SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2006

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Saving the World, and Ourselves For All Our Woes, Blame the Obese First we said they were ruining their health with their bad habit, and they should just quit. Then we said they were repulsive and we didn’t want to be around them. Then we said they were costing us loads of money — maybe they should pay extra taxes. Others, after all, do not share their dissolute ways. ESSAY Cigarette smokers? No, the obese. The list of ills attributable to obesity grew recently: fat people cause global warming. This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is about 3.8 billion liters a year. Their conclusion draws on ideas similar to those in a letter published last year in The American Journal of Public Health. Its authors, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did an informal calculation of how much extra fuel airlines spend hauling around fatter Americans. The answer,

GINA KOLATA

Continued on Page 7

Wanted: Ideas and Cash to Aid Warming Globe By ANDREW C. REVKIN DENVER — For all the enthusiasm about alternatives to coal and oil, the challenge of limiting emissions of carbon dioxide, which traps heat, will be immense in a world likely to add 2.5 billion people by midcentury, a host of experts say. Moreover, most of those people will live in countries like China and India, which are just beginning to enjoy an electrified, air-conditioned mobile society. The challenge is all the more daunting because research into energy technologies by both government and industry has not been rising, but rather falling. In the United States, annual federal spending for all energy research and development — not just the research aimed at climatefriendly technologies — is less than half what it was a quarter-century ago. It has sunk to $3 billion a year in the current budget from an inflation-adjusted peak of $7.7 billion in 1979, according to several different studies. Britain, for one, has sounded a loud alarm about the need for prompt action on the climate issue, including more research. [A recent report commissioned by the British government calls for spending to be doubled worldwide on research into low-carbon technologies; without it, the report says, coastal flooding and a shortage of drinking water could turn 200 million people into refugees.] President Bush has sought an increase to $4.2 billion for 2007, but that would still be a

China Newsphoto/Reuters; NASA, top

Because short-term profits are rare, few corporations will invest in alternative energy. The Smoking Ban, Italian Style Italy to France: Life without tobacco is still sweet. PAGE 7 small fraction of what most climate and energy experts say would be needed. Federal spending on medical research, by contrast, has nearly quadrupled, to $28 billion annually, since 1979. Military research has increased 260 percent, and at more than $75 billion a year is 20 times the amount spent on

In American Politics, So Many Hands, So Many Germs Politicians like Dick Cheney rely on antiseptic hand lotions, applied when supporters are out of sight.

By MARK LEIBOVICH WASHINGTON — Campaigns are filthy. Not only in terms of last-minute tricks and smears to an opponent’s reputation. But also as in germs, parasites and all the bacterial unpleasantness that is spread around through shaking hands. “You can’t always get to a sink to wash your hands,’’ said Anne Ryun, wife of Representative Jim Ryun, Republican of Kansas. Like so many other people involved in politics these days, Mrs. Ryun has become obsessive about using antiseptic lotion to sanitize her hands and ensuring that others do, too. She squirted hand cleanser on the hands of people lined up to meet Vice President Dick Cheney recently at a fundraiser in Topeka. When Mr. Cheney was done meeting and greeting, he, too, rubbed his hands with the stuff, dispensed in dollops by an aide when the vice president was out of public view. That has become routine in this peak sea-

Michael Conroy/Associated Press

son of handshaking. Politics is personal at all levels, and germs do not discriminate. Like chicken dinners and lobbyists, they afflict Democrats and Republicans alike. It would be difficult to find an entourage that does not have at least one aide packing Purell, a popular hand sanitizer brand. But Howard Dean, a doctor and the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said he did not bother with the stuff. “If you’ve had children, you’re immune to everything,’’ said Mr. Dean, a father of two.

As with most things, this places Mr. Dean in opposition to President Bush. “Good stuff, keeps you from getting colds,’’ Mr. Bush raved about hand sanitizer to Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, at a White House encounter early last year. Mr. Obama, who recounts the episode in his new book, says that after rubbing a blob of it on his own hands, the president offered him some, which he accepted (“not wanting to appear unhygienic’’). Purell became popular during the 2000 campaign. Donald Trump, the billionaire germophobe who contemplated running for president, even distributed little bottles of it to reporters. “One of the curses of American society is the simple act of shaking hands,’’ Mr. Trump wrote in his book “Comeback.’’ “I happen to be a clean-hands freak.’’

WORLD TRENDS

ARTS & STYLES

Mexico’s War on Drugs

Just One More Drink

The fight against drugs has taken a new turn in Mexico, with beheadings and assassinations.

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energy research. Internationally, government energy research trends are little different from those in the United States. Japan is the only economic power that increased research spending in recent decades, with growth focused on efficiency and solar technology, according to the International Energy Agency. In the private sector, studies show that energy companies have a long tradition of eschewing long-term technology quests because of the lack of short-term payoffs. Still, more than four dozen scientists, econo-

Continued on Page 7

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2006 O P I N I O N

&

C O M M E N T A R Y PAUL KRUGMAN

Arithmetic of Failure

SCHRANK

Basler Zeitung, Switzerland

EDITORIALS OF THE TIMES

In Iraq, Wasted Money When the full encyclopedia of Bush administration misfeasance in Iraq is compiled, it will have to include a lengthy section on the contracting fiascos that wasted billions of taxpayer dollars in the name of rebuilding the country. It isn’t only money that was lost. Washington’s disgraceful failure to deliver on its promises to restore electricity, water and oil distribution, and to rebuild education and health facilities, turned millions of once sympathetic Iraqis against the American presence. Their discovery that the world’s richest, most technologically advanced country could not restore basic services to minimal prewar levels left an impression of American weakness and, worse, of indifference to the well-being of ordinary Iraqis. That further poisoned a situation already soured by White House intelligence breakdowns, military misjudgments and political blunders. The latest contracting revelations came in a report recently issued by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The office reviewed records covering $1.3 billion out of the $18.4 billion that Congress voted for Iraq reconstruction two years ago. Reported overhead costs ran from a low of 11 percent for several contracts awarded to Lucent to a high of 55 percent for, you guessed it, the Halliburton subsidiary, KBR Inc. On similar projects in the United States, over-

head is typically just a few percent. Given the difficult security environment in Iraq, overhead was expected to run closer to 10 percent. But in many of the contracts examined, it ran much, much higher, in some cases consuming over half the allocated funds. The main explanation for these excessive overhead rates turned out to be not special security costs but simply the costly down time that resulted from sending workers and equipment to Iraq months before there was any actual work for them to do. That is yet another example of the shoddy contract writing and lax oversight. Bush administration incompetence, not corporate greed, is the chief culprit. Still, these charges are one more example of how the favored American companies lucky enough to be awarded reconstruction contracts made large sums of money while the Iraqis failed to get most of the promised benefits. As Americans now look for explanations of how things went so horribly wrong in Iraq, they should not overlook the shameful breakdowns in reconstruction contracting. They need to insist that Congress impose tough new rules on the Pentagon to ensure more competitive bidding, tighter contract writing and more rigorous supervision. That is the best way to ensure that such a costly and damaging failure never happens again.

