Senate Leaders Set to Work on a Last-Minute Tax Agreement

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

In a televised statement at the White House after meeting with Congressional leaders on Friday, President Obama said he was “modestly optimistic” that an agreement could be reached.

WASHINGTON — At the urging of President Obama, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate set to work Friday night to assemble a last-minute tax deal that could pass both chambers of Congress and avert large tax increases and budget cuts next year, or at least stop the worst of the economic punch from landing beginning Jan. 1.

After weeks of fruitless negotiations between the president and Speaker John A. Boehner, Mr. Obama turned to Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader — two men who have been fighting for dominance of the Senate for years — to find a solution. The speaker, once seen as the linchpin for any agreement, essentially ceded final control to the Senate and said the House would act on whatever the Senate could produce.

“The hour for immediate action is here. It is now,” Mr. Obama said in the White House briefing room after an hourlong meeting with the two Senate leaders, Mr. Boehner and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader. He added, “The American people are not going to have any patience for a politically self-inflicted wound to our economy, not right now.”

Senate Democrats want Mr. McConnell to propose an alternative to Mr. Obama’s final offer and present it to them in time for a compromise bill to reach the Senate floor on Monday and be sent to the House. Absent a bipartisan deal, Mr. Reid said Friday night that he would accede to the president’s request to put to a vote on Monday Mr. Obama’s plan to extend tax cuts for all income below $250,000 a year and to renew expiring unemployment compensation for as many as two million people, essentially daring Republicans to block it and allow taxes to rise for most Americans.

Bipartisan agreement still hinged on the Senate leaders finding an income level above which taxes will rise on Jan. 1, most likely higher than Mr. Obama’s level of $250,000. Quiet negotiations between Senate and White House officials were already drifting up toward around $400,000 before Friday’s White House meeting. The two sides were also apart on where to set taxes on inherited estates.

But senators broke from a long huddle on the Senate floor with Mr. McConnell on Friday night to say they were more optimistic that a deal was within reach. Mr. McConnell, White House aides and Mr. Reid were to continue talks on Saturday, aiming for a breakthrough as soon as Sunday.

“We’re working with the White House, and hopefully we’ll come up with something we can recommend to our respective caucuses,” said Mr. McConnell, who has played a central role in cutting similar bipartisan deals in the past.

The emerging path to a possible resolution, at least on Friday, appeared to mirror the end of the protracted stalemate over the payroll tax last year. In that conflict, House Republicans refused to go along with a short-term extension of the cut, but Mr. McConnell reached an agreement that permitted such a measure to get through the Senate, and the House speaker essentially forced members to accept it from afar, after they had left forChristmas recess.

This time, the consequences are more significant, with more than a half-trillion dollars in tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts just days from going into force, an event most economists warn would send the economy back into recession if not quickly mitigated. With the House set to return to the Capitol on Sunday night, Mr. Boehner has said he would place any Senate bill before his chamber and let the vote proceed and the chips fall. The House could also change the legislation and return it to the Senate.

If the Senate is able to produce a bill that is largely bipartisan, there is a strong belief among House Republicans that the same measure would easily pass the House, with a large number of Republicans. While Mr. Boehner was unable to muster enough votes for his alternative bill that would have protected tax cuts for income under $1 million, that was because the measure lacked Democratic support, and was roughly a few dozen votes shy of passage with Republicans alone.

Helene Cooper and Ron Nixon contributed reporting.

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Victim of Gang Rape in India Dies at Hospital in Singapore

NEW DELHI — Government officials appealed for calm in the streets here Saturday after the death of young woman who was raped two weeks ago by a group of men who lured her onto a bus.

The woman, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student whose rape on Dec. 16 had served as a reminder of the dangerous conditions women face in India, died “peacefully,” according to a statement by Dr. Kelvin Loh, the chief executive of Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.

The police have arrested six people in connection with the attack, Indian officials said.

The woman, whose intestines were removed because of injuries caused by a metal rod used during the rape, has not been identified. She was flown to Singapore on Wednesday night after undergoing three abdominal operations at a local hospital. She had also suffered a major brain injury, cardiac arrest and infections of the lungs and abdomen. “She was courageous in fighting for her life for so long against the odds, but the trauma to her body was too severe for her to overcome,” Dr. Loh’s statement said.

After word of her death spread, protesters gathered in New Delhi at Jantar Mantar, a popular site for demonstrations. By noon, the crowd had swelled to several hundred, most of them young men.

Upamanyu Raju, 21, a student at Delhi University, said he has been attending protests since a day after the rape victim was admitted to the hospital because of the "utter atrocity of what happened." Mr. Raju said he has given his younger sister pepper spray and a Swiss Army knife, but he worries that won’t protect her. "It’s wrong to stop girls from going out" of the house, he said, but there’s little choice because the city is so unsafe for women.

Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister of Delhi, arrived at the Jantar Mantar protest grounds in the early afternoon, and was booed, heckled and jostled by the crowd, even as the diminutive 74-year-old was surrounded by a police escort. She left after only a few minutes, after lighting a candle and holding her hands together in prayer, and without speaking to the crowd.

The roads leading to India Gate, the site of earlier protests that had turned violent, had been barricaded by the police, and nearby subway stations were closed. More than 40 police units have been deployed in the area, including 28 units of the Central Reserve Police Force, which are national anti-insurgency troops.

Revulsion and anger over the rape have galvanized India, where women regularly face sexual harassment and assault, and where neither the police nor the judicial system is seen as adequately protecting them. Top officials now say that further change is needed, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed his “deepest condolences.”

“We have already seen the emotions and energies this incident has generated,” he said in a statement. “It would be a true homage to her memory if we are able to channelize these emotions and energies into a constructive course of action.” The government, he said, is examining “the penal provisions that exist for such crimes and measures to enhance the safety and security of women.”

And Sonia Gandhi, India’s most powerful female politician and the president of the governing Congress Party, made in a rare televised statement that was broadcast on Saturday.

"As a woman, and mother, I understand how protesters feel," she said. "Today we pledge that the victim will get justice," she said.

The six men arrested in the case will be charged with murder, the Delhi police said Saturday morning, as they, too, asked citizens to remain calm.

"We appeal to the people that they maintain peace," Satyendra Garg, a joint commissioner of the police, said in a televised interview. "We want the situation in Delhi to normalize as soon as possible," he said. Until then, he added, Delhi commuters will have to plan their travel carefully and be aware of the restrictions.

Activists and lawyers in India have long said that the police are insensitive when dealing with crimes against women, and that therefore many women do not report cases of sexual violence.

Niharika Mandhana contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Keith Bradsher contributed from Hong Kong..

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China Toughens Its Restrictions on Use of the Internet

  HONG KONG — The Chinese government issued new rules on Friday requiring Internet users to provide their real names to service providers, while assigning Internet companies greater responsibility for deleting forbidden postings and reporting them to the authorities.

   The decision came as government censors have sharply stepped up restrictions on China’s international Internet traffic in recent weeks. The restrictions are making it harder for businesses to protect commercial secrets and for individuals to view overseas Web sites that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive.

  The new regulations, issued by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, allow Internet users to continue to adopt pseudonyms for their online postings, but only if they first provide their real names to service providers, a measure that could chill some of the vibrant discourse on the country’s Twitter-like microblogs. The authorities periodically detain and even jail Internet users for politically sensitive comments, such as calls for a multiparty democracy or allegations of impropriety by local officials.

   Any entity providing Internet access, including over fixed-line or mobile phones, “should when signing agreements with users or confirming provision of services, demand that users provide true information about their identities,” the Standing Committee ordered.

   In recent weeks, Internet users in China have exposed a series of sexual and financial scandals that have led to the resignations or dismissals of at least 10 local officials. International news media have also published a series of reports in recent months on the accumulation of wealth by the family members of China’s leaders, and some Web sites carrying such reports, including Bloomberg’s and the English- and Chinese-language sites of The New York Times, have been assiduously blocked, while Internet comments about them have been swiftly deleted.

   The regulations issued Friday build on a series of similar administrative guidelines and municipal rules issued over the past year. China’s mostly private Internet service providers have been slow to comply with them, fearing the reactions of their customers. The Standing Committee’s decision has much greater legal force, and puts far more pressure on Chinese Internet providers to comply more quickly and more comprehensively, Internet specialists said.

