Better Luck Tomorrow

thankfully, due to curiosity and the determination of andrey, finally saw better luck tomorrow last night. with all the asian hype, i was a little doubtful if the film was really going to deliver, or just be another mediocre movie with asian actors replacing mediocre white actors. (and plenty of those i've already seen on DVD from HK.)

i'm all about supporting asian causes, but i also hate seeing bad movies. from the lack of intelligent reviews (i had seen thus far), i had been hoping to hear more personal accounts (which i didn't) before i went. nevertheless, i was not disappointed. despite the hype, i was very pleased that this was actually a very intelligent and well made film.

just like a slippery slope, or a frog in water brought to a slow boil, what made the film work so well for me was a relatively well formed foundation conscientiously built of so many little "truths" that were in themselves credible -- making the ending come without seeming extraordinarily unreasonable or odd, and actually making the actors' pained looks in the film's climactic scene seem almost surreal.

there were so many little details that made the main story seem so believable -- the adopted asian girl, the neatly brown paper covered box of money under the main character's bed, a split camera shot showing an open doorway and a framed picture of a little dressed up model asian boy. (ok, i know there were better examples, but those are the ones that stuck in my mind.)

the film follows a small group of friends (all asian) from being little academic minority stars to a little extracurricular cheating racket, robberies, drug dealing, and finally -- ok, you know it, murder.

justin forms his characters well. and through a well moving narrative he is able to raise quite a few minority staple issues - discrimination, affirmative action, racial and personal identity (JV jerseys to chinese mafia references), the adopted asian, the "asian" study ethic, family anomie, and class-difference.

i loved his portrayal of the main character - soft spoken, unassuming, and diligent (daily feeding his fish, studying his SAT vocabulary), yet with a tightly controlled intensity that shows itself by the end. you can sense the main character's focused reserve from the beginning of the film, which may seem apt for the asian stereotype (and maybe i've just been watching alot of asian movies lately), but this was not a film just about asians. it *is* a film where the main protagonists just happen to be asian (as eric mentions). and it *is* a film about asians in a western american context. (they are actually surrounded by a diversity of other races, and you can feel their "otherness".)

if i have any criticisms of the film, it's that in thinking about it (like 90210), it's hard to believe that these kids are really in high school! (none of the parents makes an appearance in the film. but maybe, that just has the effect of making the kids' identities that much more focused.) also, the brothers don't even look like brothers (one is obviously korean, while the other looks chinese).

before seeing the film, i was turned off (as a slightly misguided Voice review mentions) by the way the film seemed marketed and positioned as a political act, just as the bench-sitting main character is cheered at his basketball game by affirmative action well-wishers.

i was also turned off by reviews that termed the movie perverse, anarchic, and amoral. like Talk to Her, the presentation of extraordinary or abnormal actions in an ordinary way can have the effect of creating its own convincing island of reality. and that is the strength of the film. as one of the characters asserts -- "This is just a game. We make our own rules." that is a question for all of us, minorities or not.

if you haven't seen this film, you should. and if you've already seen the film, maybe it would be helpful to see it again with that question, and some of these observations, in mind. i think i will -- tomorrow!

Chirac's Latest Ploy

[french diplomatic rationalizations reach new lows...]

Chirac's Latest Ploy
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/opinion/24SAFI.html

WASHINGTON — Jacques Chirac's scheme to win French companies fat contracts in reconstructing Iraq has run into realpolitik: anti-U.S. actions have consequences.

After a decade of opposing any pressure on Saddam to obey U.N. resolutions, France reversed itself after its favorite dictator was brought down. Chirac and his new ally, Vladimir Putin, let it be known they would refuse to lift U.N. sanctions on the sale of Iraqi oil.

Last week's Chirac-Putin ultimatum: If we don't get French-Russian contracts to rebuild Iraq, we won't let Iraq sell its oil. You suffer the casualties; we get the contracts.

France and Russia also want to keep under U.N. control the currently permitted sale of Iraqi oil, ostensibly to buy food and medicine for a majority of Iraqis. That's because the oil-for-food bureaucracy headed by Benon Sevan let Saddam steer billions in banking and commercial business to Paris, Moscow and Damascus.

The blatant hypocrisy of all this created an op-ed firestorm.

In The Times, Claudia Rosett exposed the secrecy of the oil-for-food boondoggle, manipulated by Saddam to favor Security Council supporters. Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post excoriated Chirac's brazen flip-flop of opposing sanctions on Saddam and then insisting they be imposed on post-Saddam Iraq. My own tirade appeared in The International Herald Tribune, read in Paris by Quai d'Orsay's would-be Talleyrands.

As France appeared to be taking the moral low ground, Security Council diplomats became uncomfortable. Then France appeared to have been struck by sweet reason. Instead of ending sanctions on a regime that no longer existed, France floated a proposal merely suspending sanctions until the Security Council decides that the new post-Saddam Iraq is not making weapons of mass destruction.

Some compromise. That neat trick is designed to force the U.S. into gaining the U.N. inspectors' approval before sanctions are ended. It would keep a heavy U.N. foot on Iraqi pipelines and keep France in the reconstruction contracts business. Suspension would put the emerging Iraq in a class with Libya, still suspended after its downing of Pan Am 103.

Fortunately, Colin Powell is not about to be sandbagged again. State spent yesterday preparing a U.N. resolution to decisively end, not merely suspend, economic sanctions on Iraq. If carefully crafted, it should contain language similar to that of the oil-for-food resolution. That would guarantee that proceeds from future oil sales held in trust for the interim Iraqi authority would be immune from attachment by previous claimants.

In plain language, that means that sales of Iraqi oil sold starting now would be for rebuilding the nation, and could not be snatched by France and Russia to pay Saddam's old arms debts. Chirac and Putin won't like that a bit. Would either of them veto the will of a Security Council majority and stand before the Arab world as greedy obstructionists? Let's see.

Planners of the trust fund flowing from the end of sanctions should draw lessons from the Saddam-dominated, secretive U.N. oil-for-food mess. Barham Salih, a Kurdish leader, told The Wall Street Journal that "half of the money allocated to Iraqi Kurdistan never reached us, thanks to bureaucratic obstacles erected in Baghdad and supported by U.N. Plaza. . . . We could not pay a single teacher or doctor with this money, while oil-for-food largess went to Uday Hussein's National Olympic Committee."

U.N. Under Secretary Sevan admits that the French bank BNP Paribas was chosen to issue letters of credit to most of the favored suppliers, but brands as "inaccuracies" charges by Ms. Rosett and me of secrecy. He cites a hundred audits in five years. But details of which companies in what countries got how much — that's not public.

The U.S. has a seat on the "611 committee," which supposedly oversees this $12 billion bureaucratic bonanza. Its reports should be available to Congress; Henry Hyde, the House's International Affairs chairman, is looking into that. Senator Arlen Specter of Senate Appropriations wrote to Powell yesterday about "reports that these funds are a slush fund," saying, "I urge the State Department to demand an accounting."

France hasn't seriously harmed the United States; we'll be friendly again. But in their hubristic drive for dominance in Europe, combined with their grubby grab for contracts, Chirac and his poodle Putin have severely damaged the United Nations.

Follow the Money

Follow the Money
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/21/opinion/21SAFI.html

WASHINGTON -- Why do you suppose France and Russia — nations that for years urged the lifting of sanctions on oil production of Saddam's Iraq — are now preventing an end to those U.N. sanctions on free Iraq?

Answer: the Chirac-Putin bedfellowship wants to maintain control of the U.N.'s oil-for-food program, under which Iraq was permitted to sell oil and ostensibly use the proceeds to buy food and medicine for its people. (In reality, Saddam skimmed a huge bundle and socked it away in Swiss, French and Asian banks.)

Iraqis now desperately need all that the country's oil production can buy. But Jacques Chirac cares little about reconstruction of basic services; he is more concerned about maintaining U.N. control — that is, French veto control — of Iraq's oil.

"Sophisticated international blackmail" is what Senator Arlen Specter called it yesterday. Blackmail is the apt word: unless the U.S. and Britain turn over primary control of Iraq to the U.N. — none of this secondary "vital role" stuff — Chiracism threatens to hobble oil sales and prevent recovery.

This extortion is greeted with hosannas by the thousand or more U.N. employees and contractors involved in the present oil-for-food setup, many beholden to France for their jobs. And so long as the U.N. bureaucracy handles the accounting, it is as if Arthur Andersen were back in business — no questions are asked about who profits from the sanctions management.

My Kurdish friends, for example, who are entitled by U.N. resolution to 13 percent of the oil-for-food revenues, believe their four million people are owed billions in food and hospital supplies. I wonder: in what French banks is the money collected from past oil sales deposited? Is a competitive rate of interest being paid? Is that interest being siphoned off in "overhead" to pay other U.N. bills?

Colin Powell apparently believes that Chirac's new fondness for sanctions could tie up Iraqi oil production with litigation for years. His advice to President Bush is to pay the ransom but nibble away at the sanctions with limited resolutions. I think we should confront the extortion scheme head on and let Chirac use his veto to isolate France further.

What other money trails need to be followed? Few doubt that vast Iraqi assets have been secretly transferred out of the country for years, and especially in the prewar months. This is done through cut-outs, phony foundations, numbered accounts, intelligence proprietaries, leveraged currency speculation through proxies in unregulated hedge funds and a hundred other financial devices. Taken together, Saddam's huge haul is now terrorism's central bank account.

This kind of money moves not in satchels but over wires. Needed to root it out is a financial Javert. Bush and Tony Blair should create a task force of the best computer sleuths at Treasury, the exchequer, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Fed, Interpol and the Bank of England to ferret out the hidden billions that belong to the Iraqi people. (Here is how Admiral Poindexter can find gainful employment.)

Start with the 200,000 barrels a day of Kirkuk oil that Iraq smuggled to Syria, an illegal pipeline flow ignored by the U.N. but stopped recently by Secretary Rumsfeld.

Then follow the money: We know that President Bashar Assad turned an ophthalmologist's blind eye to Saddam's use of the Syrian port of Tartus to import missile fuel components from China and night-vision goggles from Russia. In return, Saddam sold Syria oil at a bargain price — say, as little as $5 a barrel. That adds up to more than a billion bucks over a few years in Saddam's personal pocket, placed — where?

Money recaptured from the Thief of Baghdad should be used to build new villages for those Arabs he transferred north in his campaign to ethnically cleanse Kirkuk of troublesome Kurds. That would allow a peaceful return of Kurds to their ancestral homes without displacing Arab or Turkmen families.

And here's the way the government of New Iraq can save some of the money it now loses by Russia's eager participation in blackmail in the Security Council: Declare that the $10 billion owed by Iraq under Saddam to Russia for unused tanks and planes will be repaid on the day Vladimir Putin repays the debt incurred by Russia under the czars.

Oil, Food and a Whole Lot of Questions

Oil, Food and a Whole Lot of Questions
By CLAUDIA ROSETT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/18/opinion/18ROSE.html

President Bush's call to lift economic sanctions against Iraq could mean the end of the United Nations oil-for-food program, which has overseen the country's oil sales since 1996. Not only are France and Russia likely to object, but they may well support efforts by Secretary General Kofi Annan to modify the oil-for-food system, which is due to expire on May 12, and give it a large role in rebuilding the country. Whatever Mr. Annan's reasons for wanting to reincarnate the operation, before he makes his case there's something he needs to do: open the books.

The oil-for-food program is no ordinary relief effort. Not only does it involve astronomical amounts of money, it also operates with alarming secrecy. Intended to ease the human cost of economic sanctions by letting Iraq sell oil and use the profits for staples like milk and medicine, the program has morphed into big business. Since its inception, the program has overseen more than $100 billion in contracts for oil exports and relief imports combined.

It also collects a 2.2 percent commission on every barrel — more than $1 billion to date — that is supposed to cover its administrative costs. According to staff members, the program's bank accounts over the past year have held balances upward of $12 billion.

With all that money pouring straight from Iraq's oil taps — thus obviating the need to wring donations from member countries — the oil-for-food program has evolved into a bonanza of jobs and commercial clout. Before the war it employed some 1,000 international workers and 3,000 Iraqis. (The Iraqi employees — charged with monitoring Saddam Hussein's imports and distribution of relief goods — of course all had to be approved by the Baath Party.)

Initially, all contracts were to be approved by the Security Council. Nonetheless, the program facilitated a string of business deals tilted heavily toward Saddam Hussein's preferred trading partners, like Russia, France and, to a lesser extent, Syria. About a year ago, in the name of expediency, Mr. Annan was given direct authority to sign off on all goods not itemized on a special watch list. Yet shipments with Mr. Annan's go-ahead have included so-called relief items such as "boats" and boat "accessories" from France and "sport supplies" from Lebanon (sports in Iraq having been the domain of Saddam's Hussein's sadistic elder son, Uday).

On Feb. 7, with war all but inevitable, Mr. Annan approved a request by the regime for TV broadcasting equipment from Russia. Was this material intended to shore up the propaganda machine Saddam Hussein had built in recent years? After all, the United Nations in 2000 and 2001 approved more than a dozen contracts with Jordan and France for Iraq to import equipment for "educational TV."

It is impossible to find out for certain. The quantities of goods involved in shipments are confidential, and almost all descriptions on the contract lists made public by the United Nations are so generic as to be meaningless. For example, a deal with Russia approved last Nov. 19 was described on the contract papers with the enigmatic notation: "goods for resumption of project." Who are the Russian suppliers? The United Nations won't say. What were they promised in payment? That's secret.

I was at least able to confirm that the shipment of Russian TV equipment approved in February was not delivered before the war started. A press officer told me that batch didn't actually get to Iraq because United Nations processing is so slow that "it usually takes three to four months" before the purchases start to arrive.

Bureaucratic lags notwithstanding, putting a veil of secrecy over tens of billions of dollars in contracts is an invitation to kickbacks, political back-scratching and smuggling done under cover of relief operations. Of course, with so little paperwork made public, it is impossible to say whether there has been any malfeasance so far — but I found nothing that would seem to contradict Gen. Tommy Franks's comment that the system should have been named the "oil-for-palace program." Why, for example, are companies in Russia and Syria — hardly powerhouses in the automotive industry — listed as suppliers of Japanese vehicles? Why are desert countries like Libya, Syria and Saudi Arabia delivering powdered milk?

And then there is this menacing list of countries that supplied "detergent": Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen and Sudan. Maybe all that multisourced soap was just a terrific bargain for doing the laundry. But there is no way for any independent parties — including the citizens of Iraq, whose money was actually spent on the goods — to know.

Mr. Annan's office does share more detailed records with the Security Council members, but none of those countries makes them public. There is no independent, external audit of the program; financial oversight goes to officials from a revolving trio of member states — currently South Africa, the Philippines and, yes, France.

As for the program's vast bank accounts, the public is told only that letters of credit are issued by a French bank, BNP Paribas. Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq, entitled to goods funded by 13 percent of the program's revenues, have been trying for some time to find out how much interest they are going to receive on $4 billion in relief they are still owed. The United Nations treasurer told me that that no outside party, not even the Kurds, gets access to those figures.

Then there is the program's compensation commission, which is supposed to dole out 25 percent of all oil-for-food proceeds to people and companies harmed by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It has so far dispensed $17.5 billion and approved a further $26.2 billion. Who decides on compensation claims? Commission members are picked from a "register of experts" supplied by Mr. Annan. One staff member told me that that this register cannot be released because it is "not public." The identities of the individual claimants are, of course, "confidential."

Lifting the sanctions would take away the United Nations' remaining leverage in Iraq. If the oil-for-food operation is extended, however, it will have a tremendous influence on shaping the new Iraq. Before that is allowed to happen, let's see the books.

Claudia Rosett, a former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, is writing a book on dictatorships and democracy.

U.S., Angry at French Stance on War, Considers Punishment

[French rationalizations bordering on the absurd and contradictory -- not lifting sanctions placed on Iraq as a penalty to pursuing WMD, and intimating that the US would plant WMD as evidence!]

U.S., Angry at French Stance on War, Considers Punishment
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/international/worldspecial/24FRAN.html

WASHINGTON, April 23 — The Bush administration is pursuing steps to punish France for opposing the United States on the war in Iraq, including the possibility of limiting French participation in American-sponsored meetings with European allies, senior officials said today.

The measures were discussed at a White House meeting on Monday of senior officials led by Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security adviser. Marc Grossman, the under secretary of state for political affairs, also attended, as did I. Lewis Libby and Eric Edelman, two influential hawks on the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby and Mr. Edelman were described by some administration officials as driving forces within the group.

The anger at France is so deeply felt within the administration that even Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in an interview on Tuesday, warned that the country would be punished for taking on the United States. Asked on "The Charlie Rose Show" on PBS if France would suffer consequences, Mr. Powell bluntly replied, "Yes."

Mr. Powell did not specify the consequences, nor did any Bush administration official making public comments today. But speaking anonymously, one official said the group that met on Monday was considering shifting decisions asked of NATO to the organization's Defense Planning Council, which does not include France, and bypassing the North Atlantic Council, NATO's governing body, of which France is a member. In February, the administration successfully got the Defense Planning Council to agree to an American request to make plans for Turkey's defense, effectively sidelining French objections.

Another administration official took pains to point out that when President Bush attends an international economic summit meeting in Évian in the French Alps later this spring, he will stay at a hotel across the border in Switzerland.

"We are not forcing anyone to spend the night in France," a senior French diplomat responded today. The diplomat then pointedly said that Switzerland had been even more opposed than the French president, Jacques Chirac, to the American-led invasion of Iraq.

"They didn't even allow overflight rights for American planes," the diplomat said. "It amazes me that he doesn't realize the Swiss government was extremely hostile to war."

Administration officials said they were also considering downgrading the status of France at international conferences where the nation was once considered a major player, specifically by adding Spain and Italy to an annual meeting of envoys that now includes only the United States, Britain, Germany and France. "We want to find places where France now has special privileges and ask whether it's smart to continue those," one American official said.

The White House's confrontational strategy, administration officials said, is intended to try to bludgeon France into more acquiescent behavior, or at least to make it clear that the Bush administration will now only cooperate with France when it is in the interest of the United States.

"It's a concern to see that some people in the administration are still fighting a war against France that is completely irrelevant," the French diplomat said. When asked to react to the comments of Mr. Powell, who has been publicly conciliatory to France but privately smoldering, the diplomat sighed and said, "Wow."

Publicly, administration officials tried to play down the emotions today. Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said that Mr. Powell had taken a call today from his French counterpart, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, and that the two had spoken in part about Mr. Powell's blunt "yes" on the Charlie Rose program.

"They kind of laughed about some of the exaggerated press reporting of what `yes' means," Mr. Boucher said. "I think some of the papers have described `yes' as `war.' "

But Mr. Boucher did not back off on the essential position that France must be made to pay for its actions.

"There's obviously an effect on the relationship, on how we look at things, how we evaluate things, and how we look at things we might want to do in going forward," Mr. Boucher told reporters, adding that the consequences for France would be more than "philosophical."

Administration officials said they were annoyed but not surprised that the French this week proposed suspending — but not lifting — penalties against Iraq that had been imposed on Saddam Hussein's government. On Tuesday at the United Nations, the French said they were willing to agree to immediately suspend the penalties, but not to lift them permanently until they could verify that Iraq had disarmed.

In effect, the French position puts more pressure on American-led military teams to find biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, and would require that a United Nations weapons inspections team return to Iraq to validate any finding.

The White House is adamantly opposed to the return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq, at least for the immediate future, because officials say they would get in the way of the military teams there now. The Bush administration is insisting that the penalties, an economic hardship on Iraqis, be lifted immediately.

Bush administration officials say the original reasons that the United Nations imposed the penalties — to try to force Mr. Hussein to give up his unconventional weapons — have now disappeared, making them irrelevant. The French argue that the weapons could still be there, in enemy hands, and so still pose a potential threat. "Where are they?" the French diplomat said. "And who controls them?"

Therefore, the French argument goes, the penalties should not be lifted until the weapons are found and verified by a United Nations inspection team. The French say that will help convince skeptical Arabs that the United States did not plant the weapons in Iraq.

Iraqis Tell of a Reign of Torture and Maiming

Iraqis Tell of a Reign of Torture and Maiming
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/international/worldspecial/24MAIM.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 23 — In the Abu Chair neighborhood on the city's outskirts, Ali Kadhem Ghanem answers the door to his family's house with a sheepish smile. He is a handsome man of 29, until he turns his head to reveal the monstrous approximation of an ear, like something a child might fashion out of clay.

It is the result of two attempts at reconstructive surgery to replace an ear sliced off as punishment for leaving his army unit without permission for seven days. Young men by the hundreds, he said, lost ears for deserting the military after the policy was put into effect in 1994.

Thousands of people are missing in Iraq, victims of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, but a more visible legacy are the parts that are missing from people who survived. Missing eyes, ears, toenails and tongues mark those who fell into the hands of Mr. Hussein's powerful security services.

A network of Baath Party informers, intelligence service investigators, secret police operatives and the feared Fedayeen Saddam preyed on the populace to snuff out dissent before it could spread. One man encountered in Baghdad in recent days said he had his hand cut off and a cross carved in his forehead for dealing in dollars.

Many of the victims were Shiite Muslims, who make up some 60 percent of the roughly 25 million Iraqis and presented a constant potential threat to Mr. Hussein's secular but Sunni-dominated government.

Kadhim Sabbit al-Datajji, 61, a resident of the poor Shiite neighborhood known as Saddam City under Mr. Hussein, said his trouble began when the eldest of his seven sons became old enough to join the Baath Party, but did not. "Some Baathists in the neighborhood began asking why no one in my family was a party member and saying that with so many children, my family could cause trouble," he said. "They asked, `Why don't you or your sons join? We think you are in an opposition party.' "

He now has a walleyed stare to show for eight years in prison. He is quick to pop out his glass eye for a visitor — and to tell of how he lost the real one to torture.

Farris Salman is one of the last victims of Mr. Hussein's rule. His speech is slurred because he is missing part of his tongue. Black-hooded paramilitary troops, the Fedayeen Saddam, run by Mr. Hussein's eldest son, Uday, pulled it out of his mouth with pliers last month, he said, and sliced it off with a box cutter. They made his family and dozens of his neighbors watch.

"I thought they were going to execute me," said Mr. Salman, sitting on the floor in his family's small house in a run-down neighborhood of the capital a week after being freed by a frightened prison warden as Americans took control of the city. "When one of the fedayeen said they were going to cut my tongue out, I said, `No, please, just kill me.' "

The tales of torture burn fresh in the memory, regardless of how many years have passed since the damage was done.

Mr. Datajji said he was detained for questioning after the country's 1991 Shiite uprising. In 1994, the secret police kicked in his door and rounded up the 14 males in his extended family. All were eventually released — except for Mr. Datajji and a 24-year-old nephew. The nephew was hanged after eight months in jail.

Mr. Datajji spent over two years in a lightless, six-foot-square cell from which he was summoned for what he said were countless sessions of torture. Sometimes they hung him by his arms from behind, pulling his shoulders out of joint. Sometimes they beat him with a thick wooden club and sometimes jolted him with electricity. Sometimes, he said, they did all three. One day, they pulled out four of his toenails.

"At the beginning, I was afraid, but it became normal," he said. "Of course you scream, but it is normal to scream."

Some people died; he does not know why he survived.

"I can't even imagine it now," he said. "It's something like watching a video for me."

After two and a half years, he was sentenced to 15 years for sedition and moved to Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, sharing a 15-foot square cell with 30 to 40 other prisoners. When cellmates fought, he said, everyone was punished with more torture.

After a few years, his right eye became swollen from so many beatings. A doctor in the prison hospital promised an operation.

"I thought they were going to fix my eye," he said, "but when I woke up I had just one eye left. They had cut the other one out."

Mr. Datajji was suddenly released last October as part of a general pardon declared by Mr. Hussein. He said many of the people in his cell had become insane by then, and a few did not want to leave. After he returned home, he was still required to report to the local intelligence bureau once a week. The last time he went there was two days before the war started.

"I don't know where they are now," he said, and laughed for the first time in two hours. "They have all vanished."

Mr. Ghanem was drafted just after Iraq was defeated by the United States in the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

He deserted once, in 1992, and lived on the run before returning to the army in 1994 when Mr. Hussein offered amnesty to deserters. After he left again for a week to help his widowed mother, he was told that Mr. Hussein had ordered one ear lopped off all conscripts who left their units.

Doctors gave him an injection and he lost consciousness, he said. When he awoke, the right side of his head was wrapped in bandages. It was Sept. 15, 1994.

"I started crying," Mr. Ghanem said. "I felt crippled. I felt oppressed. I hated Saddam with all of my heart, but I didn't know what to do."

He was sent to prison where he said he saw hundreds of others missing one ear. Many, like Mr. Ghanem, had inflamed wounds.

His mother came every Friday, selling off household appliances to buy painkillers and antibiotics for her son. Others were less fortunate. Mr. Ghanem described a medieval scene in which delirious and dying inmates lay on the prison's dirt floor screaming from pain. "The right side of some of the men's heads were puffed up like red balloons," he said. Two of his friends died from infections.

Many inmates had tuberculosis, Mr. Ghanem said, and when he developed a cough in 1996 he was sent under guard to a hospital. He managed to slip into a crowd, and ran away once more.

In 1999, Mr. Hussein offered deserters amnesty again. Mr. Ghanem returned to the army, and was sent to the Jordanian border.

As war with the United States drew near this spring, he said his unit was ordered to fire on Iraqi civilians trying to flee to Jordan. When the war began, his unit simply dissolved and he went home again, this time, he hoped, for good.

"Saddam, God curse him, treated my son like an animal," said Mr. Ghanem's weeping mother. "Only animals have their ears cut off."

A doctor for the fedayeen confirmed that maiming was a common form of punishment under Mr. Hussein. He said that some soldiers had their ears cut off or their limbs broken.

Mr. Salman said blurrily that his offense was cursing Mr. Hussein last December, after a brawl with a local intelligence officer who had taken away two of Mr. Salman's uncles after a Shiite uprising in 1991.

Mr. Salman, 23, and another uncle had gone to seek information about the missing men, he said. After the brawl, which ended with a fedayeen member shooting in the air, he and his uncle fled, but returned home after 10 days on hearing a false rumor that it was safe to do so. Mr. Salman and three of his uncles were arrested within hours.

For two months, he said, the men were repeatedly tortured at a prison in the Zaiona district of the capital.

Then, on March 5, Mr. Salman was blindfolded and bundled into a van. Residents of his neighborhood say the van arrived in the afternoon with an escort of seven trucks carrying more than a hundred black-uniformed fedayeen wearing black masks that only showed their eyes.

They rounded up neighbors for what was billed as a rally; Mr. Salman's mother was ordered to bring a picture of Mr. Hussein.

Two men held Mr. Salman's arms and head steady, and pointed a gun to his temple. Another man with a video camera recorded the scene.

"I was standing and they told me to stick my tongue out or they would shoot me, and so I did," Mr. Salman said. "It was too quick to be painful but there was a lot of blood."

The fedayeen stuffed his mouth with cotton and took him to a local hospital, where he got five stitches, no painkiller and was returned to prison.

Moaed Hassan, the owner of the tea shop outside of which the deed was done, said the fedayeen officer who cut the tongue held it up to the crowd and shouted, "You see this? This will be the fate of anyone who dares insult the president." He then threw the bit of flesh on the ground; another fedayeen officer scooped it up and said it would be given to Uday Hussein as a present.

Ten days later, after the Americans started bombing, Mr. Salman and inmates of the Zaiona prison began an odyssey around other Baghdad detention places. Eventually, last week, a frightened prison warden stopped a truck during yet another transfer, and announced he was releasing his captives.

As a final gesture, the warden insisted the prisoners clap and chant, "We sacrifice our blood and soul for Saddam." Then the guards left. Mr. Salman and one of his uncles flagged down a car, which took them home.

Iraqi Population Map

[interesting population map of Iraq from the NYT:]
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2003/04/24/international/24IRAQmap.ready.html

Travelers Urged to Avoid Toronto Because of SARS

Travelers Urged to Avoid Toronto Because of SARS
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/science/24CANA.html

TORONTO, April 23 — The World Health Organization added Toronto today to its list of places that travelers should avoid because of an outbreak of a contagious respiratory disease, shattering this city's image as a safe place to live and visit.

The decision stunned local leaders and highlighted the impact of an illness that mysteriously emerged from the Chinese countryside only a few months ago. Toronto is the first locality outside China to be designated as a threat to international health because of the respiratory disease.

The group also added Beijing and Shanxi Province in China to its list, joining Hong Kong and Guangdong Province as the hot spots for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

Only two weeks ago, health care officials here expressed optimism that the disease could be stopped. Efforts to trace every case and isolate everyone who came in close, unprotected contact with every patient appeared to be working because of what seemed to be efficient public health efforts and a largely obedient public's accepting of volunteer quarantine.

But now, with the disease spreading nearly every day and a sixteenth Toronto patient dying early today, what once looked like a model for the world to manage the SARS epidemic has been severely tarnished. The former prototype now looks more like a leaky dike protected by an overextended and increasingly weary and infected army of health workers.

The metropolitan Toronto area had 136 probable cases Tuesday, more than a 40 percent rise in the last two weeks, although there were no new cases reported today.

"There are worst-case scenarios of losing control completely," said Michael Bliss, a University of Toronto historian of medicine. "It could already have happened and we just don't know it. It's like a war and we still don't know the enemy very well."

Even before the W.H.O. urged travelers to go to Toronto only if necessary — a message with enormous potential economic consequences — the local hotel industry had been devastated by almost daily cancellations of conventions. Chinese malls and restaurants, the source of thousands of jobs in the large Asian immigrant community, are almost empty.

A forecast by J. P. Securities Canada on Tuesday estimated that the epidemic in Toronto, Canada's largest city and financial center, would cost the country $30 million a day. The firm reduced its forecast for a 2 percent to 2.5 percent national economic growth rate in the current quarter to 1 percent.

City officials were livid about the W.H.O. advisory today, saying it was an over-reaction that would worsen the economic impact of the disease.

"I have never been so angry in my whole life," Toronto's mayor, Mel Lastman, said. "If it's safe to live in Toronto, it's safe to come to Toronto. This isn't a city in the grips of fear and panic."

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Mr. Lastman have come under increasing criticism in recent days for not taking stronger action to confront the health crisis or even making a concerted effort to calm fears. But the possible political fallout remains unclear. Neither Mr. Chrétien nor Mr. Lastman intends to run for re-election, while candidates for their jobs are already saying the federal government must be prepared to grant major financing to help Toronto manage the crisis.

Should the disease spread, and the health care system be overwhelmed, the epidemic could easily help push the issue of inefficiencies in the financially pressed national health care system to the forefront of national elections next year.

Several health officials acknowledged this week that they were confounded by the challenge of keeping SARS from racing through hospital wards, among family members of the sick, and then gradually spilling into the population at large.

Many are beginning to conclude that no quarantine system can be foolproof for a disease that is hard to detect and easily confused with other ailments in its initial phases.

"This virus follows no rules or regulations of epidemiology," said Dr. Donald Low, chief of microbiology at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. "It's so highly contagious. There is no precedence for this kind of disease."