China’s Milestone The Chinese sell a lot of merchandise in the United States and, in the process, accumulate a lot of dollars. They then loan many of those dollars back to the United States in exchange for all manner of American i.o.u.’s, including Treasury bonds, federal agency bonds, and private-sector debt. America’s indebtedness to China, as a result, is staggeringly high, although the Bush administration — which needs foreign loans to help finance the budget deficit — seems unfazed. But there is reason for pause. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that China’s holdings of foreign currency and securities would soon top $1 trillion, a fivefold increase since 2000. Roughly 70 percent of that is believed to be in dollars or dollar-based assets. The size and growth of China’s holdings mean increasing vulnerability for the United States. For several years, China’s loans have helped to keep prices and interest rates low in the United States, and to finance big tax cuts. If the lending began to dry up — because Chinese officials decided to

diversify into other currencies or to spend more at home — prices, interest rates and taxes in the United States would very likely rise. If the loans dried up quickly — a worst-case scenario — the result could be a sharp financial crisis. A gradual shift could mean a long downward trend in American living standards as a higher cost of living took its toll. China might never pull back in a way that harmed the United States. But the fact that it could already makes the global financial system more volatile. The Journal also reported that administration officials are concerned that developing nations, unhappy with conditions on loans from the International Monetary Fund, may decide to borrow directly from China. That would give Beijing more influence over emerging markets and their governments. To its credit, the Bush administration has repeatedly stressed that the rise of China is not to be feared or begrudged. But excessive borrowing during the Bush years has made the United States unnecessarily vulnerable.

: 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 “Beheadings and Fear in Mexico Drug War,” page 3: BEHEADING: décapitation TO BLARE: tonitruer GARB: costume TO STAY PUT: rester sans bouger MOBSTER: gangster, membre de la Mafia FEUD: querelle TO JAM: coincer, enfoncer SEASONED: chevronné Dans l’article “Wartime Takes Its Toll on Ordinary Iraqis’ Lives,” page 3: TO ELUDE: échapper (à) TO SHRINK: rétrécir SPARSELY: de manière clairsemée FABRIC: tissu

Dans l’article “Exiles Return to Afghanistan, Setting Off a Building Boom,” page 3: UNTENDED: à l’abandon COMPOUND: enceinte PLOT: ici, terrain Dans l’article “A Message of Freedom Through Jazz,” page 8: CHECKERED: à carreaux WEATHERED: qui n’est plus un perdreau de l’année HIPSTER: fan de jazz, drogues, bouddhisme, baba cool.

EXPRESSIONS Dans l’article “Behadings and Fear in Mexico Drug War,” page 3: TO BE IN THE GAME: ici, “en croquer”; à

Iraq is a lost cause. It’s just a matter of arithmetic: given the violence of the environment, with ethnic groups and rival militias at each other’s throats, American forces there are large enough to suffer terrible losses, but far too small to stabilize the country. Afghanistan, on the other hand, is a war we haven’t yet lost, and it’s just possible that a new commitment of forces there might turn things around. The moral is clear — we need to get out of Iraq, not because we want to cut and run, but because our continuing presence is doing nothing but wasting American lives. And if we do free up our forces (and those of our British allies), we might still be able to save Afghanistan. The classic analysis of the arithmetic of insurgencies is a 1995 article by James T. Quinlivan, an analyst at the Rand Corporation. “Force Requirements in Stability Operations,’’ published in Parameters, the journal of the United States Army War College, looked at the number of troops that peacekeeping forces have historically needed to maintain order and cope with insurgencies. Mr. Quinlivan’s comparisons suggested that even small countries might need large occupying forces. Specifically, in some cases it was possible to stabilize countries with between 4 and 10 troops per 1,000 inhabitants. But examples like the British campaign against communist guerrillas in Malaya and the fight against the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland indicated that establishing order and stability in a difficult environment could require about 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants. The implication was clear: “Many countries are simply too big to be plausible candidates for stabilization by external forces,’’ Mr. Quinlivan wrote. Maybe, just maybe, the invasion and occupation

of Iraq could have been managed in such a way that a force the United States was actually capable of sending would have been enough to maintain order and stability. But that didn’t happen, and at this point Iraq is a cauldron of violence. And that means that stabilizing Iraq would require a force of at least 20 troops per 1,000 Iraqis — that is, 500,000 soldiers and marines. We don’t have that kind of force. The combined strength of the United States Army and Marine Corps is less than 700,000 — and the combination of America’s other commitments plus the need to rotate units home for retraining means that only a fraction of those forces can be deployed for stability operations at any given time. Meanwhile, what about Afghanistan? It comes as something of a shock to realize that Afghanistan has a larger population than Iraq. If Afghanistan were in as bad shape as Iraq, stabilizing it would require at least 600,000 troops — an obvious impossibility. However, things in Afghanistan aren’t yet as far gone as they are in Iraq, and it’s possible that a smaller force — one in that range of 4 to 10 per 1,000 that has been sufficient in some cases — might be enough to stabilize the situation. But right now, the forces trying to stabilize Afghanistan are absurdly small: we’re trying to provide security to 30 million people with a force of only 32,000 Western troops and 77,000 Afghan national forces. If we stopped trying to do the impossible in Iraq, both we and the British would be able to put more troops in a place where they might still do some good. It’s hard to believe that the world’s only superpower is on the verge of losing not just one but two wars. But the arithmetic of stability operations suggests that unless we give up our futile efforts in Iraq, we’re on track to do just that.

DAVID BROOKS

The Era of What’s Next WOOSTER, Ohio — Sometimes liberalism is dominant and sometimes conservatism is dominant, but sometimes there is no dominant ideology. Between 1932 and 1968, liberalism dominated American politics. The big accomplishments were liberal accomplishments — Social Security, Medicare, the civil rights movement. Even if Republicans sometimes held the White House, the general drift of things was still to the left. Between 1980 and 2006, conservatism was dominant. The big accomplishments were conservative accomplishments — the defeat of communism, the reinvigoration of the economy through deregulation, tax reform and monetarism, the rebalancing of the culture to emphasize family, work and individual responsibility. Even if Democrats sometimes held the White House, the general drift of things was to the right. But in some eras there is no dominant political tendency. The 1970’s were such a period. That decade was marked not by a change in political winds so much as by disillusionment and a scrambling of political categories. People who once had been liberals drifted away. Voters became cynical about politics itself. The pendulum swung not only from left to right but from politics to antipolitics. Jimmy Carter promised a break from the normal methods of political life. We’re about to enter another of those periods without a dominant ideology. It’s clear that this election will mark the end of conservative dominance. This election is a period, not a comma in political history. That’s clear not only because Republicans could lose their majorities, but for several other reasons. First, conservatives have exhausted their agenda. They have little new left to propose and have lost their edge on issues like fiscal discipline and foreign policy. Second, conservatives are beset by scandals, the kind of institutional decay that af-

rapprocher de “to be on the game”, faire partie d’un réseau (de vol, de prostitution), ou “to be in the know”: être au courant, dans le coup. Dans l’article “A Message of Freedom Through Jazz,” page 8: Satchmo: surnom donné à Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), l’immense trompettiste et chanteur de jazz; diminutif de “satchel mouth”, surnom qu’on lui donnait à cause de sa façon de poser ses lèvres sur l’embouchure de sa trompette.

RÉFÉRENCES Dans l’article “A Message of Freedom Through Jazz,” page 8: CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: Ville de 100.000 habitants, séparée de Boston par la rivière Charles, très proche aussi de Somerville, au point qu’on les appelle parfois “Camberville”. Elle est connue pour abriter le campus de Harvard, la plus ancienne université des Etats-Unis (1636), ainsi que celui du MIT et les centres de recherche de nombreuses industries hi-tech. Alors qu’elle existait depuis 8 ans sous le nom de Newtone, elle fut rebaptisée Cambridge en

flicts movements at the end of their political lives. Third, the Reagan coalition is splintering, with the factions going off in wildly different directions. Fourth, there is no viable orthodox conservative candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Orthodox conservatives like George Allen, Bill Frist and Rick Santorum are fading, and only heterodox figures like John McCain, Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney are rising. Identification with the Republican Party is falling but identification with the Democratic Party is not rising. Instead, there is a spike in the number of people who do not identify with either. People correctly perceive that neither party has a coherent agenda this year. The candidates who thrive will be those who offer a new way of politics. This might be the maverick independence of McCain, or the ostentatiously deliberative style of Barack Obama, or it could be the manner of somebody whom none of us are even thinking about. Candidates who seem conventional will have a tough time. This includes Hillary Clinton. The people who will be most important are those who can most precisely identify the new era’s defining problems. The first is the continuing rise of Islamic fundamentalism. It’s clear the categories of the nation-state era — rollback and containment — are not working to reverse extremism, but what will? The second big problem is entitlement spending and the stultification of government. The third challenge is the emergence of China and India — seizing the opportunities afforded by those new workers, mitigating the pain associated with tougher competition and managing the fiscal imbalances. The fourth is the growing importance of cognitive skills and cultural capital, the need to surround people with stable relationships. One party will become distracted by passing squalls, but the other will focus on those issues. Then, a new period of dominance will begin.

