avoiding an emergency vote called by the opposition Labour Party for Wednesday, when politicians were likely to have dealt a fatal blow to the acquisition. In the longer term, the commission’s lengthy review process, which could take up to eight months, could give the News Corporation some distance from the political fallout of the hacking scandal.

But the move also raises the question of just how much the News Corporation might balance the prospects of the BSkyB acquisition, which would be the largest in the company’s history, with its newspaper business.

Mr. Murdoch built the News Corporation on newspapers — his first love and still where he devotes most of his time and energy — but the tabloid scandal has become a hindrance to his more lucrative digital and entertainment properties. With The News of the World already shut down, many observers wonder whether Mr. Murdoch would stomach selling or closing more papers.

David Bank, a media analyst at RBC Capital Markets in New York, said it was a decision that would win approval from investors.

“Investors would probably want nothing more,” he said. “It’s the worst business in the portfolio.”

But Claire Enders, a media analyst in London, said the News Corporation was still far from such a decisive move as jettisoning all of its British newspapers. “The newspapers are very dear to Mr. Murdoch’s heart,” she said. “You have also got to find a buyer for these things. They are barely profitable.”

The Murdoch family “is in a bunker,” according to one person who is close to the company but declined to be identified discussing confidential matters. But, this person added, the idea of the News Corporation getting out of the newspaper business was very unlikely.

Shares in the News Corporation fell 7 percent on Monday. Since the scandal exploded last week, shares in the company have declined 11.4 percent; shares of BSkyB have fallen more than 15 percent.

Thomas Eagan, an analyst for the London-based company Collins Stewart, said the pullback in the BSkyB stock price could actually help the News Corporation “to get it cheaper than it otherwise would have.”

Acquiring BSkyB would increase the News Corporation’s cash flow and improve its business mix, further reducing the significance of the company’s newspapers, which account for a smaller portion of its revenues than television or film.

BSkyB is firmly rooted across the British media marketplace. In the United States, it would be akin to rolling DirecTV, Turner Broadcasting and ESPN into one.

Like DirecTV, BSkyB beams channels to paying subscribers; it has 10 million in the United Kingdom, making it the biggest such service in the country. Like Turner, it operates news and entertainment channels, including Sky News. Like ESPN, it operates a suite of hugely popular sports channels.

“It is clearly embedded in the viewer’s media habits,” said Alex Degroote, a media analyst for Panmure Gordon Co. in London.

As the bid now comes before the commission, the referral is sure to delay the News Corporation’s 13-month-old effort. A spokeswoman declined to comment beyond the company’s statement.

However, the contentious bid is also the subject of a separate inquiry by the government media regulator, Ofcom, about the News Corporation’s status as “fit and proper” to hold a broadcast license after what looked like a rubber-stamp decision was thrown into doubt by the revelation that The News of the World had hacked into the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl who was abducted and killed in 2002.

Since then, the scandal has mushroomed to include allegations that the paper hacked into the accounts of dead soldiers and that the News Corporation-owned Sunday Times used subterfuge to get personal information about former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on Monday became the most senior official to publicly urge Mr. Murdoch to abandon the takeover, deepening the hacking scandal that has been transformed from a long-simmering controversy into a full-blown crisis swirling around Mr. Murdoch’s British operation, News International, and its chief executive, Rebekah Brooks.

Mr. Clegg urged Mr. Murdoch to “look how people feel about this — look how the country has reacted with revulsion to the revelations” about the phone-hacking scandal. ”Do the decent and sensible thing, and reconsider, think again about your bid for BSkyB.”

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, had already called for the bid to be stopped. While Prime Minister David Cameron has not gone so far, on Monday he said that “if I was running the company right now I think they should be focused on cleaning that up rather than on the next corporate move.”

Graham Bowley reported from London, and Brian Stelter from New York. Ravi Somaiya, Julia Werdigier and John F. Burns contributed reporting from London.

After more than six hours of talks in Brussels, the ministers issued a statement outlining a range of options for reducing the debt burden on nations that have accepted loans, including reducing their interest rates and extending loan maturities, as well as helping them to buy back their bonds.

The meeting failed, however, to resolve the continuing dispute over private sector involvement in a second bailout for Greece, and over whether Europeans should run the risk of their rescue being declared a selective default by the bond rating agencies.

That argument has put Germany — which is seeking a substantial role for private investors — at odds with the European Central Bank, which wants to avoid the risk of a new Greek bailout being declared a default, thereby spreading further alarm in the market.

Monday’s talks took place against a backdrop of acute market anxiety with the spread, or risk premium, of Italy’s bonds over their German equivalents widening amid fears that Italy will be swept into the sovereign debt crisis.

