The four-page signed submission, filled with arguments and accusations, also went into greater detail about the deal that Mr. Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, contends he made with the United States in 1996 to help him evade justice.

Mr. Karadzic had begun to read the letter out loud on Thursday during his first appearance before the international tribunal, but the judge stopped him, saying he would have only two minutes to speak. Mr. Karadzic was invited to submit the letter to the registrar, whose office translated it from Serbian and released it as a trial document.

In the letter, he offered bitter criticism of the former American envoy Richard C. Holbrooke; Mr. Karadzic claimed in court on Thursday that he had brokered a deal with Mr. Holbrooke that would enable him to avoid a trial. Mr. Karadzic also asserted in the letter that Madeleine K. Albright, secretary of state at the time, had proposed that he drop out of sight by opening a private clinic somewhere abroad.

Ms. Albright suggested that “I get out of the way and go to Russia, Greece or Serbia and open a private clinic or at least go to Bijeljina,” he wrote.

Mr. Holbrooke, who brokered the peace agreement that ended the war in the Balkans in 1995, denied that he had agreed to any deal with Mr. Karadzic, calling the accusation “ridiculous.”

In an interview, Mr. Holbrooke said that in July 1996 he had traveled to Belgrade and, over 10 hours of talks, negotiated a signed agreement forcing Mr. Karadzic to resign as the Bosnian Serb leader, with Slobodan Milosevic, then the president of Serbia, also pressing him to quit.

“There was an agreement he would leave power,” Mr. Holbrooke said. “He got nothing in return.”

During the hearing on Thursday, Mr. Karadzic was required to hear a summary of his indictment. Occasionally twitching his mouth, he stared straight ahead as Judge Alphons Orie cited from the catalog of crimes from the ethnic war that he led in Bosnia and that turned into genocide.

But Mr. Karadzic became more animated in court when he began to list his grievances, what he called the “many drastic irregularities.” His written statement elaborates on old rumors that Mr. Holbrooke had brokered a deal with him to avoid arrest.

The offer, he asserted, required him to withdraw from public life, declining all interview requests and offers to write articles or books.

“Mr. Holbrooke undertook on behalf of the U.S.A. that I would not be tried before this tribunal and that I should understand that for a while there would be very sharp rhetoric against me, so that my followers would not hamper the implementation of the Dayton agreement.”

That agreement, which ended the Balkans war, was negotiated and signed in Dayton, Ohio.

Mr. Karadzic, who was arrested in Belgrade on July 21, according to the Serbian government, described in the letter his life after leaving office in 1996. He said that he had kept his side of the bargain, lying low to avoid the attention of international troops “whom I used to pass quietly,” and also to avoid “possible adventurers and glory hunters.”

Mr. Karadzic also contended that the State Department had urged the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, who had indicted him a year earlier, “to refrain from hunting me.” Mr. Goldstone threatened to resign “if this happened,” he wrote.

In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Goldstone, who was the chief prosecutor from 1994 to 1996, scoffed at the claims. “I cannot imagine what he is talking about,” said Mr. Goldstone, a South African judge. “The whole thing does not make sense. Resign because of what?”

Mr. Goldstone said the United States had not asked him to withdraw Mr. Karadzic’s indictment. “No one could ask me to do that,” he said.

Mr. Karadzic said that he had tried to meet his end of the deal, but that it eventually became apparent that there were attempts to have him killed — and he blamed Mr. Holbrooke for them. “It is clear that, unable to fulfill the commitments he had undertaken on behalf of the U.S.A., he switched to Plan B, the liquidation of Radovan Karadzic,” he wrote.

Some observers of the trial of Mr. Milosevic, the former Serbian president and Mr. Karadzic’s mentor, said they saw parallels between the men. Mr. Milosevic often used his time in court to criticize and try to embarrass the West.

Christian Schwarz-Schilling, a formal international envoy to the region, told German radio on Friday that he did not rule out that Mr. Karadzic would reveal embarrassing secrets during his trial.

“I believe Karadzic knows certain things which in any case aren’t pleasant for the international community,” he said. “I suppose that he, having been involved in the events, will have to say some new things which were unknown until now.”

These might involve what other governments knew in 1995 of the impending seizure of the United Nations-protected enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa by troops under Mr. Karadzic’s command, assisted by forces from Serbia. The fall of Srebrenica ended with the execution of nearly 8,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

The allegations in Mr. Karadzic text, including his fear that Mr. Holbrooke was, and still is, out to kill him may seem like the fruits of a fevered mind.

Mr. Holbrooke has insisted that there was no deal for immunity for Mr. Karadzic. But he may well have left room for ambiguity or provided hints during talks in Belgrade that Mr. Karadzic took to be a promise that international troops would not arrest him.

In his book “To End a War” (Random House, 1998), Mr. Holbrooke wrote that in 1996, heading for the talks to persuade Mr. Karadzic to give up power, he called Strobe Talbott, then the deputy secretary of state. He wrote that Mr. Talbott told him, “Just use that old creative ambiguity.”

The nationalization of the bank would extend to the financial sector a series of takeovers, which Mr. Chávez initiated last year, in industries including oil, telecommunications, electricity and steel-making.

Mr. Chávez further shook the political establishment and financial markets on Friday when he disclosed that he had used his decree powers to issue 26 laws on Thursday. They included a banking reform, although the government did not provide details on any of the laws the president decreed.

The central bank was similarly vague in its attempt to reassure depositors that the banking system was solid. It said it had enough reserves to guarantee normal financing operations throughout the economy, but did not provide new figures on its reserves, which are thought to exceed $30 billion.

On Thursday, Mr. Chávez announced plans to nationalize the nation’s third-largest bank, Banco de Venezuela, owned by the Spanish financial giant Santander. Compensating Santander could cost the Venezuelan government more than $2 billion, banking analysts here said.

Although Mr. Chávez had earlier threatened to nationalize Spanish-owned enterprises in retaliation for European immigration measures, his move surprised investors. He returned from a trip to Spain last week and assured Venezuelans that he had mended relations with King Juan Carlos, who famously told Mr. Chávez to “shut up” at a summit meeting last year.

