SUNDAY-MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1-2, 2009

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news analysis

For Capitalists, Nationalization May Be Reality By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON

O

NLY DAYS INTO the Obama presidency, members of the new administration and Democratic leaders in Congress are already dancing around one of the most politically delicate questions about the financial bailout: Is the president prepared to nationalize a huge swath of the nation’s banking system? Privately, most members of the Obama economic team concede that the rapid deterioration of America’s biggest banks, notably Bank of America and Citigroup, is bound to require far larger investments of taxpayer money, atop the more than $300 billion already poured into those two financial institutions and hundreds of others. But if hundreds of billions of dollars of new investment is needed to shore up those banks, and perhaps their competitors, what do taxpayers get in return? And how do the risks escalate as government’s role expands from a few bailouts to control over a vast portion of the financial sector of the world’s largest economy? The Obama administration is making only glancing references to those questions. In a recent interview on a political show, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, alluded to internal debate when she was asked whether nationalization, or partial Continued on Page 4

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY THE NEW YORK TIMES; HOWELL/GETTY IMAGES, INSET, JASON REED/REUTERS

wORlD TRenDs

Fearing a quagmire in Afghanistan.

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BUsiness OF GReen

Gulf states are looking beyond oil.

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aRTs & sTyles

A Sherlock Holmes who’s up for a fight.

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i nTelliGence: a n i cy c h i l l d esce n d s o n eu ro p e, Page 2 .

In a Parrot’s Words, Progress for the Disabled for the blind, monkeys to aid Jim Eggers of St. Louis sufLENS quadriplegics and ferrets, fers from bipolar disorder with pigs, iguanas and ducks to a history of violent psychotic ease anxiety. outbursts. But these days when But even though laws in he is about to snap, Sadie, his the United States ensure constant companion, is there to that service animals may go talk him down. wherever their owners choose, “It’s O.K., Jim,” Sadie inlegal battles rage over what is tones, “Calm down, Jim. You’re a proper service animal and all right, Jim. I’m here, Jim.” whether, say, a goat should be allowed Sadie is not a therapist or a nurse in a restaurant. As Ms. Skloot reported, or a girlfriend. She is a parrot. And as Mr. Eggers filed a complaint against St. Rebecca Skloot reported in The New Louis Community College after Sadie York Times Magazine, she is part of an was barred. expanding menagerie of service aniThat such a debate is even occurmals helping the mentally and physiring is perhaps a sign of the progress cally disabled. There are guide ponies made by the disabled after many years of struggles to obtain even the most For comments, write to nytweekly@ fundamental rights. In many places nytimes.com.

around the world, a disability now may be less of an impediment to opportunity than ever before. And advances in digital technology promise an even brighter future. But there are also places where the dark ages live on. In Bulgaria, Hungary and other Eastern European countries, the mentally ill are still subject to draconian rules left over from the Communist era. As Matthew Brunwasser reported in The Times, legally appointed guardians are given power over every facet of their lives. And even those with milder mental illness often wind up confined to grim institutions, stripped of basic rights. “We call it civil death,” Victoria Lee, a lawyer and advocate for the mentally disabled in Budapest, told Mr. Brun-

wasser. “Once you are under guardianship, that’s it. You basically become a nonperson.” In Uganda, rights for the disabled are barely a rumor. There are few ramps for wheelchairs, guide dogs are almost unheard of and there is little or no government aid. But as Jeffrey Gettleman reported in The Times, the estimated 500,000 Ugandans who are blind have a new hero. After losing his sight 12 years ago, Bashir Ramathan of Kampala eked out a meager existence through charity from a mosque. But lately he has established himself in an unusual arena: boxing. With quick wits, a quicker jab and a finely honed sense of sound and smell, he has battled blindfolded professionals in matches celebrated

CAHIER DU DIMANCHE 1er - LUNDI 2 FÉVRIER 2009, NO 19913. NE PEUT ÊTRE VENDU SÉPARÉMENT

across Africa. His dream is to establish a worldwide blind boxing league. “If blind people can wrestle or throw a javelin,” he asked Mr. Gettleman, “why can’t they box?” But whether in Africa or America, a new wave in computer technology may transform the lives of the disabled more than any previous breakthrough. Devices that can read signs, scan product bar codes and control computers with brainwaves and eye movements are all being tested, as James Flanigan reported in The Times. The new wonder gadgets may prove to be smarter than any guide dog and nimbler than a monkey. But for companionship and emotional support, they will probably never equal even the lowliest service iguana.

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LE MonDE

SATURDAY, JANUARY 31, 2009 o p I n I o n & C o M M E n TA RY InTELLIgEnCE/RogeR coheN

editorials of the times

All Together, Over the Cliff

The President Orders Transparency President Obama wasted no time in moving to roll back the Bush administration’s disgraceful strictures on open government. In a welcome series of orders, Mr. Obama directed federal agencies to err on the side of transparency, not the Bush-era default of secrecy and delay, in releasing records to the public. He also undid the executive order signed by President George Bush that lets past presidents and vice presidents sit indefinitely on potentially embarrassing records that belong in the public domain. And Mr. Obama issued some of the toughest limitations yet on the power of lobbyists to influence government from within. Under the new rules, anyone who leaves the Obama administration will be barred from lobbying the executive branch for the remainder of Mr. Obama’s time in office, rather than the yearlong ban Mr. Bush employed. In addition, no one may serve in the Obama administration if he or she lobbied an executive agency in the preceding two years. The new president’s actions provided a burst of executive sunshine that Washington badly needs. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama already wants to make an exception for William Lynn, a former lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon, to become deputy secretary of defense. Mr. Lynn, a respected Pentagon official in the Clinton administration, has the right résumé — except that he was a lobbyist until last year. This clearly violates the mint-new standard, especially since the Pentagon job is so wide-ranging that recusal on specific issues is impossible. The White House is hoping for Senate approval nevertheless, arguing that while the president sought the firmest ethics rules, he also believes that “any standard is not perfect,” that “a waiver process that allows people to serve their country is necessary.” Voters who heeded the president’s campaign message of openness must demand any exceptions to be few and far between. This is particularly true for Mr. Obama’s order reversing a memo from Mr. Bush’s Department of Justice that hobbled agencies in fulfilling the Freedom of Information Act’s promise of accountability. Historians instantly hailed Mr. Obama’s reversal of Mr. Bush’s order, which gave veto power to past presidents, vice presidents and their heirs over which executive archives are made public. President Obama’s new orders go well beyond the standards of his predecessors. The promise of transparency is heartening. The president has vowed “a clean break from business as usual,” with transparency at the core. The United States welcomes this promise and will be tracking its fulfillment.

AKIRA SUEMORI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The global economy is enduring a cruel winter. In London, the bursting of the real estate bubble has prices plummeting.

Seattle Here’s a paradox: In these brutal economic times, one of the leading advocates for the world’s poorest people is one of the richest. Bill Gates first “annual letter” outlines his work on his twin passions — health and development in the poorest nations and education in America — and calls for the United States to do more even during this economic crisis. I came here to Seattle for an advance peek at the letter and to ask how he is adjusting to his transition from tycoon to philanthropist. Mr. Gates ended his full-time presence at Microsoft last July and since then has thrown himself into work at his foundation. He is now trying to do to malaria, AIDS, polio and lethal childhood diarrhea what he did to Netscape, and he just may succeed. He does seem to be going through withdrawal, for software engineering was his passion. “I miss that,” he said, but added that he is becoming equally maniacal (that’s his word) about poverty and education. Mr. Gates and his wife, Melinda, are already having an effect on the developing world that is simply transformative. Just one of their investments, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, has saved more than three million lives since 2000. That’s a down payment.

pULpIT: chaire (religion) pARIsh: paroisse ALTAR: autel DEARTh: pénurie wELL: puits

Dans l’article “Nasty Sport of Dogfighting is Spreading,” p. 6: MURkY: obscure, trouble pETTY CRIMInAL: petit malfaiteur InDICTMEnT: mise en accusation To foRfEIT: perdre (ses droits) pLYwooD: contreplaqué wIThERs: garrot To bLUDgEon: matraquer

Send comments to [email protected].

prices to $300 oil, but a global economic crash was not one of them. Any suggestion in early 2008 that $10 trillion in stock market and housing wealth would be lost in the United States alone would have been ridiculed. One thing this crisis has proved is that the herd instinct is alive and well and global. It led Bear Stearns and Citigroup and Lehman Brothers and A.I.G. to believe that risk was a thing of the past, that housing markets could only go up and that unregulated mortgagebacked securities would forever yield unprecedented returns. It led Spanish banks to Bernard Madoff and British pensioners to Icelandic banks. It led the world off a cliff with the great majority of pontificators agonizing not over millions of lost jobs today but how to feed and fuel an overheated globe in 2035. Here’s a paradox: with more news available globally than ever before, it seems to have become more difficult for people to think independently. The information glut appears to stunt, rather than stir, contrarian thinking. We are at the end of something, and not just the Spanish construction boom or spiraling London property prices. We are at the end of the phase of globalization that allowed the self-styled masters of the universe, recently gathered in Davos, to devise forms of financial engineering based on leverage and opacity that brought them great wealth while gaps between rich and poor widened the world over. Some people talk of the short 20th century, the period from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the end of the cold war in 1989. A case can be made that, in the winter of our discontent, the 21st century is beginning in 2009 with an attempt to reinvent the global economic system in ways that spread its benefits wider.

