Q & A: Should Older Adults Be Vaccinated Against Chickenpox?

Q. Should a 65-year-old who has never had chickenpox be vaccinated against it?

A. In someone who has never had chickenpox, the vaccine would protect against a disease that is far more serious in adults than it is in children, said Dr. Mark S. Lachs, director of geriatrics for the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System and professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.

After childhood chickenpox, the varicella virus is never eliminated from the body but lies dormant in nerve roots. Decades later, it may reactivate along the nerve pathway and cause the very painful rash called shingles, and later, in many cases, a persistent pain called postherpetic neuralgia, or PHN.

Therefore, for most people over 60, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the shingles vaccine. It safely reduces (but does not eliminate) the risk of both shingles and PHN in those who have had chickenpox, Dr. Lachs said.

In someone who never had chickenpox, he said, the concern is not shingles but adult chickenpox, which has “fatality rates 25 times higher than in children.”

Such a person should instead be vaccinated against a primary infection with the varicella virus, Dr. Lachs said. The vaccine differs in strength from the one for shingles and is given in two injections, a month apart.

C. CLAIBORNE RAY

Readers may submit questions by mail to Question, Science Times, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018, or by e-mail to question@nytimes.com.

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Toyota Settles Lawsuit Over Accelerator Recalls’ Impact

DETROIT — Toyota Motor said on Wednesday that it would spend $1.1 billion to settle a sweeping class-action lawsuit by owners of millions of vehicles that were recalled for problems with unintended acceleration.

The agreement, filed in federal court in California, was called one of the largest product-liability settlements in history.

If the agreement is approved by the court, Toyota would compensate current and former owners for loss of value on vehicles recalled because of faulty floor mats and other conditions that could cause sudden acceleration.

Toyota has also agreed to install special safety systems on 3.2 million vehicles that were recalled for floor-mat problems.

The class-action suit was filed in 2010 after widespread complaints were made to federal safety regulators about Toyota models that accelerated unexpectedly.

Toyota has since recalled about eight million vehicles in the United States for problems relating to floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals.

After a long investigation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said there was no evidence that electronic systems contributed to unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles.

The law firm representing Toyota owners in the class-action suit said the overall settlement was estimated at $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion.

“We are extraordinarily proud of how we were able to represent the interests of Toyota owners, and believe this settlement is both comprehensive in its scope and fair in compensation,” said Steve Berman, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs.

Toyota said in a statement that it would compensate customers for loss of value of their vehicles, as well as retrofit additional cars with a free safety system that prevents unintended acceleration.

The company said it will take a one-time, $1.1-billion charge against earnings to cover the costs of the settlement and possible resolution of other pending litigation.

“This agreement marks a significant step forward for out company,” said Christopher Reynolds, Toyota’s chief United States legal officer. “In keeping with out core principles, we have structured this agreement in ways that work to put our customers first.”

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Iran Says Hackers Targeted Power Plant and Culture Ministry

Iran reported a spree of new cyberattacks on Tuesday, saying foreign enemy hackers tried in recent months to disrupt computer systems at a power plant and other industries in a strategically important southern coastal province as well as a Culture Ministry information center.

Accounts of the attacks in the official press did not specify who was responsible, when they were carried out or how they were thwarted. But they strongly suggested that the attacks had originated in the United States and Israel, which have been engaged in a shadowy struggle of computer sabotage with Iran in a broader dispute over whether Iran’s nuclear energy program is for peaceful or military use.

Iran has been on heightened alert against such sabotage since a computer worm known as Stuxnet was used to attack its uranium enrichment centrifuges more than two years ago, which American intelligence officials believe caused many of the machines to spin out of control and self-destruct, slowing the Iranian program’s progress.

Stuxnet and other forms of computer malware have also been used in attacks on Iran’s oil industry and Science Ministry under a covert United States effort, first revealed in January 2009, that was meant to subvert Iran’s nuclear program because of suspicions that the Iranians were using it to develop the ability to make atomic bombs. Iran has repeatedly denied these suspicions.