Pavel Gómez, an economist with ODH, a financial consulting firm here, said Mr. Chávez’s government could build 500 schools for an estimated 500,000 students with the money needed to pay Santander for the takeover of Banco de Venezuela. “The true cost of this measure to Venezuelan society is open to debate,” Mr. Gómez said.

Mr. Chávez said that a Venezuelan banker had asked for his approval to buy Banco de Venezuela from Santander, a plan that the president overruled. Reports here identified the banker as Victor Vargas, a flamboyant financier whose daughter is married to the great-grandson of Francisco Franco, the deceased Spanish fascist.

“It’s possible that Santander saw the clouds gathering on the Venezuelan economy and is relieved to just get out,” said Orlando Ochoa, a financial analyst here. “But this move also destroys some of the pragmatism recently introduced into policies trying to stave off a crisis among the banks.”

Venezuelan bonds fell Friday for a second day, with the nation’s debt trading at more than 6.5 percentage points above United States Treasury securities. That puts Venezuela behind only Argentina, also struggling with rising inflation, in economic risk measures of large Latin American countries.

Indeed, fears recently arose over the possible collapse of several banks because of rules forcing them to sell $5 billion of complex securities called structured notes. Banks bought the notes last year at values tied to high black-market rates of the dollar, exposing some of them to huge losses after the local currency, the bolívar, strengthened this year.

Faced with a possible banking crisis, Mr. Chávez recently named as finance minister Alí Rodríguez Araque, who had won the grudging respect of some members of Venezuela’s business establishment after serving as the country’s representative to OPEC.

Mr. Rodríguez quietly sought advice from the I.M.F. and from the World Bank, multilateral institutions previously shunned or threatened with expulsion by Mr. Chávez. In recent weeks, banking executives and financial analysts here said, the finance ministry had asked troubled banks to individually negotiate ways out of the crisis.

But nationalizing Banco de Venezuela could cause those plans to unravel. Smaller banks might be hesitant to take difficult steps to strengthen themselves financially if they thought they would be nationalized anyway.

Soaring oil revenues give Mr. Chávez a cushion to carry out the nationalizations, with oil revenues up 70 percent in the first quarter to $20.5 billion. But demands from some sectors for a greater share of the revenues have also intensified, as seen in Mr. Chávez’s decision last month to raise salaries for the armed forces by 30 percent.

Such increases barely offset inflation, the highest in Latin America at 32 percent; food-price inflation has soared even higher, reaching 52 percent.

 

A monk at the Abu Fana Monastery wore a neck brace this week after a violent clash at the monastery in May. More Photos

CAIRO — A monastery was ransacked in January. In May, monks there were kidnapped, whipped and beaten and ordered to spit on the cross. Christian-owned jewelry stores were robbed over the summer. The rash of violence was so bad that one prominent Egyptian writer worried it had become “open season” on the nation’s Christians.

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Does Egypt face a sectarian problem?

Not according to its security officials, who insist that each dispute represents a “singular incident” tied to something other than faith. In the case of the monastery and the monks, officials said the conflict was essentially a land dispute between the church and local residents.

“Every incident has to be seen within its proper framework; you study an incident as an incident,” said an Interior Ministry spokesman who grew furious at the suggestion that Egyptians were in conflict because of their differing faiths. It is customary for security officials not to have their names revealed publicly.

“An incident is an incident, and a crime is a crime,” he said.

But the Egyptian security apparatus is increasingly alone in its insistence.

As more and more conflicts pile up and as the tensions of daily life increase, many people in Egypt and around the region said the problem of sectarian clashes had become more urgent. They said that ordinary conflicts had become more bitterly sectarian as religious identity had become more prominent among Muslims and Christians alike.

“It is as if there is a struggle — each against the other — and it creates a sectarian atmosphere,” said Gamal Assaad, a former member of Parliament who is a Coptic intellectual and a writer. “This tense atmosphere makes people ready to explode at any point if they are subjected to any amount of instigation or incitement.”

Egypt is the most populous Arab country, with about 80 million people. About 10 percent are Coptic Christian.

For most of Egypt’s Coptics, the major flare-ups — the attack on the Abu Fana Monastery or riots in 2005 in Alexandria — are faraway episodes that serve only to confirm a growing alienation from larger society. For most, the tension is more personal, a fear that a son or daughter will fall in love with a Muslim or of being derided as “coftes,” which means “fifth column.”

“We keep to ourselves,” said Kamel Nadi, 24, a Coptic who runs a small shop in the Shubra neighborhood of Cairo. “Muslims can’t say it, but it’s clear they don’t accept us. Here no one can speak the truth on this issue, so everybody’s feelings are kept inside.”

Christian Arabs have increasingly complained of being marginalized in the Middle East, with large numbers leaving over the decades. Now it appears that pressure on these communities is spiking, whether in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan or the West Bank. In each, Christians speak of specific national behavior that has made them feel less welcome. While governments are generally regarded as more accommodating than they used to be, the overall environment is seen as less hospitable.

“Yes, we are feeling marginalized,” said Dr. Audeh Quawas, a surgeon in Amman, Jordan, who serves on the central committee of the World Council of Churches, a Geneva-based group. He rattled off a list of grievances, from the refusal of the state to acknowledge Easter as a national holiday to the insistence that Christians abide by Islamic law regarding inheritance.

For Egypt, sectarian tensions are complicated because they are connected to many other challenges burdening the nation, including crushing inflation and high unemployment among the young.

Many Egyptians around Cairo and in the south said that conflicts often arose over everyday matters — a dispute between farmers, an argument between students — but that once sparked, they deteriorated into sectarian name-calling, sometimes worse. That is partly because religious identity is paramount now, more important than a common citizenship, Mr. Assaad said.

“When something happens, it always comes back to Muslim and Christian,” said Tharwat Taki Faris, 45, a subsistence farmer in Mansafees, a village of about 33,000 people five hours south of Cairo.

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The village is poor, its unpaved and uneven roads filled with barefoot children in tattered clothing. There are two churches, each guarded by men with shotguns. There are also two mosques, where security men are posted outside on Fridays, just in case the faithful become overwrought during prayer, people here said.

It was midday, and villagers back from working their small plots of land began to gather to discuss relations with their Muslim neighbors. Any conflict between Muslim and Christian is a “singular incident,” they all said, using the same phrase. Villagers said that the government was adamant about keeping things “singular,” so whenever a Muslim and a Christian had a problem, they knew to go to the police before the matter escalated.

