Certain sounds

"No matter how tired I may be"
from Unicorn (1980)
by Whitin Badger

No matter how tired I may be
Certain sounds will lift my head
And make my heart beat fast
The whirr of wings in air
A bluejay's call
The lapping of water
On a sandy shore

The Joy of Cooking

Great journal entry from linda on cooking (and the loss of generational experience). We all need historical family recipe books.
http://www.luckykat.com/03/020203.shtml

Xin Nian Quai le

this was a busy weekend with celebrations for chinese new year, and hanging out with a close friend leaving to India for a medical training rotation. friday, had thai at penang and then went to see the new spike lee movie, which was good but rather depressing. and saturday, despite almost having a rule never to go out on weekends (with the mobs), found ourselves out at pangaea after burgers at corner bistro and drinks with selina's attending and his girlfriend at Rhone (where we saw Dirk van Stockum, who used to be the old manager of System when it was hot in the mid90s; he went to london for a few years, and is back now).

as i almost never go out on weekends, i wasn't sure what pangaea would be like or who would be working the door, but Irv (who i've known for years and who must have just started there) was there, and waved us through the crowd as soon as he saw us coming up the street (one of the benefits of being a clubscene pseudo-regular for the last ten years). inside, the crowd was like a high school prom. ok, not really that bad. but we had alot of fun, and bumped into a few other friends from the uptown circuit.

sunday went down to chinatown for the parade, and then dim sum at Hop Sing. In the evening, a few people came over -- the girls brought food, the guys brought wine, and we fried up some guotie. yummy!

some pictures from the day:
http://www.paulwhkan.com/plog/nyc030202xinnian/
http://pics.cassworld.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=albun55

lots of articles this weekend -- new research on "happiness", an article on the consequences of the over-zealous anti-fur movement, assisted suicide in zurich, and Frank Quattrone getting suspended; then a bunch of articles on China (including an interesting PRD on overseas returnees), the upcoming NY fashion shows, and the Thomas Struth show at the Metropolitan.

Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left

Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left
By DANIEL GOLEMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/health/psychology/04ESSA.html

All too many years ago, while I was still a psychology graduate student, I ran an experiment to assess how well meditation might work as an antidote to stress. My professors were skeptical, my measures were weak, and my subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not surprisingly, my results were inconclusive.

But today I feel vindicated.

To be sure, over the years there have been scores of studies that have looked at meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the adverse effects of stress. But only last month did what I see as a definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis, by revealing the brain mechanism that may account for meditation's singular ability to soothe.

The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally distressed — anxious, angry, depressed — the most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.

By contrast, when people are in positive moods — upbeat, enthusiastic and energized — those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex. . . .

By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the left-right ratio on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme value to the left of the 175 people measured to that point.

The data has emerged as one of many experimental fruits of an unlikely research collaboration: the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious and political leader in exile, and some of top psychologists and neuroscientists from the United States. The scientists met with the Dalai Lama for five days in Dharamsala, India, in March 2000, to discuss how people might better control their destructive emotions.

One of my personal heroes in this rapprochement between modern science and ancient wisdom is Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Davidson, in recent research using functional M.R.I. and advanced EEG analysis, has identified an index for the brain's set point for moods.

The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally distressed — anxious, angry, depressed — the most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.

By contrast, when people are in positive moods — upbeat, enthusiastic and energized — those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex.

Indeed, Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a quick way to index a person's typical mood range, by reading the baseline levels of activity in these right and left prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts daily moods with surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to the right, the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while the more activity to the left, the more happy and enthusiastic.

By taking readings on hundreds of people, Dr. Davidson has established a bell curve distribution, with most people in the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those relatively few people who are farthest to the right are most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky few farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid.

This may explain other kinds of data suggesting a biologically determined set point for our emotional range. One finding, for instance, shows that both for people lucky enough to win a lottery and those unlucky souls who become paraplegic from an accident, by a year or so after the events their daily moods are about the same as before the momentous occurrences, indicating that the emotional set point changes little, if at all.

By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the left-right ratio on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme value to the left of the 175 people measured to that point.

Dr. Davidson reported that remarkable finding during the meeting between the Dalai Lama and the scientists in India. But the finding, while intriguing, raised more questions than it answered.

Was it just a quirk, or a trait common among those who become monks? Or was there something about the training of lamas — the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of a priest or spiritual teacher — that might nudge a set point into the range for perpetual happiness? And if so, the Dalai Lama wondered, can it be taken out of the religious context to be shared for the benefit of all?

A tentative answer to that last question has come from a study that Dr. Davidson did in collaboration with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

That clinic teaches mindfulness to patients with chronic diseases of all kinds, to help them better handle their symptoms. In an article accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Psychosomatic Medicine, Drs. Davidson and Kabat-Zinn report the effects of training in mindfulness meditation, a method extracted from its Buddhist origins and now widely taught to patients in hospitals and clinics throughout the United States and many other countries.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught mindfulness to workers in a high-pressure biotech business for roughly three hours a week over two months. A comparison group of volunteers from the company received the training later, though they, like the participants, were tested before and after training by Dr. Davidson and his colleagues.

The results bode well for beginners, who will never put in the training time routine for lamas. Before the mindfulness training, the workers were on average tipped toward the right in the ratio for the emotional set point. At the same time, they complained of feeling highly stressed. After the training, however, on average their emotions ratio shifted leftward, toward the positive zone. Simultaneously, their moods improved; they reported feeling engaged again in their work, more energized and less anxious.

In short, the results suggest that the emotion set point can shift, given the proper training. In mindfulness, people learn to monitor their moods and thoughts and drop those that might spin them toward distress. Dr. Davidson hypothesizes that it may strengthen an array of neurons in the left prefrontal cortex that inhibits the messages from the amygdala that drive disturbing emotions.

Another benefit for the workers, Dr. Davidson reported, was that mindfulness seemed to improve the robustness of their immune systems, as gauged by the amount of flu antibodies in their blood after receiving a flu shot.

According to Dr. Davidson, other studies suggest that if people in two experimental groups are exposed to the flu virus, those who have learned the mindfulness technique will experience less severe symptoms. The greater the leftward shift in the emotional set point, the larger the increase in the immune measure.

The mindfulness training focuses on learning to monitor the continuing sensations and thoughts more closely, both in sitting meditation and in activities like yoga exercises.

Now, with the Dalai Lama's blessing, a trickle of highly trained lamas have come to be studied. All of them have spent at least three years in solitary meditative retreat. That amount of practice puts them in a range found among masters of other domains, like Olympic divers and concert violinists.

What difference such intense mind training may make for human abilities has been suggested by preliminary findings from other laboratories. Some of the more tantalizing data come from the work of another scientist, Dr. Paul Ekman, director of the Human Interaction Laboratory at the University of California at San Francisco, which studies the facial expression of emotions. Dr. Ekman also participated in the five days of dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

Dr. Ekman has developed a measure of how well a person can read another's moods as telegraphed in rapid, slight changes in facial muscles.

As Dr. Ekman describes in "Emotions Revealed," to be published by Times Books in April, these microexpressions — ultrarapid facial actions, some lasting as little as one-twentieth of a second — lay bare our most naked feelings. We are not aware we are making them; they cross our faces spontaneously and involuntarily, and so reveal for those who can read them our emotion of the moment, utterly uncensored.

Perhaps luckily, there is a catch: almost no one can read these moments. Though Dr. Ekman's book explains how people can learn to detect these expressions in just hours with proper training, his testing shows that most people — including judges, the police and psychotherapists — are ordinarily no better at reading microexpressions than someone making random guesses.

Yet when Dr. Ekman brought into the laboratory two Tibetan practitioners, one scored perfectly on reading three of six emotions tested for, and the other scored perfectly on four. And an American teacher of Buddhist meditation got a perfect score on all six, considered quite rare. Normally, a random guess will produce one correct answer in six.

Such findings, along with urgings from the Dalai Lama, inspired Dr. Ekman to design a program called "Cultivating Emotional Balance," which combines methods extracted from Buddhism, like mindfulness, with synergistic training from modern psychology, like reading microexpressions, and seeks to help people better manage their emotions and relationships.

A pilot of the project began last month with elementary school teachers in the San Francisco Bay area, under the direction of Dr. Margaret Kemeny, a professor of behavioral medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. She hopes to replicate Dr. Davidson's immune system findings on mindfulness, as well as adding other measures of emotional and social skill, in a controlled trial with 120 nurses and teachers.

Finally, the scientific momentum of these initial forays has intrigued other investigators. Under the auspices of the Mind and Life Institute, which organizes the series of continuing meetings between the Dalai Lama and scientists, there will be a round at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Sept. 13 and 14. This time the Dalai Lama will meet with an expanded group of researchers to discuss further research possibilities.

Though open to the public, half the seats will be reserved for graduate students and academic researchers. (More information is at www.InvestigatingTheMind.org.)

As for me, I am taking all this to heart. An on-again, off-again meditator since my college days, I have become decidedly on again. Next month, my wife and I are heading to a warm spot for two or three weeks of meditation retreat. I may never catch up with that sublime lama, but I will enjoy trying.

The War Against the Fur Trade Backfires

The War Against the Fur Trade Backfires, Endangering a Way of Life
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/international/americas/04CANA.html

EDMONTON, Alberta, Jan. 30 — Native Canadians here in the frigid north tend to be soft-spoken and guarded about expressing their opinions to outsiders; that is, until the conversation turns to the subject of the antifur campaigns that began in the late 1960's.

Little wonder. The unintended consequences of the war against fur have hurt the livelihoods of thousands of Canadian Natives, and have enticed them to replace their lost incomes by welcoming into unspoiled areas the oil, gas and mining interests they once opposed.

"I can't find the words to fight back," said Zacharias Kunuk, an Inuit film director and seal hunter who lives in the Arctic town of Igloolik. "They are a bunch of Hollywood rich people who talk as if animals think like humans, when they don't."

Such opinions, expressed in recent weeks, hit like harpoons to the soul for environmentalists who now acknowledge that some activists went too far. . . . "The collapse of the fur trade was a disaster for people who are guardians of the environment," said Elizabeth May, executive director of Sierra Club Canada. . .

The sentiment of Rudy Cardinal, a 43-year-old Inuvialuit who now works as a custodian at Aurora College in Inuvik, was not much kinder.

"I grew up in an old log cabin with a sod roof, traveling by dog teams, checking my nets, hunting and trapping," he said on a day not long ago. "I'd love to go back to the old days but the bleeding hearts from Europe and the self-righteous groups killed our way of life."

Now he is training to drive heavy trucks for a proposed natural gas pipeline project in the pristine Mackenzie River Valley.

Such opinions, expressed in recent weeks, hit like harpoons to the soul for environmentalists who now acknowledge that some activists went too far in their zeal to protect baby seals from clubbing and lynx, marten, beaver, fox and other furry animals from cruel foot traps that left them writhing in pain.

The campaigns against the commercial kills of seals and against inhumane treatment of animals by hunters seemed to some a moral imperative. Now those campaigns appear to have unnecessarily snared the native populations in sanctions that might have been more accurately aimed at large commercial interests.

"The collapse of the fur trade was a disaster for people who are guardians of the environment," said Elizabeth May, executive director of Sierra Club Canada, who now proposes that fur trapped by Canadian Natives be labeled as such to promote their acceptance among environmentally minded consumers.

The long campaign to ban furs had many twists and turns. Public outrage led the European Economic Community to ban the import of seal pelts in 1983. Eight years later, in 1991, the European Union passed a resolution banning the import of fur from countries using leg-hold traps.

The 1991 European resolution was delayed for years by Canadian, Russian and the American lobbying, but the decades of campaigns against seal skins and other furs led by the International Fund for Animal Welfare and other groups helped change fashion tastes.

Women who wear animal skins for coats and stoles still risk attracting nasty glares from the ecology-minded, who would probably be surprised to hear that their righteous cause has a cost.

Trappers who once used to report to environmental groups when logging companies were clear-cutting forests or to the Canadian military when low-flying jets were disrupting caribou herds are no longer in a position to perform those custodial roles.

Populations of wolves, once killed by trappers to protect the skins of animals caught in their traps, have soared to the detriment of buffalo and caribou herds. An explosion in the population of beavers, which were almost extinct a century ago but now number an estimated 20 million in Canada, has caused the flooding of farmland as the animals eagerly pursue their dam-building.

"I'm still bitter about what was done to us," said Stephen Kakfwi, the premier of the Northwest Territories. "We pleaded with Greenpeace and the others. We told them we will have to turn to oil and gas and mining for jobs if they took such a hard stance against the import of wild furs to Europe."

As a young leader of his Canadian Native group, the Denes, Mr. Kakfwi opposed the development of the Mackenzie River pipeline. After the fur trade collapsed, he said, the native groups had no choice but to negotiate royalty agreements with oil companies to make up for the loss of the fur market. Now environmentalists fear that natural gas development in the river valley could threaten vital habitat for the grizzly, musk ox and caribou.

Similarly, impoverished Inuit settlements in northern Quebec reached an agreement last year with the Canadian government to promote offshore gas drilling in waters still teeming with seals. Nine Cree settlements around James Bay recently voted in a referendum to allow the provincial government to flood 115 square miles of traditional hunting lands for hydroelectric development in exchange for millions of dollars in aid and greater autonomy.

Among the strongest supporters of the agreement were trappers who could no longer make a good living off the area's foxes and beavers, said Bill Namagoose, the executive director of the Grand Council of the Quebec Cree.

"By saying don't kill the animals," Mr. Namagoose said, "they killed the economy." He added that many moose and marten would die in the flooding and that sturgeon and walleye spawning would be affected. "But we have to accept reality," he said.

Hunting seals was central to a way of life for the 45,000 Inuit who used blubber for fuel and skins for clothing and tents and insulation for their igloos and wooden huts. That way of life is now almost gone, replaced by an emerging urban landscape on the tundra. Seal meat has been replaced largely by a modern diet high in unsaturated fats and sugar, raising local rates of diabetes.

'Suicide Tourists' Go to the Swiss for Help in Dying

'Suicide Tourists' Go to the Swiss for Help in Dying
By ALISON LANGLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/international/europe/04SWIS.html

ZURICH, Feb. 3 — On a Monday morning in mid-January, Reginald Crew, a retired auto worker, flew in from Liverpool to kill himself.

The 74-year-old Englishman, who suffered from motor neurone disease, met a doctor at 10 a.m. In accordance with Switzerland's liberal euthanasia law, the doctor agreed that Mr. Crew was terminally ill and prescribed a deadly barbiturate, pentobarbital sodium.

By 3 p.m., Mr. Crew, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic in constant pain, sipped, through a straw, some water containing the barbiturate. Four minutes later, he was dead. His wife and his daughter were at his side.

The Crews were among a growing number of people known in Switzerland as suicide tourists — the desperately ill who long to end their suffering, and come here to do so legally.

In 2000, three foreigners committed assisted suicide in Zurich. In 2001, the number of death tourists rose to 38, plus 20 more in Bern. Last year, in Zurich alone, 55 foreigners came to die by their own hand in a strange land in an apartment not their own.

Most of those deaths occurred in Gertrudstrasse, in a working-class section of Zurich, in an apartment rented by Dignitas, one of four groups that have taken advantage of Switzerland's 1942 law on euthanasia to help the terminally ill die.

While the three other groups focus primarily on the terminally infirm in Switzerland, where scores of terminally ill people are assisted in dying each year, some three-quarters of the 2,500 members of Dignitas are foreigners.

Dignitas was founded by Ludwig Minelli, 70, a portly former journalist who, in midlife, became a lawyer and devoted his attention to Switzerland's oldest assisted suicide group, Exit. He started Dignitas in 1998, he said in an interview, to help others to die with a dignity they cannot find in their own countries, which in Mr. Minelli's opinion have "laws from the Middle Ages" on euthanasia.

Switzerland is not the only country to have legalized euthanasia for those certified by a doctor to be terminally ill. The Netherlands and Belgium have similar laws, but have attracted fewer "death tourists" because their laws insist that doctor and patient have a close relationship. Germany has firm rules prohibiting euthanasia dating back to the post-Nazi era.

Mr. Minelli said he does not advertise, except through Dignitas's Web site. Mr. Crew heard about the group from a television program. Most of Dignitas's members come from Germany, according to Mr. Minelli and the coroner's office. Fewer come from neighboring Austria and France. Others have traveled from as far as Israel, the United States, Britain and Lebanon, paying Dignitas a $70 registration fee and $30 yearly membership charge. Although some, like Mr. Crew, came with a gaggle of reporters and sold their story to media in their own countries, others cover their own travel and funeral expenses.

It is not the kind of tourism Swiss officials wish to encourage.

"Suicide is not something Switzerland wants to be known for," said Andreas Brunner, a prosecutor for the canton of Zurich. "This kind of tourism isn't the proper thing for Zurich."

To date, no charges have been filed against a person helping someone commit suicide. Mr. Brunner said he was investigating Dignitas's assistance of a person who was supposedly depressed but suffered no terminal illness.

The terminally ill would be better served dying at home, he said, adding that groups like Dignitas should campaign to change the laws in other countries.

Congresswoman Dorle Vallender wants to change the law to prohibit death tourism, and has proposed a bill that would regulate euthanasia groups and make the rules more cumbersome so that those wishing to die have more time to think about what they are doing.

"I'm not against assisted suicide," Ms. Vallender said. "But with Dignitas, it all happens too fast. They come here in the morning and are dead in the afternoon."

"We have a duty to make sure they really can't be helped and are making this decision without pressure," she said.

Back in 1942, Switzerland's euthanasia law was intended to help those with only a few weeks left to live die in a dignified way. For decades, there was an unwritten rule by established euthanasia groups to accept only Swiss citizens.

"At the time, it was thought that each person could freely decide their own fate," Ms. Vallender said. Lawmakers at that time could not foresee any instance where people would travel from another country to die.

More than a half-century later, though, as medical advances have extended life, an increasing number of people throughout the world are questioning the value of that endurance, Mr. Minelli said.

"We can prolong life," he said. "But my concern is that many people don't want to live any longer when their quality of life is gone."

The law states that a doctor must first diagnose the illness as hopeless or the disability as unreasonable. The person who wishes to commit suicide also must be of sound mind. Finally, the death must be witnessed by three people, one of whom must be a disinterested party, such as a nurse or physician.

Until recently, few took notice of the handful of people who ended their own lives each year.

Now, however, foreigners like Mr. Crew have turned their act into a political statement intended to sway public opinion in their home countries.

The Crew family's travel expenses were paid for by the "Tonight With Trevor McDonald" show, broadcast on Britain's private Independent Television network, which bought exclusive rights to the story for an undisclosed sum.

A week before, an 81-year-old German with Parkinson's disease, Ernst-Karl Aschmoneit, arrived at the Gertrudstrasse apartment with seven television crews and five newspaper journalists.