The statement issued Monday by the ministers of the 17-nation euro zone said proposals would be considered “to resist contagion risk,” including “enhancing the flexibility and the scope” of the 440-billion-euro bailout fund (about $600 billion at the time) agreed to last year.

These would include the possibility of lengthening the maturities of loans offered to debtor countries and cutting the interest rates on them.

The idea of buying bonds on the secondary market had been rejected several months ago, but now appears to be gathering momentum.

“There are a variety of ways of enhancing the flexibility,” said Olli Rehn, the European Union economic and monetary affairs commissioner, adding that bond buybacks were one of those.

“I would at this stage not exclude any option,” he added.

The idea is supported by the European Central Bank, which argues that it would satisfy calls for a private sector contribution because Greek bonds would be sold at below their face value. By being voluntary, such a program would not prompt further downgrades by the ratings agencies.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg and head of the euro zone finance ministers, said details would be filled in “shortly, and shortly means as soon as possible.”

But confusion remained over the euro zone’s broader approach toward involving the private sector in a new bailout of Greece. Until recently the European governments had insisted that private sector involvement in a new rescue for Greece should be voluntary, to avoid a selective default.

Technical negotiations in recent weeks have led several governments to believe that those objectives are incompatible, and Monday’s declaration watered down those conditions. It also welcomed ideas for voluntary private involvement, but did not say such contributions must be voluntary or that they should be substantial. The declaration also noted that the bank remained opposed to moves that would provoke a “credit event” or selective default, but it did not describe that as the position of the euro zone.

Last week a French plan for a voluntary rollover of Greek debt, designed to satisfy the ratings agencies, was rejected by Standard Poor’s. That prompted Germany to revive its earlier idea of bond swaps on the basis that, if any plan involving private investors was destined to fall foul of the ratings agencies, its model should be reconsidered.

On Monday, the Netherlands continued to press for a substantial private sector contribution, while Austria’s finance minister, Maria Fekter, said any plan that included banks and other investors “must be expressly voluntary.”

Germany had gone into the meeting skeptical of bond buyback plans, though it has not ruled out the idea, said a government official with knowledge of the discussions. Once such a plan was established, the official said, Greek bond prices would immediately rise, making the buybacks more costly and canceling out the amount effectively contributed by investors.

“You need to mobilize quite a lot of money for relatively little impact in terms of private sector involvement or debt reduction,” the official said.

Such a plan could also require a revision of the current legislation authorizing the European rescue fund, which was established last year and has already provided aid to Ireland and Portugal. That would add more political complications than already exist, the official noted. “It raises a number of question marks,” he said. “I don’t want to rule it out.”

Greece received a 110-billion-euro bailout last year, much of it in the form of bilateral loans from its European Union partners. If those loans were used instead to buy bonds, no rule changes would be needed.

The European Central Bank has already bought Greek, Portuguese and Irish bonds on the open market for 74 billion euros. But it has not made any purchases since March and is not expected to make any more purchases for fear of taking on too much risk. The bank is pushing the European Union to take on that task instead.

Stephen Castle reported from Brussels and Jack Ewing from Frankfurt.

Stephen Castle reported from Brussels and Jack Ewing from Frankfurt.

But the contagion that started in the euro zone’s smaller countries is suddenly moving to some of its largest. As Greece teeters on the brink of a default, the game has changed: Investors are taking aim at any country suffering from a combination of high debt, slow growth and political dysfunction — and Italy has it all, in spades.

In recent days, Italy has become Europe’s next weak link after Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, harmed in particular by a power struggle between Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his finance minister, Giulio Tremonti. The dispute threatens to turn the euro zone’s third-largest economy, after Germany and France, into one of its biggest liabilities.

On Monday, the Italian government struggled to rein in the tensions, as fears rose that political paralysis could make it harder for Italy to embrace the austerity demanded by outsiders to reduce one of the highest debt levels in the world. European policy makers also sought to figure out how they would put out a bigger fire if Italy were to succumb.

Those jitters hit stock markets on Monday not just in Italy, where the major index fell nearly 4 percent, but across much of Europe as well, with the markets in France and Germany off more than 2 percent each. The United States was affected, too, with the Standard Poor’s 500-stock index down about 1.8 percent on European debt fears and worries about the showdown in Washington over raising the United States debt limit.

“Italy is too big to fail,” said Moisés Naím, a senior associate in the international economics program at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. “If Italy really gets hit by contagion because of political mismanagement, it would be a threat not only to the euro zone, but to the global economy.”

Political soap operas in Italy — especially those featuring Mr. Berlusconi — are nothing new. Nor do they usually matter much to financial markets, even after the debt crisis hit Europe. The widespread problems in Italy’s economy, which has been sluggish for the better part of a decade, also rang few alarm bells.

