IHT Quick Read: Nov. 30

NEWS Security forces in Myanmar mounted a violent raid Thursday against Buddhist monks and villagers protesting the expansion of a copper mine, using incendiary devices to set fire to protesters' encampments, according to witnesses. The crackdown was the largest since President Thein Sein's government came to power 20 months ago, and analysts said its brutality - online photos showed monks with badly seared skin - could hamper the president's efforts to convince the country he has made a clean break from the military governments of the past. Thomas Fuller reports from Bangkok.

After President François Hollande and his industry minister raised the possibility that the French state would take over an ArcelorMittal steel factory in a dispute over the foreign company's plans to close two blast furnaces, union workers in another industry - shipbuilding - are calling for the government to seize their South Korean employer's property. The French corporate establishment i s bracing for a global backlash, if the nationalization impulse takes hold. David Jolly reports from Paris.

A long-awaited report on the behavior of British newspapers embroiled in the phone hacking scandal recommended on Thursday a new system of press regulation that would be backed by parliamentary statute, setting up what threatened to become an acrimonious debate about curbs on Britain's 300-year-old tradition of broad press freedom. Weighing in at 1,987 pages, the report reprised nine months of testimony at the inquiry led by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, who was appointed at the height of the scandal that erupted around the now-shuttered News of the World tabloid. John F. Burns and Alan Cowell report from London.

Jasmine Lee, who was born Jasmine Bacurnay in the Philippines, made South Korean history in April when she became the first naturalized citizen - and the first non-ethnic Korean - to win a seat in the country's National Assembly. Her election re flected one of the most significant demographic shifts in South Korea's modern history, as a country that once took pride in being of “one blood” faces the prospect of becoming a multiethnic society, with one marriage in 10 now involving a foreign spouse. Choe Sang-Hun reports from Seoul.

British banks need more capital to protect them against fallout from the crisis in the euro zone, the Libor rate-manipulation litigation and other potential costs, the Bank of England warned in a report Thursday. The central bank said that current capital ratios at major British banks were probably insufficient because possible future losses and costs of bad loans or other past business decisions might be bigger than expected. Julia Werdigier reports from London.

ARTS In his latest film, “Hyde Park on the Hudson,” Bill Murray plays President Franklin D. Roosevelt as he manages an affair with a distant cousin, a visit from George VI of Britain and the crippling effects o f his polio. It is a part that almost no one, least of all Mr. Murray, expected him to play, and it again raises the question: Why does he do what he does? Dave Itzkoff asked him.

SPORTS The latest symbol of the college football arms race is not the coaches' salaries themselves, but rather the money that university officials are spending to buy out those contracts when a coach falters. Jeré Longman reports.

From the Ashes, Tibetan Buddhism Rises in the Heart of the Forbidden City

On a freezing Tuesday this week, dozens of special guests from China's cultural, political and business elites gathered within the blood-red walls of the Forbidden City. They were there for the opening of the newly restored Hall of Rectitude, the center of Tibetan Buddhism during China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing.

After a fire in 1923, the hall and about a half-dozen surrounding buildings that comprise the Buddhist architectural complex lay in ruin for nearly a century in the northwestern corner of the 8,000-room former imperial palace.

After six years of restoration funded by the Hong Kong-based China Heritage Fund, the Zhong Zheng Dian, as it's known in Chinese, is back, rebuilt from the ground up, though it won't be open to the public for at least two years according to officials at the Forbidden City's Palace Museum, the Beijing News said (in Chinese).

The opening comes at a tense time in relations between the Beijing government and people in th e Tibet autonomous region. At least three more Tibetans burned themselves to death in protest of Chinese rule this week, according to a Web site run by Tibetan exiles.

This brings the number of self-immolations by Tibetans to about 90, according to overseas-based Tibet advocacy groups. Significantly, the protests are taking place outside the autonomous region in the Tibetan-populated homeland provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu, which were once relatively peaceful, said Robert Barnett, a scholar of Tibetan studies at Columbia University. This presents a “very dramatic issue for China and its strategies,” Mr. Barnett said.

The painful state of Sino-Tibetan relations wasn't mentioned at the event on Tuesday afternoon, where the guests included the China-born, naturalized American Nobel prize winner, Chen Ning Yang (Physics, 1957); a deputy foreign minister, Cui Tiankai; and Shan Jixiang, the recently appointed head of the Palace Museum, who has big plans fo r the institution.

Historically and religiously, the event was deeply significant.