1638, en hommage à la ville universitaire anglaise. Incorporée en 1846, elle devient la deuxième ville du Massachusetts, et en 1920 était une ville industrielle importante. La crise de 1929 et la Grande Dépression verront le déclin d’activité industrielle de Cambridge qui se recentrera en ville intellectuelle. Elle fait partie des villes considérées comme les plus à gauche, même du Massachusetts: on la surnomme parfois PRC (People’s Republic of Cambridge). C’est à Cambridge que fut célébré le premier mariage gay légal des Etats Unis. Dans l’article “Drink Up. You Don’t Have Lines to Learn,” page 8: VH1: chaîne télévisée du câble, petite sœur de MTV, elle est créée en 1985 pour diffuser des clips vidéos ayant pour cible le groupe des 18-35 ans (MTV étant centrée sur les ados). On y voyait des vidéos de chansons pop, R&B, musique jazz et country, mais pas de rap. Depuis 2000, cependant, elle propose des programmes plus rock (les Red Hot Chili Peppers, ou Metallica font leur apparition) et même Eminem. Depuis 2003, de nombreux programmes de télé-réalité se sont ajoutés aux clips musicaux.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2006

LE MONDE W O R L D

T R E N D S

Wartime Takes Its Toll On Ordinary Iraqis’ Lives

Mexico is awash in grisly gangland killings. Fanny Carranza Domínguez, far left, holds the shirt of her husband, a police officer who was assassinated. Five heads were dumped on the floor at a club in Uruapan, left.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Antonio Betancourt contributed reporting from Mexico City, and Marc Lacey from Nuevo Laredo.

Exiles Return to Afghanistan, Setting Off a Building Boom say the villagers have seized the land illegally. “When these families broke the law and grabbed KELAGAY, Afghanistan — land, now everyone wants to grab Just months ago this place was an land,’’ complained Imamuddin empty, dusty plain, the site of an Hasan, the chief refugee and reold Russian military base, with patriation official for Baghlan an abandoned village of broken Province, here in central Afwalls across untended fields. But ghanistan. frantic construction has been goThe return of Afghan refugees ing on, as Afghan laborers have over the last four years, and their built high-walled compounds and ability to adapt and survive, has flat-roofed houses from mud and been one of the real successes of straw. the international intervention The building boom began when here and of President Hamid the entire population of a ruined Karzai’s government. Since the village that had been called Na- fall of the Taliban in late 2001, an seri Chehl Kapa came back this estimated 4.7 million refugees have flooded back from Iran and Pakistan, 3.7 million with UZBEK. assistance from the United TAJIKISTAN Nations refugee agency and TURKMENISTAN another million on their own. The returns are slowing now, BAGHLAN with only 135,000 returning Kabul so far this year, but one of the main reasons they are not reZABUL Kelagay turning is because they have AFGHANISTAN no house or land to go to. So far the province, one of Kandahar the leading ones in the counPAKISTAN try’s refugee resettlement program, has given out plots to 4,000 families, with plans to INDIA 320 Kms. settle 6,000 more families in The New York Times two new government-planned Refugees returning from exile towns. But at least 500 famiare building houses in Kelagay, lies are living in tents in one camp, Mr. Hasan said. their ancestral village. The whole population of this village, 200 families, fled one summer after 26 years as refu- night in 1980 after a raid by Soviet gees in Pakistan. troops that killed 40 people. Now Because of their numbers, they they number 360 families, they occupied government land well said. Despite the hardships, they beyond their original village and had prospered and multiplied in fields, up to and over the nearby their 26 years away. road, and within a week the reHaji Abdul Momin, 75, has two turned villagers began dividing wives, 10 children and 10 grandchildren, and he has taken a plot up the land and building. “This is our ancestral land; big enough to house the whole our forefathers lived here,’’ said family. “I used to live in the village — Haji Abdul Jabar, who is building a large compound that will house we were very few then,’’ he said. his family and those of his seven “Now we have increased. We are 23 people, and I don’t have brothers. But the provincial authorities enough land.’’ By CARLOTTA GALL

law rather than turn a blind eye to drug traffickers, often paying with their lives, pros����� ecutors say. But those assessments, oth������ er authorities say, are overly ����� optimistic. Some experts say ������ the Mexican police forces, weakened by corruption and ������� ���������� intimidated by assassinations, are simply not up to the task of countering the under��������� ������� world feuds. ����� ������� Beheadings, in fact, have ������ become a signature form of ���� intimidation aimed at both �������� criminal rivals and federal ���� ��� and local authorities. In the The New York Times tourist town of Acapulco, killstruggle among second-rank ers from one drug gang decapimobsters for trade routes, fed- tated the commander of a special strike force, Mario Núñez Magaeral prosecutors say. Attorney General Daniel Ca- ña, in April, along with one of his beza de Vaca said a steadily ris- agents, Jesús Alberto Ibarra Veing tide of drug addiction within lázquez. They jammed the heads in a Mexico had spurred some of the murders, as dealers fought for fence in front of the municipal local markets. At the same time, police station. “So you will learn more and more honest police of- to respect,’’ said a red note next ficers are trying to enforce the to them. ����������

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URUAPAN, Mexico — Norteño music was blaring at the Sol y Sombra bar on September 6 when several men in military garb broke up the late night party. Waving high-powered machine guns, they screamed at the crowd to stay put and then dumped the contents of a heavy plastic bag on the dance floor. Five human heads rolled to a bloody stop. “This is not something you see every day,’’ said a bartender, who asked not to be named for fear of losing his own head. “Very ugly.’’ An underworld war between drug gangs is raging in Mexico, medieval in its barbarity, its foot soldiers operating with little fear of interference from the police,

its scope and brutality unprecedented, even in a country accustomed to high levels of drug violence. In recent months the violence has included a total of two dozen beheadings, a raid on a local police station by men with grenades and a bazooka, and daytime kidnappings of top law enforcement officials. At least 123 law enforcement officials, among them 2 judges and 3 prosecutors, have been gunned down or tortured to death. Five police officers were among those beheaded. In all, the violence has claimed more than 1,700 civilian lives this year, and federal officials say the killings are on course to top the estimated 1,800 underworld killings last year. Mexico’s law enforcement officials maintain that the violence is a sign that they have made progress dismantling the major organized crime families in the country. The arrests of several drug cartel leaders and their top lieutenants have set off a violent