About two-thirds of the 330 probable and suspected cases in Canada have been reported in Toronto. Perhaps more worrisome still is a report that a woman who died a few days ago in the Philippines has now been determined to have been infected with SARS in Toronto — the first known death abroad linked to the Canadian outbreak. W.H.O. officials said that they took their action against Toronto, in part, because of evidence that the disease had been exported from the city.

A W.H.O. official said the international spread included the death of the Philippine woman, a nurse, and three probable cases in Australia linked to trips to Toronto.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, invited by Canadian officials, arrived Tuesday night to monitor infection controls in Toronto hospitals. By the end of the week, the C.D.C. will issue health warning cards to travelers entering the United States from Toronto, urging them to see a doctor if they feel ill.

Only two weeks ago, the respiratory disease that had paralyzed an entire province of China, Hong Kong and Singapore appeared to be coming under firm control here.

The daily number of new cases of SARS, brought here two months ago by an elderly Chinese immigrant, was coming down. The vast majority of more than 7,000 people put in quarantine had been released. Three schools that had been closed reopened. And most people infected were getting better.

But the mood among doctors has changed drastically in recent days.

"It's time to acknowledge the impossibility of the original goal of complete eradication," said Dr. Neil Raugh, an infectious disease specialist at Credit Valley Hospital in a suburb of Toronto. "The idea of beating SARS is a bit like finding the holy grail."

The Mistakes
A Chain of Missteps
Adds to the Risks

"SARS Rides the Rails" blared an oversize front-page headline in The Toronto Sun this week, echoing the first hints of a mood change in this otherwise thoroughly stoical city steeped in British poise.

A nurse who was not yet aware she was infected with the mysterious respiratory disease had taken two commuter trains at rush hour. When news got out, hundreds of panicky passengers called health hot lines to see if they might be in danger.

Unfortunately, the deluge of calls did not include five of six of the commuters whom public health officials were desperately seeking to quarantine since they had shared train booths with the nurse.

It was another potential leak, one in a growing series that seems to bring fresh concerns every day.

Four people have been found to have SARS in one north Toronto condominium, and experts have not been able to tie one of them to any previously known cluster.

Some of the leaks are due to their own mistakes, health officials acknowledge.

In one early miscalculation, an infected patient was transferred from one hospital to another, producing an entire new pathway for the disease.

Last week, an infected doctor, who has said he was unaware of his disease, went to a well-attended funeral only two days before going into the hospital. And over the last weekend new reports indicated that the apparent breakdown in isolation techniques caused a new cluster of cases among up to 15 employees at a major city hospital. Officials now hypothesize that the workers may have been prematurely taken off protective gear while in contaminated rooms, with the virus apparently surviving on surfaces for as long as 24 hours.

"The mistakes are blindingly obvious in retrospect, and every day you learn about new ones," said Dr. Allison McGeer, an infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital and one of the top experts involved in trying to control the disease.

"You're talking about people who have been working 20 hours a day for four weeks," added Dr. McGeer, who is one of 66 Toronto health care workers infected by SARS and is currently in isolation after having mild symptoms. "That's when mistakes are made."

The biggest potential leak surfaced two weeks ago, when health care officials belatedly notified and isolated a church group of 500 people that had been exposed at an April 3 funeral and subsequent prayer meetings. Many members of the group were not notified until well after the incubation period of the disease, usually around 10 days, meaning they could already have exposed others outside the group.

One infected man from this group was turned away from as many as three hospitals before he received medical attention for SARS, as officials misdiagnosed his mild symptoms.

Twenty-nine people among the church group, the Bukas-Loob Sa Diyos Covenant Community, made up mostly of Philippine immigrants, have become sick, with probable or suspected cases. Several are in critical condition. Two traveled to Pennsylvania and Montreal before they were quarantined, fueling fears of further spread.

Health officials said they were hampered by the fact that many people in the community did not speak English, and that church leaders were at first reluctant to give them membership lists. But the problems only underscore the challenges of dealing with SARS in a city that is highly multicultural and multilingual.

It could take several more days to know how broadly the 29 sick church members spread the disease, said Dr. Low, the microbiology chief at Mount Sinai Hospital. "This could be the transmission phase from hospital to community," he said.

The City

Sell-Out Crowds
For Maple Leafs

So far Torontonians have remained remarkably calm, clinging to confidence in the health care system despite the deteriorating situation. Masks are still rarely seen.

The Toronto Maple Leafs played the Philadelphia Flyers before sell-out crowds in the Stanley Cup Playoffs over the last two weeks. Overflow crowds are still waiting on lines to get into dance clubs in the entertainment district.

Subway ridership has been down a mere 5 percent.

Churches filled their pews for Easter services, despite warnings from health care officials that anyone suffering even a single symptom should stay home; age-old traditions like kissing the cross and shaking hands were prohibited.

Even after today's W.H.O. travel advisory, most commuters said they would carry on with their lives. But confidence may be beginning to ebb. "I'm not sure the medical people know how it is spreading," Dave Horner, a 55-year-old accountant, said today over coffee at a restaurant.

A grocery store in the upper-class section of Rosedale placed a bottle of hand disinfectant in the front of the produce section today as a precaution. "People are beginning to get antsy," one cashier said.

A local radio broadcaster this morning told listeners how his family doctor turned him away and would not treat him for a common cold, fearing he had SARS.

Hit hardest are the city's hospitals, where the forced quarantine of hundreds of health workers and the closing of several emergency rooms and other clinics has stretched manpower and resources to the limit.

The infection rate has grown so high in hospitals that this week workers were ordered to wear two gloves and shields covering their entire faces when treating patients. The use of full-body biohazard suits is being considered.

M.R.I.'s, C.A.T.-scans and elective surgery have mostly been put off for all but emergencies, and officials say it could take months before the waiting lists are brought under control. Toronto cancer surgeons normally perform 150 to 200 procedures a day; that figure dropped to about 5 on some days last week.

A man died this week after his heart bypass surgery scheduled for the first week of April was postponed, the first known indirect casualty of SARS.

The OriginHow SARS Genie
Got Out of the Box

The fatal chain goes back to Sui-chu Kwan, a 78-year-old grandmother and immigrant from Hong Kong.

When she died in her Toronto home with a dry cough, fever and sore throat on March 5, doctors did not know what she had. No autopsy was considered necessary for the woman, who had long been ill with diabetes and heart disease.

But what was ailing Ms. Kwan, and what would soon strike her entire family and health care workers treating them, was SARS.

The woman probably picked up the disease two weeks before, perhaps from a single sneeze or cough from a stranger in Hong Kong while she was on a trip to see her family.

Health care professionals say the passing of the disease from Hong Kong to Toronto probably took place on the 9th floor or on an elevator of the Metropole Hotel, where Ms. Kwan and Dr. Liu Jianlun, a 64-year-old researcher in respiratory diseases, were both staying for a single day, on Feb. 21.

Dr. Liu had treated SARS patients in the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital in Guangdong' and had become ill himself with the disease.

A mere two months later Ms. Kwan is now the subject of a growing literature of scholarly study identifying her as the original Toronto case and the root of virtually every subsequent case here.

No one suspected Ms. Kwan had SARS until days after she had died when several members of her family became sick.

Two days after Ms. Kwan died, her 43-year-old son, Chi Kwai Tse, had such a high fever his sister took him to Scarborough Grace Hospital.

Doctors thought he had pneumonia and put him in emergency care. Joe Pollack, a 76-year-old man treated for an irregular heart beat, was in the gurney beside him. Both died of SARS in the coming days.

The fatal connections moved fast before health care officials realized the extent of the infection.

Mr. Pollack's wife, who also became sick but survived, nevertheless infected an elderly Philippine immigrant when both were at the same Scarborough hospital.

The immigrant's sons eventually exposed the large, mostly Philippine prayer group at their father's funeral. That exposure is now considered the greatest threat to broad community infection.

How could the disease spread in its initial phases, when SARS had already been identified in Hong Kong and China and alerts had already been e-mailed by the Pro MED global network to Toronto health authorities as early as mid-February?

Dr. McGeer, the infectious disease expert who is a consultant to Scarborough Grace, said that when Mr. Tse was brought to the hospital with what was thought to be pneumonia no one immediately made the connection to his late mother.

"We don't go and interrogate people to see if their family had been to Hong Kong," said Dr. McGeer, who was the first official to connect Mr. Tse's March 13 death to SARS, after reading the World Health Organization SARS alert that came out the day before. "It was sheer bad luck."

China Offers Its Help in U.S.-North Korea Nuclear Talks

China Offers Its Help in U.S.-North Korea Nuclear Talks
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/international/asia/24KORE.html

BEIJING, April 23 — As American envoys today completed a first day of talks to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program, China appeared to be playing an unusually assertive role in pressing both sides to keep open lines of communication even if an initial round of discussion produces no breakthrough.

Chinese officials and analysts say they are merely convening the talks and providing a forum for the two sides to talk after a six-month diplomatic impasse that led to fears here and around the region that the former Korean War enemies were on a path to a new conflict.

But the Chinese role appears to be more than that of host: officials and analysts describe Beijing as determined to keep the two sides talking, first in low-level diplomatic exchanges, then perhaps in more direct negotiations between decision makers, to soften entrenched positions and force both sides to focus on how to bring about a diplomatic outcome.

"The main achievement is just to get them talking," a Foreign Ministry official said. "We have low expectations of what could come out of the talks this time, but just having the meeting is a success."

None of the three parties had anything to say about the discussions today, the first of three scheduled days of face-to-face meetings being held at the Diaoyutai State Guest House in Beijing. James A. Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, met with Li Gun, deputy director of North Korea's Foreign Ministry, and Wang Yi, China's deputy foreign minister. Mr. Kelly told waiting reporters, "No words today, thank you."

China and the United States have both set the bar low. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the Bush administration would not introduce any new proposals during the meetings, but hinted that if they went well they would lead to future rounds.

"In this first set of meetings, nothing is being put on the table," Mr. Powell said in a television interview. "We'll begin a set of discussion. They will hear what we think about the situation."

The talks are the result of a bold diplomatic venture by China, which had remained on the sidelines during previous rounds of talks over North Korea's nuclear program. Diplomats say it was China's deft footwork that made the talks possible so soon after the Iraq war, when some worried that the Bush administration would be disinclined to undertake a prolonged and potentially inconclusive dialogue with North Korea.

North Korea had been insisting for months that it would discuss its nuclear program and its security concerns only in direct negotiations with the United States. Washington, meanwhile, had been seeking to internationalize the issue through the United Nations Security Council or in regional talks.

The three-party talks proposed by China appeared to provide both sides with a face-saving compromise.

"Both sides gave a bit to make this happen," said the Foreign Ministry official. "North Korea gave a little to allow a mediator. The U.S. changed a bit to allow direct talks."

The discussions are the first between Washington and North Korea since October, when the Bush administration presented evidence that North Korea had violated a 1994 pact to dismantle its nuclear program. North Korea admitted that it had a covert program to make highly enriched uranium for nuclear arms.

President Bush has branded North Korea a member of the "axis of evil" along with Iran and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. North Korea has vowed to build a nuclear arsenal to fend off an American attack, which its state media has warned is imminent.

Some senior Pentagon officials have opposed any talks with North Korea, arguing that the United States should oust the government there as it did in Iraq.

Chinese experts say they are cautiously optimistic about an agreement being reached. They say North Korea has two main concerns, both of which can be addressed in the talks. One is that its economy is a shambles and relies heavily on outside food assistance. The second is that it fears the United States has plans to attack it.

To facilitate discussion, China has presented itself as a reliable mediator that does not formally back either side. China has let North Korea know that it backs the North's desire for a security guarantee from the United States, according to the Communist Party newspaper Global Times. China has also signaled its willingness to work with the United States in taking a tougher line on North Korea if it does not cooperate.

Epidemic Spurs Plan to Revive Hong Kong

Epidemic Spurs Plan to Revive Hong Kong
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/international/asia/24HONG.html

HONG KONG, April 23 — Officials today announced a $1.5 billion package of tax breaks, loan guarantees for businesses and short-term janitorial jobs to clean and disinfect the homes of victims of the new respiratory disease, SARS.

It is one of the largest initiatives in Hong Kong's history, and it is 11 times the size of a plan unveiled by Singapore, which has had far fewer SARS cases. The plan here calls for government spending and tax cuts concentrated in the next four months that will equal 1 percent of the territory's annual economic output.

In an echo of the Works Progress Administration that the United States used to address unemployment during the Depression, the plan calls for creating 21,500 short-term government jobs. The announcement of the program coincides with signs that the economic effects of SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, are spreading elsewhere as well.

Except in South Korea, where no cases of SARS have yet been reported, stock markets in Asia have generally been flat or falling in recent days, even as markets elsewhere, especially Wall Street, have risen.

Saudi Arabia's oil minister, Ali Naimi, said today that SARS was reducing global oil demand and would have to be considered by ministers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries when they meet in Vienna on Thursday.

"I know that SARS is affecting demand," he said. "It's having an effect on everything," especially demand for jet fuel in Asia.

Stores, hotels, restaurants, tour agencies and movie theaters here have reported that business is off by more than 50 percent. Those businesses will receive most of the benefits from today's initiatives.

More than half of the 21,500 government jobs will be for people to clean and disinfect the homes of the elderly and disabled, as well as back alleys. Other jobs will include training positions to teach laid-off service workers to perform their tasks better when the economy recovers.

Cheung Kin-chung, Hong Kong's secretary for economic development and labor, said the program was unparalleled for this former British colony. The territory has a tradition of very limited government involvement in the economy that has largely persisted, even after its transfer to Chinese rule in 1997.

Anthony Leung, Hong Kong's financial secretary, said the territory faced an emergency that demanded a departure from that longtime economic philosophy.

The measures come just seven weeks after the government announced higher taxes and deep cuts in welfare benefits and other social programs to reduce an enormous budget deficit. J. P. Morgan Chase estimated today that with today's program and other budget effects from SARS, the deficit would rise to 7.3 percent of economic output here, compared with a previous estimate of 5.6 percent.

Takahira Ogawa, the director of Asian and Pacific government debt ratings at Standard and Poor's, said today's program would not affect the territory's credit rating, because all of the plan's components were temporary measures that would affect the budget deficit only this year.

SARS has crippled air travel in Asia. Mr. Leung said the Hong Kong Airport Authority was likely to announce separate plans to help airlines but declined to be specific. Cathay Pacific Airways and other airlines have asked the authority to reduce landing fees.

In addition to creating temporary government jobs, Hong Kong will waive water and sewage charges for the general public for up to four months, increase income tax rebates, waive license fees for heavily affected industries, guarantee $450 million in loans to businesses in those industries, increase medical research spending and reduce commercial rents for stores at public housing sites and other government-controlled properties.

Few details were available today on the rules for many of the programs. "It's on the plate, but we haven't had a chance to digest it yet," said Nigel Roberts, the general manager of the 487-room Great Eagle Hotel, which is less than 10 percent full.

Many customers have repeatedly postponed their reservations by a week at a time, he said. The World Health Organization is still advising travelers to consider postponing trips here.

Li Kui-wai, the director of the Asian studies center at Hong Kong's City University, said that the spending programs made sense but that the tax cuts might not do much to revive the economy as long as many people here remained afraid to leave their homes. "Whether we have another $1,000 in the pocket may not make a difference," he said. "The problem is confidence."

A Campaign as Japanese as Baseball and Apple Pie

A Campaign as Japanese as Baseball and Apple Pie
By JAMES BROOKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/international/asia/24JAPA.html

NUYAMA, Japan, April 18 — He quotes John Travolta while commuting as a straphanger. He goes to work in sneakers, blue jeans and a fine gold chain glinting under his black leather jacket. Anthony Bianchi looks little changed from the boy who went to Xaverian High School in Brooklyn, the guy whose mom, Frances, lives in Staten Island.

But widen the camera angle — as Mr. Bianchi, who once helped produce the television show "The Jeffersons," might say — and cherry blossoms and Japanese-language billboards flash by the windows of his commuter train.

One new billboard in town has a red, white and blue motif. It shows "Bianchi-san," in coat and tie, with a sharp new haircut, appealing for votes in the race for the Inuyama City Council on April 27.

Americans of Asian descent running for political office in the United States is old news. But Mr. Bianchi is believed to be the first native of the United States to run for elective public office in Japan.

In a society where harmony is the golden rule, some Council members serve their two-year terms without ever speaking at a meeting. If elected — and he is given a strong chance — the boy from Bensonhurst promises to do his best to introduce some American-style politicking to City Council meetings.

"If I become councilman, I'm going to bust their chops," Mr. Bianchi, a 44-year-old English teacher, promised today.

But to be elected he has to follow a strictly choreographed one-week campaign that would have American political consultants gnashing their teeth.

On the Sunday before the vote, campaign workers tack posters to each of 190 wooden billboards erected in the city expressly for the elections. Each poster must be of a precise size and must be tacked to the candidate's numbered location. In addition, each candidate may erect 12 small billboards around town.

Campaigning begins the next morning at 8 a.m. — no earlier, because candidates with megaphones might wake people up. In Mr. Bianchi's campaign headquarters, the ground floor of his house, stacks of Bianchi-san fliers competed for space with New York Yankees baseball paraphernalia. Hung on the wall were large posters, with endorsements from local politicians handwritten in large black characters.

Currently, the only Westerner holding elective office in Japan is Marutei Tsurunen, a native of Finland, who is in Parliament. Mr. Tsurunen and Mr. Bianchi each became Japanese citizens after marrying a Japanese woman.

"Keiko and I are going out with loudspeakers, but we are not going to blast people out of their houses," the candidate said of his campaign manager, his wife.

At 73,000, the population of the city he hopes to represent is less than 1 percent of New York City's, but Inuyama is renowned for tourist attractions that draw day-trippers from nearby Nagoya, the home of Toyota, Japan's biggest company. On a bluff overlooking the Kiso River here, the oldest castle in Japan rises four stories high, an elegant concoction of white walls and pagoda-style roofs dating back to the early 1500's.

On a street below, Mr. Bianchi walked to a Chinese restaurant, bowing furiously to friends and prospective voters he encountered. His political base, he said, is the 1,800 students he has taught here since 1988. He joked, "If you run into anyone around town speaking English with a Brooklyn accent, you know who taught them."

Besides helping to produce "The Jeffersons," Mr. Bianchi worked on newsletters for a New York City financial agency.

"That was a lot of laughs," he said. "If you can learn City Hall bureaucratic procedures, you can handle learning Japanese."

Eventually the study of Zen, karate and Japan led him to take up permanent residence here. He was hired by the city government to recruit native English speakers to teach the language. But he quickly ran afoul of the educational bureaucrats.

"They just teach grammar, like English was Latin, a dead language," Mr. Bianchi said of the school system's authorities, recalling his days at Xaverian, a Catholic high school.

A longtime friend of Inuyama's mayor, Yoshihiro Ishida, who urged him to run, Mr. Bianchi bristled at the suggestion that he might be the token white man.

"I am not going to do the typical foreign clown thing," he said. "We want to get Council meetings on the Internet, broadcast on cable TV. Citizens don't find out until things are decided."

On the other hand, he recognizes the value of being a novelty in a time when voters are bored and political parties and voting turnouts are eroding.

"If I was a regular 44-year-old schoolteacher running for election, all this wouldn't be happening," he said, jerking his thumb toward a Japanese television crew and two reporters doing stories today about an American reporter doing a story about the American running for City Council.

Mr. Bianchi got a lucky publicity boost last month when Hideki Matsui — the Japanese slugger known to fans here, as in New York now as well, as Godzilla — started playing last month for the Yankees.

Hoping to surf Japan's Yankees-mania to victory, Mr. Bianchi, a diehard fan, decorated his campaign headquarters with Yankees pennants and calendars. He almost broke campaign protocol by posing for his poster wearing a Yankees shirt, standing in a batting stance. He added: "My slogan would have been: `Vote for me, or I'll hit you with the bat!' "

Building Yankees frenzy, NHK, Japan's government-owned television channel, is now broadcasting Yankees games live, a first in this Brooklynite's nearly 15 years in Japan. But when the first pitch is thrown in New York at a Sunday afternoon game, it is 3 a.m. Monday in Japan.

That is why a world away from Yankee Stadium, on the third floor of a row house in Inuyama, Mr. Bianchi and his wife struggle every game night to set the recording timer on their VCR. Reporting that Japanese models are no easier to program than American ones, he said glumly, "Half the time, I turn it on and what I recorded was `Little House on the Prairie,' in Japanese."

Hearst Is Said to Be in Deal to Purchase Seventeen Magazine

Hearst Is Said to Be in Deal to Purchase Seventeen Magazine
By DAVID CARR and ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/business/media/24MAGS.html

The Hearst Corporation has agreed in principle to buy Seventeen, the largest-circulation magazine for teenage girls, from Primedia for about $180 million in cash, executives close to the negotiations said.

The companies were completing the sale last night, the executives said, and were expected to announce the deal today. The acquisition of Seventeen would give Hearst — which owns the teenage magazine CosmoGirl, the younger sister of Cosmopolitan — a commanding position in an intensely competitive but stagnant publishing category.

For Primedia, the price attached to Seventeen is less than the $200 million or more that executives at the company had hoped for when the magazine was put up for sale this year. And it is a far cry from the $500 million that Condé Nast Publications offered Primedia for the magazine in 1998.

But an executive at Primedia said the company was pleased that the sale — at a price about 12 times the magazine's $15.1 million in operating profits last year — would effectively reduce debt.

The sale is the latest divestiture by Primedia, a collection of consumer, hobbyist and business-to-business properties like New York, Guns & Ammo and National Hog Farmer. In the last year, the company has sold American Baby and Chicago magazines to keep its promise to Wall Street that it would shed at least $250 million worth of assets to pare down its debt of about $1.7 billion. But as the company continued to struggle financially and its stock price remained in the low single digits, a strategic divide opened up between Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the buyout firm that is the largest shareholder in the company, and Thomas S. Rogers, the chief executive handpicked less than four years ago to fulfill Kohlberg Kravis's desire for an integrated digital and print media company.

Kohlberg Kravis, frustrated that the more than $1 billion in equity it has put into the company has not paid off, has decided to sell much if not all of Primedia over the next 18 to 24 months. Primedia, which had $1.6 billion in revenue from continuing businesses last year, announced last week that Mr. Rogers had resigned.

The deal for Seventeen comes after a months-long auction that pitted Hearst against Hachette Filipacchi Media USA, a unit of Lagardère, in a final whirlwind round of bidding, executives involved in the negotiations said. In one of the more unusual wrinkles of the sale process, Jean-Marie Messier, the former head of Vivendi Universal, served as an adviser to Hachette, according to two executives. Hachette officials declined to comment about Mr. Messier's participation.

The prize in the auction is a tarnished one. Seventeen has been the leader in both ad pages and circulation for years — at one time it even commanded the largest number of fashion ad pages of any American magazine, executives at Primedia said — but now finds itself besieged by competitors like YM from Gruner & Jahr USA and Teen People from Time Inc.

According to documents shown to potential bidders, operating profits at the magazine have fallen to $15.1 million last year from $25.9 million in 2000. And current trends are not particularly promising. Newsstand sales, a good indication of current consumer interest, were off 24.1 percent in the last six months of 2002, compared with the period a year earlier.

The slide in lucrative newsstand sales was not stemmed in spite of the appointment of a new editor, according to one publisher who examined the books. And sales of ad pages were off almost 6 percent in the first quarter of this year compared with the period last year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

The documents shown to potential bidders predicted that operating profit this year would rise to $15.6 million, on revenue of $84.8 million. Revenue last year was $78.8 million.

But several suitors for the magazine said they had doubts those projections would be reached.

According to two companies involved in the bidding, advertising, circulation and licensing are all performing below expectations.

"It seemed clear to me from looking at the magazine that they needed to make an adjustment in their rate base," said one publishing executive, referring to the number of paying readers promised to advertisers. "It has been very costly to maintain their No. 1 position, but the minute you take down the rate base, you have to reduce what you charge advertisers. It was hard for us to figure how to grow the business."

In addition, the teenage magazine category — after five years of steady circulation growth up to 2001, driven in large part by the success of Teen People and CosmoGirl — has slowed. Teen magazine was closed in March 2002, not long after Primedia bought it and other magazines from Emap of Britain for $515 million. And advertising pages were off slightly in 2002 compared with 2001.

But while Seventeen has lost much ground to its competitors, it can have strategic value to a big magazine publisher like Hearst. The company, which owns women's magazines ranging from Good Housekeeping to Marie Claire and Harper's Bazaar, can use its power with marketers to direct some of their ads to Seventeen. And Hearst, unlike Primedia, has a circulation department with more experience dealing with large-circulation consumer magazines.

One challenge that arrives with the likely acquisition is how Seventeen will co-exist with its new sibling CosmoGirl. Hearst will have to decide how to aim each magazine so that the success of one does not come at the expense of the other.

"This was a rare opportunity to pick up a franchise magazine," said David Verklin, chief executive of Carat North America, a media buying firm that is part of the Aegis Group. "It is one of the great, venerable brands in publishing and they just don't come up for sale that often. In Hearst, you have a well-run company that is looking for growth and they just went out and bought a lot of market share."

At Big Board, a Disturbing Investigation of a Lesser Sin

At Big Board, a Disturbing Investigation of a Lesser Sin
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/business/24PLAC.html

By describing more fully the nature and extent of its investigation into some of its traders, the New York Stock Exchange clearly hoped to reassure investors that its trading floor was worthy of their trust. But for investors with a sense of history, the Big Board's disclosure on Tuesday that a handful of traders may have profited by breaking the rules is disturbing nonetheless.

The exchange said that it was investigating activities by traders in about two dozen stocks and that the traders, known as specialists, might ay have stepped in between buyers and sellers, making a slight profit by buying from one and selling to another instead of matching them directly. Stock exchange rules say that these traders must match up customer orders whenever possible, allowing investors who want to buy and sell to meet without an intermediary.

The Big Board came forward with details of its inquiry to dispel news reports that it was investigating charges of front-running, which occurs when a specialist profits by trading ahead of a customer's order. Front-running is a more serious matter, according to exchange officials, and they wanted to set the record straight.

But allowing investors to meet without a specialist's interference is central to the Big Board's argument that it is a superior place to trade stocks. And such interference always raises the costs to investors. So the exchange's confirmation that some specialists may have stepped in between investors does damage to its claim of superiority and gives a boost to its chief competitor, Nasdaq, which operates an electronic market that does not employ specialists.

The Big Board and Nasdaq compete assiduously for the right to trade shares of public companies. Both markets earn fees from their listings. They are arch rivals.

For example, in a March 24 letter to Representative Doug Ose, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy Policy, Natural Resources and Regulatory Affairs, the Big Board argued against allowing Nasdaq to become an exchange, a status for which it has sought approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the letter, the Big Board said Nasdaq should not be granted exchange status because dealers in its stocks, unlike the exchange's specialists, are not obligated to step aside when investors' trades can be matched. "On exchanges, customers go first," the letter said.

For years, this was the case. Investors found the Big Board a more agreeable place to trade stocks, mostly because its costs were smaller than those associated with Nasdaq stocks. One reason for the Big Board's cost advantage was that on Nasdaq, investors rarely met and instead almost always encountered an intermediary from a brokerage firm. In 1995, for example, according to an article published in the Stanford Journal of Law, Business & Finance, matched investor orders occurred in only 1.8 percent of trades on Nasdaq. But such orders occurred in more than 80 percent of trades on the Big Board.

Then, in the mid 1990's, Nasdaq ran into regulatory problems when the Justice Department and the S.E.C. found that its traders had treated investors unfairly by keeping the costs to trade its stocks artificially high. In 1996, the Nasdaq dealers paid $1 billion in fines and agreed to overhaul their marketplace to make it fairer for investors.

Those overhauls have made vast improvements at Nasdaq. For example, all orders that investors place in Nasdaq stocks at a specified price, known as limit orders, must be displayed to everyone. Previously, such orders could be hidden from other investors.

And the automatic execution that Nasdaq has worked to put in place allows investors to meet far more often than they used to. Last year, according to Nasdaq officials, investors met without an intermediary in 57 percent of trades. Dealers were involved in 43 percent of trades.

Meanwhile, the trend at the Big Board seems to be in the opposite direction. There, the percentage of trades in which a specialist or a member firm is involved has been steadily rising. In 1996, the figure was 18.8 percent. Today an estimated 34 percent of trades involve an intermediary.

And now comes the Big Board's investigation. Its officials said that the specialists might have taken advantage of a quirk in the exchange's computer system that allowed small orders in a stock to accumulate for a few seconds as the specialist in charge of that stock reported orders that had been completed.

According to the officials, specialists may then have stepped in between those orders, buying shares at one price from a customer and immediately selling them for a penny more to another customer.

It is unclear, of course, what the Big Board's investigation will turn up. But the existence of such an inquiry hurts the Big Board's reputation as the marketplace where customers always come first.

Post Prada, a Design Darling Slims Down

Post Prada, a Design Darling Slims Down
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/garden/24KOOL.html

ANHATTAN has consistently inspired in its beholders ecstasy about architecture," Rem Koolhaas, the Rotterdam-based architect, wrote in his 1978 book "Delirious New York." Mr. Koolhaas hoped to ratchet up the ecstasy with a dramatic addition to the Whitney Museum's Madison Avenue building and a downtown hotel for Ian Schrager. But both projects have fizzled and now the love affair between Mr. Koolhaas and the city appears to be on the rocks.

Last week, after the Whitney Museum of American Art canceled plans for the addition, which experts said would have cost at least $200 million, Mr. Koolhaas grumbled in a telephone interview that the Whitney's benefactors were more interested in building the endowment than his architecture.

Economic problems combined with bad timing and perhaps a bit of hubris have brought the cancellation of several long-awaited projects by Mr. Koolhaas, who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000.

Last December, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that it was indefinitely postponing a new complex, designed by Mr. Koolhaas, because it could not raise enough of the estimated $300 million cost. Also on the ropes is a 12-story Prada store in San Francisco, which would have been the most ambitious of three "epicenters" commissioned by Miuccia Prada. (The SoHo store opened in 2001, and another in Beverly Hills is under construction.)

While Daniel Libeskind, who won the World Trade Center commission, is busy opening an office in New York, Mr. Koolhaas, who says he opted not to participate in the final competition for the World Trade Center site, is reducing his New York office to a dozen employees. In a recent speech to architecture students at Columbia University, he said he "admitted defeat in New York."

"Though the firm is in good shape globally, " a partner in his firm, Dan Wood, said, "its focus has moved away from the U.S." Mr. Wood added that he would be leaving the firm, amicably, because of the lack of American projects.

Mr. Koolhaas is one of many architects who have seen large commissions evaporate or shrink with the economic downturn. "There are layoffs at nearly every firm, small, large, famous, not famous," said Reed Kroloff, the former editor of Architecture Magazine, and a consultant to architecture competitions.

Frank Gehry, who like Mr. Koolhaas is a Pritzker Prize winner and whose Guggenheim museum planned for Lower Manhattan was canceled, said that potential clients "have pulled in their horns a little bit."

