Happiness

sometimes i am filled with such a rush of happiness from beauty. like immersed listening to a beautiful aria, or gazing at a beautiful painting, or reading over the lines of a particularly beautiful poem. last night i felt the rush rediscovering a book i had on Fra Angelico. and this morning, i woke up to the most beautiful reddish pink sky (too bad you can't really tell how beautiful it was from these weak images). how can this just be chance and not design?

Why Bush Won't Wait

Why Bush Won't Wait
By BILL KELLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/25/opinion/25KELL.html

President Bush says he has not yet decided whether to go to war with Iraq, but this week the signs were that he had all but given up on peace. Administration hawks, who had been worrying that American resolve would dissipate during a prolonged game of inspection cat-and-mouse, are suddenly being sent forth to proclaim the weapons hunt a farce. State Department officials, who thought they had maneuvered us off the short road to war, seem resigned to the fact that they have probably failed.

Maybe this is just another mood swing, or an effort to ratchet up the pressure again in hopes Iraqis will disarm themselves. But I suspect that the new official refrain — "Time is running out" — means the chief inspector, Hans Blix, should not count on the several more months he wants to do his job. The internal debate now is not war versus peace, or this year versus next year, but February versus March.

So what's the hurry?

I can't claim to know what Mr. Bush thinks, but I have an idea what he is hearing. It goes something like this:

The detour through the United Nations looks more than ever like a dead end. Saddam's shuck and jive shows he will never come clean. The antiwar tantrums of France and Germany just encourage his intransigence.

The only way to force the issue is to set war in motion — but once you do, it can't be a false start. Saddam's nervous neighbors have watched America do that before, talk tough and back down, leaving them in the lurch.

Perhaps if we give Mr. Blix a few more months to chase wild geese around Iraq, the U.N. will reward us by endorsing war, but we can already count on a substantial coalition: The gulf Arabs are on board (if they are sure we will see it through to the end), probably Turkey (which wants leverage over the future of its neighbor), the Brits, the Aussies, Italians, Spanish and all those dependable ex-Communists. The Russians and French might even jump on the train once it's moving, to protect their investments. Where's the unilateral in that?

The polls that show support for war steadily dwindling are not likely to get better. And while Americans may not be eager to go to war, at least they expect to go to war. Plus, once we are no longer worried about the Iraqis playing hide-and-seek with the inspectors, we are freer to lay out our evidence of Iraqi concealment — though, frankly, Mr. President, that's something of a problem, since we can't agree among ourselves how conclusive the evidence is.

Delay means more time for other things to go wrong in the world — more North Koreas. Delay, Mr. President, means the North Koreans wonder what you're really made of. Delay means that all this uncertainty continues to be a drag on the global economy. Delay means more time for Saddam to prepare nasty surprises for an invading force (or to help terrorists go for our back).

By mid-February, 150,000 American troops and at least four aircraft carrier battle groups will be deployed in the region around Iraq. You cannot park the Fourth Infantry Division in the desert for very long before the waiting erodes battle readiness and angers our hosts. And in summer the heat saps a fighting force.

The fact that we are ready for a war is not, by itself, reason to fight one — unless you are convinced that the non-war option has been closed off, that Iraq will never otherwise be rendered harmless. Which you are, aren't you, Mr. President?

This makes a tempting rationale, particularly to a president who worships decisiveness. But you do not have to be a peacenik to fear the cost of rushing in.

So far in its showdown with Iraq, the Bush administration has mostly done the right things, though often with a disheartening lack of finesse. Mr. Bush was right to identify Saddam Hussein as a menace, right to mobilize our might to prove we mean business, right to seek the blessing of Congress and the Security Council. A credible demonstration of will has produced tangible results. The inspectors are at work. Arab neighbors are looking for ways the Iraqis can solve their Saddam problem short of an invasion. (The prospect of a coup or an asylum deal for Saddam may be remote, but give them credit for creative thinking.) Saudi Arabia was moved, first, to propose a peace plan for Israel and Palestine, and second, to suggest a charter for political and economic reform in the Arab world.

There are compelling reasons for war with Iraq. Mr. Bush has been wise to emphasize the danger Saddam poses because of his unrelenting campaign to acquire weapons of horrible power. His mere possession of such weapons would give him daunting power in a vital region.

Many Americans and some of our allies have mistaken inspection for an answer to this problem. In fact, inspections have always been a way to buy some time, during which the regime might crumble, or Iraq might shock us all by really surrendering its weapons, or Iraqi non-compliance would exhaust the patience of even the French. Eventually, though, the inspectors go away, and if Saddam is still in place his quest for the nuclear grail resumes, presumably with fiercer motivation than before.

This is to my mind the administration's best argument for going to war, but it is not a terribly persuasive argument for going right now. On the contrary, at this moment, a mere nine weeks into inspections, Saddam seems to most people a less immediate threat than he was when inspections began. The presence of 200 inspectors and American technical surveillance is not exactly a lockdown, but it limits what he can get away with. Moreover, we have not yet given the inspectors time to check out our shared intelligence, or to push the demand that Iraqi scientists be interviewed in private. Pulling the plug at this point tells the world that Mr. Bush was never very serious about the U.N. route in the first place.

The second justification for war is that this is a beastly regime, chronically brutal and episodically genocidal. This is true and not irrelevant. Saddam's reign of terror weakens his claim to sovereignty, and suggests that many Iraqis will welcome us as liberators. But this was a stronger argument for ousting Saddam 15 years ago, when he was actively engaged in mass murder.

A third argument for war is that replacing Saddam offers the hope of a (somewhat) more democratic Iraq. This could begin a political and cultural reformation of a region that has been an incubator of anti-American pestilence. I'm somewhat less optimistic than the romantic interventionists about America's ability to do for Iraq what we did for Japan and Germany after World War II. Re-engineering that misbegotten region is a noble undertaking, but will the impatient Mr. Bush and his successors have the attention span for a decade of nation-building? In any case, this is another argument without a deadline. On the contrary, delay might allow us to invest more of our authority in resolving the neglected, bloody impasse between Israel and Palestine, which is a sinkhole for American credibility.

The fourth reason for wresting Iraq from the hands of Saddam is oil. I don't share the cynical view of many war opponents that this whole adventure is nothing more than a giant oil grab. Big oil companies (my father ran one until 1989) have always been much more in sync with the order-loving sheiks than with the boat-rockers touting upheaval and democratization. But oil is a big prize, and in the hands of a new Iraqi government it could be either a force for stability or a lever for rattling OPEC and undermining other Arab tyrannies, depending on your preference. It will be no less a prize if we hold off.

All of these are reasons to want Saddam gone. None are reasons not to wait — especially if haste further alienates the nations whose partnership we need to rebuild Iraq, to fight the terrorism that will surely escalate in response to our war and, incidentally, to sort out other messes that arise on our new imperial watch.

What Mr. Bush has failed to do over these months of agitation is to explain his urgency to the American public or our allies. In the year since the "axis of evil" speech, popular support for war has declined by at least 10 points. It's not that people doubt Saddam is a danger. They just think Mr. Bush is in too much of a rush. They want to see the evidence the president claims to have. They would like to know what costs and dangers we're in for. Most of all, they want the world, as much as possible, with us.

Presidents should not make decisions of war and peace based on polls. (Mr. Bush's father launched the last war against Iraq with less support than the current president has.) Nor should our national interests be decided by the faintest hearts among our allies. But the dwindling of support here and resentment abroad represent a failure to persuade, and persuading is worth taking some time.

In Iraqi No-Flight Zones, Containment May End in Bombardment

In Iraqi No-Flight Zones, Containment May End in Bombardment
By DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/25/international/middleeast/25TURK.html

INCIRLIK AIR BASE, Turkey, Jan. 24 — Through a long season of undeclared war, America's pilots have spent so much time in the skies over Iraq that some of them have passed most of their careers there.

Mike, the lieutenant commander of an EA-6B Prowler squadron, for instance, is on his fourth tour patrolling the no-flight zones, the novel creations erected over northern and southern Iraq 12 years ago.

Several times a week, Mike, who is prevented by base regulations from giving his last name, climbs into his radar-jamming jet, flies into the skies over northern Iraq and maneuvers himself safely back to his Turkish base. On most days, Mike and his comrades are the target of Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, but on most days, the skies remain clear of Iraqi planes.

"It's pretty much the same thing every day," said the lieutenant commander, who flew his first mission as a Navy pilot during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. "I joined the Navy to see the world, but my entire naval career has been dedicated to Iraq. I am ready for something new."

The no-flight zones have proved a remarkable, if limited, success, preventing the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from sending his air forces into northern and southern Iraq to attack the region's Kurdish and Shiite populations. In the north, especially, the Kurds have flourished, enjoying a respite from the relentless campaigns waged against them over the years by the Iraqi President.

But now, as the Bush administration prepares to invade Iraq, the no-flight zones sit on the edge of political oblivion, the very symbols of the idea, now scorned, that Mr. Hussein's ambitions could be contained without war.

The American pilots who fly the tightly controlled missions over Iraq, where their freedom to engage Mr. Hussein's forces is sharply limited, may be soon be called to go on the offensive.

As a result, the no-flight zones are now being seen as a training ground for the very pilots who may be called upon to attack Iraq. With a 700 percent annual turnover rate among pilots who patrol the areas, nearly all of America's combat pilots, by some estimates, have already flown missions over Iraq.

At the same time, American pilots are now conducting mock bombing runs on likely Iraqi targets, and have been authorized to attack a broader array of targets if they are fired upon.

"Just about every aircraft carrier wing, and the vast majority of tactical Air Force fliers, have had exposure to northern and southern Iraq," said Rear Adm. Stephen H. Baker, retired, senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information in Washington.

"They're used to the environment. They are used to getting shot at. They have experience and understanding of how the Iraqi air defense network works."

The no-flight zones were declared by the United States in the aftermath of the gulf war in 1991, when Mr. Hussein, clinging to power, launched attacks against the country's rebellious Kurdish and Shiite populations. In response, the United States vowed to shoot down any Iraqi warplane crossing the 33rd parallel in the south and the 36th parallel in the north.

It was an unusual experiment in containment, making use of America's prowess in air power while avoiding the perils of maintaining an army on the ground.

Mr. Hussein has refused to recognize the no-flight zones, calling them an illegal infringement on Iraq's sovereignty. American military officials say their planes are fired on nearly every time they cross into Iraqi airspace, usually by relatively inaccurate anti-aircraft guns but often with missiles.

While the Iraqis have managed to shoot down at least one unpiloted Predator drone, they have failed so far to destroy a single American plane since the war.

"We call it the golden BB," said one American pilot here. "They are praying for that lucky shot."

For all the shooting, the latitude of American pilots to attack Iraqi targets is limited to cases of self-defense. But some of the rules have been loosened. Last fall, as the United States began preparations for a possible war against Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld authorized pilots to attack a broader range of targets, as well as to conduct mock bombing runs on likely Iraqi targets.

Few people on Incirlik Air Base, the home of the pilots who maintain the northern no-flight zone, are willing to speculate on the likelihood of a war with Iraq. But there are a few signs here that the base may be preparing for a sudden transformation. One day last week, each of the more than 2,000 American military personnel at the base took part in a "mock attack" drill, donning gas masks and suits designed to protect them from chemical and biological weapons. A team of 150 American military inspectors has been touring Incirlik and other Turkish bases and seaports to gauge their ability to support a large American military presence in the country.

Then, buried beneath the ground, there is the state-of-the-art medical ward designed to treat patients who have been contaminated by biological and chemical agents. The ward, which includes decontamination chambers, is itself prepared to withstand a chemical or biological attack.

For all the hints of an imminent conflict here, Incirlik Air Base exudes a businesslike atmosphere, a place where, according to a recent article in Air Force Magazine, crews have launched 21,000 flights over the past decade. There is no high-fiving by exuberant pilots after a mission, no scoreboards recording Iraqi targets destroyed. As much as anything here, the graffiti on the walls reflects the evolution, after 12 years, of an extraordinary enterprise into a day-to-day affair:

"18th Air Refueling Squadron," reads one of the insignias of the units that passed through the base here. "Can do and did."

"344th Refueling Squadron," reads another, "Anytime, anywhere."

To the newcomer, a single day's work at Incirlik seems a remarkable affair. As many as 18 times a month, the crews at the Incirlik base launch a fleet of fighter jets, refueling tankers and radar-jamming planes, all of them operating in intricately choreographed maneuvers at altitudes of more than 20,000 feet.

During a recent mission, a dozen American fighter jets pulled up behind a KC-135 tanker one at a time, each pulling close enough to the back of the plane to grasp the extended fuel pump while the others waited in a line off to the side.

The fighter planes flew to within 15 feet of the tanker, making eye contact possible and even the display of risqué photographs. Speaking into his radio, one F-16 pilot apologized for not flashing any of the photos this time out.

"I'm sorry I don't have any pictures for you today," the pilot said.

The pilot of the KC-135, a woman, wasted no time in answering.

"Next time, you can bring me a copy of Handyman magazine," she said.

For the rest of the day, the three crewmembers of the KC-135 continued with their duties, with no hint that the mission might soon be taking a sharp turn. The fighter jets outside continued queuing up like cars at a gas station.

By 1 p.m., with the fighter jets inside Iraqi airspace, the crew of the refueler was ready to call it a day.

"I think that does it for us," said the pilot, an Air Force major named Kim. "We're heading in."

'The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey': A Dark Night in Vietnam

'The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey': A Dark Night in Vietnam
By JAMES STEWART
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/books/review/26STEWART.html

On a hazy night on Feb. 25, 1969, Lt. Bob Kerrey and his seven-man Navy Seals team slipped into the Vietnamese coastal hamlet of Thanh Phong. Heavily armed and camouflaged, Kerrey and his squad hoped to infiltrate a meeting between the village secretary and a Vietcong military officer and take out the Vietcong officer. But when they reached the supposed meeting site, all the Americans found were civilians, mostly women and children. They rounded them up at gunpoint. Then, fearful that the villagers might raise an alarm and make their escape difficult, Kerrey gave the order to open fire.

Or did he?

What happened on the night of Feb. 25 has been the subject of national debate and widespread press coverage since 2001, when accounts in The New York Times and ''60 Minutes II'' of the atrocities and the participants' ambiguous recollections prompted both vigorous defense of Kerrey, the former United States senator who is president of New School University, and charges that he should have been tried for crimes of war. Kerrey himself dealt with the episode in his memoir, ''When I Was a Young Man,'' published last year. Each version has left troubling questions unanswered.

So it would be gratifying to report that Gregory L. Vistica, the journalist most responsible for the Times and CBS accounts, has delivered the definitive rendition in ''The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey.'' But Vistica appears to have done scant new reporting after his magazine and television versions, and so the book gets no closer to the truth than they did. His account of ''how I got the story,'' potentially the freshest and most insightful of the book's intersecting narratives, also leaves many questions unanswered, even as it inadvertantly betrays the weaknesses of investigative journalism in an era of co-productions and reporting by committee.

To his credit, Vistica seems to have approached his subject from the start with an open mind, an inherent sense of fairness and a determination to pursue a story that many reporters would have abandoned in frustration. He deserves credit for his perseverance and for bringing a subject of national significance to public attention. But he has also accused Bob Kerrey, a distinguished public servant and decorated military veteran, of war crimes, using evidence that would never convict him in a court of law.

No one disputes that something terrible happened that night, resulting in the deaths of some two dozen civilians, including women, children and babies. Put simply, the crucial question is whether Kerrey and his men fired on this group of civilians in self-defense, after having been fired on themselves, or whether they rounded them up, deliberated about their fate and then shot them rather than risk having them betray the team's presence and endanger their escape.

Vistica first heard about the incident from an unnamed source who steered Vistica to Gerhard Klann, who served under Kerrey on the Seals mission. At first, Klann ignored Vistica's letters and phone messages, but after Vistica showed up near his home near Pittsburgh, Klann agreed to meet him at the bar of a Days Inn to ''cleanse his soul.''

Klann was a first-generation American; his father and uncle fought for Hitler and his grandfather for the Kaiser. He had performed a clandestine mission in Iran for the C.I.A., but after retiring from the military in 1990, he had led a quiet life, getting a degree in computer-aided design and working for a steel company. Klann's account of the incident is disturbing and almost apocalyptically blood-drenched. He says the killings were premeditated, and the Americans knew they were dealing with a group of mostly women, children and babies. In his version, Kerrey gave the order to shoot, and though Klann doesn't remember Kerrey's exact words, he insists that Kerrey said something to the effect that ''we're going to kill them and then we're getting out of here.''

Vistica first confronted Kerrey with this potentially explosive account during an interview in Omaha in December 1998, when Kerrey was seriously considering a run for the Democratic presidential nomination and Vistica was a reporter for Newsweek. The interview is one of the most fascinating episodes in the book: Kerrey squirms, is alternately angry and ingratiating, but insists his men fired in self-defense. Essentially, the story at this juncture was Klann's word against Kerrey's, since Vistica was unsuccessful in getting any of the other Seals who participated in the mission to talk freely to him.

Less than a week after the interview, Kerrey announced he would not run for president. Newsweek never ran a story about Kerrey and Vietnam. In the ensuing years Vistica quit Newsweek and Kerrey quit the Senate to become a college president. But Vistica kept pursuing the story, which became a joint venture between The New York Times Magazine and ''60 Minutes II.'' (He doesn't explain how that collaboration came about.) Kerrey agreed to be interviewed on television by Dan Rather, as did Klann. ''60 Minutes'' also sent a cameraman to Thanh Phong, the site of the massacre. The cameraman discovered a woman named Pham Tri Lanh, a Communist who'd been married to a Vietcong fighter during the war, who claimed to have been an eyewitness to both the massacre and an earlier incident in which the Seals team brutally killed the civilian occupants of a thatched hooch. Significantly, in a videotaped interview she largely corroborated Klann's version of events.

In response to this potential bombshell, CBS sent the producer Tom Anderson to interview Lanh in Vietnam. Vistica's role in the joint venture was to ''reapproach Kerrey'' with the news that an eyewitness had surfaced. He doesn't tell us anything about Anderson's trip, especially whether Lanh's story was consistent with her earlier interview or held up under questioning or whether there were other witnesses. According to Vistica, Lanh said in the earlier videotaped interview with the ''60 Minutes'' cameraman that she first watched the killings at the hooch, then checked on the safety of her children in an underground bunker, then left them and crept to the site of the massacre where she saw the entire incident, all without being detected herself. While this may be true, it is hard to accept at face value the contention that a mother left her children and put herself in mortal danger under such circumstances. Curiously, Lanh was quoted only briefly in the Times article, and then only as a witness to the killings at the hooch. Vistica does not tell us whether there were questions about her reliability.

After Vistica confronted Kerrey with Lanh's story, Kerrey convened a meeting of the six other members of the Seals team in New York, at which, he said, they collectively searched their memories and consciences. While still vague about many details, they unanimously supported Kerrey's account that they fired in self-defense.

There matters stood when Vistica's stories broke in The Times Magazine and on ''60 Minutes II'' in April 2001. In the press coverage that followed, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press and Time magazine sent reporters to the village of Thanh Phong. The Time reporter wrote that Lanh had now changed her story: she didn't see the killings; she had only heard the shooting. But other reporters, unnamed by Vistica, apparently found another witness to back up Lanh's version.

So the conflicting accounts persist. Throughout Vistica's account, Kerrey behaves likes someone guilty of something. Indeed, Kerrey himself readily admits he feels morally guilty, and that he will be haunted for the rest of his life by the deaths of those civilians. Vistica clearly believes Kerrey to be guilty of a war crime -- an unjustified, cold-blooded massacre. ''When Kerrey's multiple inconsistent stories are coupled with the available evidence,'' he writes, ''the only conclusion I am able to draw is that Klann has provided the more accurate version.'' But Klann's version also poses the question: why would a Navy Seals group, hoping to escape undetected, have unleashed a thunderous barrage of machine-gun fire in the dead of night into a group of Vietnamese peasants, especially with Vietcong forces in the immediate vicinity?

I might be more convinced if Vistica had persuaded more of the Seals team to talk before they coordinated their stories with Kerrey; if he had done more reporting on Klann's credibility; and if he had told us he had traveled to Vietnam himself to interview Lanh and other possible witnesses and assess their credibility. It strikes me as a serious weakness of such joint efforts that no one reporter or even news organization is in a position to judge the credibility of witnesses and to evaluate inconsistent accounts.

Perhaps it would have been possible for an enterprising and resolute reporter like Vistica to determine beyond a reasonable doubt what happened that terrible night, and what responsibility Kerrey must bear for the tragedy. But to judge from this record, readers may never know.

James Stewart is the author of ''Den of Thieves'' and, most recently, ''Heart of a Soldier.''

Exit Havel, to Muted Applause From Czechs

Exit Havel, to Muted Applause From Czechs
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/25/international/europe/25HAVE.html

PRAGUE, Jan. 24 — Some days ago, student pranksters scaled a scaffolding at Prague Castle and, by covering the left half of an immense red neon heart hung as a kind of playful homage to President Vaclav Havel, transformed it into a giant and highly visible question mark.

Mr. Havel, the former dissident who led this country from Communist dictatorship to democracy 13 years ago, is stepping down as Czech president next week and, given his stature and historic role, you might think that Czechs would unite in a rousing, even reverential send-off.

But as the prankish question mark suggests, such is not entirely the case in the Czech Republic, where Mr. Havel's image abroad as a kind of living saint is matched by a complicated and ambivalent view of him, one that mixes respect and gratitude with a good deal of doubt and criticism.

Many Czechs, perhaps even most Czechs, seem to like Mr. Havel and to view him not just as a brave man of principle but as a man who has brought a kind of reflected glory to his country.

His departure is the end of a remarkable era when a playwright and a humanist first defeated a totalitarian government and then led his country more by force of moral example than by conventional horse trading and arm-twisting.

Yet Mr. Havel has been in office longer than just about any other democratically elected leader, and the time has clearly left its stains on him and his reputation.

In 1993 he watched as his old country — Czechoslovakia — split bloodlessly, but many still think needlessly, in two. He has about a 50 percent approval rating in opinion polls, not a disaster but low perhaps for a man who played such a role in local and world history.

The Czech Parliament, divided into quarrelsome factions, has been deadlocked in its efforts to elect a successor — the president is not chosen by direct popular vote — and Mr. Havel's bitterest rival, Vaclav Klaus, who openly detests him, is a leading candidate.

Meanwhile, having over the years been drubbed by the very free press he helped to create and to safeguard, Mr. Havel himself is reported by friends to be tired and discouraged. Speaking last fall in New York, he described the experience of being a kind of fairy-tale king who learned what it was to take a hard fall to earth.

Last week Mr. Havel presided at the final session of a long series of informal meetings he has held at a hunting lodge called Amalie.

"He was a bit sentimental about leaving office," recalled an adviser, Jiri Pehe. "But he also repeated what he's been saying in speeches lately. It is that the older he gets, the more he feels powerless. He feels that civilization is not going in the right direction, that it's headed for catastrophe unless we change our ways, and even with all his influence, there's very little that he can do."

The president's younger brother, Ivan, said, "His power as president is in some sense less than it was when he was a powerless person." The younger Mr. Havel was giving voice to a refrain among the president's friends and allies, who note the irony for the author of "The Power of the Powerless," one of Mr. Havel's most resonant anti-Communist essays.

President Havel speaks such rich and inventive Czech that barely a speech passes without a memorable phrase, hard to translate and atypical in modern politics. This is a president who speaks of matters like "the magical intersection of both visible and hidden historical stirrings."

In a country whose 19th-century thrust for independence was led by intellectuals and marked by a struggle to rescue the very Czech language from extinction, this evocative fluency strikes a chord.

"My most important feeling is that he elevated the country to a level way above its real importance," said Tomas Klavana, a journalist for Economia, a local daily, who has covered Mr. Havel for several years.

Mr. Klavana says some of Mr. Havel's luster has rubbed off in his own country precisely because some of his statements no longer ring true — for example, that he is a reluctant president rather than a man who came to enjoy holding power.

The very fact that he continued to speak the same moral language he used in the dissenting years lost some of its charm in a country where most people silently went along with dictatorship.

"Part of the ambivalence he inspires comes from the feeling that he's so different, that he's not like us," Mr. Klavana said. "He reminds people of their own deficiencies. He reproaches people precisely because he is above corruption."

In his speeches, he entreats his people to better behavior and scolds them for having won their freedom only to become indifferent to the sufferings of people in other countries.

"Surprisingly," he said in his annual New Year's address a couple of years ago, "freedom has given vent to a number of bad feelings and shown the depth of moral decline in our souls."

Among Mr. Havel's accomplishments was his steady and successful campaign for the Czech Republic to be among the first of the former Soviet bloc countries to be admitted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Next year, fulfilling another ambition to anchor the country firmly in the West, the Czech Republic will become a member of the European Union. Mr. Havel experienced something of an international apotheosis last fall when he played host to a NATO summit meeting in Prague, the very city whose streets were occupied by Soviet tanks in 1968.