The latest Iranian sabotage reports raised the possibility that the attacks had been carried out in retaliation for assaults that crippled computers in the Saudi Arabian oil industry and some financial institutions in the United States a few months ago. American intelligence officials have said they believe that Iranian specialists in cybersabotage were responsible for those assaults, which erased thousands of Saudi files and temporarily prevented some American banking customers from accessing their accounts.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta cited those attacks in an Oct. 11 speech in which he warned of America’s vulnerability to a coordinated computer warfare attack, calling such a possibility a “cyber-Pearl Harbor.”

The Iranian Students’ News Agency said the country’s Passive Defense Organization, the military unit responsible for guarding against cyberattacks, had battled a computer virus infection of an electric utility and other unspecified manufacturing industries in southern Hormozgan Province, home to a large oil refinery and container port in the provincial capital of Bandar Abbas.

The news agency quoted Ali Akbar Akhavan, the head of the Passive Defense Organization’s provincial branch, as saying that “with timely measures and the cooperation of skilled hackers in the province, the progress of this virus was halted.” It was unclear from the account whether any Iranian targets had been damaged.

Iran’s Fars News Agency said a cyberattack had also been made against the information center of the Culture Ministry’s Headquarters for Supporting and Protecting Works of Art and Culture, and that the attack had been “repelled by the headquarters’ experts.”

The Fars account said the attack had originated in Dallas and was routed to Iran via Malaysia and Vietnam. It did not elaborate on the significance of that information but noted that a broad array of Iranian targets had recently come under cyberattacks that were “widely believed to be designed and staged by the U.S. and Israel.”

News of the latest cyberattacks came as Western economic sanctions on Iran have been tightening while diplomatic negotiations aimed at resolving the nuclear dispute have remained basically stalled since June. There are expectations that a resumption of those negotiations will be announced soon, possibly next month.

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The 30-Minute Interview: The 30-Minute Interview With Nick J. Romito

Mr. Romito, 30, is the founder and chief executive of View the Space, a new real estate technology business that creates online video tours, primarily of office space, and provides data-tracking services to commercial real estate companies, among them SL Green Realty, Vornado Realty Trust and Silverstein Properties.

Before starting the business last year, Mr. Romito worked as a commercial broker and tenant and landlord representative.

Q. How has business been so far?

A. Business is good. We launched the beta version of the Web site about a year ago, and this April was when we took the beta logo off and decided that we were at a point where we could start charging for the product. We’ve grown extraordinarily fast, but that’s a good thing.

Q. Are you profitable yet?

A. We had profitability in May, then like most start-up companies we scaled up. We hit profitability again in October.

I put in all my life savings, which was roughly $50,000 to $100,000, with my wife’s help. As we were going into the market and trying to get people to believe in our dream it gets rough. But we actually got really lucky and found some great partners — a syndicate of hedge fund professionals who knew commercial real estate and invest in start-ups — who liked our idea. We raised about $650,000.

Q. Let’s talk about the services you provide.

A. As you probably know, commercial real estate is an antiquated business, more or less reluctant to embrace technology. We thought we were a crazy enough bunch to change that. We decided we could improve the process by taking it online from start to finish. So for us that means video. We’ve created a style of shooting video for office space that’s really never existed. Ours is the closest thing to actually being there, where you fly through the space and you actually feel like you’re in it. You just can’t touch the walls.

On the landlord side, we allow you to track how a person is interacting with the tour. So you get to see 1) the prospect who’s looking at it; 2) how many times they’ve watched it; and 3) how engaged are they with it. You’ll actually be able to tell whether a specific firm has taken the tour 10 times — that’s a very, very high level of engagement — and they’re a serious prospect so I’m going to follow up with them.

Q. What kind of analytics software accomplishes this?

A. We had to build a pretty serious back end of data that’s taken us awhile. You’ve got I.P. addresses all over the place, so we had to build a library of those, which we can identify for the most part which companies are viewing your space.

Q. And how do the clients see this information?

A. They can see it in real time whenever they want — from their dashboard. And if they’re not online we’ll e-mail it to them.

