IHT Quick Read: Feb. 27

NEWS The political gridlock in Italy revives a question that hasn’t been heard lately: Is the euro zone crisis really over Judging by the panic that seized financial markets on Monday and carried over into European stock and bond trading on Tuesday, the answer seems to be no. Liz Alderman reports from Rome, and Jack Ewing from Frankfurt.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Chuck Hagel as defense secretary on Tuesday after he survived a bruising struggle with Republicans. At the same time, President Obama’s nominee to be Treasury secretary moved closer to approval with bipartisan support, suggesting that the Republican blockade against the administration’s second-term nominees was beginning to ease. Jeremy W. Peters reports from Washington.

A Grad rocket fired from the Gaza Strip struck in southern Israel early Tuesday, threatening to further escalate tensions that have been mounting since Saturday, when a 30-year-old Palestinian prisoner died in an Israeli jail. Jodi Rudoren reports from Jerusalem.

Talks between Iran and six world powers over its nuclear program will go into a second day, with Western diplomats waiting to get a clear response from Tehran to an offer of step-by-step sanctions relief in return for confidence-building measures from Iran, Western diplomats said on Tuesday. Steven Erlanger reports from Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Several high-profile cases may change social attitudes about rape and the handling of rape cases in China and India, two places where victims are often shamed and justice is elusive. Didi Kirsten Tatlow reports from Beijing.

A cramped hilltop town outside Rome is in its final preparations for the arrival on Thursday afternoon of an honored guest: Pope Benedict XVI, who will commence his new life as pope emeritus, one of the titles by which he will be known. Elisabetta Povoledo reports from Castel Gandolfo, Italy.

The music industry, the first media buiness to be consumed by the digital revolution, said on Tuesday that its global sales rose last year for the first time since 1999, raising hopes that a long-sought recovery might have begun. Eric Pfanner reports.

FASHION On Thursday, Alexander Wang will face his baptism by fire. America’s Wonderkind, whose streetwise-meets-couture aesthetic has made him a fashion star in New York at age 29, is bringing his Asian background, his Californian school years and his New York fashion energy to the storied house of Balenciaga. Suzy Menkes reports.

ARTS With the Bayerische Staatsoper’s new production of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” the directo! r Calixto! Bieito has not lost his appetite for operatic violence. George Loomis reviews from Munich.

SPORTS Kei Kamara, whose family fled war in Sierra Leone while he was a child, is impressing with Norwich City in the Premier League, while the Barcelona defender Eric Abidal is nearing a return. Rob Hughes reports from London.

Time for an Asian Pope

BEIJING â€" As details emerge about what Pope Benedict XVI plans for his imminent retirement - he’ll be called “pope emeritus,” live in the Vatican next door to the radio station, keep his white papal cassock but swap his signature red shoes for brown loafers, according to the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi - a bigger issue is swirling: who will be his successor

Or as Sandro Magister, the commentator and author of political histories of the church, wrote on his blog, www.chiesa, “Who Will Take Up the Keys of Peter”

The pope’s last day at work, officially, is Thursday, Feb. 28. In the middle of March, 117 cardinals will gather in Rome to select a new leader, Mr. Magister wrote.

They’ve done it many times before.

“But this time it will be completely different,” wrote Mr. Magister. The pope’sresignation took the cardinals by surprise, coming “like a thief in the night”. There hasn’t been time for the discussions beforehand that would allow them “to arrive at the conclave with sufficiently vetted options already in place” about a suitable successor, he wrote.

In papal terms, it’s a roller-coaster ride.

So who are the main candidates

Lists vary, but Mr. Magister, a respected commentator, offers an interesting one: three Italians, three North Americans, and Luis Antonio Tagle, the archbishop of Manila, capital of the Philippines, Asia’s only majority-Catholic nation. He was elevated to cardinal last year in Rome.

In his mid-50s, Cardinal Tagle is popular at home, according to reports in the Philippine media. He’s considered humble, coming from a working-class family outside Manila, and is  truly interested in charitable work. As the Inquirer.net wrote in a headline: “Philippine papal bet wants people power for Church.” In the article, one of Cardinal Tagle’s mentors, Father Rome Ner, was quoted as saying he possesses “remarkable empathy, as well as discipline and intellect.”

