SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 2008

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A High-Tech Generation Selling Phones To the Young Raises Alarms By DOREEN CARVAJAL

PARIS — The MO1 beginner mobile phone is not as cuddly as a teddy bear, but manufacturers of the curvy crimson-and-blue handset for 6-year-olds promise a similarly warm and fuzzy relationship. They boast about socialization, emotional health and the comforts of “peace of mind.’’ And yet such shiny child-size phones are stirring some parental and government unease, particularly at a time when the mobile telephone industry is reaching deeper into saturated markets to tap customers with chubby hands capable of cradling both dolls and phones. Already, the category of young customers —

tweens and teens — is driving subscriber growth in the United States, according to IDC, a technology research firm in Massachusetts, which projects that 31 million new young users will join the market from 2005 to 2010. The year 2006 was the turning point when the industry started focusing not just on teenagers and adults but also on tweens — children between middle childhood and adolescence, about 8 to 12 years old — and even children as young as 5. Bright new “kiddie’’ telephones began appearing on the market that can speed-dial grandma and grandpa with a click of a button. The MO1 — developed by Imaginarium, a toy company, and Telefónica in Spain — prompted some parent groups in Europe to demand a government ban

ILLUSTRATION BY THE NEW YORK TIMES

on marketing to children. Here in France, the health minister recently issued a warning against excessive mobile phone use by young children. The objections are driven in part by a lack of knowledge about the long-term health effects of mobile phone use. But they also appear to reflect an instinctive worry about whether parents should be giving young children cellphones at all. Jóvenes Verdes, an environmental advocacy group for young people in Spain, argues that “the mobile telephone industry is acting like the tobacco industry by designing products that addict the very young.’’ While there is no specific evidence that mobile telephones pose a health threat to young users, researchers worry that there is still only scanty sci-

entific information about the long-term impact of radio frequency electromagnetic fields emitted by mobile telephones on the developing brains and tissues of children. In France the health minister, Roselyne Bachelot, has taken such concerns public, issuing an alert in January urging parents to limit use, reducing children’s telephone calls to no more than six minutes. Her announcement followed a similar warning by the Health and Radio Frequencies Foundation, a government-backed research group created two years ago to study the impact of radio frequency

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Cyber Rebels in Cuba Defy State’s Limits By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

JOSE GOITIA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

At an e-mail center in Havana, customers work under an employee’s watchful eye. Old Havana has only one true Internet cafe.

HAVANA — A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress. Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly. Mr. Alarcón seemed confused when students sharply questioned him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread through Havana, passed from person

to person, and seriously damaged Mr. Alarcón’s reputation in some circles. Something similar happened in late January when officials tried to impose a tax on the tips and wages of employees of foreign companies. Workers erupted in jeers and shouts when told about the new tax, a moment caught on a cellphone camera and passed along by memory sticks. “It passes from flash drive to flash drive,” said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. “This is going to get out of the government’s hands because the technology is moving so rapidly.” Cuban officials have long limited the public’s access to the Internet and digi-

tal videos, tearing down unauthorized satellite dishes and keeping down the number of Internet cafes open to Cubans. Only one Internet cafe remains open in Old Havana, down from three a few years ago. Hidden in a small room in the depths of the Capitol building, the state-owned cafe charges a third of the average Cuban’s monthly salary — about $5 — to use a computer for an hour. The other two former Internet cafes in central Havana have been converted into “postal services” that let Cubans send e-mail messages over a closed network on the island with no links to the Internet. Yet the government’s attempts to control access are increasingly ineffective.

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A Speck of Sunlight Is a Town’s Annual Alarm Clock By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway — Early this month, the 2,000 inhabitants of Longyearbyen were eagerly awaiting a visitor, a guest to warm the air and make the town’s colors come alive: the white of the snow; the deep blue of the water; the red, yellow and green of the wooden homes, banks, restaurants, schools and the post office. On March 8, the sun rose again in Longyearbyen, on an island 965 kilometers from the North Pole, for the first time since October. For residents here, after months of perpetual darkness, the return of sunlight is a very big event. Now, the wheels are turning again. Inger Marie Hegvik, who has worked at the airport for 15 years, said that she sleeps two to three hours more in the dark months, and that her energy rose dramatically in the days leading up to March 8. “It is excellent,” she said, shopping for wine at the Coop, a local store. “Everything becomes easier.” To celebrate the

DEAN C. K. COX FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

The sun peeks over mountains near Longyearbyen, after months of night. sun’s arrival, her office planned a party at a mountain cabin. Longyearbyen, originally a coal mining town named for the American who founded it a century ago, is in total darkness from mid-November through January. During the first part of November and in February, when the sun is well below the horizon, daytime is only indirect light, a brief period of bluish twilight. For the next few weeks, residents will enjoy the diurnal alternation of light and

The Cost of a Growing Global Appetite

darkness that is usual elsewhere. By the end of March, the transformation will be complete: from April through September, there will be perpetual day in this town, now home to a university and a thriving tourist industry, as well as miners. The return of the sun also means the return of warmth to this frigid land, although that concept is relative. Summer temperatures average only 6 degrees Celsius. The record high is 18. But for many longtime inhabitants there is a sense of regret this time of year, as well. The perpetual night in Longyearbyen’s winter can be a time of contemplation. “Winter is so nice, you have all these things you want to do,” said Birgit Brekken, who moved here as a nurse 30 years ago and now works in a boutique. “You write long letters instead of making a phone call. It’s a time when you can slow down and read.” Now, she said, “the sun is coming back, and you have to get busy again.”

Functional Art From a Finite Resource

Increased demand for grain is pushing up food prices all over the world. WORLD TRENDS

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A Brazilian designer’s eco-chic furniture is a symbol of cool from Miami to Rio de Janeiro. ARTS & STYLES

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CAHIER DU « MONDE » DATÉ SAMEDI 15 MARS 2008, NO 19640. NE PEUT ÊTRE VENDU SÉPARÉMENT

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 2008 O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY

EDITORIALS OF THE TIMES

Oceans at Risk There is no shortage of scientific studies documenting the degradation of the world’s oceans, the decline of marine ecosystems and the collapse of important fish species. Several have appeared in the last month. What is in short supply is a sustained effort by world governments and other institutions to do something about it. Last month, a team of American, British and Canadian researchers concluded that not a single square meter of ocean had been left untouched by society, and that humans had fouled 41 percent of the seas with polluted runoff, overfishing and other abuses. A narrower study from the University of Oregon found that a dead zone off the Oregon coast had spread south to California and north to Washington and devastated marine life in one of the world’s most productive fisheries. The culprit is believed to be global warming, which has changed the interaction between wind and sea in ways that rob the fish of oxygen. A third study is the latest legislative report card from the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, established to push Congress and the administration to do a better job of protecting America’s waters and to play a more active role globally. Washington policy makers get no grade higher than a ‘’C’’ in any category, including financing for scientific research and fisheries management. The United States has to do better but so, too, must the rest of the world.

A case can be made that the United States has been more sensitive to ocean issues than other major fishing nations, including Japan and the maritime members of the European Union. The problems are global and so, in the end, are the solutions. The United Nations could do far more. Successful in banning huge drift nets, it has made few inroads on bottom trawling, a ruthless form of industrial fishing. And it has gone nowhere in its effort to persuade Japan and the European Union to stop their assault on the world’s shark populations, which have been decimated beyond belief. The World Trade Organization could also usefully limit the huge government subsidies that allow most of the world’s industrial fleets to stay afloat. Last year, President Bush, who is weak on many environmental issues, created one of the largest protected marine reserves in the world — 360,000 square kilometers of largely unspoiled reefs and shoals near Hawaii. He should replicate that achievement elsewhere in American waters and persuade other leaders to do the same. And he must keep the pressure on Congress to approve, finally, the Law of the Sea. Without that approval, the United States will have no voice when decisions are made about rights of passage, exploring the ocean floor and fishing. The United States should have that voice, and the rest of the world needs to hear it.

Dark Days in Armenia The democracy that Armenians dreamed of during their long decades under Moscow’s control is slipping away. After opponents challenged last month’s flawed presidential election, the government imposed a brutal state of emergency. At least eight people are now dead, independent news outlets throttled and all protests silenced. President Bush and other Western leaders need to make clear to Armenia’s government that such behavior is unacceptable and will jeopardize future relations. Compared to post-Soviet tyrannies like Belarus or Uzbekistan, Armenia may not look so bad. That is why it is so important to halt this slide into authoritarianism before it is too late. Official election results handed an overwhelming victory to the ruling party candidate, Serge Sargsyan. International monitors declared that while the overall outcome appeared fair, there were serious problems with the vote count. The protests that followed only turned violent after police began beating demonstrators. Witnesses told our colleague, Sabrina Tavernise, that government authorities planted guns and grenades among the sleeping protesters on March 1. Then, claiming that they were thwarting an attempted coup, police attacked the opposition camp. The next day, the outgoing president sent tanks into the streets, banned demonstrations and

ordered Armenian news organizations to relay only information provided by his government. Local stations can no longer use the Armenian language programs produced by foreign broadcasters including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. That drew an admirably strong protest from Washington’s Broadcasting Board of Governors, the independent federal agency that supervises these stations, while the State Department has expressed its concern over the death toll. Their words would carry more weight if President Bush added his voice. Armenia, embroiled in a lengthy standoff with neighboring Azerbaijan, is relatively isolated in its own region and especially values its good relations with the United States. This is not a case of pure democratic virtue against pure authoritarian evil. The defeated opposition leader, Levon Ter-Petrossian, is a former president who in the 1990s sent armored cars into the streets to crush demonstrators protesting his electoral manipulations. He insists, without credible evidence, that he won this election. And once government forces set off the recent violence, some of those who turned out in Mr. Ter-Petrossian’s behalf seemed more interested in looting nearby shops. The main responsibility lies with Armenia’s government leaders, and it is to them that the White House must address its protests.

