SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2007

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Michael Kamber for The New York Times

In the fight against global warming, relatively small actions, like better farming practices in Niger, left, or buying organic products can have a dramatic impact on the environment.

Giving Earth a Little Love In Niger, Trees and Crops Help Turn Back the Desert By LYDIA POLGREEN

THE ECO-FRIENDLY WEDDING

GUIDAN BAKOYE, Niger — In this dust-choked region, long seen as an increasingly barren wasteland decaying into desert, millions of trees are flourishing, thanks in part to poor farmers whose simple methods cost little or nothing at all. Better conservation and improved rainfall have led to at least 7.4 million newly tree-covered acres in Niger, researchers have found, achieved largely without relying on the large-scale planting of trees or other expensive methods often advocated by African politicians and aid groups for halting desertification, the process by which soil loses its fertility. Recent studies of vegetation patterns, based on detailed satellite images and on-the-ground inventories of trees, have found that Niger, a place of per-

Some couples are making wedding plans that reflect their devotion to the environment. PAGE 4 sistent hunger and deprivation, has recently added millions of new trees and is now far greener than it was 30 years ago. These gains, moreover, have come at a time when the population of Niger has exploded, confounding the conventional wisdom that population growth leads to the loss of trees and accelerates land degradation, scientists studying Niger say. The vegetation is densest, researchers have found, in some of the most densely populated regions of the country. “The general picture of the Sahel is much less bleak than we tend to assume,” said Chris P. Reij,

a soil conservationist who has been working in the Sahel region for more than 30 years and helped lead a study published last summer on Niger’s vegetation patterns. “Niger was for us an enormous surprise.” Today, the success in growing new trees suggests that the harm to much of the Sahel may not have been permanent, but a temporary loss of fertility. The evidence, scientists say, demonstrates how relatively small changes in human behavior can transform the regional ecology, restoring its biodiversity and productivity. About 20 years ago, farmers like Ibrahim Danjimo realized something terrible was happening to their fields. “We look around, all the trees were far from the village,” said Mr. Danjimo, a farmer in his 40s who has been working the rocky, sandy soil of this tiny village since he was a child. “Suddenly, the trees

were all gone.” Fierce winds were carrying off the topsoil of their once-productive land. Sand dunes threatened to swallow huts. Wells ran dry. Across the Sahel, a semiarid belt that spans Africa just below the Sahara and is home to some of the poorest people on earth, a cataclysm was unfolding. Severe drought in the 1970s and ’80s, coupled with a population explosion and destructive farming and livestock practices, was denuding vast swaths of land. The desert seemed determined to swallow everything. So Mr. Danjimo and other farmers in Guidan Bakoye took a small but radical step. No longer would they clear the saplings from their fields before planting, as they had for generations. Instead they would protect and nurture them, carefully plowing

Continued on Page 4

Sport of Hawaiian Kings Now Attracts a Modern Breed of Aristocrat By MATT HIGGINS

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: GADGETS

Updating Vinyl Records Convert dusty old albums into digital music files with the help of two new turntables.

ARTS & STYLES

The Capital Of Cocktails London’s lounges beckon with creative drinks and stylish decor. 8

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For $10,000 a day, you can have the ultimate surfing sojourn in Indonesia aboard the Indies Trader IV, a sort of floating hotel with 15 cabins, a helipad and three-course meals with wine. A motorized tender takes you to the waves. Or for a daily rate, in addition to the cost of his airfare, Brad Gerlach will give private instruction to select clients anywhere in the world. Mr. Gerlach, who was ranked No. 1 on surfing’s world professional tour during the 1986 and 1991 seasons, termed the cost “not cheap at all.’’ Surfing, once the sport of Hawaiian kings, has come back to its roots. After being a counterculture activity for beach bums and bohemians, it has emerged as a status sport. “It’s sort of lost that dirtbag appeal,’’ said Isabelle Tihanyi, who started Surf Diva, a school based in La Jolla, California, that caters mostly to women, a growing segment of surfers. “Now you see more yuppies in the water with a brand-new board and a brand-new S.U.V. — all the latest technical gear.’’ This new species of surfer contributes to a booming market for vacation

packages, instruction, equipment and real estate near some of the world’s best surf breaks. Like golf, surfing has become an ideal activity around which to discuss business. Surfers find plenty of time for talk while driving in search of good spots, while changing into and out of wetsuits in the parking lot, and especially while waiting between sets of waves. “There’s more down time in surfing than any other sport,’’ said Chris Mauro, the editor of Surfer Magazine. It was not always this way. “In the 1970s, you would stop at 25 and went to work or you were going straight to loserdom,’’ Mr. Mauro said. “It used to be a strike against you if you were a surfer.’’ But now it is often an asset. Todd Juneau, a real estate consultant in San Diego and a longtime surfer, looks for business while surfing. “I’ll sit in the water and listen to conversations, and if someone says something about real estate, I’ll find a way to interject,’’ he said. “And it pays off. “In San Diego, you never know if the guy next to you could be a multimillionaire, or a judge or an executive, and he’s surfing.’’ Surfing’s popularity has helped drive international real estate sales, with

Surfing, once the realm of the young and the jobless, is joining golf as a status activity for business people. Liz Galendez took lessons in California.

Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

property along remote coastlines being bought and developed into resorts and vacation homes. Parts of Costa Rica are considered so crowded that some surfers have pushed north to Nicaragua. And in Mexico, rumors abound about development in a remote area of Baja California known as Scorpion Bay. Surf schools have become another

CAHIER DU " MONDE " DATÉ SAMEDI 17 FÉVRIER 2007, NO 19305. NE PEUT ÊTRE VENDU SÉPARÉMENT

growth industry. San Diego had so many that the city began to regulate them. But for more adventure, surfers can take boat trips to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Indonesia and East Timor. “Good surf is predominantly a thirdworld deal,’’ said Jake Burton Carpenter, founder and owner of Burton Snowboards. “In surfing, you’re trying to get away from the crowd.’’ As a result, boat charters in destinations like Indonesia have begun to serve older, more affluent clients. “With boat trips, it’s an older demographic because these trips are so expensive,’’ Mr. Carpenter said. Last summer, Enrique Huerta, who got a job in the New York fashion industry through his surfing contacts, said he overheard a comment at Montauk, a prime East Coast surfing spot, that spoke to the state of surfing today. Through a breeze, he heard a voice say, “I can get service on my Treo at Scorpion Bay.’’

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2007

LE MONDE O P I N I O N

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C O M M E N T A R Y THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

In Russia, Liberty Awaits Oil Prices

Peresh

The Khaleej Times, Dubai

EDITORIALS OF THE TIMES

A Clear Warning On Global Warming Should Congress require any further reason to move aggressively to limit greenhouse gas emissions, it need only read the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s authoritative voice on global warming. A distillation of the best peer-reviewed science, the report expresses more than 90 percent certainty that man-made emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have caused the steady rise in atmospheric temperatures, with the destruction of tropical rain forests playing a lesser but important role. The report warns that if society keeps to its current course, emissions will increase to twice their preindustrial levels by the end of this century, causing temperatures to rise 1.8 to 4 degrees Celsius. The consequences will include rising seas, more powerful hurricanes, disappearing coral reefs and more intensive droughts in subtropical countries. The report also offers hope, suggesting that what humans have caused, humans can mitigate; that even though the world is committed to centuries of further warming, the process can be slowed. This is the fourth in a series of studies that began in 1990. The first left open the possibility that the warming that

began with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and increased in the 1950s was “largely due to natural variability.” The second and third reports detected a bigger human role, and this one lays the whole problem at humanity’s doorstep. A later paper will address specific remedies. But many climate experts believe the world must embark on a swift and sustained shift in the way energy is produced and used — away from fuels like oil and coal, and toward cleaner alternatives. That is the objective of the many global warming bills now circulating in Washington. The best of these would put a price on carbon through a mandatory cap on emissions from sources like power plants and cars, thus making coal and oil relatively more expensive while driving the market toward cleaner sources of energy. President Bush has brandished those very real costs of moving to a new energy-delivery system again and again to argue against mandatory caps on emissions and to make the case for his own cost-free(anddemonstrablyinadequate) program of voluntary reductions. Yet what the panel is telling us is that the costs of doing nothing, especially to future generations, will be far greater than the price of acting now.

The Kremlin’s Cartel The Russian energy minister, Viktor Khristenko, piously declared in late January that Russia’s meetings with other gas producers were intended only to improve energy security, and that any talk of a cartel was the product of a “sick imagination.’’ A curious insistence since the idea of a cartel has been discussed by President Vladimir Putin, who recently called OPEC-like cooperation with Iran for gas “an interesting idea’’ — though, of course, its goal would be to better serve customers, not fix prices. The Kremlin is full of disturbing and counterproductive ideas these days about how it can wield its energy resources, not to mention shield its economic client Iran from international pressure. And if it looks as if a cartel might serve Mr. Putin’s ambitions, the world should pay close attention. There are reasons why a gas cartel

could not work like an oil cartel. Gas is generally delivered through pipelines and is expensive to store, leaving sellers as well as buyers dependent on longterm contracts. Moscow has also stayed out of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. What arouses anxiety over the new cartel talk is the fact that Mr. Putin has already managed to get most of Russia’s energy production and distribution under the Kremlin’s control. Mr. Putin needs to understand that Russia’s long-term economic and strategic interests depend on its playing by the international rules, rather than breaking them. Russia is still not capable of developing its oil and gas by itself, and the expertise it needs lies almost entirely in the West. So yes, Mr. Khristenko, number us among those who mistrust the Kremlin — and prove us wrong.

