THAT Babble, a new online magazine for parents, should be introduced by the slinky literary sex site Nerve.com seems at once ludicrous and altogether logical.

Sure, it stands to reason that after nine years of being sexually titillated and encouraged by the editors of Nerve, its readers have produced results. Yet in an era in which babies are overprotected and practically dipped in Purell, it's hard to imagine people seeking insight into sleep training from a Web company that publishes personal essays by former teenage prostitutes.

"From an editorial perspective, launching Babble is extremely natural and very exciting," said Rufus Griscom, 39, founder of Nerve Media and a new father himself. "But clearly there's an element of irony to it."

Babble.com, set to begin on Tuesday, aspires to appeal to educated, culturally engaged urban hipsters who are knee-deep in baby gear and seeking not just advice but the humor in it all.

"We've found that there are a lot of taboos around parenting, as much as we felt there were around sex when we launched Nerve," Mr. Griscom said. "There are a lot of things you can't say, like, 'We wanted a girl, but we got a boy.' Or, 'We're pregnant with a third, but we don't know if we want it.' "

Babble, he says, will say it, and with wit and style. Or at least with irreverence.

The site, which will be updated almost daily and feature interactive community-building features like video sharing and message boards, will attempt to cater to its prospective audience's sensibility by mixing low-brow and high — archly observed commentaries on Kelly Ripa's children or the latest wacky gadget for harried moms and literary satire with contributions by A-list writers, such as the novelist Walter Kirn and the screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson.

And the indie band Mates of State has been invited to chronicle the experience of taking the toddler daughter of its keyboardist and its drummer on tour.

But if Babble is to succeed, the site must do more than overcome its association with its naughty sister. Store shelves and library archives are filled with current and departed parenting magazines, and today the Web is full of mommy and daddy blogs, message boards like UrbanBaby and social networking sites like Maya's Mom and MothersClick.

Some numbers are in Babble's favor. Seventy-eight percent of women ages 30 to 44 are mothers, according to Census data from 2004. It's clear that men — a big target readership of both Nerve and Babble — are more attentive to their children than previous generations. A study by the University of Maryland released in October, "Changing Rhythms of American Family Life," found that married fathers spent 6.5 hours a week on child care in 2000, up from 2.6 hours in 1965.

This is also a generation that sees raising children a bit differently from the way it is portrayed in most parenting magazines. Many have a knee-jerk skepticism toward mainstream corporate parenting culture and a determined reluctance to give up the vestiges of their own youths.

"This is a new generation of parents who are interested in taking their existing lifestyle, sense of self and priorities into parenting, as opposed to checking them at the parenthood door," said Julia Beck, founder of 40 Weeks, a consultancy serving the expectant- and new-parent market. "They're looking for ways to infuse their personality and aesthetic into this new phase of life, and all this new lifestyle parenting media reflects that."

Ada Calhoun, 30, a mother to 3½-month-old Oliver and Babble's editor in chief, intends to avoid the fear and didacticism she sees as endemic to the parenting magazine category. Rather than issue a dictum on whether to circumcise, for example, the site will post a range of opinions by a variety of experts, and a brief "Babble" take on the issue, encouraging readers to decide for themselves.

Not everyone believes that what Babble is setting out to do is all that radical. "It's not as if this is a new idea," said Stephanie Wilkinson, a founder and an editor of Brain, Child, a magazine that reaches 36,000 readers, three-quarters of them paid subscribers. "The whole ironic absurdity of parenting, absence of dewy-eyed-sentimentalism thing is what the mother-lit movement — starting with Mothers Who Think on Salon and the 'momoir' genre — has been doing for the past 10 years."

Still, Ms. Wilkinson says, "If Babble can get men to read it in anything close to the numbers women do, that will be a real feat."

Greg Allen, 39, whose blog for new dads, DaddyTypes, attracts up to 300,000 visits a month, thinks the audience is there. "A lot of dads want to get involved in all aspects of raising their kids, but feel they're ignored by the people who make baby products and by the parenting media," he said. He will soon be a columnist for Babble.

But magazines for dads have a tarnished pedigree. Three that started since 2001 — Dads, Offspring and Real Dad — closed after just a few issues.

Mr. Griscom said that Babble is not aiming for elitism. "We do not intend for this to be a little literary magazine," he said. "We intend for it to be wildly commercially successful." To do so, Babble's executives said, they need an audience of two million to three million readers a month.

Mr. Griscom said that Nerve is profitable, with a projected profit margin of 20 percent on more than $3 million in revenue this year. But half its revenue stems from personal ads and subscriptions, neither to be offered on Babble.

This leaves the magazine dependent on advertising, and a much smaller percentage of revenue is expected to come from licensing and publishing deals.

According to Denise Fedewa, vice president and planning director for Leo Burnett USA, Babble has the right idea, at least in terms of the target reader. "It's a very valuable psychographic in that the urban hipster lifestyle is something that a lot of people aspire to, even if they don't technically live it," she said. "These are the kind of consumers advertisers want to reach in order to get a trend started that will then filter out to a broader audience."

So far, smaller design brands have signed up as advertisers.

Whether the big spenders like Target and Johnson & Johnson, companies that Babble is keen to reach, will advertise may depend on whether they are comfortable with the site's affiliation with Nerve, say experts. Ms. Volkman, Mr. Griscom's wife, insisted that "there will be no crossbreeding between Nerve and Babble," with no visible Internet links between the sites.

Alan Schanzer, managing partner at Mediaedge: cia, a media buying and planning agency, said it helps that the new magazine is confined to the Web. "In general, advertisers are a lot braver with the online space than with other media, so I think the majority will be open-minded," he said.

At least some parents seem tantalized by the possibility of a reading alternative. Deva Dalporto, a 32-year-old actress and children's clothing designer in the San Francisco Bay area, said the traditional parenting publications are "a bit too kitchen-country-gingham" for her taste.

"The smart, edgy magazine doesn't exist for women, and it certainly doesn't exist for parents," she said. "It would be great to have a magazine with more wit and a sense of humor. After all, there's so much that's hilarious about this whole process, from childbirth to raising a child."

HAVANA, Dec. 7 — Anatomy is a part of medical education everywhere. Biochemistry, too. But a course in Cuban history?

The Latin American School of Medical Sciences, on a sprawling former naval base on the outskirts of this capital, teaches its students medicine Cuban style. That means poking at cadavers, peering into aging microscopes and discussing the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power 48 years ago.

Cuban-trained doctors must be able not only to diagnose an ulcer and treat hypertension but also to expound on the principles put forward by "el comandante."

It was President Castro himself who in the late 1990s came up with the idea for this place, which gives potential doctors from throughout the Americas and Africa not just the A B C's of medicine but also the basic philosophy behind offering good health care to the struggling masses.

The Cuban government offers full scholarships to poor students from abroad, and many, including 90 or so Americans, have jumped at the chance of a free medical education, even with a bit of Communist theory thrown in.

"They are completing the dreams of our comandante," said the dean, Dr. Juan D. Carrizo Estévez. "As he said, they are true missionaries, true apostles of health."

It is a strong personal desire to practice medicine that drives the students here more than any affinity for Mr. Castro. Those from the United States in particular insist that they want to become doctors, not politicians. They recoil at the notion that they are propaganda tools for Cuba, as critics suggest.

"They ask no one to be political — it's your choice," said Jamar Williams, 27, of Brooklyn, a graduate of the State University of New York at Albany. "Many students decide to be political. They go to rallies and read political books. But you can lie low."

Still, the Cuban authorities are eager to show off this school as a sign of the country's compassion and its standing in the world. And some students cannot help responding to the sympathetic portrayal of Mr. Castro, whom the United States government tars as a dictator who suppresses his people.

"In my country many see Fidel Castro as a bad leader," said Rolando Bonilla, 23, a Panamanian who is in his second year of the six-year program. "My view has changed. I now know what he represents for this country. I identify with him."

Fátima Flores, 20, of Mexico sympathized with Mr. Castro's government even before she was accepted for the program. "When we become doctors we can spread his influence," she said. "Medicine is not just something scientific. It's a way of serving the public. Look at Che."

Che Guevara was an Argentine medical doctor before he became a revolutionary who fought alongside Mr. Castro in the rugged reaches of eastern Cuba and then lost his life in Bolivia while further spreading the cause.

Tahirah Benyard, 27, a first-year student from Newark, said it was Cuba's offer to send doctors to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which was rejected by the Bush administration, that prompted her to take a look at medical education in Cuba.

"I saw my people dying," she said. "There was no one willing to help. The government was saying everything is going to be fine."

She said she had been rejected by several American medical schools but could not have afforded their high costs anyway. Like other students from the United States, she was screened for the Cuba program by Pastors for Peace, a New York organization opposed to Washington's trade embargo against the island.

Ms. Benyard hopes that one day she will be able to practice in poor neighborhoods back home. Whether her education, which is decidedly low tech, is up to American standards remains to be seen, although Cedric Edwards, the first American student to graduate, last year, passed his medical boards in the United States.

If she makes it, Ms. Benyard will become one of a small pool of African-American doctors. Only about 6 percent of practicing physicians are members of minority groups, says the Association of American Medical Colleges, which recently began its own program to increase the number of minority medical students.

Even before they were accepted into Cuba's program, most of the Americans here said they had misgivings about the health care system in their own country. There is too much of a focus on the bottom line, they said, and not enough compassion for the poor.

"Democracy is a great principle," said Mr. Williams, who wears long dreadlocks pulled back behind his head. "The idea that people can speak for themselves and govern themselves is a great concept. But people must be educated, and in order to be educated, people need health."

The education the students are receiving here extends outside the classroom.

"I've learned to become a minimalist," Mr. Williams said. "I don't necessarily need my iPod, all my gadgets and gizmos, to survive."

There are also fewer food options. The menu can be described as rice and beans and more rice and beans. Living conditions are more rugged in other respects as well. The electricity goes out frequently. Internet access is limited. Toilet paper and soap are rationed. Sometimes the water taps are dry.

Then there is the issue of personal space.

"Being in a room with 18 girls, it teaches you patience," said Ms. Benyard, who was used to her one-bedroom apartment back home and described her current living conditions as like a military barracks.

Other students cited the American government's embargo as their biggest frustration. The blockade, which is what the Cuban government and many of the American students call it, means no care packages, no visits from Mom and Dad, and the threat that their government might penalize them for coming here.

Last year Washington ordered the students home, but the decision was reversed after protests from the Congressional Black Caucus, which supports the program.

One topic that does not come up in classes is the specific ailment that put Mr. Castro in the hospital, forced him to cede power to his brother Raúl and has kept him out of the public eye since late July. His diagnosis, like so much else in Cuba, is a state secret.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the Reagan administration's first United Nations ambassador and a beacon of neoconservative thought who helped guide American military, diplomatic and covert action from 1981 to 1985, died Thursday at her home in Bethesda, Md. She was 80.

Her death was announced yesterday by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where she was a senior fellow. The cause was congestive heart failure, said her personal assistant, Tammy Jagyur.

Ms. Kirkpatrick was the first American woman to serve as United Nations ambassador. She was the only woman, and the only Democrat, in President Ronald Reagan's National Security Council. No woman had ever been so close to the center of presidential power without actually residing in the White House.

"When she put her feet under the desk of the Oval Office, the president listened," said William P. Clark Jr., Mr. Reagan's national security adviser during 1982 and 1983. "And he usually agreed with her."

President Reagan brought her into his innermost foreign policy circle, the National Security Planning Group. There she weighed the risks and rewards of clandestine warfare in Central America, covert operations against Libya, the disastrous deployment of American marines in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada and support for rebel forces in Afghanistan.

Her public diplomacy made her a national political figure. She was a star performer at the 1984 Republican national convention, deriding the Democrats as the "blame America first" party.

She changed her political affiliation after leaving the Reagan administration and thought hard about seeking the Republican nomination for president.

"So many people talked to me about it so much that they finally persuaded me to consider it," she said in October 1987. But she decided against it, fearing she would split the conservative vote and help elect Vice President George H. W. Bush. Though he won, she thought him too moderate to inherit the Reagan legacy.

