Pan-Arab Al-Jazeera buys Current TV from Al Gore

LOS ANGELES (AP) — With its purchase of left-leaning Current TV, the Pan-Arab news channel Al-Jazeera has fulfilled a long-held quest to reach tens of millions of U.S. homes. But its new audience immediately got a little smaller.

The nation's second-largest TV operator, Time Warner Cable Inc., dropped Current after the deal was confirmed Wednesday, a sign that the channel will have an uphill climb to expand its reach.

"Our agreement with Current has been terminated and we will no longer be carrying the service. We are removing the service as quickly as possible," the company said in a statement.

Still, the acquisition of Current, the news network that cofounded by former Vice President Al Gore, boosts Al-Jazeera's reach in the U.S. beyond a few large U.S. metropolitan areas including New York and Washington nearly ninefold to about 40 million homes.

Gore confirmed the sale Wednesday, saying in a statement that Al-Jazeera shares Current TV's mission "to give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling."

Al-Jazeera, owned by the government of Qatar, plans to gradually transform Current into a network called Al-Jazeera America by adding five to 10 new U.S. bureaus beyond the five it has now and hiring more journalists. More than half of the content will be U.S. news and the network will have its headquarters in New York, spokesman Stan Collender said.

Collender said there are no rules against foreign ownership of a cable channel — unlike the strict rules limiting foreign ownership of free-to-air TV stations. He said the move is based on demand, adding that 40 percent of viewing traffic on Al-Jazeera English's website is from the U.S.

"This is a pure business decision based on recognized demand," Collender said. "When people watch Al-Jazeera, they tend to like it a great deal."

Previous to Al-Jazeera's purchase, Current TV was in 60 million homes. It is carried by Comcast Corp., which owned less than a 10 percent stake in Current TV, as well as DirecTV. Neither company announced plans to drop the channel.

In 2010, Al-Jazeera English's managing director, Tony Burman, blamed a "very aggressive hostility" from the Bush administration for reluctance among cable and satellite companies to show the network.

Even so, Al-Jazeera has garnered respect for its ability to build a serious news product in a short time. In a statement announcing the deal, it touted numerous U.S. journalism awards it received in 2012, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Grand Prize and the Scripps Howard Award for Television/Cable In-Depth Reporting.

But there may be a culture clash at the network. Dave Marash, a former "Nightline" reporter who worked for Al-Jazeera in Washington, said he left the network in 2008 in part because he sensed an anti-American bias there.

Al-Jazeera English went on the air in November 2006. It moved quickly to establish a strong presence on the Internet, launching web streaming services and embracing new social media services such as Twitter in part to compensate for its lack of a presence on U.S. airwaves.

The English news network has a different news staff and a separate budget from the Arabic network, which launched in 1996. They and the company's growing stable of other Al-Jazeera branded channels are overseen by Sheik Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, a member of Qatar's royal family.

Sheik Ahmed took over last year following the abrupt resignation of the company's longtime Palestinian head, Wadah Khanfar, who was widely credited with helping build Al-Jazeera into an influential global brand. In his departure note to staff, he said he was leaving behind "a mature organization" that "will continue to maintain its trailblazing path."

Both the English and the Arabic channels actively covered the protests, violence and political upheaval that have become known as the Arab Spring.

Current, meanwhile, began as a groundbreaking effort to promote user-generated content. But it has settled into a more conventional format of political talk television with a liberal bent. Gore worked on-air as an analyst during its recent election night coverage.

Its leading personalities are former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Cenk Uygur, a former political commentator on MSNBC who hosts the show called "The Young Turks." Current signed Keith Olbermann to be its top host in 2011 but his tenure lasted less than a year before it ended in bad blood on both sides.

Current has largely been outflanked by MSNBC in its effort be a liberal alternative to the leading cable news network, Fox News Channel.

Current hired former CNN Washington bureau chief David Bohrman in 2011 to be its president. Bohrman pushed the network to innovate technologically, with election night coverage that emphasized a conversation over social media.

