Bulgarian Government Is Reported Set to Resign

The government of Bulgaria will resign Wednesday afternoon following a week of sometimes violent protests, Prime Minister Boiko Borisov said in a surprise announcement to Parliament. "The people gave us power and today we are returning it," he said, according to local news reports.

Reuters

Prime Minister Boiko Borisov of Bulgaria in Parliament on Wednesday. “The people gave us power and today we are returning it,” he said.

The mass protests were triggered by electricity price increases and corruption scandals, including one over the nominee to head the state electricity regulatory commission, which sets rates. She was alleged to have sold cigarettes illegally online and her nomination was later withdrawn.

Protests in cities around the country on Sunday night were believed to be the biggest the country had seen in 16 years.

Trying to appease the protesters, the prime minister said Tuesday that the license of the Czech utility CEZ, which provides power to many residential customers in Bulgaria, would be withdrawn.

Opposition political parties had been attempting to exploit public anger over the government’s austerity measures as general elections planned for July approached. They are now likely to be held earlier.

Mr. Borisov cited beatings of protesters Tuesday by the police as one reason for his decision.

"Every drop of blood for us is a stain," he said. "I can’t look at a Parliament surrounded by barricades, that’s not our goal, neither our approach, if we have to protect ourselves from the people."

Mr. Borisov said he would not participate in an interim government.

After the announcement, members of his party left Parliament and the speaker called a recess because of the lack of a quorum.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An earlier version of this article and an accompanying photo caption misspelled the given name of Bulgaria’s prime minister. He is Boiko Borisov, not Boyko.

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No. 1 Indiana beats No. 4 Michigan State 72-68

EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Indiana has gone from good to great, and Michigan State coach Tom Izzo thinks he knows how the Hoosiers have done it.

Victor Oladipo.

"He makes them better," Izzo said.

Oladipo shook off a sprained left ankle with a spectacular performance to lift top-ranked Indiana to a 72-68 win over the fourth-ranked Spartans on Tuesday night.

"I'm not going to lie, it hurt a little," Oladipo said. "But I wanted to win."

It looked like a victory meant more to him than any other player in the highly anticipated game that matched the pregame hype.

"Oladipo is just a refuse-to-lose guy," Izzo said. "Winning time, he made the plays."

Oladipo's go-ahead putback, dunk and free throws in the final minute gave him 19 points to go with nine rebounds, five steals and a block. Not bad for a guy who didn't play after halftime of his previous game, just three days earlier, because of the injury.

Hoosiers coach Tom Crean insisted that the junior shooting guard "wasn't even close" to 100 percent healthy.

"There's no doubt his foot hurt," Crean said. "That mind was right, and that was the biggest thing."

Indiana (24-3, 12-2 Big Ten) broke a first-place tie in the conference — with four games left in the regular season — and moved a step closer toward earning top seeding next month in the NCAA tournament.

"It was a huge win for us," Oladipo said. "We've come a long way."

The Hoosiers had lost 17 straight — since 1991 — on the road against the Spartans.

"Most of those guys weren't alive," Crean said of his players. "It didn't affect them."

Michigan State (22-5, 11-3) blew chances at the line, but Izzo thought a lot of little and big plays earlier in the game were as much to blame for the missed opportunity to win.

"Games aren't lost with free throws at the end," he said.

This one was won by Oladipo

Trailing by three with 3.7 seconds left, Gary Harris was fouled on a 3-point attempt. He missed the first one — setting off sighs in the sold-out arena — and after making the second, he deliberately missed the third.

Indiana got the rebound — Oladipo grabbed it, of course — and he hit two free throws to seal the win.

"We were right there," Harris said somberly. "And, we could've won."

Keith Appling had missed the front end of a one-and-one with a little more than a minute left.

"I'd say I was more upset than surprised," he said.

Cody Zeller had 17 points — nearly doubling what he had in the previous matchup against Michigan State — while Jordan Hulls and Christian Watford scored 12 each for the Hoosiers.

Oladipo and Zeller went over the 1,000-point mark of their careers in the game, joining Hulls and Watford in the club, to give the storied program four players with that many points on the same team for the first time.

"They've got a lot of weapons," Izzo said. "They've got a lot of experience."

Harris, Indiana's Mr. Basketball last year, missed a layup in a crowded lane with 16 seconds left and finished with 19 points. Adreian Payne scored 17 and the rest of the Spartans struggled offensively.

