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odierno de la RepubblicaSped. abb. postale art. 1

legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

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WAR

OVSKI

2010

P U B B L I C I T À

LENS

History’s never-ending tale of greed and violence suggests that hu-

mans are simply born to be bad.

But new sci-entific evidencesupports the ideathat altruism ishardwired into all but the most hard-ened sociopaths, the result of thou-sands of years of

evolutionary biology that has kept societies from slipping into anarchy.

Though the stressed parents of pet-

ulant children might question why,toddlers are at the center of some research. Babies reveal an innate in-clination to help, the Times reported, even before the socialization process has fully begun. By age three, chil-dren in groups enforce social rules,just as primitive hunter-gatherer societies would have long ago, when itwas a matter of survival.

Jane E. Brody wrote in The Times that some experts believe babies reveal empathy when they whimper at the sound of another infant crying or hand a favorite toy or blanket to a friend who is upset.

Frans de Waal, a primatologist and author of “The Age of Empathy,’’ hasfocused his research on aggression,

but has concluded that it is overrated since natural selection would havefavored cooperation. “We’re prepro-grammed to reach out,’’ Dr. de Wallhas written. “Empathy is an auto-mated response over which we havelimited control.’’

M.R.I scans support this, revealing high activity in the pleasure centerswhen people are involved in activitiesinvolving social cooperation. As TheTimes’s Natalie Angier wrote, “peo-ple cooperate because it feels good.’’

Even die-hard atheists might admit that this natural inclination to coop-erate may have, historically, been channeled through religion. Again,this may have originated with withearly hunter-gatherer societies. Nich-

olas Wade, the author of “The FaithInstinct’’ and a Times reporter, sug-gests that religion may have “bound people together, committing them toput their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest.’’

And though humans may havemade a mess of the planet, the urge to clean it up may be innate as well. Dan-iel B. Smith wrote of a collective “eco-logical unconscious,’’ which is being explored in the burgeoning study of ecopsychology, in a recent issue of the Times Sunday magazine. Experts be-lieve that the evolution of the human mind has been so interconnected withnature that being detached from it isprofoundly harmful.

“Despair and anxiety are the con-

sequences of dismissing deep-rootedecological instincts,’’ Mr. Smith wrote, adding that “an imperiled environment creates an imperiled mind.’’

The question of whether humans will choose to do the right thing by the planet may not be answered by sci-ence. But optimistic scientists stress that these innate urges for coopera-tion, altruism and preserving nature will continue to guide us.

As Dr. de Waal wrote, “I’d arguethat biology constitutes our best hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies would depend on the whims of politics, culture or religion.”

KEVIN DELANEY

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

COULD WIKI TECHNOLOGY find Osama bin

Laden?

Imagine if any Pakistani could send an anony-

mous text message to the authorities suggesting where

to look. Each location could be plotted on a map. The

dots would be scattered widely, perhaps, with promis-

ing leads indistinguishable from rubbish. But on a given

day, a surge of dots might point to the same village, in

what could not be coincidence. Troops could be ordered

in.

This kind of everyone-as-informant mapping is shak-

ing up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to

the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute

into places with little good information. And an impor-

tant force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born

organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero

of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may

have something larger to tell us about the future of hu-

manitarianism, innovation and the nature of what we

label as truth.

After Kenya’s disputed election in 2007, violence

erupted. A prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger,

Ory Okolloh, who was based in South Africa but had

gone back to Kenya to vote and observe the election,

RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Ushahidi Web platform, a Web mapping tool created in Kenya after election violence in 2007, helped pinpoint victims during the recent earthquake in Haiti, above.

The Evolution of Empathy

Con tin ued on Page IV

VIMONEY & BUSINESS

France dodges the

worst of the crisis.

ARTS & STYLES

Caravaggio has his

moment in the sun.

Humanitarianism 2.0

For comments, write tonytweekly@nytimes.com.

VIIIVAMERICANA

In a double-lock town,

unlocked doors.

Repubblica NewYork

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O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA R Y

II MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2010

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Haiti, Two MonthsAfter the Quake

With every day that passes in themud and rubble of Haiti, the failures of the relief effort are heartbreaking.There are four main strands to thecampaign to make sure 1.2 millionhomeless people are sheltered and safe as the weather turns fierce. All are inadequate.

THE MAJOR PLAYERS The UnitedNations and foreign countries andaid organizations have dispatchedtents, tarps, food, water, medicineand doctors, as they should. Theyhave done a lot of good, particularly the United States, which rushedsupplies, a troop force that peakedat about 20,000 and a hospital ship.After meeting with Haiti’s presi-dent, René Préval, President Obama pledged continued aid.

But after about two months,it’s not enough. Only half of thosedisplaced have received even thecrudest means of emergency shel-ter: plastic tarps and tents that willhardly protect them when floodsstart in earnest next month, andthe hurricanes come in June. Inhundreds of crowded settlementsaround the country, like the onessheltering more than 600,000 inPort-au-Prince, food, water, medi-cal care and security remain spot-ty.

Large swaths of the earthquakezone remain untouched by aid. Theyare choking in rubble, and trucksand volunteers have barely begun toscratch out safe places in the wreck-age for people to live.

Relief agencies have overcomestaggering obstacles, starting withthe fact that the quake demolishedthe United Nations mission, killingmuch of its leadership and employ-ees. The United Nations is in highgear now, but it has been rightlycriticized for disorganization. Lastmonth, in a scathing e-mail mes-sage, the emergency relief coordi-nator for the United Nations, JohnHolmes, blasted his colleagues forhaving been too slow to step up tothe challenge.

THE HAITIAN GOVERNMENT The

quake ruined the presidential palaceand the best managers and workers were still on the job when the trem-ors hit. President Préval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive havenot been able to resume strong oreven visible leadership.

The government has not made de-cisions or has made confusing ones. It has, for instance, refused to al-low undamaged or lightly damaged schools to reopen with a full curricu-lum until all schools can reopen —letting children languish.

THE N.G.O.’S Existing charitymechanisms have been revved upto try to match the staggering scale of the earthquake, and new ones are being invented. The big multination-al nongovernmental organizationsare providing vital support to theUnited Nations. But there are thou-sands of others, like the small rural mission churches and other groups that right now are offering just pin-pricks of relief.

THE PEOPLE Haitians are eager to help themselves. Refugees areforming settlement councils andelecting representatives to col-laborate with the nongovernmental organizations. They are buildinghomes themselves, clearing rubblethemselves, burying the dead them-selves, organizing security brigades themselves. But they are as over-matched as everyone else by thescale of the disaster.

There is a burning need to tap the energies of Haitians. That means at the grass-roots, church, businessand neighborhood groups that knowthe country and are deeply commit-ted to its rebirth.

Efforts to do so have been negli-gible so far. Haiti should be able tocount on American technical exper-tise, security and money, especially as energy shifts to rebuilding. Ev-eryone should keep improving basic efforts to keep refugees safe and ingood health. But, ultimately, it is theUnited Nations that must take re-sponsibility to lead and coordinatethe relief efforts.

Learning From Lehman

E D I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M E S

On top of everything LehmanBrothers did before it collapsed in2008, nearly toppling the financialsystem, it now seems that it was ag-gressively doctoring its books.

Of course, many colossal bank-ruptcies involve bad accounting.But a new report on the Lehman col-

A drumroll, please. In a moment,the winner of my 2010 “win-a-trip”contest.

But first, a message from the spon-sor — that’s me. A generation ago,the most thrilling program for young Americans was the Peace Corps. To-day, it’s Teach for America, which thisyear has attracted 46,000 applicantswho are competing for about 4,500slots.

Peace Corps and Teach for America represent the best ethic of public ser-vice. But at a time when those pro-grams can’t meet the demand fromyoung people seeking to give back, weneed a new initiative: Teach for theWorld.

In my mind, Teach for the Worldwould be a one-year program placing young Americans in schools in devel-oping countries. The Americans mightteach English or computer skills, orcoach basketball or debate teams. The program would be open to Americans 18 and over. It could be used for a gap year between high school and college,but more commonly would offer a de-tour between college and graduateschool or the real world.

The host country would provideroom and board through a host fam-ily. To hold down costs, participantswould be unpaid and receive onlyairplane tickets, a local cellphone and a tiny stipend to cover bus fares andanti-malaria bed nets.

This would be a government-fi-nanced effort to supplement an Ameri-can diplomacy outreach that has been eviscerated over the last few decades.A similar program, WorldTeach, was founded by a group of Harvard stu-dents in 1986 and does a terrific job. Butwithout major support from the Ameri-can government, it often must charge

participants thousands of dollars for a year’s volunteer work.

Teach for the World also would bean important education initiative forAmerica itself. Fewer than 30 percent of Americans have passports, and onlyone-quarter can converse in a second language. And the place to learn lan-guages isn’t an American classroombut in the streets of Quito or Dakar or Cairo.

Here’s a one-word language testto measure whether someone reallyknows a foreign country and culture:What’s the word for doorknob? Peo-ple who have studied a language in a classroom rarely know the answer.But those who have been embedded ina country know. America would be awiser country if we had more peoplewho knew how to translate “door-knob.” I would bet that those peoplewho know how to say doorknob in Far-si almost invariably oppose a militarystrike on Iran.

(Just so you don’t drop my columnto get a dictionary: pomo de la puertain some forms of Spanish; poignée de porte in French; and dash gireh ye dar in Farsi.)

American universities are belatedlyrecognizing how provincial they areand are trying to get more studentsabroad. Goucher College in Baltimore requires foreign study, and Princeton University in New Jersey has begun a program to help incoming students go abroad for a gap year before college.