Current TV, founded in 2005 by former vice president Gore and Joel Hyatt, is expected to post $114 million in revenue in 2013, according to research firm SNL Kagan. The firm pegged the network's cash flow at nearly $24 million a year.

___

AP Television Writer David Bauder in New York and AP writer Adam Schreck in Baghdad contributed to this report.

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The New Old Age Blog: On the Way to Hospice, Surprising Hurdles

I’ve often wondered why more families don’t call hospice when a loved one has a terminal disease — and why people who do call wait so long, often until death is just days away.

Even though more than 40 percent of American deaths now involve hospice care, many families still are trying to shoulder the burden on their own rather than turning to a proven source of help and knowledge. I’ve surmised that the reason is families’ or patients’ unwillingness to acknowledge the prospect of death, or physicians’ inability to say the h-word and refer dying patients to hospice care.

But maybe there’s another reason. A study in the journal Health Affairs recently pointed out that hospices themselves may be turning away patients because of certain restrictive enrollment policies. It’s possible, too, that physicians who know of these policies aren’t referring patients whom the doctors fear wouldn’t qualify.

Surprisingly, this randomized national survey of almost 600 hospice programs represents the first broad inquiry into enrollment practices, though it’s been nearly 30 years since hospice became a Medicare benefit.

Nearly 80 percent of hospice programs, the study found, reported having at least one policy that could restrict access. “It represents a barrier to people who want hospice care but can’t receive it,” said lead author Melissa Aldridge Carlson, a geriatrics and palliative care researcher at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

What kind of barriers are we talking about? More than 60 percent of hospices won’t accept a patient on chemotherapy, and more than half won’t take someone relying on intravenous nutrition. Many won’t enroll patients receiving palliative radiation or blood transfusions; a few say no to tube feeding.

This made more sense a couple of decades ago, when Medicare developed the regulations requiring patients to forgo curative treatments when they entered hospice. Hospice patients must have a terminal disease, likely to cause death within six months, so such treatments were presumed futile.

But medicine evolves. Now, Dr. Aldridge Carlson pointed out, the distinction between curative and palliative treatments has grown blurry. “It’s increasingly an artificial dichotomy,” she said. “That’s not the reality for most patients today with end-stage disease.”

Chemotherapy, for instance, is often used to shrink tumors that cause pain; radiation can prevent nausea and vomiting for patients with bowel obstructions. Though neither will cure a terminal cancer, as palliative treatments they can improve quality of life. Blood transfusions can help anemic cancer patients feel better, too, at least for a while.

Why, then, would hospices not accept dying people using these treatments? First, these are expensive to provide. The national average Medicare reimbursement for hospice care is just $140 a day, the study notes, and it’s not adjusted to reflect the cost of more complicated regimens. Besides, hospices worry about running afoul of Medicare regulations and being denied even that inadequate reimbursement.

This probably explains why the researchers found that smaller hospices were more likely than large ones to say no to patients receiving such treatments. “If you’re a small hospice caring for someone with many medical issues and the reimbursement doesn’t even cover the care – and then Medicare comes to take it back – that’s a big hit,” Dr. Aldridge Carlson said. Larger organizations with more patients and bigger budgets can better absorb the costs.

One bright note, though, is that almost 30 percent of the hospices studied offer some kind of open access enrollment without insisting on those prohibitions. Much more common in nonprofit hospices (a pity, because the real growth is in for-profit ones), open access usually means enrolling people who don’t yet meet the Medicare criteria, then converting them to Medicare patients as they become eligible.

At Gilchrist Hospice Care in Baltimore, for instance, patients still using chemotherapy, radiation, transfusions and several other treatments can enter what it calls “expanded care,” sometimes also known as “concurrent care.” (At Gilchrist, however, such patients still must meet the six-month hospice eligibility requirement.)

“If you say, ‘You can’t get blood transfusions any more,’ people say, ‘Why would I go with your program?’” said Regina Bodnar, Gilchrist’s clinical director. The hospice’s concurrent program “is not so either/or.”

