Virus Explosion Delays Some EFL Mail

Virus Explosion Delays Some EFL Mail
August 20, 2003
http://alum.mit.edu/ne/noteworthy/security-alert.html

As yet another worm deluges the Internet, one anti-virus software manufacturer has called this the "worst virus week ever."

The Alumni Network Services team is aware of problems adversely affecting delivery of some email sent through the Email Forwarding for Life (EFL) service. Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are reportedly overwhelmed due to recent virus outbreaks and a continued upsurge in spam. The delays are an indirect result of this inundation. We are working with MIT's senior network managers to alleviate the situation as quickly as possible and we ask for your patience and understanding.

Many ISPs are accepting email from MIT at a very slow rate. Messages that aren't accepted are returned to us and we attempt delivery again. Because of the back-up, such emails are then sent to the end of the queue resulting in even longer than usual delays.

MIT's network managers are attempting to work with major ISPs to resolve the problems.

Please understand that we are doing the best we can to resolve the situation as quickly as possible. We will keep you informed of our progress.

Security Alert: Email Hoax and Virus Attachment
August 5, 2003

Several alumni are reporting spam purportedly sent by "admin@alum.mit.edu" to their Email Forwarding for Life (EFL) accounts claiming that their alum.mit.edu e-mail address is about to expire. This email is a hoax and its attachment contains a virus affecting Windows users. Please do not open the attachment, but delete it at once!

The mass-mailer worm called W32/Mimail appeared late last week. Once opened, the worm replicates by sending itself to all email addresses it finds on the recipient's computer. Please update your anti-virus software and install the appropriate Windows security updates. More information about the virus is available from Wired News or the BBC.

The Alumni Association reminds users that EFL email accounts, available as part of the Infinite Connection™ never expire. Any official email from the Association would be signed by a staff person and the Association never sends bulk email with attachments.

The virus does not affect users of other operating systems, including Macintosh, Linux, and UNIX.

As Ex-Radical Nears Release, Old Wounds Are Reopened

As Ex-Radical Nears Release, Old Wounds Are Reopened
By LYDIA POLGREEN and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/22/nyregion/22CAST.html

Brent Newbury was just 14, playing football on the fields at Nyack High School, when two police officers and a security guard were killed in a shootout after a group of radicals robbed a Brink's armored car in 1981. It had a profound effect on him: He decided to become a police officer.

Nine years later when he joined the Nyack Police Department, home to the two slain officers, one of the four rooms in the station was devoted entirely to storing evidence in the case, Mr. Newbury said.

"That's how important it was," he said. "We thought of the officers who were killed as heroes. For every police officer in this county, this was the main concern for us, this terrible tragedy."

More than 20 years after the three men were killed, Kathy Boudin, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for her role in the killings, stands close to freedom after two state parole commissioners voted on Wednesday to grant her parole. For her supporters it was cause for jubilation. For others like Mr. Newbury, it brought back all the pain of the past. But on both sides the intense emotions were a reminder just how vivid the reverberations from the case — and the era it represented — still are.

"The cultural conflict this case represents is always just somewhere beneath the skin," said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University who has written about the social upheavals of the 1960's, which gave birth to the radical movements that inspired Ms. Boudin and the others who participated in the robbery.

Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN) was preparing to leave prison after serving 22 years of a 20-years-to-life sentence for her role in the robbery that led to the deaths of Sgt. Edward O'Grady, Officer Waverly Brown and Peter Paige, a Brink's guard. Four others, including David J. Gilbert, the father of Ms. Boudin's son, Chesa, (CHAY-sa) 23, were found guilty of murder. Mr. Gilbert is serving 75 years to life in Attica.

There remained one possible, though unlikely, roadblock to her release. A spokesman for the State Division of Parole said that the decision could be reversed at a "recision hearing" at the request of one of the 19 members of the parole board.

Such a move would require new information the board should have heard, and experts on parole said that such hearings were unusual. The spokesman for the parole division, Thomas P. Grant, said yesterday that no one on the board had indicated that such a move was being considered. He said a decision on any possible recision hearing would probably come today.

Absent that, Ms. Boudin, 60, will leave prison by Oct. 1, possibly within weeks or even days. But passions engendered by the case are unlikely to die down.

"Kathy's case has taken on this larger than life quality," said Ann Jacobs, executive director of the Women's Prison Association, who wrote to the parole board in support of Ms. Boudin's release. "She is a screen on which so many of society's problems are projected. It often gets lost that she is just a person, not a symbol."

As Ms. Boudin served her sentence over the past two decades, a small army rose up on both sides of her case. To these people — those who sought her release, noting her numerous good works in prison, or those who opposed it, citing the heinous nature of the crime — the question of whether she should be paroled became loaded with all the drama of the 60's, fueled by the tensions between redemption and vengeance.

On one side are those who held her up as an example of the possibility of transformation and a model for why parole exists. There are also those who view her crime through the lens of the 1960's, even though it was committed in 1981, and excuse it at least partly as the result of a difficult time in history. "She is the perfect parolee," Mr. Gitlin said. "She represents the possibility for redemption. No doubt some people have loaded onto her a certain idea about what the 60's was and what can be salvaged from it. To say that Kathy Boudin can be redeemed is to say the 60's were worthy."

And on the other side, members of the victims' families and critics of parole hold Ms. Boudin up as a symbol of the moral corruption of the 1960's and a living example that some crimes cannot be atoned for, no matter how repentant the criminal. Opponents of her parole often note her wealthy background as the daughter of a prominent lawyer, in contrast to the police officers and security guard killed in the robbery.

"This crime was so horrific," said Michael E. Bongiorno, the district attorney for Rockland County, where the crime took place. "Just because you have been a choirboy in prison doesn't mean you should be paroled no matter how awful the crime. This case is a perfect example of that."

Ms. Boudin became the subject of what opponents of her release describe as a slick, well-managed public relations campaign that focused on her work with mothers in prison and inmates with AIDS but played down or distorted her role in the robbery. Wealthy benefactors and celebrities advocated for her release, and her supporters put together a Web site, kathyboudin.com, that featured letters urging her release.

The parole board will decide whether it will hold a recision hearing, Mr. Grant said, after reviewing hundreds of pages in Ms. Boudin's files. Asked what changed between May, when Ms. Boudin was denied parole by different members of the board, and this week, when her parole was approved, Mr. Grant said: "It does not look like anything did." He said the transcript of the hearing on Wednesday, which he expected to be released today, would "kind of reveal" what changed between May and August.

Gov. George E. Pataki, who appointed all but one of the current parole board members, said at an appearance in Syracuse yesterday that he had been advised not to comment until the process was complete. In 2001, a Pataki administration official said that the governor had expressed support for the parole board's decision at the time to deny Ms. Boudin parole.

Ms. Boudin's son, Chesa, was driving across Nebraska with his adoptive parents when he received a telephone call from an old family friend, telling him that his mother had been paroled after 22 years in prison.

Yesterday, Mr. Boudin's 23rd birthday, his mother called him from the Bedford Hills Correctional Center to wish him a happy birthday and celebrate the news. "It's quite a birthday present," said Mr. Boudin, who recently graduated from Yale and has been awarded a Rhodes scholarship. "It's been a process of birth and rebirth for the family."

"It's still sort of overwhelming, the joy and justice of a person who has served her time," he said in a telephone interview from his Chicago home yesterday.

Then he quickly added that he and his mother were looking forward to beginning "the healing process" with the families of the men killed in 1981.

He said the news of his mother's pending release tapped a welter of emotions, from extreme joy to vague qualms about getting to know her as a free person, to the weight of his father's unfinished sentence. "He won't be eligible for parole until he's 112 years old," Mr. Boudin said.

Mr. Boudin has been raised in Chicago by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who along with Ms. Boudin were members of the 1960's radical group Weather Underground. Mr. Boudin said he could not wait to see his mother walk out of prison but also expressed sympathy for the families of the men killed. He said he hoped his mother could reach some sort of peace with them.

"I also was a victim of that crime," he said. "I know how important it was for me to forgive."

Correction: Aug. 27, 2003, Wednesday

An article on Friday about the parole of Kathy Boudin, a former member of the Weather Underground imprisoned for her role in a fatal robbery, misstated the views of Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University professor and former antiwar activist. He said she was a good candidate for parole; he was not among those who said her crimes could be excused partly as a result of a difficult time in history.

A Chinese Robin Hood Runs Afoul of Beijing

A Chinese Robin Hood Runs Afoul of Beijing
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/international/asia/24CHIN.html

BEIJING, Aug. 23 — The arrest of a rural businessman who antagonized government officials but earned a loyal following among peasants has created a sensation in Beijing, where influential scholars say he showed how to improve life in the vast, backward Chinese countryside.

The businessman, a bold and politically artless onetime farmer named Sun Dawu, is in jail awaiting trial in Hebei Province in northeastern China on charges that he ran an illegal credit cooperative and lured millions of dollars in deposits away from state banks.

In opinion columns and popular Web sites, though, liberal-leaning intellectuals have portrayed Mr. Sun as a modern Robin Hood. They say he battled state finance and trade cartels that they view as draining the savings of China's 800 million peasants to support urban development.

Lawyers for Mr. Sun and supporters in Beijing's academic circles are pressing the government to scrap or define more clearly the scope of the law Mr. Sun is accused of breaking. The loosely worded article gives the authorities broad discretion to charge businessmen who fall out of favor with a catch-all crime called illegal fund-raising.

"It's well worth considering what this case is really about," said Jiang Ping, the former president of the Chinese University of Politics and Law and one of China's most prominent legal experts. "Perhaps the government is violating the law and has wrongly accused him. If this isn't handled properly, it will greatly affect rural economic development."