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as they focus intensely on just staying alive, they said, even the basics are being stripped away. “All the elements of society have been dismantled,” said Fawsia Abdul al-Attiya, a sociologist and a professor at Baghdad University. “You are afraid because you are a woman, a man, a Sunni, a Shiite, a Kurd. “All these things start to change society.” In a room in the Amal Women’s Network, the women talked about the changes forced on their lives by that fear. One of the women recalled recently walking through the gate of her office building with several colleagues, two wearing form-fitting dresses with bare heads and a third in a hijab, when security guards pulled the third woman aside. “They told her to tell her friends to be more cautious,” she said. She asked that her name not be used because it would be recognized. She has received two threats on her life. As the violence tears the fabric of society, breaking communities and long-established social networks, even peoples’ thinking is muted. The feeling is particularly intense for those who have lost a close relative, especially a child. Haifa Hassan, an English teacher whose 12-year-old son was kidnapped while he walked home from school this summer and then brutally killed, has a face like a mask. She finds it hard to smile, and when she does, it is more a grimace. She has trouble sleeping at night. “My son dies every day,” she said, recalling his small body and neck with rope marks. She left Iraq with her husband and remaining son in October. Life was also hard under Saddam Hussein, the women said. But the basic fabric of life, visiting family, attending weddings and funerals, was for the most part intact. Now Iraqis are letting go even of those parts. Hana Edwar, the director of the women’s center, said she brought a group of young people to a scenic lakeside resort in Iraqi Kurdistan in September. When a group gathered there for prayer, one young man joked that he did not need to pray because he was already in heaven. “Really, you feel how much we miss these things,” Ms. Edwar said. “How much we miss them.” A year ago, there was still so much hope, she said, “but now the light is so weak.”

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

Photographs by Janet Jarman for The New York Times

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For Baghdad women, joy is but a memory.

Beheadings and Fear In Mexico Drug War � ��

BAGHDAD — The things the women missed were almost too small to notice at first. Simple numbers and dates began to elude their memories. They were hugging their children less. Past pleasures, eating and listening to music, began to feel flat. They were shouting at their husbands like army commanders. Small as they seemed, these scraps of life were the effects of the war as discussed by four Iraqi women on a cloudy Saturday afternoon in a women’s center in Baghdad. Their stories began with a familiar theme: the shrinking lives of middle-class families in the capital. Social clubs have emptied out. Weddings have been sparsely attended. But as the circle has become smaller, and

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Arrests have been made in only a handful of the assassinations of police officers this year. The overwhelming majority remain unsolved because witnesses fear testifying against drug traffickers. Even seasoned investigators are afraid to dig too deep into the murders. “There is an atmosphere that affects us, of distrust, of terror inside the police force,’’ said Jesús Alemán del Carmen, the head of the state police in Guerrero, where 22 law enforcement officials have been brutally assassinated this year. One of the officers killed was Gonzalo Domínguez Díaz, the state police commander in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. So far, prosecutors have made no progress in solving his murder. He was 47, the father of three. “I think the commanders that haven’t been killed are in the game,” said Mrs. Carranza Domínguez, “and the ones that have been killed, it is because they attacked crime.’’

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2006 ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

ROLEX AWARDS / XAVIER LECOULTRE

Chanda Schroff has revived the declining tradition of Kachchhi hand embroidery.

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or decades, Rolex, through its Awards for Enterprise program, has offered support to individuals dedicated to making a difference in science, technology, the environment, exploration and cultural heritage. The Awards program, now in its 30th year, recognizes singular, determined pioneers who empower the many and so change our world. The Geneva maker of fine timepieces has honored the 2006 laureates at its international prize-giving ceremony on Oct. 26 in Singapore, the first time the event has been held in Southeast Asia. Rolex created the Awards for Enterprise to furnish assistance to forward-looking individuals who seek to help humanity in new ways. Typically working on their own, often unpaid or outside the mainstream, these adventurous innovators frequently lack access to traditional endowments, nor do their ideas always fall into conventional categories. Through its commitment, Rolex supports theirs; the Awards are one of the many ways in which Rolex fosters the spirit of achievement and endeavor. Every two years, applications pour in from inventive visionaries around the world. Nearly 1,700 project proposals arrived at the Geneva headquarters from 117 countries for the 2006 round, the 12th since the Awards began in 1978. The oldest applicant was 97 — the youngest, 15. Particularly heartening

was this year’s increase in female applicants, as well as the final result: Three of the five laureates honored in 2006 are women. The 2006 winners hail from Australia, Britain, France, India and Thailand. They join the ranks of 55 previous honorees who have been celebrated by the Rolex Awards for Enterprise as initiators of projects that enhance the well-being of humans and the planet we share. The 2006 laureates are the French ethnologist Alexandra Lavrillier, founder of a nomadic school in southeast Siberia; Brad Nor-

man, an Australian marine conservationist who has devised a photo-identification system to help preserve the whale shark; the Thai professor Pilai Poonswad, who is working to save her country’s hornbill population and rain forests; Chanda Shroff, a reviver of threatened traditions of Indian hand embroidery; and the British zoologist Rory Wilson, who has invented a revolutionary device to measure the energy expenditure of animals in the wild. Each winner receives $100,000 and an inscribed gold Rolex chronometer. ‘‘These highly original proposals are sym-

bolic of the enterprising spirit we cherish at Rolex,’’ says Patrick Heiniger, Rolex’s chief executive officer. ‘‘We are proud to support this spirit and the individuals who exercise it. The winners of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise are making a difference, and that is what counts in today’s world. Thanks to them, our future looks a bit brighter.’’ In addition to the five winners, five Associate Laureates have also been selected. They are Cristian Donoso, Zenón Porfidio Gomel Apaza, Shafqat Hussain, Runa Khan Marre and Julien Meyer. �

Cultural heritage | Chanda Shroff

Empowering village women in India, stitch by stitch

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handa Shroff has spent the last 40 years saving a rich and intricate cultural tradition and improving the lives of women in India. The 73-year-old crafts teacher has been active since the 1960s in rescuing the hand-embroidery techniques of Kachchh, an isolated and impoverished corner of her native state of Gujarat. These creations represent more than just decorative brocade. Each of Kachchh’s 16 ethnic groups has, for thousands of years, produced its own distinctive style of needlework. The techniques, handed down from mother to daughter, are all means of person-

al expression in a harsh and arid region. But the modern use of synthetic materials began putting these traditions in peril, and this agesold artistry began to decline. ‘‘I was shaken by the plight of Kachchhi women,’’ says Shroff. ‘‘They were reduced to helplessness, while they possessed skills few others could claim.’’ The solution, she realized, lay literally in their own hands. In 1969, Shroff founded Shrujan (Sanskrit for ‘‘creativity’’), a nonprofit organization that began paying women to embroider. It provided raw materials, helped with designs and found customers. Since then, Shroff has

worked with over 22,000 women in 150 villages representing all 16 sewing styles, and has so revived the flagging craft. Yet, Shroff realized her organization would expire with the village elders if she weren’t able to inspire younger women. That idea became Pride and Enterprise. Its first phase, completed in 2004, created 1,200 embroidered panels showing the 16 styles. Its second phase involves their promotion, making the collection available to women in the region. They are often unable to leave their villages, so the Award money will build a mobile center to take the panels to them. �

Associate Laureates | 2006 winners

Five additional trailblazers for humanity

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he Rolex Awards for Enterprise honor a total of 10 winners for each series: five Laureates and five Associate Laureates. The five Associate Laureates in 2006 each receive $50,000 and a steel-and-gold Rolex chronometer. Ten years ago, when Runa Khan Marre focused her attention on the boats of Bangladesh, the 3,000-year-old tradition of building wooden river craft was losing out to steel hulls and diesel power. She set out to save this heritage by commissioning carpenters to carve scale models from materials used for full-sized boats. ‘‘Once we saw the models,’’ says 48-yearold Khan Marre, ‘‘we realized we had to do more.’’ Thus the idea of a living museum was born. Since 2004, local blacksmiths and sail makers have been working at the Living Museum of Traditional Country Boats of Bengal, restoring 40 varieties of river craft. Passion for a different type of boat inspired Cristian Donoso, who will take kayaks into western Patagonia to gather information

about this little-known and inhospitable region. Starting next September, the Chilean lawyer-explorer and his team will cross 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) of open sea, lakes, glaciers and mountains, facing a range of forbidding physical challenges as the local nomadic Kaweskar people did for 4,000 years. At times dragging the 200-kilogram (440 pound), provision-laden craft behind them, they will collect soil and fossil samples. The expedition will gain new knowledge of the region and help protect it. Farther north, high in the Peruvian Andes, the agronomist Zenón Gomel Apaza is laboring in the fields his ancestors have tilled for generations. Replacing what he believes is harmful modern technology, with its pesticides and high-yield hybrids, the 31-year-old is returning to ancient skills. He is undoing damage done to eroded hillsides by using environmentally sustainable farming methods. In the past, these time-tested formulae generated many new varieties of vegetables, rather than reducing them, as modern agriculture