What’s more, Italy’s banks are sound; they never speculated in a housing bubble. The current annual budget deficit is low, at about 4.6 percent of gross domestic product. And while Italy issues the largest amount of bonds of any euro zone country, Italians own about half the debt, making it less vulnerable to the follies of financial markets.

But with interest rates rising, Italy’s economy is not growing fast enough to cover an accumulated debt load of 120 percent of gross domestic product, the second-highest in Europe, after Greece. The International Monetary Fund expects growth to pick up only slightly, to 1.3 percent in 2012.

In a sign of how quickly things have turned against the country, the stock market regulator imposed emergency rules on Monday against speculation after shares in Italian banks slumped for a fifth consecutive session. The cost of insuring Italy’s sovereign debt against default surged to a record high, and the interest on its 10-year bond leaped to a record 5.67 percent.

While that is still well below what Greece pays, analysts say Italy will have serious problems if its borrowing costs exceed 6 percent.

“Italy is a banana republic that didn’t depend so much on foreign capital in the past, but now it does, and markets are less forgiving,” said Daniel Gros, the director of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels. “Italy is in the danger zone; that is quite clear now.”

Italy tends to function best in crisis management mode, analysts say, and Mr. Berlusconi has begun to acknowledge the seriousness of the dangers facing the country after a phone conversation with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on Sunday.

Today, Mr. Berlusconi “understands the risks objectively because the situation is dramatic,” said Stefano Folli, the chief political columnist for the financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore.

The impoverished city, operating under a receiver for a year, has promised $80 million worth of retirement benefits to 214 police officers and firefighters, far more than it can afford. Those workers’ pension fund will probably run out of money in October, giving Central Falls the distinction of becoming the second municipality in the United States to exhaust its pension fund, after Prichard, Ala.

“Time is running out,” warns Robert G. Flanders, the state-appointed receiver, who recently closed the public library and a community center to save money. He has no power to cancel the city’s contracts with workers, so instead he has begun approaching retired police officers and firefighters with what he describes as “the Big Ask”: will they voluntarily accept smaller benefits in the name of saving Central Falls?

Some of the retirees are in their 90s, and Central Falls, like many American cities, has not placed its police and firefighters in Social Security. Many have no other benefits to fall back on.

State lawmakers are trying to contain the damage, mindful that it would be a bad time for any state to seek help in Washington. Last month they rescinded an offer of state aid to Central Falls, just after Moody’s downgraded the city’s credit to “possibility of default.”

But the state still has risks related to the woes of its municipalities, risks that have gone largely unnoticed because it is not as big as, say, Illinois and California. Several other Rhode Island cities are sinking under big debt burdens. Even Providence, the capital, risks running out of cash in September, according to its auditor, and if it scrapes by until October, it must then come up with $60 million for its own municipal pension plan.

Some analysts fear that a Central Falls bankruptcy, and a whiff of other problems out there, could scare nervous investors away from bonds issued by Rhode Island’s other municipalities, perhaps setting off a chain reaction that could push the state itself to the brink. There is a precedent: the last American state to default on its bonds, Arkansas in 1933, got in over its head by trying to help struggling municipalities.

More recently, when local governments have veered toward bankruptcy — Orange County, Calif., in 1994; Cleveland in 1978 — neighboring municipalities have found it harder to sell their own debt. During the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975, New Jersey suddenly found its bonds harder to sell.

“That type of contagion is what you’re trying to avoid,” said James E. Spiotto, a bankruptcy specialist at the law firm Chapman Cutler, who is not involved in Rhode Island’s problems.

Rhode Island has an investment-grade credit rating, but it is in no position to bail out a string of teetering cities, or take over their shaky local pension funds the way the federal government does when some companies go bankrupt. The state treasurer, Gina M. Raimondo, says Rhode Island must first stabilize its own pension fund, which continues to require more and more cash each year, despite four overhauls since 2005 that were supposed to get the cost under control. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating. If the state turns out to have understated its commitments, it could deliver a new jolt to bond markets still nervous after two traumatic years.

Lawmakers in Rhode Island are trying to reassure investors. On July 1 they passed a law giving certain bonds, known as general obligations, legal priority over all other payments that municipalities must make, including retirement benefits. The measure, awaiting Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s signature, also requires Rhode Island’s cities, towns and districts to dedicate their general revenue to paying bondholders first, and to raise property taxes as much as necessary to make all payments to bondholders on time.

It gives less secure types of bonds priority, too, and makes local officials personally liable for any losses they cause by failing to comply with the new requirements.

For struggling borrowers in better financial shape, the outcome could be more positive: the deal would include incentives for mortgage servicers to help homeowners who have fallen behind on their payments and whose homes are worth less than they borrowed.