The impact of time in the developingworld is evident in the work of Abigail Falik, who was transformed by a sum-mer in a Nicaraguan village when she was 16. As a Harvard Business School student two years ago, she won firstplace in a competition for the best planfor a “social enterprise.” Now she is

the chief executive of the resultingnonprofit, Global Citizen Year, whichgives high school graduates a gap yearworking in a developing country.

Global Citizen Year’s first class is inthe field now, in Guatemala and Sen-egal, teaching English, computers,yoga, drama and other subjects. Ms.Falik is now accepting applicationsfor the second class, and in anotherdecade she hopes to have 10,000 stu-dents enrolled annually in Global Citi-zen Year.

Getting young people more engagedwith global issues is also the aim of myannual win-a-trip contest, in whichI take a student with me on a report-ing trip to the developing world. Andwithout further delay: The winner thistime is Mitch Smith, a 19-year-old fromOverland Park, Kansas, who is study-ing journalism at the University of Ne-braska-Lincoln. He’s a terrific writer who has never been outside the UnitedStates, so stay tuned for his blogging and videos from Africa later this year. (One possibility is an overland journeyfrom Gabon through the two Congos toAngola).

Congratulations as well to therunner-up, Saumya Dave, a medicalstudent who took a leave from Drexel University in Philadelphia so that shecould study writing at Columbia Uni-versity. The other finalists are KateEaneman of the University of Califor-nia at Berkeley and Matt Gillespie, arecent Stanford graduate now at theHunter College School of Education.And thanks to the Center for GlobalDevelopment for whittling down thepool of 893 applicants for me.

And for those of you who didn’tmake it, ask President Obama to cre-ate a Teach for the World so that youcan win your own trip.

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Teach for the World

The Mystery of Happiness

To the Editor:I write in response to Nicholas D.

Kristof’s interesting essay (AsianAge, January 8) that reported thehappiest people on earth live in CostaRica. It reminds one that, from indi-viduals to happiness economists, hap-piness is a personal choice and subjec-tive in its conceptualization. For someit is an emotion, for others, as J. Gil-christ Lawson said, “the supreme ob-ject of existence”, or, even “the union of ourselves with God” (Pascal).

Besides, some people measure oth-ers’ happiness with respect to theirown parameters. Western countriesthink that Indians are unhappy be-cause most of them are poor and Indi-ans presume that the Westerners are unhappy because they lack “mentalpeace,” their forte.

Given such diversity of views,should we conclude as L.E. Landondid: “Happiness is like the statue ofIsis whose veil no mortal raised.”

Y. G. CHOUKSEY

Pune, India

‘A Clash of Cultures’

To the Editor:I think Roger Cohen’s Intelligence

column (The Observer, March 7) sumsup what we Europeans feel is a majorfault in the thinking of some Ameri-cans when you write “Europeans pitytheir war dead; Americans extol theglory of sacrifice.” Americans seemfundamentally ignorant of the basicfacts of modern warfare.

The young children of the Londonstreet in which I was brought in thelate 1940s/early 1950 thought we were

underprivileged. While every otherstreet around had wide expanses ofcleared bomb sites for children toplay on, our street did not, alone inthat part of London it had not sufferedfrom a direct bomb hit.

Can you think of New York beingsubjected to weekly 9/11s for a year?That was London, in the early 1940s,and what German cities suffered laterwas much worse. Can you imagine the terror of the men, women and childrenwho, as night approached, as the airraid sirens sounded, went to the shel-ters knowing that they, their childrenor their neighbors might be killed,injured and maimed for life; as thebombs came down night after night on Europe’s cities for year after year?

Yes, we do pity them, for we knowthat the vast, overwhelming majorityof war casualties are the civilian vic-tims of war.

ALAN MATHISON

Harrow, England

To the Editor:Roger Cohen develops an analysis

that seems quite relevant, particu-larly from the psychological point ofview. The lack of solidarity amongEuropean allies of the United States iswhat Jean-Francois Revel called “the obsessive anti-Americanism,” whichis less of an issue, for obvious reasons,in former Eastern Bloc countries.

Historically, we may regret someof the anti-American posturing ofleaders like De Gaulle, who, however,proved loyal in the case of Soviet mis-siles in Cuba in 1962. But De Gaullewas also reasonable to be wary of anally who has helped the Viet Minh in1945, through the work of the Office of Strategic Services and Major Patti.

These days, the fact that Europe-ans do not seem willing to share in the fight is not an excuse, because we’reall in this together.

The attacks on September 11 may

have been spectacular, but there were also deadly bombings in London andMadrid. The danger to our democ-racies presented by radical Islam isformidable. But that danger does not seem to be perceived by our leaders inEurope, who persist in denial for thesake of political correctness.

“Any military alliance,” Mr. Cohencorrectly points out, “must be basedon a common perception of danger.”Our common goal should be to fightterrorism, Yes to transatlantic soli-darity, not the communitarianism!

GÉRARD LEVANO

Brussels

Lessons of Greek Debt

To the Editor:Nikos Konstandaras’s Intelligence

essay in last week’s InternationalWeekly was the first I’ve read to makeany sense since the beginning of this“crisis.”

Bully for him! MATTHEW FENNER

Vienna

The Benefits of Plagiarism

To the Editor:On the Arts page last week in the

International Weekly (The Observ-er, March 14) was an article with theheadline: “Writers Who Like to Bor-row.” This reminded me of the dictumrelated in song by Tom Lehrer. Theadvice of the great Russian mathema-tician N. I. Lobachevsky was:

“Let no one else’s work evade youreyes

remember why the good Lord madeyour eyes

don’t shade your eyes — but plagia-rize, plagiarize, plagiarize…”

JOHN CHUBB

Cheltenham, England

LETTERS TO THE INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Send comments tonytweekly@nytimes.com.

lapse, released recently, would leave anyone dumbstruck by the firm’saudacity — and reminded of the se-vere need for adult supervision ofWall Street. The 2,200-page reportwas written by Anton R. Valukas, a former federal prosecutor who was appointed by the Justice Depart-ment as an examiner for the Lehmanbankruptcy case. According to thereport, Lehman engaged in transac-tions that let it temporarily shift as-sets off its books and in so doing, hideits reliance on borrowed money.

The maneuvers, which Mr. Valu-kas said were “materially mislead-ing,” made the firm appear healthier than it was. He wrote that RichardS. Fuld Jr., Lehman’s former chiefexecutive, was “at least grosslynegligent,” and that Lehman execu-tives engaged in “actionable balancesheet manipulation.” Accordingto the report, rating agencies, gov-ernment regulators and Lehman’sboard of directors had no clue about the gimmicks. The result is that wewere all blindsided. And we couldbe blindsided again. Congress isnot even close to passing meaning-ful regulatory reform. The surviv-ing banks have only gotten biggerand more politically powerful. If the Valukas report is not a wake-up call, what would be?

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2010 III

Jerusalem

JORDAN

SYRIA

LEBANON

ISRAEL

EGYPT

WEST

BANK

GAZA

STRIP Dead

Sea

Jordan River

Mediterranean

Sea

Amman

SAUDI

ARABIA

65Kms.

By ANDREW JACOBS

SHANGHAI — It’s not so easy be-ing Han Han, the heartthrob race car driver and pop novelist who just hap-pens to be China’s most widely readblogger.

Traveling incognito is all but im-possible. Local officials vie for his en-dorsement of their latest architecturalboondoggles. (He politely declines.)And young women often approachhim after races with letters bearinghis name. (He says the women havebeen duped by impostors .)

But Mr. Han’s most vexing challengecomes from a more formidable neme-sis: the unseen censors who delete blogposts they deem objectionable and the publishing police who have held upthe release of his new magazine, “AChorus of Solos,” a provocative collec-tion of essays and photographs. “The government wants China to becomea great cultural nation, but our lead-ers are so uncultured,” he said with a shrug, offering his characteristic grin. “If things continue like this, China willonly be known for tea and pandas.”

Since he began blogging in 2006, Mr.

Han has been delivering increasingly caustic attacks on China’s leadership. With more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular liv-ing writer in the world.

In a recent interview at his office inShanghai, he described party officialsas “useless’’ and prone to spouting non-sense, although he used more delicatelanguage to dismiss their relevance.“Their lives are nothing like ours,’’ hesaid. “The only thing they have in com-mon with young people is that like us,they too have girlfriends in their 20s,although theirs are on the side.’’

Mr. Han is careful to deliver hisbarbs through sarcasm and humor-ous anecdotes.

In one recent post about redevel-opment projects that often end inviolence and forced evictions, hesuggested that the government build public housing in the form of prisons.The benefits would be twofold, he ex-plained: Tenants could make no claim on the apartments and those whomake a fuss could simply be locked upin their homes.

His current gambit is a competition that will award $730 to the person who comes up with new lyrics to a song-and-dance routine that was broadcast last month during the Chinese NewYear television gala.

The performance, staged by China’snational broadcaster, featured merry members of the Uighur minority sing-ing praise for Communist Party poli-cies.

Although his posts are sometimes“harmonized” — a popular euphe-mism for censorship — his blog hasso far been allowed to continue. RanYunfei, a writer and blogger in SichuanProvince, says that Mr. Han is partly insulated by his celebrity, but also byhis avoidance of the most politicallycharged topics.

“He uses humor and wit to laugh at the injustices he sees,” said Mr. Ran,whose own blog is blocked in China.“Perhaps the reason he’s tolerated isbecause he does not name names di-rectly and he doesn’t go after the heartof the problem, which is China’s one-party dictatorship.”