What most here remember, of course, are the events of November and December 1989 when, beginning with student demonstrations and ending with Mr. Havel's elevation to the presidency, 41 years of Communist dictatorship came to an abrupt end.

Mr. Havel's former colleagues in dissent say that what made him the leader of the movement was a combination of determination, brilliance in summing up goals, organizational capacity and plain, simple bravery.

Mr. Havel spent more than five years in prison, at one time so severely afflicted with pneumonia that his wife, Olga, feared for his life. She died in 1996.

When he was not in prison, he was constantly followed and harassed by the not-so-secret police. The plays he wrote in the 1960's, which initially made his reputation here and abroad, were banned, and so, of course, were his dissident essays.

"He was always completely calm and quiet," remembered Eda Kriseova, another former dissident and, more recently, the author of a biography of Mr. Havel. "Many times the police came to his house and searched it. He was followed all the time. To live like that is very disturbing, but to see how he behaved, you had to appreciate him."

Jan Urban, a former dissident who is now a radio journalist, takes a more critical view of what Mr. Havel has done since.

"His main shortcoming is that he never created a political movement and therefore he leaves behind no political legacy," Mr. Urban said. "He was always a lone rider. He did not understand that governing is not about brilliant ideas but about building majority approval in Parliament for brilliant ideas, and he hasn't done that."

Mr. Havel came to power at the end of 1989 urging a "kindhearted revolution" — the phrase Velvet Revolution was an invention of the Western press — but kindhearted or not, he has had to play two contradictory roles. He has had to stand above politics as a ceremonial head of state and at the same time to make practical decisions, some of them less than popular.

When he first came to office, for example, he gave amnesty to a large portion of Czechoslovakia's prison population, ordinary prisoners and political prisoners alike.

The move was consistent with the concept of a fresh start for a new democracy, and with Mr. Havel's own years as a prisoner. But he has continued to issue presidential pardons — of a woman who murdered her own child, for example — without explaining them, and that has alienated many Czechs.

One family has even filed suit with the United Nations, alleging that Mr. Havel's pardon of a drunken driver who killed their son was a violation of their human rights.

The last few years have been especially difficult. The now 66-year-old president smoked heavily for most of his life, is troubled by respiratory disease and tires easily. Certainly he can no longer ride the corridors of the Castle on a child's scooter, as in the early magical days of his presidency. In December 1996 he was operated on for lung cancer.

His lowest point in public opinion came after his wife, Olga, died. He married Dagmar Veskrnova, a striking, younger blond actress, and she quickly became the target of scurrilous stories in local tabloids.

"He was hurt very much by that," Ms. Kriseova said. "It was like under the old system: they always got to you by persecuting somebody you loved — a child, a wife, a husband."

Mr. Havel was criticized again a few months ago when he failed to return from a trip abroad quickly after the worst floods in a century hit the country. And yet as his retirement approaches, a kind of anticipatory fondness is growing.

"My view of Havel is tainted by personal knowledge," Mr. Urban said, "by the fact that I've been very critical of his domestic performance since the beginning. But I'm sure we will miss him, because he was bigger than Czech politics. He aimed at concepts that cannot be discussed in television sound bites.

"Call it morality. Call it philosophy. It doesn't matter what you call it, but the simple fact that he represented such a stark contrast to the rest of what we see in Czech politics will make him a historical figure."

Indexes Drop About 3% as Worries Over a War Increase

Indexes Drop About 3% as Worries Over a War Increase
By JONATHAN FUERBRINGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/25/business/25STOX.html

The worsening outlook for corporate earnings and the threat of a war with Iraq weighed heavily on Wall Street yesterday, as the three leading stock gauges fell more than 2.9 percent, giving the stock market its second consecutive week of losses.

The dollar also sank, falling almost 1 percent against the euro and 0.3 percent against the Japanese yen. Analysts said the decrease, which continues the dollar's decline of 8.3 percent against the euro since December, can be attributed to geopolitical concerns and doubts about the strength of the American economy.

Gold prices, meanwhile, soared 1 percent, to a six-year high of $368.40 an ounce, also reflecting worries about an Iraqi war, as well as the fall in stocks and the dollar.

It is hard to quantify how the threat of an Iraqi war is affecting the stock market. But some Wall Street analysts are saying that the growing split between the United States and its allies is not helping, especially because it makes it appear more likely that Washington could enter a war nearly alone.

"I think the market is having a Rolaids moment," said William E. Rhodes, chief investment strategist at Rhodes Analytics in Boston. "It's not the going to war. The problem is that we don't have the support of many other countries."

Fane Lozman, chairman of Scanshift, a Chicago research firm, said that "until the war is over, there is no reason to buy this market."

The Dow finished the day down 238.46 points, or 2.9 percent, at 8,131.01, while the S.& P. 500 was off 25.94 points, or 2.9 percent, to 861.40. The Nasdaq composite index fell 46.13 points, or 3.3 percent, to 1,342.14. The Dow is off 2.5 percent for the year and the S.& P. is down 2.1 percent, while the Nasdaq is up 0.5 percent.

The market was led lower yesterday by the American International Group, the insurer, which plunged 8 percent after it was downgraded by Morgan Stanley. The market was also dragged lower by 3M, Microsoft, I.B.M., General Electric and Intel.

The price of crude oil for March delivery rose $1.03, or 3.2 percent, to $33.28 a barrel, after Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said that it was "unacceptable" for Iraq to bar Iraqi scientists from talking to United Nations weapons inspectors. Despite the fall in the stock market and the tension over Iraq, bond prices were little changed.

The decline in the stock market over the last two weeks has pushed the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index into negative territory after a strong start to 2003, with the Dow up as much as 6 percent for the year at one point. Now all three market gauges are at their lows for the year. The weakening of the market comes just ahead of next week's meeting of Federal Reserve policy makers to decide if the economy needs another lift from a cut in interest rates. But most analysts do not expect the Fed to lower its benchmark interest rate, which is at a four-decade low of 1.25 percent.

The outlook for corporate earnings in the first two quarters is clouding up quickly, as Wall Street analysts have been cutting their profit estimates based on the lukewarm forecasts that many companies gave when they announced their fourth-quarter earnings.

Microsoft cut its 2003 sales forecasts. Intel reduced its capital spending for the year. AT&T said it did not expect the telecommunications sector to improve in 2003 after a dismal 2002. Eli Lilly reduced its earnings forecast for the first quarter and the entire year. And I.B.M. said it still faced challenges.

"Our fears that the slashing of first-half estimates would continue is coming true," said Chuck Hill, director for research at Thomson First Call, which collects Wall Street earnings estimates. "The first and second quarters are going to be lower then the fourth."

The earnings growth forecast for the first quarter, compared with the first quarter of 2002, is down to 10.8 percent, from 11.7 percent on Jan. 1 and 17.4 percent on Oct. 1, according to Thomson First Call. The second-quarter forecast is down to 9.4 percent, from 10.9 percent on Jan. 1 and 16.4 percent on Oct. 1. Fourth-quarter earnings growth is expected to come in near 13 percent.

As for the dollar's decline — to $1.0844 against the euro and 117.69 against the Japanese yen — Robert Sinche, global head of currency strategy at Citigroup, said Iraq was not solely to blame. He pointed out that the British pound, the currency of the United States' staunchest ally against Iraq, has been rising sharply against the dollar. Yesterday, it rose 0.8 percent, to $1.6336, and is up 4.9 percent since December.

So there is also "concern for the United States and the global economy," Mr. Sinche said, and that is making investors defensive. When currency investors are defensive, they usually turn their money back into their local currency to avoid losses or favor currencies, like the euro, that offer higher interest rates.

In the bond market, the yield on the Treasury's 10-year note slipped to 3.93 percent from 3.94 percent Thursday, while the price, which moves in the opposite direction, rose 332, to 1001932.

Mergers and Acquisitions: Here they go again?

Mergers and Acquisitions: Here they go again
by Sharon Reier IHT
Saturday, January 25, 2003
http://www.iht.com/articles/84530.html

The new go-go years

No sooner had the whining of investment bankers over job losses and slashed bonuses begun to dissipate at the end of the year than merger and acquisition activity entered the new year with a flourish: William Morrison Supermarkets Ltd. opened a salvo in what now appears to be a six-way battle over Safeway PLC, the fourth-largest food retailer in Britain.

Takeovers provide some of the highest drama in finance, as chief executives pit their corporate strategies and egos and investment bankers their financial muscle and finesse. For investors, owning a stock that is a hot takeover target can mean significant profits, despite a volatile stock market that may be going nowhere.
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On Jan. 9, the day Morrison bid 1.32 of its shares for each Safeway share, Safeway stock jumped 20 percent. It is now up 50 percent as investors perceived that there would be ensuing bids from J. Sainsbury PLC and ASDA Group PLC, a British subsidiary of cash-rich Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and potential bids from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Inc., the entrepreneur Philip Green and Tesco PLC. Safeway stock has risen to where the company is no longer recommending Morrison's bid, urging shareholders to "await developments."
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Just a week after the Safeway battle began, Constellation Brands Inc. of New York state revealed it was in negotiations to acquire BRL Hardy Ltd., one the largest wine producers in Australia. The eventual bid valued the stock at 37 percent over its close the day before the talks were announced.
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There promise to be more such deals as the year unfolds. This month Procter Gamble Co. announced it expected to enhance growth this year by means of acquisition. On Thursday, Novartis AG took a significant stake in its Swiss rival, Roche Holding AG, in the hope of an eventual megamerger of the two pharmaceutical giants.
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These announcements signal that there are more deep-pocketed buyers back in the hunt. Investment bankers say there are plenty of other potential acquirers with cash-raising power, including Unilever NV, Glaxo SmithKline PLC and Vodafone Group PLC in Europe and Philip Morris Cos. in the United States.
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The value of worldwide M&A activity has plunged by nearly two-thirds since 2000, the year that America Online Inc. and Time Warner Inc. announced their $150 billion star-crossed megamerger. According to figures compiled by Thomson Financial, companies engaged in $3.4 trillion of deals in 2000. That fell to $1.7 trillion in 2001 and limped to $1.1 trillion last year.
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The worst deterioration has occurred in the United States, where the value of deals fell about 50 percent last year. European deals were down only 16 percent, and their value, according to Thomson Financial, exceeded that of U.S. deals.
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The pace of activity this year will not approach the merger mania that marked the late 1990s and the tech bubble. That go-go period was characterized by sky-high stock prices that chief executives could use as currency and by top executives' egomania, which fostered bulking up on size and earnings seemingly without strategic thought or value.
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"We had a period that could be characterized as a South Sea bubble in 1999 and 2000," said Don Johnston, European head of M&A at Deutsche Bank AG. "I don't see it returning to that level in my lifetime."
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Chief executives made a lot of promises that could not be achieved. As a result, deals like the one that created AOL Time Warner Inc. ran into a buzz saw, destroying vast amounts of investor value.
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"In 2001, takeovers dropped sharply because Wall Street was challenged by those who abused acquisitions and accounting," such as Enron Corp., Tyco International Ltd. and WorldCom Inc., said Mario Gabelli, chairman of Gabelli Asset Management. But a sea change occurred, Gabelli said, when HSBC Holdings PLC bought Household International Inc. in November. That deal, by a well-managed bank with a track record of managing acquisitions, relegitimized the M&A game, he said.
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With two mutual funds and two hedge funds that capitalize on profiting from M&A, Gabelli scrutinizes the environment for takeovers. He has concluded that a group of factors should encourage merger activity over the coming year:
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The new Sarbanes-Oxley disclosure rules, which are likely to substantially increase compliance costs. Those costs are expected to be particularly burdensome for smaller companies. "That means that companies with under $1 billion in revenue will have increased desire to sell," Gabelli said, "and they will be willing now to take low prices."
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Low cost of capital. For large companies such as P&G, Unilever and Philip Morris, borrowing is cheap because of record low interest rates, and new accounting rules mean companies will no longer have to write off goodwill.
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Government policy in the United States.Besides the high-profile tax stimulus and fiscal stimulus the Bush administration has proposed, Gabelli noted that the government intended to revisit the Telecommunications Act and the way utilities, the media and entertainment were regulated. That should also stimulate takeovers.
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Among the media companies Gabelli sees as hunting for acquisitions are Viacom Inc. and Tribune Co., which he said would buy more television stations as the government increases the market share of viewers that an operator can own. Among his media takeover target investments, Gabelli likes Young Broadcasting Inc. It owns 11 television stations. He also said that Boston Beer Co., the microbrewer known for its Samuel Adams beers, could be tempting for a consumer goods company, as would Campbell Soup Co. and H.J. Heinz Co. The financial sector is another arena that should see a continuing hum of merger activity. As the year started, BB&T Corp. made an all-share bid for a rival, First Virginia Banks Inc., which may signal a revival of consolidation.
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While the BB&T deal was considered expensive, Anton Schutz, portfolio manager at Burnham Financial Services Fund, said investor acceptance was improving these days. "Acquirers are paying smarter prices," he said, "not as inflated as they used to be. What they are doing now is rational. The cost cuts they are talking about are achievable."
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In fact, Schutz said, the stock prices of acquirers have been going up and not down after deals because the market perception is that they are reasonably priced. With 9,000 banks and thrifts still operating in the United States, it could be a fertile field. Schutz maintains that S&Ls are poised to become sellers because "they have had the wind in their sails for the past three years." Interest rates have come down; mortgage originations are strong. But that trajectory cannot last. "They are at their peak; they are at Nirvana now," he said, "so why don't they sell at the top of the cycle?"
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Schutz said S&Ls in the New York area were poised "for something to break." With acquisitive companies such as North Shore National Bank and Washington Mutual on the prowl, he pinpointed possible takeover candidates, including the Roslyn, Staten Island and Greenpoint savings banks. Schutz also said Fifth Third Bancorp in Cincinnati, which he called "the best-run bank in the country," would like to get bigger and might buy some regional S&Ls in the Chicago area.
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But he warned investors to stay away from financial institutions in Silicon Valley or other high-tech regions. "The deals are very hard to get done there," he said. With the economy down, real estate prices and commercial rental rates are falling, and defaults on consumer loans are rising.
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One way for individuals to participate in merger activity is to buy into a mutual fund focused on mergers, such as Gabelli Enterprise M&A Fund, Gabelli Enterprise Small Cap Fund or Gabelli Associates Arbitrage Hedge fund as well as its Arbitrage Mutual fund. There is also the Merger Fund, which focuses on arbitrage and had a good record until last year, when a dearth of deals resulted in negative performance.
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Another way, according to Russ Kinnel, head of research at Morningstar, is to buy into highly disciplined value funds that have a record of investing in companies that are targeted by acquirers. Kinnel suggested Ariel Fund, managed by John Rogers, which specializes in small-cap value stocks with high cash flow and low debt and a discount to what Ariel considers its private market value. Kinnel also suggested Keeley Small Cap Value Fund, which ferrets out companies with relatively small market caps and emphasizes those undergoing changes such as emerging from bankruptcy, spin-offs and recapitalization.
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For investors with the time and courage to do their own research into companies ripe for takeovers, Charles LaLoggia's book "The Superstock Investor: Profiting from Wall Street's Best Undervalued Companies" might be a place to start. LaLoggia publishes a pricey newsletter called Superstock Investor, which boasts that he managed to choose 48 stocks that got takeover bids in a 55-month period.
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Ignore the daily chatter of the market, LaLoggia instructs, and instead check into industries that are undergoing consolidation and delve into companies that have concentrated share ownership and whose beneficial shareholders - another term for outside owners - have an interest in unleashing value.
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LaLoggia also suggests reading Barron's to track the filings required by owners who have purchased 5 percent or more of a company. Some filings, he said, "leave open the possibility that the outside beneficial owner may seek to influence management in some way, including possibly urging the restructuring or sale of the company as a means of 'maximizing' or 'enhancing' shareholder value."
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But once a bid is made, LaLoggia said, investors should take the money and run, and not wait around to see whether the acquirer makes a success of the deal. They frequently don't.

2 Frozen Bodies Fall From Jet in Shanghai

2 Frozen Bodies Fall From Jet in Shanghai
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/25/international/americas/25CHIN.html

SHANGHAI, Jan. 24 — The Chinese authorities are investigating the deaths of two men who dropped from the undercarriage of an Air France Boeing 777 as the plane approached Shanghai airport after a flight from Paris.

One of the men smashed through the roof of a house, leaving a large gash in the roof.

The two, described as Caucasians in their 30's, had apparently suffered from frostbite. The state news media, speculating that they were stowaways on the flight, said that neither carried identification.

An airport official told the Chinese news media that the men probably dropped from the area containing the landing gear just before the plane was about to land at Pudong International Airport.

The official said the circumstances suggested that the two had been in the wheel wells of the aircraft and had frozen to death during the 11-hour journey, dropping from the sky when the landing gear was deployed.

Police officials declined to comment on the matter.

There have been cases of people seeking to travel from poor countries to wealthy ones by stowing away on aircraft. But sneaking into China from Europe in that way would be highly unusual.

Air France said that it had accounted for all of its ticketed passengers on the flight and that it also was investigating how the two men might have gotten aboard the plane.

The Chinese state news media quoted an official from Laogang as saying that both men had been wearing red coats. Eastday.com, a Web site controlled by the Shanghai government, quoted witnesses as saying that the coats appeared to be airport uniforms and that one man had been carrying a walkie-talkie. The police would not confirm that report.

The circumstances of the deaths remained unclear.

It was uncertain whether the men had hid themselves in the baggage compartment of the plane or in the wheel wells, or whether any doors had been opened during the flight.

Though the Chinese state news media often wait for official versions before offering detailed coverage of news events, newspapers and Web sites played up the odd incident.

"The skin of each man was obviously frostbitten," China Daily said, quoting Cai Jun, who the newspaper said was one of the first police officers to arrive at the scene.

The Beijing Morning News said both of the men had brown hair and were tall and muscular.

Paul's Boutique

last night while walking home from dinner with an ex-DLJ friend, passed by 99 rivington, and was shocked to see it gone. well sort of. it used to be a simple but quaint euro-styled cafe. small wooden chairs and tables. big windows. now it is a restyled haute-boite (is that a real term? i just made it up!) with the appelation Paul's Boutique (after an old boutique that had been there years ago; and that supposedly was a beastie boys album cover). with the floors raised, it feels like a little cubby hole of a place suspended in the corner space. very NYC modern. a little scary with all the gentrification. but the old owner/managers (jenny & daniel) are still coming by, or so they tell me. so i would love to support them. but i also miss the old place. it was so authentic, bright, and atmospheric. and this feels so.... soho.

and finally starting to catch up with posting a few articles i had saved -- iraq, china, the arts, travelling, and a few other things.

Bleak Forecast as City Jobless Rate Climbs

Bleak Forecast as City Jobless Rate Climbs
By LESLIE EATON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/nyregion/24JOBS.html

New York City's economy ended 2002 in steep decline, with an unemployment rate far above the national average and an accelerating loss of private sector jobs, according to data released today by the state and city governments.

The jobless rate jumped to 8.4 percent in December, up from 8 percent in November, after adjustment for seasonal factors, according to the New York State Department of Labor.

Companies in the city have already eliminated close to 175,000 jobs in the last two years, including 11,700 in December, according to the New York City Comptroller's Office, which adjusts Labor Department data to reflect seasonal factors.

The last time such a large percentage of the labor force was looking for work was March 1998, when the jobless rate was heading downward.

The employment situation in the city is far graver than in much of the country. In the last 12 months, the city's unemployment rate has jumped by 1.1 percentage points; nationally, the jobless rate has risen just 0.2 percentage points in the same period, and now stands at 6 percent.

The increase in New York City unemployment can be traced to low levels of hiring by stores during the holiday season, and to layoffs by airlines and brokerage firms, said James P. Brown, an analyst for the Labor Department.

"We're going to see some more of that going forward," Mr. Brown said, referring to the layoffs.

Companies in the city have already eliminated close to 175,000 jobs in the last two years, including 11,700 in December, according to the New York City Comptroller's Office, which adjusts Labor Department data to reflect seasonal factors.

Job losses in the fourth quarter of 2002 were not as severe as those in the fourth quarter of 2001, which included the immediate economic aftershocks of the attack on the World Trade Center, the comptroller's office said.

But that period aside, the city lost more jobs in the last three months of 2002 than at any time since the recession that ended in 1992.

"The city's jobs recession has continued for a second straight year," William C. Thompson Jr., the city comptroller, said in a statement.

He said that the city lost 1.2 percent of its payrolls in 2002, a drop six times as big as the national decline of 0.2 percent.

Some economists fear that when the final figures for 2002 are available, in March, New York City's employment losses will be even larger. The state revises the employment data each year to reflect new information about payrolls that is included in tax returns.

The city's economy is not expected to rebound any time soon, economists say, citing among other things the city's severe fiscal problems, which recently led to an 18.5 percent increase in property taxes.

"With the war in Iraq looming, along with the spike in oil prices, businesses should continue to put off hiring or investing in newer technologies," Barbara Byrne Denham, chief economist for the newsletter The New York STAT, said in an e-mail message.

She continued, "As a result, New York City's employment numbers should continue to decline in the coming months."

Master Key Copying Revealed

Master Key Copying Revealed
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/business/23LOCK.html

A security researcher has revealed a little-known vulnerability in many locks that lets a person create a copy of the master key for an entire building by starting with any key from that building.

The researcher, Matt Blaze of AT&T Labs-Research, found the vulnerability by applying his area of expertise — the security flaws that allow hackers to break into computer networks — to the real-world locks and keys that have been used for more than a century in office buildings, college campuses and some residential complexes.

The attack described by Mr. Blaze, which is known by some locksmiths, leaves no evidence of tampering. It can be used without resorting to removing the lock and taking it apart or other suspicious behavior that can give away ordinary lock pickers.

All that is needed, Mr. Blaze wrote, is access to a key and to the lock that it opens, as well as a small number of uncut key blanks and a tool to cut them to the proper shape. No special skills or tools are required; key-cutting machines costing hundreds of dollars apiece make the task easier, but the same results can be achieved with a simple metal file.

After testing the technique repeatedly against the hardware from major lock companies, Mr. Blaze wrote, "it required only a few minutes to carry out, even when using a file to cut the keys."

AT&T decided that the risk of abuse of the information was great, so it has taken the unusual step of posting an alert to law enforcement agencies nationwide. The alert describes the technique and the possible defenses against it, though the company warns that no simple solution exists.

The paper, which Mr. Blaze has submitted for publication in a computer security journal, has troubled security experts who have seen it. Marc Weber Tobias, a locks expert who works as a security consultant to law enforcement agencies, said he was rewriting his police guide to locks and lock-picking because of the paper. He said the technique could open doors worldwide for criminals and terrorists. "I view the problem as pretty serious," he said, adding that the technique was so simple, "an idiot could do it."

The technique is not news to locksmiths, said Lloyd Seliber, the head instructor of master-key classes for Schlage, a lock company that is part of Ingersoll-Rand. He said he even taught the technique, which he calls decoding, in his training program for locksmiths.

"This has been true for 150 years," Mr. Seliber said.

Variations on the decoding technique have also been mentioned in passing in locksmith trade journals, but usually as a way for locksmiths to replace a lost master key and not as a security risk.

When told that Mr. Seliber taught the technique to his students, Mr. Tobias said: "He may teach it, but it's new in the security industry. Security managers don't know about it."

In the paper, Mr. Blaze applies the principles of cryptanalysis, ordinarily used to break secret codes, to the analysis of mechanical lock designs. He describes a logical, deductive approach to learning the shape of a master key by building on clues provided by the key in hand — an approach that cryptanalysts call an oracle attack. The technique narrows the number of tries that would be necessary to discover a master-key configuration to only dozens of attempts, not the thousands of blind tries that would otherwise be necessary.

The research paper might seem an odd choice of topics for a computer scientist, but Mr. Blaze noted that in his role as a security researcher for AT&T Labs, he examined issues that went to the heart of business security wherever they arose, whether in the digital world or the world of steel and brass.

Since publishing Mr. Blaze's technique could lead to an increase in thefts and other crimes, it presented an ethical quandary for him and for AT&T Labs — the kind of quandary that must also be confronted whenever new security holes are discovered in computing.

"There's no way to warn the good guys without also alerting the bad guys," Mr. Blaze said. "If there were, then it would be much simpler — we would just tell the good guys."

Publishing a paper about vulnerable locks, however, presented greater challenges than a paper on computer flaws.

The Internet makes getting the word out to those who manage computer networks easy, and fixing a computer vulnerability is often as simple as downloading a software patch. Getting word out to the larger, more amorphous world of security officers and locksmiths is a more daunting task, and for the most part, locks must be changed mechanically, one by one.

But Mr. Blaze said the issue of whether to release information about a serious vulnerability almost inevitably came down to a decision in favor of publication.

"The real problem is there's no way of knowing whether the bad guys know about an attack," he said, so publication "puts the good guys and the bad guys on equal footing."

In this case, the information appears to have made its way already to the computer underground. The AT&T alert to law enforcement officials said that a prepublication version of the paper distributed privately by Mr. Blaze for review last fall had been leaked onto the Internet, though it has not been widely circulated.

"At this point we believe that it is no longer possible to keep the vulnerability secret and that more good than harm would now be done by warning the wider community," the company wrote.