MOSCOW Russia today is a country that takes three hands to describe. On the one hand, it is impossible any more to call Vladimir Putin’s government “democratic,’’ given the way it has neutered the Russian Parliament, intimidated or taken over much of the Russian press, subordinated the judiciary and coercively extended its control over the country’s key energy companies. On the other hand, it is obvious in talking to Russians how much the humiliating and dispiriting turmoil that accompanied Boris Yeltsin’s first stab at democracy — after the collapse of Communism — left many people here starved for a strong leader, a stable economy and stores with Western consumer goods. Mr. Putin is popular for a reason. On the third hand, while today’s Russia may be a crazy quilt of capitalist czars, mobsters, nationalists and aspiring democrats, it is not the totalitarian Soviet Union. It has more than a touch of the authoritarianism of postwar Gaullist France and a large spoonful of the corruption and messiness of postwar Italy — when those countries emerged from World War II as less than perfect democracies. But 60 years later, after huge growth in their per capita incomes, France and Italy now help to anchor Western Europe. For all of their shortcomings, their postwar governments provided the context for the true democratic agent of change to come of age — something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a generation raised on basically free markets and free politics. I still think Russia will follow a similar path — in time.

Dans l’article “African Filmmaker Puts Big Money on Trial,” page 7: COMPOUND: enceinte PLAINTIFF: plaignant DEFENDANT: accusé TO BE CHARGED WITH: être accusé, inculpé de PLIGHT: situation difficile DRIFT: dérive

ment’s Moscow office, “because it was delegitimized by the 1998 ruble crash and because it was a time of supreme corruption and dominance by oligarchs — but the Russian democratic experiment is not over because Russia is such a changed place.’’ Ms. Gottemoeller, an American, told me she recently visited Ulyanovsk, Lenin’s birthplace, in the heart of Russia’s aging industrial rust belt, and went out to dinner with three Russian couples, all new entrepreneurs. “After they plied me with drinks,’’ she recalled, “they said: ‘O.K., we have a question. We want to know how you define middle class’ — and did I think they were middle class? And

Challenging the Mullahs, One Name at a Time “Well-behaved women rarely make history,’’ my favorite bumper sticker says. It surely applies to Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner whose relentless campaign against discrimination has enraged the mullahs for more than 25 years. In a country where the law values a woman’s life at only half the price of a man’s, Ms. Ebadi will not be quiet, and she is urging other women to find their voices. Her newest effort is to help collect the signatures of one million Iranian women on a petition protesting their lack of legal rights. The concept is simple and revolutionary, melding education, consciousnessraising and peaceful protest. Starting last year, women armed with petitions began to go to wherever other women gathered: schools, hair salons, doctors’ offices and private homes. Every woman is asked to sign. But whatever a woman decides, she receives a leaflet explaining how Iran’s interpretation of Islamic law denies women full rights. The material explains how Iran’s divorce law makes it easy for men, and incredibly difficult for women, to leave a marriage, and how custody laws give divorced fathers sole rights to children above the age of 7. Ms. Ebadi says the petition drive has already trained “400 young women to educate others’’ about these injustices. The movement, made up of a network of women’s organizations and publica-

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.

Dans l’article “A Maestro of Movies and a Historian of Sound,” page 7: SCORE: ici, partition (de musique) FLINTY: dur comme la pierre TERSE: laconique SWEEP: ici, élan HIPSTER: baba cool TO SCOWL: froncer les sourcils

Not a real democracy, but not the Soviet Union, either.

that just flummoxed me. They wanted to know what middle class was in America. It meant a lot to them to think they were linked up to a broader community of middle class. [They] are not out in the streets with a banner, but their aspirations are huge and in the right direction.” People who identify themselves as middle class often end up fighting for legal and civil rights to protect their gains, without even knowing they are fighting for them. That said, the pace of democratization here will most likely depend on three things. One is whether this emerging middle class gets so preoccupied with material gains. Another is the genie of Russian nationalism, which can always pop up and derail democratization. Third is the price of oil and gas. Anyone who observes Russia can see that the price of oil and the pace of freedom here operate with an inverse correlation. As oil prices go down the pace of freedom goes up, because Russia has to open itself more to the world and empower its people to get ahead. As oil prices go up the pace of freedom goes down, because the government can get by drilling oil wells, rather than unleashing its people. “When oil prices became higher, the reforms became slower,’’ said Vladimir Ryzhkov, a liberal Russian Duma member from Altay. “Russia became a more closed country with a more stateoriented economy. Last year we saw record oil prices and not one reform. [That is the] reason Freedom House last year proclaimed Russia a ‘non-free country.’ The question for you Americans is: When will prices go down? It is the only hope for us Russian democrats.”

Editorial Observer/MAURA J. CASEY

: AIDE A LA LECTURE

LEXIQUE

“In historical terms, the transition will be very fast,’’ Boris Makarenko, deputy chief of Russia’s Center for Political Technologies, said to me. “But I am 47. I am in a hurry. I am very optimistic [though] for my daughter, who is 15. I can see the normal middle class rising here. It’s all about shape and pace. When will we get there, I don’t know — we will get there, but probably not fast enough for me to see.’’ The Yeltsin democratic experiment is over, to be sure, added Rose Gottemoeller, director of the Carnegie Endow-

EXPRESSIONS Dans l’article “’76 Bomber Tries to Keep a Low Profile”, page 7: TO CONTEND WITH: faire face à, mais aussi se mesurer à, lutter contre; le verbe to contend signifie affirmer, soutenir; contention: affirmation, mais aussi compétition, rivalité; a bone of contention: un sujet de désaccord. TO TURN OUT: éteindre, licencier, mais aussi produire en grand nombre, être élégamment habillé; as it turned out: comme la suite des évènements l’a montré... it turned out that: il s’est avéré que.

RÉFÉRENCES Dans l’article “A Machine to Improve Car Engines and Drivers,” page 6: ARIZONA: ce territoire, dont le nom, indien,

tions, has no formal leadership, in part to lessen the chances of retaliation. That didn’t help three female journalists who were arrested late last month after they wrote articles for feminist publications backing the drive. They have since been released but will face a hearing in two months. Ms. Ebadi will defend them. It’s only natural to wonder how many more women will be arrested as they rebel, one signature at a time. And only natural to marvel about the courage of the

Shirin Ebadi’s courageous petition against injustice. 30,000 women who have already signed. The movement is doing on a grand scale what Ms. Ebadi has done for her entire adult life. When I last spoke with her, eight years ago in her Tehran home, she had emerged as a tenacious human rights campaigner after being forced to step down as a judge by the Islamic revolution. She was blunt about the lack of freedom in Iran and well aware of the price for such outspokenness. She’s been arrested and imprisoned and the target of death threats. In New York in January for meetings at the

signifie “petite source”, n’est devenu Etat qu’en 1912: c’est le 48èmeEtat des Etats-Unis, seuls l’Alaska et Hawaï le suivront. Il a été exploré dès 1539 par le franciscain Marcos de Niza, quelques missions et écoles furent construites mais la géographie (montagnes, hauts plateaux, déserts), le climat (étés brûlants) et les Apaches belliqueux ont longtemps découragé la colonisation. Seules diverses tribus indiennes, Apaches, Hopis, Navajos y étaient véritablement installées lorsqu’à la suite de la guerre Américano-mexicaine en 1848, il est devenu américain. Cela se ressent dans sa démographie actuelle: environ 6 millions d’habitants, dont 64% de blancs, 25% d’hispaniques et 5% d’amérindiens. Son développement est d’abord venu des déçus de la ruée vers l’or qui sont venus y prospecter, y ont trouvé du cuivre et de l’or. Au 20ème siècle, c’est surtout le tourisme, du fait de la splendeur de l’environnement naturel (le Grand Canyon, la Petrified Forest, le Canyon de Chelley entre autres) et aussi de l’extension de la climatisation, qui en fait la richesse. Nombreux sont les “snowbirds” (résidents d’hiver) et les retraités (Sun City, communauté fermée) qui s’y

United Nations, she was just as defiant and just as unafraid as I remembered. Winning the Nobel Prize has not given her immunity. There’s a lot to speak out about. When Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not propagating lies about the Holocaust or cheering on Iran’s nuclear program, he’s having independent journalists arrested. But he is not the only problem. Above him is the hard-line Council of Guardians and above it the supreme religious leader. The Council of Guardians vetoed legislation increasing civil liberties and banned most moderates from running for Parliament in 2004. Given the breadth of the institutional opposition arrayed against them, the Change for Equality Petition Drive is especially clever. Rather than directly confronting the system, it goes around it. Even women who don’t sign the petition will be better informed about their second-class status. The hope is that they will then be less likely to accept injustice. And if Iran’s women start questioning their lack of rights, perhaps Iran’s men will have the courage to speak out, too. Ms. Ebadi, the lifelong agitator, does not mask her pride or her belief that women’s voices will someday make all the difference. “By getting one million signatures, the world will know we object to these conditions,” she said. And I can’t help but think that instead of one courageous woman for the government to contend with, it will have reaped a million.

installent. RACINE, WISCONSIN: Ville industrielle, de

tradition ouvrière, installée sur le lac Michigan, à l’embouchure de la rivière Root, à 100km au nord de Chicago. Cette ville s’est distinguée pendant la Guerre de Sécession par son ferme engagement contre l’esclavage et l’ “Underground Railway” y a déposé de nombreux esclaves en fuite. En 1854, James Glover, esclave échappé, installé à Racine est pris par la police et mis en prison à Milwaukee: 100 habitants de Racine créent le début d’un rassemblement d’habitants qui investissent la prison et libèrent le prisonnier. De grandes entreprises ont leur siège à Racine: entre autres Horlicks (lait malté) et Johnson (cire et produits ménagers) dont le siège a été dessiné par Frank Lloyd Wright: ce fut le résultat d’un compromis car l’architecte voulait le construire à l’extérieur de la ville. Il y renonça donc mais construisit un édifice ... sans fenêtres; ses colonnes qui traversent l’espace du bâtiment pour s’évaser en corolles au plafond, en font une merveille d’architecture, même si l’entretien (fuites fréquentes) irrite les habitants. Racine est jumelée à Montélimar.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2007

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U.N. Troops Battle Haiti’s Gangs One Battered Street at a Time The kidnappers began singling out children. In one horrible episode, a teenage girl was killed and her eyes were gouged out. A school bus of children was seized by gunmen, prompting many terrified parents to keep their children hidden at home. Mr. Préval ceased negotiations with the gangsters and gave the United Nations the authority to go after them. Not everybody agrees that confrontation is the best way of calming the slums. “The gang men can change,” insisted Meleus Jean, 45, a pastor who runs a tiny church in Cité Soleil and who was once almost hit by a stray bullet while deliv-