Fifteen years later, in March 2003, President Bush recalled Ambassador Kirkpatrick to active duty and sent her to Geneva, said Alan Gerson, who had served as her general counsel at the United Nations. The secret mission, previously undisclosed, was to head off a diplomatic uprising against the imminent war against Iraq. Arab ministers wanted to condemn it as an act of aggression.

"The marching orders we received were to argue that pre-emptive war is legitimate," Mr. Gerson said. "She said: 'No one will buy it. If that's the position, count me out.' "

Instead, she argued that the attack was justified by Saddam Hussein's violations of United Nations resolutions dating from the 1991 war against Iraq. The foreign ministers found her position convincing and their resolve against the war faded, Mr. Gerson said.

Ms. Kirkpatrick was a political science professor with no diplomatic experience when she arrived at the United Nations in February 1981. Her mission was to wage rhetorical warfare against Moscow and its allies. She sought to restore the international standing of the United States after its defeat in Vietnam and the captivity of Americans in Iran.

Her high-profile performance at the United Nations made her President Reagan's favorite envoy. "You're taking off that big sign that we used to wear that said, 'Kick Me,' " the president told her. He admired her strong diplomatic stands and her undiplomatic language. In a letter to 40 third world ambassadors in October 1981, for example, she accused them of spreading "base lies" and making "malicious attacks upon the good name of the United States."

When nations opposed American foreign policy, she sent their voting records to Congress. The threat was tacit but clear: to stand against the United States meant to risk losing its foreign aid. Her deputy at the United Nations, Kenneth L. Adelman, said she enjoyed such close combat.

"We were like Davy Crockett at the Alamo," he said.

Said She Hated U.N. Job

She professed to detest the United Nations. She compared it to "death and taxes." But she endured it for four years.

At the United Nations, she defended Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. She argued for El Salvador's right-wing junta and against Nicaragua's left-wing ruling council, the Sandinistas.

In private, she supported American efforts to sustain the contras, the rebel group that tried to overthrow the Sandinistas with help from the Central Intelligence Agency. She was a crucial participant in a March 1981 National Security Planning Group meeting that produced a $19 million covert action plan to make the contras a fighting force.

She was part of a national security team that was often at war with itself. Her relationship with Mr. Reagan's first secretary of state, the four-star general Alexander M. Haig Jr., "started off bad and got worse over time," Mr. Adelman said in an oral history of the Reagan years. She had something Mr. Haig found that he lacked: the president's ear.

Ms. Kirkpatrick first entered Mr. Reagan's inner circle on the strength of a 10,000-word article she published in the neoconservative magazine Commentary in November 1979. The article, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," drew a bright line between right-wing pro-American governments and left-wing anti-American ones.

"Traditional authoritarian governments," she argued, "are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies." She said it was an historic mistake for the United States to have shied away from dictators like the Somozas in Nicaragua and the Shah of Iran. If they served American interests, she asserted, they were defensible.

Mr. Reagan read the article closely. Richard V. Allen, who later became the first of his six national security advisers, introduced him to Ms. Kirkpatrick. They met at a February 1980 dinner party given by George F. Will, the syndicated columnist.

She recalled that she wondered aloud how she, a Democrat all her life, could join his team. Mr. Reagan confided, "I was a Democrat once, you know." He won her over. After his election a year later, Ms. Kirkpatrick became the United Nations ambassador and "Dictatorships and Double Standards" became an important part of the foreign policy of the United States.

At the United Nations, Ms. Kirkpatrick was the target of barbs and backstabbing. Sometimes she was aware of the source, sometimes not.

She knew she was "a kind of special target for the Soviets — disinformation target," she said at a 2003 foreign policy roundtable convened by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. In 1982, the K.G.B. forged a letter to discredit her and fobbed it off on the Washington correspondent for The New Statesman, a leftist British weekly, which reprinted it. The phony letter was a note of "best regards and gratitude" from the intelligence chief of the apartheid South African government.

"But I felt there was as much disinformation aimed at me from inside our own government, frankly, as from the Soviet Union," Ms. Kirkpatrick said. "That's a shocking thing to say, but it is no exaggeration."

Role as Adviser Blocked

In 1983, Ms. Kirkpatrick was a strong candidate to become President Reagan's third national security adviser. She had support from the director of central intelligence, William J. Casey, and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger. But her new boss, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, opposed her.

"I respected her intelligence, but she was not well suited to the job," Mr. Shultz wrote. "Her strength was in her capacity for passionate advocacy," and the post, he added, demanded a "dispassionate broker."

Ms. Kirkpatrick was at the June 1984 National Security Planning Group meeting that began the secret initiative that later became known as the Iran-contra affair. Congress had cut off funds for the contras. Mr. Casey wanted to obtain money from foreign countries in defiance of the ban.

Ms. Kirkpatrick was in favor. "We should make the maximum effort to find the money," she said. Mr. Shultz was opposed. "It is an impeachable offense," he said. President Reagan warned that if the story leaked, "we'll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House."

Secret Arms Sales Exposed

Over the next two years, millions skimmed from secret arms sales to Iran went to the contras. The story did leak, as Mr. Reagan feared, and his administration was shaken by Congressional investigations and criminal charges. Robert C. McFarlane, who had won the national security slot over Ms. Kirkpatrick, pleaded guilty to misinforming Congress.

Mr. McFarlane said he should have stood up against the secret initiative to support the contras. But "if I'd done that," he said, "Bill Casey, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Cap Weinberger would have said I was some kind of commie."

By then Ms. Kirkpatrick had left the government. She stuck to a vow to leave the United Nations at the end of Mr. Reagan's first term and resigned in April 1985. She was succeeded by Vernon A. Walters, a former deputy director of central intelligence. The next year, as the Iran-contra story began unfolding, Mr. Casey urged the president to make her secretary of state, but Mr. Reagan rejected the idea.

Ms. Kirkpatrick spent the rest of her career commenting on policy instead of making it. She remained among the most highly regarded members of the Republican establishment, and her voice remained one of the strongest echoes of the Reagan era.

Jeane Duane Jordan was born on Nov. 19, 1926, in Duncan, Okla., about 160 miles northwest of Dallas, the daughter of Welcher F. and Leona Jordan. Her father was an oil wildcatter who moved from town to town searching for a gusher that he never hit.

She attended Stephens College in Missouri for two years, then moved to New York, where she earned a bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1948 and a master's degree from Columbia University in 1950. She went to Washington as a research analyst at the Intelligence and Research Bureau of the State Department, where she met her future husband, Evron Kirkpatrick. Fifteen years her senior, he was a veteran of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, and he soon became the head of the American Political Science Association. They married in 1955 and had three sons — Douglas Jordan, John Evron and Stuart Alan. Douglas died earlier this year. The other sons and five grandchildren survive her. Mr. Kirkpatrick died in 1995.

In 1967, before completing her doctoral dissertation, she was appointed associate professor at Georgetown University. The next year, she earned a doctorate in political science at Columbia University. Georgetown made her a full professor in 1973 and gave her the endowed Leavey Chair five years later.

Ms. Kirkpatrick supported Jimmy Carter in 1976 and came close to being chosen for an ambassadorship in his administration. But she had become deeply disenchanted with her party.

Swept In With 50 Others

She joined the vanguard of the neoconservative movement, the Committee on the Present Danger, which warned throughout the late 1970s of a disastrous downturn in every aspect of American strength, from nuclear warheads to national image. When Mr. Reagan came to office in 1981, 51 of the committee's members won positions of significant power in his administration.

Power, Ms. Kirkpatrick said in a 1996 interview, is based not merely on guns or money but on the strength of personal conviction.

"We were concerned about the weakening of Western will," she said. "We advocated rebuilding Western strength, and we did that with Ronald Reagan, if I may say so."

UPPER DARBY, Pa., Dec. 1 — As Upper Darby High played its annual Thanksgiving Day football game, a northeaster raked the Philadelphia suburbs, turning the field into a muddy pudding. The last thing any player needed was protection from the sun's glare. And because the game began in late morning, no one bothered turning on the stadium lights.

Still, the dreariness did not keep many Upper Darby players from spreading eye black on their cheeks. Some dabbed a line of grease under the eyes. Some wore adhesive antiglare patches that resembled Morse code for the face. Others smeared the stuff like shaving cream.

"It's just the look," Brandon Murray, an Upper Darby halfback, said after his team had been upset, 20-8, by its archrival, Haverford High. "Most kids think it's intimidating or it looks good. No one uses it to block out the light."

That is not necessarily the case in the National Football League. Jerricho Cotchery described a scene in the Jets' locker room before a game last Sunday, when he and his fellow receiver Laveranues Coles applied eye black as if they were showgirls applying false eyelashes.

They were carrying out a decades-old tradition. A Yale University study found evidence of eye black use dating at least to a 1942 photograph of a Washington Redskins player named Andy Farkas. The eye black origins in baseball are more obscure, the study said.

Coles said that playing without eye-black grease was like "playing with no shoulder pads or no helmet." Although he grew up in sunny Florida, Coles said he never used eye black until he reached the N.F.L. and struggled with glare.

"I don't know if it was one of those placebo effects, but it was one of those things that stuck with me," he said.

But many athletes do not seem to care much about the intended use of eye black. Instead, those smudges and patches and decals have become popular fashion accessories, miniature billboards for personal messages and war-paint slatherings aimed at gaining a psychological advantage more than a visual edge.

"I think it kind of lost its purpose," said Nick Ciccone, a safety at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. "It's a fashion thing now. A lot of guys say, if you look good, you feel good, and if you feel good, you play good."

Reggie Bush, the 2005 Heisman Trophy winner who is now a running back for the New Orleans Saints, inscribed the 619 area code for his hometown in San Diego County on his antiglare stickers while at the University of Southern California. Seizing the moment, Bush had plans to unveil a 619 cologne.

Rutgers running back Ray Rice wears stickers that run cheek to cheek, across his nose. He writes a weekly eulogy to a deceased cousin: RIP 914 SUPE.

Sometimes eye stickers are used for more frivolous purposes. In a game against Arkansas on Nov. 24, running back Keiland Williams of Louisiana State University wore an LSU patch under one eye only, looking like a kind of decal pirate.

Rory Jones, a receiver at South Plaquemines High in Port Sulphur, La., said he had no idea what the eye-black stickers were intended for. "I use them for showboating," he said.

Tim Heagy, a defensive end at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania, said he thought the smeared-cheek look might give him a slight edge over a larger opponent. "If he's a little bigger, maybe he thinks you're crazy because you have eye black on," Heagy said.

Researchers wondered, too. In the past few years, they have begun to examine the accepted truth that eye black does indeed decrease glare reflecting off the skin.

Recent studies have shown that eye black reduces glare somewhat, while improving contrast sensitivity. Yet it remains debatable among experts whether glare is diminished sufficiently to increase a kick returner's ability to field a ball out of the stadium lights or a shortstop's ability to pluck a pop fly out of the sun.

Through the years, players have fashioned eye black from burnt cork and shoe polish. Today's commercially produced eye-black grease is made from such items as beeswax, paraffin and charcoal powder, while antiglare stickers are made of patented fabric with a dull, matte finish.

The Yale study placed 46 students in the sun and tested their reactions using a sensitivity contrast chart. Some participants wore eye-black grease, while others wore adhesive stickers. A third group wore smudges of petroleum jelly as a placebo.

The study found a small, but statistically significant, improvement in contrast sensitivity and glare reduction for participants who wore the eye grease, but not for those who wore antiglare stickers. The results were published in 2003 in Archives of Ophthalmology.

"I thought we would find it to be like war paint and a psychological advantage more than anything else," Dr. Brian M. DeBroff, the lead author of the Yale study, said in a telephone interview. "We were surprised to find a benefit from the grease."

Asked if the benefits were significant enough to enhance athletic performance, Dr. DeBroff said, "Certainly in football and baseball, where tracking a ball at high speed is an important aspect, any competitive advantage could be beneficial."

He added: "Does it translate in terms of being able to pick up the ball if looking back into the sun? Possibly. Certainly, it would be interesting to do further study to determine the exact benefit."