  In what appeared to be an attempt to make the decision more palatable to the Chinese public, the Standing Committee also included a mandate for businesses in China to be more cautious in gathering and protecting electronic data.

   “Nowadays on the Internet there are very serious problems with citizens’ personal electronic information being recklessly collected, used without approval, illegally disclosed, and even traded and sold,” Li Fei, a deputy director of the Standing Committee’s legislative affairs panel, said at a news conference in Beijing on Friday. “There are also a large number of cases of invasive attacks on information systems to steal personal electronic information, as well as lawbreaking on the Internet through swindles and through defaming and slandering others.”

  Mr. Li denied that the government was seeking to prevent the exposure of corruption.

   “When citizens exercise these rights according to the law, no organization or individual can use any reason or excuse to interfere, and cannot suppress them or exact revenge,” he said. “At the same time, when citizens exercise their rights, including through use of the Internet, they should stay within the bounds of the Constitution and the laws, and must not harm the legitimate rights and interests of the state, society, the collective or of other citizens.”

   A spokesman for the National People’s Congress said that that 145 members of the Standing Committee voted in favor of the new rules, with 5 abstaining and 1 voting against them.

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The New Old Age Blog: United States Lags in Alzheimer's Support

This month, the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging released a report examining how five nations — the United States, Australia, France, Japan and Britain — are responding to growing numbers of older adults with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

Every country has a strategy, but some are much further ahead than others. Notably, France began addressing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in 2001 and is in the midst of carrying out its third national plan. (Scroll down at this link to find the English version of the 2008-2012 French plan.)

By contrast, the United States released its first national plan to address Alzheimer’s in May.

The Senate report highlights several trends under way in all five countries, including efforts to coordinate research more effectively, diagnose Alzheimer’s disease more reliably and improve training in dementia care by medical practitioners.

Most relevant to readers of this blog is another trend with increasing international scope: an accelerating effort to keep patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia at home and arrange for care and treatment there, rather than in institutions.

Anyone who’s followed reader response to Jane Brody’s column this week on aging in place knows the burden that this can place on families, especially if government support for home-based services (companions or home health aides who help with bathing, dressing, toileting and other tasks), adult day care or respite care is scarce or nonexistent, as is the case for most middle-class families in the United States.

Is care at home for patients with Alzheimer’s necessarily more humane? Only if caregivers have the resources — financial, physical and emotional — to handle this draining, exhausting, immeasurably difficult job. And only if the institutions that serve people with more advanced forms of Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia are so poorly financed, staffed and operated that we wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving loved ones in their care.

Three charts in the new Senate report underscore the extent to which the United States differs from other countries in what is expected of family caregivers. The first, on Page 60, shows countries’ support for paid long-term care services for residents age 65 and older. This includes all residents who need long-term care, including those with Alzheimer’s disease, other forms of dementia and other disabling chronic illnesses. Not included are services provided by unpaid family caregivers.

Look at where the United States ranks compared with Australia, Japan, France and the 30 other developed countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Paid support for long-term care is much less in our country than in theirs.

The second chart, on Page 64, gives a sense of how much paid support for long-term care is provided in people’s homes. Again, the data is not specific to Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, although these are primary reasons older adults need long-term care.

And again, the United States falls short in terms of the amount of paid care it provides in home settings, even though older people tend to prefer these settings over institutions.

The third chart, on Page 75, brings results in the other two down to the level of families. When paid long-term care support is scarce or unavailable, you would expect a heavier load to fall on unpaid caregivers, and this is what the chart shows. Look at the number of caregivers in the United States who put in 10 to 19 hours a week (34.2 percent) or 20 hours or more a week (30.5 percent), and compare those with similar figures for France, Australia and Britain, all of which provide more paid long-term care than we do. Where are informal caregivers working the hardest? Right here at home in the United States.

For me, the take-away is clear. Other countries with which the United States is closely aligned have embraced long-term care as an essential social responsibility while we have not. Unless and until we do so, caregivers here will be among the most harried, stressed and burdened among wealthy, developed countries in the world.

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The New Old Age Blog: United States Lags in Alzheimer's Support

This month, the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging released a report examining how five nations — the United States, Australia, France, Japan and Britain — are responding to growing numbers of older adults with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

Every country has a strategy, but some are much further ahead than others. Notably, France began addressing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in 2001 and is in the midst of carrying out its third national plan. (Scroll down at this link to find the English version of the 2008-2012 French plan.)

By contrast, the United States released its first national plan to address Alzheimer’s in May.

The Senate report highlights several trends under way in all five countries, including efforts to coordinate research more effectively, diagnose Alzheimer’s disease more reliably and improve training in dementia care by medical practitioners.

Most relevant to readers of this blog is another trend with increasing international scope: an accelerating effort to keep patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia at home and arrange for care and treatment there, rather than in institutions.

Anyone who’s followed reader response to Jane Brody’s column this week on aging in place knows the burden that this can place on families, especially if government support for home-based services (companions or home health aides who help with bathing, dressing, toileting and other tasks), adult day care or respite care is scarce or nonexistent, as is the case for most middle-class families in the United States.

Is care at home for patients with Alzheimer’s necessarily more humane? Only if caregivers have the resources — financial, physical and emotional — to handle this draining, exhausting, immeasurably difficult job. And only if the institutions that serve people with more advanced forms of Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia are so poorly financed, staffed and operated that we wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving loved ones in their care.

Three charts in the new Senate report underscore the extent to which the United States differs from other countries in what is expected of family caregivers. The first, on Page 60, shows countries’ support for paid long-term care services for residents age 65 and older. This includes all residents who need long-term care, including those with Alzheimer’s disease, other forms of dementia and other disabling chronic illnesses. Not included are services provided by unpaid family caregivers.

Look at where the United States ranks compared with Australia, Japan, France and the 30 other developed countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Paid support for long-term care is much less in our country than in theirs.

The second chart, on Page 64, gives a sense of how much paid support for long-term care is provided in people’s homes. Again, the data is not specific to Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, although these are primary reasons older adults need long-term care.

And again, the United States falls short in terms of the amount of paid care it provides in home settings, even though older people tend to prefer these settings over institutions.

The third chart, on Page 75, brings results in the other two down to the level of families. When paid long-term care support is scarce or unavailable, you would expect a heavier load to fall on unpaid caregivers, and this is what the chart shows. Look at the number of caregivers in the United States who put in 10 to 19 hours a week (34.2 percent) or 20 hours or more a week (30.5 percent), and compare those with similar figures for France, Australia and Britain, all of which provide more paid long-term care than we do. Where are informal caregivers working the hardest? Right here at home in the United States.

For me, the take-away is clear. Other countries with which the United States is closely aligned have embraced long-term care as an essential social responsibility while we have not. Unless and until we do so, caregivers here will be among the most harried, stressed and burdened among wealthy, developed countries in the world.

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Gadgetwise Blog: App Smart Extra: The Melodies Linger On

Streaming music, and streaming “radio” apps like Pandora and Spotify, were the topics of this week’s App Smart column. They let you listen to music you do not necessarily have in your own collection. They can also be an excellent way to break out of a musical rut and discover new sounds.

Here is another app that you may like: ooTunes ($5 on iOS). It behaves like a very clever access point to a huge list of online radio stations, among which you may well find music you would like to hear. I love the Radio RooLette function, which takes you to a random selection of tracks. The Lyrics option is nice too, because I bet that you, like me, often wonder what the heck a singer just said.

The app’s “Similar” function also does a surprisingly good job of suggesting similar music; clicking on this while listening to some holiday tunes by Andy Williams led me to Bobby Vee’s “Christmas Vacation,” for example. But from the point it delivers the list, it’s a bit of potluck to see if those tracks are being played somewhere on the radio now, or can be found on YouTube. Unfortunately this app had flaky audio quality for me several times, even though I’m on a superfast Wi-Fi broadband connection. Also, its interface is far from being highly polished. But at least it’s not expensive, and it comes with bonus powers to record the tracks and act as a radio alarm clock.