“The goal is to reinstate as many borrowers in a modification that performs well,” said Tony Meola, a servicing executive with Bank of America. “It also is likely to lead to faster resolution in those unfortunate situations where foreclosure is inevitable. While not a desirable outcome, the recovery of the housing markets depends on moving through the foreclosure process as quickly and fairly as possible.”

While powerful investors stand to benefit from the $8.5 billion settlement over the bank’s bundling of shoddy mortgages as securities, the fallout for the nearly 275,000 borrowers who took out those loans depends greatly on how deep they are in the foreclosure process and whether they earn enough money to dig themselves out.

While no exact income qualification has been set as part of the agreement, which was announced last month, many servicers use a formula in which borrowers can qualify for a modification as long as the new monthly payment does not exceed 31 percent of their monthly gross income. For borrowers who are unemployed or lack the income to cover even reduced mortgage payments, foreclosure and eviction could be much more immediate.

With 1.3 million borrowers at risk of foreclosure, Bank of America has been overwhelmed by the surge in defaults, and the accord has raised hopes that this logjam will finally begin to ease. But skeptics say that previous arrangements, like another multibillion-dollar settlement by Bank of America in 2008, have barely made a dent in the problem.

“The mortgage servicers have repeatedly promised to do things and then not done them,” said Michael S. Barr, a former assistant Treasury secretary who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. “I think it’s positive in general, but I don’t expect it to be transformative of what we’ve witnessed from the mortgage servicers over the last four years.”

Matthew Weidner, a Florida lawyer who represents borrowers facing foreclosure, said he was skeptical of promises by the deal’s architects that lower monthly payments would be easier to obtain.

“It’s like giving aspirin to someone with cancer,” he said of the proposed assistance. “You had all the big players at the top of the pyramid negotiating but nobody was speaking for the homeowners who have far more at stake at the ground level.”

Still, for some of the homeowners now facing foreclosure who took out loans with Countrywide, the subprime specialist bought by Bank of America in 2008, the deal could bring a few quick improvements.

Under the terms of the agreement, Bank of America must now start transferring these borrowers to 10 smaller outside servicers, even without the deal being approved in court, which is not expected before November. The architects of the settlement say these subservicers will be far more efficient than Bank of America’s giant payment processing operation.

For example, an analysis of data by RBS prepared as part of the settlement found that Bank of America provided fewer modifications as a percentage of unpaid principal than JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Litton and other servicers. In addition, borrowers defaulted again within six months in nearly one in five cases when modifications were made by Bank of America, a higher rate than other servicers that were studied.

Officials at Bank of America contend the company has made nearly 875,000 modifications since 2008, more than any other servicer.

Phil McCarten/ReutersSteve Capus, president of NBC News.

NBC News and Interactive One, a network of Web sites aimed at African-Americans, plan to announce a partnership on Monday that will combine the editorial and sales resources of both properties. The partnership will focus on aligning NBC’s African-American news site, TheGrio.com, and Interactive One’s news Web site, NewsOne.com.

“Now, for the first time, you have a news-gathering and producing organization solely dedicated to African-Americans at scale, and that really has not happened for decades,” said Tom Newman, the president of Interactive One, a digital subsidiary of Radio One.

While there are no staff changes imminent for either Web site — editorial staffs in the newsrooms of each site range from two to 10 people — reporters on both sites will be able to collaborate with one another on content.

The looming election season of 2012 and the increase in niche Web sites and advertising to African-Americans and other minority groups helped to propel the alliance. TheGrio will coordinate the sharing of content from one site to the next, and NewsOne will take the lead on advertising sales efforts, a critical part of the alliance.

“Election coverage is going to be our watershed moment,” Mr. Newman said.

According to comScore, from May 2010 to May 2011, the total audience for TheGrio grew 300 percent, to 1.3 million viewers from 319,000. NewsOne also had significant growth in the same period, increasing its viewership to 881,000 from 356,000.

“They are basically offering a more robust sales proposition, bigger audiences and the opportunity to get ads in front of more eyeballs,” said Steve Capus, the president of NBC News. “We instantly grew the business as a result of this partnership.”

Some of the top advertisers for Interactive One include Ford, American Airlines, Home Depot and Hewlett-Packard.

In August, Cosmopolitan will begin selling CFG (Cosmo for Guys), an iPad app aimed at men.

Cosmopolitan offers the answers to a lot of crucial questions. Should you get back with your ex? How do you make your pony tail sexy? Are those the right sunglasses for summer?

But one area the magazine has not delved into much is giving advice to the people whose secrets it is usually trying to unlock: men.