nIChoLAs D. kRIsTof

Bill Gates’s Next Big Thing In 1960, almost 20 million children died annually before age 5, Mr. Gates notes. There are more children today, yet the death toll has been halved to under 10 million annually. Now his goal is to see it halved again, saving an additional five million children’s lives annually. “We’re on the verge of some big advances,” Mr. Gates said. In particular, a promising malaria vaccine will enter its final phase of human trials this year, with others behind it. Mr. Gates said he is “absolutely confident” that a successful malaria vaccine will be achieved, probably within a half dozen years, and an AIDS vaccine 10 or more years from now. Look, I’m a cynical journalist, and I don’t want to sound too infatuated. I think the Gates Foundation has missed the chance to leverage the revolution in social entrepreneurship, hasn’t been as effective in advocacy as it has been in research, and has missed an opportunity to ignite a broad social movement behind its issues. But if Mr. Gates manages to accomplish as much in the world of vaccines, health and food production as he thinks

: AIDE A LA LECTURE Pour aider à la lecture de l’anglais et familiariser nos lecteurs avec certaines expressions américaines, Le Monde publie ci-dessous la traduction de quelques mots et idiomes contenus dans les articles de ce supplément. Par Dominique Chevallier, agrégée d’anglais. LExIqUE Dans l’article “Foreign Voices Ring From American Pulpits,” p. 6:

Barcelona, Spain It’s been a harsh winter in Europe. Storm winds recently ripped the roof off a sports center here and killed four young hockey players. Gales and blizzards elsewhere in Spain and France have taken dozens of lives. The Spanish economic climate is equally bitter. Growth long spurred by a housing boom has evaporated; output will likely shrink 2 percent this year. In the tourism sector alone, accounting for a tenth of the national economy, 100,000 jobs could be lost. The story in Britain, where the winter has been colder than in many years, is even direr. Sterling has plunged with no end in sight. Major banks are fighting for survival. The housing market is in headlong retreat. Comparisons to bankrupt Iceland are rife. A headline in the Financial Times read: “Property bargain hunters head for London.” What? The world has been turned on its head. I know a freezing winter does not mean that global warming has abated. I know the dip in Spanish tourism does not signal the end of German thirst for the Catalonian sun. I know London real-estate bargains will not last forever. It’s also true that the current collapse in commodity prices does not mean that demand in the new economies of China and India will not drive them up again one day. That nobody talks about the food crisis anymore does not mean there are no longer millions more people hoping for two meals a day. And, of course, cheap oil is temporary. Still, this wintry world turned on its head has made us all look stupid. A year ago plenty of trends were being predicted and debated, from rapid global warming to spiraling food

he can, then the consequences will be staggering. In that case, the first few paragraphs of Mr. Gates’s obituary will be all about overcoming diseases and poverty, barely mentioning his earlier career in the software industry. Mr. Gates said he got the idea for an annual letter from Warren Buffett, who writes such a letter ruminating about investments and the business world. (You can sign up to get Mr. Gates’s letter, or read it at www.gatesfoundation.org.) In the letter, Mr. Gates goes out of his way to acknowledge setbacks. For example, the Gates Foundation made a major push for smaller high schools in the United States, often helping to pay for the creation of small schools within larger buildings. “Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way,” he acknowledges. Small schools succeeded when the principal was able to change teachers, curriculum and culture, but smaller size by itself proved disappointing. “In most cases,” he says, “we fell short.” Mr. Gates comes across as a strong education reformer, focusing on sup-

Cesspit: cloaque Street urchin : gamin des rues

ExpREssIons Dans l’article “Nasty Sport of Dogfighting is Spreading,” p. 6:

Dans l’article “In Ohio, an Unsung Birthplace of Pop Music,” p. 6: CRADLE: berceau hILLbILLY: plouc

To cut one’s teeth on: se faire les dents sur pAwnshop: boutique de prêt sur gages, montde-piété shELLAC: laque fACILITY: installation, bâtiment utile

fELonY, MIsDEMEAnoR, offEnsE: “offense”

signifie une infraction à la loi qui peut être une “misdemeanor,” une infraction mineure – boire de l’alcool dans la rue à New York – ou une “capital offense” c’est-à-dire un “crime,” crime au sens large qui inclut les “felonies” (une attaque à main armée par exemple) et les “homicides.”

RÉfÉREnCEs

Dans l’article “Sherlock Holmes, the Sexy Action Hero,” p. 8:

Dans l’article “Studying Avalanches From the Inside Out”, p. 7:

foIL: faire-valoir bRITTLE: fragile AskEw: de travers To bE bUffETED: se faire balloter sTRAIT-LACED: prude, collet monté bRAwLER: bringueur

bozEMAn, MonTAnA: Bozeman est une petite ville du Sud Ouest du Montana (elle compte environ 30 000 âmes), dans les Rocheuses, qui symbolise, à elle toute seule, l’esprit de l’Ouest américain. Les tribus autochtones des Blackfeet, Nez Percés, Shoshone, Sioux – si importants

porting charter schools and improving teacher quality. He suggested that when he has nailed down the evidence more firmly, he will wade into the education debates. “It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one,” Mr. Gates writes in his letter. “Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.” Mr. Gates told me he was optimistic that President Obama would make progress on these issues, notwithstanding the economic crisis, and he noted that the downturn had only added to the need for foreign assistance and education spending. “The poorer you are, the worse the impact is,” he said. I asked Mr. Gates what advice he had for ordinary readers who might want to engage in micro-philanthropy. “The key thing is to pick a cause, whether its crops or diseases or great high schools,” he said. “Pick one and get some more in-depth knowledge.” If possible, travel to see the problems firsthand, then pick an organization to support with donations or volunteer time. So try it. The only difference between you and Mr. Gates is scale.

dans l’histoire de la Conquête de l’Ouest – s’y sont installées bien avant les Blancs. L’expédition Lewis et Clark – première exploration de l’Ouest par des Blancs, sur ordre du président Jefferson – traverse le continent, de St Louis du Missouri jusqu’au Pacifique, en remontant le Missouri, en 1803. Après avoir pris ses quartiers d’hiver au bord du Pacifique, l’expédition s’en retourne vers l’est, se sépare à un moment – Lewis et quelques hommes partant vers le Sud, tandis que Clark prend une piste au Nord…et arrive sur le site de Bozeman, avant de découvrir la rivière Yellowstone puis de rejoindre Lewis. Quelques trente ans plus tard naît la Piste de l’Oregon. L’un de ses voyageurs, John Bozeman, s’en détourne, part au Nord – pour y chercher les mines d’or – et crée la piste Bozeman. Celle-ci est fermée à cause des guerres Indiennes en 1868, mais la petite bourgade demeure, se développe avec l’arrivée du train en 1883 et accueille aujourd’hui un campus de l’université du Montana, et de nombreux touristes venus surtout faire du ski. Cet esprit de l’Ouest n’a pas échappé à Robert Redford, qui a tourné dans les environs Et au milieu coule une rivière ainsi que L’Homme qui murmurait à l’oreille des chevaux.

ThE nEw YoRk TIMEs Is pUbLIshED wEEkLY In ThE foLLowIng nEwspApERs: CLARín, ARgEnTInA ● DER sTAnDARD, AUsTRIA ● foLhA, bRAzIL ● LA sEgUnDA, ChILE ● EL EspECTADoR, CoLoMbIA ● LIsTIn DIARIo, DoMInICAn REpUbLIC ● LE MonDE, fRAnCE ● 24 sAATI, gEoRgIA ● sÜDDEUTsChE zEITUng, gERMAnY ● pREnsA LIbRE, gUATEMALA ● ThE AsIAn AgE, InDIA ● LA REpUbbLICA, ITALY ● AsAhI shIMbUn, jApAn ● sUnDAY nATIon, kEnYA ● kohA DIToRE, kosoVo ● REfoRMA gRoUp, MExICo ● VIjEsTI, MonTEnEgRo ● LA pREnsA, pAnAMA ● ExpREso, pERU ● MAnILA bULLETIn, phILIppInEs ● RoMAnIA LIbERA, RoMAnIA ● EL pAís, spAIn ● UnITED DAILY nEws, TAIwAn ● sUnDAY MonIToR, UgAnDA ● ThE obsERVER, UnITED kIngDoM ● ThE koREA TIMEs, UnITED sTATEs ● EL nACIonAL, VEnEzUELA

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SUNDAY-MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1-2, 2009

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wOrld Trends news analysis

The Graveyard Of Empires By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — Ever since the Bush administration diverted its attention — and resources — to the war in Iraq from the war in Afghanistan, military planners and foreign policy experts have bemoaned the dearth of troops to keep that country from sliding back into Taliban control. And in that time, the insurgency blossomed, as Taliban miliOBaMa’s wasHinGTOn