Last November, a Parisian woman named Marie Hascoët granted French television permission to film her death. A newspaper reporter accompanied her and the crew.

Mr. Minelli dismisses Mr. Brunner and Ms. Vallender simply as xenophobes. "If someone is needlessly suffering, a real human need of assistance also exists and I don't care where they are from," he said.

Dr. Wulf Rössler, head of the psychiatric clinic at the University of Zurich, said the central question was whether society wanted to help the gravely ill die. Suicide is contagious, he said, citing studies that show that a highly publicized suicide tends to beget copycat cases.

The neighbors in Gertrudstrasse certainly dislike the notoriety that comes with all the television cameras. "It doesn't belong in an apartment building," said Pius Schwendimann, who lives downstairs from Dignitas's fourth-floor premises. Every time a coffin is carried down, he said, "it's creepy."

Credit Suisse Suspends Star During Inquiry

Credit Suisse Suspends Star During Inquiry
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/business/04WALL.html

Credit Suisse First Boston suspended Frank P. Quattrone, its star technology investment banker, yesterday after discovering e-mail messages that suggested he knew of regulatory investigations when he urged his co-workers to clean up their files.

According to people who have read the messages, Mr. Quattrone was informed on Dec. 3, 2000, of both a civil and grand jury investigation into the firm's practice of allocating shares of hot stock offerings to favored clients. The notice came from David Brodsky, who was the firm's general counsel for the Americas at the time.

Two days later, Mr. Quattrone sent a message to his technology bankers endorsing a recommendation by a Credit Suisse banker that members of his group clean out their files in advance of a possible surge of securities lawsuits after the collapse of technology stocks.

This banker, unlike Mr. Quattrone, had not been informed that a regulatory investigation had begun, people briefed on the investigation said.

No documents were destroyed, according to the firm, because lawyers there rescinded the original recommendation after seeing Mr. Quattrone's e-mail message.

If Mr. Quattrone knew of the investigation when he warned his bankers about retaining documentation, he may have violated securities laws. Mr. Quattrone has already been notified by the NASD about a possible civil complaint regarding his role in the allocation of technology stock offerings to the firm's clients during the technology boom. Mr. Quattrone has 30 days to respond to what is called a Wells notice.

In a statement released by his spokesman, Mr. Quattrone said: "I did nothing wrong. I am confident that the investigation will show that."

For Credit Suisse First Boston, the disclosures represent a setback in the attempt by the chief executive, John J. Mack, to clean up the firm's reputation. Mr. Quattrone, who directed his own team of bankers and research analysts, personified the extent to which barriers separating research and banking blurred in the technology boom. By controlling both the stock allocation and stock research functions in his technology division, Mr. Quattrone was more a kingmaker than he was a classic investment banker.

Until now, Credit Suisse officials have maintained that Mr. Quattrone and his team operated above board throughout the 1990's.

The shift yesterday was abrupt. Within just days, Mr. Quattrone has gone from being a banker in good standing to one who may have been less than truthful with firm officials and who has perhaps interfered with a regulatory investigation.

Credit Suisse said in a statement that Mr. Quattrone would be put on administrative leave effective yesterday, pending further investigation into his actions. It also said it would cooperate fully with regulators.

Mr. Quattrone occupied a central role in the technology boom of the mid-1990's. He presided over his own department, based in Palo Alto, Calif., overseeing all functions of the initial public offering process — landing the deal, allocating shares to clients and generating research. It was an unusual Wall Street arrangement and one that he had previously tried at Morgan Stanley in the early 1990's. So rich were the fees that accrued to Mr. Quattrone and his team of bankers that he demanded his own cut from the firm.

Mr. Quattrone and Mr. Mack had clashed in the early 1990's at Morgan Stanley when Mr. Mack, then president of Morgan Stanley, refused to grant Mr. Quattrone the autonomy and slice of the profits he demanded for his technology group.

Mr. Quattrone took his group to Deutsche Bank in 1996, before moving on to Credit Suisse in July 1998.

In January 2002, six months after Mr. Mack succeeded Allen Wheat as chief executive of Credit Suisse, the firm agreed to pay $100 million to settle a regulatory complaint that Credit Suisse had received illegal kickbacks in exchange for technology offerings. Under the terms of the agreement, the firm neither admitted nor denied the claims.

To the surprise of many, Mr. Mack kept Mr. Quattrone and his group on board, even as he fired hundreds of other high-priced deal makers.

At Morgan Stanley and at Credit Suisse, Mr. Mack spoke out against the star system in investment banking. Mr. Quattrone ripped up his contract in the welcoming spirit of Mr. Mack's arrival, but he remained a star with his own fief, albeit one that generated scant revenues in a gloomy business environment.

When Mr. Quattrone's e-mail messages suggesting a file cleanup were first disclosed, Credit Suisse officials were not alarmed. Paring firm records and files after a certain period is an accepted industry practice. It is not allowed, however, when a regulatory investigation is either imminent or has already begun.

Gary Lynch, a former regulatory official brought in by Mr. Mack to oversee the firm's compliance and research areas, called Mr. Quattrone after the disclosure last Wednesday and asked if he had been aware of any regulatory investigation into banking practices when he suggested the file cleanup. Mr. Quattrone said he had no such knowledge.

On Friday, though, as Mr. Lynch was preparing a presentation to regulators on the firm's record-retention policies, a lawyer at Davis, Polk & Wardwell, Credit Suisse's law firm, came across Mr. Brodsky's e-mail messages from Dec. 3, 2000.

The first message sent by Mr. Brodsky reminded Mr. Quattrone that officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission and NASD had asked the firm for documents concerning its practice of allocating public offerings to banking clients.

Mr. Quattrone responded, asking for more information.

Within the hour, Mr. Brodsky sent another message asking that Mr. Quattrone not disclose its contents. Recently, he wrote, the firm had received subpoenas from a grand jury being set up by the United States attorney general's office asking for testimony and documentation on the firm's allocation of public offerings.

Mr. Quattrone asked whether the firm was being accused of any criminal activity.

Mr. Quattrone's e-mail message suggested two things: that he may not have been forthcoming when speaking to Mr. Lynch on Wednesday and that he may have actually committed a crime in suggesting that evidence be dispensed with before it could go to a grand jury.

Mr. Lynch informed regulators of his finding, and over the weekend he informed Mr. Quattrone's lawyer that his client would be on leave.

'97 Report Warned of Foam Damaging Tiles

'97 Report Warned of Foam Damaging Tiles
By JAMES GLANZ and EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/national/04WRON.html

As early as 1997, a senior NASA engineer warned that hardened foam popping off the external fuel tank on the Columbia shuttle had caused significant damage to the ceramic tiles protecting the vehicle from re-entry temperatures.
The warning was sure to receive new scrutiny after NASA said yesterday that its investigation into the cause of the destruction of the space shuttle on Saturday was focusing on damage to tiles that may have been caused by foam or ice or a combination of the two. NASA officials also acknowledged that they might have underestimated the potential seriousness of damage sustained by the tiles when the shuttle lifted off.

Gregory N. Katnik, a NASA engineer at Cape Canaveral, said in a report dated Dec. 23, 1997, that the Columbia had sustained damage to more than 300 tiles on a recent flight. The inspection after a Columbia mission in 1997 showed that the tiles had sustained damage that was "not normal," Mr. Katnik said.
In a number of other shuttle flights, tile damage from falling foam also caused smaller amounts of damage, but NASA decided that over all, the problem did not threaten the survival of its spacecraft.

Now the agency is re-examining that assumption as it struggles to explain the mystery of how the Columbia broke up as it soared back into the atmosphere.
Ron D. Dittemore, the shuttle program manager, told a news conference yesterday that damage to the tiles was the leading focus of the investigation, but he cautioned that what appeared to be the most likely solution might prove illusory as the complex inquiry moved ahead.
"There's some other event; there's some other missing link that we don't have yet that is contributing to this temperature increase," Mr. Dittemore said. "It's a mystery to us."
But new evidence that surfaced yesterday suggested that damage to the tiles may have been more severe and covered a wider area than first estimated.
A videotape made by a team of NASA scientists at the Jan. 16 liftoff appeared to show a bushel-basket-sized chunk of debris breaking away from the external fuel tank and striking the fragile protective tiles on the underside of the left wing. A NASA analysis suggested the impact could have damaged a swath of tile as large as 7 inches wide and 32 inches long, according to an agency memorandum made public yesterday.
The possibility that damaged tile could have caused the ship to break apart when it re-entered the atmosphere was supported by several outside experts in aerodynamics. They said in interviews that even slightly damaged tiles — perhaps only roughened or cracked — could generate turbulence near the tiles during the tremendous speeds of re-entry, creating potentially dangerous heating of Columbia's aluminum skin.
"There is a possibility that just damage to the tile to the point that they are rougher could create increased heating," said Dr. Michael Holden, director of the Calspan University of Buffalo Research Center in New York, which does aerodynamic testing of the shuttles.
"If it went turbulent, you'd be in more jeopardy," possibly affecting the survival of the entire craft, Dr. Holden said.
While NASA has had trouble working out the details of how the foam impact could have led to the breakup, the accumulating evidence could force the agency to alter its initial determination that the damage seen on the Columbia was not significant, said Dr. Edward Crawley, chairman of the department of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"It's possible that more insulation fell off than they thought," Dr. Crawley said. "It's possible that it hit in a way that caused more damage than their model suggested."
But it is also possible, Dr. Crawley said, that "there's still sort of a missing event here" — the link that will make a new pattern, and a new theory for the catastrophe, emerge.
The newly released NASA video shows a whitish object soaring backward, striking the Columbia's left wing and bursting into a cloud of dust. The oblong chunk appears to be the size of the shuttle's astronaut hatch, which measures about 40 inches by 40 inches.
Mr. Dittemore said NASA's analysis determined that the piece probably weighed just under three pounds, though he said that new and more intensive work was being done that could revise that number. With a range of assumptions about the exact angle at which the piece ricocheted off the spacecraft, he said, NASA determined that anywhere from a single tile to a swath 32 inches long could have been damaged.
He said that NASA's computer model generally predicted more damage than would actually take place. The debris was first noticed the day after the shuttle liftoff when engineers were reviewing film. But Mr. Dittemore said no one on NASA's study team initially thought the damage posed a serious concern.
"At the time I was not aware of anybody that had those feelings, at least to the point where they would want to come forward and identify that there's still something that they think remains undone," Mr. Dittemore said.
Reports prepared during the flight of the Columbia were released yesterday by NASA. They showed that the falling debris occurred 81 seconds into the flight and was first identified the day after the liftoff.

"At approximately 81 seconds Mission Elapsed Time, a large light-colored piece of debris was seen to originate from an area near the ET/Orbiter forward attach bipod," the report said. "The debris appeared to move outboard and then fall aft along the left side of the Orbiter fuselage, striking the leading edge of the left wing."

The report said that more detail would come from analysis of high-speed tracking films.

A report two days later said analysis of the films could not identify individual tiles, but it concluded, "no indications of larger scale damage were noted."

On Jan. 28, a report said that a study of films and analysis of temperatures onboard the spacecraft indicated a potential for significant damage to the tiles. But it concluded that there was "no safety of flight issue."

But the idea that somehow the tile was extremely vulnerable to damage received support from the earlier report on similar damage.
In 1997, Mr. Katnik, the senior NASA engineer, worked in a division that analyzed data from inspections of the shuttles. He is now a technical manager in the Space Shuttle Program Launch Integration Office at the Kennedy Space Center.
He said on the 1997 mission the shuttle sustained a significant amount of damage to its heat tiles. In a normal mission, a shuttle will sustain damage to up to 40 tiles because of ice dropping from the external tank and hitting the tiles, Mr. Katnik reported. But on that mission, he said, "the pattern of hits did not follow aerodynamic expectations, and the number, size and severity of the hits were abnormal."
Inspectors counted 308 hits. Of those, 132 were "greater than one inch," Mr. Katnik said. Some of the hits measured up to 15 inches long with depths of up to one-and-a-half inches. The tiles were only two inches deep, so the largest hits penetrated three-quarters of the way into the tiles, he noted.
The damaged tiles were mostly around the shuttle's nose. After the mission, more than 100 tiles were taken off because "they were irreparable," Mr. Katnik said.
The report went on to speculate as to why the foam dropped off. As it turned out, to be environmentally friendly, NASA had eliminated the use of Freon in foam production, Mr. Katnik reported. The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., later concluded that the absence of Freon led to the detachment of the foam.
While the formulation was later improved, the episode revealed potentially dangerous new ways in which tiles could be damaged.

"The tiles still had plenty of material left," Mr. Katnik said in an interview yesterday. "There was a margin of safety."

Nonetheless, he said, the shuttle "was coming back with an irritating amount of damage that we had to repair."

Columbia Was Beyond Any Help, Officials Say

Columbia Was Beyond Any Help, Officials Say
By KENNETH CHANG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/national/04OPTI.html

HOUSTON, Feb. 3 — Even if flight controllers had known for certain that protective heat tiles on the underside of the space shuttle had sustained severe damage at launching, little or nothing could have been done to address the problem, NASA officials say.

Virtually since the hour Columbia went down, the space agency has been peppered with possible options for repairing the damage or getting the crew down safely. But in each case, officials here and at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida say, the proposed solution would not have worked.

The simplest would have been to abort the mission the moment the damage was discovered. In case of an engine malfunction or other serious problem at launching, a space shuttle can jettison its solid rocket boosters and the external fuel tank, shut down its own engines and glide back down, either returning to the Kennedy Space Center or an emergency landing site in Spain or Morocco.

But no one even knew that a piece of insulation from the external tank had hit the orbiter until a frame-by-frame review of videotape of the launching was undertaken the next day. By then, Columbia was already in orbit, and re-entry would have posed the same danger that it did 16 days later.

Four other possibilities have been discussed at briefings or in interviews since the loss of Columbia, and rejected one by one by NASA officials.

First, repairing the damaged tiles. The crew had no tools for such a repair. At a news conference on Sunday, Ron D. Dittemore, the shuttle program manager, said that early in the shuttle program, NASA considered developing a tile repair kit, but that "we just didn't believe it was feasible at the time." He added that a crew member climbing along the underside of the shuttle could cause even more damage to the tiles.

Another idea, widely circulated on the Internet in the last few days, was that the shuttle could have docked with the International Space Station once the damage was discovered. But without the external fuel tank, dropped as usual after launching, Columbia had no fuel for its main engines and thus no way it could propel itself to the station, which circles the earth on a different orbit at a higher altitude.

"We have nowhere near the fuel needed to get there," said Bruce Buckingham, a spokesman at the Kennedy Space Center.

Another shuttle, Atlantis, was scheduled for launching on March 1 to carry supplies and a new crew to the space station, and it is possible to imagine a Hollywood-type series of events in which NASA rushed Atlantis to the launching pad, sent it up with a minimal crew of two, had it rendezvous with Columbia in space and brought everyone down safely.

But Atlantis is still in its hangar, and to rush it to launching would have required NASA to circumvent most of its safety measures. "It takes about three weeks, at our best effort, to prepare the shuttle for launch once we're at the pad," Mr. Buckingham said, "and we're not even at the pad." Further, Columbia had enough oxygen, supplies and fuel (for its thrusters only) to remain in orbit for only five more days, said Patrick Ryan, a spokesman at the Johnson Space Center here.

Finally, there is the notion that Columbia's re-entry might have been altered in some way to protect its damaged area. But Mr. Dittemore said the shuttle's descent path was already designed to keep temperatures as low as possible. "Because I'm reusing this vehicle over and over again, so I'm trying to send it through an environment that minimizes the wear and tear on the structure and the tile," he said at his news conference on Sunday.

Today he added that he did not know of a way for the shuttle to re-enter so that most of the heat would be absorbed by tiles that were not damaged, on its right wing. "I'm not aware of any other scenarios, any other techniques, that would have allowed me to favor one wing over the other," he said.

Even if that had been possible, it would probably have damaged the shuttle beyond repair and made it impossible to land, requiring the crew to parachute out at high speed and at high altitude. He said there was no way managers could have gotten information about the damaged tiles that would have warranted so drastic a move.

Gene Kranz, the flight director who orchestrated the rescue of astronauts aboard the crippled Apollo 13 in 1970, said that from what he knew about the suspected tile damage, there was probably nothing that could have been done to save the flight. "The options," he said in a telephone interview, "were just nonexistent."

Recovery Turns Grim as Remains of Some Victims Are Found

Recovery Turns Grim as Remains of Some Victims Are Found
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/national/03XDEBR.html

NACOGDOCHES, Tex., Feb. 2 — A gargantuan recovery effort turned increasingly grim today, as hundreds of officials, volunteers and homeowners combed the countryside of East Texas and western Louisiana, turning up remains of some of the astronauts aboard the space shuttle Columbia.

The most taxing part of the task quickly became clear, as searchers and even small children stumbled across human remains in backyards, in hayfields and on roadsides.

In Plainview, Tex., Tammy White's three sons — 4, 6 and 8 — were riding a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle when they came across a charred leg. "They've been asking questions," Ms. White said.

Her youngest, Colton, "keeps saying, `Go with me to the bathroom;' he doesn't want to be left alone," she said. "The oldest one is sad, he's really devastated. He says, `It's so bad, no one should be looking at that stuff, no one should be taking pictures of it — it's somebody's Momma or Daddy.'

"I said, `Yes, baby, it is.' "

Late today, Ms. White said she had seen a person's charred and badly disfigured upper body, including the head, at a neighbor's property a mile from her own. "I do not even know what to begin to say," she said. "There's nothing I can say."

Teams of searchers in San Augustine County, Tex., reported finding a human heart, a leg and fingers — one with a ring on it.

Clark Barnett, 33, a nursery owner, was driving into Hemphill, Tex., when he spotted a torso in the road.

"It's not something you want to sit and look at," he said. "It wasn't pretty. It was a very gruesome sight. It kind of brought it all home. It just kind of made you realize — it really makes you think about things, especially those families."

Ambulance crews were dispatched to collect and preserve human remains, which were to be transferred to Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, La. before being sent to Dover Air Force Base.

At Barksdale, a board of inquiry was also being convened, and investigators from NASA, the F.B.I., the National Transportation Safety Board and other agencies were setting up a staging area for shipments of recovered debris.

Bob Cabana, a NASA official, announced in a news conference tonight that remains of all seven astronauts had been found, but the agency released a statement later saying he misspoke. He said that NASA was in contact with the Israeli government to permit Col. Ilan Ramon's remains to be identified quickly.

The recovery effort swept up virtually everyone in a uniform of any kind — firefighters, ambulance drivers, tobacco and alcohol agents, National Guardsmen — and countless other volunteers. Riding horses, ATV's and boats, on foot and in the air, they scoured pine woods, lakes and reservoirs covering hundreds of square miles for any fragments that could yield clues to the cause of the shuttle's disintegration.