People who enter hospice care with palliative treatments usually decide to forgo them anyway when they become less effective or more burdensome, Ms. Bodnar said, but “this allows people to make the transition over time.” As the largest hospice program in Maryland, a nonprofit with generous donors, Gilchrist can afford this more flexible, but expensive, approach.

Could it be the future of hospice? That would require Medicare to make some changes in eligibility and reimbursement practices — a shift that might bolster Medicare’s solvency, too.

“Hospice saves money because it keeps people out of the hospital,” Dr. Aldridge Carlson said. Even more expensive outpatient treatments, like palliative radiation, are less costly than days spent in intensive care. Adjusting policies to allow more patients into hospice might bring costs down.

But as important, it could make the call to hospice a slightly less terrifying prospect and provide more families with the help they need at the end of life. “We need to take down the barriers to hospice care,” Ms. Bodnar said, “and this is one way to do it.”

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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DealBook: Avis to Buy Zipcar for $500 Million

The Avis Budget Group said on Wednesday that it had agreed to acquire the car-sharing pioneer Zipcar for $500 million in cash.

The deal represents a new direction for Avis in the fiercely competitive car rental market. Rivals Hertz Global and Enterprise each have hourly rental operations that compete with Zipcar. These rentals tend to have younger, more urban customers than traditional business or leisure travelers. And the Zipcar acquisition comes just months after Hertz clinched a takeover of Dollar Thrifty Automotive group.

“We see car sharing as highly complementary to traditional car rental, with rapid growth potential and representing a scalable opportunity for us as a combined company,” Ronald L. Nelson, Avis’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Avis’s offer of $12.25 a share represents a premium of 49 percent over Zipcar’s closing stock price of $8.24 at the end of 2012. The company, based in Cambridge, Mass., rents vehicles by the hour or the day, and it went public in April 2011 at $18 a share.

Founded in 2000, Zipcar says it has more than 760,000 members, referred to as Zipsters. It is in 20 metropolitan areas in the United States, Canada and Europe, as well as located near many college campuses.

In November, Zipcar said that it expected to end its fiscal year with a profit of as much as $4 million — its first annual profit. That forecast came as the company reported a 15 percent gain in third-quarter revenue, to $78 million, from the year-ago period.

Avis said it expected to reap significant cost reductions in acquiring Zipcar, including savings on its fleet. It also said Avis’s fleet could meet more of Zipcar’s heavy weekend demand. Avis said it expected annual “synergies” of $50 million to $70 million.

When the deal is completed, Zipcar will operate as a subsidiary of Avis in new headquarters in Boston. Scott W. Griffith, Zipcar’s chief executive, and Mark D. Norman, its president and chief operating officer, are expected to stay on.

The venture capital firms Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners and the AOL co-founder Stephen Case’s Revolution have been among Zipcar’s backers. Revolution is currently its largest shareholder, with a 17.1 percent stake.

In 2007, Zipcar had merged with a car-sharing rival, Flexcar.

Citigroup and the law firm Kirkland & Ellis is advising Avis Budget. Morgan Stanley and the law firm Latham & Watkins is advising Zipcar.

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Barack Obama’s AMA is Reddit’s Top Post of 2012

Do you remember that Barack Obama AMA on Reddit this past August? The one that started with “Hi, I’m Barack Obama, President of the United States. Ask me anything.”

That was Reddit’s top post of 2012 with 5,598,171 page views. Reddit compiled a list of it’s top posts of the year we just said farewell to.

[More from Mashable: This Is 2012 Summed Up in One Image]

The site also handed out some “best of” awards along with a few other tidbits of info. To see if your favorite post ranked, check out the video above.

BONUS: 20 Silliest Questions Posed to Obama in reddit AMA

1. Star Trek vs Star Wars

[More from Mashable: Dying Trekkie Gets Private ‘Into Darkness’ Screening]

Click here to view this gallery.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Playboy Hugh Hefner marries his 'runaway bride'

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hugh Hefner's celebrating the new year as a married man once again.

