Jordan Farmar vents to Jackson about his role

Guard Jordan Farmar is confused as to what head coach Phil Jackson wants him to do,the L.A. Times are reporting.
After getting yanked against the Knicks and playing just nine minute,Farmar met with Jackson to discuss what he
should be doing.He didn't call me up there,I asked to talk to him-to vent,Farmar said.Just trying to get some things across.It was as if Farmar popped into the principal's office Jackson said I felt he was frustrated.I asked them what they wanted me to do so I can go out there and do it and not be confused about my job.Farmar said
they are not looking for me to do anything personal-just run our office.It affects my performance and what I do
I'm a guard coming off the bench playing limited minutes so I got to make those minutes count and do what
the coaching staff and the organization wants.Jackson is not trying to stifle Farmar's creativity,but he wants the 22 years old to be a better decision-maker.I think there are some things about playing his game kind of thing and comforming to our style,Jackson said.

Topsy-Turvy.Amid the U.S. financial crisis,globalization is standing some conventional wisdom on its head

Stocks around the world have been tumbling in reaction to the dramatic news on Wall Street.In doing so,financial markets are trashing one of the fashionable economic theories of the past couple of years,that the rest of the world can decouple itself from the U.S. and keep on growing storngly.But that may not be the whole story.Just ask Stephen Lussier,an executier director at De Beers,the huge diamond group.His London office is in the same hulking concrete building as the firm's diamond-sorting operation,so getting in to see him requires navigating through a maze of locked doors and red security zones worthy of Fort Knox.But it's worth the effort if you want to glimpse how globalization is upedning a lot of conventional wisdom these days.If history were a guide,Lussier should be a worried man.The U.S. is easily the biggest market for diamond jewelry in the world,accounting for about 50% of the total,and whenever the American economy has hot a rough patch in the past,the diamond industry has quicky felt it.But not this time-or,at least,not yet.U.S. diamond sakes have been dropping,but worldwide demand for rought diamonds has been stronger than ever,especially for the largest and most expensive rocks,and that has enabled De Beers to continue raising prices this year.Normally we would be in a state of battening down the hatches,but so far that's not happening,Lussier says.This is different from every economic cycle we have seen for the past 25 years.The state of the diamond market is just one glittering example of a world that,to all appearance,has gone topsy-turvy.It is a world in which the biggest and most sophisticated finanical markets,in the U.S. and U.K.,are struggling to confront the sort of meltdown more normally associated with underdeveloped economies and feeble banking systems.The only difference is that,in this case,the International Monetary Fund isn't coming to the rescue with loans and tough policy prescriptions.It is a world in which consumers for years benefited from bargain prices for everything from T shirts to flat-screen televisions thanks to ultra-low-cost producers in Asia-but now suddenly discover that skyrocketing consumption in those same Asian countries is pushing up the prices of staples such as wheat and milk.It is an increasingly interdependent world in which two countries with McDonald's restaurants were never again supposed to go to war-but one in which old-style geopolitics,in the form of Russian muscle-flexing,has suddenly intruded.Both Geogians and Russians,it turns out,enjoy Big Macs with fries,even as they slug it out on the battlefield.As he looks around the globe and tries to assess what to make of it all,Jagdish Bhagwati,a senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City,can't resist quoting the British economist John Maynard Keynes,The inevitable never happens.It is the unexpected always.



Two cheers for free trade in such unpredictable times,the big questions are the extent to which the finanical and economic woes in the U.S. will continue to spill over into the world economy-and whether this poses a threat to the onward march of globalization itself,as people lose faith in free markets and open trade.The demage is already considerable,the IMF world economic growth to drop to 4.1 this year,its lowest since 2003,after a run of years at around 5%.Much of Europe and Japan seem particularly vulnerable,with Britain and Spain already teetering on the edge of recession.China and India,the huge growth engines of the past few years,also are facing slowdowns.It's still unclear just how far the contagion could spread.Certainly the demise of Wall Street titans Merrill Lynch and Lehman Bros,.and the U.S. government bailouts of insurance giant AIG as welll as mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,sent shock waves around the world. Sagging growth means even the biggest boosters of free markets and free trade are being a lot quieter these days.While the U.S. government refused to step in to save the Lehman Bros.,it did intervene to rescue AIG,Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,in moves that,in ideological terms,amount to a significant retreat from the sort of market liveralism that Washington has long embraced.And skepticism about the benefits of globalization appears to be rising,an international poll earlier this year by Globescan shows that,while majorities in most of the 18 countries surveyed to support the notion of free markets,there has been a significant eroion of support in Turkey,South Korea,Chile,Britain,Mexico,Russia,Brazil and China.That's not surprising ,says Andrew Watt,an economist at the European Trade Union Institute in Brussels.It's hard to sustain the idea that markets are perfact and should be left to work against the background of what has happened in the last year.What's less clear is the extent to which this skepticism will feed into national politics and provoke a new bout of international protectionism.Watt and others point out that while globalization has created substantial wealth around the world,its benefits have been distributed disproportionately.