But the government has lately found a way to pique him by holding up therelease of his magazine. Mr. Han saidthe main objection appears to be an ar-ticle that details the blacklisting of ac-tors who have angered the authorities.Asked what he will do if his endeavoris thwarted, or if one day his blog isbanned entirely, Mr. Han smiles andoffers trademark sarcasm. “I’ll justbecome a better driver.”

For a few months in the mid-1960sPresident Johnson and his aidessecretly weighed bombing China’snuclear sites — perhaps seeking

Soviet help — ratherthan let Mao get thebomb. Then the costs ofstarting another war inAsia sank in and theydecided to try contain-ment — living with a

threatening regime while deterring itsmost dangerous moves.

It worked. China has evolved into acomparatively manageable militarycompetitor, at least for now.

Today a version of the same debateabout whether containment is the an-swer is breaking out again, this timeabout Iran. Prominent strategists likeZbigniew Brzezinski argue forcefullythat what worked in the cold war willwork with the mullahs. The cover ofForeign Affairs this month is an articletitled “After Iran Gets the Bomb”; itdraws scenarios for dealing with whatmany believe is inevitable. Mean-while, the administration races to addantimissile systems and a naval pres-ence in the Gulf — an effort to contain

Iran’s power in the region, officialssay, but it sure looks like the buildingblocks of a nuclear containment policy,in case the next round of sanctionsfails to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

The White House denies that nucle-ar containment is on the table. “TheUnited States is determined to prevent

Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons,period,” Vice President Joseph R.Biden Jr. said on his recent tense tripto Israel.

But to many in the early 1960s, anuclear China was also unthinkable.

More recently, George W. Bushwould regularly repeat that Americawould never “tolerate” a nuclearNorth Korea. The reality was that he

tolerated it, then prepared the way forthe current containment strategy ofintercepting shipments from NorthKorea to customers for its nuclearknow-how.

What is striking about the currentdebate about containing Iran is thatneither side seems entirely confidentin the solidity of its argument.

Those who advocate sanctions ac-knowledge that three rounds enactedby the United Nations Security Coun-cil failed to change Iran’s behavior.Even if the administration wins newsanctions aimed at the RevolutionaryGuard, the advocates admit it will stillbe a long shot that Iran would hurtenough to stop enriching uranium.

Those who argue that a militarystrike might be needed if sanctionsfail have their own doubts. They admitthey cannot predict Iran’s response —from terror strikes to oil cutoffs to con-frontations in the Strait of Hormuz.

Even the administration seemstentative about when Iran will exceedAmerican tolerance. In the Pentagonand the intelligence agencies, severalsenior officials complain — thoughnever on the record — that President

Obama and his staff have not clearlydefined when Iran will gain a “nuclearweapons capability.”

So what is the argument for contain-ment? Basically, it assumes that if Chi-na and Russia changed over decades,so might Iran. And nuclear weaponscan handcuff a nation as easily as theycan empower it. Recently, at the Uni-versity of Oklahoma, Mr. Brzezinskiargued that either an Iranian bomb oran attack on Iran would be “a calam-ity, a disaster.” He said containment could work because Iran “may bedangerous, assertive and duplicitous,but there is nothing in their history tosuggest they are suicidal.”

Nevertheless, in their Foreign Af-fairs essay, James Lindsay and RayTakeyh concede that the Iran casediffers substantially from the cold warones, and that a successful strategy to-day would have to recognize that fact.They urge Mr. Obama to prescribethree explicit no-go zones for the Ira-nians: “no initiation of conventionalwarfare” against another nation; “notransfer of nuclear weapons, materi-als, or technologies”; no increase insupport for terrorists. The penalty,

they argued, would have to include“military retaliation by any and allmeans necessary,” including the useof nuclear weapons.

It is a logical list. But there is a coun-terargument: Why would Iran believethe threat if the United States, havingsaid it would never allow Iran to get anuclear capability, then allowed it?

In fact, the administration is deep in-to containment now — though it insistsits increases in defensive power in theGulf are meant to deter a conventionalattack by Iran. If Iran’s threat wentnuclear, America might have to extendits nuclear umbrella as well.

Defense Secretary Robert Gatescarefully stepped around that optionrecently while in Saudi Arabia and theUnited Arab Emirates, trying to reas-sure leaders who increasingly fear theprospect of an Iranian bomb.

Mr. Gates defended the sanctionsstrategy: “I think the prospects ofsuccess are certainly better than ina lot of other situations where sanc-tions have been applied,’’ he said. Buthe spent most of his time explainingthe need for “defensive capabilities’’against Iranian missiles.

If Iran Goes Nuclear, Containment May Be the Default Policy

DAVID

SANGER

ESSAY

Li Bibo contributed research.

Some say whatworked in the cold war can work now.

Stripped of Citizenship, Jordanians Set Adrift

A Heartthrob Who BlogsPokes at China’s Leaders

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

AMMAN, Jordan — MuhannadHaddad grew up here, went to schoolhere, got a job in a bank here andtraveled to foreign countries with apassport from here. Then one day the authorities said he was no longer Jor-danian, and with that one stroke theytook away his citizenship and com-promised his ability to travel, study,work, seek health care, buy propertyor even drive.

The authorities effectively told himthey were doing it for his own good. They said that like thousands of oth-er Jordanians of Palestinian descent,he was being stripped of his citizen-ship to preserve his right to someday return to the occupied West Bank orEast Jerusalem.

“They gave me a paper that said,‘You are now Palestinian,’ ” he said, recalling the day three years ago thathis life changed.

In a report titled “Stateless Again,”issued last month, Human RightsWatch said that 2,700 people in Jor-dan lost their citizenship from 2004to 2008, and that at least another200,000 remained vulnerable, large-ly those who moved abroad at some point in search of work.

The government says it is trying tohelp by requiring Jordanians of Pal-estinian descent who fled the WestBank or Jerusalem after the war in1967 to keep their Israeli documents valid. This has become a more urgentmatter recently, political analystsand government officials said, withthe accession of a right-wing Israeligovernment and its ultraconserva-tive foreign minister, Avigdor Lie-berman.

“It is no secret that some elements

in Israel would like to see the Pales-tinian areas without the people,” saidNabil Sharif, Jordan’s minister ofstate and a government spokesman.“We do not want to be party to this.”

Critics and human rights advo-cates, however, see a different moti-vation. They said the Jordanian gov-ernment acted to preserve its owninterest, trying to appease non-Pal-estinian Jordanians concerned aboutthe growing economic and politicalinfluence of citizens of Palestiniandescent, a charge Mr. Sharif denied. They say it also appears that Jordanis frightened by talk of declaring Jor-dan a Palestinian homeland as an al-ternative to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

The critics accuse the govern-ment of acting in an arbitrary man-

ner, frequently dividing familiesbetween citizens and noncitizens,sometimes based on the timing oftheir birth, and for not offering effec-tive avenues to appeal of decisionson citizenship.

For years now, Jordanian officials have expressed concern for preserv-ing the demographic balance in anation of six million people, divided about evenly between those from the East Bank of the Jordan River andthose from the West Bank.

“The government is not doing thisto support the Palestinians in theirright of return,” said Fawzi Sam-houri, director of a human rightsorganization in Amman, Jordan’scapital. Rather, he said, the govern-ment is responding to domestic politi-cal pressures because “some peoplethink these procedures will reducethe percentage of the population thatis of Palestinian origin.”

Seven Palestinian men who losttheir citizenship described a simi-lar chain of events. They said it was during a routine interaction with the state — renewing a driver’s license, a passport or a document that provedone’s military service.

In each case, they said, a clerktyped the person’s name, or a fam-ily member’s name, into a computer and told the applicant that there was a problem and that he needed to goto the Interior Ministry’s Follow-up and Inspection Office.

The government says that this hasnothing to do with demographic bal-ance, that the process has been going on since 1988, when King Hussein de-livered a speech in which he gave upany claim of sovereignty to the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

A report found that 2,700 Jordanians lost citizenship.

SHAWN BALDWIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

SHIHO FUKADA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“The government wants

China to become a great

cultural nation, but our

leaders are so uncultured.”

HAN HAN

Race car driver, novelist and blogger

Pictures ofKing Abdullahand Queen Rania ofJordan andYasir Arafat in a home in a Palestinian section ofAmman.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2010

ILLUSTRATION BY

THE NEW YORK TIMES

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

For many years, few metals drewbigger yawns from mining executivesthan lithium, a lightweight elementlong associated mostly with mood-stabilizing drugs.

The yawns are being replaced byeurekas. As awareness spreads thatlithium is a crucial ingredient for hy-brid and electric cars, a global hunt isunder way for new supplies.

Toyota Tsusho, the material sup-plier for the big Japanese automaker,announced a joint venture in January with the Australian miner Orocobreto develop a $100 million lithium proj-ect in Argentina. That deal came onlydays after Magna International, theCanadian car parts company that ishelping develop a battery-poweredversion of the Ford Focus, announced that it was investing $10 million in asmall Canadian lithium firm that alsohas projects in Argentina.

They were the latest in a series ofdeals and projects announced overthe last year, reflecting a new urgency among companies to assure them-selves future supplies of the metal.

“There is a sea change under way,” James D. Calaway, the chairman ofOrocobre, said. “We are at the frontend potentially of a very significantincrease in the demand for lithium for the emerging electric transportation sector.”

Mr. Calaway added, however, thatthe timing of any increase in lithiumsupply and demand was difficult to

predict in large part because electriccars had yet to take off in any big way.

