IHT Quick Read: May 3

NEWS The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings told F.B.I. interrogators that he and his brother considered suicide attacks and striking on the Fourth of July as they plotted their deadly assault, according to two law enforcement officials. Eric Schmitt, Mark Mazzetti, Michael S. Schmidt and Scott Shane report.

More than two years after the Egyptian uprising, the country’s new Islamist government has struggled to confront a drop in tourism and the faltering economy. But the leadership has remained silent about another crucial indicator that has surged to a 20-year high: the country’s birthrate. Kareem Fahim reports from Cairo.

The European Central Bank cut its benchmark interest rate to a record low on Thursday. But its president, Mario Draghi, indicated that his promise last year to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro had limits. Jack Ewing reports.

In an unexpected turn in the investigation into the deadly collapse of the Rana Plaza building, the Bangladeshi police on Thursday arrested the engineer who warned a day before the disaster that the building was unsafe. Jim Yardley and Julfikar Ali Manik report from Savar, Bangladesh.

An elderly British television and radio personality has admitted to 14 counts of sexually abusing girls ages 9 to 17 decades ago, it emerged on Thursday. The broadcaster, Stuart Hall, 83, pleaded guilty to the charges last month, but the news media was prohibited from reporting the plea until now. Sarah Lyall reports from London.

With Benedict’s return to Vatican City, the pope emeritus inaugurates a living arrangement as unusual as it may be unpredictable: a former pope and a current pope both living within the Vatican walls. Elisabetta Povoledo reports.

ARTS The sculpture of a boy holding a squirming frog was commissioned to sit at the tip of the Punta della Dogana, between the Grand and the Guidecca canals in Venice. The work, by the California artist Charles Ray, is a much-loved landmark, photographed daily by scores of tourists, and was to have celebrated its fourth anniversary there next month. But the city, which controls the spot, plans to remove it on Tuesday and replace it with a reproduction of the 19th-century lamppost that formerly stood there. Carol Vogel reports.

It’s not uncommon for China to ask for editing changes in movies to fit its ideological framework, but in the case of “Iron Man 3,” the movie actually added four minutes of product placements. Joyce Lau writes from Hong Kong.

SPORTS In a city full of soccer clubs, including 6 of the 20 in the Premier League, the team you support can say a lot about you.This Saturday alone, six London teams â€" four from the Premier League and two from the Championship â€" will play home games, meaning that in a single afternoon as many as 150,000 fans will attend matches taking place in stadiums that are all less than 10 miles from Westminster Abbey. Sam Borden writes from London.

Iraq’s Kurds at the Eye of Regional Storm

ERBIL, Iraq â€" Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, has been on self-imposed gardening leave for the past few weeks, having moved from Baghdad to his native Kurdistan as part of a Kurdish boycott of the central government.

Along with Khayrullah Hassan Babaker, the trade minister and fellow Kurd, and Kurdish members of the national Parliament, he left his post in the Iraqi capital as a signal of Kurdish discontent over deteriorating relations with the government of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite prime minister.

With Mr. Maliki now confronting a renewal of sectarian conflict with the Sunni community after ordering a violent crackdown on Sunni protests this month, he appears to have decided it is time to patch up his differences with the autonomous Kurdish region.

After talks in Baghdad with a high-level Kurdish delegation this week, he has decided to make a rare trip north to Erbil in about 10 days for further talks on divisive security and budget issues, senior Kurdish officials told Rendezvous.

In turn, Mr. Zebari and his colleagues will resume their functions in Baghdad.

The deal follows a week in which the Kurdish Regional Government (K.R.G.) unilaterally sent its soldiers to deploy around the disputed city of Kirkuk.

According to Kurdish officials, they were sent to fill a security vacuum left by Iraqi Army units, which had abandoned their positions for fear of retaliation after the army attacked a Sunni protest camp in Kirkuk province.

The territory governed by the K.R.G. has been mercifully spared the sectarian violence that has gripped the rest of the country for much of the decade since the 2003 U.S-led invasion that toppled the government of Saddam Hussein.

Kurdistan, with its own government and its own army, exists as a virtual state with a state and is enjoying unprecedented prosperity for a region that was once the most impoverished and repressed in the country.

Kurdish officials acknowledged that with the rest of Iraq now threatened by a renewal of strife between Sunni and Shiite â€" April saw 460 violent deaths in sectarian conflicts â€" there was a temptation for Kurds to wish a plague on both sets of their Arab neighbors.

The officials privately blame the upsurge on Mr. Maliki’s crackdown on Sunnis, which they say is inspired by his fear of Sunni fundamentalism spreading across the border from Syria.

Many Kurds now say they would be better off with an independent state rather than continuing to be tied to a failing Iraq. Officials insist, however, that neither Kurdish independence nor the disintegration of Iraq would allow the Kurds to escape the current realities of the region.