"There aren't as many inquiries," Mr. Gehry said. "The mood is different."

Richard Meier, also a Pritzker winner, said, "The phone may not be ringing as often."

In New York, post-9/11 budget cuts by the city have forced the cancellation of an addition to the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library at 40th Street designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates. And Mr. Libeskind's planned $55 million Jewish Museum San Francisco has been scaled back for budgetary reasons.

A tough economy may be forcing a more conservative turn in architecture, and Mr. Koolhaas is no traditionalist. His firm, he said in an interview, "is better at reinventing than reasserting." By that he means he is turning his attention to building a $650 million television broadcast center in Beijing, opening for the 2008 Olympics. The World Trade Center competition, he said in the speech at Columbia in February, was all about looking backward, while the Chinese government was looking forward.

Robert Ivy, editor in chief of Architectural Record, said: "In China, people are basically saying, you can wave your hand and make this happen. You can understand Rem's enthusiasm for that kind of client."

Mr. Ivy added, "It's not surprising he might have sour grapes, given how many projects have evaporated."

But few architects are inclined, as Mr. Koolhaas is, to see a morality tale in the economic downturn. In his Columbia speech, Mr. Koolhaas recounted his attempts to satisfy Mr. Schrager, the developer of a planned hotel on Astor Place, which ended with him being "fired." Ultimately, Mr. Koolhaas said, "It became very clear that America in its current mood would resist a certain kind of challenge as systematically as Ian Schrager." Mr. Schrager, responding through a publicist, said he would let his buildings speak for themselves.

Mr. Koolhaas's office has three projects under construction in this country: the Prada store on Rodeo Drive, a student center at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the Seattle Public Library. As recently as December, Mr. Koolhaas was optimistic enough to predict that the Whitney project would move forward, and that the cancellation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art "would galvanize" donors to come through with the funds needed for his plan.

Neither has happened. And that may be due in part to the ambition of Mr. Koolhaas's work. "People come to Rem for dramatic solutions to their problems," Mr. Kroloff said. "And those solutions tend to be terribly expensive."

Mr. Koolhaas, 58, famously began his career not by building but by writing. His first book, "Delirious New York," described how New York came to represent the "culture of congestion." His 2000 manifesto, the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, featured his dazzling essay on the mall-style developments that he calls "junkspace."

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art would have been his biggest American project. Rather than preserve the museum's existing buildings, Mr. Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture proposed creating a new gallery complex under a vast curving roof. Mr. Koolhaas said his plan was nothing less than "a moral imperative" for the museum.

But morality and money are rarely drawn on the same account. The plan, according to the museum's president, Andrea Rich, meant that the museum had to build "all or nothing." Another kind of design, she said, might have been buildable in stages, allowing her to break ground before she had raised the entire cost.

Mr. Koolhaas won the competition without deciding what the giant canopy over the museum would be made of. As recently as last May, employees of his firm were still considering everything from glass to plastic to fabric. "Maybe he should cover it in chintz," Paige Rense, the editor of Architectural Digest, suggested.

Ms. Rich said, "That was a problem, and if we return to the project, it will have to be addressed." Mr. Koolhaas's initial plan for the Whitney, in which a giant, fist-shaped addition would have cantilevered over the museum's existing Marcel Breuer building, was bound to be controversial.

The architect's unusual combinations of materials and sometimes-unsettling shapes are visible at his art museum in Rotterdam and the concert hall nearing completion in Porto, Portugal, built from the ground up. (His 70,000-square-foot Guggenheim Las Vegas closed in January after less than two years of operation.)

But in New York, his projects, the Prada store, the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Chelsea and the Second Stage Theater in Midtown, have been interior renovations.

And time has not been kind to the Prada store, which opened in December 2001. "We've had some maintenance problems," Mr. Wood said, citing zebrawood floors that had to be refinished, aluminum polish that damaged marble and electronic systems that failed after tourists pushed the buttons "a few hundred times more than we expected."

The store, he noted, "gets an extraordinary amount of traffic."

Worst of all, a hatch had to be added to the glass elevator after several shoppers became trapped in it last fall.

At the same time, Mr. Koolhaas's 2001 deal to serve as an editorial consultant to Condé Nast magazines has produced more rumors than magazine pages. James Truman, the editorial director of Condé Nast, could cite no other Koolhaas projects besides the new Wired magazine, for which Mr. Koolhaas served as a guest editor of one section. An essay by Mr. Koolhaas, which he described as a postscript to "Delirious New York," is the centerpiece of a section of the magazine on "space." Condé Nast will give a party for Mr. Koolhaas on May 7 in SoHo.

Mr. Koolhaas, for his part, has said he will attend. "I remain committed to New York," he said. "It is an extremely critical part of my mental map."

Mr. Kroloff said that as bad as Mr. Koolhaas's situation in the United States is, "most architects would trade places with him in a second."

Perhaps Mr. Koolhaas can take comfort in the lessons of architectural history, in which many influential "buildings" have never existed except on paper. Even Mr. Koolhaas's hero, Mies van der Rohe, was subject to the vicissitudes of the economy and the whims of clients. Mr. Koolhaas likes to tell students the story of a residential commission that Mies lost after creating a full-size canvas model for the client. "The building's cancellation," Mr. Koolhaas wrote, "was more dramatic, more important almost, than its realization."

For $2, a Bottle of Wine and Change

For $2, a Bottle of Wine and Change
By FRANK J. PRIAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/dining/23WINE.html

MOVE over Mondavi. Step aside Gevrey-Chambertin. And Grgich Hills, get lost. Make way for Two-Buck Chuck, at $1.99 a bottle the hottest thing in the wine market since, well, since nothing. There's never been anything like it.

The wine's real name is Charles Shaw. It's a year-old line of California wines produced and bottled by the Bronco Wine Company of Ceres, Calif., and sold only in Trader Joe's stores, of which there are 193, most of them on the West Coast. The Two-Buck Chuck nickname is said to have come from a Trader Joe's employee who, one hopes, was quickly made a marketing director.

These Charles Shaw wines first appeared last spring, with three vintages — 1999, 2000 and 2001 — arriving simultaneously. But it wasn't until late fall that sales started to move. "They were doing 350, 500 cases a day in some stores," said Jon Fredrikson, a California wine consultant. "By the end of the year, they'd sold almost two million cases."

Tales abound of how, as the holidays approached, customers carted off 10 to 15 cases at a time in their S.U.V.'s. They would buy a bottle, them come back for cases, said one manager of a Trader Joe's store in Emeryville, Calif. Sales of Two-Buck Chuck could reach five million cases this year, Mr. Fredrikson said, adding: "It's the fastest-growing table wine in the U.S. wine industry's history. Here in California, they are currently outselling all the Gallo labels combined."

Harvey Posert, a public relations consultant working for Bronco, said: "We've never seen anything like it. It's sort of a reverse cult wine."

So-called cult wines like Screaming Eagle and Grace Family Vineyards are produced in tiny quantities by small wineries and sold at astonishingly high prices. Two-Buck Chuck appears to have reversed the process by attracting thousands of customers who ordinarily pay much more for their wine. Suddenly, it's chic to boast that you are serving a $2 wine.

Wine chat rooms on the Internet quickly took up the Two-Buck Chuck story and are credited, at least in part, for the wine's rapid rise to fame.

Two-Buck Chuck is a phenomenon of the current California wine market, which has been hard hit by the economic downturn and is trying to rid itself of an ocean of surplus wine. The wholesale price of bulk wine, as high as $10 a gallon in the late 1990's, was down to about $1 last year.

Bronco's president, Fred Franzia, has made a success of picking up the labels of bankrupt or otherwise dormant wineries and using them on lines of inexpensive wines. Among the has-beens whose names he owns — in addition to Charles Shaw — are Grand Cru, Hacienda, Rutherford Vintners and Napa Ridge. Napa Ridge is in Napa but its wines are made from bulk wine trucked in from other parts of California. Charles Shaw wines are bottled at Napa Ridge.

Several years ago, the Napa Valley Vintners Association sued Bronco for what it contended was the illegal use of the "Napa" name on wines "bulked in" from elsewhere. The vintners lost.

And many California vintners seem to be losing again, as Mr. Frederikson said that the $1.99 bottle has taken business away from other wineries.

CHARLES F. SHAW was a Chicago investment banker who fell in love with the wine business and, in the late 1970's, bought 50 acres off the Silverado Trail in the Napa Valley. There, he planted gamay grapes to make a California version of Beaujolais. The Charles F. Shaw Vineyard and Winery opened for business in 1979.

Eventually, Mr. Shaw was making 10,000 cases a year of gamay and sauvignon blanc. But a dozen years later, after his gamay gamble had met with little success in cabernet country, Mr. Shaw declared bankruptcy and returned to Chicago. Bronco stepped in and bought the name, keeping it in deep freeze for about another 12 years.

There are four wines now in the Charles Shaw Two-Buck Chuck line: cabernet sauvignon, merlot, chardonnay and sauvignon blanc. They are all priced at $1.99 in California's Trader Joe's stores. In the chain's stores in Washington and other states, the wine has often been priced at $2.99.

Two-Buck Chuck has been compared with Franzia three- and five-liter bag-in-the-box wines but, in fact, those wines are not made by Bronco, but by the Wine Group, another big California company, which some years ago purchased the Franzia name.

The Charles Shaw wines are relatively dry for inexpensive wines. This puts them in competition with more sophisticated table wines rather than the bag-in-a-box wines. The cabernet, the only one I have tried, is light, pleasant and easy to drink and has little varietal character. It could have been merlot for all I knew. Nondescript would not be too harsh a characterization. Nothing wrong with that: wine is supposed to accompany food and Charles Shaw will do that quite adequately. Someone referred to it recently as the ultimate fund-raiser wine — perfect for large groups of people who really don't care what they are drinking.

No one is sure how long the Two-Buck Chuck phenomenon will last. Bulk wine prices have climbed to as high as $1.50 a gallon in recent weeks, but as Mr. Posert of Bronco noted, there is a wine glut all over the world working to keep prices down. He sees the Charles Shaw wines doing well for another two to five years.

The wines quickly spawned competitors, the most interesting of which happens to be called, yes, Two Buck Chuck. The difference is that with the Charles Shaw wines, Two-Buck Chuck is merely a clever, informal nickname. Two weeks ago, the new Two Buck Chuck appeared in California, at the stores of a chain called Beverages & More. Only this second Two Buck Chuck was registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as a legitimate proprietary name.

This other Two Buck Chuck is made at the Adler Fels winery in Santa Rosa, Calif., which also bottles private-label wines for chain stores. The winemaker David Coleman said that Beverages & More had asked him to make the wine some months ago and that he had had no idea someone else was using the name Two Buck Chuck. Mr. Coleman said he doesn't see the $2 wine phenomenon lasting more than "three or four months." He now has a 2000 cabernet sauvignon and a 2001 chardonnay.

In the meantime, he told the Wine Business Insider, a trade publication: "It's amazing how much wine is out there and how inexpensive it is. I wish I could run my car with it."

Quattrone Arrested for Obstructing Investigations

[i suppose it was only a matter of time. its always the coverup that gets them...]

Former Star Banker Arrested for Obstructing Investigations
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:52 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-CSFB-Quattrone.html

NEW YORK (AP) -- A former star investment banker with Credit Suisse First Boston was arrested and charged Wednesday with witness tampering and obstructing federal criminal and civil securities probes by directing the destruction of evidence.

The complaint said Frank Quattrone ``unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly, corruptly influenced, obstructed and impeded ... the due administration of justice.''

It said he directed CSFB's officers and employees to destroy evidence required to be produced for investigations by a federal grand jury and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Quattrone was released on his own recognizance after agreeing at his initial court appearance to surrender his passport and confine his travel to within the United States. He declined comment outside court.

``Frank Quattrone is innocent. He never obstructed justice,'' said his attorney, John W. Keker.

U.S. Attorney James B. Comey scheduled an afternoon news conference to discuss the charges.

Quattrone resigned from CSFB in early March. During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, he was one of the highest-paid figures on Wall Street, earning almost $100 million a year and wielding enormous influence at the helm of CSFB's technology unit. He presided over lucrative initial public offerings of companies such as Amazon.com and Netscape Communications Corp.

When the tech bubble burst in 2000, regulators began taking a closer look at the firm's IPO practices.

The complaint unsealed Wednesday outlined a series of e-mails in early 2000 that investigators allege led to the destruction of numerous CSFB documents they believe would have been helpful to the SEC and grand jury.

In several internal CSFB e-mails send on Dec. 5, 2000, and Dec. 6, 2000, certain CSFB employees directed other CSFB employees to destroy IPO-related documents, according to the complaint.

The complaint alleged that Quattrone was told about grand jury subpoenas and probes by securities regulators on Dec. 3, 2000, and asked in an e-mail, ``Are the regulators accusing us of criminal activity?''

``They are investigating because they think something bad happened,'' Quattrone allegedly was told in an email from a company lawyer. ``They are completely wrong but merely being investigated and having something leak could be quite harmful, so the idea is to get them to back off their inquiry.''

On the same day, he was warned by a company lawyer, ``Everything we say now is going to come under a microscope,'' according to the complaint.

On Dec. 4, 2000, CSFB's ``Global Head of Execution - Technology Group'' told Quattrone and others in an e-mail that securities lawyers were ``mounting an all out assault on broken tech IPOs,'' the complaint said.

The executive reminded Quattrone and three other senior officers of the company's technology unit about the company's document retention policy, which called for destruction of most documents related to a securities offering unless litigation began over the transaction or the company received subpoenas to produce documents.

The executive suggested ``that before they leave for the holidays, they should catch up on file cleanup,'' the complaint said.

``Today, it's administrative housekeeping. In January, it could be improper destruction of evidence,'' the e-mail warned, according to the complaint.

The complaint said Quattrone distributed an e-mail on Dec. 5, 2000, saying he had once been a key witness in a securities litigation case in south Texas and that he would ``strongly advise'' other CSFB employees to follow procedures outlining which documents should be kept or destroyed.

CSFB's legal department sent more e-mails on Dec. 6 and 7 telling employees not to destroy IPO-related material.

CSFB paid $100 million in late 2001 to settle accusations brought by the SEC and the National Association of Securities Dealers that it had charged inflated commissions to some clients in exchange for access to IPO shares.

At the end of 2002, CSFB agreed to pay another $200 million as part of an industrywide settlement over conflicts of interest between stock research and banking.

Throughout the investigation, Quattrone has maintained that he did nothing wrong. In sending the e-mail to staff, ``he was following the document retention policies in force for his technology banking group at CSFB. He did not destroy any documents nor improperly direct others to do so,'' his lawyers said in a statement when he resigned.

Magistrate Judge Theodore Katz told Quattrone to return to court on May 13.

Beijing Posts Surge in SARS Cases as Infection Fears Mount

Beijing Posts Surge in SARS Cases as Infection Fears Mount
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/science/sciencespecial/23CND-CHIN.html

BEIJING, April 23 — Reported cases of a new respiratory disease in Beijing surged by 105 new cases today, bringing the total to 693, as the threat of deadly infection suddenly became the main topic of conversation in this metropolis of 14 million.

Migrant workers and college students lined up warily at railroad stations for tickets to their native provinces while thousands of residents, on rumors of possibly draconian quarantines, thronged to grocery stores to stock up on rice and noodles.

Health experts warned that hundreds more cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome appeared inevitable as the government belatedly struggles to contain an epidemic it had tried to conceal until several days ago.

"Beijing lost the entire month of March in the fight against SARS, and now this is the consequence," said Henk Bekedam, chief of the World Health Organization office here.

"Now they are working very hard on disease control," he said in an interview. "But the disease is more widespread here than we expected, and it's not clear if the end is in sight."

The W.H.O. headquarters in Geneva today added Beijing, along with China's Shanxi Province and Toronto Canada, to its list of places where nonessential travel should be avoided. Hong Kong and Guangdong Province in southeast China, where the disease first erupted, had previously been named.

[Canada is the only country outside of Asia where people have died from the disease. According to health officials, there have been 15 deaths in Canada from SARS and there are now 324 probable or suspected cases, most of them in Toronto.

[The Associated Press reported today that Major League Baseball plans to recommend that teams take precautions against the disease when they play in Toronto. The 10 teams that are scheduled to play in Toronto through the All-Star break in mid-July will be advised against signing autographs, visiting hospitals, using public transportation and mingling with large crowds, Rich Levin, a spokesman for Major League Baseball, told the news agency.]

In one of its most visible countermeasures yet in Beijing, the city today shut down all primary and secondary schools for at least the next two weeks, a step that may have been prudent but which only added to anxiety among a mistrustful public.

Only a week ago, a World Health Organization team caused concern by suggesting that cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome in the city may have reached 200, rather than the few dozen officially reported at the time.

Alarm mounted on Saturday when health officials, pledging a new honesty, reported 339 confirmed cases in the capital. The national health minister and the mayor of Beijing were fired in a show of top-level resolve.

Now, just four days later, the reported total has climbed to 693 and health experts here say this reflects not only the transfer of previously "suspected" patients into the "confirmed" category, but also a significant rise in new cases of the disease. SARS has been fatal in 4 percent to 5 percent of cases.

The tally of new suspected is still climbing along with the confirmed cases, Mr. Bekedam said — an indication that actual new cases are significantly climbing. On Monday, the health ministry said Beijing had more than 600 suspected cases, but it has not provided such figures for the last two days, adding to the uncertainty.

Mr. Bekedam would not speculate on the ultimate toll, but some health experts predicted that hundreds more cases, at least, would almost certainly appear in the city before new cases could taper off. That would still leave the disease a small actual presence in this vast city, but the psychological impact is already huge.

Mr. Bekedam stressed that it was essential for officials to provide more detailed information about which groups are contracting the virus and exactly where in the city. Such information can help to focus control measures, help the public reduce risks and prevent generalized panic.

Over all, China had 2,305 confirmed cases of the dangerous new viral disease as of Tuesday evening, the health ministry reported today, an increase of 147 over the total reported one day earlier. Ninety-six patients have died.

SARS was first detected late last year in Guangdong Province, which still accounts for the bulk of the country's listed cases.

But SARS has now been reported from many interior provinces, raising the specter of a much wider epidemic, even harder to tame. International experts question the credibility of persistently low totals reported from several poorer regions that have clusters of known SARS cases and scanty, substandard health services to halt the spread of the virus.

A World Health Organization team is now investigating conditions in the giant city of Shanghai. Only two cases there have been officially reported, but more appear to have been overlooked or concealed, some experts charge.

The steps toward greater openness about SARS in Beijing have not assuaged public fears, and many people continue to suspect the government's pronouncements.

Today, after rumors spread that commerce into the city might be stopped or that neighborhoods where cases were detected might be quarantined, shoppers raced to grocery stores, stocking up on rice, instant noodles and vegetables. State television tonight tried to reassure people that the stores were well stocked and would remain so.

Thousands of provincial businessmen, migrant workers and college students, most of them wearing protective masks, crowded railway stations and rushed onto buses today, feeling they would be safer elsewhere and ignoring official appeals for people to avoid travel that could expose them to the virus and disseminate it around the country.

The mood was tense at Beijing's central train station. Nearly everyone out front, including the policemen, wore a face mask. Small groups of travelers huddled in the plaza outside, trying to avoid spending time in crowded waiting rooms, and ticket lines were long.

Song Yang, a first-year student at the Nationalities University, was heading home to Jilin province. "We have no class for the next month, and Beijing is dangerous right now," he said.

A construction worker named Li was headed back to Jiangxi province with his co-workers, all of them still in work uniforms. "I've been in Beijing for four years now, but I need to go home and wait for this to blow over," he said.

This morning, city officials announced that all the city's primary and secondary schools would be closed for at least two weeks. They said that the 1.7 million affected students should study at home, using a newly improvised on-line educational service.

There have been no public reports of children dying from SARS, but fearful parents in many parts of the city had already kept their children home on Monday.

City officials said that the entrance exams for junior and senior high school may have to be postponed, which could cause major disruptions for families and schools in the months ahead.

The city education department said it was opening an "Educational Committee Online School" to help students study at home. (The Web address is www.bjedu.gov.cn.) But many schoolchildren do not have computers at home, instead visiting crowded Internet bars where they are more apt to play on-line games than to download math problems.

Citing the effects of the SARS epidemic on tourism and business in China, international financial analysts now predict that China's economy will stall or contract in the second quarter of 2003, hampering growth throughout East Asia.

Forecasts by Citicorp and J.P. Morgan both predict negative growth in the April-to June period, in part because of the costs related to SARS. But China's economy grew swiftly in the first quarter, and these companies and others still predict healthy net growth for the year as a whole.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous

Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/international/middleeast/23GORDON.html

PRESIDENTIAL PALACE, Baghdad — As American and British forces prepared to invade Iraq, the workers at Saddam Hussein's presidential compound here were hard at work on their own secret war preparations: removing the ornate furniture from Mr. Hussein's palaces to hide it until after the war.

While the allies were preparing to unleash their missiles and bombs, Mr. Hussein's aides were busy establishing a strategic reserve of handsomely upholstered sofas, fine china, wall hangings with pastoral scenes, and wall-sized mirrors decorated with cherubs. A label was affixed to each of the items explaining precisely where it came from right down to the very floor and room.

In terms of aesthetics, the furniture seems to be a foreign despot's misguided attempt at sophistication. Mr. Hussein and his colleagues, it seems, dwelled in a world in which excess was the norm, no expenditure was too extravagant and ostentation was substituted for good taste.

But the cache also provides a window into the Mr. Hussein's strategic calculations — or more accurately his miscalculations. Mr. Hussein and his colleagues, it seems, were expecting to ride out the war in their bunkers and to return afterward to their former life of splendor. They were not only expecting to endure the allied bombardment; they were hoping to retain the seat of power along with all of their furniture and imperial trappings.

After fighting the Americans in the 1991 Persian Gulf war and surviving four days of American air strikes in 1998, Mr. Hussein and his deputies had a good sense of what structures would be high on the allied target list (the leadership's offices and residences, airfields and other military assets) and which would be off limits (schools, mosques and civilian neighborhoods.)

So, they planned accordingly.

In the Amiriyah section of Baghdad I met an Iraqi aviation engineer who told me that the government had decreed that the engines be removed from all of Iraq's jets at the international airport. The airport, in fact, is dotted with engineless airplanes. (Two were turned into burned-out hulks anyway by over-eager American troops determined to deprive the regime of any chance to escape.)

The military did much the same. The Iraq Air Force buried entire aircraft in its western desert to try to hide them from the Americans. Tanks were buried near Al Kut. Weapons and ammunition were hidden in the nation's schools.

The leadership applied the formula, too. Mr. Hussein's Abu Ghurayb Palace was stripped of its furniture. Paintings were even removed from their frames. (The Americans fired a cruise missile into Mr. Hussein's vacant palace bedroom anyway.) There is also the $656 million dollars that was found hidden in a gardener's shed and in other modest buildings in Baghdad, a cache that the Iraqi power elite clearly planned to recover one day.

Mr. Hussein's presidential palace here — a sprawling compound that has gone from being the nation's power center to a furniture warehouse — is another case in point. For the regime's loyalists life was good. This was not just a government installation. It was a planned community for the elite on the banks of Tigris, with parks, swimming pools, Disney-like castles, moats, and man-made pounds plied by paddleboats.

Brig. Gen. Sayyad Yassen, a Republican Guard commander, was one of the favored few. He had a home in the compound with a swimming pool, a sauna, and a river view.

American troops found $16 million today in another house across the street, and an officer said there could be much more. A white Mercedes with a bullet hole in the front passenger window was parked outside.

"These are the real looters," said Sgt. First Class Greg Walker, who took me around in a Hummer.

General Yassen's home was filled with beds, an indication that soldiers bunked there with the intent to defend the regime. The Special Republican Guard, which was charged with defending the capital, however, seems not to have made much of a fight once it was clear that the American armor was on the way. Some Republican Guard troops left their uniforms in their lockers and their boots by their cots. For soldiers determined to avoid the American prisoner of war camps, army boots seem to have been a decided liability.

The abandoned uniforms suggest an answer to one of the great riddles of the war: what happened to the Iraqi Republican Guard? In one of the fastest demobilizations in history, the Iraqi troops that escaped the American bombing appear to have cast off their military gear and tried to blend in with the civilian population.

"You could say the Iraqi Army has us surrounded,"said Col. Martin Stanton, a senior officer at the land war command for civil-military relations. "They are lining up each day looking for work."

These days, the presidential compound is an American headquarters — M-1 tanks rumble along the avenues; soldiers have turned one of the buildings into a indoor shooting range; other soldiers have make the generals' homes temporary camps.

The Pentagon's Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which is charged with overseeing the rebuilding of Iraq and the establishment of a new government, is setting up its office in a hall the Iraqi Foreign Affairs Ministry used for official functions. The office is just short walk from the stockpile of fine furniture, much of which seems to be have been built in France.

I wandered through the rooms with an Arab-speaking officer. Some of the pieces, he explained, were from the Republican Palace, others from the Huraa Library and the Mothers of All Battles Hall. There was even a splendid chair with finely stitched cushions. Its label indicated that it have been removed from the "special corridor." That, my guide, told me seems to be a reference to the quarters formerly occupied by Mr. Hussein himself.

Creating Jasper Johns

[a few excellent art articles from modernartnotes.blogspot.com:]

Star turn
Is it patriotic? Subversive? Both? Jonathan Jones on how Jasper Johns made a provocative masterpiece out of the American flag
Tuesday April 22, 2003
by Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,940948,00.html

In a recent Simpsons episode, Bart's friend Milhouse vomits on the American flag, offending, as newsreader Kent Brockman reports, "flag hags everywhere". The Simpsons, with its ambiguous patriotism, is in a tradition of American art since the 1950s. What American artists up to and including Matt Groening have done is to at once love and question the US. And perhaps no artist ever did both quite so compactly as Jasper Johns when he painted an American flag.

Johns, who has been an unlikely guest voice on The Simpsons, has an exhibition of recent prints opening. But it is his almost 50-year-old Flag that is his most current and contemporary work. So contemporary that some people will find its large-scale presence on these pages offensive. It is there in all its provocation: well, how do you like that?

In the past two years - as flying the flag on homes, public buildings, opera houses and (momentarily) central Baghdad has become an American enthusiasm - Johns has emerged as the last hope, or maybe the fig leaf, of the ambivalent flag-waver. When a video of the concert for New York after the World Trade Centre attacks was released in this country, Johns's Flag was on the cover. When New York museums wanted to match the patriotic mood, they displayed not just any flag, but Johns's flag: Three Flags (1958), a version owned by the Whitney. Ambivalence is his thing. There are few works of art quite so uncertain, so confounding - not just in its values and meaning, but even in its status as an object or a sign - as Jasper Johns's Flag, made in its most famous version in 1954-55.

The simple facts about Flag, which belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, are that it is a painting of a flag that looks just like a flag pinned to the wall (except it stands forward from the wall, and its surface is not at all the texture of a billowing banner). It is painted in a medium called encaustic, a warm wax suspension that dries quickly as it cools. Encaustic was used by ancient Egyptian painters of mummy portraits. Johns used it, he said, for its speed of drying.

Describing Flag, you see it but you don't understand it. It is hard to say why it is a work of art and not a flag. Because it is painted? But a flag painted on the side of a building is still a flag, not art. Johns's Flag might be accepted, with a sigh, as art. But as great art - as an icon of modern American art? Why?

Johns's Flag was immediately acknowledged as a startling work of art when it was first exhibited in New York, at a group show at the Leo Castelli gallery in 1957. The critic Robert Rosenblum asked of Flag: "Is it blasphemous or respectful, simple-minded or recondite?" Its brilliance, implied his review, lay in these questions. The same lack of resolution impressed Alfred H Barr Jr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, who visited Johns's first solo show at Castelli in January and February 1958 - and bought Flag, along with two Targets and a White Numbers, for the museum. So by early 1958, Johns's Flag was accepted not just as an original work of art, but as one worthy of inclusion in the world's leading modern art collection.

Someone should have told the art teacher of a shy high-school student called Robert G Heft. In 1958, Alaska and Hawaii were about to become states, increasing the number of stars on the flag from 48 to 50. Heft took it upon himself to redesign the flag with 50 stars. He got a B+ for his labours (he actually stitched the flag), because, said his teacher, "it lacked originality. He said anybody could make the flag." But Congress accepted the schoolboy's design, and it is the current American flag.

This patriotic little anecdote, part of the folklore of the American flag, stands in revealing contrast to the making and ratification of Johns's Flag. The new flag rendered Johns's painting, with its 48 stars, obsolete - as a flag. But this just adds to the sense of estrangement, as if his is the flag of another country, an alternate, counterfactual nation.

Heft's art teacher said anybody could make the flag. While there were still art critics around in 1958 who said the same, and of course there still are, the smart ones saluted Flag, seeing in it a gleeful subversion, not of any national creed as such, but of conservatism, obviousness, literal-mindedness - the notion that a flag must be a flag, that there is no room for ambiguity. Yet Johns, like Heft (who became a patriotic politician), was contributing to the history of America's most primal piece of popular culture. They both worked in a homely, craft-like, hobby-making way. Heft stitched his flag. Johns built his as an object with layers of encaustic over collaged newsprint. It was one of the first works of art Johns made after he destroyed his early efforts. He remembered that the image came to him in a dream.

"One night I dreamed I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it. And I did. I worked on that painting a long time. It's a very rotten painting - physically rotten - because I began it in house enamel paint, which you paint furniture with, and it wouldn't dry quickly enough. Then I had in my head this idea of something I had read or heard about: wax encaustic."

Johns's account of painting Flag stresses the homely, amateurish nature of the way he went about it, first using the furniture paint, then a technique that had not been widespread for thousands of years. He thought of himself at this point, at the beginning of his public career, as inventing an art specific to him: "I decided I would only allow myself to do what I couldn't not do." His use of primitive craft techniques, his readiness to try whatever came to hand, was part of a rejection of received ideas of what an artist or a work of art is, a philosophical questioning. He was waiting for something to do that he couldn't not do, and from that something he would take his representation of the artist Jasper Johns. And the thing that came to him, in a dream, was that he should paint a large American flag.

Lisa Simpson dreams about helping George Washington in a Simpsons episode that has Washington complaining about the flag he ordered: "I'll take it, but I'm not paying for it." Johns's almost folk-art method of making a flag places him not at the margins but at the centre of the flag's history. Legend has it that Washington himself designed the original version of the stars and stripes, and that he gave his drawing to be worked up into a banner to the most patriotic seamstress in American history, Betsy Ross, in 1777. The story allies the national leader and the seamstress, high state interest and folk craft: that is, the myth of the flag's origin makes it a piece of ver nacular art, a product of good honest American handicraft, like Johns's Flag.

Unfortunately the story is a fiction, first told by Elizabeth Ross's grandson in the late 19th century. The stars and stripes does date from the beginning of an independent US. In 1777, the Continental Congress passed a Flag Act: "Resolved, That the flag of the United States be made of 13 stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be 13 stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation." In fact, the flag is a piece of neo-classicism, with its cool rows of alternating red and white. There is no feudal heraldry, no dragons or gryphons. It is neatly, smoothly modern. The white stars on blue represent a "new constellation". Today, the American flag is the only one on the moon.