The support for Mr. Sun is part of a broader effort to bring about gradual political change by pressing top leaders to apply their sometimes high-profile promises to real situations. Even the state-controlled press increasingly highlights individual examples of abuse by local governments in the provinces, prodding the authorities to make good on pledges to respect the rule of law.

Civic pressure may have had an effect on the way officials handled another recent case, over the beating death of a migrant worker held in police custody in Guangdong Province. After a trial that attracted sustained attention in June, the central government abolished a law that gave the police power to treat rural migrants as vagrants who could be detained at will.

Mr. Sun's supporters include many of the same people who campaigned to have the migrant law overturned. They say they hope the central government will rewrite finance regulations to give businessmen more freedom to raise money and to limit the influence of state banks and local officials.

"One of the biggest problems for peasants is that local officials decide who gets money and who doesn't," said Xu Zhiyong, a law professor at Telecommunications University in Beijing and a legal adviser to Mr. Sun. "This is about taking the politics out of finance."

Mr. Sun, who is 50, grew up in a farm family. He joined the army and then worked at the state-owned Agricultural Bank of China. In 1985 he went into business, leasing wasteland and using it to raise chickens and pigs. His company, called Dawu Farm and Husbandry Group, has since expanded into food processing, cattle breeding and grape growing.

He initially had cordial relations with the authorities, who appointed him to the local branch of the People's Congress, the Communist Party-controlled legislature.

But even as Dawu Group grew to employ 1,500 people in Xushui County, a poor area, he had trouble raising money from state-run banks. Typically they lend only to larger companies that have state ownership or to entrepreneurs who give favors to bank officers. Mr. Sun arranged one loan in 1994, but was repeatedly denied credit in subsequent years, state-run newspapers reported.

To raise money, Mr. Sun began offering banking services to his own workers. He accepted their deposits, paying interest rates slightly above what state banks offered.

The cooperative became so popular that local farmers who did not work for Dawu also made deposits. Mr. Sun eventually collected about $22 million from 4,600 area households, official newspapers said.

He has not been accused of fraud and apparently kept his workers and neighbors happy, these reports said. He promoted a quasi-collectivist philosophy, steering some company profits into roads and schools. He also challenged the state's grain-trading monopoly by buying wheat and corn from farmers at relatively high prices and selling processed foods in the free market.

But relations with officials deteriorated. Mr. Sun had not been shy in making charges about his difficulties getting loans. He publicly accused bankers of lending only to people who bribed them, which he said he refused to do.

At a well-attended seminar in Beijing earlier this year, he acknowledged making an exception. In 2000, he said, when he was short of capital to expand his vineyard, he gave the boss of a state-run bank a $1,200 bribe. But Mr. Sun said the boss considered the amount a pittance and still declined to make him a loan. So, enraged, he demanded his money back.

There were other strains. He was slapped with a large tax bill, which he fought in court. He also sued the land bureau. He lost his seat in the People's Congress.

As troubles mounted, Mr. Sun cultivated ties to a circle of scholars who study rural issues. He made speeches at top universities, arguing passionately that the nation's financial system effectively subsidized rich coastal cities at the expense of the interior. He posted these polemics on his company's Web site.

Though some of his speeches were detached and analytical, he also tested the limits of debate. He once said the Communist Party presided over a "fake republic."

"Our national political focus is to develop the cities," he said in a speech at Beijing University this year. "But what about the peasants? You could see rural problems becoming urban problems, and then the country will fall into chaos."

The Hebei provincial authorities detained Mr. Sun in late June and charged him with illegal fund-raising last month. His son continues to run his company, though many of its workers have been laid off and the bank was dissolved.

Mr. Xu, Mr. Jiang and others who have rallied to Mr. Sun's defense say they hope the central government will revise the legal provision used to charge him, which they argue theoretically forbids all borrowing and lending outside official channels.

"The problem with the current law is that it is so vague it gives undue power to local officials," Mr. Xu said. "Nobody will arrest you for borrowing money from one or two people, but you could get in trouble if you borrow from 100. The law does not draw a line."

More broadly, some rural experts say Mr. Sun showed how poor farm areas could prosper if given greater sway over financing. Though Mr. Sun's outspokenness makes him a problematic figure, they say China's leaders could still embrace his model to address endemic poverty.

Li Zhi, a longtime rural activist and writer who asked to be identified by his pen name, said that if the government let Mr. Sun off lightly, it could provide the biggest boon to rural development since the late 1970's. It was then that Deng Xiaoping dismantled agricultural communes and returned land to the people who farmed it.

"There is an opportunity here for a breakthrough," Mr. Li said. "On the other hand, if he gets a harsh sentence, the implications for farmers are dire."

China's Growth Creates a Boom for Cargo Ships

China's Growth Creates a Boom for Cargo Ships
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/28/business/worldbusiness/28SHIP.html

HONG KONG, Aug. 27 — Less than two years after many of the world's cargo ships lay idle and were worth no more than the scrap value of their steel, shipping lines around the world are enjoying one of their most profitable booms ever, and they have the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy to thank for it.

China has become a ship line executive's dream. It is importing huge and growing quantities of oil, iron ore, coal and other bulky raw materials from the Persian Gulf, Australia, Brazil and Canada, and exporting rising quantities of furniture, consumer electronics, toys and other finished goods to American and European markets.

Shipowners and operators essentially measure their living by the tons of cargo they haul multiplied by the miles they carry it. By providing big cargoes that have to travel long distances, China offers a bonanza of ton-miles, as this measure is known, keeping ships so busy around the world that for some kinds of vessels on some routes, daily charter rates have tripled in the last year.

"Now is one of the best times ever seen" in the shipping industry, said K. H. Koo, chairman of the TCC Group, a big Hong Kong shipping company. "China is the main thing that is helping the shipping industry."

The China shipping boom is driving up freight rates all over the world, not just on Pacific Ocean routes. For companies that need to ship their products by sea, the boom means higher costs. For consumers, though, there will probably not be any discernible effect on price tags in stores, because sea shipping is generally a tiny part of the cost of most goods.

Still, at a time of rising trade friction between China and the United States, the newfound prosperity of ship lines illustrates how a big global industry can become dependent on the Chinese economy in just a few years.

Nor are ships the only example. China is now the world's largest market for cellphones and color television sets, and the second largest for personal computers after the United States. Some technology stocks now trade as much on how the companies' sales are faring in China as in the United States.

Because computers and communications are the biggest users of computer chips, Intel announced today that it would build a $200 million semiconductor assembly and testing factory in China. "It is the fastest-growing market for us," Craig R. Barrett, Intel's chief executive, said in a telephone interview.

Yet a growing dependence on the Chinese market is a two-edged sword, making more industries susceptible to China's sometimes vertiginous economic booms and busts. Now that the Chinese central bank has begun trying to slow the economy gently without pushing it into recession, and trade and currency friction with the United States is becoming evident, few industries are as vulnerable as shipping.

With the development of China as the world's factory, its ports have become the biggest departure points for container ships, which carry finished goods like furniture and toys in standardized 40-foot-long steel boxes stacked high on their decks. The ports in the Pearl River delta of southern China now handle almost as many containers a year as all the ports in the United States combined.

Chinese ports are also the fastest-growing destinations for dry-bulk carriers — freighters that haul commodities like coal and iron ore — and for tankers. Though the United States still imports more oil by ship than China does, the Chinese reliance on Middle East oil is growing. As the output from its own aging oil fields has stagnated, the energy to sustain China's 8 percent annual economic growth has had to come from abroad.

But some ship line executives are nervous about how dependent their industry has become on the health of Chinese industries like construction and steel making. "If China stopped importing iron ore, the market for dry carriers would drop like a stone," warned George Chao, chairman of Wah Kwong Shipping Holdings, also of Hong Kong.

Low interest rates have fed a construction boom in China, contributing to a doubling of China's enormous steel output in the last four years, with many more mills still being built. Chinese mines have been unable to keep up with the demand for iron ore to be melted into steel, so China has tripled its iron ore imports since 1999.

These imports — nearly 150 million tons this year, enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome to the roof 30 times — come by sea, much of it from Australia's giant iron mines. But not even they have been able to expand output fast enough to meet all of China's needs, so the mills are now importing iron ore from Brazil, a monthlong voyage in each direction.

Long trips are keeping so many dry-bulk freighters busy that the cost to charter one from Brazil to China has soared to $46,000 a day, from $15,000 a day just last year, according to Tim Huxley, managing director of Clarkson Asia, a big ship broker. Daily rates for container ships have also risen sharply, he said.

Charter rates were briefly this high in 2000, when Western economies were at the peak of long-term expansion, especially in the United States. This time, though, China's dynamism has single-handedly driven up shipping rates even though the American economy is only starting to show signs of renewed vigor and European economies are struggling.

Tanker charter rates depend heavily on oil prices and on political stability in the Middle East; the usual late summer lull in shipments and the end of large-scale ground combat in Iraq have recently brought rates down. But in general, growing demand from China has greatly improved the long-term market for tankers, Mr. Huxley said.

Dry-bulk carrier rates have soared so high this year that they are starting to distort world markets for some commodities. A ton of coal costs less to mine in Australia than in China, but power plants in Japan and South Korea increasingly rely on Chinese coal because getting it requires only a three-day voyage, compared with 14 days from the Cairns, Australia, region, according to William Randall, the coal-shipping director at the Noble Group, a big shipping and logistics company here.

Likewise, the cost of sending a 40-foot container from Asia to the United States or Europe — already much more expensive than going the opposite way — has climbed an additional 20 to 30 percent in the last year, depending on the route, as Chinese exporters clamor for deck space.