Pocket of Resilience the good news is that lower growth in emerging markets is relative.Even at an 8-9% annual growth rate,the lower end of economists predictions for this year and next,China's economy would still be racing ahead,just not at the feverish double-digit rates of recent years.In fact,a cooler international climate could prove beneficial if it helps Chinese authorities to get a grip on inflation and minimize other problems of an overheating economy.There are still only scant signs of a slowdown in other fast-growing countries.Russia's economy is expected to cool this year to about 7% growth,and some highly leveraged businesses there are experiencing the beginning of a liquidity squeeze.But Brazil this month reported that its economy actually accelerated in the second quarter,with growth rising to an annual rate of 6.1%.Meanwhile,the Gulf states and other countries in the middle East are in the midst of a petrodollar-driven consumption boom that shows little sign of slowing,even though oil prices have fallen below$100 per barrel.



Puzzling patterns this resilience helps to explain why De Beers diamond sales are still thriving.Americans may be less willing to splurge on fancy rings.but from Abu Dhabi to Shanghai,bling is still very much in-and the bigger the better.This is hardly proof that U.S. economic growth and free-spending American shoppers are no longer important to the global economy.Economists at French bank Societe Generale have calculated that consumption in the bric countries-Brazil,Russia,India and China-would have to rise by almost 25% to fully offset the effects of a U.S. recession,an increase that's beyond even their dynamic capacities.But the linkages of the past no longer seem to be reliable indicators of the director of individual economies.Clearly,we're in a period of uncertainty and volatility,and we'll have to get used to it.Says Mark Spelman,a globalization-strategy specialist at consulting firm accenture in London.The pattern are more confused,says Spelman,who describes the current economic situation as two steps forward and one step backward.

Zimbabwe If you can't beat Em....After six months of political chaos in a nation facing an acute economic crisis,

Rivals Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangriai have reached an agreement to share power.While the terms of the deal are vague,it raises hope fro stability in a country where inflation is estimated at more tham II million percent.Half the population is malnourished and 8 out of 10 people are unemployed and live on less than $2 a day.Western economic sanctions on the country remain in place.


Pakistan Border dispute the Pakistani government warmed the U.S. that it would use deadly force on American troops who crossed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in search of Taliban and al-Qaeda members.The order came in response to a Sep.3 Raid carried out by American ground forces that killed more than a dozen civilians.Owais Ahmed Ghani,governor of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province,also accused U.S. force of launching a second raid on Sept 15,an allegation that was denied by Pakistani and U.S. military officials,who said the attack was a mistake made by an errant helicopter.



Tainted Baby-food shock In a widening scandal,at least three babies have died and more than 6200 have become sick after consuming milk contaminated with the nonfood substance melamine.Beijing is investigating at least 22 companies that packaged tainted milk and yogurt sold in mainland China and Hong Kong.Melamine,a plastic compound that shows up as protein in some food tests,has been used by certain manufacturers in China to make their products appear more nutritious.In 2007,thousands of pets in the U.S. died after eating pet food contaminated with Chinese melamine.Melamine a chemical composed of nitrogen,carbon and hydrogen that is often mixed with formaldehyde to make plastic.