A study of eye-black grease at the University of New Hampshire also found a small improvement in contrast sensitivity. The findings, published last year in an undergraduate research journal, were considered preliminary, said Dr. Kenneth Fuld, chairman of the university's psychology department and the study's sponsor.

Even so, Dr. Fuld, a former New Hampshire assistant baseball coach, said he was skeptical that the grease enhanced a player's performance.

"I would be highly doubtful that it would have much of an effect, if any," Dr. Fuld said, noting that tennis players performed at high levels without eye black while constantly dealing with the sun's glare.

Placing a brand name on adhesive strips in white letters, writing messages on stickers and adorning them with initials and logos appeared to defeat the antiglare purpose of the patches, Dr. Fuld said.

Among the findings of the New Hampshire study were: Eye-black grease did not work as effectively with blue-eyed participants, who have less iris pigment to screen out unwanted light. And women had better results than men, although that might be explained by the smaller sample size of male participants (18) than female participants (28).

While it may seem counterintuitive that all skin tones benefit from eye black, oiliness of the skin and sweating, not simply skin color, affect how much light is reflected into the eyes, said another researcher, Mike Maloney, president of Bjorksten Research Laboratories in Wisconsin.

His company has done testing for Mueller Sports Medicine, a Wisconsin manufacturer of antiglare patches, which were judged ineffective in the Yale study. Brett Mueller, president of the company, said that Yale researchers tested "couch potatoes" rather than attempting to replicate on-field distractions an athlete encounters in his peripheral vision.

The research commissioned by Mueller used a mannequin with a photo diode attached to the right eye. The findings indicated that antiglare stickers reduced the amount of light that entered the periphery of the eye to a greater extent than eye-black grease did.

"But what I can't tell you is the amount of difference that will make in athletic performance," Mr. Maloney said.

For elite athletes, the chance that eye black might provide even the slightest advantage can be convincing, said Jeremy Bloom, a kick returner and two-time Olympian who was formerly the world's top-ranked moguls skier.

"It's very symbolic of football, whether science proves it works or not," said Bloom, who is on injured reserve with the Philadelphia Eagles. "If it works just a little, that's helpful. It can't hurt."

On the high school level, though, the ostentatious use of eye black and facial decals has led to a backlash by some coaches. Brian Sipe, a former All-Pro quarterback now coaching Santa Fe Christian School near San Diego, said he limited his players to a thin smudge no wider than the eye.

"It really serves no purpose other than adornment," Sipe said.

In suburban Philadelphia, Haverford High prevailed over Upper Darby on Thanksgiving without any players wearing eye black. Coach Joe Gallagher had banned its use.

"That's just frills," he said. "They were too concerned about how they looked."

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., Dec. 1 — During their 81-year history, the Giants have tried to build a reputation on integrity and decency, on consistency and the occasional championship. They hired Tom Coughlin as the coach less than three years ago to ensure that those traits were continued or, in some cases, restored.

Then came the past three weeks. The Giants became a team bumbling toward buffoonery, on and off the field.

A three-game losing streak was lowlighted by players carping at coaches, coaches carping at players, players carping at players and the news media filling the roles of diarist and villain.

By recent accounts, some from the Giants, the franchise quarterback rattles, the leading receiver quits, the star defensive end rants, the top running back criticizes and the coach scrambles to hold the parts together.

But the N.F.L. is not a complicated place. The Giants (6-5) are not Humpty Dumpty. There is a quick fix.

A victory.

"Last week never matters," center Shaun O'Hara said of life in the N.F.L.

The Giants hope so, because last week was brutal. Sunday brought a blown lead of 21 points in the fourth quarter, the worst reversal of fortune in franchise history.

The second worst might have been Wednesday, when Coughlin said that his mission was "to pull everybody together and encourage." Within an hour, defensive end Michael Strahan, his eyes bulging and his mouth filled with the final bites of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, railed against reporters for asking about his criticism of his teammate Plaxico Burress.

The conversion was complete. The roster, which had seemed an embarrassment of riches, was instead richly embarrassing. The past week has been filled with endless clips of Sunday's collapse to the Tennessee Titans and Strahan's finger-pointing diatribe.

Coughlin has been unable to instill the discipline he demands. His team has been undone by silly penalties, goofy plays, odd decisions and questionable effort. Off the field, like an exasperated Whac-a-Mole player, Coughlin has been one step behind his attention-grabbing players, unable to knock back their egos and personalities.

But in a redemptive twist — or a twist of cruelty, depending on how it plays out — the Giants can reverse weeks of bungling with a winning three-hour performance Sunday against the visiting Dallas Cowboys (7-4), who lead the National Football Conference East.

"We control our own destiny," linebacker Antonio Pierce said. "And I don't think everybody around here understands that."

For the Giants, it will be their biggest regular-season game in years. A victory or a loss — but not a tie, which would seem oddly fitting in these head-shaking days — could be viewed as monumental and potentially franchise shifting.

A loss would continue the team's spectacular free fall and would fuel more damning speculation about the future of Coughlin as the coach and the direction of the team in general. A victory against the Cowboys and Bill Parcells, the Giants' former coach — against whose legacy Coughlin and every other Giants head coach is measured — would repair the damage, at least for a week.

A victory, as absurd as that possibility may seem, would lift the Giants back into first place in the division. They would hold the tie-breaking advantage against the Cowboys.

"We know behind all of this, behind all of the rhetoric and talk and the commentaries and the columns, there is a huge opportunity for us, sitting at 6-5, one game behind the Cowboys, to jump right into the lead in our division and third place in the N.F.C.," running back Tiki Barber said. "And that is what is most important. I think that is what we shall be focusing on."

The biggest mystery — other than determining the last time a professional football player used shall in a sentence — is exactly how things went so wrong, so quickly.

The Giants had been humming along with a victory, then another, then three more. They were gaining credibility and being viewed as a potential Super Bowl contender.

That credibility can be restored in one day. Turnarounds are a weekly event in the parity-rich N.F.L., where no team is out of the postseason picture until the mathematicians deem it so. The Atlanta Falcons, the Minnesota Vikings and the St. Louis Rams have had losing streaks of four games or more this season, and each remains in the playoff hunt. The Carolina Panthers have lost back-to-back games twice, and are tied with the Giants for a wild-card spot.

For further inspiration, the Giants can look at the Cowboys. When the Giants beat them, 36-22, in Dallas on Oct. 23, the Cowboys were 3-3. They had benched the starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe at halftime, and the backup Tony Romo threw three interceptions. Receiver Terrell Owens was a one-man soap opera. Parcells looked weary on the sideline, like a man wondering why he was there.

But Romo has been the hottest quarterback in the N.F.L. since. Owens has been quiet off the field and splendid on it. Parcells has begun kissing players in joy. And the Cowboys have won four of five games, passing the Giants.

"As you've seen in the last month, a team's fortunes can change very quickly in this league," Parcells said in a conference call.

That is a source of optimism for the Giants. This week, they compared themselves with the 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers — not the version that won the Super Bowl, but the one that was 7-5 in early December and the loser of three in a row.

Those Steelers won their final four games, then swept through three road playoff games and won Super Bowl XL against the Seattle Seahawks.

The analogy, linebacker Brandon Short said, "is dead on."

There are some differences, of course. The Steelers did not have a quarterback struggling as mightily as Eli Manning.

The Steelers did not have a Barber criticizing the play-calling, saying it is "not rocket science," after the Giants lost to the Jacksonville Jaguars and their losing streak reached two.

Pittsburgh did not have a Coughlin telling reporters that the players are not to criticize the coaches or their teammates in the news media. They did not have a Strahan ignoring such a directive by suggesting on the radio Monday that Burress quit on his team on several recent plays. They did not have a Burress acknowledging that Strahan's words hurt, but suggesting that his occasional laissez-faire approach would not change. (Actually, the Steelers had him from 2000-4, and tired of his attitude.)

But the Steelers began their surge a week after the biggest blown lead in the fourth quarter in franchise history, as the Giants want to do.

The Titans were only the third team in N.F.L. history to win after trailing by 21 points with 10 or fewer minutes remaining. It was a loss, Coughlin said, that would be remembered "forever."

Selective amnesia is possible. The N.F.L. is no place for teams with long memories. Last week never matters, but only if the Giants turn themselves inside out, again.

EXTRA POINTS

The Giants signed the veteran punter Sean Landeta because Jeff Feagles has a sore knee. Landeta was the Giants' punter from 1985-93, and last played in 2005 for the Philadelphia Eagles. He is second in league history, behind Feagles, in punts and punting yards. To make room on the roster, the Giants waived defensive tackle Lance Legree.

GREEN BAY, Wis., Dec. 3 — By the time Chad Pennington threw his first interception of the day, the Jets had such a huge lead — and Pennington had done so much to make it that way — that the turnover hardly mattered.

With Pennington throwing for 241 of his 263 yards in the first half, the Jets scored 31 points on their first five possessions and went on to rout the Green Bay Packers, 38-10, at frigid Lambeau Field today. The victory brightened the 7-5 Jets' American Football Conference playoff hopes and essentially eliminated the Packers, who are 4-8 with three consecutive losses, from the National Football Conference race.

Cedric Houston ran for two touchdowns, both in the first half. For the day, Pennington finished 25 of 35 for 263 yards, two touchdowns and two interceptions, and wideout Jerricho Cotchery had nine catches for 99 yards and a score. Green Bay's Ahman Green ran for 102 yards, but quarterback Brett Favre was mostly ineffective, completing 24 of 47 passes for 214 yards, a touchdown and two interceptions.

The Jets played a near-perfect first half while grabbing a 31-0 lead, outgaining the Packers, 340 yards to 100, forcing two turnovers and committing only one penalty, five yards for illegal motion. It was the most first-half points by the Jets since another 31-point effort against San Diego on Nov. 3, 2002, an eventual 44-13 victory.

The game began in biting cold — 19 degrees with 2-degree wind chill, and light swirling snow. Though the elements suggested running the ball, the Jets peppered the Packers' shaky defense with short passes in building the big lead.

Pennington completed six passes to six receivers in eight attempts on the opening drive for 58 yards. The Jets took a 24-yard field goal from Mike Nugent after Cotchery couldn't pull down a high pass in the back right corner of the end zone. It was the only drive in the half where the Jets had to settle for three.

After the Jets forced a turnover — right end Bryan Thomas stripped the ball from Favre, and tackle Dewayne Robertson recovered — Pennington moved the Jets 51 yards in less than two and a half minutes. Cotchery ran away from safety Nick Collins over the middle for the 12-yard touchdown catch.

Packer fans were already booing late in the first quarter as Pennington drove the Jets again, this time 83 yards in nine plays, the last Houston's three-yard run for the score with 12:40 left in the half. At that point Pennington was already 13 for 19 for 166 yards, and the Jets had outgained the Packers, 202-26.

A 35-yard run by Ahman Green brought the Packers to the Jets' 26, but the drive stalled and Dave Rayner missed a 40-yard field goal. The Jets then mixed runs with passes, including wideout Brad Smith's 32-yard run down the right sideline on a reverse (the longest run by any Jet this season), in taking a 24-0 lead. Linebacker Nick Barnett interfered with Laveranues Coles in the end zone — Coles had screamed for interference on cornerback Al Harris on the play before — and it took Houston two tries to bull over from the one.

Cornerback Andre Dyson intercepted Favre on a deep sideline for Donald Driver with five minutes left in the half, and the Jets used up all but nine seconds of the remaining time to move 77 yards for another touchdown. With no timeouts left, Pennington found tight end Chris Baker wide open in the end zone on a play-action pass. The Packers were resoundingly booed as the left the field.

For the half, Pennington was 22-of-29 for 241 yards and two touchdowns.

Rayner kicked a 34-yard field goal early in the third quarter for the Packers' first points, then made an even bigger play on the kickoff, preventing a touchdown by wrestling down Justin Miller after a 45-yard runback. Charles Woodson intercepted Pennington as the Packers stopped the Jets for the first time all day.