"Everything comes back to how China is growing," said Steen B. Lund, the vice president for China at Maersk Sealand, a unit of A. P. Moller-Maersk of Denmark, the world's largest shipping company.

The growth of the Asian shipping market is also changing the ownership of the global fleet of freighters and tankers. While Greek, Italian, Belgian, Danish, German and Norwegian companies remain important and have many vessels in service on Pacific routes, Asian shipping lines now own 40 percent of the world's fleet. Events like the annual meeting of the Asian Shipowners Forum, which ended here today, have become increasingly important.

The fat profits coursing through the industry for the first time in nearly a decade are also starting to draw investment bankers, as shipowners see room for mergers and acquisitions. "There's definitely some interest in consolidating some of the routes" between ports, said Robert A. Morrice, chairman and chief executive of Barclays Capital Asia.

Previous shipping industry booms have tended to end quickly, with executives glutting the market by ordering too many new vessels. But the world's shipyards were already booked solid through 2005 before the latest China boom began, because of the need for new double-hull tankers to replace single-hull vessels, which are being banned for safety and environmental reasons.

The lack of shipyard capacity to build more dry-bulk carriers and container ships means that rates in these categories could stay high into 2005, said Rajaish Bajpaee, president and group managing director of the Eurasia Group, the Asian arm of the Bernhard Schulte Group, a privately held German shipping company that is among the world's largest.

Many shipping lines are privately owned and do not release sales or profit figures. But publicly traded lines have recently reported that their profits leaped in the first half of the year, especially in Asia.

The shipping lines posting improved results included two late last week, Neptune Orient Lines in Singapore and Orient Overseas International here, as well as Sinotrans in Beijing on Monday, and China Shipping Development and A .P. Moller-Maersk on Tuesday.

Despite the risks of financial troubles or trade wars involving China, most shipping executives seem to believe that, for now, trade with the mainland has brought them the prosperity that so long eluded them. "The times are good," Mr. Bajpaee said, "as they have not been in a long time."

In Reversal, U.S. Nears Deal on Drugs for Poor Countries

In Reversal, U.S. Nears Deal on Drugs for Poor Countries
By ELIZABETH BECKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/28/business/28TRAD.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 — The United States said today that it was close to accepting an agreement, which it had rejected last December, to help poor nations buy generic medicines through exemptions from trade rules.

The reversal by Washington — meant to improve the access of millions of people in those countries to expensive patented medicines for AIDS and other diseases — could enhance the Bush administration's international standing and prevent the collapse of global trade talks to be held in Mexico next month.

After weeks of intensive negotiations, the United States won assurances that countries would not take advantage of the arrangement to increase exports of generic drugs to nations that are not poor and do not have a medical emergency, diplomats involved in the discussions said.

They said an agreement could come as soon as Thursday.

These global public health decisions are being made by the World Trade Organization because it protects intellectual property rights, including the patents held by pharmaceutical companies.

For years, poor countries have used moral and political arguments, saying concerns about patent protection paled in comparison with the needs of millions of poor people for advanced medicines that could save their lives.

Peter Allgeier, the deputy United States trade representative, said today in a telephone conference call from Geneva that he hoped to reach an agreement before the formal meeting of the World Trade Organization began in Cancún, Mexico.

"It is possible," Mr. Allgeier said. "We are still working very intensively on that."

Mr. Allgeier refused to discuss details. "It is so sensitive," he added.

But Faizel Ismail, the permanent representative of South Africa to the World Trade Organization, who was part of the private negotiations, said the United States accepted the deal because of new assurances that it would not be abused by the countries in need of generic drugs to fight diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

"We were willing to reach out to the American pharmaceutical industry and find a way of including them in the consensus without sacrificing the substance of the agreement," Mr. Ismail said in a telephone interview from Geneva.

Developing nations had pinned their hopes on such an agreement. The European Union and Switzerland, the other big producers of medicines, signed off on a deal last December to allow poor nations to buy generic medicines to fight these diseases.

But the United States, with the strong approval of the American pharmaceutical industry, blocked the deal by exercising the veto that every member nation possesses at the World Trade Organization.

That move upended the timetable for the current round of trade negotiations that is dedicated to helping developing nations, and put the United States in the embarrassing position of being the lone nation opposing a solution to make vital drugs affordable for the poorest people on earth.

Poor countries already have the right to manufacture copycat versions of brand-name medicines in the event of a health emergency by issuing what is called a compulsory license. But the poorest nations have no factories to produce such medicine. The pending trade agreement solves that problem by allowing these countries to import the generic drugs from developing nations like Brazil or India under the compulsory license.

Jeff Trewhitt, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry group for research-based American pharmaceutical companies, said there would be no comment until a final deal was reached. But officials who have met with American pharmaceutical executives said that the companies would not lobby against the agreement.

Ambassador Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, was credited today by several officials with persuading the American pharmaceutical industry, as well as the White House, that a compromise had to be reached before the trade talks start on Sept. 10.

In the last few days, the United States struck an accord with a crucial group of developing countries — including Brazil and India, which are large producers of generic drugs, and South Africa and Kenya — raising the odds for a full agreement by the 146 members of the trade organization.

In exchange for these new assurances sought by the pharmaceutical industry, the United States dropped its demand that the agreement cover only a few diseases and that it limit the number of countries eligible to import the generic drugs, several diplomats said.

Instead, the United States has successfully lobbied more than 20 developed nations to agree to voluntarily opt out of using this agreement to import generic medicines, several officials said.

"This is better than what the United States originally wanted and doesn't limit the scope of diseases," said Nelson Ndirangu, a member of the Kenya delegation to the World Trade Organization.

But several nongovernmental organizations said the compromise did not go far enough to ensure that generic versions of medicine could be produced and exported wherever they were needed.

"We are saying that promoting public health and pursuing commercial objectives are not contradictory, and that we need a highly competitive market to keep prices down," said Ellen 't Hoen, director of the campaign for access to essential medicines for Doctors Without Borders, in a telephone interview from Paris.

The compromise was offered today at a committee meeting in Geneva and was greeted, officials said, with nearly unanimous approval.

Several ambassadors said they would consult with their governments before the Thursday meetings. Representatives from the Philippines and Argentina offered objections that officials said they hoped could be answered by the time the issue was brought before the trade organization on Thursday.

At Ease in Vietnam, Asia's New Culinary Star

At Ease in Vietnam, Asia's New Culinary Star
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/27/dining/27VIET.html

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- IT is enough to daunt all but the most gluttonous of gastronomes.

Right by the door stand piles of rice from several different provinces, some with large grains, some with small grains, some darker, some lighter, each with a wholly different aroma. Down the aisle are banks of vividly green herbs and vegetables, with their hyperintense Asian scents and tastes, stunningly fresh despite the lack of refrigeration because they arrive direct from their growers in the middle of the night.

Many of the vegetables are Asian natives — bumpy bitter melons, lotus stems, long beans, banana flowers, luffa squashes and pungent Chinese celery. But others are European transplants — delicacies like baby cress, escarole, miniature artichokes and exquisite asparagus (which the Vietnamese called "French bamboo" when French colonial officials first imported it).

Over there is a cauliflower the size of a basketball. Over here are mounds of delectable, unfamiliar fruit — enormous knobby durians, which smell like rotting cheese but taste like rich custard, and spiny little soursops, which yield a sweet-and-tart juice that makes an unforgettable sorbet, and horrid lipstick-pink dragon fruit. Breadfruit. Jackfruit. Custard apples. Tamarind pods.

On the other side of a partition are caged chickens and other fowl, squawking noisily, and all kinds of sea creatures — iced squid, crabs tied with red ropes, clams the size of silver dollars with ridged shells, carp swimming in basins and tiger prawns that look as ferocious as their namesakes, all overseen by a raucous corps of vendors in rubber boots.

This is the tumultuous Ben Thanh market, which faces Quach Thi Trang Square in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City. A shedlike building with four entrances, it attests to this country's peacetime bounty. Visit it, look around, join the chattering, jostling crowd, listen to the noodle vendor's spiel, grab a snack. That will put you in the right frame of mind for the splendid meals that await you in a galaxy of attractively designed, mostly new restaurants near the big hotels here.

Restaurant cooking of real excellence has evolved in the last 10 years, and particularly in the last three, with bright young chefs innovating and adapting like their brethren in other major Asian capitals. French and Chinese and Indian influences remain, of course, the legacy of a long and clamorous history, but something new and manifestly Vietnamese is emerging.

Spring rolls and salad rolls on white tablecloths, you ask? Absolutely, and in Ho Chi Minh City's better places they might be filled with squid or grilled fish or chicken instead of crab or shrimp and pork. Chefs have no qualms about serving the traditional alongside the inventive: a plate of fat rosy shrimp with satisfyingly sour tamarind pulp, for instance, together with a plate of tiny quail glazed with star anise and grilled with garlic and paprika.

My wife, Betsey, and I ate those two dishes, among others, at Nam Phan, a luxurious villa decorated with antique ceramics and scrolls. On our table, a single orchid floated in a silver and black lacquer box.

Nothing so deluxe could ever have been found in Ho Chi Minh City's former incarnation, wartime Saigon, where I was based for almost three years as a correspondent. It would have been easier to unearth a truffle. The ingredients weren't available (too many roadblocks), nor were the cooks (in the army). So we hung out in a series of joints that flourished in a world of low expectations and minimal competition.

On my return this year, I couldn't find any of them. Every one has been swallowed up by the 35 years that have passed since I left, but I remember them — a street-corner Basque place called Aterbea, with a jai alai mural, where I ate boudin noir, sautéed apples and mashed potatoes for lunch, because it was good and because the wizened waiters assured me it was what the Foreign Legionnaires had ordered, and Amiral, where the resourceful Morley Safer gave a jolly dinner party the same night that Truman Capote gave his storied Black and White Ball in New York.