By MARC LACEY PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — For years, street gangs have run Haiti right alongside the politicians. With a disbanded army and a corrupted wreck of a police force, successive presidents have either used the gangs against political rivals or just paid them to stop causing trouble. Recently, something extraordinary has occurred. President René Préval decided to confront the gangs and set the 8,000 United Nations peacekeepers loose on them, a risky move that will determine the security of the country and the success of his young government. “We’re taking back Port-au-Prince centimeter by centimeter,” said Lieutenant Colonel Abdesslam Elamarti, a peacekeeper from Morocco. “We’re pressing these gangs so the population can live in peace.” The offensive by the United Nations forces, who arrived here in 2004 after the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, began in earnest in late December. One of the fiercest battles took place on the morning of January 25 with a raid by hundreds of United Nations forces on a gang hide-out on the periphery of Cité Soleil, this sprawling seaside capital’s largest and most notorious slum. After a fierce firefight in which gang members fired thousands of shots, United Nations officials succeeded in taking over the hide-out, a former schoolhouse that gang members had once used to fire upon peacekeepers and to demand money from passing motorists. The United Nations said four gang members had been killed in the battle. Other raids have followed, and though it is still too early to judge the operation, gang leaders seem to be on the run, and armored United Nations vehicles now rumble through the crowded streets of Cité Soleil. The biggest of the United Nations operations have been aimed at one of the

An end to negotiations after thugs began to terrorize children.

Ariana Cubillos/Associated Press

United Nations peacekeepers are trying to bring gang violence under control in the Port-au-Prince slum of Cité Soleil, but their raids anger some residents. A soldier held a tear gas canister during a confrontation on February 9. most wanted and feared of all the gang leaders, an unlikely and unpredictable power broker in his 20s who goes simply by the name Evans. Evans and his groups have been linked to a rash of kidnappings in the capital, and lately his men have been locked in fierce battles with United Nations peacekeepers. Evans and the other leaders now hide in the maze of tin-roofed shanties that are home to some 300,000 of Haiti’s urban poor. Haiti, the poorest country in the West-

ern Hemisphere, has a long tradition of politics mixed with thuggery. In the 1970s and ’80s, François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude employed the Tontons Macoute, dreaded paramilitary hoodlums. Mr. Aristide was elected president in 1990 and again in 2000 with the support of the poor. Gang leaders, who act as spokesmen for long-neglected slums, gained entry to the presidential palace and helped dole out jobs and other spoils to their men.

DIPLOMATIC MEMO

U.S. Diplomats Decline Posts in Iraq By HELENE COOPER WASHINGTON — While the diplomats and Foreign Service employees of the State Department have always been expected to staff “hardship’’ postings, those jobs have not usually required that they wear flak jackets with their pinstriped suits. But in the last five years, the Foreign Service landscape has shifted. Now, thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House is calling for more American civilians to head not only to those countries, but also to some of their most hostile regions to try to establish democratic institutions and help in reconstruction. That plan is provoking unease and apprehension at the State Department and at other federal agencies. Many federal employees have outright refused repeated requests that they go to Iraq, while others have demanded that they be assigned only to Baghdad and not be sent outside the more secure Green Zone, which includes the American Embassy and Iraqi government ministries. And while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice maintained recently that State Department employees were “volunteering in large numbers’’ for difficult posts, including Iraq, several department employees said that those who had signed up tended to be younger, more entry-level types — who see the move as an adventure and a career-builder — and not experienced, seasoned diplomats. The reluctance highlights a problem with the administration’s new strategy for Iraq, which calls on American diplomats to take challenges on a scale unmatched anywhere else in the world, when the lack of security on the ground outside the Green Zone makes it one of the last places people, particularly those with families, want to go. Steve Kashkett, vice president of the American Foreign Service Association, the professional organization that represents State Department employees, said that “our people continue to show great courage in volunteering for duty in Iraq.’’ But Mr. Kashkett added, “there remain legitimate questions about the ability of unarmed civilian diplomats to carry out a reconstruction and democracy-building mission in the middle of an active war zone.’’ The issue flared recently when Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates testified at a Senate hearing that he shared the concerns of officers who complained about a request from Ms. Rice’s office

that military personnel temporarily fill more than one-third of 350 new jobs in Iraq that the State Department is supposed to be responsible for. The New York Times reported February 7 that senior military officials were upset at the request and told President Bush and Mr. Gates that the new Iraq strategy could fail unless more civilian agencies stepped forward quickly to carry out plans for reconstruction and political development. David Satterfield, the State Department’s senior adviser for Iraq, told reporters during a teleconference that the State Department’s request was only for temporary help and for non-State Department positions that would probably be filled by contractors anyway. “The skill sets needed for the additional staff are not skill sets in which any foreign service in the world, including our own,’’ are proficient, Mr. Satterfield said. But many military officials remained angry at the request, saying that the military did not necessarily have people with those skills, either, and that it would have to go to the already strained National Guard to plug holes that would take advantage of their civilian, and not their military, strengths. Admiral Edmund P. Giambastiani, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military was used to working with State Department officials in Iraq. But Admiral Giambastiani went on to describe a kind of cultural clash. “The problem, not surprising, is we’re used to deploying over there,’’ Admiral Giambastiani said. “We send out orders, we execute orders, we deploy our military, and guess what happens? They turn up and do their job.’’ He said that while it was acceptable for the State Department to ask for the National Guard, with its experts in civilian military affairs, to fill the positions temporarily, “you have to understand why people on the Defense side would come up with this frustration.’’ The complaints from the Pentagon are part of long-simmering tensions between the Pentagon and the State Department over who is responsible for what in Iraq. The differences go back to the months before the invasion, when State employees complained that they were being cut out of the postwar planning by a Pentagon bent on doing everything itself. “There’s some outrage that the collective capacity of American reconstruction capability was ignored prior to the war,’’ said one State Department employee who is learning Arabic before deploying to the Middle East. “And now we are expected to clean up the mess.’’

The military is filling civilian jobs in the war zone.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting.

In his initial months in office, Mr. Préval, who had been Mr. Aristide’s prime minister as well as president from 1996 to 2001, followed a similarly conciliatory tack. But he has grown increasingly impatient with the gangs as they resisted surrendering their guns and continued wreaking havoc on Portau-Prince. Then, as the country prepared for Christmas, street thugs began grabbing people off the street, taking them into the slums and demanding ransoms.

ering a Sunday morning sermon. “I talk to them and I think they are gang men because they have nothing else. Fighting them will not change them.” One of those who has been criticized in the past for dealings with gang members has been Wyclef Jean, the HaitianAmerican rapper formerly of the Fugees. “The problem is much bigger than the gang leaders,” he said in a telephone interview from New York. “I’m not saying they are not part of the problem. When people are killing people, that’s a problem. But we don’t have enough conversation.” But United Nations officials say the time for talk is over. “If one of them goes to Préval and says, ‘I want to give up,’ and waves a white handkerchief, that is fine,” said Edmond Mulet, a Guatemalan diplomat in charge of the United Nations mission here. “That’s the kind of conversation we want.”

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Designing the 100% Recyclable Wedding By MIREYA NAVARRO Kate Harrison’s idea of a fairy tale wedding goes something like this: Gather more than 150 friends and relatives at an organic farm for a prewedding day of hikes and environmental tours. Calculate the distance guests will travel and offset their carbon dioxide emissions by donating to programs that plant trees or preserve rain forests. Use hydrangeas, berries and other local and seasonal flowers for her bouquet and the decorations, instead of burning up fuel transporting flowers from faraway farms. Design an organic autumnal menu (same reason). Find a vintage dress to avoid the waste of a wedding gown that will never be worn again. “It’s well worth it to start your life together in a way that’s in line with your values and beliefs,” said Ms. Harrison, 28, a graduate student at Yale University, who is to marry in October. “You don’t want this event that is supposed to start your life together to come at the expense of the environment or workers in another country.” Ms. Harrison is an unusual bride-tobe, whose wedding is all about the planet, rather than “all about me.” People in the wedding business say the eco-friendly or “green” wedding has arrived, its appeal having expanded to spur a mini-industry of stores and Web sites offering couples biodegradable plates made of sugar cane fiber and flowers grown according to sustainable farming practices. The quality and choice of products has so steadily improved that the green concept is spreading to other kinds of par-

ties, allowing hosts to embrace the earth without sacrificing style, party planners and others say. “People are making purchasing decisions based on environmental concerns,” said Gerald Prolman, the founder of OrganicBouquet.com, an online organic florist. Mr. Prolman, who said his Web site has doubled its sales yearly since it began in 2001, added a wholesale business last August to meet growing demand. “Whether it’s food or cotton or flowers,” Mr. Prolman said, “people are asking questions: How are farmworkers treated? Who produced the product?