The 86-year-old Playboy magazine founder exchanged vows with his "runaway bride," Crystal Harris, at a private Playboy Mansion ceremony on New Year's Eve. Harris, a 26-year-old "Playmate of the Month" in 2009, broke off a previous engagement to Hefner just before they were to be married in 2011.

Playboy said on Tuesday that the couple celebrated at a New Year's Eve party at the mansion with guests that included comic Jon Lovitz, Gene Simmons of KISS and baseball star Evan Longoria.

The bride wore a strapless gown in soft pink, Hefner a black tux. Hefner's been married twice before but lived the single life between 1959 and 1989.

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Scant Proof Is Found to Back Up Claims by Energy Drinks

Energy drinks are the fastest-growing part of the beverage industry, with sales in the United States reaching more than $10 billion in 2012 — more than Americans spent on iced tea or sports beverages like Gatorade.

Their rising popularity represents a generational shift in what people drink, and reflects a successful campaign to convince consumers, particularly teenagers, that the drinks provide a mental and physical edge.

The drinks are now under scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration after reports of deaths and serious injuries that may be linked to their high caffeine levels. But however that review ends, one thing is clear, interviews with researchers and a review of scientific studies show: the energy drink industry is based on a brew of ingredients that, apart from caffeine, have little, if any benefit for consumers.

“If you had a cup of coffee you are going to affect metabolism in the same way,” said Dr. Robert W. Pettitt, an associate professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato, who has studied the drinks.

Energy drink companies have promoted their products not as caffeine-fueled concoctions but as specially engineered blends that provide something more. For example, producers claim that “Red Bull gives you wings,” that Rockstar Energy is “scientifically formulated” and Monster Energy is a “killer energy brew.” Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, a Democrat, has asked the government to investigate the industry’s marketing claims.

Promoting a message beyond caffeine has enabled the beverage makers to charge premium prices. A 16-ounce energy drink that sells for $2.99 a can contains about the same amount of caffeine as a tablet of NoDoz that costs 30 cents. Even Starbucks coffee is cheap by comparison; a 12-ounce cup that costs $1.85 has even more caffeine.

As with earlier elixirs, a dearth of evidence underlies such claims. Only a few human studies of energy drinks or the ingredients in them have been performed and they point to a similar conclusion, researchers say — that the beverages are mainly about caffeine.

Caffeine is called the world’s most widely used drug. A stimulant, it increases alertness, awareness and, if taken at the right time, improves athletic performance, studies show. Energy drink users feel its kick faster because the beverages are typically swallowed quickly or are sold as concentrates.

“These are caffeine delivery systems,” said Dr. Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who has studied energy drinks. “They don’t want to say this is equivalent to a NoDoz because that is not a very sexy sales message.”

A scientist at the University of Wisconsin became puzzled as he researched an ingredient used in energy drinks like Red Bull, 5-Hour Energy and Monster Energy. The researcher, Dr. Craig A. Goodman, could not find any trials in humans of the additive, a substance with the tongue-twisting name of glucuronolactone that is related to glucose, a sugar. But Dr. Goodman, who had studied other energy drink ingredients, eventually found two 40-year-old studies from Japan that had examined it.

In the experiments, scientists injected large doses of the substance into laboratory rats. Afterward, the rats swam better. “I have no idea what it does in energy drinks,” Dr. Goodman said.

Energy drink manufacturers say it is their proprietary formulas, rather than specific ingredients, that provide users with physical and mental benefits. But that has not prevented them from implying otherwise.

Consider the case of taurine, an additive used in most energy products.

On its Web site, the producer of Red Bull, for example, states that “more than 2,500 reports have been published about taurine and its physiological effects,” including acting as a “detoxifying agent.” In addition, that company, Red Bull of Austria, points to a 2009 safety study by a European regulatory group that gave it a clean bill of health.