Also Cheap Charlie's, where my colleague Charlie Mohr (no relation) taught me to pick up peanuts with chopsticks in a grueling session the night after I arrived; the Arc en Ciel in Cholon, where the taxi-dancers were more interesting than the food; Les Affreux, the Ghastly Ones, a kind of bistro-in-a-bunker run by Corsicans displaced from Algeria; and the Guillaume Tell, down by the river, whose proprietor used to drill holes in the bottoms of fancy bottles of wine and refill them with plonk.

BUT back to Nam Phan, which is the latest venture of Hoang Khai, a young entrepreneur who has quickly assembled a group of a dozen Khai Silk shops, as notable for their décor (a goldfish pond, complete with humpbacked footbridge, graces the interior of one of them) as for the chic clothes they sell. His restaurant, like his silk business, is aimed not only at well-off travelers and expatriates but also at the growing coterie of high-living Vietnamese. With dinner checks averaging $100 or so a couple, without wine, it is the town's costliest place to eat.

The villa housing Nam Phan stands at the center of a walled garden on the busy corner of Le Thanh Ton and Hai Ba Trung, two of the city's main streets. Inside, though, all is quiet. The high-ceilinged rooms are painted in grays, taupes and whites, and furnished with a spare, modern refinement rare in Vietnam; no 1930's nostalgia, no Indochine tristesse here. A series of glassed, backlighted niches, each holding a vase with a single flower, dominates one wall.

"Ravishing," said Betsey, who is not easily swept off her feet.

I would say the same about the food, especially the salads. One was made from grilled dried beef and the tender leaves and crunchy stems of water spinach, a relative of the morning glory. It was light and refreshing, just the thing on a warm day. Another, more elaborate and more assertive but equally appealing, included lotus stems, bits of pork and tiny shrimp, fried shallots, chilies, mint, rau ram or Vietnamese coriander and fish sauce. Tangy, fishy, sweet all at once, it had the layers of flavor the Vietnamese love.

Chicken and seafood were ground together to make the unusual, ethereal spring rolls, which were served, sparkling on the plate, in bite-size pieces.

But nothing, for me, matched the shrimp with tamarind sauce. The pulp inside the tamarind pods, which look like giant brown beans, had been sweetened just enough to balance its sourness, and gobs of black pepper added a contrasting punch. The combination was fabulous. I thought of semisweet chocolate, but Betsey put the matter much more aptly. "Spice candy," she said.

The plates and cutlery were good-looking and the service was charming. The only jarring note, at least to us, was the flag that we could see out the window — a yellow star on a red field. Just then, it was hard to believe we were in a Communist nation.

TWO of the other choice spots in town, Mandarin and Hoi An, are located around the corner from each other. Both are owned by another Vietnamese businessman, Pham Quang Minh, and ably managed by an Australian, Frank Jones, a former actor.

Hoi An specializes in the cooking of the central coast town of that name, a photogenic little port whose food and architecture were influenced by the Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and Portuguese merchants who settled there in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The restaurant is a facsimile of an old dining house, with ideograms on the walls and carved shutters dividing the rooms. Bonsai trees and shrubs decorate various corners. The chairs are ironwood.

In a typical example of central Vietnamese delicacy, the flavor palette in Hoi An's spring rolls is limited to shrimp and pork paste, black sesame seeds and Chinese coriander, and the paper in which they are wrapped, made from rice and cassava flour, is more brittle than most. The salad rolls, which are just as elegant, arrive with a miniature pagoda carved from a carrot.

Shrimp grilled in a banana leaf, another specialty, emerge rich and buttery. Dipped in a concoct-it-yourself sauce of lime juice and salt, they spoil you forever for shrimp cocktails. Sumptuous, chili-laced beef and onions, served inside a coconut, is vaguely South Indian in style; could that be the influence of the Portuguese?

Though the rice noodles are not authentic (only those made with water from a particular Hoi An well get the nod from the purists), the ca lau here is luscious all the same: thin slices of baconlike pork, butterflied shrimp and crushed bits of crunchy sesame cake are piled onto the broad noodles, and a bowl of clear, fragrant marrow-bone broth is served on the side. The dish reminded me again of the Vietnamese genius for making a lot from a little.

We went to Mandarin at the suggestion of Loren Jenkins, a colleague of many years standing who is now the foreign editor for National Public Radio. "As good a Vietnamese meal as I've ever had," he announced when we ran into him in Hue, and he was not that far off.

Mandarin brims with class. A pianist, a cellist and a violinist play downstairs in the four-story, skylighted building; dinner is served on big, handsome blue-and-white plates; and shellfish, the house specialty, are delivered directly from Nha Trang on the South China Sea several times a week. Premium ingredients like abalone and shark's fin dot the menu, at a price.

Throwing self-control to the winds, and fortified by a couple of bottles of well-chilled Alsatian riesling from Gustav Lorentz, we managed to work our way through creamy, juicy bay scallops grilled in their shells and dressed with chopped scallions, peanuts and herbs; a tuna salad, served in a green mango, to be spread on rice crackers with a chili sauce — that familiar Vietnamese blend of spicy, fishy, salty, sour and caramelized tastes again, with so much ginger that it left a stinging sensation on the lips; a few pickles and other tidbits; and then a pair of gargantuan crabs steamed in beer.

The crabs left a lasting impression, to say the least. They had thick shells and big claws, like stone crabs, and they gave up firm, moist, glacier-white lumps of meat, as big as cherries, as sweet as you could ask.

En garde, Baltimore!

I MUST admit I wondered what I was getting us into when we walked into Blue Ginger, a place with Italianate arches and a tile floor. A "traditional" Vietnamese band was having a go at "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean."

But the menu held out promise, and the kitchen made good on it. Beef rolls flavored with turmeric and lemon grass, among other spices, wrapped in peppery la lot leaves and grilled over charcoal, got us off to a good start. Long, thin purple eggplants, roasted to a smoky, melting succulence, combined beautifully with crumbly, spicy pork. Fried chicken — we called it Eastern fried chicken — was suffused with the heady taste of lemon grass.

A tureen of sweet-and-sour soup was dazzling in its complexity, a far cry from the derisory brew served under that heading in tens of thousands of Chinese restaurants around the world. Among its ingredients were fiery bird's-eye chilies, coriander, Thai basil, lime juice, fish sauce, tomatoes, onions, star fruit and tiny, tender clams closely resembling Neapolitan vongole.

The stylish Temple Club, one of the older upscale restaurants in town, is an immensely cheerful place, where the merest acknowledgment of waiters and busboys produces faces creased with smiles. The hallway is lined with ceramic elephants, lighted by oil lamps, and more lanterns burn inside, casting dancing, romantic shadows onto the bare brick walls.

First things first: the martinis were world-class. We hugely enjoyed the black-lipped clams, steamed with a chili-laced broth in a clay pot; the maître d'hôtel said they had come from Vungtau, at the mouth of the Saigon River. Duck breast, flavored with ginger, grilled over charcoal, was served rare; in southeastern France, it would have been called magret, and it could have been no better. All Vietnamese fowl are free-range birds, and they taste it.

Camargue is another matter altogether, a thatched, two-story open-air pavilion where the European accents are in the foreground. Seated upstairs, we dined by candlelight with palm fronds dangling near us, overhead circular fans beavering away and billiard balls clicking downstairs. Feeling as louche as Bogart, we started with foie gras (cool, firm, brightened by a Sauternes jelly, and altogether respectable, if not quite up to the standard of Chez L'Ami Louis) and vitello tonnato, as good a dish as we tasted in all of Vietnam during a 10-day stay.

Large prawns, listed on the menu as gambas, grilled and set on edge around a heap of remarkable, tarragon-infused ratatouille, not only tasted fresh from the sea; they had the supple texture that disappears in a split-second when our own gulf shrimp are flash-frozen. One flaw: A lemon butter sauce, which might have been fine in Lyons, seemed far too heavy in the tropics.

But other things were just as they should have been: quick, competent service from nattily uniformed waiters, crusty mini-baguettes and the best wine list in town, with plenty of classified-growth clarets (a rarity in Vietnam) and a crisp, racy Pouilly-Fumé from Henri Bourgeois, a top-flight grower.

Betsey and I were constantly reminded of New Orleans as we moved through the languid streets that for me will always constitute Saigon. It was all there: the humidity lying over the city like damp cotton, the slow-moving river lined with decaying warehouses, the oleander blossoms, the scent of jasmine in the air.

And like New Orleans, Ho Chi Minh City is blessed not only with terrific big-time restaurants but also with worthwhile smaller ones tucked into nooks and crannies.

Got a lunch date? On Nguyen Thiep, a narrow street a couple of blocks from the Caravelle Hotel in the center of town, you will find three worthy choices.

Lemon Grass, a long room with minimally adorned white stucco walls, does a mean green mango salad, with slices of the fruit mixed with chopped peanuts, shallots and fish sauce, and herb-scented grilled chicken kebabs. (Green mango is not unripe, by the way; it is a special variety, bred to be green.) Whole crab in pepper sauce is terrific; the leathery fish cakes are not.

Globo, a bohemian bar and restaurant done up in black and white, with zebra-striped fans and Tunisian folk art, is a hangout for expats from all over, and Augustin, a bistro you might think had been transported intact from 1930's Paris, with a clientele that might very well have made the trip with it. You will recognize a lot of old friends on the menu — salade niçoise, entrecôte bordelaise, profiteroles — and they are all well executed.

Cup of coffee? Brodard, established in 1932, will serve you a fine one, with a perfect head of crema, with a slice of house-made chocolate cake if you want. Drink a Pernod if you are in the mood, or a delicious citron pressé (freshly made lemonade, best with soda water). Or order one of the juiciest steak frites in the city.