But is the archbishop of Manila a true “papabili,” or papal candidate

The six candidates from Italy and North America (who include Cardinal Angelo Scola of Italy and the Canadian Marc Ouellet, a former archbishop of Québec who is now a prefect in the Vatican congregation), are strong, noted Mr. Magister, with that core region still holding “the theological and cultural leadership over the whole Church,” despite the fact that today, the church is probably more enthusiastically viewed and joined in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia than in Europe or North America.

Still, “nothing prevents the next conclave from deciding to abandon the old world and open up to the other continents,” he wrote.

If “there do not seem to emerge promnent personalities capable of attracting votes” from Latin America and Africa, “the same is not true of Asia,” he wrote, calling Cardinal Tagle “young and cultured” with “a balance of vision and doctrinal correctness” that is reportedly appreciated by the outgoing pope.

“Especially striking is the style with which the bishop acts, living simply and mingling among the humblest people, with a great passion for mission and for charity,” he wrote.

But at just 56, he’s perhaps too young for the job, wrote Mr. Magister (others say the Cardinal is 55.)

Still, with the church shocked at Benedict XVI’s departure on grounds of old age-related health, that could help him, too.

Memories of Floating Over Luxor, Now Tinged With the Macabre

My 5-year-old son spent the entire hot-air balloon ride over Luxor crouched in the bottom of the basket, terrified of the flames that kept shooting into the balloonâ€"the flames that produced the hot air that kept us afloat. He missed the glorious views: of the ancient ruins and the sandy hills, of the magnificent sunrise and the dancing shadows it created out of the dozens of other hot-air balloons with which we shared the early-morning sky.

We had hardly thought about danger when we booked the ride, a staple of Luxor vacations, worrying only about whether it would be worth the $240 pricetag for our family of fourâ€"and the 4:40 a.m. wake-up call. Less than two months later, with Tuesday’s horrific headlines about a crash on one of those very balloons that killed at least 18, it seems my son may have been on to something.

This is not my first there-but-for-the-grace eperience. Days after I went skydiving in the Chicago suburbs to celebrate a friend’s 40th birthday, I read that a skydiver who crash-landed into a lake we had flown over had drowned. While covering the small-plane crash that killed Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota in 2002, I discovered that the day I had spent with him three weeks earlier was on the very same King Air A-100.

Skydiving and small-plane rides in rural areas are known risks. But a fatal hot-air balloon ride Did not occur to me. (Maybe it’s that tourist mentality: I never inquired about whether the camels we rode through back roads and villages were insured, either.)

Before this morning, the balloon ride was easily one of the best memories of our weeklong adventure in Luxor and Cairo over New Year’s.

It did not begin well: The hotel failed to make that 4:40 a.m. wake-up call, and we were hopelessly late. That meant we kept a literal boatl! oad of Chinese tourists waiting to cross the Nile. Aboard the rickety wooden boat there was instant coffee, tea, and, oddly, Twinkies. On the other side, we were shuttled in vans to the open field where these huge, colorful balloons were in various stages of lifeâ€"some lying limp on the ground, others half-filled, some taking flight.

My twins hoped for one of the multicolored balloons, but we ended up in red. Some 20 strangers joined us in the basket, where the kids were just the right height to peer out of the footholds we had used to climb in. My daughter peeked; my son cowered. The blue flames roared, and we were
airborne.

The ride lasted perhaps a half-hour, each minute offering a landscape transformed by the relative height of our balloon, the others, and the emerging sun. It was remarkable, if was not quite peaceful â€" there were those loud, hot flames shooting up a few feet away every few seconds. It was flames like those that, for the doomed balloon, ignited the stream from aripped gas hose at landing, sending it bouncing back into the air to explode.

For us, on Dec. 31, the landing was smooth. Once on the ground, each rider was given a signed certificate commemorating the flight. (We passed on the offers to purchase
photographs or video.)

My daughter excitedly pasted her certificate into the vacation journal she was keeping for kindergarten. Now that seems like a macabre piece of memorabilia. We will be waiting a long time to tell our children the postscript to our adventure.