Favre hit Driver for a 20-yard touchdown to make it 31-10, and Green Bay recovered an onside kick after a replay challenge, but then failed to gain any yardage on three plays and punted.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 — As Dorris Edwards slowed for traffic near Kingdom City, Mo., on her way home from a Thanksgiving trip in 2004, an 18-wheeler slammed into her Jeep Cherokee.

The truck crushed the sport-utility vehicle and shoved it down an embankment off Interstate 70. Ms. Edwards, 62, was killed.

The truck driver accepted blame for the accident, and Ms. Edwards's family filed a lawsuit against the driver and the trucking company.

In the course of pursuing its case, the family broached a larger issue: whether the Bush administration's decision to reject tighter industry regulation and instead reduce what officials viewed as cumbersome rules permitted a poorly trained trucker to stay behind the wheel, alone, instead of resting after a long day of driving.

After intense lobbying by the politically powerful trucking industry, regulators a year earlier had rejected proposals to tighten drivers' hours and instead did the opposite, relaxing the rules on how long truckers could be on the road. That allowed the driver who hit Ms. Edwards to work in the cab nearly 12 hours, 8 of them driving nonstop, which he later acknowledged had tired him.

Government officials had also turned down repeated requests from insurers and safety groups for more rigorous training for new drivers. The driver in the fatal accident was a rookie on his first cross-country trip; his instructor, a 22-year-old with just a year of trucking experience, had been sleeping in a berth behind the cab much of the way.

Federal officials, while declining to comment about the Edwards accident, have dismissed the assertion that deregulation has reduced safety and have maintained that in fact it has helped, though the Edwards family and many other victims of accidents have come to the opposite conclusion.

In loosening the standards, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was fulfilling President Bush's broader pledge to free industry of what it considered cumbersome rules. In the last six years, the White House has embarked on the boldest strategy of deregulation in more than a generation. Largely unchecked by the Republican-led Congress, federal agencies, often led by former industry officials, have methodically reduced what they see as inefficient, outdated regulations and have delayed enforcement of others. The Bush administration says those efforts have produced huge savings for businesses and consumers.

Those actions, though, have provoked fierce debate about their benefits and risks. The federal government's oversight of the trucking industry is a case study of deregulation, as well as the difficulty of determining an exact calculus of its consequences. Though Ms. Edwards's family and the industry disagree on whether the motor carrier agency's actions contributed to her death, her accident illuminates crucial issues in regulating America's most treacherous industry, as measured by overall deaths and injuries from truck accidents.

The loosened standards, supporters say, have made it faster and cheaper to move goods across the country. They also say the changes promote safety; without longer work hours, the industry would be forced to put more drivers with little experience behind the wheel. Regulators and industry officials point out that the death toll of truck-related accidents — about 5,000 annually — has not increased, while the fatality rate, the number of deaths per miles traveled, has continued a long decline. The number of annual injuries has also been dropping slowly, falling to 114,000 last year.

"This administration has done a good job, and the agency has done a good job, in advancing safety issues in a manner that takes into account all the important factors of our industry," said the top lobbyist for the American Trucking Associations, Timothy P. Lynch.

But advocates of tighter rules say the administration's record of loosening standards endangers motorists. The fatality rate for truck-related accidents remains nearly double that involving only cars, safety and insurance groups say. They note that weakening the rules has reversed a course set by the Clinton administration and has resulted in the federal government repeatedly missing its own targets for reducing the death rate.

"It is a frustrating disappointment that has led to a tragic era," said David F. Snyder, an assistant general counsel at the American Insurance Association who follows the trucking industry closely. "The losses continue to pile up at a high rate. There has been a huge missed opportunity."

An Industry's Influence

In decisions that had the support of the White House, the motor carrier agency has eased the rules on truckers' work hours, rejected proposals for electronic monitoring to combat widespread cheating on drivers' logs and resisted calls for more rigorous driver training.

While applauded by the industry, those decisions have been subject to withering criticism by federal appeals court panels in Washington who say they ignore government safety studies and put the industry's economic interests ahead of public safety.

To advance its agenda, the Bush administration has installed industry officials in influential posts.

Before Mr. Bush entered the White House, he selected Duane W. Acklie, a leading political fund-raiser and chairman of the American Trucking Associations, and Walter B. McCormick Jr., the group's president, to serve on the Bush-Cheney transition team on transportation matters.

Mr. Bush then appointed Michael P. Jackson, a former top official at the trucking associations, as deputy secretary of the Department of Transportation. To lead the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the president picked Joseph M. Clapp, the former chairman of Roadway, a trucking company, and the leader of an industry foundation that sponsored research claiming fatigue was not a factor in truck accidents, a conclusion at odds with government and academic studies.

And David S. Addington, a former trucking industry official who led an earlier fight against tougher driving limits, became legal counsel and later chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, an advocate of easing government regulations.

In addition to supplying prominent administration officials, the trucking industry has provided some of the Republican party's most important fund-raisers. From 2000 to 2006, the industry directed more than $14 million in campaign contributions to Republicans. Its donations and lobbying fees — about $37 million from 2000 to 2005 — led to rules that have saved what industry officials estimate are billions of dollars in expenses linked to tougher regulations.

But to the families of accident victims, the motor carrier agency has failed to fulfill a promise to significantly reduce fatalities, exacting a tragic personal price.

"They are not getting much done in Washington," said Daphne Izer of Maine, who founded Parents Against Tired Truckers in 1994 after a Wal-Mart driver fell asleep at the wheel of his rig, killing her son and three other teenagers in the car with him. "As a result, more people will continue to die."

Federal regulators disagree with that assessment of their performance. "We have made significant progress, yet much work remains to achieve our vision," said David H. Hugel, the new deputy administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. "Our challenges also are increasing because our nation maintains the most extensive and complex transportation system in the world, and that system and number of people who use it continues to grow."

The federal government began overseeing the trucking industry in the 1930s, setting rates, limiting competition and regulating safety practices. From the start, companies won important concessions from Washington, including exemptions from minimum wage and other labor laws. The industry also resisted efforts to impose tougher safety standards, saying it could police itself.

In 1937, the first driving hour limits were set. Truckers were allowed drive up to 10 continuous hours but were required to rest for a minimum of 8 hours. The remaining six hours could be used for other work activities, like loading, or for breaks or meals. Truckers could drive up to 60 hours over 7 consecutive days, or 70 hours over 8 days. To enforce those rules, the government required drivers to keep logs.

Repeated efforts over the years to tighten the rules were blocked, often as a result of vigorous industry lobbying.

Trucking companies have long argued that tougher standards are not necessary to promote safety, and that they would cause devastating economic pressures. Profit margins in the industry are thin, particularly after economic deregulation in 1980 prompted competition. Long hours and low pay for drivers have led to high turnover, and carriers struggle to find replacements. Those conditions, safety experts say, have contributed to widespread safety problems.

The practice of falsifying driver hours is an open secret in the industry; truckers routinely refer to their logs as "comic books." Fines are small. The federal motor carrier agency does not have the staff to monitor closely 700,000 businesses and almost eight million trucks.

Timothy L. Unrine, a 41-year-old driver from Virginia, said in a recent interview that he was taught to conceal excessive driving hours during training last January by his former employer, Boyd Brothers Transportation of Birmingham, Ala. Mr. Unrine said his orientation instructor told his class that government inspectors were allowed to examine a monthly logbook if it was bound. But if the staples were removed, the log was considered "loose leaf" and inspectors could require an examination of only those pages from the most recent seven days, Mr. Unrine said the drivers were told.

Company officials advised drivers to use fuel credit cards that recorded only the date, not the time, of the fuel stop, he said.

Mr. Unrine added that the company pushed him to work longer hours than permitted, and that his logbooks were "adjusted" many times to make it appear he was within the limits. Several times, when he told a dispatcher he was too tired to make another trip, he said, he was ordered to do so after just a few hours' sleep.

"I never felt safe driving under these conditions," said Mr. Unrine, who left Boyd last June because of a legal dispute over medical bills from a fall. "I talked to many drivers on the fuel islands, truck stops and rest areas. Logbooks are so fake; it scares me that there aren't more accidents on the road."

Richard Bailey, the chief operating officer at Boyd Brothers, and Wayne Fiquett, the company's vice president for safety, disputed Mr. Unrine's claims. They said that drivers might have been instructed to keep only seven days of log entries, but denied that they were encouraged to violate the rules.

"Nobody here will tell someone to do something unsafe," Mr. Fiquett said. "If a driver is tired or over his hours, the system will not allow that driver to continue driving."

In 1995, Congress directed regulators to study truck driver fatigue and its safety consequences and to consider new rules. But the agency then charged with truck safety, the Federal Highway Administration, never did so. Two years later, the Clinton administration vowed to cut the annual death toll of truck-related accidents in half within a decade. In 1999, Congress created the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in response to what lawmakers considered ineffectual regulation and high casualties.

A year later, the agency proposed tighter service hour rules. They would allow long-haul drivers to work a maximum of 12 hours a day, and require them to take 10-hour breaks between shifts. They also required installation of electronic devices to replace driver logs.

Advocates of tighter standards said the rules did not go far enough, while the industry said cutting driver hours could raise costs by $19 billion over a decade, five times more than government estimates. Action stalled when trucking lobbyists inserted language into a spending bill that forced the motor carrier agency to delay action until after the presidential election that November.

Rewriting the Rules

Industry leaders overwhelmingly supported the candidacy of George W. Bush, confident that his administration would be friendlier than one led by his opponent, Al Gore. On the campaign trail, Mr. Bush accused his Democratic rival of wanting to expand government, while Mr. Bush repeatedly expressed his desire to reduce federal regulations.

During the 2000 election cycle, trucking executives and political action committees gave more than $4.3 million in donations to the Republicans and less than $1 million to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research organization.

In the months before and after the election, a leading industry figure in the campaign against tighter driving rules was Mr. Acklie, who became chairman of the American Trucking Associations in the fall of 2000. A longtime Bush family friend and Republican fund-raiser, he led one of nation's largest trucking companies, Crete Carrier, based in Nebraska. Mr. Acklie, who stepped down from the post about a year after his appointment, did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Another important advocate was Mr. Addington, then general counsel to the Trucking Associations. In August 2000, when two top transportation officials complained in a press release about the industry's "raw use of political power," he demanded that they be investigated for possibly violating a federal law that prohibits officials from lobbying and issuing propaganda. In January 2001, he joined Mr. Cheney's office, where he is now chief of staff. Lea Anne McBride, the vice president's spokeswoman, said Mr. Addington had not been involved in issues related to his trucking activities.

Other industry officials also joined the administration. Mr. Jackson, a former colleague of Mr. Acklie and Mr. Addington at the trucking group, became the No. 2 official at the Transportation Department, which oversees the industry. Mr. Clapp, the former head of Roadway trucking, took over the motor carrier agency and soon became involved in rewriting the rules.

The insurance industry and safety groups provided studies showing a high percentage of accidents were caused by tired truck drivers. But after the Trucking Associations produced a study concluding that only 2 percent of accidents were caused by fatigued truckers, while more than 80 percent were caused by passenger cars, the agency decided to loosen the hourly restrictions.

In April 2003, the agency issued rules that increased the maximum driving hours to 77 from 60 over 7 consecutive days and to 88 hours from 70 over 8 consecutive days. It capped daily work hours at 14, which included driving as well as waiting for loading and unloading. The agency also decided not to require truck companies to install electronic monitoring devices.

The agency said the new rules would modestly decrease the number of fatalities by increasing the required time off for drivers, to 10 hours from 8. A year later, the agency set training standards for new drivers: 10 hours of training, none of it on the road.

Congress has provided little scrutiny of the trucking standards.

"There has not been the kind of in-depth examination of these issues that should have occurred," said Representative James L. Oberstar of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Mr. Oberstar and others blamed the failure on the political muscle of the industry. From 2000 to 2004, the American Trucking Associations donated $2 million to lawmakers, mostly to Republicans who served on committees with jurisdiction over trucking issues.

The courts have played a more significant role. In July 2004, a three-judge panel from the federal appeals court in Washington issued a harsh opinion in a lawsuit brought by several safety organizations over the trucking work rules.

