Herni Cartier-Bresson The modern century a new exhibition at the museum of Modern Art in New York City

Outlets are the bright spot going into otherwise dim retail season

on an overcast English morning,two women from middle england are out shopping.They duck first into the Gucci boutique,fingering discounted handbags and rifling through racks of last season's fashion lineup.Dolce&Gabbana is next,folllowed by Armani.The outlet boutiques among 136 clustered along a cobblestone outdoor shopping center called Bicester village about an hour's drive from London-are mobbed with bargain-seekers even at an early hour.You get value for money here,who pauses to chat only briefly before her friend hustles her off to Valentino.My husband is in businesss.so it's hard for us just now,but i don't mind paying for quality.Luxury outlet malls are the one bright spot of brisk trade going into the holiday shopping season.In recent weeks,retailers have reported small but still rather anemic signs of recovery.Yet sales numbers show that consumers have been flocking to discount outlets all year long,depsite the recession. Value retail.the london based compay that owns the largest string of luxury outlets in Europe,including Bicester village,has seen sales rise 20 percents to just over one billion euro in the first theree quarter of 2008,that compares with predictions of flat or at most a two percents increase in spending across the retail sector over the holiday shoppping period.value retail,whose major investor also owns part of the sprawling woodbury common outlet mall outside of new york city,has seen its growth this year double the average over the past 14 yeats ,when sale increased at a rate of about 10 percents annually,according to scott malkin,valure retail chairman.it's human nature to indulge,i think we've gone away from i need more for the sake of more and more,to people being more discerning in what they purchase.that sentiment has benefited luxury outlets in a year when full price luxury sales have been forecast to fall as much as 10 percents ,rather than view outlet shopping as cannibalizing from their high sterrt or madison avenue sales,luxury retailers in fact have welcomed the oppotunity to sell excess merchandise in a slow time ,while reaching a separate segment of customers to whom they wouldn't normally be able to sell.We're service to the brand.the ceo of value retail management .the brands have a lot more stock they want to dispose of ,elegantly,we're a platform for them that is quality,with a customer that is aspirational.

For centuries Serbs have striven with epic fervor to unite their scattered people,define their lands,preserve their unique identity.

States and most of Europe,To many Serbs,that makes Nakalamic a traitor.After Kosovo grabbed independence,TV viewers worldwide watched radical nationalists storm through Belgrade,Serbia's capital,smashing windows and torching a symbol of arrogant foreign meddling-the U.S. embasssy.The Serbian government views Kosovo's independence as an illeagl dismemberment of Serbia's sovereign territory-It ordered Serbs in Kosovo-many of whom receive cash assistance from Serbia-to boycott elections there,and most obeyed.Without the requisite ballots from his district.Nakalamic lacks a council vote and thus can't fully participate in drafting budgets and ordinances.Yet many Serbs seem resigned to the new borders,and to the prospect of a smaller,tamer Serbia at ease with its neighbors.People are marching and demostrating,but no one believes we will get Kosovo's back,a young woman I met in Belgrade as she and her fiance.A Caribbean American from New York,had a midnight drink with friends on a stylish Belgrade street,A student from Florence,is the kind of liberal,internationally oriented Serb on whom Western governments pin their hopes.After Kosovo independence and the resulting riots.Serbian voters.in the spring of 2008,surprised the world by propelling into power to a pro-european union government that vowed to track down Serbian's war criminals- evidence of a widespread belief that the country's best hope for cultural and economic growth is with the West.But outsiders should never mistake resignation for acceptance.It's Serbian pride,we can't say,sure .take kosovo.Do whatever you want to us.what kind of people would we be?A human rights lawyer who pursues accused Serbian war criminals,says the gulf between unreconstructed nationalists and Western-style democrats,including Serbia's president,Boris Tadic.is not as wide as outsiders may think.To Popvic,all major parties to some extent cling to the ideal of uniting Serbian-inhabited lands-a catalyst for way in the 1990s.It's charitable to say this country is divided between democrats and nationalists.In reality,the nationalist ideal rules.

One late summer day in 1961 a biologist named Sherman Bleakney

Got a telephone call about a strange sea creature that fishermen had just unloaded on a wharf in Halifax,Nova Scotia.who lived nearby,was captived by what he found there.Sprawled on its back amid a curious crowd was an immense black sea turtle tipping the scale at 900 pounds.
with a soft,rubbery cara-pace.winglike front flippers,and a massive,conical head like an artillery shell.Bleakney recognized it as a leatherback,the biggest of all sea turtles,Leatherbacks,he recalled,were supposed to be creatures of the tropics,as out of place in chilly,gray Canadian waters as parrots in a Halifax park.When Bleakney began asking around,though,he learned that fishermen saw leatherbacks swimming in the waters off maritime Canada regularly enough to call late summer turtle season.The conclusion was inescapable,he wrote in 1965.Evidently there is an annual invasion of our cool Atlantic coastal waters by trutles of tropical origin,Their southern roots were obvious from the few dead trutles he examined.One had a twig from a tropical mangrove tree stuck in its eye.others carried warm-water barnacles.Yet the leatherbacks were surviving,even flourishing,at temperatures that would kill other sea trutles.Stranger still was what he found inside them.Their huge stomachs contained masses of chewed-up jellyfish,stinging tentacles and all,and their gullets were lined with three-inch spines.angled inward to hold in all that slippery prey.