Q. Has this service helped to sell property faster?

A. Yeah. We’re at about 1.5 million square feet leased on View the Space since December 2011.

Q. How many clients do you have right now?

A. Over 50. We’ve got most of the larger commercial real estate institutions both on the public and private side.

It’s funny, when we first started, our thesis was that we would get all of the smaller landlords on board first because we have more access to them. But because we worked so tightly with the brokerage community to build this, SL Green caught wind of what we were doing very quickly and they ended up being our first big client.

So it’s kind of like a domino effect where you get the SL Greens of the world soon enough the Silversteins and all the other players want to find out what you’re doing.

Q. Where do you hope to see your business in, say, the next five to 10 years?

A. We think that technology is here to stay in commercial real estate. And we see us growing, hopefully, in every major market. We’re actively in 10 markets right now.

New York right now is probably 60 percent of the activity that we have.

Q. You don’t have a technology background, do you?

A. I don’t. During the first year of development I was still a broker. I tried to outsource the first part of this to India, which was a very painful process. You’ve got to start your day at 4 a.m., because of the time difference, and the language barrier was very difficult. Not only was I trying to learn Hindi, but also the language of technology.

Q. So when you’re not learning new languages, what do you do for fun?

A. I surf. That was more or less my life growing up on the Jersey Shore. In Toms River.

Q. Were you or your family affected by Hurricane Sandy?

A. My mom lost her house. She got a couple of feet of water, and now they’ll have to demo the house.

But as long as everyone is O.K., it’s just stuff. I think everybody down there is so resilient, and this is like when everybody really comes together.

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Netflix Points to Amazon to Explain Christmas Eve Outage

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An outage at one of Amazon's web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc.'s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.

The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles such as Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray players.

Evers said that the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services' cloud computing center in Virginia, and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users late on Monday.

"We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented," Evers said.

"We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night," he added.

An outage at Amazon Web Services, or AWS, knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare in April of last year.

Amazon Web Services was not immediately available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company's contracts with Amazon.

(Reporting by Sam Forgione; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

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U.S. Civilian Is Killed at Police Headquarters in Kabul

KABUL, Afghanistan — A female police sergeant shot and killed an American civilian adviser at police headquarters in Kabul on Monday, Afghan police officials said, breaking a relative lull in the so-called insider killings that have strained the relationship between Americans and Afghans here.

The American victim was identified as Joseph Griffin, 49, of Mansfield, Ga., who had worked for DynCorp International as a police trainer since July 2011, according to a DynCorp spokeswoman, Ashley Burke.

Afghan officials identified the suspect as a woman named Nargis, a 33-year-old sergeant in the national police force who worked in the Interior Ministry’s legal and gender equality department, and whose husband is also a member of the police force.

A person at Kabul police headquarters, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release information, said the attacker had shot the American adviser in the head at close range with a pistol and then was immediately arrested by other Afghan police officers. The person added that both American and Afghan officials were questioning her, and he said she was distraught. The police said they did not believe the attack was related to terrorism and that the suspect had no known connections with insurgents.

The Afghan news station TOLO cited Afghan officials as saying that the woman, who had crossed multiple police checkpoints before she fired her gun, had graduated from the national police academy in 2008, in one of its first female classes.

The effort to recruit and train female police officers has been fraught with difficulty. Eupol, the European police organization active in police training here, says there are only 380 female police officers in Kabul, and even fewer in the provinces, despite a goal by the Interior Ministry of recruiting 5,000 by the end of 2014.

Insider attacks, in which members of the Afghan security services have turned against their foreign allies, have greatly increased in the past year, with 61 American and other coalition members killed, not including the episode on Monday, compared with 35 deaths the previous year, according to NATO figures.

Monday’s attack — the first insider attack known to be committed by a woman — came after a lull in insider shootings after the military instituted a series of precautions meant to reduce them. The most recent episode was on Nov. 11, when a British soldier was killed in Helmand Province.