Judge David B. Sentelle, a conservative Republican appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote the opinion, faulting the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for "ignoring its own evidence that fatigue causes many truck accidents."

The opinion continued, "The agency admits that studies show that crash risk increases, in the agency's words, 'geometrically' after the eighth hour on duty." The judges said they could not understand why the agency had not estimated the benefits of electronic monitoring, saying the agency's "passive regulatory approach" probably did not comply with the law. The panel struck down the hour and service rules.

But a year later, in August 2005, the agency issued virtually identical rules, which the safety groups and the Teamsters union are again challenging in court. Oral arguments are set for Monday before another three-judge federal appeals panel here. The agency had a similar legal setback on driver training. A three-member appeals court panel called the regulation "baffling" and criticized the agency for ignoring its own studies on the need for more comprehensive training.

The agency has not responded to the court's decision by issuing any new rules.

Meanwhile, the agency has failed, by growing margins, to meet its annual targets for lowering the death rate for truck-related accidents.

Mr. Hugel, the agency's deputy administrator, blames increasing traffic for the agency's inability to meet its goals. "More trucks, combined with even more passenger vehicles," he said, "leads to more roadway congestion, increased risk and a larger number of fatalities."

In a budget submission to Congress last February, though, the Transportation Department noted its repeated failure to cut the death rate and conceded that the agency "has difficulty demonstrating how its regulatory activities contribute to reaching its safety goal."

Safety experts, for their part, say the numbers reflect the agency's failings.

"The fatalities speak to the agency's lackluster performance," said Jacqueline S. Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, an alliance of consumer, health and insurance organizations. "These truck crashes happen one at a time in communities across the country and get little attention," Ms. Gillan said. "Can you imagine what the outcry would be at the F.A.A. if we had 25 major airplane crashes a year, which is the equivalent of what is happening with trucks?"

A Family's Lawsuit

After Ms. Edwards's death, her only son, Steve, a professional musician in Chicago, sued the trucking company, Werner Enterprises of Omaha, and the driver involved in the accident, John L. McNeal, 36. Mr. McNeal was dismissed shortly after the accident.

Mr. McNeal said in a sworn deposition that he had been tired from driving all day from Tennessee without a break. He had been in the cab for about 12 hours, including about 8 hours at the wheel. Because he had been driving trucks professionally for only a month, he was assigned a trainer, who had slept much of the trip.

After Mr. McNeal acknowledged he was at fault, Werner Enterprises settled the lawsuit for $2.4 million. Werner's general counsel, Richard S. Reiser, said that the company had a strong safety record and that its training program far exceeded the federal requirements. Mr. Reiser said that Mr. McNeal was in compliance with both the old and new work hour rules but acknowledged he was unfamiliar with the proposals by safety groups that would have prevented the driver from working as long as he did that day. He also said that any driver who was tired should stop, regardless of how long he had been on the road.

"The driver should be the one who says, 'If I'm tired, I should pull over,' " Mr. Reiser said.

Mr. Edwards, though, thinks responsibility for safety goes beyond individual drivers, and links his mother's death to the Bush administration's decisions against imposing tighter driving limits. "These drivers are working hard every day on the road to make a living," he said. "They are overtired and underpaid."

Mr. Edwards said his mother, who had worked at a Procter & Gamble Company factory before her weakened knees forced her to retire, had been looking forward to traveling, gardening and playing with her grandchildren.

"If there is any silver lining, it is that he hit her so hard she never saw it coming," Mr. Edwards said of the accident. "She probably was happy that she was going to be home soon."

LONDON, Dec. 2 — The tangled tale of Alexander V. Litvinenko, the maverick Russian K.G.B. agent turned dissident who died of radiation poisoning last week, has seized the headlines recently, but its roots can be traced to a late spring evening in Moscow in 1994.

At just after 5 p.m. on June 7, Boris A. Berezovsky, one of Russia's most powerful oligarchs, was leaving the offices of his car dealership in a chauffeured Mercedes 600. According to Russian news accounts at the time, he and his bodyguard were sitting in the rear seat behind the driver. As the car drove by a parked vehicle, a remote-controlled bomb detonated, decapitating the driver but somehow leaving Mr. Berezovsky unscathed.

As a high-ranking officer in the organized crime unit of the F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., Mr. Litvinenko "was the investigating officer of the assassination attempt," said Alex Goldfarb, a Berezovsky associate and a spokesman for the Litvinenko family, in an interview conducted, fittingly, in the rear seat of a parked Mercedes in central London with a heavyset driver at the wheel. "They became friends."

It was a friendship that was to shape Mr. Litvinenko's career, which began in the roller-coaster politics and self-enrichment of post-Soviet Russia, spanned his desperate flight from Russia through Turkey and then on to Britain to seek asylum. It ended spectacularly and mysteriously, with the British police saying the only thing they knew for sure was that he was dead, poisoned after ingesting an obscure radioactive isotope called polonium 210.

After Mr. Litvinenko's death, sketchy facts and abundant speculation unfolded like some lost chapter of the cold war. But unlike those days of East-West division and the half-light of shadowy, underground conflicts, this saga played out in the bright glare of newspaper headlines and 24-hour news channels.

Although the precise circumstances of his death remain hidden, Mr. Litvinenko lived the last years of his life as a public critic of President Vladimir V. Putin and the Russian government. Assigned to investigate the assassination attempt on Mr. Berezovsky, he ended up accusing the F.S.B. of involvement in a later conspiracy, a charge that severed his ties with the agency. Once in exile in London, his contacts with Mr. Berezovsky and a circle of other Russian émigrés and former agents flourished, even as his criticism of Mr. Putin grew more vigorous. In the weeks before his death, he had begun looking into the shooting death in Moscow of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of Mr. Putin and his policies in Chechnya.

Mr. Litvinenko began his lingering decline on Nov. 1, when he met an Italian academic, Mario Scaramella, in a sushi bar and linked up with former K.G.B. colleagues in a five-star hotel. Then he fell ill, wasting away over 22 excruciating days from a muscular, almost boyish figure to a gaunt shadow. Investigators followed a radioactive trail around London and, through British Airways planes found to have traces of radiation, to Moscow. British Airways said 221 flights, carrying 33,000 people, might have been affected. In a bizarre sideshow, a former Russian prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, a quiet critic of the Kremlin, fell ill with symptoms of poisoning.

The episode left Britain's relations with Russia strained: no matter how much Mr. Putin denied it, British officials faced a barrage of newspaper speculation that a supposedly friendly power, or its disaffected agents, had reached onto the streets of London for nefarious purposes.

From his deathbed, Mr. Litvinenko accused Mr. Putin of responsibility for his plight, but that conclusion was far from certain. One thing, though, was abundantly clear: Mr. Litvinenko's death matched his life in a world of conspiracy and betrayal as a former spy.

Links to a Tycoon

Mr. Litvinenko's role in the investigation of the assassination attempt against Mr. Berezovsky, who fled into exile in London in 2000, is not widely chronicled, although it was alluded to in an Associated Press report in 1998, which said the case was never solved.

Nonetheless, it appears to have provided the starting point for an association between Mr. Berezovsky, then one of Russia's richest men and most influential power brokers, and Mr. Litvinenko, who was rapidly acquiring a reputation at the Russian spy agency as a rebel and whistleblower.

Mr. Berezovsky declined to be interviewed for this article, saying through a spokesman that he was not prepared to offer further comment until after the police investigation of Mr. Litvinenko's death. But, in a statement five days after his friend died, Mr. Berzovsky said, "I credit him with saving my life, and he remained a close friend and ally ever since. I will remember him for his bravery, his determination and his honor." He was referring to another episode that would lead both men to flee Russia for asylum in Britain.

In a book he published in 2004, "Lubyanka Criminal Group," Mr. Litvinenko referred to a turning point in his life as an agent. In December 1997, he said his superior in the F.S.B. called him into his office with staggering orders: "You, Litvinenko, you know Berezovsky? You have to liquidate him," he said his superior told him.

That claim resurfaced sensationally in the public eye in November 1998, after Mr. Berezovsky accused the F.S.B. of plotting to assassinate him. Mr. Litvinenko and other disaffected agents called a news conference to confirm Mr. Berezovsky's allegations. It was a bizarre spectacle, even by the conspiratorial standards of the time: one dissident F.S.B. officer appeared in a ski mask, another in dark glasses. Mr. Litvinenko did not conceal his identity.

Mr. Putin, who led the agency at the time, reacted angrily, threatening to dismiss Mr. Litvinenko and the other officers who had spoken out.

According to a transcript published by the Kremlin International News Broadcast, Mr. Litvinenko began with a forthright attack on corruption within the agency. He said some of its units "have been used by certain officials not for constitutional purposes of state and personal security but for their own private political and material purposes, to settle accounts with undesirable persons, to carry out private political and criminal orders for a fee and sometimes simply as an instrument to earn money."

The remarks led to Mr. Litvinenko's suspension from the F.S.B. and a series of criminal court cases on five counts of abuse of power and other charges. In 1999, he spent eight months in pretrial detention in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow. When charges were dropped in November 1999 for lack of evidence, he was rearrested the instant the acquittal was read out, according to an account in Izvestia in 2001. He was released again in December 1999 and ordered not to leave town.

But the weeks and months went by with no indication that the investigations against him would be dropped.

Mr. Litvinenko, his wife, Marina, and son, Anatoly, fled Moscow in October 2000. According to accounts by Mr. Litvinenko at the time, and by others including Mr. Goldfarb and Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet military intelligence officer and defector, his trail led from Russia to the town of Antalya in southern Turkey, possibly via Ukraine.

But once in Turkey, no one, it seemed, wanted to deal with a renegade Russian agent.

"I brought him to the U.S. Embassy at the end of October in Ankara," said Mr. Goldfarb, by his own account an American citizen who fled the Soviet Union 31 years ago and spent many years in exile working for, among others, the financier George Soros. "We just walked in and said here's the F.S.B. colonel, and they are not interested."

Finally, Mr. Litvinenko left Turkey using a ticket allowing him to transit, but not stay, in London. In November 2000, he arrived at Heathrow airport, surrendered to the British police and claimed asylum, according to accounts by Mr. Litvinenko and in the British press. But he was still not treated as a high-level defector.

Mr. Suvorov, an agent from Russian military intelligence, G.R.U., who defected in 1978, said: "I raised the question, 'Look, there's a man who has lots of information about organized crime' — no one else had so much information — but no one questioned him about it, British, French, Americans. He had incredible knowledge." Neither Turkish nor American officials confirmed this account.

But, to judge from what happened later, Mr. Litvinenko was determined to put his knowledge of Russia's intelligence networks to use.

Émigrés in London

From the minute he landed in Britain, Mr. Litvinenko resumed his association with Mr. Berezovsky, who had arrived some months earlier also seeking asylum. From a modest row house in white-collar Muswell Hill in north London, he appears to have moved easily in security and former espionage circles, frequently visiting Mr. Berezovsky's offices in Mayfair — one of London's most upscale districts.

He was part, too, of a population of an estimated 300,000 Russians in London, including political émigrés, old-time defectors and wealthy tycoons who spend their time in nightclubs and boutiques and buying up real estate and soccer clubs. He was granted British citizenship earlier this year.

But he also maintained contact with his former F.S.B. colleagues, like Mikhail Trepashkin, who was jailed in October 2003 for betraying state secrets while investigating apartment bombings in Moscow and elsewhere in 1999 that killed scores of people. Those bombings formed the basis of a book published in English the same year by Mr. Litvinenko accusing Russia's security services of staging the bombings as a pretext for the second Chechen war.

In a letter released Friday and dated Nov. 23, Mr. Trepashkin said in a reference to the F.S.B., "Back in 2002, I warned Alexander Litvinenko that they set up a special team to kill him."

But Mr. Litvinenko also registered increasing concerns about his safety. "A secret service is designed to fight another secret service," he told The New York Times in a telephone interview in 2004 during the inquiry into the poisoning of Viktor A. Yushchenko, then a Ukrainian presidential candidate. "When a secret service goes after an individual, they have no chance."

