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INTELLIGENCE

The provocative silence of Havana.

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ThE obAMA PRESIdENCY

Detention after Guantánamo.

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Married to the Mob karova, a lawyer and executive director In theory, the 21st century is marked of the Bulgarian Judges Association, by 21st-century threats, like global tertold Doreen Carvajal of the Times that ror networks and sophisticated cyber lawyers were well aware of judges with attacks. But in many places, the probcriminal ties. lems are more familiar, parochial and “How do we know?” Ms. old-fashioned: drug dealing, LENS Pushkarova said. “They have prostitution, kidnapping and marriage connections or corruption, all the hallmarks of business ties with organized organized crime. criminal bosses. They are In developing countries, rackneighbors.” eteering thrives on instability. In parts of Mexico, criminal But it can be hard to eradicate gangs fueled by the booming even in more prosperous and drug trade have diversified into well-regulated places. kidnapping for ransom. The naIn Japan, for example, the tion’s affluent families have responded criminal syndicates known as yakuza by hiring swarms of bodyguards for have been tolerated as regulators of themselves and their children, donning gambling, sex trades and other shadowy designer clothes made of bulletproof enterprises, so long as they do not dismaterial and, in some cases, leaving the turb the peace. But in the city of Kurume, residents protested when a factional feud country altogether. “There’s an exodus, and it’s all about among the Dojinkai, the local yakuza, led insecurity,” Guillermo Alonso Meneses, to shootouts in the street. As Norimitsu an anthropologist at the Colegio de la Onishi reported in The Times, more than Frontera Norte in Tijuana, told Marc 600 alarmed neighbors recently went Lacey of The Times. “A psychosis has to court to try to evict the Dojinkai from developed. There’s fear of getting kidtheir six-story Kurume headquarters. napped or killed.” That kind of civic action is less likely But in places where there is little govin a country like Bulgaria, where wideernment to speak of, anything organized spread mob influence is assumed to can look like a boon, even crime. Coninfect the legal system itself. Iva Push-

sider the audacious pirates of Somalia: seizing freighters in poorly patrolled waters of the Indian Ocean — most recently, a Saudi-owned supertanker, the largest ship ever hijacked — they have built a lucrative business collecting ransoms in a region otherwise lacking for opportunity. And in the eastern Congo, as Lydia Polgreen reported in The Times, a tin mining operation run by a renegade army brigade provides employment to hordes of miners and porters, and a certain level of assurance to their customers. “To be honest, it is better for us that they are there,” said Bakwe Selomba, an ore purchaser. “I can send my buyers walking through the jungle with lots of money, but nobody will touch them as long as we pay the tax.” The yakuza also claim to promote stability in Japan. But in Kurume, Nobuyuki Shinozuka, 54, the Dojinkai’s acting chairman, was philosophical about the lawsuit his group faces — and about the place of organized crime in any society. “It’s up to the state,” he told Mr. Onishi. “If the state feels it no longer needs us, it can pass a law banning the yakuza. But if it feels even a little bit that it still needs us, then we’ll find some way to survive.”

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2008 o p i n i o n & C o m m e n ta ry intelligenCe/roger Cohen

editorials of the times

Bailout Needs Some Clarity A month into the Bush administration’s $700 billion bank bailout, the effort has become as fractured as the ad hoc rescues that it was supposed to replace. As a result, the modest easing the bailout initially brought about in the credit markets is now being reversed over doubts about the Treasury’s stewardship of the plan. The rates for loans between banks have begun edging up again, and consumer borrowing costs are also up — that is, assuming consumers can find a bank willing to lend. President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team is reportedly planning how the new administration will better manage the bailout. But two months is a long time to wait while the Bush Treasury burns through the bailout billions, with little to show in terms of enhanced stability and even less in terms of enhanced confidence. Recently Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined a complex new bailout strategy intended to promote consumer borrowing. Mr. Paulson defended this latest iteration, saying he would never apologize for changing his approach as the facts change. But it is not surprising that everyone else is feeling confused. Before the bailout even got under way in October, Mr. Paulson had to sideline his original strategy — to buy up banks’ bad assets — because, he soon came to realize, it was too complex and indirect to deliver the swift jolt the financial markets needed. He indicated that he would return to that strategy later, but to get the bailout started, he opted instead to directly invest $250 billion in the nation’s banks. The about face was necessary, but it raised uncertainty about whether the Treasury really had a firm grasp of the problem — exactly what shaky markets don’t need. Since then, the doubts have grown, among investors and the public. Mr. Paulson invested the taxpayers’ money on terms so lenient that banks have felt free to hoard it, or to buy other banks — while refusing to bolster lending to consumers and small businesses. He has diverted another $40 billion of the fund to American International Group, the reckless insurance company that had already received $85 billion in federal assistance. If government officials know where all that money is going, they haven’t shared their knowledge with the public. Mr. Paulson disappointed investors by ditching the plan to buy up banks’ bad assets. Instead, he expanded the bailout to include investing money in nonbank financial companies, like GMAC, the lending arm of General Motors, and the other carmakers’ lending units. He also announced that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve were considering a plan to use taxpayer money to jump-start consumer lending via credit cards, car loans and student loans. The Fed quickly said the plan was still in early development. The one approach Mr. Paulson stubbornly refuses to consider is using bailout money to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. His reasoning — that the money is to be used to stabilize the financial system — inexplicably ignores the fact that the instability he is seeking to quell is rooted in the housing bust. Over the next two months, Mr. Paulson must impose some coherence and clarity on the bailout. Otherwise he will only fan anxieties and mistrust, which will undermine the effectiveness of his good decisions and amplify the fallout of his bad ones. With markets gyrating wildly, and the economy deteriorating rapidly, the nation needs clear leadership and a sound plan.

In Havana, Time to Reflect measure of Cuba’s failure. Life is hard for Havana, Cuba most Cubans. It is very hard. If there’s a place on earth untouched It is also less than free, and that I cannot by the global financial crisis, it’s Fidel accept. Castro’s Cuba. As the 50th anniversary Yet, at a moment when the West, in one of the revolution that swept him to power way or another, is assessing the huge cost on January 1, 1959, approaches, Fidel preof excess, I found myself feeling more indulsides still over his quietly decaying socialgent toward ailing Fidel than I would have ist experiment. thought possible. Stress inhabits the wired societies of His obstinate pursuit of an unfashionmodern capitalism. From Hong Kong to able idea has driven many Cubans to flight, Houston, there is little relief from the presstill more to misery. The Cuban economy sure to have more. As there is not much to makes no sense. But Fidel’s obsession has have in sagging Cuba, that particular angst also instilled forms of pride, civility, altrudoes not exist. In its place hovers the deism, education and humor that are woven pression of idle days. into the frayed fabric of Cuban life and conMasonry sags in lovely Havana. Paint stitute its strange resilience. peels. The Atlantic pounds the Malecon, I sympathize with every Cuban who perhaps the most beautiful urban waterlongs to escape this beautiful island. But front in the world, sending eruptions of I thank Cuba for allowing me to press the spray over the granite wall. People gaze. pause button. We all need that from time to Their minimal salaries buy little. There is time. no incentive to work harder. Conversation ASSOCIATED PRESS The shock of being sucked into Havana’s is the sole thriving commodity as the city crumbles. Life in Cuba is very hard and doctrinaire, but it has been frozen half-life is matched only by the shock of emerging from it, back to Starbucks, and General Motors, Citigroup, A.I.G. and spared the worst gyrations of the global financial crisis. Christmas carols (already), and 500 waitlate lamented Lehman Brothers: these ing emails, and the gyrating Dow and disare faraway names in Cuba, where the lost glory of Detroit is on display in the form of 1950s in which to reflect. There is no visual clutter in Cu- appearing jobs. The danger in this globalized assault on our Pontiacs and Studebakers with their extravagant ba. Yes, there are countless exhortations to further fins and hulking forms. Before consumerism inten- the glory of socialism, daubed on walls, trumpeted senses, this insatiable demand on our very beings, sified, things were built to last. In the absence of on billboards, but the ad-free landscape rests the is that of dehumanization. As the credit-driven party unwinds, people are consuming less and renew cars, Cubans have contrived their very own eye. Life without brands exists after all. On the eight-lane, trans-island national highway, flecting more. United States auto museum. In this time of questioning, Cuba offers no anThey have also, at great cost to themselves, af- started with Soviet help, abandoned at its halfway forded the rushing world a place of strange silence point when the Soviet Union imploded, three cars swers. But it is provocative. The obverse of the pass every couple of minutes. A great emptiness haunting humanity within its material failure is extends. This almost unfathomable absence is one the inhumanity of material excess. Send comments to [email protected].