Appling, Michigan State's leading scorer, was held to six points on 1-of-8 shooting.

"My quarterback struggled a little bit," Izzo said.

Branden Dawson had eight points and Derrick Nix scored eight and some of his contributions offensively late in the game looked like they were going to help the school win its second game in the regular season against a No. 1 team.

Nix made a go-ahead shot — after grabbing rebounds off two of his misses — to put Michigan State ahead 64-63 lead with 3:08 left and scored again in the post on its next possession.

Harris made one of two free throws with 1:38 remaining to give the Spartans a game-high, four-point lead.

Watford responded with a three-point play on the ensuing possession to pull Indiana within a point and Oladipo did the rest.

Michigan State had won five straight and 11 of 12 with its only loss during the stretch at Indiana. In last month's five-point loss at Indiana, Oladipo had 21 points, seven rebounds, six steals and three blocks.

The rematch marked the first time two top-five teams have met at the Breslin Center.

It was the third matchup of top-four teams in college basketball this season — the second for Indiana, which beat then top-ranked Michigan — and was just the fourth with a pair of Big Ten teams since 1997.

"Nothing rattles us too much," Zeller said.

___

Follow Larry Lage on Twitter: http://twitter.com/larrylage

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Well: No Consensus on Plantar Fasciitis

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

There are more charismatic-sounding sports injuries than plantar fasciitis, like tennis elbow, runner’s knee and turf toe. But there aren’t many that are more common. The condition, characterized by stabbing pain in the heel or arch, sidelines up to 10 percent of all runners, as well as countless soccer, baseball, football and basketball players, golfers, walkers and others from both the recreational and professional ranks. The Lakers star Kobe Bryant, the quarterback Eli Manning, the Olympic marathon runner Ryan Hall and the presidential candidate Mitt Romney all have been stricken.

But while plantar fasciitis is democratic in its epidemiology, its underlying cause remains surprisingly enigmatic. In fact, the mysteries of plantar fasciitis underscore how little is understood, medically, about overuse sports injuries in general and why, as a result, they remain so insidiously difficult to treat.

Experts do agree that plantar fasciitis is, essentially, an irritation of the plantar fascia, a long, skinny rope of tissue that runs along the bottom of the foot, attaching the heel bone to the toes and forming your foot’s arch. When that tissue becomes irritated, you develop pain deep within the heel. The pain is usually most pronounced first thing in the morning, since the fascia tightens while you sleep.

But scientific agreement about the condition and its causes ends about there.

For many years, “most of us who treat plantar fasciitis believed that it involved chronic inflammation” of the fascia, said Dr. Terrence M. Philbin, a board-certified orthopedic surgeon at the Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Center in Westerville, Ohio, who specializes in plantar fasciitis.

It was thought that by running or otherwise repetitively pounding their heels against the ground, people strained the plantar fascia, and the body responded with a complex cascade of inflammatory biochemical processes that resulted in extra blood and fluids flowing to the injury site, as well as enhanced pain sensitivity.

But instead of lasting only a few days and then fading, as acute inflammation usually does, the process can become chronic and create its own problems, causing tissue damage and continuing pain.

This progression is also what experts believed was happening when people developed chronic Achilles tendon pain, tennis elbow or other lingering, overuse injuries.

But when scientists actually biopsied fascia tissue from people with chronic plantar fasciitis, “they did not find much if any inflammation,” Dr. Philbin said. There were virtually none of the cellular markers that characterize that condition.

“Plantar fasciitis does not involve inflammatory cells,” said Dr. Karim Khan, a professor of family practice medicine at the University of British Columbia and editor of The British Journal of Sports Medicine, who has written extensively about overuse sports injuries.

Instead, plantar fasciitis more likely is caused by degeneration or weakening of the tissue. This process probably begins with small tears that occur during activity and that, in normal circumstances, the body simply repairs, strengthening the tissue as it does. That is the point of exercise training.

But sometimes, for unknown reasons, this ongoing tissue damage overwhelms the body’s capacity to respond. The small tears don’t heal. They accumulate. The tissue begins subtly to degenerate, even to shred. It hurts.