Don’t forget that these kinds of apps can also help you identify music you haven’t heard before when listening from a more conventional source, like over a store’s speaker system, or on a friend’s radio. Shazam (free on iTunes and Android) is my favorite app for doing this; you simply run it and let it “listen” to the music. It then does a clever pattern-matching to identify the song, and presents you with a page crammed with data like the name of the artist, information about tours, a link to YouTube and, in the iOS edition, the “artist’s popular songs” on iTunes. Clicking on this last option is, of course, a great way to listen to more of the music that has just attracted your ear. Finally, the app’s “Discover” tab helps you find new music by showing the popular tracks people are listening to and identifying with Shazam.

Quick Call

The popular social music app maker Smule has a new, free iOS app out, Strum. It is a little like Instagram, but is all about sharing video clips on a social network. Unlike other, similar apps, Strum applies both video and audio filters — to the extent of composing new music for you, or editing the audio and video of your clips to make them look and sound as if you’re rapping.

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Currents: Keeping One's Work in Perspective

NEW YORK — For much of the year now fleeing us, Americans engaged in a noisy, bitter, fervent, thrilling argument about work.

There it was when Mitt Romney suggested that 47 percent of Americans are lazy, shirking dependents mooching on the toil of others. There it was when President Barack Obama told entrepreneurs that “you didn’t build that.” There it was when one party sought to reinvigorate labor unions and collect more taxes from “millionaires and billionaires,” and the other party pushed back against unions with “right-to-work” laws and pressed to rebrand millionaires and billionaires as America’s “job creators.”

And now, as a new year looms and Washington scrambles to avoid jumping off the so-called fiscal cliff, the argument about work is still with us. How strong a safety net should workers have? How long must an able-bodied person work before retirement? Should those who have thrived economically pay more taxes, or be rewarded for their superior enterprise?

It is an argument of great importance that yet manages to feel boring, because the camps are so clearly demarcated and the positions so well rehearsed. But once in a while, someone wades into the debate and offers hope of new ways of seeing, like the Rev. Timothy Keller, a Christian theologian who recently published a book-length critique of America’s strange relationship with the idea of work.

The book, “Every Good Endeavor,” is ostensibly a meditation on work from a Christian worldview. But Dr. Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, wrote it with the hope that it would be “overheard” by people of all backgrounds, he said in a recent conversation.

One reason Americans may be struggling to reach political accommodation about work is that, as Dr. Keller shows, they are talking about different things when they talk about work.

Surveying the United States’ privileged “knowledge classes,” Dr. Keller describes a population that is “work obsessed,” holding their jobs to be the fount of “self-fulfillment and self-realization,” seeing leisure as merely “work stoppage for bodily repair” and allowing office principles like “efficiency, value and speed” to infuse and overwhelm their personal lives. In this world, where work becomes the chief source of identity and meaning, families ache and — from Wall Street to elite sports to political office — dishonesty abounds, because professional loss can sink a person’s sense of being. “They just have to keep their spot,” Dr. Keller said.

The pastor reminds congregants that he is not criticizing industriousness, but rather its elevation to the status of an idol, a false god: “Work is a good thing turned into an ultimate thing,” he said on the phone the other day. “Idols are good things that you have to have, but you need to demote them.”

At the other end of the class spectrum, Dr. Keller writes of an equal and opposite pathology: a common perception of work as miserable toil, inherently “frustrating and exhausting,” to be “avoided or simply endured.”

“The working-class culture can be infected by that idea that work is a drudgery,” he said in the interview. “The best thing you can possibly do is just win the lottery and just go to a beach and sit there for the rest of your life — that work is a necessary evil.”

Dr. Keller argues for a centrist understanding of work as calling — work that lends life meaning but doesn’t monopolize it, work that is performed not for personal glory but in service of others. He challenges the idea, as he puts it in the book, that “work is a curse and that something else (leisure, family, or even ‘spiritual’ pursuits) is the only way to find meaning in life”; and he criticizes “the opposite mistake, namely, that work is the only important human activity and that rest is a necessary evil — something we do strictly to ‘recharge our batteries’ in order to continue to work.”

The other great schism in perceptions of work is, of course, between the political left and right. Dr. Keller considers himself a moderate whose views about work alienate him from both camps. He said he wants to rescue work from the belief, prevalent among many on the right, that there are no excuses — not even the worst childhood — for failing to succeed; and from the belief, prevalent among many on the left, that wealth creation is somehow tawdry.

Those on the right, he said, undermine their ideas about work and self-reliance by failing to recognize how social context can limit — or enable — a person’s life chances. Social Darwinism, in Dr. Keller’s telling, ignores how “the fittest will keep on making enough money to put their kids in the right sorts of schools and right sorts of processes to stay the fittest.”

“On the other hand,” he said, turning his attention, “there’s almost a sense in which people who have made money through their hard work and ingenuity are almost guilty till proven innocent on the left.”

The pastor insists that God is a centrist on the question of work. “When I read my own religious texts and the Scripture,” he said, “I see warrant for both the suspicion of capital and the celebration of work and wealth creation. I see them both in the Bible.”

Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly; follow on Twitter.com/anandwrites

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In Gabon, Lure of Ivory Proves Hard to Resist

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

SEIZED AND DESTROYED Gabon burned 10,000 pounds of ivory in June to show its commitment against poaching, but elephants are still being slaughtered. More Photos »

OYEM, Gabon — This lush country, often called a “forest republic,” used to stand proudly apart from its shaky neighbors, like the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, tropical disaster zones where state failure, rebel marauders and loose weapons conspired to spell doom for endangered wildlife.

The Price of Ivory

This is the second installment in a series of articles exploring how the surge in poaching of African elephants both feeds off and fuels instability on the continent.

Gabon’s government, blessed with billions of dollars of oil money and miles and miles of virgin rain forest, has made many of the right moves to protect its animals by setting aside chunks of land for national parks, actually paying wildlife rangers on time (a rarity in Africa) and recently destroying a towering mountain of ivory in a statement of its refusal to look the other way.

But as the price of ivory keeps going up, hitting levels too high for many people to resist, Gabon’s elephants are getting slaughtered by poachers from across the borders and within the rain forests, proof that just about nowhere in Africa are elephants safe.

In the past several years, 10,000 elephants in Gabon have been wiped out, some picked off by impoverished hunters creeping around the jungle with rusty shotguns and willing to be paid in sacks of salt, others mowed down en masse by criminal gangs that slice off the dead elephants’ faces with chain saws. Gabon’s jails are filling up with small-time poachers and ivory traffickers, destitute men and women like Therese Medza, a village hairdresser arrested a few months ago for selling 45 pounds of tusks.

“I had no idea it was illegal,” Ms. Medza said, almost convincingly, from the central jail here in Oyem, in the north. “I was told the tusks were found in the forest.”

She netted about $700, far more than she usually makes in a month, and the reason she did it was simple, she said. “I got seven kids.”

It seems that Gabon’s elephants are getting squeezed in a deadly vise between a seemingly insatiable lust for ivory in Asia, where some people pay as much as $1,000 a pound, and desperate hunters and traffickers in central Africa.

It is a story of temptation — and exploitation — and it shows that the problem is not just about demand, but about supply as well. Poverty, as well as greed, is killing Africa’s elephants.

Across the continent, tens of thousands of elephants are being poached each year in what is emerging as one of the gravest wildlife crises in decades. Gabon’s elephants are among the last of the planet’s rare forest elephants, a subspecies or possibly a totally distinct species (scientists can’t agree), which makes the stakes particularly high here. Forest elephants are smaller than their savanna cousins and have an alluring, extra-hard pinkish ivory that is especially prized.

A few decades ago, there were perhaps 700,000 forest elephants roaming through the jungles of central Africa. Now there may be fewer than 100,000, and about half of them live in Gabon.

“We’re talking about the survival of the species,” said Lee White, the British-born head of Gabon’s national parks.

In June, Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo, defiantly lighted a pyramid of 10,000 pounds of ivory on fire to make the point that the ivory trade was reprehensible, a public display of resolve that Kenya has put on in years past. It took three days for all the ivory to burn, and even after the last tusks were reduced to glowing embers, policemen vigilantly guarded the ashes. Ivory powder is valued in Asia for its purported medicinal powers, and the officers were worried someone might try to sweep up the ashes and sell them.

Some African countries, like Zimbabwe and Tanzania, are sitting on million-dollar stockpiles of ivory (usually from law enforcement seizures or elephants that died naturally) that someday may be legal to sell. Gabon has the unusual luxury of kissing its ivory mountain goodbye because it has an even more lucrative resource: two billion barrels of crude oil.