Mr. Litvinenko said his supporters arranged for him to address British legislators, whom he told that members of the Russian secret services were "getting more aggressive, threatening my relatives." He said he knew of 32 Russian spies working in England. "They follow us and prepare provocations and our liquidation," he said.

In September 2004, two weeks after his appeal to Parliament, Mr. Litvinenko said in the interview, bottles containing burning liquid were thrown at his apartment at 1 a.m.

Some of his associates bridled at the idea that he was Mr. Berezovsky's personal agent or go-between. "He was not just someone who came from Russia and said to Berezovsky: give me some money," said Mr. Suvorov, the former G.R.U. agent.

But Mr. Litvinenko nonetheless displayed a knack for confidential business. According to a report in The Times of London in November, he traveled to Israel weeks before he died to hand over a dossier on the Yukos oil affair — in which the company's former chairman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, has been imprisoned for tax evasion — to Leonid Nevzlin, an exiled oil tycoon. Mr. Nevzlin was quoted as confirming the article. On the fateful day when he first took ill, the radiation trail of his movement led to the offices of Erinys, an international security company in Mayfair.

It was in that upscale district on Nov. 1 that he met his former Russian security service colleagues, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, in the Millennium Mayfair hotel, and Mr. Scaramella, the Italian consultant and academic, in the sushi bar on nearby Piccadilly. All three men have denied poisoning him.

A Mystery Deepens

But the saga was not over. One week after the police reported that Mr. Litvinenko had been poisoned, Mr. Scaramella himself was hospitalized when concentrations of the isotope were found in his body. Traces were also found on a member of Mr. Litvinenko's family.

The mystery seemed as deep as ever: the police had traced Mr. Litvinenko's movements and his contacts on Nov. 1. Detectives had spent 20 hours interviewing him in the hospital, according to associates. Yet the trail to Moscow seemed elusive and was impossible to confirm. Speculation swirled inconclusively about Kremlin plots and counterplots and efforts by rogue operatives to pursue their own feuds or discredit President Putin. But no one could say where the poison came from or how it entered Mr. Litvinenko's body.

Indeed, Mr. Lugovoi, the former K.G.B. agent, said in a Russian newspaper interview published on Saturday that Mr. Litvinenko might have, in fact, ingested the poison weeks earlier than anyone realized. If true, that would upend some of the most basic assumptions of the investigation — at least as far as it has been made public — and explain why radiation was found on a British Airways plane that flew between Moscow and London on Oct. 25.

"Alexander Litvinenko, my business partner Dmitri Kovtun and I were in London on Oct. 17 at a meeting in the office of Erinys," the private security company, Mr. Lugovoi told the Russian newspaper Kommersant. "Traces of radiation could have been left there after this visit."

Some of Mr. Litvinenko's associates said his position might have been made more precarious when he began to gather information about the death of Ms. Politkovskaya, the Russian investigative reporter shot to death in Moscow in October. "He was a very good investigator himself," said Mr. Suvorov, the former G.R.U. agent. "That made him very dangerous and vulnerable: if anyone called him and said, 'I know who killed Politkovskaya,' he just arranged a meeting. So, definitely, he was very vulnerable."

OAKLAND, Calif., Dec. 1 — Until recently, many children who did not conform to gender norms in their clothing or behavior and identified intensely with the opposite sex were steered to psychoanalysis or behavior modification.

But as advocates gain ground for what they call gender-identity rights, evidenced most recently by New York City's decision to let people alter the sex listed on their birth certificates, a major change is taking place among schools and families. Children as young as 5 who display predispositions to dress like the opposite sex are being supported by a growing number of young parents, educators and mental health professionals.

Doctors, some of them from the top pediatric hospitals, have begun to advise families to let these children be "who they are" to foster a sense of security and self-esteem. They are motivated, in part, by the high incidence of depression, suicidal feelings and self-mutilation that has been common in past generations of transgender children. Legal trends suggest that schools are now required to respect parents' decisions.

"First we became sensitive to two mommies and two daddies," said Reynaldo Almeida, the director of the Aurora School, a progressive private school in Oakland. "Now it's kids who come to school who aren't gender typical."

The supportive attitudes are far easier to find in traditionally tolerant areas of the country like San Francisco than in other parts, but even in those places there is fierce debate over how best to handle the children.

Cassandra Reese, a first-grade teacher outside Boston, recalled that fellow teachers were unnerved when a young boy showed up in a skirt. "They said, 'This is not normal,' and, 'It's the parents' fault,' " Ms. Reese said. "They didn't see children as sophisticated enough to verbalize their feelings."

As their children head into adolescence, some parents are choosing to block puberty medically to buy time for them to figure out who they are — raising a host of ethical questions.

While these children are still relatively rare, doctors say the number of referrals is rising across the nation. Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, New Jersey and the District of Columbia have laws protecting the rights of transgender students, and some schools are engaged in a steep learning curve to dismantle gender stereotypes.

At the Park Day School in Oakland, teachers are taught a gender-neutral vocabulary and are urged to line up students by sneaker color rather than by gender. "We are careful not to create a situation where students are being boxed in," said Tom Little, the school's director. "We allow them to move back and forth until something feels right."

For families, it can be a long, emotional adjustment. Shortly after her son's third birthday, Pam B. and her husband, Joel, began a parental journey for which there was no map. It started when their son, J., began wearing oversized T-shirts and wrapping a towel around his head to emulate long, flowing hair. Then came his mothers' silky undershirts. Half a year into preschool, J. started becoming agitated when asked to wear boys' clothing.

En route to a mall with her son, Ms. B. had an epiphany: "It just clicked in me. I said, 'You really want to wear a dress, don't you?' "

Thus began what the B.'s, who asked their full names not be used to protect their son's privacy, call "the reluctant path," a behind-closed-doors struggle to come to terms with a gender-variant child — a spirited 5-year-old boy who, at least for now, strongly identifies as a girl, requests to be called "she" and asks to wear pigtails and pink jumpers to school.

Ms. B., 41, a lawyer, accepted the way her son defined himself after she and her husband consulted with a psychologist and observed his newfound comfort with his choice. But she feels the precarious nature of the day-to-day reality. "It's hard to convey the relentlessness of it, she said, "every social encounter, every time you go out to eat, every day feeling like a balance between your kid's self-esteem and protecting him from the hostile outside world."

The prospect of cross-dressing kindergartners has sparked a deep philosophical divide among professionals over how best to counsel families. Is it healthier for families to follow the child's lead, or to spare children potential humiliation and isolation by steering them toward accepting their biological gender until they are older?

Both sides in the debate underscore their concern for the profound vulnerability of such youngsters, symbolized by occurrences like the murder in 2002 of Gwen Araujo, a transgender teenager born as Eddie, southeast of Oakland.

"Parents now are looking for advice on how to make life reasonable for their kids — whether to allow cross-dressing in public, and how to protect them from the savagery of other children," said Dr. Herbert Schreier, a psychiatrist with Children's Hospital and Research Center in Oakland.

Dr. Schreier is one of a growing number of professionals who have begun to think of gender variance as a naturally occurring phenomenon rather than a disorder. "These kids are becoming more aware of how it is to be themselves," he said.

In past generations, so-called sissy boys and tomboy girls were made to conform, based on the belief that their behaviors were largely products of dysfunctional homes.

Among the revisionists is Dr. Edgardo Menvielle, a child-adolescent psychiatrist at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington who started a national outreach group for parents of gender-variant children in 1998 that now has more than 200 participants. "We know that sexually marginalized children have a higher rate of depression and suicide attempts," Dr. Menvielle said. "The goal is for the child to be well adjusted, healthy and have good self-esteem. What's not important is molding their gender."

The literature on adults who are transgender was hardly consoling to one parent, a 42-year-old software consultant in Massachusetts and the father of a gender-variant third grader. "You're trudging through this tragic, horrible stuff and realizing not a single person was accepted and understood as a child," he said. "You read it and think, O.K., best to avoid that. But as a parent you're in this complete terra incognita."

The biological underpinnings of gender identity, much like sexual orientation, remain something of a mystery, though many researchers suspect it is linked with hormone exposure in the developing fetus.

Studies suggest that most boys with gender variance early in childhood grow up to be gay, and about a quarter heterosexual, Dr. Menvielle said. Only a small fraction grow up to identify as transgender.

Girls with gender-variant behavior, who have been studied less, voice extreme unhappiness about being a girl and talk about wanting to have male anatomy. But research has thus far suggested that most wind up as heterosexual women.

Although many children role-play involving gender, Dr. Menvielle said, "the key question is how intense and persistent the behavior is," especially if they show extreme distress.

Dr. Robin Dea, the director of regional mental health for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, said: "Our gender identity is something we feel in our soul. But it is also a continuum, and it evolves."

Dr. Dea works with four or five children under the age of 15 who are essentially living as the opposite sex. "They are much happier, and their grades are up," she said. "I'm waiting for the study that says supporting these children is negative."

But Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist and head of the gender-identity service at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, disagrees with the "free to be" approach with young children and cross-dressing in public. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Zucker has treated about 500 preadolescent gender-variant children. In his studies, 80 percent grow out of the behavior, but 15 percent to 20 percent continue to be distressed about their gender and may ultimately change their sex.

Dr. Zucker tries to "help these kids be more content in their biological gender" until they are older and can determine their sexual identity — accomplished, he said, by encouraging same-sex friendships and activities like board games that move beyond strict gender roles.

Though she has not encountered such a situation, Jennifer Schwartz, assistant principal of Chatham Elementary School outside Springfield, Ill., said that allowing a child to express gender differences "would be very difficult to pull off" there.

Ms. Schwartz added: "I'm not sure it's worth the damage it could cause the child, with all the prejudices and parents possibly protesting. I'm not sure a child that age is ready to make that kind of decision."

The B.'s thought long and hard about what they had observed in their son. They have carefully choreographed his life, monitoring new playmates, selecting a compatible school, finding sympathetic parents in a babysitting co-op. Nevertheless, Ms. B. said, "there is still the stomach-clenching fear for your kid."

It is indeed heartbreaking to hear a child say, as J. did recently, "It feels like a nightmare I'm a boy."

The adjustment has been gradual for Mr. B., a 43-year-old public school administrator who is trying to stop calling J. "our little man." He thinks of his son as a positive, resilient person, and his love and admiration show. "The truth is, is any parent going to choose this for their kid?" he said. "It's who your kid is."

Families are caught in the undertow of conflicting approaches. One suburban Chicago mother, who did not want to be identified, said in a telephone interview that she was drawing the line on dress and trying to provide "boy opportunities" for her 6-year-old son. "But we can't make everything a power struggle," she said. "It gets exhausting."

She worries about him becoming a social outcast. "Why does your brother like girl things?" friends of her 10-year-old ask. The answer is always, "I don't know."

Nila Marrone, a retired linguistics professor at the University of Connecticut who consults with parents and schools, recalled an incident last year at a Bronx elementary school in which an 8-year-old boy perceived as effeminate was thrown into a large trash bin by a group of boys. The principal, she said, "suggested to the mother that she was to blame, for not having taught her son how to be tough enough."

But the tide is turning.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, requires that students be addressed with "a name and pronoun that corresponds to the gender identity." It also asks schools to provide a locker room or changing area that corresponds to a student's chosen gender.

One of the most controversial issues concerns the use of "blockers," hormones used to delay the onset of puberty in cases where it could be psychologically devastating (for instance, a girl who identifies as a boy might slice her wrists when she gets her period). Some doctors disapprove of blockers, arguing that only at puberty does an individual fully appreciate their gender identity.

Catherine Tuerk, a nurse-psychotherapist at the children's hospital in Washington and the mother of a gender-variant child in the 1970s, says parents are still left to find their own way. She recalls how therapists urged her to steer her son into psychoanalysis and "hypermasculine activities" like karate. She said she and her husband became "gender cops."

"It was always, 'You're not kicking the ball hard enough,' " she said.

Ms. Tuerk's son, now 30, is gay and a father, and her own thinking has evolved since she was a young parent. "People are beginning to understand this seems to be something that happens," she said. "But there was a whole lifetime of feeling we could never leave him alone."