American and Afghan officials have been struggling to figure out how large a factor Taliban infiltration or coercion has been in such attacks. Although insurgent contact has been clear in some cases, many of the attacks have seemed to come out of personal animosity or outrage, attributed to culture clash or growing Afghan anger at what they see as an unwelcome occupation by the United States and its allies.

“The loss of any team member is tragic, but to have this happen over the holidays makes it seem all the more unfair,” Steven F. Gaffney, the chairman of DynCorp, said in a statement.

The company also released a statement attributed to the victim’s wife, Rennae Griffin. “My husband was a thoughtful, kind, generous and loving man who was selfless in all his actions and deeds,” it said.

In other violence on Monday, a coalition member was killed in an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan, and an Afghan Local Police commander killed five fellow officers at a checkpoint in Jowzjan Province in the north. Dur Mohammad, the commander at the checkpoint, shot and killed five officers under his command, according to Gen. Abdul Aziz Ghairat, the provincial police chief. He said the commander fled after the shooting. General Ghairat did not offer a motive, but said that Mr. Mohammad had connections with the Taliban in the area.

The Afghan Local Police program, which seeks to bring armed elements — including some former insurgents — into government service, has drawn criticism because of a series of episodes in which the armed elements have switched allegiances, sometimes repeatedly.

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Bits Blog: Instagram Does an About-Face

11:14 p.m. | Updated
SAN FRANCISCO — In the aftermath of the uproar over changes to Instagram’s privacy policy and terms of service earlier this week, the company did an about-face late Thursday.

In a blog post on the company’s site, Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s co-founder, said that where advertising was concerned, the company would revert to its previous terms of service, which have been in effect since October 2010.

“Rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible advertising products we have not yet developed,” he wrote, “we are going to take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work.” Users had been particularly concerned by a clause in Instagram’s policy introduced on Monday that suggested Instagram would share users’ data — like their favorite places, bands, restaurants and hobbies — with Facebook and its advertisers to better target ads.

They also took issue with an update to the company’s terms of service that suggested users’ photos could be used in advertisements, without compensation and even without their knowledge.

The terms of that user agreement said, “You agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your user name, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata) and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.”

Following a reaction that included customers defecting to other services, Mr. Systrom told Instagram users on Tuesday that the new policy had been misinterpreted. “It is our mistake that this language is confusing,” he wrote, and he promised an updated agreement.

That statement apparently was not enough. With more people leaving the service, the company, which Facebook bought for $735 million this year, reacted again by returning to the old rules.

Acknowledging those concerns late Thursday, Mr. Systrom wrote: “I want to be really clear: Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did. We don’t own your photos — you do.”

Mr. Systrom said the company would still be tweaking its privacy policy to quell users’ fears that their photos might pop-up on third-party sites without their consent.

But Mr. Systrom did not clarify how Instagram planned to monetize its service in the future. Facebook is under pressure to make Instagram earn income.

“It’s a free service — they have to monetize somewhere,” said John Casasanta, a principal at Tap Tap Tap, the maker of Camera+, a photo-filter app that has shunned advertising and instead charges users for premium features. “The days of the simple banner ads are gone. Their user data is too valuable.”

It was unclear whether reverting its terms of service would be enough to satisfy high-profile users like National Geographic, which stopped using its Instagram account in light of the moves, or other users who have aired their grievances on Twitter and Facebook.

The controversy has driven traffic and new users to several other photo-sharing applications.

Pheed, an Instagram-like app that gives users the option to monetize their own content by charging followers to see their posts, gained more users than any other app in the United States on Thursday. By Thursday morning, Pheed had jumped to the ninth most downloaded social-networking app in Apple’s iTunes store, just ahead of LinkedIn.

O. D. Kobo, Pheed’s chief executive, said Thursday morning that subscriptions to the service had quadrupled this week and that in the last 24 hours users had uploaded 300,000 new files to the service — more uploads than any other 24-hour-period since Pheed made its debut six weeks ago.

Another runaway success was Flickr, Yahoo’s photo-sharing service, which redesigned its app last week to make it easier to share photos on Twitter. In a stroke of good fortune, it released the app to positive reviews just as Instagram announced it would no longer sync with Twitter, a Facebook rival.