By and large, most sports medicine experts now believe that this is how we develop other overuse injuries, like tennis elbow or Achilles tendinopathy, which used to be called tendinitis. The suffix “itis” means inflammation. But since the injury isn’t thought to involve chronic inflammation, its name has changed.

This has not yet happened with plantar fasciitis, and may not, given what a mouthful fasciopathy would be.

The evolving medical opinions about plantar fasciitis matter, beyond nomenclature, though, because treatments depend on causes. At the moment, many physicians rely on injections of cortisone, a steroid that is both a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory, to treat plantar fasciitis. And cortisone shots do reduce the soreness. In a study published last year in BMJ, patients who received cortisone injections reported less heel pain after four months than those whose shots had contained a placebo saline solution.

But whether those benefits will last is unknown, especially if plantar fasciitis is, indeed, degenerative. In studies with people suffering from tennis elbow, another injury that is now considered degenerative, cortisone shots actually slowed tissue healing.

We need similar studies in people with plantar fasciitis, Dr. Khan said. “They have not been done.”

Thankfully, most people who develop plantar fasciitis will recover within a few months without injections or other invasive treatments, Dr. Philbin said, if they simply back off their running mileage somewhat or otherwise rest the foot and stretch the affected tissues. Stretching the plantar fascia, as well as the Achilles tendon, which also attaches to the heel bone, and the hamstring muscles seems to result in less strain on the fascia during activity, meaning less ongoing trauma and, eventually, time for the body to catch up with repairs.

To ensure that you are stretching correctly, Dr. Philbin suggests consulting a physical therapist, after, of course, visiting a sports medicine doctor for a diagnosis. Not all heel or arch pain is plantar fasciitis. And comfort yourself if you do have the condition with the knowledge that Kobe Bryant, Eli Manning and Ryan Hall have all returned to competition and Mr. Romney still runs.

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Boeing Engineers Approve Pact, but Tech Workers Say No

SEATTLE (AP) — The union representing Boeing Co.'s engineers and technical workers delivered a split decision on a new contract Tuesday, with the engineers accepting their offer and the technical workers rejecting theirs and authorizing a future strike.

The union had recommended that both units reject the contract offer because it would not provide pensions to new employees. They would have a 401k retirement plan instead.

The union called that unacceptable, but the Chicago-based airplane-maker said the change was important to the company's future.

The vote came as the company is trying to solve battery problems that have grounded its new 787s. The engineers and technical workers in the union work on plans for new planes and solve problems that arise on the factory floor.

While a strike by the technical workers is not imminent, the vote means the negotiating team can call one at any time, said Bill Dugovich, spokesman for the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace.

The engineers' vote means those 15,500 employees have a new four-year contract in place, Dugovich said. Union negotiators hope to resume contract talks soon on behalf of the 7,400 technical workers, he said.

Boeing Commercial Airplanes President and CEO Ray Conner said in a statement that the company was pleased with the engineers' vote but "deeply disappointed" in the technical workers' rejection of what he called the company's "best and final" offer.

"The realities of the market require us to make changes so we can invest in new products and keep winning in this competitive environment ..." Conner said in his statement. "That's why our proposal to move future hires to an enhanced 401(k)-style retirement plan is so important, as we have repeatedly emphasized over the course of these negotiations."

Union members rejected one previous contract offer in October. SPEEA last went on strike for 40 days in 2000.

"With this second rejection by technical workers of Boeing takeaways, it's time for the company to stop wasting resources and improve its offer to reflect the value and contributions technical workers bring to Boeing," SPEEA Executive Director Ray Goforth said in a statement. "That way, we can avoid a strike and focus on fixing the problems of the 787 and restoring customer confidence in Boeing."

The latest labor unrest is happening as U.S. regulators launch an open-ended review of the 787's design and construction. Last month, a battery on a parked 787 caught fire in Boston. On Jan. 16, another 787 made an emergency landing in Japan after another battery problem.

All 50 787s that Boeing had delivered so far are grounded until the issue is resolved.

The union's nearly 23,000 employees are mostly in the Puget Sound region. Union leaders believe a strike would shut down Boeing production lines in Everett, Wash., where its big planes are made, as well as in Renton, Wash., where it cranks out the widely used 737.

The factory-floor assembly work is done by the members of the International Association of Machinists. The Machinists approved a new, four-year contract in December 2011, after a walkout in 2008 that contributed to a 3½-year delay in delivering the first 787.