Most of all, the flag instituted by the Continental Congress is a systematic repudiation of Britain's union flag, with its explosive fist of diagonals, suggestive of a grenade thrown by an 18th-century fusilier. The new American flag was pacific in feeling, democratic and egalitarian in its lack of a centre - in contrast to the union flag radiating from a monarchical centre - and in its equal and independent elements. Perhaps more American art than anyone cares to admit comes from this 18th-century design: the repeated units of Don Judd or Carl Andre are not so different from those even bars.

Anyway, Old Glory was a potent enough image for Johns to dream about painting it. His flag is a provocative masterpiece of unresolvable questions. And yet the defining characteristic of this painting is not coolness or cleverness. It is passion. There is so much emotion held inside the transparent surface of Johns's flag that it cannot ever be ignored. Far from defining art as philosophy, Flag equates art with emotion. In making it, Johns made the flag, his nation's flag, his own.

It is not that Johns had any special grudge or patriotic obsession. He has never been an overtly political artist. But the briefest facts about his life up to the time he made Flag hint at the feelings this work might contain. He was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, one of the states that seceded from the Union and its flag in 1861, precipitating the American civil war. Johns's parents divorced when he was two or three, his mother remarrying a man called Robert E Lee, like the Confederate general. He started drawing when he was three and "never stopped". In 1951, he was drafted, serving as a private from 1951 to 1953 in Japan during the Korean war. Johns had been in the army, at a time of war. He had that relationship with the flag.

His Flag is full of stories. Under its soft, waxy, rough-smooth surface are headlines and stories clipped out of newspapers, barely visible in reproduction. In the gallery, the stories are dimly read through ghostly suspensions of white between the red bars. Their spectral presence suggests that under the surface of the flag's simple iconic presence are complicated lives, happenings and secrets. The simple banner conceals untold possibilities. For us, looking at this Flag may be a reminder of what ought to be obvious: that nations, like individuals, cannot be summed up easily.

· Jasper Johns: Prints 1987-2001, is at the Gagosian Gallery, London W1, from Thursday. Details: 020-7292 8222.

Ruscha's Kodak moments

Ruscha's Kodak moments
For a man who claims not to be a photographer, painter Edward Ruscha has taken enough snapshots for a bountiful retrospective.
By Suzanne Muchnic, Times Staff Writer
March 30 2003
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-ca-muchnic30mar30.story

"I never aspired to be a photographer," says artist Edward Ruscha. "To this day, I'm still not a photographer."

Yet here he is, in a tony Southern California gallery -- Gagosian in Beverly Hills -- with a big show of his photographs, taken over the past 40 years.

A painter with a Pop sensibility who is often identified as L.A.'s quintessential artist, Ruscha has produced iconic paintings of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art going up in flames and a version of the Hollywood sign, with block letters marching into the sunset across a mountainous ridge. An ace at making cool combinations of images and text, he's also known for floating provocative phrases in ethereal space: "Those of Us Who Have Double Parked," "Three Darvons and Two Valiums" or "Listen, I'd Like to Help Out, But."

Ruscha has taken thousands of photographs while producing all this work. He has even immortalized some of the images in witty little books of swimming pools, palm trees, real estate opportunities and parking lots. But photography is mainly "an aid" or "a support medium" for his painting, he says. "I've never pursued photography with a capital P."

Admitting that he had "some apprehension at first" when the gallery approached him about presenting a show of his photographs, Ruscha says later he thought "maybe so" and finally decided "why not?" The works on view are "unlooked-at things in my life as an artist," he says. "It's like revisiting some abandoned highway."

Longtime fans will probably be delighted to revisit his books -- including "Twenty Six Gasoline Stations," "Various Small Fires," "Some Los Angeles Apartments" and "Every Building on the Sunset Strip," which have been in shows in the past. But most of the images are being exhibited for the first time. Even viewers who have followed his work will probably get a few surprises among the selection of vintage books and photographs, new prints of old images and recent work.

Take "Ross the Rooster," a crumpled black-and-white photograph of a chicken, taken in 1960. "It's like a photograph of a friend," Ruscha says. "There were five of us guys who rented a house in Hollywood and he just appeared in the backyard one day. I captured him and put him in a little screened-in summer house that we made into a studio. He took to it and lived there."

As for the creases and wrinkles, "I guess I was into manipulated pictures," Ruscha says. "I wanted the picture to be something other than just a photograph, so I folded it up and cracked it."

Three pictures on the same wall, also taken in 1960, depict a 1938 Plymouth coupe that belonged to painter Joe Goode, an Oklahoma City high school chum who moved to Los Angeles with Ruscha and was one of the guys in the Hollywood house. Two head-on images of the car's grille are paired in a diptych. Another is attached to a long stick and "planted" in a landscape.

"I was manipulating images rather than capturing reality," Ruscha says. "I took a picture and then took another one, and put one on a stick and put that in the yard. It's just a matter of taking one step and then another and another."

The image of the Plymouth never evolved into a painting, but it lodged in Ruscha's memory. "Joe bought the car out here and used it for a couple of years," he says. "I think he let the license expire and left it in front of my studio. Finally it just got towed away. Today it would be worth a fortune."

A movie memory

Born in Omaha in 1937 and bred in Oklahoma City, Ruscha came to Los Angeles in 1956 and enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute with dreams of becoming a commercial artist. He had no interest in photography in his youth, but John Ford's classic 1940 film "Grapes of Wrath" captured his imagination.

"The idea of black-and-white photography got to me with that movie," he says. "I guess it brought a lot of things together that encouraged me -- to maybe become an artist or do something, leave Oklahoma."

He bought his first camera in Los Angeles. "Rolleiflex was the camera of the day," he says. "That was too expensive. I think it was like $300 or $400. I bought a Yashika, a copy of the Rolleiflex, for $36 brand-new. I began to shoot pictures while I was in school, but not on a serious basis. I liked the idea that it could capture the here and now, an immediate reality that could then be appraised and put back into a painting."

Occasionally, an image in the show triggers thoughts of a specific painting. A photo of a can of Spam in his 1961 series of "Products" pictures, for example, recurs in "Actual Size," a 1962 painting. But Ruscha doesn't paint directly from photographs, and their relationship to his paintings can be very subtle.

"Even this little guy might influence me in doing something that doesn't look anything like a rooster," Ruscha says, giving a nod to Ross.

As for what motivates him to pick up his camera and shoot, "I think a lot of it has to do with what goes on in the world," he says.

A sign above a building at the corner of Sunset and Alvarado appealed to him because "it was old and seemed to have a power to it," he says. In the "Products" pictures -- which feature boxes of Sunmaid raisins and Oxydol detergent and a can of Sherwin Williams turpentine in relatively formal still-lifes -- he liked that the containers were "semi-stressed," he says. "They weren't all brand-new. They have slight little imperfections and dings and all that."

A series of gas station photographs was shot on cross-country trips, along Route 66. "I love the bleakness of these places," he says of the grim little outposts. "It's alive to me." Devoid of artifice, these pictures look like casual snapshots -- and that also suits Ruscha just fine.

"I've always liked the term snapshot because it denotes something that's not absolutely planned," he says. "In effect, it's almost like stealing the subject and you steal it quickly, like a thief. I haven't really pursued the idea of very carefully setting up a scene and photographing it. I point the camera and shoot. It's like thinking but not thinking at the same time, a way of just capturing something and moving on."

With the passage of time the photographs have become more than visual reports. "A lot of these works have unintended consequences," he says. "When I photographed these things, especially the gas stations and the apartment houses, I was after the immediacy, the now. None of these things possessed any kind of nostalgia. I had a little inkling that someday these pictures would begin to look antique-y or nostalgic. That was something I wished I could avoid, but couldn't because everything eventually begins to look old."

Still, Ruscha hasn't abandoned his camera or his fascination with the streets of L.A. The most recent works in the exhibition are "Bow Tie" landscapes, color prints that were shot this year in the desert near Palm Springs. Printed from a computer, each picture is a symmetrical image with a pair of pure white arrows or angular shapes forming a sort of bow tie superimposed on the foreground.

Ruscha calls these odd white shapes "dingbats" and says they are like captions, but what they say isn't clear. "I'm trying to add some new kind of language to the concept, that there's a second statement within a main statement," he says with an air of mystery, suggesting that he's still grappling with the idea.

Perhaps more surprising than that body of new work is that he continues to systemically photograph the Sunset Strip and other major thoroughfares, with the help of crew. Returning to sites he has photographed over the years, Ruscha says he feels like an archeologist charting the layers of an ancient site. One day, he hopes to publish a book that will track the evolution of the Sunset Strip.

Retrospective exhibitions can be unnerving for artists, Ruscha says. The photography survey feels "strange but good," and he hopes "it will lead somewhere." But it has led him to question the effect of artists he particularly admires.

"The photographers who have influenced me most, like Walker Evans or Robert Frank, have great, emotionally charged statements in their work, and mine don't," he says. "I'm not picking up on the power of their emotion, but I must be picking up on something else. Maybe it's just the black-and-white quality of the prints."

Yet even as he ponders this mystery, he has a quick answer for puzzled viewers who wander into the show expecting to see his trademark work. "If you compare this to an exhibit of my paintings, you might say, 'What's the deal? Where does this connect?' I feel that my painting and my photography are not as much two separate entities as they work toward one another. Or at least photography works toward painting and makes me understand it a little better," he says.

"I would love to get in painting some of the effects I get in photography, but the pursuit discourages me. Like maybe it can't be done, so go ahead and do it with a camera."

An Influential Family Arrives in D.C. With No Reservations

An Influential Family Arrives in D.C. With No Reservations
By Nicole M. Miller
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 10, 2003; Page C05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1557-2003Apr9.html

The renovation of a Southwest Washington hotel is unexpectedly affecting the local art community. That's because the owners are big-time collectors with an eye for contemporary art and a bank book to pay for it.

Don and Mera Rubell and their adult children Jason and Jennifer, who oversee the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, plan to show a sampling of the family's artworks at their Best Western Capitol Skyline property by year's end. Mera Rubell is already making the rounds of area museums on visits to oversee the renovation and just purchased a piece at the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran's recent auction.

"It's fun to engage with a whole new contemporary art scene," Rubell says. "There's much more activity than I realized."

The Rubell Family Collection is an extensive survey of art from the 1960s to the present -- with works by Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, among others -- located in a 32,000-square-foot warehouse once used by the Drug Enforcement Administration for seized goods. Only about 2 percent of a total 6,000 pieces can be on view at one time.

Mark Coetzee, the director of the collection, says portions of it will be exhibited in a small -- say, 1,600-square-foot -- space adjacent to the hotel. They will do three-month shows and hope to mount the first before the end of the year.

"We will bring work up from the permanent collection that hasn't been seen in D.C.," Coetzee says.

In addition to exhibiting work, Mera Rubell and Coetzee have discussed related programming in the "project space" with Annie Adjchavanich, the director of WPA\C, which would coordinate lectures, films and performances.

"The idea is that we want to develop some kind of debate -- contribute to the conversation locally," Coetzee says. That could mean getting artists who speak at the Miami collection to agree to travel here for a second lecture. Or perhaps local artists could get exposure in Miami.

That will be the case for Dan Steinhilber.

During an advance walk-through to see works in the WPA\C's annual auction a couple weeks ago, Rubell saw a centerpiece Steinhilber created for the pre-bidding dinner.

Steinhilber had taken 10 foam carryout containers -- the square kind that open like a clamshell -- and stacked them upside down. He rotated alternating ones 180 degrees. No glue or anything else.

Steinhilber says he had the dinner in mind when he made it.

"It sort of puts you in the present tense," he says. "There's the proposition that someone could use it."

Of course, no one was scooping leftovers into the containers at the dinner late last month. The sculpture was at gallery owner Cheryl Numark's table. Not coincidentally, she recently started representing Steinhilber, who wasn't with a gallery but has been showing regularly in the area.

"I haven't seen such an impressive body of work from someone his age in town," Numark says. The centerpiece was "a teaser for what his work is usually like."

Steinhilber, 30, is from Oshkosh, Wis., and graduated last year with an MFA from American University and teaches part time at George Mason University. Most of his pieces are much larger than the centerpiece, such as a seven-foot cube of clear plastic takeout containers filled with colored water.

"He tends to aggregate materials -- pull them together into something greater than the sum of its parts," Numark says.

Rubell agrees.

"It's not that it's a new invention in that category" of found-object art, she says. "It feels extremely individual nevertheless."

Can't anyone stack takeout containers?

Perhaps, but Steinhilber came up with the idea.

"The mind of the artist is as valid as his hand," Rubell says. "The most powerful thing in art for me is that it's a language that the artist talks."

The Rubells are known for buying pieces by artists who haven't made it -- yet. They also focus on developing a comprehensive body of each artist's work rather than snatching up art by as many artists as they can.

Numark expects to start showing Steinhilber's work this summer when she opens a larger, street-front space on the 600 block of E Street NW.

"It's salable," Numark says of conceptual pieces. "The art scene here is growing and becoming more contemporary-art-world savvy."

Rubell couldn't attend the WPA\C dinner and auction, so she told Adjchavanich to bid $300 for her. Bidding started at $100 for the centerpiece, but was at $500 just before closing. Adjchavanich called Rubell. She raised the bid to $550 and won.

Rubell doesn't know when the piece will go on view in Miami, but she says, "We try to always show the latest works that we buy."

"I was happy that it was purchased by the Rubell Collection," says Steinhilber. "It's not a major work of art at all, but it's exciting."

Particularly exciting if they buy more.

Chirac arrives at a crossroads

News analysis: Chirac arrives at a crossroads
President has to decide whether to try to limit U.S. power
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
By John Vinocur/IHT International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/94084.html

PARIS In a matter of days, President Jacques Chirac may be giving a good indication of how much he wants to make his four years left in office a crusade to limit American power, with himself in the role of leading global proselytizer.
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Chirac can throw down an important card at a meeting next Tuesday of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg (the only European countries willing to attend) that is meant to draw new outlines for an autonomous European military force.
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If the discussions, described by the host, Belgium, as a summit meeting produce a project for something that looks like a rival or competitor to NATO, then Chirac will have chosen a collision.

There are Frenchmen who say Chirac and French foreign policy are now engaged by convictions so deep that no other course besides selective confrontation with the United States is possible. Others insist that Chirac is restrained by reality, the obvious limits of French means and influence, and in Europe the unmistakable absence of desire of a majority of a 25-member European Union to follow France's lead.
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But an almost psychic issue is at hand. Beyond the foreseeable to-and-fro over a United Nations role in Iraq's reconstruction, Chirac has to decide on how he wants to sustain a vision of the United States as one of the world's primary problems - a notion hardly born in response to the actions of President George W. Bush, but specifically articulated through French policy since 1999, or the last four years of Chirac's presidency.
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Pressing the concept through opposition to the American-led strike against Saddam Hussein, Chirac gained a kind of substance and admiration - at least among many of the war's opponents - unknown to him in a career that has been more than occasionally composed of near-scandal and low-trajectory politics.
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At age 70, the issue for Chirac appears to be pressing on with an approach from which he takes enormous personal validation, while running the risk, alongside American power and potential for good, of possibly appearing a crank on a mission damaging to his country's place in the world.
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The alternative would not be an about-face, but finding a rhetorical slot that would allow him to carry on verbally, without the aspects of the frontal clash in NATO and the United Nations of the past six months that arguably has hurt France more among its European partners than the United States.
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The autonomous EU force under discussion in Brussels would be one, in theory at least, that could project military power in the manner of NATO or the Americans. Although there would be doubts about its masters' willingness to spend enough for the hardware, or to find the resolve to eventually pull the trigger, the force would give Chirac an army with a European name that on paper could raise EU security policy to something close to eye-level with the Americans.
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In getting there, the redlines not to be crossed have been clearly established by NATO and the United States. They do not want the duplication on a European level of NATO's planning staff or headquarters. There must be no EU version of NATO's military decision-making center, called SHAPE.
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According to a British official, a headquarters and planning staff was precisely what the Belgian foreign minister, Louis Michel, called for at an EU meeting last week as he set out what the official described as a possible smokescreen for the French. A phrase used to describe what NATO loyalists do not want emerging from the four-party meeting is "something with a name that doesn't suggest it's subordinate to the alliance."
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Yet, an administration official in Washington did not see a provocation, or the substance of a major new clash at hand in the Brussels meeting "unless Chirac wants it."
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Rather, the official, who suggested after Chirac's re-election a year ago that he would tread more of a Gaullist line in foreign policy in years ahead, and never regarded France's participation in a strike against Saddam as likely, said he thought of Chirac currently being in a phase of "rhetorical adjustment."
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That means trying to improve bilateral relations with the United States while refitting his approach to asserting a battered French leadership role in Europe.
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The official gave as an example Chirac's "businesslike" telephone conversation with Bush last week, while pointing out that at the same time Chirac was reiterating at the EU's Athens summit meeting, albeit "with a lighter touch," his earlier warning to new members from Eastern Europe that in the future they must behave as Europeans.
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From an American point of view, Chirac's subtext was that France held the right to define for the EU, as opposed to new members with strong Euro-Atlantic inclinations, its foreign policy and security attitudes. In this light, the official said he could not conceive of a change in a French foreign policy that is in essence anti-American.
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The background is decades of French opposition to U.S. policy, but with a specific reference point in 1999.
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Early that year, Chirac called for the UN General Assembly's adoption of a set of principles for an international order "excluding unilateral temptations." The list was never presented for a vote, but Chirac's foreign minister at that time, Hubert Vedrine - French governance places supreme authority for foreign and defense policy in the hands of the president - defined the United States at that point as a primary international problem, tending to "inadmissible" hegemony and unilateralism.
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If anything for the French, this description has since been amplified through the war in Iraq.
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While Bill Clinton still occupied the White House, a French political figure like Bernard Kouchner, who served as UN administrator of postwar Kosovo, described anti-Americanism as the motor of French foreign policy. Kouchner, whose approval rating leaped to 66 percent last week after months of criticizing the French position on Iraq, said more recently that while French opposition to the Americans was often justified, "our manner of being opposed, making it a basis for everything, without any thought, is just stupid."
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Guy Sorman, another Frenchman, one with good relations with Chirac, also calls anti-Americanism the single constant of French foreign policy, and now insists there has been an intensification of what he calls Chirac's anti-Americanism.
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Sorman, an essayist, described Chirac in November 2001, after participating with him and a small group of French intellectuals in a discussion at the Elysee Palace, as "the most anti-American of all of us." Sorman spoke publicly then, after Chirac visited the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, of a president who regarded the American leadership as devoid of historical sense, lacking in patience, nuance and profundity - attributes Chirac presumably considers as his own.
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In March, Sorman was invited to accompany Chirac on an official visit to Algeria, which was portrayed here as a triumphal demonstration of Chirac's links to the Arab world, although the crowds that mobbed the president were essentially clamoring for visas that would let them leave their dictatorship for France.
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Now, Sorman says: "Chirac is persuaded he's right on America. I persist and confirm what I said about his anti-Americanism. A year and a half later, I realized I was more right than I had imagined at first.
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"Pay no attention to what he might say about his affection for the United States from his student days. This is not the question. His view is something deep, deep within him. For Chirac, the Americans understand nothing."
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Indeed, none of this negative vision appears marked by the personal or the petty. It is hard politics, made more complex by Chirac's unfailing affability, a 30-year reputation for changeableness and, now, his experience at being taken for the first time at home and abroad as a man with a view of the world.
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Undoubtedly, the Iraq episode has both enhanced Chirac's reputation for maneuvering and leveraging France's role, and has made puzzling him out an increasingly important job for France's allies. Parallel to this it also raises questions, perhaps for Chirac as well, about France's needs in a time of growing economic misery to refocus its energies from the single low-yield effort of tripping up the Americans.
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In projecting an answer, the Americans may actually have a more incisive and intimate view of Chirac than is usually known.
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Every three weeks for the period from 1989 to 1995, according to a book about Chirac by Raphaelle Bacque, the Elysee Palace correspondent of Le Monde, Chirac flew to New York for sessions with a media coach helping him in developing a television style. The coach and the politician, Bacque said, went over Chirac's approach to forthcoming speeches, media events and trips.
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The coach was Roger Ailes, a former adviser to George H.W. Bush, the father of the president. Ailes is now chairman of Fox News, the broadcaster characterized here over the last months as the Bush administration's most important media ally, and the great villain in creating an American caricature of Chirac as a man of treachery and ingratitude.
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The International Herald Tribune telephoned Ailes in New York, saying it hoped to ask him about his impressions of Chirac, whether they fit his network's portrayal of the French president, and the two men's financial arrangement as tutor and student. No return call has been received.

Seeking solace in Taiwan's tea

Seeking solace in Taiwan's tea
Friday, April 18, 2003
By Kaori Shoji, IHT
http://www.iht.com/articles/93604.html

TAIPEI The Japanese had long prided themselves on their knowledge of tea. So much, in fact, that one of the first books written in English by a Japanese (in the late 19th century) was "The Book of Tea," chronicling the nation's particular and (supposedly) superior tea culture for the benefit of the barbaric Western reader.
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Tea was a Japanese thing and even now, the subject is tinged with nationalism. So why are scores of Japanese suddenly going to Taiwan on what the travel agencies are calling "tea tours"?

More than 200,000 Japanese traveled to Taiwan in the past year, many of them to sample the Taiwanese teas that have become so fashionable. Naoko Serizawa of H.I.S. Travel said that tea tours were surprisingly immune to the travel slump after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the U.S.-led war in Iraq and even SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome. "It's because people want solace more than anything else," she said. "Tea is a source of solace that we can all identify with."
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Taipei has always been popular, mainly because the city is so much more Japan-friendly than Hong Kong or mainland China. Memories of the Japanese occupation of World War II are not as bad as those in other parts of Asia, and many of the older generation retain remnants of their Japanese language skills. Hotels greet Japanese tourists with what seems like genuine friendliness.
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Taipei's teas are more varied than those in Hong Kong, with a range of herbal brews said to cure everything from liver trouble to acne. The bulk of Japanese tourists combing the tea shops are young women who spend an average of $85 on tea packets to take home. Many of them come armed with an intimate knowledge of Chinese tea.
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Taipei shopowners laugh and say they can't fool a Japanese woman - though they have no qualms about selling her leaves for three times as much as to a local.
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The brew of the moment? A blend of Jasmine and green tea, said to work wonders on the skin and ensure natural weight loss, sells for about $10 for a 250-gram packet.
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A visitor from Tokyo, Nobuko Kawakami, said that the accessibility of Chinese teas got her hooked.
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"Japanese tea is so ritualistic, so fussy," Kawakami said. "Here in Taipei, you can pop into any tea shop and just ask to taste the different brews, free of charge. You can sit down, chat with the owner, drink cup after cup and choose the best leaves to buy. It's all very easygoing. Unlike Japanese tea, you don't have to be on your best behavior."
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Sitting at a large glass-topped table at the Ten Shang Tea Shop, Kawakami demonstrated her point by plunging back into animated conversation with her two friends, giggling loudly and downing her tea in one appreciative swallow. She also likes Taiwanese tea accessories, which she said were "like cute toys" - tiny cups and a pot arranged on a wooden tray with slats.
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The hot water is poured into the pot, and then all over, until steam rises from the entire tray. This way, the pot, the cups and the tray are always kept warm and moist, allowing the fragrance of the brew to linger.
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There is nothing difficult about this process and no decreed methodology. "The only rule here is to enjoy," said the owner, Pi-Yuan Hsieh, who presides over her steaming tea table all day and greets her young Japanese customers with the generous kindness of a favored aunt.
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Kawakami's take on tea is typical of many young Japanese women. For them, the domestic version is too lofty and ceremonial, a process that demands silence, self-discipline and almost religious devotion.
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The history is also a bit oppressive: Five centuries ago, the tea house was where warlords held conferences to subtly showcase their power and wealth. It was also the place where conspiracies were hatched, clandestine agreements were reached or broken, assassinations were plotted and carried out. In early 1600, a tea master dared to defy a warlord and was ordered to commit suicide, right in the tea house.
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The women also don't like the fact that the tea houses themselves were designed to build tension and physical discomfort. A space that measures only about five square meters (60 square feet), with tiny openings that force the guests to bow their heads and crawl in, the objective is to remind everyone of their humble role in the grand scheme of existence.
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Once inside, knees must be folded and feet tucked underneath, backs must be straight and eyes cast downward at a discreet angle. To a novice participant, 15 minutes in this position will bring on aches and muscle pain. A half hour will begin to feel like torture.
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Kawakami said she appreciated that Japanese tea was supposed to foster endurance and enhance the spirit. "But it's only tea," she said. "I mean, why can't we learn to enjoy it more? Chinese tea, on the other hand, is all about healing and relaxation."
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Indeed, the Chinese do seem to have better rapport with their tea cups, compared with young Japanese who have divorced themselves from proper tea tradition because they're too busy to be bothered. In Taipei, kettles sing everywhere, on the streets, on doorsteps, shopfronts and alleyways.
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People take time off to sip a cup as often as 10 times a day - tea-drinking is an ingrained part of daily life. "We all envy that," Kawakami said. "I wish we had the same casual custom."
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Alert to the trend, more Tokyo cafés now have Chinese tea on the menu, and the beverage manufacturer Suntory was the first to import leaves and sell tea concoctions in vending machines throughout Japan.
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As Kawakami said, however, "It's sad to say, but it just doesn't taste the same."
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Kaori Shoji is a free-lance journalist based in Tokyo.

Recording Industry Goes After Students Over Music Sharing

Recording Industry Goes After Students Over Music Sharing
By AMY HARMON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/national/23STUD.html

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Jason, a senior at the University of Maryland, ran one of the most popular Web sites on campus out of his shoebox dorm room here. The site let his 8,500 fellow dorm residents search for music files, among other things, stored on one another's computers and copy them in seconds.

Then came the news that the record industry had filed lawsuits against four students running similar sites at other universities, accusing them of enabling large-scale copyright infringement and asking for billions of dollars in damages. Within an hour, Jason, who insisted on anonymity for fear of being sued himself, had dismantled his site.

"I don't think I was doing anything wrong," said Jason, a computer science major. "But who wants to face a $98 billion debt for the rest of their lives? I was scared."

The lawsuits, filed on April 3, are the most aggressive legal action the record industry has ever directed against college students, who in recent years have exercised an enduring predisposition to consume large quantities of music by copying it over the Internet without ever paying for it. College campuses, the record industry says, have become far and away the prime locus for online piracy.

Wary of alienating young customers who continue to generate a large chunk of their revenue, record companies until recently focused on prodding university administrators to discipline their students. But freshman orientation sessions on respect for intellectual property have had little effect. With CD sales in a tailspin that record executives attribute at least partly to the downloading frenzy in academia's hallowed halls, they said they needed to try another approach.

Record executives say the lawsuits — singling out four students at three colleges — mark a turning point in the battle they have been waging since Napster popularized Internet music trading three years ago. (A federal judge in 2001 ruled that Napster had abetted copyright infringement, and it has been off line since.) The unauthorized copying of digital music that has become as routine a part of college life as cramming and keg parties may have finally lost some of its charm.

"We have decided to bring to the attention of universities just how much music piracy is going on on college campuses and universities," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which brought the suits, "and we think that message has been received."

College students are not the only ones copying music off the Internet. But students, who often justify their behavior by arguing that CD's are too expensive and that artists do not get the money anyway, may be more hostile toward the music industry than most. Many say record labels should accept that the Internet has irrevocably changed their business and instead offer new services, like chat sessions with artists or early ticket sales for concerts, which they would be willing to pay for. Others say they buy as many or more CD's as they ever did because they are able to sample music free and discover artists they like.

"This is just more crazy litigation that shows everyone over 40 not understanding the future of music," said Thomas Geoghegan, 21, a history major at Maryland and a frequent user of Jason's site before it was so abruptly removed.

College administrators say they are mindful of their responsibility to teach students that what they are doing is wrong. They are also aware of the expense they are incurring as the constant flow of large media files strains campus networks.

At the same time, they want to protect students' privacy and rights to free speech and stay out of the role of monitoring what is sent over their networks. As a result, most colleges have simply sent warnings to students whom industry groups have reported as downloading copyrighted material. Some have required students to write papers on copyright law or have temporarily deprived them of Internet access. But such measures have had little impact

"It's been very difficult because students have grown up viewing the Internet as a place where you go to get lots of free access to things," said Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University. "As we have tried to educate our students, half of them understand it's like going into a store and putting a CD in your pocket and the other half just can't see it that way."

The threat of legal retribution may be improving their vision. Since the record industry filed its lawsuits, officials say they have seen over a dozen internal campus Web sites devoted to music-sharing go dark.

The complaints charge Daniel Peng, a student at Princeton University; Joseph Nievelt, a student at Michigan Technological University; and Aaron Sherman and Jesse Jordan, both students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with directly infringing copyrights by providing dozens of songs from popular artists to other students to copy.

They also charge the students with contributing to much broader infringement by running programs that indexed tens of thousands of songs stored on other computers connected to the campus network by students who chose to make them available to copy. Accusing the four of having "taken a network created for higher learning and academic pursuits and converted it into an emporium of music piracy," the lawsuits ask for $150,000 for each of the recordings listed on the students' Web sites, but recording industry officials acknowledge that having made their point, they expect to settle out of court.

The proliferation of campus file-trading networks appears to have started two years ago, when many universities capped the amount of bandwidth allotted to each student.

In response, students began using programs that would let them share files over the superfast networks that connect computers on campus, without relying on the Internet.

Because those files may be notes from Psych 101, family pictures or music by bands that choose to distribute it freely, some academic community members argue that the students running the programs should not be held accountable for how others may have used them. By singling out the technology, they say, the record industry has also raised First Amendment issues in what otherwise could have been a straightforward copyright infringement case.

"If this becomes more about a challenge to the technology than about downloading music for recreational purposes, that is a serious concern for us," said Peter McDonough, general counsel for Princeton. "Because we emphatically believe the technologies themselves are not illegal."

That is also the conclusion of Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, 19, a freshman at Wesleyan University who has continued to run his own site, which indexes the shared files of every computer on the Wesleyan network.

Mr. Dolan-Gavitt took his site down the day after the suits were filed but put it back up the next day after poring over copyright statutes. He said that if a copyright holder notified him of an infringing file in his index, he would remove it, just as the law says. His mother is nervous, but "I just figured if there was something I was going to take a stand on it might as well be this," he said.

Even before the lawsuits, university administrators felt the heat of the music industry's stepped-up anti-piracy campaign. In recent months, entertainment companies have barraged administrators with complaints documenting alleged copyright infringement over their networks. Several colleges, in turn, issued more stringent policies regarding student behavior.

