image Home       image Fowles,       image Fitzgerald,       image r04 06 (9)       image R 22MP (3)       image 45 (3)       

Linki

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
STRUTTINGAND
SOARINGAT
THEMET
PAGE 19
|
ARTS
A BAROQUE
RIPOSTE TO
SICILY’SWRATH
OF NATURE
BACK PAGE
|
TRAVEL
WEEKEND
A RICHMAN’S
‘CRAZY IDEA’
FOR EUROPE
PAGE 14
|
BUSINESS
DAVID BROOKS:
THE ROMANTIC
ADVANTAGE
PAGE 7
|
VIEWS
THE CATHARTIC
WRITINGOF
COLUMMcCANN
PAGE 18
|
WEEKEND ARTS
....
THE GLOBAL EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, JUNE 1-2, 2013
GLOBAL.NYTIMES.COM
Israel nudges
students of
Torah to join
work force
JERUSALEM
Germany
finally holds
census, and
sees big gap
BERLIN
Officials try to lift
ultra-Orthodox from
high rates of poverty
1.5 million fewer people
are found, raising worry
about future liabilities
BY JODI RUDOREN
One ultra-Orthodox job-seeker listed on
his resume, under technical skills, his
success building a hut on his porch for the
annual fall harvest holiday, Sukkot, and
preparing his kitchen for Passover. An-
other brought a résumé handwritten on
fax paper, folded in his pocket.
When Binyamin Yazdi, an employ-
ment counselor, asks ultra-Orthodox cli-
ents their e-mail addresses, many re-
spond, ‘‘What’s that?’’
Israel has been consumed in recent
months with the challenge of integrat-
ing the insular, swelling ultra-Orthodox
minority, known as Haredim, into soci-
ety. The animating theme of the last
election campaign was a call for
Haredim — and Israeli Arabs — to
‘‘share the burden’’ of citizenship, par-
ticularly in military service, and this
week a Parliament committee approved
legislation to end widespread draft ex-
emptions for yeshiva students.
But while the draft is the emotional is-
sue that has drawn thousands to
protests, and this week threatened to
break up the governing coalition, most
experts agree that work force participa-
tion is amuchmore substantive, serious
— and complicated — problem. A little
more than 4 in 10 ultra-Orthodox men
work, less than half the rate of other
Jewish men here, with average salaries
at 57 percent of their counterparts.
Nearly 60 percent of Haredi families live
in poverty and by 2050 they are expect-
ed to make up more than a quarter of Is-
rael’s population.
‘‘It’s clear this is a situationwhich can-
not continue,’’ Stanley Fischer, the gov-
ernor of the Bank of Israel, declared this
spring, a warning underlined in a recent
report to the cabinet from the National
Economic Council. Without a radical
change, cautioned Yedidia Z. Stern of the
Israel Democracy Institute, ‘‘the Israeli
economy will collapse in two decades.’’
The urgent new focus by the govern-
ment, which recently allocated $132 mil-
lion over five years for training and
placement, comes after years of lower-
key private efforts, most underwritten
by the Israel branch of the Joint Distri-
bution Committee, a nonprofit group
that helps poor Jews worldwide. The
Joint spends $10 million a year on
Haredi employment.
Beyond the community’s commit-
ment to full-time Torah study and fear of
assimilation, there are many barriers to
scale. Haredi schools teach little math,
BY NICHOLAS KULISH
AND CHRIS COTTRELL
It’s as if Leipzig, Hanover and Dresden
have disappeared, at least statistically.
Germany, a country deeply con-
cerned about its dwindling population,
released the results of its first census in
nearly a quarter of a century Friday and
found 1.5 million fewer inhabitants than
previously assumed.
Chancellor Angela Merkel already
was concerned about the shrinking
numbers of taxpayers and workers. The
central question now is how the coming,
smaller generations will pay back Ger-
man debts, much less the mounting lia-
bilities and guaranteesmeant to contain
the euro-zone debt crisis.
There had not been a census count
since reunification, not even an effort to
tally those in the former East Germany
after theBerlinWall fell in 1989. Themiss-
ing 1.5 million people — equal to 1.8 per-
cent of the population — will exacerbate
the longer-term downward trend.
How a country known for its ex-
actitude could miss the mark so badly is
a result of another German preoccupa-
tion: privacy. The last census, in 1987,
was strenuously opposed by those who
believed the government should not
keep tabs on its citizens. The latest,
conducted in 2011, only came about be-
cause the European Union mandated it.
‘‘Who shrunk Germany?’’ said a
headline on theWeb page of the newspa-
per Bild after the news was announced,
the beginning of a demographic detect-
ive story that ends with no individual
mastermind but millions of culprits
guilty only of bureaucratic oversights.
The finding, that Germany has 80.2
million people, rather than 81.7 million,
announced Friday by the Federal Statis-
tical Office, does not lessen the repercus-
sions for upended notions about every-
thing from the economy to integration of
migrants, who were responsible for a
majority of the missing people.
Anyone who moves to Germany or
even within the country is expected to
register with the local municipality.
DMITRY KOSTUKOV FOR THE NEWYORK TIMES
Ukraine’s feminist shock troops
From left, Sasha Shevchenko, Anna Hutsol and Oksana Shachko, activists behind Femen, the group famous for guerrilla-style,
bare-breasted political protests. The women of Femen have elevated nudity as a tool of activism to an Internet-age art form. A Female Factor special report.
PAGES 11-13
Grim task
overwhelms Bangladeshi lab
DHAKA, BANGLADESH
Those test tubes represent the only
chance of identifying them. More than
500 people have given blood samples in
the hopes of finding a DNA match. On a
recent morning, Hasibul IslamReaz, 10,
placed his arm before a needle.
‘‘If I give them blood,’’ the boy said
softly, ‘‘I will learn where my father is,
which body is his.’’
First came the frantic search for sur-
vivors after Rana Plaza collapsed. Then
came the recovery of victims. With a
death toll now at 1,129, this is the deadli-
est disaster in the history of the gar-
ment industry. Now, with the wreckage
cleared, the painstaking process of
identifying bodies has brought accusa-
tions of cover-ups as many families
struggle to find loved ones and qualify
for government compensation.
With its venomous politics and blood-
soaked history, Bangladesh is rife with
conspiracy theories. In the Rana Plaza
stalling compensation payments to sur-
vivors and families of the dead.
The controversy has intensified the
pressure on the small staff of the Na-
tional Forensic DNA Profiling Labora-
tory. Founded in 2006 with a grant from
the Danish Embassy, the lab is now
overwhelmed. Completing the DNA
profiles could take months. New ma-
chines are needed to decalcify the bone
samples. Approval is still pending for
expensive software capable of sorting
through the tens of thousands of possi-
ble DNAmatches.
‘‘To handle normal situations, the lab
is O.K.,’’ said Sharif Akhteruzzaman,
who oversees operations there. ‘‘But
now a whole year’s caseload has come
up, all of a sudden.’’
From the moment Rana Plaza col-
lapsed, the scale of the disaster out-
stripped the capacities of the Banglade-
After factory collapse,
families seek closure
through DNA matches
BY JIM YARDLEY
Inside a small government laboratory
here, there are about 300 test tubes, each
labeled with masking tape and contain-
ing an extracted tooth or a shard of bone.
Day and night, dozens of these tubes
rest on metal trays that vibrate. The
shaking decalcifies the bone in a process
that requires two weeks before material
can be gleaned for a DNA profile.
Outside the laboratory, people are
waiting. There are at least 301 unidenti-
fied victims of the collapse of the Rana
Plaza factory building on April 24.
GERMANY, PAGE 4
TASLIMA AKHTER FOR THE NYT
Hasibul Islam Reaz, 10, has provided
blood for efforts to identify his father, who
worked as a guard at the Rana Plaza.
TRYING TO SET A FIRST FOR BLACK GERMANS
Karamba Diaby hopes to do something
no black person has done before: get
elected to the Bundestag.