The office of Artur Chilingarov,the beared polar explorer and anointed hero of the Russian Federation,is at the end of a long hall in the Duma

Russia's Parliament,where he is deputy speaker,Its entrance is guarded by a poster of a nuclear icebreaker,the Yamal,a 492 foot monster with rows of painted-on fangs,and inside is a knee-high wooden penguin and two chicks,a pair of carved warlrus tusks,and eight miniature porcelain polar bears,an iconography of the Arctic and Antarctic.On a wall is a portrait of Vladimir Putin.It was dark,very dark he says of the descent.of course it was risky.Of course we were sacred.he and fellow parliamentarian,a business who had paid half a million dollars for his berth,peered out the portholes.which had one more paying adventurer,A swedish businessman and an Australian tour operator followed,The descent was to take nearly three hours,the return to the surface that long again,meanwhile the ice pack would be drifting.If they could not find the opening,they would be be stuck.The depressing thing,Chilingarov tells me was knowing no one could come rescue us.Just after midday I touched down on the flat, fine clay of the seabed.The sub scraped up samples of ocean floor,then moved to the pole itself,where its robotic arm firmly planted a titanium Russian flag in the muck.The submersibles return was harrowing-following Mir I up from the seabed,Mir II searched for an hour and a half before finding the ice opening-but the drama of the dive was soon drowned out by the supposed politics of it.More than 40 journalists were waiting aborad the surface vessels,and they quickly filed their reports.Russian claims the North pole!!!Chilingarov willingly stoked nationalist flames.The Arctic.he said at a press conference,has always been Russian.The dive soon became something it had scarcely been.an act of expansionism,not exploration-of geopolitics rather than glorified tourism.Observers seemed ready to believe that the Arctic's future would be decide by flags and warships.belligerence and brinkmanship.

mammoth ice-baby the extinctions also coincided

however,with the arrival of another ecology-altering force.Modern humans arose in Africa about 195000 years ago and spread int o northern Eurasia some 4000 years ago.As time went go,their expanding populations brought increasing pressure to bear on prey speices. In addition to exploiting mammoths for food-a big male killed in the autumn would see a band of hungry hunters through many lean winter days-they used their bones and ivory to make weapons,tools,figurines,and even dwellings.Some scientist believe that these human hunters,using throwing spears fitted with deadly stone points,were as much to blame as climate change for the great die-off.Some say they caused it.The debate over the megafaunal extinction is one of the liveliest in paleontology today,and not one likely resolved by a single specimen,no matter how complete.But Khudi was right that the now missing baby-its flesh,internal organs,stomach contents,bones,milk tusks and other teeth,all intact-would be of enormous interest to the outside world.he also suspected that a person willing handle such a thing would probably turn a nice profit-ivory traders regularly visited the region to buy mammoth tusks,and who knows what they'd pay for an intact mammoth?Khudi's suspicions soon fell on one of his own cousins,whom some local Nenets had seen on the sand-bar and later,riding away on his reindeer sled toward the town of Novvy port.Khudi and Serotetoo set off in pursuit on snowmobile.When they arrived.They found the little mammoth propped up against the wall of a store.People were talking snapshots of it on their cell phones.The shop owner had bought the body from Khudi's cousin for two snowmoblies and a year's worth of food.Though it was no longer quite perfect-stray dogs had gnawed off part of its tail and right ear-with the help of some local police,Khudi and Serotetto managed to reclaim the infant.The body was packed up and shipped by helicopter to the safety of the Shemanovsky Museum in Salekhard,the regional capital.Luckily there was a happy ending,says Alexei Tikhonov,director of the St.Petersburg Zoological Museum and one of the first scientist to view the baby,a female.Yuri Khudi rescued the best preserved mammoth to come down to us from the ice age.Grateful officials named her Lyuba,after Khudi's wife.

On the opposite side of

The message is complex but ultimately clear. To Protect Borneo's forest and wildlife will require rethinking old ideas,accepting new truths,and adopting new models of conservation.And in the end,the fate of Borneo may be decide far from the forests,in government offices and corporate boardrooms from New York to Genva.Because of the vast amounts of carbon tied up in the plants and soils,the last best hope for Borneo's future may rest not on the emotional appeal of an orangutan's face,but on the hard facts of climate change-and our own determination and ability to protect ourselves from disaster.In the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan,a narrow paved road leads away from Pontianak,a city neat the South China Sea.Crowed with trucks and buzzing motorbikes,the road passes wooden shops and houses in small villages separated by rice fields.The harvest has just began,and here and there people beat sheaves against wooden lattices or toss grains into the air to let the wind carry away the hulls.There's little trace of the forests that once stood here.I'm traveling with Dessy Ratnasari,a scientist from a local research organization,whose animated faced is encircled by a light blue head scraf.Our driver,Harum who like many Indonesians,uses only one name-speaks up as we pass a large building fringed with weeds.This is a sawmill where he worked,Ratnasari translates.It went bankrupt because there are no more trees for timber.It had 13000workers and a payroll 9000.Within a couple of miles we pass two more mills,gated locked,windows broken,parking lots empty.There were several big companies and some smaller mills around Pontianak,Now there's only one big company still operating.