Harvard University warned undergraduates this month that they would lose their Internet access for a year if they illegally shared copyrighted material more than once. The United States Naval Academy punished 85 students who were found to have downloaded copyrighted movies and songs through the academy's Internet connection. Penn State warned students that file-sharing could lead to huge fines and jail time, and deprived 220 students of high-speed Internet connections in their dorms after finding that they were sharing copyrighted material. A committee of university presidents and entertainment industry executives are in the process of formulating strategies to address the illegal activity on campus. One idea under consideration: negotiating campuswide licenses for legal online music services, which colleges could provide as part of a standard student activities fee along with recreation facilities and newspaper subscriptions.

Colleges have a financial interest in working with the entertainment industry to solve the downloading problem: the free bandwidth they provide to students is getting more and more expensive, and they must constantly investigate all of the entertainment industry's complaints to avoid being held liable for the infringement themselves.

The peremptory lawsuits have also angered some college administrators.

"They have apparently changed their minds about wanting to work cooperatively with universities," said Curtis Tompkins, president of Michigan Tech, who vented his frustration in an open letter to the recording industry association. "To pick four individuals out of thousands and line them up against the wall and say, `Here's the firing squad,' is not the way you deal in higher education."

Just how successful the industry's tougher tactics will be is unclear. On a recent afternoon at Maryland, a student who once used Jason's site showed a reporter how to log on to another local network instead.

"We can't live without it," said Eric Lightman, a junior majoring in computer science. "If one goes down, another comes up."

On the other hand, an advertisement for a new administrator for Jason's site willing to "take on whatever legal risks may come about" has so far received no replies.

New York Has a Number to Call: 311

New York Has a Number to Call: 311
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/nyregion/23PHON.html

The telephone operators at the city's 311 center had the alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules down pat. They knew what to do with a complaint about a broken traffic light. Marriage license issue? Loud car alarm? Recycling laws? Check! Check! Check!

But then, there was the chicken. A woman in the Bronx had one living in her hallway, and she was none too happy about it. It seems she and her landlord had divergent views on all matters of rent and heat, a dispute that manifested itself in the landlord placing a rather menacing bit of fowl at her front door.

The operator typed into the computer: "Chicken on stoop." The results were quickly forthcoming. What the lady had was an agricultural problem, and she was referred to the Department of Health.

Of the array of changes undertaken by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg since he took office 15 months ago, few are as ambitious as his insistence on overhauling the way city residents receive information from their government.

Appalled to learn during the campaign that there was no central clearing house where residents could call with their questions — there were over 40 call centers and help lines in the city connected to dozens of different agencies — Mr. Bloomberg decided after he was elected that he would set up a single line people could call to get answers to all questions pertaining to government, and to lodge their complaints. Similar systems exist in cities like Chicago, Baltimore and Dallas.

Today, as many as 32,023 callers a day find their way to 311, which quietly went live in March. (The average daily volume is 8,385 calls.) New Yorkers get there either by dialing directly or because they have been redirected through another city hot line that will soon be obsolete.

"This is a top priority of the mayor," said Vincent A. LaPadula, the mayor's senior advisor, who oversees 311 for City Hall. "This is our massive reinventing-government project. I really believe 10 years from now the mayor will look back and say, `We changed peoples' lives.' "

Mr. Bloomberg turned the task of creating 311 to Gino P. Menchini, the city's information technology commissioner, who has put together a complex system of telephone and computer technology aided in huge part by plain human patience, which is tried daily among 201 agents who take calls 24 hours, seven days a week, in 170 languages. (Another 100 agents will be added over the next three months.) The claim is that all calls get answered within five seconds.

The call center is not without its controversies. While other city agencies watched their budgets take anywhere from 2 percent to 15 percent hits this year, the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which operates 311, had $7.7 million added to its budget, and is slated for a fairly gentle cut in the mayor's proposed budget for next year, when cuts are going to be very deep citywide. City Council members have complained frequently and bitterly about the $25 million start-up costs for 311.

But Mr. Bloomberg is undaunted. Just yesterday, when confronted with a newspaper article detailing the city's many potholes, Mr. Bloomberg shot back. "If you see a pothole, what do you do? 311. It's very easy. That's the whole idea of it. Call 311. They'll give you a number so that you can call back the next day and see when the pothole is going to get fixed. It works and I'm tired of people complaining about it."

Mr. Menchini shares Mr. Bloomberg's passion for technology and service — the cornerstones of Mr. Bloomberg's information company — and can get a bit excited when going over the fine points of the "geo-codes" (a program that takes a caller's address and spits back her community board, precinct and zip code) and good old fashioned phone manners.

"Figuring out what the problem is is a skill," Mr. Menchini said. "So if I am understanding that your problem is with a chicken, then I must be respectful of that and help you. We're committed to a lot of stringent training."

He is trying to transform the act of answering calls from a mundane day job into a career path. There is room to become a supervisor and more, as an operator picks up intense knowledge about various areas of government.

At the 45,000-square-foot center on Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan, operators buzz quietly over various levels of calls. The first type is simple. Someone wants a phone number of a government agency — they are given it or transferred. Other callers ask for information that is easily available with a quick click of the operator's mouse — zoo hours, for instance — and they are given the answers, or the operator will fill out a complaint about, say, a pothole. Then there are more complex questions, that go either to a specialist who used to work at one of the agency call centers now located in 311, or are transferred to the appropriate agency. Those range from the fairly simple — how to get a birth certificate — to complex tax questions that take 45 minutes to answer.

Another common set of calls relate to so-called quality of life issues, which make up a large volume of 311 calls. Noise is the most common, but the hot line also receives plenty of calls from steamed people whose driveways are blocked by churchgoers or bar patrons who never made it home on a Sunday morning. Those and other police matters are sent by computer to the appropriate precinct in a matter of minutes, and callers are given a tracking number to follow through, just as they are on every unresolved call.

"The mayor is very involved on the precinct level," Mr. LaPadula said. "He wants the precinct commander to have real time information on quality of life complaints." As a result, the city is able to use 311 as a new management tool.

The Police Department is learning a lot more about what types of non-emergency police complaints are cropping up where, and plans to address these issues in a fashion similar to Compstat, which measures crime in various neighborhoods. "We can get a much better understanding of what is going on out there," Mr. Menchini said. "You can see how the precincts are stacking up."

Not that it is easy. People can be rude, unspecific, ill informed and often do not have a pen within reach. Operators are often retrained on the fine skills of patience. There is a quiet room in the building, where there are no phones but there are comfy chairs, where operators can regroup.

Indeed the rest of the 311 call center can most politely be described as modest. There is new carpeting, bright lighting and new furniture. Operators do not have their own desks; they keep their belongings in a locker and move day to day. There is a small area with vending machines and tables. The desks are smallish. The elevators are perhaps the slowest operating in Lower Manhattan. And the operators have yet to face the increased traffic that will come as word of 311 spreads and replaces the city's myriad other hot lines. The big question then will be how fast the city can take care of all the problems it learns about.

But it is here, Mr. Menchini insists, that a revolution in government is really happening. "This is a microcosm of the city's world," he said excitedly, tapping at a computer screen. "Where is it noisy? Where is it cold? Where are there too many cars?"

Chinatown Bank Endures Run as Fear Trumps Reassurances

Chinatown Bank Endures Run as Fear Trumps Reassurances
By JAMES BARRON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/nyregion/23BANK.html

It looked like a colorized newsreel from the Depression: panicky depositors lining up outside a bank, convinced it was about to fail, demanding dollars they had entrusted to savings accounts and keepsakes they had put in safe deposit boxes. They seemed to expect the tellers to say the cash drawers were empty, the vault bare.

Added to that was a 21st-century fear. In this crowd, some customers were apparently so concerned about the possibility of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, that they arrived wearing surgical masks. Others pulled their shirts, soggy from standing in a crowd on a warm afternoon, over their faces.

Officials of the bank — the Abacus Federal Savings Bank — said the depositors' financial fears were unfounded. The officials said that Abacus, whose name in Chinese includes two characters that translate as "national treasure," was not in trouble, it was just that they had fired the manager of one of the bank's six branches after concluding that she had embezzled more than $1 million.

But depositors who read an article in a Chinese newspaper or heard reports on a Chinese-language radio station yesterday converged on three branches — two in Chinatown, including the one at Canal and Mott Streets that had been run by the fired manager, Carol Lim, and one in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

"My mother was going to work and saw everyone at the bank and she went in to take out all our money," a 13-year-old boy who gave his name only as Victor explained as he waited outside the Sunset Park branch. Citing safety concerns and the size of the crowd, the police ordered bank officials to stop letting people in several hours before closing time.

The tellers inside kept working. And after Victor's mother finally reached the head of the line at the teller's window and made her withdrawal, he said: "She's happy. She got the money."

The bank's founder, Thomas Sung, said that cash would be diverted from the bank's other branches to cover withdrawals. And a federal banking regulator said the dismissal of the manager was no cause for a run.

"Should these people be concerned? No," said the official, Richard Riccobono, the deputy director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, the independent bureau of Treasury Department responsible for monitoring federally chartered savings banks.

For one thing, he said, Abacus is federally insured, so every depositor would be insured up to $100,000 were the bank to fail.

For another, he said his agency had recently concluded its annual examination of Abacus and found the bank to be financially sound. Abacus had assets of $282.7 million on Dec. 31, up from $245.2 million at the end of 2001. The bank added 13 employees last year, bringing its staff to 158 at the six branches.

But while depositors worried about getting their hands on their cash, Mr. Riccobono said he was more concerned that other people — robbers — would get their hands on it once the depositors left the bank. "You're an easy mark," he said. "No doubt you're being watched. You walk out with a bag" containing a large amount of cash, "I bet you're not going to get very far."

Yesterday, though, the crowds of suspicious depositors had one goal: withdraw the money. Mr. Riccobono said that the bank had given some depositors cash and others a combination of cash and checks to cover what they had had on deposit.

"We saw the people here so we came, too," said a customer at the branch at Canal and Mott Streets who would give his name only as Mr. Liang. He said he had lots of money in the bank.

Another person in the line at that branch, Lee Li, said she had also heard about the firing of the manager and was concerned about whether her savings account was safe. "If I can, I will take it all out," she said. "A lot of people will take their money and not come back to this bank."

Mr. Sung, who was in Baltimore yesterday, said by cellphone that he was driving to Manhattan to help his employees. "We will restore every account," he said. "We will not close the bank. We will order more cash, as much as we need."

He said the bank had placed Ms. Lim, the manager, on a leave of absence in March and had dismissed her on April 13. He said the bank had turned over its records on her activities to the F.B.I. and the United States attorney's office.

Ms. Lim, who lives in Brooklyn, had not been arrested or charged as of last night, but the F.B.I. was investigating. Efforts to reach her by telephone were unsuccessful.

On Mr. Sung's orders, fliers in Chinese and English were distributed to the crowd explaining about Ms. Lim and trying to reassure customers that all accounts were insured.

But the fliers seemed to create more confusion by explaining that one of the things the bank found she had done was to set up fake certificates of deposit and savings accounts. Mr. Sung said that she had also taken deposits without recording them.

What began as a handful of concerned customers in midmorning had turned into a frenzy by lunchtime.

Inside Ms. Lim's old branch at about 1 p.m., things were hectic. Deposit slips littered the floor, phones rang unanswered and the 100 or so customers who had made it inside were lined up at the teller's windows, waiting to withdraw their money.

Getting outside proved a challenge.

From 1 p.m. until the bank closed at 4 p.m. — 30 minutes later than scheduled — police officers guarded the doors and opened them only reluctantly.

It was obvious why; whenever the doors opened, the crowd would surge forward. The half-dozen officers at each doorway, vastly outnumbered, would move them back. Several elderly people fainted.

"I almost passed out," said John Lin, who left the bank when it closed at 4 p.m. "People are scared here."

Bad girls and good girls

Bad girls and good girls
People's Republic of Desire
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
by Annie Wang, SCMP
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/anniewang/ZZZERR45PED.html

AFTER LULU LEAVES the magazine, the realisation that she has no job, husband or home of her own, hits her hard. All she has is her Chinese-made SUV. Actually, she also has great looks, a wonderful figure and a fine mind, but for the moment, she can't acknowledge that.

She drives out to an area near the Great Wall. She climbs a hill, and looking out on the grand vista of the Great Wall, sits pondering. She thinks about Jenny, the woman nobody likes in her office because she is lazy and arrogant. But by seducing the magazine's owner and becoming his mistress, Jenny got the editor-in-chief position, when everyone else assumed Lulu had it in the bag.

Jenny hasn't even tried hiding her affair from her husband or her colleagues. She wants people to know she has the boss wrapped around her little finger.

There are so many Jennys around. Colourful Cloud, who was Niuniu's acquaintance in Missouri, used her teacher to get her out of a poor Guangxi village. By sleeping with her college room-mate's father, she was able to come to Beijing. She chased after an old American man in Beijing who later married her, and off they went to the United States.

Once she had some roots in the US, it wasn't long before she dumped the old man and married his young and virile grandson.

Little Fang, the vixen who stole CC's English boyfriend Nick, is the next character who springs to Lulu's mind. With the help of Nick, she got into Oxford where she met Sir William, who was referred to by the locals as ''Old-Money and Plenty Of It''. Nick was immediately dumped, and Little Fang made Sir William divorce his wife and abandon his kids to marry her.

Little Fang's wedding was held in both an English castle and a five-star Shanghai hotel. All the guests' travel expenses were paid for by Sir William, and everyone is still unsure what kind of tricks Little Fang employed to make that happen.

None of these women take principles or morals seriously. They use men as shortcuts to better lives. And they get away with it.

Where is my shortcut? Lulu wonders. From childhood, she studied hard. After graduating from a top university in China, she chose to work for a women's magazine when she was offered work at a foreign company. She simply wanted to be a journalist.

Everybody in the office thought she was a great writer, a first-class interviewer and a dedicated editor. But it was Jenny, not her, who got the promotion.

Her pay was low and she worked hard to save money. She bought a car, but still couldn't make her family proud of her. Her mother and brother were disappointed the car was Chinese-made, not an import. Before her father died, his only dream was to see his daughter a blissful bride. But it hasn't happened.

Talking about men, Lulu feels heart-broken. Her parents' genes ''agreed'' and made Lulu a beauty. When she went out to interview models, she showed them up with her good looks. In fashion magazine circles, her nickname was the Sex Goddess. But her good looks haven't attracted Mr Right yet.

As her girlfriends have pointed out, she doesn't know how to play games with men. If she likes someone, she'll confess it to the man and devote herself to him. It is not that she doesn't know the play-hard-to-get-game, but she always wants to stay above it.

In return, what has she got? One man she fell in love with claimed to be a free spirit, who didn't believe in marriage. Another man she adored wasn't afraid of matrimony: he secretly married another woman without even a goodbye.

Yes, there have been rich men who have approached her. Again, she doesn't believe in marrying money and wants to stay above it.

She thinks she is noble, but she's ended up a noble failure. Standing on the hills of the Great Wall, she feels she has done nothing but sell herself short.

She cries out, ''What's wrong with men? What's wrong with society?'' Bad girls get rewarded for being manipulative, while good girls have to suffer for staying good. Should I change? she wonders. What about the principles my father taught me?

Confused, she calls her friend Beibei for help. After hearing her story, Beibei laughs, ''Who really cares about principles anyway? Instead of acting with principles, let me hook you up with the principal stockholder of the competitor's magazine!''

Le show must go on

Le show must go on
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
By Desiree Au {desiree.au@scmp.com}
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/arts/ZZZ9GO45PED.html

THEY SAY TIMING is everything. For the past decade, Le French May, the annual festival of all things Gallic, has occupied a prime slot on the cultural calendar. May is a month blessed with beautiful weather and audiences hungry after a two-month hiatus from the Hong Kong Arts Festival.

This year, however, festival organisers not only found themselves amid an economy dampened by the war in the Middle East, but something much closer and apparently more deadly - the atypical pneumonia virus. While Sars may have wiped out all major cultural performances for the entire month of April, Serge Mostura, the Consul-General of France, has decided to go full steam ahead with Le French May - because art is what Hong Kong people need to take their minds off the negativity.

''It has been a difficult process, we had many meetings ourselves and with the sponsors in deciding whether we should go ahead, things have been very complicated due to the virus situation,'' Mostura says.

Several options were debated: Le French May could be postponed, or even cancelled. ''We ruled out the option of postponing because it would be impractical, a huge scheduling concern for the artists, and there is also a problem with the availability of venues,'' he says. ''We don't want to cancel because Le French May has become something very unique for Hong Kong, and we have a continued relationship with our partners and sponsors.''

That said, festival programming this year has been ''streamlined''. Several shows have been cancelled, leaving less than 20 programmes. So far, Sars has driven away magnificent mime master Marcel Marceau, the Lorraine Ballet and the annual festival gala dinner.

''Marceau is over 80 years old and therefore it is a health concern,'' Mostura says. ''We also couldn't negotiate proper insurance coverage for the Lorraine Ballet, because there are 40 members and if one gets sick, the entire troupe will be affected.''

On the other hand, those artists who are coming are entirely aware of the current health situation. ''We are very clear with them about the facts, many of them are individual performers and they know it is a limited risk.''

The catchphrase of Le French May this year is ''Speak, See, Hear'', and all senses will still be stimulated with a varied line-up. Besides a much anticipated two-month exhibition on Napoleon Bonaparte I at the Hong Kong Museum of History, the highly popular French Cinema festival will go into full swing with a theme many Hong Kongers fancy.

Titled ''When Cinema Meets Fashion'', the stylish visual feast will examine the inseparable and complementary relationship between the two entities - featuring memorable classics such as Marcel Carne's Port Of Shadows, Jean Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast, Jacques Demy's The Young Girls Of Rochefort and a recent Luc Besson effort, The Fifth Element, with costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier.

''This is a film festival not only for film enthusiasts; it will draw members from all sectors,'' says Consul (culture) Michele Guyot.

Dance is another highly anticipated aspect of Le French May and although the Lorraine Ballet has been cancelled, a unique genre, Baroque ballet, will be introduced by dance troupe The Company of the Fan. The piece, The Masked Ballet, is inspired by the court of Louis XIV - the Sun King, who made ballet de rigueur with performances taking place all over his palace.

In music, the diversified elements range from the great jazz pianist Bojan Zulfikarpasic, known as Bojan Z, and violinist Tedi Papavrami - appearing with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta - to the hip DJ Claude Monnet (''not to be confused with the French Impressionist Claude Monet,'' jokes Mos-tura) spinning at Club Ing in a session called House Party.

In theatre, it's the unlikely combination of cabaret and science with Professor Daniel Raichvarg's Cabaret Pasteur. Although he spends his days as a scientist at the University of Burgundy, Raichvarg's alter ego is the great Louis Pasteur - his funny rendition of Pasteur's path in the development of a vaccine and the invention of pasteurisation strikes a chord with Hong Kong microbiologists wrestling with the atypical pneumonia virus.

Local collaborators with the festival include theatre troupe 20 Beans + A Box, which will present a mixed-media performance called Transformation Double, while Alisan Fine Arts will present the paintings of Chinese-born, Paris-based painter Hoo Mojong, who creates strikingly rustic still life and portraits.

With Sars gripping Hong Kong, Mostura admits he is concerned about box-office receipts. ''We don't make money from Le French May, but we will have to make sure we don't go into a deficit,'' Mostura says. ''We are not expecting large audiences, it's so difficult to say what will happen, but we are working very hard to make sure the budget stays positive.''

Mostura, however, feels certain that the festival, and Hong Kong, will ride out the Sars crisis: ''I am not discouraged at all, we are taking care of all the necessary things. But we believe Hong Kong people could use some fresh air during this time. We try to be positive about things.''

Le French May will be held from April 30 to May 31. Tickets for performances are available through Urbtix 2734 9009, or HK Ticketing 3128 8288.

For information and the latest show updates visit www.frenchmay.com

Patrick Cox at Jourdan: The shoe fits

Patrick Cox at Jourdan: The shoe fits
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/93226.html

LONDON They were the favorite shoes of Lady Diana Spencer when she became Princess of Wales in 1981. Brigitte Bardot so famously loved Charles Jourdan footwear that a line snaked round the Place de la Madeleine when the first Paris store opened in 1957, in the hope that she would be there. And now Patrick Cox, the Canadian-born shoemaker, has been tapped as designer of France's iconic cobbler.

"It's quite daunting," says Cox. "When I looked at the archive I thought, Oh my god, this is the entire history of footwear in one room." He says he is thrilled to join his shoemaking heroes, Andre Perugia and Roger Vivier, who both worked with Jourdan in the past.
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The company shone in the 1960s - literally, since patent leather and Perspex gleamed from footwear that reflected the modernist spirit of the times.
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"Very chic, architectural, geometric, bold and colorful," says Cox to describe the essence of a style that he first appreciated when he started collecting vintage footwear at the flea markets.
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"Jourdan stood out - 20 percent of my own collection is Jourdan. It was about the line of the heel and the toe shape," says Cox, 40, who founded his own label in London in 1986. He will keep his high-end and accessible Wannabe shoe collections as well as his clothing, accessories and fragrance, while commuting to France, where Charles Jourdan seeded the company, in Romans, near Grenoble, in 1919.
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Cox describes his new employer as France's premier footwear company; it produces half a million shoes a year, even if that number was 650,000 in 1963, after Jourdan's three sons, Rene, Charles and Roland, joined the company. A contract with Christian Dior was signed in 1959, making Jourdan the manufacturer for the most exclusive and illustrious couture shoes in that era.
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Roland Jourdan was the creative spirit, and it is his crisp, clean, clear style that is most associated with the house. He became president in 1971, when the American footwear giant Genesco Inc., which had taken Jourdan to the United States, became the major stockholder.
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Roland Jourdan traveled the world when international fashion barely existed, making the shoemaker into a global brand. But instead of today's system of wide-ranging collections containing one hundred different styles, the line was tightly focused: just 10 shoes put into production, with 100,000 for each style and in 20 colors. The exceptional advertising campaigns by Guy Bourdin were part of the forward-looking strategy.
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Charles Jourdan died in 1976, and Roland retired in 1981, when the Swiss company Portland Cement Werke bought the company that was later taken over by the Asian luxury player Dickson Poon. Jourdan remained a solid label, but not one that played a part in the rise of designer fashion. In the past two decades, Italian footwear has been in the limelight, but giving creative polish to Jourdan fits with Cox's enthusiasm for Gallic style. When he started out, France was the cradle of footwear fashion with names such as Robert Clergerie and Stephane Kelian.
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"Jourdan is the antithesis of the Italian shoe," Cox says. "I love Italy, and that's where I make my own shoes. But the French really do respect designers. Italy is totally different; footwear is an industry. The shoes are all about craft and luxury. French shoes are more about straight lines and they are way more geometric."
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Cox spent part of his childhood years, from 2 to 7, in Cameroon, so he speaks French and says about France, "I get their head space totally, I get the mentality." So what about the new Charles Jourdan shoe line he will unveil next week? The challenge has been "how to make it contemporary." And how to absorb the archives when shoe companies from Gucci to Prada have seen vintage shoes in thrift shops.
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"Archives can be inspiring but overwhelming," says Cox. "You have to forget them - especially when the whole world has been knocking them off. Everyone shops the same flea markets."
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So Cox is giving a millennial twist to Roland Jourdan's geometry.
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"It's going to be very modernist - there has been too much retro," says the designer. "The word 'modern' is a cliché. Think modern space age with a feeling for shiny surface. And the existing customers are so loyal. When I did a radio show in Canada, they all rang in saying, "Don't change them." But we've got everyone's mother in the stores - now we want the daughters."

Richard Phillips

went to visit the seventh avenue studio of Richard Phillips yesterday. despite his height (6'4"?) and subtle good looks, he was surprisingly gentle, softspoken, humble, and unassuming.

although much of what he said seemed to pass right over me (maybe it was my mood or was he rambling a bit?), i think the point he tried to make about his art was that in representing contemporary pop icons/symbols (most which look like they stepped right out of the height of the 70s), he was really giving his view of the society as a whole that they represent. pretty straightforward enough.

more interesting to me though, was the route at which he arrived at his present success. from his parents and grandparents that all were what he termed "sunday painters", he had had art in him since a very early age. however, although he painted through art schools straight through college and an MFA at Yale, he shortly thereafter abandoned his painting for several years. he explained his frustration at trying to get galleries in NY to look at his work. and described how he tried sculpting, and went south for more traditional teaching jobs. in any case, in the mid 90s, he started to come back to painting for himself. and i think that is when he hit his stride.

at his studio, we got to see two of his latest works that will be shortly going to his show in berlin. a monochromatic magenta painting of Demi Moore, and a hypnotic full wall mural of seven Deepak Chopra heads (they really start getting to you, especially all those deep eyes looking right through us to Demi on the opposing wall!).

I Said That?

I Said That?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/opinion/22KRIS.html

Last September, a gloom-and-doom columnist warned about Iraq: "If we're going to invade, we need to prepare for a worst-case scenario involving street-to-street fighting."

Ahem. Yes, well, that was my body double while I was on vacation.

Since I complained vigorously about this war before it started, it's only fair for me to look back and acknowledge that many of the things that I — along with other doves — worried about didn't happen. So let's look back, examine the record and offer some preliminary accountability.

Despite my Cassandra columns, Iraq never carried out terrorist attacks in the U.S. or abroad, it didn't use chemical or biological weapons, and it didn't launch missiles against Israel in hopes of triggering a broader war. Turkey has not invaded northern Iraq to attack the Kurds.

So let me start by tipping my hat to administration planners whose work reduced those risks. For example, one reason Iraq did not attack Israel may have been the Special Operations forces in the western desert of Iraq, where the launches would have come from. And belated pressure from Washington has kept Turkey out of the war so far.

The most curious aspect of the war was Iraq's failure to use weapons of mass destruction, and neither most doves nor most hawks get credit for predicting that. If the U.S somehow blocked Iraq from using them, a deep bow to President Bush. But if Iraq never had any weaponized chemical or biological agents, then Mr. Bush has plenty of explaining to do to the children of the Americans and the Iraqis who died in the war.

President Bush, in his State of the Union address, described a vast Iraqi weapons program and talked about several mobile labs, 30,000 munitions, 500 tons of chemical weapons, 25,000 liters of anthrax and 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin. These weapons were supposedly deployed in the war and controlled by field commands that we have long since overrun — so where are they?

It's too early to be sure, but my guess is that doves cried wolf in terms of the risks of upheavals in Pakistan and Jordan. Indeed, that alarm has been raised repeatedly — at the time of the first gulf war, again with the Afghanistan war and now with the Iraq war — and the worries proved exaggerated each time. True, radicals came to power in parts of Pakistan, but on the whole the Muslim Street has not been as scary as we expected. Maybe it's time to retire that bogeyman.

No one got the level of resistance quite right. We doves correctly foresaw that the war would not be a cakewalk, but for all our hand-wringing, there was never prolonged street-to-street fighting in Baghdad.

The ones who really blew it were the superraptors like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and, to a lesser extent, Paul Wolfowitz, who over the years had suggested, as Mr. Perle put it in a Washington Post essay in 1998: "It would be neither wise nor necessary for us to send ground forces into Iraq" because Iraqi exiles could do the job by themselves with American weapons and air cover. Fortunately, Tommy Franks and Colin Powell demanded more than an Invasion Lite pipedream.

As for the reaction of the Iraqi people, I'd say the doves were more accurate than the hawks. Frankly, the reaction varied hugely. There were some places where, as Vice President Dick Cheney had forecast, our troops were "greeted as liberators." But even in the Shiite south, one feels as much menace as gratitude.

Those Americans who contend that Iraqis hail us as liberators should try traveling around Iraq. I grew a mustache to look more like an Iraqi so hostile locals wouldn't throw rocks at my car. (I've now returned to the U.S. and had to shave my mustache so my family wouldn't throw stones at me.)

The hawks also look increasingly naïve in their expectations that Iraq will soon blossom into a pro-American democracy. For now, the figures who inspire mass support in postwar Iraq are Shiite clerics like Ali al-Sistani (moderate, but tainted by being soft on Saddam), Moqtadah al-Sadr (radical son of a martyr) and Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim (Iran's candidate), all of whom criticize the United States.

As in revolutionary Iran, the Shiite network is the major network left in Iraq, and it will help determine the narrative of the war: infidel invasion or friendly liberation. I'm afraid we infidels had better look out.

New Worry for China as SARS Hits the Hinterland

New Worry for China as SARS Hits the Hinterland
By JOSEPH KAHN with ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/international/asia/22CHIN.html

HOHHOT, China, April 20 — Meng Chunying says she felt the beginnings of a nasty head cold on March 18. But Ms. Meng, an Air China flight attendant who often flew the Hong Kong-Beijing route, said she never made the connection with an outbreak of atypical pneumonia that she thought was under control.

A few days later, Ms. Meng, feeling listless and feverish, flew to Hohhot, the wind-swept capital of the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, to see her her family.

Though the atypical pneumonia, called severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS, first appeared in southern China in November, local doctors did not figure out that Ms. Meng, 27, was Inner Mongolia's first case until early April. By then, Ms. Meng had infected her mother, stepfather, brother and doctor, who gave it to another patient. Ms. Meng also passed SARS to Li Ling, her husband of three months, who became one of the first people in Inner Mongolia to die of SARS.

While China, under international pressure, has admitted that the outbreak of SARS in big cities like Beijing is far worse than originally reported, it now has a problem that is potentially even more serious: the disease has spread to less developed regions in China's vast hinterland.

"We were told atypical pneumonia was finished in February," Ms. Meng said through tears at the Hohhot Hospital, where she has mostly recovered. "I never imagined that this kind of tragedy would fall on me and my family."

In recent weeks SARS has arrived in force in places like northern Inner Mongolia and northwestern Shanxi, places that lack the medical expertise and equipment to adequately treat a disease that can require weeks of intensive care.

Shanxi, a poor, parched coal mining province, has the largest outbreak outside the major cities, with considerably more than 120 cases, provincial health officials said.

Inner Mongolia has 25 cases officially, though the number of patients being treated in at least five places around the sprawling region appears to be significantly higher.

[Nationally, health officials on Monday reported 132 new cases of SARS, bringing China's total to 1,959, with 86 deaths. The government news media said the new tally included cases in six new cities or provinces since Sunday.]

China has become a society on the move, where people from the remotest provinces travel routinely for work and pleasure. But planes and trains also allow a potentially lethal virus to hitch a ride to communities where the level of health care has fallen far behind that of transportation links.

China's economic transition has brought airports to the smallest cities, but it has forced local hospitals to make do with far less government support.

"We are getting help from the authorities, but it is a terribly difficult situation," said a doctor at the Provincial People's Hospital in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi. The hospital had to buy and borrow a cache of ventilators for what has become the largest SARS ward in the provinces.

The rapid spread of the disease to interior regions explains why the Chinese authorities reversed themselves and canceled "golden week," a weeklong holiday starting on May 1 that officials had been promoting for months to help stoke tourism and higher consumer spending.

The disconnect between China's mobility and its medical care also shows the terrible gamble China's government made — and lost — when it suppressed information about SARS in February, apparently so that bad news would not sully the parliamentary session held in March to anoint new government leaders. Around the time that President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao were appointed to their current positions by the National People's Congress, SARS was extending its reach to at least nine provinces.