PAGE 4
collapse, opposition leaders have
claimed — without substantiation —
that the government has hidden bodies.
Activists have accused the government
and industry leaders of intentionally
MAKING THE BEST OF A FALTERING KINSHIP
AngelaMerkel of Germany and
François Hollande of France are putting
a brave face on their relationship.
PAGE 4
BANGLADESH, PAGE 5
ISRAEL, PAGE 5
WORLDNEWS
U.S. chides Russia on weapons
Secretary of State John Kerry strongly
criticized Russia’s pledge to send
advanced antiaircraft weapons to
Syria, making his most pointed
statement yet about Moscow’s arming
of the government in Damascus ahead
of proposed peace talks.
PAGE 5
Russian who fled gets vote
The economist Sergei M. Guriev fled
Russia because he feared he would be
prosecuted, but the shareholders of
Russia’s largest bank re-elected him to
its board of directors, a show of support
that points to deepening rifts within
Russia’s ruling class.
PAGE 5
BUSINESS
Record joblessness in euro zone
Unemployment rose to 12.2 percent in
April from the previous record of 12.1
percent the month before, and some
analysts said the number of people
without jobs could hit 20 million by the
end of the year.
PAGE 14
ONLINE
SPORTS
With Nadal, it’s never boring
Rafael Nadal has certainly done his
part to spice up a rain-interrupted, so
far shock-free week at the French Open.
After losing the first set in his first-
round match against Daniel Brands,
Nadal did something unprecedented on
Friday at Roland Garros: He lost the
first set in his second-round match, too,
looking in dire need of a ‘‘café solo’’ on
the changeovers.
PAGE 9
VIEWS
The impending deluge
We are catastrophically vulnerable to
attacks from the rising ocean. For the
first time, we may have to confront the
problem of permanent environmental
refugees, Brian Fagan writes.
PAGE 6
How to play well with China
Presidents Barack Obama and Xi
Jinping must use their meeting in
California to elevate and focus a critical
partnership, Ian Bremmer and JonM.
Huntsman Jr. write.
PAGE 6
TOLGA BOZOGLU/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
Istanbul police clash with protesters
Police officers used water cannons and tear gas Friday in an attempt to break up
a demonstration in Taksim Square, turning the center of Istanbul into a battle zone.
The police action was the latest crackdown by Turkey’s government against a
movement challenging plans to develop a park.
global.nytimes.com/europe
NEWSSTAND PRICES
France ¤ 3.00
IN THIS ISSUE
No. 40,503
Art 18
Books 22
Business 14
Crossword 23
Sports 9
Views 6
CURRENCIES
NEW YORK, FRIDAY 1:30PM
STOCK INDEXES
FRIDAY
PREVIOUS
t
Euro
€1=
$1.2970
$1.3050
s
The Dow 1:30pm 15,329.42
+0.03%
Algeria Din 175
Ivory Coast CFA 2.200
t
Pound
£1=
$1.5180
$1.5230
t
FTSE 100 close
6,583.09
–1.11%
Andorra ¤ 3.00
Morocco Dh 22
t
Yen
$1=
¥100.890 ¥100.720
s
Nikkei 225 close
13,774.54
+1.37%
Antilles ¤ 3.00
Senegal CFA 2.200
t
S. Franc
$1=
SF0.9590 SF0.9530
Cameroon CFA 2.200
Tunisia Din 3.200
OIL
NEW YORK, FRIDAY 1:30PM
t
Light sweet crude
$93.16
–$0.30
Gabon CFA 2.200
Reunion ¤ 3.50
Full currency rates Page 17
....
2
|
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, JUNE 1-2, 2013
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
page two
In U.S., lives
of extremes
and isolation
Skewe
ring the rich, on film
money,’’ to rig the system to its own
benefit.
The result, the book argues, is a re-
turn to a spruced-up version of the pre-
New Deal America in which people
were pretty much on their own.
The focus of ‘‘The Unwinding’’ is on
big, sometimes predatory institutions
failing ordinary people. What Mr. Pack-
er seems less eager to explore, though
his subjects’ lives sometimes leave him
no choice, are defects in the broader
culture: problems with the choices that
ordinary people have become used to
making — choices that make hard lives
and going it alone that much harder.
Two such issues stand out.
The first is a weakening commercial
spirit. Although Mr. Packer frames the
new go-it-alone economy as a kind of
return, there is, in an important sense,
no going back. Once people get used to
a certain level of protection, expecta-
tions are not easily lowered. And so Mr.
Packer depicts Americans who, left
stranded, wait for someone to pave
them a road rather than cutting their
own.
Entrepreneurs beg for government
grants; Wall Street banks press to re-
write laws to suit their interests; laid-
off workers wait for politicians and
business to ‘‘create jobs’’ instead of in-
venting new jobs of their own; the des-
perately poor play video games for
hours a day, waiting for their earned-
income tax credit check to arrive.
Mr. Packer also writes about striv-
ing. But the striving he portrays is so
often a striving within the framework
of dependence — a striving disconnec-
ted from the American heritage of be-
ing out on the prairie, with no one to
rely on, and somehow making it work.
The second problem is social break-
down. If the go-it-alone economics of
the early 20th century is returning, it
lands in a country whose family and
community bonds are now also of the
go-it-alone kind. This makes the eco-
nomics harder to bear. In the lives Mr.
Packer chronicles, the chaos at work
(or of seeking work) is rarely soothed,
and very often made worse, by chaos
at home.
Mr. Packer depicts this chaos but
does not emphasize it, choosing to fo-
cus on failing institutions. But in the
lives of many of his subjects, the norm
is now multiple divorces and out-of-
wedlock births, divided childhoods, ab-
sent fathers, accruing alimony. A tiny
minority of his subjects have been mar-
ried once and remain so.
An economy of every-man-for-him-
self, undergirded by a social structure
with the same ethos, is less a return to
the past than a new predicament.
Solitude is among the things that make
poverty in the United States so differ-
ent from that of many poorer countries.
‘‘The Unwinding’’ is a book likely to
be read and argued about for a long
time. The question it leaves you with is
whether decline is inevitable, or wheth-
er the seeds of the new lurk unseen
amid the widening decay. I found my-
self wondering whether it would be
read a century from now as a prescient
elegy for what was — or rather a
quaint declinist story that portrayed a
moment with great force but failed to
see that rebirth was coming, as it has
so many times before.
Join an online conversation at
http://anand.ly and follow on
Twitter.com/anandwrites
MEXICO CITY
Satirical look at habits
of the wealthy is Mexico’s
highest-earning movie
BY ELISABETHMALKIN
‘‘Why are they taking everything away
from us, like in Venezuela?’’ wails Bar-
bie Noble, a spoiled rich girl crammed
into a getaway cab with her two broth-
ers as the family flees a police raid on
their sumptuous mansion.
A business scam, all the money is lost,
explains her father, twisting around from
the front seat to break the news to his 20-
something children slouched in the back.
Dusk is falling as their decrepit cab
bounces across the city, and from the
window, the Noble children watch a col-
lage of misfortune and decay: graffiti
splashed across crumbling cement
walls; weary vendors packing up mar-
ket stalls; ragged workers trudging
home over pockmarked pavements.
That trip is the only serious moment
in the Mexican farce ‘‘We Are the
Nobles,’’ a movie hit that inflicts blunt
trauma on any suggestion that Mexico
may soon emerge as a middle-class
country.
‘‘You have an elite few that control ev-
erything,’’ said the film’s director and
its main screenwriter, Gaz Alazraki, 35.
‘‘These few families have not generated
a good partnership with the govern-
ment so that a big middle class will de-
velop in the country. You have just a big
division between wealthy and poor,
which replicates itself in Brazil, Argen-
tina, in Latin America in general.’’
Almost 6.5 million people have seen
‘‘We Are the Nobles,’’ making it the
highest-grossing Mexican film ever
shown in cinemas there. It is still filling
multiplexes 10 weeks after its release.