By late today, officials in Lufkin, Tex., where the recovery efforts were being coordinated, had reported finding more than 1,400 pieces of shuttle debris in five counties, but at least 13 counties had confirmed at least one finding of debris.

There were a few large discoveries: a piece of metal the size of a pickup truck found in thinly populated San Augustine County east of here; a car-size object seen by fishermen splashing down in the Toledo Bend reservoir on the Louisiana state line; a round tank about three feet across that landed on the runway of the regional airport here; a large piece of what looked like landing gear, found in San Augustine not far from what resembled a radio.

And there were more revelations of brushes with disaster on the ground. About 10 miles west of Nacogdoches, a maintenance man checking a natural-gas pipeline station late Saturday found a charred electronic box the size of a stereo component on the ground between two full two-story-tall gas tanks. There was not a nick on either of the tanks. The box missed a host of pipes and connections between the tanks. It also missed a high-tension power line just 20 yards away.

In Nacogdoches, where more than 800 fragments of the shuttle were confirmed by midday today, and about 100 were being guarded by troopers or National Guardsmen, 12 teams of scientists at Stephen F. Austin State University were racing to mark precise locations with global-positioning backpack contraptions. At daybreak, NASA employees, including a pair of astronauts, were out videotaping any debris that might provide information.

NASA officials said the space agency had sent more than 100 administrative, technical, engineering, management and support workers from several offices around the country to help in the recovery effort. "Everybody has been mobilized," said Dwayne Brown, a NASA official in Lufkin.

So many others were mobilized, in fact, that the scene here alternated from the macabre to the ridiculous, as convoys of photographers chased scientists carrying global-positioning equipment, and dozens of amateur photographers and gawkers sped along highways only to brake suddenly at the sight of yellow caution tape.

"I'm just mesmerized by it," said Lomond Bussey, 64, who had driven her Cadillac three and a half hours to see what she could see. "My husband thinks I'm a nut."

The need to guard against souvenir hunters, meanwhile, was straining law enforcement. National Guardsmen on weekend maneuvers who expected to return to their jobs on Monday had their duties extended 48 hours. Hundreds of state law enforcement agents were arriving. And East Texas was expected to be declared a federal disaster area.

It remained unclear tonight when the removal of debris would begin. But Gov. Rick Perry said schools where potentially dangerous pieces of debris remained within reach of children would not hold classes on Monday. About 12 miles west of Nacogdoches, 25 fragments were found on the 20-acre campus of the Douglas Independent School District.

New year brings fresh hope for revellers

New year brings fresh hope for revellers
NAILENE WIEST CHOU, in Beijing
Tuesday, February 4, 2003
http://china.scmp.com/chimain/ZZZ8P8OXMBD.html

Mrs Yan sat on the pavement twisting colourful balloons into animals, flowers and bows. The street fair in Beijing's Liulichang district celebrating the Spring Festival meant a little extra income and she wished for "a bit more comfort, a bit less worry" in the new year.

She comes from a village in a Muslim autonomous district near Changzhou in Hebei province, where her family grows corn and cotton. Most of the able-bodied men of the village work in the cities, and as they spent the holiday at home, she decided to go there for herself.

"City folks have no idea of our lives in the countryside. I am amazed at the way they spend money. We are different," she said. She said she expected to make 100 yuan (HK$94) or more at the fair, which she would put aside for emergencies and to help relatives.

Meanwhile Mr Hu, a senior correspondent at the official Legal Daily and an amateur photographer, ambled through the crowd looking for pictures to take.

"I wish a more prosperous year for the whole country," he said, quoting late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping's famous dictum: "Development is the hard truth."

As a journalist, he said he had noticed that press controls had been loosening, but he thought the pace should not be hurried.

"I am not blaming the system. Too much freedom can cause chaos," he said.

Across town, the temple fair at Ditan Park, which draws one million visitors every year during the festival, was in full swing. Miss Cai, in tight trousers and a coat trimmed with fake fur, had just finished singing a popular song at karaoke. She bowed deeply and blurted out a string of new year wishes for her parents in Sichuan, her best friends going home for the holiday, the staff making the fair possible and the audience for listening to her.

Stepping down from the stage, she joined her friend. What wish did she have for herself?

"I want to be prettier," she said with a giggle.

She said she had another year to go before graduating from university. This year she had resisted a plea from her family to go home for the holiday because spending 40 hours travelling seemed a waste of time, and she preferred hanging out with friends in Beijing. "I knew my parents were disappointed, but I am happy here," she said.

Mr Liu, a government worker, said he was visiting the fair with his grandson. He said the new year was nothing special to him any more.

"In the old days, the new year festival was really something unusual - good food, new clothes, colourful decorations and a special time for relaxation and fun," he said. "Now we eat well and dress well every day. The excitement is just not there anymore."

He said economic progress had somehow dampened enthusiasm for the holiday and modern consumer culture was distasteful. He said that for the new year, he wished not for riches but for more harmony in society, and a better world for children like his grandson to grow up in.

The overseas returnees

The overseas returnees
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Annie Wang, SCMP PRD
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/anniewang/ZZZ4CLBIWAD.html

OXFORD-EDUCATED CC has been asked many times by her Chinese friends on the mainland if she felt like a second-class citizen or was bullied or discriminated against in England. Every time, CC replies that the English didn't treat her badly.

But no one believes her, asking: ''If England was so good, why did you come back to China?'' Every time, the question stumps her because of the implication she is either lying because she is an English lackey or trying to hide her pain.

CC phones Niuniu, hoping she can help come up with a better response.

After explaining the situation, CC asks Niuniu if she's ever faced a similar predicament.

Niuniu answers, ''I've been asked the same question over and over again. Many Chinese who haven't been to America think of the States as a racist country probably because of its history of slavery. I tell my Chinese friends there is prejudice in every country. In China, city people are contemptuous of country people; Hong Kong people look down on mainlanders; Beijingers look down on waidiren, outsiders; Shanghainese look down on non-Shanghainese speakers, Cantonese look down on all the people north of them.''

''Good point,'' CC says. ''Confucian societies, including Japan and Korea, are often classist. But when it comes to foreigners, I find Asians tend to look up to whites and down on blacks.'' Niuniu disagrees. ''I really don't think so. The Chinese are very nationalistic, just like the Americans.''

''Being nationalistic is one thing, but admiration for foreign things is something else,'' CC says. ''They do co-exist in China. Otherwise, how can you explain why so many young Chinese men want to go to America? Why so many young Chinese girls want to marry Europeans or Americans?''

Hearing this, Niuniu realises CC is thinking about how she was dumped by her English boyfriend Nick, who had so many female admirers in China. Before she can think of how to comfort her, CC continues: ''I felt I wasn't treated badly as an Asian woman in England. But I do get a raw deal as a Chinese woman in China. I'm constantly reminded that I'm fat and old and too strong for a woman. It's so odd that being in my home country, I feel like a stranger in a strange land.

''Many people believe Chinese girls who've stayed in the West for a period of time are too liberal and open. They all want a traditional wife. But China is no longer conservative or traditional. So many friends I know have extra-marital affairs. Look at those corrupt officials; so many of them got into trouble because of their mistresses.''

''But being Chinese, especially an overseas returnee, you can't criticise China like this,'' says Niuniu. ''It would make you a hanjian, a traitor. Being a traitor is the lowest of the low. Even if your criticism makes sense, it would hurt their feelings.''

''Right,'' CC says. ''Now I remember you just said that the Chinese are very nationalistic, as much as the Americans I guess. We Europeans aren't like that.''

Niuniu jumps in. ''Don't say 'we Europeans' in front of your Chinese patriots. Remember how Hollywood actress Joan Chen was humiliated and criticised by the Chinese media after she referred to 'you Chinese' in a speech she made in the 1980s?''

''Let's go back to the original question,'' CC says. ''What should I say if my Chinese fellows ask me again, 'If England was so good, why would you come back to China?'

''I don't think I can say it's because I'm a patriotic overseas Chinese who returned to her motherland because I couldn't put up with racism in the West. That's simply a lie.''

''But it's the standard answer from all returnees,'' Niuniu says.

''It seems I've no choice but to quote the cliche, yeluoguigen, falling leaves returning to their roots?'' CC says.

''I think you're right,'' Niuniu says thoughtfully.

''But am I so old that I'm already a falling leaf? I thought I was still a greenish leaf.''

''No. You're not, as least not by Chinese standards,'' Niuniu says.

North of Beijing, California Dreams Come True

North of Beijing, California Dreams Come True
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/international/asia/03CHIN.html

ORANGE COUNTY, China — An hour's drive north of Beijing, on an icy country road lined by fields and populated by trucks and sheep, the landscape is a far cry from palm-ringed golf courses and "Surfin' USA."

But wait. There is Sun City, a half-built gated community with echoes of the desert. Then the tidy homes of Orange County come into view. Finally, you drive through a stone portal, past advertisements showing men fly-fishing in cowboy hats, pulling up before the impressive mansions of Watermark-Longbeach, the epicenter of faux L.A. in China.

"I liked it immediately — it is just like a house in California," exulted Nasha Wei, a former army doctor turned businesswoman, sitting on a white suede banquette in the four-bedroom home in Orange County (China) she moved into this year.

Bits of American geography are popping up all over Beijing, the latest fashion in real estate marketing and sales. Soho, Central Park, Palm Springs and Manhattan Gardens are among recent developments.

There are two Sun Cities. American place names have supplanted offerings like Jade Dragon Apartments and East Lake Villa, reflecting Chinese consumers' increasingly Western aspirations.

"Especially in Beijing, it's a kind of fashion — and if you don't chose a Western concept right now you're really out of it," said Victor Yuan, whose Horizon Market Research advises developers on how to set their buildings apart. In surveys, his company found that 70 percent of developers were emphasizing Western style as a marketing tool.

In many instances, the name is just an American location tacked on to typical upmarket Chinese apartments. But at Orange County and Longbeach, developers have promised clients the real deal — so long as they can afford the minimum half million-dollar price tag.

Houses are replicas of Southern California homes, designed by Southern California architects, with model homes decorated by Los Angeles interior designers. The basement pool tables are American. The appliances are imported. The tiles, wood siding and wall sconces are from the United States, too.

Of course, not every aspect of upper-middle-class Los Angeles translates exactly, and adjustments have had to be made. Houses in Orange County were all built with sprawling American-style open-plan kitchens, with ovens and countertop stoves. But residents have discovered that they are poorly suited to typical Chinese cooking, which is centered on woks and sends grease and smoke spewing everywhere.

"I love the kitchen — it is very pretty — but the smoke is dispersed all over the house by the central air," said Liang Haijing, a thirtysomething lawyer, with big eyes and curly hair. So, like many Orange County residents, Ms. Liang has built a shack just outside the kitchen's sliding glass doors, and all cooking is done out there.

Weighdoon Yang, vice president of SinoCEA, the real estate development company that owns both Orange County and Watermark-Longbeach, showed off a yellow wood French country estate modeled, he said, on Coto de Caza. In 1999, he and his partner, Zhang Bo, traveled to California to research homes, coming back with a concept and a deal with a Newport Beach architect.

"Chinese people like the image of the American lifestyle, and we are the only company building homes like this here," he said.

It is clear that their offering has tapped into a well of desire. Though an hour out of Beijing, all of the homes in Orange County, or Ju Jun in Chinese, were sold within a month. In this mix of free-standing tudor and stucco three- and four-bedroom homes, children play in the street and sport utility vehicles sit comfortably in driveways.

Homes in the more upmarket and more recently completed Watermark-Longbeach section of the compound cost $1.5 million and up, ranging from yellow French country estates to Spanish stucco castles, each model home a pumped-up version of the American dream.

Landscaped backyards sport barbecues, fountains and kidney-shaped pools. Girls' rooms are decorated with beach sets from Old Navy. Even though fire trucks are nonexistent here in the Chinese countryside, the toddler's room in one home is furnished in a fire engine theme.

What is on sale here is not just a dwelling but a dream — one that is just a fantasy for most Chinese, who make well under $500 a month. As in the case of its namesake, Orange County (China) is mostly a haven for conservative lawyers, businesspeople and celebrities, looking for a peaceful place to rear children.

The Chinese developers have had to pay attention to some local preoccupations, including the requirements of feng shui (an Asian philosophy of home environment), a relatively new concern in Southern California, but more or less an obsession here.

"As soon as I saw the place I was very happy," Ms. Liang said. "In appearances, it's totally unlike other Chinese compounds, but more than that, we have the river to the south and the mountains to the north. The feng shui is excellent — it gives you the feeling of coming home."

The compound's residents are all Chinese, a mix of those who have spent time in the West and those who just liked the atmosphere. Ms. Wei goes to the United States several times a year, selling her company's wooden furniture to American stores.

Ms. Liang, in contrast, has never been abroad. She said she liked the huge master bathroom and "scientific" layout, which divides the first floor into living, dining and family rooms. Typical upmarket Chinese homes have just one large space.

"This is much more cozy," she said, snuggling in a fleece vest on a couch by the fireplace. "Chinese sitting rooms are like hotels."

So far, Orange County is a suburb without suburbia, surrounded by villages and fields. But that is sure to change. It is less than 10 miles from the site of the 2008 Olympic Games, and the area is scheduled for rapid development. Already, two newly completed six-lane superhighways that run nearby are giving it more of that L.A. feel, with just one difference: there is no traffic — yet.

For Now, New Rules Don't Snarl Hong Kong Port Traffic

For Now, New Rules Don't Snarl Hong Kong Port Traffic
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/international/asia/03HONG.html

HONG KONG, Feb. 2 — Container shipping traffic slowed today at the sprawling port here, but maritime officials reported no serious disruptions as the United States Customs Service began enforcing new antiterrorism rules on cargo bound for American ports.

Shipping executives emphasized that the rules had taken effect in the middle of Chinese New Year celebrations, when few containers are shipped. They warned that problems could still crop up when business returns to normal next week.

"In no way does this mean we have full compliance moving ahead," said Steen B. Lund, the vice president for southern China and Hong Kong at Maersk SeaLand, the world's largest shipping line.

Drafted in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the rules are aimed at thwarting any terrorist attempts to send nuclear weapons or other bulky weapons of mass destruction to the United States in the 40-foot steel shipping containers now used to carry much of the world's trade. The rules require exporters to transmit electronically to the Customs Service exactly what is in each container at least 24 hours before a ship departs for the United States.

Customs officials had said that the new rules could pose a serious problem for Hong Kong's port, the world's busiest, handling nearly a tenth of all containers worldwide. Unlike most ports these days, the Kwai Chung Port has a freewheeling business culture in which containers are packed and loaded hours before a ship sails, while most records are still kept on paper and cannot be easily transmitted electronically to the Customs Service.

APL, a container shipping line especially active on trans-Pacific routes, said this afternoon that Customs officials had asked for additional documentation on a couple of containers leaving Kwai Chung Port. But APL and the exporters were able to provide the information quickly and the containers were loaded, said Ted Fordney, a vice president at APL, a subsidiary of Neptune Orient Lines, based in Singapore.

Mr. Lund said that of 430 containers scheduled for loading on one of Maersk SeaLand's ships at the port here today, only one had to be left behind because the exporter did not file information on the container's contents in time.

But the Maersk SeaLand ship today was mostly carrying containers full of garments, a fairly high-value cargo typically shipped by exporters who have already computerized their operations and who have been better prepared than most for the new rules, Mr. Lund added.

Port operators in Hong Kong charge higher container handling fees during Chinese New Year than at any other time, a practice that discourages shipments and allows the ports to run with minimal crews during the holidays.

Many factories upstream of Hong Kong in the Pearl River delta, the world's biggest export region in terms of numbers of containers, closed last week and will remain closed for the holidays this week, so the flow of goods has diminished.

The new Customs rules require exporters to provide 14 categories of information electronically to Customs officials. The rules technically took effect two months ago, but the Customs Service set today as the date that it would begin collecting fines for violators shipping containers to the United States from any port. The Customs Service is preparing to impose similar rules next year on air, trucking and rail shipments.

Fines start at $5,000 for the first container sent to an American port in violation of the rules, and $10,000 for each additional container, with potential extra penalties up to the value of the cargo. In addition, the Customs Service has banned American ports from unloading containers that do not comply with the rules.

Wary of being stuck with containers that they could not unload, the world's major shipping lines have told exporters in recent weeks that they would not accept any containers that fail to comply.

Exporters in many countries tend to be multinational corporations that already file electronic lists of containers' cargos with shipping lines and government agencies. But Hong Kong exporters tend to be small and medium-size companies that still keep records on paper, and face minimal filing requirements from the Hong Kong government, which has long maintained this semi-autonomous Chinese territory as a free-trade haven.

China is the world's fifth-largest exporter in terms of the dollar value of its foreign sales, after the United States, Japan, Germany and France. But it exports more containers than any other country because its exports tend to be manufactured goods like shoes and toys and furniture, which are well suited to containerized shipping. Wealthier countries rely more on exports of computer chips, cars and aircraft, which seldom are shipped in containers.

U.S. police arrest a Chinese banker suspected of huge embezzlement

U.S. police arrest a Chinese banker suspected of huge embezzlement
By David Lague / FEER HONG KONG
Issue cover-dated February 06, 2003
http://www.feer.com/articles/2003/0302_06/p044money.html

THE SCANDAL-PLAGUED Bank of China has scored a victory in its efforts to crack down on corruption with the arrest in the United States of a former branch manager accused of playing a key role in one of Communist China's biggest embezzlement cases. But Beijing is likely to face a long battle in its efforts to extradite Yu Zhendong and bring him to trial on the mainland for the alleged theft of up to $725 million from the Kaiping branch of the Bank of China in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

Law enforcement officials and diplomats from China, the U.S. and Canada began negotiations in early January in Beijing to repatriate Yu, according to senior Hong Kong police officers and U.S. officials in Hong Kong. The suspect was arrested in December in California on charges of passport fraud and is currently being held in Las Vegas, U.S. and Hong Kong officials tell the Review, without giving further details. But the negotiations for his return to the mainland, where he could face the death penalty, are expected to be politically sensitive and legally complex, in large part because there is no extradition treaty between the United States and China.

Another two former managers from the Bank of China branch at Kaiping, Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun, who are also suspected of involvement in the theft, are still on the run. They are thought by police to be somewhere in North America. The three fled China via Hong Kong using false travel documents in October 2001 just as the bank's auditors were closing in. Chinese police and bank officials believe the managers' families had earlier been sent abroad.

"China is very, very interested in getting the subjects in the Bank of China investigation back," top U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation official Charles Prouty told reporters in Hong Kong on January 23. "We are working on some agreement but we also have a case against them," he added.