With a blackout on reporting about the disease in the government-controlled press, patients knew little. Doctors were unprepared for outbreaks, even though SARS had emerged in the southern province of Guangdong four months earlier and was raging through Hong Kong by mid-March.

"We did not even have the proper masks," said Zhang Wei, a doctor in Hohhot, describing the confusion when the first SARS cases reached Inner Mongolia. "No one had any idea how to deal with this disease. We had four people die here, one after the other, before the officials realized we had a serious problem."

In Taiyuan, an edginess hangs in the air at the ramshackle Shanxi Provincial People's Hospital, over a battle whose outcome is still uncertain. Hospital workers finger white masks as if they were rosaries.

Taxi drivers, whose red cabs boast signs proclaiming "Newly Disinfected," refuse to pick up people who emerge from the gates. Passers-by haul huge bags of medicinal herbs and plants — a concoction that the provincial government has announced can prevent SARS.

The object of the nervousness is a squat glass and concrete building that sits behind a locked fence at the very back of the hospital. It is home to several dozen patients with SARS, some sick enough to be on ventilators.

Through a large plate glass window, doctors and nurses clad in bright blue head-to-toe protective garb can be seen scurrying through the halls, the white coats that used to be the armor of their profession hanging limp by the door.

The chronically underfinanced health department had to round up expensive tools to fight SARS: large stocks of protective gear, including fancy masks that cost $3 apiece, as well as oxygen tanks and ventilators. Doctors and nurses, some quarantined in the SARS wards, work 10-hour shifts.

The first case from Taiyuan was diagnosed in early March, in a jewelry merchant who had returned from Guangzhou, the SARS epicenter. He infected close to 30 patients, including his mother and father, who both died in mid-March in a military hospital in Beijing.

Even as provincial doctors worked hard to contain the first outbreak, the virus nonetheless slipped back into the province in the lungs of other travelers.

In late March an official from the Qingxu district of Taiyuan had an oral ulcer treated at People's Liberation Army No. 301 Hospital in Beijing — a place that secretly housed SARS patients. A week later, back home in Taiyuan, he developed the disease and it began racing through the Qingxu district.

A third outbreak started after a man who collected the body of a relative who had died at Youan Hospital in Beijing returned to Shanxi and discovered he had SARS.

SARS has also begun to show up in even poorer areas, hitchhiking with sick patients like a dental resident at Provincial People's Hospital who became infected and took SARS home to the southern city of Linfen.

Some expect the problem to get worse before it gets better. Jiang Cheng, a local pharmacist, said there were far more cases than had been reported so far.

"It has already spread to other parts of the province, especially in the south," he said. "That's because it's more developed there and people travel around a lot."

As a flight attendant for Air China for six years, Ms. Meng traveled regularly to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and she heard about the outbreak in Guangdong Province in February. But following the government's propaganda line, Air China assured employees that the outbreak was purely local and "under control."

On March 15, Ms. Meng was working on Flight 112 from Hong Kong to Beijing. Among the passengers she served that day was an elderly man who looked pale and wan and asked for water so that he could take some pills.

Hong Kong authorities in late March rushed to track down travelers on that flight after as many as nine members of a tour group took ill after flying to Beijing.

Ms. Meng first felt sick three days after the flight. She visited an Air China medical clinic, but no one warned her about SARS, she said. "We work hard and get tired all the time, so we're used to it," she said.

Had she known she had a highly infectious disease, she said, she would never have returned to Hohhot. But it was there that she developed a high fever, and there that she sought help.

She described the Huhhot Hospital as "completely unprepared," initially putting her into a room with patients who had different diseases. Only in early April did doctors diagnose her SARS.

When her husband, brothers and stepfather took ill, the hospital staff panicked and refused to treat them, Ms. Meng said, adding that the hospital manager eventually relented.

The disease had spread to health workers anyway. At the nearby Hohhot Chest Hospital, the main treatment center for lung diseases, SARS infected half a dozen medical workers. Frightened staff members refused to work, leaving the hospital critically short-handed.

Huang Qi, the deputy general manager of the chest hospital, worked day and night in the SARS ward, even wheeling dead bodies to the "peace room," or morgue. Mr. Huang was subsequently found to have SARS.

The disease has roamed far in this northern region, as far north as Hulun Buir, an area near the Russian border known for its grassy steppes.

And in the west, Li Song. a medical worker for the government-owned railroad system who was sent to Beijing for training in March, took SARS home to the remote town of Linhe. An isolation ward at Ba Meng Hospital there now houses at least 13 patients, including Mr. Li, his wife, his mother and the 21-year-old nurse who first treated them.

Internet Is Losing Ground in Battle Against Spam

Internet Is Losing Ground in Battle Against Spam
By SAUL HANSELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/technology/22SPAM.html

Alyx Sachs is no longer sending people e-mail offering to "fix your credit risk free."

Confronted by an increasing number of individuals, businesses and Internet service providers using software meant to identify and discard unwanted junk e-mail — commonly known as spam — Ms. Sachs has been forced to become more creative in her marketing pitches. The subject line on her credit e-mail, for example, now reads "get a fresh start."

From a small office on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, millions of messages prepared on behalf of others by Ms. Sachs and her partner are still going out to e-mail in-boxes every day, promising not just to restore a poor credit rating but also to sell printer ink, 3-D glasses and, lately, even playing cards with pictures of wanted Iraqi leaders.

In the cat-and-mouse game of e-mail marketers and those trying to stop them, the spammers are still winning.

So far, nothing that has been tried to block spam has done much more than inconvenience mass e-mailers. Just as Ms. Sachs's company, NetGlobalMarketing, has been able to reword its e-mail to evade spam filters, others use even more aggressive tricks to disguise the content of their messages and to send them via circuitous paths so their true origin cannot be determined.

"There is no silver bullet," said Lisa Pollock, the senior director of messaging at Yahoo, the popular Web portal. "There will always be people who can find a way to get around whatever you have in place."

No doubt making a living selling things by e-mail is becoming harder. Not only are more messages being blocked by automated antispam systems, more senders of e-mail are also facing legal action. Last week, America Online and the Federal Trade Commission each filed suit against e-mailers that they say are illict spammers. Congress is seriously considering legislation to crack down on spam.

But the infestation is growing faster than the antispammers can keep up. Brightmail, which makes spam-filtering software for corporate networks and big Internet providers, says that 45 percent of the e-mail it now sees is junk, up from 16 percent in January 2002. America Online says the amount of spam aimed at its 35 million customers has doubled since the beginning of this year and now approaches two billion messages a day, more than 70 percent of the total its users receive.

Indeed, the spam problem defies ready solution. The Internet e-mail system, designed to be flexible and open, is fundamentally so trusting of participants that it is easy to hide where an e-mail message is coming from and even what it is about.

Another reason there is so much spam is that, with a simple computer hookup and a mailing list, it is remarkably easy and inexpensive to start a career in e-mail marketing. Companies that offer products like vitamins and home mortgages as well as those selling items like penis and breast enlargement kits will allow nearly any e-mail marketer to pitch their wares, paying a commission for any completed transaction.

The microscopic cost of sending e-mail, compared with the price of postal mailings, allows senders to make money on products bought by as little as one recipient for every 100,000 e-mail messages. Internet marketing companies typically charge $500 to $2,000 to send a solicitation to a million in-boxes, but the cost goes up if the list is from a reputable source or is focused on people in certain favored demographic groups. Sending the same offer to a million people by mail costs at least $40,000 for a list, $190,000 for bulk-rate postage and more for paper and printing.

Albert Ahdoot, for example, started a part-time business using e-mail to sell printer-ink refill systems while he was in college. When he dropped out of medical school, he hooked up with Ms. Sachs, a former producer with Geraldo Rivera who later worked in marketing at several Internet companies. With her client contacts, his technology and some e-mail lists they acquired, they started their business about a year ago.

Like many in the e-mail marketing business, Ms. Sachs says her e-mail blitzes are not spam because she sends them only to lists of people who have agreed to receive marketing offers over the Internet. These opt-in lists, as they are called, are generated when Internet users enter a contest on the Web or sign up for an e-mail list in which the fine print says the user agrees to receive "occasional offers of products you might find valuable from our marketing partners."

Arguing that no one is forced to sign up for e-mail pitches, Internet marketers say that the attack on spam has already gone too far, interfering with legitimate business.

"We have allowed these spam cops to rise out of nowhere to be self-appointed police and block whole swaths of the industry," said Bob Dallas, an executive of Empire Towers, an e-mail firm in Toledo, Ohio, widely cited on antispam lists used by many Internet companies.

"This is against everything that America stands for," Mr. Dallas added. "The consumer should be the one in control of this."

But activists who oppose spam say that some e-mailers who argue that they have permission to send e-mail to a certain address often do not. Earlier this year, a New York court ruled that a Niagara Falls, N.Y., company, MonsterHut, had violated antifraud laws for misrepresenting opt-in permissions.

Lower on the marketing totem pole than opt-in mailing is what the industry calls bulk e-mailing: blasting a message out to any e-mail address that can be found. CD-ROM's with tens of millions of e-mail addresses are widely available — advertised by e-mail, of course. These addresses have been harvested by software robots that read message boards, chat rooms and Web sites.

Others use what are called dictionary attacks, sending mail to every conceivable address at major e-mail providers — first, say, JohnA @example.com, then JohnB @example.com, and so on — to find the legitimate names.

Such distinctions, however, are usually lost on users who, in recent years, have found unwanted marketing pitches are overwhelming their legitimate e-mail.

As dissatisfaction has risen, the big Internet service providers, like AOL, and purveyors of free e-mail accounts, including Yahoo and Microsoft's Hotmail, have all greatly accelerated efforts to identify and block spam. Among other things, they have created prominent buttons for users to report offending e-mail as spam.

There is little that Internet services can do to keep spammers from gathering e-mail addresses directly from users. Many people still will type virtually their life history into an unknown Web site that claims to be offering a chance to win a Lexus.

But some Internet providers have built systems to identify when they are being subject to dictionary attacks and cut them off quickly before valid e-mail addresses are deduced.

To identify phrases and other patterns that occur in spam, the Internet service providers look at what is received in thousands of so-called honeypot e-mail accounts — those that have no legitimate reason to receive e-mail messages.

The spammers quickly caught on to this technique, however. So they have varied their messages — morphing, they call it — often by simply appending random words or characters, so the filtering systems no longer see millions of identical solicitations.

At the same time, e-mail users now receive spam that is not only unwanted but cryptic, too. In an attempt to avoid automatic filters that search for certain phrases, marketers offer, for example, "Her bal V1agra" and ways to make "F*A*S*T C*A*S*H."

So the Internet companies now look for unusual spelling as well. "Some people have jobs that change day to day," said Charles Stiles, the technical manager of AOL's postmaster team, which looks after spam blocking. "Ours changes from minute to minute. A filter that works one day will likely not work the next."

Another way spammers avoid detection is to send mail using the HTML format, the language mainly used to display Web pages. Spammers and major advertisers alike think that e-mail with varied type and inserted graphic images is more persuasive than ordinary text. But the spammers also find that this format makes it easier to evade the filtering programs.

A lot of spam now puts the actual sales pitch in an image that is only displayed when the user reads her e-mail. The filter reads merely some random text and the Web address of the image to be displayed.

Spam filters are now being adjusted to be suspicious of e-mails that only have links to Web images. But it is still hard for any program to distinguish, say, a pornographic come-on from a baby picture, especially when processing hundreds of millions of messages a day.

At the same time, the argument is intensifying over what represents legitimate e-mail, particularly when it ends up being blocked by an antispam filter. Last November, AOL threatened to block e-mail from Gap. Even though Gap said it only sent e-mail to people who explicitly signed up for its mailing list, AOL said that many of its members reported Gap mailings as spam. When it investigated, AOL found that Gap had been offering people a 10 percent discount for providing their e-mail address. Nearly a third of the addresses collected were fake, but they often belonged to other people who did not want the Gap e-mail.

"You can't underestimate the power of people to make up an e-mail address to get a 10 percent discount," said Matt Korn, AOL's executive vice president for network operations.

The other major approach to preventing spam is to block any messages sent from computers and e-mail addresses known to be used by spammers. This is harder than it seems because the spammers are constantly changing their accounts and are adept at methods to make up fake return addresses and hide behind private accounts. That does not prevent the big service providers, and an army of spam vigilantes, from creating blacklists of offenders.

These blacklists, however, often also block legitimate companies and individuals from sending e-mail. That is because the spammers find ways to hijack unprotected computers to relay their messages, thus hiding their true origins.

In the earlier, more innocent days of the Internet, many computers were set up to relay e-mail sent by any other user, anonymously, just to give a helping hand to those with connection problems. Now there still are computers set up to be what is known as an open relay, even though such machines are largely used by spammers.

Another approach to limiting spam, which is favored by big marketers, is to create a "white list" of approved senders, but this raises the question of who will compile such a list. A group of the companies that send e-mail on behalf of major corporations will put forward another proposal tomorrow that would allow senders to certify their identities in every e-mail message they send and report a rating of how much they comply with good mailing standards. Users and Internet service providers would then decide what sort of mail they choose to accept.

"We wanted to come up with a way of shining a big bright light on all those that want to stand in the light and say, `This is who I am, and I was that person yesterday, and I'll be that person tomorrow,' " said Hans Peter Brondmo, a senior vice president at Digital Impact, a major e-mail company and one of the developers of the proposal, known as project Lumos.

Rather than such a self-regulatory approach, the antispam legislation in the Senate would try to make many deceptive e-mail practices illegal. It would force commercial e-mail messages to identify the true sender, have an accurate subject line and offer recipients an easy way to remove their names from marketing lists. And it would impose fines for violators.

For her part, Ms. Sachs, the e-mail marketer, says that any such move would only end up making it harder to run a legitimate business.

"These antispammers should get a life," she said. "Do their fingers hurt too much from pressing the delete key? How much time does that really take from their day?"

By contrast, she said, "70 million people have bad credit. Guess what? Now I can't get mail through to them to help them."

Anxiety and Hope in a Mystical Fusion

Anxiety and Hope in a Mystical Fusion
By ALAN RIDING
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/arts/design/22CHAG.html

PARIS, April 21 — After their deaths even prominent artists are often neglected for a time before they are again appreciated. This has been the case with Marc Chagall. This Russian-born painter lived to such a ripe old age that he was already out of fashion when he died in southern France in 1985 at the age of 98. Many critics considered that his best work was done a half-century earlier.

Thus over the last three decades or so Chagall has tended to be viewed, even dismissed by some, as a colorful, friendly painter of folkloric Jewish themes and whimsical animals who was neither a central figure in the 20th century's important art movements nor influential enough to create a school of his own. His gift was simply to convey his joie de vivre through his paintings.

But now, 34 years after the last Chagall retrospective here, the time may be right to reassess his huge body of work. This, at least, is the premise of "Chagall: Known and Unknown," an exhibition of 180 works at the Grand Palais in Paris through June 23. The show will move to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from July 26 through Nov. 4.

The gamble appears to have paid off. Covering more than 60 years of creation, the exhibition confirms the critics' opinion that in his later years — he was completing a lithograph just days before he died — Chagall frequently revisited his earlier themes. Yet, seen together, his life's work exudes both freshness and mysticism. Many visitors to this show appear to have been surprised to discover that they like Chagall.

At first glance, it is the color in his paintings that distinguishes them: rich shades of blue, green, yellow and red, at times juxtaposed almost shockingly. Then there is their peculiar composition, with not only figures occasionally floating in midair but also people, buildings, trees and animals often presented two-dimensionally on completely different scales.

But what is perhaps most striking is the humanity of Chagall's paintings. He refused the Paris avant-garde's invitation to create art for art's sake. Instead, he turned to allegories to communicate both his Russian Jewish culture and his emotions. He wanted to reach out, to touch, to share. It was evidence of his generosity of spirit, but it also made him something of a loner.

Born in 1887 into a poor Hasidic family in Vitebsk, then part of the Russian empire, now Belarus, he was already an accomplished artist when he arrived in Paris in 1911. It was here, apparently nostalgic for home, that he first began evoking both Jewish themes and the iconography of the Russian Orthodox Church in his oils. In their form, they reflected Cubism, the only time that Chagall responded consciously to a new movement.

From that period several works in this exhibition stand out. "Self-Portrait With Seven Fingers" shows the artist painting a rural scene against a backdrop where medallions portray Paris and Vitebsk. "Adam and Eve," which was accepted for the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1913, is perhaps Chagall's most Cubist work, while "Golgotha," his first religious painting, portrays the Crucifixion against a green Cubist background.

With the outbreak of World War I Chagall returned to Vitebsk, where he married Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter of a rich jeweler. He also integrated himself into Jewish intellectual life and joined the 1917 revolution in the belief that it would bring greater freedom for Russian Jews. He was then named Arts Commissar for the Vitebsk region and director of the town's Fine Arts School.

His own painting, still with some Cubist influence, remained figurative and narrative, albeit often magical. In "The Promenade" (1917) for instance two lovers are seen levitating with joy. His opposition to abstraction became even clearer when he invited the Suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitzky to teach at the Fine Arts School. After frequent clashes with them Chagall resigned from the school in June 1920 and moved to Moscow.

There he mixed with Jewish intellectuals and designed theater costumes and sets. More significantly he decorated the auditorium of the new State Yiddish Chamber Theater with cheerful canvases that paid homage to Jewish folklore and theater traditions. This show includes the large "Introduction to the Jewish Theater" as well as four lively panels representing dance, music, theater and literature.

But despite this optimistic work, which somehow survived Stalinist anti-Semitism and was restored in the early 1990's, Chagall was unhappy in Moscow. In 1922 he left for Berlin and a year later settled in Paris. ("Marc Chagall: The Russian Years, 1907-1922," at the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris in 1995, was the last major Chagall show held here.) He made friends with the Surrealist artists and poets but refused to join the movement, aware that his religious and sentimental art would come under attack.

Seeking other ways of coming closer to French culture, he painted landscapes and tried still life in a Post-Impressionist vein. One of his first commissions illustrated La Fontaine's "Fables," allowing him to create an entire menagerie of delightful little animals. He also illustrated poetry books by Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon and was commissioned by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard to illustrate scenes from the Old Testament.

But in the 1930's, as Nazi persecution of Jews mounted, Chagall turned again to the Crucifixion to express his anxiety, using Jesus as a metaphor for the Jews. In "White Crucifixion" (1938), Jesus' nakedness is hidden only by a Jewish prayer shawl, while a menorah burns at his feet. And all around the central figure, there are scenes of fleeing refugees, a burning village and a synagogue in flames.

When Germany occupied France in 1940, Chagall fled south and eventually made his way to New York. Jewish themes returned to his work, as in "The Lights of Marriage," in which a newly married couple stroll across the main square of Vitebsk. But in his references to the war, he kept using the figure of Christ crucified to symbolize Jewish suffering.

He returned to Paris in 1948 in time for the first retrospective of his work. Three years later he moved to the Provençal town of St.-Paul-de-Vence, where, savoring the magic of Mediterranean light, he painted self-portraits, the circus, flowers, animals and lovers. ("The Couple in a Blue Landscape" shows St.-Paul-de-Vence behind his flying lovers.) In the 1960's he decorated the ceiling of the Paris Opera at the Palais Garnier and painted two murals in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Even more ambitiously, during the last 25 years of his life, Chagall embarked on what became known as the "Biblical Message" project: 17 large canvases illustrating the first two books of the Bible, which are now in the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall in Nice. (This show includes some preparatory drawings.) But religion also remained present in other oils, like "War," which shows a Crucifixion on a hill overlooking refugees fleeing a burning city.

While this exhibition recalls many images long identified with Chagall, perhaps its main achievement is to underline the intense spirituality not only of his images of love and nature but also of those showing the ravages of war. In his heart he believed in humanity. "In order to continue to live," Jean-Louis Prat, the director of the Fondation Maeght in St.-Paul-de-Vence, writes in a catalog essay, "Marc Chagall gave this nihilist century a worthy concept: hope."

Asia Project

slowly forming an idea for what my "Asia Project" will be. while i was there, i think what i was trying to do was really to create authentic portraits of a time and place -- not necessarily or definitively complete (which of course would be impossible), but something to truly convey each places' authentic feel of being.

i hope my opening lines and reflections aren't too silly. sometimes, the most important questions we ask ourselves seem so simple, silly, and trivial, from a learned pseudo-intellectual bias. yet in fact, they are the most difficult and reaching questions we can ask ourselves. so how to present those questions without seeming trivial and silly? and how to present images which hope to convey one set of answers/responses?

Angel Dust / Rebels

was so excited this weekend to find a japanese movie i'd been looking for for the last few years! i had seen it about six years ago on video back when i had lived in soho and went to the two Kims Videos in the central (bleeker&laguardia) and way-west village (bleeker&charles), now both long since closed. for some reason, it came back into my mind over the last few years, but i couldn't remember the title or director, and browsing repeatedly through the japanese sections at various video rentals were unsuccessful. so this weekend, i was at Kims on avenue A, going through their voluminous new DVD acquisitions section, and the new DVD release struck my eye. i immediately knew it was the one. but was only finally convinced as i watched the first five minutes back at home.

the film, Angel Dust (1994) (rotten tomatoes / yesasia), is a surreal film of a female psychologist that is helping the police track down a serial killer on the Yamanote Line commuter trains that ring Tokyo. i think what i most liked about the film was its contrasting views of tokyo -- crowded and anonymous city streets and subways and minimal corporate buildings on one hand, and floatation tanks, geodesic domes, and a japanese natural aesthetic on the other. added to that was this surreal time-halted sense of the killer, the prey, and the chase, and the psychologist on the verge of her own mental sanity. its not a perfect film, but definitely one worth seeing. and much much better than Insomnia (2002).

also saw Tsai Ming-Liang's Rebels of the Neon God (1992) this weekend. was almost not gonna rent it, as i had seen his more recent film What Time Is It There? (2002), and thought it quite boring and uneventful (which i presume was its intention). but my curiousity got the better of me, and i'm glad i did. in contrast, this earlier film had so much more presence, authenticity, and mood. the film was very documentary in feel, following three young men as they go about their lives in taipei, as one plots revenge against one of the others for a violent act against his father, with whom he doesn't seem to get along. anyway, it was great to be in taipei for an evening.

Reality Movies?

[interesting article from art aesthete and filmmaker greg allen's site greg.org. and a few interesting new sites to visit as well. (thanks greg for the plug!)]

Ready for a Reality Movie?
By RICK LYMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/21/movies/21CANC.html

LOS ANGELES, April 19 — Reality, the trend that ate television, now hopes to make a meal out of the multiplex.

On Friday New Line Cinema will release in more than 2,000 theaters a movie called "The Real Cancún," the first attempt by a Hollywood studio to transfer the reality television phenomenon to the movie screen. Sixteen hand-picked young men and women were transplanted to an upscale Yucatán hotel for an all-expenses-paid spring break week and were then filmed by eight cameras, 24 hours a day, while they ate, drank, swam, danced, paired off and stripped.

"It just seemed to us that there was an opportunity to take a form of entertainment that is really working on cable and prime time and bring it to the big screen," said Jonathan Murray, the film's lead producer, who earned his reality wings with MTV's "Real World," the granddaddy of the genre. "Spring break has been a staple of youth movies since the 1950's. We decided it would look good on the big screen and doing it this way would give audiences something they don't get on television, which is, quite frankly, some nudity, some sexual situations and language that's more realistic and honest."

Mr. Murray said he was aware that critics and others were likely to view this new form of "reality filmmaking" not as a welcome leap forward in entertainment but as further evidence of the decay of civilized society. But he says he does not care. Even more, he is convinced that this reality genre, despite its infamous excesses, provides a fresh way to tell true stories with emotional impact.

"I guess I've been hearing that sort of criticism since 1992, when we brought `Real World' out," he said. "So it won't bother me to hear it again. But I know there have been times when we've been able to achieve some things in this genre that are more than just fun entertainment. I know that our audience loves what we do and is very passionate about the stories we tell."

Rick de Oliveira, the film's director and a co-producer who also worked on "The Real World" and a similar MTV series, "Road Rules," wants to make a distinction between his approach and that of most reality programming.

"It's not just a booze fest," he said. "It's not just `Girls Gone Wild.' There are no competitions, no winners, no voting off islands. Instead there are the stories of what happened to these people during this week. What we have done here is not a documentary, but it's not a sex comedy like `American Pie,' either."

The reality television genre of course depends on introducing audiences to a stock group of real-life characters and then following them through a string of episodes, ratcheting up the tension with a series of melodramatic contrivances. But this will be a one-shot affair, playing to an audience that must venture down to the local cinema and put down cash to watch it.

"I don't know that it is going to work in movie theaters," said Toby Emmerich, New Line's chief of production. "It's never been done before. I don't have a crystal ball. But I do have an instinct that this particular movie will connect with some kind of an audience."

Perhaps most astonishing about the project is how quickly — and cheaply — it was done.

The week at Cancún ended on March 22 and a nearly finished version of the film was shown to New Line executives last Friday. Early screenings for entertainment journalists have taken place. Normally, movies spend months in post-production as the editing is honed, the sound is mixed, and the music is added. This one will be in theaters less than five weeks after shooting stopped.

Part of the reason was a race that had developed between "The Real Cancún" and another reality-based film from Universal Pictures called "The Quest," which followed six young men for a week in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, on a spring break quest for, well, what do you think?

Originally the New Line film was to be released on May 31. But then Universal said it intended to put out its film in early May. So New Line, mindful of the coming, youth-oriented behemoths "X-Men 2" (due May 2) and "The Matrix: Reloaded" (May 15), decided to go for broke and come out in late April. Last week Universal quietly surrendered, moving "The Quest" to some later date in 2003, to be announced.

"The Real Cancún" cost about $4 million to make, Mr. Emmerich said, and the studio intends to spend more than $20 million promoting it. "So you want this movie to do somewhere north of $25 million at the box office," he said. "I'm confident. And I think it will be more successful in foreign markets than some people might think."

A week was chosen for shooting — March 15 to 22 — and a kind of mass casting call went out on 20 or so college campuses that happened to have spring breaks that week. About 10,000 young men and women were interviewed, and approximately 600 were asked to answer questions on videotape. This number was culled further during two subsequent rounds until the finalists were flown to Los Angeles and given more thorough video interrogations that also served as screen tests.

"What we were looking for was a cross section from around the country, but more specifically we were looking for people who had interesting goals or stories to tell," Mr. de Oliveira said.

Even so, of the 16 people chosen to make the trip, only 11 have their stories told in the film; the others can be seen in the background in some scenes, their week in Cancún not having resulted in a story line sufficient to make the final cut.

A tour company was chosen to map out the week's activities, including nightly trips to the resort's clubs. A 27-room boutique hotel, the Baccara, allowed the filmmakers to isolate and redecorate a wing that included a common area where much of the film's drama takes place. About 500 hours of high-definition digital videotape was cut into the 90 minutes that will reach theaters.

The result, the filmmakers and the studio stress, is not a documentary.

"The difference, I would say, is that we leave less to chance," Mr. Murray said. "We don't just go down to Cancún and find 12 people who happen to be staying at a hotel. We specifically chose those people for a variety of reasons. The way the hotel looks in the film is not the way it looked when we got there. We made it more attractive. We lit everything, including the ocean in front of the hotel. Anybody who came into that area had to sign a release. Even the two guys who represent the tour operator in the film were cast by us. So we're controlling the situation, definitely. But at the same time no one is telling the cast to do anything. Their actions and reactions within that situation are as real as they can be."

SARS Coverup Spurs A Shake-Up in Beijing

SARS Coverup Spurs A Shake-Up in Beijing
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, April 21, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64440-2003Apr20.html

BEIJING, April 20 -- In the most significant political shake-up in more than a decade, the mayor of Beijing and the minister of health were removed from their Communist Party posts today for failing to deal with the spread of SARS in China.

The moves constituted a political earthquake for the Communist Party, which has rarely acknowledged making mistakes during its 54-year rule.

Health officials also conceded they had mismanaged the outbreak, an unprecedented admission by the Communist Party. The government increased the number of confirmed SARS cases in the capital from 37 to 346, a tacit acknowledgement that it had previously lied about the toll. The government also canceled the annual one-week vacation that begins May 1. The Ministry of Education, meanwhile, effectively confined hundreds of thousands of students in the capital to their campuses to limit the infection rate.

The moves constituted a political earthquake for the Communist Party, which has rarely acknowledged making mistakes during its 54-year rule. From the start, Chinese sources said, the new government of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, who formally took power in March, approved the coverup. But a combination of intense international pressure and the influence of the information revolution on China made the government look so out of touch that bold action was demanded, the sources said. While the government withheld information about the virus, many Chinese traded news on cell phones in text messages.

The ramifications for the way the Communist Party rules China will be huge, Chinese analysts and politicians said. Hu and Wen, who came to power in March vowing to take responsibility for problems, appear to have set a new precedent for how to rule China by firing two senior officials for organizing a coverup.

"This is the beginning of the end," said a senior official who has lobbied behind the scenes for greater democracy. "This is the spark many of us have been waiting for."

"Our government is marching toward the right direction," said Jiang Yanyong, the former head of the military's No. 301 hospital who, in a rare feat of whistle-blowing, accused the government of a coverup two weeks ago.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome is believed to have originated in China in November. China has been criticized for failing to take steps against the disease, not warning other countries about it and covering up the extent of its spread. The U.S. secretary of health and human services, Tommy G. Thompson, has said China's failures have cost lives. Worldwide, SARS has killed at least 203 people and infected more than 3,800. Today, China acknowledged a substantial increase in infected patients, to 1,807 cases and 79 deaths.

In two one-sentence dispatches, the official New China News Agency reported that the mayor of Beijing, Meng Xuenong, and the minister of health, Zhang Wenkang, had been ousted from their party posts, the first step in their dismissal from their government jobs. Not since the Tiananmen Square crackdown have such high-ranking officials been removed for disloyalty. The reports said Wang Qishan, party secretary in Hainan province, would replace Meng, and Gao Qiang, the deputy minister of health, would replace Zhang.

Zhang was widely accused of lying about the extent of the disease in Beijing during an April 4 news conference in which he claimed that the epidemic in the capital had been "effectively controlled." He hung onto his job, Chinese sources said, because he was counting on his close relationship with China's former president, Jiang Zemin, to save him. Meng, who is new to the mayor's job, is believed to have been sacrificed because other leaders, such as Beijing Communist Party secretary Liu Qi, a member of the powerful Politburo, were too influential to fall.

On the streets of the capital, people said they were surprised by the shake-up.

"This is great!" said Li Chen, 33, a designer who said his uncle, a doctor, has the virus. "I never thought those bastards would go. I hope more of them step down because of this."

Asked, however, if the government's action would help restore the public's trust, which has been eroded by the government's handling of the disease, Li shook his head. "They are only going to be as open as they have to," he said. "You can't teach old dogs new tricks."

Health Minister Zhang and Beijing Mayor Meng were expected to appear at a news conference today, but neither showed up. Instead the duty fell to Gao, an owlish bureaucrat with a wry sense of humor.