A Quagmire in Afghanistan? tants took advantage of huge swaths of territory, particularly in the south, that NATO troops weren’t able to fill. Enter President Obama. During the campaign he promised to send two additional brigades — 7,000 troops — to Afghanistan. During the transition, military planners started talking about adding as many as 30,000 troops. And within days of taking office, Mr. Obama announced the appointment of Richard Holbrooke, architect of the Balkan peace accords, to execute a new Afghanistan policy. But even as Mr. Obama’s military planners prepare for the first wave of the new Afghanistan “surge,” there is growing debate, including among those who agree with the plan to send more troops, about whether — or how — the troops can accomplish their mission, and just what the mission is. Afghanistan has, after all, stymied would-be conquerors since Alexander the Great. It’s always the same story; the invaders — British, Soviets — control the cities, but not the countryside. And eventually, the invaders don’t even

control the cities, and are driven out. Think Iraq was hard? Afghanistan, former Secretary of State Colin Powell argues, will be “much, much harder.” “Iraq had a middle class,” Mr. Powell said recently. “It was a fairly advanced country before Saddam Hussein drove it in the ground.” Afghanistan, on the other hand, “is still basically a tribal society, a lot of corruption; drugs are going to destroy that country if something isn’t done about it.” For Mr. Obama, Afghanistan is the signal foreign policy crisis that he must address quickly. Some 34,000 American troops are already fighting an insurgency that grows stronger by the month, making this a dynamically deteriorating situation in a region fraught with consequence for American security aims. Coupled with nuclear-armed Pakistan, with which it shares a border zone that has become a haven for Al Qaeda, Afghanistan could quickly come to define the Obama presidency. Mr. Obama’s extra troops will largely be battling a Taliban insurgency fed by an opium trade estimated at $300 million a year. And that insurgency is dispersed among a largely rural population living in villages scattered across about 200,000 square kilometers of southern Afghanistan. One question for Mr. Obama is whether 30,000 more troops are enough. “I think that this is more of a psychological surge than a practical surge,” said Karin von Hippel, an Afghanistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She said she favored the troop increase, but only as a precursor to getting the Europeans to contribute more, and to changing America’s policy

NICOLAS ASFOURI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

The administration of Barack Obama has promised to send more troops to Afghanistan, where drug money from the opium trade fuels the Taliban insurgency. Government corruption compounds the instability.

so it focuses more on the countryside, as opposed to the capital. “In Afghanistan, the number of troops, if you combine NATO, American and Afghan troops, is 200,000 forces versus 600,000 in Iraq,” Ms. von Hippel said. “Those numbers are so low that an extra 30,000 isn’t going to get you to where you need to be. It’s more of a stopgap measure.” Some foreign policy experts argue that Mr. Obama’s decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan is simply an extension of Bush administration policy in the region, with the difference being that Mr. Obama could be putting more American lives at risk to pursue a failed policy. While more American troops can help to stabilize southern Afghanistan, that argument goes, they cannot turn the situation around in the country un-

less there are major changes in overall policy. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, the darling of the Bush administration, has begun to lose his luster; American and European officials now express private frustration over his refusal to arrest drug lords who have been running the opium trade. Mr. Karzai has also been widely criticized for not cracking down enough on corruption. And diplomats say his distaste for venturing far beyond his fortified presidential palace in Kabul reinforces the divide between Afghanistan’s central government and its largely rural population, giving the Taliban freedom to operate in the countryside. Before sending in more troops, argues Andrew Bacevich, an international relations professor at Boston University, Mr. Obama should figure out if he is going to change an underlying American policy

that has shrunk from putting pressure on Mr. Karzai. “It seems there’s a rush to send in more reinforcements absent the careful analysis that’s most needed here,” said Mr. Bacevich, author of “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.” “There’s clearly a consensus that things are heading in the wrong direction,” Mr. Bacevich said. “What’s not clear to me is why sending 30,000 more troops is the essential step to changing that. My understanding of the larger objective of the allied enterprise in Afghanistan is to bring into existence something that looks like a modern cohesive Afghan state. Well, it could be that that’s an unrealistic objective. It could be that sending 30,000 more troops is throwing money and lives down a rat hole.”

Reporting on Gaza, Where Every Side Has Its Own Truth GAZA — Faisal Husseini, a Palestinian leader who died at the start of this decade, used to tell a story about his first visit to Israel. The 1967 war had just ended, borders were suddenly opened and he took a drive to Tel Aviv, where at some point he found himself detained by an Israeli policeman. Questions essay and answers ensued. At one point the policeman said to him, “As a proud Zionist, I must tell you . . .’’ At which Mr. Husseini burst out laughing. What’s so funny? the policeman asked. “I have never in my life,” Mr. Husseini replied, “heard anyone refer to Zionism with anything but contempt. I had no idea you could be a proud Zionist.” I have written about the ArabIsraeli conflict on and off for more than a quarter-century and have recently spent four weeks covering Israel’s war in Gaza. For me, Mr. Husseini’s story sums up how the two sides speak in two

ETHAN BRONNER

distinct tongues, how the very words they use mean opposite things to each other, and how the war of language can confound a reporter’s attempts to narrate — or a new president’s attempts to mediate — this conflict in a way both sides can accept as fair. Among Israel’s Jews, there is almost no higher value than Zionism. But go anywhere else in the Middle East and Zionism stands for theft, oppression, racist exclusionism. No place, date or event in this conflicted land is spoken of in a common language. After Israel’s three-week air, sea and land assault in Gaza, aimed at halting Hamas rocket fire, it is worth pausing to note how difficult it has been to narrate this war in a fashion others view as neutral. George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader who is Mr. Obama’s new special envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, could find something similar. Opponents of Israel feel the Gaza fighting has demonstrated (again) that Israel is a kind of Sparta that dehuman-

izes the Palestinians. Those for whom Israel is the victim and never the aggressor likewise saw in this war a reaffirmation of their beliefs — that Hamas, an Islamist terror group, hides its fighters behind women and children. Since the war started on December 27, I have received hundreds of messages about my coverage. They are generally not offering congratulations on a job well done. “Thanks to you and other scum like yourself,” said one, “Israel can now kill hundreds and you can report the whole thing like it was some random train wreck.” “Bronner,” said another, “you’re back to your usual drivel about only the poor filthy Arabs — who voted for the Hamas people who got them into this predicament — with incessant indiscriminate rocket fire on innocent Israelis.” Because Israel barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza until the war ended, The New York Times relied on my Palestinian colleague here, Taghreed el-Khodary, for on-the-

ground coverage of the fighting. Her first stop was usually Shifa Hospital to get a sense of civilian casualties. Early in the war, at the hospital, she witnessed the murder of an alleged Israeli collaborator by Hamas gunmen. One of the gunmen told Taghreed that she should never mention what she saw to anyone. She told him there was not a chance she would stay silent. A couple of Arab bloggers went after Taghreed with the worst insult they could come up with — Zionist. One reader said in an e-mail message, Taghreed “is fully complicit in the atrocities that Israel commits against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.” At the same time, Israeli officials and their backers declared that keeping reporters out of Gaza was the right move because no independent journalism could possibly occur in an area run by Hamas. Have any of these people ever read Taghreed’s work? Or any of our work out of here?

Pakistani Taliban punished a man accused of impersonating one of them to extort money in Matta, in the volatile Swat Valley.

In Pakistan, Radio Amplifies The Terror of the Taliban By RICHARD A. OPPEL JR. and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Every night around 8 o’clock, the terrified residents of Swat, a lush and picturesque valley 160 kilometers from three of Pakistan’s most important cities, crowd around their radios. They know that failure to listen and learn might lead to a lashing — or a beheading. Using a portable radio transmitter, a local Taliban leader, Shah Doran, on most nights outlines newly proscribed “un-Islamic” activities in Swat, like selling DVDs, watching cable television, singing and dancing, criticizing the Taliban, shaving beards and allowing girls to attend school. He also reveals names of people the Taliban have recently killed for violating their decrees — and those they plan to kill. “They control everything through the radio,” said one Swat resident, who deIsmail Khan contributed reporting.

clined to give his name for fear the Taliban might kill him. “Everyone waits for the broadcast.” International attention remains fixed on the Taliban’s hold on Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas, from where they launch attacks on American forces in Afghanistan. But for Pakistan, the loss of the Swat Valley could prove just as devastating. Unlike the fringe tribal areas, Swat, a territory with 1.3 million residents, is part of Pakistan proper, within reach of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the capital. After more than a year of fighting, virtually all of it is now under Taliban control, residents and government officials from the region say. The Taliban have taken a sizable bite out of the nation. And they are enforcing a strict interpretation of Islam with cruelty, bringing public beheadings, assassinations, social and cultural repression and persecution of women to what was once an independent, relatively secular

DAVID POLONSKY

Many have but it doesn’t matter because their belief in their own view is so overpowering that anything that contradicts it becomes a minor detail. But one otherwise critical reader did say one thing I agree with: “You should not be a reporter if you are not telling the whole story, not just the parts that sell.” I would offer a mediator the same advice.

EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

region. Last year, 70 police officers were beheaded, shot or otherwise slain in Swat, and 150 wounded, said Malik Naveed Khan, the police inspector general for the North-West Frontier Province. Many officers have put advertisements in newspapers renouncing their jobs so the Taliban will not kill them. In the view of analysts, the growing nightmare in Swat is a capsule of the

country’s problems: an ineffectual and unresponsive civilian government, coupled with military and security forces that, in the view of furious residents, have allowed the militants to spread terror deep into Pakistan. The crisis has become a critical test for the government of the civilian president, Asif Ali Zardari, and for a security apparatus whose loyalties, many Pakistanis say, remain in question. Without

more forceful and concerted action by the government, some warn, the Taliban threat in Pakistan is bound to spread. Accusations that the military lacks the will to fight in Swat are “very unfair and unjustified,” said Major General Athar Abbas, the chief military spokesman, who said 180 army soldiers and officers had been killed in Swat in the past 14 months. Recently, Shah Doran broadcast word that the Taliban intended to kill a police officer who he said had killed three people. “We have sent people, and tomorrow you will have good news,” he said, according to a resident of Matta, a Taliban stronghold. The next day the decapitated body of the policeman was found nearby. “The local population is totally fed up, and if they had the chance they would lynch each and every Talib,” said Mr. Naveed Khan. “But the Taliban are so cruel and violent, no one will oppose them. If this is not stopped, it will spill into other areas of Pakistan.”

