Talk Radio on WABC Shifts Focus to the Local

WABC-AM (770), which is owned by Cumulus Media, will introduce a new lineup on Thursday that emphasizes live and local programming, as its two most popular hosts, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, move to a rival station, WOR-AM (710).

Weekday programming at WABC will include the return of Curtis Sliwa’s and Ron Kuby’s show, “Curtis and Kuby,” from noon to 3 p.m., after an absence of more than six years, and, starting Monday, a one-hour program at 5 p.m. with Pat Kiernan, the NY1 television anchor.

Geraldo Rivera, who joined WABC in early 2012, will turn his focus to New York news in a two-hour live show at 10 a.m., as Cumulus announced in November. Michael Savage’s syndicated program, which has been heard in the evenings, will now run from 3 to 5 p.m. “Imus in the Morning,” with Don Imus, will continue from 6 to 10 a.m.

“We’re delivering on our pledge to invest in localized content that will entertain, inform and engage listeners while also providing advertisers unique opportunities to reach their customers on a sustained basis,” John Dickey, Cumulus’s co-chief operating officer, said in a statement.

The changes come as Cumulus tries to build its programming chest to compete against Clear Channel, whose 850 stations include WOR. Once a small player in the radio industry, Cumulus expanded greatly in 2011 when it bought Citadel Broadcasting for $2.5 billion, and it now operates about 460 stations.

Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Hannity, whose shows are syndicated to hundreds of stations by Clear Channel’s Premiere Networks division, are by far the country’s most popular talk hosts, and their combined presence helped make WABC the dominant talk outlet in New York. Talkers, a trade magazine, estimates that Mr. Limbaugh reaches more than 14 million listeners each week and Mr. Hannity 13.25 million.

Last year, however, Cumulus executives said millions of dollars were lost after advertisers withdrew from the shows, largely in response to Mr. Limbaugh’s ridicule of Sandra Fluke, an advocate of insurance coverage for birth control.

Mr. Limbaugh’s and Mr. Hannity’s shows left WABC at the end of 2013 as a result of complex negotiations between Cumulus and Clear Channel. Mr. Hannity’s show was dropped from dozens of Cumulus stations, while the syndication contract for Mr. Limbaugh was renewed at most stations, but discontinued at WABC. In New York, their shows are now heard on WOR.

“Curtis and Kuby,” which ran on WABC from 2000 to late 2007, will now compete against Mr. Limbaugh, and Mr. Savage’s show will be up against Mr. Hannity.

While none of the new figures on WABC have followings on the scale of WOR’s syndicated hosts, Cumulus is betting on the appeal of locally focused content to draw New York listeners.

Mr. Kiernan, who is on NY1 each weekday morning, said his show, which will include a co-host who has not been named, would be a recap of the major news and pop culture events of the day. He also emphasized the importance of local programming on the radio, as stations compete not only against one another but also against an ocean of media online.

“In an era when listeners can go off in so many different directions,” Mr. Kiernan said, “local is something you can’t take away from people.”

DealBook: A New Divestment Focus on Campus: Fossil Fuels

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Parliament Hearing to Focus on BBC Severance Dispute

Mr. Thompson, who left the BBC in 2012 and is now the president and chief executive officer of The New York Times, has challenged July testimony by Mr. Patten about how much the trust was told about a series of large severance payments to executives who left the corporation in an effort to reduce costs.

In a 25-page witness statement submitted to Parliament on Friday, Mr. Thompson has accused the trust, which represents the interests of ordinary Britons who pay an annual television fee that goes to the BBC, of misleading the committee and the National Audit Office.

In July, Mr. Patten expressed surprise at the details of important severance payments, which were larger than contractually mandated, according to the auditors, while Mr. Thompson insisted that the trust had been fully informed and raised no objections. In particular, Mr. Thompson’s deputy, Mark Byford, was given a full year’s salary in lieu of notice despite having worked an additional eight months when the deputy’s job was eliminated.