Senior Hong Kong government officials familiar with the talks in Beijing say that a range of options for bringing Yu to trial had been discussed. He could, for example, be arraigned in the U.S. for immigration offences or money laundering. But this was unlikely to please Chinese authorities because an open trial in the U.S. could further embarrass the Bank of China, particularly if it revealed that more senior bank officers were involved, as some of the Chinese and Hong Kong investigators now suspect.

HONG KONG OPTION
It was also suggested that Yu could be extradited for trial in Hong Kong, the officials say. A major proportion of the proceeds of the theft were channelled through Hong Kong where police have charged four people in connection with laundering more than $75 million and gained court orders freezing more than $100 million in assets. However, the complexity of the money-laundering operation means it will take Hong Kong police some time to prepare a case for extradition. The territory has an extradition treaty with the U.S.

Officials also discussed the possibility that Yu could be deported back to China as an illegal immigrant but this is also likely to be a drawn-out process as Yu is expected to exploit every legal tactic at his disposal to avoid a return home.

The case could rival the controversy and diplomatic friction surrounding Lai Changxing, the alleged mastermind behind a $6.4 billion smuggling racket centred on the coastal Chinese city of Xiamen. Lai fled to Canada in 1999 and is fighting a legal battle against Beijing's extradition efforts. The theft from Kaiping was the biggest single case of embezzlement reported since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. It turned a spotlight on corruption and fraud that could undermine domestic confidence in China's technically insolvent state-owned banks.

Graft also threatens China's plans to use public listings and management reforms to restore its banks to health and halt the accumulation of bad loans. Corruption scandals at the Bank of China, including the current investigation into its former President Wang Xuebing, were a key factor in Beijing's decision to scale back the public flotation of the bank's Hong Kong arm last year. In the prospectus for the listing, BOC claimed the three managers from Kaiping had embezzled or misappropriated about $500 million through foreign-exchange trading, off-balance sheet loans and diverting funds to third parties between 1993 and 2001. Hong Kong detectives working on the case calculate the loss at closer to $725 million.

I.N.S. Shredder Ended Work Backlog, U.S. Says

I.N.S. Shredder Ended Work Backlog, U.S. Says
By JOHN M. BRODER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/national/31FILE.html

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 30 — Tens of thousands of pieces of mail come into the huge Immigration and Naturalization Service data processing center in Laguna Niguel, Calif., every day, and as at so many government agencies, it tends to pile up. One manager there had a system to get rid of the vexing backlog, federal officials say. This week the manager was charged with illegally shredding as many as 90,000 documents.

Among the destroyed papers, federal officials charged, were American and foreign passports, applications for asylum, birth certificates and other documents supporting applications for citizenship, visas and work permits.

The manager, Dawn Randall, 24, was indicted late Wednesday by a federal grand jury, along with a supervisor working under her, Leonel Salazar, 34. They are accused of ordering low-level workers to destroy thousands of documents from last February to April to reduce a growing backlog of unprocessed paperwork.

Ms. Randall was the file room manager at the I.N.S. center. Mr. Salazar was her file room supervisor. The Laguna Niguel center handles paperwork for residents of California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii and Guam and is one of four immigration service centers around the country operated by private contractors under I.N.S. supervision.

According to the federal indictment, Ms. Randall ordered her subordinates last January to count the number of unprocessed papers in the filing center. They reported that about 90,000 documents were waiting to be handled. In February, the government says, she ordered at least five night-shift workers to begin shredding many boxes of papers.

By the end of March, the backlog had been cut to zero, and Ms. Randall ordered her subordinates to continue destroying incoming paper to keep current, the government says.

"There was no I.N.S. policy that required this, nor was she ordered to do it by any superior, as far as we know," said Greg Staples, the assistant United States attorney handling the case. "The only motive we can think of is just the obvious one of a manager trying to get rid of a nettlesome problem."

Mr. Staples said one frustrating thing about the case was that most of the evidence had been carted out with the trash and that it was impossible to identify all of the victims.

"It's like a murder case without a body," he said. "We will never really know what was destroyed."

The shredding was discovered in April by an agency supervisor who witnessed what appeared to be unauthorized destruction of documents. The I.N.S. office of internal audit, the Justice Department's inspector general and the United States attorney's office for Southern California conducted the investigation that led to this week's indictments.

Ms. Randall and Mr. Salazar were each charged with conspiracy and five counts of willfully destroying documents filed with the I.N.S. The conspiracy charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison. Each of the other counts can bring three years in prison.

Their subordinates were not charged because they were low-level workers acting on instructions, the government said.

After the shredding was discovered, the immigration service opened a hotline for people who suspected their paperwork had been destroyed. Agency officials helped petitioners reconstruct their files and gave applicants the benefit of the doubt if they could not replace the documents they had submitted, said Lori Haley, a spokeswoman for the I.N.S.'s western regional office.

She said the agency made an effort last year to publicize the problem and was confident that it had rebuilt most of the lost files. She also said that additional staff members had been hired at the center and that oversight had been tightened.

"Monitoring of the activities of the support services contractor has been enhanced at the service center," Ms. Haley said. "All materials to be shredded or destroyed are reviewed first by I.N.S. personnel to make sure that no unauthorized materials are destroyed."

Ms. Randall's lawyer, Joseph G. Cavallo, said today that he had not read the charges and would not comment. He said, however, that Ms. Randall would plead not guilty at her arraignment on Monday. Mr. Salazar's lawyer, Tom Brown, did not return calls seeking comment.

The four document processing centers are operated under a $325 million contract with JHM Research and Development of Maryland, which in turn subcontracts the operations to two other companies. John Macklin, president of JHM, was unavailable for comment.

Mr. Staples, the federal prosecutor, said the contractors were cooperating with the investigation and would not be charged unless more evidence against them was developed.

"If we had found criminal liability, we would have indicted the companies," he said.

The Brains Behind Bush's War

The Brains Behind Bush's War
By TODD S. PURDUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/01/arts/01HAWK.html

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — Any history of the Bush administration's march toward war with Iraq will have to take account of long years of determined advocacy by a circle of defense policy intellectuals whose view that Saddam Hussein can no longer be tolerated or contained is now ascendant.

Like the national security experts who were the intellectual architects of the Vietnam War, men like McGeorge Bundy, Walt W. Rostow and others branded "The Best and the Brightest" in David Halberstam's ironic phrase, these theorists seem certain to be remembered, for better or worse, among the authors of the most salient evolution of American foreign policy since the end of the cold war: the pre-emptive attack.

At the center of this group are longtime Iraq hawks, Republicans like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration defense official who now heads the Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon's advisory panel; and William Kristol, who was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and now edits the conservative Weekly Standard.

But the war camp also includes more recent and reluctant converts like Kenneth M. Pollack, an Iraq expert in the Clinton White House, who has become a prominent advocate for an attack on Saddam Hussein as the best way to avoid, as he calls his recent book, "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq" (Random House 2002); and Ronald D. Asmus, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration.

"Saddam Hussein and his regime must go, both because his pursuit of nuclear weapons endangers the vital Persian Gulf region and because a longer-term strategy of promoting democratic change in the Greater Middle East is all but impossible as long as the modern-day Stalin maintains his brutal totalitarian state," the two wrote last year in Policy Review, a journal of the conservative Hoover Institution. "This is going to require a full-scale invasion of Iraq."

Not all of these officials agree with each other on every point. Some have relatively modest aims of disarming Iraq and defusing a threat to stability in the Persian Gulf and the broader Mideast. Some are more concerned about assuring a broad coalition before combat begins, others less so.

Mr. Asmus, for example, now a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, argues that "the democratic transformation of the Greater Middle East should be the next big trans-Atlantic project following the fall of the wall and the consolidation of a peaceful Europe, including the former Eastern bloc." He added that "the Democrats can't leave this project to the Republicans," pointing out that Senators John Kerry, John Edwards and Joseph L. Lieberman have all embraced the general idea.

Mr. Wolfowitz sees a "liberated Iraq" as a vanguard of democracy, the first potential piece in a kind of reverse domino theory in which the United States could help foster the fall of authoritarian regimes in a reshaped Middle East — 50 years after it began fighting to keep pro-Western regimes from falling in Asia.

The big unsettled question, though, is whether these theorists' ideas will someday lead to "perhaps similarly disastrous consequences," as Leon Fuerth, Vice President Al Gore's former national security adviser, wondered aloud, or claim a role in an important military and foreign policy victory.

Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was the co-author of a Dec. 1, 1997, editorial with Mr. Kristol in The Weekly Standard, to which Mr. Wolfowitz contributed an article. The cover headline: "Saddam Must Go." Mr. Kagan and Mr. Kristol both take pride in their views but also warn against overestimating their influence.

"The Vietnam War was not the brainchild of three or four people," said Mr. Kagan, whose new book "Of Paradise and Power: America vs. Europe in the New World Order," has just been published by Knopf. "It was a product of a whole way of thinking about the world. It was, for better or worse, the logical consequence of the policy of containment. And the breadth and depth of support for American policy in Vietnam, certainly in the elite intellectual class, was enormous: journalists, government, policy. Let's not suggest that this was somehow just the Bundys or Walt Rostow. This was national consensus."

One difference in the current debate over Iraq is that intellectual consensus is not so widespread. Indeed, as Michael O'Hanlon, a defense policy expert at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, noted, "If you look at nongovernmental experts on Iraq or use of force, what is striking is that pure academics are almost uniformly against the war, but people who have been in government or Washington think tanks tend to be, on average, more supportive."

It was President Bill Clinton who made "regime change" in Baghdad the declaratory policy of the United States, and who came close to war in 1998, settling instead for airstrikes. Virtually all the contenders for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination support the use of force against Iraq, with varying degrees of caveats and reluctance.

The essence of all the arguments in favor of war with Iraq is that the cold war doctrine of containment, predicated on rational action by the Soviet Union, has limited effect in a world where the threat is shadowy terrorist organizations and their "rogue state" allies like Iraq, who are not susceptible to traditional notions of deterrence.

It is not a new concept. More than a decade ago, as undersecretary of defense for policy in the first Bush administration, Mr. Wolfowitz was charged by Dick Cheney, then defense secretary, with drafting a new "Defense Planning Guidance," a broad directive that was intended to govern policy in a second Bush term. An early draft proposed that with the demise of the Soviet Union, American doctrine should be to assure that no new superpower arose to rival the United States' enlightened domination of the world.

The United States would be "postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated," and the guidance was accompanied by scenarios for hypothetical wars, including one against an Iraq in which Saddam Hussein rebounded from his defeat in the Persian Gulf war. The language was later attacked as too bellicose, and was softened, but it has effectively re-emerged as official policy in the current Bush administration.

"This group kept their ideas and never lost sight of them for almost a decade when they were out of power, and when they returned to government, they added a drop of water and activated it again," said Mr. Fuerth, the Gore adviser.

The attacks of Sept. 11 also played an important role in reviving such concepts. Mr. Kagan likened it to the way North Korea's invasion of South Korea suddenly spurred a big increase in the Truman administration's defense budget and in its willingness to confront the Soviet Union more aggressively, an approach that had been urged by Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze but resisted on budgetary and other grounds until war began.

"Those of us who had argued for many years that we had to do something to get rid of Saddam Hussein were in a stronger position to make the case that we couldn't take these risks any more," Mr. Kagan said.

Mr. Bush himself, at a news conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, said today, "After September the 11th, the doctrine of containment just doesn't hold any water as far as I'm concerned."

The hope at the end of the last gulf war was that Mr. Hussein's regime would be so weakened as to collapse of its own weight, or as a result of a coup. As time made those possibilities seem increasingly remote, the drive for harsher action has steadily built.

The drive was often led by a group called the Project for the New American Century, which was started in 1997 by Mr. Kristol and others to promote robust American engagement in the world. In 1998, the group urged Mr. Clinton to adopt a "full complement" of diplomatic and military measures to remove Mr. Hussein, in a letter signed by Mr. Wolfowitz, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others who now hold senior administration jobs.

"The Europeans sometimes make it seem as if we're about to invade Madagascar, and the only way to explain it is that six people have been obsessing about it for a decade," said Mr. Kristol, the author, with Lawrence Kaplan, of a forthcoming book, "The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission" (Encounter Books, 2003). "I'm happy to take some credit for making the argument on this, but a lot of other people are responsible, too, including some liberals. I wouldn't minimize the importance of events on the ground, especially 9/11."

All the same, Mr. Kristol acknowledged in a telephone interview: "I do lie awake at night, worrying. Something could go wrong. Chemical weapons could be used against American troops. A biological weapon could be set off in an American city. I would still argue, I think, that this is a necessary thing to do. But having had some tiny role, I do feel some responsibility. I do."

Mr. Kristol later called back to add: "It's also fair to say that people who advocate doing nothing would also have to take responsibility. To govern is to choose."

U.S. Bombers on Alert to Deploy as Warning to North Koreans

U.S. Bombers on Alert to Deploy as Warning to North Koreans
By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/international/asia/04KORE.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has put 24 long-range bombers on alert for possible deployment within range of North Korea, both to deter "opportunism" at a moment when Washington is focused on Iraq and to give President Bush military options if diplomacy fails to halt North Korea's effort to produce nuclear weapons, officials said today.

The White House insisted today that Mr. Bush was still committed to a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Any decision to bolster the considerable American military presence near North Korea was simply what Ari Fleischer, the president's spokesman, called making "certain our contingencies are viable."

Mr. Rumsfeld, who Pentagon officials emphasized had not yet made a decision to send the bombers, was acting on a request for additional forces from Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, the Pacific commander, who concluded that North Korea's race to produce a nuclear weapon had significantly worsened the risks on the Korean Peninsula.

"This puts them on a short string," said a senior Pentagon official, who explained that the aircraft and crews were now ready to move out within a set number of hours should they receive the final deployment order.

The additional bomber force, which would be sent to Guam from bases in the United States along with surveillance planes, brings a potent capability to the region should Mr. Bush decide that he cannot allow North Korea to begin reprocessing its nuclear fuel into weapons.

The Pentagon's new alert status came as the International Atomic Energy Agency said it would meet on Feb. 12, in an emergency session, to declare North Korea in breach of its commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and refer the issue to the United Nations Security Council. Administration officials said today that they would seek a resolution there condemning North Korea, but that they would not take the next step — asking for economic sanctions or isolation of the country.

At the same time, administration officials, in private briefings to members of Congress, have confirmed that North Korea appears to be moving spent nuclear spent-fuel rods that have been in storage since 1994.

If reprocessed into plutonium, those rods would provide the raw material for upwards of a half dozen weapons — about one a month once the reprocessing plant is in full operation, experts say. That gives Mr. Bush a window of what one senior official said today was "a few weeks to a few months to decide if he wants to do something about Yongbyon," the nuclear complex, before the plutonium production is under way, and any military strike would risk spreading radioactive pollution around the Korean Peninsula.

Both White House and Pentagon officials insisted there were no current plans to attack the Yongbyon nuclear facility, the center of North Korea's plutonium project.

But the forward deployment to Guam would cut the bombers' flying time to the Korean Peninsula, and consideration of the move suggests that the Pentagon and the White House are concerned that they may need more power on short notice, even as many forces ordinarily based in the Pacific have been sent to the Middle East.

"We are clearly engaged in a discussion about what is appropriate should we find ourselves engaged in executing a military operation in Iraq," said one senior Defense Department official. "We want to make sure we have sufficient forces in place in the Korean Peninsula area to deter any opportunism."

The dozen B-52 bombers and another dozen B-1 bombers could certainly help the 37,000 American troops defending South Korea deter an attack from North Korea across the demilitarized zone. But American commanders in South Korea have long argued they already have sufficient forces to deter such an attack, or at least hold their ground until reinforcements could arrive.

There was no discussion, senior Pentagon officials said, about significant additions to American troops now based in South Korea.

The White House has never publicly discussed the possibility of attacking the reprocessing plant, and Mr. Bush has repeatedly said the United States "has no intention of invading North Korea."

But that is a carefully formulated statement, leaving open the possibility that a North Korean move to produce weapons could force Mr. Bush to consider the advice of several leading Republican national security experts, who have argued that Mr. Bush cannot permit North Korea to have a significant nuclear arsenal.

"It's fair to say that there is a broad assumption in the administration now that Kim Jong Il is out to produce his weapons as fast as he can," said one senior official involved in the debate, referring to the North Korean leader. "We hope they can be dissuaded by diplomacy, pressure from us and from China and from Russia. But there are no guarantees any of that will work."

Admiral Fargo is considering repositioning some jet fighters already under his jurisdiction within the Pacific Command to bases closer to the Korean Peninsula, Pentagon officials said. The bombers under consideration would be a large addition to the Pacific Command arsenal.

Each B-1 bomber can carry up to two dozen one-ton, satellite-guided bombs. The payload of the giant B-52 is 70,000 pounds of bombs and missiles.

In addition, the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, now off the coast of Japan, remains available to Admiral Fargo. However, even before the current crisis with North Korea, the Kitty Hawk had been mentioned as the likely candidate should a fifth aircraft carrier be assigned to waters off Iraq. In that event, officials said, the Carl Vinson, now on the West Coast, would sail across the Pacific to take the place of the Kitty Hawk so that one aircraft carrier would always be in the region.

"It is standard practice for us to review our defensive posture for existing security commitments when U.S. forces are preparing for potential operations elsewhere in the world," said Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman on Asia-Pacific issues. "Such planning could result in the movement of forces, but only as a prudent measure to ensure that we maintain our ability to rapidly respond to contingencies if needed."

Thus, the Pentagon is challenged with how to balance several competing interests.

The military must continue carrying out deployments to Iraq — including thousands of marines based in California who otherwise await orders for contingencies throughout the Pacific — while making sure that other forces are put into place to deter North Korea.

Yet those new deployments must be crafted so they do not increase tensions in the region while diplomacy is given a chance.

"It's a very, very fine line," said one administration official.

The Cambodian prime minister calls his government's actions incompetent

The Cambodian prime minister calls his government's actions incompetent
Tuesday, February 4, 2003
REUTERS in Kampot, Cambodia
http://asia.scmp.com/asianews/ZZZXT8OXMBD.html

Hun Sen tells a crowd in the city of Kampot that extremists started last week's riots in an effort to destabilise Cambodia ahead of July's elections. Agence France-Presse photo

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen accused his own government of incompetence yesterday over its handling of last week's riots in Phnom Penh, in which the Thai Embassy and over a dozen Thai-related businesses were destroyed.

"The government was incompetent for failing to crack down on the riots for the following reasons: we could not control the inflammatory information, and we did not use armed force to shoot the rioters," Hun Sen told a crowd of Cambodians at a temple inauguration in the southern provincial town of Kampot.

It was his first public appearance since Wednesday's unexpected mob violence, which all but destroyed warming relations between Cambodia and Thailand.

The opposition has accused Hun Sen of whipping up simmering anti-Thai sentiment with derogatory remarks about a popular Thai actress. The violence erupted after local media quoted television star Suvanant Kongying as saying the Angkor temples, Cambodia's national icon, belonged to Thailand.