Few people in the country tiptoe
around the fact that Mexico’s rich and
poor inhabit distinct worlds, sharing
little more than a taste for traditional
food and a perennial disappointment
over their almost-great national soccer
team. In the movie, Mr. Alazraki does
not even allow them the same food.
Minutes before Barbie’s credit card is
cut off, she harangues a waiter for
bringing her melted goat cheese. Days
later, the bankrupt Noble children are
camping out with their father, a self-
made constructionmillionaire, in the ru-
ins of his childhood home, dining on tor-
tillas drenched in oil. ‘‘It tastes like
beans,’’ he urges.
In fact, the Noble children are as rich
as ever. Their father, Germán, has be-
come distraught over their idle arro-
gance and wants to teach them a lesson,
so he invents a story about losing his
company and sends them all out to get a
job.
The eldest son, Javi, drives a battered
bus through the streets of Mexico City.
Barbie squeezes into aminidress towait
tables at a cantina, and the youngest
son, Cha, becomes a clerk in the neon-
lighted back office of a bank.
Their guide to this new life is Lucho,
the nephew of their ancient nanny. He
gets up before dawn to buy food in the
city’s vast wholesale market, cooks at
the cantina all day, and then caters
parties for the rich all night.
His schedule is no surprise to most
working-class Mexicans. The Organiza-
tion for Economic Cooperation and De-
velopment reports that Mexicans work
more hours than any other nationality
surveyed.
The simplest explanation for the
movie’s success is that audiences love
to see rich people humiliated. But a
more complex dynamic is at work in the
nuances of Mexico’s multiple layers of
class and perception.
‘‘I think the real reason the film is so
successful is that it’s cathartic for the
middle class,’’ said Gustavo García, a
film critic and historian. ‘‘It captures
the fears and fantasies of the middle
class.’’
Indeed, this is a country where re-
peated financial crises over decades
have generated a steady background
hum of anxiety for members of the
middle class, who are one devaluation
or layoff away from poverty.
Mexico has made some progress over
the past decade in raising incomes for
the very poor, which means that overall
inequality has decreased. But the top 20
percent of the population still earn 53.4
percent of the total national income, ac-
cording to statistics from the Economic
Anand
Giridharadas
CURRENTS
It is the literary equivalent of an MRI,
and the patient is the wealthiest coun-
try in the world, half a decade into an
economic and social crisis. The diagno-
sis is grim, and the prognosis not much
better.
George Packer’s new book, ‘‘The Un-
winding: An Inner History of the New
America,’’ is a summer blockbuster of a
work, giving the country a searching,
sweeping treatment more commonly
found when authors write about societ-
ies other than their own.
It does more than perhaps any book
in recent memory to explain where the
United States has landed in 2013: a
bizarre country in which the most valu-
able companies around continue to be
born, even as millions struggle to feed
themselves; in which a deft military
uses unmanned drones to target for-
eign enemies, even as the country fails
to find basic work for returning veter-
ans of that military; in which some of
the best schools on earth stand along-
side others that can no longer afford
chalk.
Mr. Packer’s subject is the unravel-
ing of the American dream, and of the
mid-20th-century social contract that,
for many though hardly all, provided a
clearer, more reliable link between ef-
fort and reward. To trace this unravel-
ing, the book takes your arm and
whisks you fromWashington lobbying
firms to North Carolina tobacco auc-
tions, fromWall Street boardrooms to
gang wars in abandoned houses in
Youngstown, Ohio.
Through sketches of a panoply of
American characters — hustlers and
power grabbers, lobbyists and public
servants, zany serial entrepreneurs
and Wall Street occupiers, masters of
the universe and socially awkward
technology wizards —Mr. Packer de-
picts a country losing itself under the
pressure of two distinct but related
forces.
The first is the coming of a more flu-
id, mobile, globalized world in which
things start being made overseas;
money drains away from communities,
and capital flies in and out at lightning
speed, turning today’s middle-class,
school-teaching house flipper into to-
morrow’s homeless store clerk.
The second is the weakening of
American institutions and the norms
they once upheld — Congress, banks,
schools, grocers. This erosion, in Mr.
Packer’s telling, allowed ‘‘the default
force in American life, organized
ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEWYORK TIMES
The movie’s director, Gaz Alazraki, at his office in Mexico City. ‘‘You have an elite few that control everything,’’ he said.
WARNER BROS. PICTURES MEXICO
A rehearsal for ‘‘We Are the Nobles.’’ Almost 6.5 million have seen the film, which is still filling multiplexes 10 weeks after its release.
was the filmwe should be doing in Mex-
ico.’’
Whether it is the singsong nasal
drawl that the capital’s upper classes af-
fect, or the tight shirts and loafers that
Javi and his friends sport as theymix gi-
ant vats of Cuba Libres at a private club
on the 51st floor of the city’s tallest sky-
scraper, Mr. Alazraki’s eye for detail is
unmerciful.
Against her father’s wishes, Barbie
becomes engaged to a man who charms
women with his lisp from Spain, calls
himself Peter instead of Pedro, and
needs Barbie’s money to open a Basque
restaurant, after his previous venture,
‘‘a lounge,’’ failed.
Though the Noble children and their
friends are caricatures, some of their
on-screen exploits parallel a real-life
mini-scandal that has engrossed Mex-
ico during the movie’s run. When a
woman did not get the table she wanted
at a trendy Mexican restaurant in April,
she called in inspectors who worked for
her father at the federal consumer pro-
tection agency to shut the place down,
prompting a huge outpouring on social
media condemning the arrogance of the
rich and powerful.
Although the woman and her father
apologized, the furor persisted, and he
was fired two weeks later.
For the movie, the woman’s timing
was impeccable, Mr. Alazraki said: ‘‘I
owe her some flowers.’’
Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean. The 40 percent of the popula-
tion below the wealthy, the segment
where one would expect to find the
middle class, make 33.6 percent of na-
tional income.
‘‘The middle class here does not ex-
ist,’’ said Ana Suárez, a 27-year-old law-
yer who pronounced the movie ‘‘the ab-
surd of
want to give their children all the oppor-
tunities that they never had so that they
never struggle the way they did,’’ he
said, ‘‘without actually realizing that
the character that comes out of the
struggle is what helps you succeed.’’
Midway through college inMexico, he
transferred to the University of South-
ern California, where he took film
courses and worked as a studio intern,
learning what it was like to be a relative
nobody. Unlike his Mexican circle, his
Los Angeles friends were all taking odd
jobs to make ends meet.
He said he had changed once he re-
turned to Mexico. ‘‘I could see a big dif-
ference between the friends that left the
nest and the ones that didn’t,’’ he said.
‘‘The ones that didn’t never lost their
sense of entitlement and grew to turn,
some of them, into despicable people.’’
Mr. Alazraki always knew that he
wanted to make a comedy, and he based
‘‘We Are the Nobles’’ in part on a 1949
Mexican classic by the exiled Spanish
filmmaker Luis Buñuel. He was also in-
fluenced by American comedies. The
Nobles’ taxi cab ride was drawn from
the bus ride in the 1934 American classic
‘‘It Happened One Night.’’
‘‘During the ’30s, the Great Depres-
sion eradicated all of the middle class
for the United States and the comedies
that made the biggest impact were so-
cial satires that made fun of the rich,’’ he
said. ‘‘It was pretty clear to me that that
ONLINE:
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
In China, rethinking ‘dishonest Americans’ column
‘‘If a US government official or publication undertook to critique and
disparage the Chinese national character, the outcry would be immediate
and universal.’’
GM—SAN RAMON, CALIFORNIA
ihtrendezvous.com
the extremes of
the two
classes.’’
‘‘The children of the upper classes
don’t know how to do anything, except
‘‘I think the real reason
the film is so successful is
that it’s cathartic for the
middle class.’’
party,’’ said Arturo García, 44, a collec-
tions agent, who enjoyed the movie. ‘‘I
have dealt with people like that at work.