Guests ask: ‘What do you mean forks made out of potato?’ How is the environment affected in that process?” Eric Fenster, an owner of Back to Earth, an organic catering company in Berkeley, California, said that when he started his business in 2001, his clients consisted almost exclusively of social justice and environmental nonprofit groups. But that market has expanded to make weddings a third of his business. And few events offer as many opportunities to say “I care” than a wedding, whose average cost is $25,000 to $30,000. Bridal magazines, too, have recognized the trend, and a new online site, Portovert.com, made its appearance last

month, catering to “eco-savvy brides and grooms.” Millie Martini Bratten, the editor in chief of Brides magazine, said that over the last five years the interest in green weddings has blossomed from a desire to incorporate a few green elements, like a vegan menu, to making sure the entire celebration won’t contribute to the depletion of natural resources. This may include finding halls that recycle, hiring caterers who use locally grown ingredients, decorating with potted plants that can be transplanted and using soy-based candles, rather than those of petroleumbased wax. “If anything, it makes the wedding even more meaningful,” said Ms. Martini Bratten, whose magazine’s February-March issue features a planning guide for a green wedding. But can weddings really make a difference in global warming, particularly if the couple then set out on an emissionspewing trans-Atlantic flight for the honeymoon? Janet Larsen, the director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental research group in Washington, said that every little bit helps. “All the actions add up,” she said. “Anything individuals can do to reduce their overall environmental footprint can make a difference.” Joshua Houdek, 32, and Kristi Pap-

Sophie Blackall

enfuss, 35, are planning a “zero waste” wedding for 250 guests in August. It will take place on a farm and include compostable plates and utensils, organic and fair trade-certified food, locally brewed beer and organic wine and wedding rings that are “100 percent reclaimed, recycled, ecologically responsible gold,” said Mr. Houdek, who works as a Sierra Club organizer in Minneapolis. In lieu of traditional gifts, Mr. Houdek and Ms. Papenfuss, an elementary school teacher, plan to ask guests to sign up for renewable energy and reforestation projects to counteract their energy consumption or to donate to the Sierra Club or other environmental groups. The couple don’t think it’s too much to ask. “We’re not forcing them,” Mr. Houdek stressed, though Ms. Papenfuss

said that some people have been surprised at the elements incorporated in their wedding. “We’ve had a few people say ‘What?’ when we talk about biodegradable forks that are potatobased,” she said. ‘What do you mean forks made out of potato?’ ” For her wedding, Ms. Harrison, who is working on a law degree and a master’s in environmental management, and her fiancé, Barry Muchnick, 33, also a graduate student at Yale, plan to treat guests to a rehearsal barbecue at an organic farm in upstate New York. The next day’s ceremony is to take place at Castle Rock, a state-owned 19th-century castle, followed by the reception at a restaurant that serves organic food. It all sounds like more work and expense than the traditional wedding. While Ted Ning, executive director of the Lohas Journal, a resource guide for businesses that serve the environmentally conscious market, noted that going organic often means paying up to 20 percent more because many products come from small farms that receive no government subsidies, some brides noted that a wedding at a farm is more economical than at a hotel or hall. “It doesn’t have to be any more or any less expensive,” Ms. Papenfuss said. Many couples said that more often than not their friends and families want to make a difference, too. “I have a couple of relatives who think some of it is unnecessary, but they appreciate the mind-set behind it,” Ms. Harrison said. “It’s a huge opportunity for people to make choices that can affect change. It’s one of the biggest contributions you can make as a young adult.”

Methods for Saving Fuel, In Ways Large and Small By MATTHEW L. WALD

Photographs by Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Crop yields in Niger were greatly increased by planting trees and managing irrigation. A market in Droum, below, is bountiful, largely because more trees have helped retain the soil and water in the countryside.

In Niger, Trees Help to Turn Back the Desert Continued From Page 1 around them when sowing millet, sorghum, peanuts and beans. In Niger’s case, farmers began protecting trees just as rainfall levels began to rise again after the droughts in the 1970s and ’80s. Another change was the way trees were regarded by law. From colonial times, all trees in Niger had been regarded as the property of the state, which gave farmers little incentive to protect them. Trees were chopped for firewood or construction without regard to the environmental costs. Government foresters were supposed to make sure the trees were properly managed, but there were not enough of them to police a country more than twice the size of France. But over time, farmers began to regard the trees in their fields as their property, and in recent years the government has recognized the benefits of that outlook by allowing individuals to own trees. Farmers make money from the trees by selling branches, pods, fruit and bark. Because those sales are more lucrative over time than simply chop-

ping down the tree for firewood, the farmers preserve them. The greening began in the mid-1980s, Dr. Reij said, “and every time we went back to Niger, the scale increased.” “The density is so spectacular,” he said. Mahamane Larwanou, a forestry expert at the University of Niamey in Niger’s capital, said the regrowth of trees had transformed rural life in Niger. “The benefits are so many it is really astonishing,” Dr. Larwanou said. “The farmers can sell the branches for money. They can feed the pods as fodder to their animals. They can sell or eat the leaves. They can sell and eat the fruits. Trees are so valuable to farmers, so they protect them.” They also have extraordinary ecological benefits. Their roots fix the soil in place, preventing it from being carried off with the fierce Sahelian winds and preserving arable land. The roots also help hold water in the ground, rather than letting it run off across rocky, barren fields into gullies where it floods villages and destroys crops. More trees mean that Niger’s people are in a better position to withstand whatever changes the climate might

bring. “This is something the farmers control, and something they do for themselves,” said Dr. Larwanou. “It demonstrates that with a little effort and foresight, you can reduce poverty in the Sahel. It is not impossible or hopeless, and does not have to cost a lot of money. It can be done.”

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency began Energy Awareness Month in October with the slogan “change a light, change the world,’’ and encouraged Americans to buy compact fluorescent lights instead of conventional incandescent bulbs. Useful as that may be, picking a large sport utility vehicle that goes about a kilometer farther on a liter of gasoline than the least-efficient S.U.V.’s would have an impact on emissions of global warming gases about five times larger than replacing five 60-watt incandescent bulbs. The dollar savings would be about 10 times larger. And the more-efficient light bulbs would have a negligible effect on oil consumption. People eager to reduce their consumption can take many steps, but the size of their benefit — or cost — is not always evident. The New York Times compared a number of such steps by three standards — reduction in global warming gases emitted, reduction in oil consumed and the dollar savings. The calculations found that while choosing energy-efficient lighting and appliances makes a difference, changing how we travel would make by far the biggest difference. The larger the vehicle, the bigger difference even a small increase in fuel economy makes. For example, buying an S.U.V. with fuel economy rated at about 7 kilometers per liter instead of 6 cuts oil consumption and reduces carbon dioxide emissions by three and a half times more than saving about a kilometer per liter in a typical car. A kilometer or so per liter may mean nothing more than picking a vehicle with the standard engine instead of the more elaborate version, or picking the vehicle that has the best fuel economy in its size class. The 7-kilometer-per-liter models are very big S.U.V.’s, although not as large as the 6-kilometer-per-liter models. Lee Schipper, research director of the World Resources Institute, an environmental group, said it was a change “that your neighbors won’t notice. They won’t look down on you.’’ There are lots of choices available beyond compromising on the size of an S.U.V. Commuting by train or bus, when that choice is available, will make the biggest difference. Consider the average round trip to work — 37 kilometers. In the average sedan, which gets 10 kilometers per liter, that is about 950 liters of gas a year and about 2,250 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions.

In cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, consumers can help by saving either gasoline or electricity. But as for cutting consumption of oil, saving electricity provides little help, because only 3 percent of electricity comes from burning oil. That said, there are changes around the house that make a big difference. In many parts of the United States, for example, heating a home for a winter takes about as much energy as running a car for a year. In a northeast climate like Boston’s, replacing single-pane windows and storm windows with new thermal windows in a two-story, 185-squaremeter house would save about 375 liters of heating oil. It would also reduce carbon dioxide production by more than 900 kilograms. If the heating fuel is natural gas, about 725 kilograms is saved. The next biggest energy user at home is the air-conditioner. Replacing a 10year-old air-conditioner with a new one would save about 395 kilograms of car-

A more efficient light bulb is good; a smaller S.U.V. is better. bon dioxide a year, although only 4 liters of oil. Even the most significant energy savings mentioned here are modest when compared with what it would take to limit global warming. Joseph J. Romm, an analyst at the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions and a head of the Energy Department’s efficiency and renewable energy program during the Clinton administration, said American carbon dioxide emissions come to about 20,000 kilograms per person per year. Stabilizing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide would require cutting that by about 12,000 kilograms. But the more modest goal set by the Kyoto Protocol, which would have required the United States to cut emissions by about 1,400 kilograms per person annually, is well within reach. Mr. Romm, the author of a new book about energy and climate change, “Hell and High Water,’’ said that eventually the world’s industries would have to switch to lower-carbon fuels, but before that time individuals and industries could take plenty of action. “You use efficiency to stop demand growth,’’ he said.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2007

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B U S I N E S S Joseph Johnson, far left, is one former employee who benefited from the assistance that Steven T. Bigari offered his McDonald’s workers.

A Boss Increases Profits By Helping His Workers By MICHAEL FITZGERALD In 1990, Steven T. Bigari was running McDonald’s franchises in Colorado Springs and spending most of his working hours thinking about Taco Bell, which was killing his business with a promotional menu of items costing only 59 cents each. One day, the restaurants’ owner, Brent Cameron, sat down with him at one of the franchises. “O.K., Steve, what’s your plan?’’ he asked. Mr. Bigari presented a plan to cut costs by eliminating, among other things, paid vacations for crew members. “Brent politely asked me to step into the vestibule and he stuck his finger in my face and used a foul word for one of the three times I ever heard one cross his lips,’’ Mr. Bigari said. “He said, ‘You can afford to give up your vacation, but they can’t, so I hope you have a better plan than that.’ ’’ Mr. Bigari said he got the message: take care of your people. It was a message that stuck with him even after Mr. Cameron died and Mr. Bigari became a top McDonald’s franchisee. He kept Mr. Cameron’s crew benefits in place, and

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began adding to them. He created a system to help resolve the problems of the working poor who staffed his restaurants by pulling together an array of services, from day care to transportation to small emergency loans. The goal, he said, was to keep his employees on the job and focused on customers. Now he is trying to persuade others to offer this kind of help to their workers, not as an act of kindness or charity but as a way to reduce employee turnover and increase profit. This is a major challenge. After all, American business culture tends to focus on employees at the top, not at the bottom. And many don’t want to be told that they pay workers poverty-level wages. Mr. Bigari says he thinks that they will understand when they see the benefits they can get from helping the working poor, both as employees and as customers. He had no such plans a decade ago, when he decided to continue Mr. Cameron’s practice of making small, shortterm no-interest personal loans to his employees to help them pay their rent, buy tires or meet other immediate needs. Back then, his goal was simply to re-

Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

duce employee turnover by easing some of the problems that led so many of his workers to miss shifts or to quit. He did more than lend money: he worked with a local church to set up day care, and he educated employees about public services available to low-wage workers. By 2001, Mr. Bigari was calling his collection of programs McFamily Benefits, and it worked well, for his employees and for him. So well, in fact, that three professors at the University of Colorado

at Colorado Springs found that from 2000 to 2002, turnover rates fell sharply at all of Mr. Bigari’s restaurants. All of the employees who used some part of the programs said they felt motivated to work harder. In the same period, his profit margin rose more than three percentage points. Debra Powell, a divorced mother of five who managed one of Mr. Bigari’s restaurants, said the program helped many of her crew workers, which in turn made her job easier. She herself had

money problems, and Mr. Bigari found a budgeting course at a local nonprofit agency; it helped her so much that she required all the managers in her store take it, partly because many of them had never had checking accounts. She used Mr. Bigari’s program in 2003 to get a loan for a personal computer and in 2004 to buy the first car she had ever purchased. “He’s not in it for himself; he’s in it for the people,’’ she said. For his part, Mr. Bigari says he is inspired by people like Joseph Johnson, who had to drop out of college after a family emergency. After working for a time in Phoenix, he sought a job at a McDonald’s in Colorado Springs where Mr. Bigari was then the operations manager, becoming operations manager himself when Mr. Bigari became an owner. Today, Mr. Johnson owns his own McDonald’s. Mr. Johnson says that Mr. Bigari is a genuine leader, one who had no compunction about working alongside minimum-wage workers. “The one thing we could all appreciate about him was he wasn’t just the guy who would vision up something — he’d be the guy who was there to execute it, too,’’ he said.