It was also a factor in Boeing opening a plant in South Carolina, where laws make it more difficult to unionize.

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For His Second Act, Japanese Premier Plays It Safe, With Early Results

Toru Hanai/Reuters

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose policies have sent the Tokyo stock market up, will visit Washington this week.

TOKYO — Since taking office less than two months ago, Japan’s outspokenly hawkish new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has been in what some political analysts are calling “safe driving mode.” He has carefully avoided saying or doing anything to provoke other Asian nations, while focusing instead on wooing voters with steps to revive the moribund domestic economy.

So far, his approach seems to be working. His plans for public-works projects, stimulus measures called “Abenomics,” have sent the Tokyo stock market surging along with Mr. Abe’s own approval rating, which is now at 71 percent, according to the latest poll by Yomiuri Shimbum. On Friday, he will seek to build on his strong start when he meets President Obama at a Washington summit meeting aimed at improving relations with the United States, which regards Japan as its most important ally in Asia.

Mr. Abe, 58, has said he wants to be what Japan has not seen in almost a decade: a steady-handed leader who lasts long enough in office to actually get things done. Analysts say his success hinges on whether he can lead his Liberal Democratic Party to victory in Upper House elections in July, and end the split Parliament that undermined many of his predecessors.

What is less clear is what he will do if he wins that election. One trait that makes Mr. Abe a bit of an enigma, some analysts say, is that he seems to have two sides: the realist and the right-wing ideologue. In analysts’ view, if he does jettison some of his current caution, for instance by trying to revise Japan’s antiwar Constitution to allow a full-fledged military instead of its current Self-Defense Force, he risks provoking a standoff with China over disputed islands, and possibly isolating Japan in a region still sensitive to its early-20th-century militarism.

“In his first six weeks, he has done everything he can to show he is a moderate,” said Andrew L. Oros, director of international studies at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. “But after July, he might feel he has a freer rein to do things that he thinks are justified.”

Part of the problem, Mr. Oros and others say, is that Mr. Abe faces conflicting political pressures. His base in the governing party’s most conservative wing expects bold steps to end what it sees as Japan’s overly prolonged displays of contrition for World War II. But he must also convince the broader public that he is a coolheaded, competent steward of a declining nation that also depends on China for its economic future.

There is also the ghost of his past failure. The last time he was prime minister, six years ago, he stepped down amid criticism that he had been “clueless” for having pursued a nationalistic agenda of revising the Constitution and history textbooks, and for not doing more to reduce unemployment and spur the economy.

This time, Mr. Abe is acting with the determined carefulness of a man given a second chance. He has focused on extricating Japan from its recession with steps that have quickly buoyed the country’s economy, the world’s third-largest. Since being named prime minister after his party’s election victory in December, Mr. Abe has promised $215 billion in public works spending to create jobs and promote growth.

He has also publicly pressured the central bank, the Bank of Japan, to move more aggressively to end years of corrosive price declines known as deflation — threatening, for example, to amend the law on the bank’s independence if it does not reach its target of 2 percent inflation. The bank’s governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, announced this month that he would step aside to allow Mr. Abe to appoint a new chief who will work more closely with the government by pumping more money into the economy to prompt banks to lend more and companies to spend more.

“Mr. Abe has clearly learned the lessons of his past failure,” said Norihiko Narita, a political scientist at Surugadai University, near Tokyo. “And the biggest lesson is that voters care more about the economy.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 19, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the details of a possible January meeting between the leaders of Japan and the United States.

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Pistorius charged with murdering girlfriend

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — Olympian Oscar Pistorius fired into the door of a small bathroom where his girlfriend was cowering after a shouting match on Valentine's Day, hitting her three times, a South African prosecutor said Tuesday as he charged the sports icon with premeditated murder.

Pistorius sobbed softly as his lawyer insisted that Reeva Steenkamp's shooting was an accident.

"She couldn't go anywhere. You can run nowhere," prosecutor Gerrie Nel said at a bail hearing.

The shooting death has shocked South Africans and many around the world who idolized Pistorius for overcoming adversity to become a sports champion, competing in the London Olympics last year in track besides being a Paralympian. Steenkamp, 29, was a model and law graduate who made her debut on a South African reality TV program on Saturday, two days after her death..