There is evidence that others have chanced upon other versions of the technique over the years. Though it does not appear in resources like "The M.I.T. Guide to Lockpicking," a popular text available on the Internet, Mr. Blaze said, "several of the people I've described this to over the past few months brightened up and said they had come on part of this to make a master key to their college dorm."

Mr. Blaze acknowledged that he was only the first to publish a detailed look at the security flaw and the technique for exploiting it.

"I don't think I'm the first person to discover this attack, but I do think I'm the first person to work out all the details and write it down," he said. "Burglars are interested in committing burglary, not in publishing results or warning people."

Mr. Tobias, the author of "Locks, Safes and Security: An International Police Reference," said that the technique was most likely to be used by an insider — someone with ready access to a key and a lock. But it could also be used, he said, by an outsider who simply went into a building and borrowed the key to a restroom.

He said he had tested Mr. Blaze's technique the way that he tests many of the techniques described in his book: he gave instructions and materials to a 15-year-old in his South Dakota town to try out. The teenager successfully made a master key.

In the alert, AT&T warned, "Unfortunately, at this time there is no simple or completely effective countermeasure that prevents exploitation of this vulnerability, short of replacing a master-keyed system with a nonmastered one."

The letter added, "Residential facilities and safety-critical or high-value environments are strongly urged to consider whether the risks of master keying outweigh the convenience benefits in light of this new vulnerability."

Other defenses could make it harder to create master keys.

Mr. Blaze said that owners of master-key systems could move to the less popular master-ring system, which allows a master key to operate the tumblers in a way that is not related to the individual keys. But that system has problems of its own, security experts say.

Mr. Blaze suggested that creating a fake master key could also be made more difficult by using locks for which key blanks are difficult to get, though even those blanks can be bought in many hardware stores and through the Internet.

But few institutions want to spend the money for robust security, said Mr. Seliber of Schlage. His company recommends to architects and builders that they take steps like those recommended by Mr. Blaze, measures that make it more difficult to cut extra keys — like using systems that are protected by patents because their key blanks are somewhat harder to buy, Mr. Seliber said. Even though such measures would add only 1 to 2 percent to the cost of each door, builders were often told to take a cheaper route. He said that they were told, " `We're not worried about ninjas rappelling in from the roof stuff — take it easy.' "

That is not news to Mr. Blaze, who said it was also a familiar refrain in the world of computer security. "As any computer security person knows," he said, "in a battle between convenience and security, convenience has a way of winning."

Why We Know Iraq Is Lying

Why We Know Iraq Is Lying
By CONDOLEEZZA RICE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/opinion/23RICE.html

WASHINGTON
Eleven weeks after the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed a resolution demanding — yet again — that Iraq disclose and disarm all its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, it is appropriate to ask, "Has Saddam Hussein finally decided to voluntarily disarm?" Unfortunately, the answer is a clear and resounding no.

There is no mystery to voluntary disarmament. Countries that decide to disarm lead inspectors to weapons and production sites, answer questions before they are asked, state publicly and often the intention to disarm and urge their citizens to cooperate. The world knows from examples set by South Africa, Ukraine and Kazakhstan what it looks like when a government decides that it will cooperatively give up its weapons of mass destruction. The critical common elements of these efforts include a high-level political commitment to disarm, national initiatives to dismantle weapons programs, and full cooperation and transparency.

In 1989 South Africa made the strategic decision to dismantle its covert nuclear weapons program. It destroyed its arsenal of seven weapons and later submitted to rigorous verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Inspectors were given complete access to all nuclear facilities (operating and defunct) and the people who worked there. They were also presented with thousands of documents detailing, for example, the daily operation of uranium enrichment facilities as well as the construction and dismantling of specific weapons.

Ukraine and Kazakhstan demonstrated a similar pattern of cooperation when they decided to rid themselves of the nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles and heavy bombers inherited from the Soviet Union. With significant assistance from the United States — warmly accepted by both countries — disarmament was orderly, open and fast. Nuclear warheads were returned to Russia. Missile silos and heavy bombers were destroyed or dismantled — once in a ceremony attended by the American and Russian defense chiefs. In one instance, Kazakhstan revealed the existence of a ton of highly enriched uranium and asked the United States to remove it, lest it fall into the wrong hands.

Iraq's behavior could not offer a starker contrast. Instead of a commitment to disarm, Iraq has a high-level political commitment to maintain and conceal its weapons, led by Saddam Hussein and his son Qusay, who controls the Special Security Organization, which runs Iraq's concealment activities. Instead of implementing national initiatives to disarm, Iraq maintains institutions whose sole purpose is to thwart the work of the inspectors. And instead of full cooperation and transparency, Iraq has filed a false declaration to the United Nations that amounts to a 12,200-page lie.

For example, the declaration fails to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad, its manufacture of specific fuel for ballistic missiles it claims not to have, and the gaps previously identified by the United Nations in Iraq's accounting for more than two tons of the raw materials needed to produce thousands of gallons of anthrax and other biological weapons.

Iraq's declaration even resorted to unabashed plagiarism, with lengthy passages of United Nations reports copied word-for-word (or edited to remove any criticism of Iraq) and presented as original text. Far from informing, the declaration is intended to cloud and confuse the true picture of Iraq's arsenal. It is a reflection of the regime's well-earned reputation for dishonesty and constitutes a material breach of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, which set up the current inspections program.

Unlike other nations that have voluntarily disarmed — and in defiance of Resolution 1441 — Iraq is not allowing inspectors "immediate, unimpeded, unrestricted access" to facilities and people involved in its weapons program. As a recent inspection at the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist demonstrated, and other sources confirm, material and documents are still being moved around in farcical shell games. The regime has blocked free and unrestricted use of aerial reconnaissance.

The list of people involved with weapons of mass destruction programs, which the United Nations required Iraq to provide, ends with those who worked in 1991 — even though the United Nations had previously established that the programs continued after that date. Interviews with scientists and weapons officials identified by inspectors have taken place only in the watchful presence of the regime's agents. Given the duplicitous record of the regime, its recent promises to do better can only be seen as an attempt to stall for time.

Last week's finding by inspectors of 12 chemical warheads not included in Iraq's declaration was particularly troubling. In the past, Iraq has filled this type of warhead with sarin — a deadly nerve agent used by Japanese terrorists in 1995 to kill 12 Tokyo subway passengers and sicken thousands of others. Richard Butler, the former chief United Nations arms inspector, estimates that if a larger type of warhead that Iraq has made and used in the past were filled with VX (an even deadlier nerve agent) and launched at a major city, it could kill up to one million people. Iraq has also failed to provide United Nations inspectors with documentation of its claim to have destroyed its VX stockpiles.

Many questions remain about Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and arsenal — and it is Iraq's obligation to provide answers. It is failing in spectacular fashion. By both its actions and its inactions, Iraq is proving not that it is a nation bent on disarmament, but that it is a nation with something to hide. Iraq is still treating inspections as a game. It should know that time is running out.

Condoleezza Rice is the national security adviser.

After the Storm

After the Storm
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/08/opinion/08FRIE.html

CAIRO — Here's a prediction: In the end, 9/11 will have a much bigger impact on the Arab and Muslim worlds than it does on America. Lord knows, 9/11 has been a trauma for us, and our response has been to strike back and install better security. But 9/11 has been a trauma for Arabs and Muslims as well - a shock to their systems that ranks with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, the creation of Israel and the 1967 defeat.

For Arabs and Muslims, the shock has been that this act was perpetrated by 19 of their sons in the name of their faith. As a result their religious texts, political systems, schoolbooks, chronic unemployment, media and even their right to visit America have all been spotlighted and questioned - sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly.

While the shock of 1967 was profound, it ultimately led to very little change in the Arab political or social order. Because the post-'67 shock was blunted by two factors: the existence of the Soviet Union, and Soviet aid, to cushion regimes from the need to reform; and the dramatic rise in oil wealth post-'67, which also bought off a lot of pressures for change.

Today there is no Soviet Union, and because of the huge population explosion in the Arab-Muslim world, there also is not enough oil wealth to buy off pressures anymore. At the same time, thanks to globalization, young Arabs and Muslims have a much better sense of where they stand vis-à-vis the world, and how far behind they are in many cases. Finally, because America was the target of 9/11, a refusal to face up to the local factors that produced the 9/11 hijackers runs the risk of a clash with the U.S.

Since 9/11 the Arab-Muslim world has passed through three basic stages: shock, denial and, finally, introspection. It is quite apparent here in Egypt, where, at least in part because of 9/11, issues that people did not feel empowered to discuss publicly are being tentatively aired.

``There was a strong collision on Sept. 11 between East and West, between a car and a wall, and you can see the impact on both today,'' remarked the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem. ``You have become more suspicious, and we will become more progressive. ... Look at Iraq. People do not want to see any Iraqis killed. But few people will speak up for Saddam Hussein now. People are against Saddam, because they know there is no future for tyranny anymore.''

Two weeks ago Egypt's most influential newspaper, Al-Ahram, ran a thoughtful series by President Hosni Mubarak's most important political adviser, Osama el-Baz, cautioning Egyptians against buying into European anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. His articles were triggered by intense criticism of Egypt for broadcasting, on its state-run TV, a docudrama, ``Horseman Without a Horse,'' that drew on the fraudulent anti-Semitic tract ``The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.''

``We must uphold the correct perspective on our relationship with the Jews, as embodied in the legacy of Arab civilization and in our holy scriptures,'' wrote Mr. Baz. ``This legacy holds that ours is not a tradition of racism and intolerance, that the Jews are our cousins through common descent from Abraham and that our only enemies are those who attack us. ... It is also important, in this regard, that we refrain from succumbing to such myths as `The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' and the use of Christian blood in Jewish rituals.''

In part as a reaction to the religious intolerance unleashed by 9/11, President Mubarak surprised his country last month by announcing that henceforth Jan. 7 would be a national holiday. Jan. 7 is the Coptic (Egyptian Christian) Christmas, and it has now been elevated to equal status with the Prophet Muhammad's birthday. For the first time the president's son, Gamal, attended midnight mass, a visit carried live on Egyptian TV.

After the prominent Egyptian journalist Mohammed Heikal raised the question, in a recent TV interview, of who will succeed President Mubarak, everyone has started talking in public about it, and several Egyptians expressed to me their hope that whenever the transition happens it will be the start of a more formal democratization process.

Will it? Will introspection around the region actually lead to a Stage 4 - fundamental political and economic reform? I suspect that the leaders understand that this is a storm they can't ride out. But they don't know how to change without losing the control they've enjoyed. This tension will be the drama of Arab-Muslim politics for the next decade.

Jackals Gather Round

Jackals Gather Round
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/09/opinion/09SAFI.html

WASHINGTON

Two nights ago in Tehran, President Mohammad Khatami, the pretended reformist who fronts for hard-line ayatollahs, held a meeting with leaders of the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein.

The Iranian made his purpose plain: to establish a relationship with men — and not just Iraqi Shiites now headquartered in Tehran — who may be members of the next government of neighboring Iraq.

Aware that his guests were in contact with Americans, Khatami allowed as how Iran's relations with the U.S. could be improved. How? He told a joke with the punch line "Stop casting your shadow over me!"

I am not familiar with that thigh-slapper. Nor do I have any faith in a repressive regime whose nuclear ambitions and sponsorship of Hezbollah killers belies its supposed interest in resuming contact with the West.

But apparently some Iranian theocrats observing American troop movements and the latest bellicose fulminations of Saddam see the handwriting on the wall. (That ancient Babylonian wall, on which the biblical moving finger wrote, was about 40 miles south of today's Baghdad.) Iran wants friends at the table when Saddam's power is divvied up.

Of course, Iran continues to play both sides: just across its border, in the free zone of Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran provides a unit of 600 pro-Saddam terrorists with ammunition and mines to harass the free Kurds. These terrorists are led by Musab Zarwaqi, known to be a top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden; inexplicably, they are not targeted by U.S. bombers.

Syria is another nation seeking a profitable straddle. Israel's Ariel Sharon made public what intelligence agencies have long suspected: that Syria is the new hiding place for Iraqi germ and chemical weaponry, and perhaps scientists, beyond the reach of U.N. inspectors. Saddam did something similar before, in Gulf War I, by parking his air force in Iran (which then kept the planes).

While providing a black-market conduit for Iraqi oil and a land passage for Hezbollah weapons, Syria has been touting its cooperation with the U.S. in tracking other terrorists. Because it voted right on Security Council Resolution 1441, our State Department has been pretending to believe that.

The Saudis and Egyptians, sensing Saddam's demise, are devising Saddamism without Saddam. The idea is to spirit the dictator and his two bloodthirsty sons out of Iraq, passing the power to a clique of Sunni generals and Baath Party politicians, thereby offering spurious "regime change" while averting an overthrow that might give their own citizens ideas. Algeria is said to be the location chosen for the Hussein family's permanent vacation.

France has also begun to hedge its bets. Well aware of the likelihood of allied action or an internal coup before the Ides of March, Jacques Chirac does not want his country out in the cold as oil-rich New Iraq is put on its feet by the U.S. and Britain.

Because France is not France without Arab oil, Chirac has suddenly taken to threatening Saddam with "war of unimaginable consequences" unless he disarms right away, and France will soon dispatch an aircraft carrier to the gulf. But still straddling, Chirac insists that the Security Council, and not what Bush calls "a coalition of the willing," make the decision about whether Iraq has failed to prove it has disarmed.

And what about that Blix report, due two weeks from Monday? The inspectors are working frantically but they are not being serious.

Being serious means going into Iraqi Army ammunition depots to find evidence of recently removed missile warheads. Being serious is surprising the Baghdad headquarters of the Mukhabarat, nerve center of intelligence collection and war preparation, to examine computer tapes.

Being serious is transporting Iraqi scientists to Cyprus, with no handlers present, to take testimony under oath and in secret, same as with witnesses before a grand jury. Saddam would cry "Spying!" but the U.N. resolution places the burden on Iraq to prove that no evidence exists.

If Hans Blix's report equivocates and the Security Council delays, the U.S. will act. The jackals know that. That is why Iraqi officers are sending word to the opposition through second cousins that "I'm your friend, remember later." That is why jackal-nations are circling, eager to subvert liberation and make off with the coming freedom of the Iraqi people.

Chinatown Journey: From Protesters to Developers

Chinatown Journey: From Protesters to Developers
By DENNIS HEVESI
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/realestate/12COV.html

Down from the ramparts, fists unclenched, their protest signs long ago set aside, Asian Americans for Equality — leaders among a cadre of community groups that brought thousands of demonstrators into the streets of Chinatown and to the steps of City Hall in the mid-1970's — is now a major landlord and residential developer.

Over the last 15 years, the organization has built or rehabilitated 43 buildings in Chinatown and on the Lower East Side, housing more than 500 low- to moderate-income families. It has renovated 36 one- to four-family homes for new buyers in Queens. Within six months, it expects to complete construction of three six-story buildings in Chinatown, providing 52 rental apartments for poor people.

Asian Americans for Equality says it has helped more than 1,500 immigrant families, not just from Asia, gain access to low-cost down payments and mortgages. And since last summer, it has served as the designated agency assisting thousands of Chinatown residents in applying for federal grants intended to stabilize housing occupancy in Lower Manhattan after the World Trade Center attacks.

A far cry from the days when one scholar researching radical groups in the United States labeled some of the group's leaders as Maoist.

Christopher Kui, the executive director of Asian Americans for Equality since 1993, attests to its evolution from radical roots into a nuts-and-bolts builder that has not only cooperated with government housing programs but pioneered them in tandem with major banks and nonprofit housing syndicators.

"They've been willing to take risks with us on new program models," said Jerilyn Perine, the city's commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development, "and it has sometimes made their work much tougher because they went first."

"The fact that they've been willing to do that has been really helpful," Commissioner Perine said. "It goes beyond just the buildings."

It was a natural progression, said Mr. Kui (pronounced koy), from street protests against job discrimination in the construction industry and against police brutality to community organizing and local politics to counseling people living in squalid buildings and, eventually, to creating housing. Along the way there have been critics, particularly when the group ventured into politics.

Many Chinatown residents live in "horrible conditions," said Mr. Kui, in part — but only in part — because much of the community's housing stock dates to the 19th century and because its population density is the highest of any neighborhood in the city. "The density of Manhattan is 82 people per acre," he said. "For Chinatown, it's 189."

The group's housing work started, simply enough, with the notion of informing people of their rights. "In the early 80's, a lot of people came to us seeking housing assistance, complaining, for example, that they have no heat or hot water," Mr. Kui said. "They would ask, `Can you help me apply for public housing?' And when they started applying, they were placed on waiting lists of 150,000 people."

"We visited their apartments and saw the conditions," Mr. Kui continued. "We decided we needed to build some affordable housing ourselves."

But it was a fire, on Jan. 21, 1985 — sparked by a faulty electric heater in a building without heat or hot water at 54 Eldridge Street — that immediately spurred Asian Americans for Equality into concrete housing work. "Two people were burned to death, and 125 people were displaced," Mr. Kui said. "We worked with the city to place people in shelters throughout the city, but a lot of folks wouldn't go because the shelters were in terrible condition, or they couldn't communicate and didn't want to leave Chinatown."

Initially, the organization planned to create a transitional shelter. But in the end, two vacant buildings held by the city for tax arrears, 176 and 180 Eldridge Street, two blocks from the fire site, would be renovated into a total of 60 apartments — one building for low-income families, the other for homeless individuals and families.

It was at that time, as part of an overhaul of the nation's tax code, that Congress passed the Federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit — providing a write-off of about 90 percent of the construction costs for investors willing to provide financing to develop housing for families with incomes 60 percent below the median income in a given metropolitan area.

Total renovation costs for what would be called Equality House — the first Federal Low-Income Tax Credit project in New York City — came to $5.2 million.

The Enterprise Foundation, a pioneer in creating housing for poor people throughout the country, assumed the role of syndicator on the project, bringing in Fannie Mae, the federally chartered mortgage purchase corporation, as the primary investor.

"Half of the funding came from the low-income tax credit," Mr. Kui said. "The other half was $1 million from the New York State Department of Social Services, the rest from the New York State Housing Trust Fund. And H.P.D. gave us the buildings for $1 each."

The senior vice president of the Enterprise Foundation, Bill Frey, called Equality House a breakthrough project. "It became the model that really has provided the initial way for us to do this around the city with 85 other nonprofits, creating about 13,000 units," he said.

Rents for a one-bedroom at Equality House when it opened in 1988 were between $329 and $356, and are currently $459 to $509; initial rents for two-bedrooms were $400 to $445, and are now $485 to $570. To be eligible for an apartment, if any were currently available, a family of four could have an income of no more than $37,000.

For 81-year-old Luk Ng and his wife, Choi Ngor Ng, 65, Equality House is a godsend. "Where I was before," said Mr. Ng, sitting in his kitchen, potted plants all about, "it was very bad, dangerous."

Danger accompanied Mr. Ng to this country. In 1943, he left Canton Province as a merchant seaman on an oil tanker. "During the Second World War," he said through an interpreter, "the German planes bombed the tanker, hit the rear. It was sinking and the British saved us, brought us to Alaska."

Soon after, "on another oil tanker," Mr. Ng continued, "I came to New Jersey — I don't know where — and jumped ship. I paid someone like $100 to drive me to Chinatown. There were daily raids by the immigration people; for some reason, I never got picked up." In 1959, Mr. Ng became a citizen. For decades, he worked as a waiter.

"We were living at 147 Elizabeth," Mr. Ng said, paying $200 a month for part of a one-bedroom apartment that shared a bathroom in the hallway with people living in the next apartment. "One of the reasons I was looking for something else was that the roofs were leaking, falling down, but the owner refused to fix it," he said. "No heat, hot water. My wife was very unhappy about those conditions."

Mr. Ng said he "heard about AAFE" (an acronym for Asian Americans for Equality that rhymes with taffy) "in a Chinese daily newspaper, that they were having a lottery for Equality House. Somehow I got selected; I guess I'm lucky."

Their one-bedroom apartment rented for $303 when the Ngs moved in in the late 80's; the rent is now $440. But with senior-citizen rental assistance, the Ngs pay only $220 a month. "I'm very happy here in my golden days," Mr. Ng said.

As a gateway to America, Chinatown has long harbored a stream of immigrants fleeing economic or political repression; many are poor, uneducated, unknowing of their new rights, forced into below-minimum-wage, 12-hour-a-day labor and resigned to living under code-scorning conditions.

Thousands are crammed into tenement buildings — 10, 12 or more individuals, or several families, sharing a single apartment in which the rooms have been divided by plywood partitions and raw-board bunk beds. The single kitchen is used by all; and the only bathroom is in the hallway outside the apartment, for use by all the tenants on the floor. Rents are usually about $200 a month per person.

"There are bad landlords taking advantage of these very vulnerable, scared immigrants," Mr. Kui said. "Also, it's not uncommon that families renting a one- or two-bedroom apartment in a tenement building have to pay $7,000 to $10,000 in `key money,' cash to the landlord, in order to just get an option to rent, because the competition for housing is so high in the community."

And so, often, families double or triple up. "These are unrelated families, a common occurrence," Mr. Kui said.

Muit San Sing, 71, his wife and adult daughter live on bunk beds behind plywood walls in a six-floor walk-up on Kenmare Street. They pay $260 a month — their share of the total of $1,097 paid by four families for the four-room apartment (there is no living room). They have lived there since 1993.

The apartment's filth-encrusted walls are peeling in sheaths; roaches scurry.

MR. SING was a farmer in China, on "government-issued land," he said. For 10 years, he was an elevator operator in Chinatown. "I am old, can't work any more," he said. He went to AAFE for legal counseling after the landlord, citing overcrowding and the apartment's illegal partitions, began eviction proceedings.

Shellen Wu, a housing counselor with the group, said a settlement had been reached under which the Sings and one of the other families can stay. The organization is helping to relocate the two other families. Saying the landlord had agreed to fix up the apartment, Ms. Wu said, "We'll see."

With a broad grin, Mr. Sing said: "I think America is great, the best. Freedom! You can do everything. I have a Medicare card. In China, how would you get that?"

Asked about his dire living conditions, he said: "I just need a place to live. It would be better if I could get government housing."

Chinatown — with hard to define borders edging, here and there, into Little Italy and the Lower East Side — has a population of approximately 85,000, of whom about 55,000 are Asian, according to AAFE's estimations.

In recent years, it has felt the squeeze of gentrification, with trendy bars and restaurants sprinkling among its Chinese-lettered dumpling shops, souvenir shops and groceries. And while most substandard housing in the community falls under rent regulation, increased demand for market-rate housing has sent unregulated prices soaring.

Arthur Strickler, the district manager of Community Board 2, said new buildings in Chinatown command rents at least four times higher than regulated apartments, with studios going for as much as $1,600 a month. According to Scott Durkin, chief operating officer of the Corcoran Group brokerage firm, the average price for a condominium in the area shot up about 28 percent in 2002 over 2001, with two-bedroom apartments selling for $700,000 to $900,000.

"Clever landlords," Mr. Strickler said, "empty out units, do expensive renovations and rent out at market rates."

Asian Americans for Equality has tried to relieve some of the squeeze. Two years ago, it constructed 48 condominiums in 12 town house buildings on what had been a vacant lot between 138 and 152 Suffolk Street. "We saw an opportunity to put together a homeownership project that is affordable to more moderate-income residents of the community," Mr. Kui said. Of the 48 apartments, eight are three-bedrooms that sold for $145,000 each, 40 are two-bedrooms that sold for between $119,000 and $129,000.

"There are so many sons and daughters of immigrants who grew up in the community and want to stay," Mr. Kui said, "folks who are civil service, police, teachers, who want to keep their roots in the community."

Police Officer Pedro Velazquez, 40, wanted to plant roots in the community. A native of Puerto Rico and a member of the force since 1985 — with a salary of about $50,000 — Officer Velazquez had been paying rent of $600 a month in the Bronx.

He hates to say it, but he was tired of street fights, burglaries and car break-ins in his old neighborhood, particularly several incidents in which he had to flash his badge or give chase while on his way to or from the subway he used to ride to the Ninth Precinct on the Lower East Side.

Officer Velazquez was online apartment searching when he came across AAFE's announcement of a lottery for apartments on Suffolk Street. "I think 2,000 people applied," he said. "I was No. 38."

Clapping his hands, Officer Velazquez said he paid $145,000 for the three-bedroom, two-bath duplex at Suffolk Houses. "There's a lot of need for places like this," he said. "You know how much an apartment like this would cost around here? — $500,000!"

"Now I walk to work," he said — not unlike many longer-term residents of Chinatown who live, work and shop in the neighborhood. That insularity, especially after the events of Sept. 11, has heightened the community's vulnerability.

There are two main industries in Chinatown — garment manufacturing and tourist-related stores and restaurants. After the terrorist attacks, approximately 65 of the community's 300 garment factories shut down, eliminating jobs for about 5,000 people, mostly women. "That happened because Chinatown was caught behind a frozen zone," said Robert Weber, the group's director of policy, "meaning that the police limited traffic access and parking in Chinatown for months following the disaster. This had an immediate negative impact on the garment industry, which depends on being able to quickly turn around clothing orders."