the moment 9/15/2008 New York

So much for masters of the universe.The Lehman brothers staffers trickling out of the firm's meltdown Manhattan headquarters on Sep 15 looked like prisoners on a perp walk.Overnight,the 158 years old financial behemoth had field for Chapter II bankruptcy protection,an implosion that presaged a day of calamity in the markets-the nadir of what former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has called a once in a century crisis.As media crews hovered,some of Wall Street's best and brightest staggered out onto the pavement.Their faces crestfallen and their ties yanked askew.Reporters buttonholed employee on their way out the door,asking how they would feel if they lost their jobs.The really top execs screwed up very badly,said an analyst who had arrived at work on Monday morning without any idea of what might happen beyond what he read in the Wall-Street Journal.They wouldn't admit defeat.Another pur it more succinctly.It's over.Executive recruiters bustled around,extending business cards to anyone who resembled a banker,while a man leaning aganist the building's facade hoisted a printed sign on white,letter-size paper.Looking to hire say admin.A few feet away,Geoffery Raymond,a painter,unveiled The annotated Fuld-a large canvas of embattled Lehman brothers chairman and CEO Richard Fuld rendered with sunken eyes in yellow brush-strokes-and invited employees and passersby to adorn it with personal messages.The scrawlings ranged from angry missives You are a coward,Learn to respect the dollar to gallows humor.This sucks!I'm going kiteboarding,Hakuna Matata Means No Worries.A day later,Raymond hawked the painting for $10000.


In a crisis born of greed and recklessness,pity is in short supply.Jason L.Cohen,a psychiatrist,made the 1-hr,40-min,drive from freehold,N.J.,with the intention of ofering counsel to shell-shocked employees.But after wintessing the scene unfolding on the sidewalk,he decided to hold back.I don't have the heart to approach people carrying boxes out of their offices,he said.

A fresh look.From the campaign to the financial crisis.

In print and online,Time is taking new approaches to meet a familiar goal,giving you the truth.These days,the press can't help but be a player in the U.S. presidential campaign.We're the moderator-for better or for worse.The candidates talk to the public through the media,and the public talks to the candidates through our polls.The 24/u7 news cycle-cable television,the internet,the blogosphere-has the effect of trivializing big stories and making big stories out of trivial ones.It's disingenuous to say the press is just the messenger,because we're often the message itself too.There comes a time in every presidential campaign when the political parties attack the media.The high water mark of that thus far was the Republic convention.And while our approval ratings may not be as that of congress.we're far from beloved either.But I want to tell our readers that no matter the criticism,we strive to get it straight,to get it right.Our job is to tell the truth,as we see it,and if the facts don't match up with the campaign rhetoric or commercials,we tell you.We know what our job is,we work for you.




Speaking of being of moderator,last week seven million viewers turned in to watch the Service Nation Presidential Forum Columbia University,which I co-moderated with broadcaster Judy Woodruff.Time was a co-sponsor of the forum and the summit the following day,which included First Lady Laura Bush,Caroline Kennedy,and Senators Hillary Cliton and Orrin Hatch.It was there that senator Hatch announced his bipartisan national service bill,co-sponsored by Ted Kennedy.I'm proud of Time's continued leadership on this front.Last week Time.com unveiled a brand-new look.Conceived by the site's design diretor,Sean Villafranca,and executed by our director of development,Shivani York,the idea was to being the magazine's look and feel into the digital world while allowing our editors more flexibility for news,analysis,and video.It looks great,have a look yourself.This week's hard-hitting cover on the Wall-Street meltdown was penned bt two of our favorite colleagues from fortune,Andy Serwer,the magazine's dynamic managing editor,and Allan Sloan,one of American's premier business journalists.We're pleased to have them in our pages,and you will be too.And finally I'm delighted to announce the debut of our new cartoon page,Drawing room,which is edited by Matthew Diffee.Diffee is one of the most talented and original cartoonists around,and his work appears frequently in the New Yorker and elsewhere.He'll be curating and contributing to the page,tapping the minds and pens of the best cartoonists.

Nowdays,with Russian prospering the laboratory is humming with top secret work.

Obtaining permission to enter proved impossible.But Vadim Simonenko,the deputy scientific director,and experimentalist Nikolay Voloshin agreed to meet at a sanatorium in nearby Dalnyaya Dacha.In a cool,dim,and empty dining hall,Voloshin opens a bottle of cognac,and over salmon canapes,and cold cuts,and sliced cucumbers,the two weapons scientists discuss how their bomb could save the world.In Edward Teller is the father of the hydrogen bomb,Simonenko is the father of the asteroid bomb.In the mid-1960s the superpowers dreamed of using their nuclear arsenals for peaceful purposes,such as leveling mountains and digging canals.Simonenko,a new recurit to the lab,was asked to study the effect of a torpedo-shaped charge that would explode laterally,ideal for earthmoving.It occured to him that such a device could also be used to deflect an object in space.He told his boss,who laughed and ordered the eager young physicist to get back to work.Though nuclear excavation never became a reality,Simonenko went on studying nuclear asteroid deflection.He and Voloshin concluded that the best way to deflect an asteroid up to a mile or so wide would be to detonate a nuclear charge nearby.The intense radiation would fry the surface,driving off a sacrifical layer of rock.The expanding vapor would act as a rocket motor,nudging the asteroid onto a new trajectory.For a smaller,Tunguska-size rock,Simoneneko says,it would be simpler.We vaporize it.



