Playground fads come and go, as those who have found themselves with neglected collections of Beanie Babies can attest.

But the Pokйmon franchise, which enjoyed a long run of popularity in the late 1990s, is a rare example of a craze that has come back, for reasons that have as much to do with corporate maneuvers as they do with the tastes of the average 7-year-old.

Pokйmon, which stands for “pocket monsters,” consists of a set of whimsical characters with supernatural powers who appear on trading cards, in video games and in television cartoons. And while most parents thought they had seen the last of Pikachu, Squirtle and Jigglypuff years ago, these days children are trading the cards on the playground again, playing Pokйmon on their Game Boys and tuning in to a new animated series.

“Were on fire,” said Holly Rawlinson, vice president of licensing and entertainment for Pokйmon USA, a subsidiary of the Pokйmon Company joint venture created by Nintendo and two other companies. Pokйmon USA is responsible for managing the Pokйmon name everywhere but in Asia.

Pokйmon began in Japan in 1996 and reached the United States two years later. By 1999, it had become such a cornerstone of pop culture that the characters were featured on the covers of Time, The New Yorker and TV Guide; in 2001 the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade added a Pikachu balloon.

But the attention led to overexposure. “One of the things about brands that enjoy enormous popularity is that they tend to also crash,” Rawlinson said.

Although the games and cards have always sold consistently to their core audience of boys, starting in about 2003 sales of licensed merchandise came to a standstill. “There was very little, if any, product on the shelves,” Rawlinson said. “It was a very tired time for us.”

So at the beginning of 2006, Pokйmon USA set out to revive the brand. The coordinated effort was timed to culminate with big product introductions that began this spring.

First, Pokйmon USA took control over important components of the franchise that had been managed elsewhere, including the trading cards that had been distributed by a division of Nintendo, and the cartoons, which had been handled by 4Kids Entertainment.

In April, Nintendo of America released two games for the hand-held Nintendo DS game system, Pokйmon Diamond and Pokйmon Pearl. In June, the Cartoon Network began the 10th season of the franchises cartoon series, this one called “Pokйmon Diamond and Pearl.”

Also in June, Pokйmon USAs trading card unit began shipping a new series of cards featuring the 104 characters created for the Diamond and Pearl introduction (like Piplup, Chimchar and Turtwig) as well as many of the old characters.

It was the first time that new games, a new television season, and a fresh batch of cards were introduced in this country at roughly the same time, Rawlinson said. “All the elements support each other,” she said. “The kids play the Diamond and Pearl games and watch the new shows, and they immediately want to get the new cards.”

Another element of the revival has been a change in toy vendors, from Hasbro to Jakks Pacific, which introduced a new product line. Jeremy Padawer, Jakkss vice president for brand marketing, said Hasbro had focused on a few main Pokйmon characters, but his company is shipping toys that use more than 100 of the 500 characters.

The new merchandise was showcased this summer at the Toys “R” Us store in Times Square, which opened a temporary Pokйmon boutique. Next month, Toys “R” Us plans to open Pokйmon boutiques in its 585 other domestic stores, said Ronald Boire, the president of Toys “R” Us.

Sales of the trading cards this year have already exceeded sales for all of 2006, and by the end of the year are expected to triple last years total, according to Pokйmon USA. The June 4 debut episode of “Pokйmon Diamond and Pearl” on the Cartoon Network was the top-rated show that day for boys ages 6 to 11.

Total merchandise sales this year are expected to exceed $50 million, compared with less than $4 million last year, Rawlinson said.

After the overexposure issues of recent years, the company has learned to be more selective about licensing its name. “We get requests for all kinds of products, but now we turn a lot down,” Rawlinson said. Would-be Pokйmon products that ended up on the reject list include diapers and gerbil cages.

OSLO: Last year, as United Nations scientists were warning of the perils of man-made climate change, this small country of fjords and factories reacted with an extraordinary pledge: By 2050 Norway would be “carbon neutral” - generating no net greenhouse gasses into the air.

Norways bold promise raised the bar for other nations, who were mostly still struggling to figure out how to reduce emissions, even fractionally. Then, in January, the Norwegian government upped the ante again: Norway would be carbon neutral by 2030, it said.

But as the details of the plan have emerged, environmental groups and politicians - who applaud Norways impulse - say the feat is being achieved largely by sleight-of-hand accounting and huge donations to environmental projects abroad, rather than meaningful emissions reductions that might be replicated elsewhere.