In August, Cosmopolitan plans to begin selling CFG (Cosmo for Guys), an iPad application aimed at men that offers a wide array of Cosmo’s brand of self-help.

The “All About Women” feature is a quiz that puts men in hypothetical situations, hoping to guide them to the right way to impress their date. She has something in her teeth. Should you tell her? Evidently yes. She comes back to the table after 10 minutes in the bathroom. Should you ask about it? Absolutely not. When do you text her after the date to let her know you had a good time? Immediately.

Looking for suggestions on what kinds of sexual activities women in your geographical area prefer? Yes, there’s an app for that. Cosmo for Guys culls responses from questionnaires on Cosmopolitan.com and feeds them through Google Maps based on where a woman has written her response.

Cosmopolitan’s editor, Kate White, insists the magazine has long had a secret following among men.

“Not long after I got here, I got a high number of e-mails from guys saying, ‘I love to look at the magazine, I sneak a peek at my girlfriend’s copy,’ ” she said. “A line I’d hear a lot is that it’s like having the opposite team’s playbook.”

To address any issues potential male customers might have with buying a brand identified with women, designers at the magazine crafted a new logo. In big capital letters, it says CFG; in small print, it says Cosmo for Guys.

And Cosmo is pinning its hopes on another important factor: the anonymity of an iPad app purchase.

“Nobody has to know,” Ms. White said.

CREDIT WNET’s MetroFocus site will look at policy issues and the peculiarly insular subjects that occupy New Yorkers.

A few weeks behind schedule, WNET’s MetroFocus Web site is set to make its official debut Monday, joining the ranks of Gothamist, DNAinfo, NearSay and numerous others in keeping tabs on local news, culture and urban life in New York City.

As promised when announced in March by WNET, the parent company of New York City-area public broadcasters WNET/Channel 13 and WLIW/Channel 21, the site in its first days will devote space to serious policy issues, including an examination of “5 Ways New Yorkers Say Welfare Policies Fail Them,” which is adapted from a report in City Limits Magazine. A “Media Mulch” column aggregates local news from other publications.

Although MetroFocus, at thirteen.org/metrofocus, has reporters who will update it twice a day, Laura van Straaten, the site’s editor in chief and executive producer, said by telephone that it is not meant to be a destination for breaking news. “We’ll be doing a lot of write-arounds, finding the best stuff that other people are doing and wrapping it up in a smart way,” she said.

The “soul of the site” is an area called “MetroLife,” Ms. van Straaten said, with such initial pieces as “What Makes a New York Deli Truly Great?” and excerpts from a new book, “I Feel Relatively Neutral About New York.” New Yorkers, she said, “tend to be navel-gazing as a people, and I haven’t seen a place where you can explore that in full.”

In the fall, once final financing is raised, WNET plans to expand MetroFocus to a half-hour television program, which will start out monthly or weekly, said Neal Shapiro, WNET’s chief executive. He said WNET expects to make MetroFocus into a daily program in the new year, which would be the company’s second local weekday news program, after taking over production of a half-hour newscast for NJTV, formerly known as the New Jersey Network, on July 1.

The campaign was created by Mullen, the company’s agency of record and part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, and is intended to highlight the company’s apparel. “Zappos has a quirky culture,” said Tim Vaccarino, group creative director at Mullen. “Doing something typical is not really them.”

The campaign departs from Mullen’s last work with Zappos, which featured (clothed) felt puppets whose voices were provided by real customer service calls and was made up primarily of television ads. The new campaign will incorporate a heavy dose of digital ads, videos and QR (for quick response) codes, as well as print ads in magazines. And if the idea of using naked people who need to be clothed to sell clothing seems too literal, that is exactly what the marketing minds at Zappos and Mullen say they had in mind.

“Sometimes advertisers try to do something very creative and the messaging gets lost,” said Michelle Thomas, the senior brand marketing manager at Zappos. The campaign also highlights Zappos’s focus on clothing as a “growth engine for the future,” Ms. Thomas said. “Zappos has a belief that really, we can sell anything.”

The Kantar Media unit of WPP says Zappos spent $19.7 million on advertising in 2010 and $4.8 million in the first quarter of 2011.

The hundreds of brands on the Zappos Web site are as varied as Stuart Weitzman and Spanx, and the company has a separate Web site, Zappos Couture, that sells higher end items from designers like Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney. The company also features Web pages where in-house stylists put together outfits and customers can determine their style personality (Are you a Mom-on-the-Go, a Casualista or Boho?).

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The new ads were shot outdoors in Manhattan locations like Park Avenue and the West Village and feature naked women, with censor bars strategically placed, doing outdoor activities like jogging or riding a Vespa scooter. A tagline on one ad reads “To help you break a sweat without breaking the law.”