The place to go for a Vietnamese iced coffee, made by the drip-drip-drip of water through an individual aluminum filter, flavored with condensed milk, is Givral, cater-corner from the Caravelle. Now as always, it is a headquarters for young, giggling schoolgirls, a few of whom, thank goodness, still wear the long and graceful ao dais.

If old-fashioned cafes turn you off, head for the I-Box, not far away, a youthful spot with a wildly funky décor.

Ice cream? The best you will find is at Kem Bac Dang, which has several locations around the city. Try the longan, kiwi, coconut or coffee, or spoil yourself with a luscious soursop milkshake.

They used to call Saigon the Paris of the Orient because of its lovely, tree-lined boulevards. The way things are going, with eating out here becoming the kind of preoccupation it already is in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Singapore, they may one day call Ho Chi Minh City the Paris of the Orient because of the quality of its restaurants.

The untouchables

The untouchables
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
By David McNeill, SCMP
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/ZZZBRK8RHJD.html

If you bumped into Mitsunori Agata you might mistake him for a retired civil servant. From his neatly trimmed silver hair to his sensible shoes, little marks him out of the ordinary except a certain hardness lurking behind the pensioner's eyes.

But in his office in Kabukicho, in the heart of Tokyo's vice district, it's clear Agata is a Very Important Person. The evidence is in the many photos around the room of Agata bonding with flint-faced men in expensive suits. Or the way his male assistant approaches and retreats on his knees, shaven head almost touching the floor.

The giveaway, though, if you did not know that this nondescript man was a high-ranking yakuza gangster, is the layout of the room. Agata sits dead centre, flanked on either side at the highest possible point by pictures of the most important figures in the yakuza hierarchy, his oyabun, or boss, and the emperor.

To the assistant, and others who enter, this holy trinity of the Japanese mob - local boss, big boss and the man they still regard as symbolic head of the Japanese family - is designed to intimidate. Allegiance to the yakuza fatherhood means submerging personal ambition and even logic to the dictates of the "Organisation", which is why the self-willed Japanese gangster can be useful to powerful people.

We discuss this later, but first, I itch to see his tattoos. "No problem," says Agata, slipping off his kimono. He is after all a Japanese gangster and therefore very polite, unless you get on the wrong side of him.

Like many yakuza, Agata has endured hundreds of hours under a needle for his full-body tattoos. But the tattoos, like the importance of physical forbearance, are part of yakuza tradition, which appears to have survived into the 21st century.

Despite more than a decade of economic slump and the impact of the 1992 anti-boryokudan (violent group) law, which was supposed to rein in the yakuza, there seems little danger of the gangs becoming extinct. While the number of full and associate members fell from 90,600 to a low of 79,300 in the immediate aftermath of the law, the mob ranks have steadily recovered to an estimated 85,300 last year.

While income from crime has shrunk along with the rest of the economy, the yakuza have steadily worked their way into legitimate businesses. A government-funded study found that as much as 42 per cent of bad loans to mainly construction-related companies involved organised crime.

The yakuza, say observers, are as much a part of Japanese life as dodgy builders and corrupt politicians, helping explain why an FBI vs Mafia-style war is not on the cards. "The authorities and the yakuza are in each other's pockets," says journalist Tomohiko Suzuki, who specialises in crime writing. "They've achieved a balance where they accept each other's existence but pretend otherwise. It's very Japanese. The 1992 law was a kind of performance for the public."

Agata agrees. "The law was introduced because some politicians thought we were becoming too big and dangerous. It's had a small impact on what we do, but more important is the economy. We're sensitive to recession, so some of us have been hard hit, but look at Yamaguchi-gumi [Japan's largest yakuza group]. They're getting bigger.''

To get a sense of the yakuza's place in Japanese society, a visit to the Yamaguchi headquarters is recommended. Set off the street in a quiet, upmarket suburb of Kobe 100 metres from a police station, one of the world's most powerful crime syndicates, with a full-time membership of 17,900 members - more than five times the size of the US mafia at its peak - posts a sign that reassures locals they do not permit underage workers, the selling of drugs, or the discarding of cigarette butts on their patch. "They're nice people," says an old neighbour. "They come around twice a year with gifts and they keep the neighbourhood safe. We never have trouble from them."

To those expecting the war against organised crime to be bloody, this oddly genteel relationship between the underworld and law-abiding society appears surreal. Japan's top two dozen crime syndicates, including Agata's Sumiyoshi-kai, have published addresses, often in the best areas of the largest cities, with members proudly bearing name cards and corporate insignias. Mob bosses have for years been on first-name terms with corporate presidents and senior politicians. Former prime minister Kishi Nobusuke once helped organise a yakuza funeral, and another premier, Yoshio Mori, gave a speech at a wedding attended by Yuko Inagawa, boss of the Inagawa-kai crime syndicate. When exposed by a weekly magazine, he said he "didn't realise who Inagawa was".

"Politicians always say things like that," laughs Agata. "I go to a lot of political events with well-known people. Many know me, and if they don't, when I'm dressed up in my full regalia [traditional gown bearing his family crest] they know what I am, the same way we always know a detective. They don't admit it because it would cause them political damage, but they all call on us when they need something."

What author Karel Van Wolferen calls this "ultimate symbiosis" between the authorities and the yakuza is partly a pragmatic recognition by both sides that, if there is going to be crime, at least it should be organised. The last thing anyone wants in disciplined Japan is chaos on the streets.

An illustration of how this works could be seen last week, when an Osaka cop, who broke up a prostitution ring run by a group of teenagers, was quoted in the press as saying: "We let the boys know that if the yakuza found out what they were doing, they would have made mincemeat out of them. You should have seen how pale their faces went when they heard that."

It is also a reflection of the mob's usefulness in certain situations. Yakuza have been employed to break demonstrations, protect politicians and businesses, and extensively to intimidate people involved with construction projects, which make up a huge chunk of the Japanese economy.

Agata thinks his organisation is "socially necessary". "The government could try to break us up but then what would happen? You'd have thousands of little thugs on the streets threatening people and tearing the place up. We give people discipline. That's why we don't like the term `violent groups'. We prefer to be called ninkyodan [chivalrous groups], a bit like other civic groups. Of course we have our own internal rules, but our violence is controlled and targeted and doesn't spill out among the public."

Not true. A long-running feud between Agata's Sumiyoshi-kai and the Yamaguchi-gumi has claimed a number of innocent lives, including three bystanders killed in a bar earlier this year when a Sumiyoshi mobster opened fire on a rival. This being Japan, though, the culprit voluntarily surrendered to what may well be a death sentence rather than cause problems for his organisation by going on the run.

Potentially more threatening to the status quo than perennial but mostly predictable gang warfare, however, is Japan's mob-dominated loan-sharking, which has snared an estimated two million debt-ridden Japanese, enough to worry the government that the problem is getting out of hand. That's why TV viewers tuned in last week to see snarling gangsters confront more than 100 cops who had come to raid the office of Yamaguchi-affiliated Goryo-kai, an organisation that controlled 1,000 Tokyo loan sharks. A sign, perhaps, that war is finally set to break out between the mob and the authorities? Not likely. Goryo-kai boss Susumu Kajiyama walked into a Tokyo police station the day after his arrest warrant was issued, restoring equilibrium.

Was Agata happy that the police hammer had fallen on his arch rivals? "No, of course not," he says. "People like to make out we all hate each other, but we all basically have the same philosophy. When we see the police really hassling Yamaguchi-gumi our sympathies lie with other yakuza. There are a lot worse people out there than the Yamaguchi who could be loan-sharking. Why don't the cops go after them?"

Former Dot-Commers Are Adjusting, Painfully

Former Dot-Commers Are Adjusting, Painfully
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/business/yourmoney/24DOTC.html

IN 2000, when Michael Drexler was 61, he walked away from a 40-year career in traditional advertising to join Media- smith, a young agency that specialized in Internet ads. But he found the small start-up company "too limiting," so a year later he signed on as chief executive of Optimedia International, the well-established media buying arm of the ZenithOptimedia Group.

To hear him tell it, his brief foray into dot-com land taught him a huge amount about how to harness the Internet's power for clients. Yet he is certain that Optimedia hired him in spite of, not because of, his stint at Mediasmith.

"I learned how interactive ads work — how, for example, even people who don't immediately click on an ad may go to the advertiser's site later on," Mr. Drexler said. "But no one at Optimedia really thought of that year at Mediasmith as an asset."

Chapter 2 of the Great Dot-Com Bust of 2000 has begun, the part in which former employees of Internet start-ups try to re-acclimate to the corporate world. While they were gone, they tasted what it was like to introduce products without multilayered approvals, to set their own hours, to party hard as well as work hard, and often, to own a sizable stake in the company. And they have seen what the Internet can and cannot do.

But few are the millionaires they expected to be: many are poorer than they were to begin with. Some are still frantically seeking jobs, while others are humbly grateful for finding even ill-suited ones. And many are struggling to gain — or to regain — corporate America's respect. Even the lucky few who landed exactly where they wanted, like Mr. Drexler, are having trouble persuading colleagues that their dot-com experience wasn't for naught.

The influx is still new, so few if any academics have formally studied it. But management experts, extrapolating from growing anecdotal evidence, say the adjustment is hard for young and middle-aged executives alike, though in different ways.

"The 20-somethings who were brought up in the dot-coms have to learn everything, from dress norms to timeliness to dealing with lines of authority," said Eric Abrahamson, a management professor at the Columbia Business School.

Far worse, said Daniel Cable, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Keenan Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina, they must view their former habits as unacceptable. "The true reality shock," he said, "comes from trying to unlearn ways of doing things that you've been socialized into believing were the norm."