“This is a civil war,” said one high-ranking official, who asked not to be named, describing the tensions between Sunni and Shiite. “But for the Kurds, a stable Iraq is vital for their interests.”

If the Kurds of Iraq cannot turn their back on the situation in their own country, neither can they ignore developments in neighboring Turkey and Syria.

They are closely watching developments in the peace process between Turkey and the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) Under a cease-fire deal, P.K.K. fighters will leave Turkey for the isolated Qandil Mountains of Iraq where the military leadership is already established.

Kurdish officials said they welcomed the peace agreement but were alert to the dangers of hosting militants who no longer have a war to fight in their own land.

Syrian refugees â€" both Kurds and Arabs â€" have meanwhile been arriving in Iraqi Kurdistan to escape the conflict in their country.

Iraqi Kurdish officials say they have also been providing unspecified assistance to Kurdish groups in Syria to secure areas they control in order to keep out Qaeda-linked elements within the Syrian rebel movement.

Surveying the current geopolitical dilemmas facing the Iraqi Kurds, the high-ranking official said, “The Iraqi and Syrian theaters are merging into one. Everything is related.”

In China, Iron Man’s Muscle Is Fed by Inner Mongolian Milk

HONG KONG â€" The issue of whether Hong Kong falls under Chinese rule, or its own, is a complex one. But, at least in terms of pop culture, Hong Kong is separate.

Audiences here got the Andy Warhol retrospective complete with the Mao portraits that were removed in Beijing and Shanghai. We got to see a fully naked Tony Leung in “Lust, Caution,” and heard what was whispered in the twist ending. The blood in our “Django Unchained” was a normal red. (Though why artificially darkened blood is considered less disturbing is a mystery to me.)

Mainland Chinese audiences are used to getting their foreign culture with bits missing. A fight scene in New York’s Chinatown was deleted from “Men in Black 3” because, as we all know, nobody ever fights in Chinatown. The unsightly image of laundry hanging in Shanghai was snipped out of “Mission: Impossible 3,” presumably because the authorities want to present a view of a modern China â€" one with an electric washer/ dryer in every laundry room.

“Iron Man 3,” which stars Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow, opened Wednesday in mainland China and broke opening-day box office records. In that film there were additions rather than cuts: four more minutes of footage.

The government usually offers justifications for most cuts: Scenes are too violent or sexually charged for a country that has no ratings like PG-13 or R. There are political reasons why they do not want Chinese bad guys or sensitive topics. But the “Iron Man” additions were basically advertisements for Chinese products and stars. Whose decision it was to make those additions has not been revealed.

In a sign that Hong Kong still has some autonomy, audiences here are spared the Chinese version. That means that â€" along with viewers in America, where the film opens Friday â€" we miss the first scene that asks, “What does Iron Man rely on to revitalize his energy?”

The answer, for trivia-seeking fans, is Gu Li Duo, a “milk drink” from Yili, an Inner Mongolia-based dairy. This is more than just product placement, given that the Chinese government has been trying to calm parents who are jittery over the safety of domestic milk. Consumers â€" along with black-market traders â€" have been flocking to buy out milk powder from Hong Kong, causing the city to impose a two-tin export limit on baby formula. Last year, Yili had to withdraw some of its baby formula because of high levels of mercury.

None of that seems to bother Dr. Wu (played by Wang Xueqi), who drinks from a carton of Gu Li Duo in the Chinese version of the film. Dr. Wu also uses Chinese medicine to help Iron Man, and is aided by his pretty assistant, the doe-eyed Chinese star, Fan Bingbing. She never appears again or is given a name. Perhaps her job is to make sure there’s always Gu Li Duo in the fridge to keep Dr. Wu and Iron Man strong.

The extra scenes were quickly panned by Chinese netizens. The additions also included product placements by the Chinese electronics maker TCL, a mention of heavy industry giant Zoomlion and a group of perfect cheering Chinese schoolchildren.

Japan got its own version of “Iron Man 3.” Some reports said that the “4DX” Japanese screenings would also involve smells. There are many movies I would have loved to smell â€" “Chocolat,” “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman,” even “Ratatouille” â€" but probably not this one. What would Iron Man smell like? Manly sweat? Burning metal?

According to a review by Wired, the seats vibrated, lights flashed, gusts of wind blew around the theater, and water was sprayed into moviegoers’ faces â€" but no interesting smells were recorded. The reviewer, Daniel Feit in Nagoya, called it “a drag.”

The Los Angeles Times writes that ” ‘Iron Man 3’s’ efforts to appeal to Chinese audiences fall flat.” But was that ever the point?

Do you find it strange that different versions of the same movie play in different countries? Do product placements and special effects ruin a film? Should Hollywood studios bend to Chinese government, or anyone else’s, interests?