Nel said the couple had had a shouting match and Steenkamp fled to the bathroom, down a seven-meter (yard) passage from the bedroom, and locked herself in. He said the 26-year-old Pistorius got up from bed and had to put on his prosthetic legs to reach the toilet door.

Nel told the court the door was broken open after the shots were fired. Pistorius' lawyer insisted there was no evidence to substantiate a murder charge.

"Was it to kill her, or was it to get her out?" defense attorney Barry Roux asked the court, referring to the browken-down door. "We submit it is not even murder. There is no concession this is a murder."

Pistorius, who had appeared grim and solemn at the start of the hearing, broke down and sobbed softly with his head in his hands as his lawyer argued that he had mistaken Steenkamp for a burglar. The shooting in the early hours of Feb. 14 came after neighbors had heard a loud argument and then gunshots, police have said. The couple had been dating for only about three months.

As details emerged at the dramatic court hearing in the capital, Steenkamp's body was being cremated Tuesday at a memorial service in the south-caost port city of Port Elizabeth. The family said members had arrived from around the world. Six pallbearers carried her coffin, draped with a white cloth and covered in white flowers, into the church for the private service.

June Steenkamp, the mother, said the family wants answers.

"Why? Why my little girl? Why did this happen? Why did he do this?" she said in an interview published Monday in The Times newspaper.

At the court, Nel said the killing was premeditated because Pistorius had planned to say that he thought he was shooting an intruder, and had told that story to his sister, Aimee.

"It was all part of the preplanning. Why would a burglar lock himself inside the bathroom?" Nel asked. The shooting happened at Pistorius' home in a guarded and gated community in a luxury suburb of Pretoria.

Roux, in arguing that Pistorius should be freed on bail, he said there were no other charges outstanding against the double-amputee who last year became the first double-amputee track athlete to run at the Olympics.

Legal experts say it could take months for the case to be tried.

Pistorius, in a gray suit and tie, nodded after the chief magistrate asked if he was well. And he nodded his appreciation when his brother, Carl, pressed his shoulder in support. Journalists jammed into the courtroom, which was full with almost 100 people, including Pistorius' father, Henke, and sister Aimee.

In an email to The Associated Press on Monday, Pistorius' longtime track coach — who was yet to comment — said he believes the killing was an accident.

"I pray that we can all, in time, come through this challenging situation following the accident and I am looking forward to the day I can get my boy back on the track," Ampie Louw wrote in his statement. "I am still in shock following the heart-breaking events that occurred last week and my thoughts and prayers are with both of the families involved."

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National Briefing | South: Abortion Curbs Clear Senate in Arkansas

The State Senate voted 25 to 7 on Monday to ban most abortions 20 weeks into a pregnancy. The measure goes back to the House to consider an amendment that added exceptions for rape and incest. The legislation is based on the belief that fetuses can feel pain 20 weeks into a pregnancy, and is similar to bans in several other states. Opponents say it would require mothers to deliver babies with fatal conditions. Gov. Mike Beebe has said he has constitutional concerns about the proposal but has not said whether he will veto it.

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Japan Finds Swelling in Second Boeing 787 Battery

TOKYO (Reuters) - Cells in a second lithium-ion battery on a Boeing Co 787 Dreamliner forced to make an emergency landing in Japan last month showed slight swelling, a Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB) official said on Tuesday.

The jet, flown by All Nippon Airways Co, was forced to make the landing after its main battery failed.

"I do not know the exact discussion taken by the research group on the ground, but I heard that it is a slight swelling (in the auxiliary power unit battery cells). I have so far not heard that there was internal damage," Masahiro Kudo, a senior accident investigator at the JTSB said in a briefing in Tokyo.

Kudo said that two out of eight cells in the second battery unit showed some bumps and the JTSB would continue to investigate to determine whether this was irregular or not.

The plane's auxiliary power unit (APU) powers the aircraft's systems when it is on the ground. National Transportation Safety Board investigators in the United States are probing the APU from a Japan Airlines plane that caught fire at Boston's Logan airport when the plane was parked.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Authority grounded all 50 Boeing Dreamliners in commercial service on January 16 after the incidents with the two Japanese owned 787 jets.

The groundings have cost airlines tens of millions of dollars, with no solution yet in sight.

Boeing rival Airbus said last week it had abandoned plans to use lithium-ion batteries in its next passenger jet, the A350, in favor of traditional nickel-cadmium batteries.