We call them ‘daddy’s children.’ ’’
Mr. Alazraki, the movie’s director, ad-
mits to bearing a passing resemblance
to the Noble children himself. As in the
movie, his father, Carlos Alazraki, is a
self-made man, having built a career as
an advertising executive. The younger
Mr. Alazraki recalls how furious he be-
came when his father announced that
he would not get a new car until he got
into college.
‘‘It happens to most parents that
IN OUR PAGES
✴
100, 75, 50 YEARS AGO
1913 London Sees Auto Polo for First Time
LONDON
There was a brilliant attendance of soci-
ety people at each of the grounds of the London
polo clubs yesterday [May 31], that at Ranelagh
being very large, the opportunity of witnessing
the American game of auto polo for the first time
in Europe proving a great attraction. Added to
this, there was a capital horse and pony show, in
addition to the usual programme of high-class
polo matches, while two bands discoursed some
charming music. It was almost impossible to walk
about round the third polo ground, where the auto
match was contested, so great was the throng.
1938Wire May Aid in Levine Hunt
NEWYORK
G-men brought all their research
forces to bear on the Levine case today [May 31],
hoping that a strand of wire will lead to the cap-
ture of the kidnap-murderers of twelve-year-old
Peter, whose body was washed ashore in Long Is-
land Sound Sunday evening. The Federal officers
compared the Levine murder with the killing of
Charles Mattson seventeen months ago and indi-
cated that certain unrevealed points of similarity
led them to hope that in one stroke they will clear
up the only two carry-over unsolved kidnappings
since the Lindbergh case in 1932.
1963 Atom Tests Doubled Carbon-14 in Air
WASHINGTON
The nuclear tests conducted last
year by the United States and the Soviet Union ef-
fectively altered the planet’s environment by dou-
bling the amount of radioactive Carbon-14 in the
atmosphere. We can expect, as a result of these
tests, that in future generations, 3,000 children
will be born with gross physical or mental defects
and that, also as a result of those tests, the odds of
a child suffering such a birth defect will double
from one in a million to two in a million. Further,
the amount of radioactive Strontium-90 in the
American diet increased four times over 1962.
 ....
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, JUNE 1-2, 2013
|
3
THE GLOBAL EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
THE COMPLETE OFFERING TERMS ARE IN AN OFFERING PLAN AVAILABLE FROM THE SPONSOR. FILE NO. CD 08-0055. SPONSOR: 56 LEONARD LLC. RENDERINGS BY VUW STUDIO. BRANDING BY PANDISCIO CO.
....
4
|
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, JUNE 1-2, 2013
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
World News
europe
BRIEFLY
Europe
Black and German, hoping to make history
HALLE, GERMANY
BY CHRIS COTTRELL
When Karamba Diaby arrived in Ger-
many as a student from Senegal, he only
knew two things in German: Bundesliga
andBMW, the professional soccer league
and the automobile manufacturer. The
hitch was that it was October 1985 and
Mr. Diaby had landed in East Germany,
where his comrades frowned on both
West German capitalist institutions.
‘‘They weren’t too fond of hearing
that in the East,’’ said Mr. Diaby, 51.
‘‘They told me, ‘We don’t say BMW
here, we say ‘Trabi,’ ’’ the nickname for
the rickety yet ubiquitous East German
car, the Trabant.
The bland, greasy food in East Ger-
many was a far cry from the spicy
cuisine of his native Senegal, where his
sister used to cook his favorite dish,
thiebou dien, a paella-like preparation
madewith fried okra, yams and fish. But
he stuck it out through the fall of the
BerlinWall and the reunification of Ger-
many, making a home for himself in the
state of Saxony-Anhalt and becoming a
German citizen in 2001.
NowMr. Diaby has the opportunity to
make history himself. He placed third in
the Social Democrats’ state primary in
February to earn a coveted spot on the
party’s parliamentary list for the nation-
al election in September. If Mr. Diaby
and the Social Democrats can defend the
three seats they won here four years
ago, he will become the first black mem-
ber of the Bundestag.
Around Halle, a former hub for East
Germany’s chemical industry, Mr. Diaby
is renowned for his extroverted person-
ality, which bears no trace of Teutonic re-
serve, and for his verbosity. His loud,
cackling laugh is immediately recogniz-
able, and his accent blends the regional
dialect and his French-speaking African
roots. People like to joke that Mr. Diaby
takes five times as long as other people
to get anywhere because he stops to talk
to everyone he meets along the way.
An outdoor May Day festival this year
on Halle’s central square was no excep-
tion.Mr. Diabywas out chattingwith con-
stituents in a long brown jacket buttoned
all the way up, a red carnation pinned to
his collar. In one hand he held a chocolate
chip muffin that remained half-eaten for
hours because he was so absorbed in
shaking hands and greeting voters.
That it has taken Germany this long
to vote a black man into Parliament is
an indication of the sometimes arms-
length relationship the country has with
its minorities. ‘‘It wasn’t easy for him at
the beginning,’’ said Klaus Magyar, 77, a
retired hospital director fromHalle who
spoke with Mr. Diaby at the festival.
‘‘People weren’t used to someonewith a
different skin color.’’
The former East Germany is still at
pains to shake its reputation as a breed-
ing ground for rightist extremism. The
far-right National Democratic Party has
seats in two state legislatures in the
former East and none in the former
West.
LONDON
BBC receives 152 allegations
of abuse in wake of Savile case
Since the case involving the deceased
television personality Jimmy Savile
came to light in October, the BBC has
received 152 new allegations of sexual
abuse and harassment by 81 current
and former employees, the broadcaster
said.
Thirty-six of the new accusations are
from complainants who were younger
than 18 at the time of the alleged as-
saults.
The disclosures Thursday raise new
questions about the workplace culture
at the BBC, the behavior of its employ-
ees and what it may have condoned or
overlooked.
They also show how the broadcaster
is still consumed with the fallout from
the case of Savile, a larger-than-life
BBC star who died in 2011 at the age of
84 and who was later unmasked as a
serial sexual predator with dozens of
victims over four decades.
The report shows that 40 of those ac-
cused currently work for or contribute
to the BBC, while 41 are dead or em-
ployees from long ago. Of the 152 sepa-
rate complaints, 48 involve Mr. Savile,
who died before the revelations about
him came to light.
LONDON
Friend of slaying suspect
charged with terror offenses
Aman arrested after giving an inter-
view about his friendship with a sus-
pect in the killing of a British soldier
was charged on Friday with terror of-
fenses.
The man, IbrahimAbdullah-Hassan,
who also goes by the name Abu Nusay-
bah, was arrested last week following a
BBC interview in which he said British
security services had tried to recruit
his friend, Michael Adebolajo. Mr. Ade-
bolajo, one of two main suspects in the
killing of the soldier, Lee Rigby, is still
hospitalized after the police shot and
arrested him. The other suspect, Mi-
chael Adebowale, has been charged
with murder.
The police saidMr. Abdullah-Has-
san’s arrest was not directly tied to Mr.
Rigby’s killing. He has been charged
with three offenses that allegedly en-
couraged acts of terrorism, they said.
(AP)
ATHENS
118 ancient Greek coins repatriated
A hoard of ancient Greek silver coins
seized at a Swiss airport is being repat-
riated to Greece, the Culture Ministry
said Friday. The 118 coins from the
early 4th century B.C. were confiscated
by Zurich airport customs in Novem-
ber 2011 from a Belgian man residing in
Greece. The coins were expected to ar-
rive in Athens later Friday.
(AP)
GORDONWELTERS FOR THE NEWYORK TIMES
Karamba Diaby was born in Senegal and moved to East Germany as a student in 1985. He has since become a German citizen and is on the Social Democrats’ parliamentary election list.
In 2011, an ultraconservative newspa-
per ran a story accusing Mr. Diaby of
unilaterally calling for stricter laws
against hate speech while he was the
head of Germany’s Federal Council on
Migration and Integration. The report
was inaccurate, but pictures of him in
the traditional garment known as a
grand boubou began circulating on In-
t
ernet forums alongwith thewords ‘‘the
his elder, and her husband to raise him.