“If someone can’t resolve it, they go to the police station,” said John Riyad, 23. “Trust me, the police will make him resolve it.”

The crowd quickly swelled as men and women and children joined the conversation, which almost imperceptibly began to shift toward grievances: There are no Christian officers in the police force. The villagers cannot get permission to build another church. There are no high-ranking Christian officials in their governate. And of course, if their daughters married Muslims, they would kill them.

Then, just as suddenly, the crowd thinned. The reason: state security was on the way. A village informant had already reported the conversation.

“The police know you are here now,” said Mr. Taki Faris, before he, too, made himself scarce. “They are very anxious these days.”

Egypt is an authoritarian state held in line by a vast internal security force, about twice the size of the army. Certain topics are out of bounds. People know it is taboo to say openly that a sectarian problem exists. So they are cautious.

“We feel pressure, maybe not all the time, but we do,” said Ashraf Halim, 45, a grocery store owner in the Shubra neighborhood in Cairo. “We have liberty of speech, and religion, but it’s as if somebody was telling us at the same time, ‘Don’t speak and don’t practice your religion.’ ”

Mr. Halim’s grocery is next to a hair salon with the word “Allah” atop the storefront in large Arabic letters. He responds in his own small way, with a picture of St. George on his dairy cooler.

“Me, I try to keep a certain distance from Muslims,” said Mr. Halim. “We have simple relations: I give you this, you give me this. That’s it. They don’t want more than that, either.”

The underlying tension in Egypt flares periodically around the country. There were riots when word spread of a Coptic play supposedly denigrating the Prophet Muhammad and again over plans to expand a church. The state treated each case as a security problem.

But the violence at the ancient Abu Fana Monastery in May elevated events to a new level. In a follow-up report issued last month, the National Council for Human Rights described the atmosphere in Egypt as an “overcharged sectarian environment” and chided the state, saying it “turns a blind eye to such incidents” and was “only content to send security forces after clashes catch fire.”

Frustrated by the official posture of denial, a small group of Egyptian bloggers decided in January 2007 to try to bring Muslims and Christians together to talk. The group, which calls itself Together Before God, began with about 20 members of both faiths.

They posted an Internet survey to gauge Muslims’ and Christians’ ideas about each other and received about 5,000 responses. Two-thirds were from Muslims, the rest from Christians.

The survey showed profound misunderstanding on both sides, said Sherif Abdel Aziz, 36, a co-founder of the group. Some Muslims declared that Coptic priests wore black to mourn the Arab invasion of Egypt in the seventh century. Some Christians believed that the Koran ordered Muslims to kill all Christians.

Did the group discover a sectarian problem? Absolutely, and it was compounded by the lack of frank public discussion, Mr. Abdel Aziz said.

“The religious discourse has to change from both sides because it incites hatred, even if it does so indirectly, increasing fanaticism from both sides,” Mr. Abdel Aziz said.

During meetings in Washington this week with Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, senior Bush administration officials pressed their Pakistani counterparts to assert control over Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, the American officials said. The pressure comes as relations between India and Pakistan deteriorate following reports of ISI involvement in the recent bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The American pressure reflects heightened concerns at the State Department, Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency that operatives in the ISI, who have long been believed to have close ties to Pakistani militants, have become bolder and more open in their support for militant Islamist organizations.

The New York Times reported this week that American intelligence agencies had said they have evidence that members of the ISI helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul.

In an interview on Friday, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said that American authorities have yet to show Pakistani officials specific evidence to support that conclusion.

“If any evidence were to be presented against any individual in Pakistan, or against the interest of Pakistan’s neighbors, then the government would certainly act on that evidence,” he said.

Mr. Haqqani hinted, however, that the civilian government would investigate any ISI officers who might be in league with militants, and laid blame on President Pervez Musharraf, who was firmly in power until elections earlier this year.

“Several outstanding problems in the relationship between the United States and Pakistan that the elected government inherited from the past are currently being resolved,” Mr. Haqqani said. “These include issues of trust between our two intelligence services.”

But bringing the ISI under civilian authority is easier said than done, as Pakistan’s new government found out last week. On Saturday night, while Mr. Gilani was en route to Washington, his government announced that the ISI would report to the country’s Interior Ministry.

One day later, after objections from inside Pakistan’s security apparatus, the government issued a clarification, saying that it had been “misinterpreted” and that the decree only “re-emphasizes more coordination” between the Interior Ministry and the ISI.

The Indian foreign secretary, Shiv Shankar Menon, said Friday that his country’s relationship with Pakistan had sunk to its lowest level since 2003, when the nuclear rivals stepped back from the brink of war and began peace talks.

“If you ask me to describe the state of the dialogue, it is in a place where it hasn’t been in the last four years,” Mr. Menon told journalists at the annual meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka.

“We face a situation where things have happened in the recent past which were unfortunate and which, quite frankly, have affected the future of the dialogue,” he said.

India has not cut off the peace talks, and Indian officials have said privately that the peace effort has been strained by political problems in Pakistan and the openings they may have created for hard-line forces.

“If you have this fluid situation, you have elements within the army, within the ISI, who have the opportunity to move forward with their own agenda, with respect to Afghanistan and India,” a senior Indian official said last week.

“The peace process is in limbo,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. “There is no direction. This is what has opened up the door to these elements.”

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India is scheduled to meet with Mr. Gilani on Saturday in Colombo.

At the State Department, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte has been in charge of the administration’s efforts to press Pakistan, administration officials said. Several officials noted that some officials in the Bush administration had begun to express a nostalgia for Mr. Musharraf, who has largely been pushed to the sidelines since his party lost elections in February.

While the State Department has publicly called for democratic elections and civilian rule in Pakistan, some officials said they believed that Mr. Musharraf had more authority to bring reform to the security services.

Another Bush administration official said Pakistan’s government had yet to assure the administration that it could control the ISI. “There are real questions about the organization’s loyalty,” the official said. “In the wake of political gridlock and a lack of a clear political direction, some elements of the ISI have started to exercise certain prerogatives.”

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules.