About 60 mining companies havebegun feasibility studies in Argenti-na, Serbia and Nevada that could lead to more than $1 billion in new lithium projects in the next several years,while dozens of smaller projects arebeing proposed in China, Finland,Mexico and Canada.

The companies are competing forconstruction financing, and the futureof most of the projects will depend onhow popular electric cars eventuallybecome. That is an open question sincebatteries remain expensive, recharg-ing stations need to be developed, and consumer taste for cars that dependon regular stops at electric outlets re-mains untested.

“It’s moving so fast,” said EdwardR. Anderson, president of TRU Group,a consultancy firm that specializes inthe lithium industry. “There are a lot ofpeople throwing money into this, and a lot of people are going to lose theirmoney.”

In the meantime the four biggestcurrent producers, which mine andotherwise gather lithium in Chile, Ar-gentina and Australia, say they areplanning to expand long-running proj-ects as future demand warrants.

In Bolivia, which has almost half of the world’s reserves, the leftist gov-ernment is building a pilot produc-tion plant and is drilling exploratoryholes. That Bolivia is a remote, un-stable country often hostile to foreign

investment has helped spur interestin producing lithium in neighboringArgentina and Chile, in Australia and in the United States. Several Canadianand American companies are makingclaims about future production pros-pects in Nevada, though few analystsforesee large-scale production fromthat state.

Lithium-ion batteries are the fa-vored battery type for electric andhybrid vehicles because they carrymore energy with less weight thanother materials and because they lose their charge more slowly. They storeabout three times as much as energyper pound as a nickel-metal hydridebattery.

Lithium is being produced commer-cially mainly by two methods. Oneis through mining and processing, arelatively expensive method.

The more economical and signifi-cant method is through evaporationof lithium-containing brines, mostlyin salt flats in the highland areas inSouth America and western China.

By the standards of traditional goldand copper booms, the increase in in-terest in lithium is still muted among big mining companies. But with sever-al major auto companies promising to market electric cars around the world over the next few years, demand may be poised to increase.

“We believe that demand is slated to rise dramatically,” according to a re-cent report by the investment adviserByron Capital Markets.

MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP—GETTY IMAGES

Bolivia holds almost half the world’s reserves of lithium, used to make batteries. A plant’s evaporating pool.

In an Electric Car Future, Lithium Will Be King

Humanitarianism 2.0: A New Tool Allows Crowds to Map a Crisis

received threats about her work and returned to South Africa. She postedonline the idea of an Internet mappingtool to allow people to report violence and other misdeeds anonymously.Technology whizzes saw her post and built the Ushahidi Web platform over along weekend.

The site collected user-gener-ated cellphone reports of riots,stranded refugees, rapes anddeaths and plotted them on a map,using the locations given by infor-mants. It collected more testimony— which is what ushahidi meansin Swahili — with greater rapiditythan any reporter or election monitor.

When the Haitian earthquakestruck, Ushahidi went again into ac-tion. An emergency texting numberwas advertised via radio. Ushahidireceived thousands of messages re-porting trapped victims. They weretranslated by a diffuse army of Hai-tian-Americans in the United Statesand plotted on a “crisis map.” From a

situation room at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford,outside Boston, Ushahidi volunteersexchanged instant messages with the United States Coast Guard in Haiti,telling them where to search. Whenthe Chilean earthquake struck, Usha-hidi was deployed again.

A lot of things could go wrong withthis model. People could lie, get the

address wrong, exaggerate their situ-ation. But as data collects, crisis maps can reveal underlying patterns of re-ality: How many kilometers inlanddid the hurricane kill? Are the rapes broadly dispersed or concentratednear military barracks?

Ushahidi suggests a new paradigmin humanitarian work. The old para-digm was one-to-many: foreign jour-

nalists and aid workers jet in, reporton a calamity and dispense aid withwhatever data they have. The newparadigm is many-to-many-to-many:victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volun-teers translates text messages andhelps to orchestrate relief; journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response.

Ushahidi also represents a newfrontier of innovation. Silicon Valleyhas been the reigning paradigm of in-novation, with its universities, finan-ciers, mentors, immigrants and robustpatents. Ushahidi comes from anotherworld, in which entrepreneurship isborn of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less.

Because Ushahidi originated in cri-sis, no one tried to patent it. BecauseKenya is poor, with computers out ofreach for many, Ushahidi made its sys-tem work on cellphones. Because Ush-ahidi had no venture-capital backing, it used open-source software, lettingothers remix its tool for new projects.

Ushahidi remixes have been usedin India to monitor elections; in Af-

rica to report medicine shortages; inthe Middle East to collect reports ofwartime violence; and in Washing-ton, D.C., where The Washington Post partnered to build a site to map roadblockages and the location of availablesnowplows and blowers.

With every new application, Ushahi-di is quietly transforming the notion of bearing witness in tragedy. For a long time, this was done first by journal-ists in real time, next by victim/writ-ers like Anne Frank and, finally, byhistorians. But in this instantaneousage, this kind of testimony confrontsa more immediate kind: one of aggre-gate, average, good-enough truths.

“We’re moving beyond the idea thatinformation is completely true or com-pletely false,” said Patrick Meier, astudent at Fletcher who directs Usha-hidi’s crisis-mapping operation.

What would we know about whatpassed between Turks and Arme-nians, between Germans and Jews, ifevery one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time: “I was here, and this is what hap-pened to me”?

SNOWMAGEDDONCLEANUP.COM

Ushahidi maps warned drivers in Washington, D.C., of snowy roads.

Rise in Seed Prices Draws Scrutiny to Big Company

From Page I

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

During the depths of the economiccrisis last year, the prices for manygoods held steady or even dropped. But on American farms, the pic-ture was far different, as farmerswatched the price they paid for seedsskyrocket. Corn seed prices rose 32percent; soybean seeds were up 24percent.

Such price increases for seeds— the most important purchase afarmer makes each year — are partof an unprecedented climb that be-gan more than a decade ago, stem-ming from the advent of genetically engineered crops and the rapid con-centration in the seed industry thataccompanied it.

The price increases have not only irritated many farmers, they havecaught the attention of the Obamaadministration. The Justice Depart-ment began an antitrust investiga-tion of the seed industry last year,with an apparent focus on Monsan-to, which controls much of the mar-ket for the expensive bioengineered traits that make crops resistant toinsect pests and herbicides.

The investigation is just one facet of a push by the Obama administra-tion to take a closer look at competi-tion — or the lack thereof — in agri-culture, from the dairy industry tolivestock to commodity crops, likecorn and soybeans.

“I think most farmers would look tohave more competition in the indus-try,” said Laura L. Foell, who raises corn and soybeans on 365 hectares inSchaller, Iowa.

The Iowa attorney general, TomMiller, has also been scrutinizingMonsanto’s market dominance. The company’s genetically engineeredtraits are in the vast majority of cornand soybeans grown in the UnitedStates, Mr. Miller said. “That gives them considerable power, and ques-tions arise about how that power isused,” he said.

Critics charge that Monsanto has used license agreements with small-er seed companies to gain an unfair

advantage over competitors and to block cheaper generic versions of its seeds from eventually entering the market. DuPont, a rival company,also claims Monsanto has unfairlybarred it from combining biotechtraits in a way that would benefitfarmers.

In a recent interview at Monsan-to’s headquarters in St. Louis, itschief executive, Hugh Grant, saidthat while his company might be the market leader, competition was in-creasing as the era of biotech crops matured.

“We were the first out of the blocks,and I think what you see now is abunch of people catching up and ag-gressively competing, and I’m fight-ing with them,” Mr. Grant said. Hesaid farmers chose the company’sproducts because they liked the re-sults in the field, not because of any untoward conduct on Monsanto’spart.

Yet in a seed market that Monsan-to dominates, the jump in prices has

been nothing short of stunning. Including the sharp increases last

year, Agriculture Department fig-ures show that corn seed prices haverisen 135 percent since 2001. Soybeanprices went up 108 percent over that period. By contrast, the ConsumerPrice Index rose only 20 percent inthat period.

Many farmers have been willing topay a premium price because the ge-netically engineered seeds that makeup most of the market come with ad-vantages. Genetic modifications for both corn and soybeans make thecrops resistant to herbicides, simpli-fying weed control and saving labor,fuel and machinery costs. Many ge-netically engineered corn and cottonseeds also resist insect pests, whichcuts down on chemical spraying.

Lee Quarles, a Monsanto spokes-man, said the price increases were justified because the quality of theseeds had been going up, and newbiotech traits kept being added. Forexample, he said, many corn vari-eties now include multiple genes to battle insect pests .

Since 2001, cornseed prices haverisen 135 percent.

Repubblica NewYork

N E W YO R K

MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2010 V

A Cabin in the Woods on the Lower East Side

Even in a Tough Town, Doors Stay Unlocked

Many Nuts, Few Roasters

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Somewhere among the stuffed ani-mals and fire logs, the bellows, cop-per kettles, hatchets and adzes, thepowder horn, horse skull, snowshoes,sleds, razor strop, ox-yoke chandelier and crank-operated washing machineare Rob Schleifer’s 21st-century ne-cessities.

“I ask people to find the refrigera-tor,” said Mr. Schleifer, who finallypoints it out: an all-but-invisible half-size unit. It’s camouflaged forestbrown, like his televisions, VCR, radio,telephone, computers, printers andjust about everything else in the fifth-floor Manhattan walk-up his familyhas had since 1947.

Mr. Schleifer, a 61-year-old bach-elor body builder and philologist who compiles dictionaries and writes eso-teric articles about lexicography, has carried an obsession with the frontier past to new lengths. For reasons hefinds difficult to explain, he has spent much of the last 30 years turning hisone-bedroom rental on Avenue A near14th Street into his version of a clut-tered colonial cabin in the woods.