Advertisers Discover the Allure Of Customers’ Video Clips By BOB TEDESCHI

Photographs by Mark Simon for the International Herald Tribune

In Land of the Euro, Towns Adopt an Alternative The chiemgauer, a regional currency in southeastern Germany, was issued to encourage consumers to buy local goods and services.

By CARTER DOUGHERTY ROSENHEIM, Germany — Christian Gelleri, with his straightforward manner of speech, rumpled suit and home office, hardly resembles the polished central bankers whose every breath captivates financial markets. But just as Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, lays claim to the title “Mr. Euro,” Mr. Gelleri can plausibly call himself “Mr. Chiemgauer.” Mr. Gelleri runs an organization that issues an alternative currency, known as the chiemgauer, that consumers in the region southeast of Munich use to buy products as diverse as pizza, haircuts and rugs. Aimed at fostering the production and consumption of local products and services, the chiemgauer challenges the central banking orthodoxy that pumping more cash into an economy accelerates inflation and eventually harms growth. “When people use the chiemgauer, the apple juice producer sells more bottles and the cheese maker sells more cheese,” Mr. Gelleri said. “In theory, this is not supposed to happen, but the fact is it does.” While more than 300 million people in Europe use the euro to buy life’s essentials, a small but growing number concentrated in the German-speaking world use a proliferation of currencies with names like chiemgauer, urstromtaler, landmark, kirschblüte and kann was. Issued by private organizations, these

currencies are probably better understood as vouchers — pieces of paper that can be redeemed for goods and services at regional businesses that have agreed to accept them. Charitable organizations sell the currencies for euros, at a profit, creating an incentive for people to obtain them. That, added to the desire to buy locally in an era of globalization, gives businesses that accept them a new vein of customers. But they also typically include a feature aimed at jarring users into spending them. In the case of the chiemgauer, the notes lose 2 percent of their value each quarter unless spent. Regiogeld, a German association for alternative currencies, tracks 21 such types of money in circulation in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with an additional 31 in preparation. Gerhard Rösl, an economist with the University of Applied Sciences in Regensburg, Germany,

has also located similar experiments in Denmark, Italy, Scotland, Spain and Italy. According to the Bundesbank, the German central bank, these alternative currencies are legal. But they are not legal tender like the euro, the official currency shared by 13 European nations. Orthodox economists do not dispute that the chiemgauer’s velocity outstrips the euro’s, but they contend that people will logically draw fewer chiemgauers to protect themselves against the automatic devaluation. Jürgen Wemhöner, a retired retail manager who estimates he spends several hundred chiemgauers a month, said the currency’s appeal was that it supported the locals who accepted it. That seems to matter very much to people in Rosenheim. “This currency gives small villages and regions a chance to survive,” Mr. Wemhöner said.

tive, Tom Dixon, blending random objects, including wood, marbles and Mr. Dixon’s iPod. The company posted the videos on its own site, WillItBlend.com, as well as on YouTube, and promoted them on various message boards and blogs. The marble video, which can be seen at youtube .com/watch?v=3OmpnfL5PCw quickly rose to prominence on YouTube’s entertainment section, and since then, according to Blendtec’s marketing director, George Wright, the company’s 30 videos have been viewed more than 11 million times. “We’ve seen wonderful improvements in sales,’’ Mr. Wright said. “Online, we’ve absolutely eclipsed our records, and it just continues to grow and grow.’’ Still, the runaway success of the program has included some potentially troubling side effects. Users have taken

It was just a matter of time. Online retailers have begun capitalizing on the YouTube craze, offering a video platform for product demonstrations, rants and raves, sentimental messages and just plain bizarre behavior. At this point there is little question that the videos, on sites like 1-800-Flowers .com, Buy.com, Blendtec.com and many others soon to come, have novelty value. Whether they will help build customer traffic and sales over the long term, though, remains an open question. “The scary thing is that we don’t know the financial implications of this,’’ said Jim McCann, the chief executive of 1800-Flowers, which recently began two initiatives to post user-generated videos on the site. “Does it have any benefit for sales? I can’t answer that. We’re just going on a leap here.’’ The company announced its “Video Valentine’’ service (at 1-800-Flowers.com/videovalentine), where users go to the site and upload photos, write messages and choose musical themes and graphics. The site then meshes the various elements into a 60-second clip that, while not strictly video, includes enough motion and sound to approximate the experience. The site allows users to send the valentines for free, and, after employees review them for inappropriate content, they may post the valentines on the site for others to view and rate. Users will be able to integrate full video files in the coming months, said Mr. McCann, who caught the video bug after a conversation last year Kirk Condyles for The New York Times with Chad Hurley, one of YouTube’s founders. In the meantime, the site Jim McCann, the chief executive is relying on YouTube to broadcast of 1-800-Flowers, posts videos by other video clips from customers, customers on the company’s site. through its Reconnections initiative. With that, 1-800-Flowers asks users to film testimonials about instances when to posting their own “extreme blending’’ a gift from the site has caused or high- videos, with about 600 such clips recentlighted a reunion in the customer’s life. ly featured on YouTube. Other sites, like the golf and tennis Mr. McCann said he would feature the retailer Golfsmith.com, are employmost popular videos in television ads. “The irony is that we’re using technol- ing user videos for reviews. According ogy to be much more personal with our to Matthew Corey, the company’s vice customers, and recreate the relation- president of marketing, Golfsmith.com ship I had 30 years ago, where I knew all will allow users to post clips talking the customers that came into my shop,’’ about products for sale on the site. Mr. Corey said this year’s new golf Mr. McCann said. Late last month 1-800-Flowers an- clubs include even bigger drivers than nounced record revenues of $330 million before, some with square heads. “It’s for the most recent quarter, an increase going to take people some time to unof nearly 19 percent from the same peri- derstand the features of these,’’ he said. od in 2005. The company’s stock jumped “What better way to do that than with by more than 10 percent last month to videos?’’ Brett Hurt, the chief executive of Batop $7, after dropping below $4.50 in AuzaarVoice, said his company would start gust. For at least one company, user-gen- helping three of its 60 clients solicit, reerated videos have led to a measurable view and post video reviews. “I’d expect growth in business. Blendtec, a manu- a majority of our customers to adopt facturer and seller of blenders based in this,’’ Mr. Hurt said. “It’s just a matter Orem, Utah, started late last year post- of time before it becomes the norm oning videos of the company’s chief execu- line.’’

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2007 S C I E N C E

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T E C H N O L O G Y :

A Machine to Improve Car Engines and Drivers

Toys Worthy Of Leonardo’s Dreams Of Flight

By ANNE EISENBERG

Toys with wings, like the FlyTech Dragonfly, below, move in ways unimaginable a few years ago. Thanks to innovation, toys can also float, walk and roll.

By MICHEL MARRIOTT Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th-century vision of mechanical flight apparently never included fixed wings assisted by propellers or jet engines. His chief inspiration was birds. More than 500 years later, WowWee, a robotics and entertainment products company, shares that vision. Next month, it plans to release a functional ornithopter, a device that flies in birdlike fashion — in this case, a radio-controlled toy that mechanically flaps its Mylar wings. The inspiration — besides Leonardo’s work — is an insect, said Sean Frawley, the 22-year-old inventor of the toy, the FlyTech Dragonfly. “People have been experimenting all around the world with these kinds of things,” Mr. Frawley, project manager for WowWee, said in a telephone interview from the company’s office in Hong Kong. The robotic Dragonfly is hardly alone in its use of technologies that are giving a new generation of toys extraordinary capabilities to fly, float, walk and roll — almost always inexpensively — in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. “Is there a revolution?” asked Gene Khasminsky, the design director for Interactive Toy Concepts, the Canadian maker of the Micro Mosquito, a palmsized, radio-controlled helicopter that was in great demand among holiday toy shoppers at about $70. “I think, right now, that there is a push back from our industry to get kids off the couch where they’re playing video games,” Mr. Khasminsky said in a telephone interview. “We’re moving into an age where toys are becoming more hightech to stay competitive with gaming.” He suggested that navigating welldesigned vehicles in the physical world — like the company’s inventory of re-

G A D G E T S

Photographs by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

mote-controlled helicopters, planes and helium blimps — is vastly more compelling than steering a virtual vehicle in a computer-generated universe. Mattel, which owns Tyco, is placing its bets on a radio-controlled three-wheeled vehicle it is calling the Tyco R/C Terrainiac. Scheduled to go on sale in the summer for about $80, the Terrainiac is a futuristic-looking vehicle powered by a single rear wheel that is actually a

Playthings that fly may compete with stationary video games. complex treaded ball, referred to by its makers as a “sphere drive.” George Benz, director of marketing for Tyco Radio Control, said the toy will not be limited to solid surfaces. The sphere drive is hollow, helping to provide buoyancy as well as locomotion when the Terrainiac takes to the water. “The tricky part of development is making these toys have tremendous

performance on land and really deliver when it gets wet,” he said. Wild Planet Entertainment, which makes a line of “spy toys for any mission’’ under the rubric Spy Gear, had added a surveillance wrinkle to a rather conventional remote-controlled vehicle. Its Spy Video Car, which sells for $140, has a front-mounted camera that wirelessly transmits a live video image that can be viewed in an eyepiece. But of all the innovations brimming in toy vehicles these days, the most startling have been reserved for those that achieve flight. Jakks Pacific, a toymaker in Malibu, California, offers a lightweight, radiocontrolled flying wing called the XPV, or Xreme Performance Vehicle, which sells for $60. Once its onboard battery is fully charged, the twin-propeller craft can soar as high as a 20-story building. One of the greatest boons to low-cost, remote-controlled flight has been new light batteries, said Mr. Frawley, the Dragonfly creator. He said lithium polymer batteries had freed flying toys from heavy batteries. Yet he noted that the Dragonfly’s predecessor, a kit he designed and sold as a teenager, was more energy-efficient. It was powered by rubber bands.