One of the documents Mr. Thompson has presented is a briefing memo prepared for Mr. Patten explaining the payments, which were approved before Mr. Patten became chairman of the trust. He said that Mr. Patten’s testimony in July was “fundamentally misleading about the extent of trust knowledge and involvement.”

In a statement, the trust called Mr. Thompson’s submission “a bizarre document,” said that “we completely disagree with Mark Thompson’s analysis,” and said that Mr. Patten and Anthony Fry, a trustee, had not misled Parliament. Mr. Patten had not had “a full and formal briefing on the exact terms of Mark Byford’s departure,” the trust said.

Mr. Patten has come under considerable criticism for the large severance given to Mr. Thompson’s successor, George Entwistle, who lasted only 54 days in the job. He resigned in November over a reporting scandal, but was given a full year’s salary in addition to a normal severance payment. The furor over that package has made the earlier payments more politically delicate.

Both Mr. Thompson and Mr. Patten will appear before the Public Accounts Committee on Monday.

Iran’s President Puts New Focus on the Economy

In an acknowledgment of the growing toll that international economic restrictions connected to Iran’s nuclear program are having on the population, both Mr. Rouhani and Ayatollah Khamenei made the economy a major theme of their remarks.

“People called for change and improvement in their living standards, they want to live better,” Mr. Rouhani said.

But he and the ayatollah offered somewhat different solutions. Whereas Mr. Rouhani said that interactions with the world, meaning talks with Europe and potentially the United States, were a way out of the crisis, Ayatollah Khamenei, who as supreme leader has final word on all important issues, expressed pessimism that such overtures would yield fruit. “Some of our enemies do not speak with our language of wisdom,” he said, urging self-sufficiency.

As Mr. Rouhani takes his public oath of office on Sunday, Iran’s growing economic crisis sits atop his agenda. Sanctions have slashed oil exports and limited Iran’s ability to transfer money from abroad. The shortage has been aggravated by the profligate spending that is a legacy of the departing government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

During most of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s two four-year terms, Iran enjoyed an oil windfall, with a flow of dollars and euros that fueled huge imports on goods ranging from ice cream to Porsches.

But now Mr. Rouhani’s aides describe Iran’s economic situation as the worst in decades. Many blame what they call Mr. Ahmadinejad’s erratic economic policies, punctuated by slashed subsidies and unbridled inflation.

The signs of woe abound.

Lacking money, Iran’s national soccer team scrapped a training trip to Portugal. Teachers in Tehran nervously awaited their wages, which were inexplicably delayed by more than a week. Officials warned recently that food and medicine imports have stalled for three weeks because of a lack of foreign currency.

While Mr. Rouhani has asked for a hundred days to review the state of the economy and devise solutions, there are some voices who now say that the only way to solve the economic ills is to come up with a political settlement of Iran’s nuclear dispute. Those voices were barely heard during Mr. Ahmadinejad’s tenure.

“Rouhani’s economic success depends on the determination of Iran’s other leaders to find a solution for the nuclear support,” an economics professor, Mohsen Renani of the University of Isfahan, told the Web site Neco News.

In another sign of dissatisfaction over the consequences of Iran’s nuclear stance, an influential political professor publicly expressed doubt recently over the benefits of the nuclear program. “Why are we producing radioisotopes when we can import them much cheaper?” the professor, Sadegh Zibakalam of Tehran University, told the reformist weekly Aseman. “Why should we maintain a nuclear program when we have no economic justification?”

While those voices may have grown louder, they by no means represent the official position of Iran’s ruling establishment, which maintains that self-sufficiency in nuclear energy is nonnegotiable.

“Whatever happens, our nuclear stances will not change nor waver,” Mohammad Taghi Rahbar, a former member of Parliament and an influential Friday Prayer leader in Isfahan, said in an interview. “Our supreme leader, the nation and all officials from all factions believe this is our inalienable right, so we will not retreat at all.”

But ignoring the increasing economic pressures, while promising a better future — a strategy favored by Iran’s leaders over the past years — is proving increasingly complicated. Almost everybody in Iran is feeling the pain.