Lighter and more powerful than conventional batteries, lithium-ion power packs have been in consumer products such as phones and laptops for years but are relatively new in industrial applications, including back-up batteries for electrical systems in jets.

(Reporting by Mari Saito; Editing by Richard Pullin)

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India Ink: Thomas Friedman Answers Your Questions

New York Times op-ed columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman recently wrapped up a week-long trip to India, where he met with business executives, government ministers and other officials, entrepreneurs and development groups. Even as India’s economy has slowed considerably, Mr. Friedman remains a big believer in what he calls the “miracle of India.’’

Earlier we asked India Ink readers for their questions for Mr. Friedman about India’s changing role in the world economy. Here are his answers to a select few:

By far the most popular reader question was: Is the world still flat?

I wrote the “World Is Flat” in 2004.

I have to confess, I now realize the book was wrong. The world is so much flatter than I thought.

When I wrote “The World Is Flat,” Facebook didn’t exist, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking place, LinkedIn was a prison, applications were what you sent to college, Big Data was a rap star and Skype was a typo. All of that came after I wrote “The World Is Flat.”

And so what it tells you is all those trends have actually taken us from a connected world to what we’re now in, which is a hyper-connected world. It’s a difference of degree. It’s a difference in kind.

I believe it is changing every job, every industry and every market.

The trends I identified have only intensified in every direction, enabling individuals to complete, connect and collaborate so much faster, farther cheaper and deeper.

Venkat from N. J. said: The globalization of business is basically finding a way to justify exploitation of labor, resulting in an enormous concentration of wealth in fewer hands. The majority of labor working for low-end manufacturing work in pathetic conditions, while workers in the U.S. face layoffs, particularly the elderly. Who is paying for this social cost, and should globalization be regulated, somehow?

The first thing you need to understand about globalization is that it is everything and its opposite. So it is take it with one hand and give it with another hand.

On the one hand it is automating more things faster. On the other hand I met with young Indian entrepreneurs who are leveraging the cloud, open-source tools and very small amounts of capital, and are able to invent companies that can complete globally like never before.

So, who is the exploiter and who is the exploitee in this system? If horses could vote, there never would have been cars.

What we’re getting here is rapid change. The question the reader raises, though, is a very important one, because something has changed which we have not figured out how to adjust to. This is a point that Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make in their book “The Race Against the Machine,” which I wrote my last column about.

The point they make is that over the last 200 hundred years, three things grew together: productivity, median income and employment. Whether you were an Indian or an American, productivity grew, median income grew and employment grew, and inequality tended to shrink.

That’s a good thing.

Once we hit the flattening of the world, and now the hyper-flattening of the world, those three things are splitting apart. And that’s what the reader is, rightly, concerned about.

I’m concerned about it too.

So what happens when the world gets this hyper-connected? Well, first of all, the returns to education grow enormously. To be able to use these new technologies properly, you need to be educated.

In America today, unemployment for people with four-year college degrees is 3.6 percent, basically nothing. Unemployment for someone who dropped out of high school is now infinity. I exaggerate but you get the point.
It’s called skills-bias polarization.

If you want to have a factory job in America today, doing high-end manufacturing, you need to know algebra and calculus. It’s not just a repetitive motion any more, you need to program the robot.

Second thing is the returns to capital are so much more than the returns to labor. If I have a lot of capital and I can buy a lot of machines, the returns are so much more than if I hire a lot of people.

The third thing causing this phenomenon is in a hyper-connected world, the returns to superstar talent are just staggering. If you are, say, Madonna, well, every Indian kid who has an iPad can now download your songs. That wasn’t the case 10 years ago. You couldn’t reach this market.

So all three of these things are creating much bigger income gaps, much lower employment for people with lower skills, yet much higher productivity and great wealth for owners of capital.

That’s the big change.

The challenge for every developed and developing society is how do you maintain a middle class in such a world. That’s what I’m thinking about for the topic of my next book.

D.C. Agrawal from Princeton, New Jersey, asks: “How would you rate India on governance and public institutional structures compared to other democratic countries?’’

Let’s look at the countries I visited in the last six months: India, China and Egypt. India in my mind has relatively weak governance in terms of delivering services, but a very strong civil society — very vibrant active, social movements, whether it’s Anna Hazare or reaction to the rape case.