By the time he got to college in the cap-
ital, Dakar, in 1982, university students
were pushing to rename many institu-
tions after prominent Senegalese who
had fought for independence in 1960.
‘‘Wewere the ones whowere always try-
ing something emancipatory,’’Mr. Diaby
said of himself and his university friends
in an interview after theMay Day rally.
It was through his political engage-
ment in Dakar in the early ’80s that he
came into contact with a far-left student
organization in Prague that encouraged
young people from around the world to
study behind the Iron Curtain. Mr.
Diaby applied for a scholarship.
Then one day in 1985 a telegram came
in the mail. ‘‘Karamba Diaby. Accepted.
University. Stop,’’ it read. ‘‘Register. Her-
der Institute, Leipzig. October 2. Stop.’’
After Mr. Diaby had completed nine
months of language training in Leipzig,
he was to be sent to a less prestigious
technical college while the other stu-
dents, all of whom were from Socialist
countries, had secured spots at a nearby
university.
‘‘That’s unfair!’’ Mr. Diaby com-
plained to administrators.
‘‘There’s no such thing as unfairness
in socialism,’’ he says an administrator
told him. ‘‘You’ll have to call it some-
thing else.’’
Mr. Diaby arrived in Halle on July 6,
1986, to study chemistry at the universi-
ty there but remained engaged in stu-
dent politics as the head of the Interna-
tional Student Committee.
The certainty of life behind the Iron
Curtain gave way to widespread insecu-
rity after the fall of the wall. With so
many people suddenly out of work, Mr.
Diaby was not even sure he would be al-
lowed to finish his studies. But he found
a topic for his doctorate, one that com-
bined chemistry and advocacy.
A real estate investor from the West
wanted to raze the small private gar-
dens on the edge of town and develop
the property. The developer claimed the
gardens were polluted, the soil too toxic
for agriculture. But Mr. Diaby conduct-
ed his own chemical analyses of the
earth, water and air.
He scraped together dirt samples and
sopped up groundwater to take back to
his lab while his out-of-work neighbors
were busy manicuring their small, leafy
plots on the edge of town.
In the neat, green spaces, he met jan-
itors and engineers, security guards and
university professors. ‘‘That waswhen I
gathered the most insights into their so-
ciety, their conditions,’’ Mr. Diaby said.
Mr. Diaby’s work helped disprove the
claims that the gardens were contami-
nated, short-circuiting the developer’s
plans. People still remember how the
young chemist fromSenegal tried to pro-
tect one of the few things that had sur-
vived the turbulent transition period. It
also set him on a path away from science
and deeper into activism and politics.
Today, Mr. Diaby works in the state
Labor Ministry and is a member of the
City Council in Halle. Analysts say he
has a good chance of representing the
people of Saxony-Anhalt in the
Bundestag in Berlin, but he does not
want to take anything for granted.
That is why he was out on May Day,
talking to people he knew and introdu-
cing himself to people he did not.
‘‘Not only voters in Halle but all of
Germany, especially the African com-
munity, are watching me,’’ Mr. Diaby
said. ‘‘They’ll ask, ‘Is he just here to
have his picture taken, or does he actu-
ally have something to say?’ ’’
Analysts say he has a good
chance of representing the
people of Saxony-Anhalt in
the Bundestag in Berlin.
black dictator.’’ He received hundreds
of angry e-mails and two death threats,
including one over the phone.
Mr. Diaby grew up in a small town in
southwestern Senegal called Marsas-
soum, where children played soccer on
dirt roads and many of the town’s 5,000
residents subsisted on raising livestock
or crops like peanuts and maize. The
youngest of four children, Mr. Diaby had
lost both of his parents by the time he
was 7, leaving his sister, who is 17 years
Putting a pl
easant face on a faltering kinship
PARIS
BY STEVEN ERLANGER
After months of strain, Chancellor An-
gela Merkel of Germany and President
François Hollande of France put a brave
face on their relationship this week,
making a joint visit to a controversial
exhibit at the Louvre on German
thought and painting from 1800 to 1939.
The year 1939 was painful for Ger-
many, with the consolidation of Nazism
and the invasion of Poland that set off
World War II, and the exhibit seeks to
show the influence of German Romanti-
cism and its role in the rise of Hitler.
Ms. Merkel, who trained as a chemist,
can hardly be described as a romantic,
but she is running for re-election and did
her duty, trying to repair a relationship
with a troubled France and an ideologi-
cal opponent, the Socialist Mr. Hollande.
After having been attacked by the
French Socialist Party for her ‘‘selfish
intransigence’’ over European econom-
ic policy and having endured Mr. Hol-
l
ande’s efforts to isolate her within
Germany finally holds
census, and finds big gap
GERMANY, FROMPAGE 1
tions, and the remaining countries.
Former President Nicolas Sarkozy
had always gone out of his way to find a
compromise position with Ms. Merkel
before E.U. summit meetings, believing
that the Franco-German partnership is
the motor that drives the union. But Mr.
Hollande had mocked the notion of
‘‘Merkozy,’’ arguing that Mr. Sarkozy
gave away too much.
But these days Mr. Hollande is
floundering, with France in a triple-dip
recession, domestic demand falling,
stagnant production, dropping exports
and record unemployment.
AndGermany is worried that Mr. Hol-
lande may understand France’s prob-
lems but lack the political courage — or
the domestic support, even within his
own party — to make significant
changes to the French economy, state
and labor market. A weak and uncom-
petitive France, the thinking in Berlin
goes, is a weak partner and diminishes
Europe itself.
The German government commis-
sioned, and refused to comment upon, a
study about France’s economic prob-
lems, while leading members of her
Christian Democratic Union have been
fiercely criticizing Mr. Hollande. An-
dreas Schockenhoff, a party deputy
chairman and foreign-policy spokes-
man, said that Mr. Hollande’s ‘‘vehe-
ment criticismof the European Commis-
sion’s reform proposals’’ for France
‘‘contradicts the spirit and letter of
European agreements and treaties.’’ He
continued: ‘‘Someonewho talks like that
is shaking the foundations of the E.U.’’
Similarly, a report Mr. Hollande and
Mrs. Merkel were given on Thursday on
competitiveness and growth, prepared
by two senior businessmen, a French
and a German, insisted on the necessity
of serious structural changes in France.
Gerhard Cromme, the German, who
works for Siemens, wrote separately, as
a ‘‘German francophile’’ in the quarterly
journal Commentaire, that ‘‘the gap that
is growing between the competitiveness
of the German economy and the French
one threatens to unbalance their politic-
al partnership. A weak France will find
The last time the population was
counted in the former West Germany
was in 1987. In the former East Ger-
many, the last census was in 1981.
The Nazi regime abused such infor-
mation during Hitler’s 12-year reign.
Many on the political left believed that
German law enforcement had been
overzealous in the methods used to
track down the terrorists of the Baader-
Meinhof gang and opposed the collec-
tion of more personal information.
A planned census in 1980 fell through
when the federal governments, the
states and local municipalities could not
agree on financing it. Just weeks before
a census was scheduled to begin in 1983
a court order disrupted it, on the
grounds that there was no prohibition of
census data being shared with other
government authorities, like the police
or tax examiners.
During the debate before the 1987
census, the police seized Green Party
pamphlets that declared, ‘‘Only sheep
are counted.’’ A raid on an office calling
for a boycott of the census resulted in ri-
oting inWest Berlin.
Opposition remains, though it is milder
today. Peter Schaar, the federal data pro-
tection commissioner, told the Die
Tageszeitung that the data in the census
was to be deleted quickly. ‘‘If the refer-
ence numbers that every citizen received
for the census are saved for the long
term, the danger of abuse indeed arises,’’
Mr. Schaar told the paper.
German officials believed that the re-
gistries kept by all municipalities gave
them a good idea how many residents
they had. Authorities noted the number
of births, deaths and officially reported
relocations and adjusted the old figure
as best they could. Mistakes compoun-
ded, incorrect assumptions hummed
along undetected.