The older returnees, in contrast, have to persuade colleagues and bosses that they were enhanced, not tainted, by their time away.

"I thought companies would value the experiences that executives had in the dot-com world, like learning to live with thin capitalization and limited resources," said James M. Citrin, a partner at Spencer Stuart, the executive search firm. "Instead, many shunned the would-be returnees or treated them as though the entire dot-com experience was inconsequential."

IN fact, many management experts concede that there is no way to know the possible significance of a dot-com foray. Some returning dot-commers come back more willing to take risks; others are totally risk-averse. Some have little patience for processes, while others have newfound respect for structure. Some return supremely confident, while others are grappling with insecurity. Some have learned to operate leanly, but others never learned the value of a dollar.

"I won't hire those dot-commers who were paying absurd rents, eating in expensive restaurants, basically living on borrowed money and borrowed time," said Willy Shih, president of the digital and applied imaging division at Eastman Kodak. The company did buy Ofoto, an online photo service, in 2001, but only after Mr. Shih assured himself that Ofoto's founders "had always had their feet on the ground and would fit in."

So, if it is not always easy to know how the dot-com experience affected a job candidate, why hire dot-com refugees at all — particularly in a persistently sluggish economy in which qualified applicants without ingrained bad habits far outnumber job openings?

"Many of them have seen failure on a grand scale, up close and ugly, and that's something few in corporate America get to see," said James Schrager, clinical professor of entrepreneurship and strategic management at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. "People who've stubbed their toes in dot-com land come away with great lessons."

Among those lessons are these:

• Being a Luddite is bad, but being a technophile can be worse. Robert H. Swan, 43, went from General Electric to the online grocer Webvan in 1999, and stayed with it until its bankruptcy in 2001. He is now chief financial officer for Electronic Data Systems, where he insists that every capital outlay be tied to meeting a basic customer need. "If Webvan had spent as much intellectual and financial capital on finding out what customers wanted, and less on fancy technologies, it might still be around," Mr. Swan said.

• There is a difference between red tape and necessary procedures. Mark Seals, 49, worked for Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch before he became what he calls the "process guru" at the ill-fated Meals.com in 2000. He is now a senior vice president of Kinko's, in charge of building the company's fledgling international division.

He said he is "cherry picking" entrenched processes, keeping those that help quantify goals and measure progress against them, scrapping those that require line-by-line financial forecasts or multiple approvals for buying furniture or real estate. "If I'd come straight here from A.B. or PepsiCo, I would have built a big staff, complete with complicated compensation plans and legal reviews and 100-page manuals," Mr. Seals said.

• They are more comfortable dealing with the outside world. "When I was with big corporations, I dealt only with my boss and senior management," said one executive who did not want to be named because, he said, he was a bit embarrassed by his former insularity. "It was at a dot-com that I learned to network with investors and venture capitalists and customers." He continues to ply those skills in his latest job, as a corporate vice president.

• Speed can connote efficiency as well as recklessness. Terry Lee, 49, had worked for Safeway, Del Monte and Basic American Foods before stints with Troba, an Internet software company, and Onvia.com, an online trading mart for businesses. Now he is a vice president of Albertsons, the supermarket giant, charged with building up the company's private-label business. "In my first 45 days I set strategy, restructured the organization along product lines and started the development process that led to our premium brand Essentia," he said. "It certainly would have taken me a lot longer if I hadn't developed the confidence to make speedy decisions."

• Employee loyalty isn't an outdated concept. David A. Galante, 45, wanted to taste the excitement of a start-up company, and left Xerox to join Lifecast.com, which was a host for Web sites for country clubs. He was out of work for five months after Lifecast went belly up. He is now the director of commercial marketing for Kinko's. "Before this, I'd never had to look for a job in my entire career, and it was a horrid experience," Mr. Galante said. "Now what I want is a company with sound business fundamentals and a solid future, somewhere I can spend the rest of my career."

• It is often easy to do more with less. Mary Alice Taylor, 53, worked for Shell Oil, Citibank and Cook Industries before becoming chairwoman of HomeGrocer.com in 1999; the company is now out of business. Ms. Taylor now serves on the boards of five companies.. At one recent meeting, she sent a divisional manager back to the drawing board to figure out how a new product could be developed with fewer people than he had requested. "If I had never left the corporate world, I might not realize how much productivity you can get from a small but motivated group," she said.

• The Internet may not be a great business model, but it is a great business tool. That lesson was by no means confined to those who lived through dot-com failures. Between his old job as chief financial officer of Delta Air Lines and his current one, as chief financial officer of Electronic Arts, Warren C. Jenson, 46, spent about three years at Amazon.com, a definite dot-com success. "Sure, I learned about e-commerce, but more importantly, I learned the full power of all kinds of Internet-based technologies for a high-growth business," Mr. Jenson said.

Similarly, Babs Rangaiah, 36, had been with D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles for nine years when he joined Agency.com, an Internet advertising consulting firm that is still in business. Now, as the media manager for home and personal care brands at Unilever USA, he has built a healthy dose of Internet advertising into his media mix. "The dot-com experience made me much more receptive to that idea," he said.

• Managers must value élan and encourage optimism. Mr. Gallante, who manages a staff of nine at Kinko's, is no longer impatient with young people's "naïve" ideas. "I explain that we can't go charging down a path without analyzing," he said, "but I encourage them to keep bringing those ideas to the table."

Mr. Lee, of Albertsons, learned the importance of celebrating at regular monthly meetings the successes of his 60-member staff. "I saw the passion that existed at the dot-coms, and realize that applauding individual and team successes can really foster that passion here," he said.

That is a lesson that managers without dot-com experience are learning to apply to the dot-commers who wind up on their staffs. Through trial and error, they are finding ways to introduce structure and accountability without squelching zeal.

In April 2002, Sabre Holdings, which owned part of the online travel service Travelocity, bought the whole company. A month later, Sabre named Sam Gilliland, a Sabre executive since 1988, as Travelocity's president.

He said he was blown away by the group's competitiveness — but also by its habit of going in 20 directions at once. "They'd be working on 30 product ideas, and I'd be asking them to pick five major ones that could offer earnings and sustainable growth," Mr. Gilliland, 41, said. "I needed them to do fewer things, but each of them better." He now has them detail the rationale behind proposed services and investments. After he has ascertained that the ideas make sense, he bows out. The approach recently led to the introduction of Travelocity Total Trip, which offers package rates for air fare and hotel rooms.

"Travelocity is Sabre's growth engine right now, and while I have to say no sometimes, I am not going to micromanage their innovation," Mr. Gilliland said.

Kodak had an easier time assimilating Ofoto, which was accustomed to writing business plans and rolling out products in an orderly way. Still, Ofoto's compensation plans and work habits were vastly different from Kodak's. Mr. Shih, who oversees the group, devised a pay plan for Ofoto that is richer in equity than most Kodak pay packages, and he has promised not to tinker with the plan for at least three years. And he allowed Ofoto to keep its headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., and its own board — although Kodak executives now fill the seats once occupied by venture capitalists.

The board meets monthly, half the time in Emeryville and the other half in Rochester, Kodak's base. The Ofoto people sometimes have to wake up early to participate in morning conference calls. But for the most part, Mr. Shih and the Ofoto managers call one another when the mood strikes — yes, that can mean weekends or late nights — and they take turns traveling across the country for meetings.

So far, the Ofoto people seem satisfied. "Maybe we'll miss all those stock options, but Silicon Valley stock options are useful mainly for kindling now, anyway," said James Joaquin, 37, Ofoto's executive vice president.

Perhaps most important, though, is that the Ofoto employees do not feel shoehorned into an alien world. "Willy protected us from the kind of bear hug a big corporation could give," said Lisa Gansky, 43, Ofoto's chairwoman. "He didn't just put us into the corporate Cuisinart and press `puree.' "

Life-Extending Chemical Is Found in Certain Red Wines

Life-Extending Chemical Is Found in Certain Red Wines
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/health/24CND-LIFE.html

Biologists have found a class of chemicals that they hope will make people live longer by activating an ancient survival reflex. One of the chemicals, a natural substance known as resveratrol, is found in red wines, particularly those made in cooler climates like that of New York.

The finding could help explain the so-called French paradox, the fact that the French live as long as anyone else despite consuming fatty foods deemed threatening to the heart.

Besides the wine connection, the finding has the attraction of stemming from fundamental research in the biology of aging. However, the new chemicals have not yet been tested even in mice, let alone people, and even if they worked in humans, it would be many years before any drug based on the new findings became available.

The possible benefits could be significant. The chemicals are designed to mimic the effect of a very low-calorie diet, which is known to lengthen the life span of rodents. Scientists involved in the research say that human life spans could be extended by 30 percent if humans respond to the chemicals in the same way as rats and mice do to low calories. Even someone who started at age 50 to take one of the new chemicals could expect to gain an extra 10 years of life, said Dr. Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the pioneers of the new research.

The new result was announced last week at a scientific conference in Arolla, a small village in the Swiss alps, by Dr. David A. Sinclair of the Harvard Medical School.

The new development has roused the enthusiasm of many biologists who study aging, because caloric restriction, the process supposedly mimicked by the chemicals, is the one intervention known for sure to increase longevity in laboratory animals.

A calorically restricted diet includes all necessary nutrients but has some 30 percent fewer calories than usual. The diet extends the life span of rodents by 30 to 50 percent, and even if it is started later has a benefit proportionate to the remaining life span. Scientists hope, but do not yet know, that the same will be true in people.

A similar mechanism exists in simpler forms of life, making biologists believe that they are looking at an ancient strategy, formed early in evolution and built into all animals. The strategy allows an organism, when food is scarce, to live longer, postpone reproduction and start breeding when conditions improve.