N.S.A. Leak Puts Focus on System Administrators

As the N.S.A., some companies and the city of San Francisco have learned, information technology administrators, who are vital to keeping the system running and often have access to everything, are in the perfect position if they want to leak sensitive information or blackmail higher-level officials.

“The difficulty comes in an environment where computer networks need to work all the time,” said Christopher P. Simkins, a former Justice Department lawyer whose firm advises companies, including military contractors, on insider threats.

The director of the N.S.A., Gen. Keith B. Alexander, acknowledged the problem in a television interview on Sunday and said his agency would institute “a two-man rule” that would limit the ability of each of its 1,000 system administrators to gain unfettered access to the entire system. The rule, which would require a second check on each attempt to access sensitive information, is already in place in some intelligence agencies. It is a concept borrowed from the field of cryptography, where, in effect, two sets of keys are required to unlock a safe.

From government agencies to corporate America, there is a renewed emphasis on thwarting the rogue I.T. employee. Such in-house breaches are relatively rare, but the N.S.A. leaks have prompted assessments of the best precautions businesses and government can take, from added checks and balances to increased scrutiny during hiring.

“The scariest threat is the systems administrator,” said Eric Chiu, president of Hytrust, a computer security company. “The system administrator has godlike access to systems they manage.”

Asked Sunday about General Alexander’s two-man rule, Dale W. Meyerrose, a former chief information officer for the director of national intelligence, said, “I think what he’s doing is reasonable.”

“There are all kinds of things in life that have two-man rules,” added Mr. Meyerrose, who now runs a business consulting firm. “We’ve had a two-man rule ever since we had nuclear weapons. And when somebody repairs an airplane, an engineer has to check it.”

John R. Schindler, a former N.S.A. counterintelligence officer who now teaches at the Naval War College, agreed that the “buddy system” would help. “But I just don’t see it as a particularly good long-term solution,” he said.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to scrub all your I.T.’s for security issues,” he asked, “and see if there is another Snowden?”

The two-man rule “has existed in other areas of the intelligence community for certain exceptionally sensitive programs where high risk was involved,” he said, “but it’s not a standard procedure.”

Mr. Meyerrose and Mr. Schindler both said that software monitoring systems can also help, though they can be evaded by a knowledgeable systems administrator. The biggest issue for government and industry, they said, is to vet the I.T. candidates more carefully and to watch for any signs of disillusionment after they are hired.

“It’s really a personal reliability issue,” Mr. Meyerrose said.

Insiders of all types going rogue have become a problem for the government and industry over the last decade. One of the most prominent is Pfc. Bradley Manning, who downloaded a vast archive of American military and diplomatic materials from his post in Iraq and gave it to WikiLeaks. But there have been others, including scientists and software developers who stole secrets from American companies where they worked and provided them to China.

Now the spotlight is on the system administrators, who are often the technology workers with the most intimate knowledge of what is moving through their employers’ computer networks.

Bits Blog: YouTube Founders Focus on New Video Tools

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Steve Chen, left, and Chad Hurley, the founders of YouTube, in 2011 after their Internet company purchased a site called Delicious.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Twitter should consider itself very flattered.

Wanpai, a new smartphone video recording app available only in Chinese, bears a strong resemblance to Vine, Twitter’s fast-growing service that lets users shoot and post six-second snippets of video.

Perhaps even more flattering is that the Vine clone was created by Avos, the start-up created by the YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen after they left YouTube. (Google bought YouTube in 2006 and is an investor in Avos.)

In a phone interview on Thursday, Mr. Hurley acknowledged that Vine was “the inspiration” for Wanpai (which he translated from the original Mandarin as “Play Shot”). He said that Avos’s development team in Beijing, which operates with some autonomy from the company’s headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., had developed Wanpai on their own initiative.

“They didn’t think Vine was serving the market,” he said. Vine “wasn’t translated and didn’t work well in China.” (Twitter is blocked by the Chinese government and Vine is tightly integrated into the social networking service.)

Mr. Hurley said Avos’s newest creation, MixBit, to be released in July or August, would be much more original.