‘‘These striking deviations alone
clearly show how important a readjust-
ment of population and housing data is,’’
said Roderich Egeler, the president of
the Federal Statistical Office.
Without proof of registration, even
simple steps like opening a local bank ac-
count can be impossible. Deregistering is
required when moving out, but the step
is also easily skipped.
In particular, foreigners who regis-
tered when they moved in, as required,
apparently were leaving the country
without unregistering. This createdwhat
statisticians call ‘‘card-index corpses,’’
phantomresidentswho lived on in the re-
cords long after leaving the country.
‘‘Demographers were trying to ex-
plain the healthy-migrant effect, why
they were living to be 110 years old,’’
said Steffen Kröhnert, a social scientist
at the Berlin Institute for Population
and Development. ‘‘It turns out they
hadmoved back to their home countries
and were only living in the registries.’’
A rise in migration to Germany as job
seekers from recession-wracked coun-
tries like Spain and Greece sought work
was one of the few bright spots, one that
will have to be re-evaluated in light of the
new figures. Germany is home to 1.1 mil-
lion fewer foreigners than previously
thought and 428,000 fewer Germans than
expected, the study found. In all there
are nearly 6.2 million foreigners living
here and roughly 74 million Germans.
The results reinforce a widespread
belief in Germany that, although the
country is the European Union’s most
populous and the Continent’s largest
economy, demographic decline poses
special challenges. While politicians and
economists inParis andWashington call
on Germany to spend more to pull the
European economy out of its slump,
Germans say they have to keep saving
to prepare for the long run.
The question of who will pay for the
pension system is even more urgent in
Germany than the debate over Social
Security is in the United States, where
population growth may have slowed
considerably but continues at a faster
clip. Germany has one of the lowest
birth rates and oldest populations.
JACQUES BRINON/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Angela Merkel and François Hollande at a news conference Thursday in Paris. They
agreed on a common approach to the next E.U. summit meeting at the end of June.
itself one day in the club of ‘assisted’
countries, which would deprive Ger-
many of a strategic partner.’’
Given all the German concern, and the
sense that Berlin must help support Mr.
Hollande’s efforts, Ms. Merkel’s agree-
ment to support him on a closer integra-
tion of euro zone ministers and econo-
mies was an important gesture —
especially sinceMr. Hollande had earlier
vetoed the candidacy of her finance min-
ister, Wolfgang Schäuble, to chair the
Eurogroup, raising hackles in Germany.
But Germany, and Mr. Schäuble, have
done considerably more to aid France,
arguing in Brussels that France was too
important to the euro zone and was in
toomuch economic trouble to force Paris
to reduce its budget deficit to 3 percent of
GDP this year. In the end, the European
Commission this week gave France two
more years to do so, in return for strict
promises of significant, painful and ‘‘ur-
gent’’ structural reforms —especially of
the pension systemand the labormarket
— and reductions in public spending.
The commission president, José Manuel
Barroso, even scolded Paris, warning
that ‘‘to be against globalization is like
spitting in the wind.’’
Ms. Merkel even was polite as Mr.
Hollande reactedwith political bravado.
‘‘It’s not for the commission to dictate
what we have to do,’’ Mr. Hollande said.
‘‘What’s needed is obvious.’’
That prompted Olli Rehn, the E.U.
commissioner for economic affairs, to
retort on Friday, ‘‘I’m slightly amazed
how France on one day underlines the
need for euro zone economic gov-
ernance and on another it criticizes the
commission for giving well-grounded
recommendations.’’
And Norbert Barthle, the budget
spokesman for Ms. Merkel’s party, the
Christian Democratic Union, said that
the two-year grace period for France
was longer than Germany expected.
‘‘France won’t be able to bank on such
indulgence again,’’ he said.
Still, given the economic doldrums in
France and most of Europe, the com-
mission has eased off on its demands for
budget cuts this year, hoping that
France will use the time well. So does
Ms. Merkel.
Merkel and Hollande, smiling
and finding ways to agree.
Europe by making common cause with
the euro zone’s troubled southern coun-
tries, Ms. Merkel managed to smile at
times, even at a long news conference on
Thursday dominated byMr. Hollande.
The two leaders, for the first time since
Mr. Hollande took office a year ago,
agreed on a common approach to the
next European Union summit meeting
at the end of June, which will focus on re-
ducing youth unemployment (26.5 per-
cent in France versus 7.5 percent in Ger-
many) and promoting economic growth.
And they agreed on more regular
meetings of euro zone countries and a
permanent ‘‘president’’ for the 17 euro
zone finance ministers, known as the
Eurogroup — further steps, if agreed
upon by the other countries, toward a
two-speed Europe of euro zone mem-
bers, with some of their own institu-
 ....
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, JUNE 1-2, 2013
|
5
THE GLOBAL EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
europe middle east asia
world news
Israel nudges its ultra-Orthodox to find jobs
Russian who
fled gets vote
of support
at big bank
ISRAEL, FROMPAGE 1
science or English: one recent study
said graduates have the equivalent of
zero to four years of secular education.
The community shuns the Internet.
Many men want to work few hours, and
some refuse co-ed offices.
‘‘I’malways sort of looking behindme
and seeingwhat is the distance between
me and the people I left behind—I try to
keep it a small distance,’’ said Yisrael
Shlomi, 23, who is enrolled in a special
college-prep course for Haredim and
wants to work in computers. ‘‘I have a
kosher telephone,’’ Mr. Shlomi added,
referring to amobile phone with restric-
ted or no Internet access, ‘‘I still wear
the same clothes, I’m speaking the
same way.’’
Mr. Shlomi said the first time he saw a
non-Haredi newspaper was in the cam-
pus cafeteria the first day of class. The
second day, he opened it. ‘‘The borders
are getting a little fuzzy,’’ he said.
Avner Shacham, chief executive of Bet
Shemesh Engines Ltd., which has $75
million in annual sales of parts for jet en-
gines, said the Haredi men he has hired
at his factory the past fewyears have had
a hard time. The workers cannot read the
English manuals for machines. They re-
ject overtime because they want to at-
tend afternoon prayers. The factory’s kit-
chens are kosher, but some complain
they are not the stricter ‘‘glatt kosher.’’
‘‘We have rules — the rules are the
same for everybody,’’ Mr. Shacham said
during a visit to his plant last week. ‘‘It’s
a question of performance. Are you will-
ing to reduce the performance of the air-
lines? Are you willing to decrease the
security in flying?’’
While Haredi culture everywhere pri-
oritizes Torah study, it is only in Israel
that so many pursue it full time. It was
not always this way: in 1979, 84 percent
of ultra-Orthodox men worked, close to
the 92 percent of other Jewish men, ac-
cording to the Taub Center for Social
Policy Studies in Israel.
Employment rates plummeted large-
ly because those who skirted army ser-
vice by citing Torah study as their voca-
tion were blocked from seeking jobs.
The new draft law—which still needs to
be approved by the cabinet and Parlia-
ment would remove that obstacle. At
the same time, the budget scheduled to
be approved this summer would drasti-
cally cut the subsidies their large famil-
ies rely on, adding another incentive to
work.
Even before the new public focus,
change had begun. The number of
Haredim doing military or civilian ser-
vice jumped to 2,321 last year from305 in
2007. The Joint has helped place 12,463
ultra-Orthodox Jews in jobs since 2005
— a small fraction of the estimated
346,000 Haredim over 20 years old in Is-
rael, but part of an uptick since 2002,
when 35 percent of Haredi men worked,
according to the Bank of Israel.
The number of ultra-Orthodox attend-
ing mainstream colleges has also more
than doubled to 7,350 over the past six
years, thanks in part to a Joint-funded
program of special preparatory classes.
‘‘I felt I was isolated fromwhat’s hap-
pening in the country, and if I was going
to advance in life I had to know the soci-
ety,’’ said Yehoshua Salant, a 25-year-
MOSCOW
BY ELLEN BARRY
Hours after the economist Sergei M.