Europe’s Reaction to Italian Elections: ‘Devastating’ ‘Chaos’

LONDON â€" Deadlock Impasse Stalemate Take your pick.

The European press was united on Tuesday in its anguish over an indecisive election in Italy that commentators said threatened to make the country ungovernable.

Germany’s Der Spiegel said the only good news was that Silvio Berlusconi did not win.

“But the bad news is disturbing enough,” according to Der Speigel’s Hans-Jürgen Schlamp. “Center-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani was unable to win control of the Senate, meaning that a stable government in Italy looks unlikely.

“The results for Europe could be devastating.”

Italy’s European partners have more than a passing interest in the electoral gridlock. The political uncertainty puts new strains on the euro at a time when leaders had hoped the worst of the criss in the currency zone was over.

Italian bonds fell on Tuesday as a period of instability threatened the euro zone’s third largest economy.

“Italians choose a government of chaos!” declared Germany’s Bild Zeitung and asked: “Will they now destroy our euro”

“The Italian impasse revives the specter of the crisis,” according to Les Echos, the French business daily, describing the election outcome as a worst-case scenario for investors.

The Open Europe think tank said on its blog that the final result looked like Brussels’ and Berlin’s worst nightmare.

It predicted there would be a lot of pressure to change Italian electoral law in the event of a re-run of the election. “For that, of course, you need a majority in both houses…,” it added wistfully.

As my colleague Rachel Donadio reported from Rome, Italian voters delivered a rousing anti-austerity message and a strong rebuke to the existing political order in the national elections.

That included a massive turnout for the populist Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, a former stand-up comedian.

Most European commentators failed to see the joke. François Sergent at Libération, the left-leaning daily, wrote, however, that it was understandable that Italians should have rallied to this “sinister clown of the Republic” given their recent politicl history.

Conservative Home, a grassroots journal of the British Conservative Party, lamented that “the only grown-up candidate in the election” â€" Mario Monti, the technocrat prime minister â€" won just 10 percent of the vote.

Markets in Europe and beyond responded initially with predictable nervousness to the news from Italy.

But my colleague Roger Cohen offered a sober reminder that Italian elections have been even more serious affairs in the past. During the Cold War, they were watched with some foreboding from the U.S. embassy.

“Italy was the soft underbelly of the West where the Communist Party might enter government,” Roger writes. “It never did.”

“By comparison, the Italian election unfoldi! ng as I w! rite is a geostrategic minnow. Markets are worried, but then markets always are.”

Comparing Asia’s Giants, China and India, on Rape

BEIJING â€" Women in China experience less sexual harassment in public places than women in India, two Asian nations with similar sized populations and fast economic growth which I compare, in terms of rape, in today’s Female Factor Letter.

A host of cultural and sociological factors probably account for that. And though the relationship between sexual harassment and rape may also be complex, researchers say rape is as big a problem in China as anywhere else.

According to The Hindu newspaper, Indian authorities first published data on rape in 1973, when life in China was still distorted by the Cultural Revolution which ended around when Mao Zedong died in 1976.

There are widespread, often anecdotal, reports of forced sex during that largely lawless decade, often carried out by power holders upon the powerless. Women wanting to escape poltical exile in the countryside, get an education or just survive may have parlayed sexual relations in which they were largely unwilling participants into advantage - a gray area when the power relationship is so unequal. It’s a factor that continues to figure today in discussions with feminists or researchers of rape in Chinese society.

Take the case of Li Tianyi, also known as Li Guanfeng, 17, whose father is a prominent army general and singer, detained last week in Beijing for allegedly taking part in a gang rape in the city.

According to Beijing News, the police this week denied widespread online reports that the victim, who has not been named, dropped charges against Mr. Li and four accomplices in exchange for financial compensation including an apartment, job and legal residence in Beijing. (Every Chinese has a “hukou,” or residence permit, which determines his or her legal residence and influences their life opportunities, and this woman was reportedly from out of town.)

!

“Criminal cases are brought by the prosecutors and cannot be withdrawn by the victim as they please,” the newspaper said, citing “official” sources. The case, which has attracted widespread attention in China, is still in the investigative stages “so one can’t even talk about the victim revoking the accusation,” the Beijing police were quoted as saying.