Although he wouldn’t divulge many details about the project, which is in private beta testing, Mr. Hurley said MixBit would provide an “intuitive” interface to help people easily create content, much the way YouTube made it easy to post videos to a wide audience.

“What we ended up creating at YouTube is a solution for distribution,” Mr. Hurley said. “What hasn’t been solved yet is the act of creation.”

He said current platforms for creating and sharing images and videos, likeTwitter and Instagram (owned by Facebook), are too focused on self-promotion, which intimidates many people.

“It limits what they put online,” he said. “Unless it’s pretty, they don’t share it.” (Anyone who has spent even 10 minutes plowing through a heap of Instagram photos or Vine videos might beg to differ.)

MixBit will enter a crowded market. In addition to Vine, which has grown to 13 million users in just four months, Instagram is expected to soon introduce its own quick-video product.

Avos first surfaced publicly in 2011 when it purchased the Delicious social bookmarking service from Yahoo. It has since kept a low profile, working on several projects, including Zeen, an online magazine creation tool that was supposed to go live a year ago but is still stuck in beta.

In contrast to the situation with the Wanpai app, Mr. Hurley said, he is directly involved in MixBit’s development. “This is a tool that I’m going to use,” he said.

That contrasts with a certain video site that he used to run. “Me, personally, I don’t upload video to YouTube,” Mr. Hurley said.

Advertising: FleishmanHillard Rebrands Itself, With a 21st Century Focus

Fleishman-Hillard, which was founded in 1946 as Fleishman, Hillard & Associates, will rebrand itself this week as FleishmanHillard, with elements that include a new logo and a new slogan, “The power of true” — no relation, presumably, to “Truth well told,” the slogan of McCann Erickson Worldwide, or “Truth and design,” the slogan of MediaVest.

Truth be told, the changes at FleishmanHillard — with worldwide revenue of more than $500 million and 2,500 employees in 84 offices — are meant to signal how it is striving to become an integrated marketing communications agency that offers services like advertising and social media marketing in addition to public relations.

“ ‘True’ is the central concept we’re rebranding on, to deliver on our promises to be the trusted adviser to guide you through the maze of choices,” said Dave Senay, president and chief executive at FleishmanHillard in St. Louis, which since 1997 has been part of the Diversified Agency Services division of the Omnicom Group, the world’s second-largest agency holding company after WPP.

“It’s not that we’re going to become an ad agency,” Mr. Senay said, adding: “We’re moving into a different space. The vision is to be the most complete communications company in the world. Somebody’s got to be able to put it all together.”

FleishmanHillard will seek to be “channel agnostic,” Mr. Senay said, an industry term meaning to be objective about the various forms of communication, whether paid, owned, earned or shared, to reflect “how the public consumes media today.”

To that end, the agency is hiring a former longtime journalist, Pat Wechsler, as senior vice president and director for editorial and corporate content strategy, working in realms like content marketing, which provides consumers editorial and entertainment articles and video clips that marketers sponsor.

He was hired after FleishmanHillard had brought in scores of the types of employees who are more typically found at consultancies, brand identity businesses or ad agencies, among them analytics specialists, planners, copywriters and art directors.

FleishmanHillard “wasn’t even on my radar,” said Nick Childs, an executive creative director in the agency’s New York office who arrived in 2011 after working at ad agencies like Grey.

“I had a chance to take a risk and do something unique at a big agency that could be a key partner to brands,” he added, “not just pushing out at an audience what a brand wants to say.”

Richard Dale, senior vice president, senior partner and global planning director, who also joined FleishmanHillard in New York in 2011, said that after working for ad agencies like Leo Burnett “I was looking for something different” and became intrigued by the concept of FleishmanHillard’s “transforming into a total communications resource.”

Although “the journey is just beginning at FleishmanHillard, and we still have a lot to do,” he added, “the firm is being given the tools, and it’s proving so game-changing.”

Reflecting the broadening of the services offered by FleishmanHillard beyond public relations, the agency last year placed more than $1.2 billion worth of ads in paid media, compared with $250 million in 2011.