But Red Bull’s Web site does not mention reports by that same group, the European Food Safety Authority, which concluded that claims about the benefits in energy drinks lacked scientific support. Based on those findings, the European Commission has refused to approve claims that taurine helps maintain mental function and heart health and reduces muscle fatigue.

Taurine, an amino acidlike substance that got its name because it was first found in the bile of bulls, does play a role in bodily functions, and recent research suggests it might help prevent heart attacks in women with high cholesterol. However, most people get more than adequate amounts from foods like meat, experts said. And researchers added that those with heart problems who may need supplements would find far better sources than energy drinks.

Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting from Tokyo and Poypiti Amatatham from Bangkok.

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Global Markets Rise on Fiscal Deal

HONG KONG — Stock markets in the Asia-Pacific region began the year with gains Wednesday, as investors took some relief from the last-minute fiscal deal reached in Washington but wrestled with the lingering uncertainties about many other aspects of the U.S. budget.

Two important markets, Japan and China, remained closed for holidays Wednesday, but elsewhere in the region, markets gained modestly during the morning and climbed further after a crucial vote in Washington passed a compromise deal that staved off income tax increases for most Americans.

The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong had the biggest increase, closing up 2.9 percent at its highest level since June 2011. In South Korea, the Kospi rose 1.7 percent, while the benchmark indexes in Singapore, Australia and Taiwan climbed more than 1 percent.

European markets also headed solidly higher, with the DAX in Germany, the CAC-40 in France and the FTSE 100 up about 2 percent in the late morning.

With the Chinese economy having regained momentum in recent months, Asian economic prospects are relatively positive, and growth in most of the region’s developing economies is expected to outpace expansion in the beleaguered West and in Japan.

Purchasing managers’ index reports from Taiwan, South Korea and India, which gauge the health of the manufacturing sectors in those countries, underlined the improving picture Wednesday, with readings that climbed in December. The reading for Indonesia slipped but still indicated expansion.

But in Europe, similar surveys showed that euro zone factories had ended 2012 in poor shape, with both production and new orders declining in December. Spanish manufacturing shrank for the 20th consecutive month, with the decline and the pace of job cuts accelerating.

Analysts have long cautioned that the economic and budget travails of the United States and Europe were likely to overshadow global market sentiment and could cast a pall over Asia this year, especially in highly trade-dependent countries like Taiwan and South Korea and small, open economies like Singapore and Hong Kong.

The deal reached in Washington on Tuesday averted looming income tax increases for most Americans. Combined with significant spending cuts, these would have dealt a major blow to an economy that has been growing anemically since the global financial crisis.

Market relief, however, was likely to be short-lived, analysts said, as other important issues have not been tackled. In particular, decisions on spending cuts of $110 billion were delayed for two months, and politicians have not come up with a long-term solution that would allow the U.S. government to get past the borrowing limit known as the debt ceiling, which was reached at the end of the year.

The scaled-down deal “addressed the fiscal cliff but did nothing to address longer-term fiscal health of the nation,” Aneta Markowska, an analyst at Société Générale in New York, wrote in a research note sent before the final vote in the House of Representatives on Tuesday night in Washington. “This puts the U.S. rating at risk for a downgrade.”

Broader tax overhauls also remain on the table for 2013, while the negotiations about the debt ceiling are likely to involve more potentially unsettling brinkmanship in Washington.

The U.S. fiscal problems, noted Tom Kenny, an analyst at Australia & New Zealand Banking in Australia, “are far from over.” U.S. politicians, he added, will face intense negotiations over the next two months about raising the debt ceiling. These “are likely to prove more harrowing than those just completed.”

For financial markets, the last-minute, partial deal reached Tuesday is thus likely to have brought only a temporary reprieve, analysts said.

“Call it breathing room, call it kicking the can down the road, call it whatever you like — come mid-February, when the decision on the legal U.S. debt limit will be needed, the fight starts afresh,” analysts at DBS in Singapore wrote in a research note. “Two more months of shenanigans and waffling/seasick markets? It certainly looks that way.”

David Jolly contributed reporting from Paris.