WILLIAM KRISTOL

McCain’s Daunting Task Buried inside the newspapers on March 9 was a noteworthy election result. In a special election to replace former Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, first-time Democratic candidate Bill Foster emerged victorious. George Bush easily carried the district in 2004, as has every recent Republican presidential candidate. This Democratic win suggests that, for now, we’re in an electoral environment more like 2006 than 2004. Foster’s eightpercentage-point improvement on John Kerry’s 2004 performance in the district mirrors the general shift in the electorate from 2004, when Bush won and the Republicans held Congress, to 2006, when the Democrats took over Congress and ran on average about eight points ahead of the Republicans. Most surveys have shown the Democrats retaining that sizable advantage over the last 16 months. This isn’t encouraging for Republican prospects in 2008. Nor is this: It’s rare for a party to win a third consecutive term in the White House. The only time it’s been done since World War II was in 1988. Then the incumbent, Ronald Reagan, had a job approval rating on Election Day in the high 50s. George Bush looks likely to remain stuck in the 30s. Factor in the prospect of a recession and the fact that a large majority already thinks the country’s going in the wrong direction. Add to the mix a huge turnout so far in the Democratic presidential primaries, far above that for the Republican contests, even when both parties still had competitive races. Nor should Republicans be too cheered by the prospect of a drawn-out and bitter Democratic nomination battle. That battle is personal, not ideological — and,

The economic news has been fairly dire recently. The credit crisis is getting worse, and a widely watched indicator of trends in the service sector — which is most of the economy — has fallen off a cliff. It’s still not a certainty that we’re headed into recession, but the odds are growing greater. And if past experience is any guide, the troubles will persist for a long time — say, into the middle of 2010. The problems now facing the U.S. economy look a lot like the problems that caused the last two recessions — but this time in combination. On one side, the bursting of the housing bubble is playing the role that the bursting of the dot-com bubble played in 2001. On the other, the subprime crisis is creating a credit crisis reminiscent of the crunch after the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s, which led to recession in 1990. Now, you may have heard that those recessions were short. And it’s true that the last two recessions both officially ended after only eight months. But the official end dates for those recessions are deeply misleading, at least as far as most people’s experience is concerned. There’s a reason that the Bush administration always talks about jobs added since August 2003. It was only then, two and a half years after the recession began, that the U.S. economy began to experience anything that felt like a recovery. And the same thing happened a decade earlier: the recession that began in

: AIDE A LA LECTURE

In a bad year for Republicans, the best strategy is boldness. cause difficulties in a general election. A sustained assault highlighting these weaknesses of Obama or Clinton could be effective. In 1976, Gerald Ford was the Republican nominee in similarly inauspicious circumstances. He trailed by more than 20 percentage points, but hammered away all fall at Jimmy Carter’s inexperience and liberalism, and almost closed the gap. But this time, too, such an attack probably wouldn’t be enough. Luckily, John McCain has more to offer as a nominee than Gerald Ford did. McCain can feature an amazing story of personal courage, a record of independence and accomplishment as a senator, and courage

PAUL KRUGMAN

A Long Story 1990 officially ended in March 1991, but the jobless recovery that followed kept Americans feeling miserable about the economy right up through the 1992 election. Since the current problems of the U.S. economy look like a combination of 1990 and 2001, the shape of this episode of economic distress will probably be similar to that of the earlier episodes: even if the official recession is short, the bad times will linger well into the next administration. How severe will the distress be? The double-bubble nature of the underlying problem — a housing bubble and a credit bubble combined — suggests that it may well be worse than either 1990 or 2001. And some highly respected economists are issuing dire warnings. There has been a lot of buzz about a new paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that compares the United States in recent years to other advanced countries that have experienced financial crises. They find that the U.S. profile resembles that of the “big five crises,” a list that includes, for example, Sweden’s 1991 crisis, which caused the unemployment rate to soar from 2 percent to 9 percent over a two-year period. Maybe we’ll be lucky, and that won’t happen. But what can be done to limit the

GHASTLINESS: horreur

Pour aider à la lecture de l’anglais et familiariser nos lecteurs avec certaines expressions américaines, Le Monde publie ci-dessous la traduction de quelques mots et idiomes contenus dans les articles de ce supplément. Par Dominique Chevallier, agrégée d’anglais.

LEXIQUE Dans l’article “When Justice Is Served, Profits Are In the Offing,” page 7: IN THE OFFING: proche, en vue BAIL: caution APPRAISER: expert ALL BUT: presque AKIN TO: apparenté à TO TAMPER WITH: falsifier TO BRIBE: soudoyer, corrompre BURLY: de forte carrure, costaud HANDCUFFS: menottes TO FUNNEL: canaliser TO HOUND: poursuivre sans pitié RELENTLESSLY: sans arrêt, de façon incessante TO TRUMP: faire mieux que, être plus important que

Republican hopes to the contrary notwithstanding, Democrats will unite behind Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, or behind a ticket with the two of them. Don’t Obama and Clinton have more vulnerabilities than a typical nominee? Perhaps. Obama is more liberal and inexperienced than any winning presidential candidate in modern times. Clinton is a problematic carrier of a message of change. And both have taken positions appropriate for the Democratic primaries — for a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, for tax hikes and against a ban on partial-birth abortion — that should

Dans l’article “Islanders Turn to Each Other To Fill Their Food Cupboards,” page 7: TO CATER: fournir des repas TO TEND: garder, s’occuper de POST-AND-BEAM: ossature de bois (pour colombage) TO FORAGE: fouiller TO BARTER: faire du troc SCALLOP: coquille Saint Jacques STEW: ragout BEET: betterave Dans l’article “Deadly Gas That Sustained a Rural Town Is Going Away,” page 7: STOCKPILE: réserve ENDEAVOR: effort WRYLY: ironiquement

DETERRENT: agent de dissuasion TO TEAR DOWN (TORE, TORN): démolir HAZMAT: vient de hazardous material: matériau

dangereux; ceux ci sont divisés en huit classes en fonction de la nature du danger (ex: classe 1: explosifs); ici, il s’agit de matériaux classe 6: substances toxiques ou infectieuses.

EXPRESSIONS Dans l’article “When Justice Is Served, Profits Are In the Offing,” page 7: BOND, BONDSMAN: caution; le “bondsman” se porte garant de l’accusé, libéré sous caution: il dépose le montant de la caution, et garantit la présence de l’accusé au procès; c’est un entrepreneur privé et il se fait rembourser avec intérêt par son client; si celui-ci est présent au procès, seuls 10% du montant de la caution seront prélevés, s’il ne se présente pas, le bondsman devra payer la caution en entier; il a donc tout intérêt à ce que son client ne disparaisse pas.

and foresight with respect to the most important foreign policy decision of the last couple of years — the surge in Iraq. If any Republican can defend conservative principles and policies, at once acknowledging Bush’s failures while pivoting to present his own biography and agenda to the voters, McCain can. Still, he’ll have to take risks. He could embrace a populist domestic-policy reform agenda, oriented toward the legitimate concerns of middle-class and working-class families, even if it pains affluent Republicans. (He could also criticize corporate boards that have rewarded C.E.O.’s lavishly as they’ve managed their companies into the ground.) He could explain forthrightly that we’ll have to stay in Iraq for quite a while, even if this means challenging the American people to spurn the feel-good promises of irresponsible Democrats. And he could mock the narcissism of young Obama supporters, by pointing out that their contemporaries serving in the armed forces are the ones making real sacrifices on our behalf. Perhaps the most obvious way McCain could upend the normal dynamics of this year’s election would be a bold vice presidential choice. He could pick a hawkish and principled Democrat like Joe Lieberman. He could reach beyond the usual bevy of elected officials by tapping either David Petraeus or Raymond Odierno — the two generals who together, in an amazing demonstration of leadership, turned the war in Iraq around last year. But whomever he picks, and whatever issues he emphasizes, McCain should keep following Danton’s injunction: “Il faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.’’

damage? Since September, the Federal Reserve has cut its target interest rate five times, and everyone expects it to cut further. But interest rates were cut dramatically during the last two slumps, too — yet the slumps went on for years anyway. Meanwhile, Congress and the Bush administration have reached agreement on a stimulus package. But the package, while probably better than nothing, is unlikely to make a noticeable dent in the problem. Still, by January the White House will have a new occupant. If the slump is still going on, which is likely, this will offer a chance to consider other, more effective measures. In particular, now would be a good time to think about the possibility of going beyond tax cuts and rebate checks, and stimulating the economy with some much-needed public investment — say, in repairing the country’s crumbling infrastructure. But we won’t get any innovative action to help the economy unless the next president has a couple of key attributes. First, he or she has to be free of the ideological blinders that make the current administration and its allies fiercely oppose the idea that the government can do anything positive aside from cutting taxes. Second, he or she has to be knowledgeable about and interested in economic policy. Will we have that kind of president? Stay tuned.

RÉFÉRENCES Dans l’article “Islanders Turn To Each Other To Fill Their Food Cupboards,” page 7: CAPE COD: “The Cape;” péninsule en forme d’avant-bras relevé au coude qui se projette dans l’Atlantique à l’extrémité Est du Massachusetts; c’est dans cette baie que les tous premiers explorateurs ont accosté, depuis les Norvégiens dans les années 1,000 jusqu’à Samuel de Champlain. C’est un lieu très prisé de villégiature balnéaire, qui voit toute l’élite bostonienne et new yorkaise affluer en été et à l’arrière saison (très bel été indien), pour profiter de ses magnifiques plages de sable, de la beauté de ses nombreux phares, de l’eau relativement chaude, et de l’atmosphère des petits villages de pêcheurs et de baleiniers (on y voit d’ailleurs régulièrement des baleines). Toutes sortes de sports d’eau y sont pratiqués, notamment la planche à voile. Cette région à la mode depuis la fin du 19ème siècle, a connu un regain récent de popularité lié à la famille Kennedy qui a une résidence à Hyannis, un des villages du Capage On compte 42 golfs sur le Cap, et toute la côte est protégée de l’expansion immobilière.

SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 2008

LE MONDE

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WORLD TRENDS

A Global Demand for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill DAN KOECK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By DAVID STREITFELD

LAWTON, North Dakota — Whatever Dennis Miller decides to plant this year on his 1,120-hectare farm, the world needs. Wheat prices have doubled in the last six months. Corn is rising rapidly. Barley, sunflower seeds, canola and soybeans are all up sharply. “For once, there’s great reason to be optimistic,” Mr. Miller said. But the prices that have renewed Mr. Miller’s faith in farming are causing pain across the globe. A tailor in Lagos, Nigeria, named Abel Ojuku said recently that he had been forced to cut back on the bread he and his family love. “If you wanted to buy three loaves, now you buy one,” Mr. Ojuku said. Everywhere, the cost of food is rising. Whether the world is in for a long period of continued increases has become one of the most urgent issues in economics. Many factors are contributing to the rise, but the biggest is escalating demand. In recent years, the economies of the world’s developing countries have been growing about 7 percent a year, an unusually rapid rate by historical standards. The high growth rate means hundreds of millions of people are, for the first time, getting access to the basics of life, including a better diet. That jump in demand is helping to drive up the prices of agricultural commodities. Farmers the world over are producing at full capacity. American agricultural exports are expected to increase 23 percent this year to $101 billion, a record. The world’s grain stockpiles have fallen to the lowest levels in decades. “Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,” said Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.” In contrast to a price escalation in the 1990s, investors this time are betting that scarcity and high prices will last for years. If that proves true, it is likely to present big problems in managing the American economy. Rising food prices in the United States are already helping to fuel Will Connors contributed reporting from Lagos, Nigeria, and Salman Masood from Pakistan.

A Scarcity Of Wheat

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

600 million metric tons

Droughts and Consumption competition from other crops have 450 suppressed wheat production in recent years, even as global demand has risen. 300 Adjusted for inflation, wheat prices are hitting their highest levels in a 150 quarter-century.

Production 0 ’67 ’70

By AMELIA GENTLEMAN

Are women ‘renting’ their wombs to strangers just to feed their own children? she is unique, that it came into the world in a very special way,’’ said Mr. Gher, 29, a communications officer for the environmental group Greenpeace. An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices. Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some areas of the United States and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost

’80

’90

’00

’07

MARKET YEARS Sources: U.S.D.A., National Agricultural Statistics Service

BENEDICTE KURZEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

As more people around the world can afford a Western diet, food prices have soared. At bakeries in Nigeria, the cost of bread is up 50 percent in the last year. Top, rail cars full of wheat in North Dakota. inflation reminiscent of the 1970s. And the increases could become an even bigger problem overseas. The increases that have already occurred are depriving poor people of food, setting off social unrest and even spurring riots in some countries. “People are trying to figure out, is this a new era?” said Joseph Glauber, chief economist for the United States Department of Agriculture. “Are prices going to be high forever?”

As the newly urbanized and newly affluent seek more protein and more calories, a phenomenon called “diet globalization” is playing out around the world. Demand is growing for pork in Russia, beef in Indonesia and dairy products in Mexico. Though wracked with upheaval for years and with many millions still rooted in poverty, Nigeria has a growing middle class. Median income per person doubled in the first half of this decade, to

$560 in 2005. Much of this increase is being spent on food. Nigeria grows little wheat, but its people have developed a taste for bread, in part because of marketing by American exporters. Between 1995 and 2005, per capita wheat consumption in Nigeria more than tripled, to 20 kilograms a year. Bread has been displacing traditional foods like eba, dumplings made from cassava root. Nigeria’s wheat imports in 2007 were forecast to rise 10 percent more. But demand was also rising in many other places, from Tunisia to Venezuela to India. At the same time, drought and competition from other crops limited supply. So wheat prices soared, and over the last year, bread prices in Nigeria have jumped about 50 percent. Mr. Ojuku, the man who buys fewer loaves, and one of his fellow tailors in Lagos, Mukala Sule, 39, are trying to adjust to the new era. “I must eat bread and tea in the morning. Otherwise, I can’t be happy,” Mr. Sule said. For a breakfast that includes a small loaf, he pays about $1 a day, twice what the traditional eba would have cost him. Meanwhile, at a moment when much of the United States is contemplating recession, farmers are flourishing. The Agriculture Department forecasts that

comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. “People are increasingly exposed to the idea of surrogacy in India; Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show,’’ said Dr. Kaushal Kadam at the Rotunda clinic in Mumbai, referring to the popular American television personality. Just an hour earlier she had created an embryo for Mr. Gher and his partner with sperm from one of them and an egg removed from a donor just minutes before in another part of the clinic. The clinic, known more formally as Rotunda — The Center for Human Reproduction, does not permit contact between egg donor, surrogate mother or future parents. There are no firm statistics on how many surrogacies are being arranged in India for foreigners, but anecdotal evidence suggests a sharp increase. Rudy Rupak, co-founder and president of PlanetHospital, a medical tourism agency with headquarters in California, said he expected to send at least 100 couples to India this year for surrogacy, up from 25 in 2007, the first year he offered the service. “Every time there is a success story, hundreds of inquiries follow,’’ he said. Surrogacy is an area fraught with ethical and legal uncertainties. Critics argue that the ease with which relatively rich foreigners are able to “rent’’ the wombs of poor Indians creates the potential for exploitation. Although the government is actively promoting India as a medical tourism destination, what some see as an exchange of money for babies has made many here uncomfortable. The Ministry of Women and Child De-

THE NEW YORK TIMES

farm income this year will be 50 percent greater than the average of the last 10 years. Mr. Miller’s family has worked the fields of the western plains for more than a century. One afternoon early last month, he turned on the computer in his combination office and laundry room to see what commodity prices were up to. “Oh, my goodness, look at that,” Mr. Miller said. Barley was $6.40 a bushel, nearing a price that would tempt him to plant more. Soybeans were $12.79 a bushel, up from $8.50 in August. The frozen earth outside was only a few weeks from coming to life, but Mr. Miller was happily uncertain about what to plant. “I’m debating between spring wheat, durum wheat, canola, malting barley, confection sunflowers, oil sunflowers, soybeans, flax and corn,” Mr. Miller said. The biggest blemish on this winter of joy is that farmers’ own costs are rising rapidly. Expenses for the diesel fuel used to run tractors and combines and for the fertilizer essential to modern agriculture have soared. Read Smith, a farmer in St. John, Washington, thinks a new era is at hand for all sorts of crops. “We’ve lulled the public with cheap food,” he said. “It’s not going to be a steal anymore.”

The practice of surrogate motherhood was pioneered in India at Kaival Hospital in Anand, where Dr. Naina Patel examined an expectant mother.

India Nurtures Business Of Surrogate Motherhood MUMBAI — Yonatan Gher and his male partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup. The embryo was formed in January in an Indian fertility clinic about 4,000 kilometers from the couple’s home in Tel Aviv, produced by doctors who have begun specializing in surrogacy services for couples from around the world. “The child will know early on that he or

Consumption has exceeded production in seven of the last eight years

AJIT SOLANKI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

velopment said in February that it was weighing recommending legislation to govern surrogacy, but it is not imminent. An article published in The Times of India in February questioned how such a law would be enforced: “In a country crippled by abject poverty,’’ it asked, “how will the government body guarantee that women will not agree to surrogacy just to be able to eat two square meals a day?’’ In Anand, a city in the eastern state of Gujarat where the practice was pioneered in India, more than 50 surrogate mothers are pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Dr. Naina Patel, who runs the Anand clinic, said that even Americans who could afford to hire surrogates at home were coming to her for women “free of vices like alcohol, smoking and drugs.’’

She said she gets about 10 e-mailed inquiries a day from couples abroad. Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children. A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate. This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t,’’ she said. “Unless we go to India.’’ Mr. Gher and his partner, who asked not to be named to preserve his privacy, have worked through their doubts and are certain they are doing a good thing. “People can believe me when I say that

if I could bear the baby myself I would,’’ he said. “But this is a mutually beneficial answer. The surrogate gets a fair amount of money for being part of the process.’’ They are paying about $30,000, of which the surrogate gets about $7,500. “Surrogates do it to give their children a better education, to buy a home, to start up a small business, a shop,’’ Dr. Kadam said. “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.’’ Although some Indian clinics allow surrogates and clients to meet, Mr. Gher said he preferred anonymity. When his surrogate gives birth later this year, he and his partner will be in the hospital, but not in the ward where she is in labor, and will be handed the baby by a nurse. The surrogate mother does not know that she is working for foreigners, Dr. Kadam said, and has not been told that the future parents are both men. Gay sex is illegal in India. Rotunda did not allow interviews with its surrogate mothers, but a 32-year-old woman at a fertility clinic in Delhi explained why she is planning on her second surrogacy in two years. Separated from her husband, she found that her monthly wages of 2,800 rupees, about $69, as a midwife were not enough to raise her 9-year-old son. With the money she earned from the first surrogacy, more than $13,600, she bought a house. She expects to pay for her son’s education with what she earns for the second, about $8,600. “I will save the money for my child’s future,’’ she said.