The actress has denied making any such remark.

Hun Sen, who is expected to win a general election in July, blamed extremists for the riots. He said they had been planned for over a year in a bid to destabilise Cambodia before the polls.

Some 57 people, including the owner of Cambodia's only independent FM radio station, have been charged with offences relating to Wednesday's violence.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who threatened to send in commando units to evacuate hundreds of terrified Thais, has also accused Hun Sen of mishandling the crisis.

Cambodia's Foreign Minister Hor Namhong travels to Bangkok today to start rebuilding diplomatic bridges between the two countries, but he has been denied an audience with Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej to apologise.

Thai anger peaked with noisy protests outside the Cambodian Embassy in Bangkok after reports that rioters had insulted the revered Thai monarch.

Hun Sen also reiterated promises to pay for damage to the Thai embassy and businesses, which Cambodia estimates runs to more than US$23 million (HK$180 million). Thailand said yesterday the damage bill was nearly twice that figure. That estimate did not include losses of business opportunity, Commerce Minister Adisai Bodharamik said in Bangkok.

How Cambodia, with average annual per capita income of around US$250, will pay remains to be seen. Hun Sen said the taxpayer would have to bear the brunt. "The real losers are our people," he told the crowd. "The money we generated from taxes will have to go to pay for damage. A small group of extremists has hurt the whole nation."

Schoolgirls selling panties open avenue of danger

Schoolgirls selling panties open avenue of danger
By Ryann Connell, MDN Staff Writer
February 4, 2003
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/0302/0204schoolpanties.html

Japanese schoolgirls have been soiling their panties for pocket money for years, but now it seems the sordid practice is giving them a more frightful reason for doing so, according to Shukan Taishu (2/17).

Though fewer schoolgirls are apparently prepared to go all the way for a yen, they'll still sell their knickers for a handful of banknotes.

"They take their panties off in front of a male buyer and hand them to him. The market rate is about 10,000 yen to 20,000 yen. They have to go somewhere like a love hotel to take their panties off, which leaves them alone with the male buyer. It's downright dangerous," a writer well versed in the schoolgirl sex-for-savings scheme tells Shukan Taishu.

Indeed, a 16-year-old Tokyo girl is probably still haunted by the experience a wicked Osaka police officer put her through late last year when he offered to pay double the market price to buy her underwear. The problems arose when they went to a Shinjuku love hotel to make the exchange.

"The police officer pulled out a knife and started to try and rape her. They struggled and the girl managed to get away, though she was pretty badly hurt," a reporter from an afternoon daily says. "When you consider the guy was armed and also had adhesive tape on him, you could say the girl was lucky to get away with the few injuries that she did."

Her quandary was no surprise to the veteran writer on enjo kosai, words that literally translate as "compensated dating," but are a euphemism for mainly schoolgirl prostitution.

"It's a fact that the long recession has had a considerable impact on the world of enjo kosai. Not too long ago, you could find plenty of guys out there who'd willingly hand over 100,000 yen to couple with a schoolgirl. But there's hardly anybody who'd pay that much now," the free-luncher tells Shukan Taishu. "In response to guys refusing to hand over the big bucks, the girls won't have sex. The girls still want money, though, so they'll do things that give a guy a turn-on even if it doesn't necessarily mean they'll let him sharpen his pencil."

With Metropolitan Police Department figures showing that 44 percent of junior high and high school students in the capital have no objection to enjo kosai, the prevalence of schoolgirls selling sex services means that every time they expose themselves, they're also opening up an avenue of danger.

"That's why we've been on our guard lately and always use the buddy system when we go to do a job," a schoolgirl regularly performing enjo kosai tells Shukan Taishu, adding that shifty clients are quick to counter girls trying to keep a step ahead. "A friend and I went to meet this guy at 10 o'clock one night and he turned up with another three guys. I complained because he said he'd be alone. When we got out of the car because he refused to pay in advance, the guys jumped out, whacked us on the back of our heads and drove off. I suppose we were lucky that was all that happened."

Going to the police doesn't seem to be an option for the girls at this point.

"Going to the police would mean that our schools and our parents would find out that we have been having sex," the schoolgirl says."

Phone threats have also become a way of life for schoolgirls. The nature of their illicit business often requires them to publicly disclose their phone numbers, which opens them up to verbal attacks and nuisance calls.

"Sometimes I think it's only a matter of time before I'm kidnapped or murdered," the sex-selling schoolgirl tells Shukan Taishu. "I'd say that three in every 10 customers of enjo kosai is a right whacko."

Sex and symbiosis: Evolutionary puzzle

Sex and symbiosis: Evolutionary puzzle
A 4-way partnership in ants' gardens
Nicholas Wade The New York Times
Thursday, January 30, 2003
http://www.iht.com/articles/85036.html

NEW YORK One of the most remarkable examples of symbiosis, the interdependence of different species, involves a tropical ant called the attine, or leaf-cutter. The ants grow mushroomlike fungus in vast underground gardens, and they protect the fungus against a devastating mold with antibiotics produced by a bacterium that lives in a patch on their skin.
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This menage à quatre - the ant, the mushroom, the bacterium and the mold - forms a stable association that has evolutionary biologists scratching their heads. The interplay seems to be the most complex symbiosis known.
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Biologists have long been perplexed to understand why organisms go to the bother of sex, when by far the best way to get all one's genes into the next generation is by virgin birth or asexual reproduction (as any stick insect can testify).

Now the puzzle has grown more challenging with a report in the journal Science that suggests that the mold has been part of the system for a long time and, perhaps, accompanied the mushroom fungus that the ants first domesticated some 50 million years ago. Like original sin, the pathogen was in the first garden.
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Also like original sin, the puzzle has to do with sex, though in this case the lack of it. Biologists have long been perplexed to understand why organisms go to the bother of sex, when by far the best way to get all one's genes into the next generation is by virgin birth or asexual reproduction (as any stick insect can testify). Sex passes on only half an individual's genes, so what could possibly be worth paying such a price?
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The biologist William Hamilton, who died in 2000, suggested that the answer was parasites. They are usually small creatures like bacteria or molds that can evolve faster than their large-bodied hosts can devise defense mechanisms. The hosts keep one step ahead by resorting to sex - the purpose of which may be to reshuffle the genes between generations and produce new combinations faster than the parasite can mutate.
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The ants, however, do not allow their crop plant to form fruiting bodies, which is how fungi have sex. Each queen ant takes a sample to start a new nest, so the fungus is spread vegetatively. Recently, biologists analyzed the DNA of mushroom fungi from attine ant gardens in many countries and found that all belonged to a single clone, presumably dating from 50 million years ago, when the attine ants domesticated the fungus.
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At the time of that research, in 1994, the ants and their mushroom fungus were the only two members of the symbiosis known. Cameron Currie, then a graduate student at the University of Toronto, felt sure that a clonal monoculture, especially one so widespread as that of the ants' fungus gardens, had to be highly vulnerable to parasites, even though none had been found by generations of ant biologists.
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His intuition was right. He discovered the Escovopsis mold, which can wipe out a whole garden in a couple of days, and the antibiotic-producing bacterium that the ants use to keep it in check. In his article in the current Science, Currie, now at the University of Kansas, and colleagues report they have analyzed the DNA of Escovopsis molds from ant fungus gardens in many different countries. They find that all the molds that attack attine ant gardens are sprigs of the same family tree, indicating a single origin in the distant past. Escovopsis is found just in the ants' fungus gardens, but it is related to the dreaded "green mold" that is well known to commercial mushroom farmers.
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Is Escovopsis also a clone? Does the symbiosis between mold and mushroom work because this is a true battle of the clones, each mutating too slowly to overwhelm the other? Currie said he had not yet found Escovopsis in a sexual stage and did not know whether it was a clone. His guess is that it is not.
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But if Escovopsis is sexual and can evolve quickly, then how does the fungus stay one step ahead of its deadly pursuer? Douglas Futuyma of the University of Michigan suggested that the antibiotic-producing bacterium might hold the key to the puzzle. The mushroom has been forced to quit the sexual race, but it could have handed over its evolutionary defense to the bacterium, as deployed by the ants.
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Currie and his colleagues said they believed that an evolutionary arms race had occurred between the mold on one side and the fungus, the ant and the bacterium on the other. The ants could play an important role because they are known to remove assiduously all foreign microbes from their gardens and will abandon a garden with any uncontrollable strain of Escovopsis. When an Escovopsis strain begins to escape the ants' control, the bacteria may be able to evolve a new brew of antibiotics to even the balance. Currie said he hoped to complete within six months the genetic family tree of bacteria from different species of attine ants and would start to analyze their antibiotics. That may take him to a real battlefront, the chemicals produced by the bacteria and the mold's countermeasures.
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In nature's impassive eyes, this may be just a protracted chess game among four species. But except for those who side with molds and microbes, it is hard not to admire the ant's achievements. They developed two remarkable inventions - agriculture and antibiotics - some 50 million years before people did.

< < Back to Start of Article A 4-way partnership in ants' gardens

NEW YORK One of the most remarkable examples of symbiosis, the interdependence of different species, involves a tropical ant called the attine, or leaf-cutter. The ants grow mushroomlike fungus in vast underground gardens, and they protect the fungus against a devastating mold with antibiotics produced by a bacterium that lives in a patch on their skin.
.
This menage à quatre - the ant, the mushroom, the bacterium and the mold - forms a stable association that has evolutionary biologists scratching their heads. The interplay seems to be the most complex symbiosis known.
.
Now the puzzle has grown more challenging with a report in the journal Science that suggests that the mold has been part of the system for a long time and, perhaps, accompanied the mushroom fungus that the ants first domesticated some 50 million years ago. Like original sin, the pathogen was in the first garden.
.
Also like original sin, the puzzle has to do with sex, though in this case the lack of it. Biologists have long been perplexed to understand why organisms go to the bother of sex, when by far the best way to get all one's genes into the next generation is by virgin birth or asexual reproduction (as any stick insect can testify). Sex passes on only half an individual's genes, so what could possibly be worth paying such a price?
.
The biologist William Hamilton, who died in 2000, suggested that the answer was parasites. They are usually small creatures like bacteria or molds that can evolve faster than their large-bodied hosts can devise defense mechanisms. The hosts keep one step ahead by resorting to sex - the purpose of which may be to reshuffle the genes between generations and produce new combinations faster than the parasite can mutate.
.
The ants, however, do not allow their crop plant to form fruiting bodies, which is how fungi have sex. Each queen ant takes a sample to start a new nest, so the fungus is spread vegetatively. Recently, biologists analyzed the DNA of mushroom fungi from attine ant gardens in many countries and found that all belonged to a single clone, presumably dating from 50 million years ago, when the attine ants domesticated the fungus.
.
At the time of that research, in 1994, the ants and their mushroom fungus were the only two members of the symbiosis known. Cameron Currie, then a graduate student at the University of Toronto, felt sure that a clonal monoculture, especially one so widespread as that of the ants' fungus gardens, had to be highly vulnerable to parasites, even though none had been found by generations of ant biologists.
.
His intuition was right. He discovered the Escovopsis mold, which can wipe out a whole garden in a couple of days, and the antibiotic-producing bacterium that the ants use to keep it in check. In his article in the current Science, Currie, now at the University of Kansas, and colleagues report they have analyzed the DNA of Escovopsis molds from ant fungus gardens in many different countries. They find that all the molds that attack attine ant gardens are sprigs of the same family tree, indicating a single origin in the distant past. Escovopsis is found just in the ants' fungus gardens, but it is related to the dreaded "green mold" that is well known to commercial mushroom farmers.
.
Is Escovopsis also a clone? Does the symbiosis between mold and mushroom work because this is a true battle of the clones, each mutating too slowly to overwhelm the other? Currie said he had not yet found Escovopsis in a sexual stage and did not know whether it was a clone. His guess is that it is not.
.
But if Escovopsis is sexual and can evolve quickly, then how does the fungus stay one step ahead of its deadly pursuer? Douglas Futuyma of the University of Michigan suggested that the antibiotic-producing bacterium might hold the key to the puzzle. The mushroom has been forced to quit the sexual race, but it could have handed over its evolutionary defense to the bacterium, as deployed by the ants.
.
Currie and his colleagues said they believed that an evolutionary arms race had occurred between the mold on one side and the fungus, the ant and the bacterium on the other. The ants could play an important role because they are known to remove assiduously all foreign microbes from their gardens and will abandon a garden with any uncontrollable strain of Escovopsis. When an Escovopsis strain begins to escape the ants' control, the bacteria may be able to evolve a new brew of antibiotics to even the balance. Currie said he hoped to complete within six months the genetic family tree of bacteria from different species of attine ants and would start to analyze their antibiotics. That may take him to a real battlefront, the chemicals produced by the bacteria and the mold's countermeasures.
.
In nature's impassive eyes, this may be just a protracted chess game among four species. But except for those who side with molds and microbes, it is hard not to admire the ant's achievements. They developed two remarkable inventions - agriculture and antibiotics - some 50 million years before people did.

Magical Mystery Tour: the Vatican Attacks New Age

Magical Mystery Tour: the Vatican Attacks New Age
By REUTERS
Filed at 0:11 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pope-newage.html

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Magical mystery tour, age of Aquarius, good vibrations, mind expansion. No, not a flashback to the 1960s but part of a Vatican document in which the Roman Catholic Church seeks to face threats from ``New Age'' religions.

In a 100-page document issued Monday, the Vatican said the Catholic Church had to take the appeal of the New Age spiritual phenomenon seriously because it addresses a spiritual hunger which Christian Churches sometimes fail to feed.

``The success of New Age offers the Church a challenge. People feel the Christian religion no longer offers them -- or perhaps never gave them -- something they really need,'' the document said.

New Age, which is spread across cultures, includes spiritual elements of various religions. Adherents believe that dawn of the astrological age of Aquarius early in the current millennium will mark the phasing out of Christianity.

New Age includes a loose mix of cosmic religiosity, rituals and beliefs, therapies and practices, some pre-dating Christianity.

The document was -- almost literally -- a magical mystery tour of New Age and the movement's history and practices.

In fact, sections trying to explain what New Age is and its perceived dangers had headings such as ``Wholeness: Magical Mystery Tour'' -- a play on The Beatles song -- and ``Harmony and Understanding: Good Vibrations,'' a play on the Beach Boys song.

It includes a glossary of references to yoga, zen, transcendental meditation, rebirthing, karma, and Feng-shui, an ancient Chinese method of deciphering the hidden presence of positive and negative currents in buildings and places.

SELF-CRITICISM

In an institutional self-criticism unusual by Vatican standards, Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Holy See's culture department that produced the document, said the New Age movement of spirituality should be seen as an alarm bell for the Church.

``People who adhere to New Age have authentic spiritual thirst and the Church should ask itself why are they looking elsewhere,'' he told a news conference presenting the document.

While the document recognized some positive elements in New Age thinking, it also presented a point-by-point rebuttal.

``It is good and positive to have love and respect for nature and the environment but you cannot make a divinity of the earth. That is wrong,'' said Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, head of the Vatican's department for inter-religious dialogue.

For confused believers, the document offers a section contrasting Christian faith and New Age beliefs.

``Is God a being with whom we have a relationship or something to be used or a force to be harnessed?'' it asked.

It said that in New Age belief, God was ``an impersonal energy'' and a ``component of the cosmos'' but Christians had to remember that God is ``the maker of heaven and earth and the source of all personal life.''

It said that in New Age literature Jesus Christ was often presented as ``one among many wise men, initiates or avatars'' but that Christians believe that he is ``the only Son of God, true man and true God.''

It said New Age truth was about ``good vibrations, cosmic correspondences, harmony and ecstasy, in general pleasant experiences.'' It also accused New Age of having a ``tendency to confuse psychology and spirituality.''

The airline concierge

The airline concierge: smoothing out the seams for high fliers
Roger Collis IHT Friday, January 31, 2003
http://www.iht.com/articles/85176.html

Back in my corporate days, the closest I ever got to VIP treatment was being met at the door of the plane at JFK by an FBI agent. He wafted me past Immigration and Customs with a series of complicit nods to his car double-parked in front of the terminal, where I handed over the sealed envelope I had brought from the chairman, a friend of his. He drove me over to La Guardia airport, where he bought me a coffee and put me on my flight to South Bend, Indiana.
.
Slow dissolve to a recent trip to Toronto, when I had the exquisite experience of being met at Heathrow check-in by an Air Canada "concierge." He not only escorted me through the "fast track" passport and security channels to the lounge but returned to take me to my seat in the "Executive First" front cabin, introducing me to the purser in front of fellow passengers, nourishing all manner of delusions. It certainly beats my normal technique of showing up at the first-class desk with an economy ticket and a beguiling smile. ("Hi, I've only got hand baggage.")