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News Analysis: Grand Bargains Give Way to Legislative Quick Fixes

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Representative Sander M. Levin, left, speaking with reporters on Monday at the Capitol as the clock for a fiscal deal was ticking.

WASHINGTON — The confusing struggle to head off a national fiscal crisis has made one thing crystal clear: The era of the Big Deal is over.

Despite repeated, intense and personal efforts by President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner as well as bipartisan coalitions, gangs of senators, supercommittees, special commissions and wonky outsiders, the grand bargain remains the elusive holy grail of fiscal policy and seems destined to stay that way for now.

“We don’t seem to be able to do grand bargains very well,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who has long been a force for compromise.

Some groups have produced the framework for smaller deals and even gained some bipartisan support, particularly the 2010 Simpson-Bowles plan, which fell just short of a 14-vote threshold required to get before Congress. But the alchemy of Mr. Obama and the current Republican-controlled House, not to mention the ideologically diverse Senate, appears hopelessly inhospitable to accomplishing something huge.

As Mr. Obama all but acknowledged Monday, big bipartisan legislative dreams seem all but certain to be miniaturized as incremental policy visions.

“My preference would have been to solve all these problems in the context of a larger agreement, a bigger deal, a grand bargain, whatever you want to call it,” he said. “Maybe we can do it in stages. We’re going to solve this problem instead in several steps.”

Republicans appear to agree. “We’ll continue to work on smart ways to cut spending,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said on the Senate floor. “But let’s not let that stand in the way.”

The list of unrealized goals from Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner’s last attempt at a grand bargain two weeks ago are breathtaking in their number, particularly when compared with the probable outcome of these final Congressional negotiations. Ambitious plans to overhaul the individual tax code, tackle corporate rates, revamp the Medicare program and possibly consider changes in Social Security appear to have given way mainly to a tax increase for big earners.

Members in both the House and the Senate said perhaps that was O.K.

“We can’t do the task all at once,” said Senator John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota. “I pushed for a big deal, but in this case this time we can only get the tax piece done, so we need to move we need to get it done.”

The downside of incrementalism is apparent every month in Washington, as a new battle emerges and legislative Band-Aids are affixed to fiscal gunshot wounds.

While Congress appeared on Monday to be lurching to a deal to avoid significant tax increases for millions of Americans, the emerging patchwork tax deal would push a series of fights into the next Congress, most of them very likely to be marked by the same 11th-hour, rancorous dynamics that have been the signature of every other fiscal deal.

Most pressing, Congress will have to come together as early as next month to lift the debt ceiling, which Republicans are already hoping to leverage to eke more spending cuts from Democrats. A similar fight almost led to default in 2011, and damaged the nation’s credit rating.

In March, Congress will spar again over a short-term spending agreement to keep the government open, the same sort that led to a near shutdown almost two years ago. It appeared on Monday that scheduled spending cuts to the Pentagon and other parts of government — the result of last year’s debt ceiling agreement — will be delayed for two months, yet another short-term kick of the can. Republicans and Democrats will most likely revisit the recurring question of revenues versus spending cuts when those two months are up.

Because the sharply divided 112th Congress and the White House repeatedly eschewed large-scale deals in favor of quick fixes, myriad bills left undone will be in the hands of the 113th Congress, set to convene at noon Thursday.

The legislation includes a farm bill to replace the one that has expired, a lapse that may result in soaring milk prices; a transportation bill; a funding mechanism to supplement the waning gas tax reserves to meet infrastructure needs; and even a measure, once completely uncontroversial, to prevent domestic violence.

Also left to the new year is a bill to help states hit by Hurricane Sandy. The Senate passed such a measure last week, but House Republicans, as has been the case with every disaster relief bill in this Congress, disagree with Democrats on its level of spending, and a final deal seems unlikely until the next Congress. The House was also set to vote on Tuesday on a quickie measure to deal with dairy prices.