niCholas d. kristof

Talia for President For those of you who don’t happen to be named Barack, change in the next four years might seem a spectator sport. In the aftermath of a campaign, it’s natural to think that the agenda now is in the hands of our newly elected leaders, and that the agents of change will be government officials in Washington. Yet the best proof that you don’t need a White House pass to accomplish change comes from youthful social entrepreneurs around the country. Too naïve to realize that they are powerless, these kids are flexing remarkable muscle. If your image of a philanthropist is a stout, gray geezer, then meet Talia Leman, an eighth grader in Iowa who loves soccer and swimming, and whose favorite subject is science. I’m supporting her for president in 2044. When Talia was 10 years old, she saw television clips of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and decided to help. She galvanized other kids and started a movement to trick-or-treat at Halloween for coins for hurricane victims. The movement caught the public imagination, Talia made it on the “Today” show, and the campaign raised more than $10 million. With that success behind her, Talia organized a program called RandomKid to help other young social entrepreneurs organize and raise money. At randomkid.org, young people can link up with others to participate in various philanthropic ventures. On the Web site, Talia has organized a campaign to build a school in rural Cambodia, backed by children in 48 states and 19 countries. Likewise, she’s working with schools in seven

: 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.

Dans l’article “Justice After Guantánamo”, page 3: to try: ici, juger to deem: considérer, estimer to proseCute: poursuivre (justice) to be ConviCted: être déclaré coupable murky: obscure, trouble

Dans l’article “Miró, a Serial Murderer of Artistic Conventions”, page 7: to stalk: chasser, traquer to wind down: se terminer bloated: gonflé sluglike: semblable à une limace to brew: couver (événements)

signifie, pour de bon, à l’extrême, au centuple.

rÉfÉrenCes Dans l’article “Justice After Guantanamo”, page 3: georgetown university: université privée

Dans l’article “Family Learns About Life Inside a Bubble”, page 3: to put off: remettre à plus tard, par exemple: “to put a meeting off”; mais aussi dégoûter:“this smell puts me right off”; ou décourager, dissuader quelqu’un:” to put someone off”.

catholique, fondée par le jésuite John Carroll en 1789, dans le quartier éponyme de Washington D.C., elle s’est surtout développée après la guerre de Sécession, sous la direction de Robert F. Healy, premier président d’université d’origine africaine aux Etats-Unis. Georgetown reste très liée à la réflexion intellectuelle catholique. Elle comporte un peu plus de 14 000 étudiants dont la moitié en 3ème cycle, et est une des universités les plus sélectives du pays; elle se distingue particulièrement dans ses écoles de médecine, de droit, de commerce et de relations internationales. De nombreux politiciens sont anciens élèves, ainsi Bill Clinton, J. M. Barosso, actuel président de la Commission Européenne, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, présidente des Philippines et Felipe, prince d’Asturies et héritier du trône d’Espagne.

Dans l’article “Miró, a Serial Murderer of Artistic Conventions”, page 7: with a vengeanCe: expression familière qui

Dans l’article “Family Learns About Life Inside a Bubble”, page 3: hyde park-kenwood: Quartier du South

lexique Dans l’article “Whose President Will He Be?”, page 3: ConstituenCy group: groupe de soutien to be fraught: être tendu turnout: participation (élection) stake: enjeu

states to provide clean water for rural African villages. She is a frequent guest speaker at other schools, although she acknowledges she’s just a bit intimidated when she visits a high school. “I’m only in middle school, so I see high schoolers as the big kids,” she said. “When I go to high school to pass out Unicef boxes, I see them as the big, scary ones.” At a dinner a few days ago in New York, Talia was honored by World of Children, an organization that encourages youth activism and calls its awards the “Nobel Prizes for children.” If kids like Talia can accomplish so much, without credit cards or driving licenses, just imagine what adults could achieve. Young people have often been engaged in social movements, of course, but today’s activists are younger than ever. More important, these kids aren’t just protesters but rather are “social entrepreneurs,” pioneering clever ways to “give back” just as a business entrepreneur fills a market niche. If the emblematic 1960s youth was an anti-Vietnam protester, and the 1980s emblem was a geek assembling computers in the garage, then today’s is a kid uploading videos to YouTube to raise money for anti-malarial bed nets in Africa. Frankly, these kinds of initiatives have a mixed record in terms of helping the poor in a cost-effective way. But they have a superb record in enlightening and educating the organizers. The godfather of the social entrepreneur movement is Bill Drayton, who founded an organization called Ashoka to support “change-makers.” Now

to sCowl: froncer les sourcils to ooze: suinter sore: plaie doggedly: obstinément toothsome: séduisant masonite panel: panneau de bois aggloméré tar: goudron rut: ornière

expressions

he is heavily focused on nurturing student social entrepreneurs, and he has started an organization called Youth Venture to support them. But Mr. Drayton is frustrated that many youngsters are too passive and are never encouraged to run anything of their own. “This is like foot-binding of the spirit,” he said. “We can’t imagine what the Chinese were doing when they bound girls’ feet, but now we’re doing it to our children’s spirits.” The Girl Scouts organization has also led the way in embracing social entrepreneurship, training girls how to start their own movements. It’s a step toward a “you-figure-out-how-to-get-itdone” model of citizen participation in the 21st century. “Social entrepreneurship is taking root across the age spectrum,” said David Bornstein, whose book “How to Change the World” is the bible of would-be change-makers. But he says that the movement has been stifled in some privileged communities, perhaps because students in such places are so stressed by academic pressures that they can’t find the time for philanthropy. President-elect Barack Obama won the White House partly because of a grass-roots army of youthful volunteers; he showed the power of social movements and social networking in presidential politics. Those same forces can be just as powerful on behalf of humanitarian causes. It would be a shame if the political armies took a break until the 2012 elections. Only one person can be president, but as Talia and so many kids show, absolutely anybody can be a change-maker.

Side de Chicago, qui s’étend à 10km au sud du “Loop” (centre financier et commercial de la ville), au bord du lac Michigan. Le financier et abolitionniste Paul Cornell acquiert ce terrain en 1850, et de nombreuses grandes maisons s’y érigent, qui serviront de refuges dans le “Underground Railroad” (réseau de passages et de refuges pour permettre aux esclaves en fuite de se réfugier dans les Etats du Nord et au Canada). En 1893, l’exposition universelle (la Columbian World Fair)s’y déroule; un seul bâtiment de l’exposition demeure, dans lequel est installé aujourd’hui le Museum of Science and Industry. Hyde Park abrite l’Université de Chicago. Secteur résidentiel, qui a la caractéristique d’être racialement diversifié (la population est composée d’environ 44% de blancs et 38% de noirs), il doit cette démographie originale à la rénovation urbaine importante effectuée dans les années 60, car le quartier s’était, depuis la Grande Dépression, fortement dégradé, rénovation en grande partie financée par l’Université, qui voulait y créer un quartier mixte racialement et de haut niveau. On y trouve un des bijoux architecturaux de cette ville qui en regorge: la Robie House, chef d’oeuvre de Frank Lloyd Wright, qui, par la sérénité de ses lignes, est représentative de l’esprit de tout le quartier.