Guriev announced that he had fled Rus-
sia because he feared he would be pros-
ecuted in a politically tinged case, the
shareholders of Russia’s largest bank
overwhelmingly re-elected him to its
board of directors, a show of support
that points to deepening rifts within
Russia’s ruling class.
Mr. Guriev had taken steps to with-
drawhis candidacy for re-election to the
board of Sberbank earlier this week,
which made Friday’s vote all the more
dramatic. He received more votes than
any other candidate, leaving little doubt
that in his high-profile conflict with law
enforcement authorities he has the
sympathy of a range of powerful figures
in the world of finance and government.
Mr. Guriev’s ideas helped guide eco-
nomic policy during the presidency of
Dmitri A. Medvedev, and after Vladimir
V. Putin returned to the office, he be-
came one of the most prominent people
to vocally support opposition causes.
Prosecutors have questioned him re-
peatedly in a conflict-of-interest case
centering on a 2011 report he co-au-
thored that criticized the prosecution of
Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky,
the im-
prisoned oil tycoon.
Kremlin officials have cast his de-
cision as a purely personal one, but
many inMoscow saw his flight as mark-
ing a new and foreboding phase in the
crackdown on political opposition.
Friday’s Sberbank vote made it clear
that many in Moscow’s normally cau-
tious elite were ready to rally to Mr.
Guriev’s defense.
The vote is ‘‘a display of solidarity
from what are known as ‘in-system lib-
erals,’ ’’ said Yevgeny N. Minchenko, di-
rector of the International Institute for
Political Expertise. Mr. Guriev, he said,
is well connected in this circle of power-
ful technocrats, who still dominate in
Russia’s economic sphere, corporate
world and system of higher education.
For days, Moscow insiders have been
debating whether Mr. Guriev was truly
in jeopardy, and on Friday he offered a
detailed account of what led to his de-
cision to leave Russia. He said scrutiny
from investigators had mounted in the
spring, culminating in a sudden — and,
t
o his mind, alarming—demand that he
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RINA CASTELNUOVO FOR THE NEWYORK TIMES
Binyamin Yazdi, a counselor at a Jerusalem employment service, puts clients at ease by quoting Torah verses and sharing his own struggle to balance Torah study and a job.
and I see that I’m not really succeeding
— it was hard for me to sit all those
hours,’’ said a 24-year-old from Bnei
Brak who spoke on the condition he be
identified only by his first name, Haim.
‘‘I don’t plan towork in a grocery. I want
a real salary.’’
Many of those involved in the push to
integrate Haredim said the recent pub-
lic outcry has only stymied what they
saw as a steady evolution. Twice this
month, ultra-Orthodox soldiers in uni-
form have been attacked in Haredi en-
claves. Mafteach, the employment ser-
vice whose name is Hebrew for ‘‘key,’’
has seen a slight drop in clients in 2013
after years of steady growth.
‘‘The more you push people, the more
they close inside,’’ said Naftali Flinten-
stein, who runs Mafteach in Jerusalem
and, like his seven employees, isHaredi.
‘‘It has a feeling of imposition, or for-
cing.’’
While many men are referred to
Mafteach by banks where they have
debts and arrive desperate for immedi-
ate work, the organization tries to steer
them into training programs that could
lead to careers.
With his own black hat and long coat
on the bookshelf behind his desk, Mr.
Yazdi, 26, makes clients comfortable by
quoting Torah verses and sharing his
‘‘I have a kosher telephone,
I still wear the same
clothes, I’m speaking
the same way.’’
own struggle to balance Torah study, sec-
ular courses, a job and child-care duties.
‘‘For them, it’s like diving into a pool
and not knowing whether it’s water or
acid or rain,’’ he said.
Aharon, a 25-year-old father of three
who asked that his last name not be pub-
lished to protect his family’s privacy,
came with the handwritten resume on
fax paper. He andMr. Yazdi sat together
at a computer to improve it. ‘‘If you
were looking for a wife right now and I
am your matchmaker, what would you
say?’’ Mr. Yazdi asked.
They decided Aharon was punctual,
orderly and had a strong work ethic.
They emphasized his love of math and
perhaps overstated his experience with
calculations.
Aharon’s handswere on the keyboard,
but Mr. Yazdi was dictating. Under per-
sonal skills, they put: ‘‘I have the will
and ability to learn additional things.’’
Rina Castelnuovo and Myra Noveck
contributed reporting.
Moscow’s power elite has been
consumed with the case.
An ultra-Orthodox man embraced his son after his swearing-in ceremony in Jerusalem
for a Haredi battalion that was created to integrate ultra-Orthodox men into the army.
surrender five years’ worth of profes-
sional and personal e-mails and submit
to searches of his office and home.
In particular, he was worried that in-
vestigators were preparing to name
him as a suspect rather than a witness
in the conflict-of-interest case. Prosecu-
tors contend that a group of expertswho
helped write the 2011 report on Mr.
Khodorkovsky had received money
years earlier from Mr. Khodorkovsky’s
company, Yukos.
Mr. Guriev feared the authorities
could take away his passport and pre-
vent him from leavingRussia – a serious
consideration, since his wife and chil-
dren live in France. He feared, as well,
that they would pressure him to serve
as a witness in a new prosecution tar-
geting Mr. Khodorkovsky, who is due
for release next year.
His informal exchanges with investi-
gators were foreboding, he said – one of
them asked if he was considering leav-
ing Russia, and said he should be happy
because his fate was much brighter
than that of Andrei D. Sakharov, a So-
viet dissident who was exiled in the
1980s. In lateApril, increasingly anxious
while on a trip outside the country, he
reached out to a series of well-placed
friends and concluded that his political
protection had diminished.
‘‘Some people toldme the risks are ac-
ceptable, some advisedme not to return,
but nobody gave guarantees,’’ he said.
Mr. Guriev left Russia on a single day’s
notice on April 30 and has not returned.
‘‘I won’t go back even if there is a
small chance of losing my freedom,’’ he
said by e-mail. ‘‘I have not done anything
wrong and do not want to live in fear.’’
Moscow’s power elite has been con-
sumed with discussion of the case this
week. In pro-government circles, many
said Mr. Guriev had over-dramatized
the investigation. But most analysts
agreed on one thing: Mr. Guriev falls in-
to a category of Moscow power brokers
who disagree with the Kremlin’s anti-
Western course and intense consolida-
tion of power – but who have generally
remained quiet about political changes.
In any case, it is not yet clear whether
Russia’s power players are prepared to
take real risks in defense of Mr. Guriev.
He was unusual, among Moscow in-
siders, in his willingness to associate
himself with the anti-Kremlin opposi-
tion, and last May publicly announced
that he had donated money to the fund
of Aleksei A. Navalny, the anti-corrup-
tion blogger. Mr. Guriev also had a de-
gree of latitude because of family cir-
cumstances — his wife, another
prominent economist, has lived in
France with their children for years.
Patrick Reevell contributed reporting
fromParis.
old father who is in such a program,
linked to Bar-Ilan University.
‘‘My parents are not proud of me,’’
Mr. Salant acknowledged. ‘‘The silence
is thundering.’’
Of nine young men in Mr. Salant’s
English class one recent evening, two
had fathers who worked — one as a rab-
binic court judge, the other publishing
religious books. The sons aspired to
computer programming, social work,
accounting, engineering, owning a busi-
ness.
‘‘I’ve been in the yeshiva eight years
Grim task for DNA lab in Bangladesh
BANGLADESH, FROMPAGE 1
U.S. adopts a sharper tone
with Russia o
n Syria arms
for companies like Walmart and Sears.
One problem for families is proving that
a relative worked in a factory: At
Tazreen, just outside Dhaka, the flames
destroyed victims’ identification tags.
In the Rana Plaza collapse, there are ru-
mors of bodies disappearing after being
taken away in trucks, prompting the
leader of the political opposition to ac-
cuse the government of a cover-up.