Instead of tall willowy models, the ads feature “the shapes and curves of many, many people,” Mr. Vaccarino said. Tiffany Payne, who is five feet tall, was a model featured riding a scooter in downtown Manhattan.

“Sometimes when I see ads and the girls are 6 feet 2 and skinny, it sort of deters me from buying the product because I don’t think it would fit me right,” Ms. Payne said. During the shoot, the models wore pasties and thongs or tiny bikinis, which were edited out later.

Zappos is hoping consumers will keep looking at the campaign’s print ads long enough to notice that they will be enhanced with quick response codes. When scanned by a smartphone, the codes will take the phone user to a mobile site featuring fictional videos of what happens to the naked women in the ads. Users can also select outfits for the model to wear and can enter the Zappos mobile site to buy the items on the smartphone.

Ads will begin running in the August issues of magazines like Lucky, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, and Harper’s Bazaar. The target audience is what Zappos calls “happy hunters,” or women who are fashion conscious and heavy consumers of online media.

Women who may feel slighted by the lack of a naked man in the campaign will have to wait until the end of July, when Zappos will take over the home page of a major search engine portal with an interactive ad introducing a male character, Arthur. In the ad, Arthur asks the user to help him dress while he makes his way to the Zappos Web site.

“He should be captivating in an ‘I hope you’ve had your coffee already’ kind of way,” said Kay Pancheri, an account director at Mullen.

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Using nudity and sex to sell products can be a tricky proposition for brands. Ads for Calvin Klein featuring a ménage à trois of young models wearing nothing but Calvin Klein jeans drew criticism for being too sexual. Abercrombie Fitch, the retailer of clothing for teenagers, has come under fire for using overtly sexual images in its catalogs and advertisements.

In 2003, the company withdrew a holiday catalog, AF Quarterly, after protests from parent groups and others that the images encouraged sexual behavior among teenagers.

Another retailer, American Apparel, has been criticized for nudity in ads. In 2008, the company ran ads online that featured topless women among other overtly sexual images.

“The American public, I think, is mature enough to be able to handle these types of images,” said Ryan Holiday, the director of online marketing at American Apparel. Brands should consider their motives for using nudity and sexuality in ads, Mr. Holiday said.

“Are they doing it because they want to get attention from blogs and Web sites that will write about it?” he asked. “Or are they doing it because it’s the ad campaign that speaks most truly to who they are and what they want to sell?”

After being shown the new ads, some Zappos brands declined to participate in the campaign for fear that it was “too risqué for them,” Ms. Thomas said. One brand that signed up was Lolë, a manufacturer of women’s active wear. Nathalie Binda, the marketing vice president for Lolë, described the campaign as “gutsy” and “very Zapposesque.”

Lolë has been selling clothing on the Zappos Web site for four years and will feature items like tank tops and pants in the new campaign. As for the nudity? “If there was one brand out there that can do it, it’s them,” Ms. Binda said.

Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

High unemployment has become the new normal. Two years after the official end of the recession, the monthly refrain of poor jobs reports showing an unemployment rate stalled at about 9 percent does little to increase any sense of political urgency.

The monthly employment numbers, released Friday, were more bad news, showing that for the second month in a row, employers added barely any jobs in June.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

The sound of indignation can be heard outside of Washington. Twenty-six percent of Americans surveyed in the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll named unemployment the most important problem facing the country (27 percent cited the economy in general).

The A.F.L.-C.I.O. and other unions keep demanding “Good jobs now!” Progressive think tanks like the Economic Policy Institute carefully monitor employment trends. Many economists, including the professionally prominent members of the Employment Policy Research Network, insist on the need for more attention to the issue. As Till von Wachter of Columbia University put it, “Unemployment is the No. 1 economic problem facing the country today.”

Some business leaders have spoken up. Last summer, Andrew Grove, the former chief executive of Intel, wrote a passionate commentary for Bloomberg BusinessWeek calling for a “job-centric” economy.

But this is not something the country can achieve with jobs-oblivious politicians. Why isn’t unemployment reduction front and center on the policy agenda? More specifically, why has the debate over deficit reduction shoved it aside?

Here are three possible reasons.

First, unemployment is concentrated among the less educated, blacks and Hispanics who lack political or economic clout.

Second, high unemployment is not hurting overall business profits, which have soared to historic heights. In the 1930s, joblessness reduced the demand for consumer goods, idling many businesses as well as workers, creating economic incentives to support public job-creation efforts.

Today, our largest corporations and richest investors are well positioned to take advantage of growing demand in emerging markets far from our shores, whether in the form of increased exports or new investment opportunities.

As a small-business owner explained in a recent Wall Street Journal article, he only sells domestically and does not have the opportunity to “exploit foreign markets that are growing faster.”