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 2008 WORLD TRENDS

Mobile Phone Morphs Into a Social Network for Youth By LAURA M. HOLSON

Children increasingly rely on personal technological devices like cellphones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families, changing the way they communicate with their parents. Business analysts and other researchers expect the popularity of the cellphone — along with the mobility and intimacy it affords — to further exploit and accelerate these trends. “For kids it has become an identityshaping and psyche-changing object,’’ said Sherry Turkle, a social psychologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the social impact of mobile communications. “No one creates a new technology really understanding how it will be used or how it can change a society.’’ She says these trends are likely to continue as cellphones morph into mini hand-held computers, social networking devices and pint-size movie screens. Marketers and cellphone makers are only too happy to fill the newest generation gap. Last fall, Firefly Mobile introduced the glowPhone for the preschool set; it has a small keypad with two speed-dial buttons depicting an image of a mother and a father. AT&T promotes its wireless service with television commercials poking fun at a mom who doesn’t understand her daughter’s cellphone vernacular. So far, parents’ ability to reach their children whenever they want affords families more pluses than minuses. Russell Hampton, who is divorced, says it is easy to reach his 14-year-old daughter Katie even though they live in different time zones. And college students who are pressed for time, like Ben Blanton, a freshman who plays baseball at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, can text their parents when it suits them, asking them to run errands or just saying hello. “Texting is in between calling and sending and e-mail,’’ he explained. Now he won’t even consider writing a letter to his mother, Jan. “It’s too time consuming,’’ he said. But as with any cultural shift involving parents and children — the birth of

By STEVE LOHR

ANDREW M. DADDIO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Savannah Pence likes to send text messages while her father, John, is trying to catch up with the technology. rock ’n’ roll or the sexual revolution of the 1960s — various gulfs emerge. Baby boomers who warned decades ago that their out-of-touch parents couldn’t be trusted now sometimes find themselves raising children who — thanks to the Internet and the cellphone — consider Mom and Dad to be clueless, too. Cellphones, instant messaging, email and the like have encouraged younger users to create their own inventive, quirky and very private written language. That has given them the opportunity to essentially hide out in the open. They are more connected than ever, but also far more independent. In a survey released 18 months ago, AT&T found that among 1,175 parents the company interviewed, nearly half

learned how to text-message from their children. More than 60 percent of parents agreed that it helped them communicate, but that sometimes children didn’t want to hear their voice at all. When asked if their children wanted a call or a text message requesting that they be home by curfew, for instance, 58 percent of parents said their children preferred a text. “Just because you can reach them doesn’t mean they have to answer,’’ said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which is studying the impact of technology on adolescents. Savannah Pence, 15, says she wants to be in touch with her parents — but also wants to keep them at arm’s length. “I

don’t text that much in front of my parents because they read them,’’ she said. At first, John Pence, who owns a restaurant in Portland, Oregon, was unsure about how to relate to his daughter. “I didn’t know how to communicate with her,’’ Mr. Pence said. “I had to learn.’’ So he took a quick course in text messaging — from Savannah. Mr. Pence is well aware of how destabilizing cellphones, iPods and handheld video game players can be to family relations. “I see kids text under the table at the restaurant,’’ he said. “They don’t know that’s the time to carry on a conversation,’’ he said. “I would like to walk up to some tables and say, ‘Kids, put your iPods and your cellphones away and talk to your parents.’ ’’

Yoani Sánchez at her home in Havana, where she writes gentle critiques of the government in a blog describing her daily life.

Younger Hands on Cellphones Raise Alarms on Health Risks From Page 1 fields on humans. “I believe in the principle of precaution,’’ Ms. Bachelot said. “If there is a risk, then children with developing nervous systems would be affected. I’ve alerted parents about the use of mobile telephones because it’s absurd for young children to have them.’’ The French foundation is moving now to organize a broad international research project to study the potential risks for children. More studies are developing in other countries. The Mobile Telecommunication and Health Research Program in Britain,

Many children want their own phones. But do they really need them? which is financed by the state and local telecommunications industry, is in the early stage of organizing a children’s study. Another project, called Cefalo, is under way in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland to explore whether mobile telephone use increases the risk of brain tumors for children. In January, the National Research Council in the United States also delivered a report — commissioned by the Food and Drug Administration — that reviewed existing scientific studies around the world and urged further research on the impact of mobile phone use on children and pregnant women. “This clearly is a population that is going to grow up with a great deal of larger exposure than anybody else because the kids use the phones all the time,’’ said Frank Barnes, a professor of engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder who led the study. “And you’ve got growing bodies

Warnings Of a Crisis In Demand For Bandwidth

and brains, so if there is going to be an impact, that’s likely to be a more sensitive population than others.’’ Every year, the average age of novice mobile phone users is dropping, hitting 10 years old last year, according to Scott Ellison, an IDC analyst who forecasts that the 9-and-under market will increase to nine million users in the United States and $1.6 billion in revenue by 2010. Telephone use is also getting more precocious in Europe, according to a Eurobarometer survey of almost 1,000 children in 29 countries, most of whom had telephones after age 9. In Europe, scientists are close to ending a broad seven-year study of adults in 13 countries — including Japan, Israel and much of Western Europe — that ultimately could give more impetus and financing to research on children. For most parents, decisions about cellphones are driven by other concerns. When his daughter Morgan was 12 years old, Greg Pozgar of Claysburg, Pennsylvania, resisted buying a mobile phone for her, mostly because he was worried she might run up a huge bill. “My biggest concern was whether my children were responsible enough to handle it,’’ he said. “It’s not just a toy.’’ Morgan received her first phone as a Christmas gift and went on to become a champion of text messaging at age 13 in a national $25,000 competition organized last year by the telephone manufacturer LG. As it turns out, she does not indulge in a lot of talking on the phone, but she does send and receive up to 7,000 text messages a month. Mr. Pozgar — who has been coaching football for 17 years — has noticed that lately more of his 8- and 9-year-old players are carrying mobile telephones. “I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing,’’ he said. “But how does a kid that old seem responsible enough with not losing or breaking it. My gosh, they can barely remember to tie their shoes.’’

LARA CERRI/ST. PETERSBURG TIMES

Cyber Rebels Defy the Limits From Page 1 Young people here say there is a thriving black market giving thousands of people an underground connection to the world outside the Communist country. People who have smuggled in satellite dishes provide illegal connections to the Internet for a fee or download movies to sell on discs. Others exploit the connections to the Web of foreign businesses and state-run enterprises. Employees with the ability to connect to the Internet often sell their passwords and identification numbers for use in the middle of the night. Even the country’s top computer science school, the University of Information Sciences, set in a campus once used by Cuba’s spy services, has become a hotbed of online rebels. Students download everything from the latest American television shows to articles and videos criticizing the government, and pass them quickly around the island. Some young journalists have also started blogs and Internet news sites, using servers in other countries, and their reports are reaching people through the digital underground. Yoani Sánchez, 32, and her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, 60, established Consenso desde Cuba, a Web site based in Germany. Ms. Sánchez has attracted a considerable following with her blog, Generación Y, in which she has artfully

written gentle critiques of the government by describing her daily life in Cuba. Ms. Sánchez and her husband said they believed strongly in using their names with articles despite the possible political repercussions. Shortly before Raúl Castro was elected president recently to replace his ailing brother, Fidel, Ms. Sánchez wrote a piece describing what sort of president she wanted. She said the country did not need a soldier, a charismatic leader or a great speaker, but “a pragmatic housewife” who favored freedom of speech and open elections. Writing later about Raúl Castro’s first speech as president, she criticized his vague promises of change, saying they were as clear as the Rosetta Stone was when it was first found. Both essays would be impossible to publish in Cuba. “The Internet has become the only terrain that is not regulated,” she said in an interview. Because Ms. Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet cafe, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand. “It’s a solid underground,” she said. “The government cannot control the information.”

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games. Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000. In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. But the Internet traffic surge represents more a challenge than an impending catastrophe. Even those most concerned are not predicting an Internet crash. An individual user, they say,

Growing streams of data could overwhelm the capacity of the Internet.

would experience Internet clogging in the form of sluggish download speeds and frustration with data-heavy services that become much less useful or enjoyable. “The Internet doesn’t collapse, but there would be a growing class of stuff you just can’t do online,” said Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, which predicted the bandwidth crunch by 2011, anticipating that demand will grow by 100 percent or more a year. Others are less worried — at least in the short term. Andrew Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota, estimates that digital traffic on the global network is growing about 50 percent a year, in line with a recent analysis by Cisco Systems, the big network equipment maker. That sounds like a daunting rate of growth. Yet the technology for handling Internet traffic is advancing at an impressive pace as well. The router computers for relaying data get faster, fiber-optic transmission gets better and software for juggling data gets smarter. While experts debate the immediacy of the challenge, they agree that it points to a larger issue. In the Internet era, they say, high-speed networks are increasingly the economic and scientific petri dishes of innovation, spawning new businesses, markets and jobs. If American investment lags, they warn, the nation risks losing competitiveness to countries that are making the move to higher-speed Internet access a priority. The slick video chats that William Bentley, a 13-year-old New Yorker, would like to see on the Internet are probably not in jeopardy. He is fairly representative of the next generation of digital consumer: He has made and posted his own YouTube videos, subscribes to YouTube channels, enjoys multiplayer games, and downloads music and videos. Asked what he would want next from the Internet, he replied, “It would be nice to have everybody always right there — just click and you could see them clearly and talk to them.” Whether he gets that is not just an issue of broadband occasionally slowing to dialup speeds. At least as important is how ample capacity can foster new technologies. The worries about digital traffic congestion are about the capacity of neighborhood switches, routers and pipes into a house. The cost of stringing high-speed optical fiber to a home, analysts estimate, can be $1,000 or more. That is why Internet access speeds vary so much country by country. They depend on local patterns of corporate investment and government subsidy. “The long-term issue is where innovation happens,” Mr. Odlyzko said. “Where will the next Google, YouTube, eBay or Amazon come from?”

SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 2008

LE MONDE

5

MONEY & BUSINESS

Economic Revival Has Russians Yearning for What the West Has Dmitri A. Medvedev was elected president of Russia earlier this month thanks to the political handiwork of Vladimir V. Putin. But maybe the real winner is economic globalization. From December 1999 to the end of 2007, a period overlapping the presidency of Mr. Putin, the value of Russia’s STEPHEN stock market increased KOTKIN from $60 billion to more than $1 trillion. Most Russians do not love Mr. Putin per se, but they love Mr. Putin’s Russia. They love being middle class. They love planning for the future. It is no comfort to the politically persecuted, but average wages in Russia are leaping 10 percent a year. The growing millions of Russian homeowners, vacationers and investors may seem inclined to authoritarianism or just apolitical. But they certainly value a strong ruble, moderate inflation, affordable mortgages, access to higher education, satellite television, Internet connections, passports, foreign visas and — above all else — no economic shocks. If Mr. Medvedev, 42, a former legal counsel at a Russian pulp conglomerate, can continue all that, and occasionally make a show of standing up to the

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS

West, he’ll be a hero, too. After nearly 10 years of robust growth, the Kremlin today faces a quandary. Expectations have been raised, and now many Russians, though wary of upsetting social stability, want not just high growth, but also a new modernization driven by innovation and broader entrepreneurialism. They want their whole country to reach a Western European standard of living — a standard that, historically, very few countries outside the region have attained. How in the world did it happen that Russia, still a country grappling with problems like relatively low life expectancies and alcoholism, is also, for the first time in its history, a land of widespread property ownership and of consumers brimming with confidence and pride? In “Russia’s Capitalist Revolution” (Peterson Institute, $26.95), Anders Aslund, a Russia analyst, argues that zero credit should go to Russia’s most popular politician, Mr. Putin. On the contrary, Mr. Aslund, who is from Sweden and based in Washington, insists that Russia’s economic breakthrough should be credited to Anatoly B. Chubais, who oversaw the government’s privatization program in the 1990s, when the country lost about

40 percent of its gross domestic product. It’s a bold thesis. He demonstrates that it was not the privatizations under Boris N. Yeltsin that set in motion Russia’s egregious insider enrichment. Instead, he shows, it was a process begun under the Soviet president Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and subsequently continued, to grant lobbyists preferential access to commodity export licenses at a time when there was a gap between world prices and very low regulated domestic prices — allowing them to pocket a windfall. Globalization continues to be the great opportunity for Russia. But it is an opportunity that doesn’t allow for complacency. At home, the Kremlin may be sovereign and super-controlling, but that doesn’t work globally. Even companies owned by the state are borrowing money abroad and issuing stock on international capital markets, becoming subject to investors and regulators outside Russia. Mr. Putin, using a centralizing, marketizing, globalizing playbook, has helped put Russia in a position to win big. But if Mr. Medvedev — with or without Mr. Putin’s guidance — fails to capitalize by taking the difficult next reform steps, the two Russian presidents will fade from history.

SERGEY PONOMAREV/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Vladimir V. Putin, seen on a television in a store, may not be beloved, but Russians love how their lives have improved. Mr. Medvedev’s first presidential term, just like Mr. Putin’s, will furnish a window for important, long-stalled reform measures to sustain Russia’s rise. He’ll need to cut some taxes and bureaucracy and shore up the legal system. If Russia is to make the transition to a more innovative, entrepreneurial economy, as Mr. Medvedev has stated,

In Mexico, Small Miners Search for Gold

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JENNIFER SZYMASZEK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

With the price of gold at record highs, Mexico is attracting prospectors like Jay Zebrowski. Below, rocks from the Sierra Madre. By ELISABETH MALKIN

MAGUARICHIC, Mexico — In these mountains, where conquistadors once gouged gold from open veins in the mountainside, the hardened gold miner of film lore is giving way to a new breed of prospector: geologists and engineers, who are armed with sophisticated equipment and millions of investor dollars. Largely American and Canadian, they toiled for global mining giants for years. But, now that the price of gold is near record highs, they are leaving their companies, raising capital to start their own prospecting start-ups and heading for Mexico. Recently, an ounce of gold was $991.68, up from $665 a year ago. Back in 1980, oil shock and economic gloom drove the price to $875 an ounce; that would be more than $2,000 today. “Gold hit bottom in 2001 at $250 an ounce and it has been going up ever since,’’ said Craig Stanley, a gold mining analyst at Desjardins Securities in Toronto. “That keeps dragging in more people.’’ Mining companies are ramping up gold exploration budgets all over the world. But many countries that hold out the promise of significant new deposits are either politically capricious, like Russia, or dangerous, like Congo. By contrast, Mexico has developed friendly investment rules and a relatively ef-

ficient bureaucracy, analysts said. Just to start exploring, it takes tens of millions of dollars. The cost of finding and then mining gold has increased about 25 percent in the last year, a result of soaring costs for the energy, steel and cement used in mining. Specialized equipment and qualified personnel are also in short supply. Modern-day exploration requires aerial mapping and sophisticated sensors. Even with the most sophisticated sounding and drilling equipment, only one of every 1,000 exploration projects becomes a working mine, said Peter K. M. Megaw, president of Imdex, a consulting and contracting firm based in Tucson, Arizona, that helps foreign companies exploring in Mexico.

That has not slowed the exploratory drilling taking place here. Analysts say Mexico is one of the most attractive countries in the world for mining — the 14th-largest producer of gold, up from 18th place in 2006. Most companies raise their first few million to begin mapping and testing claims at the TSX Venture Exchange in Toronto. Known in the industry as juniors, they have become the exploration arm of the industry, said Larry Segerstrom, the chief operating officer of Paramount Gold and Silver, a junior based in Ottawa that is exploring in Chihuahua State. Mr. Stanley said: “There are over a thousand junior miners listed. Most of them are a couple of guys with an idea,

and they have staked some land somewhere.’’ After two decades of prospecting here, Jay Zebrowski, 64, still drives his 1983 Chevrolet Suburban every few months from his home near Denver to check on the abandoned mine he and his geologist brother own here. Gold has put the Zebrowskis on the edge of ruin. Almost all of the one million or so dollars they have put into mining has come from investors who have yet to see a return. Indebted, Mr. Zebrowski has been able to keep exploring for gold by selling options on his claims to a small Montreal company, Dia Bras Exploration, and the Mexican mining giant Industrias Peñoles. The Zebrowski brothers eventually abandoned their mine and began staking claims instead, hoping to cut deals with bigger companies. They have mining claims on 14,000 hectares in northern Mexico, in addition to the mine. Mr. Zebrowski hopes to sell more options on those claims to the companies exploring here. Buying an option would give them the right to prospect for gold, and would pay the Zebrowskis more money if a deposit is developed into a mine. “We seem to have some good luck now,’’ Mr. Zebrowski said. He paused and added, “Well, at least good luck is all around us.’’

it must make other farsighted, complex investments in Russia’s human capital: education, health care, better conditions for private enterprise. What Mr. Medvedev’s Russia needs above all, but what Russia has never had, is the one thing that distinguishes all the most highly productive and innovation-driven countries: good governance.

Users Learning New Languages On the Internet By ANNE EISENBERG

The best way to learn a foreign language may be to surround yourself with native speakers. But if you can’t manage a trip abroad the Internet and a broadband computer connection may do the job, bringing native speakers within electronic reach for hours of practice. Web-based services now let people download a daily lesson in French or Hindi, put on their headsets, and then use Internet telephone service and the power of social networks to try their conversational skills with tutors or language partners from around the world. LiveMocha (livemocha.com), for example, is a free site where members can take 160 hours of beginning or intermediate lessons in French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi or English. There is no charge for tutoring; instead, members tutor one another, drawing on their expertise in their own language. Members chat online by typing messages, by talking or, if they have a Webcam, by video, in exchanges with others who want to tutor or be tutored. English speakers learning Spanish, for example, can write or speak descriptions of a vacation and receive feedback on their grammar and choice of idioms from native Spanish speakers on the network. A Spanish speaker, in turn, may seek advice from the English speaker about English assignments. LiveMocha introduced its Web site in September 2007, said Shirish Nadkarni, chief executive of the company, which is based in Bellevue, Washington. Since then, he said, about 200,000 users from more than 200 countries have joined. “It’s a community of like-minded learners who can leverage their native language proficiency to help one another,’’ he said. Paul Aoki, director of the language learning center at the University of Washington, Seattle, says he thinks the site’s social networking component makes it useful. “It seems to be a pretty powerful opportunity for people around the world to connect with language partners,’’ he said. Another electronic-based language learning program takes a different approach: podcasting. Praxis Language, based in Shanghai, offers free lessons in Mandarin Chinese (ChinesePod.com) or Spanish (SpanishPod. com) as podcasts. Mike Kuiack, an investment banker in Vancouver, British Columbia, who often travels to China, was an occasional student of Chinese for eight and a half years before he signed on to ChinesePod. Since he started using the service, he said, his vocabulary has grown as much as it did in all of the previous years of study. “I don’t try to conduct negotiations in Chinese,’’ he said, “but now at least I can listen to what’s going on in meetings.’’

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 2008 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: GADG ETS