‘‘In Rana Plaza, we suspect the death
toll is much higher,’’ said Jyotirmoy
Barua, a lawyer who has been working
grated to theDhaka region fromrural vil-
lages. They often supported a spouse and
children, and they also sent back money
to their parents. Some families are des-
perate and fighting over the compensa-
tion. Mr. Harun said one woman, three
months pregnant, lost her husband in the
Rana Plaza collapse. She was given his
body and his official documents, only to
have his parents take the documents and
make a claim for compensation.
At the DNA laboratory, Mr. Akhter-
uzzaman said his staff needed two or
three months to begin making matches.
Ordinarily, scientists can collect tissue
soon after a victim’s death and produce
a DNA profile within hours. But most of
the bodies from Rana Plaza were re-
covered too late to collect usable
samples, so bone shards or teeth were
taken. Bone must be decalcified before
any usable material can be collected, a
process that takes two weeks per
sample. Usually, the small shaking ma-
chines are equipped to handle 15 sample
test tubes at a time; now, the test tubes
are stacked in groups of 30.
Hasibul, the boy looking for his father,
lives inMagura, a village in the northern
tier of the country. In 2011, his father,
Asadur Zaman, started working as a se-
curity guard at Ether Tex, a fifth-floor
garment factory in Rana Plaza. He vis-
ited Magura twice a year, and his wife
and young son made occasional trips to
see him. When the building collapsed,
Mr. Zaman’s family assumed he was in-
side. To make a DNA match, officials
suggested that eitherMr. Zaman’smoth-
er or father provide a blood sample. But
his mother had died recently, and his fa-
ther had a breakdown after the collapse.
Hasibul stepped forward, escorted by
his uncle, who said the family’s future
depended on proving a DNAmatch.
‘‘Now they have a terrible life,’’ said
the uncle, Tariqul Islam. ‘‘They have no
other source of income.’’ The prime
minister announced she would give
compensation to all the victims. But if
we don’t have any official proof, we will
not get any compensation.’’
Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting.
shi government. In the initial days, as
dozens of bodies were being pulled
hourly from the wreckage, a nearby
high school served as a staging area for
thousands of people looking for missing
relatives or just gawking. Bodies were
placed in plank coffins and sprayedwith
disinfectant as lines of people walked
slowly past.
Shaikh Yusuf Harun, deputy commis-
sioner for the district of Dhaka, said the
chaos of the moment had led to confu-
sion — and some mistakes. Initially, 291
bodies could not be identified. Officials
have also since discovered that 10 bod-
ies were turned over to the wrong famil-
ies and buried in distant villages. In
three of those cases, families discovered
that their missing relatives were alive,
while in the other seven, remains were
simply handed to the wrong people.
There are plans to exhume the bodies
and take bone or tooth samples.
With the huge crowds and reporters
pressing forward, officials were some-
times reluctant to challenge someone
who claimed a body. In at least two
cases, officials handed over bodies as
well as initial payments of 20,000 taka,
or about $250, to people who pocketed
the cash and dumped the corpses at the
edge of the school grounds.
‘‘It was a crisis,’’ Mr. Harun said.
‘‘There could have been a riot. Some of-
ficials had to hand over a body.’’
Prime Minister Sheikh HasinaWazed
has announced a compensation pack-
age for families of those killed at Rana
Plaza that could exceed $12,000, with the
money coming from public and private
sources. The amount is substantial, giv-
en that the minimum wage in the gar-
ment industry is $37 a month. So far,
only 150 families have received the first
installment of about $1,100, according to
Mr. Harun, prompting criticism that the
government is making it difficult for
people to claim the money.
Such disputes over compensation are
still dragging on from the fire inNovem-
ber that destroyed the Tazreen Fash-
ions garment factory and killed 112
workers who had been making clothing
have worked together to hold an inter-
national conference in hopes of finding a
way to end the fighting.
Mr. Kerry, appearing with Germany’s
foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle,
suggested that Russia’s continued sale
of weaponry toMr. Assad’s government
called into question its commitment to
the political process that he and Mr.
Lavrov announced inMoscow onMay 7.
In fighting on Friday in Syria, govern-
ment troops attacked a convoy trying to
evacuate wounded people from a cen-
tral town near the border with Lebanon,
killing at least seven, as rebel reinforce-
ments infiltrated the besieged area to
fight government forces backed by Leb-
anese Hezbollah fighters, The Associ-
ated Press quoted activists as saying.
The Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights, an opposition group based in
Britain with a network of contacts in
Syria, said the attack in the town of
Qusayr also wounded ‘‘tens of people,’’
The A.P. reported. Hadi Abdullah, an ac-
tivist based in Qusayr, described the at-
tack via Skype, saying it killed nine
people and wounded many more.
State media on Friday reported that
forces loyal to Mr. Assad killed a 33-
year-old Michigan woman, Nicole
Mansfield, who was a convert to Islam,
and a British man during an ambush on
an opposition scouting mission north of
the city of Idlib, according to Reuters.
WASHINGTON
BY STEVEN LEE MYERS
ANDMICHAEL R. GORDON
Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday
strongly criticized Russia’s pledge to
send advanced antiaircraft weapons to
Syria, saying that its actions threatened
to disrupt efforts to negotiate a political
settlement of the Syrian conflict and
posed an unacceptable risk to Israel.
‘‘Whether it’s an old contract or not, it
has a profoundly negative impact on the
balance of interests and the stability of
the region, and it does put Israel at
risk,’’ Mr. Kerry said at the State De-
partment, making his most pointed
statement yet about Russia’s arming of
the government of President Bashar al-
Assad of Syria.
‘‘It is not in our judgment responsible
because of the size of the weapon, the
nature of the weapon andwhat it does to
the region in terms of Israel’s security,’’
he said.
Russia’s announcement last week
that it would go ahead with the sale of
sophisticated S-300 missiles to Syria —
and Mr. Assad’s defiant boasts on
Thursday about the durability of his
Russian weapons supply — have added
a dangerous new dimension to the civil
war in Syria, even as Mr. Kerry and his
Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov,
TASLIMA AKHTER FOR THE NYT
Waiting outside the laboratory in Dhaka
that analyzes DNA samples.
‘‘To handle normal situations,
the lab is O.K. But now a
whole year’s caseload has
come up, all of a sudden.’’
with victims of the Tazreen Fashions
and Rana Plaza disasters. ‘‘The only
reason for lowering the number is to
lower the compensation.’’
Such accusations have been sharply
rebutted by the government, and many
others note that any coordinated effort
to hide bodies would have been difficult,
given the thousands of people who had
rushed to the disaster site, including
dozens of journalists filming the event.
‘‘It was not possible,’’ Mr. Harun said
of the rumors. ‘‘It is totally baseless.’’
Officials say they are struggling in
some cases to determine the rightful
claimants. Most garment workers mi-
Religious Services
Association
of Int'l Churches
Paris and
Suburbs
Paris and
Suburbs
Zurich
SAINT JOSEPH'S
English speaking
Catholic Church Mon-Fri. Masses
8:30am Sat. 11am & 6:30pm
(Vigil), Sunday Masses 9:30, 11,
12:30 & 6:30pm. 50 ave Hoche,
Paris 8th. Tel 01 42 27 28 56
Metro Charles de Gaulle - Etoile.
www.stjoeparis.org
ENGLISH SPEAKING
Catholic
Mission Zurich Minervastrasse 69
(see website for directions)
Tel. 044 382 02 06
Website: www. englishmission.ch
Mass times:
Saturday 6pm (Crypt)
and Sunday 11.15am (Church)
AMERICAN CHURCH IN PARIS
Worship 9:00 am & 11:00 am.
Contemporary Service at 1:30 pm
65 quai d'Orsay. Paris 7th, Bus 63,
Metro Alma-Marceau or Invalides.
Tel 01 40 62 05 00. www.acparis.org
  [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • zolka.keep.pl

    		•