But some experts said the Bush administration should be more patient in allowing the new Pakistani government to assert its authority after years of military rule in Pakistan.

“In general, this administration at its upper reaches has been cool to the elected government from the start,” said Teresita Schaffer, a Pakistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “They like to look at Musharraf as a factor for stability.”

A senior Pakistani official sharply disputed that Mr. Musharraf had been more effective at exerting control over the ISI. “It’s not disarray in the civilian government that has brought a lot of this to light,” the senior official said. “It’s the fact that the change of government has brought out to the open a lot that was kept secret before.”

Several foreign policy experts noted that there was nothing new in the ISI’s close ties to militant Islamist groups. “People tend to forget the frustrations that were there when Musharraf was in place,” said Daniel Markey, a former South Asia expert at the State Department. “The civilians are a mess right now, and the government is in a state of flux. When there’s flux, individuals in the ISI revert to form.”

Four United States Army soldiers and their Afghan interpreter were killed in Kunar Province by what the Taliban claimed was a remote-controlled bomb, Reuters reported.

A fifth allied soldier died in a separate roadside bombing in the eastern province of Khost, NATO said in a statement without identifying the nationality of the service member. Most of the troops in the NATO-led force in eastern Afghanistan are American.

The combat deaths offered the latest evidence of a strengthening Taliban insurgency that has menaced NATO forces and reclaimed control over some southern and eastern parts of the country.

Taliban and other militant groups have turned increasingly to the insurgents’ weapon of choice in Iraq — the improvised roadside bomb — to attack American and other allied forces in Afghanistan.

A Pentagon report last month noted an increase in attacks by Afghan militants using roadside bombs.

The violence has spiked even as the number of foreign troops in Afghanistan nears its highest level since 2001. Roughly 32,000 American soldiers are deployed in the country, up from 25,000 in 2005. The Pentagon is considering sending 7,000 more troops.

The American-led coalition also includes about 38,000 troops from dozens of other countries who are operating under NATO leadership.

Late Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates authorized sending about 200 additional specialized troops to Afghanistan, including bomb-disposal experts, engineers for clearing routes and the crews for eight Cobra and Sea Stallion helicopters, a senior Defense Department official said. Some of the troops and helicopters may be transferred from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Attacks in eastern Afghanistan have increased about 40 percent from the same time a year ago, largely because more militants are launching cross-border strikes from safe havens in the nearby tribal areas of Pakistan.

Last month, Taliban fighters attacked and nearly overran an American-run combat outpost in Kunar Province, killing nine American soldiers and wounding 15 in the worst attack against United States forces in Afghanistan in three years.

Pentagon analysts say much of the violence is fueled by a sharp increase in foreign Islamist fighters traveling to Pakistan to train and mobilize, and then carry out attacks in Afghanistan against Afghan and allied targets.

“It’s bad, and it’s increasing,” a Defense Department official who follows militant trends in Pakistan and Afghanistan said Friday about the influx of foreign fighters, many of them linked to Al Qaeda. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the nature of the information.

The pattern may reflect a change that is making Pakistan and Afghanistan, and not Iraq, the preferred destination for some Sunni extremists from the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, intelligence analysts say.

American intelligence officials say that some jihadist Web sites have been encouraging foreign militants to go to Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is considered a “winning fight,” compared with the insurgency in Iraq, which has suffered sharp setbacks recently.

The Japanese government said that it was informed Friday by the United States Navy that the submarine, the Houston, might have discharged an amount of radiation that was too small to be considered harmful.

The chief government spokesman, Nobutaka Machimura, said in a news conference that the radioactive amount — estimated at less than half a microcurie — was too insignificant to “affect the human body or the environment.”

The submarine spent a week in March in Sasebo, in western Japan, before cruising to Guam and then Hawaii, where the leak was discovered during an inspection late last month, the Japanese government said.

The Japanese government and American military have been trying to ease public resistance to the stationing in September of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the George Washington, in Yokokusa, southwest of Tokyo. The scheduled arrival of the George Washington, which will replace the diesel-powered aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, has caused protests in Japan, the only country to have been attacked with nuclear weapons.

The announcement also was an embarrassment for the government of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who shuffled his cabinet on Friday in a bid to raise his low approval ratings. Government officials learned of the leak Saturday from television reports even though the United States Navy had informed the Japanese Foreign Ministry a day earlier.

“I, too, came to know about it this morning on television,” the foreign minister, Masahiko Komura, said at a news conference on Saturday.

Last winter, a Japanese warship collided with a fishing boat early one morning, killing the boat’s two passengers. But naval officials were criticized for taking more than an hour to inform the defense minister at the time.

A jellyfish in the Mediterranean off the coast of the Spanish island of Mallorca.

BARCELONA, Spain — Blue patrol boats crisscross the swimming areas of beaches here with their huge nets skimming the water’s surface. The yellow flags that urge caution and the red flags that prohibit swimming because of risky currents are sometimes topped now with blue ones warning of a new danger: swarms of jellyfish.

In a period of hours during a day a couple of weeks ago, 300 people on Barcelona’s bustling beaches were treated for stings, and 11 were taken to hospitals.

From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets.

But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans.

“These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, ‘Look how badly you are treating me,’ ” said Dr. Josep-María Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years.

The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.

These problems are pronounced in the Mediterranean, a sea bounded by more than a dozen countries that rely on it for business and pleasure. Left unchecked in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, these problems could make the swarms of jellyfish menacing coastlines a grim vision of seas to come.

“The problem on the beach is a social problem,” said Dr. Gili, who talks with admiration of the “beauty” of the globular jellyfish. “We need to take care of it for our tourism industry. But the big problem is not on the beach. It’s what’s happening in the seas.”

Jellyfish, relatives of the sea anemone and coral that for the most part are relatively harmless, in fact are the cockroaches of the open waters, the ultimate maritime survivors who thrive in damaged environments, and that is what they are doing.

Within the past year, there have been beach closings because of jellyfish swarms on the Côte d’Azur in France, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, and at Waikiki and Virginia Beach in the United States.

In Australia, more than 30,000 people were treated for stings last year, double the number in 2005. The rare but deadly Irukandji jellyfish is expanding its range in Australia’s warming waters, marine scientists say.