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le mOnde

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2008

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The Obama Presidency By PETER BAKER

news analysis

Whose President Will He Be?

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Barack Obama made a lot of promises. Some people will be disappointed.

CHICAGO — It did not go unnoticed among Italian-Americans that Barack Obama loves a four-star Italian restaurant near the Chicago lakefront. Not some pizza place, but “the Ferrari of Italian cooking,” as Spiaggia’s chef and co-owner, Tony Mantuano, puts it. Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, dined there the weekend after Election Day. Mr. Mantuano said Mr. Obama had earned a strong following in the community. “He’s the pride of the Italians,” he said. And why not? Practically everyone wants to claim Mr. Obama these days. African-Americans, obviously, but also Hispanic-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Muslim-Americans and even white Americans purging feelings of racial guilt. The youth, the online activists, the bipartisan consensus builders, the East Coast elites, the Hollywood crowd. Liberals, centrists and even some conservatives who see Reaganesque qualities. “I am like a Rorschach test,” Mr. Obama noted at one point during the campaign. “Even if people find me disappointing ultimately, they might gain something.” Reconciling all those different impressions of who Mr. Obama is and what he stands for may prove as defining a challenge as fixing the economy. Whose president is he? The standard line from his advisers would naturally be that he’s the president of all Americans. But it rarely works out that simply. Ultimately, the hazy picture of the campaign trail sharpens in the act of governing. Ultimately, choices are made and illusions shattered. And so many of Mr. Obama’s supporters invested so much passion in him that the potential for letdown seems considerable. “He reminds me of John Kennedy in

Family Learns About Life Inside a Bubble

this respect,” said Peter H. Wehner, a former Bush White House official now at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. “If you read the books on Kennedy, intellectuals who spoke to Kennedy felt like he was an intellectual; politicians who spoke with him felt like he was a politician. He had the ability to make people think he was what they wanted and what they were looking for. I get the sense that Obama is a little like that.” Mr. Obama has an advantage some other presidents did not, in that he has been a singular political phenomenon who probably does not owe his election primarily to any particular group. If

Interest groups rush to lay claim to Obama’s success, and attention. Ronald Reagan leaned heavily on the support of religious conservatives and Bill Clinton tried to move his party to the center in search of independents, Mr. Obama did not define himself in strongly ideological terms, even if his record and program are largely left of center. But it was Mr. Obama who set expectations so high among so many different constituency groups. His advertising during the primaries urged Democrats to vote for him because he would do nothing less than “save the planet.” “There’s going to be enormous pressure on him to produce,” said Tom Andrews, a former Democratic congressman who is now national director of the activist group Win Without War.

Possibly in no area will this tension be more fraught than in race relations. As the first African-American president in a nation long divided over race, Mr. Obama will face crosscurrents that none of his predecessors ever did. Many of his actions will be viewed through the lens of race, from the composition of his cabinet to the priority he places on issues historically important to black Americans. “He’ll still have to be a master manipulator, in a sense, and know how to navigate all those different forces,” said Representative Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Institute. “He has shown himself to be a very cool-underfire kind of guy.” African-Americans are not the only ones to see in him a unique champion. Two out of every three Hispanic voters supported Mr. Obama, an increase of 13 percentage points from four years ago, according to exit polls, and turnout in that demographic shot up by more than 30 percent. Hispanic leaders said they provided the margin of victory in Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. “We feel like we had a big stake in the election and that’s what prompted this historic turnout,” said Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza, an advocacy group for HispanicAmericans. The group did not wait long to begin publicly pushing the new president-elect to recognize this support with key White House and cabinet positions. “At some point in the first term we would definitely expect to see an effort to move responsible immigration reform,” she said. “It would be a big mistake not to act on this important priority.” Or all of the other important priorities that the president-elect’s believers assume he will tackle. After all, he has a planet to save.

news analysis

Justice After Guantánamo By WILLIAM GLABERSON

By PETER BAKER

CHICAGO — A couple of weeks ago, Barack Obama headed to the Hyde Park Hair Salon for a trim. He sat down in the same chair in front of the same barber who has cut his hair for the last 14 years. But when he wanted a trim more recently, the Secret Service took one look at the shop’s large plate-glass windows and the gawking tourists eager for a glimpse of the president-elect and the plan quickly changed. If Mr. Obama could no longer come to the barber, the barber would come to him. Life for the newly chosen president and his family has changed forever. Even the constraints and security of the campaign trail do not compare to the bubble that has enveloped him in the days since his election. Renegade, as the Secret Service calls him, now lives within the strict limits that come with the most powerful office on the planet. He has chosen to spend this interval before his inauguration at his home in Hyde Park, which has in some ways been transformed into a fortress for his protection. After two years of speeches and rallies, he has retreated into seclusion, largely hidden from public view. “This is a tremendous personal transition, as well, far beyond what anyone could imagine,” said Alexi Giannoulias, the Illinois state treasurer and a close friend. “Little things, like going to the gym, going to the movies, going to dinner with his wife, none of that will ever be the same again. Things that we take for granted.” Mr. Obama is putting off the change as much as he can by remaining in Chicago during the transition. “I am not going to be spending too much time in Washington over the next several weeks,” he told someone in a telephone conversation overheard by reporters on his chartered plane heading back to Chicago after a recent White House visit.

POOL PHOTO BY AMANDA RIVKIN

The Obamas now live within the limits that come with the U.S. presidency. Guards bring Sasha, left, and Malia Obama to school. In Chicago, it may be easier for him to avoid becoming drawn into decisions by the departing administration and may accentuate the sense of change when he returns to Washington as the new president. But his life is increasingly presidential. Although he does not yet have access to Air Force One, he now rides in an armored government limousine. Although the Secret Service long ago set up concrete barriers around his house here, they expanded their perimeter by several blocks after the election. “It’s changed,” said Mesha Caudle, 45, who lives a block from the Obamas. “It’s a little inconvenient, just a little, when you have to go around three blocks to go one block.” The Obama house, bought for $1.65 million in 2005, is a stately mansion in the middle of the racially and economically diverse Hyde Park-Kenwood area near the University of Chicago. Mr. Obama is the first president since Richard M. Nixon to be elected while living in a urban neighborhood. He is expected to keep his Chicago home. The streets around the home have been closed to outside traffic. For Mr. Obama, it means no more

casually stopping by the Medici for pastries or window shopping with the girls at 57th Street Books, at least not without elaborate preparation. He did manage to take his wife, Michelle, on a Saturday night to Spiaggia, a four-star Italian restaurant in downtown Chicago. His day starts with breakfast with his daughters, aides said, and he has taken them to school a few times. For his daily workout, he uses the gymnasium at Regents Park apartment building where his friend, Mike Signator, lives. He later heads to transition offices set up in the Kluczynski Federal Building. “He seems to be very, very focused on the transition,” said his friend John W. Rogers Jr., chairman of Ariel Investments. “It doesn’t seem to have changed him at all. He’s the same relaxed, in-control, engaging Barack.” Mr. Obama’s barber, Zariff, 44, who goes by one name, went to Mr. Signator’s apartment recently to give Mr. Obama his usual $21 cut. “He’s looking a lot more presidential now; he walks a little different,” he said. Mr. Obama is no longer the guy strolling around the neighborhood. “I think he misses that a lot,” Zariff said. “But that’s the price of fame.”