As the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate and as policy makers debate how to extricate the United States honorably from what increasingly appears a war without end, it is worth remembering that all wars do end eventually, and that postwar relationships between the bitterest of enemies can turn out surprisingly well. President Bush's recent trip to Vietnam, where he attended the annual meeting of APEC — the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization — illustrates this reality and even offers a measure of hope at a time when battlefront reports are almost unrelievedly bad and when America's foreign policy seems to lurch from crisis to crisis.

It often seems as if the U.S. presence in Iraq has created so many new enemies in the Muslim world that the clash of civilizations described by Prof. Samuel Huntington has gone from being the hypothesis of a Harvard political scientist to a historical inevitability. Even many of those who resist the notion that Islam and the West are on a collision course still worry that the harm that has been done in Iraq to relations between the U.S. and the Islamic world will be almost impossible to undo.

And yet the example of Vietnam suggests otherwise. If anything, the trauma of the Vietnam War on the American psyche was and for some still is far deeper than anything the Iraq war has yet produced. These days we speak — probably too glibly — of an America almost evenly divided between so-called red and blue states. But for anyone who remembers what this country was like during the Vietnam era and in its immediate aftermath, these contemporary divisions seem rather shallow. Vietnam truly split the country and brought millions of people into the streets against their own government. People died protesting the Vietnam War on campuses like Kent State. On the battlefield, there was also tremendous savagery. Think of the C.I.A.-run Phoenix program of targeted assassination or the systematic torture of American prisoners of war by the North Vietnamese.

Nevertheless, 30 years after the end of a war that left Vietnam in ruins and America in turmoil and confusion, the issues left over — accounting for the missing in action, reuniting families and even paying compensation for Agent Orange-induced maladies — are far less central to U.S.-Vietnamese relations than issues of trade and investment. America is now Vietnam's leading trading partner, and Intel has just announced the expansion of its factory near Ho Chi Minh City. While Congress dealt a temporary setback to President Bush's efforts to promote trade with Vietnam, few doubt that such efforts will succeed. As Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, has put it, Vietnam is "reforming" and "booming." (Of course, he might have added that it is hardly a paragon of human rights.)

Remarkably, President Bush's cordial reception to Prime Minister Phan Van Khai in 2005 was accepted with little protest except from small groups of Vietnamese-Americans. On the Vietnamese side, the dour commissars who fought the French and then the Americans, at the cost of more than a million of their own dead — "born in the North, die in the South" was a well-known saying in the North Vietnamese Army at the time — have given way to proud capitalists who, despite their Communist affiliations, are far more interested in deepening trade relations with America and in warding off their historic rival China than in pulling the scabs off old wounds.

Is there a lesson here for Iraq? The answer is that, in fact, there are many. The first, and perhaps the most important, is that history is not predictable and even the most deep-seated enmities can evaporate over time when the conditions are right. As President Bush himself said when he was in Hanoi last week: "History has a long march to it. Societies change, and relationships can constantly be altered to the good." There is no iron law of history that says that the bad relations between America and the Islamic world, and even between the United States and radical Shiite groups like the one led by the militant cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, are fated to continue this way indefinitely and immutably. Nor is there any reason to believe that an American withdrawal from Iraq will harm these relations any more than the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam permanently damaged U.S.-Vietnamese relations.

After the searing experience of Iraq, few among us believe that outsiders can impose democracy at the point of a gun. Nations and peoples simply have to find their own way. Of course, it is crucial not to romanticize this process. For the Vietnamese, the first decade after the fall of Saigon in 1975 was an appalling one — an era of mass repression and mass hunger. It is entirely possible, likely even, that in Iraq the situation will get considerably worse after a U.S. withdrawal, as it did in Vietnam. To put it starkly, however, the effort to foster democracy in Iraq has failed, and with that failure, short-term suffering may have to be the price of long-term coexistence. Is this perspective harsh to the point of cruelty? Perhaps. But it may be a necessary and sober one as well.

No one in his right mind should imagine a rosy future for Iraq — regardless of whether American commanders choose to preserve the status quo, start withdrawing or even add more troops to try a "final push" this spring. But again, all wars do end eventually. And in their aftermath, in the peace that follows, possibilities arise that seem almost unimaginable as people lie bleeding. It is conceivable that 30 years from now, one of President Bush's successors will travel to Baghdad not for crisis meetings in the Green Zone or to serve Thanksgiving turkey to the troops but to talk about peacetime matters like trade, tourism and the environment. Yet given America's inability to guarantee the security of ordinary Iraqis after an occupation that has lasted almost as long as our participation in World War II, it is possible to speculate that the sooner American forces leave Iraq, the sooner such a trip is likely to happen.

IN April, two months before turning 39, Stacy Jargowsky decided to learn to ride a bicycle. So she spent $9,000 for a brushed-silver custom-made bike called a Guru. "If I can only have one, I feel like it should be the best," she said. It was made of titanium, which — gearhead chatter about high performance, ultralight strength and lifetime durability notwithstanding — is as incredibly cool as it sounds. (Try saying "I'm taking my titanium Guru out for a spin today." Don't you feel better?)

A few months later, Ms. Jargowsky, who works for Flybar, a pogo-stick manufacturer, spent $10,000 for another custom-made cycle. "They kind of become like pets," she said. "Once you have one, you want to get another." This time she bought a Cervelo, made of carbon fiber. It's black. Carbon, according to many in the gearhead community, is even cooler than titanium.

That Ms. Jargowsky spent the equivalent of a few years' tuition at a perfectly respectable state university to buy two bikes when she barely knew how to ride may strike some people as — let's be honest here — floridly insane. Then again, people who raise their eyebrows at titanium Gurus and the men and women who love them like pets, it is safe to say, have not been paying attention to what's been happening at the upper end of the cycling market in Manhattan.

"You go to Central Park and there are all these expensive custom-made bikes, and they're not just for the bike geeks anymore," said Noah Budnick, a deputy director at Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit group that lobbies for bicycle-friendly laws in New York City. "You have these corporate guys now. I like to say that bicycling is the new golf."

Nationwide, demand for specially made bikes is higher than ever. "Custom bike sales are on the rise, and we're nowhere near the saturation point yet," said Megan Tompkins, the editor of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, a trade magazine.

Lance Armstrong's seven Tour de France victories provide one explanation why the road bike has seized back ground it had lost to mountain bikes in the '80s and '90s.

Another reason: aging baby boomers with worn-out knees have embraced cycling as a low-impact, aerobically demanding alternative to cartilage-grinding sports like basketball and tennis. The explosive growth of triathlons, whose participants need bicycles that will perform at long distances, has created tens of thousands more buyers since 2000. Finally — and not to be underestimated, especially in Manhattan — rich people like to buy cool things.

It's no secret to anyone who has ever endured an encounter with a grease-stained, eye-rolling, heavily sighing bicycle shop employee that customer service in the industry has historically ranged from sullen to supercilious to overtly hateful. ("It's one of the few retail industries where a condition for employment seems to be utter contempt for the customer," said one industry executive.)

Perhaps that's why many local sellers of custom bikes are newcomers to the market and eager to cater to a discriminating clientele. In January, JackRabbit, based in Brooklyn, opened a store at 42 West 14th Street, near Union Square. It traffics almost exclusively in custom bicycles, mostly carbon and titanium. So does two-year-old SBR MultiSports, at 203 West 58th Street, where Ms. Jargowsky bought her bikes. Signature Cycles opened its appointment-only store at 80 West End Avenue in February.

Although Altheus Cycling and Endurance Center, based in Rye, N.Y., closed its Union Square branch this week, Tom Crawford, the store's president, said the company plans to open at least one Manhattan outpost in 2007. In mid-April, another store that specializes in custom bicycles, Cadence Cycling and Multisport Centers in Philadelphia, will open an 11,000-square-foot store at 174 Hudson Street.

Customers who buy bikes at any of these shops first undergo an interrogation that bears more similarity to an adoption proceeding than to a bicycle purchase. What are their hopes for their new bicycle? What are their dreams? After the discussion comes the hallmark feature of the custom bike experience: the fitting. An assessment can last one to five hours, and — depending on the store — may involve computerized pedaling analysis, range-of-motion tests and individually designed insoles for cycling shoes (all for $200 to $375).

The cheapest bike at any of the stores costs about $1,600 (a single-speed aluminum road bike), and the most expensive, $23,000 (a carbon time-trial bike sold at Signature Cycles that comes with handmade German wheels at $5,500 a set).

If traditional bicycle shops are to SBR, Altheus and JackRabbit as coach is to first class, then Signature Cycles is a Gulfstream jet. "Very, very boutique," David Jordan, a cycling coach and former professional racer, said of Signature Cycles. He said that Paul Levine, Signature's owner, will "offer you a glass of Courvoisier while you discuss your cycling habits."

At Signature Cycles' Manhattan store (there is also a branch in Central Valley, N.Y.), there is a massage table for range-of-motion analysis. There is an espresso machine. There is, at the bar, Penfolds Shiraz and Maker's Mark. Courvoisier, too. There is a shower, because the fitting can be strenuous, and, as Grant Salter, an employee, said, "Our clients are Wall Street guys, and they don't want to go back to the office after a visit here and close a $5 million deal all sweaty and smelly."

To cyclists for whom the phrase "close a $5 million deal" has approximately the same relevance as "Why not take a weekend jaunt to the third moon of Jupiter," bicycles like the ones sold at Signature may represent nothing so much as the glittery and degraded signs of a gilded age's inevitable decline. Don't tell that to custom bike owners, though.

A year ago, when Manny Vidal came to Signature Cycles, he was 42 and hadn't been on a road bike for 20 years, and, at 5 feet 11 inches, weighed 260 pounds. He would go to the gym once or twice a week. He felt tired often.

Since buying his $10,000 gray titanium-and-carbon Serotta, Mr. Vidal, the chief executive of Vidal Partnership, which specializes in advertising in the Hispanic market, has lost more than 40 pounds. He rides at least 5 days a week for 90 minutes.

Mr. Vidal admits that his Serotta is sometimes more than just something he pedals. "Oh, it's definitely an accessory," he said. "People stop you and comment on the bike. They'll want to talk about it, ask you about it. They're the same kinds of looks I used to get when I drove a Porsche."

Ms. Jargowsky, who rides 60 to 70 miles a week, also confesses to a special bond with her bikes.

"The first time I had to check my triathlon bike for my race, I really noticed it missing in my home," said Mr. Jargowsky, who finished three triathlons this summer. "I would look out in the hallway and it wasn't there. It was kind of sad."

An accessory? Sad? Are these the sentiments of serious cyclists or well-heeled fanatics? Is there a difference? Dr. David Levine, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan, took up cycling three years ago. Now 39, he rides three or four laps around Central Park every weekday morning, with a group of other doctors from the hospital. They average about 16 minutes for a 6-mile lap, or 22.5 miles an hour. Dr. Levine (no relation to Paul, the Signature Cycles owner) rides a carbon Colnago, which he got from an Italian anesthesiologist who, he said, "has a nice connection to a bike shop in Como."

Yes, he said, riders of high-end bikes notice other high-end bikes. Is there wheel envy? "I'm not sure I'd call it that," he said, adding that it's more a matter of proud owners comparing the advantages of their bikes' technology.

Dr. Levine bristled slightly when it was suggested that people like him may be a little, um, obsessed with what is, after all, just a bicycle.

"You do feel a connection with it," he said. "But I don't think anyone in our group takes it to a psychotic, unreasonable extent."

He paused. "But my wife might disagree with that."

The builders of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge probably saved someone's life yesterday. They needed a place to dump all the displaced dirt from its construction, and ended up creating a new hunk of land that jutted out of Brooklyn into Coney Island Creek like a hitchhiker's thumb.

In 1962, that land became part of a city park. Yesterday, it became an impromptu runway for Paul P. Dudley, a pilot, by being in the right place — under him — at the right time when his plane's engine quit.

"There was no engine," said John Lloyd, one of three fishermen who saw the small Cessna 172 coming in. "The plane was off."