With most of those workers living and shopping in the community, other businesses immediately felt the impact. Approximately 3,000 more jobs were eventually lost, Mr. Weber said. And as unemployment benefits began expiring last summer, he said, more and more residents could not meet their rent obligations.

"What makes the situation worse is that if this loss of jobs and loss of revenues by businesses occurred somewhere else in the city," he said, "you probably would see a drop in rents and real estate prices. But that has not happened here because of the pressures of gentrification. It's a big squeeze."

In June, Asian Americans for Equality, which, with governmental and corporate support, now has 62 full-time staff members, was chosen by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to administer the process by which Chinatown residents facing rent troubles can apply for federal grants intended to stabilize housing occupancy after Sept. 11. "The grants provide a much needed tourniquet to the hemorrhaging incomes of people who lost their jobs," Mr. Weber said.

Still, some controversy has surrounded the program, largely because the grants offer the most aid to those living closest to the Trade Center site. Families in Battery Park City and parts of TriBeCa, where the median household income is $125,000, are eligible for up to $14,500. Those in Chinatown, where the median income is a third of that in TriBeCa, can receive a maximum of $7,750.

The participation of Asian Americans for Equality in the grant program has resuscitated hints of the criticism it received in the early 1990's — that it was losing touch with its roots and constituency — particularly after it proposed redrawing the local City Council district away from the Lower East Side toward more affluent environs downtown.

"I think AAFE has aligned itself with business interests and political interests at the expense of Chinatown's residential and low-wage workers," said Margaret Fung, executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. "They want to acquire properties or city-owned buildings so that they can be the developers, instead of some other group. They favor themselves."

Former City Councilwoman Kathryn E. Freed, now out of office because of term limits, was challenged by an AAFE official, Margaret Chin, in the 1990 election. Still, she said recently: "My attitude as a councilmember was that I wasn't going to cut them off because we were not friends. I never got complaints from people in their buildings. I think they've done good work for the community; it doesn't mean they didn't get their piece of the pie."

THE housing efforts of Asian Americans for Equality continue — not just in Chinatown.

In parts of Queens, including Flushing, Corona and College Point, the organization has purchased — for about $40,000 each — 36 one- to four-family private homes that had been seized by the city because of unpaid taxes. And, after providing homeownership counseling and access to low-cost mortgages and down-payment and closing-cost assistance, it has sold the homes to existing tenants — often the former owners.

On Norfolk Street in Chinatown, AAFE is constructing three six-story buildings for poor people.

"The new project is called Norfolk Apartments II" said Mr. Kui. "It's 52 units on three separate sites along two blocks on Norfolk Street" — one of them across from the already occupied 24-unit Norfolk I.

The new buildings, with total construction costs of $9.13 million — "again, a combination of the New York State Housing Trust Fund and the Federal Low-income Housing Tax Credit, syndicated by the Enterprise Foundation," Mr. Kui said — will provide rental apartments for low- and very-low-income residents.

A low-income family of four, defined as earning no more than $37,680, will pay $715 a month for a two-bedroom apartment. A very-low-income family of four, earning no more than $31,400, will pay $600 for a two-bedroom. Construction should be completed in six months.

"We have received over 11,000 requests for applications for those 52 units," Mr. Kui said.

Ex-Aide to Mao Urges China to Move Toward Democracy

Ex-Aide to Mao Urges China to Move Toward Democracy
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/07/international/07CND_CHIN.html

BEIJING, Jan. 7 — A onetime secretary to Mao Zedong has published a sweeping call for political change in a Beijing magazine, warning that China must embrace democratic politics and free speech to avoid stagnation and possible collapse.

"Only with democratization can there be modernization," the retired official, Li Rui, 85, said. "This has been a global tide since the 20th century, especially the Second World War, and those who join it will prosper while those who resist will perish."

Mr. Li, 85, a longtime advocate of faster political liberalization, has been held at arm's length by party leaders. But his status as a confidant to Mao and as a pugnacious critic of conservatives inside the Communist Party has given him a degree of protection from censorship and a large readership.

The publication of his latest article in China Chronicle, a magazine widely read by party officials, is the latest sign of growing demands for open discussion of political reform. China Chronicle is a popular history magazine published by a cultural research institute that is run by retired officials, many with a reputation for liberal views.

Mr. Li's call to action comes at a sensitive time, with many officials and academics here waiting to see if China's new leaders, installed at a party congress last November, will consider any substantial relaxation of one-party rule in coming years.

The January issue of China Chronicle features Mr. Li's speech to a group of delegates at that congress. In it he bluntly criticizes the Communist Party's resistance to political change and warns that China's stability may be imperiled by further delay.

"The key is reforming an aged political system that is obsolescent, and speeding up the development of democratic politics so the country can truly embark on a course of lasting political stability," he said.

In recent official announcements, Communist Party leaders have said the party must strengthen internal debate and make the selection of officials more competitive, but they have not shown any signs of contemplating dramatic change.

By contrast, Mr. Li challenged China's leaders to lead the way with major reforms starting at the top.

"For the country to democratize, we must first implement democratization of the party; otherwise everything will be hollow," he said. "And the party's democratization must start from the center — at every level starting from the top leader — otherwise it will also be hollow."

Mr. Li proposed formally limiting party leaders to maximum tenures of 10 years and making the party's congress an annual meeting that directly elects its leaders. At present, the congress meets every five years, and leaders are appointed through a secretive process, with no direct say from ordinary delegates.

Mr. Li also proposed wide-ranging measures to limit the Communist Party's powers, to begin introducing the popular election of government officials and to protect freedom of speech and independent rule of law.

He said the party remained "above the law" and he proposed several legal reforms to tame its powers, including an independent judiciary, a new constitutional court and laws to protect private associations, citizen rights and freedom of speech.

Criticizing the censorship exercised by the Propaganda Department, Mr. Li said, "Freedom of speech, especially freedom of publication, is a citizen's most fundamental right, and to swiftly and effectively bring abuse of government power under scrutiny, it must be fully protected."

Mr. Li has been a party member since 1937 and is a veteran of political controversy. In the late 1950's he was Mao Zedong's secretary, until he criticized the deadly excesses of Mao's attempt to realize Communism; he was later imprisoned. During the 1980's, he was an ally of the ousted party chief Hu Yaobang and became a leading critic of the controversial Three Gorges Dam.

His latest call for political change comes at a time when the party's new leadership under Hu Jintao is preparing for a crucial meeting of Parliament in March that will choose the country's new president and prime minister and discuss amendments to the constitution.

China's New Leader Works to Set Himself Apart

China's New Leader Works to Set Himself Apart
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/international/asia/12CHIN.html

BEIJING, Jan. 11 — In his first two months as Communist Party chief, navigating in the shadow of his still-ambitious predecessor, the formerly faceless Hu Jintao has moved swiftly to create an image for himself as a champion of China's forgotten poor.

With a deft series of public gestures meant to identify him with old-time Communist virtues of self-sacrifice and devotion to the downtrodden, Mr. Hu has won praise from the party faithful and the public.

At a time of widespread unease about China's mounting income disparities, unemployment and corruption, Mr. Hu has shrewdly distinguished himself in symbolic ways from his more imperial-sounding predecessor, Jiang Zemin.

Between his populist appeals and recent appointments of allies to key provincial jobs, Mr. Hu, 60, also seems to have made a good start toward building his own power base within the Communist elite, political experts here say, though this may take years and is by no means assured.

"Hu Jintao has put forth his own image and message far more quickly than most of us expected," said a senior editor of a party newspaper, who has a box-seat view of the balletic maneuvering for power in a system still dominated more by personalities than rules. "Whether that will help or hurt him over time remains to be seen."

"He can't move too quickly or he'll raise animosity from Jiang and his allies, but if he did nothing, he would soon be in danger of losing his position," the editor said.

An official at a party institute in Beijing said: "Hu Jintao's activities so far have been a deliberate contrast with Jiang Zemin. He's showing he's a vigorous young leader who's in touch with the people and understands their hardships, and I think a lot of officials feel very encouraged."

When Mr. Jiang retired in November from his party position, China's most powerful job, he packed the Politburo's nine-member standing committee with his own supporters. In March, he will relinquish a second important position, the country's presidency, to Mr. Hu, but he is expected to stay on as chairman of the military.

For a time, at least, Mr. Jiang will continue to have enormous influence and be able to limit Mr. Hu's ability to strike out in new directions.

Mr. Jiang spent his final weeks as party chief boasting about the glorious economic and social achievements of his 13 years in office, and putting more emphasis on China's bright future than on its unchecked social and economic ills. Mr. Hu has not openly challenged Mr. Jiang — he goes out of his way to praise his legacy in public — and he appears to be as firmly committed to China's market transition and a moderate foreign policy. But the early focus on such homespun virtues as modesty, struggle and helping the disadvantaged implicitly highlights the darker side of China's rapid growth under Mr. Jiang, even as it taps a deep nostalgia for the betrayed ideals of Chairman Mao.

"I think that Jiang Zemin has to be feeling a little uncomfortable about Hu Jintao's message," the newspaper editor said. "But Jiang is not in any position to find fault with Hu Jintao."

Mr. Hu's strategy became clear in early December, when, on his first public outing as party chief, he traveled to one of the revolution's most hallowed sites — the town of Xibaipo, 170 miles southwest of Beijing.

This is where Mao had his last headquarters before moving victoriously into Beijing in 1949 to establish the People's Republic.

In a famous speech early that year that both sobered and inspired the nation, Mao warned against complacency in victory. He said the struggle for a just society had hardly begun and called on comrades to practice "plain living and arduous struggle."

In his tour of Xibaipo in December, Mr. Hu spoke in a similarly sober manner about the hard work and sacrifice ahead if China was to fulfill its goal of, as he described it, "comprehensively building a well-off society," and he echoed Mao's call, 54 years ago, for "plain living and arduous struggle." His tour was reported prominently in newspapers and on television, with scenes of his earnest exchanges with grizzled villagers.

Just in case anyone missed the point, four weeks later, all the major newspapers reprinted the full text of the speech that Mr. Hu is said to have delivered at Xibaipo. Laced with long quotes from Mao, Mr. Hu's talk, 10 pages in its English text, repeats the phrase "plain living and arduous struggle" more than 60 times.

Early this month, Mr. Hu made his second public tour — not to glittery Shanghai or Shenzhen or other showcase cities, but to, of all places, the poor and now bitterly cold region of Inner Mongolia. Pictures show Mr. Hu, in sub-zero weather, meeting poor herders and farmers who are losing ground even as China's coastal cities boom.

This week, Mr. Hu presided over the party's first major policy meeting of the new year — a conference on rural poverty that called on "major leading officials" to spend more time in backward regions and directed officials to "care for the lives of the masses and do more for them."

Rural penury, unemployment, widening disparities and corruption are among China's most intractable problems, and Mr. Hu has not offered any specific new answers. But the shift in official tone has been striking and is unassailable within party circles because it affirms Maoist ideals that are still cherished, honored in word if seldom in deed.

"In his December speech, Hu Jintao referred a lot to Mao's words and example, and hardly at all to Jiang Zemin," said an editor from a second party newspaper. "He showed that his legitimacy comes ultimately from Mao, not Jiang or Deng."

Mr. Jiang's influence is likely to fade over time in any case, and it is widely assumed that Mr. Hu's true rival, should he falter, will be Zeng Qinghong, who was Mr. Jiang's closest adviser. Last November, Mr. Zeng became a member of the Politburo's standing committee in his own right, and appears likely to be named the country's vice president in March.

Mr. Zeng and several other men on the committee owe their positions to Mr. Jiang and may watch out for his interests in the short term. In practice, that may mean ensuring that Mr. Jiang, with or without his military title, has a strong voice on major issues, especially in foreign policy; protecting his economic reforms while forestalling overly rapid political change; and protecting his relatives, allies and patronage networks from possible corruption investigations.

But Mr. Hu's formal position atop the party machine gives him plenty of opportunity to burnish his reputation and build alliances. For now, other senior leaders cannot afford to challenge him openly and if he plays his cards right, political analysts say, the Jiang protégés — including Mr. Zeng — as well as top army generals may find their interests lie in joining Mr. Hu. So far, party officials say, Mr. Zeng has appeared to be in step with Mr. Hu, and has made a point of praising him.

"I'd say that Hu Jintao has about two years to establish himself," said the second editor. "If after that much time he has nothing to claim for his name, then he'll be in a very dangerous position."

China Gambles on Big Projects for Its Stability

China Gambles on Big Projects for Its Stability
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/13/international/asia/13CHIN.html

CHONGQING, China — The engineers who run China have decided that this congested southwestern city, cupped by the Zhongliang Mountains and divided by flood-prone rivers, needs a complete makeover.

Construction crews have carved a small canyon in the center of town, where they are burrowing through mountains to create 600 miles of superhighways, four new railway lines, an urban light rail system and a new airport. Chinese officials are also promising parks, drinkable tap water and riverside promenades for the city's 30 million residents.

The cost of remaking Chongqing into the heartland's metropolis, most of it shouldered by the government and state-owned banks, is estimated at $200 billion over the next decade, a bit more than the United States Congress spent, in adjusted dollars, to build the American interstate highway system in the 1950's.

China's top leaders, many of them trained in the mechanical sciences, are not just making mountain cities into transportation hubs. They also want to pump 48 billion cubic meters of water each year from south to north, transport natural gas from Central Asia to China's southeast coast, and construct the world's largest dam, longest bridge, fastest train and highest railroad.

Even more than modernizing its infrastructure or, as some critics see it, erecting monuments to its emerging might, China is desperate to keep the economy growing quickly. Over the past few years, it has reached deep into the national treasury to finance projects that it hopes will create jobs and stimulate enough growth to ensure social stability and to keep the Communist Party in power.

As a new generation of leaders takes control, China is using heavy government investment to escape the worldwide slowdown and maintain growth above the 7 percent level that the government deems crucial to avoiding mass unemployment and urban unrest.

The plan has worked, so far. China last year reported defiantly robust growth of 8 percent, attributed to surging exports and a nearly 25 percent increase in state-directed investment.

But the strategy is risky. The once fiscally prudent central government is now running hefty budget deficits. State banks, told a few years ago to clean up bad loans and begin acting like capitalist lenders, are pumping tens of billions of dollars into officially sponsored projects that have sometimes failed to produce real returns.

The Communist Party has pledged to support private companies and allow the market to flourish. Financially, though, the authorities are monopolizing the country's private savings for a building boom that dwarfs the New Deal and the Marshall Plan.

"The country has relied very heavily on government investment to lead the economy," said Shen Lishen, a top economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "It really should begin to fade out, not become part of the long-term economic plan."

Beijing opened its coffers to stimulate growth beginning in 1998, when it feared that the financial contagion spreading around Asia would infect China. Instead of fading out, the spending is getting more ambitious.

The government, state banks and companies and foreign investors collectively spent $200 billion in the first 11 months of last year on basic infrastructure projects, one quarter more than they spent in 2001, according to the State Statistics Bureau. That represents about 15 percent of China's gross domestic product, or about the proportion that the United States spends on health care.

Even for the nation that built the Great Wall and the Grand Canal, the scale of construction is extraordinary.

Not long ago Beijing had China's only subway. Now Shanghai, Guangzhou and Tianjin have tunneled under heavily populated residential districts to install subway systems. Seven other cities have begun construction on their own subways.

By 2005, China plans to add 8,500 miles of railroad, half of that to places that now have no rail service. Shanghai just opened the world's first magnetic levitation train that zips to its new airport at up to 270 miles per hour, faster than any other commercial train.

Railroad officials are completing plans for a $22 billion high-speed track from Beijing to Shanghai. Meanwhile, workers carrying oxygen tanks are pounding spikes for the 670-mile-long Qinghai-Tibet railroad, which will operate at elevations of up to 16,600 feet on its way to Lhasa, Tibet's capital.

The Three Gorges Dam, designed to tame the mighty Yangtze river and generate the power of 18 ordinary nuclear power plants, was for years considered the world's most expensive project, with a price tag of $30 billion. It has now been eclipsed by China's latest engineering colossus, a $60 billion system of channels and pump stations to divert water from the Yangtze in the central part of the country to the Yellow River in the north. In late December, Chinese officials broke ground on the first phase of the project, which they say will alleviate desertification and drought.

Like many large cities, Chongqing is now following what officials refer to as the "Shanghai model." That refers to the heavy financial support the central government gave Shanghai over the past eight years, after two former city leaders, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, became China's top bosses.

Shanghai created a new financial center in Pudong, its eastern section. It tore apart former colonial districts to install a modern transportation network. While some of the uncounted billions of dollars invested almost certainly went to waste, Shanghai has also become an Asian center of commerce and finance.

Huang Qifan, a former top Shanghai official, is now the executive vice mayor of Chongqing. He said the once remote city on the upper reaches of the Yangtze, which served as a redoubt for China's Nationalist government when it fled the Japanese advance during World War II, would be the beachhead to develop China's west. Chongqing lobbied hard for that role, partly as a political payoff for supporting the Three Gorges Dam, which will inundate riverside towns in the area.

"We have more infrastructure work going on here than anyplace else in China," Mr. Huang said. "When I say $200 billion a year, this is not some abstract number. It is really happening."

Mr. Huang spent most of a two-hour interview citing statistics to back up his point. He ticked off the highways (8), the ring roads (2), the bridges (8), the rail lines (4) and the sewage and trash facilities (4) among the projects that he said would turn Chongqing into a commercial gateway.

Like Chongqing, the capital city of Beijing is also pressing the central government to support a huge urban improvement plan, including subway lines, light rail, highways and even a giant opera house to dress up the city for the 2008 Olympics. Beijing estimates the cost at $34 billion, far more than potential revenue from the Olympics alone could justify.

Some economists argue that such investments are smart bets on the future. Only a small percentage of the urban population earns middle-class wages, and China cannot rely on consumer spending to spur growth the way most industrialized nations can.

China also needs to expand faster than wealthy countries to generate jobs for workers laid off by state-run factories and for farmers flocking to cities to seek something better than subsistence income.

"The government is sucking up savings and investing in the future," said Andy Xie, a regional economist for Morgan Stanley. "The financial returns on these kinds of investments are low. But the payoff for the economy is high."

Mr. Xie argues that China's work force is becoming significantly more efficient. He estimates that China is experiencing productivity growth of 4 percent a year. An eight-lane highway between two crowded cities greatly enhances productivity when it replaces a two-lane road. Cellphones have revolutionized communications in a place where fixed-line phones were scarce.

Fred Hu, chief China economist for Goldman Sachs, agrees. He argues that as China suffers through a period of falling prices and low consumer spending, Beijing is right to inject money into the economy.

"This is China's New Deal," Mr. Hu said. "Every problem is easier to solve when growth is faster."

Yet the risks are also mounting, in part because China is trying to outrun or perhaps run away from its inherited burden of socialist inefficiency. Banks still give loans to bankrupt factories to prevent labor unrest. Now, the government has taken to running a budget deficit of about 3 percent of economic output.

CLSA Emerging Markets, a Hong Kong-based brokerage firm, estimates that when official debt is added to bad loans at state banks and the unfinanced pensions of state workers, China's debt rises as high as 140 percent of economic output. That is as much as the burden now crippling Japan's economy.

"There is nothing wrong with investing in the future, but the question is whether they are doing enough to change the whole economic system," said Andy Rothman, China economist for CLSA.

Even within China's government, opposition has emerged. Some economists say privately they worry that the latest construction boom has become a binge of the sort that has repeatedly proved hazardous to China's health since the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950's.

A State Statistics Bureau report in August bemoaned copy-cat projects that waste state funds. The report cited one unidentified Chinese province that had 800 industrial parks under way at the same time, most of them unneeded. The bureau also said a rush to build airports had led to a glut, with 127 or the nation's 143 airports running losses.

But China is not tightening its belt. Like the departing leadership, China's new leaders, led by the new Communist Party general secretary, Hu Jintao, are under pressure to keep priming the economy.

During the leadership transition last fall, half a dozen cities publicized development plans with price tags in the billions. City leaders say they are focused on the future.

"It's a little crazy to be talking about adding so much capacity today," said Mr. Huang of Chongqing, acknowledging the unusual scope of his city's investment plans. "But in 20 years you will see what happens to this place and it will all make sense."

Made in China, Bought in China

Made in China, Bought in China
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/business/yourmoney/05CHIN.html

SHANGHAI

RARELY has a big international company spun its wheels as fecklessly as General Motors did when it first raced into China. Amid notions of fabled riches — if just one in a hundred Chinese drove Chevrolets! — G.M.'s 1992 foray collapsed after the company made about 300 pickup trucks, traded insults with its Chinese partner and entered local lore as another fool mesmerized by China's mythical market.

G.M. has a different story to tell now. Its four flexible production lines churn out a subcompact family car, a leather-lined executive sedan and six other models — 110,000 cars in 2002. Industry experts estimate that G.M.'s profit margins are at least twice as high on cars it makes in China as on similar models made in the United States. It is the skeptics, G.M. executives now say, who look like dupes.

"We had our moments of agony," said Philip Murtaugh, the company's top executive for China. "But I look back now and can say that China has been the smoothest and most successful venture G.M. has undertaken in recent history."

A year after China joined the World Trade Organization, and two decades after it began allowing foreign companies to invest locally, China is no longer the impenetrable enigma and inevitable money pit it long seemed. Plenty of foreign investors still lose money. But they are increasingly outnumbered by multinationals making profits that if not quite justifying the exaggeration of the 1990's, at least make China an indispensable part of their global operations.

Just as remarkable is the way they are making money. Foreign companies have long taken advantage of China's low-cost skilled labor to make goods for export: China is the leading exporter in the developing world, with foreign-financed companies accounting for about half, or $275 billion, of China's total exports last year.

But many multinationals have shifted their sights to the domestic market, which has become more lucrative and more openly competitive than many imagined even a few years ago. China's economy, defying the global slowdown, has had economic growth rates of 7 to 8 percent in recent years. While most Chinese cannot afford even low-end foreign-made goods, the average annual income of people living in eastern China has reached $1,200 a year, creating a lower-middle-income market of 470 million people — larger than in every other country in the world except India.

Companies invested record amounts in China last year, probably more than $55 billion, primarily because they now aim to tap Chinese consumers as well as its workers.

ALREADY, the Chinese buy more cellphones than consumers anywhere else. They buy more film than the Japanese. They now buy as many vehicles as the Germans. Foreign companies dominate sales in those categories and have a hefty presence in scores of others, like DVD players, electrical power, heavy equipment, shampoo, software, even hamburgers.

Foreign companies operating in China are not required under local accounting rules to provide financial information about their operations, and most decline to provide details for, they say, competitive reasons. Still, growing numbers of multinationals are boasting that their China business now pads their global bottom line.

For companies like Siemens of Germany and Motorola of the United States, China has become the single most important market for mobile phone handsets and equipment, accounting for billions of dollars in annual revenue and outsized profits, their executives in China say.

Toshiba, the Japanese electronics and industrial equipment giant, once used China as an export base. It now sells two-thirds of what it makes in its 34 China-based operations to the Chinese. Local sales reached $2 billion in 2001, according to the company's China president.

McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken have 700 Chinese restaurants between them and open scores more each year. Eastman Kodak controls an estimated 63 percent of the domestic market for rolled film, prompting some grumbling in the Chinese news media that it has become a near monopoly. Even Starbucks has found plenty of urban tea drinkers ready to spend $2.50 for a latte.

A few companies have turned to their China operations to support parent companies that have hit hard times. The fallen telecom titans Lucent Technologies and Nortel have suffered enormous losses globally but continue to benefit from big China contracts, including a nearly $1 billion order placed when China's president, Jiang Zemin, visited the United States in October.

Siemens's consistent profits on its nearly $4 billion in China sales "help make up for losses we've suffered in other parts of the world," says Peter A. Borger, chairman of its China holding company.

AES, the power company based in Arlington, Va., once settled for low-single-digit returns from the seven power plants in which it invested around China. But while AES struggles to pay off debt and restructure operations at home, returns from China have improved substantially.

"China is now the best-performing business in the whole corporation and one of the top cash generators," said Bill Ruccius, president of AES Orient. "I go home these days with a much nicer story to tell."

The success of a growing number of companies cuts against the persistent stereotype that China is a continental sinkhole for foreigners.

Since the age of Marco Polo, Westerners have tried, and usually failed, to create profitable businesses with the Middle Kingdom. Royal trade delegations failed to pry open the markets in the 1700's. British textiles makers never succeeded in lengthening Chinese shirttails by a foot, as the most exuberant among them imagined doing in the 19th century.

WHEN China opened its doors to Western investment in the 1980's, almost all of the pioneers struck out. AT&T, Chrysler, McDonnell Douglas, Goldman Sachs and Occidental Petroleum were among the global brand names that invested heavily, hoping to reap a bonanza. By the mid-1990's, every one of them had scaled back amid losses, inconsistent government policy and brighter opportunities elsewhere.