As a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama sketched the broad outlines of a plan to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: try detainees in American courts and reject the Bush administration’s military commission system. Now, as he moves closer to assuming responsibility for Guantánamo, his pledge to close the center has raised difficult questions. They include where Guantánamo’s detainees could be held in the United States, how many might be sent home and a matter that people with ties to the transition team say worries them most: What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all? That concern is at the center of a debate among national security, human rights and legal experts. Even some liberals argue that to deal realistically with terrorism, the new administration should seek Congressional authority for preventive detention of suspects deemed too dangerous to release even if they cannot be successfully prosecuted. “You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” said David D. Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who has been a critic of the Bush administration. Although the United States has long had procedures for detaining dangerous people who have not been convicted of a crime, the issue is particularly controversial in the context of Guantánamo. Whether the Obama administration should push for a preventive detention law has inspired “hot and serious debate,” said Ken Gude, a national security scholar at the liberal Center for American Progress in Washington, adding, “I’ve had conversations with progressives who think it is a good idea and conservatives who think it’s a terrible idea.” Human rights groups have been mounting arguments to counter pressure that they say is building on Mr. Obama to show toughness, perhaps by

echoing the Bush administration’s insistence that some detainees may need to be held indefinitely. The international law of warfare provides authority for governments to hold captured enemy fighters until the completion of a conflict. But since the Bush administration invoked that authority as a basis for its much-criticized detention policies, a move by Mr. Obama to seek explicit authorization for indefinite detention without trial would be seen by some of his supporters as a betrayal. Opponents of a preventive detention law say that continuing to treat captives as detainees instead of defendants in court would support terrorists’ self-image as warriors rather than criminals. And though the Guantánamo center

Guarding against terrorism without devolving into a gulag. might be closed, they say, the new law would effectively import Guantánamo and its image into the United States. “Not only do you not need a system of preventive detention, but it would perpetuate the problem of Guantánamo,” said Elisa Massimino, executive director of Human Rights First. On the other hand, some proponents of such a law say it would clarify questions left murky by the Bush administration’s legal battles over Guantánamo. Benjamin Wittes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that Americans need to cross a “psychological Rubicon” and accept the idea that preventive detention is necessary to fight terrorism. “I’m afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things,” he said.

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Five individuals dedicated to improving the world are honored in Dubai

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ostering enterprise, enabling groundbreaking work, and advancing human knowledge and well-being — these are the aims not only of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, but of the five Laureates honored in 2008. The Awards, now celebrating the 30th anniversary of the first prize-giving, were created by Rolex to foster a spirit of enterprise around the globe. This year’s winners, who were honored at a ceremony in Dubai on Nov. 18, were selected from nearly 1,500 applicants from 127 countries — five Laureates who embody the spirit of enterprise to benefit their communities and the wider world. In addition, five Associate Laureates were named. Each Laureate receives a grant of $100,000, while Associate Laureates each receive $50,000. All 10 also receive a Rolex chronometer. The choice of Dubai for this 13th award ceremony marked the first time the Swiss maker of fine timepieces has presented the awards in the Middle East. The initiative nearly quadrupled the number of applications in 2008 from the Middle East and North Africa: 138, compared with 35 for the 2006 Rolex Awards. Prize-winning projects fall into five areas: science and medi-

The 2008 Rolex Awards for Enterprise, presented this year in Dubai, honor the work of five individuals whose visionary projects embody excellence and innovation

To find out more about the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, visit rolexawards.com

cine, technology and innovation, exploration and discovery, the environment, and cultural heritage. But award winners often cross categories, since these individuals think outside the box and, often, work outside the mainstream. This year’s Laureates represent a range of visionary projects. The Jordanian chemistry professor Talal Akasheh is completing a knowledge system that helps preserve the cultural heritage of his country’s millennia-old city, Petra. Tim Bauer, a mechanical engineer from the United States, has found a way to reduce Asian air pollution at its source. Andrew McGonigle, a physicist from Scotland, is developing a reliable way to predict volcanic eruptions, while the South African conservationist Andrew Muir is combining nature and vocational training to heal the lives of those orphaned by AIDS. In Paraguay, Elsa Zaldívar is developing an eco-friendly, sustainable building material in response to the twin shortages of housing and lumber. The five Associate Laureates, the research professor Rodrigo Medellín and the biologist and underwater archaeologist Arturo González in Mexico; Moji Riba, a filmmaker and cultural activist, and Romulus Whitaker, a wildlife management consultant, in India; and Alexis Belonio, associate professor of agricultural engineering in the Philippines,

are also being honored for undertaking innovative projects. Winning projects are decided on the basis of originality, feasibility, potential for sustained impact and, above all, the candidates’ spirit of enterprise. An important consideration of the selection committee, which includes the French entrepreneur and expedition leader Etienne Bourgois, is the project’s ongoing nature. Winners are not so much rewarded for a body of work as given the means to continue projects already under way or about to be launched. Applicants are under no restrictions in terms of age, nationality or background — they just need to show how they will turn an original idea into a functioning project that can benefit humankind. The Rolex Awards for Enterprise were created in 1976 by the late André J. Heiniger, the company’s former chairman, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Oyster chronometer, the world’s first waterproof watch. By fostering advances in science, exploration and conservation, the Rolex Awards for Enterprise reflect the company’s determination to support excellence and innovation through the work of individuals who are dedicating their vision and ingenuity to the good of all. ‘‘Inspiring Individuals,’’ an illustrated, 144-page book describing the 10 winners and their projects, is being published this month by Thames & Hudson.


ENVIRONMENT | Elsa Zaldívar, social activist

A recyclable house built from loofah and plastic

ROLEX AWARDS / JESS HOFFMAN

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In Paraguay, Elsa Zaldívar is developing a new building material that is both ecological and recyclable.

lsa Zaldívar of Paraguay is breaking the cycle of poverty with a few simple materials: recycled plastic, cotton netting, corn husks and loofah sponges. All these materials are combined to create low-cost, lightweight construction panels that can be used for housing. With the panels, many citizens in this country will be able to construct decent, inexpensive houses for their families. This opportunity is not only good for them, it’s also good for the environment. ‘‘That’s very important in Paraguay,’’ says Zaldívar, 48, ‘‘because we’ve already reduced our original forest to less than 10 percent of the national territory.’’ Zaldívar has made development economics her life’s work. After university, she began working with women in Caaguazú, an impoverished region of Paraguay. In one com-

munity, she organized the construction of toilets and stoves, and was impressed by how these features changed the perspective of the women who used them. ‘‘They told me: ‘Now we feel like we’re people with dignity,’’’ she recalls. She decided to focus on increasing the earning capacity of rural women by encouraging them to grow loofah, a plant that had once flourished locally but had fallen out of favor. Though loofah fruit is edible, Zaldívar had something else in mind: the coarse-textured sponge that remains when the plant is dried. The women organized themselves into a cooperative and sold loofah sponges, and also used loofah to manufacture mats, slippers and other products that were exported as far away as Europe. Although the successful project drew

praise from environmentalists, Zaldívar wasn’t fully satisfied. About a third of the loofahs cultivated were not of export quality, and another 30 percent was trimmed off during the manufacturing process. Zaldívar then had another idea: use the material to make wall and roof panels for lowcost housing. She worked with Pedro Padrós, an industrial engineer, who after several unsuccessful experiments hit on the idea of combining loofah with plastic waste. He invented a machine that melted a mixture of recycled plastics, then combined the resulting liquid with loofah and other vegetable fibers like cotton netting and chopped corn husks. Eventually, a product emerged that is easier to handle than lumber or brick and is safer in the case of natural disasters. A grant from the Inter-American Development Bank

provided funds for the prototype of a machine to produce the panels. Since then, design improvements have halved the panels’ original cost of $6 per square meter, making them competitive with existing building materials, such as wood. Zaldívar’s Rolex Award will finance a promotion center and the construction of three model houses. At the same time, she is working with recyclers in urban areas to guarantee a supply of plastic, and with groups of market women to provide the corn husks and other fibers needed. The panels themselves are recyclable, too; if they wear out or break, they can be ground up and made into new panels. At the same time, the cycle of poverty — with its substandard housing — is broken. ‘‘To have a decent home liberates people,’’ says Zaldívar.