IPhones Have Become A Favorite of Smugglers By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — Factories here churn out iPhones that are exported to the United States and Europe. Then thousands of them are smuggled right back into China. The strange journey of Apple’s popular iPhone, to nearly every corner of the world, shows what happens when Often, they say, the phones are given the world’s hottest consumer product defies a company’s attempt to slowly to members of Chinese tourist groups or Chinese airline flight attendants, introduce it in new markets. The iPhone has been swept up in a who are typically paid a commission of frenzy of global smuggling and infor- about $30 for every phone they deliver. Although unlocking the phone viomal marketing that leads friends to ask friends, “While you’re in the U.S., lates Apple’s purchase agreement, would you mind picking up an iPhone it does not appear to violate any laws here, though many stores may be for me?’’ These unofficial distribution net- avoiding import duties. Considering China’s penchant for works help explain a mystery that analysts who follow Apple have been smuggling and counterfeiting highpondering: why is there a large gap quality goods, the huge number of between the number of iPhones that iPhones being sold here is not surprisApple says it sold last year, about 3.7 ing, particularly given the popularity million, and the 2.3 million that are of the Apple brand in China. Indeed, within months of the release actually registered on the networks of its wireless partners in the United of the iPhone in the United States last June, iPhone knockoffs, or iClones as States and Europe? The answer now seems clear. For some have called them, were selling months, tourists, small entrepreneurs here for as little as $125. But most peoand smugglers of electronic goods have ple opt for the real thing. “A lot of people here want to get an been buying iPhones in the United States and then shipping them over- iPhone,’’ says Conlyn Chan, 31, a lawyer who was born in Taiwan and now seas. There the phones’ digital locks are broken so they can work on local cellular networks, and they are outfitted with localized software, essentially undermining Apple’s effort to introduce the phone with exclusive partnership deals, similar to its primary partnership agreement with AT&T in the United States. “There’s no question many of them are ending RYAN PYLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES up abroad,’’ said Charles R. Wolf, an analyst who At a market in China, advertisements for the follows Apple for Need- iPhone are prominent, even though it has not ham & Company. officially been released there. For Apple, the booming overseas market for iPhones is both a sign of its marketing prowess and a blow to a lives in Shanghai. “I know a guy who business model that could be coming went back to the States and bought 20 undone, costing the company as much iPhones. He even gave one to his drivas $1 billion over the next three years, er.’’ Negotiations between Apple and Chiaccording to some analysts. But those economic realities do not na Mobile, the world’s biggest mobileplay into the mind of Daniel Pan, a 22- phone service operator with more than year-old Web site designer in Shanghai 350 million subscribers, broke down in who says a friend recently bought an January, stalling the official release of the iPhone in China. Long before that, iPhone for him in the United States. He and other people here often pay however, there was a thriving gray $450 to $600 to get a phone that sells for market. “I love all of Apple’s products,’’ said $400 in the United States. But they are a 27-year-old Beijing engineer named happy. “This is even better than I thought Chen Chen who found his iPhone it would be,’’ he said, toying with his through a bulletin board Web site. “I iPhone at an upscale coffee shop. “This bought mine for $625 last October, and is definitely one of the great inventions the seller helped me unlock it. Reading and sending Chinese messages is no of this century.’’ Mr. Pan is among the new breed of problem.’’ An iPhone purchased in Shanghai young professionals in China who can afford to buy the latest gadgets and the or Beijing typically costs about $555. coolest Western brands. IPhones are To unlock the phone and add Chinese widely available at electronic stores language software costs an additional in big cities, and many stores offer un- $25. For Apple, the sale of iPhones to peolocking services for imported phones. Chinese sellers of iPhones say they ple who ship them to China is a source typically get the phones from suppli- of revenue. But the company is still losers who buy them in the United States, ing out, because its exclusive deals with then have them shipped or brought to phone service providers bring in revenue after the phone is sold. If the phones China by airline passengers. were activated in the United States, Apple would receive as much as $120 a John Markoff contributed reporting year per user from AT, analysts say. from San Francisco.

Apple’s effort to make exclusive cellular deals is easily bypassed.

Among the offerings of the Peninsula hotel are rooms that include no-fog television screens in the bathroom.

A Tokyo Hotel Offers A High-Tech Embrace By TOM VANDERBILT

TOKYO — “The journey itself is home,” wrote the traveling 17th-century Japanese poet Basho. And maybe it was, for him. But for a modern wandering soul, can a hotel room ever achieve the comforts of home? Entering one, the first thing many travelers do is get oriented: figure out where everything is and how it all works, toy with the best configuration of lighting and temperature, arrange things in a quick reproduction of home. But there are forces working against this home-making, many arising from deficiencies of design. It takes only one scalding under a strange shower, or a few minutes trying to puzzle out the functions on a complex alarm clock, to stir a longing for one’s real home. There is a place, however, where many of these failings have been conquered though intuitive technology and smart design. It is the newest Peninsula hotel, a 24-story building opposite Hibiya Park in the Marunouchi district of Tokyo. There is nothing new, of course, about a high-tech Tokyo hotel. Even midmarket hotels here commonly feature things like remote-controlled curtains, fax machines and flat-panel televisions. And many other details of Japanese life, too — like taxi doors that seem to open on their own, motion-triggered bathroomsoap dispensers and seats that automatically turn around at the end of a shuttle train’s run — are designed to function as smoothly as possible. But the Peninsula, where rates start at 60,000 yen a night (about $550), has become a pilgrimage site of sorts for hoteliers since it opened in September. The visitor fresh off a long flight and a twohour, traffic-choked journey from Narita Airport is ushered into a quiet, softly lighted space where every contingency seems to have been anticipated. Need to call home to confirm you’ve arrived? The phone panel shows the time there. (It also advises on hometown

The hotel has been designed with intuitive technology, like an Internet radio and remote controls for light and music in the bathroom.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY AYUMI NAKANISHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

weather, and notes holidays.) Feeling dehydrated from the flight or the Tokyo winter? Just adjust the humidity. Need to wake up for a meeting? Pop an espresso pod into the Lavazza machine and press a button. When the phone rings, the radio or television is automatically muted. When it rings at night, the bedside sconce glows just enough so you can answer it. The bathroom phone features a digital filter to screen out echoes. When you push the “spa” button in the tub, the lights soften and the radio shifts to a station playing calming music. To make Skype calls via the Internet, no need to set up your laptop — just push the phone’s Skype button. If you want to continue a phone conversation in the hotel lobby, take the portable phone with you. And if you want to keep talking on the street, it shifts to a cellular network. The man behind most of this is Fraser Hickox, the head of the company’s electronic services department, who oversaw more than 20 engineers for two years as they tested various versions of the

room. Although Mr. Hickox, an Australian based in Hong Kong, has a Ph.D. in radio physics, he likes to keep his rooms accessible for nonscientists. “The real secret to technology,” he said, “is that you shouldn’t have to think about it.” Technology is the easy part, Mr. Hickox added. The real work comes in anticipating its best use. For every innovation in the Peninsula rooms, there is a story. The wall-panel Internet radio, for example, sprang from a chat Mr. Hickox had with a Japanese guest at the Peninsula New York. After a day of enervating meetings, he wanted to retreat with a touch of home — in this case, listening to the Japanese broadcaster NHK on his own shortwave radio. Mr. Hickox admitted that he and his staff have done “some silly stuff” in their pursuit of the ideal amenity. At the Peninsula Hong Kong, they installed stock tickers. “We thought our clientele would be interested in following the market,” he said. “The only person who watched them was our technician, to make sure they were working right.”

Digital Photos, Beamed to a Frame In technology, every slick and successful product today has an expensive and annoying ancestor. Take digital picture frames. A few years ago, they were novelty items. But over the years, those frames have dropped in price, grown in pixels and evolved in looks. DAVID More intriguingly, POGUE some have gained wireless antennas, Web connections and even built-in printers. Herewith, a look at some frames that do a lot more than just show photos. EMotion with Bluetooth (18 centimeters, $160, Mediastreet.com). Digital frames measure up to 81 cen-

REVIEW

timeters diagonally these days, so 18 centimeters isn’t much. But the twist here is this frame’s Bluetooth wireless feature. You can beam photos to the frame; they’re no longer trapped on your cellphone’s tiny screen. Parrot DF7220 (18 centimeters, $170, Parrot.com). Good news: this Bluetooth frame is so thin, it hangs flat on the wall. Bad news: the resolution is so coarse (410 x 234 pixels), it’s not such a big improvement over your cellphone’s screen. Kodak EasyShare EX1011 (25 centimeters, $250, Kodak.com). Now here’s a thought: add Wi-Fi to a frame. Once it’s on your wireless network, Kodak’s beautiful two-toned black frame can

display pictures that sit on a Windows computer elsewhere in the house, provided it’s running Windows Media Player 11. Unfortunately, Macs need not apply. But here’s the best part: Once you’ve signed up for a free account at Kodakgallery.com and set up some photo albums there, the frame “sees’’ them immediately and begins a slide show of the albums you select. That means you can send photos to the frame from thousands of kilometers away. EStarling Digital Wireless (20 centimeters, $250, Seeframe.com). This

Kodak’s EasyShare EX1011 digital picture frame has a wide screen and Wi-Fi capability. black acrylic frame not only has Wi-Fi, but also its own e-mail address. As a result, you or your friends can send it pictures from cellphones or computers, any time, anywhere, no charge— a fantastic feature. PanDigital Wi-Fi Picture Frame (20 centimeters, $150, pandigital.net). This screen offers both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, all the Wi-Fi lets you do is download images from Picasa.com — no e-mail, no accessing photos from your PC. Still, the price is right and the

photos look great. SmartParts SP8PRT (20 centimeters, $280, Smartpartsproducts.com). This device was just released this month, and there’s nothing wireless about it — but it will sell well. Hiding behind its dark cherrywood frame is a feature no other frame can name: a tiny built-in printer. It’s a shame that these frames are so hampered by poor design and terrible tech support, because the ideas behind them are enticing. The standouts are the Kodak, if only because it works right every time; the eStarling, imperfect though it may be; and the SmartParts printer-frame, which is in a category by itself.

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 2008

7

AMERICANA

Islanders Turn to Each Other To Fill Their Food Cupboards

When Justice Is Served, Profits Are In the Offing By ADAM LIPTAK

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida — Wayne Spath is a bail bondsman, which means he is an insurance salesman, a social worker, a lightly regulated law enforcement agent, a real estate appraiser — and a FLORIDA for-profit wing of Fort Lauderdale the American justice system. What he does, which is posting bail for people accused of crimes in exchange for a fee, is all but unknown in the rest of the world. In England, Canada and other countries, agreeing to pay a defendant’s bond in exchange for money is a crime akin to witness tampering or bribing a juror — a form of obstruction of justice. Mr. Spath, who is burly, gregarious and intense, owns Brandy Bail Bonds, and he sees his clients in a pleasant and sterile office building just down the street from the courthouse here. Except for the handcuffs on the sign out front, it could be a dentist’s office. “I’ve got to run, but I’ll never leave you in jail,’’ Mr. Spath said, greeting a frequent customer in his reception area one morning a couple of weeks ago. He turned to a second man and said, “Now, don’t you miss court on me.’’ Other countries almost universally reject and condemn Mr. Spath’s trade, in which defendants who are presumed innocent but cannot make bail on their own pay an outsider a nonrefundable fee for their freedom. “It’s a very American invention,’’ John Goldkamp, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University in Philadelphia, said of the commercial bail bond system. “It’s really the only place in the criminal justice system where a liberty decision is governed by a profit-making businessman who will or will not take your business.’’ Although the system is remarkably effective at what it does, four states — Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon and Wisconsin — have abolished commercial bail bonds, relying instead on systems that require deposits to courts instead of payments to private businesses, or that simply trust defendants to return for trial. Most of the legal establishment, including the American Bar Association and the National District Attorneys Association, hates the bail bond business, saying it discriminates against poor and middle-class defendants, does nothing for public safety, and usurps decisions that ought to be made by the