Though Procter & Gamble and a handful of other early investors began making sizable sales and profits in the mid-1990's, they were regarded as aberrations. Sooner or later, the prevailing wisdom had it, Chinese consumers would reject foreign-made products. The Communist government, it was thought, was happy to use foreign businesses to strengthen its domestic market and transfer technology but would ultimately make it impossible for them to collect steady profits at the expense of domestic rivals.

"Like adventurers in the quest for some fabled relic, investors press unendingly forward — if only on the basis that the legend may one day prove real," Joe Studwell, a leading commentator on the Chinese business world, wrote in his book "The China Dream," published last year. "The China investment proposition came down — as it always had — to hopes for the future."

To an extent, the image of China as a fickle, ornery place to do business is grounded in reality. China's corrupt legal system has only begun to honor property rights. Chinese entrepreneurs, with tacit support from local government officials, aggressively pirate Western products like cellphones, shampoo and software.

Tripping over one another to court China's bureaucrats, multinationals have overpaid for licenses, industrial land and office space. Those costs, along with the fact that they can rarely identify even small niches that are free of fierce competition, often mean steady losses.

Though P.& G. created the market for shampoo in the country — it promoted Head and Shoulders beginning in the late 1980's, when most Chinese washed their hair with soap — it has more recently run into difficulties, former company officials and retail industry experts say.

Rampant piracy of its shampoos and its Tide and Ariel laundry detergent brands hurts sales. Once-sleepy domestic brands, like White Cat laundry detergent and Slek shampoo, have challenged P.& G. as top sellers. That has confined P.& G. and Unilever of Europe, with their higher costs, to the narrow premium end of the market.

Other ardent suitors have withdrawn entirely. Maytag announced plans to sell its stake in a China joint venture last year after suffering persistent losses. Leading international brewers, like Bass of Britain, Foster's of Australia and Miller of the United States, steamrolled into China in the 1990's but have pulled back. Even Durex, the condom maker, has had to sue domestic rivals that it contends stole its brand name and undermined sales.

Yet the broader picture may be more sanguine.

Huang Yasheng, a professor at the Harvard Business School and an expert on foreign investment in China, argues that the undiminished enthusiasm of foreign companies reflects weaknesses in China's half-state-run, half-private economy that outsiders can exploit. China's failure to overhaul its money-losing state industries, and its traditional ideology-based discrimination against local private firms, has allowed foreigners to sell many high-technology goods that the government once saw as vital national priorities, he says.

Mr. Huang also disputes the idea that foreigners routinely lose money. Government statistics show that foreign-financed companies received about $27 billion in dividends in 2000, compared with $6 billion in 1996. The total volume of incoming investment has grown more slowly over the same period, suggesting that companies are making better returns on capital, he said.

A recent study by the International Monetary Fund, examining average returns for foreign investors in developing countries during the mid- to late 1990's, found that companies with operations in China, much like those in Brazil, Mexico and Turkey, earned returns of 13 percent to 14 percent on invested capital. China was only average among emerging markets during the period, but investors did substantially better there than those who put money in India, where returns were just 6 percent.

"Foreign companies are not being stupid," Mr. Huang said. "Even in many of the capital-intensive industries, you see Western firms making good profits because domestic firms are so weak."

The auto industry, for example, has proved ripe. Though the government once tightly controlled nearly all aspects of production, investment and sales, it has relaxed its grip in recent years.

A more genial regulatory environment has paid off for G.M. After its initial frustration, the company agreed to open a modern factory with a Shanghai partner in 1997. Critics derided G.M. for agreeing to invest $1.5 billion in China after flopping miserably. Many also argued that its decision to make a high-end Buick sedan geared to Chinese executives looked risky.

The Buick sold briskly, however. Late last month, the company unveiled a remodeled Buick tailored to the local market. It has a bright chrome grill and a plush interior, with DVD players on the back of the front seats for people who ride in the rear. G.M. has had little trouble adding models, including several aimed at Chinese families. The company had hoped to sell 100,000 vehicles annually after five years of operation, but it reached that annual target in November, a year and a month ahead of schedule.

LIKE G.M., many other multinationals stumbled before finding their footing. Microsoft found trouble almost as soon as it began marketing its Windows software in 1995. It peddled a version of the program translated into Mandarin by Taiwanese employees, who embedded some standard Taiwanese anti-Communist phraseology in the Chinese-language entry system, alarming mainland users.

Beijing has also encouraged local companies to adopt the Linux operating system, the free rival to Windows, because of domestic fears that the American government could use the secret Windows software code to gather information surreptitiously, a suspicion Microsoft called unfounded. Moreover, some 90 percent of Chinese computers run illegally copied versions of Microsoft's software.

Yet Microsoft has begun to turn things around. Late last year, it persuaded nearly all the major Chinese computer makers to pre-install — and prepay Microsoft — for the latest operating system, Windows XP. The Chinese news media have reported that the payment is nearly $80 a computer, not much less than what American computer makers pay.

"China is really improving the environment across the board for software makers," said Tom Robinson, one of Microsoft's Asia executives. He said the company's revenue in China is growing at a 40 percent rate, but he declined to provide numbers.

IN the hypercompetitive market for consumer electronics, where nearly all the major international brand names have battled local companies, no one makes a consistent profit, industry analysts say. One exception in 2001 was Toshiba's joint venture in the northeastern city of Dalian, where it makes high-end projection TV's for wealthy Chinese.

"Of the 70 companies making color television in China, just one, ours, made a profit in 2001," said Nobumasa Hirata, the chief executive of Toshiba China, citing Chinese government statistics. "That shows that it is difficult, but that it can be done."

Over all, Toshiba's far-flung China operations, making notebook computers, refrigerators and industrial automation equipment, among other things, now operate in the black, though only marginally so, Mr. Hirata said. He said China suffers from an inadequate legal system and favoritism for local companies. But, he added, Toshiba has found the market more promising than his bosses in Tokyo had expected.

"The stereotype is still a country that has cheap labor, for export only," Mr. Hirata said. "But we have been surprised to see how big the domestic market has become."

For mobile-telephone companies, China long ago went beyond the realm of potential. By the end of the year, China had registered more than 200 million mobile-phone users. Two foreign companies, Motorola and Nokia of Finland, have dominated handset sales. They joined Ericsson of Sweden and Siemens in supplying equipment for China's mobile telecommunications networks.

Domestic producers have bulked up and forced prices down. But locals like TCL and Bird have yet to catch the foreign rivals. Motorola increased its share this year, jumping ahead of Nokia and accounting for nearly a third of all handset sales, according to local government data.

Motorola's success took patience. It has invested $3.5 billion in China in the last decade and built a semiconductor plant in Tianjin that is the first of its kind in China. Now the country accounts for almost 15 percent of Motorola's global revenue, company executives say.

Though telecommunications has long been a sensitive area in the one-party state, Motorola officials say Beijing has started to treat foreigners and domestic companies comparably. That eases fears that China will one day nationalize the industry.

"We used to all have to be government relations experts because any time anything came up we all had to deal with the government," said Jim Gradoville, a top company executive in China. "But increasingly it's clear that the deck is by no means stacked against us."

Wealthy Chinese Businessman Killed

Wealthy Chinese Businessman Killed
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/international/23WEB-SHOO.html

BEIJING, Jan. 23 — One of China's wealthiest businessmen was shot dead on Tuesday in what investigating police said may have been a vengeful murder.

The killing of the businessman, Li Haicang, who was named as one of China's richest people last year, has prompted concern here about the personal safety of China's newly rich business owners.

Mr. Li, 47, was shot in the head by a man who burst into his office in the small city of Yuncheng, Shanxi province, about 120 miles southwest of Beijing. His killer, Feng Yinliang, then shot himself, said local police.

Mr. Li owned the Haixin Group, which is Shanxi's biggest private company and last year claimed sales worth $360 million. He was also prominent on the political stage as a deputy chairman of China's peak business chamber.

Mr. Feng, was an old friend of Mr. Li and owned a failed factory. Mr. Feng tried several times to force Mr. Li to buy his factory's land and killed him after a last unsuccessful attempt, according to the China News Agency. An officer in Yuncheng's police refused to verify this report or discuss Mr. Feng's motives. "This is a major crime," he said. "The Ministry of Public Security's leaders have told us to not to spare any efforts to solve it."

Mr. Li made his fortune from coal processing and steel making in Yuncheng, which boasts abundant coal reserves but also a reputation for lawlessness. In recent years, it has attracted nationwide attention for a string of corruption cases, especially illegal coal mines that operated with the collusion of corrupt officials.

Mr. Li told an interviewer last year, "The essence of an entrepreneur is to primitively, brazenly make money for oneself and accumulate wealth."

He started his Haixin company with $50,000 in loans in 1987; by last year it claimed to have assets worth $365 million. Last year he was placed on Forbes magazine's list of mainland China's richest people; the magazine estimated his personal fortune at $195 million.

The list attracts intense publicity in China, and some of the people listed have complained about the envious speculation and unwelcome scrutiny appearing on it attracts. Other businessmen listed in the past have been charged with tax evasion or financial fraud.

Private Chinese industrialists contacted said they were shocked by the murder.

Shen Wenrong, another prominent private steel mill owner, said: "Personal safety is a concern not just for private businessmen but all entrepreneurs everywhere. It happens in every country, and now China has entrepreneurs it may also sometimes happen here.''

Vietnam, Poor but Orderly, Is Now Tourists' Safe Haven

Vietnam, Poor but Orderly, Is Now Tourists' Safe Haven
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/international/asia/05VIET.html

HANOI, Vietnam, Jan. 4 — A generation after a war that made its jungles and rice paddies famous as places of violence and death, Vietnam is now relying on its relative stability to draw security-conscious foreign tourists.

The Sept. 11 attacks, followed by bombings in Bali on Oct. 12, have contributed to a tourism boom in Vietnam that has packed upscale hotels and filled most international flights here.

Many tourists say, and tourism industry officials agree, that they were interested in coming anyway as Vietnam increasingly opens to the outside world.

But the tourists say that Vietnam's near absence of Muslims, who make up less than 1 percent of the population, as well as the country's controlled Communist society are reassuring at a time of travel warnings and attacks elsewhere.

As John and Melissa Ryan, clothing store owners from Berkeley, Calif., rode a puttering motorboat up a palm-lined river toward Hoi An in central Vietnam a few days ago, both said they had no worries about terrorism in Vietnam.

"It's Buddhist and Communist; I don't think the Communists would tolerate Muslim radicals at all," Mr. Ryan said, as the boat passed traditional fishermen in wood boats casting small, round fishing nets by hand into the muddy, slow-moving water.

In 2001, 8.9 percent more tourists entered Vietnam than in the previous year, even as the Sept. 11 attacks produced a sharp drop in travel to many other countries. The number of foreign tourists rose another 12 percent in the first 11 months of 2002, compared with the same period a year earlier.

Tourism here increased despite the fact that flights to Vietnam are sparse and expensive. Government-owned Vietnam Airlines has severely limited the number of international flights here by foreign carriers. The limited competition has kept ticket prices among the highest in Asia.

The tourism growth has been brisk enough to prompt the opening of new hotels, after years of problems for the country's tourism industry. Like many countries in Southeast Asia, Vietnam had built too many hotels in the boom of the mid-1990's, only to have some of them close during the region's financial crisis of 1997 and 1998.

Construction of the Sheraton Saigon Hotel and Towers and Executive Residences complex, in what is now called Ho Chi Minh City, was completed in early 1999, but the building was sealed up and left unfurnished. But at the end of 2001, the owners and the management company, Six Continents, which owns the Sheraton brand, decided to open the complex.

All but 3 of the 92 apartments have been rented, and a luxury store selling Versace, Bulgari and Armani fashions to tourists is being opened, said Sean Hunt, the general manager of the project. He said the 380-room hotel would open in May.

"Vietnam is continuing to grow in popularity because it's perceived to be a safe haven and a safe place to do business," Mr. Hunt said.

Vietnam has also preserved many old buildings, especially in cities like Hoi An and Hanoi, as anemic economic growth, at least until recently, has discouraged the demolition of historic neighborhoods to build skyscrapers. Parts of Hanoi still look very French, even though Vietnam's colonial rulers left nearly half a century ago.

Vietnam's continued poverty, especially compared with more affluent, capitalist countries in East Asia, has made it a bargain, aside from the air fare. Taxi rides can cost $1, while tailor-made suits sell for as little as $40, although the quality of the stitching is sometimes suspect.

While tourism in Vietnam is booming, the number of visitors to Bali has not fallen as much as the tourism industry there had feared.

Visits to Phuket Island, a Cancun-like resort area in a heavily Muslim area of southern Thailand, appear to have recovered as well.

Accor S.A., the largest hotel operator in East Asia with 200 hotels, suffered a drop of 15 to 20 percent from a year earlier in visits to its Bali hotels in December, said David Baffsky, the chairman of the company's Asian and Pacific operations.

But, he added, "The hotels in Bali were busier than a lot of people expected over Christmas and particularly over New Year's."

Some human rights groups have urged tourists not to visit Myanmar, the former Burma, to avoid providing financial support for the ruling military regime. There has been no comparable effort by human rights groups to discourage tourists from shifting their plans away from countries like Indonesia, which has its own history of human rights violations.

But some travelers are skipping Thailand and Indonesia on their own initiative after reports of security threats. In fact, some visitors to Vietnam are coming from places with their own security concerns.

John and Sheila Bernson are Americans who live and work in Beirut, Lebanon, which has become much quieter in recent years after a civil war and kidnappings in the 1980's.

The couple headed straight for Vietnam for their New Year's vacation this week.

"I wouldn't even consider Phuket," Sheila Bernson said.

Call It the City of Darkness, and Give It Vitamin D

Call It the City of Darkness, and Give It Vitamin D
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/06/international/europe/06PARI.html

PARIS, Jan. 5 — These are dark days in the City of Light.

It is a cruel trick played on those who are not forewarned. Paris is a northern city, on about the same latitude as Seattle and Vancouver. New York, by contrast, sits on a level with Madrid and Naples.

So when winter comes, Paris's northern position combines with humidity, above-freezing temperatures, the absence of fierce winds and a location at the bottom of a basin to rob the city of sun and light.

Daylight arrives well after 8 a.m. and leaves only eight hours later. Even as the days begin to grow longer now that the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, has passed, the demons of darkness linger.

"People develop a hope for light," said Damien Léger, a Paris neurophysiologist. "You wake up in the morning, wishing, expecting light or sun. When the sky is gray, the atmosphere dark, it can rob you of energy and motivation."

The darkness has such an effect that the French government's generous medical insurance program covers medical consultations for those who grow depressed because of the waning light of winter. The syndrome — clinically known as seasonal affective disorder, more commonly as the winter blues — affects as much as 20 percent of the population, according to studies.

Consultations cost about $30 in public medical practices and are covered by medical insurance. The light treatment itself, in which patients sit in front of a special light for a specific period of time, costs about $5 a session and must be paid for by the patient. Dr. Léger, who did an internship at Stanford University, is lobbying for full insurance coverage.

"It's preventive medicine," he said. "And it's less expensive than medications and antidepressants."

A specialist in sleeping disorders, Dr. Léger uses four broad-spectrum fluorescent lights of 300 watts each in his office and 10 more that he lends to patients. One of the most popular lights, a large, round-edged modernistic white object that sits on a desk, sells commercially for $300 in the beauty department at Paris's main BHV department store.

Olivier Lacaille, the lamp buyer at BHV, said typical buyers were physically active people over 35 who are concerned about their health. At the moment, the lamps are sold out, and there is a waiting list.

Still, there is skepticism about the treatment.

"My colleagues know about my therapy, but they think it's absurd," said a 52-year-old female hospital administrator who receives regular light therapy but asked that only her first name, Eliane, be used. "They can't believe it works."

Pediatricians in Paris are so concerned about the effect of light deprivation in babies that they routinely recommend Vitamin D supplements until babies are 18 months old. "Ultraviolet rays help the body develop Vitamin D, and when there is no sun, there is more likelihood of vitamin deficiency," said Dr. Gérard Cheron, a pediatrician at the Necker Hospital.

Certainly the atmospheric gray of Paris winters can affect creativity. Painters — like Camille Pissarro in "Boulevard Montmartre: Foggy Morning" — captured the spectrum of Paris gray.

Ernest Hemingway simply got depressed. "All the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter," he wrote in "A Moveable Feast."

Despite the French appetite for surveys, there is only anecdotal evidence to suggest that this season has been particularly dark.

"In my memory I don't remember such a terribly dark winter, and I'm 80 years old," said Marc Riboud, the celebrated photographer. "But I must say that while I love the sun for my body, I love the gray for my work. The sun is kitsch for me, like postcards. But the shade and mist let me dream."

Gianluca Allaria, a 32-year-old Web designer, by contrast, longs for the light of his native Turin, in Italy.

"When you live in a city in the south, you can always hope for a ray of light, if not today, then tomorrow for sure," he said. "Here there's not even the hope that you'll see light. The strange thing is that I work more now. It's so dark and ugly outside that I focus on what I have to do here, but I have to force myself."

The habitual grayness affects Paris weather reports, which tend to have a certain sameness about them. One exception is the lively daily tabloid Le Parisien. Under the headline, "This is truly not joy," a report on a recent Sunday said, "From the morning on, as you go to get your bread and croissants at your favorite bakery, you will be immediately struck: there are gray clouds engorged with water that will dominate your day at home."

Another report on a recent Monday read: "The sky, desperately dull, will not be able to motivate those who are feeling bad to go back to work. The heavy clouds, gray and menacing, dull the most optimistic spirits even more than the horizon."

As for Paris's century-old nickname as the City of Light, it has nothing to do with the atmosphere. The seven-month-long Paris Fair of 1900 included a Palace of Electricity that displayed light encapsulated in glass and electrical motors that became symbols of modernity.

Paris became one of the first urban centers to light its streets, factories and department stores — artificially, with electric light.

Tropical Drama on Kauai

Tropical Drama on Kauai
By LISA FUGARD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/travel/12kauai.html

IT was pouring in paradise. Sitting in the dining alcove of the Jungle Cabana, a secluded cottage down a dirt road on Kauai's verdant north shore, my husband, John, and I listened to the roar of the stream just 15 feet from our doorway, the splash of water sluicing off the eaves and the PLAT! PLAT! PLAT! of raindrops pelting the leaves of the banana trees.

We couldn't go exploring, so we decided to see what Hollywood had made of this island, the lushest in the Hawaiian archipelago. We riffled through the stack of videos beside the TV - "Jurassic Park," "King Kong," "South Pacific" and several others with footage shot on Kauai - and settled for the dinosaurs.

In geological terms Kauai is a youthful five million years old; the Velociraptors had been extinct for at least 70 million years when it emerged in the Pacific. The island's terrain includes the Na Pali coast, with dizzying cliffs and valleys so narrow they're accessible only by foot or by boat; Waimea Canyon, a mile and a half wide in places, with walls that look like richly embroidered tapestry in the late afternoon light; and Mount Waialeale, one of the wettest spots on earth, receiving 400 to 600 inches of rain a year. Why-AH-lee-AH-lee - say it swiftly and the tongue flips like a fish around the watery syllables.

Waves from storms in the north Pacific can pound the north shore in November, when we visited; fortunately we woke to clearing skies and went into the village of Hanalei for breakfast. The single-lane wooden bridges punctuating the five-mile drive led us over brimming rivers dotted with fallen hibiscus flowers. White horses grazed in jade green fields and waterfalls graced the steeply sloping mountains. At various bends in the road I saw waves raging across hidden beaches, the same beaches that in the summer months are the epitome of a tropical fantasy.

We'd actually arrived on Kauai two days earlier and had stayed at Garden Isle Cottages in Poipu on the south shore, where it rains considerably less. We'd snorkeled with green sea turtles and dined well, but there were too many resorts in the area for our liking. So we headed to Hanalei, where lithe young girls in sarongs linger in the small shopping center, clinging to the tattooed arms of Hawaiian boys, and men in their 50's who look as though they haven't cut their beards since the 60's pedal along the twisting road. A bonus was the proximity to the Kalalau Trail, which scales the cliffs and dips into the valleys of the Na Pali coast for 11 miles.

A day permit is required to hike more than two miles of the trail, and after coffee and eggs at Hanalei Wake Up Cafe, a no-frills breakfast joint, we drove to the Division of State Parks in Lihue some 35 miles away. The island's main road can get horribly congested at times, and we passed several shops offering "Discount Activities." There was a catch. To get the deal on the helicopter ride or the kayak trip, we'd have to sit through a time-share presentation.

It was with some relief that we returned to the laid-back Hanalei Valley and spent the rest of the day browsing the eclectic shops in the village. At dusk I had the first of many contemplative soaks in the outdoor bathtub beneath a banana tree with leaves large as surfboards. The Jungle Cabana has cooking facilities, but we always opted for eating out. The casual riverside Hanalei Dolphin, where we devoured mahi-mahi, delicate butaguchi, opakapaka and a sublime ahi steak, was our favorite.

By 7 the next morning we were hiking up the steep first mile of the Kalalau Trail, past hala trees with their aerial roots and strange pineapplelike fruit, stopping at the lookouts to see Kee Beach, a sliver to our right and towering hazy sea cliffs to the left. The second mile of the trail traverses a valley and then drops steeply toward treacherous Hanakapiai Beach, where there have been numerous drownings and winter seas scour away the sand, leaving a rocky shore.

It's worth getting the permit because the trail beyond Hanakapiai is thrilling; instead of approaching the Na Pali coast, I now felt enveloped by it. A series of switchbacks led us through a forest of sisal plant with monstrous flower spikes, and as the vertiginous and very narrow path curled up the sheer cliffs, the views grew more astounding.

Just under a mile beyond Hanakapiai Beach, we reached the high point of the Kalalau Trail, one of the most exhilarating rest stops I've encountered on a coastal hike. A frigate bird soared by and I perched on a rock and peered down the cliff at the stormy manganese blue sea, so astonishingly alive 840 feet below me, as if it were being manipulated by giant invisible hands.

We retraced our steps, and on reaching Hanakapiai Beach we decided to take the side hike to 410-foot Hanakapiai Falls. It's a four-mile round trip, and though the trail is relatively level, the final stretch involves much root grabbing and rock clambering.

The wildlife sightings along the trail were odd - one dozy mouse, a curious rat and a composed black cat - and they speak of the isolation of the Hawaiian islands. The only indigenous mammals are the monk seal and the hoary bat. Rodents, goats, pigs and deer were all introduced, intentionally or accidentally, often with devastating effect.

Hanakapiai Falls were shaded when we finally reached them by midafternoon, and rather austere looking - Scotland in the tropics, the pool at the bottom Macbeth's bathtub. John and another fellow waded in and brrr'd and whooped in manly fashion, but the true indicator of the temperature came from a young woman who bayed and wailed like a loon and finally let out a truly blood-curdling scream as she sank into the icy water. Later on we read in a guidebook that it's not advisable to swim in the pool because of falling rocks.

By the time we got back to the trailhead, we had done a 10-mile hike, and blisters and aching muscles temporarily halted any further adventuring. The following day we visited Limahuli Botanical Garden in the lovely Limahuli valley, a few miles shy of the start of the Kalalau Trail. Rising up behind the garden is Mount Makana, also known as Bali Hai. The well-preserved stone terracing, built by early Hawaiians to grow taro, dates back 700 years, and a self-guided trail takes one past examples of indigenous vegetation the garden is devoted to saving, as well as plants introduced by the Polynesians who settled the Hawaiian islands.

Later we snorkeled at gorgeous Kee Beach. The Picasso triggerfish I was hoping to see remained elusive, but I saw Moorish idols, orange-spine unicorn fish and one that must surely be named the Miró fish.

Of course, we watched "South Pacific" that evening. Who could resist that score and Mitzi Gaynor singing, "I'm in Love With a Wonderful Guy" with the waves of Lumahai Beach - a short distance away from the Jungle Cabana - breaking behind her.

John and I were singing show tunes when, two mornings later, we drove to Port Allen on the west side of the island to board the Blue Dolphin for a seven-and-a-half-hour round-trip boat ride up the Na Pali coast and onto Niihau, a privately owned island, for snorkeling or scuba diving. We chose Blue Dolphin Charters out of the many companies offering boat tours because, for an additional $25, they offer a scuba dive for certified divers. For the same fee, they offer a PADI-approved Discover Scuba course for those like me who are interested in diving but are not yet certified. After a brief on-deck training session, I would get a half-hour dive under the supervision of an instructor.

Spinner dolphins undulated in front of the catamaran as we cruised gently out of the harbor, but winter swells soon set the boat heaving. I gripped the railing in the bow with the other first-time divers and learned how to equalize the pressure in my ears and clear my mask if it filled up with water. On the lower deck several people with blanched faces grimly sipped ginger ale; at the roughest moment of our trip at least one-quarter of the 39 people on board were seasick. By the time we reached the Na Pali coast, where waves ravaged the sea caves and rock arches and the rippling emerald cliffs looked more ominous than beautiful, I too felt a little queasy.