While no good global database exists on jellyfish populations, the increasing reports from around the world have convinced scientists that the trend is real, serious and climate-related, although they caution that jellyfish populations in any one place undergo year-to-year variation.

“Human-caused stresses, including global warming and overfishing, are encouraging jellyfish surpluses in many tourist destinations and productive fisheries,” according to the National Science Foundation, which is issuing a report on the phenomenon this fall and lists as problem areas Australia, the Gulf of Mexico, Hawaii, the Black Sea, Namibia, Britain, the Mediterranean, the Sea of Japan and the Yangtze estuary.

In Barcelona, one of Spain’s most vibrant tourist destinations, city officials and the Catalan Water Agency have started fighting back, trying desperately to ensure that it is safe for swimmers to go back in the water.

Each morning, with the help of Dr. Gili’s team, boats monitor offshore jellyfish swarms, winds and currents to see if beaches are threatened and if closings are needed. They also check if jellyfish collection in the waters near the beaches is needed. Nearly 100 boats stand ready to help in an emergency, said Xavier Duran of the water agency. The constant squeal of Dr. Gili’s cellphone reflected his de facto role as Spain’s jellyfish control and command center. Calls came from all over.

Officials in Santander and the Basque country were concerned about frequent sightings this year on the Atlantic coast of the Portuguese man-of-war, a sometimes lethal warm-water species not previously seen regularly in those regions.

Farther south, a fishing boat from the Murcia region called to report an off-shore swarm of Pelagia noctiluca — an iridescent purplish jellyfish that issues a nasty sting — more than a mile long. A chef, presumably trying to find some advantage in the declining oceans, wanted to know if the local species were safe to eat if cooked. Much is unknown about the jellyfish, and Dr. Gili was unsure.

In previous decades there were jellyfish problems for only a couple of days every few years; now the threat of jellyfish is a daily headache for local officials and is featured on the evening news. “In the past few years the dynamic has changed completely — the temperature is a little warmer,” Dr. Gili said.

Though the stuff of horror B- movies, jellyfish are hardly aggressors. They float haplessly with the currents. They discharge their venom automatically when they bump into something warm — a human body, for example — from poison-containing stingers on mantles, arms or long, threadlike tendrils, which can grow to be yards long.

Some, like the Portuguese man-of-war or the giant box jellyfish, can be deadly on contact. Pelagia noctiluca, common in the Mediterranean, delivers a painful sting producing a wound that lasts weeks, months or years, depending on the person and the amount of contact.

In the Mediterranean, overfishing of both large and small fish has left jellyfish with little competition for plankton, their food, and fewer predators. Unlike in Asia, where some jellyfish are eaten by people, here they have no economic or epicurean value.

The warmer seas and drier climate caused by global warming work to the jellyfish’s advantage, since nearly all jellyfish breed better and faster in warmer waters, according to Dr. Jennifer Purcell, a jellyfish expert at the Shannon Point Marine Center of Western Washington University.

Global warming has also reduced rainfall in temperate zones, researchers say, allowing the jellyfish to better approach the beaches. Rain runoff from land would normally slightly decrease the salinity of coastal waters, “creating a natural barrier that keeps the jellies from the coast,” Dr. Gili said.

Then there is pollution, which reduces oxygen levels and visibility in coastal waters. While other fish die in or avoid waters with low oxygen levels, many jellyfish can thrive in them. And while most fish have to see to catch their food, jellyfish, which filter food passively from the water, can dine in total darkness, according to Dr. Purcell’s research.

Residents in Barcelona have forged a prickly coexistence with their new neighbors.

Last month, Mirela Gómez, 8, ran out of the water crying with her first jellyfish sting, clutching a leg that had suddenly become painful and itchy. Her grandparents rushed her to a nearby Red Cross stand. “I’m a little afraid to go back in the water,” she said, displaying a row of angry red welts on her shin.

Francisco Antonio Padrós, a 77-year-old fisherman, swore mightily as he unloaded his catch one morning last weekend, pulling off dozens of jellyfish clinging to his nets and tossing them onto a dock. Removing a few shrimp, he said his nets were often “filled with more jellyfish than fish.”

By the end of the exercise his calloused hands were bright red and swollen to twice their normal size. “Right now I can’t tell if I have hands or not — they hurt, they’re numb, they itch,” he said.

Dr. Santiago Nogué, head of the toxicology unit at the largest hospital here, said that although 90 percent of stings healed in a week or two, many people’s still hurt and itched for months. He said he was now seeing 20 patients a year whose symptoms did not respond to any treatment at all, sometimes requiring surgery to remove the affected area.

The sea, however, has long been central to life in Barcelona, and that is unlikely to change. Recently when the beaches were closed, children on a breakwater collected jellyfish in a bucket. The next day, Antonio López, a diver, emerged from the water. “There are more every year — we saw hundreds offshore today,” he said. “You just have to learn how to handle the stings.”

But when it began production this spring, the company decided to make the batteries and assemble the cars near its home base in California, cutting more than 5,000 miles from the shipping bill for each vehicle.

“It was kind of a no-brain decision for us,” said Darryl Siry, the company’s senior vice president of global sales, marketing and service. “A major reason was to avoid the transportation costs, which are terrible.”

The world economy has become so integrated that shoppers find relatively few T-shirts and sneakers in Wal-Mart and Target carrying a “Made in the U.S.A.” label. But globalization may be losing some of the inexorable economic power it had for much of the past quarter-century, even as it faces fresh challenges as a political ideology.

Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.

“If we think about the Wal-Mart model, it is incredibly fuel-intensive at every stage, and at every one of those stages we are now seeing an inflation of the costs for boats, trucks, cars,” said Naomi Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”

“That is necessarily leading to a rethinking of this emissions-intensive model, whether the increased interest in growing foods locally, producing locally or shopping locally, and I think that’s great.”

Many economists argue that globalization will not shift into reverse even if oil prices continue their rising trend. But many see evidence that companies looking to keep prices low will have to move some production closer to consumers. Globe-spanning supply chains — Brazilian iron ore turned into Chinese steel used to make washing machines shipped to Long Beach, Calif., and then trucked to appliance stores in Chicago — make less sense today than they did a few years ago.