Doing business in pieces may end up a productive formula — in the sense that walking 100 miles will still transport a person absent an airplane or a bus — but many outside Congress do not think such halting forward motion should be confused with actual success.

“That’s the nature of the dysfunction,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. “For the parties, it gives them temporary cover and to fight again on the issues in the next few months. The parties please their base, but the country does not get a solution.”

But that seems to be the nature of what constitutes progress in such a sharply divided political world.

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Unreleased ‘BlackBerry X10′ QWERTY phone appears again in new photos

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DiDonato a luminous Mary Stuart at Met

NEW YORK (AP) — The Metropolitan Opera may have pretty much turned opening night over to the glamorous Anna Netrebko, but New Year's Eve belongs to a very different diva — Joyce DiDonato.

Last year the Kansas-born mezzo-soprano headlined a starry lineup in the baroque pastiche "The Enchanted Island." On Monday night she brought a gala audience to its feet with a luminous performance in the title role of Donizetti's "Maria Stuarda."

Never before performed at the Met, this second opera in the composer's so-called "Three Queens" trilogy portrays the lethal conflict between Mary, deposed queen of Scotland, and Queen Elizabeth I of England.

From the moment she makes her entrance in the second scene, singing of her joy in strolling outside her prison in Fotheringay Castle, DiDonato rivets attention. She imbues every syllable with a concentrated eloquence that makes her compact voice seem larger than it is. She displays seemingly effortless command of coloratura embellishments throughout a wide vocal range. And she is equally impressive in fiery outbursts and in hushed, long-held phrases — like the ones she spun out as she sang through the chorus in the final scene.

The opera's dramatic heart is a confrontation between the two queens that never took place in history but that figures in the Friedrich Schiller play on which the libretto is based. Mary at first abases herself in hope of winning a pardon; then, as Elizabeth hurls insults, her pride reasserts itself and she seals her doom by denouncing her rival as "figlia impura di Bolena" ("impure daughter of Anne Boleyn") and "vil bastarda" ("vile bastard").

DiDonato was impressive in this scene when she sang the role for the first time last spring in Houston, but her performance Monday night was even better — more confident and more filled with vocal and dramatic shadings. There was a wonderful touch when, after she had spent her fury, she allowed herself a beatific smile, as if to convey: "There! I said it and I'm glad!"

Of course, it takes two to stage a confrontation, and DiDonato's partner at the Met is Elza van den Heever, a South African soprano making her debut. She has a voice that's impressive in many respects, with a large and vibrant upper register. But she tended to fade out in the lower part of her range, where much of Elizabeth's music lies.

More damagingly, she was victimized by a quirk of David McVicar's production that has Elizabeth lurching awkwardly about the stage for much of the evening, as if thrown off balance by John Macfarlane's elaborate period costumes. Perhaps this bizarre gait is intended to contrast with Mary's immaculate poise, but it mainly proves distracting.

The opening scene in Elizabeth's palace is garishly staged, with what look like red rafters hanging down from the ceiling and gratuitous acrobats in devil costumes, but once past this, matters improve. For the scene outside Fotheringay, Macfarlane fills the stage with spindly trees barren of leaves and provides a painted backdrop that evokes a cloudy landscape. The final tableau is also striking: Mary, shorn of her long hair and wearing a simple red dress, climbs a staircase with her back to the audience to meet her executioner and the chopping block.

Though the two queens dominate the opera, there are some other characters, and they are all in extremely good hands. Having the elegant tenor Matthew Polenzani take on the thankless role of the ineffectual Leicester is luxury casting indeed. Bass Matthew Rose is warmly sympathetic as Mary's confessor, Talbot; baritone Joshua Hopkins sings with robust tone as her nemesis, Cecil; and mezzo Maria Zifchak lends her customary strong support as Mary's attendant, Anna.

Maurizio Benini conducts a lithe and lively performance of the score, even if he can't quite disguise the fact that the second half of the opera is decidedly anti-climactic.

There are seven more performances, including a matinee on Saturday, Jan. 19, that will be broadcast live in HD to movie theaters around the world.

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