At noon we dropped anchor between Niihau and Lehua Rock, the husk of an extinct volcano. Weighted with air tanks and weight belts, three of us made the 10-foot jump into the rough water. Five minutes later, the two other beginners quit. I couldn't blame them; I was feeling fearful also. The dive instructor worked with me and, gulping down air, I proved to him and myself that I could indeed remove my regulator underwater and replace it without panicking. I diligently equalized my ear pressure, then dived deeper, below the chop, and found myself suspended in an astonishing world where dozens of butterfly fish floated around me like yellow petals. An endangered Hawaiian monk seal, aptly named because it looked cowled, glided by, the abbot of Lehua checking on the novitiate in his underwater domain. Feeling increasingly confident, I gave numerous A-O.K. hand signs to the instructor, who took me down 38 feet through swirling schools of fish to the urchin-studded reef. We drifted close to a sudden drop-off where several small black-tipped reef sharks had congregated, and I stared down the blue expanse at the wall that the certified divers were exploring.

The dive sites off Niihau are some of Hawaii's finest, and I felt fortunate to have seen such a pristine and seemingly balanced environment. As stunning as the Kalalau Trail had been, I knew many of the tropical plants were introduced and highly invasive, and I wondered what Kauai had looked like before humans arrived with their ginger plants and stowaway rats, their mangoes and glossy jungle fowl.

The upland forests are some of the best places to see indigenous vegetation, and for our last excursion John and I joined two others for an educational day hike in the Waimea Canyon area with Chuck Blay, a geologist and naturalist who runs Kauai Nature Tours. The five-mile loop trail led through a cloud forest of shaggy barked ohia trees and fringed koa trees with their sickle-shaped leaves. I stopped frequently to nibble on strawberry guavas and banana passion fruit - invasive but extremely tasty.

The trail eventually led to a ridge above the rim of the canyon with views of walls mottled with black and mustards and pink and brown. White-tailed tropic birds traced the curves of the canyon as did the occasional helicopter with tourists on board.

After lunch and a fascinating talk on geology - Kauai is moving northwest at 3.4 inches a year, but don't ask me to explain why - we headed back into the forest. I lagged behind, listening to the birds, many of which are endangered, and wondered if what I was sensing was what the Polynesians had felt when they explored their new land. The forest had an air of quiet expectancy, as if the island of Kauai had taken a deep breath and was poised, on the cusp, about to exhale.

Visitor Information

Getting There

We flew to Honolulu and then to Lihue, the main town on Kauai; from there it's a 25-minute drive to Poipu and a 50-minute drive to Hanalei (except at rush hour). All major car rental companies have reservation desks at the airport; a smaller car is best suited to the many narrow roads.

The romantic one-room Jungle Cabana, 10 minutes from the town of Hanalei near the end of Alaeke Road, (808) 826-5141 or (888) 886-4969, www.junglecabana.com, has a kitchenette, dining alcove and queen-size bed. It is simply decorated with blue batik curtains and woven bamboo flooring; the tub and shower are outdoors in a screened garden with gorgeous tropical vegetation. The rates are $110 a night, double occupancy (four-night minimum), $730 for seven nights; there is a one-time $60 cleaning charge.

Also available on the estatelike property are the larger Jungle Bungalow and the Jungle Paradise House.

The four spacious units that make up Garden Isle Cottages are at 2660 Puuholo Road, a quiet lane in Koloa, near Poipu, and overlook an inlet that sea turtles visit at dusk; (808) 742-6717, (800) 742-6711, www.oceancottages.com. All units have one bedroom and a living room with a double bed, either full kitchens or kitchenettes, and original works of art. Rates are $170 a night, double occupancy, through April 15; $149 April 15 through Dec. 15.

Places to Eat

Hanalei Wake Up Cafe on Aku Road, (808) 826-5551, opens at 6.30 a.m. Breakfast for two starts at $14.

The Hanalei Dolphin is at 5-5016 Kuhio Highway, (808) 826-6113, as one enters Hanalei. The appetizers were disappointing but the fresh fish was superb and simply prepared, either grilled or blackened. Dinner for two without drinks or dessert runs about $55. A modest bottle of wine is $24; beer from $4. No reservations.

Expeditions

Kauai Nature Tours, (808) 742-8305, (888) 233-8365, www.kauainaturetours.com.The day hike in the Waimea Canyon area cost us $92 a person, including bottled water, snacks and a sandwich lunch. The company also leads hikes along the Kalalau Trail and one along the Mahaulepu coast in the southern part of the island.

Blue Dolphin Charters, (808) 335-5553, (877) 511-1311, www.kauaiboats.com. A tour of the Na Pali coast and a visit to

Niihau for snorkeling costs $149. Scuba diving is $25 extra whether you are certified or are signing up for the Discover Scuba dive. A light breakfast and a generous sandwich lunch are included in the price, as are drinks including beer, wine and mai tais. Snorkel gear is provided.

Limahuli Botanical Garden, (808) 826-1053, is in Limahuli Valley on the Kuhio Highway a mile before the road ends at Kee Beach; $10 for the self-guided trail; reservations can be made for a guided tour, $15 a person. Open Tuesday through Friday 9.30 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday.

For the Kalalau Trail, day hike permits can be obtained at the Division of State Parks, 3060 Eiwa Street, Lihue; (808) 274-3444. (A permit is not needed for the first two miles.) You have to state the day you intend to hike as the permit is only good for one day. A limited number of overnight camping permits are also available for $10 a person per night. (Day permits available only in person; overnight permits also by mail; applications are available at www.hawaii.gov/dlnr/dsp/dsp.html.) The trail is quite steep at times, but that didn't deter the families with young children we saw during our hike. After heavy rains it can be muddy, and I found a hiking stick useful.

We got our first-rate snorkel gear from Snorkel Bob's at 3236 Poipu Road in Koloa; (808) 742-2206. Open 8 a.m to 5 p.m. daily.

LISA FUGARD is a short-story writer.

In Going Legit, Some Russian Tycoons Resort to Honesty

In Going Legit, Some Russian Tycoons Resort to Honesty
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/weekinreview/12SCHM.html

MOSCOW — In the prospectus that the curiously named Russian food company Wimm-Bill-Dann prepared for its initial public offering in New York, it revealed that one of the principal owners had spent nine years in prison, and warned that this could hurt investors.

That one owner had a criminal record might not be very surprising, given the heavy reliance of Russia's first "beeznissmeny" on stealing, lying and sometimes killing. But confessing it before the whole world, and vowing thereafter to be squeaky clean according to the highest Western standards, was startling.

It paid off handsomely. Wimm-Bill-Dann, the Russian market leader in dairy products and juices, successfully raised $161 million in the offering last year (the name, pronounced VIM-beel-dun and familiar to all Russians, apparently stands for nothing more than the founders' fondness for tennis and Wimbledon).

The lesson of Wimm-Bill-Dan and a handful of other major Russian companies that have chosen to abandon the more familiar Russian approach to business has made "transparency" and "corporate governance" — business-speak for honesty — something of a fad, at least among the bigger and more profitable businesses.

The leading light of corporate virtue these days is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who used to personify the predatory Russian oligarch as the head of Yukos, Russia's second-largest oil company. After a two-year campaign to remake the company's image, Yukos now embraces the latest Western precepts for corporate candor. That, and generous gifts from Mr. Khodorkovsky's new "Open Russia" foundation, have opened wide for him the gates to respectability and honor (and capital) in Washington and London.

The 39-year-old tycoon does not pretend that he was struck by a revelatory flash on the road to Damascus. Being nice to investors and honest in the market, he says, "in the short term is to your advantage." He really doesn't need to elaborate. Investors have snapped up the cleaner, whiter Yukos, in the process raising Mr. Khodorkovsky's stake to more than $7 billion and quite possibly making him the richest man in Russia.

Many Russians are understandably skeptical of the newfound honesty, as is Charles Ryan, an American who runs United Financial Group, a Moscow investment bank. "Certainly there's a fad to appear honest — it's self-interest," he said. "If you do it, you can keep what you stole. The world is very forgiving of wealth.

"Those who had principled positions in the past are now asking, if these guys are getting accepted in the West, what am I doing?" Mr Ryan said. "So now they're going to work for the businesses run by oligarchs."

Still, to some degree the apparent transformation of some predators into model citizens confirms the faith of those economists who preached that all successful robber barons sooner or later seek to go legit.

In the early 1990's, when the government of Boris Yeltsin first embarked on a chaotic sell-off of state properties, those who managed to grab something tried to turn it into cash, and to squirrel the cash abroad as quickly as possible, since nobody knew what might come next.

A few of these "new Russians" hit the jackpot in 1995 when they agreed to support Mr. Yeltsin's re-election campaign in a "loans-for-shares" compact that netted them some of Russia's most valuable properties, including the oil companies, at bargain-basement prices.

A new chapter opened in August 1998, when Russia's bubble economy burst, crushing many banks but also chasing off get-rich-quick speculators and bringing the ruble down to a more realistic level. Then in 2000, Vladimir Putin was elected, and before long, oil prices began to climb, finally giving the country a measure of stability and sobriety. Those at the top of the economic pyramid began to realize that there was more to gain from protecting what they had than from continuing to strip it.

For one thing, it is now possible to plan ahead, at least for the eight years that Mr. Putin can be president under current rules. More important, a well-managed company attracted Western capital, and going public created far more value for major shareholders than whatever they could siphon from their business.

In addition, big-name foreign shareholders provided protection against corrupt bureaucrats or predatory oligarchs. A listing on the New York or London exchanges came to be seen as the Good Housekeeping seal of legitimacy, since it required meeting stringent standards.

At the same time, a new generation of executives came on stream. These were young Russians without Soviet hang-ups. Many had studied or worked abroad and were at home in Western-style management.

To be sure, the conversion to honesty has hardly been universal. Last fall, a survey by Standard & Poor's of corporate openness, measured by how much a company discloses, gave Russia an average score of only 34 out of a possible 98, well below that of Asia and just a notch above Latin America. The survey did note, however, that some Russian companies, including Wimm-Bill-Dann, were at West European levels of transparency and disclosure.

In other words, while there has been progress, the "Wild East" is hardly tamed as yet. The star of Russian "beezniss" these days is a tycoon named Oleg Deripaska, who at only 34 has accumulated a business empire through ruthless and elaborate, though technically legal, takeover raids.

To Yulia Latynina, a sharp-tongued television host on the TVS station who has reported extensively on business, the difference between Mr. Deripaska and Mr. Khodorkovsky is not in morality or mind-set, but simply in strategy.

"It's not a question of intentions, but of pure business," Ms. Latynina said. "There are two possible strategies, one to increase the price of assets, the other to increase assets. The one strategy requires being utterly transparent. The other requires grabbing judges, giving bribes and being utterly untransparent. This is not cynicism. It's just the stage we're at."

Anatoly Karachinsky, a computer geek who built a highly successful company, Information Business Systems, argued that it was simply stupid for successful companies like his to stay in the shadow or black economies.

"You invest in transparency the same as you invest in R & D," he said. "It's value, and to lose it is senseless. I could save five or six million dollars in the shadow economy, but I'd have no value."

Grabbing a handful of felt pens, Mr. Karachinsky jumped to a board to show that the rule applied only to the relative handful of businessmen who already controlled a large part of the economy. (According to Standard & Poor's, fewer than 50 Russian businesses control about 98 percent of Russia's capital market.)

For small and middle businesses, the obstacles to emerging from the shadows were simply too high. A recent study by the Center for Economic and Financial Research in Moscow and the World Bank found that any small business trying to grow ran up against a glass ceiling of bureaucratic corruption, feeble laws and rapacious rivals. The problem is especially acute in the provinces, where Soviet-style bosses still have a choke-hold on politics and business.

"Russia changes, but Russians don't change," many a skeptical Russian mutters. But even if corporate honesty is a phenomenon limited, for now, to the pinnacle of the food chain, the very fact that the experiment has been succeeding so publicly and so profitably seems bound to win more converts. Already small shareholders are becoming emboldened to demand greater openness from their companies, and successful banks are beginning to demand more information from smaller businesses seeking loans.

"They still need a culture shift to perceive that it is in their interest to follow laws," said William D. Morris, a lawyer with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, an American law firm with extensive business in Russia. "But the biggest positive event for this is the favorable response to the reforms of major companies."

Graying, and Playing With Trains

Graying, and Playing With Trains
By TERRY PRISTIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/15/nyregion/15MODE.html

Go past the railroad crossing sign, descend a flight of stairs and there, in a grimy basement store crammed with as many as 100,000 items, Allan J. Spitz can usually be found behind the counter. Often his cat, Kibri, is draped over his shoulders as he briskly dispenses advice to a stream of customers, most of them middle-aged and male.

Mr. Spitz, 56, who conducts business in midwinter wearing torn Bermuda shorts and rubber sandals, is the owner of the Red Caboose, one of two shops specializing in model trains that face each other across 45th Street between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas.

The Red Caboose and its neighbor, Manhattan Train and Hobby, are remnants of what was once a thriving little district catering to model train enthusiasts. At one time, there were five such stores on 45th and 46th Streets, including one run by a colorful entrepreneur known as Ma Webster that was in the space now occupied by the Red Caboose. In 1952, that store had 14 employees; Mr. Spitz makes do with two, at most.

The two existing stores are struggling to survive, a reflection of the hobby's waning popularity — nationally, and not just in New York, where apartments seldom can accommodate the space-devouring displays known as layouts. "I don't think there's enough business for two stores," Mr. Spitz said. "I don't know if there's enough business for one store."

In the pre-jet-age 1950's, it seemed as if every boy coveted a train set made by Lionel, once the world's leading toy manufacturer. But these days, model trains are an increasingly geriatric pursuit. Fifteen years ago, the average customer was 43. Today, he — and the customer is almost always a "he" — is at least 50. The average age of members of the National Model Railroad Association, a promotional organization in Chattanooga, Tenn., is 55, said Gordon Belt, the library director.

Today's customer is more likely to be someone like James R. Songer, a Manhattan architect, who returned to model trains after a lapse of many decades, a familiar pattern among older railroaders. At 63, he is trying to recreate the El Dorado, Kan., of his boyhood, when the Santa Fe and Missouri Pacific railroads came through town belching black smoke. Working in N-scale (one-160th the size of an actual train), Mr. Songer expects to spend $12,000 on his meticulously researched project, which will include a doodlebug, the one-car train that shuttled between nearby towns, and the luxury Chief, Super Chief and El Capitan trains.

Mr. Songer said he could still remember what the trains sounded like as they roared through town. "There's nothing that brings such intense pleasure than doing something that takes the skill and patience of a hobby and is connected to those childhood memories," he said.

Michael Dickey, 39, an investment banker who is originally from Pennsylvania, started with an N-scale layout of the Starrucca Viaduct in Susquehanna County, Pa., and accumulated a dozen engines and 60 cars. He painted them to look weathered and painstakingly built scenery.

Now that he has a 3-year-old son, Mr. Dickey has taken up the more kid-friendly G-scale (the real thing is 22.5 times larger), and is storing his N-scale layout in his basement. "You've got to be constantly building," he said.

It is easy to imagine that there are many reasons this kind of exacting work has less appeal to young people than it used to. Model trains are an expensive hobby requiring a combination of skills, from electrical wiring to carpentry to painting, that children absorbed with computers may not have developed. Trains themselves no longer have a hold on the imaginations of those accustomed to swiftly spanning huge distances by airplane.

Mr. Dickey, whose new train set occupies a third of his living room in Larchmont, N.Y., has another explanation: "It's a nerdy hobby," he said.

Ralph Israel, 50, the owner of Manhattan Train and Hobby, finds it sad that the hobby has lost its cachet just as the cabooses and locomotives, even the tiniest ones, look more realistic than ever. "There are a lot more stores like this one closing than opening," he said, "but at the same time, the product has advanced remarkably and is getting better all the time."

Today, most of the engines and cars are made in China, with so much attention to detail that what looks like a tiny speck of paint on, say, a Z-scale gondola, a flat open freight car, will turn out to be actual lettering when held under a magnifying glass. (A Z-scale train is 220th the size of an actual train.) Even Lionel, the nation's oldest manufacturer of toy trains, which was once based in New York, recently moved its manufacturing operations to China.

Model trains come in various price ranges, from a $100 starter set to the $1,500 gold-and-platinum New York Central steam engine and fuel-transporting tender that Lionel issued in 2000 to commemorate its centenary. Antique trains can cost much more.

These days, serious hobbyists are spending more than they used to on more precisely detailed replicas, an average of about $1,300 a year, said Fred Hamilton, the executive director of the Model Railroad Industry Association, an organization based in Seattle that represents 150 manufacturers. "The general consensus is that the hobby itself is pretty stagnant," he said, "but the number of dollars spent has increased."

About 500,000 people in North America are involved with model trains, spending more than $500 million a year, according to Model Railroader magazine, the hobby's bible.

In New York in the 1950's and 60's, a child could equip a toy railroad at stores like Sears, at the local hardware store, or at various hobby shops. Ma Webster's shop was described as the world's largest store devoted exclusively to model railroads. Today, however, the city has only a handful of hobby shops. Nationwide, the number of hobby shops selling model trains has decreased by 25 percent over the last decade, said Terry D. Thompson, Model Railroader's editor. About 10 percent of sales are made over the Internet, he said.

Until recently, Mr. Spitz had the only model train store on 45th Street, and Mr. Israel was his employee. But in 1998, after Mr. Spitz refused to give him a share of his business, Mr. Israel quit and eventually opened his own store. "Instead of a friend and partner," Mr. Israel said of Mr. Spitz, "he's now an enemy and competitor."

Referring to Mr. Israel, Mr. Spitz said, "He wanted a larger percentage than he had equity to donate."

The two men no longer speak, but Mr. Israel said they have established a détente, of sorts. Mr. Spitz sells a lot of radio-controlled cars and model airplane kits and is the exclusive dealer of several lines of subway cars and kits, made in the United States and elsewhere. He also has a steadier flow of customers, who are attracted by the window layout. Mr. Israel, who has no window display because his store is on the second floor, distributed fliers during the holidays pointing out that he and his associates had created that layout.

Mr. Israel offers more personalized service and encourages his customers to hang out in the store.

One of Mr. Israel's regulars is Jacob Newman, 22, a history buff from Elizabeth, N.J. Mr. Newman said there was a simple explanation for his obsession: "It's a miniature world that I have total control of."

A Tiny Town House Gets a Feeling of Openness

A Tiny Town House Gets a Feeling of Openness
By TRISH HALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/realestate/12HABI.html

Some town houses in Manhattan are almost too grand, with cavernous rooms and staircases that are forbiddingly high. At the other extreme is the tiny house on Bleecker Street that Laura Bilyeu and Joel Leib bought two and a half years ago.

It is uncharacteristically small for the city, even for the low-scale West Village. But by removing some walls between rooms and building a special staircase between floors, the couple and their architect found a way to create a feeling of openness and spaciousness.

When it was built in the early 1800's, the house was tucked in, seemingly as an afterthought between its two neighbors, sharing a brick wall with one and a wood wall with the other.

Ms. Bilyeu and Mr. Leib found the house, which measures 16 feet wide by 25 feet deep, in June 2000 through Edward Blankenship at Insignia Douglas Elliman. It was a relic of an earlier time, furnished in shag carpeting and painted in oranges, reds and blues.

It was apparently once a showplace, Mr. Leib said, "but by the time we saw it it looked like a bad acid trip."

They figured they would live on the top two floors, totaling 800 square feet of the three-story building, and defray a great deal of the $1.1 million cost of the house through payments from the store Ms. Bilyeu planned to open on the ground floor.

Ms. Bilyeu, 32, and Mr. Leib, 40, had moved to New York not long before from Chicago, where he had a gallery called Ten in One and she taught art in the city schools. But when it was time for Mr. Leib to try his luck in New York, Ms. Bilyeu decided it was time for her to change careers.

She wanted to start something that involved dogs, inspired in part by Natalie, her 12-year-old retriever mix. "I've always loved dogs," Ms. Bilyeu said recently. "How can you not love them?"

After they moved to New York and her husband opened his Ten in One Gallery way west on 26th Street, she took a course in dog grooming, adding that diploma to her master's in fine arts.

She considered opening a kennel or day care operation but decided against it because of strict zoning. Instead, in April 2001 she inaugurated the Four Paws Club at 387 Bleecker Street, creating an instant hit. The store won New York Magazine's "Best of New York" award for its homey feel, occasional celebrity sightings and unusual items for and about pets. Right now, for instance, she has handmade ceramic dishes for cats, coats made from vintage fabrics for dogs and, for the human in the family, a double-headed spaniel humidor from the 1920's.

The renovation of the rest of the building, however, did not go quite so quickly. They found to their dismay that its structural problems were more extensive and more difficult to repair than they had realized.

Their architect, Philip Parker, who has his own firm in Manhattan and also teaches at Columbia University, said that most of the wood joists were rotted, and because they were intertwined with an adjoining building, they could not simply be cut out and replaced; they were essential for support. They had to be painstakingly replaced one at a time to assure the buildings' stability.

There were many delays, for many reasons, but one of the lowest points, they said, was when a subcontractor took a payment and then simply disappeared, never to be seen again.

Through month after month of renovation, the couple lived in the building, starting out on the ground floor, then the one above, and finally the top. For the first few months, Ms. Bilyeu said, "we were taking showers in the dog sprayer."

FOR nearly two years, she said, they ate takeout from restaurants. But this Christmas, they cooked their first holiday meal in their new kitchen.

After the long siege, the results are impressive. The first floor of their residence contains their bedroom and a large bathroom that will eventually be reduced in size to make room for their baby, who is expected to arrive very soon. Their doctor believes the baby will be a girl, and they plan to name her Ruby Louise.

Upstairs from their bedroom is an open room with a kitchen area, a narrow table with a banquette and chairs for dining, and an open living area. For now, the crib is up against the staircase that leads to the roof.

The two stories are joined by a glass and aluminum staircase that allows light to flow through and itself seems to aerate the entire feel of the interior. The top section of the staircase has a flat area that can serve as counter space for the kitchen.

Although the staircase is a lovely textural object, using several kinds of glass, it arose from a simple need, the architect said: the owners wanted a king-size bed, and their room wouldn't accommodate one if the staircase flowed up and down in the conventional way.

The staircase was turned so that its second leg goes up the center of the space rather than along the side wall — where the first leg is — giving the bedroom the configuration they wanted. In addition, the feeling of the apartment became more open and less conventional. And eliminating the room divisions (except for the bathroom) to create two open levels made the house seem much larger.

The dining and living areas on the second floor are united by a counter that runs along the perimeter of three walls, starting in the kitchen. The counter serves as a work space, becomes a mantel for the fireplace in the living area and then goes around and down the third wall, where it becomes a bookshelf.

The counter, a light wood, enlarges the space rather than dividing it, Mr. Parker said.

Despite the modern materials and design, there is no question that this is an old house, with all that involves. It is so lopsided that a shelf on the living area's brick wall is level but doesn't look it. The shelves were built in a store and then had to be redone, Ms. Bilyeu said. "I had to unlevel it so it would look level," she said.

Mr. Leib, who likes comic art and conceptual art, said he probably wouldn't have picked an 1800's building if he hadn't had to; his taste in architecture runs more toward the 20th century.

"But," he said, "you're not going to get a glass house in Manhattan."

The living area is furnished with a midcentury modern feel, except for their old sofa, which is a plumper and longer piece than they would like for the space. But there is a problem in replacing it, Ms. Bilyeu said. Natalie, their dog, seems to like the existing arrangement, and she is in charge of the sofa.

A few things are left to be done, including the lighting over the stove and some finish work around doorways. But Ms. Bilyeu, with her baby due any minute, said she has lost patience with the renovation. "I said, `Phil, this house had better be done,' " she said. "This baby is my limit."

City to Let Christo Do Central Park Art Project

City to Let Christo Do Central Park Art Project
By ROBIN POGREBIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/arts/design/23CHRI.html

A work of art featuring 23 miles of billowing saffron-colored fabric by the artist Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude will be displayed along Central Park's pedestrian paths for two weeks in February 2005, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday.

It will be the first public art project in New York for the Bulgarian-born artist and his wife, who have previously wrapped the German Reichstag in white cloth and scattered several thousand blue and yellow umbrellas across Japan and California.

First proposed in 1979, the Christo idea was rejected because of concerns that it would damage the park. So the artists have called their project "The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005."

Still, the Sierra Club's New York Chapter recently announced that it would oppose the project unless it received further environmental review. "Our position is this project of Christo's would interrupt and interfere with the life of the birds and animals in Central Park," said John E. Pearson, chairman of the executive committee of the Sierra Club's local chapter.

Adrian Benepe, the parks and recreation commissioner, said the project had been scaled back from its original form, with half the number of gates and no holes being drilled in the ground, and was no threat to the park. "There is no environmental impact," Mr. Benepe said. "There is nothing to study."

Because the project will be installed in the month of February, Mr. Benepe added, it will come at a "dormant time for plants and for birds."

The mayor said the project would attract some 500,000 visitors and generate $72 million to $136 million in spending.