Third, the jobless individuals, public employees and small-business owners who could, in theory, form a strong political coalition to support more active job creation are constantly subjected to a barrage of arguments that we should do nothing but cut government spending and hope for the best.

A recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek article, for example, asserted, “There’s vanishingly little that policy makers can do to create jobs for their citizens.” Yet solid research based on analysis of differences in state and county spending shows that some components of President Obama’s initial fiscal stimulus were quite effective at creating jobs. Unemployment would have soared higher without them.

A conspicuously large repertoire of more targeted job-creation proposals could significantly lower unemployment, including public investments in energy-saving projects and cheap credit for small businesses (both developed by economists at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, my academic home) and increased investment in infrastructure (advocated by the Economix blogger Laura D’Andrea Tyson, among others).

But political interest is low among most Democrats, and Republican governors and Republicans in Congress are pushing to cut unemployment insurance benefits, proclaiming that this would help the economic recovery. I’ve tackled this argument before, and a detailed critique can be found in this article by David R. Howell, an economist at The New School, and Bert M. Azizoglu, a graduate student there, forthcoming in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.

On the state level, many efforts to expand employment involve attempts to woo businesses from other states with tax breaks, hardly a process that is likely to increase jobs for the nation as a whole. A fascinating “This American Life” episode on public radio, “How to Create a Job,” describes a special government office in Arizona that does nothing but try to persuade California businesses to relocate.

How can advocates for public job creation reach a wider audience? We need to keep making the case wherever and whenever we can.

If you or someone else you know (employed or not) needs some fun summer reading, I recommend the new graphic novel, “The Adventures of Unemployed Man.” It describes a heroic search for work that requires an epic battle against the Just Us League.

Emile Wamsteker/Bloomberg NewsGlazed donuts for sale at a Dunkin’ Donuts store in West Orange, N.J.

The owner of Dunkin’ Donuts is looking to raise as much as $460.6 million in a stock offering, the latest privately held company looking to go public.

Dunkin’ Brands, which also owns the Baskin Robbins ice cream chain, disclosed in a regulatory filing on Monday that is planned to sell 22.25 million shares in an initial public offering. Underwriters have the option to sell an additional 3.34 million shares if demand warrants.

The estimated price range is $16 to $18 a share. At the top end of the offering range, Dunkin’ Brands could raise as much as $460.6 million if underwriters sell the additional shares.

The company plans to use the proceeds to reduce debt.

Like many companies owned by private equity, Dunkin’ Brands has a sizable debt load, which has weighed on earnings. In March 2006, Bain Capital Partners, the Carlyle Group and Thomas H. Lee Partners acquired the company from Pernod Ricard.

After posting a loss of $269.9 million in 2008, Dunkin’ Brands returned to profitability, earning $35 million in 2009 and $26.9 million in 2010. This year has been rocky. The company reported a $1.7 million loss in the first quarter, compared with a $5.9 million profit in the period a year earlier.

JPMorgan, Barclays Capital, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs are the lead underwriters on the deal.

In America, newspapers have been seen as an expensive hobby for Mr. Murdoch, the bane of the News Corporation’s shareholders, but as it turns out, the newspapers in Britain may end up being more costly to him in the long run.

So useful in wielding influence, if not producing revenue, his newspapers are the very thing that brought his company into the cross hairs, and delayed, at least temporarily, his efforts to expand it by gaining full control of British Sky Broadcasting, the largest pay television company in Britain.

Logic and fairness would suggest that it was folly to concentrate so much power in the hands of someone who already controlled many national media assets. So where was the outrage? Well, check who owns the megaphone. The News Corporation has historically used its four newspapers — it also owns The Sun, The Times of London, and The Sunday Times — to shape and quash public debate, routinely helping to elect prime ministers with timely endorsements while punishing enemies at every turn.

Don’t take my word for it. After David Cameron was elected prime minister, one of the first visitors he received at 10 Downing Street was Mr. Murdoch — discreetly through a back entrance — and Mr. Cameron spoke plainly last week about the corrosively close relationship. “The truth is, we’ve all been in this together,” he said.

“The press, the politicians and leaders of all parties.” To which a dumb Yank like me might say, “Duh.”

The only thing Mr. Cameron didn’t do was point to Mr. Murdoch himself. But he didn’t really have to after the tactical ruthlessness of Mr. Murdoch’s familiars was laid bare for all to see.

Newspapers, as anybody will tell you, aren’t what they used to be. Part of the reason that the News Corporation was willing to close down a paper with a circulation of about 2.7 million copies every Sunday was that its revenue was under $1 billion. (The News Corporation’s heir apparent, James Murdoch, has always seemed eager to shed some of the company’s newspapers, though I doubt that putting the nail gun to this paper was what he had in mind.)