The day before Instagram announced changes to its terms of service, Flickr’s mobile app was ranked at around 175 in Apple’s overall iTunes app charts. Since that day, the application skyrocketed to the high 20s.

Of course, most of these services are still tiny compared to Instagram, which claims to have more than 100 million members who have uploaded upward of 5 billion photos using its service. And it was unclear if the services’ newfound members had also deleted their Instagram accounts or were merely dabbling in other offerings. But the migration, whether temporary or permanent, was a reminder of the volatility of success and that the fall to bottom can sometimes be as swift as the rise to the top.

Facebook and Instagram declined to say whether they had seen any significant number of account deletions or if they were concerned about losing ground in the photo-sharing market to rivals. Some photo apps took direct aim at Instagram. Camera+ even went so far as to include a snide, holiday-themed reference to Instagram’s stumbles in an app update on Wednesday.

“We’ll never do shady things with your shared pics, because it just isn’t right,” the update noted. “On that note, happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

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Measles: Measles Epidemic Is Spreading in Central Africa

Jehad Nga for The New York Times

An internally displaced persons camp in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to recent violence in the country, a spreading measles epidemic is further endangering the lives of thousands of children there.

A large measles epidemic is spreading in Central Africa, endangering the lives of thousands of children, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders warned last week.

Since October, the charity has vaccinated more than 226,000 children in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The organization has also treated nearly 13,000 Congolese for the effects of the disease.

Measles is very contagious. In places where many children are malnourished and vitamin-deficient, it kills 1 percent to15 percent of those who don’t receive medical care, Doctors Without Borders estimated. (Even in the United States in the 1990s, although cases were rare, the fatality rate was 0.3 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In AIDS patients, the rate is 30 percent.)

The eastern Congo basin has serious shortages of medical workers and of drugs. While there is no treatment for measles itself, antibiotics can save those who develop pneumonia, meningitis or other secondary infections. Measles can also cause blindness by scarring the eyeball.

The outbreak is taking place despite enormous success against the disease worldwide. According to a study released earlier this year, deaths from measles have dropped by almost 75 percent since 2000.

Most of the lives saved were in Africa and India. Measles shots are often cited as one of the chief reasons that deaths of children under age 5 around the world have fallen steadily.

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Measles: Measles Epidemic Is Spreading in Central Africa

Jehad Nga for The New York Times

An internally displaced persons camp in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to recent violence in the country, a spreading measles epidemic is further endangering the lives of thousands of children there.

A large measles epidemic is spreading in Central Africa, endangering the lives of thousands of children, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders warned last week.

Since October, the charity has vaccinated more than 226,000 children in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The organization has also treated nearly 13,000 Congolese for the effects of the disease.

Measles is very contagious. In places where many children are malnourished and vitamin-deficient, it kills 1 percent to15 percent of those who don’t receive medical care, Doctors Without Borders estimated. (Even in the United States in the 1990s, although cases were rare, the fatality rate was 0.3 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In AIDS patients, the rate is 30 percent.)

The eastern Congo basin has serious shortages of medical workers and of drugs. While there is no treatment for measles itself, antibiotics can save those who develop pneumonia, meningitis or other secondary infections. Measles can also cause blindness by scarring the eyeball.

The outbreak is taking place despite enormous success against the disease worldwide. According to a study released earlier this year, deaths from measles have dropped by almost 75 percent since 2000.

Most of the lives saved were in Africa and India. Measles shots are often cited as one of the chief reasons that deaths of children under age 5 around the world have fallen steadily.

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Monti Won’t Run in New Elections

Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters

Mario Monti, Italy’s caretaker prime minister, at a news conference in Rome on Sunday.

ROME — After weeks of speculation, Italy’s caretaker prime minister, Mario Monti, said Sunday that he would not run as a candidate in national elections that are expected in February, but was open to leading the government if parties that endorsed his pro-Europe, pro-reform agenda asked.