To avoid having to ship all its products from abroad, the Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea opened its first factory in the United States in May. Some electronics companies that left Mexico in recent years for the lower wages in China are now returning to Mexico, because they can lower costs by trucking their output overland to American consumers.

Neighborhood Effect

Decisions like those suggest that what some economists call a neighborhood effect — putting factories closer to components suppliers and to consumers, to reduce transportation costs — could grow in importance if oil remains expensive. A barrel sold for $125 on Friday, compared with lows of $10 a decade ago.

“If prices stay at these levels, that could lead to some significant rearrangement of production, among sectors and countries,” said C. Fred Bergsten, author of “The United States and the World Economy” and director of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, in Washington. “You could have a very significant shock to traditional consumption patterns and also some important growth effects.”

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”

The spike in shipping costs comes at a moment when concern about the environmental impact of globalization is also growing. Many companies have in recent years shifted production from countries with greater energy efficiency and more rigorous standards on carbon emissions, especially in Europe, to those that are more lax, like China and India.

But if the international community fulfills its pledge to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol to combat climate change, even China and India would have to reduce the growth of their emissions, and the relative costs of production in countries that use energy inefficiently could grow.

The political landscape may also be changing. Dissatisfaction with globalization has led to the election of governments in Latin America hostile to the process. A somewhat similar reaction can be seen in the United States, where both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton promised during the Democratic primary season to “re-evaluate” the nation’s existing free trade agreements.

Last week, efforts to complete what is known as the Doha round of trade talks collapsed in acrimony, dealing a serious blow to tariff reduction. The negotiations, begun in 2001, failed after China and India battled the United States over agricultural tariffs, with the two developing countries insisting on broad rights to protect themselves against surges of food imports that could hurt their farmers.

Some critics of globalization are encouraged by those developments, which they see as a welcome check on the process. On environmentalist blogs, some are even gleefully promoting a “globalization death watch.”

Many leading economists say such predictions are probably overblown. “It would be a mistake, a misinterpretation, to think that a huge rollback or reversal of fundamental trends is under way,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “Distance and trade costs do matter, but we are still in a globalized era.”

As economists and business executives well know, shipping costs are only one factor in determining the flow of international trade. When companies decide where to invest in a new factory or from whom to buy a product, they also take into account exchange rates, consumer confidence, labor costs, government regulations and the availability of skilled managers.

‘People Were Profligate’

What may be coming to an end are price-driven oddities like chicken and fish crossing the ocean from the Western Hemisphere to be filleted and packaged in Asia not to be consumed there, but to be shipped back across the Pacific again. “Because of low costs, people were profligate,” said Nayan Chanda, author of “Bound Together,” a history of globalization.

The industries most likely to be affected by the sharp rise in transportation costs are those producing heavy or bulky goods that are particularly expensive to ship relative to their sale price. Steel is an example. China’s steel exports to the United States are now tumbling by more than 20 percent on a year-over-year basis, their worst performance in a decade, while American steel production has been rising after years of decline. Motors and machinery of all types, car parts, industrial presses, refrigerators, television sets and other home appliances could also be affected.

Plants in industries that require relatively less investment in infrastructure, like furniture, footwear and toys, are already showing signs of mobility as shipping costs rise.

Until recently, standard practice in the furniture industry was to ship American timber from ports like Norfolk, Baltimore and Charleston to China, where oak and cherry would be milled into sofas, beds, tables, cabinets and chairs, which were then shipped back to the United States.

But with transport costs rising, more wood is now going to traditional domestic furniture-making centers in North Carolina and Virginia, where the industry had all but been wiped out. While the opening of the American Ikea plant, in Danville, Va., a traditional furniture-producing center hit hard by the outsourcing of production to Asia, is perhaps most emblematic of such changes, other manufacturers are also shifting some production back to the United States.

Among them is Craftmaster Furniture, a company founded in North Carolina but now Chinese-owned. And at an industry fair in April, La-Z-Boy announced a new line that will begin production in North Carolina this month.

“There’s just a handful of us left, but it has become easier for us domestic folks to compete,” said Steven Kincaid of Kincaid Furniture in Hudson, N.C., a division of La-Z-Boy.

Avocado Salad in January

Soaring transportation costs also have an impact on food, from bananas to salmon. Higher shipping rates could eventually transform some items now found in the typical middle-class pantry into luxuries and further promote the so-called local food movement popular in many American and European cities.

“This is not just about steel, but also maple syrup and avocados and blueberries at the grocery store,” shipped from places like Chile and South Africa, said Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets and co-author of its recent study on transport costs and globalization. “Avocado salad in Minneapolis in January is just not going to work in this new world, because flying it in is going to make it cost as much as a rib eye.”

Global companies like General Electric, DuPont, Alcoa and Procter & Gamble are beginning to respond to the simultaneous increases in shipping and environmental costs with green policies meant to reduce both fuel consumption and carbon emissions. That pressure is likely to increase as both manufacturers and retailers seek ways to tighten the global supply chain.

“Being green is in their best interests not so much in making money as saving money,” said Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University. “Green companies are likely to be a permanent trend, as these vulnerabilities continue, but it’s going to take a long time for all this to settle down.”

In addition, the sharp increase in transportation costs has implications for the “just-in-time” system pioneered in Japan and later adopted the world over. It is a highly profitable business strategy aimed at reducing warehousing and inventory costs by arranging for raw materials and other supplies to arrive only when needed, and not before.

Jeffrey E. Garten, the author of “World View: Global Strategies for the New Economy” and a former dean of the Yale School of Management, said that companies “cannot take a risk that the just-in-time system won’t function, because the whole global trading system is based on that notion.” As a result, he said, “they are going to have to have redundancies in the supply chain, like more warehousing and multiple sources of supply and even production.”

One likely outcome if transportation rates stay high, economists said, would be a strengthening of the neighborhood effect. Instead of seeking supplies wherever they can be bought most cheaply, regardless of location, and outsourcing the assembly of products all over the world, manufacturers would instead concentrate on performing those activities as close to home as possible.

In a more regionalized trading world, economists say, China would probably end up buying more of the iron ore it needs from Australia and less from Brazil, and farming out an even greater proportion of its manufacturing work to places like Vietnam and Thailand. Similarly, Mexico’s maquiladora sector, the assembly plants concentrated near its border with the United States, would become more attractive to manufacturers with an eye on the American market.