“A lot of things have changed in consumer product marketing, especially the multiplicity of channel options,” said Mike Brooks, executive director at the William K. Busch Brewing Company in St. Louis, which hired FleishmanHillard to create television, radio, outdoor, online, retail and social-media ads to introduce two beers, Kräftig Lager and Kräftig Light.

Asked to assess the work, Mr. Brooks paused to declare, “I’m not on a P.R. campaign for FH,” then said: “I am happy to report thumbs up in every regard. The creative and the messaging are well received. And we have one quarterback of all the disciplines, Tom Hudder, an executive creative director, ensuring everything is consistent.”

FleishmanHillard is, of course, not the only agency reassessing its operations in light of the profound changes in marketing and media. Large competitors like Edelman, part of Daniel J. Edelman Inc., and Weber Shandwick, a unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies, are also reworking their service offerings.

“It’s exciting if we look at it as different opportunities, new opportunities, to be creative,” said Mark O’Brien, president at the DDB North America division of DDB Worldwide, an Omnicom ad agency. “Persuasion is an art, not a science.”

Because of innovations like social media, the model has evolved from “trying to connect people with brands” to “trying to connect people with people to connect with brands,” he added. “Agencies that have made an effort to bring in fresh talent are getting hotter.”

Mr. Senay said rough patches are likely during the transition. For instance, referring to the employees who have worked on public relations assignments at the agency, he said, “about a third are turned on by” the new vision, “about a third will go along with it and about a third will not get it.”

To promote its new identity, FleishmanHillard is introducing a quarterly digital magazine, FleishmanHillard True. And a television, print, outdoor and online ad campaign that is being created internally, with a budget estimated at $750,000, is to begin this week. “Be as you wish to be seen,” a 15-second commercial proclaims.

DealBook: Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Plans to Expand Its Focus

Wall Street’s self-regulator is planning to exercise some new muscle.

Richard G. Ketchum, the head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, said in an interview on Tuesday that he would ramp up scrutiny of high-speed trading and a batch of complex products. Finra, Mr. Ketchum said, would take aim at so-called leveraged loans and collateralized loan obligations, along with the potential conflicts that brokerage firms face in pitching their own investments over rivals’ products.

“We’re going to be very focused on conflicts of interest,” said Mr. Ketchum, the chairman and chief executive of Finra. In a statement, Firna added that it would “pursue potential cross-market abuses and refine its surveillance patterns based on new threat scenarios and regulatory intelligence.”

The expanded focus comes as Finra announced on Tuesday that it filed more than 1,500 enforcement actions against financial firms and brokers in 2012, an all-time record for the regulator. Finra, which barred nearly 300 people from the industry, levied more than $100 million in penalties.

“It’s nice to see an upward trajectory,” Mr. Ketchum said.

A private, nonprofit organization, Finra monitors 600,000-plus stockbrokers. The group’s enforcement arm has struggled to shake the perception that brokers and their firms, which pay for Finra’s operations through fees and dispatch representatives to sit on the board, have muzzled the watchdog.

But Finra, Mr. Ketchum noted, is now tracking bigger game. He highlighted the range of cases filed last year, a collection of actions against some of the biggest names on Wall Street. Firna last year sanctioned Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and UBS, among others, for improper sales tactics. Goldman Sachs paid an $11 million fine for failing to keep an eye on its research analysts.

The agency’s enforcement unit, run by J. Bradley Bennett, also waded into the minutiae of Wall Street products, filing cases involving structured investments and leveraged exchange-traded funds. Finra said on Tuesday that the unit could strike a more aggressive tone in 2013, investigating other products and the high-speed trading industry.

“What I like about the cases we brought is the focus on complex products,” Mr. Ketchum said.

On the Road: With Demand Dropping, Airlines Focus on Fees

The initiative is arguably counterintuitive because domestic airlines have been piling up money in recent years from all sorts of fees — baggage fees and the change-penalty fees among them — on top of the base fares.