Still, how did we find out that a British tabloid was hacking thousands of voice mails of private citizens? Not from the British government, with its wan, inconclusive investigations, but from other newspapers.

Think of it. There was Mr. Murdoch, tying on a napkin and ready to dine on the other 60 percent of BSkyB that he did not already have. But just as he was about to swallow yet another tasty morsel, the hands at his throat belonged to, yes, newspaper journalists.

Newspapers, it turns out, are still powerful things, and not just in the way that Mr. Murdoch has historically deployed them.

The Guardian stayed on the phone-hacking story like a dog on a meat bone, acting very much in the British tradition of a crusading press, and goosing the story back to life after years of dormancy. Other papers, including The New York Times, reported executive and police complicity that gave the lie to the company’s “few bad apples” explanation. As recently as last week, Vanity Fair broke stories about police complicity.

Mr. Murdoch, ever the populist, prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect.

His corporation may be able to pick governments, but holding them accountable is also in the realm of newspaper journalism, an earnest concept of public service that has rarely been of much interest to him.

The coverage last week, on a suddenly fast-moving story that had been moving only in increments, destabilized the ledge that the News Corporation had been standing on. James Murdoch regretted everything and took responsibility for almost nothing. What looked like an opportunity for him to prove his mettle as a manager of crisis might yet engulf him.

Andy Coulson, the former editor of News of the World who became the chief spokesman for Mr. Cameron, has been arrested. And Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International and previous editor of The News of the World, responded by saying that it was “inconceivable” that she knew of the hacking.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com; Twitter.com/carr2n

Because of agreements between the city’s leaders and employee unions, many drivers often are required only to chauffeur other employees and equipment to work sites across Chicago. Upon arrival, the drivers then just wait while other workers complete such tasks as installing street lights or trimming trees.

“It is commonplace, if you are a resident of the city of Chicago, to see work crews on which only a couple of people are working and others appear to be standing or sitting idle,” Mr. Ferguson said last week. “The remarkable thing about this is they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. We have basically codified wasteful overstaffing.”

As Mayor Rahm Emanuel begins to grapple with the city’s daunting financial shortfalls, he faces a thicket of longstanding labor rules that could complicate efforts to make city government operate more efficiently.

Just two months after his inauguration, Mr. Emanuel already finds himself locked in a dispute with union officials over his demand that they agree to change some workplace rules or face hundreds of layoffs.

Mr. Emanuel and his budget-cutting aides are plunging into a murky legal sphere.

Reaching a clear understanding of how city employees are supposed to earn their taxpayer-financed paychecks can be much more complicated than merely reading union contracts. The way things have been done historically carries legal weight, labor law experts say.

The new mayor’s options appear to be limited even further by the 10-year contracts that Richard M. Daley reached with dozens of city workers’ unions in 2007. Those deals promised the same conditions and annual wage increases for union members through 2017.  Still, there are clauses that seem to allow the Emanuel administration to reopen the contracts in 2012.

With a budget deficit that could exceed $700 million next year, and with personnel costs representing the vast majority of expenses, Mr. Emanuel has said everyone must make sacrifices to help balance the city’s books. He has adhered to his campaign pledge to refrain from requesting that employees take more unpaid days off to save money, as Mr. Daley pushed them to do for years.

Instead, Mr. Emanuel said last month, he will have to lay off more than 600 workers unless their unions agree to changes in work rules. Although at first city officials did not offer details, Mr. Emanuel last week described three of the nine proposals he had presented to union officials in a closed-door meeting. The mayor and his aides have not publicly revealed the other six changes or the amounts that any of the nine changes would save.

Two of those ideas would affect the city’s hoisting engineers, who operate heavy machinery and who belong to the clout-heavy International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150. The mayor suggested an end to the contractually mandated practice of paying those employees double their usual $45.10 hourly rate for overtime. Almost all other city employees are entitled to just one-and-one-half times their regular wage when they work overtime.

Mr. Emanuel also called for changes to the perk that hoisting engineers call “grease time,” a practice that guarantees a half-hour of overtime pay in each shift for maintaining the heavy equipment that union members operate.

Even before factoring in overtime, which has added tens of thousands of dollars to yearly wages, the annual pay for more than 200 hoisting engineers is at least $93,808.

Officials of Local 150 declined to answer questions about the two mayoral proposals.

The hoisting engineers’ union, which had been a major supporter of Mr. Daley, backed Gery Chico to succeed him in the election in February.

The third concept Mr. Emanuel mentioned last week would involve compelling the city’s administrative staff to work 40 hours a week instead of 35.

dmihalopoulos@chicago
newscoop.org