Much of China's claim to Tibet rests on the close relationship that existed between Beijing and Lhasa during the reign of three Qing emperors - Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong - in the 17th and 18th centuries. Tibet's religious leader, the Dalai Lama, exercised great influence on the emperors during that time, in a patron-priest relationship.

Artistically, too, it's significant: the palace's large collection of Tibetan art and artifacts, including ritual worship objects, once again have a unified home in three galleries, as well as a small research space, the Research Center for Tibetan Buddhist Heritage.

“It's like a home-coming for the artifacts,” said Gerald Szeto, an architect at the Beijing-based firm of Mo Atelier Szeto, who did the interior design of the galleries. “For a hundred years the whole area was left fallow,” he said.

The Palace Museum says it has about 20,000 Tibetan Buddha statues in its collection dating from the 7th to the early 20th centuries, and over 1,000 tangkas, or religious paintings. Some were on display on Tuesday, including an intricate, highly-colored, 18th century, three-dimensional mandala of brass and enamel (above), and tangkas painted in gold.

“The art and ancient artifacts are very mysterious to the outside world because they've never been shown before,” Luo Wenhua, a curator and researcher of Tibetan and Buddhist art at the museum, said in a telephone interview.

“There are written records for almost every piece in the imperial collection, including where it is from, which year it was made, and the name of donors, its history and so on,” said Mr. Luo, who has in the past called for greater protection for Tibetan Buddhist history in the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai, here in Chinese.

“Some have very detailed information. This makes the pieces mor e precious, no matter what their artistic or academic value, because compared to other similar stuff in the rest of the world there are clear clues as to their identities,” he said.

“It supports the study of Buddhist culture in Tibet and Mongolia, and its influence in China.”

Europe Moves to Curb Power of Ratings Agencies, Sort of

LONDON - European legislators this week struck the latest blow in the Continent's battle with the international ratings agencies by approving new controls that one commentator said on Thursday marked the end of their “golden age.”

The measures follow a string of downgrades of the sovereign debt of European states that have dented national pride as much as the ability of governments to raise money in the marketplace.

The plan principally targets the “big three” U.S.-based agencies - Fitch, Moody's, and Standard & Poor's - which are accused by their European critics of exercising too much power and not enough responsibility in assessing national and corporate debt.

They have been accused of exacerbating Europe's debt woes by issuing downgrades at delicate moments of the euro crisis, and their judgment has been challenged over the top scores they awarded to doubtful debt ahead of the 2008 financial meltdown.

In the latest downgrade, Moody's las t week took away France's prized AAA rating, citing the country's loss of competitiveness and excessive regulation.

Under measures approved by the European Parliament and awaiting endorsement by European Union governments, the agencies face new rules that include making it easier for investors to sue them if they get it wrong.

In a possible foretaste of that, prosecutors in southern Italy were reported to have called for seven executives at Standard & Poor's and Fitch to be tried over downgrades that were made to Italy's sovereign debt rating last year.

“In tough times it's natural that people are looking for a scapegoat for all the turmoil,” Management Today, a British business news Web site, said of the Italian case.

Standard & Poor's reportedly dismissed the Italian claims as “entirely baseless and without any merit.”

The latest moves in Europe came after the big three warned that the United States could be facing its own downgrade as it approaches the so-called fiscal cliff.

The measures approved by the European Parliament would bar the agencies from rating corporate or national debt if they did not have sufficient quality information on which to base their findings.

They would also be subject to a timetable of when they could publish their unsolicited assessments of European debt.

The new rules would also bar agencies from rating companies in which their shareholders have a major stake. That could prevent ratings being issued on Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. by Moody's, an agency in which the Sage of Omaha has a 12.75 percent stake.

The Financial Times questioned how such rules will be implemented in practice and how they would apply to ratings in the United States.

Michel Barnier, Europe's internal market commissioner, welcomed agreement on rules that aimed to reduce “the over-reliance on ratings, eradicate conflicts of interest, and establish a civil liabili ty regime.”

Others were more skeptical about the impact of what, in the end, was a compromise deal that did not go as far as some European critics of the agencies wanted.

“This reform is no big breakthrough in changing the rating agency market,” Sven Giegold, a German member of the European parliament, told Reuters. “It's a step towards better supervision but there are no big structural changes.”

Les Echos, the French business daily, also suggested that the Europeans appeared to have lost interest in setting up their own rival agency to replace the big three. It said there was no longer much talk about that project, which the European Commission is due to report on in 2016.

Norbert Gaillard, an economist who specializes in the sector, said many investors were concerned about the creation of a public or quasi-public agency that would have to be set up from scratch.

“You might as well say it's been put in the cupboard and will never se e the light of day,” he told Les Echos.