At a much-anticipated news conference in which he strove to avoid being swept into the blood sport of Italian party politics, he said that he would give political forces “appreciation, encouragement and, if asked, my guidance.” He called on parties and citizens across the political spectrum to adopt his anticrisis “Monti Agenda,” saying its motto was: “Change Italy, reform Europe.”

Mr. Monti later told a television interviewer that he would not rule out allowing a centrist grouping to name him as its candidate for prime minister, if there were “sufficient forces and guarantees of credibility in their commitment.” (Under Italian law, parties name their candidate for prime minister before elections.) Polls have placed the center-left Democratic Party first, but Mr. Monti could be a contender if it does not win enough votes to govern in a balloting expected on Feb. 24 and 25.

Mr. Monti, an economist, was appointed to replace former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi amid fierce economic turmoil in November 2011, helping restore the country’s international credibility. But his government’s tax increases have been unpopular and deepened Italy’s recession, the longest since World War II. After Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party withdrew its support from the Monti government this month, Mr. Monti said he would step down, opening the most chaotic season in Italian politics in decades.

President Giorgio Napolitano dissolved Parliament after it passed Italy’s 2013 budget on Friday, and Mr. Monti handed in his resignation. He will remain caretaker prime minister until after elections.

On Sunday, in a nearly three-hour news conference, Mr. Monti tried to use a new political language, going beyond the old categories of right and left. “I think that the axis in the coming years can be framed as ‘will to change’ and ‘Europe’ more than left and right,” he said.

Indeed, he appears to be laying the groundwork for a civic-minded, Catholic centrist movement, which Italy has not had since the Christian Democratic Party, which governed Italy during the postwar period, collapsed in a bribery scandal in the early 1990s. Questions about his future role have divided centrists.

The grouping that has been courting Mr. Monti includes a veteran centrist party, the Union of Christian Democrats, and a civic movement led by the president of Ferrari, the carmaker, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo. A handful of former Berlusconi loyalists have also indicated their support for Mr. Monti, including Gianfranco Fini, a former speaker of Parliament.

The centrists are also allied with Andrea Riccardi, the minister of cooperation — who is effectively the minister of intercultural relations — in the Monti government and a co-founder of a liberal Catholic group, the Community of Sant’Egidio, a sign that Mr. Monti enjoys strong support from the Roman Catholic Church. The church remains a powerful political force in Italy. Still, polls indicate that even with Mr. Monti’s blessing, these centrists would most likely not win more than 15 percent of the vote.

Mr. Monti called Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the Democratic Party, “a legitimate candidate for prime minister of a coalition.”

Mr. Bersani, whose party has been undercut by Mr. Monti’s de facto candidacy, issued a terse statement, saying: “We need more change, more equality, more work. And so we need a political majority that isn’t ‘strange’ but that is real and coherent, strongly pro-Europe and strongly reform-minded.”

For his part, a furious Mr. Berlusconi, who has been striking an increasingly populist line in order to draw votes to his collapsing party, took to the airwaves to hammer Mr. Monti. “Last night I had a nightmare, I woke up screaming — there was still a Monti government,” he said on state-run television.

Mr. Monti on Sunday offered a witheringly ironic critique of Mr. Berlusconi, saying he had difficulty “following his line of thought.” He noted that Mr. Berlusconi had called his government a disaster, then asked him to lead a center-right coalition, an offer he said he refused.

Mr. Monti was also cleareyed about the mixed record of his government, which raised taxes and the retirement age but was unable to carry out significant structural reforms because the parties supporting the government sometimes undermined its efforts.

He said that the right, namely Mr. Berlusconi’s party, had blocked justice reform. “It’s better to pass laws that are ‘ad nationam’ rather than ‘ad personam,’ ” implicitly criticizing Mr. Berlusconi’s tendency to want laws that protect his own interests.

And he said that the hard left — especially the C.G.I.L. labor union, which has more retirees than workers among its membership and is a key constituency of the Democratic Party — had blocked more aggressive changes to Italy’s labor laws. “They find it difficult to evolve, and this harms Italian workers,” Mr. Monti said.

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