How’s your driving? If you’re ready for a blunt, detailed answer to that question, computer-based gadgets selling for $200 or less will provide it. The devices plug into a car’s engine control computer and keep track of any bad behavior you might display behind the wheel. Some of these devices display the data immediately on a gauge. Others store the facts on a computer chip, to be downloaded later and put into charts. Two of the electronic backseat drivers were recently updated to keep even closer tabs on the behavior of both engine and driver: the CarChip from Davis Instruments of Hayward, California, (www.davisnet.com); and the ScanGauge II by Linear-Logic of Mesa, Arizona, (www.scangauge.com). Users who have the patience to study these displays’ revelations may soon find themselves easing up on the gas pedal, not only to improve their fuel economy but also to add fewer molecules of carbon dioxide to the earth’s atmosphere. The CarChip that I tried (Model E/ X with Alarm, $150 to $199) monitors a driver’s speed every second and has an alarm that can be set, for instance, to ring whenever the car is going more than the speed limit. The CarChip does not display its data while recording it. Instead, it accumulates the information and then downloads it to a Windows-based computer by way of a U.S.B. connection. The findings can be displayed on a screen or in a report, color-coded to show errors like quick starts. The ScanGauge II ($169.95) does not download its data. It shows the numbers it collects instantly, on a small monitor. The gadgets plug into a socket, typically under the dashboard, that mechanics use to check a car’s emissions system. Before buying either of these gadgets, make sure your car has this diagnostic socket, called an OBD II port. The manufacturers of both devices have information on incompatible vehicles on their Web sites. Installation is simple, but there is a small complication. First, you have to find the port. You can avoid time-wasting searches by going to the National OBD Clearing House Web site, maintained by Weber State University in Ogden, Utah (www.autocenter.weber. edu/OBD-CH/vehicleoems.asp). Find your car model on the list and get the exact location of the port. Once the port is found, the devices plug in easily. The CarChip provides a wealth of information. It can tell you when the ignition was turned on and off and the time and date of each trip. That is why some people use these devices for keeping an eye on others’ driving. Fleet owners, for example, put them in vans to monitor the driving habits of employees; anxious parents use them in the cars of their teenage children. The CarChip can be moved from one vehicle to another. Patrick Barrett, director of transportation services at the

Old Vinyl Records Transformed to Digital Music By ANNE EISENBERG Long-playing records are gathering dust in the homes of many music lovers, who hope to hear their contents one day on a CD player or iPod. Now, an updated version of another audio relic, the phonographic turntable, may provide a fairly inexpensive way to do that. Two new consumer turntables on the market at $200 or less connect directly to computers to transfer cherished vinyl to MP3 files and CDs. One of the new turntables is called the Ion USB or, more formally, the iTTUSB ($199 list price, about $150 on the Web through a site like Amazon.com). Made by Ion Audio, it works with both PCs and Macs. This lightweight plastic turntable plugs directly into the USB port of computers; inside, it has a preamplifier to bolster the sound, which is digitized and then sent to the computer through the USB cable. The Ion uses a venerable and free program called Audacity, which can do many jobs — like eliminating some scratches on the recording. Installing it

is easy, though a few instructions in the Audacity manual are difficult to understand, particularly those that guide you through changing the settings so the internal sound card on the computer will be used for playback rather than the turntable, which has no speakers. When you press “record,’’ you’ll see the digitized wave forms of the music traveling across the monitor and hear the audio version through the computer speakers or headphones. If you are ambitious, you can edit the file, deleting some of the scratches. Once the recording is done, the album must be divided manually into tracks, by marking the beginning and end of each with the computer mouse. If you can’t tell from the wave forms where the break is — they drop off when there’s silence — you can always check by listening to the recording. In Audacity, each track is stored as a separate file; if you are making multiple tracks, you send each on its way as a .wav file to your hard disk. Once the files are on the hard drive,

they can be burned quickly to a CD. The Ion will also convert 78-r.p.m. records, as well as cassette tapes. Another new turntable, Audio-Technica’s LP2Da ($170 to $199) works with PCs but not with Macs. It has a pre-amplifier, but no USB connection. It plugs into the computer through an analog line input jack. The software, Cakewalk Pyro, is easier to use than Audacity: burning a CD, for instance, requires only one click for the entire LP, while Audacity requires

that you send along each track separately. And it includes software for converting .wav files to MP3 files; by contrast, Audacity requires users to download a free plug-in in order to do this. Ion users may soon have software that is easier to handle: in April, the company plans to replace Audacity with a program that detects tracks automatically and allows recording in MP3 format without a separate download. To see how the new, inexpensive turntables sounded once they were set

University of Nebraska, Lincoln, has about 100 CarChips that are popped in and out of the more than 430 sedans and vans used by the university. The chips offer a relatively inexpensive way to keep an eye on the driving habits of people who use the university’s passenger vans and cars, Mr. Barrett said. In addition, they have helped with the occasional diagnostic problem. For instance, one person complained that the engine was stalling when it pulled onto an Interstate highway, he said. But the chip showed that the driver had not let the engine warm up enough. Instead, Mr. Barrett said, “the driver

The CarChip, above, stores data that can be downloaded to a computer. The ScanGuage II displays information on a screen.

pushed the pedal to the floor and expected the car to perform.’’ Like the CarChip, the ScanGauge II starts logging data immediately. It has a cable that runs from the plug-in to the console, about the size of a stick of butter, which displays the data. One screen shows trip data, including fuel economy and the distance the car can cover before the fuel tank is empty. Rees Roberts, of Racine, Wisconsin, said that his monitoring of his driving habits had led him to make changes. “I drive differently now,’’ he said. “You watch the gauge, and you learn the behaviors that work, so that you get better and better at conserving gas — and reducing emissions.’’

The Audio Technica turntable, near left, and the Ion iTTUSB convert music from vinyl records to digital files that can be played on CDs or through MP3 files. up, I invited a friend, George Basbas, a physicist, to bring over some of his treasured LPs. One was an old Columbia Masterworks album featuring the countertenor Russell Oberlin. We recorded it on the AudioTechnica turntable, burned a CD from the .wav files, then played both the CD and the LP on the stereo. We couldn’t tell for sure which was the LP and which was the CD, although many experts probably could. “Any digitization process imposes limits on quality,’’ said Mark Schubin, a media technology consultant in Manhattan. “Be prepared: it won’t sound the same as you heard it through your analog system when you were playing back the record.’’ But the new recording sounded good enough as we listened to Mr. Oberlin’s voice fill the room, ready to be taken along by CD or MP3 in the car or on a walk, freed after more than 50 years from its vinyl confinement.

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2007

7

P E R S O N A L I T I E S

ENNIO MORRICONE

A Maestro of Movies and a Historian of Sound By JON PARELES

Ennio Morricone has written music for more than 400 films, including “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’’ starring Clint Eastwood, right.

ROME — For many filmmakers through the years, a certain kind of pilgrimage to Rome leads to the opulent parlor of the composer Ennio Morricone. It’s the place where he has often unveiled new themes on the piano for the distinctive film scores he has written over the past four decades, from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’’ to “The Mission.’’ There are more than 400 of them, though he hasn’t kept count. On February 25, Mr. Morricone, 78, will be presented with an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. Along with his hundreds of film scores, he has composed a sizable body of concert music like “Voci dal Silencio’’ (“Voices From the Silence’’), a cantata he wrote in response to “the terrorist attacks of September 11 and all the massacres of humanity all over the world,’’ he said. “The notion that I am a composer who writes a lot of things is true on one hand and not true on the other hand,’’ he said. “Maybe my time is better organized than many other people’s. But compared to classical composers like Bach, Frescobaldi, Palestrina or Mozart, I would define myself as unemployed.’’ Maestro Morricone is a flinty, pragmatic character, but one who marvels at what he called “the strange miracle of music.” He looked like a businessman recently, wearing glasses, a sport jacket, dark trousers, white shirt and tie. He greeted any generalizations about his

Alessandro Garofalo; United Artists, left

“A composer is conditioned by the film, but he has to find a way to overcome these limits.” work with a shrug, or a terse “That is up to the audience to decide.” But through the years he has created music that is as memorable as the films it accompanies, and sometimes more so. Audiences respond to the operatic sweep of themes like the ones he wrote for “Cinema Paradiso’’ and “Once Upon a Time in America.’’ Musicians prize the ingenuity of his writing: the unexpected harmonic turns, the odd meters, the use of silence and wide spaces between instruments. Hipsters and producers delight in the almost sardonic themes he wrote for films like “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion’’ and the strik-

ing timbres he has invented. Mr. Morricone grew up playing trumpet like his father, who worked in jazz bands and opera orchestras. While studying music in Rome, he was also arranging and sometimes writing pop songs. His film scores invoke centuries of popular music, from tarantellas and polkas to lounge pop and jazz. “I have studied the expressive methods of the entire history of musical composition,’’ he said. “I mingle things, and sometimes I turn into a chameleon. We are living in a modern world, and in contemporary music the central fact is contamination, not the contamination of disease but the contamination of musical styles. If you find this in me, that is good.’’ After he became known for Sergio Leone’s westerns, he wrote for every imaginable genre. He has worked with virtually every major Italian director after Fellini, as well as a long international list. Mr. Morricone’s personality, what he has called a “musical calligraphy,’’ comes through his work. “A composer is conditioned by the film, but he has to find a way to overcome these limits,’’ he said. “And how does he do this? Through his musical culture, through his great passion for musicians of the past. And doing it time after time, little by little it becomes a style.’’ Is his own story in the music? “That’s a romantic idea of composing, that there is autobiographical inspiration in things,’’ he said. “Some composers, perhaps, they see a woman and say, ‘I’m going to write something extraordinary because I’m thinking of her.’ ’’ And has that happened to him? He scowled. “Niente,’’ he said. “Never.’’