Two experiments to see if caloric restriction extends life span in monkeys are about at their halfway point — rhesus monkeys live some 25 years in captivity — and the signs so far are promising, though not yet statistically significant. But even if caloric restriction did extend people's life spans, the current epidemic of obesity suggests how hard it would be for most people to stick with a diet containing 30 percent fewer calories than generally recommended.

Biologists have therefore been hoping to find some chemical or drug that would mimic caloric restriction in people by tripping the same genetic circuitry as a reduced-calorie diet does and give the gain without the pain.

Dr. Sinclair and his chief co-author, Dr. Konrad T. Howitz, of Biomol Research Laboratories in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., say they have succeeded in finding a class of drugs that mimic caloric restriction in two standard laboratory organisms — yeast and fruit flies. Both mice and humans have counterpart genes that are assumed to work in a similar way, though that remains to be proved.

Independently, Elixir Pharmaceuticals, a company in Cambridge, Mass., found a different set of chemicals that mimic caloric restriction, Ed Cannon, the chief executive, said. "We can do the same things he can do," Dr. Cannon said of Dr. Sinclair's findings. Because of testing and regulatory requirements, "we are 8 to 10 years away from having an approved drug," Dr. Cannon added.

In an interview from Arolla, Switzerland, where he presented his findings, Dr. Sinclair said, "I've been waiting for this all my life," adding, "I like to be cautious, but even as a scientist, it is looking extremely promising."

So far, Dr. Sinclair and his colleagues have shown that resveratrol prolongs life span only in yeast, a fungus, by 70 percent. But a colleague, Dr. Mark Tatar of Brown University, has shown in a report yet to be published that the compound has similar effects in fruit flies. The National Institute of Aging, which sponsored Dr. Sinclair's research, plans to start a mouse study later in the year.

Despite the years of testing ahead to prove that resveratrol has any effect in people, many of the scientists involved in the research have already started drinking red wine.

"One glass of red wine a day is a good recommendation. That's what I do now," Dr. Sinclair said, adding he hoped the finding would not lead people to drink in excess. "One glass of wine is enough," he said. However, resveratrol is unstable on exposure to the air and "goes off within a day of popping the cork," he said.

Dr. Tatar, asked if he had changed his drinking habits, said, "No, I have always preferred red wine to white."

The new finding is so novel that health authorities have not yet had time to make a detailed evaluation of the research. Dr. David Finkelstein, the project officer at the National Institute of Aging, which financed the study, said that he would not advise anyone to start drinking red wine. "At this point, we have no indication that there will be a benefit in people," he said, adding that the calories in a glass of wine would lead to weight gain.

Dr. Toren Finkel, the head of cardiovascular research at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, said that "I would be cautious in sending out the message that one glass of wine a day will make you live 10 years longer."

"The concentration of resveratrol in different wine differs," he said. "As a drug, it is not ready for prime time." But he acknowledged that the concept of a drug that mimicked caloric restriction "is a great idea.".

Dr. Sinclair said that he and Dr. Howitz were working on chemical modifications of resveratrol that would be more stable. Ownership of the patent will be split 50:50 between their parent institutions, the Harvard Medical School and Biomol.

Resveratrol is synthesized by plants in response to stress, like a lack of nutrients or contracting a fungal infection. It exists in the skin of both red and white grapes but is found in amounts 10 times higher in red wine because of differences in the manufacturing processes.

According to the Oxford Companion to Wine, Pinot Noir tends to have high levels of the chemical, while Cabernet Sauvignon has lower levels. "Wines produced in cooler regions or areas with greater disease pressure, such as Burgundy and New York, often have more resveratrol," the book says, whereas wines from drier climates like California or Australia have less.

Besides resveratrol, another class of chemical found to mimic caloric restriction is that of the flavones, found abundantly in olive oil, Dr. Howitz said.

The enthusiasm scientists are showing for the new discovery, despite its preliminary nature, stems in part from a train of fundamental discoveries stretching back a decade. In 1991, Dr. Guarente decided to study the basis of aging, then considered an unpromising field of research. He spent four years searching for strains of yeast, a common laboratory organism, that lived longer than others. By 1997, he and Dr. Sinclair, who worked in his laboratory at the time, had discovered the reason for the new strains' longevity. It centered on a gene called sir2, for silent information regulator.

Dr. Guarente next found that when yeast live longer because of starvation, sir2 is the gene that mediates the response. His research then started to fuse with longstanding work on caloric restriction as he and others showed that starvation is sensed by sir2, which triggers the cellular changes that lead to increased life span.

What Dr. Sinclair and Dr. Howitz did was to take the human version of sirtuin, the enzyme produced by the sir2 gene, and devise a test to tell when the enzyme was activated. They then screened a large batch of likely chemicals to see if any made the enzyme more active.

Their screen produced two active chemicals, both of a similar chemical structure and known as polyphenols. That led them to expand the search to more polyphenols. The most active compound in the second screen was resveratrol.

Dr. Sinclair said he was amazed "that in an unbiased screen we pulled out something already associated with health benefits."

Much attention has been paid to resveratrol in the last few years because it is a candidate for explaining the apparent innocuousness of the French diet despite its artery-weakening ingredients. Epidemiological studies point to red wine as containing some beneficial antidote, but it is not yet certain whether alcohol, or resveratrol, or both, are the active ingredients.

Why should chemicals like resveratrol play a role both in the French paradox and in caloric restriction? Dr. Sinclair believes the chemicals are produced by plants in response to stresses like starvation and that browsing animals may have evolved to make use of the chemicals as a signal of hard times ahead. Other scientists said this idea was possible but not particularly plausible.

Dr. Guarente, his former mentor, founded Elixir Pharmaceuticals to pursue the same goal of developing drugs that mimic caloric restriction. Dr. Guarente said Dr. Sinclair's results were plausible and exciting. He said diet-mimicking drugs might add a decade of life to someone starting them at age 50, based on the calculation that the 30 or so years of life expected at that age could be increased by one third, and assuming that humans would benefit from caloric restrictions to the same degree as mice.

Dr. Cynthia Kenyon, of the University of California, San Francisco, an expert on aging in roundworms and a cofounder of Elixir, said from Arolla that Dr. Sinclair's work was "really remarkable."

Elixir uses the same screen for sirtuin activity as Dr. Sinclair did, one provided by Biomol. It is not yet clear if the efforts by Dr. Sinclair and Elixir will be competitive or collaborative, Dr. Howitz said.

In either case, considerable testing lies ahead to see if the promise of the new research can be fulfilled.

Passports and Visas to Add High-Tech Identity Features

Passports and Visas to Add High-Tech Identity Features
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/national/24IDEN.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 — Technologies that scan faces and fingerprints will become a standard part of travel for foreign visitors next year, and for all travelers in the near future.

The technology, known as biometrics, has been developing for years, but largely because of security concerns after the attacks on Sept. 11, its arrival has been greatly accelerated.

One deadline looms large — Oct. 26, 2004. In a little more than a year, the State Department and immigration bureau must begin issuing visas and other documents with the body-identifying technologies to foreign visitors. The change is mandated by border security legislation passed by Congress last May. The federal government has started issuing border-crossing cards for Mexican citizens and green cards that display fingerprints and photos.

By the same deadline, the 27 countries whose citizens can travel to the United States without visas must begin issuing passports with computer chips containing facial recognition data or lose their special status. People from those countries with passports issued before the deadline may still travel to the United States without visas as long as their governments have begun biometric identification programs.

Given the complexity of the technology, many countries are struggling to meet the deadline, and some in the industry say that it may have to be extended.

Privacy advocates expressed dismay at what they see as pressure being applied to Europe.

"Our government has forced on European governments the obligation to adopt biometric identifiers though most in the U.S. still oppose such systems," said Marc Rotenberg, the head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group. He predicted, however, that the United States would soon adopt those same technologies.

Officials from the State Department said mandatory use of the biometric identifiers is scheduled to begin in three years. They have announced plans to test American passports with computer chips by Oct. 26, 2004. At a recent card technology conference, the deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services, Frank Moss, said the department planned to have all new passports containing biometric data by 2006 at an estimated annual cost of $100 million. About 55 million American passports are in circulation, and 7 million are issued annually.

"Including the standards and implementing the standards, not only is it more secure for other countries, it's more secure for us," said Kelly Shannon, a spokeswoman for the State Department. "The idea is that it is contingent on reciprocal treatment for United States citizens."

The adoption of biometric technologies has been held back for years by concerns about privacy and reliability, along with a lack of uniform standards. But in the last two years policies and standards have begun to catch up with the technologies.

The new biometrics technologies are meant to cut down on subjectivity in photo identification. Right now, the border agent must decide if it is really the person in the photograph or simply someone who resembles that person.

Biometric systems take digital measurements of a person's fingerprints, face, retinas or other characteristics and store the information on a computer chip or a machine-readable strip, which can be retrieved at border check points.

Upon arrival, travelers will be asked to put their fingers on scanners and to stand in front of facial recognition cameras to see if their measurements match the ones stored on the visa or passport. Biometric systems tested by the United States at the Mexican border have been sensitive enough to distinguish between identical twins.

The biometrics are part of a larger arc of tightening security with identification documents as people have become more mobile over the last century, a trend that intensified after the 9/11 attacks.

The new computer-chip passports are based on an international standard set in May by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency.

The new passports will use facial recognition technology contained on encrypted computer chips similar to those found in so-called smart cards.

"What was required was a globally interoperable biometric — one biometric that could be used worldwide and can be read worldwide," said Denis Shagnon, spokesman for the organization.

Under the new standards, countries would also be allowed to add additional biometric technologies to the passports, like fingerprints or iris scans.