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le monde

SUNDAY-MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1-2, 2009 world trends

Spain's housing bubble was fueled by a strong euro. After the bubble burst, its debt was downgraded.

Once a Boon, the Euro Is Now a Burden for Some By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

ATHENS — “The Italians, the Spaniards, the Greeks, we all have been living in happy land, spending what we did not have,” said George Economou, a Greek shipping magnate, contemplating his country’s economic troubles and others’ from his spacious boardroom. “It was a fantasy world.” For some of the countries on the periphery of the 16-member euro currency zone — Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain — this debt-fired dream of endless consumption has turned into the rudest of nightmares, raising the risk that a euro country may be forced to declare bankruptcy or abandon the currency. The prospect is a humbling one. The adoption of the euro just a decade ago was meant to pull Europe together economically and politically. For the Continent, the currency signaled the potential to one day rival the United States. For its poorer countries, winning admission to the euro zone was a point of pride, showing that they had tamed their budget deficits and set their financial houses in order. Now, in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the euro’s birth, a new view is emerging — especially as the

creditworthiness of Greece, Spain and Portugal, one after the other, has been downgraded. The view is that the balm of euro membership allowed these countries to gloss over serious economic problems that have now roared to the fore. “Membership is not a panacea for a country’s social and economic problems,” said Simon Tilford, the chief economist at the Center for European Reform in London. “In fact, there has been a huge divergence in competitiveness that shows up in massive trade imbalances,” he said, comparing Greece with the wealthier euro countries. “While Greece may have been insulated from the risk of a currency crisis, there is also the risk of a credit crisis and a collapse of confidence in its solvency.” While sharing a currency with some of the mightiest economies in the world helped Europe’s poorer nations share in the wealth, a boon during boom times, in hard times the rules of membership are keeping them from doing what countries normally do to survive economic storms, including enormous spending. So Germany, France and the Scandinavian countries are mounting billiondollar stimulus plans and trying to protect their banks. But the peripheral

MIGUEL RIOPA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

economies are on their own. These countries find themselves caught in an awful policy bind: credit is available, but only at punitive rates; and further borrowing not only breaks with European Commission dictates but raises broader questions about their solvency. Bond and currency speculators have demonstrated that they intend to punish countries with dubious economic prospects. Yields are skyrocketing on the debt of peripheral European economies with growing deficits. The British pound has plummeted. The widening gap between the interest rate that Greece and larger economies like Germany have to pay to borrow reveals the first cracks in what so far has been a fairly strong Europe.

Standard & Poor’s has also downgraded the debt of Spain because of the toll taken by its housing crisis. In Ireland, the economy continues to reel from a housing collapse and a defunct banking sector with liabilities that surpass the country’s gross domestic product. But Greece’s problems are probably the worst. The country has been an easy target for the vigilantes of the European bond market, and recently it has been shaken by a wave of violent protests. The omnipotent hand of the Greek state produced a public debt of more than 90 percent of Greece’s total economic output. The relentlessly rising demand of its consumers has created a current-account deficit of 14 percent of its gross domestic product — estimated to be the highest in Europe.

Yannis Stournaras, an economist who was a top economic adviser to the previous government of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, scoffed at the prospect of a bankruptcy like those once common in Latin America. Nor did he accept the idea that Greece might leave the euro zone and try to devalue its way back to recovery. “Bankruptcy? No, no, no,” he said. “Since the beginning of the 20th century, we have never had problems with our arrears.” But others are not prepared to rule out such an event, though they concede it is highly unlikely. One of the few politicians in Greece who has not shied from addressing these issues is Stefanos Manos, a former economic minister who in the early 1990s ushered in a drastic, and ultimately successful, privatization program. He has founded a new party and is considering a return to Parliament. “We need money to finance our deficits and I see difficulty in us attracting such funds from abroad,” he said. “I am not sure that this won’t spiral out of control, and that makes me saddened and frustrated.” As for the rest of Europe, particularly its weaker links, he also has doubts. “I don’t think Europe is up to it,” he said. “It expanded too rapidly without fixing its institutions.”

news analysis

Nationalization May Be a Reality From Page 1

WU HONG/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

China is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on projects like a new railway line in Shandong Province.

Facing a Slowdown, China Invests in the Future By KEITH BRADSHER

GUANGZHOU, China — In an effort to hold back the domestic effects of the global downturn, China is starting to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on new highways, railroads and other infrastructure projects. The stimulus plan, one of the world’s largest, promises to carry the modernity of China’s coasts deep into the hinterlands, priming China for a new level of global competition. A $17.6 billion passenger rail line across the deserts of northwest China, a $22 billion web of freight rail lines in Shanxi Province in north-central China and a $24 billion high-speed passenger rail line from Beijing to Guangzhou here in southeastern China are among the biggest projects. But extra spending is being planned in practically every town, city and county across the country. And, unlike the United States, China has the cash to pay for it, with few debts and a tiny deficit. China will spend $88 billion constructing intercity rail lines, the highest priority in the plan. It spent $44 billion last year and just $12 billion as recently as 2004, said John Scales, the transport coordinator for China at the World Bank. “I don’t think anything compares except maybe the growth of the U.S. rail network at the start of the 20th century,” Mr. Scales said. Fear, not competition, is motivating the building boom. Chinese leaders are increasingly worried about the slowdown of their economy and the growing risk of protests by disgruntled workers. Gross domestic product grew just 6.8 percent between the fourth quarter of 2008 and a year earlier. Growth for all of 2008 was 9 percent, down from 13 percent in 2007, and every indication is that

expansion has continued to slow. Policy makers “are already in a mode of panic,” said Qu Hongbin, the chief China economist at HSBC. “They’re going to spend like there’s no tomorrow.” When inflation started to become a problem in China in the spring of 2004, Beijing began a four-year effort to prevent the economy from overheating. It barred local and provincial governments from proceeding with plans for many roads, airports, subway systems and other infrastructure. Now Beijing is urging local and provincial governments to go ahead with their projects. The combined national, provincial and local spending for economic stimu-

Beijing hopes to limit unemployment and social unrest. lus promises to change the face of China, giving the country a world-class infrastructure for moving goods and people quickly, cheaply and reliably across great distances. “The increased expenditure on infrastructure will certainly contribute to China’s productivity growth and improve its long-term competitiveness, allowing it to pull away from its Asian neighbors who are much more constrained — by higher levels of budget deficits and public debt — in their ability to unleash a fiscal stimulus,” said Eswar Prasad, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonparti-

san research group. Feng Fei, the director general of industrial economics at the policy research unit of China’s cabinet, the State Council, said steep increases in railroad investments would create lasting benefits. The goal is to slow China’s dependence on personal cars and imported oil, he said. China has already built as many kilometers of high-speed passenger rail lines in the last four years as Europe has in two decades. A new bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin, opened last summer, travels at up to 350 kilometers an hour. Most of the rest of China’s national stimulus program will be spent on airports, highways and environmental projects, particularly water treatment plants, Mr. Feng said. China’s actual incremental spending on economic stimulus is hard to calculate. The central government announced two months ago that it planned a $586 billion stimulus program spread over two years. If all of that money were new spending, it would equal 14 percent of China’s economic output last year. But the plan included some projects that were already slated for construction. And the government has set aside less than a third of the money. All told, China’s stimulus program is likely to add 1 to 3 percent to its economic growth this year, said Dong Tao, a China economist at Credit Suisse. Of course, there is no guarantee the large chunk of the spending earmarked for poor inland and rural areas will prove economically viable. But with China’s once powerful export machine suddenly stalled and its housing bubble deflating, virtually no one questions the urgent need for spending.

nationalization, of the largest banks was a good idea. “Well, whatever you want to call it,” said Ms. Pelosi, a California Democrat. “If we are strengthening them, then the American people should get some of the upside of that strengthening. Some people call that nationalization. “I’m not talking about total ownership,” she quickly cautioned — stopping herself by posing a question: “Would we have ever thought we would see the day when we’d be using that terminology? ‘Nationalization of the banks?’ ” So far, President Obama’s top aides have steered clear of the word entirely, and they are still actively discussing other alternatives, including creating a “bad bank” that would nationalize loans that are in default by taking them off the hands of financial institutions without actually taking ownership of the banks. Others talk of de facto nationalization, in which the government owns a sizable chunk of the banks but not a majority, with all that connotes. That has already happened; taxpayers are now the biggest shareholders in Bank of America, with about 6 percent of the stock, and in Citigroup, with 7.8 percent. But the government’s influence is far larger than those numbers suggest, because it has guaranteed to absorb the losses of some of the two banks’ most toxic assets, a figure that could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Many believe this form of hybrid ownership — part government, part private — will not prove workable. “The case for full nationalization is far stronger now than it was a few months ago,” said Adam S. Posen, the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan research institution. “If you don’t own the majority, you don’t get to fire the management, to wipe out the shareholders, to declare that you are just going to take the losses and start over. It’s the mistake the Japanese made in the ’90s.” Members of the Obama administration’s economic team — among them Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Lawrence H. Summers, the president’s top economic adviser — made the case during the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s that governments make lousy bank managers. The risks of nationalization they warned about then apply equally to the United States now. The first is that nationalization can prove contagious. Eric Dash contributed reporting from New York.