But a trend toward regionalization would not necessarily benefit the United States, economists caution. Not only has it lost some of its manufacturing base and skills over the past quarter-century, and experienced a decline in consumer confidence as part of the current slowdown, but it is also far from the economies that have become the most dynamic in the world, those of Asia.

“Despite everything, the American economy is still the biggest Rottweiler on the block,” said Jagdish N. Bhagwati, the author of “In Defense of Globalization” and a professor of economics at Columbia. “But if it’s expensive to get products from there to here, it’s also expensive to get them from here to there.”

That, at least, is the conventional wisdom. But as the Olympic Games approach, training a spotlight on China’s rights record, that view obscures a more complex reality: political change, however gradual and inconsistent, has made China a significantly more open place for average people than it was a generation ago.

Much remains unfree here. The rights of public expression and assembly are sharply limited; minorities, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang Province, are repressed; and the party exercises a nearly complete monopoly on political decision making.

But Chinese people also increasingly live where they want to live. They travel abroad in ever larger numbers. Property rights have found broader support in the courts. Within well-defined limits, people also enjoy the fruits of the technological revolution, from cellphones to the Internet, and can communicate or find information with an ease that has few parallels in authoritarian countries of the past.

“Some people will tell you, look at the walls, and say they are still pretty high, while others will tell you that there is a lot of space between the walls,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a China specialist at Human Rights Watch. “Both things are true.”

Chinese who try to challenge the one-party state directly say authorities are no more tolerant of dissent than they were in the 1980s, and in some cases they are tougher on citizen-led campaigns to enforce legal rights or stop environmental abuses.

On the other hand, the definition of what constitutes a political challenge has changed. Individuals are far less likely to run afoul of a system that no longer demands conformity in political views or personal lifestyles.

The shift toward a more diverse society helps explain some anomalies in perceptions of life inside China. Amnesty International, the human rights group, reported this week that the rights situation had deteriorated significantly in the months before the Olympics despite China’s pledges to improve its record as a condition for hosting the games.

But a survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project this spring and issued last month found that an astounding 86 percent of Chinese said they were content with their country’s direction, double the percentage who said the same thing in 2002. Only 23 percent of Americans polled in the survey said they were satisfied with their country’s direction.

The speeches of China’s leaders, with their gray imagery and paternalistic phrasings, have changed relatively little, emphasizing unity, harmony and economic growth under party rule. The reality on the ground, though, has been transformed, partly because a more dynamic economy necessitates a more dynamic society, partly because money gives people options they did not have when they were poor.

Arguably the most dramatic change in the freedoms enjoyed by most Chinese has been the gradual erosion of a population registration system that tied people to their places of birth, preventing internal migration or, at its height, even tourism.

China has not formally abandoned the system, known as hukou, and it can still prove a nuisance. But as hundreds of millions of people have moved from the inland provinces to wealthier coastal cities in search of economic opportunity, authorities in one place after another have found themselves making concessions to this new reality.

Song Daqing, who lives in a single-room home here with his wife and three children, counts himself as a beneficiary of these changes. Born into poverty in Sichuan Province, he worked as a cattle herder, bricklayer and coal miner, earning as little as 60 cents a day before coming to Shanghai in 1998. His early years in this city were marked by frequent mass roundups of migrants by the police, and he was twice held in crowded detention centers before being expelled from the city.

“Now we all have residence permits,” said Mr. Song, who supports his family by selling vegetables. “The police don’t check our paperwork anymore, and even if they found you without a permit, they won’t arrest you, but rather would suggest you get one as soon as possible.”

Reality Trumps Ideology

The relative flexibility the government has shown in allowing this to happen is more a matter of pragmatism than any overt ideological shift, a grudging concession to economic reality.

“China’s economic development relies on the flow of migrants into cities,” said Wei Wei, the founder of Little Bird, an organization that runs a special phone line to help migrant workers protect their rights. “The country’s growth depends on it.”

Little Bird itself is an example of incremental openness. It is a nongovernmental organization, one of thousands addressing social, economic and environmental issues that the party once insisted it could handle by itself. The leeway private groups have to influence public policy is still limited. Those that cross unwritten lines into political opposition often are shut down.

But China’s bureaucracy is more contentious than it was under Mao. Policy advocates within the government — including officials representing weak bureaucracies, like those charged with fighting pollution, improving education and broadening women’s rights — often seek popular support to increase their clout.

A recent example involved a revision of a law covering rights for the handicapped, which the government undertook after several organizations banded together in 2004 to advocate change on the issue. The activists also contacted Chinese legislators and provided a report to the official Chinese Disabled Person’s Federation.

The government never publicly acknowledged the citizens’ action, but a revised law incorporating some of their recommendations was enacted earlier this year. “The pressure came from both inside and outside,” said Wu Runling, director of the Beijing Huitianyu Information Consulting Center, one of the groups involved. “You can’t tell me that our appeal and calls for revision of the law had no meaning at all.”

Although a powerful system of censorship remains a fact of life, and journalists are frequently jailed and detained, feisty publications with mass audiences in print and on the Internet report forthrightly about ills in society.

Greater access to information has emboldened people to assert some rights. Homeowners in cities like Shanghai and Chongqing have resisted government development schemes with some success, and the proliferation of petitioners with all kinds of grievances presents the authorities with an informal check on their power.

“After 30 years, everybody knows about democracy and freedom,” said Wang Xiaodong, a researcher at the China Youth Research Center, a wing of the Communist Youth League. “They know that as taxpayers, we support the government, not the opposite.”

Before the Olympics, Beijing demolished a favorite pilgrimage spot for petitioners who flow to the capital from all over the country to seek redress from perceived injustice. According to a recent report in a Hong Kong magazine, Phoenix Weekly, the government has also hired thugs to intimidate or kidnap petitioners to prevent them from making their cases. Critics of such abuses say that in an indirect way, the state is acknowledging the power of such protest.

“Human rights has become more than just a theory for the public,” said Jiang Qisheng, a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and former political prisoner. “In the past they petitioned and complained about injustice, but that wasn’t about defending their rights. They let the higher authorities to decide their rights.

“What they are asking for now is a change in the system, and this reflects a widespread change in attitude,” he said.