SCIENCE | Andrew McGonigle, vulcanologist

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ooking into the crater of one of the world’s 60 active volcanoes is an audacious enterprise, but the physicist Andrew McGonigle finds it ‘‘absolutely awesome.’’ He has climbed 15 of them in his quest to improve early-warning systems for volcanic eruptions. The earlier and more accurate the warning, the more lives can be saved. A lack of forewarning resulted in the deaths of 25,000 in Colombia in 1985, when the eruption of Nevado del Ruiz melted a glacier and created a deadly river of mud and rock. Six years later, early warning may have saved up to 300,000 lives in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo exploded in the Philippines. The most effective monitoring, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, uses a combination of techniques (seismic, geodetic,

hydrological, geochemical and remote satellite analysis) on a continuous near-real-time basis. One of the most effective techniques is measuring the sulfur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) that issue from an active volcano. The Catch 22 of early detection is that it was long believed that instruments had to be very close to the mouth of the volcano — in the case of CO2, actually inside the crater — for greatest accuracy, but then data retrieval was problematic. Dr. McGonigle, a research scientist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, specializes in the study of air pollution and volcanic gases using lasers and other sensing devices. He saw that the plume of gas emanating from the volcano’s mouth might provide a better way to read SO2 and CO2 levels if he

could position sensors below and briefly through it. In 2005, a colleague at Sheffield University began testing a radio-controlled helicopter for studying glaciers, and this gave Dr. McGonigle the idea to do the same for volcanic gases. He tapped David Fisher, remotecontrol helicopter champion of Great Britain, to work with him to develop a remotecontrolled copter that could carry a three-kilo (6.6 pound) payload. The resulting prototype helicopter, AEROVOLC I, was tested in March 2007 at the vent of Vulcano, near Sicily. It functioned perfectly, says McGonigle: ‘‘Clear proof that the concept worked.’’ He adds: ‘‘It may be possible to predict from weeks to months ahead whether an

eruption is developing, from the flow of CO2.’’ This can only be good news for those who live around the 550 volcanoes that have been active over the centuries. The 35-year-old scientist is using his Rolex Award to purchase and equip a 14-kilo helicopter that will be known as AEROVOLC II. The equipment costs about $80,000, a fraction of the price of piloted helicopter flights over volcanoes. Next year, McGonigle will carry out further field trials on two more of Italy’s famous volcanoes, Mount Stromboli and Mount Etna. Eventually, he hopes to combine the information gathered with other seismic and ground deformation data, producing reliable predictions that could save many thousands of lives.


ROLEX AWARDS / MARC LATZEL

Developing a new predictor of volcanic activity

Andrew McGonigle’s small, sensor-equipped helicopter could save thousands of lives.

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2008

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CULTURAL HERITAGE | Talal Akasheh, chemist and conservationist

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isitors to the ancient city of Petra in Jordan are struck by the beauty of this 2,500-year-old archaeological treasure, which boasts the largest number of rockcarved monuments in the world. While visitors have flocked in tens of thousands to view its wonders, which were added to the list of Unesco World Heritage sites in 1985, Petra has also been listed by the World Monuments Fund among the annual 100 most endangered sites four times in the past 12 years. The Jordanian chemistry professor Talal Akasheh, whose family is originally from Petra, has devoted more than a quarter-century to helping save the city. When he first visited the area, he says: ‘‘I was astonished by the beauty of the site, its geology, its architecture. But I also saw many signs of deterioration. I felt something should be done about it. I could not look at such beauty without saying: Maybe I can help.’’

Dr. Akasheh, now 61, had little experience with the weathering of monuments. ‘‘The geological, physical, chemical and biological processes were out of my scope at the time,’’ he admits, ‘‘and I had to learn those things.’’ But as a scientist, he understood the wisdom of the business adage ‘‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.’’ Petra’s preservation couldn’t be managed unless the existing site could be described with precision. So, slowly, he helped to develop an information system that would serve as a baseline for conservation efforts. By 2002, Petra’s geo-archaeological information system (GIS), the first of its kind in Jordan, was operational and being used by Jordan’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities to plan and manage the site. It includes maps and minute details of the site, its physical characteristics, its 500 facades of tombs and 3,000 features.

In the 26 years that Dr. Akasheh has devoted to the project, technology has advanced dramatically, leading him to create a database using new digital technologies. As of this year, the GIS’s 10-gigabyte memory has collated 2,000 monuments and features, and mapped Petra itself, the nearby tourist town of Wadi Musa and the Bedouin settlement of Um Sayhoun. Archaeologists, geologists, hydrologists, chemists, engineers, architects and planners have all contributed their expertise. Still, the GIS covers only part of the site. Dr. Akasheh’s Rolex Award will be used in the next three years to incorporate up to 1,000 additional features in the database. Researchers will study the flash floods that threaten the site and search the surrounding terrain for hidden tombs and other archaeological treasures. X-ray fluoroscopy and other advanced techniques will be deployed to

ROLEX AWARDS / MARC LATZEL

Knowledge system helps conserve Petra’s ancient stones

Talal Akasheh’s digital database will serve as a key tool in efforts to conserve Jordan’s ancient city.

study the weathering chemistry of the monuments, to identify those in most urgent need of conservation. Ultimately, Dr. Akasheh concedes, nature will reclaim the sandstone city.

But, he maintains, his efforts are worthwhile in that they are slowing the process in Petra and creating a model for conservation sites anywhere in the world.


ECOTOURISM | Andrew Muir, conservationist

Nature’s healing power changes orphans’ lives in Africa

ROLEX AWARDS / TOMAS BERTELSEN

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Andrew Muir’s multifaceted intervention program provides vocational training for those who have been orphaned by AIDS.

ighty percent of the world’s orphans live in sub-Saharan Africa, many of them victims of the AIDS pandemic in the region. South Africa has the largest number of HIV/AIDS infections of any country in the world, with 5.5 million people believed to be infected. HIV/AIDS deaths account for about half of the country’s estimated 2.2 million orphans. When the South African conservationist Andrew Muir read similar statistics in a United Nations report four years ago, he was shocked. He understood that the repercussions were not only socially grave, but devastating to the environment. ‘‘Orphans generally have no other option than to use the resources readily available to them,’’ explains the 42-year-old Muir. ‘‘This can lead to poaching, chopping down trees for firewood and shelter, and the like.’’ To break the cycle of dependence and poverty facing Africa’s orphans — individuals whose lives have been affected by AIDS but

who are not necessarily infected by the virus — Muir realized a multifaceted program was needed. It would encompass residential support, adult role models, education, health care, job opportunities and, in keeping with his own philosophy, contact with the healing powers of nature. So he founded Umzi Wethu (‘‘our home’’ in Xhosa) in 2006 in Port Elizabeth, working with more than 30 partners, including nongovernmental and community organizations, game reserves and parks, academic institutions, government agencies and individual experts. It provides a full year of certified vocational training, internships and mentoring to young people who have lost their parents (the majority due to AIDS) and prepares them for ecotourism jobs with private game reserves and public parks. The organizational challenge didn’t faze Muir: as executive director of the Wilderness Foundation in Port Elizabeth, he had been responsible for dozens of social and conser-

vation projects over the years. Earlier in life he had organized a 485-mile (780 kilometer) walk along South Africa’s coast to raise awareness about tuberculosis, in which he was joined by 13 of the country’s top athletes. The experience, he says, transformed him and also inspired him to use nature as a springboard for social and environmental change. ‘‘The wilderness,’’ he says, ‘‘can heal and sustain the human psyche.’’ Following Umzi Wethu’s success so far — ‘‘Eighty-five percent of the 40 graduates have made the successful transition into employment, with some already having been promoted to junior management,’’ says Muir — he hopes to widen the program to reach 10,000 young people over the next decade. He and his associates are currently refining the project model. Starting early in 2009, they will launch a series of workshops to extend the concept to ecotourism developments in other game reserve areas of South Africa, Mozambique and Namibia.