But it is not clear how long Gabon will continue as this relatively prosperous, politically stable corner of Africa. Protesters recently began chaffing against Mr. Bongo’s rule, saying he rigged an election to ensure that he would take over from his father, who died in 2009 after 41 years in office.

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Creating the Ultimate Housework Workout

Robert Wright for The New York Times

Chris Ely, an English butler, and Carol Johnson, a fitness instructor at Crunch NYC, perfecting a houseworkout.

CAN housework help you live longer? A New York Times blog post by Gretchen Reynolds last month cited research linking vigorous activity, including housework, and longevity. The study, which tracked the death rates of British civil servants, was the latest in a flurry of scientific reports crediting domestic chores with health benefits like a lowered risk for breast and colon cancers. In one piquant study published in 2009, researchers found that couples who spent more hours on housework had sex more frequently (with each other) though presumably not while vacuuming. (The report did not specify.)

Intrigued by science that merged the efforts of a Martha with the results of an Arnold (a buffer buffer?), this reporter challenged a household expert and a fitness authority to create the ultimate housework workout — a houseworkout — in her East Village apartment. Perhaps she could add a few years to her own life while learning some fancy new moves for her Swiffer. Christopher Ely, once a footman at Buckingham Palace, and Brooke Astor’s longtime butler, was appointed cleaner-in-chief. Mr. Ely is a man who approaches what the professionals call household management with the range and depth of an Oxford don. Although he is working on his memoirs (he described his book as a room-by-room primer with anecdotes from his years in service), he was happy enough to put his writing aside for an afternoon. His collaborator was Carol Johnson, a dancer and fitness instructor who develops classes at Crunch NYC, including those based on Broadway musicals like “Legally Blonde” and “Rock of Ages.”

Mr. Ely arrived first, beautifully dressed in dark gray wool pants, a black suit coat and a crisp white shirt with silver cuff links. He cleans house in a white shirt? “I know how to clean it,” he countered, meaning the shirt. When Ms. Johnson appeared (in black spandex and a ruffly white chiffon blouse, which she switched out for a Crunch T-shirt), theory, method and materials were discussed.

“If you’re dreading the laundry,” Ms. Johnson said, “why not create a space where it’s actually fun to do by putting on some music?” If fitness is defined by cardio health, she added, it will be a challenge to create housework that leaves you slightly out of breath. “I’m thinking interval training,” she said. As it happens, one trend in exercise has been workouts that are inspired by real-world chores, or what Rob Morea, a high-end Manhattan trainer, described the other day as “mimicking hard labor activities.” In his NoHo studio, Mr. Morea has clients simulate the actions of construction workers hefting cement bags over their shoulders (Mr. Morea uses sand bags) or pushing a wheelbarrow or chopping wood.

Mr. Ely averred that service — extreme housekeeping — is physically demanding, with sore feet and bad knees the least of its debilitating byproducts. Mr. Ely still suffers from an injury he incurred while carrying a poodle to its mistress over icy front steps in Washington When the inevitable occurred, and Mr. Ely wiped out, he threw the dog to his employer before falling hard on his backside. And the right equipment matters: After two weeks’ employ in an Upper East Side penthouse, he was handed a pair of Reeboks by his new boss, the better to withstand the apartment’s wall-to-wall granite floors. (For cleaning, Mr. Ely wears slippers, deck shoes or socks.)

Mr. Ely, whose talents and expertise are wide-ranging (he can stock a wine cellar, do the flowers, set a silver service, iron like a maestro and clean gutters, as he did once or twice at Holly Hill, Mrs. Astor’s Westchester estate), is a minimalist when it comes to materials. He favors any simple dish detergent as a multipurpose cleaner, along with a little vinegar, for glass, and not much else. “Dish detergent is designed for cutting grease; there’s nothing better,” he said. He’s anti-ammonia, anti-bleach. He said bleach destroys fabric, particularly anything with elastic in it. “Knickers and bleach are a terrible combination,” he said. “I had a boss who thought he had skin cancer. His entire trunk had turned red and itchy.” It seems his underpants were being washed in bleach. (Collective wince.) “It’s horrible stuff.”

As for tools, he likes a cobweb cleaner — this reporter had bought Oxo’s extendable duster, which has a fluffy orange cotton duster that snaps onto a sort of wand, but Mr. Ely prefers the kind that looks like a round chimney brush. (If you live in a house, he also suggests leaving the cobwebs by the front and back doors, so the spiders can eat any mosquitoes coming or going.) Choose a mop with microfiber fronds (he suggested the O Cedar brand) because it dries quickly and doesn’t smell. And a sturdy vacuum. Also, stacks of microfiber cloths or a terry cloth towel ripped up.

But first, to stretch. Ms. Johnson took hold of this reporter’s Bona floor mop (it’s like a Swiffer, but with a reusable washcloth) and Mr. Ely followed along with an old-fashioned string mop. Though Mr. Ely has a kind of loose-limbed elegance, he is not exactly limber. He grimaced as he parroted Ms. Johnson, who used her mop as Gene Kelly did his umbrella, stretching her arms overhead, one by one, twisting from side to side, sucking in her stomach, rising up on tip toes. (Mr. Ely said his old poodle-hurling injury was kicking in.) Ms. Johnson adjusted his chin — “You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep sticking your neck out,” she warned — and Mr. Ely raised a black-socked foot napped with cat hair and chastised this reporter: “Would you look at that?” (The cat had vanished early on, but his “debris,” as Mr. Ely put it, was still very much in evidence. The reporter hung her head. Did she know that cat spit is toxic? Mr. Ely wondered.)

“We’re warming up the spine,” said Ms. Johnson. “Squeeze your abdominals.”

Mr. Ely looked worried: “I don’t think I have abdominals!”

MR. ELY’S technique is to clean a room from top to bottom. That means he begins with the cobweb cleaner, wafting it along ceiling corners, moldings, soffits and, uh, the top of the fridge (major dust harvest there). His form was pretty, like a serve by Roger Federer, if not exactly aerobic. For Mr. Ely kept stopping to lecture this reporter — on condensation; on the basic principles of heat transfer and why one needs to vacuum the refrigerator coils; on the movement of moist air in a kitchen; on floor care, which involved a long story about a Belgian monastery whose inhabitants never washed the kitchen floor; on how to dust the halogen spot lights (use a cotton cloth, not a microfiber one, and make sure the lights are off, and cool).  “I do rabbit on, don’t I?” he said. Ms. Johnson gamely hustled him along, noting that anytime you raise your arms over your head you can raise your heart rate. “What about a balance exercise?” she cajoled, executing a neat series of leg lifts. “That’s good for the butler’s booty!”

Read More..

Creating the Ultimate Housework Workout

Robert Wright for The New York Times

Chris Ely, an English butler, and Carol Johnson, a fitness instructor at Crunch NYC, perfecting a houseworkout.

CAN housework help you live longer? A New York Times blog post by Gretchen Reynolds last month cited research linking vigorous activity, including housework, and longevity. The study, which tracked the death rates of British civil servants, was the latest in a flurry of scientific reports crediting domestic chores with health benefits like a lowered risk for breast and colon cancers. In one piquant study published in 2009, researchers found that couples who spent more hours on housework had sex more frequently (with each other) though presumably not while vacuuming. (The report did not specify.)

Intrigued by science that merged the efforts of a Martha with the results of an Arnold (a buffer buffer?), this reporter challenged a household expert and a fitness authority to create the ultimate housework workout — a houseworkout — in her East Village apartment. Perhaps she could add a few years to her own life while learning some fancy new moves for her Swiffer. Christopher Ely, once a footman at Buckingham Palace, and Brooke Astor’s longtime butler, was appointed cleaner-in-chief. Mr. Ely is a man who approaches what the professionals call household management with the range and depth of an Oxford don. Although he is working on his memoirs (he described his book as a room-by-room primer with anecdotes from his years in service), he was happy enough to put his writing aside for an afternoon. His collaborator was Carol Johnson, a dancer and fitness instructor who develops classes at Crunch NYC, including those based on Broadway musicals like “Legally Blonde” and “Rock of Ages.”