ABDERRAHMANE SISSAKO

FREDDY LUGO

African Filmmaker Puts Big Money on Trial

’76 Bomber Tries to Keep A Low Profile

By DENNIS LIM

By SIMON ROMERO David Rochkind/Polaris, for The New York Times

CARACAS, Venezuela — There are ment, a staunch Cuban ally these days, not many places where a man convicted says the difficulty in extraditing Mr. in the bombing of a commercial airliner Posada Carriles illustrates American that killed 73 people can be found roam- hypocrisy in battling terrorists. Mr. Lugo has tried his best to remain ing the streets. This city, home to Freddy in the shadows of the diplomatic uproar Lugo, is one of them. Mr. Lugo, like an uneasy memory surrounding Mr. Posada Carriles, whom from the cold war, is tucked away here, he described simply as “an adventurer, obscure to most of his countrymen but capable of anything.’’ Despite his conviction, Mr. Lugo said not completely forgotten. He was one of two men sentenced to 20 years in prison he considered himself a pawn in the for placing explosives on a DC-8 jetliner machinations of Cuban exiles to topple Fidel Castro. Along with many of those flown by Cubana Airlines in 1976. The plane blew up in the sky above Cubans, Mr. Lugo, a Venezuelan, found Barbados, killing everyone on board, himself in Caracas in the 1970s. It was including two dozen members of Cuba’s here that Mr. Lugo, then a news photognational fencing team and a 9-year-old rapher, met the man who recruited him Guyanese girl. That explosion, consid- for the bomb plot, a fellow Venezuelan ered the first act of midair terrorism in journalist named Hernán Ricardo Lothe Americas, poisons relations between zano, according to police records. Mr. Ricardo, it turned Havana and Washington to this day. out, had been working on Mr. Lugo, 65, who was the side for Mr. Posada “I have a released in 1993 after 17 Carriles, doing photograyears in prison, has tried tranquil life now. phy and surveillance. to put the past behind “My life would have him. “I have a tranquil life taken a completely differI have a clean ent path if I had never met now,’’ he said in a rare 90Hernán Ricardo,’’ Mr. minute interview. “I have conscience.” Lugo said. a clean conscience.’’ For his part, Mr. Lugo But the past has a way of catching up with him. There is the oc- divides his time now between an apartcasional journalist to contend with, and ment where he lives with his wife and his glimmers of recognition from among son’s home in a poor district. He says he avoids any involvement in politics. He the many Cubans who live here. A new book on the Cubana bombing, says his taxi, an aging beige sedan, is his called “Terrorist of the Bush Family,’’ only source of income. by two Venezuelan journalists, Alexis Asked if he felt remorse over the Rosas and Ernesto Villegas, has not deaths of 73 people, including many helped either. The book has become teenagers on the Cuban fencing team, a best seller since its release here last Mr. Lugo said he did not. He explained November. It has focused new attention somewhat cryptically that he considon the bombing and the request by Ven- ered himself manipulated in an act beezuela for Washington to extradite the yond his control. “I am a normal man,’’ Cuban exile accused of masterminding he said. “I am innocent.’’ the bombing, Luis Posada Carriles, to Others disagree. “Freddy Lugo may face terrorism charges here. not want to admit it, but he’s a mass murSo far the Bush administration has derer,’’ said José Pertierra, a lawyer in refused, and Mr. Posada Carriles, 78, Washington representing Venezuela’s a naturalized Venezuelan citizen who government in its attempt to extradite sneaked into the United States in 2005, Mr. Posada Carriles. “He can claim he currently sits in a jail in southern New wasn’t the mastermind; maybe he can claim he was duped. But he participated Mexico on immigration charges. President Hugo Chávez’s govern- in a terrorist act that killed 73 people.’’

ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands — A rarity among contemporary filmmakers, Abderrahmane Sissako is doing his best to uphold the tradition of “J’accuse” and the outraged polemic. For his latest movie Mr. Sissako, who lives in Paris, returned to his family courtyard in Bamako, the capital of Mali, and staged an act of symbolic justice. “Bamako” is a courtroom drama that takes place within a mud-walled compound. It revolves around an unlikely cast of characters: the plaintiffs are the people of Africa; the defendants, charged with worsening the economic plight of the continent, are the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. “Through art you can invent the impossible.” Mr. Sissako, 45, said in an interview here at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, where he was the subject of a retrospective. “It’s obviously an improbable scenario: to put on trial these two institutions that nobody can hold accountable. But that’s the point. In this little courtyard we make the impossible possible.” To staff the tribunal in “Bamako,” Mr. Sissako sought out real judges and lawyers, whom he armed with research material. He also assembled a cross section of witnesses, from childhood friends to a former minister of culture, all appearing as themselves. Once the cameras were rolling, he allowed the improvised arguments to unfold without interruption. Witness after witness lands blow after blow against the economic policies of the international financial bodies, contending that they have contributed to the impoverishment of Africa and led to cuts in health care and education. But “Bamako,” despite its equation of globalized capitalism and neocolonialism, is not purely a diatribe. To an almost surreal degree it emphasizes the drift of daily life. In the very space where the court is in session, residents come and go, women dye fabric, a wedding party passes by. “The idea of the trial was born together with the idea of showing life adjacent to it,” Mr. Sissako said. The primary setting of “Bamako”

New Yorker Films

“Truth cannot always be expressed in words. It can also be silent, and you cannot say no to those who are silent.” on his film “Bamako”, starring Aisatta Tall Sall, left, and Aissa Maiga holds great significance for Mr. Sissako, whose work often incorporates elements of autobiography. “I couldn’t have made a film like this in just any courtyard,” he said. “It had to be this one, where I grew up. Shooting there I felt protected. I felt I was allowed to make mistakes.” Thanks to Mr. Sissako’s father, an engineer, there was always a bustling communal atmosphere at the compound. “My father was the only one in his family who went to school,” he said. “He felt a responsibility to take in the children of relatives and friends who were less well off.” The courtyard, he said, “is Malian society in miniature.” Mr. Sissako was born in Mauritania but grew up in Mali, his father’s home country. At 19, he moved to Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, where his mother was living. Homesick for Mali, he found unexpected solace at the Soviet cultural center, where he spent his days playing table tennis, learning Russian and reading Dostoyevsky. He ended up at the prestigious film academy in Moscow.

After nearly a decade there he moved to Paris in the early 1990s. His nomadic existence strongly informed his worldview. He found his voice as a poet of displacement, forever grappling with the bafflement of exile and the sorrow of the impossible return. In “Waiting for Happiness” (2002), set in a Mauritanian town that functions as a way station between Africa and the West, one of the characters is an alienated young man visiting his mother before he leaves for Europe. In “Life on Earth” (1998) Mr. Sissako plays a version of himself, an expatriate returning from Paris to Mali on the eve of the millennium. The explicit subject of “Bamako” had been the implicit themes of his other films: the legacy of colonialism and the lopsided relationship between the first and third worlds. It also, however, demonstrates the limits of language. Called to the stand, one of the witnesses finds himself unable to speak. “Truth cannot always be expressed in words,” Mr. Sissako said. “It can also be silent, and you cannot say no to those who are silent.” Mr. Sissako recalled the advice of an old friend, a Malian judge: “He told me, ‘Don’t think this film will change anything. But you have to make it. Perhaps then they will know that we know.’ ”

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2007 A R T S

&

S T Y L E S

These Americans, Stars in Asia, Still Harbor Dreams of Hollywood By ROBERT ITO LOS ANGELES — Maggie Q looks calm, or as calm as one can look while clutching the side of a Ford Explorer that is dangling by a tangle of cables inside an elevator shaft. Dressed in black down to her high-heeled boots, Ms. Q, 27, is waiting for the truck to drop. When it does, the jolt shakes the Ford and Ms. Q with it; dust and bits of gravel drizzle down on her head. “Do we have more debris?” the second-unit director yells. “We’d like a bit more debris.” On the next take the Explorer drops with a bigger thud, and considerably more debris. Ms. Q is on Stage 12 of the Universal Studios lot, filming her final scenes of “Live Free or Die Hard,” the fourth installment of the Bruce Willis “Die Hard” series. It looks brutal — the midair stuff, the cranberry-red gash painted above her right eyebrow — but it’s not really. If anything gets too dangerous, Ming Qiu, Ms. Q’s wiry stunt double, is ready to step in. And it is certainly nothing compared with the bruises and scrapes that Ms. Q has received in Asia, where she has starred in action films like “Dragon Squad,” “Naked Weapon” and “Gen-Y Cops.” In Hong Kong a cracked shin earned her an hourlong respite. “On ‘Live Free’ I got a little cut and they were like: ‘Oh my God! Medic!’ ” she said. “It was so wonderful. I was, like, in tears.” Getting roughed up in China is just

part of the ride for many young AsianAmerican actors, who have been finding it easier to get started abroad than at home. But while Ms. Q — who grew up in Mililani, Hawaii, and moved to Tokyo in her teens to model — managed to leverage foreign stardom into a shot at a Hollywood career, few others have done so. Scores of other Asian-American actors are still waiting for their big chance back home. Among them are Daniel Henney, a Korean-American who grew up in Carson City, Michigan, and became a star in Korea playing a kindly radiologist in the hit television series “My Lovely Sam-Soon”; Daniel Wu, a native of Orinda, California, who won the Golden Horse award in Taiwan as best supporting actor in 2004; and Allan Wu, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, who has become a television star in Singapore. For Asian-Americans, who are seldom greeted with open arms in Hollywood, the trans-Pacific route to big-screen success is an old one. “The biggest example of this, in our current era, is Bruce Lee,” said Jeff Yang, a global trends analyst at the market research firm Iconoculture and the author of “Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to the Cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China” (Atria, 2003). “He was born in the United States and tried to establish himself as the talent he was, only to find doors barred and a plum role that was actually written for him taken away and given to a white guy.