If the Obama administration took over Bank of America and Citigroup, two of the largest banks in the United States, private investors could decide to flee from the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, or other major banks, fearing they could be next. Moreover, Mr. Obama’s advisers say they are acutely aware that if the government is perceived as running the banks, the administration would come under enormous political pressure to halt foreclosures or lend money to ailing projects in cities or states with powerful constituencies. But nationalization might be the only way to pull America’s largest financial institutions out of the downward spiral. Right now, many banks are reluctant to write off their bad debts, and absorb huge losses, unless they can first raise enough capital to cushion the blow. But they cannot attract that capital without first purging their balance sheets of the toxic assets. Nationalization could pull the banks out of a dive, at least temporarily. But

Options include a ‘bad bank’ to take over the worst loans. some Republicans would charge that Mr. Obama was steering America toward socialism. Nationalization, said Charles Geisst, a financial historian at Manhattan College in New York, “is just not a term in the American vocabulary.” “We think of it,” he continued, “as something foreigners do to us, not something we do.” Another option is for the government to buy the banks’ most toxic assets either through a giant fund or, more likely, a federally supported bad bank designed to buy up troubled investments. But in that case, taxpayers would have all of the banks’ worst assets. Cleaning up the banks’ bad assets, without extracting a heavy price for the bank managers, shareholders and their lenders, is exactly what Mr. Summers and Mr. Geithner warned against during the Asian financial crisis. “We told the Asians that they had to be willing to let banks and companies fail,” said Jeffrey Garten, a professor at the Yale School of Management and a top official in the Clinton administration. “We warned that there was great moral hazard if governments just bailed them out.” “And now,” he said, “we are doing the polar opposite of our advice.”

le monde

SUNDAY-MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1-2, 2009

5

business of green

Seeking Alternatives, Airlines Turn To New Fuels By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — Burned by the cost of jet fuel, the aviation industry is trying everything from algae to camelina and jatropha as alternatives, but specialists say that some of the new fuels, which include coal, might simply trade one set of problems for another. Recently, Continental Airlines tested a fuel made from algae and jatropha, a tropical shrub with an oil-bearing seed, in a Boeing 737 jetliner, in a two-hour flight beginning and ending in Houston. The flight was the first airline trial of algae, and, perhaps more important, the first use of biofuels in a twin-engine jet. Air New Zealand flew a four-engine Boeing 747 recently with one engine on a 50 percent biofuel mix, and Japan Airlines plans to do the same as part of a series of tests. Although jet fuel prices have dropped with crude oil, industry executives say they are determined to become less dependent on a single source of fuel in case prices rise again. “It’s hard to plan a business, and buy expensive pieces of equipment that last for 20 or 30 years, when you have total uncertainty about the cost of your biggest expense,’’ said John P. Heimlich, chief economist of the Air Transport Association, the trade group of the major airlines. At Pratt & Whitney, the engine manufacturer, Alan H. Epstein, vice president for technology and environment, said, “It’s the first time in the history of jet aviation that the world is seriously considering going to a totally new fuel.’’ Continental’s algae comes from a Hawaiian company called Cyanotech, which raises it as a nutritional supplement. One oil substitute is already used in large volumes. Sasol, the South African coal company, for years produced semisynthetic jet fuel, half from petroleum and half from coal, and pumped it into airliners leaving Johannesburg. In April 2008, the British Ministry of Defense approved the use of 100 percent synfuel, clearing the way for many airlines to use it. The fuel has some advantages over traditional jet fuel, including extremely low sulfur levels, but when production is considered, jet fuel from coal produces substantially more carbon dioxide than jet fuel from oil. Using a process similar to Sasol’s, a refinery in Qatar, in the Persian Gulf, is making a jet fuel substitute from natural gas. At the fuel maker UOP, Jennifer S. Holmgren, director of renewable energy and chemicals, said fuel made from jatropha had only about half as much carbon dioxide effect as fuel from petroleum. This is significant because the European Union is trying to bring the airlines into a carbon dioxide reduction system. Environmental advocates strongly favor low-carbon fuels, but only if they do not compete with food production.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DARYL VISSCHER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Gulf States Look for an Edge in Clean Energy By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — With one of the highest per capita carbon footprints in the world, these oil-rich emirates would seem an unlikely place for a green revolution. Still, the region’s leaders know energy and money, having built their wealth on oil. They understand that oil is a finite resource, vulnerable to competition from new energy sources. So even as President Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America’s route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy. They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home. “Abu Dhabi is an oil-exporting country, and we want to become an energyexporting country, and to do that we need to excel at the newer forms of energy,” said Khaled Awad, a director of Masdar, a futuristic zero-carbon city and a research park that has an affiliation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is rising from the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi. This new investment aims to maintain the gulf’s dominant position as a global energy supplier, gaining patents from the new technologies and promoting green manufacturing. But if the United States and the European Union have set energy independence from the gulf states as a goal of new renewable energy efforts, they may find they are arriving late at the party. “The leadership in these break-

Masdar, a model city being built in Abu Dhabi that is designed to generate no carbon emissions, uses recycled rebar, above, and different types of solar panels.

When the oil is gone, the future may turn from black to green. through technologies is a title the U.S. can lose easily,” said Peter BarkerHomek, chief executive of Taqa, Abu Dhabi’s national energy company. “Here we have low taxes, a young population, accessibility to the world, abundant natural resources and willingness to invest in the seed capital.” The vision of a renewable future in the gulf is rooted not so much in a green sentiment as in analysis of the region’s economic future and the lifestyles of its citizens. “You see what the gulf states have achieved in terms of modern infrastructure and beautiful architecture, but this has come at a very high environmental price,” said Mr. Awad of Masdar, standing in a field of 40 types of solar panels that the project’s engineers are testing, and using to power offices. “We know we can’t continue with this

carbon footprint,” he said. “We have to change. This is why Abu Dhabi must develop new models — for the planet, of course, but also so as not to jeopardize Abu Dhabi.” The crown prince of Abu Dhabi announced last January that he would invest $15 billion in renewable energy. That is the same amount that President Obama has proposed investing — in the entire United States — “to catalyze private sector efforts to build a clean energy future.” Masdar, the model city that will generate no carbon emissions, is tied to the crown prince’s ambitions. Designed by Norman Foster, the British architect, it will include a satellite campus of the M.I.T., as well as a research park with laboratories affiliated with Imperial College London. In Saudi Arabia, the new stateowned King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, gave a Stanford University scientist $25 million last year to start a research center on how to make the cost of solar power competitive with that of coal. Kaust, now in its first grant cycle, also gave $8 million to a University of California at Berkeley researcher developing green concrete.

Berthold Kaufmann and his family live in a highly insulated and efficient “passive house.”

Warm in the Winter, Without a Furnace By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District. But they are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace. In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer. “You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,” said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, eat a sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same

size, he said. Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and highefficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines. The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies. And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses. Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, be-

cause of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency. “The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.” There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia. The first passive home was built here

“The impact has been enormous,” said Michael McGehee, the associate professor at Stanford who received the $25 million Saudi grant. “It has greatly accelerated the development process.” Director of the largest solar cell research group in the world, Professor McGehee had tried and failed to get money from the United States government or American industries to commercialize cheaper solar cells. With the Saudi money he has hired 16 researchers and expects the new energy cells to dominate the market by 2015. “People are astonished to see how big this grant is and where it came from,” he said, noting that his past grants from the United States government were about $160,000. With no industrial history, the gulf states say they have the advantage of starting from scratch in developing green manufacturing; countries like the United States are forced to retool ailing industries, like car manufacturing. Also, although the gulf states have previously showed little interest in green energy like wind or solar, they have another advantage, Mr. Awad noted as he stood in the shimmering desert. “The sun shines 365 days a year,” he said.

ROLF OESER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world. The industry is thriving in Germany, however — schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.

Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011. The United States Army, long a presence in this part of Germany, is considering passive-house barracks. “Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up with requests,” Mr. Hasper said. Georg W. Zielke, who built his first passive house here, for his family, in 2003, said, “I grew up in a great old house that was always 10 degrees too cold, so I knew I wanted to make something different.” Most passive houses allow about 45 square meters per person, a comfortable though not expansive living space. Mr. Hasper said people who wanted much larger houses should look for another design. “Anyone who feels they need that much space to live,” he said, “well, that’s a different discussion.”

6

le monde

SUNDAY-MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1-2, 2009 americana

Foreign Voices Ring From American Pulpits By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY

Dogfight winners can earn $10,000. Betting is also heavy.

Nasty Sport Of Dogfighting Is Spreading By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

HOUSTON — Over 17 months, agents from the Texas state police penetrated a murky and dangerous subculture in East Texas, a world where petty criminals, drug dealers and a few people with ordinary jobs shared TeXaS a passion for watchHouston ing pit bulls tear each other apart in a fourmeter-square pit. Investigators found that dogfighting was on the rise in Texas and was much more widespread than they had expected. The ring broken up here had links to dogfighting organizations in other states and in Mexico, suggesting an underground network of people devoted to the activity, investigators said. People came to the contests from as far away as Tennessee, Michigan and the Czech Republic. Every weekend, fights were held in the area for purses that usually ran about $10,000. The agents documented at least 50 fights. Officials said the sport has begun to attract a growing following among young people from poorer neighborhoods in Texas, where gangs, drug dealing and hip-hop culture make up the backdrop. The investigation here led to the indictments of 55 people and the seizing of 187 pit bulls, breaking up what officials described as one of the largest dogfighting rings in America. “It’s like the Saturday night poker game for hardened criminals,” said one of the undercover agents, Sergeant C. T. Manning, describing the tense atmosphere at the fights. The Texas Legislature made dogfighting a felony in September 2007. Before that, the police in Texas had largely ignored the phenomenon because the offense was a misdemeanor. In the Texas case, law enforcement officials described a secretive society of men who set up prize fights between their pit bulls and bet large sums. The training techniques were brutal. One man who was indicted trained a dog by forcing it to run for up to an hour at a time with a chain around its neck that weighed as much as it did. Then he forced dogs to swim for long periods before running on a treadmill. Every day the dogs would be given vitamins and high-grade food to build muscle. Then, as the fight date approached, the trainers would starve the dog, give it very little water and pump it full of an anti-inflammatory drug. The ring members called the fights “dog shows.” The two dogs would be suspended from a scale with a thin cord tied around their neck and torso. If one of the dogs did not make weight, the owner would forfeit his half of the prize money, or the odds would be adjusted. After the weigh-in, the owners washed each others’ dogs in water, baking soda, warm milk and vinegar to make sure their coats were not poisoned. Then dogs were forced to face off in a plywood box 30 centimeters tall, usually with a beige carpet on the floor, to show the blood, officials said. The dogs would collide with a thud in the center of the ring, tearing at each other’s mouths, jaws, necks, withers and genitals, officials said. A referee usually would let the dogs fight until one backed off. The fight usually ended when a dog refused to cross a line in the center to confront the opponent, known as “standing the line.” Such dogs were usually drowned or bludgeoned to death the next day, officials said. “These dogs were kept in more than cruel conditions — they were subjected to torturous conditions,” said Dr. Timothy Harkness, of the Houston Humane Society. “Death was more pleasant than what they had to exist for.”