Mr. Ely arrived first, beautifully dressed in dark gray wool pants, a black suit coat and a crisp white shirt with silver cuff links. He cleans house in a white shirt? “I know how to clean it,” he countered, meaning the shirt. When Ms. Johnson appeared (in black spandex and a ruffly white chiffon blouse, which she switched out for a Crunch T-shirt), theory, method and materials were discussed.

“If you’re dreading the laundry,” Ms. Johnson said, “why not create a space where it’s actually fun to do by putting on some music?” If fitness is defined by cardio health, she added, it will be a challenge to create housework that leaves you slightly out of breath. “I’m thinking interval training,” she said. As it happens, one trend in exercise has been workouts that are inspired by real-world chores, or what Rob Morea, a high-end Manhattan trainer, described the other day as “mimicking hard labor activities.” In his NoHo studio, Mr. Morea has clients simulate the actions of construction workers hefting cement bags over their shoulders (Mr. Morea uses sand bags) or pushing a wheelbarrow or chopping wood.

Mr. Ely averred that service — extreme housekeeping — is physically demanding, with sore feet and bad knees the least of its debilitating byproducts. Mr. Ely still suffers from an injury he incurred while carrying a poodle to its mistress over icy front steps in Washington When the inevitable occurred, and Mr. Ely wiped out, he threw the dog to his employer before falling hard on his backside. And the right equipment matters: After two weeks’ employ in an Upper East Side penthouse, he was handed a pair of Reeboks by his new boss, the better to withstand the apartment’s wall-to-wall granite floors. (For cleaning, Mr. Ely wears slippers, deck shoes or socks.)

Mr. Ely, whose talents and expertise are wide-ranging (he can stock a wine cellar, do the flowers, set a silver service, iron like a maestro and clean gutters, as he did once or twice at Holly Hill, Mrs. Astor’s Westchester estate), is a minimalist when it comes to materials. He favors any simple dish detergent as a multipurpose cleaner, along with a little vinegar, for glass, and not much else. “Dish detergent is designed for cutting grease; there’s nothing better,” he said. He’s anti-ammonia, anti-bleach. He said bleach destroys fabric, particularly anything with elastic in it. “Knickers and bleach are a terrible combination,” he said. “I had a boss who thought he had skin cancer. His entire trunk had turned red and itchy.” It seems his underpants were being washed in bleach. (Collective wince.) “It’s horrible stuff.”

As for tools, he likes a cobweb cleaner — this reporter had bought Oxo’s extendable duster, which has a fluffy orange cotton duster that snaps onto a sort of wand, but Mr. Ely prefers the kind that looks like a round chimney brush. (If you live in a house, he also suggests leaving the cobwebs by the front and back doors, so the spiders can eat any mosquitoes coming or going.) Choose a mop with microfiber fronds (he suggested the O Cedar brand) because it dries quickly and doesn’t smell. And a sturdy vacuum. Also, stacks of microfiber cloths or a terry cloth towel ripped up.

But first, to stretch. Ms. Johnson took hold of this reporter’s Bona floor mop (it’s like a Swiffer, but with a reusable washcloth) and Mr. Ely followed along with an old-fashioned string mop. Though Mr. Ely has a kind of loose-limbed elegance, he is not exactly limber. He grimaced as he parroted Ms. Johnson, who used her mop as Gene Kelly did his umbrella, stretching her arms overhead, one by one, twisting from side to side, sucking in her stomach, rising up on tip toes. (Mr. Ely said his old poodle-hurling injury was kicking in.) Ms. Johnson adjusted his chin — “You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep sticking your neck out,” she warned — and Mr. Ely raised a black-socked foot napped with cat hair and chastised this reporter: “Would you look at that?” (The cat had vanished early on, but his “debris,” as Mr. Ely put it, was still very much in evidence. The reporter hung her head. Did she know that cat spit is toxic? Mr. Ely wondered.)

“We’re warming up the spine,” said Ms. Johnson. “Squeeze your abdominals.”

Mr. Ely looked worried: “I don’t think I have abdominals!”

MR. ELY’S technique is to clean a room from top to bottom. That means he begins with the cobweb cleaner, wafting it along ceiling corners, moldings, soffits and, uh, the top of the fridge (major dust harvest there). His form was pretty, like a serve by Roger Federer, if not exactly aerobic. For Mr. Ely kept stopping to lecture this reporter — on condensation; on the basic principles of heat transfer and why one needs to vacuum the refrigerator coils; on the movement of moist air in a kitchen; on floor care, which involved a long story about a Belgian monastery whose inhabitants never washed the kitchen floor; on how to dust the halogen spot lights (use a cotton cloth, not a microfiber one, and make sure the lights are off, and cool).  “I do rabbit on, don’t I?” he said. Ms. Johnson gamely hustled him along, noting that anytime you raise your arms over your head you can raise your heart rate. “What about a balance exercise?” she cajoled, executing a neat series of leg lifts. “That’s good for the butler’s booty!”

Read More..

U.N. Envoy Calls for Transitional Government in Syria

MOSCOW — The international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, on a mission to Damascus seeking an end to the escalating civil conflict in Syria, said Thursday that a transitional government should be granted full executive powers until President Bashar al-Assad’s term ends in 2014.

Mr. Brahimi’s remarks to journalists, reported by news agencies, follow intensive talks this week with Mr. Assad and a range of opposition figures.

Over the past month, Mr. Brahimi, as special representative from the United Nations and Arab League, has consulted extensively with both the United States and Russia in hopes of fulfilling of an accord reached in Geneva this summer calling for dialogue between Syria’s government and the opposition.

“The Syrian people seek genuine change,” he said. He emphasized the importance of preserving state institutions and warned that military intervention would “lead to the destruction of the Syrian state” according to Russia’s ITAR-TASS news service.

“There will be no victor in this war,” he said.

As a Syrian government delegation met with Russia’s top diplomats in Moscow, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Aleksandr K. Lukashevich, said there was no specific plan under discussion that would envisage a transitional government. Opposition figures have suggested that Mr. Brahimi presented Mr. Assad with offers either to cede some of his authority or to leave the country, but Mr. Lukashevich denied that. “There was and is no plan, it is not being discussed with Mr. Brahimi or with American colleagues,” he said.

Mr. Brahimi will have his own meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in Moscow on Saturday, Mr. Lukashevich said. Asked about the topic of Thursday’s meeting with Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Faisal al-Meqdad, Mr. Lukashevich said Russia was making an effort to “intensify dialogue, not only with the government but also with the opposition groups.”

“Naturally, we are talking with the government very often,” he said.

Mr. Lukashevich said Russia was open to talks with Syria’s national opposition coalition, which has been recognized by many Western governments as representing the Syrian people.

“We are not rejecting this dialogue,” he said. “On the contrary, we are holding it very vigorously with all opposition groups who are also interested in getting better insight into the Russian approach.”

“It is obviously another question when and at what level they will take place,” he said.

Among the widely discussed sticking points for a possible transition plan is what role, if any, Mr. Assad and his allies would play in the process. Among the options being floated this week are an arrangement that would allow him to remain in office for most or all of the rest of his presidential term, which ends in 2014, but transferring much of his authority to a transitional body. A separate question is whether the agreement would allow him to run for re-election in 2014.

Mr. Lukashevich said Russia had no role in determining this.

“We are not lawyers for this regime,” he said. “We would prefer that the Syrians themselves should determine the prospects for their state’s further development.”

Russia has staunchly opposed military intervention in Syria, insisting on a negotiated solution. But its officials have acknowledged that Mr. Assad’s forces are losing control, and are preparing for a chaotic period of transition.

Ellen Barry reported from Moscow, and Kareem Fahim from Beirut, Lebanon.

Read More..

Recipes for Health: Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Penne with mushroom ragout and spinach.

​​Mushrooms and spinach together is always a match made in heaven. I use a mix of wild and regular white or cremini mushrooms for this, but don’t hesitate to make it if regular mushrooms are all that is available.