“I’m always yearning for the moun-tains and pristine wilderness,” saidMr. Schleifer, who once fled to theColorado wilds to live in a lean-to withonly a bag of potatoes and wild plantsto sustain him.

He began by trying to hide the whitewalls. “The color of death,” he said. “Itwasn’t like a plan from the beginning.The more changes I made, the more I wanted to do to create a complete envi-

ronment.” He etched woody patterns into the door frames and moldings. Hebroke into the walls and temporarily reopened two bricked-up fireplaces. Heturned the bathroom steam pipe into atree, complete with curling serpent.

“I know nothing about antiques,” he said. But he filled the apartment withfound treasures. A stuffed cat. A zither he bought at auction for 45 cents. An oxyoke he turned into lighting. A horseskull picked up in the woods in Flori-da. A World War II radiation detector. Handcuffs. Brass knuckles, two sets.

“About 95 percent of the people are thrilled by it,” he said. The remainder,he acknowledged, include his girl-friend of eight months, a translator of French and Spanish.

He grew up in the same StuyvesantTown neighborhood. His father ownedan air-conditioning repair company,and he and his twin brother, Ronald,went to local schools. He attended theState University at Albany, where he majored in history, and in 1970 went to

Colorado to build houses, sleeping out for a time in the woods. He returnedin 1979, joining his uncle George, apainter, in an $87.72-a-month rent-controlled apartment at 217 Avenue A that the uncle had lived in since 1947.

After several years, his uncle movedto a nursing home, and Mr. Schleiferleft for Oklahoma State University to teach technical and scientific writing, letting an aspiring actor, Bill Pullman,move into the apartment.

“I thought New York is a wackyplace with probably a lot of faux-Co-lonial cabins,” recalled Mr. Pullman,who went on to appear in more than 50films.

Mr. Schleifer returned in 1985, re-possessing the apartment for a timewith his uncle, taking a job maintain-ing the air-conditioning in the Barneysstore and working on a Macmillanhigh school dictionary. In 1995, hepublished “Grow Your Vocabulary,” a Random House trade paperback. Hewrote for the Chicago-based languagequarterly Verbatim, contributing ar-ticles like “Alchemical Calques or the Transmutation of Language.”

Now, though it is hard to imagine, heis taking it all down, like a frontiers-man breaking camp. He was lured byhis landlord’s buyout offer and the de-pressed housing market. “There areso many great deals, I want to buy.”

Will he re-create the cabin in hisnext home? “The work that I put into this place I can’t imagine ever doing itagain,” he said, before reconsidering. “Oh, I’ll do something.”

By JOYCE WADLER

It’s the lore and lure of bucolicsmall-town living: The communityis so safe, people don’t even locktheir doors. But Joyce Weisshappel,a 63-year-old vice president with the Corcoran Group, a real estate com-pany, does not live in a small town; she lives in Manhattan, in a luxuryapartment building.

And she doesn’t think she has ever locked her door in the 30 years shehas lived there — she doesn’t evenknow where the keys are.

Why would she lock the door, she asks. There are 24-hour doormen, de-livery people cannot enter the build-ing unescorted and she’s never heardof a crime being committed there.

The No Lock People: You maydoubt their existence, particularlyin big cities like New York, but peo-ple who do not lock the doors to their houses and apartments do exist— and in surprising numbers. A2008 survey by State Farm In-surance of 1,000 homes across America reported that fewerthan half of those surveyed al-ways locked their front doors.

But when a committed LockPerson lives in the samebuilding as a No Lock Per-son, things can heat up.

“It’s the height of naïveté,”says a New York businesswomanwho identifies herself as a DoubleLock Person. (She would not use her name, she says, for fear of incurring the anger of her neighbors.)

“I live in a high rise with a door-man, I’ve been there 15 years andI’ve never heard of a burglary inthe building, but that has absolutely nothing to do with it — it’s commonsense,” she says. “There is someone in my building who never locks her door. Her story is she would onlylose the key. She has told the build-ing staff to just go in.”

The building managers sent thisresident a letter, Ms. Double Locksays, notifying her, “If you are stu-pid enough to keep the door openand yell to anyone within hearingdistance that the door is open, andanyone who hears it can go on in, the building isn’t going to be responsiblefor it” if anything happened to herbelongings.

A spokesman for the New YorkCity Police Department reportedthat of the 19,263 burglaries that tookplace in New York City in 2009, 5,041 did not involve forced entry.

While out-of-towners may cling to the notion of New York as a city of tri-ple locks and metal bars bracing the door — an image common in movies from the 1960s and 1970s — that ideais dramatically out of date. Accord-ing to the Police Department, there were 210,703 burglaries in the city in1980, more than 10 times as many asthere were last year.

And in some ways, the city may bea victim of its own success — peoplemay have become too comfortable,says James Murtagh, the command-ing officer of the 19th Precinct on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

“My crime prevention officer goes to visit each one of the burglary lo-cations,” he says. “And the resident

will often tell the officer, ‘I don’t lock the door,’ or they feel safe

or it’s a safe neighborhood.They blatantly admit it to us. The logic to them is they feel

comfortable enough to leave itopen.”

But the decision to lock or not lock is not always logical — often, it isbased entirely on emotion.

“A person’s perception of safetyis not necessarily tied to statistics,”says Lois Braverman, the presidentof the Ackerman Institute for theFamily in New York, which trainsmental health workers. “A person’sidea of safety is tied to variables thatare very illogical but are part of the story they tell themselves.”

Ms. Braverman — who lives in aManhattan doorman building whereshe always locks her door, but spent much of her adult life in a house inDes Moines where she usually lefther door unlocked during the day— also insists that one should notequate locking habits with person-ality. She knows of no data that sug-gest No Lock People are risk-takers,she says, and it would be incorrect to assume that those who triple-locktheir homes are cautious.

“I know of people who lock theirdoors, but will ski down the hardest,steepest runs in Colorado in their60s,” she says.

By DIANE CARDWELL

“We Are Nuts About Nuts,” the aw-ning proclaims, as the classic stain-less-steel roaster spins in the window, churning out three-kilogram batches of hot almonds, cashews and pista-chios, up to 10 times a day. Beyond theglass, bins of macadamias, raisins andpumpkin seeds nestle amid containersof dried fruit, store-made snack mixes and black licorice.

There are plenty of places to buynuts in Manhattan, from grocerystores to the occasional subway plat-form. But if you want them fresh, per-haps even still warm, from the roaster,SP’s Nuts and Candy may well be youronly option.

Once upon a time, shops like thiswere common in the city, quick stops for a cheap, salty snack. Today, SP’sowner, Michael Yeo, is keeping alivea New York tradition that has all butvanished over the past several de-cades, one he simply happened into.

He explained that in 1996, when hebought the business on Church Street in Lower Manhattan, it came with aroaster, and now he was simply stuck with it.

“My customers know that I roast

here, so I cannot stop,” he said. “If I do — big trouble.”

The nut shops, which often soldsweets and, in the summer, ice cream to keep sales up, date back to an era inNew York when specialty stores andniche shopping districts — one evenfor pickles — were the norm.

“If you wanted to buy deli, youwent to a deli shop; if you wanted tobuy nuts, you went to a candy shop,”said Bentzy Klein, owner of Bentzy’sBrokerage, a nut and dried fruit sup-plier in Brooklyn. “Now you could go into Fairway,” he continued, referringto the large grocery store, “and youcould buy everything that you need,and they have top of the line.”

Much of the business has movedonline and is largely gift baskets, hesaid. “In the Jewish neighborhoods,yes, you still have these people thatwill go in before Shabbos and buy up

a bunch of stuff because they’re sit-ting home and they’re going to nosh on everything,” he said. “But most of thebusiness is gifts.”

The nut shops are a dying business. Of the 38 Manhattan retail food opera-tions licensed with the word “nut” inthe company name, only 7 bear anyresemblance to the nut sellers of yore, and none of them roast.

Economy Candy, a Lower East Side institution since 1937, still sells nuts,but no longer roasts. “It just becametoo much, with the oils and the smellsand the Fire Department coming to in-spect every week,” said Jerry Cohen,the owner.

Rocco D’Amato, who owns Baz-zini, one of the largest import and whole-sale nut operations in the city, blamedthe decline on rising real estate costs,migration to the suburbs — where nutscan be sold from inexpensive mall ki-osks — and competition from super-markets and drugstores.

“You have nuts now being packagedin very sophisticated, gorgeous pack-ages by the Europeans, then you movethe customer base out into suburbia,then you add in the dramatic increase in rent, and you have the catastrophe that you have now,” he said.

STEPHEN WEBSTER

JENN ACKERMAN/THE NEW YORK TIMES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRED R. CONRAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Rob Schleifer has amassed a large collection of oddobjects in his apartment in New York, most made tolook old and rural.

Despite New York’sreputationfor fear and paranoia, some residentsare quite relaxed about crime.

Nut-roasting stores, like SP’sNuts and Candy in the Tribeca neighborhood, used to becommon in Manhattan.

Repubblica NewYork

M O N E Y & B U S I N E S S

VI MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2010

By STEVEN ERLANGER;

QUIMPER, France — HB-Henri-ot is one of the oldest companies inFrance, an artisanal producer of fa-ïence — hand-painted glazed earth-enware — since 1690.

The company was founded here inBrittany for its waterpower and riv-erbed clay.