Frank Masi/20th Century Fox

Maggie Q, 27, is one of the few Asian-Americans to move from making Asian films to Hollywood. She is in ‘‘Live Free or Die Hard.’’ So what did he do? He went to Asia.” If doors open more readily in Asia, the obstacles are still considerable for actors who may not know the language and customs of a host country. When Mr. Henney traveled to Korea to film “My Lovely Sam-Soon,” for instance, he spoke no Korean. He had been spotted by a talent manager while modeling for an Olympus commercial there in 2005 but had to plead his case to network executives before landing a part in their new show. A non-Korean actor — from a small agricultural town in

London Makes A Strong Case As the Capital Of Cocktails

A Job Full of Daily Danger: A Librarian in Baghdad By PATRICIA COHEN

By KATE SEKULES “London is the best cocktail city in the world right now,’’ Audrey Saunders said. “I hate to admit it, but it’s true.’’ The confession is difficult because Ms. Saunders, an owner of the Pegu Club in New York City, is seen as the torchbearer for New York’s own bartending resurgence. But she has sampled beverages from Paris to Tortola, and she is convinced that London has more bartenders turning out more sophisticated drinks than any other place. “Even though it’s coming along here, our talent is nowhere near as widespread,’’ she said. “If I hadn’t started Pegu Club, I’d probably be in London. I just love what’s going on in the scene. The bartenders are so extraordinary — the professionalism and the skill level and the passion.’’ Ten years ago, with the opening of a handful of “proper cocktail’’ establishments, London mixology was in its protozoan stage: the mere appearance of fresh fruit juice in a cocktail glass was considered a giant evolutionary leap. Cocktails caught on, and soon lesser bars were seeking attention with absurd drinks like bacon martinis. Which is why the explosion of sheer quality and variety in the city now strikes connoisseurs of mixed drinks as so fortunate and so welcome. At certain restaurants — Zuma, Roka, Hakkasan, Baltic — the people behind the bar are more of a draw than those in the kitchen. Recently renewed hotel bars — the Bar at the Dorchester, the Lobby Bar at One Aldwych, Artesian at the Langham Hotel, Claridge’s Bar, the Blue Bar at the Berkeley — are irresistible again. Stand-alone boîtes that look as if Bond just left (Milk & Honey, Montgomery Place) or Barbarella is about to arrive (the Lonsdale, Trailer Happiness) publish booklet menus with sections of rye, shochu, Pisco and cachaça drinks alongside the gins and cognacs. These bars squeeze and press their juices daily, partially defrost and refreeze their mineral-water ice for density and purity and keep libraries of precious liquors. Bartenders outdo each other to corral the most outré bottles: Antica Formula, Dolin Chambéryzette, Wokka Saki Vodka, Penderyn single malt Welsh whiskey. Everyone keeps Martin Miller’s gin from Notting Hill, liqueurs of violet and prickly pear, Lillet and absinthe. Asked to nominate the most professional, skilled and passionate London barkeep of all, Ms. Saunders gave the same answer as everybody else: Dick Bradsell. “He’s completely unassuming and so low-key, but he’s one of the

Michigan, no less — on Korean TV? “It was risky for them,” he said. “My Lovely Sam-Soon” became a huge hit. For Ms. Q, stardom in Asia has led to successively larger roles in Hollywood. Last year she was the only female member of Tom Cruise’s Impossible Missions Force team in “Mission: Impossible III.” This year she is set to appear in both “Live Free or Die Hard,” scheduled to open in the United States in late June, and “Balls of Fury,” a comedy starring Christopher Walken and George Lopez, due out in September. “The Tourist,”

which she filmed with Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor before she began “Live Free or Die Hard,” is tentatively scheduled for release this year. Ms. Q’s career in Asia was one of fits and starts. The daughter of a Vietnamese mother and a Polish-Irish father, she struggled to find modeling jobs in Japan, where she arrived in 1997 at the age of 17. “A lot of people think, ‘Oh, you’re mixed, they’ll love you in Japan,’ ” she said. “But normally what they wanted was either a Japanese girl or a white girl.” Taiwan was even worse: “I remember walking into castings, and they’d go: ‘Nope, get out! We didn’t ask for dark hair. We didn’t ask for ethnic. We want white,’ ” she said. “Even now, they love white girls.” This month Ms. Q will travel to China to film “Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon,” a historical epic starring Andy Lau and Sammo Hung. It will be her biggest Asian film, with a reported $25 million budget, and her most challenging role. But as big as Asian-American talent can become in Asia, true success is still often measured in American terms. “My manager’s biggest dream is for me to be on Letterman,” Ms. Q said of the late-night talk show. “Letterman comes on at, like, 2 a.m. in Hong Kong, and she watches him every night. She says, ‘Oh, Maggie, will you promise me you’ll be on Letterman?’ What can I say? I just tell her I can’t promise, but I’ll try my best.”

Photographs by Tanya Habjouqa for The New York Times

Sipping at One Aldwych in London, left, and the Jasmine Pearl, served by the Bar at the Dorchester.

greats,’’ she said. Mr. Bradsell usually gets credit for founding the modern era of London cocktails when he opened Dick’s Bar in 1994. Dale DeGroff, an American mixologist, says he believes that London has a

barhopping problem: “young creative bartenders jumping from bar to bar’’ before cashing in as consultants (which he understands, being one himself) or brand representatives. “There are very interesting cuttingedge cocktails coming from London,’’ he said. “But the problem is consistency, and it’s exacerbated by the lack of a strong tipping tradition at bars.’’ Mr. Downey and Ms. Saunders say they believe the opposite: that tips ruin drinks. “Over there, they’re career bartenders,’’ Ms. Saunders said. “Here they’re mostly actors.’’ “Europeans consider cocktail bartending a real profession,’’ said Robert Wattie, who oversees the Lobby Bar at One Aldwych hotel — at nine years old, another early adopter of proper cocktails. “You start off at the bottom, polishing glasses, learning about spirits and balancing the drink.’’

Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, finally had some time to catch up on his diary after a couple of very busy weeks. As he wrote in his latest entry, he was having trouble repairing the Internet system; the Restoration Laboratory “was hit by 5 bullets’’; and “another librarian, who works at the Periodical Department, received a death threat. He has to leave his house and look for another one, as soon as he can; otherwise, he will be murdered.’’ For more than a month now, Dr. Eskander’s intermittent diary entries have been appearing on the Web site of the British Library (bl.uk/iraqdiary. html), and they detail the daily hurdles of keeping Iraq’s central library open, preserving the surviving archives and books and, oh yes, staying alive. “We thought it would be a good opportunity to highlight the conditions Dr. Eskander and his staff are really facing and that they are risking their lives to provide this service,’’ said Catriona Finlayson, a spokeswoman for the British Library. Written in a flat, unemotional style, the entries relate the bombings, blockades, shootings, threats, shortages and petty frustrations that make up life for the civil servants working at Iraq’s main cultural and literary storehouse. A complaint that heating fuel prices are 40 times higher than in the fall is followed by a report on the assassination of one of the library’s bright young Web designers and the need to ask the government to keep the electricity on. Dr. Eskander said he agreed to participate in the project because “I was in debt to my librarians and archivists, who have been working very hard and making all sorts of sacrifices to serve the cultural needs of the educated class of the country.’’ The British Library started publishing his journal on December 30, the day of Saddam Hussein’s execution. It includes material beginning in mid-November, right before Dr. Eskander decided to close his library for three weeks after a frightening series of bombings, shootings and death threats. The mostly unedited entries retain their typos, missing words and mistakes in English, contributing to a sense of immediacy and intimacy. Tuesday, January 23, began well enough, Dr. Eskander wrote: “The staff received their monthly salaries after two days delay.’’ But by 11:30 a.m., “One window was smashed as a result of the explosions. I was informed on the same day that two of our technicians were kidnapped by unknown armed men.’’ Both were later released unharmed, but then Dr. Eskander learned that “Mr. C, the

head of the Restoration Laboratory, received a death threat. He and his family left their house.’’ After visiting the laboratory, Dr. Eskander wrote: “One of the restorers told me that her brother was murdered ten days a go for sectarian reasons. Another restorer told me that a cousin, who lived in Mosul, in northern Iraq, was also murdered for sectarian reasons. I did not know about these two incidents. I discovered that a number of my staff do not inform the administration about their ordeals for fear of reprisals.’’ The response to the diary has been moving, said Andy Stephens, secretary to the British Library Board. “To me, why it’s so powerful is these are people doing exactly the same job we are here,

Associated Press

These books survived a fire set by looters at Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad. and we can relate to them.’’ He said there has been some interest in dramatizing the excerpts on the radio. In an e-mail exchange, Dr. Eskander wrote: “I used to be very optimistic. But, the security situation is getting worse daily.’’ Although all available resources have been directed to keeping the collections safe, “terrorists attacks, especially mortars shelling represent a considerable threat,’’ he wrote. “It is extremely difficult for my staff, including me, to work in a normal way. Many roads and bridges are often blocked. Hundreds of checkpoints are responsible for the daily heavy traffic. There is always the possibility of daily car-bomb attacks, assassinations, kidnapping and so on. Sometimes our drivers refuse to go to dangerous districts. All these ‘tiny things’ affect our works on daily basis.’’