 

1/2 ounce (about 1/2 cup) dried porcini mushrooms

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1/2 medium onion or 2 shallots, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 pound mixed regular and wild mushrooms or 1 pound regular white or cremini mushrooms, trimmed and cut in thick slices (or torn into smaller pieces, depending on the type of mushroom)

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1/4 cup fruity red wine, such as a Côtes du Rhone or Côtes du Luberon

2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme or a combination of thyme and rosemary

6 ounces baby spinach or 12 ounces bunch spinach (1 bunch), stemmed and thoroughly cleaned

3/4 pound penne

Freshly grated Parmesan to taste

 

1. Place the dried mushrooms in a Pyrex measuring cup and pour on 2 cups boiling water. Let soak 30 minutes, while you prepare the other ingredients. Place a strainer over a bowl, line it with cheesecloth or paper towels, and drain the mushrooms. Squeeze the mushrooms over the strainer to extract all the flavorful juices. Then rinse the mushrooms, away from the bowl with the soaking liquid, until they are free of sand. Squeeze dry and set aside. If very large, chop coarsely. Measure out 1 cup of the soaking liquid and set aside.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy, nonstick skillet over medium heat and add the onion or shallots. Cook, stirring often, until tender, about 5 minutes. Turn up the heat to medium-high and add the fresh mushrooms. Cook, stirring often, until they begin to soften and sweat, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and salt to taste, stir together for about 30 seconds, then add the reconstituted dried mushrooms and the wine and turn the heat to high. Cook, stirring, until the liquid boils down and glazes the mushrooms. Add the herbs and the mushroom soaking liquid. Bring to a simmer, add salt to taste, and cook over medium-high heat, stirring often, until the mushrooms are thoroughly tender and fragrant. Turn off the heat, stir in some freshly ground pepper, taste and adjust salt.

3. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt generously. Fill a bowl with ice water. Add the spinach to the boiling water and blanch for 20 seconds only. Remove with a skimmer and transfer to the ice water, then drain and squeeze out water. Chop coarsely and add to the mushrooms. Reheat gently over low heat.

4. Bring the water back to a boil and cook the pasta al dente following the timing suggestions on the package. If there is not much broth in the pan with the mushrooms and spinach, add a ladleful of pasta water. Drain the pasta, toss with the mushrooms and spinach, add Parmesan to taste, and serve at once.

Yield: Serves 4

Advance preparation: The mushroom ragout will keep for 3 or 4 days in the refrigerator and tastes even better the day after you make it.

Nutritional information per serving: 437 calories; 9 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 73 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams dietary fiber; 48 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste or Parmesan); 17 grams protein

​

Up Next: Spinach Gnocchi

 

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

Read More..

Recipes for Health: Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Penne with mushroom ragout and spinach.

​​Mushrooms and spinach together is always a match made in heaven. I use a mix of wild and regular white or cremini mushrooms for this, but don’t hesitate to make it if regular mushrooms are all that is available.

 

1/2 ounce (about 1/2 cup) dried porcini mushrooms

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1/2 medium onion or 2 shallots, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 pound mixed regular and wild mushrooms or 1 pound regular white or cremini mushrooms, trimmed and cut in thick slices (or torn into smaller pieces, depending on the type of mushroom)

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1/4 cup fruity red wine, such as a Côtes du Rhone or Côtes du Luberon

2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme or a combination of thyme and rosemary

6 ounces baby spinach or 12 ounces bunch spinach (1 bunch), stemmed and thoroughly cleaned

3/4 pound penne

Freshly grated Parmesan to taste

 

1. Place the dried mushrooms in a Pyrex measuring cup and pour on 2 cups boiling water. Let soak 30 minutes, while you prepare the other ingredients. Place a strainer over a bowl, line it with cheesecloth or paper towels, and drain the mushrooms. Squeeze the mushrooms over the strainer to extract all the flavorful juices. Then rinse the mushrooms, away from the bowl with the soaking liquid, until they are free of sand. Squeeze dry and set aside. If very large, chop coarsely. Measure out 1 cup of the soaking liquid and set aside.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy, nonstick skillet over medium heat and add the onion or shallots. Cook, stirring often, until tender, about 5 minutes. Turn up the heat to medium-high and add the fresh mushrooms. Cook, stirring often, until they begin to soften and sweat, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and salt to taste, stir together for about 30 seconds, then add the reconstituted dried mushrooms and the wine and turn the heat to high. Cook, stirring, until the liquid boils down and glazes the mushrooms. Add the herbs and the mushroom soaking liquid. Bring to a simmer, add salt to taste, and cook over medium-high heat, stirring often, until the mushrooms are thoroughly tender and fragrant. Turn off the heat, stir in some freshly ground pepper, taste and adjust salt.

3. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt generously. Fill a bowl with ice water. Add the spinach to the boiling water and blanch for 20 seconds only. Remove with a skimmer and transfer to the ice water, then drain and squeeze out water. Chop coarsely and add to the mushrooms. Reheat gently over low heat.

4. Bring the water back to a boil and cook the pasta al dente following the timing suggestions on the package. If there is not much broth in the pan with the mushrooms and spinach, add a ladleful of pasta water. Drain the pasta, toss with the mushrooms and spinach, add Parmesan to taste, and serve at once.

Yield: Serves 4

Advance preparation: The mushroom ragout will keep for 3 or 4 days in the refrigerator and tastes even better the day after you make it.

Nutritional information per serving: 437 calories; 9 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 73 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams dietary fiber; 48 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste or Parmesan); 17 grams protein

​

Up Next: Spinach Gnocchi

 

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

Read More..

The 30-Minute Interview: The 30-Minute Interview With Nick J. Romito

Mr. Romito, 30, is the founder and chief executive of View the Space, a new real estate technology business that creates online video tours, primarily of office space, and provides data-tracking services to commercial real estate companies, among them SL Green Realty, Vornado Realty Trust and Silverstein Properties.

Before starting the business last year, Mr. Romito worked as a commercial broker and tenant and landlord representative.

Q. How has business been so far?

A. Business is good. We launched the beta version of the Web site about a year ago, and this April was when we took the beta logo off and decided that we were at a point where we could start charging for the product. We’ve grown extraordinarily fast, but that’s a good thing.

Q. Are you profitable yet?

A. We had profitability in May, then like most start-up companies we scaled up. We hit profitability again in October.

I put in all my life savings, which was roughly $50,000 to $100,000, with my wife’s help. As we were going into the market and trying to get people to believe in our dream it gets rough. But we actually got really lucky and found some great partners — a syndicate of hedge fund professionals who knew commercial real estate and invest in start-ups — who liked our idea. We raised about $650,000.

Q. Let’s talk about the services you provide.

A. As you probably know, commercial real estate is an antiquated business, more or less reluctant to embrace technology. We thought we were a crazy enough bunch to change that. We decided we could improve the process by taking it online from start to finish. So for us that means video. We’ve created a style of shooting video for office space that’s really never existed. Ours is the closest thing to actually being there, where you fly through the space and you actually feel like you’re in it. You just can’t touch the walls.

On the landlord side, we allow you to track how a person is interacting with the tour. So you get to see 1) the prospect who’s looking at it; 2) how many times they’ve watched it; and 3) how engaged are they with it. You’ll actually be able to tell whether a specific firm has taken the tour 10 times — that’s a very, very high level of engagement — and they’re a serious prospect so I’m going to follow up with them.

Q. What kind of analytics software accomplishes this?

A. We had to build a pretty serious back end of data that’s taken us awhile. You’ve got I.P. addresses all over the place, so we had to build a library of those, which we can identify for the most part which companies are viewing your space.

Q. And how do the clients see this information?

A. They can see it in real time whenever they want — from their dashboard. And if they’re not online we’ll e-mail it to them.

Q. Has this service helped to sell property faster?

A. Yeah. We’re at about 1.5 million square feet leased on View the Space since December 2011.

Q. How many clients do you have right now?

A. Over 50. We’ve got most of the larger commercial real estate institutions both on the public and private side.

It’s funny, when we first started, our thesis was that we would get all of the smaller landlords on board first because we have more access to them. But because we worked so tightly with the brokerage community to build this, SL Green caught wind of what we were doing very quickly and they ended up being our first big client.

So it’s kind of like a domino effect where you get the SL Greens of the world soon enough the Silversteins and all the other players want to find out what you’re doing.

Q. Where do you hope to see your business in, say, the next five to 10 years?

A. We think that technology is here to stay in commercial real estate. And we see us growing, hopefully, in every major market. We’re actively in 10 markets right now.

New York right now is probably 60 percent of the activity that we have.

Q. You don’t have a technology background, do you?

A. I don’t. During the first year of development I was still a broker. I tried to outsource the first part of this to India, which was a very painful process. You’ve got to start your day at 4 a.m., because of the time difference, and the language barrier was very difficult. Not only was I trying to learn Hindi, but also the language of technology.