The salting of the River Odet hasrendered local clay unusable, be-cause the salt causes the earthen-ware to crack in the kilns. But thecompany remains, having absorbed arival in 1968, as one of two faïenceries in the region, and holds a plaque from the government as an “enterprise dupatrimoine vivant” — a company of the living heritage of France.

That designation brings HB-Henri-ot no money, said its director general,Michel Merle, and it has been hit hardby Asian competition, a weak dollarand the economic crisis in its mainexport markets in the United States and Japan.

Still, the French governmentstepped up early, helping to save the company and its 54 jobs, Mr. Merlesaid. Paris accelerated paymentsand tax reimbursements to smalland medium-size companies; it de-ferred tax payments and accepteddeductions immediately, auditingthem later; it gave subsidies equal to almost a month’s salary per worker so firms could reduce labor costs and inventory without losing employees.

And Paris provided some creditguarantees, so that nervous bankerswould be more willing to make loans to small companies like this one.

HB-Henriot is a prime example of how France is not only weatheringthe economic storm, but has emerged

as one of the most stable economies in Europe, the first to pull out of re-cession and with unexpectedly large growth in the last quarter of 2009,while the German recovery stalled.

France moved early. It concen-trated on saving companies andjobs, sometimes to the annoyanceof its European Union partners;emphasized investment in job-cre-ating infrastructure; propped upits banks and pressed them to lend;and decided to let its budget deficitexpand further for a few years, butin moderation.

As Greece struggles to avoid de-

fault or bailout, Spain and Portugalwatch anxiously, Sweden falls backinto recession, Germany arguesabout historically high budget defi-cits and Britain grapples with defi-cits and debt of Greek proportionswhile France looks both solid andeven wise.

But France was also lucky, neither as export-oriented as Germany noras go-go as Britain and the UnitedStates. Alexandre Delaigue, aneconomist with a popular blog, écon-oclaste, said simply: “France was hit less because its real estate was less important than Ireland and Spain, itsfinance less important than the U.K., and it was less exposed to EasternEurope than Germany.”

France’s recession was not nearly

as deep as Germany’s, let alone thatof the United States. Growth for thisyear is forecast to be positive butmodest at about 1.2 percent, about thesame as in Germany, compared with0.7 percent for Europe as a whole and with 2.2 percent in the United States.

But French banks are in bettercondition than those in Germany,and France is far less dependentthan Germany on finding mar-kets for manufactured and luxurygoods.

French policy is far from perfect,with unemployment increasing, es-pecially among youth, along with thebudget deficit and the already highnational debt, issues that will outlastthe crisis.

The government now promises to cut growth in total public spendingto less than 1 percent a year from2011 and get the deficit to 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2013, al-though its growth forecasts seem toohigh and tax increases may be neces-sary, despite steady denials.

But in general the verdict is posi-tive for President Nicolas Sarkozyand his government, which movedquickly to recognize a crisis and ex-ercise state powers.

“France resisted the crisis betterthan most of her European partnersand got out of recession first,” saidPrime Minister François Fillon.

Mr. Fillon, Patrick Devedjian, the minister in charge of implementingthe recovery plan, and ChristineLagarde, the minister of economicaffairs, industry and employment,are given a lot of the credit.

In an interview, Ms. Lagarde said: “I think we’ve done relatively andreasonably well. We applied thethree ‘t’s’: timely, temporary andtargeted.”

Last fall, while working with cor-porate women across various indus-tries, job levels and generations, anage-old issue re-emerged at a near-fever pitch. Women were obsessed

about being labeled a “bitch,” and to a degree I hadn’t seen since the 1990s.

The reason for their nervousness? Sure, they saw obnoxious

women on reality TV shows. And they endured all the talk-show lam-pooning of Sarah Palin and Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008presidential campaign. Yet one issue was even more personal: A recession was in full swing, and jobs were on

the line.As one woman put it, “Even in this

day and age, a guy barks out an order and he is treated like someone who is in charge and a leader. But when a woman communicates in the exact same way, she’s immediately labeled assertive, dominating, aggressiveand overbearing.”

Today, women make up half of thework force, and half of the enrollmentat medical and law schools. Withnumbers like these, you’d think that women could finally relax and stop worrying about how they are being perceived at the office.

But women must still deal with a well-entrenched double standard when it comes to gender-acceptable

behavior. Because of that, they often fall victim to self-defeating actionsthat can undercut their careers. Theymay assume a strident command-and-control approach or else turnpassive — by clamming up, being indirect, failing to ask for what theywant or need, and refusing to del-egate junior-level tasks and respon-sibilities.

Consider one of my clients, whosemale subordinate had botched a financial analysis. Though he was at fault, she was reluctant to tell him how badly he had done because of how she would be perceived. Instead of asking him to redo it, she planned to fix the report herself.

It’s hard to blame women for this

type of behavior, especially when youlook at the research.

One study from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Har-vard University gave participantsdescriptions of men and women withequivalent qualifications who had ap-plied for a fictitious job.

When told that some candidateshad tried to negotiate for a higher sal-ary, the study participants — whether men or women — found fault at twice the rate with the women who negoti-ated than with the men who negoti-ated. Translation? Pushy women are less likely to be hired.

So how do women stay strong and in control, given this narrower bandof acceptable behavior? They can

start by revamping their communica-tion style, resisting the extremes ofacting too forcefully or shyly.

When I suggest to women that theymake communication adjustments,there’s often a huge pushback. “Whydo we have to change? It’s not fair,”they tell me. But women must be more mindful and use greater finesse when conveying their messages. We needto become better chameleon com-municators and to carefully read our audience, adjusting our style to the circumstances

Let me be clear. I’m not askingyou to give up your soul — but ratherto exercise new communicationmuscles so you can be heard in avariety of situations by a wide rangeof people.

The ultimate goal: for them to get the message without wanting to get back at you.

France Avoids Blows Buffeting Europe

WILLIAM DANIELS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

France deferred tax payments and gave subsidies to save HB-Henriot, a producer of earthenware.

PEGGY

KLAUS

ESSAY

Women at Corporations Still Navigate Stereotypes

Nadim Audi contributed reporting.

Paris stepped up earlyin the crisis to savecompanies and jobs.

By KEITH BRADSHER

GUANGZHOU, China — Just a yearafter laying off millions of factory work-ers, China is facing an increasinglyacute labor shortage.

As American workers struggle withnear double-digit unemployment, un-skilled factory workers here in China’sindustrial heartland are being offeredsigning bonuses.

Factory wages have risen as much as20 percent in recent months.

Telemarketers are turning awaypotential customers because recruit-ers have fully booked them to cold-callpeople and offer them jobs.

Some manufacturers, already weeks behind schedule because they can’t find enough workers, are closing downproduction lines and considering rais-ing prices. Such increases would mostlikely drive up the prices consumers

around the world pay for all sorts of Chinese-made goods.

Rising wages could also lead togreater inflation in China. In the past,inflation has sown social unrest. The immediate cause of the shortage is thatmillions of migrant workers who trav-eled home for the long lunar New Yearearlier this month are not returning tothe coast. Thanks to a half-trillion-dol-lar government stimulus program, jobsare being created in the interior.

But many economists say that the re-cent global downturn has also obscureda longer-term trend: China has drainedits once vast reserves of unemployedworkers in rural areas and is runningout of fresh laborers for its factories.

Since China does not release reli-able, timely statistics on employment,wages are considered the best barom-eter of labor shortages. And temp agen-cies here in Guangzhou recently raisedtheir rate for factory workers to $1.17 anhour, from 95 cents an hour before thenew year holiday.

The rate was 80 cents an hour two years ago, before the global financial crisis temporarily depressed wagesand demand.

The dearth of returning migrantsset off a desperate scramble recently to recruit the workers who did step offlong-haul buses and trains returning from the interior.

At a government-run employment center in downtown Guangzhou, em-ployers seeking workers outnumberedjob-hunters on a recent afternoon.

Outside, Liang Huoqiao, a 22-year-old plastics worker, joined a smallgroup of men and women studying a 13-meter-wide list of companies seek-ing workers.

“You can walk into any factory and get a job,” he said.

The official China Daily newspaper said recently that surveys of employersshowed that one in 12 migrant work-ers was not expected to return here toGuangdong Province.

Cities farther north along China’scoast are also running low on labor;Wenzhou posted a shortage of up to onemillion workers. Guangdong provin-cial officials announced that they wereconsidering increasing the minimumwage, which varies by city and rangesfrom $113 to $146 a month.

Higher wages could ease labor short-ages by prompting factories to reducetheir work forces. But many factories already pay well above the minimum wage. They are wary of further pay increases because it is not certain theycan pass the increased costs on to theircustomers .

Though the wage boost increasesthe prospect of inflation, it may haveanother more salutary aspect. TheObama administration has beenpushing China to let the renminbi riseagainst the dollar, which would erode some of China’s formidable advantagein export markets.

Rising wages in China have the sameeffect — while also giving Chinese fam-ilies more spending power.

Mr. Liang, the 22-year-old plasticsworker, said that he expected his pay todouble in the next five years and addedthat he already had set his priorities.

“For sure, I want to buy a car,” he said. “Car first, then maybe marriagelater.”

Chinese Plants StartingTo Feel Labor Shortage

The vast pool of ruralworkers is starting torun dry.

JOE TAN/REUTERS

Factory wages have risen up

to 20 percent in recent months,

fueling fears of inflation

in China and higher pricesfor its goods.

Employers sit with recruitment

posters in Guangzhou.

Repubblica NewYork

S C I E N C E & T E C H N O L O GY

MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2010 VII

Tiger parts are prized across Asia for questionable medicinal and protective benefits, some of which are listed here. This Siberian tiger was photographed last month in a Chinese reserve.