"It's very user-friendly; it's unobtrusive," he said.

Many privacy advocates have raised concerns about the reliability of the systems, noting that the city of Tampa decided in the last week not to renew its facial recognition surveillance system because of a lack of results. But Mr. Shagnon said the passport system relies partly on facial measurements that do not change as people age or even get plastic surgery.

The International Labor Organization, another United Nations agency, has recently set a biometric standard for identity documents for the 1.2 million workers on ships worldwide. The new identity cards for maritime employees use fingerprint data and photographs stored digitally in what is known as a two-dimensional bar code.

For $150,000, a Neo-Classical You

For $150,000, a Neo-Classical You
By JOHN LELAND
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/arts/design/24LELA.html

THERE was a time when Kip Forbes, vice chairman of the Forbes publishing empire, asked himself what he really wanted in life, and one of the things he came up with was this: a portrait of himself rendered in the lush manner of François-Xavier Fabre's 1797 neo-classical portrait of Allen Smith nobly contemplating the Arno River. Forbes, for his part, would be seated in front of the family's Normandy chateau, wearing the family kilt and knickers, noodling at a set of paints.

When this inspiration struck Mr. Forbes in 1989, he turned to a painter named James Childs, whose work Mr. Forbes's father, Malcolm Forbes, had collected with interest. Up until then Mr. Childs had been painting mainly landscapes or classical motifs with models — that is, models he had to pay, instead of the kind who pay him.

In these times when any visitor to Times Square can sit for an artist whose oeuvre includes fine sketches of Tupac Shakur, Mr. Childs has turned a clever living immortalizing what was once called upper-case-S Society, in a heroic, labor-intensive style you might have thought even more antiquated than Society itself. Working in the formal discipline of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or John Singer Sargent, Mr. Childs takes about four such commissions a year, for which he charges $150,000 and up for full-length portraits.

Mr. Forbes, 52, is a serious collector of art, some of it depicting himself. "It's one of life's most ego-satisfying experiences," he said. "Anyone who complains about having their portrait painted doesn't know what fun is. Having someone else devote all that effort to immortalize you is highly gratifying."

He then turned to the details of Mr. Childs's rendering. "My only quibble is that I always admired Ingres when he put more vertebrae in the `Odalisque' to make her look more odalesque," he said, referring to the 1814 blue-plate special nude, a staple of liberal arts curriculums. "I would have thought we could have stretched my legs a little longer just to work the composition. Jim was willing to stretch tree trunks but not my legs. I am as is."

On a nasty afternoon a few weeks back, Mr. Childs, 57, sat in the cool Sutton Place living room of Jo Hallingby, working methodically on a preliminary sketch of Ms. Hallingby, whom he had previously described as "quite a well-known socialite." For Mr. Childs, who had ridden the subway up from SoHo, contact with people like Ms. Hallingby and her husband, Paul Hallingby, a managing director emeritus of Bear, Stearns & Company, has meant navigating often-forbidding social terrain, like the parterre box at the Metropolitan Opera.

"We have Rudolf Bing's center box," Ms. Hallingby volunteered, referring to the company's former general manager, who died in 1997. "People have been trying to get that box from us forever."

Like many artists, including Sargent and Ingres, Mr. Childs leads something of a double life, soliciting commissions to support his other work, which often involves themes from classical literature. For more than a decade he has been working on a portrait of a hero in ancient garb inspired by a 1917 Greek poem called "One of Their Gods," by C. P. Cavafy. His model, a downtown club D.J. named Angelos Stylianu, has the features of a Cypriot warrior but, Mr. Childs said, not always the attitude. "He says, `Do I have to wear the pink dress?' "

Mr. Childs also runs a school called the Drawing Academy of the Atlantic in his SoHo studio, where for about $6,500 a year up to six students study in the formal, rigorous, 19th-century tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Mr. Childs gently mentioned that the legendary modernists, Picasso included, would have flunked his class.

In her serene living room, Ms. Hallingby wore a simple, light blue dress set off by diamond earrings and the kind of heavy bejeweled rings that leave a funny feeling when you shake hands. Last fall, she said, she had attended the unveiling of a portrait by Mr. Childs of her friend Barbara Tober, the chairwoman of the Museum of Arts and Design, and decided that she, too, was ready for the Childs treatment. "It was the most beautiful portrait I'd ever seen," said Ms. Hallingby, who compared it to the work of Ingres.

As Mr. Childs sketched a detail of her hand, Ms. Hallingby thought about how she wanted Mr. Childs to paint her. Ms. Tober had worn an iridescent burgundy taffeta dress against a background of burnished gold leaf, which gives the impression of an attractive, accomplished, silver-haired woman set like a precious stone. We should all get that treatment once.

In a separate conversation, Ms. Tober said she had imagined a smaller, less declarative portrait, but her husband, Donald G. Tober, the chairman and chief executive of Sugar Foods Corporation, which makes Sweet 'n' Low, Morton Salt and other household names, said, "No, I want the full-tilt boogie."

That much boogie had an unsettling effect at first, Ms. Tober admitted. "It was like having another one of you in the house. I'd walk in the door and be startled by the image."

For her own portrait, Ms. Hallingby was thinking of something with cupids, which she collects. Around the room were dozens of 19th-century Meissen figurines. Still, it was a big decision. Some years back she had commissioned a pastel portrait of herself, from an artist she declined to name, and it had always fallen short of satisfying. It hung forlorn behind her.

"I always like to look at diamonds," Mr. Childs suggested.

"And I always like to wear them," she agreed.

Ms. Hallingby tried to remember why she had started down this road in the first place. Mr. Childs's portraits usually require at least six sittings. What with crowded social schedules, some of his portraits — like his life-size rendering of the designer Carolyne Roehm, meant to evoke Sargent's portrait of Madame X — can take years.

At the other end of the room, facing the pastel, was an oil painting of one of Ms. Hallingby's bichon frisés. She addressed Mr. Childs with a soft, breathy voice: "Remember how I asked you, `Why do people really have their portraits painted . . . ' " Her voice trailed off. She couldn't remember what he'd said.

Finally, after a reference to Sept. 11, she said: "I decided I wanted to look at one of James's paintings, and I wanted it to be of me, not someone else. But it's not a vanity thing."

Ms. Tober, who met Mr. Childs at an antiquities society at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had her own reasons. "I said to my husband, `While I'm still looking O.K., maybe I should do something,' " she explained. On the boogie question, she added: "I guess I'm a romantic at heart. I wasn't the editor-in-chief of Bride's magazine for 20 years for nothing. I'm aware how murderous and unjust the world is, but I don't need to surround myself with that in my home."

For Mr. Childs, the idea of painting society has always been intriguing. Reared in Minneapolis, where his mother sang on the radio, he befriended that city's leading families, including the Pillsburys. When he arrived in New York in 1987, he wanted nothing more than to paint Ms. Roehm, who struck him as evocative of Hollywood glamour — a favorite theme — in a way that the actual women of Hollywood weren't. He pursued her through Jerry Zipkin, the legendary "walker" to society women, who died in 1995. Such pursuit has put Mr. Childs in the position of asking aesthetic questions like, "Do you think we can have that necklace taken out of the vault?" He saw no conflict between high classical ideals and the people who rack up the news clippings.

"I admire those people for their discipline and verve," he said. "I feel a lot of empathy for people who have positions that other people feel envious of. Those positions can be onerous. There's a lot of duties involved."

Ms. Hallingby endorsed this view. "You always have to be perfect, and I'm not perfect," she said. With her portrait, she added, "Finally I get to be perfect."

Because of Mr. Childs's unfashionable idealization of heroism and beauty, a visit to his studio can be an otherworldly experience. Enormous scenes from ancient Greece jockey with the portraits of doyens of the parterre. John Russell Taylor, art critic for The Times of London, likened Mr. Childs's technical ability to that of the Victorian painter Frederic Lord Leighton, adding that his work avoids sentiment but instead "revels in the sensuous possibilities of embodying the ancient myths" and also "seeks to imbue them with a becoming gravitas."

Ms. Roehm, on a visit to the studio in July, stood by a full-size reproduction of her 1991 portrait, which remains Mr. Childs's best-known work. (The original was destroyed in a fire.) "All of us want to be the heroine of the opera," she said, explaining the attraction. "We all want to see ourselves as heroic and unforgettable, especially if we think of ourselves as forgettable and not very heroic."

Mr. Childs plans to close his atelier temporarily in the autumn to go to Greece and paint athletes training for the Olympic Games. Already he has sketched Paul and Morgan Hamm, twin gymnasts from Waukesha, Wis. Modern athletes have no trouble understanding his work, he said: they're raised on the fantasy of video games; compared to that, his fantasies are mild.

When he returns from Greece, he said, he hopes to expand his school: "There's dozens of small ateliers now teaching the classical style, in the tradition of master and protégé, that's been dead since the rise of the art school and the modernist idea." He also has a commission to paint a mural for the National Museum of American History in Washington.

Mr. Childs said he considered himself a modern artist and his work of the moment. Yet there are times he feels like an outsider in the art world. His mentor, R. H. Ives Gammell, who introduced Mr. Childs to the uncompromising discipline of classical art in Boston, died in 1981. Before his death, Gammell used to lament the death of his own teacher, William McGregor Paxton. "Gammell used to call Paxton `the last of those who know,' " Mr. Childs said, meaning the last true classicist. Gammell taught Mr. Childs without charge, and even flew him to Boston from Minneapolis for lessons.

"It's a lonely feeling sometimes," Mr. Childs said of life outside modernism. "My ideals and interests have become specialized. I feel the way Gammell did. When I have a question about something, there's no one I can ask. All the people I look up to are dead."