Q. So when you’re not learning new languages, what do you do for fun?

A. I surf. That was more or less my life growing up on the Jersey Shore. In Toms River.

Q. Were you or your family affected by Hurricane Sandy?

A. My mom lost her house. She got a couple of feet of water, and now they’ll have to demo the house.

But as long as everyone is O.K., it’s just stuff. I think everybody down there is so resilient, and this is like when everybody really comes together.

Read More..

Lübeck Journal: Museum Seeks to Update Thomas Mann for Age of Texting

Gordon Welters for The New York Times

As the Buddenbrookhaus, a museum about Thomas Mann, prepares to grow, it aims to make a formidable writer more accessible.

LÜBECK, Germany — The latest sensation from the literary lion Thomas Mann is more than a century old and runs over 500 characters, not pages, long.

In one of a trove of 81 recently discovered postcards, Mr. Mann rhapsodized to his older brother, Heinrich, about yogurt, “tasty and lightly laxative,” and fretted over the healthiness of decaffeinated coffee. Zippy, chatty and refreshingly accessible, the messages soften the image of a titan of letters known for lengthy and difficult masterpieces like “The Magic Mountain” and the family saga “Buddenbrooks.”

A batch of the postcards, written between 1901 and 1928 and found by Heinrich’s grandchildren among his daughter’s effects, scroll down a giant flat-screen monitor here at the Buddenbrookhaus museum, set in the speech-bubble shape familiar from text messages. As officials prepare to expand the museum next year, they are wrestling with the question of how to make this Nobel-winning author of weighty tomes approachable to coming generations weaned on Twitter messages and status updates.

The prototype is just a brisk stroll away, past the brick Gothic marvels of this Hanseatic city at the Günter Grass-Haus, spotlighting another Nobel laureate. There, visitors vote on a touchscreen for possible coming exhibitions about Mr. Grass, author of “The Tin Drum” and at 85 still a magnet for controversy. “Sexuality” and “Grass as soldier” tied for the top spot on a recent afternoon. “The poet Grass” was last.

“In Germany, people experience museums passively,” said Jörg-Philipp Thomsa, head of the Grass museum, while demonstrating how to operate a giant tablet computer the size of a kitchen table.

Pictures of Mr. Grass grew, shrank and swiveled beneath Mr. Thomsa’s fingers as he searched for the Smurfs, the cartoon characters. The little blue fellows, he explained, were there because they represented the Polish labor movement Solidarity in Mr. Grass’s novel “The Rat.” Also, children like them.

“The goal is to awaken interest in Grass’s work, which is often seen as difficult,” Mr. Thomsa said.

But the latest gadgets are only one piece of the puzzle. For many readers, the sense of connection to the work and the author is the ultimate draw, like taking a walking tour of Dublin locations that Joyce featured in “Ulysses.”

“There has to be something about the place, something extraordinary you can’t find on the Internet,” said Holger Pils, head of the Buddenbrookhaus. “The need for the experience of the place is growing because everything else is two-dimensional.”

In some ways the Manns are perfect for a gossipy, confessional era. The brothers are like a German version of the Brontë sisters with a dash of Cain and Abel, nonviolent but still rivalrous. The family history includes prosperity and power, a fall from grace, sibling strife, suicide and scandal. “The Blue Angel,” adapted from Heinrich Mann’s novel “Small Town Tyrant,” is a cinema classic that made Marlene Dietrich a star.

Germans remain particularly fascinated by “Buddenbrooks,” a goliath of German literature, like “Middlemarch” in Britain or “War and Peace” in Russia. The novel chronicles the decline of a merchant family based on the Manns. Most of the action in the book plays out in a fictional version of the house on Mengstrasse where the author’s grandparents lived, now home to the museum.

The baroque facade of the old patrician house still faces St. Mary’s Church, where, in the book’s opening pages, “the wind whistled in the nooks around its massive Gothic corners.” On a recent winter evening, guests gathered in the vaulted cellar, nibbling on red and white meringues like ones described in the novel, to listen as an actor with a deep, soothing voice read the book’s famous Christmas scene.

They paid 65 euros, or about $86, for dinner and a tour of landmarks from the lives and works of the brothers.

“The characters in the novel are strongly bound to the real people, the reality of this great literature,” said Thomas Katschewitz, 52, as the tour stopped to drink mulled wine and listen to an organ grinder play in front of the brothers’ old school.

For a city of 212,000, Lübeck has an exceptional literary tradition. The main public library is nearly 400 years old. Bernd Hatscher, the library’s director, showed off a copy of the “Rudimentum Novitiorum,” a history of the world with vividly colored maps printed in Lübeck in 1475.

Lübeck was home to the 19th-century poet Emanuel Geibel, whose poetry volume ran through 100 editions just during his lifetime; the novelist Ida Boy-Ed, an early supporter of the young Thomas Mann; and the radical Jewish writer Erich Mühsam, killed by the SS at the Oranienburg concentration camp. Lübeck suffered significant damage in World War II bombing raids, including to the Buddenbrookhaus, but its literary reputation has not ebbed.

Read More..

News Analysis: Getting Polio Campaigns Back on Track

How in the world did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that teenage girls — whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children — are gunned down in the streets?

Nine vaccine workers were killed in Pakistan last week in a terrorist campaign that brought the work of 225,000 vaccinators to a standstill. Suspicion fell immediately on factions of the Pakistani Taliban that have threatened vaccinators in the past, accusing them of being American spies.

Polio eradication officials have promised to regroup and try again. But first they must persuade the killers to stop shooting workers and even guarantee safe passage.

That has been done before, notably in Afghanistan in 2007, when Mullah Muhammad Omar, spiritual head of the Afghan Taliban, signed a letter of protection for vaccination teams. But in Pakistan, the killers may be breakaway groups following no one’s rules.

Vaccination efforts are also under threat in other Muslim regions, although not this violently yet.

In Nigeria, another polio-endemic country, the new Islamic militant group Boko Haram has publicly opposed it, although the only killings that the news media have linked to polio were those of two police officers escorting vaccine workers. Boko Haram has killed police officers on other missions, unrelated to polio vaccinations.

In Mali, extremists took over half of the country in May, declaring an Islamic state. Vaccination is not an issue yet, but Mali had polio cases as recently as mid-2011, and the virus sometimes circulates undetected.

Resistance to polio vaccine springs from a combination of fear, often in marginalized ethnic groups, and brutal historical facts that make that fear seem justified. Unless it is countered, and quickly, the backlash threatens the effort to eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

In 1988, long before donors began delivering mosquito nets, measles shots, AIDS pills, condoms, deworming drugs and other Western medical goods to the world’s most remote villages, Rotary International dedicated itself to wiping out polio, and trained teams to deliver the vaccine.

But remote villages are often ruled by chiefs or warlords who are suspicious not only of Western modernity, but of their own governments.

The Nigerian government is currently dominated by Christian Yorubas. More than a decade ago, when word came from the capital that all children must swallow pink drops to protect them against paralysis, Muslim Hausas in the far-off north could be forgiven for reacting the way the fundamentalist Americans of the John Birch Society did in the 1960s when the government in far-off Washington decreed that, for the sake of children’s teeth, all drinking water should have fluoride.

The northerners already had grievances. In 1996, the drug company Pfizer tested its new antibiotic, Trovan, during a meningitis outbreak there. Eleven children died. Although Pfizer still says it was not to blame, the trial had irregularities, and last year the company began making payments to victims.

Other rumors also spring from real events.

In Pakistan, resistance to vaccination, low over all, is concentrated in Pashtun territory along the Afghan border and in Pashtun slums in large cities. Pashtuns are the dominant tribe in Afghanistan but a minority in Pakistan among Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis and other ethnic groups. Many are Afghan refugees and are often poor and dismissed as medieval and lawless.

Pakistan’s government is friendly with the United States while the Pashtuns’ territory in border areas has been heavily hit by American Taliban-hunting drones, which sometimes kill whole families.

So, when the Central Intelligence Agency admitted sponsoring a hepatitis vaccination campaign as a ruse to get into a compound in Pakistan to confirm that Osama bin Laden was there, and the White House said it had contemplated wiping out the residence with a drone missile, it was not far-fetched for Taliban leaders to assume that other vaccinators worked for the drone pilots.