If anything, they say, Norways early experience shows that cutting carbon dioxide emissions - the essential thing scientists agree is needed to stem the momentum of global warming - will require real sacrifice closer to home, like driving less, flying less and putting restrictions on business.

That realization has set off intense soul-searching in Norway, where further emissions reductions are likely to be painful. Like all the environmentally conscious Scandinavian countries, Norway made the easy changes decades ago.

It may also come as a rude awakening to the many countries, companies, cities and universities that have lined up behind Norway in recent months in pursuit of the goal of becoming carbon neutral - essentially an environmental balance sheet showing they absorb as much carbon dioxide as they emit.

Many have signed on not only to set an example but also for favorable public relations or to pre-empt government regulations they believe may be inevitable. In the last year, the Vatican has announced it was carbon neutral and companies like Wal-Mart say that is their goal.

But their claims, like Norways, require asterisks. As the Norwegian plan shows, achieving a carbon neutral state, for now, often depends as much on how you make the calculation and how much money you spend as it does on sacrifice or innovation.

“Were a nice little selfish country of petroholics and that has made us lazy,” said Frederic Hauge, head of Bellona, Norways largest environmental NGO. “The move from 2050 to 2030 is a sign of good intentions, but unless I see action, Ive heard it all before.”

Norway does not look like a poster child for environmental friendliness when seen from the perspective of its smoke-spewing rigs producing hundreds of millions of barrels of oil a year. It is the third largest oil exporter in the world.

In the short term, the country is poised to become carbon neutral by financing environmental projects abroad, as allowed under the United Nations environmental accounting policy. That means that emissions at home can be “canceled out” by things like planting trees or cleaning up a polluting factory in a faraway place.

Norways actual plan for reducing its own emissions is less clear, relying in large part on developing unproved technology.

The Norwegian model, critics say, may not be a path to the future of carbon neutrality and may not be sustainable, since it requires significant investment and there are not enough environmental projects in poor countries to cancel out all the emissions of the developed world.

“Theyre willing to spend a lot of money on a climate policy thats based abroad, but so far they havent been quite so willing to make politically difficult choices at home that people will feel,” said Steffen Kallbekken, a senior analyst at Cicero, the Institute for International Climate and Environmental Research, a nongovernmental group here. “So its not so much of a model as it could be.”

The same goes for the Vatican, which “offsets” its emissions by planting forests in Hungary, but did not include the polluting travel of its priests and officials or the emissions caused at properties outside of Vatican City.

Wal-Mart, an acknowledged leader on the environmental front, is encouraging suppliers to emit less carbon, but does not take into account the emissions caused by the millions of people who drive to its stores.

Those kinds of accounting gaps and trade-offs are widespread and mask the true challenges ahead, even for well-intended countries like Norway, say scientists and environmental groups.

Norways program, widely praised at least for its vision, was born out of its sense of global responsibility or perhaps just plain guilt. Behind its green pledge lay an uncomfortable truth: Norways vast wealth comes from its status as the third leading exporter of oil in the world at 2.6 million barrels a day. It is also in the top 10 exporters of natural gas and a major refiner of aluminum.

WASHINGTON—The trade deficit shot up in March to the highest level in six months, driven upward by a big jump in imported oil. The politically sensitive deficit with China shrank as U.S. exports to that country hit an all-time high.

The reported Thursday that the gap between what the United States imports and what it sells to the rest of the world rose to $63.9 billion in March, up 10.4 percent from the February level.

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That was a bigger-than-expected deterioration in the trade deficit from the $60 billion deficit that analysts were forecasting. It reflected a big 17.6 percent jump in oil imports, which climbed to $24.6 billion, the highest level in six months.

In other economic news, the reported that the number of laid off workers filing claims for unemployment benefits fell to 297,000 last week, a drop of 9,000 from the previous week.

So far this year, the trade deficit is running at an annual rate of $722.6 billion, slightly below last year’s all-time record of $765.3 billion. The deficit has set new records for five consecutive years.

Critics of President Bush’s trade policies contend that the administration has not done enough to protect American workers from unfair foreign competition from low-wage countries such as China.

Democrats used the soaring trade deficits and the loss of 3 million manufacturing jobs since Bush took office in their successful effort last year to regain control of both the House and Senate.

The administration, worried about a protectionist backlash in this country, has toughened its approach to China, imposing penalty trade tariffs in a dispute over Chinese paper imports and filing two new trade cases this year against the Chinese before the .

Treasury Secretary has pledged to keep up pressure on the Chinese to do more to open their markets to American goods. The two countries will hold the second round in a new series of economic talks later this month in Washington.

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