INNOVATION | Tim Bauer, mechanical engineer

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uk-tuks — also known as auto rickshaws, trishaws or motorized tricycles — are part of the urban landscape throughout the developing world. They’re not only a colorful and characteristic mode of transportation, but also easy to build, lightweight to move and inexpensive to operate, thanks to their simple two-stroke engines. ‘‘They play an essential role in the social and economic fabric,’’ says Tim Bauer, a 31-yearold American mechanical engineer. ‘‘But their impact on public health is disastrous.’’ The two-stroke engine allows up to 40 percent of fuel and oil to exit unburned. This results in substantial emissions of oxides of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, hydrocarbons and fine dust — major sources of air pollution. As a result, each of the 100 million motorized tricycles in Asia can generate as much pollution

as 50 cars; together, they are partially responsible for more than half a million deaths in the region each year. But, as Bauer points out about these ubiquitous engines: ‘‘They are powerful, simple, reliable and robust, and spare parts are easy to find. They also have a long lifetime.’’ In the Philippines, 94 percent of motorcycles use them, and the figure ranges from 50 percent to 90 percent in India, Pakistan and Thailand. While a student at Colorado State University in 1997, Bauer joined a university spinoff called the Engines and Energy Conservation Lab. Three years later, he and a colleague, Nathan Lorenz, led a project focusing on direct fuel injection in the snowmobiles of Yellowstone National Park. Bauer recognized the potential of this technology for reducing emissions from two-stroke engines, and in 2004

the pair decided to develop a commercially viable product and make it widely available in Asia. ‘‘There were several key constraints,’’ says Bauer of the kit they developed. ‘‘It had to substantially reduce emissions without impairing the engine’s performance. It had to be installed without machining the engine crankcase, and with only a basic tool set. Of course, it also had to be affordable for Filipino drivers.’’ He and his team used off-the-shelf components to develop a kit that transforms two-stroke tuk-tuk engines into direct fuel-injection mechanisms, reducing particulate emissions by 70 percent and carbon dioxide emissions by 76 percent. To commercialize the kit, Bauer and three of his colleagues founded a nonprofit organization, Envirofit, in 2003, and

began working with two seaside resorts in the Philippines, Vigan and Puerto Princesa. They have published a manual, held training workshops and launched a microcredit program. ‘‘Microcredit is essential to ensure a sustainable impact to our action,’’ says Bauer. ‘‘Drivers earn money daily, so it’s easy for them to pay back their loan, and 90 percent of them do it in less than a year.’’ To date, over 260 drivers have fitted their taxis with the kit. The Rolex Award will help Bauer distribute the kit more widely in Asia. ‘‘These drivers are at the base of the economic pyramid,’’ he says, ‘‘and these tricycles are a testament to their ingenuity and work ethic. At the end of the day, we can improve their lives with a cylinder head, a few brackets and, of course, hard work.’’


ROLEX AWARDS / STEFAN WALTER

Cutting two-stroke pollution in Asia at minimal cost

Off-the-shelf components help make Tim Bauer’s retrofit kit affordable for Filipino users.

ASSOCIATE LAUREATES | The vision widens

Recognizing five more remarkable achievers and achievements

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he same vision that characterizes this year’s five prize-winning Laureates of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise can be found in the five individuals who have been named Associate Laureates. Though their research ranges from Ice Age caverns to isolated cultures in India, they share a determination to use their fieldwork to improve life on earth. The inventor and professor Alexis Belonio of the Philippines is turning rice husks — a byproduct of Asia’s main food staple, which feeds two billion people — into a source of energy for cooking. Although rice husks had been tried before as fuel for cookers, the discouraging results had suggested that this was unfeasible. Dr. Belonio, 48, an associate professor of agricultural engineering, was happily unaware of this. He came up with a simple metal stove that converts burning rice husks into a gaslike flame and that can be sold for $25. He will spend his Rolex Award money on promoting and sharing the technology in the Philippines

and the world, while finding new industrial uses for the energy generated by burning rice husks. Equally passionate about his work is Rodrigo Medellín, 50, professor of ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the country’s leading authority on bats. They are, he says, ‘‘misunderstood animals,’’ consuming almost their weight in mosquitoes and crop pests each night, and pollinating the rain forests. Alarmed by the decline in the population of some of Mexico’s 138 different bat species, Professor Medellín founded the Program for the Conservation of Bats of Mexico in 1994 in partnership with his university and Bat Conservation International. His team identifies priority sites among the country’s 30,000 caves, develops programs to save endangered species and educates communities about bat benefits. The Rolex Award will allow Professor Medellín to add new caves and new threatened species, including Myotis planiceps, one of the world’s smallest bats.

Caves of a different sort are the focus of the underwater archaeologist Arturo González, 44, also of Mexico. While a student, he became a scuba diver; a documentary about underwater exploration inspired him to combine the two interests. In 1999, while working with the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, he put together a multidisciplinary team to explore the sinkholes of the Yucatán Peninsula. They found Ice Age fossils of human skeletons that may be older than any other human remains in the Americas, with morphology resembling that of East Asians. Professor González plans to use his Rolex Award to field a team for at least another year of research. The more ancient evidence that is found, he says, the more can be understood about human evolution, prehistoric life and human movement into the Americas. The filmmaker Moji Riba, 36, is creating recordings of the traditional practices and folkways of the 26 ancient tribal cultures existing today in his home state of Arunachal

Pradesh in northeast India. Long isolated from outside influences, these diverse ethnic societies, storehouses of indigenous knowledge, are now in danger of being overwhelmed by the outside world. In 1997, he established the Center for Cultural Research & Documentation in Arunachal’s capital. The center functions as an archive, a library, a studio for documentaries and a platform for tribal people. Next, Riba created the Mountain Eye Project, which will document on film a year in the life of 15 different ethnic groups, selecting and training young people from each community to do the filming. Starting next year, up to 300 hours of film per village will be recorded, a total of more than 4,000 hours of local culture. His Rolex Award will be used to help launch the project and purchase video equipment.

Romulus Whitaker, 65, also from India, though American-born, cares equally about conservation — of India’s rain forests. He has had a distinguished career as a herpetologist, author and documentary filmmaker, and his fascination with snakes eventually led him to eco-development and water resources. India faces a water shortage ‘‘that will dwarf any of the past problems faced by the people,’’ he says. He established a research conservation center in 2005, the first of seven stations linking strongholds in the rain forests, origin of water supplies for millions of Indians. His Rolex Award will be used to further develop this network, which will exchange expertise and research, create a biodiversity database and deliver mobile educational programs.



           

      

  

                  
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le monde

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2008 world trends

Many migrant workers in Chang’an are returning to their rural homes.

Once Engines of Growth, China’s Factories at Standstill By EDWARD WONG

CHANG’AN, China — Wang Denggui, father of three, arrived more than a year ago in the palm-lined streets of this southern town with a single goal: toil in a factory to save for his children’s school tuition. But the plans of Mr. Wang and thousands of co-workers unraveled at noon on November 1, when the Taiwanese chairman of their ailing shoe factory climbed over a factory wall to flee the country and his debts. That left several American shoe companies with unfilled orders and 2,000 workers without jobs. “He just ran without telling anyone,” Mr. Wang said. For decades, the steamy Pearl River Delta area of southern Guangdong Province served as a primary engine for China’s astounding economic growth. But an export slowdown that began earlier this Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Guangzhou, and Jimmy Wang from Chang’an. Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

year and that has been magnified by the global financial crisis of recent months is contributing to the shutdown of tens of thousands of small and mid-size factories here and in other coastal regions, forcing laborers to scramble for other jobs or return home to the countryside. Furthermore, the slowdown inhibits China’s ability to work with other nations in alleviating the worldwide crisis. The Pearl River Delta, known as the world’s factory, powered an export industry that pushed China’s annual growth rate into the double digits and provided work for migrants from interior provinces with poor farmland. But circumstances have changed quickly. The slowdown in exports contributed to the closing of at least 67,000 factories across China in the first half of the year, according to government statistics. Labor disputes and protests over lost back wages have surged, igniting fear in local officials. Local officials are also trying to tamp down unrest by doling out back wages. Here in Chang’an, after the worker protest, the government distributed more

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SHIHO FUKADA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Men looked for work in Chang’an, China, a town in the coastal region that had fueled China’s export growth. than $1 million to pay back wages to most of the workers at the shoe factory. The slowdown in exports has accelerated a major shift in the nature of Chinese manufacturing: small factories that were already being pinched by rising costs of labor, transportation and raw materials, as well as by the appreciating yuan, are closing en masse. That is especially the case in these towns scattered around the city of Dongguan, known for churning out low-end products. Soon the labor-intensive factories that rely solely on migrant work could disappear from southern China, and foreign companies could contract with similar factories in Vietnam and other countries where costs are lower. “There’s very serious damage being done down there, I don’t deny it, and I think it’ll get worse because we haven’t seen the full impact of the economic downturn in Europe,” said Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Dragonomics, an economic research and advisory firm based in Beijing. “I think next year we might see export growth in the country as a whole go down to 0 percent.”