The airline concierge is a new breed of staff members whose role is the tender loving care of premium passengers, assisting them with ticketing, upgrades, connections, baggage handling, immigration and customs. Like hotel concierges, they also help with personal needs and last-minute arrangements, such as hotel and restaurant bookings, theater tickets and limo services. They'll meet and greet you and make alternative plans if the flight is canceled or delayed. Ask them about special events, weather and the political climate.
.
Air Canada concierges aspire to membership in Les Clefs d'Or (the elite corps of professional concierges who wear lapel pins of crossed golden keys).
.
Airline concierges rarely wear a uniform and are hard to identify except for a discrete name badge. The idea is not to be recognized as an airline staff member. "It can be embarrassing if people come up to us with questions when we are busy with a VIP," says one concierge.
.
The "air concierge" who takes over from the "ground concierge" will arrange car pick-ups, confirm hotel bookings, send personal messages, change onward flights and request special meals for later flights.
.
My Air Canada concierge regaled me with "nothing is impossible" tales - procuring an Indian visa after hours, rounding up a missing group of Canadian gold miners en route from Kyrgyzstan to Calgary, Alberta, and sorting out a last-minute hitch involving a pet dog going to Vancouver - and such routine exploits as getting a table at The Ivy restaurant in London and a seat on fully booked flights.
.
Concierges are typically dedicated to first-class or business-class passengers and very frequent fliers who have attained the highest gold- or platinum-card status in, say, Air Canada's Aeroplan Super Elite program (who need to fly 100,000 miles a year) - in whatever class. Super Elite passengers flying economy have the run of the lounge, and, depending on how full the flight is, they may have empty seats reserved around them.
.
United Airlines Premier Executive and Virgin Atlantic Gold Card members enjoy similar perks. When you check in, a concierge staff member will take you to the lounge and, later, to the plane.
.
Virgin Atlantic Gold Card members and ticket-holding denizens of Upper Class (Virgin's premium cabin) are escorted through immigration and security channels to the Virgin Club House lounge and enjoy the use of an arrivals lounge to help get their act together when they land.
.
British Airways' Premier card trumps even Executive Club Gold Card members. It is acquired exclusively "by invitation of the BA board," a "club of clubs" made up of only 1,200 members from around the world - "captains of industry," BA says, "and people in the public eye."
.
Gerry Lydon, who heads BA's "special services" at Gatwick Airport outside London, says: "We're always there saying hello; recognition is what people appreciate. I think of us as being an extension of a Premier Club member's own organization or company." Another card to aspire to is American Express Black Centurion card, which costs $1,000 to $2,000 a year and is by "invitation only" to "high net-worth individuals." It offers a 24-hour-a-day "personalized" travel, financial and "lifestyle" service, through a "dedicated team of specialists," comprehensive travel insurance, free airline upgrades and companion tickets when you pay the full fare, priority check-in at more than 300 airports, access to private clubs and private banking services, shopping privileges and a raft of perks and discounts. A concierge is only a phone call away on a private number.
.
Rob Wilsher, head of charge cards at American Express in London, says: "We're talking about just a few thousand Centurion members (1 percent of our member base) in the U.K., Germany, United States, Hong Kong and Australia, where we have launched Centurion. You need a small, controlled group of members for a personalized service to work. In the U.K. alone we have 100 customer-service people devoted exclusively to the Centurion card member - specializing in travel, entertainment, financial, insurance and lifestyle."
.
Time is money, they say. But people with more money than time need "Lifestyle management," a new service provided by Jeeves Concierge (Askjeevesconcierge.co.uk), a members-only Internet site launched a year ago in Britain by those wonderful folk who brought you the search engine Askjeeves.com.
.
Jeeves Concierge is a "virtual butler," which for an annual fee of £299 (about $490) can take care of "a weekend away, a leaking tap, that last minute present for the boss's wife, finding a hotel or restaurant."
.
Besides bringing you "lots of priceless insider information," Jeeves will help with "travel, special occasions, eating out, domestic help, entertainment, sport, motoring and car maintenance. An array of member assistants will deal with your every whim. All you need to do is telephone or e-mail the team with your request."
.
But for getting through U.S. Immigration and Customs, give me the FBI agent any time.
.
Readers may contact Roger Collis by fax at (44-20) 7987-3451 or by e-mail at rcollis@iht.com. Please include city and country.

< < Back to Start of Article Back in my corporate days, the closest I ever got to VIP treatment was being met at the door of the plane at JFK by an FBI agent. He wafted me past Immigration and Customs with a series of complicit nods to his car double-parked in front of the terminal, where I handed over the sealed envelope I had brought from the chairman, a friend of his. He drove me over to La Guardia airport, where he bought me a coffee and put me on my flight to South Bend, Indiana.
.
Slow dissolve to a recent trip to Toronto, when I had the exquisite experience of being met at Heathrow check-in by an Air Canada "concierge." He not only escorted me through the "fast track" passport and security channels to the lounge but returned to take me to my seat in the "Executive First" front cabin, introducing me to the purser in front of fellow passengers, nourishing all manner of delusions. It certainly beats my normal technique of showing up at the first-class desk with an economy ticket and a beguiling smile. ("Hi, I've only got hand baggage.")
.
The airline concierge is a new breed of staff members whose role is the tender loving care of premium passengers, assisting them with ticketing, upgrades, connections, baggage handling, immigration and customs. Like hotel concierges, they also help with personal needs and last-minute arrangements, such as hotel and restaurant bookings, theater tickets and limo services. They'll meet and greet you and make alternative plans if the flight is canceled or delayed. Ask them about special events, weather and the political climate.
.
Air Canada concierges aspire to membership in Les Clefs d'Or (the elite corps of professional concierges who wear lapel pins of crossed golden keys).
.
Airline concierges rarely wear a uniform and are hard to identify except for a discrete name badge. The idea is not to be recognized as an airline staff member. "It can be embarrassing if people come up to us with questions when we are busy with a VIP," says one concierge.
.
The "air concierge" who takes over from the "ground concierge" will arrange car pick-ups, confirm hotel bookings, send personal messages, change onward flights and request special meals for later flights.
.
My Air Canada concierge regaled me with "nothing is impossible" tales - procuring an Indian visa after hours, rounding up a missing group of Canadian gold miners en route from Kyrgyzstan to Calgary, Alberta, and sorting out a last-minute hitch involving a pet dog going to Vancouver - and such routine exploits as getting a table at The Ivy restaurant in London and a seat on fully booked flights.
.
Concierges are typically dedicated to first-class or business-class passengers and very frequent fliers who have attained the highest gold- or platinum-card status in, say, Air Canada's Aeroplan Super Elite program (who need to fly 100,000 miles a year) - in whatever class. Super Elite passengers flying economy have the run of the lounge, and, depending on how full the flight is, they may have empty seats reserved around them.
.
United Airlines Premier Executive and Virgin Atlantic Gold Card members enjoy similar perks. When you check in, a concierge staff member will take you to the lounge and, later, to the plane.
.
Virgin Atlantic Gold Card members and ticket-holding denizens of Upper Class (Virgin's premium cabin) are escorted through immigration and security channels to the Virgin Club House lounge and enjoy the use of an arrivals lounge to help get their act together when they land.
.
British Airways' Premier card trumps even Executive Club Gold Card members. It is acquired exclusively "by invitation of the BA board," a "club of clubs" made up of only 1,200 members from around the world - "captains of industry," BA says, "and people in the public eye."
.
Gerry Lydon, who heads BA's "special services" at Gatwick Airport outside London, says: "We're always there saying hello; recognition is what people appreciate. I think of us as being an extension of a Premier Club member's own organization or company." Another card to aspire to is American Express Black Centurion card, which costs $1,000 to $2,000 a year and is by "invitation only" to "high net-worth individuals." It offers a 24-hour-a-day "personalized" travel, financial and "lifestyle" service, through a "dedicated team of specialists," comprehensive travel insurance, free airline upgrades and companion tickets when you pay the full fare, priority check-in at more than 300 airports, access to private clubs and private banking services, shopping privileges and a raft of perks and discounts. A concierge is only a phone call away on a private number.
.
Rob Wilsher, head of charge cards at American Express in London, says: "We're talking about just a few thousand Centurion members (1 percent of our member base) in the U.K., Germany, United States, Hong Kong and Australia, where we have launched Centurion. You need a small, controlled group of members for a personalized service to work. In the U.K. alone we have 100 customer-service people devoted exclusively to the Centurion card member - specializing in travel, entertainment, financial, insurance and lifestyle."
.
Time is money, they say. But people with more money than time need "Lifestyle management," a new service provided by Jeeves Concierge (Askjeevesconcierge.co.uk), a members-only Internet site launched a year ago in Britain by those wonderful folk who brought you the search engine Askjeeves.com.
.
Jeeves Concierge is a "virtual butler," which for an annual fee of £299 (about $490) can take care of "a weekend away, a leaking tap, that last minute present for the boss's wife, finding a hotel or restaurant."
.
Besides bringing you "lots of priceless insider information," Jeeves will help with "travel, special occasions, eating out, domestic help, entertainment, sport, motoring and car maintenance. An array of member assistants will deal with your every whim. All you need to do is telephone or e-mail the team with your request."
.
But for getting through U.S. Immigration and Customs, give me the FBI agent any time.
.
Readers may contact Roger Collis by fax at (44-20) 7987-3451 or by e-mail at rcollis@iht.com. Please include city and country.

Asia's new weekend warriors

Asia's new weekend warriors
For stress-addicted professionals, rat race isn't enough
Kate Linebaugh Bloomberg News
Monday, February 3, 2003
http://www.iht.com/articles/85440.html

HONG KONG Perched at the edge of an ancient bridge in a forest in Guangxi Province, China, Paul Jeffery, a broker at Credit Suisse First Boston, looked into a muddy pool 9 meters below - and jumped.
.
Jeffery, 35, who runs CSFB's equity sales team in Hong Kong, spends his weekends as far from stock trading as he can: competing with colleagues in races that involve jumping off bridges, rappelling down cliffs and kayaking through white-water rapids from Vietnam to Borneo.

"It's slightly druglike. You do get hooked on the endorphins," said the Englishman, who competed in the Guangxi adventure race last year - one of four such events he attended on four continents. "The competitive thing certainly is true: that old cliché about executives wanting to find other ways to deal with their competitive juices."
.
Scores of Asia-based bankers at companies like CSFB, Deutsche Bank AG and Morgan Stanley recover from 14-hour days of dealmaking by competing in extreme sports events that often last for days.
.
They say fighting it out in far-flung mountains and jungles eases the pressure of their jobs while stoking the competitive instincts that help them succeed at work.
.
They may need more stress relief than their counterparts elsewhere as the region bucks a slump in global deals. The value of Asian takeovers fell just 10 percent last year, compared with a 41 percent slide in the United States and a 19 percent drop in Europe. Chinese companies sold $4.9 billion of shares in first-time sales in 2002 and could double that figure this year, bankers estimate.
.
Justin Crane, who works at Barclays Capital's syndicated loan division in Hong Kong, brings his Giant TCR road bicycle on long business trips. At home in Hong Kong, he squeezes in a 12-kilometer (7.5-mile) run at 5 a.m. each weekday before his 12-hour workday kicks off with a 7:45 a.m. sales meeting.
.
"There's a lycra-clad lunatic fringe in Hong Kong," Crane said.
.
He runs as much as 90 kilometers and cycles as much as 200 kilometers a week to train for the Ironman triathlon in New Zealand in March - a 4-kilometer swim, a 175-kilometer bike ride and a 42-kilometer run.
.
During his predawn runs on the popular Bowen Road path on Hong Kong island, Crane, who turned to extreme sports after tiring of the city's bars and golf courses, says he passes plenty of people preparing for the same race.
.
Two years ago, Keith Noyes ended a 10-year career in structuring equity derivatives to make a living organizing so-called adventure races. Bankers, he says, account for about 20 percent of competitors.
.
"By nature, bankers are competitive people," Noyes said. His Hong Kong-based company, Seyon Asia Ltd., is teaming up with VF Corp.'s North Face outdoor-clothing unit to sponsor three Asian races this year. It also organizes a series of mountain marathons in Hong Kong.
.
After-work athletes who find gym workouts too tame have more than 300 extreme sporting events to choose from in Asia this year - double the number five years ago - from standard marathons to a 700-kilometer race across South Korea. Rising interest in the events has attracted sponsors such as North Face, Nike Inc., Adidas Salomon AG and Japan Tobacco Inc.
.
"It's a growth industry," Noyes said.
.
That may not be true everywhere. In London, for one, extreme sports are not especially popular among bankers.
.
"To be honest, after the hours that most people put in during the week in London, the last thing they'd want to do at the weekend are any extreme physical sports," said Chris Smith, a manager at Co-Operative Bank PLC in London.
.
Asia's more accommodating weather and rough terrain - which includes the Gobi Desert, the jungles of Borneo and Mount Everest, as well as hundreds of kilometers of hiking trails in Hong Kong alone - are more conducive to outdoor sports.
.
Extreme sports can be big business. The cost of organizing races such as the Eco-Challenge and the Mild Seven Outdoor Quest, which have television coverage, can top $1 million, said Nick Freyer, senior international vice president at International Management Group, the world's largest sports-management company.
.
Sponsors are targeting an audience with plenty of cash to burn on their extreme-sports habit. The addiction is not unique to bankers.
.
Clive Saffery, who runs sales and marketing for Swire Pacific Ltd.'s Coca-Cola bottling division in China, competed in Asia's first adventure race in Borneo nine years ago and has done five races on five continents in each of the past 13 years.
.
Such commitment does not come cheap. While Saffery's sponsorship from Nike reduces his spending on gear, he estimates that he and his wife - and now his 13-year-old daughter, who competed in her first race last month - still spend about 140,000 Hong Kong dollars ($17,950) a year taking part in sports events. He and his wife have four mountain bikes and two road bikes, altogether worth about $8,000.
.
"Adventure racing is certainly a sport for those who like their toys," Saffery said.
.
The Oxford University graduate says he favors races he can measure "with a calendar, not a watch." At 48, he can still hold his own in an annual 135-mile run across Death Valley in California. He has competed in the race four times, placing 10th in 2000.
.
Extreme sports come with risks. A hundred miles into last year's Death Valley race, Saffery pulled out when he couldn't put weight on his leg, discovering later that a leg muscle had separated from the bone.
.
At an Action Asia race in Malaysia last year, a Hong Kong fireman fell to his death while descending a cliff face.
.
The threat of severe injury is not enough to make Saffery cut back. This year, he plans to run in 100-kilometer races in Taiwan and South Korea to train for a 240-kilometer run in China across the Gobi Desert in September.

< < Back to Start of Article HONG KONG Perched at the edge of an ancient bridge in a forest in Guangxi Province, China, Paul Jeffery, a broker at Credit Suisse First Boston, looked into a muddy pool 9 meters below - and jumped.
.
Jeffery, 35, who runs CSFB's equity sales team in Hong Kong, spends his weekends as far from stock trading as he can: competing with colleagues in races that involve jumping off bridges, rappelling down cliffs and kayaking through white-water rapids from Vietnam to Borneo.
.
"It's slightly druglike. You do get hooked on the endorphins," said the Englishman, who competed in the Guangxi adventure race last year - one of four such events he attended on four continents. "The competitive thing certainly is true: that old cliché about executives wanting to find other ways to deal with their competitive juices."
.
Scores of Asia-based bankers at companies like CSFB, Deutsche Bank AG and Morgan Stanley recover from 14-hour days of dealmaking by competing in extreme sports events that often last for days.
.
They say fighting it out in far-flung mountains and jungles eases the pressure of their jobs while stoking the competitive instincts that help them succeed at work.
.
They may need more stress relief than their counterparts elsewhere as the region bucks a slump in global deals. The value of Asian takeovers fell just 10 percent last year, compared with a 41 percent slide in the United States and a 19 percent drop in Europe. Chinese companies sold $4.9 billion of shares in first-time sales in 2002 and could double that figure this year, bankers estimate.
.
Justin Crane, who works at Barclays Capital's syndicated loan division in Hong Kong, brings his Giant TCR road bicycle on long business trips. At home in Hong Kong, he squeezes in a 12-kilometer (7.5-mile) run at 5 a.m. each weekday before his 12-hour workday kicks off with a 7:45 a.m. sales meeting.
.
"There's a lycra-clad lunatic fringe in Hong Kong," Crane said.
.
He runs as much as 90 kilometers and cycles as much as 200 kilometers a week to train for the Ironman triathlon in New Zealand in March - a 4-kilometer swim, a 175-kilometer bike ride and a 42-kilometer run.
.
During his predawn runs on the popular Bowen Road path on Hong Kong island, Crane, who turned to extreme sports after tiring of the city's bars and golf courses, says he passes plenty of people preparing for the same race.
.
Two years ago, Keith Noyes ended a 10-year career in structuring equity derivatives to make a living organizing so-called adventure races. Bankers, he says, account for about 20 percent of competitors.
.
"By nature, bankers are competitive people," Noyes said. His Hong Kong-based company, Seyon Asia Ltd., is teaming up with VF Corp.'s North Face outdoor-clothing unit to sponsor three Asian races this year. It also organizes a series of mountain marathons in Hong Kong.
.
After-work athletes who find gym workouts too tame have more than 300 extreme sporting events to choose from in Asia this year - double the number five years ago - from standard marathons to a 700-kilometer race across South Korea. Rising interest in the events has attracted sponsors such as North Face, Nike Inc., Adidas Salomon AG and Japan Tobacco Inc.
.
"It's a growth industry," Noyes said.
.
That may not be true everywhere. In London, for one, extreme sports are not especially popular among bankers.
.
"To be honest, after the hours that most people put in during the week in London, the last thing they'd want to do at the weekend are any extreme physical sports," said Chris Smith, a manager at Co-Operative Bank PLC in London.
.
Asia's more accommodating weather and rough terrain - which includes the Gobi Desert, the jungles of Borneo and Mount Everest, as well as hundreds of kilometers of hiking trails in Hong Kong alone - are more conducive to outdoor sports.
.
Extreme sports can be big business. The cost of organizing races such as the Eco-Challenge and the Mild Seven Outdoor Quest, which have television coverage, can top $1 million, said Nick Freyer, senior international vice president at International Management Group, the world's largest sports-management company.
.
Sponsors are targeting an audience with plenty of cash to burn on their extreme-sports habit. The addiction is not unique to bankers.
.
Clive Saffery, who runs sales and marketing for Swire Pacific Ltd.'s Coca-Cola bottling division in China, competed in Asia's first adventure race in Borneo nine years ago and has done five races on five continents in each of the past 13 years.
.
Such commitment does not come cheap. While Saffery's sponsorship from Nike reduces his spending on gear, he estimates that he and his wife - and now his 13-year-old daughter, who competed in her first race last month - still spend about 140,000 Hong Kong dollars ($17,950) a year taking part in sports events. He and his wife have four mountain bikes and two road bikes, altogether worth about $8,000.
.
"Adventure racing is certainly a sport for those who like their toys," Saffery said.
.
The Oxford University graduate says he favors races he can measure "with a calendar, not a watch." At 48, he can still hold his own in an annual 135-mile run across Death Valley in California. He has competed in the race four times, placing 10th in 2000.
.
Extreme sports come with risks. A hundred miles into last year's Death Valley race, Saffery pulled out when he couldn't put weight on his leg, discovering later that a leg muscle had separated from the bone.
.
At an Action Asia race in Malaysia last year, a Hong Kong fireman fell to his death while descending a cliff face.
.
The threat of severe injury is not enough to make Saffery cut back. This year, he plans to run in 100-kilometer races in Taiwan and South Korea to train for a 240-kilometer run in China across the Gobi Desert in September.

Even the Up Escalator Is Down, and It's Not Likely to Be Fixed Soon

Even the Up Escalator Is Down, and It's Not Likely to Be Fixed Soon
By RANDY KENNEDY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/nyregion/04TUNN.html

In 1931, the construction of the Empire State Building, then the tallest skyscraper in the world at 1,250 feet, was completed after 14 months.

In 2003, the replacement of two 32-feet-high subway escalators at 60th Street and Third Avenue, nowhere close to being the tallest in the world, will take almost exactly as long — unless something else goes wrong, and then it will take even longer.

No one seems to want to take bets.

A bored-looking police officer, planted yesterday at a desk in front of the barricaded escalators, shrugged when asked if he knew when the exit would reopen. "Let me put it to you this way," he said. "When it's open, then I'll tell you it's open. I've stopped making predictions."

Subway riders have not stopped asking questions, however. Chief among them for the last few years: "Are escalators really that complicated?" and "Should it really take that long to replace them?"

The answers — provided by transit officials during several hours of interviews last week aboard escalators, above escalators and inside escalators — are yes and no.