How to apply for the 2008 Awards generally does. But the lessons of the past are reaping another harvest — they are transforming how communities are governed. People have communicated through whistling and drummed languages for millennia, but today these systems face extinction. Julien Meyer, a 30-year-old Frenchman, is committed to preserving them. His Rolex Award will support an interactive Internet site with recordings and photos he has collected over a decade, which include 34 whistled and drummed tongues, to be managed with the people who use the languages. Asian snow leopards suffer from a poor reputation among Himalayan herders. As the ibex, the leopards’ traditional prey, disappears, domesticated goats are falling victim to the feline, and the herders are killing snow leopards in defense. Shafqat Hussain has managed to convince the goatherds that protecting leopards is in their interest. His Project Snow Leopard provides insurance compensation for every goat lost. �

Though all eyes have now been on Singapore for the 12th Rolex Awards for Enterprise, matters are already moving ahead toward the next series, in 2008. The Rolex Awards for Enterprise have been won, since 1978, by people from all walks of life, including an accountant, a taxi driver, a teacher and a wine maker. There are no restrictions; applicants don’t need formal education, can be any age and can come from any country. What they do need is a unique project that will help mankind take a step forward, coupled with the desire to make an impact. The deadline for the AsiaPacific region and the Americas is May 31, 2007; for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, it is Sept. 30, 2007. The five winners of the 13th series of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise will

join the ranks of outstanding men and women who, aided by Rolex, have helped the world face new challenges. Winners will each receive $100,000 and a specially inscribed gold Rolex chronometer. But perhaps more important, their work will gain worldwide recognition through the company’s international campaigns. Applicants and their projects will be assessed by a jury selected for each Awards series. Voluntary and independent, jury members are invited to join the Selection Committee not only because of their international reputations as specialists, but also because their interests, knowledge and their own spirit of enterprise mirror the ethos of the Rolex Awards and make them qualified to recognize similar traits in the candidates whose projects they evaluate.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2006

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ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

Education | Alexandra Lavrillier

Marine biology | Brad Norman

A school that follows the ways of nomads

Whale sharks, mapped with star methods

Her Rolex Award for Enterprise will help operate the school for the first three years, paying the teachers’ salaries and allowing Lavrillier to buy much-needed multimedia equipment — as well as a new team of 15 reindeer to haul it. In the meantime, her heart belongs to these people and she is proud of the contribution she is making. ‘‘Those who remain nomadic are the sole custodians of this culture,’’ she says. �

Two tent classrooms are the ambulatory halls of academe where Lavrillier and her team teach the standard Russian math, history, geography and natural science classes. In addition, they provide courses on Evenk culture. But her two-dozen six-to-10-year-olds also learn computer basics and foreign languages (English and French), possibilities offered by no other educational facility available to Siberian nomads. At the same time, tribal elders pass on traditional skills to the young

ROLEX AWARDS / MARC LATZEL

Migratory classrooms

The Evenk tradtions of Siberia will be preserved through Alexandra Lavrillier’s traveling school.

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rad Norman’s first encounter with the whale shark — the world’s largest fish — was unforgettable. ‘‘My eyes were popping out of my head,’’ he recalls. ‘‘It looked like a bus under water. I nearly swallowed my snorkel.’’ The meeting, as it turns out, was decisive for the destinies of both the 38-year-old Australian and Rhincodon typus, as the species is scientifically known. Despite its size — it can reach 20 meters (65 feet) in length and weigh 20 tons — little is known about this gentle giant of the deep, other than it feeds on shrimp and small fish and has never been known to hunt man. Until recently, its population, breeding and habitat preferences were unknown. In 2000, its conservation status was listed as ‘‘data deficient.’’ Since that seminal 1995 encounter off a beach in Western Australia, Norman has dedicated his life to understanding the whale shark. He has earned a 2006 Rolex Award for Enterprise for his plan to involve thousands of divers and tourists around the world in its conservation and for helping to extend our knowledge of the species. Norman is one of the first naturalists to study the whale shark in depth. His painstaking research revealed that each individual bears a pattern of white spots on its body, as distinctive as a human fingerprint. This inspired him to try underwater photography to identify individual animals. In 1999, he set up a Whale Shark Photo-Identification Library on the Internet. Yet, despite a growing body of information, he found he had no means of comparing different sharks. So the diver reached for the stars — literally. An astronomer friend at NASA showed him a technique used by the Hubble Space Telescope to

Zoology | Rory Wilson

Conservation | Pilai Poonswad

Reading the energy diary of elusive animals

Sowing seeds of regeneration

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problem is that animals do things in places where you can’t observe them,’’ the 49-year-old says. The trick is to find ways to watch them without actually being there — a trick he has repeatedly mastered. An original thinker in behavioral ecology, Wilson, professor of aquatic biology at the Institute of Environmental Sustainability at the University of Wales, brings a flair for developing new technological approaches to today’s ecological questions. It started 25 years ago, while he was studying African penguins. He realized his research would remain

ROLEX AWARDS / MARC LATZEL

racking animals is a tricky business in the best of times. But following them in their hidden habitats demands a different brand of patience and perseverance. Rory Wilson can testify to that. Finding ways of being present when human beings can’t, to monitor hardto-get-at species, has been his challenge since the early 1980s. The British zoologist has spent a career unearthing ways to learn the hunting patterns of creatures that feed under the sea, or discovering the mating habits of those that burrow deep in the ground. ‘‘The main

Thanks to the devices developed by Rory Wilson, endangered species can be monitored.

incomplete unless he found a way to observe them under water, where they spend much of the day. So he invented one: The world’s first ‘‘penguin speedometer’’ was a pellet in a syringe attached to a bird that recorded how fast it dived and swam. This first creation set him on a professional path as an originator of ways to access animals when and where scientists normally could not. He has since developed two-dozen devices, each time pushing the technology envelope to advance animal research. His latest brainchild is a lightweight electronic logger, a miniature recorder that, when fitted to animals, provides data on how they perform in different environments. In particular, it estimates how much energy an animal expends flying, swimming, hunting, digging, fighting, feeding or mating. These figures, unavailable until now, will yield a picture of a species’ entire energy spend — vital statistics about its survival. The new device is no bigger than a cellphone and weighs less than 50 grams, or two ounces. Wilson’s invention is likely to revolutionize animal conservation. Despite this, up until now he has been unable to raise sufficient funding, as his project falls between two disciplines, biology and physics. The funds from the Rolex Award will allow his project to make rapid advances. ‘‘My master plan is to create a generic diary for animals which will give us an understanding of how they work,’’ Wilson says, ‘‘so we can make useful conservation decisions.’’ The beneficiaries are ‘‘the unthinkable number of animals that need to be properly understood.’’ �

I

n her efforts to save an endangered species in the Thai rain forest, Pilai Poonswad has faced cobras, tigers, bears — even leeches. She has had to use all her powers of persuasion to make poachers and bandit loggers in southern Thailand stop destroying the forest and stealing hornbills, regal birds that measure up to 1.5 meters (5 feet) in length. Poonswad, an academic from Bangkok, has also had to win the trust and respect of villagers who were suspicious of her. The story of Pilai Poonswad, a 59year-old microbiology professor, is a lesson in perseverance and diplomacy, illustrating how it can often take more than one set of skills to bring a dream to completion. Deforestation and poachers were gradually obliterating the species of hornbill indigenous to southern Thailand when Poonswad began explor-

A web of enterprise Further information on the Rolex Awards for Enterprise is available on www.rolexawards.com. Entrants for the next series can also complete the official application online, or download the form and submit it by mail to the Rolex Awards Secretariat, P.O. Box 1311, 1211 Geneva 26, Switzerland. The Web site includes interviews with prominent scientists and explorers who have served as judges of the Awards and articles from the Rolex Awards magazine about past laureates.