BARBARA P. FERNANDEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Wayne Spath, a bondsman in Florida, posts bail for defendants he considers to be good risks. He charges a 10 percent fee for his services. justice system. Since bond companies do not compete on price, they have every incentive to collude with lawyers, the police, jail officials and even judges to make sure that bail is high and that attractive clients are funneled to them. Commercial bail bond companies dominate the pretrial release systems of only two nations, the United States and the Philippines. The flaw in the system most often cited by critics is that defendants who

‘A very American invention’ in which liberty comes at a price. have not been convicted of a crime and who turn up for every court appearance are nonetheless required to pay a nonrefundable fee to a private business, assuming they do not want to remain in jail. “Life is not fair, and I probably would feel the same way if I were a defendant,’’ said Bill Kreins, a spokesman for the Professional Bail Agents of the United States, a trade group. “But the system is the best in world.’’ The system costs taxpayers nothing, Mr. Kreins said, and it is exceptionally effective at ensuring that defendants appear for court. Mr. Spath’s experience confirms that. If Mr. Spath considers a potential client a good risk, he will post bail in exchange for a nonrefundable 10 percent fee. In a 35-month period ending in November, his records show, Mr. Spath posted about $37 million in bonds — 7,934 of them. That would suggest revenues of

Deadly Gas That Sustained A Rural Town Is Going Away NEWPORT, Indiana — The employees pull up to the gate, show their identification cards to the armed security guards and continue on. They drive past wooded stretches and open fields, past the occasional frolicking deer, and park before unattractive buildings. Save for those stockpiles of chemical ESSAY warfare agent on the grounds, the Newport Chemical Depot could be any other industrial plant. But here they are, steel containers of viscous fluid the color of straw and as lethal as almost anything on earth. The agent’s benign name, VX, leaves people to wonder if the V stands for victory or venomous, while its very nature challenges the imagination to convey the deadliness at hand. Just know that a drop on the skin can cause gruesome death in minutes. During the cold war, this rural cor-

DAN BARRY

about $1.3 million a year, given his fee. Mr. Spath, who is 62, has seven bail agents working for him, including his daughters Tia and Mia. “It probably costs me 50 grand a month to run this business,’’ Mr. Spath, 62, said. Mr. Spath hounds his clients relentlessly to make sure they appear for court. If they do not, he must pay the court the full amount unless he can find them and bring them back in a short time. Only 434 of his clients failed to appear for a court date over that period, and Mr. Spath straightened out 338 of those cases within the 60 days allowed by Florida law. In the end, he had to pay up only 76 times. That is a failure rate of less than 1 percent. Still, critics say, efficiency and business considerations should not trump the evenhanded application of justice. The rest of the world considers the American system a warning of how not to set up a pretrial release system, F. E. Devine wrote in “Commercial Bail Bonding,’’ a 1991 book. He said that courts in Australia, India and South Africa had disciplined lawyers for professional misconduct for setting up commercial bail arrangements. Other countries use a mix of methods to ensure that defendants appear for trial. Mr. Spath is not much concerned with how the rest of the world views commercial bail bonds, but he was upset about recent talk of a greater government role in pretrial release here in Broward County. “Here’s what everybody forgets,’’ he said. “The taxpayers have to pay for these programs. Why should they pay for them? Why should they? When we can provide the same service for free. I’d rather see the money spent in parks, mental health issues, the homeless. Let the private sector do it. We do it better.’’

By JOAN NATHAN mer and a carpenter in winter, said: “If CHILMARK, Massachusetts — For I catch some fish in summer, I’ll sell it to year-round residents of this village on Larsen’s Fish Market but I’ll just give Martha’s Vineyard, a popular resort is- the rest away to friends. I don’t expect land 11 kilometers from Cape Cod, win- anything in return.” ter is time to relax. In summer, when the Since Ms. Buhrman likes to cook and island’s population soars from 15,000 to knows a lot of people who like to farm, she 75,000, locals like Jan Buhrman have to has no trouble getting food. She trades make a year’s living in just a few short soups and stews for vegetables and lamb months. Ms. Buhrman, who is 50, caters from her friends Mitch Posin and Clarissa weddings and dinner parties for the Allen, who run Allen Farm in Chilmark. seasonal crowd. When win“I live out of Mitch’s root celter comes, she tends a local lar,” Ms. Buhrman said. “Mitch school library, among other MASSACHUSETTS will give me a big batch of cabMartha’s Vineyard jobs, and she cooks. bage or beets. He has a big abunEven in January, her hours dance of food.” in the kitchen have a purpose. In addition to the working Sitting in the bright oak postfarms, Martha’s Vineyard has many backyard gardens. In Ms. and-beam room built by her Buhrman’s, animals grow as husband, Richard Osnoss, well as vegetables. a carpenter, Ms. Buhrman For the last four years her backyard explained that she tries to eat only food raised on Martha’s Vineyard and to go has been home to a colorful array of the 20 kilometers to the grocery store in chickens that her son Oliver, 17, ordered over the Internet. Her younger son, Vineyard Haven as little as possible. Some of her groceries she grows her- Oren, 10, collects eggs each morning self. For much of the rest, she trades with before going to school. Outside her house live two heritage her neighbors. Following Ms. Buhrman for a day or breed pigs, which she buys every year two as she gathers ingredients is a les- from S.B.S. Grain Store in Vineyard Hason in how to eat locally, in all seasons. ven for $65 each. Most years she sends Because she seems to know everybody the pigs off the island to a slaughteron the small, 260-square-kilometer is- house, but this year, with some workland who raises, catches or forages for ers’ help, she slaughtered them in her food, it is also a glimpse of an alternative backyard and sent some of the pork to economy of eating, one in which modern a smokehouse in New Hampshire to be capitalism yields to a looser style of bar- made into bacon and hams. She also makes pork sausages, and tering. In summer, for instance, Ms. Buhrman this year she is making a venison-pork hands out ice from her freezers to help sausage with ground venison given to the local fishermen keep their catch cold. her by Bobby Brown, a hunter in winter In winter, they repay her with fish, oys- and caretaker in summer. “I have fatback and the expertise in ters and bay scallops. “It’s just the way we do it here,” she making sausage, and Bob has meat that needs the fat to make the sausage,” she said. Carl Flanders, a fisherman in sum- said. “So we split the final product.”

ERIK JACOBS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jan Buhrman selects “hearty salad greens” in a neighbor’s greenhouse.

The Newport Chemical Depot is neutralizing most of its VX stockpile produced during the cold war.

ner of west-central Indiana produced thousands of tons of VX for the government. Now this same rural corner is carefully neutralizing a sizable portion of the VX it made long ago, in keeping with international treaty and the ever-peculiar endeavors of INDIANA humankind. Newport Of course, for those on the other side of the plant’s fence, all of this has meant adapting to unthinkable thoughts. Sara Morgan, a retired teacher who over the years has challenged some Army decisions regarding the VX stockpile, says she lives in a farming area that, in preparations for a major chemical accident, used to be referred to as “the dead zone.’’ “Now they call it the Immediate Response Zone,’’ she says wryly. “The

Office in nearby Clinton, where a white hazmat suit is displayed in the window. That contribution stretches back to 1941, when the Army ÁNGEL FRANCO/THE NEW YORK TIMES took over several square kilometers of farmland, along I.R.Z.’’ with some homes and a few cemeterStill, many people here are proud ies, to build an installation. First it that when their country called, they produced explosives, then heavy water, answered, conducting a mission that and then, in 1961, a “deterrent’’: the should be completed by late summer. nerve agent called VX. They worry less about the risks By the time President Nixon declared of the job — no injury or death a moratorium on chemical weapons in so far — than they do about 1969, the Newport plant had produced the loss of hundreds of jobs 4,000 metric tons of VX — enough, if when that last droplet of VX is judiciously applied, to kill nearly everydestroyed at what is the largest one on the planet. Although most of it employer in Vermillion County. had already been shipped in bombs and The nerve agent is so much rockets to various American bases, the with the community that it plant still had more than 1,000 metric has nearly lost its ghastliness. A local tons of VX, which raised the question: calendar features both the artwork of Now what? schoolchildren and tips for emergency For several years the steel containpreparedness. These calendars, along ers, each one holding nearly 820 liters with pens, decks of cards and other of VX, lay on the ground outside, like informational items, are free at the abandoned farm equipment. Then they Newport Chemical Stockpile Outreach

sat for 25 years inside a warehouse, until the attacks of 9/11 prompted the Army to store them in gravel-covered igloos surrounded by guards, fencing and signs that say, “Use of Deadly Force Authorized.’’ A couple of years ago the Army finished decontaminating and tearing down anything used to produce VX. Now, in new buildings a few dozen meters away, a government contractor is neutralizing one steel container of the chemical agent at a time, in a project that is expected to cost nearly $2 billion. Most depot employees were either very young or not yet born when their country decided it simply had to have VX; some have parents who helped to create the chemical agent. Their inheritance, then, is a well-paying but very strange, very delicate assignment. Here, meanwhile, feelings remain mixed about, of all things, VX. “It’s such an odd set of circumstances,’’ says Ed Cole, the executive director of the Vermillion County Economic Development Council. “We want the threat to go away, because that would allow us to market the county more effectively. But once that VX is gone, we’ll lose 830 to 1,000 jobs.’’ Luckily, horribly, the Newport Chemical Depot still has almost 200 metric tons of a deadly cold war remnant to destroy. This means that at least for another few months, some people in Indiana will continue to keep their country safe from a threat, real and self-created.

8

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 2008 ARTS & STYLES

This Batman Bears Death And Darkness By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK SIMON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Thomas Peiser owns a graffiti-supply shop in Kreuzberg, a district in Berlin that is home to projects by well-known street artists.