OWENSBORO, Kentucky — Sixteen of the Reverend Darrell Venters’s fellow priests are exhausting themselves here, each serving three parishes simultaneously. One priest admits he stood at an altar once and forgot exKenTUcKY Owensboro actly which church he was in. So Father Venters, lean and leathery with a cigarette in one hand and a cellphone in the other, spends most of his days recruiting priests from overseas to serve in the small towns, rolling hills and farmland that make up the Roman Catholic Diocese of Owensboro. “If we didn’t get international priests,” he said, “some of our guys would have had five parishes.” In the last six years, he has brought 12 priests from Africa, Asia and Latin America who are serving in this diocese covering the western third of Kentucky, where a vast majority of residents are white. His experiences offer a close look at the church’s drive to import foreign priests to compensate for a dearth of Americans. One of six diocesan priests now serving in the United States came from abroad, according to “International Priests in America,” a large study published in 2006. About 300 international priests arrive to work in the United States each year. Even in American seminaries, about a third of those studying for the priesthood are foreignborn. Father Venters has seen problems. Some foreign priests had to be sent home. One became romantically entangled with a female co-worker. One isolated himself in the rectory. Still another would not learn to drive. A priest from the Philippines left after two weeks because he could not stand the cold. But there have been victories as well, when Kentucky Catholics who once did not know Nigeria from Uganda became aware of the conditions in the countries their foreign priests came from — even raising $6,000 to install wells in the home village of a Nigerian priest serving in Owensboro. “Honestly,” Father Venters said, “other than a few, we have had really, really good results.” The foreign priests in Owensboro earn the same amount as their American counterparts: a base salary of $1,350 a month, plus $60 for each year since ordination. For the African priests, it is a windfall. Most of the priests serving in Owensboro support Father Venters’s recruiting drive, but some voice doubts. The Reverend Dennis Holly, with the Glenmary Home Missioners, an American order dedicated to serving regions that are not predominantly Catholic, like Western Kentucky, believes America is essentially taking more than its share of resources, spending money to attract priests from countries that have even

recruiting From abroad As the ratio of Roman Catholics per priest in the United States continues to rise, dioceses have been forced to recruit from other parts of the world. About one in six priests in the United States is from abroad, but many foreign priests are coming from parts of Africa and Latin America where there are even higher ratios of Catholics per priest. CATHOLICS PER PRIEST IN 2006

2,500

5,000

7,500

Data unavailable

U.S. 1,510

Mexico 6,276

India 786

Jamaica 1,243

Brazil 8,513

Nigeria 4,214

Philippines 8,478

Kenya 4,343 Uganda 6,845

Source: Statistical Yearbook of the Church

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Reverend Titus Ahabyona, from Uganda, near left, at a retreat in Kentucky, a state that has several priests from outside America.

JAMES ESTRIN/THE NEW YORK TIMES

greater shortages. “We experience the priest shortage, and rather than ask the question, ‘Why do we have a priest shortage?’ we just import some and act like we don’t have a priest shortage,” Father Holly said. “Until we face the issue of mandatory celibacy and the ordination of women, we can’t deal with the lack of response

to the invitation to priesthood.” But Father Venters is a pragmatist. He said those were good questions, “but, in the meantime, you have to respond to the needs of people.” Some of the foreign priests have confided apprehensions to Father Venters. They had studied American history in school and knew about racism, the civil

rights movement and the Ku Klux Klan. “I told them that, as much as I hated it, there is prejudice — but it’s nothing like when I was growing up,” Father Venters said. “We never had a parish that rose up in revolt” against having a foreign priest, he said. “The longer they’re in a place, the better it gets.” Father Venters checks in often on the recruits and said he was regularly heartened by what he found. He watched from the back row as Father Julian Ibemere from Nigeria celebrated a noon Mass for 32 parishioners, most of them elderly. Majestic in a green vestment, Father Ibemere delivered his homily strolling up and down the aisle. When it was time to distribute the eucharist, he bent down to give communion to a man he knew was too ill to stand. After the Mass, one member of the congregation, Virginia Ballard, gestured toward the Nigerian priest and confided in Father Venters, “I can’t understand what he said, but he’s a sweet young man.” Mrs. Ballard went on to praise Father Ibemere’s knowledge of the Bible, his capacity to remember the names of congregants, his willingness to teach the Americans about his home in Nigeria. “He is a holy man,” she concluded, “and we are honored to have him.”

In Ohio, an Unsung Birthplace of Pop Music By R J SMITH

GUSTO RECORDS

James Brown once recorded at King Records, a Cincinnati label that helped to create rock ’n’ roll.

CINCINNATI, Ohio — Enough about New Orleans, Memphis or Nashville, and other, better-celebrated cradles of American music. For Cincinnati, it’s star time. oHio On a cold afternoon in No- Cincinnati vember, a crowd gathered at the crumbling headquarters of King Records for the unveiling of a historical marker financed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. A landmark the city barely knew it had, King Records was once the home of James Brown, Nina Simone and Charlie Feathers. King started as a so-called hillbilly label in 1943; moved into “race music” — the onetime name for what became rhythm and blues — around 1945; and attempted in ways great and small to merge both audiences until it essentially shut down after the death of its owner, Syd Nathan. “While no single city has naming rights as the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll, the elements that made rock ’n’ roll — the blend of country, blues and the big beat — were being created at King Records,” said Larry Nager, former pop music editor for several Cincinnati newspapers and the author of the book “Memphis Beat.” “Whether

it was the big-voiced jump blues of Wynonie Harris or the hillbilly boogie of Moon Mullican, these were the records that the first generation of rock ’n’ rollers were cutting their teeth on.” King was also where Little Willie John recorded “Fever”; where “The Twist” was first laid down by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters; and where Wynonie Harris made “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” King also became the epicenter of a music scene, like Sun Records in Memphis and Chess Records in Chicago. For about a decade, musicians, fans and local politicians and businesspeople had been working on their own to elevate King’s profile. At the dedication, Bootsy Collins — who was a studio musician at King until James Brown took him on the road, to say nothing of his long membership in Parliament-Funkadelic — exuded an enthusiasm for what King meant. “The more I hung around King,” he said, “the more I started falling in love with music. From seeing how passionate and dedicated those musicians and artists were, I realized, ‘If I’m going to do this, I can’t be joking.’ ”

Born in Cincinnati in 1904, Mr. Nathan, the label’s owner, worked at a pawnshop as a young man and promoted wrestling matches. Then he opened a record shop and found he had, as he would put it, “shellac in my veins.” (In the early days, records were made of molded shellac.) One of Mr. Nathan’s innovations was to construct a facility not just for recording music but also for pressing records, designing album-cover art, and packing boxes and shipping them out. Mr. Nathan to some degree assembled a music industry that he could control, all under his roof. Another key to King’s success was its racial pragmatism. It’s probably a stretch to call Mr. Nathan a progressive, but he was colorblind in his pursuit of the widest possible audience. He didn’t just record both white and black acts; he had his ace R&B studio band playing on country records, and his country bands trying their hands at black pop hits, an almost unthinkable practice at the time. Brian Powers, a city librarian, has written about King and Mr. Nathan. “Guys like this just did so much for American music, and America doesn’t even know about them,” Mr. Powers said. “Heck, Cincinnati barely even knows.”