The export sector is still growing but has slowed considerably; year-on-year growth was at 9 percent in October compared with 26 percent in September 2007, Mr. Kroeber said. The mass layoffs have led to a profound change in the movements this year of migrant workers like Mr. Wang who spend virtually the entire year away from home. Many are heading home early for the Chinese New Year, in late January, and say they might not return to work in the coastal regions. Once in the interior, the workers will have less incentive than in the past to return to the coastal provinces. Rising grain prices have made farming more profitable. The Chinese government recently announced a rural land reform policy that could spur some farmers to stay on their land and make better use of it. The social problems arising from the slowdown have stirred anxiety in the top leadership of the Communist Party, whose legitimacy is based on maintaining economic growth. Prime Minister

Wen Jiabao is pushing for policies that will increase domestic consumer consumption to wean China off its reliance on exports. Recently, the government unveiled a stimulus package worth $586 billion over the next two years to help create jobs. Foreign governments expecting China to take the lead in addressing the global crisis will be disappointed, say analysts and scholars. Chinese officials say they are focused on trying to ease domestic problems and keeping the country’s annual growth rate above 8 percent, which they see as vital to generating enough new jobs. Some analysts say economic expansion could drop to as little as 5.8 percent in the fourth quarter this year, down from about 11 percent in 2007. “I think China foresees that it’ll need to spend a lot of money to get itself out of the current domestic situation,” said Victor Shih, an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University who studies the political economy of China. “On the global financial crisis, China will not take a leading role.”

In Russia, Start-Up Dreams Interrupted by Cold Reality Until recently, markets were driven by fear and greed. Lately, they have been driven by fear and fear.

By ELLEN BARRY

STAN HONDA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

As Hormones Go, So Go Markets From Page 1 risks that eventually went bust. Now, the lingering presence of cortisol makes them irrationally fearful, negative and risk averse. John M. Coates, a former trader who is now a senior research fellow in neuroscience and finance at the University of Cambridge, and a colleague, Joseph Herbert, laid it all out in the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Measuring steroid levels of traders in the City of London, they demonstrated that successful traders were heavily influenced during market booms by a positive feedback loop fueled by increased levels of testosterone. It’s akin, Dr. Coates says, to the “winner’s effect” among male athletes, in which successive victories push testosterone levels higher and higher, giving the winner an advantage — until he begins to misjudge risk and take stupid chances. “Testosterone doesn’t create bubbles, but it exaggerates them,” Dr. Coates said. “It’s possible that bubbles are a male phenomenon.” Likewise, when markets tumble, traders are stressed out by the uncer-

tainty and volatility and produce a lot of cortisol; they fall into a negative feedback loop that turns them into emotional fear-mongers, rather than analytical thinkers. So they’re now prolonging and deepening the market plunge, and dragging down the economy. With markets swinging scarily from one day to the next, traders have become bundles of dueling hormones. Though Dr. Coates hasn’t studied it — yet — he said “it’s possible” that testosterone-fueled competitiveness may even have driven investment bankers to be ever more creative in inventing the risky, complex securities designed to deliver more leverage and better returns. They got so creative that few people understood their risks. But Jonathan D. Cohen, director of the neuroscience program at Princeton University in New Jersey, hesitated to agree. “This is intriguing, but correlation is not causation,” he said. “That’s the first thing we learn in science.” Still, Dr. Bruce McEwen, head of the neuroendocrinology lab of Rockefeller University in New York, said “it’s kind of exciting.” “Who knows,” he asked, “what other hormones are doing as well? There’s a lot we don’t know,

because people don’t think about hormones in this context, but this is an aspect we have to consider. All bets are off.” Dr. McEwen said it was too early to make recommendations to policy makers. Not so Dr. Coates: The question reminded him of a headline in The Financial Times: “Icelandic Women to Clean Up Male Mess.” The article reported that Iceland had turned to two women to lead banks nationalized during the country’s brush with bankruptcy. Women, Dr. Coates explained, have only about 10 percent of the testosterone men have; their judgment is not confused by it. He said he also suspected that women were less likely to produce excess cortisol. So he advised getting “more women and older men on trading floors.” There’s a lesson in this, too, for central bankers. “This explains why bubbles and crashes are beyond the control of central banks,” Dr. Coates said, and they should recognize that male traders simply don’t respond rationally to their pricing signals. And maybe they should add more women to the mix, too.

MOSCOW — Last month, as Russia’s stock market fell and the credit crunch took hold around the world, Russian companies spooked by memories of previous bank collapses scrambled to protect what cash they had. Venture capital dried up virtually overnight, including at a young company called MeshNetics. The tale of MeshNetics, which produces innovative wireless networking systems, offers a glimpse of how the financial crisis has swept through Russia’s budding entrepreneurial culture and crashed like cold water onto young workers who had come to see the boom times as normal. “It’s going to be tough letting go of this period of growth,” Ilya Bagrak, the company’s software product manager, said last month. He was still in shock from the experience of firing one of his employees hours after they had shared their morning coffee. Eight years of stability and economic growth under Vladimir V. Putin had produced a wave of start-ups and spinoffs in Moscow’s high-tech sector. Here the employees of MeshNetics had found the kind of opportunity that Russian scientists once could pursue only overseas. The workers were young and compulsive; it was not unusual for them to chat online about their projects on Saturday afternoons. There were dartboards on their cubicles, and pictures of their heads Photoshopped onto chicken legs, but what they liked most was technology. Their main product, the ZigBit, was a chip capable of setting up wireless networks almost automatically. Vasily Suvorov, the chief executive, seemed to have picked the perfect moment. This spring, President Dmitri A. Medvedev came to power vowing to wean Russia’s economy off fossil fuels and invest in innovation. In March, Mr. Suvorov, 36, met with his shareholders and planned “full-throttle movement.” The ZigBit has an 18-month sales cycle, so it requires heavy upfront investment, and the company was not yet profitable. But sales were growing

by 50 to 80 percent per quarter. When Mr. Bagrak moved back to Russia from Berkeley, California, he worried about the fabled lassitude of Russian office life. But what he found at MeshNetics reminded him of Sun Microsystems and Google, where he had done internships. His peers worked long hours and were buzzing with start-up ideas. “There’s this idea of ‘You can make something happen,’ ” Mr. Bagrak said. In the midst of young people in blue jeans, Efim Grinkrug was a walking reminder of the past. At 57, he was a chain smoker in a loose black suit, from a generation that saw science as a religion. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian scientists his age left Russia, or left science. He considers it a success that, as he put it, “I didn’t end up selling cars.” When Mr. Suvorov announced that layoffs were coming, alarm bells went off in Mr. Grinkrug’s brain. His last major project, a three-dimensional Web browser he had developed for another company, was abruptly frozen during the Russian banking crisis of 2004, and it was still frozen. The first round of cuts at MeshNetics was less than 10 percent. Nine days later, about a dozen more people were fired. On October 29, Mr. Suvorov looked stricken. He said the company was in a “shutdown phase.” Within a few days, there seemed to be reason for optimism: Mr. Suvorov said he was close to reaching an agreement with a Western company that would save the core of the business. That was little comfort to Mr. Grinkrug, who was informed October 30 that his division would be eliminated. After four and a half years with the company, he still could fit all of his possessions in two bags. The thought of finding a new job at his age scared him. MeshNetics was retaining four of his programmers, so that his project might go forward if the new leadership chose. “All the rest, probably, will die in my head,” Mr. Grinkrug predicted sadly in an e-mail message. “This head is not needed anymore.”