In Berlin, One Wall Down and Thousands to Paint By ANDREAS TZORTZIS

Spray cans clink in Ali’s bag as he walks down a cobblestone street in Berlin’s post-hip neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. He stops in front of a grocery truck and pulls out a can. He strokes his name in bubbly, bright red letters, before leaving his mark on a telephone booth, a dozen doors and a concrete wall next to the train tracks. “It’s a great feeling doing a piece at night and coming back the day after to look at it,’’ said Ali, 31, an industrial designer who didn’t want his surname used to avoid prosecution. “I also see it as reclaiming the city and shaping my urban environment.’’ Apparently, many Berliners feel the same. The city’s skyline might be defined by a Sputnik-era TV tower, bombed-out churches and the ghost of a certain wall that once split the German capital. But its streetscape

is largely molded by graffiti, turning Berlin into arguably the most “bombed’’ — slang for graffiti-covered — city in Europe. Among the graffiti “writers” who have left their mark are Banksy, the art world mystery, whose stenciled rat in a police uniform decorates a curb in Mitte. Os Gemeos, the Brazilian twins whose cartoonish works have commanded $20,000 at the Deitch Projects in New York City, have spray painted a five-story-high mural of a yellow man in an orange shirt on a building on Oppelner Strasse. And the shaking fist of the Berlin artist Kripoe swings from traffic signs, elevated train tracks and, perhaps most spectacularly, a piling in the middle of the Spree River. “It’s like everyone grabbed a can of paint at one point and just went for it,’’ said the New York-based photographer Peter Sutherland. “It’s become a

real paradise for writers.’’ The roots of graffiti culture can be traced back to West Berlin in the early 1980s, when the American-occupied sector was the reluctant melting pot of anarchist punks, Turkish immigrants and West German draft resisters. While the west face of the Berlin Wall was blanketed with graffiti, the east face was orderly and gray. All that changed with the fall of the wall in 1989, which opened up vast new blank walls virtually overnight.

Hugo França, on a ‘‘sofa’’ in his São Paulo showroom, spent 15 years learning to sculpt wood. His pieces are found worldwide in boutique hotels.

His Furniture Of Old Wood Is Au Courant By JULIA CHAPLIN

Wander into the penthouse lounge of the new Huntley Hotel in Santa Monica, California, or the Tides Hotel in South Beach, designed by Kelly Wearstler, or Philippe Starck’s recently opened Hotel Fasano in Rio de Janeiro, and you can’t help but notice the cocktail tables and other furniture made of chunks of rustic wood. Such eco-chic pieces seem to have edged out Buddhas, communal tables and taxidermy as the latest symbol of cool in boutique hotels, restaurants and luxury condos. For Hugo França, a 54-year-old Brazilian furniture designer, the trend has been a long time in coming. Mr. França spent 15 years in the 1980s and 1990s in isolation in northeastern Brazil, learning the fine points of working with trees. Since that time, he has been sculpturing furniture out of fallen and burned pequi hardwood scavenged from the coastal rain forest. “Hugo understands nature in a different way,’’ said Zesty Meyers, an owner of R 20th Century in New York City, where a solo exhibit of Mr. França’s work opens on April 24. “Somehow he can look at wood and find natural contours and understand why it should be a chair or a bench.’’ Mr. França’s self-imposed exile began in 1982, when he gave up his job at a computer company in São Paulo and moved to the jungle in Bahia, after becoming disenchanted with Brazil’s military dictatorship. (In the late 1970s, he says, he had protested

Germany’s capital is a haven for artists with spray paint cans.

“It was kind of like New York,’’ said Thomas Peiser, owner of a graffiti supply store in the gritty Kreuzberg neighborhood. “It was paradise to us.’’ Galleries like Circleculture, a stark storefront in Mitte, regularly exhibit internationally known street artists like Anton Unai, who often works with objects he finds on the street, and Shepard Fairey, the creator of “Obey, Giant’’ and, most recently, a popular poster of Barack Obama. Last summer, Adrian Nabi, a former publisher of the pioneering Berlin graffiti magazine Backjumps, organized a “live issue,’’ a two-month-long graffiti festival which attracted more than 15,000 people. He still admires the recklessness and audacity of the West Berlin graffiti writers of his youth. “A writer is far more brash,’’ Mr. Nabi said. “They take the entire city for themselves.’’

against the dictatorship and was imprisoned and tortured.) He returned to the city in the late 1990s and now lives in a high-rise penthouse with his fourth wife, Tania Soriani Barros. Every 45 days, Mr. França makes the 1,600-kilometer journey to his studio in the Bahian fishing village of Trancoso, where he follows tips from ranch hands, farmers and Indians who know where to find tree trunks.

roads. He and his two assistants camp out, waking before dawn and trekking hours through tangled vegetation with machetes and bug repellent. Mr. França doesn’t know how to draft or sketch, he said. He uses chalk to draw on the trees, assessing what they might become. He might look at a 1.5meter-wide stump and decide PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAULO FRIDMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES to invert it and scoop it out, creThe region is rife with ating a sofa with holes and pits. “The most fascinating thing is charred two-meter tall trunks of trees left over when you start unearthing roots to from the ’60s and ’70s, see curves and shapes it reveals,’’ Mr. when the forests were França said. He might take a two-meslashed and burned for ter chunk of a root system and form it agriculture and cattle into a low curvy lounge chair with a grazing. (The practice of center woven with strips of leather. deforestation has since Mr. França also buys abandoned cabeen outlawed.) There noes from the Pataxó Indians that he are also trees that have converts into elegant chairs. Mr. França’s work ranges in price died from drought or flood, but are still stand- from $18,000 for a small canoe chair to ing 45 meters high in the around $100,000 for a 30-centimetermiddle of dense, virgin thick, six-meter-long dining table. On a January morning, Mr. França jungle. These are Mr. França’s favorite finds, was in his showroom flipping through because he can carve an entire furni- a portfolio of his work when he came ture series from one tree. across a photo of a Jacuzzi carved from “Ranchers used to be happy to have a charred tree stump, the first of eight me remove the trees,’’ Mr. França said that he eventually made after seeing a in his São Paulo showroom. “They con- plastic one in a magazine. It weighs 18 sidered them trash. But now they see metric tons and holds 11 people. I’m successful, and they want more Mr. França lamented that he will and more money.’’ probably never happen upon another In his pursuit of the right wood, Mr. tree trunk so accommodating. “It’s França drives for kilometers in his red hard when you’re working with a fiFiat or by motorcycle over bumpy dirt nite resource,’’ said Mr. França.

CHICAGO — A dreary office plaza at Wabash Street and the river. A mist blows in from Lake Michigan. Producers and idle actors huddle under a flimsy canopy. A few stories overhead, a stunt double in a familiar black-caped costume swings from a hoist, slamming into a window in a tower that we shall imagine is Gotham City Hall. A noose is around his neck, a knife plunged into his heart. The meaning is clear: Batman, or at least his döppelganger, is dead. A tiny detail irks Christopher Nolan, the director of “The Dark Knight” — the follow-up to his 2005 film, “Batman Begins.” He shouts to the stuntman, “Could you turn yourself a little more to the left?” In so many ways this isn’t what you’d expect of a $180 million Hollywood comic-book movie sequel. Anyone else would shoot indoors, use digital effects or wait for clear skies; Mr. Nolan accepts the vagaries of the weather. Another filmmaker would leave a shot like this in the hands of a second-unit director, but Mr. Nolan doesn’t use one; if it’s on the screen, he directed it. Stars on any other movie would have fled to their trailers to wait in comfort until needed again. Here, Gary Oldman is watching and shivering along with everybody else, making jokes to keep warm. Mr. Nolan, 37, has barely changed his approach to filmmaking since his 2000 indiesmash “Memento,” the film noir in reverse. “A movie is a movie,” he says. So he’s still scribbling new dialogue on the set, improvising camera setups, letting his actors decide the time to move on and otherwise racing through each day as if his money might run out. That kind of director is just what Warner Brothers wanted five years ago when it hired Mr. Nolan to restore a jewel of a property that had become a laughingstock with Joel Schumacher’s 1997 reviled “Batman and Robin.” But the risks of giving over a franchise to an auteur untested at making blockbusters STEPHEN VAUGHAN/ were outweighed by WARNER BROTHERS PICTURES the need to re-establish credibility with Heath Ledger as the Batman’s alienated Joker and Christian fans. “If the people Bale as Batman. who make the film aren’t taking it seriously,” Mr. Nolan said, summarizing fans’ view of the 1997 movie, “why should we?” Now the question is whether Mr. Nolan’s vision of Batman can not only maintain its hold on the imaginations of comic fans and critics, but expand its reach to a wider summer moviegoing audience, even as the death of Heath Ledger, who played the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” has added unanticipated morbidity to the film’s deliberate darkness. “Batman Begins” catapulted Mr. Nolan into the top tier of mainstream filmmakers. His Caped Crusader, Christian Bale, recalls how “people would kind of laugh” when they heard that he and Mr. Nolan were taking Batman seriously. But when they saw the film, those people “would say, ‘What a surprise,’ ” Mr. Bale said. “The Dark Knight,” which will have a global release this summer, is jammed with characters, plot and action. It picks up where “Batman Begins” left off, with Mr. Oldman’s police lieutenant, Jim Gordon, warning about the perils of escalation: that Batman’s extreme measures could invite a like response from the criminal element. And sure enough, a deadly new villain, the Joker, emerges. In a political context this would politely be called an “unintended consequence.” (Gotham as Baghdad, anyone?) Mr. Nolan doesn’t deny the overtones. “As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman’s presence in Gotham actually attracts criminals to Gotham, attracts lunacy,” he said. In Mr. Bale’s view “The Dark Knight” is an even lonelier outing for his character. “This escalation has now meant that he feels more of a duty to continue,” he said. “And now you have not just a young man in pain attempting to find some kind of an answer, you have somebody who actually has power, who is burdened by that power, and is having to recognize the difference between attaining that power and holding on to it.” Will the death of Mr. Ledger cast a pall over “The Dark Knight,”? Mr. Nolan, for his part, said he felt a “massive sense of responsibility” to do right by Mr. Ledger’s “terrifying, amazing” performance. “It’s stunning, it’s iconic,” he said. “It’s going to just blow people away.”