American’s new coach fare options are “another example of how we’re building toward a new, innovative and more modern airline,” said Rob Friedman, the vice president for marketing at the airline, which is about to emerge from bankruptcy court protection and is in talks with US Airways.

Oddly, while American moves to incorporate some stand-alone fees into some base fares, a process known as bundling a fare, Southwest Airlines seems to be going in the other direction. Southwest, which has long bragged about having simple fare structures that don’t include fees for things like changing tickets or checking bags, recently announced plans to increase its dependence on fees, a process known as unbundling.

It all adds up to more complexities on the chalkboard of airline fee and fare formulas.

The changes by American and Southwest suggest that domestic airlines in general are looking more closely at ways to experiment with revenue, especially from business travelers, as a new year begins with indications that demand is dropping.

In November, most airlines in the United States reported small declines in passenger demand and in load factors, the number of available seats filled by paying customers. Southwest, for example, reported that its revenue passenger-miles, a standard measure of demand, were off 3.3 percent compared with November 2011.

On Monday, the airline forecaster Michael Boyd, of the Boyd Group International, summed up his predictions for 2013 this way: “No traffic growth. Fewer flights. Less capacity.” Airlines, he added, will focus more “on revenue growth, not traffic volume.”

American’s new fare strategy encompasses two basic changes, both of which include some fees in coach fares. One is Choice Essential, which costs $68 extra for a round-trip domestic fare but eliminates the $150 penalty fee for ticket changes after purchase. It also drops the $25 fee for the first checked bag and gives the buyer “priority boarding.” (We’ll address the laughable scrum that airlines’ “priority boarding” has become in a future column.)

Another option, Choice Plus, costs $88 extra and adds penalty-free same-day standby change options, while also eliminating the change penalty. And it includes what American calls a free “premium beverage” (beer, wine, cocktail), and a 50 percent bonus on frequent-flier mileage awards, as well as priority boarding.

American’s lowest nonrefundable coach fare structure, which it now calls Choice, remains unchanged. That is, checked-bag fees and $150 penalty fees for making a reservations change remain in effect, while customers continue to have “the flexibility to purchase additional products à la carte,” as American put it.

The American penalty fee changes are aimed mostly at business travelers, the customers most likely to occasionally change plans after a ticket is purchased. Southwest’s recently announced fare and policy changes include a penalty fee on tickets that are not used and not canceled before flight time.

Southwest has long been valued by many business travelers for not charging a penalty fee to rebook a ticket, and that has not changed. Southwest said it was merely adding a “no-show fee” for customers using the cheapest fares who rebook “tickets that are not flown and not canceled by our passengers prior to a flight,” Robert E. Jordan, Southwest’s chief commercial officer, said at a recent meeting with airline stock market analysts.

But in describing initiatives that are certain to interest Southwest’s intensely loyal customer base once the details are announced early in 2013, Mr. Jordan also said, “We are increasing our ancillary fees” in general, without providing specifics. He said that Southwest hoped to raise an additional $100 million this year from new fees.

There is no indication that Southwest is considering revising its policies on basic rebooking or allowing the first two bags to be checked free. Still, an increasing reliance on fees will probably start to redefine the Southwest flying culture. For example, Mr. Jordan said, “we are testing a new revenue stream enabled by selling open and premium boarding positions, so that’s the A1 to A15 position, and selling those open positions at the gate.” Southwest also plans to increase its “EarlyBird” priority boarding fee to $12.50 from $10.

Airlines have come to depend mightily on revenue from fees. In 2011, domestic airlines raised $2.4 billion in change-penalty fees, up from $915.2 million in 2007, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, an agency of the Transportation Department.

And there is even more money in fees for checked bags. In 2007, a year before most airlines other than Southwest began charging for most checked bags on coach fares, domestic carriers raised a mere $464.3 million from such charges. Last year, the total was $3.4 billion.

News Analysis: In Europe, Focus Begins to Shift to Speed of a Recovery

A year ago, many people seriously doubted whether the euro would still exist by now. On the threshold of 2013, the debate is more about how long it will take for the euro zone economy to recover and what must be changed to avoid future crises.