ROLEX AWARDS / KURT AMSLER

generation: fishing, herding and fashioning clothes from animal skins. Lavrillier’s initiative has turned young Evenks into active agents in the preservation of their heritage. They work with their teacher to document life and culture in their native taiga, or forest. Drawn since childhood to the Far North, Lavrillier at 36 is integrated into the Evenk way of life; she married a local herder in 2000, and she and her husband have a small daughter.

Brad Norman’s groundbreaking whale shark project includes NASA-developed techniques.

map star patterns in the night sky. Norman adopted the method, called the Groth algorithm, to chart the patterns of white spots on the shark’s dark hide. The idea had never been applied to marine science; it took Norman and his colleagues to see the link between the heavens and the high seas. Months of intense work followed as he refined the algorithm for a living creature. After countless sessions of calculations and computer programming, his team came up with a reliable way of adopting the celestial method to distinguish individual whale sharks. It was a breakthrough for biology.

Today, Norman’s images are fleshing out a portrait of a species that has remained hazy up until now, building a global picture of its population and habits. What is more, since the animals travel huge distances to collect food, their demographics are an indicator of the health of all the oceans and of our impact on them. Over 500 animals have been identified and added to his database. There is now growing public awareness of the big fish, and contributions come from the world over. ‘‘Anyone with a disposable underwater camera can play a part in conserving whale sharks and monitor the health of the oceans,’’ says Norman. �

ROLEX AWARDS / TOMAS BERTELSEN

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n a far corner of Siberia, the cultural heritage of an ethnic minority of wandering hunter-herders has been gradually slipping away. Since the late 1960s, its children have been sent to Russian boarding schools, where their nomadic traditions and customs form no part of the national curriculum. ‘‘The separation is painful,’’ says the ethnologist Alexandra Lavrillier. ‘‘It creates a lost generation, caught between modernity and tradition.’’ Lavrillier is a bright spot in this picture. The enterprising and determined Frenchwoman has brought some of the children back home, and is helping to preserve a culture in jeopardy. She has founded a nomadic school, adapted to the seasonal calendar of these migrating folk, the Evenk, one of 30 ethnic groups in Siberia. Before Lavrillier arrived, most of the remaining 30,000 Evenk had lost touch with their ancestral hunting and fishing ways. Most live in towns and villages, out of touch with their own traditions. Lavrillier’s traveling school follows the rhythmic passages of the Evenk — who cover an average of 1,000 kilometers, or about 600 miles, a year — and adapts to the children’s lifestyle. Youngsters live with their parents and continue playing a vital role in their community.

In Thailand, Pilai Poonswad is working with the local community to protect hornbills.

ing the region in 1994. She confronted the poachers first, using her teacher’s art of communication, her people skills and her natural charisma. Join my team, she urged them; stop raiding and start saving the birds. She argued that the hornbill chicks that the poachers were exporting illegally were vital to the forest. Hornbills consume up to 80 different kinds of fruits, spreading the seeds across hectares of forest. The logic was convincing; she managed to recruit and convert 12 poachers in the first year, turning animal pillagers into animal protectors. She approached the hostile villagers next, offering to pay them to locate and watch over hornbill nests, and collect data. She sketched the barren prospect that plundered forests would mean for their children and outlined the economic benefits

of a concept new to the villagers: ecotourism. The locals listened and, again, mind-sets changed. By 2005, 41 people from nine villages were safeguarding 176 nests belonging to six different hornbill species. Poonswad has faced numerous obstacles, but has overcome all of them. When a downturn in Thailand’s economy threatened her project in 1997, she came back with a fund-raising plan allowing urban residents to ‘‘adopt’’ a hornbill nest for an annual $120 donation. The money pays the salaries of the nest monitors; subscribers receive information and photos of their nests and can visit them. Poonswad’s efforts have resulted in hornbill survival, a reversal of deforestation, alternative livelihoods for local people and, perhaps most impressive, a total change in their attitudes. �

Advancing human endeavor: The 12th Rolex Awards for Enterprise did not involve the reporting or editorial departments of the IHT. It was sponsored by Rolex. Text: JOSHUA JAMPOL. For information on IHT Advertising Supplements: [email protected]

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2006

UNE FOIS TOUS LES CORPS ENTERRÉS AU DARFOUR, COMMENT L’HISTOIRE VA-T-ELLE NOUS JUGER ?

Des civils innocents sont massacrés au Darfour. Vous pouvez y mettre fin. 400 000 morts. 2,5 millions de réfugiés. Un nombre incalculable de personnes violées, torturées et terrorisées. Des hommes. Des femmes. Des enfants. Pour mettre fin à l’horreur, l’intervention immédiate d’une puissante force de maintien de la paix des Nations Unies est indispensable. Et cela nécessitera une véritable implication des leaders mondiaux.

Arrêtez le massacre. | www.DayForDarfur.org

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2006

LE MONDE W O R L D

Research and Cash Needed to Aid A Warming Globe Continued From Page 1 mists, engineers and entrepreneurs interviewed by The New York Times said that unless the search for abundant non-polluting energy sources and systems became far more aggressive, the world would probably face dangerous warming and international strife as nations with growing energy demands compete for increasingly inadequate resources. Most of these experts also say existing energy alternatives and improvements in energy efficiency are simply not enough. “We cannot come close to stabilizing temperatures” unless humans, by the end of the century, stop adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than it can absorb, said W. David Montgomery of Charles River Associates, a consulting group, “and that will be an economic impossibility without a major R.& D. investment.” A sustained push is needed not just to refine, test and deploy known low-carbon technologies, but also to find “energy technologies that don’t have a name yet,” said James A. Edmonds, a chief scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute of the University of Maryland and the Energy Department. At the same time, many energy experts and economists agree on another daunting point: To make any resulting “alternative” energy options the new norm will require attaching a significant cost to the carbon emissions from coal, oil and gas. “A price incentive stirs people to look at a thousand different things,’ ” said Henry D. Jacoby, a climate and energy expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For now, a carbon cap or tax is opposed by President Bush, most American lawmakers and many industries. And there are scant signs of consensus on a long-term successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the first treaty obligating participating industrial countries to cut warming emissions. (The United States has not ratified the pact.) The next round of talks on Kyoto and an underlying voluntary treaty will take place this month in Nairobi, Kenya. Environmental campaigners, focused on promptly establishing binding limits on emissions of heattrapping gases, have tended to play down the need for big investments seeking energy breakthroughs. At the end of “An Inconvenient Truth,” former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary film on climate change, he concluded: “We already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem.” While applauding Mr. Gore’s enthusiasm, many energy experts said this stance was counterproductive because there was no way, given global growth in energy demand, that existing technology could avert a doubling or more of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in this century. Mr. Gore has since adjusted his stance, saying existing technology is sufficient to start on the path to a stable climate. Other researchers say the chances of success are so low, unless something breaks the societal impasse, that any technology quest should also include work on increasing the resilience to climate extremes — through actions like developing more drought-tolerant crops — as well as last-minute climate fixes, like testing ways to block some incoming sunlight to counter warming. Without big reductions in emissions, the midrange projections of most scenarios envision a rise of 4 degrees or so in this century, four times the warming in the last 100 years. Sir Nicholas Stern, the chief of Britain’s economic service and author of the new government report on climate options, has summarized the cumulative nature of the threat succinctly: “The sting is in the tail.”