China has a very muscular government, in terms of delivering infrastructure and education, but a very weak civil society, although it is getting stronger. And Egypt has a very flabby, overweight government and a very weak civil society. That’s why when the government collapsed — you got the Muslim Brotherhood taking advantage of the revolution, not strong-rooted democratic movements.

I think India’s governance will improve. The government here is not utterly ineffective. It does do some things very well, but clearly it has weaknesses around policing, infrastructure building and providing consistent education. It holds elections very well, it does the census very well.

Let’s remember it is still a billion people. I don’t want to be too hard on it, but people want more, they want better.

India today has, because of hyper-connection of the world, and diffusion of technology, experienced the pushing down to lower and lower income levels more technology empowerment and education. That’s why India today seems like it has a 300 million-person middle class and a 300 million-person virtual middle class.

These are people who now have available to them, whether it’s a cell phone or other technologies, things that you would normally have to have a middle-class income to have. And they have access to certain learning opportunities.

So they’re actually in their minds middle class, thinking like middle class and putting middle-class demands on the government. I think the young woman who was raped in this terrible tragedy was a member of that virtual middle class – the tools she had, what she was doing, expectations of the government.

That’s a big change. It’s putting more pressure on the government. And the government will eventually respond because it has to.

Jason Richardson-White from Bethlehem, Georgia, said: Studies indicate that equal treatment between the sexes is important to slowing the birth rate. I don’t see that globalization is contributing significantly to that end in India. An argument can be made that globalization has made it possible for the people who are most likely to start egalitarian families to leave India for the West?

First let me make a general response:

I did not invent globalization. I promise you. I just wrote about it.

I wrote about the upsides and the downsides. I didn’t start it and I can’t stop it. I have my own problems with it.

Having said that, I profile in my column an N.G.O. that is providing cell phone-based SMS messaging to alert women about their menstrual cycle, on when exactly they are fertile and when they should not be having unprotected sex, if they want to do family planning.

This is totally based on cloud computing. Without globalization it doesn’t exist. It allows a woman in a remote place to do this. There’s privacy to it. You do one interview on the phone to set it up.

People need to keep in mind, globalization giveth and globalization taketh. The biggest revolution about to hit India, in the next two years, is distance learning. Any woman from any village who knows English will be able to take courses from Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T.

Do you know what this means for women in conservative families, who don’t want them to go to school? It’s going to be a revolution. I’m very excited about the kind of educational empowerment that is going to be coming the way of Indian women that will give them greater earning power, greater control over their own bodies and greater ability to negotiate with their sexual partners.

Anand Kumar from Chicago, Illinois, asks: Tom, China may not be loved in the West, but is respected and admired for its accomplishments. How do you think India ranks on the loved vs. respected and admired spectrum?

What an interesting question.

I think India’s brand remains very strong around the world. I appreciate India’s democracy.

What if 1 billion 50 million Indians were living like Syria today? The whole world would be different. Literally, the whole world would feel different today.

So to me India is a miracle. One billion fifty million people holding free and fair elections, just about every day, in the country. We now take it for granted because it has gone on for so long. I think it’s amazing.

I can’t generalize about the whole world, but I’m still enormously optimistic about what I see here.

Zaigum Kashmiri from Clarence, New York, asks: Tom, I know you are an Indophile and write great things about India. But, honestly, how can anybody be hopeful about India’s economic and social progress, keeping in view the lawlessness, dysfunctional government, corrupt police, a huge incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy and poverty?

I think the important thing to always remember when you look at India is not the snapshot, but the slope of the change.

If you take a snapshot, those will be some of the things you see.

But if you came with me to my meeting with NASSCOM [National Association of Software and Services Companies, India's technology industry association] this week, you’d see eight young entrepreneurs leveraging the flat world to start global businesses that not only contribute to the world but that make Indians unpoor.

They’re amazing.

So you always have to keep these things in balance. What excites me most about India today is the trend line. Every time I come here, I see more and more Indians starting things, collaborating on things and inventing things to make Indians unpoor. And to me that’s the most important thing you have to keep in mind.

By the way, everything the reader cited there, you could say that about America. We have all that, plus guns.

No country is a paradise. Everyone is a work in progress. You have to think about where the thrust is.

I’d like to think that with all our problems in America, we’re still tilted in a positive direction. I’d like to say the same about India.