Whiskers Believed to bring good luck and have the power to protect against curses. (Sumatra)

Skins Small pieces are believed by some to protect against black magic; shamans may cast black magic spells with them (Sumatra). Hides are used for ceremonial clothing in Tibet.

Penis Thought to promote virility and general vitality. May be steeped in tonics or alcohol. (China)

Eyes Used to treat epilepsy. (China)

Tail For skin diseases. (China)

Bones Used for all manner of medical products, which usually contain only trace amounts of the animal. (China)

Right front paw bone Seen as strongest bone, used by tigers for pulling down large prey. It is soaked in warm water, which is drunk to treat headaches. (Sumatra)

Canines Used in jewelry for good luck and protective powers.

Claws Inlaid in gold for the same purposes. (Sumatra)

Anatomy of an Illegal Trade

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Sources: Traffic; Panthera

KAZAKHSTAN

IRANAFGHAN.

TURKMEN.

UZBEK.

PAKISTANINDIA

CHINA

MYANMAR

INDONESIA

MALAYSIA

THAI.

VIETNAM

TURKEY

RUSSIA

MONGOLIA

THE NEW YORK TIMESSources: Panthera; International Union for Conservation of Nature (map data)

Fractured Habitats

Historic range of tigers

Remaining areas where wild tigers

were known to have existed, 2005

By DENNIS OVERBYE

The years from 1957 to 1962 were agolden age of science fiction, as well asparanoia and exhilaration on a cosmicscale. The future was still the futureback then. Some of us could dreamof farms on the moon and heroicallyfinned rockets blasting off from alien landscapes. Others worried aboutRussian moon bases.

Scientists debated whether robotsor humans should explore space. Sat-ellites and transistors were jazzy em-blems of postwar technology, and wewere about to unravel the secrets ofthe universe and tame the atom (if itdid not kill us first).

Some of the most extravagant ofthese visions of the future came from corporations buffing their high-techcredentials and recruiting engineer-ing talent in the heady days whenzooming budgets for defense andNASA had created a gold rush in outer space.

In the pages of magazines like Avia-tion Week, Missiles and Rockets andeven Fortune, companies, some fa-mous and some now obscure, wereengaged in presenting a catalog ofdreams. And so, for example, Repub-lic Aviation of Farmingdale, New York— “Designers and Builders of the In-comparable Thundercraft” — couldbe found bragging in Aviation Weekand Space Technology magazine in1959 about the lunar gardening ex-periments it was doing for a future Air

Force base on the moon.Or the American Bosch Arma Cor-

poration showing off, in Fortune, its“Cosmic Butterfly,” a solar-poweredelectrically propelled vehicle to ferry passengers across the solar system.

Most Americans never saw theseconcoctions, but now they have beencollected and dissected by MeganPrelinger, an independent historianand space buff, in a new book, “An-other Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962.” It is being pub-lished May 25 by Blast Books.

Ms. Prelinger and her husband,Rick, operate the Prelinger Library, a private research library in San Fran-cisco with a heavy emphasis on media,technology and landscape history.

In an e-mail message, Ms. Prelingersaid she had grown up “on a culturaldiet of science fiction and space,”memories of the moon landings and“Star Trek” merging in her mind. “As a result,” she said, “I grew up believ-ing that I was a junior member of anadvanced technological society.”

The book, she said, was inspired bya shipment of old publications to thelibrary, including Aviation Week &Space Technology and Missiles andRockets. “I little expected that theadvertising in their pages would seize my attention more than the articlesthemselves,” she writes in the intro-duction to her book.

The ads are chock-full of modernist energy and rich in iconography.

The late ’50s were also the years of the Organization Man. The cover illus-tration, from an insurance ad, showsa man in a gray flannel suit floatingalarmed and bewildered among the

planets and stars. Time and again, themountains and valleys of the moon, forexample, are portrayed as if they werethe mountains, canyons and deserts ofthe American West.

In one illustration, the hands of God and Adam from Michelangelo’s SistineChapel ceiling have been transformedinto a giant pair of space gloves reach-ing for each other. In another, the sil-houette of a spaceship forms a cross.

It’s hard to know what to be morenostalgic about, all those childhooddreams of space opera or the opti-mism of an era in which imaginationand technology were booming andevery other ad ended with a pitch tocome work for the thriving companyof the future. “To advance yourselfprofessionally, you should become amember of one these teams. Write to N. M. Pagan,” reads a typical noticefrom the Martin Company, now partof Lockheed Martin.

You don’t hear that much thesedays.

Experts believe the global wildtiger population has fallen to be-low 3,000 — less than 3 percent of what it was just 100 years ago.

The long human assault on ti-gers has many participants: the seekers of traditional tiger-basedmedicines; poachers and traf-fickers; governments indifferent to the steady march of farmersand settlers on the tiger’s dwin-dling range.

Alan Rabinowitz, who headsPanthera, a group devoted tobig cat preservation, says thattiger organizations are mostlycompeting for donors when theyshould be concentrating on pro-tecting the most promising pop-ulations. Despite millions raisedand spent in the last decade or so, wild tigers may have declined byhalf over that time.

BILL MARSH

When Ads Fed DreamsOf Conquering Space

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM “ANOTHER SCIENCE FICTION”/BLAST BOOKS

For Biggest Cats,

Survival Is

Still in Doubt

By way of aviation industry ads, a new book revisits a time whenouter space still thrilled.

By TARA PARKER-POPE

For decades, advocates havefought to protect women from dis-figuring breast cancer surgery, ar-guing that it was just as effective to remove only the cancerous tissuerather than the whole breast.

But today, a growing number ofwomen with breast cancer are push-ing surgeons in a startling new di-rection. Not only do they want thecancerous breast removed, but they also want the healthy breast cut off.

“I just didn’t want to worry aboutit,” explained Liliana Holtzman, 50, an art director in Ann Arbor, Michi-gan, who had both breasts removed after a diagnosis five years ago. “It was for my own peace of mind.”

The percentage ofwomen asking to re-move both breastsafter a cancer di-agnosis has morethan doubled in re-cent years. Over all,about 6 percent ofwomen undergoingsurgery for breastcancer in 2006opted for the procedure, formallyknown as contralateral prophylac-tic mastectomy. Among women intheir 40s who underwent breast can-cer surgery, one in 10 opted to haveboth breasts removed, accordingto a University of Minnesota studypresented recently in St. Louis at the annual meeting of the Society of Sur-gical Oncology.

The practice is also more popu-lar among women with the earliest, most curable forms of cancer. Amongwomen who had surgery for ductalcarcinoma in situ, sometimes calledStage 0 cancer or precancer, the rateof double mastectomy rose to 5.2 per-cent in 2005, from 2.1 percent in 1998,according to a 2009 study in The Jour-nal of Clinical Oncology.

Women with a known geneticrisk for breast cancer can lower the chances of developing it by havingboth breasts removed before cancer appears. But for most women who

are given a diagnosis of breast can-cer, cutting off a healthy breast does not improve the odds of survival.

A study in The Journal of the Na-tional Cancer Institute reviews dataon 108,000 women who underwentmastectomy, including 9,000 whochose to remove a healthy breastalong with the cancerous one.

The study found a slight survival benefit among a small subset ofbreast cancer patients — women un-der 50 with early stage estrogen-re-ceptor-negative tumors, which don’t respond to risk-lowering drugs likeTamoxifen.

“A lot of patients coming into myclinic are asking for it,” said Dr. Isa-belle Bedrosian, a surgical oncolo-

gist at M.D. Ander-son Cancer Centerin Houston, whoconducted the newstudy. “Part of thereason women arefrightened is wehaven’t given them good information.”

The data are con-fusing, because a

diagnosis of breast cancer or ductalcarcinoma in situ does carry a slight-ly higher risk (about 0.6 to 1 percent a year) of developing a new, unre-lated cancer in the second breast— although many women wronglybelieve this means their cancer has “spread” to the other breast.

Doctors say that the highest riskto a woman is not from a future can-cer, but from the potential spread of the cancer she already has. Remov-ing a second healthy breast doesn’t change those odds.

“Women say the reason they’regoing to have both breasts removed is because they want to see theirchildren graduate or watch theirgrandchildren grow up,” said Dr.Todd M. Tuttle, chief of surgical on-cology at the Masonic Cancer Centerat the University of Minnesota. “Buthaving that other breast removeddoesn’t help them at all in being ableto survive another 10 or 20 years.”

A debate overthe efficacy of aninvasive surgery.

After Cancer, Women Remove Healthy Breast

Repubblica NewYork

By ANUPAMA CHOPRA

MUMBAI — Little about “Kites”suggests “Rush Hour.” An extrava-gant Bollywood romantic thriller,“Kites” features the Indian starHrithik Roshan and the Mexican ac-tress Barbara Mori as mismatchedlovers who can’t speak each other’slanguage and end up on the run inNew Mexico.

But last October, when the director Brett Ratner saw an unfinished ver-sion at a screening in Los Angeles, he found echoes of “Rush Hour,” his own Jackie Chan-Chris Tucker smash hit.“It was two characters that were fish out of water,” Mr. Ratner said, “only here it was an Indian and a Mexican.I’m not saying that ‘Kites’ will be the box office hit that ‘Rush Hour’ was,but I felt it had the potential to cross over to American audiences.”

So Mr. Ratner, who until then hadseen only a few Hindi films, offeredto re-edit “Kites” and make it moreaccessible for mainstream America.Working with Mark Helfrich, hiseditor on the “Rush Hour” series and “X-Men: The Last Stand,” Mr. Rat-ner pared the 118-minute film to 90minutes. He lost some of the elementsthat “just wouldn’t translate.”