What Matters Most Reducing human influence on the climate would require big changes in how energy for electricity and for transportation is produced and used. Here are a few of the options that many climate and energy experts put at the top of their lists for cutting heat-trapping emissions in the next 50 years, derived from recent Princeton University studies.

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T R E N D S

ANNUAL CARBON* EMISSIONS

14 billion tons

7 Projection with no action Increase of 7 billion tons 0

ANDREW C. REVKIN

’60 ’70 ’80 ’90 ’00 ’10 ’20 ’30

’40 ’50

*3.67 tons of carbon dioxide contains 1 ton of carbon.

Top priorities

Seven steps industry and governments could take in the next 50 years, each of which would cut emissions by a billion tons. European Press Photo Agency

CAPTURING CARBON DIOXIDE

SHORT TERM

LONG TERM

• When designing new coalburning plants, leave space for equipment to be invented and installed later that could capture carbon dioxide.

• Conduct large-scale tests of systems for pressurizing and piping carbon dioxide long distances.

• Scale up testing of existing

geological formations under

plant designs that produce

continents and the sea to find repositories that can hold billions of tons of compressed carbon dioxide for centuries.

streams of storable carbon dioxide. 1 Capture 90 percent of the

carbon dioxide from 800 new billion-watt coal-burning power plants.

NUCLEAR POWER

• Expand testing of safer, and more flexible, reactor designs. • Intensify work on ways to safely store waste and protect plants

from terrorists or other threats – vital if public support for nuclear power is to build.

Experts foresee flooding, drought and strife over energy.

• Test many more kinds of

• Do more research on methods that might pull carbon dioxide out of the air instead of a power plant.

• Sustain and expand support for research on fusion, which remains a distant but potentially monumental prospect, as it has for decades.

2 Displace planned coal plants with about 880 new nuclear plants.

TRANSPORTATION

• Raise efficiency standards for vehicles. • Intensify research on battery designs. 3 The projected 2 billion cars on roads get 60 miles per gallon instead of 30.

• Do basic work on the many steps involved in making hydrogen a climate-friendly fuel. • Shift zoning, planning, and transportation strategies to encourage clustered living and alternatives to single-passenger travel.

4 Increase wind power 80fold and use that energy to make hydrogen fuel for cars.

ELECTRICITY

• Improve efficiency of electricity generation and use through a mix of tightening standards and increased public and private R.& D. 5 Raise the efficiency of 1,600 full size power plants that turn the energy locked in coal into electricity from 40 to 60 percent. 6 Cut 25% of electricity use in homes, offices and stores.

SOLAR POWER

• Create more incentives to expand use of existing solar power technologies. • Expand existing solar thermal power plants, which use mirrors to concentrate the sun’s heat and drive turbines.

• Expand research to find ways to sharply cut the manufacturing cost of photovoltaic cells and boost the amount of electricity they generate. • Develop efficient and cheap batteries so that solar energy (and wind power) can be stored.

7 The amount of electricity-

generated using solar technologies is raised 700-fold.

• Test systems that could harvest solar energy in orbit and beam it to earth in large volumes using microwaves.

Sources: Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, Princeton University

The New York Times

French smokers are complaining about pending smoking bans, but Italians know there is no real need to worry. NEWS ANALYSIS

Italians Embrace Life Without Tobacco By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL TO: French citizens worried that the impending smoking ban will cause irreparable harm to their cafe society and can never be enforced. From: Italy, the neighbor to the southeast, which has been there, done that. On January 10, 2005, Italy enacted a law that banned smoking in public places like offices, restaurants, cafes and bars. Smokers declared they would never comply. Restaurateurs were certain business would slow. And politicians worried that an essential pleasure of Italy would be lost. Nearly two years later, people in Italy smoke less and are exposed to less secondhand smoke In fact, the law has become very popular, with support for smoking bans increasing yearly among nonsmokers and smokers alike. Business in bars is up. “Italy is not known for success with this kind of regulation, so if it is working in Italy, it can work everywhere,’’ said Silvano Gallus, a researcher at the Mario Negri Institute in Milan, who has studied the law’s effect. There were howls in the weeks before the ban took hold, just as there is anger building now in France. “Before antismoking laws, every country thinks, ‘Our country is different, we won’t be able to enforce the law here,’ ’’ said Geoffrey Fong, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada who leads the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project. “But in every community that’s gone ahead and tried it, strong initial resistance very quickly gives way to acceptance.’’ Almost two years after the legislation was enacted, Italians have accepted their new world. And happily. In interviews with bar owners and restaurateurs in Rome, all re-

sponded with broad praise for the law and said it had not hurt business. “It was a huge change, a shock, but most people came to appreciate it since it has improved the atmosphere for dining,’’ said Alberto Baldo, manager of the Vernissage Restaurant and Wine Bar in Piazza San Eustacio. “Everyone accepts it now, even smokers. No one wants to go back.’’ In the three months after the ban, cigarette sales dropped 8 percent, Italian tobacco sales data indicate. In 2004, more than 26 percent of the Italian population smoked. That dropped to 24.3 percent in 2006, although it is not clear how much of the drop can be attributed to the ban, since the numbers had been decreasing slightly anyway. A study in Ireland, whose ban in 2004 was the first in Europe, showed that half of all smokers said the smoke-free law had made them more likely to quit. “We can say that smoke-free policies account for a decrease in consumption,’’ Mr. Gallus said. In a representative survey of more than 3,000 Italians conducted by Mr. Gallus in collaboration with the DOXA Institute, a polling group, 9.6 percent of those who responded said they went to bars and restaurants more since the smoking ban; 7.4 percent said they went out less. “The tobacco industry says that people will go out of business with a smoking ban, but that’s just a myth, it’s not supported by evidence,’’ Mr. Fong said. So, dear French neighbors, don’t fret about being smoke free. Your ban won’t really hit until 2008, anyway. Italians will tell you they worried for naught. Maurizio Bertusi, owner of Rome’s Enoteca Capranica, said: “It has been good, actually, because everywhere there are more nonsmokers than smokers, so this keeps the larger number happy.’’

For All Our Earthly Woes, the Obese Often Will Get the Blame Society criticizes obesity and its costs, but in response to such pressure, overweight people often eat more.