Yes, escalators are that complicated. In fact, engineers and repairmen have been losing sleep over them pretty much since a flashy inventor named Jesse W. Reno flipped the switch on the first working one, called the Reno Inclined Elevator, at Coney Island in 1891. (It was six feet long and basically a frightening, tilted conveyor belt with rungs.)

While a subway car can be swapped out and hoisted into a garage for repair, escalators can be neither swapped nor hoisted without Herculean effort and many millions of dollars. To figure out what has gone wrong inside one, workers must either crawl inside or remove the 80-pound metal steps one at a time. Then there is the matter of figuring out which of the thousands of tiny, oily parts inside is broken.

"How many parts are there in an escalator?" said Michael Caputo, a maintenance supervisor in Brooklyn, standing inside the whirring motor room of an escalator at the Lawrence Street station last week. "It's like, `Guess how many beans are there in the jar.' Who knows? There's a lot of parts. Thousands." And it can sometimes take no more than a tiny 5-cent screw, dropped on the steps and then sucked into the motor works, to do serious damage to many of these parts.

Mr. Caputo's boss, Herman Hausmann, the general superintendent of elevator and escalator maintenance, said that in spite of the odds — in spite of errant 5-cent screws, malicious teenagers, riders with 400-pound packages and children riding on the handrails — the reliability of the 177 escalators throughout the subway system was 97.5 percent last year.

Of course, it is only the other 2.5 percent that come to the notice of the owners of weary urban legs, and never more so than when those legs must walk up long flights of stairs for more than a year while old escalators are being replaced.

Which brings us back to the second question: Should it really take so long to complete those replacements?

Transit officials say that, at least for the last three years, the answer is no.

Several projects — at 125th Street on the Lexington line, at Borough Hall in Brooklyn and at the 60th Street site — have taken several months longer than orginally expected.

Joseph Trainor, the official in charge of putting in new escalators and replacing old ones, explains that installing escalators is among the most complicated of transit projects, especially in a system never designed for them.

Last week, to give some idea of this, he conducted an impromptu tour of a project deep beneath 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue, where 12,000 cubic yards of earth and rock have recently been carted away to make way for just one new 100-foot-long escalator.

With no hint of irony, Mr. Trainor said: "This is really nothing compared to what we normally have to do."

But he added said that in several replacement projects, the agency had recently run into long delays, mostly because of what he described as problems with one escalator manufacturer, Fujitec America, that began working in the New York subway in 1999.

Transit officials noticed, for example, that the company's designs for the subway escalators did not include enough space for repairmen to climb down into the machinery, as older escalators did, he said.

And at 60th Street, it was discovered that space in the old motor room was inadequate to accommodate the new motors, and steel columns had to be moved. (A Fujitec spokeswoman responded yesterday by saying that many problems at 60th Street occurred largely because a contractor performing the excavation and preparation work went bankrupt.)

Mr. Trainor said he believed the problems were only growing pains. "It bothers me, though, because this should not have happened. I make no excuses for it."

He said he could offer subway escalator riders only one parting assurance. The main reason installing escalators in the New York subway is so difficult is that they have to be among the best in the world, running around the clock, he said. "And that's what we're eventually going to get: a Rolls-Royce with everything but the little guy flying on the front of the hood."

Catwalks in Search of a Rebel

Catwalks in Search of a Rebel
By GUY TREBAY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/fashion/04DRES.html

The Jacobs one typically finds on the fashion pages is Marc and not Jane. But if ever there were a moment to invoke the celebrated urban theorist out of her usual context, this is the time. Old buildings need new uses, Ms. Jacobs once observed in her classic "Death and Life of Great American Cities." The sentiment has a certain aptness as the creaking global house of fashion prepares this Friday to begin a monthlong open-house during fashion weeks in New York, London, Paris and Milan.

Fashion has been troubled for some time and for a variety of reasons. These include the economy (consumer confidence recently fell to a nine-year low in a survey by the Conference Board); an aging population of brand-name designers; the rarely remarked failure of American fashion schools to field effective farm teams or introduce new design stars; and the reality that fewer corporations control more brands.

There is another factor. Fashion may have been hurt by its own success.

Credibility is no easier to measure in fashion than hip-hop, but it's a commodity crucial to each. Whether one talks in terms of tipping points, the anatomy of buzz or the network of mysterious "influentials" who motivate culture (and who are the subject of a new book of that name by Ed Keller and Jon Berry), it is clear that a growing sense exists in the industry that fashion may have lost some of its essence — loopiness, daring, whimsy, frivolity, experimentation and an affection for risk — by venturing so deeply into the mainstream.

This is not just a matter of young and independent designers feeling, as Marylou Luther, a consultant to the Fashion Group International, recently said, "shut out, burned out" or afraid of being fed alive to corporate machines. It is that, by the time automobile manufacturers start franchising fashion weeks in Bangkok and New Delhi, or record labels start marketing import compilations titled Fashion Week, or "Full Frontal Fashion" goes international, a certain alienation sets in at the grass roots.

"When was the last time anyone saw wit in fashion?" Ms. Luther asked recently. The question is easily answered: February 2000, when Miguel Adrover sent scraps of Quentin Crisp's mattress onto the runway in the form of a ladylike coat.

Yet it could be that those developments will prove good, by providing a backdrop of staid institutions — the old structures of Ms. Jacobs's formulation — against which a nascent fashion counterculture can react.

"We're coming out of a period of too much luxury," said Norma Kamali, a designer who has maintained a wary relationship with the mainstream throughout her 34-year career. "There was too much of everything, and now a lot of that is going to fall away and be devastated by the economy and probably by a war. It's a very hard time for the industry, of course, but it's also a perfect time for new designers to come in."

Tyros will be be well represented during New York's Fashion Week, with showings by media darlings like Zac Posen, 22, and Esteban Cortazar, 20; by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, both 24, of Proenza Schouler; by Thomas Vasseur, 28, and Gaba Esquivel, 29, of Vasseur Esquivel; and by Richie Rich and Traver Rains, the former club kids whose Heatherette, after three seasons, is practically the establishment.

"Everything in the business is about branding yourself," Mr. Rich said last week at a silver-walled East Village studio where the transgendered model Amanda Lepore sipped coffee as a cutter prepared dress patterns for Ms. Lepore to wear in a show that takes its inspiration from the 1978 cinematic gold mine, "Eyes of Laura Mars." "I don't want to have to worry about the future of fashion," Mr. Rich added. "I'm more interested in being free, pushing it, creating nonsense but in a structured way."

Youth, of course, is no valid criterion for assessing value. The surprises of the coming week may arise from seasoned designers hidden in plain sight. "There is a lot of pressure to find a brand new really young exciting designer and build them up," said Mary Gehlhar, the fashion director for Gen Art, the nonprofit organization founded 10 years ago to showcase new talents in the arts. "Just throwing someone in the spotlight isn't what will make them last."

Among the names often cited as potential comers by those knowledgeable about the industry — Liz Collins, Alice Roi, Maria Cornejo, Alvin Valley, Jess Holzworth, Benjamin Cho, Daphne Gutierrez and Nicole Noselli of Bruce, Hanii Yoon and Gene Kang of Y & Kei — most barely register except to the fashion adept. This may be a good thing.

"We always used to feel we had to go to Europe for wonderful new designs," said Beth Buccini, the owner with Sarah Easley, of Kirna Zabête, the adventurous SoHo retailer. "Now, in the past couple seasons, we've been feeling sincerely that there's a lot of homegrown talent around."

Fashion Week may demonstrate how tough times work with Darwinian efficiency, culling the herd and changing the overall landscape, as new designers edge back into those retail spaces they could never afford when the economy was fat. "We've all read the stories," Ms. Buccini said. "We've watched Miguel Adrover and what he went through. Designers don't commit now unless they feel they've got it all. In a climate like this, you've got to really want it bad."

The Straight and Not So Narrow

The Straight and Not So Narrow
By CATHY HORYN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/28/fashion/28DRES.html

PARIS, Jan. 27 — "Habillé, habillé, habillé," chanted Tom Ford, using the French word for attire, as the fall 2003 men's collections swept out the shabby for the chic. But how to dress — that is the question that had designers knocking themselves out over the weekend as mere mortals discussed war.

No matter how coherent and bold many of the shows were, particularly from Louis Vuitton, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Jean Paul Gaultier, you had the feeling they took place in a vacuum. Men, typically the last to flash the cash in a crisis, will want to know why they should change now.

Certainly Hedi Slimane gave them a reason tonight with a mean Dior show. "I loved it — I want everything," said Bryan Lourd, a Hollywood agent, who also praised Mr. Ford's pinstripes and flaring lapels at Yves Saint Laurent.

Nostalgia wormed its way into Mr. Ford's collection — in the 1970's chic of blow-dried hair, bug-eyed glasses and a silk cravat foaming at the neck. And there were times when the clothes looked perversely déjà vu, as if the references to the coiffed hair, wide shoulders, elevator heels and pin-dot velveteen tuxedos were in a 1970 high school yearbook.

Yet, little by little, Mr. Ford is creating a vocabulary at Saint Laurent men's, where there was none before, with a lean silhouette, the widest lapels in the business and a big belt of glamour.

Mr. Slimane is of a completely different mind, and the effect of his highly energized show — with Elton John and Catherine Deneuve in the front row — is to wipe the slate clean.

Even if you don't see yourself dressed in the style of a German punk rocker, deep in black leather — with straps lashed around your hips and chains piled up your wrists — Mr. Slimane will at least change your eye. He has given his clothes a tougher edge, perhaps owing to the fact that he regularly spends time in Berlin, with woven leather shells rising up to the neck, roomy great coats over low-riding leather trousers and a terrific take on the braided military jacket.

Some editors found it hard to fathom how minimalists like Mr. Slimane and Helmut Lang have become maximalists. Mr. Lang also had straps dangling from his clothes, including an unattached zipper and what resembled a parachute harness. Guests interviewed after the show were equally divided in their opinion, with some praising his avant-garde approach and others questioning what the straps added to the clothes.

That Raf Simons, perhaps the most belligerent voice of the fashion underground, sent out an elegant collection of creamy topcoats and suits suggests how real the longing for change is. At Hermès, the designer Véronique Nichanian gave her car coats and skinny corduroy trousers, some in shocking pink, a refreshing hint of 1960's London, when the young "hair boys" described by Tom Wolfe dressed up.

But no one expressed that unfettered ideal better than Marc Jacobs. He didn't offer much — some slouchy car coats, ribbed sweaters and skinny suits with loosened narrow ties. But the look was so straightforward in its attitude that it sparkled with rightness. Besides, with a status label like Louis Vuitton you don't need much. The label is the point, as Mr. Simons acknowledged when he showed his coats with the label on the sleeve, mimicking a street fad.

To the stir of Celtic music, Jean Paul Gaultier offered his own variation of "Gangs of New York," and it was a hilarious romp as Tanel, a studio assistant and runway favorite, came out in rough leather breaches, dragging a big mink coat.

Mr. Gaultier made a clever play on the gang theme with sharp tweed suits, high-laced stomper boots and the odd hairy leg breaking through a kilt. But the collection had plenty of modern gear, like puffy parkas.

Whatever separate planets men and women occupy, the male sex seems better equipped to laugh at himself, at least on the catwalk. Even when female models are engaged in something as stupendously silly as the Victoria's Secret underwear show, they rarely crack a smile. You get the feeling they actually believe they're angels in garter belts. And the fact that you rarely see fat women or old women or women whose faces betray character or hard living suggests, too, that Adam didn't give Eve a funny bone.

But the men — the men at Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto, anyway, get the joke. Fashion for men is an innately funny proposition, and the blond Adonis type, with or without the blow-dried porno hair, simply doesn't square with real life.

Rei Kawakubo's boiled-wool suits at Comme des Garçons had a soft, spongy feel — the opposite of a stuffed shirt — and her models were an intriguing blend of geek and ghoul. One even affected a nice sneer, as if to say, "Arrggh, get me out of here."

The clothes fit naturally on the body, and probably over time would mold to it like a bespoke suit. Ms. Kawakubo has explored tailoring in unconventional ways since the start of her career; this time she worked insets of contrasting fabrics into her suits to suggest a tailor's pattern. Tweed coats had raised, fringed seams, and a loud pair of patchwork pants seemed a comment on conventional country-club casual. Though you never can tell with Ms. Kawakubo. Her collections are a master class in tradition, delivered backward.

"The pimp life as my ideal life," Mr. Yamamoto said after his homage (if that's the right word) to the ecstatic street style of pimps. In case the message wasn't clear, Mr. Yamamoto, who seems as unlikely a candidate for criminal activity as you can imagine, included silver rings that spelled out "pimp" and "Yohji" across the knuckles.

One model, who in real life works at the Brazilian Embassy here, looked like the elderly high roller in "Ocean's 11," his jive walk down pat. Out of his boss leathers, he seemed a courtly old gentleman, mildly fastening his cardigan.

Some guests found it dispiriting that Mr. Yamamoto had resorted to an ethnic stereotype, using a number of large black men and several Asians of varying girth and age. And, without the pimp motif — a well-worn notion — he would have been just as effective, if not more, in imparting a sense of scale and macho entitlement. It is enough to see aging oak among the youthful saplings.

The ideal of masculine elegance (as exemplified by Cooper or Gable) has been democratized — or diminished — by a constant montage of stubble-faced film stars surrounded by their sunglass-wearing bodyguards.

And you have to wonder if Mr. Yamamoto was analyzing how thin the line is between taste and vulgarity, fame and obscurity. It should be mentioned that the collection included takes on war and peace, with floral jackets over khaki fatigues.

Maybe it is the threat of war that has caused designers to embrace the ultra-innocence of a privileged boy's life, as Dries Van Noten did in a fine show at a sports club. As young fencers clashed swords beforehand, models silently lined up as if for a class portrait. Were you meant to think of the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and the grief of World War I?

Inevitably, as the models stepped forward in trench coats, gaiters and regimental vests, khaki tailcoats over T-shirts, and bravery ribbons. Mr. Van Noten kept the mood aloft by treating every garment as a memento, as though he wanted to crowd out a brute thought.

Fashion Has a Story, and Plans to Shout It

Fashion Has a Story, and Plans to Shout It
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/fashion/04FASH.html

An analyst for Bear Stearns, say, making his way home to Cos Cob or Scarsdale through Grand Central Terminal any night next week, might find his thoughts temporarily digressing from the solemn news surrounding fourth-quarter earnings. Distraction will come from images of young women blown up to many times their already Brobdingnagian size. Vogue magazine will install a giant screen in Vanderbilt Hall for the duration of Fashion Week, to deliver continual runway footage from the fall 2003 shows in Bryant Park to the 500,000 commuters every day.

"This is about taking the fashion industry to the people," Vogue's publisher, Thomas A. Florio, said. "The models will look as though they are walking through the logo of Vogue."

Although little on the world stage might suggest that the mass appetite for style news is growing, the monthlong collections that begin with the New York shows on Friday are the focus of unusually aggressive media attention.

Besides Vogue's Grand Central project, the magazine is producing five one-hour specials drawing from runway news, which will be shown over the coming months on syndicated television. In conjunction with Fashion Week, 600,000 of Time magazine's most affluent subscribers will receive a special style and design supplement along with the newsweekly next Monday. The special issue will be distributed twice a year; the first features Heidi Klum on the cover.

The motive behind Time's venture is to attract more luxury-goods advertisers to the weekly, Taylor Gray, an associate publisher, said. "Obviously the environment for this isn't as good as it was two years ago," Mr. Gray said, "but the hope is to develop relationships with these advertisers and lay the groundwork for when times are better."

Meanwhile, the Metro Channel's popular "Full Frontal Fashion" series, which already features saturation coverage of the New York shows, will travel for the first time to Milan and Paris for the European collections. Beginning in April, "Full Frontal Fashion" will expand beyond its New York City base to become a weekly program on the WE cable channel, with Ali Landry as host, which reaches 50 million viewers.

WE has made a weekly commitment to style coverage, the network's president, Martin von Ruden, said, "because companies like Revlon and L'Oréal expressed specific interest in fashion coverage on WE."

Perhaps in a sour economy, purveyors of clothes, beauty products and other comparative frivolities find they need to advertise more assertively, rather than less so.

Finally, as the ultimate captive audience for fashion and beauty marketers, the industry professionals attending the collections will find themselves besieged by even more coverage. The Time supplement will be distributed at Bryant Park, along with a gossip-filled daily magazine produced for showgoers by Us magazine, which made a successful debut last fall during the spring collections. Buyers and editors will also receive another publication, The Daily, produced by Seventh on Sixth, the official presenters of the New York shows.

Fern Mallis, director of Seventh on Sixth, said The Daily had little trouble finding advertisers. The paper will appear six times during Fashion Week with 101 pages of advertising from companies like Condé Nast, Redkin, Avon and Sony, she said.

"We've got thousands of people sitting and waiting for shows to start for 20 minutes to an hour with nothing," Ms. Mallis added. "We can give them something to do. This industry has a million stories."

A Sexy Gift, Dear Valentine, to Remember Me

A Sexy Gift, Dear Valentine, to Remember Me
By JOYCE CHANG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/fashion/02NUDE.html

COLLEEN O'BRIEN lay down on the dark wooden planks of a roof deck still damp from rain the night before. She closed her eyes, her forehead furrowed, even in repose. She is not a conventional beauty; her 40 years are etched on her face. She wore no makeup. Yet the photographer took her picture from many angles, capturing every inch of her. He paid her a compliment, and a smile played on her lips for the rest of the shoot. She stood up and the smell of wet wood rose with her. He asked her to move against a wall. He asked her to arch her back slightly, lean on one foot, lift her chin more. In that moment, against the rough black wall, she became beautiful. Face and body relaxed.

She was naked.

This was business as usual for Brian Leighton, 36, a photographer in New York who has found a niche in nudes, especially portraits intended as the most personal of gifts, and a perfect valentine for the hard-to-please lover.

"I feel beautiful," said Ms. O'Brien, a personal trainer and a former professional kickboxer whom Mr. Leighton has photographed nude several times over the last six years. "I feel amazing. When I look at the pictures, I can't believe it's me. He sees something in me no one else does."

The nude portrait is having its fashion moment. For Ben Affleck's birthday, Jennifer Lopez gave him a nude portrait made by Herb Ritts; Samantha Jones, Kim Cattrall's character in "Sex and the City," had her nude taken by a celebrity photographer, Firooz Zahedi; and Kate Moss sat pregnant and naked for a painting by Lucian Freud. Nude portraits are popular with ordinary people, too, like those Mr. Leighton shoots, from kindergarten teachers to fetishists, Park Avenue princesses to retired couples in Florida.

"I feel like I am a part of a work of art," said Isabelle Krishana, 26, a real estate manager, who gave her nude portraits to her husband last summer as an anniversary gift. "I'm not a particularly creative person, but I was a part of the creation."