"When our natural instincts are to retreat to the comfortable and the familiar, we have to reassert the daring and the creative spirit that differentiates New York from any other city in the world," Mr. Bloomberg said.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude will finance the project through the sale of Christo's work from the 1950's and 1960's, with no cost to the city. Wrapping the Reichstag cost $13 million; the umbrellas, $26 million. As for this project, "we cannot tell you in advance, because it is very much like bringing up a child," Jeanne-Claude said. "It will cost us whatever it has to cost."

Stretching from 59th Street to 110th Street, the project will consist of 7,500 gates 16 feet high and 6 to 18 feet wide. The free-hanging fabric panels will be suspended about seven feet above the ground and spaced 10 to 15 feet apart.

Gordon J. Davis, the parks commissioner who opposed the project 24 years ago, said he supported it now because the park is a different place. "The park is gloriously reclaimed," he said. "The project "will only highlight its splendor."

Leonardo: The Eye, the Hand, the Mind

Leonardo: The Eye, the Hand, the Mind
By HOLLAND COTTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/arts/design/24COTT.html

LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452-1519) is the Great Oz of European art. At least that's the way he sometimes seems, glimpsed through the fogs and fumes of history: a cultural force more than a man, a colossal brain and a sovereign hand at the controls of a multidisciplinary universe.

Where did his supreme gift lie? In art? Science? Engineering? Aesthetic theory? All of the above. We all have our strengths; I have mastered MetroCard dispensers and a home computer. Yet Leonardo understood, described and illustrated the principles of hydrodynamics, gross anatomy, physics and astronomy. He invented the helicopter, the armored tank and the submarine. He painted like an angel and despite being phobic about deadlines, wrote often and well. In addition, according to Vasari, he was drop-dead gorgeous.

And, perhaps most confounding, he generated all this near-magical accomplishment from behind a curtain of personal discretion so dense and insulating that no historian or psychologist — and dozens, maybe hundreds have tried — has been able to pull it aside to reveal the person behind the personage.

"Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art also tries, and manages to part the curtain just a crack. We may not learn exactly what made this artist tick, but we can see him ticking away, at length and in some depth.

Naturally, the show had blockbuster written all over it from the word go. With 118 Leonardo drawings, it is the largest gathering of his work in America. The lending institutions are a superstarry lot: the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Vatican, the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. And the Met has given it the imperial treatment: crimson walls, acres of space, a catalog as thick as The Physician's Desk Reference.

Are the drawings worth the fuss? In a word, totally. Individually, many are glorious; some are workmanlike; a few are just weird, so weird you find yourself wondering: what planet was this guy from? As a package, though, as the datastream output of a single sensibility, they're huge. They are also very alive. People always say that you can't know painting from a book, that you have to experience it. This is at least as true of drawing, a profoundly physical medium, where a smudge or erasure can be a heart-catching event, and a pen stroke can leap like a solar flare.

The show comes with some fresh scholarship, not blindingly revealing, but solid and worthwhile. The curators — Carmen C. Bambach and George R. Goldner, both of the Met's department of drawings and prints — have avoided a hit parade approach in their selection, opting instead for some less familiar material. They've also brought related drawings — 10 studies for the Florentine mural "The Battle of Anghiari" alone — together, in some cases for the first time. Finally, by arranging the work chronologically, they've created something like an organic picture of the history of one man's polymathic life.

Leonardo was born in 1452 and started life with certain disadvantages. He was a small-town kid, illegitimate, indifferently educated and — a liability for an artist, you would think — left-handed. But he also had luck. His supportive father took him to Florence, by then a major node on the information highway of Renaissance Europe. There he was apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio, a leading sculptor but also a painter (five gorgeous drawings of his open the show) from whom Leonardo learned much.

For one thing, he learned to draw sculpturally. This meant drawing with a command of volume, as several early drapery studies demonstrate. It also meant executing fleet, notational sketches to capture the look of real things viewed from many angles in actual space, as seen in Leonardo's serial depictions of squirming babies and wide-awake cats. From Verrocchio he also learned to carry a notebook with him at all times and to use it, so that whatever went in through the eye came out through his hand.

In 1481, he landed a substantial job, an altarpiece painting of "The Adoration of the Magi." And at that point, he seemed to have settled on a work pattern that, for better or worse, he would follow thereafter. Basically, it entailed conceiving pictorial designs so complex and technically demanding that he would never complete them.

For "The Adoration," for example, he planned to place more than 60 figures in an elaborate perspectival setting. He drew and drew; several well-known studies, one of them madly complicated, are in the show. But the ideas never really gelled, and he eventually headed to Milan in search of different work, leaving an unfinished painting behind.

He stayed in Milan, employed by the city's ruler, Ludovico Sforza, for 15 years, which were among the most productive of his life. His first commission — he proposed it himself — was an outsize equestrian monument to Ludovico's father. Again, he produced studies galore, dashed off and spirited, fastidious and polished. But the monument never materialized, and the plans were abandoned.

In any case, Leonardo was, as usual, working on several other things. One was the unfinished painting, now owned by the Vatican, titled "St. Jerome in the Wilderness." It's at the Met and gives a stark, almost agonizing sense of how he carried his obsessive, draftsmanlike self-correction right into what should have been the final stages of a painting.

And there was "The Last Supper," painted from 1493 to 1498 in the refectory of Santa Maria della Grazie. One renowned sheet from Windsor carries what could be a preliminary sketch of that painting's composition, mixed in with geometric and architectural designs. And from the Albertina in Vienna comes a powerfully resolved drawing on blue paper of an old man who is sometimes identified as St. Peter. Whatever his identity, he is animated by the tense, urgent gravitas of the painting itself.

When French troops invaded Milan in 1499, Leonardo made his way back to Florence. There he whipped up a large-scale drawing titled "Virgin and Child With Saint Anne" and gave himself a one-man show. The drawing — now lost, though later versions on the same theme exist — was rapturously received and resulted in a commission from the city government for the Battle of Anghiari mural, to be painted in the Palazzo della Signoria. Its subject was a Florentine military victory.

The assignment was a very big, very public deal; Michelangelo, the local reigning prince of art, was to paint the opposite wall. Once more, Leonardo feverishly poured out ideas on paper, and the studies in the show are fantastic, from an explosive drawing of a horse in motion (several legs, many heads) to a hyperrealistic depiction of a screaming soldier. As for the mural, Leonardo designed a cartoon and expensive scaffolding, then left town, heading back to Milan.

Once there, he did what he had always done: many things simultaneously. He painted; he taught; he studied anatomy and geometry. He designed maps, architectural plans and stage sets. He conducted scientific experiments and recorded his findings in notebooks, writing from right to left and in mirror image, which, as a lefty, he had always done.

And he sketched. Small drawings of grotesque human heads flowed from his hand like telephone pad doodles. His famous "Deluge" pictures date to this time. Imaginary scenes of tidal waves overwhelming minute towns, they are both aquatic studies and apocalyptic visions. In 1516, the French king Francis I, who collected trophy artists as well as art, invited him to live at his court. Leonardo, old at 64, moved to France and died there three years later.

He left behind a godlike reputation, worshipful disciples, a scant handful of paintings — about 15 survive — and the 4,000 works on paper that are his primary visual legacy. Some of his drawings are art historical icons: the face of Mary in a study for the painting of "The Virgin and Child With St. Anne," now in the Louvre, is one. He invented this expressive type, with its interior smile and apparitional draftsmanship, and with it a Western ideal of human perfection.

My favorite drawings, though, are of a different kind. They're ones where everything is happening, nonlinearly, all at once, and anything goes: double-sided sheets filled with animals, armaments, allegorical scenes, geometrical diagrams, exploding buildings, sexy models, dissected muscles, wheels and bridges, flowing water, reminder notes, sums, scratches, spots and stains.

In these, for me, the curtain parts that little bit, to reveal an artist who always preferred to dream and draw rather than to do, who remained at some level a venturesome child controlling his world by taking it apart, piece by piece, to see how the whole thing worked. By thinking big, Leonardo became big; illusions sometimes work that way. And the neat thing is that in his company, we get to think big, too.

Courageous Pilgrims on the Road to Freedom

Courageous Pilgrims on the Road to Freedom
By SARAH BOXER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/arts/design/24BOXE.html

In May 1961 Bruce Davidson, a member of the Magnum photo agency, went to Montgomery, Ala., and joined the Freedom Riders, civil rights workers protesting the racial segregation of interstate travel in the South. A few weeks before he arrived, one bus of Freedom Riders going from Washington to Birmingham, Ala., was firebombed. Another bus traveling the same route was attacked by a mob. Mr. Davidson was there for a third try, traveling with the Freedom Riders on a Trailways bus escorted by National Guard troops from Montgomery to Jackson, Miss. Thus began his off-and-on five-year stint in the South.

"Time of Change: Bruce Davidson, Civil Rights Photographs, 1961-65," an exhibition of 25 pictures, fills only one small room of the International Center of Photography. But it packs a punch. Visitors move silently through the show with their mouths open. What makes these photographs so breathtaking is not just the content but the point of view. No matter what his angle, Mr. Davidson's empathy is always eye-level. You see, almost from inside, how small, intimate and vulnerable those early civil rights protests were.

The first image in the show depicts a young black woman sitting in the bus. Her hand is to her ear, and she looks absently out the window. She is singing. Sitting behind her is a white man with his window open a crack to the world outside. You see not only these two riders in the darkened world inside the bus, but also what they see through their windows. In the glary white daylight is a long angry convoy of white cars that looks as though it is on a collision course with the bus.

Who are these people outside? It's not easy to tell. Some of them are National Guardsmen and state troopers protecting the bus; some are hecklers. But there is always a hint of danger, barely held at bay. One photograph shows a group of five middle-aged white men watching the bus pass a Texaco station. Two look as if they are jeering the riders. One is removing a cigarette from his mouth, cupping his hand in James Dean fashion. One is pumping the air with his fist, or maybe he's making a sarcastic hitchhiking gesture. They look like men who are having a ball.

When the bus reached Jackson, all the passengers were arrested by the Mississippi State Police. In one of Davidson's shots, a lone black woman wearing a neat white shirt is handed over for arrest. You can't see the police officers approach her. You see only the National Guardsmen with bayonets pointed in the air, calmly watching the proceedings and the photographer. Everything is strangely still.

Following the Freedom Rides, Mr. Davidson photographed various small demonstrations and arrests in the spring of 1963. Some of his pictures have the air of games about to go wrong. One shows a woman in a white cardigan and a black dress standing outside the Carver Theater in Birmingham, her wrists held by her arresting officers. From the look of their grip, they seem to be playing a fierce game of Red Rover. Behind them is a movie marquee: "Suspense! Excitement! Susan Hayward in `Back Street' and `Damn the Defiant.' "

Another pair of pictures shows firemen spraying high-pressure hoses to break up a demonstration in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham in May 1963. In the foreground of one is a fireman. The white arc of the water from his hose cuts diagonally through the picture like a highway. At the end of the arc you see a well-dressed black couple, untouched by the water, hands on hips. The next picture is more sinister. This time the arc of the hose spray cuts horizontally across the frame. A young black man sprints through it. He could be a youngster cooling himself in the water, if not for that one policeman in the foreground hiding behind a tree, waiting, billy club at the ready.

In spring 1963 a white postman from Baltimore was shot dead in Mississippi while carrying a sign that said, "Eat at Joe's both Black and White." Soon after, five white and five black civil rights workers, guarded by one state trooper, continued the postman's planned route to Jackson. Mr. Davidson went with them. One of his pictures is of a young black man sitting calmly on the ground in white shirt, jeans and boots. Over him stands a white gang of guys. One has his hands stuffed in his pockets; one grabs his crotch; one folds his arms. Rather than shooting the picture from above, Mr. Davidson got on the ground with the protester and shot upward at the looming, heckling mob.

Mr. Davidson's final photographic trip south was in March 1965. He returned to document a drizzly day of the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery. On one side of the rain-slicked road you see a crowd of soggy marchers; on the other is a convoy of military police vans with their headlights on. A sign is affixed to the front van: "Caution Marchers Ahead." Who is the caution sign for? That same day Mr. Davidson took a picture of a black girl, dressed in a blouse and white shoes, smiling in the rain. She is encased in a big clear plastic envelope, the kind of flimsy covering used to protect dry cleaning.

Not everyone was protected. On the way back from the Selma-to-Montgomery march, Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit housewife, was shot and killed after driving some fellow marchers home. Mr. Davidson photographed her car the morning after, window shattered, door ajar, seat covered in blood. You don't need to see her body to feel that this was the danger waiting in the wings, behind the trees, out the windows, at the next bus stop, all along. Mr. Davidson's documents of these five crucial Southern years — almost always focused on the moment of silent vulnerability — give a visceral sense of what it was like to be on the inside looking out at the madding crowd.

A Photographer Who Portrayed Cuba's Revolution With Complex Wit

A Photographer Who Portrayed Cuba's Revolution With Complex Wit
By SARAH BOXER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/15/arts/design/15RAUL.html

COJÍMAR, Cuba — The fishermen in this little village near Havana "are a lot of liars," said Raúl Corrales, who has lived here for more than half a century. "Each one has a catch, the biggest, but he loses it."

Mr. Corrales, a tanned little man who will be 78 on Jan. 29, claims a few big catches of his own. He caught Ernest Hemingway on a fishing boat, fat and happy. He snapped Che Guevara as he sipped espresso. He captured Fidel Castro hiking through the Sierra Maestra. And he has the pictures to prove it.

Born Raúl Corral Fornos, Mr. Corrales is one of the last great living photographers of the Cuban revolution. His best known work is a grand full-frontal photograph of revolutionaries trotting toward the camera on horseback, dust at their feet, mountains behind, straw hats on their heads, smiles on their faces, Cuban flags hoisted high. The photograph, "Caballería," or "Cavalry" (1960), is one of the icons of the revolution.

Mr. Corrales may not be as famous outside Cuba as Korda (Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez), who took the ubiquitous, stern portrait of Guevara seen on Cuban currency and billboards, but he has just as secure a throne in the pantheon of Cuban photography. Korda himself (1928-2001) called Mr. Corrales "the teacher." While Korda's hard-edged graphic photographs work well on posters, Mr. Corrales's complex pictures have more pith and wit. Or as Mr. Corrales once jokingly put it, "I'm the better photographer, but Korda is more famous."

Sitting in the living room of his tile-floored, 50's-modern house, Mr. Corrales wears a white fishing cap, a black polo shirt, gray slacks and brown shoes. A thin slice near the tip of his nose seems to be missing, which gives him a hint of danger. His "grand great-son," a toddler, pops in and out of the room, casting a toy on a string through the doorway over and over, as if practicing his fly fishing technique. The smell of garlic and seafood comes from the kitchen, where Mr. Corrales's wife, Norma, is preparing lobster. The room is open to the outside garden, which gives onto a small shed of a darkroom. You can hear birds chirp and roosters crow.

"I suppose you want to know something more about me," Mr. Corrales said, puffing away at an El Credito cigar that he had stuffed down his carved pipe. (He explained that this way none of the cigar would be wasted.) He put his hands on his knees and began to speak in excellent English.

Mr. Corrales got his first taste of photography in the late 1930's when he worked at El Carmelo, a fashionable cafe in Havana. There one of his jobs was selling foreign newspapers and magazines, including Life and Look. He spent his free time studying Farm Security Administration photographs of the American Depression by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. With his tips from El Carmelo, Mr. Corrales bought a plastic camera for 3 pesos. Soon he was taking professional photographs for Última Hora and Hoy, two Cuban lifestyle magazines.

Mr. Corrales said he first came to Cojímar when it was a small fishing village. "As soon as I came here I fell in love with Cojímar and with Norma." There were only two long streets, and everybody knew everybody else. "You had to be careful when you said something bad."

It was nothing like Havana. "In Havana in those years, early in the 50's, there were a lot of American tourists," Mr. Corrales said. "It was easy to come from Florida." You didn't need a passport or visa.

Ernest Hemingway was the great American celebrity in Havana. "Everyone wants to talk, have a picture with him, start a conversation," Mr. Corrales said. "For Papa, it was all right," he said, pausing for a moment to consider whether that was really so, "but there were too many Americans."

One day Hemingway visited Cojímar, where the skipper of his boat, Gregorio Fuentes, lived. Suddenly Hemingway was anonymous. When he walked down the street in Cojímar, "no one cares about him, no one wants to take his photograph or autograph," Mr. Corrales said. So he stayed. He was very popular, not as a writer, just as an American. "He loved that," Mr. Corrales said.

Hemingway once invited Mr. Corrales to go fishing and take some pictures. "We didn't catch anything," Mr. Corrales said. But pictures were made. Hemingway is shown fat and boisterous with what looks like a fanny pack, or more likely a wineskin, around his waist. Another picture captures Hemingway's skipper, Fuentes, who often claimed that he was the old man of "The Old Man and the Sea."

But Mr. Corrales says that another man, Anselmo Hernández, the oldest fisherman in town and Hemingway's friend, is the real old man of the novel. In one of Mr. Corrales's pictures, Mr. Hernández is shown as Hemingway's body opposite, skinny and grizzled, walking down a dock holding a fishing pole in one hand and a tiny headless fish by the tail in the other. Mr. Corrales suggested comparing the photo of the old man with Hemingway's description in the novel. "It is the same," he noted.

"Then came the revolution," he said, almost without missing a beat. In 1959, Mr. Corrales, who was already a press photographer for some Cuban magazines, joined Revolución, the new government newspaper. He accompanied Castro on his first trip to Washington, New York and Harvard University. At Harvard Mr. Corrales took a famous picture of Mr. Castro making a speech in the football stadium from a podium bearing the university's seal with the word Veritas, Latin for truth. "You know these things happened," Mr. Corrales said with a twinkle.

During Mr. Castro's visit to Washington, where he made an appearance on "Meet the Press," Richard M. Nixon, then vice president, invited him for a chat. "It was informal, without protocol," Mr. Corrales said. "The time for the interview was 15 minutes. They talked for 45." When Mr. Castro left, the problems with Cuba and the United States began, first the Bay of Pigs invasion, then the Cuban missile crisis. "I was very afraid for everybody," Mr. Corrales said. "Well, time rolled on and nothing happened."

The old snapper's story was drawing to a close. "Many, many Americans think we are liars. But we are a happy country, a happy people. We have families, we work, we study. We have everything many countries do not have," he said. "I'm not political. I'm just a photographer who has lived all these years. I know all the world," he concluded. "And now I invite you to see some of my pictures. Of course, I have to make a living. If you want a copy, it will be a pleasure."

Mr. Corrales pulled out two envelopes. One had large photographs that cost about $1,000 each. The other had larger, limited edition prints for about $2,200 each. There were views of a plump Hemingway, shots of Che Guevara smoking and smiling (the face that launched a thousand postcards), many winning group portraits of young revolutionaries in straw hats and a famous shot of Castro hiking through the Sierra Maestra.

One odd photo showed a wedding couple sitting in a bathroom flanked by toilets. Another was of a fisherman with a huge white net billowing over him, looking as if he were in a Martha Graham dance. Mr. Corrales displayed a picture of a sea of marching hats and guns, a study of the tools of the machetero (cane cutter) and a moody portrait called "El Sueño" ("The Dream"), showing a soldier in Caracas dozing in a hammock under a painting of a reclining nude woman. Mr. Corrales, unlike many other revolutionary photographers, has an eye for visual puns, abstract patterns and surreal or sardonic moments.

At one point in his career, Mr. Corrales gave his pictures commercial American titles. A photograph of two children asleep in a hammock is called "Beautyrest." A shot taken in Nicaragua showing three dark legs with rolled cuffs standing amid a mess of bananas on the ground is called "Banana Split." Mr. Corrales said: "I have no favorite photographs and no favorite sons. I like them all. I love them all."

One of Mr. Corrales's sons took charge of selling the photographs while Mr. Corrales went back to his chair to finish his cigar, which was quickly vanishing into the bowl of his pipe. On one side of him was an old Singer sewing machine. On the other side a cast iron grate on the wall held some keepsakes: children's boots and women's shoes, his mother's old iron with its gas tank, a dried marlin fin, a few gas lamps, a frame for a coffee filter and a blue license plate from Nicaragua.

Why the license plate? It was number 246296 and had the year 1979 on it, the year the Somozas fled the country and the Sandinistas came to power. Mr. Corrales said he snatched it from the car belonging to Somoza's wife.

I asked Mr. Corrales why he had joined the revolution. "I didn't," he said. "I made the revolution."

More Babies Share Beds With Parents

More Babies Share Beds With Parents
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/health/14BED.html

Many more American parents are letting their babies share their beds, according to a new federal study.

The results, issued Monday, delighted advocates of families sleeping together, who say it makes for closer parent-child bonds and more secure children. The same results worry safety experts, who say the practice causes suffocation.

The survey, by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, found that the percentage of infants under 8 months old who usually shared an adult bed more than doubled in just seven years, to 12.8 percent in 2000 from 5.5 percent in 1993. When respondents were asked if their infants had spent at least some time sleeping in an adult bed in the previous two weeks, the percentage rose to nearly 50 percent.

The interviews were conducted by phone in all states except Alaska and Hawaii, with about 1,000 adult care givers each year. They were identified from county birth records and lists used by infant photographers and makers of baby formula.

The study did not ask the respondents why they made the choice, but experts on sleep habits were eager to offer explanations for the trend.

Some poor families do it, they said, because they cannot afford beds for everyone or because it has been the family habit for generations. Some ethnic groups, especially Asian-Americans and Latin-Americans, tend to consider the North American norm of relegating infants to separate rooms to be cold-hearted and psychologically harmful. Some working parents at all income levels are trying to regain the hours of closeness they lose by being away at work all day. And with breast-feeding on the increase, some nursing mothers find it more restful than repeatedly getting up for a hungry or crying child.

The study did find that infants whose mothers were under 18 and infants in families earning less than $20,000 a year were twice as likely as others to share a bed with an adult.

It also found wide ethnic differences. Black infants were four times as likely to share an adult's bed as white infants, and Asian-Americans were almost three times as likely.

But the percentage of white infants in adult beds more than doubled in the 1990's, to 9.6 percent from 4 percent. The Asian-American percentage nearly tripled, to 32.1 from 11.5, and the African-American percentage rose to 31.3 from 21.6.

A 1996 companion study of mothers in a low-income, mostly black urban neighborhood found that almost half the mothers said their infants usually shared a bed with a parent or other adult caregiver.

Jan Hunt, the director of the Natural Child Project, a Web site that teaches parents how to develop close bonds with their children, called the report ``good news.'' Mothers who sleep with their babies coordinate their cycles and are less likely to be dragged out of deep sleep by a howling child, she said, ``so it makes sense that it would reduce child abuse.''

As with other primates, she pointed out, human babies slept next to their mothers for millennia until the fashion changed in recent centuries.

Dr. Bradley Thatch, a professor of pediatrics at the Washington University School of Medicine, who has done studies of infant deaths in St. Louis, said he was ``in the camp that thinks it's dangerous.''

In 50 percent of the sudden infant deaths in St. Louis, and 70 percent of those among blacks, he said, bed-sharing was involved.

``Taking the baby to bed to soothe it or breast-feed it'' is not dangerous, he said, but the risks rise when the baby is in the bed all night, when the sleepers are on a couch or easy chair, when the bed has crevices between headboard or wall that a baby can be caught in, when a sleeper is drunk, drugged or exhausted, when the baby is very small or when the mother smoked during pregnancy.

But Dr. James J. McKenna, head of the Mother-Child Sleep Lab at the University of Notre Dame, an advocate of mothers and babies sharing beds, drew the opposite conclusion. Baby deaths from suffocation ``are in extreme situations - being with Dad on the couch when he's half-drunk,'' he said, while the comfort and closeness babies get from sleeping with their mothers makes them ``more independent and able to deal with stress better.''

Meg Ramsdell, a mother of three in Alexandria, Va., said she and her husband hadn't planned on a family bed, but their first child, Emma, hardly slept. Their pediatrician's advice to alternately comfort her and let her cry ``was not very satisfying,'' she said. Emma, now 4, and Grace, 3, were in the bed until they were 2, and Ben, who is 11 months, is there now.

Mrs. Ramsdell said she has been ``pretty much able to sleep through the night - and it's kind of zombie-like feeding - I roll over, nurse, and we both fall back asleep.''

She put her children in sleeper sacks so she could avoid pulling blankets over them, just as she would if they were in a crib, she said. When they were tiny, she slept with her face to theirs and had a foam wedge between them and her husband. Asked if she had worried about suffocating them, she said, ``I never felt like that would happen.'' She added, ``Ben was 9-and-a-half pounds when he was born. He was pretty sturdy.''

Adaptation

saw adaptation last night. the first 2/3s of the movie was interesting, but the last third felt totally manipulated and constructed. by the ending we felt cheated. it definitely did not deserve the 91 rating on rotten tomatoes. overall, i'd say rent Being John Malkovich instead. or go see City of God. that movie was great.

btw, the latest news on the orchard street killing:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/nyregion/21SLAY.html

Man Arrested After a Slaying Is No Longer Seen as a Suspect

Man Arrested After a Slaying Is No Longer Seen as a Suspect
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/nyregion/21SLAY.html

A 25-year-old man who was arrested last week in the slaying of a college acquaintance on the Lower East Side and then released hours later is no longer a suspect, a police official and the man's lawyer said yesterday.