For a week, Beijing authorities had insisted that only 37 people in the capital had SARS and that only four people had died from it. Chinese doctors, however, had reported hundreds of cases. Sources at two hospitals said authorities had ordered them to hide cases from a team from the World Health Organization, even bundling 30 patients into ambulances while the experts visited one hospital.

Gao said an investigation ordered by top leaders on Tuesday had revealed 346 confirmed cases, including seven new discoveries today, 18 deaths and 402 suspected cases of SARS in Beijing -- vastly higher than previous reports. He said "several hundred" officials had fanned out and visited all 700 hospitals in Beijing, in some instances discovering new cases.

"The Ministry of Health was not adequately prepared for a crisis in public health; its system of prevention was weak," Gao said. "After SARS appeared, the ministry's demands were unclear and its leadership was ineffective."

Gao said the ministry's work in tracing SARS cases and gathering correct figures was "incomplete." Various ministries control hospitals in Beijing, he said, and the hospitals do not communicate with one another and resources are not shared. As a result, he said, even with the new Beijing numbers, "the statistics in Beijing are not completely correct."

Gao said the government was encouraging people to cancel travel plans associated with the May Day holiday. Last year, 87 million people traveled around China during that time, spending billions of dollars. Until a few days ago, the government had been encouraging travel as a way to prove that the country was safe for tourism.

Gao also said the government had ordered each province and municipality to submit daily reports on the SARS situation, and supervisory teams from the central government have been dispatched to Guangdong province, Beijing and Inner Mongolia to ensure that the numbers are accurate. Teams will soon be working in Shanxi and Ningxia, two poor provinces where the disease is believed to be spreading rapidly, he said.

Gao acknowledged that some hospitals had been turning away SARS patients because they were too sick or too poor. He said the government had issued new rules on how to deal with suspected cases and warned hospitals that failed to treat patients or help them find treatment.

Despite the new openness, the work ahead for the central government will be arduous. There have been persistent reports that the disease has killed far more than the 18 people in Beijing that the government had acknowledged. And, perhaps more worrying for China, there have been reports that SARS has spread much farther into the interior than local governments concede. Local doctors have reported cases and fatalities in Yunnan and Liaoning provinces, for example, although provincial authorities deny any cases.

Gao said he was worried about SARS spreading into rural areas, where the medical system is deteriorating and farmers lack awareness of the disease.

"Once the disaster spreads to these areas," he said, "the consequences will be especially grave."

Last Days of a Brutal Reign

Last Days of a Brutal Reign
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/international/worldspecial/20BURN.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 19 — On the gilded marble tablets posted at the gateways of a score of presidential palaces, it was known as "The Era of Saddam Hussein."

Yet in the 26 days of American warfare it took to bring that era down, the hallmark of Mr. Hussein's rule was revealed not as one of grandeur, but of gangsterism and thuggery. On the pediments of his palaces, Mr. Hussein mounted 30-foot bronze busts of himself as Saladin, the Mesopotamian warrior who conquered Jerusalem with his Islamic army in the 12th century. But Mr. Hussein's legacy, revealed with merciless clarity in his last, desperate weeks in power and in the looting of those palaces that followed, was not one of historical accomplishment, as he claimed, but a chronicle of terror, greed and delusion writ large.

In effect, Mr. Hussein and his entourage inverted what was said of the dying dignity of a 17th-century English king, that nothing so became him in life as the leaving of it. Of Mr. Hussein, who may yet be alive, perhaps hiding somewhere in Baghdad with the last of his loyalists, a truer epitaph would record that nothing characterized the way he ruled Iraq, for nearly 24 years, so much as the bullying, mendacious and cowardly way in which he and his associates behaved as their power collapsed.

In the end, some of the closest witnesses to those last days were 150 Western reporters, photographers and broadcast technicians who were sequestered throughout the war in the Palestine and Sheraton hotels on the eastern bank of the Tigris River in the heart of Baghdad, and taken from there by Iraqi officials on closely guided tours of the city.

From the hotels' upper floors, they had a panoramic view across the muddy-green river to the government quarter, and the palaces, ministries and security headquarters that symbolized Mr. Hussein's grip on power.

The reporters had a grandstand seat as American bombs and cruise missiles pulverized Mr. Hussein's heavily guarded compounds, encompassing whole districts of Baghdad, where he and his family enjoyed the gilded privileges of ancient caliphs. In the war's closing stages, the hotels' balconies gave an unimpeded view as American tanks blasted their way from their first foothold in Baghdad, the former Saddam International Airport, into the Republican Palace presidential compound that was the White House of Mr. Hussein's Iraq.

But what the reporters saw was more than the power of America's arsenal, and the inability, for all their boasts about America finding the graveyard of its imperial ambition in Iraq, of Mr. Hussein and his cronies to mount more than a delaying action on the road to their downfall.

Mr. Hussein himself remained — remains, if still alive — the furtive, vainglorious figure he ever was, proclaiming from secret sanctuaries his solidarity with his people in their hour of trial, the certain defeat of the enemy, and his unshakable belief in Iraq.

But there were no Churchillian scenes of Mr. Hussein visiting the wounded, or clambering atop rubble left by airstrikes. Instead, the 65-year-old Iraqi leader appeared on television, until cruise missiles knocked it off the air, in videotapes recorded from a small, low-ceilinged room, white sheet against the wall, like a leader of an underground group taunting those hunting him down. Twice in the last days before American troops seized Baghdad, Iraqi television showed him on the streets, surrounded, as ever, by adoring crowds — the leader revered by his people, but doing nothing, at least nothing that was visible, to help them.

Even at the last, Mr. Hussein's priority was only himself. In the late afternoon of Wednesday, April 9, Marine Corps tanks entered eastern Baghdad from the south and took control of the district by the river that encompasses the Palestine and Sheraton hotels. Within three hours, after attempts by Iraqi men with sledgehammers and ropes had failed, the marines brought up an M-80 recovery tank with a long boom to assist in hauling down a 30-foot cast-iron statue of Mr. Hussein in Firdos Square, behind the hotels.

If any one moment marked the end of Mr. Hussein's rule, it was the sight of the statue's legs cracking, its torso tumbling, and the severed head and body being pelted with garbage and shoes — the ultimate Arab insult — by the hundreds of Iraqis who had gathered to celebrate their freedom.

To be in the square at that moment was to know, beyond doubt, that Iraqis in their millions hated Mr. Hussein, that the truth about Iraq was the diametric opposite of all that he and his acolytes had maintained, and that all else that was said about him in the years that went before was the product of relentless terror.

"Good, good, Bush!" the crowds chanted. "Down, down, Saddam!" Men and women wept, and reached out to shake the hands of the marines, or simply touch their uniforms. "Thank you, mister!" they cried, again and again. Hours later, the crowds still milled about the fallen idol, spitting and mocking.

Yet during the whole sequence, it now appears, Mr. Hussein was barely five miles farther north in the district of Adhamiya, one of the last safe strongholds for him in Baghdad, in the neighborhood of Al Safina beside the Abu Hanifa mosque.

Almost all who live there are, like Mr. Hussein, Sunni Muslims, in a country with a 60 percent Shiite Muslim majority. Adhamiya has been, for 50 years, a bastion of the Baath Party, whose coattails Mr. Hussein rode to power. Witnesses' accounts in the days that followed, and a videotape released by Abu Dhabi television on Friday, showed Mr. Hussein atop his car before the mosque, slapping supporters' hands, pumping his arm, as always, in the gesture of an emperor acknowledging his subjects' fealty.

Residents of Adhamiya, and old associates of Mr. Hussein from the 1950's, said they had heard that he went from the mosque to a simple house, probably the one from which he made his broadcasts earlier in the war against a background of a white sheet, and stayed there, with his closest companions, until sometime early on April 10.

Then, just ahead of American airstrikes and advancing American ground troops who stormed the mosque, he slipped away, so one old Baath Party member said, without telling many of the men who had guarded and accompanied him throughout the war. Several of these, local residents said, died in the American attacks that followed.

Delusions of Dominance

Apparently convinced that he could use the Western news media to foment protests against the American attacks, and to save himself by forcing President Bush to call a standstill before American troops overran Baghdad, Mr. Hussein sent his inner coterie out to hold news conferences.

These became forums for illusion of an almost comical cast, and, in the language used by many top officials, who spoke of Mr. Bush as a "mad dog" and "garbage" and "a stupid, ignorant man," for a street-corner vulgarity that made for a stark contrast with the officials' frequent invocation of the "Arab and Islamic civilization" they claimed to represent.

Almost all of these high officials seemed divorced from the reality that was known to the simplest Iraqi with access to a shortwave radio or to neighborhood gossip — that Iraqi troops were falling back almost everywhere, and that the Americans would be at the gates of Baghdad in a matter of days.

Listening to these officials, it was as though they had been immersed so long in a parallel world where truth was routinely walled out that, even now, they could not grasp the facts about to overwhelm them.

As members of the Revolutionary Command Council and the Council of Ministers made their way to the microphones, none of them appeared to have the courage, or even the instinct, to say anything that might earn them the opprobrium of Mr. Hussein, and, perhaps, the cruel punishment — commonly, execution — meted out to anyone who remotely challenged the Iraqi leader.

In this, the men of the leadership were ultimately the prisoners of the repressive political system they had helped to create.

Day after day, a Westerner waited in vain for any sense that their vision of Iraq and its future extended beyond the personality of Mr. Hussein and his family, particularly his sons, Uday and Qusay. The Iraqi people, incessantly invoked, appeared in this tableau to have little significance. It was as if Mr. Hussein's cult of personality — the portraits and the statues, the parades, the hagiographic books and songs, the tapes of the leader being cheered by his people — had become, at the end, synonymous with Iraq; as if a country with a history of civilization dating back nearly 7,000 years had been reduced to no more than a cardboard backdrop for Mr. Hussein.

The apotheosis came with the appearance, a few days into the war, of the interior minister, Muhammad Diab al-Ahmed. His job established him as one of the more sinister figures in the regime, responsible for many of its detention centers and prisons, and thus for many of the outrages now open to investigation.

With a worldwide television audience, Mr. Ahmed might have been expected to favor a style that was at least somewhat benign. Instead, he showed up waving a Kalashnikov rifle ominously in the direction of the reporters, his finger rarely off the trigger. In his combat vest, he carried four magazines of bullets; at his belt, a hunting knife.

His message? That he was ready to fight for Iraq, for its independence, for its long history of resisting foreign invaders? No. "If you are asking me why I am here with my machine gun," he said, "it is to show that the Iraqi people are committed to fighting to the last, that we are ready to sacrifice ourselves; I myself have an 18-year-old son, and he, too, stands ready to die, like me, for President Saddam Hussein and his family."

Days later, a man who had left the Baath Party many years ago, Wamidh Ladhmi, a professor of political science at the University of Baghdad, said that watching Mr. Ahmed that day was, for him, the final nail in the political coffin of Mr. Hussein. "On that day, we saw what it had all come down to — nothing to do with Iraq, nothing to do with the people, only the cult of the leader, and of his two miserable sons," he said. "We knew then that the entire system was bankrupt, that there was nothing that in any way could save it."

Much the most frequent of the visitors to the Palestine Hotel was the information minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, whose performances were so far removed from reality that reporters flocked to see if he could top his own extravagant inventions with yet more fantastical accounts of Iraqi battlefield triumphs. The more dire the situation facing the Iraqi forces, the more triumphalist Mr. Sahhaf became.

Even when the combat moved into the Iraqi capital, and could be seen from the Palestine Hotel, the minister, in battle dress and beret, stuck to his rose-tinted versions, giving a spectacular new dimension to the spin doctor's art. To reporters who suggested that his accounts were at odds with known American successes, his answer, in effect, was that they were hallucinating.

By the early morning of April 7, American tanks could be seen parked on the Tigris embankment two-thirds of a mile away, with American infantrymen firing at fleeing Iraqi fighters dressed only in boxer shorts who plunged into the river and swam away upstream. Mr. Sahhaf hastened to the hotel to renew his assurances that American troops were everywhere in headlong flight, and that those who had seized the airport on Friday, April 4, had been driven out.

The following day, acknowledging that Americans were indeed at the airport, he offered a new spin. "I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide under the walls of Baghdad."

By the time American tanks were in plain view from where he spoke to reporters, he had resorted to a sort of magician's art, of now you see it, now you don't. "I am here to inform you that you are too far from reality," he said.

But perhaps the most revealing of his statements had to do with truth, a commodity always in short supply under Mr. Hussein. At the Information Ministry, destroyed by American cruise missiles about halfway through the war, the most mendacious and corrupt officials were often the ones most intent on offering lectures about truth. Come the war, and Mr. Sahhaf was the unquestioned champion. "Lying is forbidden in Iraq," he said at one news conference. "President Saddam Hussein will tolerate nothing but truthfulness, as he is a man of great honor and integrity."

Mr. Sahhaf, like most top government officials, disappeared on the day American troops closed in on the Palestine hotel. Along with his burnished, almost cherubic optimism, there was much about him that was chilling. One theory was that, as an information minister in a totalitarian regime, his job, by definition, was always to construct alternate versions of the truth.

In this view, the moment when the whole edifice of power was crumbling presented him with his greatest challenge — the opportunity to tell the biggest lies of all. Doing this before a television audience of millions, he radiated the satisfaction of a performer who had finally made the big time, a small-time vaudevillian who found himself, for a brief season, on a global stage, with an immediate audience of western reporters who — captive as any audience as could be — were not disposed to challenge him too abruptly on his excursions from the truth.

Could Hussein Really Vanish?

Ordinary Iraqis, in the main, never had the difficulty of distinguishing fact from fiction that became a hallmark of their rulers. For all the secrecy of the regime, for all the cruel punishments Mr. Hussein and his security agencies inflicted, anybody who spent a few weeks or months in Iraq in recent years understood that here, as in the former Soviet Union, China and other countries subjected to totalitarian repression, the truth about the horrors of the system lay just beneath the surface. Getting to know any Iraqi enough to establish a basis for trust meant that some of this truth would eventually begin seeping out.

From this, many Westerners who knew Iraq assumed that American forces, once the war began, would be helped by local uprisings, or at least by mass defections from the Iraqi forces, and that this would help bring a speedy American victory.

King Abdullah II of Jordan, who came to Iraq as a young man with his father, King Hussein, told a group of American reporters a few weeks before the war began that the conflict could be over in seven days. In the end, it took nearly four times that long, and American troops, at almost every step of their 350-mile drive from Kuwait, met resistance from Hussein loyalists, and reluctance to assist on the part of Shiites who felt betrayed by the lack of American support for their uprising in 1991.

Partly, the explanation for the stronger-than expected Iraqi defenses lay in Mr. Hussein's decision to rely on paramilitary formations largely recruited from the families of regime hard-liners. Meeting reporters, Iraqi political and military leaders made only passing reference to the Iraqi Army, and not much to the supposed crack troops, the Republican Guard. Even the defense minister, Sultan Hashem Ahmed, spoke of Iraqi defenses being led by the Fedayeen Saddam, the militias of the Baath Party, tribal units and other volunteers.

The Iraqi leaders' judgment seemed to be that when the critical moment came, the army and Republican Guard would surrender or desert. Indeed, on April 9, the day that most of Baghdad fell to the Americans, the highways into the capital from the south were littered with abandoned Republican Guard tanks and artillery guns, along with camouflage uniforms and combat boots hastily abandoned along the roads.

But of popular resistance to Mr. Hussein, until the end, there was virtually no sign. Reporters taken out to see American bombing targets found crowds gathered beside blasted telephone exchanges, in neighborhoods where bunker-busting bombs had left 60-foot craters, and at two marketplaces where dozens of civilians died. At a marketplace in the western Shuala district of Baghdad, where officials said 62 people were killed, many of them women and children, there were signs that the weapon might have been an Iraqi antiaircraft missile gone astray, or an American missile lured by placing an Iraqi air defense radar nearby.

In these places, there was genuine anger against the Americans who inflicted casualties, even if at least some of the ire was orchestrated by Baath Party officials who organized chants of "Saddam, Saddam!" Moving among the crowds, almost no ordinary Iraqis, unless prompted by direct questioning about Mr. Hussein, had anything to say about him. And among those who did, there was barely a whisper of dissent. Fear of retribution remained pervasive.

The change came on April 9, and it was a tidal wave. That morning, reporters left the Palestine Hotel for the eastern suburbs, where Marine units had been reported on the move overnight. At the Canal Expressway, they found themselves staring at the barrel of an M1/A1 Abrams tank. Marines dismounting from the tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles moved quickly into abandoned Iraqi bunkers. Told there were no Iraqi military units anywhere between them and the city center, they relaxed. "Love it!" said Lt. Geoff Orazem, a Marine company commander.

"Yes, love it! Love it! Love it!" replied youths streaming past the tank.

What followed, with disastrous consequences for Baghdad's museums and libraries, for some of its hospitals, and for virtually all government ministries, was an orgy of looting. For many Iraqis, this blunted, even eradicated, much of the gratitude to the Americans. Especially among the middle class, many of whom had found ways to live comfortably under Mr. Hussein, the mood shifted.

"Tell Mr. Bush that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is no liberation," said Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, an archaeologist standing amid the shattered, emptied showcases of the National Museum. "Tell him, if we had stayed under the rule of Saddam Hussein, it would have been much better."

But there were few misgivings in the ruins of Mr. Hussein's bombed palaces, where those who arrived to plunder, by car, on motorcycles, with handcarts and even with double-decker buses, came from every walk of life. For them, picking out a chair or a sofa from the rubble, or even a cut-crystal ashtray, was not so much an act of lawless self enrichment as a gesture of self assertion, a chance to strike back, a moment to stand up after years of subjugation.

A woman who said she was a pharmacist paused for a moment outside the Sajida Palace, named for Mr. Hussein's wife, with her husband, an orthopedic surgeon, and their two daughters. "I feel no shame," she said, gesturing to a few bags filled with tokens from the palace. "We paid for these things a hundred times over." She paused. "Not a hundred times," she said. "A thousand times."

Just then, a middle-aged man passed by, and asked, like so many Iraqis in recent days, for assurance that Mr. Hussein was truly gone. "Hello mister," he said in broken English. "Saddam not come another time? Saddam go, stay away? Tell me, mister, please, Saddam gone?"

Secrets and Lies

A rigorous system for controlling and monitoring Western journalists has been in place in Iraq for decades, based on a wafer-thin facade of civility. As the strains of the war mounted, that facade progressively slipped away, revealing the realities of threat and extortion that Iraqis confronted almost every day under Mr. Hussein.

Long before the war, many reporters had adjusted to the pressures by seeking the approbation of the Information Ministry officials who approved visas, assigned minders and controlled special favors. Bribes were endemic, with some officials demanding sums in the thousands of dollars for visa approvals and extensions, or obtaining exemptions from the AIDS tests required for any reporter remaining in Baghdad for more than 10 days.

A tacit understanding, accepted by many visiting journalists, was that there were aspects of Mr. Hussein's Iraq that could be mentioned only obliquely. First among these was the personality of Mr. Hussein himself, and the fact that he was widely despised and feared by Iraqis, something that was obvious to any visitor ready to listen to the furtive whispers in which this hatred was commonly expressed.

The terror that was the most pervasive aspect of society under Mr. Hussein was another topic that was largely taboo. Every interview conducted by television reporters, and most print journalists, was monitored; any Iraqi voicing an opinion other than those approved by the state would be vulnerable to arrest, torture and execution. But these were facts rarely mentioned by many reporters.

Some reporters bought expensive gifts for senior ministry officials, submitted copies of their stories to show they were friendly to Iraq, or invited key officials like Uday al-Ta'ee, director general of information, for dinners at the expensive restaurants favored by Mr. Hussein's elite.

Mr. Ta'ee, in his early 50's, previously worked at the Iraqi Embassy in Paris where, French intelligence officials said, he ran a network of Iraqi agents in Western Europe. Eventually, he was expelled from France, a subject that still rankled years later.

Before the war, this reporter was already on a blacklist Iraqi officials maintained for journalists considered hostile to Iraq, mainly because of articles about the system of terror that sustained the power of Mr. Hussein that appeared from Baghdad in the closing months of last year.

For two months, in January and February, the Information Ministry blocked my visa requests. Eventually, through contacts in Amman, Jordan, I obtained a Foreign Ministry visa that allowed me to enter Iraq to cover the "peace movement," as represented by Western protesters then gathering in Baghdad. The visa came without Information Ministry approval.

On arrival in Baghdad, I sought a meeting with Mr. Ta'ee, the Information Ministry director. After three days, he met me in his office, and immediately referred to stories printed in The New York Times in previous months that chronicled the torture and killing in Iraq's jails. Mr. Ta'ee's opening remarks were remarkable. "You have written a great deal about killing in Iraq, and this is good," he said. "This is a shame for Iraq. But now America will be killing Iraqis. Will you write about that?" Assured that I would, he shook my hand, and said I would be issued the accreditation necessary to work in Iraq.

But other Information Ministry officials warned me that this was a ruse, and that I would henceforth be "under the control" of the intelligence agencies, not of the Information Ministry. A senior intelligence agent, who gave his name as Sa'ad Muthanna, was assigned as my minder. Mr. Ta'ee distanced himself, calling out, often in the presence of other Iraqi officials and Western reporters, what was either a black joke or a threat. "Ah," he would say, "the most dangerous man in Iraq!"

Personal Experience

None of this made much practical difference until eight days before the tanks of the Third Battalion of the First Marine Expeditionary Force drove from southern Baghdad to take control of the two hotels.

At midnight on April 1, without warning, a group of men led by Mr. Muthanna, identifying themselves as intelligence agents, broke into my room at the Palestine Hotel. The men, in suits and ties, at least one with a holstered pistol under his jacket, said they had known "for a long time" that I was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, that I was from that moment under arrest, and that a failure to "cooperate" would lead to more serious consequences.

"For you, it will be the end," Mr. Muthanna said. "Where we will take you, you will not return."

The men gathered up all the equipment belonging to me and to Tyler Hicks, a staff photographer of The New York Times, including four laptop computers, a satellite telephone, two cameras and a printer, and then demanded money, taking $6,000 from a plastic zip-lock bag. Then they left, ordering me to remain in my room until "more senior" intelligence men arrived.

From that moment until the arrival of the American tanks, I lived a clandestine existence, using darkened hotel stairwells in place of elevators, sleeping and working in other reporters' rooms.

The fact that the men never returned — and never broke into other rooms where they must have known I was hiding — suggested, in the end, that the break-in of April 1 was a shakedown. Some missing equipment turned up later in a room at the Palestine Hotel that had been abandoned by intelligence agents. The rest, excepting the two cameras, was returned by an Iraqi man with links to the mukhabarat, the principal intelligence agency, who led me to his home and handed the equipment over. The money remains missing.

To many Iraqis who heard of the experience, it was unexceptional, save for the fact that I suffered no physical harm. For years, Mr. Hussein's security agents had been breaking into Iraqis' homes, arresting people at will, and taking them away to the gulag of torture centers and prisons. Some emerged weeks, months, or years later, many of them disfigured, with eyes gouged out, hands and fingers mangled. But tens of thousands never returned, dying under torture, or being summarily executed.

The anguish of their families, lining up to wave photographs and shout names at American troops guarding the now abandoned interrogation centers and prisons, has been among the most distressing scenes since the fall of Mr. Hussein. For them, there is unlikely to be any of the catharsis that came at the Palestine Hotel in the 12 hours before the marines arrived.

Mr. Ta'ee, in the hours before midnight, toured the rooftop positions of Western television networks, demanding immediate cash payment, in dollars, of the exorbitant fees imposed by the ministry on all Western journalists. Offering no receipts, he gathered a hefty sum — estimated by some of the networks to be in excess of $200,000 — then disappeared.

One of his underlings, a Mr. Mohsen, the Information Ministry's press center director, known for his lugubrious manner, delayed his getaway until the following morning. His ambitions were set on the property of a group of Italian journalists who had driven into southern Iraq after the war began without visas. They were arrested, brought to Baghdad, and placed under guard in the Palestine Hotel, with their vehicles and all their equipment confiscated, along with the vehicles' keys.

Early on the morning of April 9, with the marines less than three miles from the hotel, one of the Italians spotted Mr. Mohsen loading booty into one of the confiscated vehicles. Thinking quickly, the Italian used his penknife to slash the vehicle's tires. Other Italian journalists described Mr. Mohsen fleeing on foot, up the Tigris embankment to the north, pursued by the men he hoped to rob. After a few hundred yards, exhausted, he stopped, turned to face his pursuers, and, as if to establish that he was done with Mr. Hussein and all his works, reached into his pocket for his Information Ministry identification card. After ripping it to shreds, he set off again, to what fate nobody knows.

Hole in a Wall at a Palace Yields Millions in U.S. Cash

Hole in a Wall at a Palace Yields Millions in U.S. Cash
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/international/worldspecial/20CASH.html

AT THE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, near Baghdad, Iraq, April 19 — A huge cache of United States currency that American soldiers found hidden in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces could be as much as $656 million, senior officials said today.

Lt. Col. Mack Huey, provost marshal of the Third Infantry Division, said the money was found when a sergeant went to look for a chain saw in a small building on the grounds of one of Mr. Hussein's palaces and was moved to the airport on Friday night.

The sergeant noticed a hole in a false wall and some metal containers were found on the other side. Checks at other nearby sites yielded a total of 164 metal containers.

All the boxes were riveted shut with the same lead, paper and plastic seals. They bore green tags indicating, according to military officials, that the money had originally been acquired from the Bank of Jordan. When six of the containers were selected at random and opened, each was found to contain $4 million in neatly stacked $100 bills.

"Based on the sample, the estimated value is about $650 million," Colonel Huey said. Some officials first estimated it might be about half that.

The funds are being held under guard at the airport. Two large pallets of the metal crates have been loaded onto large trucks inside a fenced-off compound protected by the military police and tracked vehicles with .50-caliber machine guns.

Only a close inspection of the bank tags and the armed guards standing astride the cargo suggest what may be inside. Otherwise, the boxes could be part of the mass of supplies that are being shipped into the airport as United States forces settle into Iraq.

American officials said the currency would be flown to a secure location for safekeeping and turned over to the new leadership of Iraq.

"Our intention is to safeguard these funds so they can be used in the rebuilding and reconstruction of Iraq to benefit the people," said Sgt. First Class David Dismukes, a spokesman for the allied land command.

American forces fought their way into Baghdad almost two weeks ago. The palace grounds where the funds were found is controlled by Second Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, which led the Army assault on the Iraqi capital.

The money had been placed in a small structure that American forces passed numerous times and would never have inspected had soldiers not been looking for a chainsaw and other tools to fix up their compound.

After the funds were discovered, the military police hauled away three truckloads of the containers on Friday night. Five of the boxes were opened and when Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, the commander of the Third Infantry Division came in today, he ordered that one more be picked at random and opened. As with the other opened boxes, it contained $4 million.

How Mr. Hussein's officials intended to use the money remains a mystery, but it may be that the funds, like the furniture and paintings from some of his palaces, were moved from potential targets and hidden in the expectation that Mr. Hussein would survive the war and retain power. Inside the opened boxes were orderly piles of United States $100 bills wrapped in plastic. The packs of cash bear the markings of the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Most of the bills are brand new, and the serial numbers run in sequence. But some of the bills appear to be used. There is paperwork inside indicating, officials said, that the funds were taken from the Bank of Iraq after their transfer from the Bank of Jordan.

"We have run across currency before, but nothing like this," said Master Sgt. David James, the operations noncommissioned officer for the provost marshal's office. "To see the way the people of Iraq live and then to see so much cash, it's insane."

These are not the only funds that the military police here are securing. They have $6.3 million more in cash that was seized when American forces stopped a bank robbery in Baghdad. That money is being added to the shipment of funds being flown from here tonight.

The official value given by officials for all the money being shipped is $661,893,800.

Bonds depicting Saddam Hussein's likeness were also discovered, but these are likely to be of interest primarily to war buffs and historians.

An Army finance officer, Maj. Rod King, came to the site today to make sure that the accounting was in order. "Most people don't think of finance on the battlefield," he said. "But there is a role in this conflict, and it appears we will continue to receive captured currency. We have not secured funds like this since World War II."

Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War

Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/21/international/worldspecial/21CHEM.html

WITH THE 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION, south of Baghdad, Iraq, April 20 — A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said.

They said the scientist led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons, which he claimed to have buried as evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs.

The scientist also told American weapons experts that Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990's, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda, the military officials said.

The Americans said the scientist told them that President Saddam Hussein's government had destroyed some stockpiles of deadly agents as early as the mid-1990's, transferred others to Syria, and had recently focused its efforts instead on research and development projects that are virtually impervious to detection by international inspectors, and even American forces on the ground combing through Iraq's giant weapons plants.

An American military team hunting for unconventional weapons in Iraq, the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, or MET Alpha, which found the scientist, declined to identify him, saying they feared he might be subject to reprisals. But they said that they considered him credible and that the material unearthed over the last three days at sites to which he led them had proved to be precursors for a toxic agent that is banned by chemical weapons treaties.

The officials' account of the scientist's assertions and the discovery of the buried material, which they described as the most important discovery to date in the hunt for illegal weapons, supports the Bush administration's charges that Iraq continued to develop those weapons and lied to the United Nations about it. Finding and destroying illegal weapons was a major justification for the war.

The officials' accounts also provided an explanation for why United States forces had not yet turned up banned weapons in Iraq. The failure to find such weapons has become a political issue in Washington.

Under the terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of MET Alpha, this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials.

Those officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted. They said they feared that such information could jeopardize the scientist's safety by identifying the part of the weapons program where he worked.

The MET Alpha team said it reported its findings to Washington after testing the buried material and checking the scientist's identity with experts in the United States. A report was sent to the White House on Friday, experts said.

Military spokesmen at the Pentagon and at Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, said they could not confirm that an Iraqi chemical weapons scientist was providing American forces with new information.

The scientist was found by a team headed by Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, the leader of MET Alpha, one of several teams charged with hunting for unconventional weapons throughout Iraq. Departing from his team's assigned mission, Mr. Gonzales and his team of specialists from the Defense Intelligence Agency tracked down the scientist on Thursday through a series of interviews and increasingly frantic site visits.

While this reporter could not interview the scientist, she was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he said that material from the arms program was buried.

Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection.

Military officials said the scientist told them that four days before President Bush gave Mr. Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war, Iraqi officials set fire to a warehouse where biological weapons research and development was conducted.

The officials quoted him as saying he had watched several months before the outbreak of the war as Iraqis buried chemical precursors and other sensitive material to conceal and preserve them for future use. The officials said the scientist showed them documents, samples, and other evidence of the program that he claimed to have stolen to prove that the program existed.

MET Alpha is one of several teams created earlier this year to hunt for unconventional weapons in Iraq. Supported by the 75th Exploitation Task Force, a field artillery brigade based in Fort Sill, Okla., the teams were charged with visiting some 150 top sites that intelligence agencies have identified as suspect.

But the Pentagon-led teams, which include specialists from several Pentagon agencies, have been hampered by a lack of resources and by geography.

Because the task force has two expensive, highly sophisticated, transportable labs in which chemical and germ samples can be analyzed quickly, it was kept at a safe distance from fighting at a desert camp in Kuwait, just across the Iraqi border.