Even in friendly areas, the vaccine teams have protocols that look plenty suspicious. If a stranger knocked on a door in Brooklyn, asked how many children under age 5 were at home, offered to medicate them, and then scribbled in chalk on the door how many had accepted and how many refused — well, a parent might worry.

In modern medical surveys — though not necessarily on polio campaigns — teams carry GPS devices so they can find houses again. Drones use GPS coordinates.

The warlords of Waziristan made the connection specific, barring all vaccination there until Predator drones disappeared from the skies.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian who is chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization, expressed his frustration at the time, saying, “They know we don’t have any control over drone strikes.”

The campaign went on elsewhere in Pakistan — until last week.

The fight against polio has been hampered by rumors that the vaccine contains pork or the virus that causes AIDS, or is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Even the craziest-sounding rumors have roots in reality.

The AIDS rumor is a direct descendant of Edward Hooper’s 1999 book, “The River,” which posited the theory — since discredited — that H.I.V. emerged when an early polio vaccine supposedly grown in chimpanzee kidney cells contaminated with the simian immunodeficiency virus was tested in the Belgian Congo.

The sterilization claim was allegedly first made on a Nigerian radio station by a Muslim doctor upset that he had been passed over for a government job. The “proof” was supposed to be lab tests showing it contained estrogen, a birth control hormone.

The vaccine virus is grown in a broth of live cells; fetal calf cells are typical. They may be treated with a minute amount of a digestive enzyme, trypsin — one source of which is pig pancreas, which could account for the pork rumor.

In theory, a polio eradicator explained, if a good enough lab tested the vaccine used at the time the rumor started, it might have detected estrogen from the calf’s mother, but it would have been far less estrogen than is in mother’s milk, which is not accused of sterilizing anyone. The trypsin is supposed to be washed out.

In any case, polio vaccine is now bought only from Muslim countries like Indonesia, and Muslim scholars have ruled it halal — the Islamic equivalent of kosher.

Reviving the campaign will mean quelling many rumors. It may also require adding other medical “inducements,” like deworming medicine, mosquito nets or vitamin A, whose immediate benefits are usually more obvious.

But changing mind-sets will be a crucial step, said Dr. Aylward, who likened the shootings of the girls to those of the schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.

More police involvement — what he called a “bunkerized approach” — would not solve either America’s problem or Pakistan’s, he argued. Instead, average citizens in both countries needed to rise up, reject the twisted thinking of the killers and “generate an understanding in the community that this kind of behavior is not acceptable.”

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News Analysis: Getting Polio Campaigns Back on Track

How in the world did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that teenage girls — whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children — are gunned down in the streets?

Nine vaccine workers were killed in Pakistan last week in a terrorist campaign that brought the work of 225,000 vaccinators to a standstill. Suspicion fell immediately on factions of the Pakistani Taliban that have threatened vaccinators in the past, accusing them of being American spies.

Polio eradication officials have promised to regroup and try again. But first they must persuade the killers to stop shooting workers and even guarantee safe passage.

That has been done before, notably in Afghanistan in 2007, when Mullah Muhammad Omar, spiritual head of the Afghan Taliban, signed a letter of protection for vaccination teams. But in Pakistan, the killers may be breakaway groups following no one’s rules.

Vaccination efforts are also under threat in other Muslim regions, although not this violently yet.

In Nigeria, another polio-endemic country, the new Islamic militant group Boko Haram has publicly opposed it, although the only killings that the news media have linked to polio were those of two police officers escorting vaccine workers. Boko Haram has killed police officers on other missions, unrelated to polio vaccinations.

In Mali, extremists took over half of the country in May, declaring an Islamic state. Vaccination is not an issue yet, but Mali had polio cases as recently as mid-2011, and the virus sometimes circulates undetected.

Resistance to polio vaccine springs from a combination of fear, often in marginalized ethnic groups, and brutal historical facts that make that fear seem justified. Unless it is countered, and quickly, the backlash threatens the effort to eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

In 1988, long before donors began delivering mosquito nets, measles shots, AIDS pills, condoms, deworming drugs and other Western medical goods to the world’s most remote villages, Rotary International dedicated itself to wiping out polio, and trained teams to deliver the vaccine.

But remote villages are often ruled by chiefs or warlords who are suspicious not only of Western modernity, but of their own governments.

The Nigerian government is currently dominated by Christian Yorubas. More than a decade ago, when word came from the capital that all children must swallow pink drops to protect them against paralysis, Muslim Hausas in the far-off north could be forgiven for reacting the way the fundamentalist Americans of the John Birch Society did in the 1960s when the government in far-off Washington decreed that, for the sake of children’s teeth, all drinking water should have fluoride.

The northerners already had grievances. In 1996, the drug company Pfizer tested its new antibiotic, Trovan, during a meningitis outbreak there. Eleven children died. Although Pfizer still says it was not to blame, the trial had irregularities, and last year the company began making payments to victims.

Other rumors also spring from real events.

In Pakistan, resistance to vaccination, low over all, is concentrated in Pashtun territory along the Afghan border and in Pashtun slums in large cities. Pashtuns are the dominant tribe in Afghanistan but a minority in Pakistan among Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis and other ethnic groups. Many are Afghan refugees and are often poor and dismissed as medieval and lawless.

Pakistan’s government is friendly with the United States while the Pashtuns’ territory in border areas has been heavily hit by American Taliban-hunting drones, which sometimes kill whole families.

So, when the Central Intelligence Agency admitted sponsoring a hepatitis vaccination campaign as a ruse to get into a compound in Pakistan to confirm that Osama bin Laden was there, and the White House said it had contemplated wiping out the residence with a drone missile, it was not far-fetched for Taliban leaders to assume that other vaccinators worked for the drone pilots.

Even in friendly areas, the vaccine teams have protocols that look plenty suspicious. If a stranger knocked on a door in Brooklyn, asked how many children under age 5 were at home, offered to medicate them, and then scribbled in chalk on the door how many had accepted and how many refused — well, a parent might worry.

In modern medical surveys — though not necessarily on polio campaigns — teams carry GPS devices so they can find houses again. Drones use GPS coordinates.

The warlords of Waziristan made the connection specific, barring all vaccination there until Predator drones disappeared from the skies.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian who is chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization, expressed his frustration at the time, saying, “They know we don’t have any control over drone strikes.”

The campaign went on elsewhere in Pakistan — until last week.

The fight against polio has been hampered by rumors that the vaccine contains pork or the virus that causes AIDS, or is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Even the craziest-sounding rumors have roots in reality.

The AIDS rumor is a direct descendant of Edward Hooper’s 1999 book, “The River,” which posited the theory — since discredited — that H.I.V. emerged when an early polio vaccine supposedly grown in chimpanzee kidney cells contaminated with the simian immunodeficiency virus was tested in the Belgian Congo.

The sterilization claim was allegedly first made on a Nigerian radio station by a Muslim doctor upset that he had been passed over for a government job. The “proof” was supposed to be lab tests showing it contained estrogen, a birth control hormone.

The vaccine virus is grown in a broth of live cells; fetal calf cells are typical. They may be treated with a minute amount of a digestive enzyme, trypsin — one source of which is pig pancreas, which could account for the pork rumor.

In theory, a polio eradicator explained, if a good enough lab tested the vaccine used at the time the rumor started, it might have detected estrogen from the calf’s mother, but it would have been far less estrogen than is in mother’s milk, which is not accused of sterilizing anyone. The trypsin is supposed to be washed out.

In any case, polio vaccine is now bought only from Muslim countries like Indonesia, and Muslim scholars have ruled it halal — the Islamic equivalent of kosher.

Reviving the campaign will mean quelling many rumors. It may also require adding other medical “inducements,” like deworming medicine, mosquito nets or vitamin A, whose immediate benefits are usually more obvious.

But changing mind-sets will be a crucial step, said Dr. Aylward, who likened the shootings of the girls to those of the schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.

More police involvement — what he called a “bunkerized approach” — would not solve either America’s problem or Pakistan’s, he argued. Instead, average citizens in both countries needed to rise up, reject the twisted thinking of the killers and “generate an understanding in the community that this kind of behavior is not acceptable.”

Read More..