She left her shoot feeling exhilarated, her blood surging. "I would do it again," she said. "I would do it every day if I could."

Mr. Leighton, who charges $800 to $1,000 a session and $50 to $150 a print, photographed Gail Gerzof, 54, a retired city planner, and her husband, Steve, 60, a radiologist, together in their backyard in Delray Beach, Fla.

"I looked at Steve differently because of the way Brian was looking at us," Ms. Gerzof said. "We relive the experience every time we look at the pictures. And Brian was a part of that experience. We have a part of Brian in our lives."

There are many photographers who shoot nudes. But the field narrows when moving out of the "boudoir" genre. In New York, Brian Keith appeared last week on an episode of Metro TV's "To Live and Date in New York," shooting a character nude. Jeff Olson is a fashion photographer who also takes nude portraits. In Los Angeles, Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer, has compiled his portraits in what he is calling "Naked Truth," a book he wants to have published.

Mr. Leighton, who estimates he has photographed hundreds of men and women nude over the last half-dozen years, said that to be able to do the job well, "I have to be able to connect with people as opposed to just taking a picture."

All portrait photographers would agree, but when nudity is part of the equation, photographer and subject must find an even deeper trust, and Mr. Leighton's pas de deux with clients can take an unconventional turn.

A Leighton shoot is not especially erotic, judging by Ms. O'Brien's session on the roof. But a number of his subjects have come to adore him in ways that transcend a professional relationship.

They invite him to their weddings. They call him for love advice. He swaps books with Ms. Krishana. The Gerzofs have drinks with him whenever they visit the city. Ms. O'Brien wants him to take her boyfriend's portrait, too.

Marianne Engle, a psychologist in Manhattan, has had several patients who have posed for nude portraits, though not by Mr. Leighton. "There is a sort of flirtation," she said. "It depends on how deeply the experience goes in the fantasy life of the woman."

Carol Armstrong, an art history professor at Princeton, said: "It is a kind of sexual relationship. In making pictures, creating an intimate gift, the photographer stands in place of the husband."

Does Mr. Leighton cross the line? Photographing nudes, he acknowledged, has led to romance with subjects on a few occasions, though never, he added, with clients who had come for a portrait meant as a gift, a boundary he takes seriously.

He said he was routinely pursued by his subjects, men and women alike. "I understand that it's a part of the experience and the connection, but it fades," he said. "There's a trajectory to this."

Not everyone falls under Mr. Leighton's spell. A 26-year-old graduate school student in New York City who asked that her name not be used decided not to go ahead with a portrait after Mr. Leighton failed to win her trust at a preliminary meeting.

"When someone is about to get naked, I expected more warmth, more of an effort to make you feel totally comfortable," she said. "For me this was so personal. He seemed more interested in himself than in my hopes for the final product and in the requests I made. He already had his ideas."

She conceded, however, that the situation is tricky. "It would be creepy if he was saying, `Oh, you have beautiful legs' or `I think you'd look great like that.' Maybe he was afraid I'd interpret more warmth as a pass."

Mr. Leighton, who gets clients by word of mouth, said he hopes his charm will not fail him as he continues to meet with a publisher who has expressed interest in a book whose working title is "50 Ways to Shoot Your Lover," a manual for the at-home nude portraitist. It combines his photographs, vignettes about how they were taken and tricks of the trade.

Drink water so that skin will be more luminous. Moisturize. If shooting under natural light, be aware of shadows (a shadow between the breasts is very unattractive). Don't stand flat-footed; shift your weight. Don't wear underwear or tight clothes for two hours before the shoot.

More evocative of Ansel Adams than Playboy, Mr. Leighton's black-and-white nudes usually make their subjects look good, even better than in the flesh.

Through his eye, the subjects see their body made into art. After her shoot, Ms. O'Brien pointed out certain framed prints on the wall of the photography studio.

"That's me. And that's me. Can you believe it?" she said, her voice a mixture of pride and wonder.

As she left, she and Mr. Leighton embraced. They had hardly spoken throughout the session. Picture-making was their language.

"I love you," she said.

"I love you too," he answered.

And she was out the door.

Pictures Worth 10,000 Words, at Least

Pictures Worth 10,000 Words, at Least
By RICHARD B. WOODWARD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/arts/design/02WOOD.html

IF you can't make it good, make it big," New York street photographers used to say in the 70's, adding with even more sarcasm, "and if you can't make it big, make it red."

The German artist Thomas Struth, 48, whose exhibition of 70 works opens on Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum, has produced enormous photographs since the late 80's. His color prints typically measure 7 or 8 feet long and 4 or 5 feet wide when framed. And his "Video Portraits" are truly monumental at 14 feet high by 24 feet across. Never before seen in the United States, they will be projected in the Great Hall, just inside the Met's entrance.

As a Bronx cheer for an art world that had begun to turn its back on its 35-millimeter aesthetic, the adage was true enough for its time. The 70's was when the 8-by-10-inch print started to look small. Color was slowly muscling its way into museums, and several well-known artists responded by conspicuously bulking-up in black-and-white. In 1975 Richard Avedon created a sensation by exhibiting three photographic murals at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, one of them a 21-foot-long, life-size group portrait of Andy Warhol's Factory crew. Two years later, Irving Penn's blow-ups of trash from the city's streets graced the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even the grandfatherly Ansel Adams, meeting the demands of a hungry photography market in its infancy, reprinted images from his youth in ever increasing quantities and sizes.

But big in the 70's isn't big anymore. Not when the German artist Thomas Ruff makes color photographs of heads as large as entire bodies in Mr. Avedon's portraits. Mr. Penn's cigarette butts hardly register as oversize now. Like S.U.V.'s and television screens, photographs throughout the 90's swelled to almost irrational dimensions. As technology allowed huge color prints to be processed with ease and buyers paid top prices for them, big became the norm. Younger photographers and students, when asking themselves how large an image should be, often opted for the McDonald's answer: supersize it.

The German artist Thomas Struth, 48, whose exhibition of 70 works opens on Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum, has produced enormous photographs since the late 80's. His color prints typically measure 7 or 8 feet long and 4 or 5 feet wide when framed. And his "Video Portraits" are truly monumental at 14 feet high by 24 feet across. Never before seen in the United States, they will be projected in the Great Hall, just inside the Met's entrance.

In other respects, though, Mr. Struth's work remains within the tradition of "straight" photography. The values of precise observation — the familiar world of people, trees, streets and buildings examined through a lens at a specific place and time — are at the heart of his work. Despite efforts by some essayists in the catalog (Yale University Press) to bend him into a more tortured postmodern stance, he has said that he regards photography, rather quaintly, as a "communicative and analytical medium."

But like his countryman Andreas Gursky, whose 2001 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was a popular smash, Mr. Struth also faces a degree of critical skepticism. Can an artist whose photographs are so clearly seductive be trusted? Are the places and people rendered in such detail and icy perfection more interesting and alive after scrutiny? Or has he embalmed them? Does the power of his images derive from thoughtful choices about what he has included or excluded from the frame? Or from the persuasive rhetoric of their sheer size?

The question of scale is front and center in Mr. Struth's celebrated photographs of museum and church interiors. Pictures about people looking at pictures, they capture the weariness and confusion of the art spectator, hoping for a private experience in a crowded public arena like the Pantheon or the Louvre. As tourists and students move through the Art Institute of Chicago or the Church of the Frari in Venice, pausing to read labels or just staring, Mr. Struth has pulled back and given us a cool but not unsympathetic large-format view of art in the age of mass travel.

His photographs also destabilize the confident neutrality of anyone viewing them at an exhibition. Moments after studying the seriously dazed or slouching figures in Mr. Struth's pictures, visitors at the Met will no doubt be self-consciously checking their own attitudes and postures. These huge works will be shown in the Special Exhibitions gallery, while the Gilman gallery on the second floor will display his smaller prints.

Many of these pictures embody the deference — and the envy — that photography has traditionally shown toward painting. The people observed by Mr. Struth have come to museums to commune with artworks — centuries old and weighty with religious or political themes — that command attention and respect by their generous allotment of wall space. In their scale, Mr. Struth's photographs aspire to be compared with 19-century history paintings and other revered canvases and murals. At the same time, in their minute human imperfections — figures whose movements are blurred by long time exposures — his images also gently mock such pretensions. They are proud of what they are.

Photography has long yearned for the opportunity to be big like its older brother. Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge and others who hauled their cameras across the 19th-century American west produced startlingly sharp contact prints with glass negatives as large as 18 by 22 inches. For maximum punch, it was standard practice in the 1860's and 70's to join photographs together in panoramas. A 21-panel view of a pagoda in India by the British photographer Linnaeus Tripe, dating from 1858 and now in the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, measures 17 inches high by more than 19 feet long.

A century later this was still the most popular method for those making photographs exceeding 20 by 24 inches — the largest standard-size paper then commonly available. During the 1960's and 70's, many artists — including Andy Warhol, Mel Bochner, Joyce Neimanas, Chuck Close, Sol LeWitt, Ray Metzker, Jan Groover, Lew Thomas and Brian Wood — constructed large photographs out of smaller ones, the breaks between images integral to the meaning or rhythms of the whole. Mr. Avedon's murals were composites.

SEVERAL exhibitions in the United States during the 80's took notice of this new proclivity for supersize scale: "Big Pictures by Contemporary Photographers" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1983; "The Real Big Picture" at the Queens Museum in 1986; and "This Is Not a Photograph: 20 Years of Large-Scale Photography 1966-86" at the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Fla., in 1987.

Mr. Struth was too young and obscure to be in these surveys. But his teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher from the Düsseldorf Academy in Germany, have been recurring figures in them — and ubiquitous throughout the last 20 years. Their systematic cataloging of water towers, factory chimneys and other relics of the industrial age, arranged neatly in black-and-white grids, have an almost sculptural presence on the wall. Mr. Struth's meticulous photographs of apartment complexes and deserted urban streets from the late 70's owe much to the Bechers.

The checker-board grid was not for him, however, and over the last 15 years his photographs have expanded to suit his different and even grander pictorial appetite. His camera now swallows as much reality in one gulp as the Bechers do in 16 bites. The smooth unity of these giant single images allows him to maintain the illusion — one of the pleasures of photography — that the artist has interfered as little as possible between the world and the spectator.

In a sense, Mr. Struth's photographs bridge a gulf that has persisted since the 70's between photographers and other artists. One of the motives for widening the dimensions of photographs was a desire to compete — for economic and critical respect — in galleries where painters and sculptors held sway. Thirty years ago, artists who wanted to burst the seams of the traditional black-and-white print were usually judged to be unsuitable — too odd for exhibition in intimate print rooms. Likewise, photographers who played variations in a 35-millimeter format were dwarfed in SoHo lofts that had been used to hanging Abstract Expressionist or Pop Art.

Mr. Struth, who lives in Düsseldorf, exhibits his work in New York at the Marian Goodman Gallery, a space designed for large-scale painting and sculpture. He has all the financial and art-historical support from the art world that anyone could want. His "Pantheon, Rome" sold at auction in 2000 for $270,000. Even so, as a photographer he is something of a 19th-century throwback. He does not digitize his 8-by-10-inch negatives, as Mr. Gursky does, nor is he preoccupied with narrative. Critical attempts to marry his art to Cindy Sherman's theatrical tableaus seem far-fetched. Cinematic scenarios and performance-art high jinks are absent in his deadpan descriptions. August Sander would have approved.

But the success of the young Germans has provoked hordes of imitators who don't do big with the intelligent purpose of Mr. Struth or Mr. Gursky. The Armory Show in New York last fall was overstocked with gargantuan photographs of banal landscapes and domestic scenes, pictures with no evident reason for demanding that much space and attention. They existed to be big, as if that were enough.

In photographs the size of a billboard almost everything looks more impressive. Big is dramatic. Big is thrilling. Big sells. It can also clarify detail and reveal relationships — between objects in a picture and between the picture and the viewer — that aren't apparent in an 8-by-10-inch print.

Most photographers will tell you that scale is vitally important to them, although many dealers offer prints by their artists in more than one size for customers who prefer small or can't afford large versions. The British photographer Julian Opie is cavalier enough about the matter to have made work for sale in S, M, L and X-L. But more prevalent among dealers selling gigantic photographs is the trend of offering editions of an image, but in only one size, thus reinforcing a kinship with painting. Mr. Struth's pictures are marketed in this way.

That photographers are no longer boxed in by the old standard sizes of manufacturer's papers in imagining work, or by the confines of print galleries in exhibiting it, can only be called a step forward. Technology offers new choices every year. A digital printer has come on the market that accepts 70-inch paper. Photographs on the scale of a Pollock will be an increasingly common sight. Extraordinary size made for extraordinary photographs in recent New York shows of works by Paul Shambroom at Julie Saul (of American town meetings) and Edward Burtynsky at Charles Cowles (of ships being broken up for scrap in Bangladesh). He currently has a show of oil fields in California and Canada at Cowles.

Still, it was refreshing this fall to see that Chuck Close, a pioneer of the supersize photograph and an artist for whom scale has been a binding issue throughout his long career, has been making daguerreotypes. Maybe small is the new big.

Richard B. Woodward has been a visiting critic in photography at Columbia Universi ty's Graduate School of the Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design and other schools.

Pursuit of the America's Cup Can Be Fulfilling, and a Curse

Pursuit of the America's Cup Can Be Fulfilling, and a Curse
By WARREN ST. JOHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/sports/othersports/02BOAT.html

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, Feb. 1 — Back in 2000 when the cellular phone entrepreneur Craig McCaw was thinking about backing an America's Cup syndicate, someone called his attention to the cautionary tale of Raul Gardini, the Italian industrial magnate who backed the Italian team Il Moro di Venezia in 1992.

After spending a fortune trying to win the Cup, Gardini lost in the finals. Upon returning home to Italy, Gardini was soon caught up in a corruption scandal. Only months after losing the Cup, Gardini penned a one-word farewell to his family — "Grazie" — and shot himself to death.

"You could see how it would've happened," McCaw said he remembers thinking. "The Cup means so much to some people that it can cause them to go to excess in their quest. It's the same as gambling in Las Vegas. You can get so close to winning and not get it that it drives destructive behavior."

Call it the curse of the America's Cup.

Indeed, only a few certainties face each crop of tycoons and dreamers who decide to chase after yachting's greatest prize. For one, they will spend huge sums of money — more than $100 million in the case of this year's most expensive teams. For another, they'll have the world's attention, for a few months anyway, as hordes of news media — in helicopters, on boats and on land — fight to catalog their every gesture and utterance.

And if history is any guide, something else is certain: sometime during or not long after the regatta, some terrible misfortune will befall at least some of them, in the form of lost fortunes, prison terms, even untimely deaths.

Call it the curse of the America's Cup.

There have been others besides Gardini. In 1995, Maurizio Gucci, the free-spending fashion heir who co-financed an Italian Cup campaign in the late 1980's, was shot by a hit man hired by his former wife.

Less than a year after heading New Zealand's successful Cup effort in 2000, Sir Peter Blake, the renowned Kiwi yachtsman, was shot to death by pirates in the Amazon.

In August, Jan Stenbeck, a hard- driving Swede who once threw a $25 million, weekend-long New Year's Eve party for the citizens of Stockholm, died in Paris of a heart attack, the very day his team, Victory Challenge, launched its boats in Auckland. Stenbeck was 59.

And there have been colossal business failures as well. Alan Bond, the Australian billionaire whose winged-keeled Australia II beat Dennis Conner and the Americans for the first time in 1983, pleaded guilty to embezzlement in 1995 and was sentenced to four years in prison.

Soon after beating Bond in 1987, Kevin Parry, an Australian retail and mining magnate went bankrupt and was put on trial for theft. He was later acquitted.

What's going on here? Is there some ineluctable jinx hovering over the Auld Mug?

John Bertrand, the skipper of Australia II back in 1983, said it probably has more to do with the sort of people the America's Cup attracts. "It's a high-risk, high-gain, and doesn't attract conservative people," he said. "It takes a double or nothing mentality to win. Eventually the double or nothing mentality could undo you."

Bertrand should know. His own company, a sports-themed Internet outfit called Quokka, went bankrupt in 2001.

John Rousmaniere, an America's Cup historian, says that grandiose unravelings have been part of the lore since the first challenge back in 1870.

That's when James Ashbury, a young Briton who had made a fortune building railroad cars, decided to launch a campaign for the Cup aboard his yacht Cambria. Ashbury lost, and lost again the next year aboard the yacht Livonia.

Dejected and frustrated by the tactics of the New York Yacht Club, he moved to New Zealand to farm sheep. When that business went bust, he returned to England and took his own life.

"He was archetypal America's Cupper — ambitious, ferocious, and proud," Rousmaniere said. "That he also ended his life unhappily places him in good, if sad, Cup company.

"The event has a romance that seems to attract idealists," Rousmaniere added. "They're not always prepared financially or in other ways for its rigors. A lot of people get overextended."

Of course there have been striking successes to emerge from America's Cup competition, and plenty of people have fared well enough. Conner, the man who lost then regained the Cup for the United States, happily pads along; he just completed his ninth America's Cup effort and said that if he can raise the money, he'll be back again.

Thomas Lipton, the British tea mogul, lost the Cup five times, but his teas are still the best-selling in the world.

And despite his recent troubles at AOL-Time Warner, Ted Turner's business exploits after the America's Cup have netted a windfall. When he won the Cup aboard Courageous in 1977, CNN was just the germ of an idea.

Sir Michael Fay, a New Zealand banker who has funded three Cup campaigns, doesn't buy the theory of a jinx.

"I don't think there's a rule that says the Cup leads to a trail of wreckage," Fay said. "But it might be that the type of person who is challenged by the Cup may be drawn to challenges elsewhere. They will have huge successes and inevitably they will have big failures. When you step outside the trimline you've increased the risk, and when you increase the risk there's downside everywhere."

The 2003 Cup has already seen its share of downside. Since announcing their campaigns in 2000, Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder, and Serono Chairman Ernesto Bertarelli have seen their companies' market values decline by roughly half.

McCaw, who backed the Seattle-based OneWorld Challenge, has taken an even bigger hit. His net worth has spiraled from around $10 billion to around $2 billion, enough of a slump to have caused him to scale back his contribution to the team midway through the campaign. He doesn't blame the Cup for his troubles.

"If we were the only ones maybe," he said. "You would have to take the view that the mass insanity that gripped the late 90's was linked to the Cup and that might be going too far. It's true that misfortunes have befallen people around the time of the Cup," he added. "But maybe when people become more visible their misfortunes get more attention."

If things turn more bleak for McCaw, Ellison or Bertarelli, they can always look to the story of the Wall Street tycoon George Mallory Pynchon for inspiration. A few years after a failed effort aboard his yacht Defiance in 1914, Pynchon's brokerage house went bust and he was barred from the stock exchange. But Pynchon landed on his feet. He was soon hired by a rival broker — as a messenger.