Mr. Dudley made an emergency landing in Calvert Vaux Park shortly after 10:30 a.m., touching down in an empty field and taxiing about 100 yards before crossing a small berm and coming to a stop, man and machine undamaged. The cause of the engine trouble is under investigation.

Mr. Dudley was traveling to Linden Airport in New Jersey from Westhampton Beach Airport on southeastern Long Island, about a 100-mile trip that he said takes 35 to 40 minutes in a Cessna. He works as a manager at the airport in Linden, in Union County. He said he has been flying this route for about 20 years.

"It's akin to getting a blowout with your car on the highway," he said last night. "This was a nonevent."

Mr. Dudley, 51, who said he lived in homes on both Staten Island and Long Island, said that the plane's problem was mechanical. He added that workers found about eight gallons of fuel in the Cessna's tank after the landing, so despite speculation by some people at the scene, being out of gas was not the cause.

The tracks of the Cessna left creases in the taller-than-average grass where people from Coney Island, Gravesend and Brighton Beach in Brooklyn can sometimes be found playing a pickup game of football.

"I detected something wrong with the airplane, and rather than risk going across the water and maybe or maybe not making it, this was the closest available field," Mr. Dudley told reporters in the park, near 27th Avenue and Shore Parkway in Brooklyn. "You're trained to look for places to land. That's all there is to it."

Later, he added: "If you have a good spot and an empty spot, you take it. You don't take the chance of kids playing ball in the next field."

The three friends from Coney Island were fishing for striped bass nearby in the creek when they witnessed the landing. They said they could tell he was in trouble because the wings were tipping back and forth. What was worse, they added, was that the plane was producing no sound.

"He needed to buy $10 of gas," said Ernell Gomez, one of the fisherman.

Mr. Lloyd, who was fishing with Mr. Gomez, said that he believed that the pilot was going to try a water landing. "Then he saw that soccer field and said, 'Hey, I'm going to try this,' " Mr. Lloyd said.

One of the fishermen called 911 with a cellphone. It turned out they saw more than just the landing. They believed so strongly that they had seen the airplane strike a crane's boom that they were certain the pilot was badly injured.

"How bad was he hurt? Is he pretty bad?" Mr. Lloyd asked a reporter. "Seems like the front of it would be pretty bad. You figure the pilot's face hit the windshield, like a car."

The men were surprised to hear that the pilot was fine.

"He's definitely lucky," Mr. Lloyd said.

Investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration said they planned to interview Mr. Dudley on Friday. The National Transportation Safety Board is not looking into the landing because it does not qualify as an accident.

A group of men spent more than four hours yesterday taking the wings off the Cessna so it could be loaded on a flatbed truck and carted to New Jersey. But the airplane's wheels were stuck in the mud, and as darkness approached, Mr. Dudley hurried off to a nearby Home Depot for wooden planks.

A handful of nearby residents, attracted by the police helicopters, came by the park for a look. "Any landing is a good landing," said Joe Barone, 62, himself a pilot.

Calvert Vaux Park, named in 1998 for the architect and one of the designers of Central Park, Prospect Park, Morningside Park and Fort Greene Park in the 1800s, is a little larger than 73 acres. Much of it was created from landfill from the bridge, according to the Parks Department. It was formerly known as the Dreier-Offerman Park, named for a home for unwed mothers and children that once stood on part of the property.

"Over here, they don't do much," said Ed Henry, who lives nearby. "I guess he picked a good place to land a plane. When I was a kid, this was all water. They took tons and tons of dump trucks full of dirt and dumped it here."

Asked about the experience of landing in such a place, Mr. Dudley said, "Walk in the park."

BAGHDAD, Wednesday, Nov. 15 — Gunmen dressed in Iraqi police commando uniforms and driving vehicles with Interior Ministry markings rounded up dozens of people inside a government building in the heart of Baghdad on Tuesday and drove off with them in one of the most brazen mass kidnappings since a wave of sectarian abductions and killings became a feature of the war.

Although some Iraqi officials said as many as 150 people had been taken, the American military command put the total at 55.

Witnesses said as many as 50 gunmen arrived at the Ministry of Higher Education compound at midmorning, forced their way past a handful of guards and stormed through a four-story building, herding office workers, visitors and even a delivery boy outside at rifle point. After women were separated, the men were loaded aboard a fleet of more than 30 pickup trucks and two larger trucks, then driven away through heavy traffic toward mainly Shiite neighborhoods on the city's eastern edge, officials and witnesses said.

Late in the evening there were conflicting reports that some or most of those taken had been freed. Iraqiya state television reported that most of those seized had been freed in security operations, but a Shiite station, Al Furat, said 25 people were still missing, according to Reuters. None of the reports could be confirmed.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, which is responsible for the police, announced on state television several hours after the abductions that orders had been issued for the arrest of several police commanders from the Karada area in eastern Baghdad, site of the Higher Education Ministry.

The announcement combined with other details, including accounts by one of a group of about a dozen people released by the kidnappers later on Tuesday, to suggest that the abductions may have been the latest in a series of mass kidnappings carried out by Shiite gangs and death squads operating from inside the Interior Ministry, or with access to its uniforms and vehicles. If the abductions are traced to groups operating under Interior Ministry cover, they seem certain to add a new level of crisis to the political tensions in Baghdad.

On Wednesday, an Interior Ministry spokesman said a brigade of the police searching in eastern Baghdad had found and freed 30 kidnap victims. He said the brigade was continuing its search and expected to free the remaining victims before the end of the day.

Recent events in the United States, including the Democrats' midterm election gains last week and the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, have intensified American pressure on Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and the alliance of Shiite religious groups he leads to act decisively to improve his government's performance — in effect, to show that America has trustworthy partner, and help to head off the momentum in Washington for a withdrawal of American troops.

Action against sectarian militias and death squads, particularly those associated with the governing Shiite parties, tops the American priorities that have been urged on the Iraqi leader, most recently in a meeting in Baghdad Monday with the top American military commander in the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid.

Late on Tuesday, Mr. Maliki, appearing on state-run television, seemed eager to establish that he had responded swiftly to the abductions, saying that he had ordered the Defense and Interior Ministries to mount an intensive search for those seized.

During a meeting with the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, Mr. Maliki appeared to suggest that the kidnappers came from the Mahdi Army, an unruly militia headed by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, a mainstay of the ruling Shiite alliance. "What is happening is not terrorism, but the result of disagreements and conflict between militias belonging to this side or that," he said.

The 56-year-old prime minister said security sweeps had been responsible for the dozen people released earlier in the day, though that did not immediately tally with the account given by a Shiite ministry official who was among those set free. The official said he and others in his group were separated from the main body of those seized by their kidnappers after the gunmen quizzed all their captives about their identities and occupations. After being driven blindfolded to a rural area in northern Baghdad, the official said, they were abandoned and left to make their own way to safety.

The government's swift response in ordering the arrest of the police commanders broke with a pattern of inaction in several earlier mass kidnappings that appeared to have been linked to Shiite death squads.

While concern to show a new resolve to restive critics of the war in Washington was likely to have been a major spur, another was the sheer scale and audacity of the attack. By seizing such a large number of people from a government building, in the center of the capital, in broad daylight, the kidnappers appeared to be sending a message that they could pounce anywhere with impunity.

The precise number abducted remained uncertain. In an angry, anguished address delivered on live television, Abed Thiab al-Ajili, the higher education minister and a member of the country's largest Sunni political bloc, told Parliament that 100 to 150 people had been taken; ministry officials said they included Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Christians. A similar figure was given by the Shiite ministry official who was released. His figure, though, appeared to be based on a rough count of the people working in the building and visitors, rather than an accurate head count of those abducted.

The American military command, which sent troops to the site of the kidnappings, said its investigation showed that the number of men taken was about 55. It also said there were indications that the kidnapping victims had been taken to the Baladiyat district in eastern Baghdad, a predominantly Shiite neighborhood on the southern fringe of Sadr City about three miles from the building where they were seized.

The fact that the kidnappers took captives from a wide cross-section of Iraq's cultural and religious groups created some confusion about their motives, though many previous kidnappings have followed a similar pattern.

In his speech to Parliament, Mr. Ajili, the higher education minister, skirted the question of whether the kidnapping was motivated by sectarian hatred. But he suggested that the Maliki government was incompetent, if not complicit in the abductions. He said he had repeatedly asked the government for additional security to protect the ministry and members of the university community, who have been favorite targets for assassination since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

According to a tally by The Associated Press, more than 150 educators have been killed, and thousands of others have fled the country. "I told the M.O.I. and M.O.D. if you can't protect the universities, give me 800 recruits and I will do this mission," Mr. Ajili said, referring to the Ministries of Interior and Defense. "But they rejected the idea."

Shiite leaders have often said that kidnappers who have been linked to the Interior Ministry have in fact been criminal thugs, or even Sunni insurgents, who have acquired the military-style uniforms used in the attack from street markets where they are widely available. Basil al-Khateed, a spokesman for the Higher Education Ministry, counseled against hasty conclusions. "It's not clear if this kidnapping was sectarian or not," he said.

Witnesses said the gunmen arrived at the ministry about 9:30 a.m. in a long line of vehicles that appeared to be on police business. "I saw around 30 Interior Ministry vehicles which did not have license plates close the road, and then the commandos stepped out of their vehicles," said one man who worked in a government agency nearby but asked not to be identified. Mr. Khateed, the ministry spokesman, said the gunmen told ministry guards and onlookers that the American ambassador was arriving.

The ministry official who was later released said he was in his office inside the building. The gunmen, in the blue camouflage uniforms worn by police commandos, flooded into the building, the official said, and told him they were from the government's integrity commission, an agency that investigates corruption.

Suddenly, however, the gunmen cocked their weapons and yelled for everyone to stay where they were, the official said. They gathered the women in one room, before eventually letting them go, Mr. Ajili, the minister, said, but not before taking their cellphones and sorting through them for newer models, which they stole, leaving older models behind. He said the men taken captive had their hands bound behind them and their eyes blindfolded before being taken out to the pickup trucks.

Iraqi police and army units in the area did nothing to stop the abductions, witnesses and officials said, either because they believed the gunmen were legitimate commandos, or, some suggested, because they were part of a preset plan. "We are astonished by this," said Saleem Abdulla, a lawmaker from the Iraqi Consensus Front, the main Sunni bloc in Parliament. "It just seems so odd. How can people kidnap about 100 people like that, in daylight?"

He added: "And what about the vehicles? What about the checkpoints? Aren't we in a state of emergency? And no one can trace these people? No one can follow them to find out who they are? It is very odd. We think there has to be some link between these gangs and powerful men in the M.O.I."

The released Shiite official, who spoke later on Iraqi television but did not give his name, said the gunmen yelled at motorists to clear the road as they headed east through the traffic from the ministry building.

The official said the gunmen had taken their captives into a large hall with a concrete floor, then began to quiz each of them, demanding their names, often an indicator of their sect, as well as identity cards. "They split us into two groups," he said. "The first group, they said, 'We will release you.' The second group, 'We will keep you for additional investigation.' They put me in the group that would be released. When they said that, I thought, no, they will kill me. I was sure they would kill me. They were shouting, 'We will kill everyone who doesn't listen to us.' "

But the gunmen put him and the others in his group back onto the pickup trucks, and drove them elsewhere, the official said. There, he said, they were told to sit on the ground and not move, and warned that anyone removing a blindfold would be killed.

But after 10 minutes of silence, he said, one of the men in the group mustered the courage to clear his eyes, and told the others they were safe. "We don't know why they took us, and why they released us," the official said. "It's a terrorist operation with a big criminal ring that planned this."

Elsewhere, a car bomb exploded near a busy market in the capital, killing 10 people and wounding 25 others, an Interior Ministry official said. Late Monday and into Tuesday, clashes erupted between members of the Mahdi Army militia and American troops, leaving six civilians dead and 13 wounded, an Interior Ministry official said. The police found 25 bodies dumped across the city on Tuesday, the official said.

Reporting was contributed by Ali Adeeb, Khalid al-Ansary, Qais Mizher, Omar al-Neami, Kirk Semple and Sabrina Tavernise.