Europe still has plenty to worry about. Economic output is shrinking in nine of the 17 nations that use the euro. European banks remain weak, and many have yet to confront their problems decisively.

Many businesses in Spain, Italy and other distressed countries cannot obtain credit, hampering a recovery.

On top of that, with national elections coming in Italy in February and Germany in September, leaders there may be more focused on the narrow concerns of their voters than the cause of European unity.

“At the moment the crisis seems to have calmed down somewhat,” Jens Weidmann, president of the Bundesbank, the German central bank, said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper published on Sunday. “But the underlying causes have by no means been eliminated.”

But consider some of the doomsday situations that did not occur in 2012. Greece did not leave the euro zone or set off a financial disaster like the one sparked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Spanish and Italian bond yields, rather than succumbing to contagion from Greece, retreated from levels that had threatened their governments with bankruptcy. And nowhere did populist, anti-euro political parties gain the upper hand.

All of these things could still happen, but the probability of catastrophe has fallen substantially because of a fundamental change in the way that European leaders are dealing with the crisis.

Under its president, Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank has promised to buy the bonds of countries like Spain, if needed, to control their borrowing costs.

That vow, which cooled the crisis fever of late summer, bought time for elected officials to begin creating the superstructure needed to make the euro more credible, including a permanent fund for rescuing stricken member countries and a unified system for overseeing banks.

“In 2012, the euro area leaders finally got the diagnosis right,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It wasn’t about Greek debt or Irish banks. It was about some very fundamental design flaws that needed to be fixed. That’s what markets were looking for.”

Even though European political leaders seem to argue endlessly, they have made enough progress to keep speculators at bay. Investors surveyed by UBS recently ranked the chances of a breakup of the euro zone well behind the potential danger from a combination of spending cuts and tax increases scheduled to take effect in the United States next month or a hard landing by the Chinese economy.

“There is more of a perception that nobody is better off if this thing breaks up,” said Richard Barwell, senior European economist at Royal Bank of Scotland.

The question in 2013 will be whether a fragile calm in Europe holds long enough for economic growth to resume, for banks to rebuild their balance sheets and for leaders to make progress creating a more durable currency union.

Here are some of the main things to watch:

ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE The euro crisis, arguably, will be over the day that all of the stricken countries are generating economic growth. Ireland, one of the first countries to get into debt trouble back in 2008, might already have turned the corner. Its gross domestic product grew 0.2 percent in the third quarter from the period a year earlier.

Spain, Italy and Portugal are still deep in recession, and Greece is in a de facto depression. But there are some signs of progress in one crucial measure: trade balances. All of the distressed countries have increased exports this year and reduced trade deficits. That is a sign their products have become more competitive on world markets.

7-Eleven Stores Focus on Healthier Food Options

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Attorney Finds Rhythm and Focus in Climbing and Sculpting

Jim Ewing, at right, stands at the summit of Russia's Mount Elbrus in 2004 with Atlanta trial lawyers Ken Canfield, left, and Dave Schaeffer.
Photo courtesy of Jim Ewing

Jim Ewing works with a small file called a riffler on the face of a heart sculpted from Carrera marble.
Photo courtesy of Jim Ewing

After graduating in 1973 from the U.S. Naval Academy with an aerospace engineering degree, serving five years in the U.S. naval fleet service and earning a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1981, Jim Ewing has done a few things:

- established an intellectual property practice;

- climbed an 18,000-foot mountain; and

- created a gargoyle.

He's now working on another gargoyle, chipping away at a piece of Tate marble.

Ewing, who calls himself a "lifer" at Kilpatrick Townsend, spends most of his time these days in the firm's office in Menlo Park, Calif., working with the firm's Silicon Valley IP lawyers in the medical devices field.

His last big mountain climb was in 2004, the same year he took up sculpting. Mountain climbing, he says, is "a dormant passion" -- he's too busy in Silicon Valley to be traipsing around the world in hiking boots.

But through all these peaks and valleys he still has time for making beautiful things out of pieces of stone. And one day, he says, he will climb again.