le monde

SUNDAY-MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1-2, 2009

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science & technology

Studying Avalanches From the Inside Out By JIM ROBBINS

BOZEMAN, Montana — Not long ago, Ed Adams, a civil engineering professor, studied avalanches by setting them off with dynamite and studying their movement as they buried him, his instruments and his colleagues in a tiny shack. Recently, though, Dr. Adams, a 58-year-old materials researcher, started a new and somewhat quieter phase of research, studying avalanches in the lab at Montana State University. A $2 million “cold lab” financed primarily by the National Science Foundation and the Murdock Charitable Trust and completed here in November allows Dr. Adams to replicate and control the uncontrollable field conditions of mountains in winter and understand in detail how snow behaves under widely varying conditions. The goal is to be better able to predict an avalanche. “Snow seems simple, but it’s extraordinarily complex,” Dr. Adams said. “If I set a box of snow in the refrigerator and come back in an hour, it’s changed significantly. It’s almost always in a constant state of motion, and studying it is a moving target.” That is where the lab comes in, allowing researchers to vary the sky, sun and temperature to see how snow responds. There have been 31 avalanche fatalities in North America this season through January 19, 16 in the United States and 15 in Canada. The record in the United States is 35 in the winter of 2001-02. “The number of fatalities we have had shows they’re a difficult phenomenon for us to understand,” said Karl Birkeland, an avalanche scientist at the Forest Service’s National Avalanche Center here. “There’s definitely a need to better understand them.” Montana State is well situated for the study of avalanches. There are four Class A avalanche zones — the most severe — at nearby skiing areas, and numerous backcountry locations for study. For years, Dr. Adams and his colleagues set up their instruments in a small shack on a steep slope at Bridger Bowl, about 24 kilometers from the university, and sent another researcher up the slope to ignite a one-kilogram bomb

that set off an avalanche. As the wall of snow rumbled around or over the shack, Dr. Adams, bundled up against the cold, watched his laptop record information on velocity, depth, flow and temperature. He estimates he has survived dozens of such self-inflicted avalanches. In the cold lab, however, where the temperature is 22 degrees below zero Celsius, the focus is on a one-squaremeter panel, brilliantly lighted by an artificial sun and watched over by an icy artificial sky that can be widely varied to replicate different winter conditions. Wearing his puffy down jacket, wool hat and sunglasses, Dr. Adams shows how he can reproduce the wide range of conditions found on mountain slopes and create different types of snow. “We want to understand what conditions cause the change in the crystalline structure and the bonding between crystals,” he said. It is the missing part of the puzzle of understanding avalanches. Once he and his students and colleagues have created the snow crystals under certain conditions, they put them under the microscope to see what conditions made for the strongest or weakest layers. The biggest cause of avalanches is a weak layer of snow on a slope covered by

KELLY GORHAM/MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY; LEFT, JANIE OSBORNE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

At a “cold lab’’ in Montana, Ed Adams, in peaked hat at left, recreates the conditions that cause an avalanche. solid layers, Dr. Adams said. “The weak layers are faceted crystals, very smooth and unbonded to each other,” almost like ball bearings, he said. Strong layers have stronger bonds between crystals, which makes them more stable. “It’s like a layer cake with very weak frosting,” Dr. Adams said. When something causes the weak layer, usually less than 2.5 centimeters thick, to give way, the strong layer or layers — there can be dozens, some of them a meter thick or more — go with it. Even skiing at low altitudes can fracture a weak layer and set off an avalanche far above. Contrary to conventional wisdom, sound, unless it is from an explosion, does not set off

BENEDICT CAREY

have shown this in studies of a wide variety of events — losing a spouse, a marriage, even a bodily function,” said George Bonanno, a professor of psychology at Columbia University in New York. In a recently completed study of 16,000 people, tracked for much of their lives, Dr. Bonanno, along with Anthony Mancini of Columbia and Andrew Clark of the Paris School of Economics, found that some 60 percent of people whose spouse died showed no change in self-reported well-being. Among people who’d been divorced, more than 70 percent showed no change in mental health. Many of those in the study who suffered serious distress — depending on the loss — rebounded psychologically, with time. In any group of people, moreover, there will be a handful who are exceptional, who find some release or hidden opportunity in a seemingly devastating loss — a kind of Zorba response. In one study in England, psychologists found a bricklayer who, after being paralyzed, became an academic and now says the injury was the best thing that ever happened to him. Other research has recorded significant improvements in the lives of some people after they lose a loved one. If some Wall Street executives seem curiously unmoved by public outrage (Mr. Madoff?), it’s likely that they’re drawing on the same psychological skills that have gotten them through

a pocket in front of the face to breathe while waiting for rescue. “I would swim, though,” Dr. Adams said. “Get prone in the snow and stay on top.” Dr. Adams traces his zeal to understand avalanches to his days as a bartender and skier at Alta, a resort in Utah. “The lodge I was working in got hit by an avalanche,” he said, “and it took a whole wing out and blew cars from the parking lot across the road. It was impressive.” Despite the danger, Dr. Adams says he may one day return to doing research from the inside of an avalanche. “I’d like to go back,” he said. “But for me understanding the metamorphosis of snow in the cold lab is every bit as interesting.”

Anti-Love Drug May Prevent Foolishness

When Facing a Crisis, Resiliency Protects Us After watching his timber company crash to pieces, literally before his eyes, the narrator in the 1964 movie “Zorba the Greek” hangs his head for a few moments. Then he turns to his friend with a simple request. “Teach me to dance, will you, Zorba?” In recent months, essay three prominent European businessmen have had something like the opposite reaction to their own economic crises. A London financier threw himself in front of a train in September. A French aristocrat tied to Bernard L. Madoff (accused of operating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme) stabbed himself in his Manhattan office in December. And in early January, the body of a German industrialist turned up by the railroad tracks near his house. All were ruled suicides. People’s responses to loss can differ wildly. There are people who fall hard and do not get back on their feet for a long time, if ever — a condition some psychiatrists call complicated grief. And the depth of this economic collapse has unceremoniously stripped thousands of far more than money: reputations have reversed; friendships have turned sour; families have fractured. Yet experts say that the recent spate of suicides, while undeniably sad, amounts to no more than anecdotal, personal tragedy. The vast majority of people can and sometimes do weather humiliation and loss without suffering any psychological wounds, and they do it by drawing on resources that they barely know they have. “The fundamental point is that most people are extremely resilient, and we

avalanches. Based in the jagged mountains of the northern Rockies, the avalanche center at Montana State was founded by Charles Bradley and John Montagne, veterans of the Army’s Tenth Mountain Division who came here after World War II. Other major avalanche centers include the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos, the world’s largest, and the Nagaoka Institute for Snow and Ice Studies in Japan. The best way to survive an avalanche is still not clear. Some researchers say the most critical thing is to create

In a recent issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding, Dr. Young predicts that it won’t be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink. essay The good news is that we might reverseengineer an anti-love potion, a vaccine preventing you from making an infatuated ass of yourself. This is what humans have sought ever since Odysseus ordered his crew to tie him to the mast while sailing past the Sirens. It was clear that love was a dangerous disease. Dr. Young conducted research with prairie voles at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. These mouselike creatures are among the small minority of mammals — less than 5 percent — who share humans’ propensity for monogamy. When a female prairie vole’s brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she’ll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex). After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married. In his Nature essay, Dr. Young speculates that human love is set off by a “biochemical chain of events” that originally evolved in ancient brain circuits involving motherchild bonding, which is stimulated in

JOHN TIERNEY

JIM DATZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

previous crises, whether a divorce or a demotion, a disease or the death of a friend. The ability to ignore an ominous cloud and concentrate on what needs to get done today — to “compartmentalize” — is a psychological skill that doctors, soldiers and others need in order to do their jobs. It’s an absolute requirement for any serious trader or high-end investor. In the United States, where reinvention is considered a birthright, a certain type of loss — perhaps especially a “paper” loss, of net worth rather than irreplaceable life — may even seem an invitation to something better. Or in the case of those who, like Mr. Madoff, had been living a treacherous, secret life, it could bring something even more precious: relief. “You’d think someone in that position,” Dr. Bonanno said, “would be almost delighted to be free of living that way.”

mammals by the release of oxytocin during labor, delivery and nursing. Dr. Young noted that sexual foreplay and intercourse stimulate the same parts of a woman’s body that are involved in giving birth and nursing. This hormonal hypothesis would help explain a couple of differences between humans and less monogamous mammals: females’ desire to have sex even when they are not fertile, and males’ erotic fascination with breasts. More frequent sex and more attention to breasts, Dr. Young said, could help build long-term bonds through a “cocktail of ancient neuropeptides,” like the oxytocin released during foreplay or orgasm. Researchers have achieved simi-

The propensity for monogamy may be tied to brain chemistry. lar results by squirting oxytocin into people’s nostrils. It seems to enhance feelings of trust and empathy. Dr. Young said there could be drugs that increase people’s urge to fall in love. But a love vaccine that can prevent infatuation seems simpler and more practical. “If we give an oxytocin blocker to female voles, they become like 95 percent of other mammal species,” Dr. Young said. “They will not bond no matter how many times they mate with a male or how hard he tries to bond. They mate, it feels really good and they move on if another male comes along. If love is similarly biochemically based, you should in theory be able to suppress it in a similar way.”

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le monde

SUNDAY-MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1-2, 2009 arts & styles

Sherlock Holmes, The Sexy Action Hero

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LALO DE ALMEIDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By working with native flora, Roberto Burle Marx transformed the way Brazilians see their surroundings. Clockwise from top, sidewalks along Copacabana Beach, an early park project and a terrace garden.