The man, Forrest Bloede, was initially arrested and charged in the killing of Burke O'Brien, who was shot once in the chest in the early hours of Jan. 12 in front of 75-79 Orchard Street. But the charges, which came after Mr. Bloede was questioned over a period of about 20 hours, were later dropped after supervisors at the Manhattan district attorney's office reviewed the case, investigators have said. Mr. Bloede was released.

Mr. Bloede (pronounced BLO-dee) and Mr. O'Brien, a Chicago native and a Colorado State University graduate who had recently arrived in the city to begin working for the Bank of America, were returning from a night out when Mr. O'Brien was shot shortly before 4 a.m. outside the apartment building where they were staying with friends.

Mr. Bloede's arrest was based on the initial accounts of two witnesses who said the two men were alone, with one pointing something, possibly a gun, at the other, before a shot rang out, investigators have said. But the charges were dropped after those statements were determined to be insufficient to support the arrest and no credible motive could be found for Mr. Bloede to kill Mr. O'Brien, investigators have said. During a subsequent interview, one of the witnesses made statements that led investigators to believe that he may have seen the aftermath, rather than the shooting itself, and a third witness provided an account that supported Mr. Bloede's contention that Mr. Burke was shot by robbers, investigators said.

Mr. Bloede's lawyer, Glenn A. Wolther, said yesterday that it was "essential" that his client's name be cleared, and he criticized the way the case was handled. "Mistakes made by the D.A.'s office and the police in the early hours of the investigation wasted critical time," he said. "Moreover, Forrest was subjected to hours of abusive interrogation and wrongly arrested just hours after watching his friend get shot and surviving an armed mugging himself."

A police spokesman said the department would have no comment and a spokeswoman for Robert M. Morganthau, the Manhattan district attorney, also declined to comment.

Detectives on the Lower East Side recently began distributing fliers offering a $2,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of Mr. Burke's killer. The fliers describe two assailants and ask anyone with information to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS. The fliers say one of the assailants was a black or light-skinned 5-foot-11-inch Hispanic man who weighed 175 pounds and had a goatee. The other assailant is described as a dark-skinned black man from 5 feet 6 inches to 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighing 130 to 145 pounds. Mr. Bloede is white.

8 days of frozen temperatures in NYC

A Snap So Cold Dogs Whine Going Out, and Birds Rush In
By LYDIA POLGREEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/22/nyregion/22COLD.html

It was so cold in New York Harbor yesterday that the pigeons were riding inside the Staten Island Ferry.

New York City has shivered through eight straight days of temperatures stubbornly stuck below freezing. This is not just any cold snap. The air has been shipped straight in from Siberia. (Blame the jet stream.)

One jogger had Kissena Park in Queens to himself.

On Fifth Avenue, the women bundled in fur had no time for window-shopping. It was out of a cab, into Tiffany's, then back out again to the warmth of another taxi.

New York City has shivered through eight straight days of temperatures stubbornly stuck below freezing. This is not just any cold snap. The air has been shipped straight in from Siberia. (Blame the jet stream.)

On Jan. 14, the temperature stayed below freezing, peaking at 28 degrees. It has not moved above 32 degrees since, and dropped as low as 7, on Saturday. It is not expected to break 32 until the weekend, when it may reach a sizzling 35 degrees. Before that happens, though, it will get colder. Sorry.

There is really only one way to stay warm. Stay home.

In a city where many people accept a tiny apartment in exchange for an outsize life beyond the front door, New Yorkers have suddenly become reacquainted with the charms of home.

/>Spouses have spent more time together than they have, perhaps, since their honeymoons. Apartment-dwellers are venturing into the deepest, most mysterious regions of their freezers, retrieving long-forgotten cuts of meat to avoid leaving home for dinner. Life is taking place between four walls.

"I just want to come home from work, get under the covers and watch the people go by out the window," said Stephen Larkin, who lives in a small studio on Jane Street in the West Village with his dog, a German shorthaired pointer named Hudson. Sure, his place is tiny, but at least it is warm. "Even my dog doesn't want to go out. He hesitates and whines when we get to the front door. So it must be really cold."

Yesterday, the high temperature was 26, and the wind gusted to 20 miles per hour at times, bringing the chill down to what felt like 9 degrees. That was not the worst of it, Jeff Warner, a meteorologist at Penn State University, said.

Tomorrow will most likely be colder. The forecast calls for a high of 19 degrees, and a low of 10. With 30-m.p.h. winds barreling down Broadway, into subway stations and through even the sturdiest coats, it will feel as if it is well below zero.

If this cold snap ends Sunday, as meteorologists expect, it will have lasted 12 days. That is short of the record — 16 bone-chilling days in 1961 takes that prize — but it is an impressive stretch nonetheless, Mr. Warner said.

That news failed to impress Dara Foster Spooner, who, in her Brooklyn apartment, stared down yet another frigid day to be spent at home with Parker, her 10-month-old daughter, and her husband, Jonathan, who works from home. Taking Parker for a walk on a balmy day can be tough. Going out in the freezing cold is an epic project.

"First, it is about a 20-minute production just to get her dressed," Ms. Foster Spooner said. "Then once you get outside she can only stay out for a few blocks."

Without the distraction of walks to keep Parker amused, the yawning hours spent in their sunny third-floor walk-up are tough to fill. Parker has seen all the Elmo videos and is bored with her toys; her parents have started borrowing from neighbors.

"We are getting cabin fever," Ms. Foster Spooner said. "I'm crawling the walls, but what can you do? It is just so cold."

But for others, staying home has been a rare pleasure, a break from hectic city life.

"The weekends have been very hunkered down," said Charlotte Sector of Brooklyn. "I have been very happy to stay home and have people over for dinner."

Instead of the usual bustling weekend of brunch and shopping, Ms. Sector plowed through two books and cooked some stick-to-the-ribs food — gratin dauphinois, a ground beef casserole, brioche pizza. She said she is relishing the chance to nest.

Criminals seem to be staying indoors, too. As of last Sunday, overall crime was down 7.5 percent this year compared with the same period last year, though no one is sure whether the weather has played a role. Crime was already down 5.5 percent at the end of last year, compared with 2001.

Even the Kung Fu masters stayed indoors. Joseph Chung and Henry P. Gong practice the martial art together every day, usually in Kissena Park, across the street from Mr. Gong's house in Flushing. But not for the past week or so.

On a good day, 100 people practice in the park, Mr. Gong said. "But lately there are no good days."

So the two men practiced Chinese grappling techniques and tai chi in Mr. Gong's living room instead. Outdoors, they would use swords and staffs, but the Chinese watercolor paintings on his living room walls might get damaged.

"You have to do some physical activity no matter how cold it gets, or your body deteriorates," Mr. Gong said. "In the Chinese way of thinking, it keeps everything flowing and keeps you alive."

In Shanghai, the Beat Goes On

[this is the place being developed by Saeri's friend Handel Lee. hope it is better than that major dud -- "Jean Georges" on columbus circle. been there several times and each time it was awful and inconsistent. although mercer kitchen used to be one of my favorite.]

In Shanghai, the Beat Goes On
By ELAINE LOUIE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/22/dining/22SHAN.html

JEAN-GEORGES VONGERICHTEN is planning not only a Shanghai restaurant in New York, but also a French restaurant in Shanghai, a city that in culinary terms is rapidly becoming one of the most important in China.

Mr. Vongerichten's outpost in Shanghai, to open in the fall, will be at Three on the Bund, a $50 million temple of food, art and fashion being renovated under the direction of the American architect Michael Graves. Nobu Matsuhisa will also have a restaurant there, as will two other restaurateurs.

Shanghai supports a rich and varied restaurant scene. It is not the custom of the city to entertain at home; restaurants are lively every day of the week.

"The Chinese never show the inside of the house to acquaintances," said Handel Lee, 42, the chief executive of House of Three, the real estate concern that is developing Three on the Bund in a seven-story 1916 building. "You never, ever show your wealth. And out, you must have a private room. You don't want to be seen."

Mr. Vongerichten and Mr. Matsuhisa will add notes of sophistication to a city that already has French, Italian and Thai restaurants. But Shanghai, which dates as a commercial power only to the 19th century, is best known for its own food — a hybrid cuisine, silky and savory and occasionally sweet, created from the food of older cities like Hangzhou and Suzhou.

The best restaurants, which are not always the fanciest, are booked at least a day in advance, sometimes two. Restaurants that cater to expatriates and tourists have menus in Chinese and English. Those that follow serve lunch and dinner. (Most stop serving by 10 p.m.) Prices range from $4 for a bowl of noodles with a small plate of spareribs to $100 for a five-course crab feast. The average for one person is $20.

XIN GUANG The hairy green crab is homely, its dark body covered in coarse brown hair. (Pesky, too, when alive — the claws are tied snugly to the body with string.) The meat is sweet and silky, yet firm, and the roe is rich and unctuous. In Shanghai, many restaurants serve hairy crabs — which the Chinese have adored since the sixth century — and other green crabs. But Xin Guang, a plain three-story place that opened in 1991, is said to be the first to specialize in crabs; it serves some 800 pounds a day. The meat is served sautéed with scallions and sliced asparagus; brightened with roe on a bed of silken tofu, drizzled with black vinegar; and in a palate-cleanser of chicken broth with tiny crab won tons. 512 Tianjin Road; 011-86-21-6322-3978.

FWU LUH PAVILION This spot is as fancy as Xin Guang is plain: the walls are oxblood in color, the chopsticks are made of ebony. Lily Ho, the owner, is a former Hong Kong movie star. Dressed in a red-printed white cotton sheath, she looks more glamorous than most women do in ball gowns. The cuisine is from Yangzhou. "This is complicated, light food," Ms. Ho said. Indeed: a paper-thin slice of eggplant wrapped around slivered bamboo shoots, mushrooms and minced pork; double-boiled duck soup with won tons of watercress and minced pork; duck so tender it can be plucked off the bones with chopsticks; and for dessert, little pumpkin croquettes filled with sesame paste. 603B Grand Gateway, No. 1 Hong Qiao Road; 011-86-21-6407-9898.

CHINA MOON In 2001, when Jacky Cheung opened China Moon, a Sichuan restaurant, he and Zhao Li, his chef, made the food mellow to suit the local palate. "I like spice," said Mr. Cheung, 36. "But the Shanghainese cannot eat hot food. So we take old Sichuan recipes and make them less hot." A perfect example is pencil-thin asparagus sautéed with soft, silky mushrooms and scattered with slivered crisp sour ginger. The ginger cuts through the asparagus and mushrooms, as vinegar does with crabs. 3F Citic Square, 1168 Nanjing Xi Road; 011-86-21-3218-1379.

YUAN YUAN This restaurant, which opened in August 2001, has white walls, dark wood chairs and a classic Shanghainese menu. A signature appetizer is red dates sliced in half and stuffed with a slightly sweet filling of sticky rice. The stuffed balls, the size of Milk Duds, are simmered five minutes and served warm. They are an addictive complement to savory appetizers like jellyfish ribbons glossed with sesame oil. A dish that offers a soulful counterpoint of flavors and textures is dragon vegetable with smoked bacon. (Dragon vegetable is also called Chinese okra or silk gourd.) The vegetable, which tastes like a cross between cucumber and zucchini, is nicely juxtaposed with the smoky, meaty bacon. 201 Xing Guo Road, 011-86-21-6433-9123.

SHANGHAI LAO ZHAN This restaurant, whose name translates casually as "the old station," has a turn-of-the-century ambience inspired by classic train cars, two of which extend out of the first-floor dining room. Shi Kai, 30, the chef, makes savory steamed buns two and a half inches in diameter filled with minced Shanghai bok choy, and a spectacular deep-fried duck served with tiny folded pancakes pleated at the edges. 201 North Cai Xi Road, 011-86-21-6427-2233.

JESSE'S The name is an English corruption of ji shi, which translates to "auspicious gentleman." This tiny eight-year-old restaurant has just 12 tables — 5 downstairs, and 7 up. It proves that some of the best Shanghai food — red-cooked pork and fresh sweet river shrimp, for instance — can be found in the simplest places. 41 Tianping Road, 011-86-21-6282-9260.

WU YUE REN JIA This chain of noodle houses, which has eight branches in Shanghai, is an inexpensive local favorite. Noodles Suzhou style arrive in a light, savory broth, topped with fried scallions. Locals order it with a plate of red-cooked pork ribs with a scattering of toasted sesame seeds. But there are noodles here for every palate — with shrimp and kidney, mushrooms and bean curd, crab meat and pickles (more than 30 varieties in all). 141 Shanxi South Road, 011-86-21-6445-7555, and other locations.

66 Leonard Street

Ladies and Gentlemen, It's Show Time
By FLORENCE FABRICANT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/22/dining/22VONG.html

THE woks needed adjusting. There was a problem with the four fish tanks. The busboys were struggling to wrap their kung fu pants so they would stay up.

Jean-Georges Vongerichten was in the kitchen, happily taking his chopsticks to hunks of freshly fried chicken.

Time was running out.

What is at stake for Mr. Vongerichten, who has produced Jo Jo, Vong, Mercer Kitchen and Jean Georges — restaurants that have scaled culinary heights — is his latest project: a Chinese restaurant designed by Richard Meier that seeks to add surprise and dazzle to New York dining and to provide a new spin on a favorite New York cuisine. This latest excursion, a seven-figure venture, will test Mr. Vongerichten's talent for innovation and his culinary magnetism in a part of town that is still undergoing wrenching change.

Mr. Vongerichten kept eating. He seemed oblivious, or in denial, of the chaos around him.

He expects to open the doors of 66, at 66 Leonard Street, in TriBeCa, next week — just a crack. It will be a "soft" opening, mainly for friends, but it will be an opening all the same. People will eat his food, then discuss it with friends. Good fortune, or ill, will follow. "I have to be open by Chinese New Year," Mr. Vongerichten said. "For good luck."

Chinese New Year starts Feb. 1 and lasts about a week. The restaurant will start taking reservations next week for early February, as the phone message at (212) 925-0202 informs. Mr. Vongerichten has given himself some wiggle room.

Six years ago, he opened Jean Georges in the Trump International Hotel and Tower, a repeatedly postponed event that reflected perfectly his obsession with detail and his tremendous skills as both a chef and a restaurateur. Nothing was left to chance, and it took off immediately. Can Peking duck fly as high?

"Expectations are tremendous because he's one of the top," said Michael Tong, the owner of Shun Lee West and Shun Lee Palace. The economy is stumbling; diners are easily rattled by culinary experimentation, in which Mr. Vongerichten excels, and serious prices, which he also knows something about. An average dinner for two at 66 will cost at least $100, without drinks.

"It could be very successful," Mr. Tong continued, "or a disaster that will send people a few blocks over to Ping's in Chinatown for a third of the price. Jean-Georges has to put his signature on it so the food has a twist."

That is exactly Mr. Vongerichten's intention. "I imagine people will come here the way they go to Vong," he said, referring to his Thai-influenced Midtown restaurant, which has spawned offshoots in Chicago, London and Hong Kong. "It will be because it's my restaurant and not because they want Thai or Chinese food." Vong is Thai in flavor but French in technique. "But 66 will be more authentic," he continued. "We're using Chinese techniques here even though we're breaking some rules."

The question of authenticity has never been an issue at Vong, despite the French flourishes. Mr. Vongerichten worked in Bangkok for many years, sopping up Thai culture and cuisine. But Chinese food is new to him, an idea he only seized upon a year ago, after a quick trip to Shanghai.

And so he has brought in a Chinese chef, Lam Lun, from Man Wah restaurant in Hong Kong to train the staff and reveal his recipes. He has hired five dim sum experts from a Chinatown restaurant "on Elizabeth Street" that neither Mr. Vongerichten nor the cooks will name, and an eight-man wok team, also from Chinatown, who also prefer not to talk about their previous employment. Running this team as executive chef is Josh Eden, 32, a New Yorker who has worked with him for eight years.

Lee Tak Sum, the executive chef at Vong in Hong Kong, is also on board. He translates for the non-English-speaking cooks. Ken Lai, who has worked with Mr. Vongerichten for 17 years, is in the kitchen, too. And several chefs on loan from Jean Georges are helping out, tasting and adding their two cents.

The menu still needs to be finalized.

The crew members have all spent the last 10 days in the main kitchen on the ground floor and in the basement prep kitchen, cooking exhaustively, experimenting and tinkering. About a week before the opening, Mr. Vongerichten was tasting some dishes for the first time. Leaving aside the problems with the woks and the fish tanks, he sat with his acolytes, as he is doing every day now, at a big banquet table in one corner of the dining room as cooks brought out waves of dishes, a dozen or more, for sampling.

"This is the most fun," he said. Mr. Vongerichten could not stop talking about the fried chicken he had tasted in the kitchen; it had been marinated, dried, marinated again, dried overnight and then deep-fried in a wok by Mr. Lam. The bronzed, glassy-skinned yet astonishingly moist-fleshed chicken will be known as the best in the city, he promised.

But he was also nudging Mr. Lam and the other Chinese chefs to see some things his way. Mr. Vongerichten was not at all sure about a plate of sweet-and-sour pork served in a garish vermilion sauce made with bottled tomato coloring and melted Chinese candy. The dish may not make the final cut.

"He has an advantage," Mr. Tong said. Because of his reputation, "he does not have to have some of the expected Chinese dishes, like orange beef, on his menu." General Tso has been decommissioned. To say nothing of that sweet-and-sour pork. Mr. Eden, meanwhile, lobbied for innovative and refreshing cold vegetable dishes, perhaps more Japanese than Chinese, like spinach with fried ginger.

"If you're a good enough chef there's plenty of room to do this sort of thing with Chinese food," said Ed Schoenfeld, a restaurant consultant who has specialized in Chinese food and restaurants. "The question will be whether Jean-Georges can get Chinese chefs to do what he wants."

At 66 one afternoon last week, it seemed to be happening.

Then Gregory Brainin, executive chef at Jean Georges, piped up. He had spent the morning making wafer-thin scallion pancakes, which must be rolled several times, almost like puff pastry, then fried in a wok and served within minutes.

"I can imagine six, even 10 orders for these coming in at once," Mr. Brainin said. "How many in an order? Five? And how many woks can you tie up to produce them?"

Silence rolled over the table like fog.

Originally, Mr. Vongerichten did not expect to be faced with decisions like these. Two years ago, just after he bought an apartment in the building, at the corner of Leonard and Church Streets, he was tempted by the retail space on the ground floor. He and Phil Suarez, his business partner, leased it. Mr. Vongerichten planned to open a vegetarian restaurant. Then he considered seafood. But the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, put the project on hold.

Early last year, when Mr. Vongerichten and Mr. Suarez traveled to Shanghai, where they are planning to open a French restaurant, they tasted the local fare.

"Our eyes popped," Mr. Suarez said. Mr. Vongerichten became wild for Chinese food, just Shanghai style at first, then everything, as he ventured daily to Chinatown and elsewhere. Mr. Tong of Shun Lee estimated that he had seen the chef in his restaurant every Sunday for the last six months. New ideas began percolating.

"Why can't a steak in a Chinese restaurant be medium-rare?" Mr. Vongerichten asked. "Why can't the meat on a Peking duck be more like confit? Why do they use so much pork fat in the fillings for dumplings, even shrimp dumplings? I don't see why we can't steam cod, even though it's not a fish they use. Chinese is a great cuisine but they haven't changed some of this stuff in 3,000 years. It's about time."

The chefs now cook the ducks differently, use butter instead of pork fat in the dumplings and sear the porterhouse to medium-rare. Cod steamed with ginger, it turns out, is excellent. "Every day Mr. Lam rethinks some of the dishes, and he seems very pleased with the results," Mr. Eden said.

Mr. Vongerichten has created new recipes for dumpling fillings (foie gras, for instance, or chopped diver scallops and freshwater chestnuts). And he has weaned the Chinatown chefs from their usual canned baby corn and straw mushrooms. Meaty chicken wings from Murray's, top-quality baby back ribs and prime beef have also entered the equation. And there is bound to be fleur de sel sprinkled somewhere. Why not on the steak? A jar of it was sitting in the kitchen, next to some chili oil.

What he is up to is not without precedent. Twenty years ago, another French-trained chef, Wolfgang Puck, opened Chinois-on-Main in Santa Monica, Calif. Mr. Puck was less compulsive. "I never wanted a strictly Chinese restaurant," he said.

Last-minute missteps aside, Mr. Vongerichten and his crew have come a long way since early December, when a few preliminary holiday parties were held in the still-unfinished restaurant, with chefs cooking on little Coleman burners instead of in giant woks. "Chinese camping" is how Mr. Vongerichten put it.

With scarcely more than a week to go, as the chefs tasted, some waiters were trying to master the computer ordering system as others were in the dining room being fitted with gray mandarin-collar Vivienne Tam uniforms. There was that tricky kung fu get-up for the busboys. The pants on the cocktail waitresses needed to be tighter. Daniel Del Vecchio, Mr. Vongerichten's ombudsman, raced about, troubleshooting, untangling glitches.

Now the pastry chef, Pichet Ong, who had been a fish cook at Jean Georges and was doing desserts at RM and the Jefferson, joined the tasting crew. He started work on what Mr. Vongerichten said would be an assortment of light desserts: a dozen or more sorbets, for example, served on Chinese soup spoons.

In the Chinese style, all the appetizers and main dishes at 66 will be served family style, for sharing. They will be taken to the tables as they are cooked, rather than in a set order. But except for the lazy susans on some of the tables, those Chinese-style uniforms and the festive red banners over the high counter, which seats 40 for noodles at lunch and drinks in the evening, there is nothing obviously Chinese about the restaurant's design.

"It's a modern setting but the red banners and the fish tanks give it a sense of place," Mr. Meier, the architect, said, awarding credit for the fish tanks, whose inhabitants are turned into dinner, to Mr. Vongerichten. Everything else about the sleek white room, softened with frosted glass panels, resin tables and Eames chairs, is pure Meier, including the choice of dinnerware, chopsticks and the carryout containers. Mr. Meier even painted the watercolors on one wall. He has gotten himself Chinese food for life.

What 66 most calls to mind is Pearl's, on West 48th Street, which opened in 1970, also a stark white Chinese restaurant designed by a famous architect, Charles Gwathmey, at a time when an upscale Chinese restaurant in New York was known by the liberal use of red and black lacquer and gold.

"The original Pearl's was a block away and done in orange and white," Mr. Gwathmey said. "Pearl and Jimmy Wong lost their lease and moved the restaurant and all they said to me was to make it a great room. It was pretty revolutionary at the time."

Today's aesthetic, both from a culinary and a design point of view, is vastly different. There is, for instance, the issue of feng shui. The superstitious Mr. Vongerichten insisted that it had been factored into Mr. Meier's design, particularly in the placement of a circular divider at the restaurant's entrance.

Mr. Meier scoffed at this notion. The architect, who has won the Pritzker Prize and who designed the Getty Center in Los Angeles, said, "I got the Getty right without it, didn't I?"

Feng shui is not really the issue, though. Nor is luck, despite the restaurant's name and address (66 is a lucky number in China). The big question is how to turn out enough of those scallion pancakes, and whether they will be as hot and crisp as when the chefs tasted them.

New Yorkers are demanding. And they do not like to wait.

MLK Day & City of God

After working the whole night, slept most of the day, again! in the evening, went to Grand Sichuan on 9th avenue (not bad, but no Shanghai Gourmet) with my friend selina, who just came back from a weekend in miami with friends. so lucky! i know i've had more than my fair share of sunny climes lately. but everytime i talk to someone going somewhere (italy, miami, bali), i cannot help but feel envious. especially as we are literally freezing our butts off here.

afterwards, as selina had to get up for surgery at 6am!, i went to see City of God at angelika by myself. there are almost no movies i am excited about that are out now. but this is one. and i was not disappointed. the theater was packed (on a monday night no less!). and although violent, the pace, story, and societal issues addressed were just right -- a mix of reality, survival, and a society careening out of control. (ok, have to do a little better on that one-liner summary. but its late...)

i guess the difference between a Quentin Tarantino film and this one is that in Tarantino's films you always have this surreal sense and consciousness that what you are seeing is not real and that everything is just a little too pretty and just a little too perfect. which is comforting, despite the violence. in this film, the documentary style of the cameras, the pace and shifted time contexts of the editing, and the story itself seemed like reality. or at least pretty close, in a realistically surreal way. sort of like Black Hawk Down, but better.

i actually have a ticket to go to rio, but after seeing this movie, i find myself thinking twice about the whole thing. then again, what i really liked about the film was the "warped" sense of survival, that i know in the real world is not really that warped at all, but probably necessary. seems like i cannot escape these two issues lately -- authenticity and survival based existence.

A Cold Winter Sunday

it took several days, but finally finished editing and processing my images from our trip to miami:
http://www.paulwhkan.com/abm/

also recently realized that the building that has been going up behind us is a new andre balazs (the mercer) hotel. the gentrification around here in the last two years has been nothing short of scary. soon starbucks will be moving in too. and we just left soho! sigh...