Unable to move their task force closer to Baghdad, where most of the suspect sites and scientists who worked in them are situated, the mobile exploitation teams have had to rely on scarce helicopters to travel to suspect sites in the Baghdad area. Until recently, these were reserved mainly for soldiers going to battle. As a result, most of the teams had done almost no weapons hunting until the fighting had largely concluded.

Two weeks ago, MET Alpha was finally given a mission of inspecting barrels filled with chemicals that were buried on the outskirts of Al Muhawish, a small town south of Baghdad. A small team with little equipment and virtually no supplies traveled to the town for what was supposed to be a half-day survey. The barrels turned out to contain no chemical weapons agents.

But during the survey of that site, Maj. Brian Lynch, the chemical officer of the 101st Airborne Division, told MET Alpha members about a report of suspect containers buried in the area that fit the description of mobile labs.

Other officers mentioned that a man who said he was an Iraqi scientist had given troops a note about Iraq's chemical warfare program. No one had yet followed up the report, they said, because of the fighting and also because similar tips had failed to produce evidence of unconventional weapons.

The team, with vehicles and supplies from the 101st Airborne Division, went out on its own to survey other sites and pursue the tip about the buried containers and the scientist. After completing a lengthy survey of one installation, Mr. Gonzales and other team members from the Defense Intelligence Agency's Chemical Biological Intelligence Support Team decided to try to find the scientist.

Mr. Gonzales tracked down the scientist's note, which had never been formally analyzed and was still in a brigade headquarters, along with the scientist's address, military officials said.

The next morning, MET Alpha weapons experts found the scientist at home, along with some documents from the program and samples he had buried in his backyard and at other sites.

The scientist has told MET Alpha members that because Iraq's unconventional weapons programs were highly compartmented, he only had firsthand information about the chemical weapons sector in which he worked, team members said.

But he has given the Americans information about other unconventional weapons activities, they said, as well as information about Iraqi weapons cooperation with Syria, and with terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. It was not clear how the scientist knew of such a connection.

The potential of MET Alpha's work is "enormous," said Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.

"What they've discovered," he added, "could prove to be of incalculable value. Though much work must still be done to validate the information MET Alpha has uncovered, if it proves out it will clearly be one of the major discoveries of this operation, and it may be the major discovery."

After the War, New Stature for Rumsfeld

After the War, New Stature for Rumsfeld
By MATTHEW PURDY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/international/worldspecial/20RUMS.html

WASHINGTON, April 19 — It was not the heat of war that rattled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, but the lull beforehand. Meeting with advisers a couple of weeks before fighting began, Mr. Rumsfeld, usually supremely self-assured, suddenly insisted, "I need help."

The United Nations would not support the war. Turkey had shut its doors to coalition troops. His desire for quick military action against Iraq was stalled, and Mr. Rumsfeld was looking for ways to move it off the diplomatic dime. He found himself in a rare position — not in control. "It was beyond his realm," said someone who was present.

But once the United States pronounced diplomacy dead, and troops began moving and bombs falling, Mr. Rumsfeld's tension melted. "He was very relaxed, workmanlike," the adviser said. "He was on his terrain."

Iraq has been Mr. Rumsfeld's war. It was fought on his terms, and the victory has made him an unusually forceful defense secretary at a pivotal moment for the American military.

Waging two wars in less than two years has drawn Mr. Rumsfeld into the inner circle of a president he did not know well until after the 2000 election.

It is a striking turnabout for the 70-year-old defense secretary, whose assertive style fueled rumors before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that he was a short-timer. He now has fresh leverage to press his vision of a 21st century fighting machine prepared to use force not just in retaliation, but to head off perceived threats. His chin-out performance as war briefer to the world has made him the face of American strength — or, alternatively, American arrogance.

"We've never had a cabinet official, possibly with the exception of Kissinger, with that high a profile," said Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary to the first President Bush.

The swift victory in Iraq, with relatively low casualties, is seen by Mr. Rumsfeld's supporters as validation that future wars can be won with more covert operatives to gather intelligence, a more agile force, more sophisticated equipment and a willingness to strike first.

James R. Schlesinger, a defense secretary under President Richard M. Nixon and President Gerald R. Ford, said Iraq could "make pre-emption easier, the barrier lower." Although that might not translate into more preventive wars, Mr. Schlesinger said, "what has been demonstrated here is the great American advantage in technology that can be exploited on the field of battle."

Mr. Rumsfeld is likely to use it to sell a military overhaul, which has faced opposition in Congress and in parts of the military. Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who sometimes advises the defense secretary, said Mr. Rumsfeld had a rare opportunity to restructure the Pentagon. "He will be able to focus on the building with the authority unmatched by a secretary of defense since George Marshall," Mr. Gingrich said.

This heightened stature causes a kind of Rumsfeld-recoil among those who are offended by his tough, tart manner, or who question his significance.

Gary Hart, a former Democratic senator from Colorado and a military expert, said Mr. Rumsfeld, rather than being a trailblazer, had benefited from decades of work to modernize the military.

"He's on deck when the action is occurring," Mr. Hart said. He called Iraq an overlapping "of the last 20th century war and the first 21st century war," and said the Pentagon was confronting new threats by using "lighter, more mobile, more lethal" capabilities developed before Mr. Rumsfeld arrived.

Some fear the victory will embolden Mr. Rumsfeld and others in the administration to use force more willingly.

"You end up with short-term gains," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat who is the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "but it's no way to deal with the world."

In the world of Washington, military action has hardened Mr. Rumsfeld's bond with President Bush, their aides say. Mr. Rumsfeld has given President Bush war updates twice daily, and the Pentagon is overseeing postwar Iraq.

Mr. Rumsfeld has, seemingly, seized all of Washington's means of communication.

A stickler for precision, in bombs and words, Mr. Rumsfeld became his own chief spokesman at televised briefings, engaging in the dance with the news media that many top officials avoid.

An Unlikely Trajectory

Mr. Rumsfeld has come to personify the administration's stance of using offense as defense. It is a role his life prepared him for, from his youth as a wily lightweight wrestler, to a stint as a Navy pilot, to a career as a take-no-prisoners corporate executive.

Ten days ago, as videotape of rejoicing Iraqis rolled around the world, Mr. Rumsfeld told aides that he wanted to brief the press that day.

The images demanded narration and he would be the narrator. "We are seeing history unfold," he said.

His blunt delivery distinguishes his voice amid the capital's verbal effluent. In the White House view, a senior administration official said, Mr. Rumsfeld proved his character by assisting rescue workers at the Pentagon on 9/11. "That broke through with the public," the official said.

Richard Perle, a former Pentagon official and business consultant who also advises Mr. Rumsfeld, said, "More and more I recognize Donald Rumsfeld's point of view and arguments in what the president says."

Mr. Perle, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Schlesinger are among 30 members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, an unpaid panel that gives advice to Mr. Rumsfeld on a range of issues.

The last two years have been an unlikely trajectory for Mr. Rumsfeld, who was the nation's youngest defense secretary under President Ford in 1975, and returned after 24 years in corporate life to become the oldest defense secretary.

The Bush family has felt both edges of the Rumsfeld sword.

If President Bush respects Mr. Rumsfeld, his father appears to resent him. In his book "Looking Forward" (Doubleday, 1987), the first President George Bush called Mr. Rumsfeld "an able administrator and a skillful political in-fighter."

They both apparently had an eye on running for vice president with Mr. Ford in 1976. Kenneth Adelman, who worked for Mr. Rumsfeld in that administration, said Mr. Rumsfeld "would have loved to have been chosen."

Mr. Bush wrote that his own chances ended with his appointment to head the Central Intelligence Agency, a steppingstone away from politics.

The former president wrote that a colleague told him that Mr. Rumsfeld, then Mr. Ford's chief of staff, had arranged the appointment to sideline him. Mr. Rumsfeld "vehemently denied the rumor," Mr. Bush wrote, and "I accepted his word."

A Complex Profile

It is perhaps a measure of the public mood that Mr. Rumsfeld, who wears his aggressiveness like a medal, is a popular figure.

A Gallup poll taken this month showed that 71 percent of Americans who knew of Mr. Rumsfeld approved of his job performance. In Congress, there had been grumbling about Mr. Rumsfeld's imperiousness, but when he and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, updated members on the war 10 days ago, they received a "sustained, tumultuous standing ovation," one congressman said.

Applause drops off sharply overseas. A Lebanese television station has introduced its news report with a recording of Mr. Rumsfeld boasting of precision bombing overlaid with scenes of bleeding civilians. A recent cartoon in the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram showed Mr. Rumsfeld flashing a victory sign, while behind him a United States soldier was punched by the Iraqi resistance springing out of a jack-in-the-box.

Conservative Republicans view Mr. Rumsfeld as a hero, but his full profile is more complex.

Bob Dole, the former Senate majority leader, said that when he and Mr. Rumsfeld served in Congress in the 1960's, "you wouldn't put him in that far-right group." Mr. Rumsfeld left his seat representing Chicago's northern suburbs to head Nixon's Office of Economic Opportunity. Vin Weber, a former congressman who worked with Mr. Rumsfeld on Mr. Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, called the defense secretary a "moderate Republican who moved right."

Newton Minow, a Federal Communications Commission chairman under President John F. Kennedy and a friend of Mr. Rumsfeld's, was among the lawyers who advised the defense department on procedures for military tribunals after 9/11. Mr. Minow said the Pentagon's expansion of the rights of the defendants reflected Mr. Rumsfeld's politics.

"He's very conservative on foreign affairs," Mr. Minow said. "On certain issues — civil rights, civil liberties — he's liberal."

`He's Very Competitive'

Mr. Rumsfeld's position in the current foreign affairs debate is clear. Years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote his "Rules of Life," which included the aphorism "Weakness is provocative." It still seems to be his rule.

In 1998, Mr. Rumsfeld headed a Congressional commission assessing the ballistic missile threat. That work, a former aide said, impressed him with the potential speed of enemy action and convinced him "that we are going to be surprised."

Asked how Mr. Rumsfeld's view of military force changed after 9/11, one adviser said, "I don't think he would always think it has to be a last resort."

Testifying before Congress last September, Mr. Rumsfeld said that in the age of terrorism, "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" is too high a threshold for military intervention. "Expecting to find that standard of evidence, from thousands of miles away, and to do so before such a weapon has been used is not realistic," he said. This view is at the heart of the current debate. Mr. Hart said that after Iraq, among some hawks there might be "an inclination to say, `Who's next?' " He said the next several weeks could determine whether the United States will "bring democracy to the Arab world at the point of a bayonet."

Mr. Rumsfeld's verbal bayonet is always at the ready. He criticized European detractors of the war as "old Europe" and began the administration's drumbeat against Syria two weeks ago with veiled threats.

"You have to remember," said Mr. Gingrich, "he was a wrestling champion. He's very competitive."

The move on the mat that Mr. Rumsfeld perfected at Princeton University was the fireman's carry. "You get them by an arm and a leg and pull them down to the mat," said Brad Glass, a fellow Princeton wrestler. "That was his strongest move, and he took a lot of people down with it."

A Taste for Experimentation

There is a pattern to Mr. Rumsfeld's life. He takes over organizations and shakes them up — often hard.

After the Ford administration, Mr. Rumsfeld became president of a struggling pharmaceutical company, G. D. Searle. Two years later, he wrote to shareholders that there were new occupants in "roughly half of the top 65 management positions."

Mr. Rumsfeld shed 20 Searle businesses and reassigned or let go hundreds of people from administrative jobs. "I think he was totally convinced that the people who left, he was doing them a favor," said Ned Jannotta, the chairman of the William Blair investment banking firm, who advised Mr. Rumsfeld at Searle. Eventually, Searle's stock rose and the company was sold.

Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Mr. Rumsfeld's background in pharmaceuticals gave him a taste for experimentation, which led him to insist on building myriad options into the Iraq military plan. That allowed for launching ground troops before the air war, which contained an element of surprise, General Pace said.

His corporate experience, and his long friendship with Vice President Dick Cheney, also made him attractive to the Bush administration for the Pentagon job. Mr. Gingrich said Mr. Rumsfeld told President Bush, "If you want me to change the building, I'll change the building." But many experts say Mr. Rumsfeld has had less effect at the Pentagon than on the battlefield.

At a Pentagon briefing last October, Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, which monitors government procurement, said Mr. Rumsfeld "was obviously frustrated with the obstacles to his agenda."

Ms. Brian said that according to her notes from the meeting, Mr. Rumsfeld pointed out the opposition in Congress to his cancellation of the Crusader artillery system. "It was as if I shot a little old lady in the grocery store," she quoted Mr. Rumsfeld as saying.

Common wisdom says the war will strengthen Mr. Rumsfeld's hand with Congress. But Michael Vickers, the director of strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said similar speculation followed the Afghan war, although there were few changes in weapons systems. "People are now saying, `Look at this great victory in Iraq, now there are going to be all those changes,' " said Mr. Vickers, a former Army special forces officer. "I'm not so sure."

At the moment though, Mr. Rumsfeld seems well positioned everywhere — just as supporters expected and detractors feared.

Last Monday, he appeared at Michael Jordan's final home basketball game for the Washington Wizards and presented him with an American flag. The next morning, he was back at the White House.

"I don't know where you put him in the pecking order," Mr. Dole said, "but he's probably right where he wants to be."

China Cancels National May Day Vacations

China Admits Underreporting Its SARS Cases
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/21/science/21CHIN.html

BEIJING, April 20 — In a rare public admission of failure, if not deception, the Chinese government disclosed today that cases of a dangerous new respiratory disease were many times higher than previously reported, and stripped two top officials of their power.

The government also announced that the weeklong national May Day vacation had been reduced to one day to discourage people from traveling and spreading severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

With the dismissals of the health minister and mayor of Beijing, who only days ago were playing down the epidemic, and an unusual nationally televised live news conference by a senior health official, the government sought to repair its shredded credibility — at home and abroad — about the extent of the sometimes fatal virus.

Admitting to the existence of more than 200 previously undisclosed SARS patients in military hospitals, the official, Deputy Health Minister Gao Qiang, said that as of Friday Beijing had 339 confirmed cases of SARS and an additional 402 suspected cases.

Ten days ago, Health Minister Zhang Wenkang said there were only 22 confirmed SARS cases in Beijing. Last Wednesday, the World Health Organization caused a stir here by estimating that there could be as many as 100 to 200 cases.

Mr. Gao warned that a significant number of the suspected cases would be confirmed as SARS and said that, on Saturday alone, seven more cases were confirmed.

The new numbers bring the total of confirmed cases on mainland China as of Friday to 1,807 — the highest of any country. Of these, 79 have ended in death.

Seeking to explain the abrupt jump in official numbers, Mr. Gao said, "The Ministry of Health was not adequately prepared to deal with a sudden new health hazard." He added, "Accurate figures have not been reported to high authorities in a timely manner," though he later said this was a result primarily of incompetence rather than deceit.

The cancellation of the May Day vacation was another sign of the government's new resolve to combat the disease. International health experts have warned that the mass movement of holiday travelers — about 70 million last year — could spread SARS to far-flung parts of the country.

That a political as well as a medical drama was unfolding was apparent at the outset of the news conference, when Mr. Gao and a second deputy health minister appeared instead of the two previously advertised speakers — Health Minister Zhang and the Beijing mayor and deputy party chief, Meng Xuenong. The removal of these two from their Communist Party posts, the basis of their power, was announced afterwards by state news media. In recent years, such public humiliation of senior officials has been rare except in major corruption cases.

The unveiling of the markedly higher disease figures as well as the firings, perhaps the first of many, capped a tense week in which China's efforts to play down SARS, especially in Beijing, were assailed by experts from W.H.O. and questioned by medical whistle-blowers and local residents, who through word of mouth were hearing about far more patients than officials had acknowledged.

President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao spent the week seeking the high ground, describing SARS as a grave danger to society and sternly warning officials not to cover up any cases. Today, the high-profile dismissals were announced and Mr. Gao had the delicate task of explaining what he tried to describe as incompetence and mistakes in the city's public health system. He did not directly discuss reported evidence of deliberate deception at some hospitals.

How soon the confidence of a fearful and suspicious public can be regained — and what will be the impact on the fortunes of Mr. Hu, who took over as party leader last fall and president in March — were not yet clear this evening. Some analysts said the mounting crisis in public confidence was approaching levels that followed the military's massacre of unarmed demonstrators at Tiananmen Square.

"This is the first time since 1989 that the leaders and the system have come under such close global scrutiny and pressure," said Ding Xueliang, a Chinese politics expert at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Mr. Hu spoke out forcefully over the week and today, in effect engineering a rare and painful show of public contrition for which he may gain some public respect. But the official playing down of the situation here began in early March if not before. Officials have privately said that no one wanted to release bad news during the two-week parliamentary session last month, which certified Mr. Hu as president and and Mr. Wen as prime minister, though it is unclear who may have given orders to ignore SARS.

Although the health minister and the mayor lost their power for their handling of the crisis, their efforts to minimize the threat followed a well-worn Communist Party tradition. But that approach is less tenable in an era of global communications and an increasingly outspoken public, and the old strategy exploded in their faces.

Today, Mr. Gao repeatedly tried to heap blame on the Ministry of Health, and on institutional disarray in Beijing, where several jurisdictions — municipal, national, military and others — overlap but have not previously coordinated disease-control efforts. Starting today, Mr. Gao said, Beijing municipal health officials would oversee all anti-SARS measures throughout the city, including at military hospitals.

Chinese citizens are accustomed to dissembling by national or local officials, Mr. Ding said, but in this case, the disease has been felt everywhere as a personal threat, adding potency to the public suspicions.

"Over the weeks, as people saw how their government tried to manipulate information, SARS became a serious political problem for the government as well as a medical one," Mr. Ding said.

People who were approached this evening on the streets of Beijing and who were aware of the latest tack seemed initially more resigned than angry.

Xia Yan, a Chinese language instructor, said: "The initial underreporting is exactly what I would have expected. But firing the mayor and the health minister seems like a step in the right direction."

A laundry worker from a Beijing hotel, who declined to give her name, said, "No one had confidence in the government to begin with, but the handling of SARS has diminished it even more."

Of the 1,807 nationally confirmed cases of SARS, 1,304 were in the province of Guangdong, where the epidemic first appeared last fall and where early official secrecy has also been criticized. Today, Mr. Gao expressed concern about the spreading reports of SARS in several inland provinces while some outside experts said the case reports from distant provinces seemed too low.

A major source of error in previous Beijing reports was the exclusion of patients in several major hospitals that are run by the military, but that also have civilian patients. The recent allegation by a retired military surgeon that at least 100 SARS patients were in the military system and were being omitted from public reports was a major blow to the government's credibility. Today, Mr. Gao revealed that the discrepancy was even greater. He said that 235 of the 353 SARS patients who were in Beijing hospitals on Friday were in military facilities, a high proportion that no one has explained but could indicate that patients were placed there to avoid their inclusion in civilian disease reports.

Over the last week, Mr. Gao said, hundreds of officials were dispatched to all of Beijing's hospitals to check for possible SARS patients and to find out whether they had been reported. He urged the public to understand that the sudden increase in reported cases did not imply a surge in the disease, but rather that the official numbers were catching up to reality. "In days to come, more of the `suspect' cases will be confirmed," he added.

With more complete SARS data only now being compiled, Mr. Gao said, the trend in the epidemic is unclear, and he could not say whether the number of new cases reported each day was rising or falling.

"I trust that the situation will be much improved following a period of hard efforts," he said. "We will spend as much as it takes to contain this disease."

A World of Doughnuts and Spheres

A World of Doughnuts and Spheres
By GEORGE JOHNSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/weekinreview/20JOHN.html

Though you might not guess it from trying to read some of the research papers, the whole point of mathematics is to make things simpler. No one has taken this more seriously than the topologists, a rarefied breed of thinkers who insist that the world, however messy and diverse it may appear, is really made of just two basic shapes, the doughnut and the sphere.

Actually it's a bit more complicated than that — the doughnuts can have more than one hole, for example, and the topologists don't limit themselves to the usual three dimensions. Lately, they have been preoccupied with claims that a Russian mathematician has solved a famous century-old problem involving what might be called hyperdoughnuts and hyperspheres existing in an imaginary four-dimensional space.

Grappling with such slippery abstractions, Dr. Grigori Perelman of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in St. Petersburg says he has found a proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, which seeks to explain how some of these airy higher-dimensional objects behave. He outlined his approach earlier this month in a series of lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

If he is right, it will be the biggest mathematical news since 1995, when Dr. Andrew J. Wiles, a Princeton professor, proved Fermat's Last Theorem. Sweetening the victory, Dr. Perelman would be eligible for a $1 million prize, sponsored by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., for solving what it considers one of the seven most important problems of the millennium.

The money is almost beside the point. That grown men and women can make a living pondering such matters is a sign that civilization, as fragile as it may sometimes seem, remains intact.

"When you spend years closeted away with these things, they are as real to you as your family," said Dr. Michael Freedman, a mathematician at Microsoft who made his mark 22 years ago proving the Poincaré Conjecture for objects in five-dimensional space. Before that it had been proven for all dimensions beyond five.

"Ironically the higher dimensions turned out to be easier than the lower ones," Dr. Freedman said. They offered more wiggle room.

Topology is the study of that which remains constant as an object is bent, stretched or squeezed. A coffee cup with a looped handle, a bugle and a garden hose can each be transformed into a doughnut (more formally called a torus). Likewise, anything without a hole through it — a pencil, a brick, a piece of spaghetti (but not rigatoni, which is a very long and skinny doughnut) — can be molded into a sphere.

The topological cookbook does not permit tearing an object or joining two unconnected points. That would be cheating and would allow anything to be transformed into anything else. Try as you might, you cannot turn a sphere into a doughnut or a doughnut into a sphere. Topologically they are as immiscible as oil and water.

Having cataloged all the possible shapes in this realm, topologists have been reaching further. A sphere can be thought of as the three-dimensional world's version of a circle. So, going one level higher, what would be the four-dimensional equivalent of a sphere? And the five-dimensional version and so on?

Seeking to find some order, the French mathematician Henri Poincaré proposed almost a century ago that the world of four dimensions obeys a rule similar to the one that prevails down here: Things without a hole are just different squishings of some canonical four-dimensional answer to the sphere.

The technical name for this impossible object is the 3-sphere. Just as an ordinary sphere is a two-dimensional surface curving to form an enclosed object in three-dimensional space, a 3-sphere is a three-dimensional surface curving in on itself in four dimensions.

Every few years someone claims to have tamed this monster, coming forth with a proof of the conjecture that is subsequently torn to shreds. "It's a famous problem, and at any time maybe a dozen people are working on it," Dr. Freedman explained. "Statistically one or two of them will be convinced that they almost have it."

Hearing that a competitor may be on the verge of a breakthrough, "you work for four nights in a row, and then in some crazed state you claim that you've also proved it," he said.

Dr. Perelman has raised the stakes even higher, claiming not only to have finished off the Poincaré Conjecture but to have listed every possible kind of object that can exist in the four-dimensional world — 3-spheres and who knows what else, an atlas of an invisible neighboring realm. His approach is innovative enough to make many topologists optimistic that the answer is finally in sight.

If so, when the celebrations are over, the result may be met with a bit of melancholy.

"Say you're a graduate student and you're picking a subject that will become your career," Dr. Freedman said. Do you really want to pick an area whose main problem has just been solved?

"It's not a tragedy, because these people will go into other things," he said. "But it's a small sorrow for this particular branch of topology. You won't have the brilliant young people you have now."

Why TiVo Owners Can't Shut Up

Why TiVo Owners Can't Shut Up
By WARREN ST. JOHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/fashion/20TIVO.html

TO hear his friends tell it, Matt Smith is an easygoing guy. A recently engaged business consultant from Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Smith, 31, is a casual fan of golf, Nascar and Wake Forest basketball. But there is one subject his friends are loath to bring up around him, for fear it will provoke one of his prolonged sermons on its myriad virtues: the television gadget TiVo.

"I'd say he brings it up every time we're together," said Fran Radano, a college pal who has resisted Mr. Smith's efforts to convert him to TiVo. "There's usually someone in the group who's new to his preaching. It's highly annoying."

Not since the PalmPilot debuted in 1996 has a new electronic contraption sparked a cultlike following and so many zealous proselytizers. Type the phrase "TiVo changed my life" into Google, and you will summon an afternoon's worth of reading (including the observation that there are "as many TiVo-praise Web sites out there as there are hairs on Robin Williams"). Michael Powell, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, once called TiVo "God's machine." TiVo has around 700,000 subscribers — a tiny fraction of American television viewers, 70 percent of whom have never even heard of TiVo, according to Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. But, Mr. Bernoff said, TiVo's fans are a vocal minority.

"A cult implies a small group of enthusiasts and a large number of people who don't know what it is," he said. "That's exactly what we have here."

Mr. Smith, of course, is an enthusiast. He estimates he has talked 15 people into buying a TiVo — so far. "If I'm at a cocktail party and I've had more than two drinks," he said, "I'm going to try to sell you a TiVo."

For those who have not yet run into one of the Matt Smiths of the world — and you almost have to run into a Matt Smith to understand what TiVo does, because the company hasn't advertised since 2000 — TiVo is a personal video recorder, a kind of VCR on steroids that hooks up to a television and can record up to 80 hours of programming on a hard drive. Much of the media coverage about the device has focused on viewers' ability to skip commercials at the touch of a button. But TiVo worshipers say that is only part of the gadget's allure.

Press a button, and TiVo will record every episode of "Six Feet Under," or any other show, for a season. TiVo viewers can pause when the phone rings, or speed through the boring parts. By fast-forwarding through commercials and those dull conferences at the mound, a TiVo viewer can watch a baseball game in 40 minutes without missing a pitch. Sit-coms take about 22 minutes. "Saturday Night Live" and "60 Minutes" can be viewed back to back — on Monday.

Like early adopters of cellphones and the Internet, the first wave of users of personal video recorders swear that the devices have fundamentally altered their lives — changing domestic routines, making it possible to live a life free of commercial interruptions and even providing the satisfaction of a rebellion against network goliaths.

The devices also make it easier to watch a lot more TV. Studies by Next Research, a media consulting firm, show that TiVo users watch an average of five to six additional hours of television per week, the company said.

"You justify it because it's more efficient," said Elise Loehnen, 23, an editorial assistant at Lucky magazine. "It means you're late going to the gym and that when you're home, you're not reading."

Other devotees say that is not the point. "You control your TV, not the other way around," said Jeffrey Hawkins, a technology consultant in Oceanside, Calif. "So the amount of TV you watch is not even the question."

Mr. Hawkins said that among his friends, there is a rift between those who get it — in his view, TiVo owners — and those who don't. "It's like the abortion issue," he said.

Some TiVo owners characterize the object of their affections in grandiose terms.

"The most important way that TiVo has changed my life is that it's given me freedom," said Tom Wang, 32, a technology company employee in San Francisco, fresh off a two-hour "Simpsons" binge. Mr. Wang said he's responsible for at least five converts to TiVo. "I've gotten 20 or 30 on the intended list," he said.

But freedom, as the saying goes, comes at a price. In the case of TiVo, that price is around $250 for a model with a hard drive capable of storing 40 hours of programs, or $350 for an 80-hour machine. After that, customers pay a $12.95 monthly fee, or a one-time lifetime charge of $250 for online access to TiVo's computer servers. The systems require cable or satellite television and a phone line the system uses to download scheduling information.

Another cost: some privacy. Personal video recorders know what viewers watch, and the service providers use that information to send targeted advertising their way. In the case of TiVo, the system recommends programs based on its users' individual viewing habits. Watch "The Simpsons" and "Seinfeld," for example, and the system might automatically record the movie "This Is Spinal Tap" on your machine.

TiVo's competitors include ReplayTV, and Echostar's DishPVR; all promise to protect the anonymity of their users and say they will not share personal information with third parties without customers' consent. But some privacy groups have expressed concern.

Hard-core TiVo users seem to find the privacy debate tedious.

"I could care less whether people know what I'm watching or not," said Ms. Loehnen's brother, Ben, 25, an editorial assistant in Manhattan with his own TiVo. Mr. Loehnen said that TiVo's power to recommend shows was part of the product's charm. "I walk through the door, put down the mail, see what TiVo taped and then I plan my evening from there," he said. "You come home every night and think `What did TiVo do today?' It's like a pet."

Like the telephone and the television before it, TiVo and similar gadgets seem certain to alter established domestic routines. Couples and roommates with TiVo now find themselves squabbling not over network schedules, but over memory space on the devices' hard drives.

Ms. Loehnen, the editorial assistant at Lucky, said that her roommates' affinity for "Seinfeld" frequently means there's no room to record her favorite, "Dawson's Creek." TiVo, she said, has turned their downtown Manhattan apartment into a "war field."

Randall Rothenberg, a columnist for Advertising Age and an executive at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, said having TiVo has changed the television hour debates with his wife. "The spousal arguments are no longer about `I want to watch this on TV' or `I want to watch that,' " he said. "It's `you've had this thing TiVoed for six months and you haven't watched it yet. Can we delete it now?' "

Mr. Rothenberg said that subscribing to TiVo had had an unintended effect. By skipping ads and filling his viewing time with documentaries and shows about gardening rather than the regularly scheduled fare, he took himself "outside of culture," he said. When friends joked about the ubiquitous Budweiser "Wazzup?" advertising campaign a couple of years back, Mr. Rothenberg said, he had no idea what they were talking about.

He compared talking to non-TiVo users with the experience of Brendan Fraser's character in "Blast From the Past," who emerges after 35 years in an underground bomb shelter. On the other hand, Mr. Rothenberg said, TiVo viewers tend to find each other.

"You end up having these odd conversations with people; `I was watching "Curb Appeal" on HGTV and there was an interesting thing about this shrub,' " he said. "And the person will say, `Yeah, I TiVoed that, too.' "

So why do TiVo owners feel the need to tell everyone about it? Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University's interactive telecommunications program, said it might have to do with the nature of the medium. "People watch a lot of TV, so anything that has an even slightly positive effect on it is disproportionately important to peoples' lives," he said.

There's another theory — that there is something thrilling about being unshackled, at least partly, from a device that for years has had people at its mercy. Skipping ads and thumbing your nose at the scheduling structure imposed by corporate broadcasters feels, if not exactly revolutionary, at least titillating.

"There seems to be something slightly illicit about it," said Michael Crowley, an associate editor at The New Republic who has written about his relationship with his TiVo. "You feel like you're working the system. You're in on a racket, and a racket is something you like to brag about."

But how successful a racket is it, considering that TiVo owners watch more TV, spend more money and give up more details of their private lives to companies than those without TiVo? It's not a question TiVo users are quick to posit themselves, but in the brief blips between reruns of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," at least some can spot the paradox.

Mr. Hawkins, the technology consultant, remains a TiVo evangelist, but his devotion is not entirely blind. "The freedom that Tivo allows you may be a bit more fleeting when you find yourself glued to the TV for 12 hours straight watching a `Saved by the Bell'-`Fresh Prince of Bel Air' marathon," he said.