On May 21 the original Hindi ver-sion and Mr. Ratner’s reworked Eng-

lish version of “Kites” will be releasedaround the globe.

“For me it’s about breaking barri-ers,” Mr. Roshan said. “The largergoal, the big dream, is to have an In-dian film being watched by a worldmarket.”

Bollywood already has a worldmarket. Indian cinema has an annualestimated audience of over three bil-lion worldwide. South Asians areavid consumers, as are viewers incountries as varied as Germany,Malaysia and South Korea. But theworld’s largest film market, the Unit-ed States, has remained impervious to the seductions of song and dance.

“There are essentially two kindsof audiences in the West: mass andniche,” said Nasreen Munni Kabir, a documentary filmmaker. “The mass audience wants English-languagefilms with known stars and familiarstory lines. The niche audience ac-

customed to world cinema acceptssubtitles, slightly longer films and un-familiar actors. But these films must reflect a cultural, political and socialreality of their country. Bollywoodfilms by their very nature do not fitinto either category.”

That situation is beginning tochange, thanks in large part to thestaggering success of “Slumdog Mil-lionaire.” It also helps that the defini-tion of Bollywood has become moreelastic. No longer a monolithic stylethat denotes stars, songs and melo-drama, Bollywood has also come toencompass something else; over the last decade new filmmakers havetweaked the traditional form.

Even established filmmakers arewilling to break boundaries. So inthe recently released “My NameIs Khan” the director Karan Joharforgoes opulent songs and feel-goodemotions for a more grim subject: the

plight of American Muslims after the September 11 attacks.

Smaller, grittier Hindi films aremaking inroads via the festival route.In January “Peepli Live,” a low-bud-get black comedy about farmer sui-cides in central India, became thefirst Hindi film selected for competi-tion at Sundance. In February “Peep-li Live” screened at the Berlin FilmFestival, alongside another crossovercandidate: “Road, Movie.”

It’s doubtful that any of these films will pull off a “Slumdog”-style suc-cess, but there’s hope for makingbigger inroads in the United States.Rakesh Roshan, who produced“Kites,” was cautiously optimistic .

“I think we haven’t been able tomake a ‘Crouching Tiger’ so far be-cause you need guts, and you need a vision,” he said. “Maybe ‘Kites’ won’t work, but at least we took a step for-ward.”

ROME — By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unof-ficial 500-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended. Cara-vaggio, who somehow found time to

paint when he wasn’tbrawling, chasing women (and men), murdering a tennisopponent with a dag-ger to the groin, flee-ing police assassins

or getting his face mutilated by one of his many enemies, has bumpedhim from his perch.

That’s according to an art histo-rian at the University of Toronto,Philip Sohm. He has studied the number of writings (books, catalogs and scholarly papers) on both of them during the last 50 years. Mr.Sohm has found that Caravaggio has gradually, if unevenly, overtaken Michelangelo.

He has charts to prove it. The change, most obvious since

the mid-1980s, doesn’t exactly meanMichelangelo has dropped downthe memory hole. To judge from the throngs still jamming the Sistine Chapel and lining up outside the Accademia in Florence to check out “David,” his popularity hasn’tdwindled much.

But, charts or no charts, Mr. Sohmhas touched on something. Cara-vaggiomania, as he calls it, implies not just that art history doctoralstudents may finally be struggling to think up anything fresh to say about Michelangelo. It suggeststhat the whole classical tradition inwhich Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane,even to many educated people. Hisotherworldly muscle men, casting the damned into hell or straining toemerge from thick blocks of veinedmarble, aspired to an abstract and bygone ideal of the sublime.

Caravaggio, on the other hand, exemplifies the modern antihero, a hyperrealist whose art is instantly accessible. His doe-eyed, tousle-haired boys with puffy lips andbubble buttocks look as if they’vejust tumbled out of bed, not descend-ed from heaven. Coarse, not godly,locked into dark, ambiguous spaces

by a strict geometry, then pickedout of deep shadow by an oracularlight, his models come straight off the street.

Rome’s art establishment at the turn of the 17th century, immersed inthe mandarin froufrou of Late Man-nerism, despised Caravaggio for the filthy, barefoot pilgrims he painted at Mary’s doorstep. Out to “destroypainting,” as Nicolas Poussin, the most high-minded of all French art-ists, saw it, Caravaggio connected with ordinary people, the ones who themselves arrived barefoot and filthy as pilgrims in Rome. Andfortunately for Caravaggio, he also

appealed to a string of rich and pow-erful patrons.

But almost immediately after he died from a fever at 38, in 1610, on the beach at Porto Ercole, north of Rome, his art was written off by crit-ics as a passing fad and neglected for hundreds of years, setting the stage for his modern resurrection. Con-noisseurs like Bernard Berenson were still dismissing his work a cen-tury ago when Lionello Venturi, Rog-er Fry and Roberto Longhi, among others, finally revived his reputation as a protomodernist.

Mr. Sohm, who announced his findings during a talk at the College

Art Association conference in Chi-cago last month, focused on publica-tions, not tourist revenues or exhibi-tion attendance figures.

But his research does corroborate evidence plain to anybody in or out of art academe or who has browsed for scarves in Italian airports where motifs of Caravaggio’s “Bacchus” and head of Goliath have become asubiquitous as coasters bearing bitsof David’s anatomy and mugs withthe figure of Adam from the Sistineceiling.

“The only way to understand old art is to make it participate in our own artistic life” is how Venturi phrased it in 1925. That Caravaggio left behind no drawings, no letters,no will or estate record, only policeand court records, makes him a per-fect Rorschach for our obsessions.

He was outed in the 1970s by gen-der studies scholars, notwithstand-ing the absence of documents to in-dicate he was gay. Pop novelists and moviemakers have naturally been drawn to his life.

Exhibition organizers cook up any excuse (“Caravaggio-Bacon,” “Car-avaggio-Rembrandt”) to capitalizeon his bankability. Newly discovered“Caravaggios” test the market ev-ery year.

Another Caravaggio retrospectivehas also opened, here at the Quiri-nale: two dozen paintings, on viewthrough June 13, a blue-chip survey, installed ridiculously in darkenedrooms with spotlights, as if his art needed more melodrama. But thepictures are glorious anyway. The exhibition is mobbed.

The other afternoon endless scrums of tourists here jostled be-fore the Caravaggios in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi and the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, feeding pocket change into the boxed light meters. It was probably just coincidental, but in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, nobody stopped to look at the Michelangelo.

By SIMON ROMERO

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Hispack of Comme Il Faut cigarettes wasalmost depleted. The smell of rotting garbage on the street and fried porkfrom a stall next to his tent filled theair in Place St. Pierre. Some children looked at his crutch and grew silent.Beken, one of Haiti’s most gifted musi-cians, exhaled a veil of smoke.

“I should be in Miami living off the proceeds of my records,” said Beken,born here 54 years ago as Jean-Pros-per Deauphin before adopting hisstage name. “Instead I’m living in the filth of this place.”

Haiti is astonishingly rich in music,with musicians who are more success-ful and famous than Beken, includ-ing the Port-au-Prince hip-hop group Barikad Crew and the protest singer

Manno Charlemagne, who now livesin the United States. But few compos-ers occupy a space quite like Beken’s,whose songs of despair and redemp-tion strongly resonate with Haitiansduring times of tragedy.

Peddlers sell pirated CD collections of his songs, including “Tribilasyon”(“Tribulation”) and “Mizè” (“Mis-ery”), on the streets of Port-au-Princefor about $1.30 apiece. Gritty photos of Beken, who lost his right leg at age 12 ina car accident, accompany the CDs. Hesings in Haiti’s troubadour tradition,playing a guitar and emphasizing con-tact with the audience in songs of la-ment, humor and sometimes politics.

“Beken usually sold best after a hur-ricane,” said Jonas Gaspard, 25, a mer-chant selling bootleg music on a street near the wrecked presidential palace. “But since the earthquake, demand forhis music is the strongest in years,” he said. “The customers love the way he sings about suffering.”

Beken knows a thing or two aboutlife’s trials. Disabled as a child, heexcelled in composing music. He en-joyed some success, particularly in the 1980s, before some bad decisions withhis money pushed him into penury.

Then came the earthquake. It de-stroyed his home, pushing him and his wife and three children into one of the city’s most squalid camps, in the Pé-tionville hills.

“The only thing I can do is play mu-sic, and I haven’t touched my guitarsince January 12,” he said. “ I don’tthink I have the strength to writesongs at the moment.”

By one recent evening, Beken hadfound his guitar, taking it to a smallcafe in Pétionville.

He had a look of surprise, and some-thing approaching delight, as he per-formed that night. Beken returned to his tent amid the stench of Place St.Pierre clutching his guitar. “I can sing again,” he said. “Maybe that means I can write a new song.”

Time for an Italian Antihero to Shine

GREGORIO BORGIA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

MICHAEL

KIMMELMAN

ESSAY

Bollywood Soars TowardHollywood

SingerAnd Guitar Fight UrgeTo Weep

RELIANCE BIG PICTURE

TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Beken sings songs that resonatedeeply with Haitians.

A Haitian artistrediscovers his voiceafter the earthquake.

There is renewed interestin Caravaggio’s work. His “Annunciation’’ at the Quirinale in Rome.

The Bollywood starHrithik Roshan andthe Mexican actress Barbara Mori in ‘‘Kites.’’

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2010

Repubblica NewYork