Seeing Fine Art in Tropical Landscapes By LARRY ROHTER

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil teems with jungles, forests and all sorts of exotic plants, flowers and trees. But until the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx came along to tame and shape his country’s exuberant flora, his countrymen had mostly disdained the natural riches that, often literally, flourished in their own backyards. “Burle Marx created tropical landscaping as we know it today, but in doing so he also did something even greater,” said Lauro Cavalcanti, the curator of an exhibition devoted to the work of Burle Marx that runs through March at the Paço Imperial museum here. “By organizing native plants in accordance with the aesthetic principles of the artistic vanguard, especially Cubism and abstractionism, he created a new and modern grammar for international landscape design.” Burle Marx was born in 1909, and to mark that centenary the museum set out to show the full extent of his creativity. (The show travels next to São Paulo.) In addition to scale models and drawings of his most celebrated landscape design projects, the exhibition includes nearly 100 of his paintings, as well as drawings, sculptures, tapestries, jewelry, and sets and costumes he designed for theatrical productions. “He was truly a polymath,” said William Howard Adams, the chief curator of a Burle Marx exhibition presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 1991. “But the

thing about him that really stands out is that he regarded landscape design as an equal partner with architecture, not as a backdrop or decoration.” Burle Marx always thought of himself first and foremost as a painter. Landscape design, he once wrote, “was merely the method I found to organize and compose my drawing and painting, using less conventional materials.” It was while studying painting in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as he would later tell it, that Burle Marx

Brazil celebrates a visionary who painted with plants. realized that the vegetation Brazilians then dismissed as scrub and brush, preferring imported pine trees and gladioli for their gardens, was extraordinary. Visiting the Botanical Garden in Berlin, he was startled to find many Brazilian plants in the collection and quickly came to see the untapped artistic potential in their varied shapes, sizes and hues. Burle Marx was of German descent on his father’s side and French on his mother’s side. He was born in São Paulo, but moved at a young age to Rio de Janeiro,

where one of his neighbors was the Modernist architect Lucio Costa, the future designer of Brasília, who gave Burle Marx his first commissions. Burle Marx is known among Brazilians for his many ambitious projects here in Rio. “The face of this city bears his imprint,” Mr. Cavalcanti said. Rio’s largest park, the bayside Aterro do Flamengo, built on reclaimed seafront just southwest of downtown, is an early example of one of Burle Marx’s signature projects. But for sheer sweep, nothing surpasses the sidewalks of Copacabana, with colorful abstract stone mosaics extending unbroken the entire length of that beach. From the upper floors of the buildings that line Avenida Atlantica, Burle Marx appears to have painted a single canvas nearly five kilometers long. Burle Marx was almost as much a botanist as a landscape architect, although largely self-taught. More than 50 plant species have been named for him, and he was one of the world’s leading experts on bromeliads, the plant family to which the pineapple belongs. “Burle Marx was prescient in his reverence for plants and his stewardship of the whole nursery, for his ability to see the garden both as an aesthetic experiment and also as part of the ecology,” said Karen Van Lengen, dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. “That’s the challenge for today’s landscape architects, to bring those energies together.”

By SARAH LYALL by many internal vicissitudes, including a long spell of drug addiction. Like LONDON — In a filthy, dank labyHolmes, Mr. Downey, 43, has a mind so rinth of rooms below the streets of the active it seems to run ahead of itself. East End, Sherlock Holmes was solvHe craves constant stimuli, partly for ing a case. That is, Robert Downey Jr., his own intellectual nourishment and playing Holmes in the forthcoming partly, you suspect, to keep his demons film “Sherlock Holmes,” was engaged at bay. in hand-to-hand, foot-to-stomach “He’s the archetype of a tortured combat with a very big and very bad perfectionist,” Mr. Downey said of his villain (Robert Maillet). Bam! Pow! character. Ouch! Both characters would end up Mr. Law said he was enjoying upknocked out on the floor, along with ending the conventional wisdom about Holmes’s trusty sidekick, Dr. John Watson: that he is fat and slow. “He’s a Watson, played by Jude Law. man who left the military a few years Filmed in December, the scene preago and who takes a military approach sented a sharp corrective to the poputo situations,” he said. “He’s slightly lar cinematic view of Holmes, at least more strait-laced than Holmes but the one propagated by the old films feacertainly no less brave.” turing the wonderfully named British Susan Downey, a producer on the actor Basil Rathbone. Rathbone’s Holfilm and Mr. Downey’s wife, said Holmes occasionally wielded guns, leapt mes is “a bit of a ladies’ man, a bit of a out of carriages and rushed through brawler,” adding: “He has a gambling the fog with Errol Flynn-style panache, problem. If you’re a Sherlock Holmes but mostly he was a giant brain inside fan who is in love with the original stoa tweed suit, sexlessly debonair in the ries, then you’ll appreciate him.” way Hollywood liked its leading men Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales set the in the 1930s and 1940s. His Watson, stage for the classic Holmes-Watson played by Nigel Bruce, was a good-narelationship, “the relish of language tured, simpleminded foil for Holmes’s brittle brilliance. The Sherlock Holmes of “Sherlock Holmes,” which is scheduled for release next fall, will still be smarter than everyone within a three-planet radius, and he will retain his uncanny ability to intuit whole life stories from the tiniest speck of dust on a shoe. But he will do those things while being a man of action — “like James Bond in 1891,” Joel Silver, one of the film’s producers, said last fall. Lionel Wigram, who conceived the story and is also a producer of the film, said ALEX BAILEY that reinventing Holmes as an action hero made Robert Downey Jr., right, and Jude Law perfect sense. “I never star as a more kinetic Holmes and Watson. agreed with the idea of the fairly stuffy Edwardianand the cerebral tennis matches that type gentleman,” Mr. Wigram said. “It go on between them as they unravel wasn’t my idea of Sherlock Holmes.” this mystery,” as Mr. Law described The director, Guy Ritchie — formerit. But Conan Doyle appears to have ly Madonna’s husband — is known for conceived his detectives as action stylized, quick-talking, fast-moving characters, too, alluding to Watson’s films set among the criminals, lowlifes military service, to boxing matches and hard men of London’s underworld. and gunfights, and to Holmes’s use of He would seem to be something of a the martial art baritsu (he most likely gamble as director of such a big Holmeant bartitsu). lywood extravaganza. “So many of the ideas that Conan The “Sherlock Holmes” producers Doyle had took place offstage in his say that Mr. Ritchie’s style is perfectly books,” Ms. Downey said. “We have suited to their concept. “We thought the technology, the budget and the he had the capacity and the ability to means to carry them out.” make a big, fun movie, and what reBut will the movie really work as a ally pushed it over the top was Robert Guy Ritchie movie? Downey Jr.,” Mr. Silver said. “Guy brings an energy and an exMr. Downey’s Holmes is darker than pertise at physicality and action while that of Mr. Rathbone or others who being faithful to the period,” Mr. Law have taken on the part, like Christosaid. “The Victorian London that Holpher Plummer in “Murder by Decree” mes and Watson were working in was (1979) and Nicol Williamson in “The the cesspit of the world. They’re dealSeven-Per-Cent Solution” (1976). The ing with criminals and villains and new Holmes is rougher, more emotionstreet urchins.” ally multilayered, more inclined to run Another question, since the movie is with his clothing askew, covered in meant for a family audience: Drugs? bruises and dirt and blood. No, Mr. Wigram said, speaking of Character and actor share certain Holmes. “He doesn’t do cocaine in our traits. Like Holmes with his cocaine movie.” habit, Mr. Downey has been buffeted

Self-Invention Relocates to Mumbai VERLA, India — It isn’t about cows or cobras, a wedding or outsourcing; it isn’t about gurus or Gandhi. “Slumdog Millionaire,” in fact, may be the first world-traveling film about India in a generation to discard the old, smudged lenses for seeing India. anand Its novelty has givGIrIdHaradas en it a dream run in American movie theaters, and it recently was chosen best dramatic picture at the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles. It has now picked up 10 Oscar nominations, including one for best picture. But the film’s freshness lies not just in how the West sees India. It lies, too, in how Indians see themselves. It portrays a changing India as something India long resisted being: a land of self-makers, where a son of the slums can, solely of his own effort, hoist himself up, flout his

ESSAY

origins, break with fate. And that may explain the movie’s strange hold over Americans. It channels to them their own fantasy of selfinvention, and yet places it far enough away as to imply that it is now really someone else’s fantasy. Indeed, after the havoc wreaked on ordinary selfreliant Americans by the impenetrable workings of the markets, the mythology of self reliance is under siege in America. The film, directed by Danny Boyle, opened in India on January 23 and will open in Europe and Asia in the coming months. It follows Jamal Malik, who rises from Mumbai’s shantytowns to compete on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” In India, clan is everything. But Jamal needs no one. He has no parents; his brother betrays him; even the game-show host, feigning goodwill, deceives. In India, hierarchy rules.

‘‘Slumdog Millionaire’’ shows a more realistic version of life in India.

RAJANISH KAKADE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

But Jamal treats the mighty no differently from the meek. He is that rare, but increasingly less rare, Indian creature: a man all his own. The old restraints were formidable: family, caste, religious fatalism, Byzantine bureaucracy. But the new pull is toward a life of one’s making, in a city not one’s own, in a vocation not inherited. “Why does everyone love this pro-

gram?” Jamal, seeing the “Millionaire” show on TV, asks a friend. “It’s a chance to escape, isn’t it?” she replies. “Walk into another life.” Oceans away, the United States was founded with the promise of such escape. Its early settlers were fleeing restraints much like those in old India. But now, even as the myth of selfmaking spreads to India, a pause for

second thoughts may have started in America. It was partly the crash of 2008, in which supposed masters of the universe sank the economy, then asked to be bailed out. It was partly a dawning sense that policies that promoted the entrepreneur could forget communities. It was partly the fraying of American families. As Indians sever their attachments, Americans reweave theirs. Scientists are pushing the self-made from their pedestal, arguing that success is social: that certain cultures breed success, that genes influence skills. The recent election was won by a candidate who is self-made but did not position himself that way; he spoke instead of roots and linkages. It is roots and linkages that many Indians now seek to shed, and many Americans now seek to reclaim. And that may be the silent allure of “Slumdog Millionaire.” It is a tribute to the irrepressible self, filmed in a society now realizing it has given the self too little, watched in a society now realizing it has given the self too much.