le monde

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2008

7

arts & styles

Mr. Obama Goes Casual, After a Fashion By CATHY HORYN

Apart from the trip to Washington to visit his new home, President-elect Barack Obama has been looking pretty casual lately. Instead of the familiar dark suits and solid dress shirts, he has variously worn a baseball cap with a North Face warm-up jacket, jeans and white sneakers, and a black windbreaker that some observers assumed was leather but, more likely, was made of cotton. Several things happened when Mr. Obama surrendered, if briefly, the formality of his suit. You realized what a celebrity he is. After all, we know celebrities not so much by what they wear on the red carpet at movie premieres as by what they wear at the airport or to run an errand: a baseball cap and some version of a track suit. Americans like to see their presidents being athletic, or at least ready for action. Mr. Obama’s after-work dress tells us he doesn’t yet feel free to relax and that, unlike John F. Kennedy in his sailing shorts or Ronald Reagan in his ranch clothes, he doesn’t have an informal style that can be endowed with meaning. Considering the choices and forms of expressions available to him, Tom Kalenderian, the men’s wear fashion director at Barneys New York, said, “The casual thing is a bit of a disappointment.” Because his campaign was so tightly controlled in terms of self-presentation, it is hard

“The Two Philosophers,” 1936, on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, exemplifies Joan Miró’s attempts to “assassinate painting.”

Miró, a Serial Murderer of Artistic Conventions Amputate tradition, torture the past, terrorize the present. The impulse to destroy was part of what made early Modern art the guerrilla movement it was. So in 1927, when Joan Miró said, “I want to assassinate painting,” he wasn’t saying art anything new. review What was new was the way he carried out his task. That process is the subject of “Joan Miró: Painting and AntiPainting 1927-1937,” an absorbing, invigorating and — Miró would be mortified — beautiful show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition illustrates, step by step, exactly how Miró stalked and attacked painting — zapped its conventions, messed up its history, spoiled its market value — through 12 distinct groups of experimental works produced PHOTOGRAPHS BY ©2008 SUCCESSIÓ MIRÓ/ over a decade. Crisp, clear and ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/ADAGP, PARIS chronological, the show reads like “Painting (Head),” 1930, above, a combination of espionage tale and psychological thriller set out and “Woman,” 1934, are also in in a dozen chapters. the exhibition, which examines the In 1927, Miró, who was born in artist’s work over a decade. Barcelona, had turned 34. He was a successful artist and an early devotee of Surrealism, working in a polished, fantastical-realist century painting, and turns it into mode. But he had a restless temperament and a hostile clash of bloated, sluglike lived in provoking times. The high-flying 1920s forms. were winding down, the political climate was As Miró doggedly continued his growing tense. assault on art in the 1930s, the world was assailSurrealism, he discovered, had limitations. He ing him. Fascism was on the rise across Europe. was ready for a radical change in art, but he realized that he would have to create it himself. He de- Events that would lead to the Spanish Civil War were brewing. At this time, he was living in the cided it would take the form of a crime. Painting Catalan town of Montroig, a favorite retreat, but would have to go. He would deliver the blow. his anxiety was building. And as it grew, he reHow to start? With dissection, which entailed turned to painting as if seeking solid ground. taking painting apart, piece by piece, and throwIn the fall of 1934 he finished a series of 15 exing out essential things. traordinary pastels on paper, most of them of sinThis is what we see happening in the seven gle scowling, extravagantly sexualized figures so stark abstract paintings that open the show, all luridly colored and amorphously shaped that they done in Paris in January to mid-February of 1927. look like walking cancers and oozing sores. The pictures look intact enough, with their handThey were succeeded by small narrative paintwritten phrases and clouds filled with dots, until ings. Done in tempera on Masonite, and in oil on you notice that something is missing: paint, or all copper plates, like “The Two Philosophers,” their but a minimal amount of it. Most of each picture is diminutive scale and assertive color gives them raw, untouched canvas. the toothsome innocence of fairy-tale illustraA year later Miró gets rid of something else: tions. But they are not sweet or innocent: they are skill. The wood panel used as a support in a piece battle scenes from a psychic hell. They are also called “Spanish Dancer I” is covered with a formally exquisite. For them Miró summoned all sheet of colored paper. A small rectangle of plain sandpaper is tacked on top of it. Glued to the sand- the virtuosity that in the cause of revolution he had labored so hard to suppress. paper is a tiny cutout image of a woman’s shoe. He makes just one more murderous lunge at That’s about it: no paint, almost no image, almost tradition, in a series of paintings on Masonite no artist. panels from 1936. The attack is physical and feels Then in a third series the painter comes back a bit desperate. In many ways this series brings with a vengeance to demolish art history. In a him back to 1927. The pictures are abstract; he work called “Dutch Interior,” Miró takes an imleaves the Masonite surface mostly bare. But age of a lover serenading his lady, from a 17th-

HOLLAND COTTER

what he adds has changed: oil stains, vomitlike substances and fecal-looking hunks of tar and dirt. In addition he hacks away at the surface, stabbing and gouging and leaving deep ruts and splintery scars. At that point, with Spain in chaos, he leaves for Paris. The final picture in the show was done there. Titled “Still Life With Old Shoe,” it is in a conventional oil-on-canvas medium, in semirealist style, on a traditional theme. The searchand-destroy is over. Painting has survived and won. Miró as master painter, the new, oddly adorable artist of popular fame, more or less starts here. He must have been exhausted. I was when I reached the last gallery, but exhilarated too because I felt I’d been through something: the experience of one artist’s creative process and the experience of an exhibition as a form of thinking. Like reading a book, the process makes you part of the trip, not just a witness to it. In this case the trip is fairly demanding, but one I suspect that audiences with even a casual interest in how art is conceived and made will enjoy. The show could also be a guide to living a creative life. Destroy the artist you think the world thinks you’re supposed to be, and you’ll start to find the artist you are.

Setting aside the business suit, but not the cautious approach to his image. to look at recent images of a more casual Mr. Obama without seeing the same cautious man. However cool and informal a black windbreaker may look, it still represents a safe, formal choice. Andrew Ross, a professor and chairman of the department of social and cultural analysis at New York University, points out that informality in presidents isn’t just about looking relaxed. “It’s intended to convey clear-cut messages,” Mr. Ross said. He cited the example of Jimmy Carter, who wore a cardigan when he asked Americans to turn down their thermostats and save energy. “It remains a fact that white males can dress down much more easily than women and minorities,” he said. That’s because, unlike white males, their formal rights have never been secure. Hence they lean toward more formal attire. In a way, Mr. Obama’s suits say more about him. “He likes to keep it simple,” said Jim Moore, the creative director of GQ, who last year did a cover shoot with Mr. Obama, adding that he could probably wear a size 40 rather than a 42. To Mr. Kalenderian, there is a great deal in the consistency and plainness of Mr. Obama’s twobutton, American-made suits that sends a message of nonmaterialism. “He’s not about belonging to someone else,” he said. “It’s about the lack of branding.” Given this fairly esoteric approach to dressing, as well as the absolute consistency and almost nostalgic allusions to ’60s formality, Mr. Kalenderian said he feels sure that Mr. Obama is the architect of his own look, and that he has probably “said no to 99 suggestions.”

EMMANUEL DUNAND/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE—GETTY IMAGES

Recent photos of President-elect Barack Obama show a less formal but safe look.

8

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2008

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