Continued From Page 1 they wrote, based on the extra 4.5 kilograms the average American gained in the 1990s, is about 1.3 billion liters, which means an extra 3.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. “People are out scouring the landscape for things that make obese people look bad,’’ said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. And is that a bad thing? Dr. Jacobson doesn’t think so. “We felt that beyond public health, being overweight has many other socioeconomic implications,’’ he said, which was why he was drawn to calculating the gasoline costs of added weight. The idea of using economic incen-

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

tives to help people shed weight comes up in the periodic calls for taxes on junk food. Martin B. Schmidt, an economist at the College of William and Mary, suggests a tax on food bought at drivethrough windows. Dr. Schmidt said people would expend more calories if

they had to get out of their cars to pick up their food. “We tax cigarettes in part because of their health cost,’’ he wrote. “Similarly, the individual’s decision to lead a sedentary lifestyle will end up costing taxpayers.’’ Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, said such claims often get wide attention and take on a life of their own.“This is like, let’s find another reason to scapegoat fat people,’’ Dr. Oliver says. At an annual meeting of the Obesity Society, one talk correlated obesity

with deaths in car accidents, and another correlated obesity with suicides. Dr. Oliver, who attended, said no one in the crowd of at least 200 questioned whether the correlations were really cause and effect. “The funny thing was that everyone took it seriously,’’ he said. Fat people are more reviled than ever, researchers find, even as more people become fat. When smokers and heavy drinkers turned pariah, rates of smoking and drinking went down. Won’t fat people, in turn, follow that pattern? Research suggests that the stigma of being fat leads to more eating, not less, and with obesity the stigma seems to be growing along with the national girth. One problem with blaming people for being fat, obesity researchers say, is that getting thin is not like quitting smoking. People struggle to stop smok-

ing, but many, in the end, succeed. Obesity is different. It’s not that the obese don’t care. Instead, as science has shown over and over, the obese have limited personal control over their weight. Genes play a significant role, the science says. But there is a notion that anyone can be thin with a little effort, and this notion has consequences. “Once weight is due to a personal failing, a lot of things follow,’’ Dr. Brownell said. There’s the attitude that if you are fat, you deserve to be stigmatized. Maybe it will motivate you to lose weight. The opposite happens. In a paper published October 10 in Obesity, Dr. Brownell and his colleagues studied more than 3,000 fat people, asking them about their stigmatization and how they responded. Almost everyone said they ate more.

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S T Y L E S Tomasz Stanko, the Polish musician, toured the United States.

A Message of Freedom Through Jazz By NATE CHINEN NEW YORK — For the trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, one of the most acclaimed improvising musicians in Europe, the significance of jazz was unmistakable the first time he heard it more than 50 years ago. “The message was freedom,’’ he said during an interview in mid-October at a Manhattan hotel room. “For me, as a Polish who was living in Communist country,’’ he continued in his slightly broken English, “jazz was synonym of Western culture, of freedom, of this different style of life.’’ Speaking in a rapid-fire cadence, checkered-framed glasses accenting his oval face, the 64-year-old Mr. Stanko resembled a weathered but ageless hipster, which in some ways he is. As a young man, he led one of the first European bands inspired by the free jazz of Ornette Coleman. His solo career was an underground affair until about a decade

A musician whose yearnings led to improvisations. ago, when a new batch of lyrical albums for the German label ECM sparked a surge in recognition at home in Europe and in the United States. Mr. Stanko, who lives in Warsaw, was in New York between stops on a 12-city tour, his fourth cross-country American trek in five years. He was expected shortly at a reception organized by the Polish Consulate, across from his hotel; he would play solo, then with classical musicians on a chamber composition. “He is one of the greatest figures of Polish culture,’’ the consul general, Krzysztof W. Kasprzyk, would later proclaim, adding that he had first heard Mr. Stanko

as a student in Krakow in the 1960’s. Like most Eastern Europeans of his generation, Mr. Stanko encountered jazz through Voice of America broadcasts and State Department tours; the music registered as a soundtrack of freedom partly because it was packaged that way by the United States government. Mr. Stanko recalled seeing Dave Brubeck in a 1958 tour. In a 1958 interview in Down Beat magazine cited by the historian Penny M. Von Eschen in her book “Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War,’’ Mr. Brubeck described that tour: “Whenever there was a dictatorship in Europe, jazz was outlawed,’’ he said. “And whenever freedom returned to those countries, the playing of jazz inevitably accompanied it.’’ In Poland, he added, the word freedom “was in the mouths of everybody we had anything to do with.’’ Mr. Stanko said he still remembered that sort of yearning, which could be said to exist, on a subconscious level, even on

Michael J. Lutch for The New York Times

“Lontano,’’ his latest album. “Lontano’’ is a haunting, suitelike effort, with Mr. Stanko’s trumpet as the running thread. But it is more restless than its predecessors; often it assumes an avant-garde elasticity evocative of

Drink Up. You Don’t Have Lines to Learn. By HEATHER FLETCHER For Dave Kerpen, his drink of choice was potent Long Island iced teas. He says he had eight of them during his first night as a cast member of the reality dating show “Paradise Hotel.” “It was open bar 3 o’clock on, every day, for three months,” said Mr. Kerpen. He recalled that cast members were offered beer, wine, mixed drinks and shots before segments in which roommates revealed secrets about one another. “It’s a very stressful situation to have so many cameras on you. It takes a lot of getting used to. So there’s a relaxation factor that alcohol can assist with. Like any situation in which people are drinking socially, it’s easy to keep drinking with them.” Mr. Kerpen is one of a number of reality show veterans who, now released from the expired nondisclosure clauses

in their contracts, say that alcohol was one of the producers’ favorite tools. The former contestants say producers made alcohol, but not food, very available, and encouraged them to drink before emotional scenes. Now 30, married and living in New York, Mr. Kerpen said he had no regrets about his days on the 2003 Fox show, even though he said he was drunk or nearly so for 4 of his 13 hours on television. “I think, for the most part, people sign up for reality shows knowing what to expect,” he said. “That being said, producers should be ethical. Producers shouldn’t go out of their way to encourage reality contestants to drink.” But advocates of programs like VH1’s “Flavor of Love” and MTV’s “Real World” are steadfast that they do not cross the line and encourage excessive drinking. “If the question is, ‘Has there ever

Cast members on reality shows, like these on Season 9 of ‘‘The Bachelor,’’ are often encouraged to drink as much alcohol as they want.

Craig Sjodin/ABC

been a reality show producer who has used alcohol to get more out of their contestants?’ I would say yes,’’ said Stuart Krasnow, executive producer of the Oxygen Network show “The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency.” “And I’d be willing to bet my mortgage on that one.” But many producers and network

representatives argue that social drinking is a fixture of modern life — especially among young people — and that depicting alcohol consumption is essential to their shows’ verisimilitude. Besides, as even the former cast members acknowledge, they could have said “No, thanks.” Sarah Kozer was a contestant on the

Mr. Stanko’s earlier, freedom-seeking recordings. “It’s true that I come back to the past, to improvised music,’’ Mr. Stanko said. “But exactly my mood. This is what I really love in music, you know, this kind of narration, like maybe what in literature Faulkner has.’’ “Kattorna,’’ the only nonoriginal piece on “Lontano,’’ is the jauntiest track on the album and has served as a set closer for Mr. Stanko’s quartet on its current tour. The musicians played it during their late show at the Regattabar, a jazz club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a couple of nights after the Polish Consulate reception. “We play this music different live,’’ Mr. Stanko had said in New York, and the Regattabar set illustrated his point, conveying an energy more emphatic but less experimental than on “Lontano.’’ “This is my way to follow roots: to get ideas, not sound,’’ Mr. Stanko said. “To get ideas,’’ he reiterated, “but in my way. In my language.’’

2003 Fox hit “Joe Millionaire,” in which she and others competed to win the affections of a bachelor. She says she was drunk or close to it in 90 percent of her on-air scenes. A 10-hour date at a winery with the show’s male love interest and a 10-hour grand ball with one tray of appetizers and unlimited Champagne led Ms. Kozer to one conclusion: Producers were trying to get her drunk. “Anytime anyone ever wanted something to drink, it was made available,” said Ms. Kozer, 31, who works as a television host and writer in Los Angeles. “Whereas if you requested tampons you’d have to wait a couple days.” Marc Marcuse, who was an “Average Joe” contestant in 2003, now runs Reel Management, booking appearances for more than 180 reality television personalities. He said he did not find the practice to be unethical. “If you encourage me to pull out a gun and kill someone, I’m still not going to pull out a gun and kill someone,” he said. “There’s a degree of personal responsibility there.”

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