Even in the best of times, China’s human rights improvements have been so gradual as to be almost impossible to discern in any month-to-month sense. And in the tense environment before the Olympics, which China fears could invite uncontrollable protests or blemish its international image, the climate has become noticeably more restrictive.

Lawyers have been sternly warned not to represent clients involved in delicate political cases. Tibetans and Uighur Muslims have been subjected to arrests and “re-education” campaigns.

Hu Jia, a Beijing-based political activist who campaigned for years on behalf of AIDS patients and for greater political openness, was arrested late last year and sentenced to three and a half years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power.” Many other dissidents have been warned to stay away from Beijing, or have seen state surveillance and harassment extended to their family members.

The government relies on unwritten laws: political confrontation with the ruling party remains a no-go area, and state stability trumps nascent notions of human rights.

Blogs Subvert Propaganda

Yet even as the police tightened security before the Games, the power of new information technologies to chip away at the official line was still on display. In a poor county in Guizhou Province in the south, a teenage girl died under mysterious circumstances, and rumors of police malfeasance and a cover-up spread widely on the Internet, prompting public protests to demand a new investigation.

Local authorities initially tried to suppress news of the protests, which turned violent, and impose an official account of events there. But people wielding video cameras uploaded material to YouTube, and some Chinese journalists disputed official accounts that the riots had been put down peacefully.

One of them was Wu Hanpin, a radio reporter who took pictures of the riot. They showed that the police had fired rubber bullets and teenagers in detention whose bruised foreheads suggested beatings.

“I saw a gap between the official story and the reality, which was mind-blowing, like the presence of the armed police,” Mr. Wu said. “So I put some of these things on the Internet, on my personal blog.” Four days later, after registering hundreds of thousands of visitors, his blog was closed by censors.

“The media has made a huge step forward from the ’80s,” said Sun Jinping, a veteran senior editor at a Beijing newspaper. The riot in Guizhou Province, he said, “would have been impossible for the public to know about in the past.”

A View of the Outside

For others, the impact of information about other countries has been just as great. He Weifang, a professor of law at Peking University, said that before the economic reform era began in 1979, the country was much like North Korea, where people were indoctrinated to believe that Chinese were the better off than people anywhere else.

“Today, even the farmers in remote areas have satellite TVs,” Mr. He said. “So whenever they see an election, such as the one held in Pakistan recently, they may wonder why, even though we have approximately the same economic conditions, they can elect their top leaders, and we can’t even vote for the leader of a small county. I think a consciousness of political rights has increased more than anything.”

Even China’s party-run legal system is a fulcrum for experimentation, though in an ambiguous way that highlights the uncertainties in the country’s transition.

Judges do not have the power to rule independently in China. Yet the country now has 165,000 registered lawyers, a five-fold increase since 1990, and average people have hired them to press for enforcement of rights inscribed in the Chinese Constitution. The courts today sometimes defend property rights and business contracts even when powerful state interests are on the other side.

In criminal law, progress is more grudging. Yan Ruyu, a former Beijing police officer who quit the force and became a lawyer after the violent crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen Square, said such cases remained unpopular with most lawyers because the likelihood of prevailing over the state remains so slim.

“There has been progress, but it’s so slow that sometimes one becomes pessimistic,” he said. “It’s empty talk to speak of having an independent judiciary if the party leads everything.”

On the other hand, Mr. Yan says, party control turns every criminal case into a human rights case. That gives every criminal defense lawyer the chance — and for some of them, the incentive — to inch the system forward.

North Korea also refused to let South Korean officials enter its territory to investigate the shooting.

The incident, in which a 53-year-old woman was killed after apparently wandering into a restricted military zone near the North’s Kumgang resort, added chill to already-frosty relations between the two Koreas.

It also forced President Lee Myung Bak of South Korea to face a consequence of his hard-line policy on the Communist North. Since he took office in February, the North has cut off all government contact and banned South Korean officials from Kumgang, shutting down what had always been a minimal channel of communication with the North.

“What cannot and should not happen has happened,” Mr. Lee told a security ministers’ meeting, according to his office. “I can’t understand that they shot a civilian tourist” at an hour when it was possible to discern she was a civilian, Mr. Lee said.

Mr. Lee urged North Korea to “actively cooperate” in an investigation.

But when South Korea tried to send a telephone message through the border village of Panmunjom north of Seoul to protest and demand that South Korean investigators visit the scene, the North didn’t even pick up the phone, said Kim Ho Nyoun, a government spokesman.

Instead, a relatively obscure government bureau in charge of running the Kumgang resort issued a statement making a brief expression of regret over the death and condemning the South’s decision to suspend the visits to Kumgang as an “intolerable insult.”

“The responsibility for the incident entirely rests with the South side,” the bureau said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. “It should make a clear apology.”

It said the South Korean woman walked around a fence on a beach and “intruded deep” into a military zone. Soldiers had to shoot her because she ignored repeated orders to stop and warning shots and began running away, it said.

The incident highlighted the challenge Mr. Lee faces in dealing with North Korea. Nearly half a day after the shooting, and an hour after he learned of it, he proposed resuming stalled reconciliation talks with North Korea in a speech to parliament on Friday.

What could have been considered a bold initiative — an unexpected policy about-face intended to reverse the chill in inter-Korean relations — was quickly overwhelmed by the furor over the shooting.

The liberal opposition, whose rule before Mr. Lee’s election had ushered in an era of reconciliation on the divided peninsula, criticized Mr. Lee for taking hours to learn of the death, not from the North Korean authorities but from a private tourist company. Conservative dailies also criticized him for pressing ahead with his overture of reconciliation despite the shooting.

On Saturday, the head of Hyundai Asan, a Seoul-based company that runs the Kumgang tours, left for the North on a fact-finding mission.

The woman, Park Wang Ja, was the first South Korean tourist killed by a North Korean at Kumgang since the resort, located a shade north of the heavily fortified eastern border, was opened in 1998.

Nearly 2 million South Koreans have since visited there, helping thaw relations between the two countries but also providing the cash-strapped North Korean government with hundreds of millions of tourist dollars. Mr. Lee had been skeptical of providing any economic stimulus before the North abandons its nuclear weapons programs.