(Interview has been lightly edited and condensed.)

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Danica Patrick wins pole for NASCAR's Daytona 500

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Danica Patrick is at her best in the spotlight.

Good thing, too, because she's going to be there all week.

Patrick won the Daytona 500 pole Sunday, becoming the first woman to secure the top spot for any race in NASCAR's premier circuit. It's by far the biggest achievement of her stock-car career. She's braced for the attention that will follow.

"I think when pressure's on and when the spotlight's on, I feel like it ultimately ends up becoming some of my better moments and my better races and better results," Patrick said. "I just understand that if you put the hard work in before you go out there that you can have a little peace and a little peace of mind knowing that you've done everything you can and just let it happen."

Patrick, who taped interviews Sunday with CNN, ESPN and Good Morning America, was the first woman to lead laps in the Indianapolis 500. She finished third in 2009, the highest finish in that illustrious race for a woman. And she became the only woman to win an IndyCar race when she did it in Japan in 2008.

Her latest stamp in the history books came with a lap at 196.434 mph around Daytona International Speedway. Patrick went out eighth in the qualifying session, then had to wait about two hours as 37 fellow drivers tried to take her spot.

Only four-time Cup champion Jeff Gordon even came close to knocking her off the pole. Gordon was the only other driver who topped 196 mph in qualifying. He locked up the other guaranteed spot in next week's season-opening Daytona 500.

"It's great to be a part of history with Danica being on the pole," said Gordon, who joked that at least he was the fastest guy. "I think we all know how popular she is, what this will do for our sport. Congratulations to her. Proud to be on there with her."

The rest of the field will be set in duel qualifying races Thursday.

However the lineup unfolds, all drivers — including boyfriend Ricky Stenhouse Jr. — will line up behind Patrick's No. 10 Chevrolet SS.

"I was brought up to be the fastest driver, not the fastest girl," she said. "That was instilled in me from very young, from the beginning. Then I feel like thriving in those moments, where the pressure's on, has also been a help for me. I also feel like I've been lucky in my career to be with good teams and have good people around me. I don't think any of it would have been possible without that.

"For those reasons, I've been lucky enough to make history, be the first woman to do many things. I really just hope that I don't stop doing that. We have a lot more history to make. We are excited to do it."

Even before her fast lap, Patrick had been the talk of Speedweeks. Not only did she open up about her budding romance with Stenhouse — Patrick officially filed to end her seven-year marriage to 47-year-old Paul Hospenthal in January — but she was considered the front-runner for the pole after leading practice sessions Saturday.

Now, she will garner even more hype.

"That's a huge accomplishment," team owner and fellow driver Tony Stewart said. "It's not like it's been 15 or 20 years she's been trying to do this. It's her second trip to Daytona here in a Cup car. She's made history in the sport. That's stuff that we're proud of being a part of with her. It's something she should have a huge amount of pride in.

"It's never been done. There's only one person that can be the first to do anything. Doesn't matter how many do it after you do, accomplish that same goal. The first one that does always has that little bit more significance to it because you were the first."

The result surely felt good for Patrick, especially considering the former IndyCar driver has mostly struggled in three NASCAR seasons. Her best finish in 10 Cup races is 17th, and she has one top-five in 58 starts in the second-tier Nationwide Series.

She raced part-time in 2010 and 2011 while still driving a full IndyCar slate. She switched solely to stock cars last season and finished 10th in the Nationwide standings.

She made the jump to Sprint Cup this season and will battle Stenhouse for Rookie of the Year honors.

Starting out front in an unpredictable, 500-mile race doesn't guarantee any sort of result, but securing the pole will put her in the limelight for at least the rest of the week.

"I don't think about Danica as a female race-car driver," defending Cup champion Brad Keselowski said. "I think of her as a rookie and someone that hasn't won races or proved that she is competitive."

Patrick won the pole at Daytona for last year's Nationwide race.

But this is considerably different, significantly bigger.

The previous highest female qualifier in a Cup race was Janet Guthrie. She started ninth at Bristol and Talladega in 1977.

"It's obviously a history-making event that will last a long, long time," Guthrie said, praising Patrick's feat. "It's a different era, of course. Different times. I can't imagine what I would do with a spotter or somebody telling me how to drive. It's rather a different sport now. Back then, there was a much greater difference from the front of the field to the back."

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