Simonenko has a brother-in-arms in nuclear physicist David Dearborn of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in northern California.Dearborn's day job is determining whether the aging weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile are reliable.In his spare time,he ponders asteroid defense.He,too,favors a stand off nuclear blast.No too close-then the blast is too intense.and things shatter too much.And not too far,or you don't get enough energy.Although it may be technically straightforward to dust off a few warheads and sling them at an asteroid,deciding whether to press the red buttom-and which nation gets to press it-could be excruciating.First,the nation with its finger on the trigger would have to withdraw from the outer space treaty,which bans the use of nuclear weapons in space.But if catastrophe looms,says Dearborn,people would really have to say,Can we be brighter than the dinosaurs?Apophis may pose that the first real test of our collective intelligence.For now,scientists can give only a range of probabilities for its future trajectory.As it swings past Earth in 2029,ducking under dozens of high-flying communications and spy satellites and appearing as a bright star lumbering across the night skies over Europe,there's a slim chance that Apophos will pass through a keyhole.In this narrow corridor of space,maybe a few hundred yards wide,Earth's gravity would deflect the asteroid just enough to put it on a certain collision course with our planet on the next pass,in 2036.The odds that Apophis will pass through this fatal corridor are currently estimated at 1 in 45000.Continued tracking will almost certainly deliver an all clear a few years from now.If now,we might have to wait until weeks after its close approach in 2029 to learn whether Apophis has squeezed through a keyhole,leaving us precious little time to avert calamity in 2036.In the prophesies of the Hopi of the American Southwest,the arrival of a spirit called Yellow Star Kachina will herald the end of the world.When Hopi elder heard about Apophis in 2004,they worried that Yellow Star Kachina was on its way.Carolyn shoemaker tried to reassure them that it was not.Let's hope she was right.

Asteroids and comets in nearby space pose a constant threat to our planet. Can we avert catastrophe the next time around?

About 140 million years ago,a comet or an asteroid smashed into the Australian outback,blasting a hole in 14 miles in diameter.Today,Gosses Bluff is the two-mile-wide central remnant of the crater.The first sign of the threat was no more than a speck on a star-streaked telescope image.Just after 9 p.m. on June 18 2004,as twilight faded over Kitt Park Observatory in Arizona,David Tholen was scanning for asteroids on an astronomical blind spot,right inside Earth's orbit,where the sun's glare can overwhelm telescopes.Tholen,an astronomer from the university of Hawaii,knew that objects lurking there could sometimes veer toward Earth.He had enlisted Roy Tucker,an engineer and friend,and Rabrizio Bernardi,a young colleague at Hawaii,to help.As they started at a computer,three shots of the same swath of sky,made a few minutes apart,cycled onto the screen.Here's your guy,said Tucker,pointing at a clump of white pixels that moved from frame to frame.An estimate ten million rocky asteroids and ice-and-dirt comets pirouette in outer space,and once in a while their paths fatefully intersect our planet's.One such encounter took place a hundred miles from present-day Washington D.C.,where a 53 miles wide crater lies buried beneath Chesapeake Bay-the scar left when a two miles wide rock smashed into the seafloor 30 million years ago.More notorious is the titan,six miles in diameter,that barreled into the Gulf of Mexico around 65 million years ago,releasing thousands of times more energy than all the nuclear weapons on the planet combined.The whole earth burned that day.says Ed Lu,a physicist and former astronaut.Three quarters of all life-forms,including the dinosaurs,went extinct.




Astronomers have identified serveral hundred asteroid big enough to cause a planetwide disaster.None is on course to do so in our lifetimes.But the heavens teem with smaller,far more nerberous asteroid that could strike in the near future,with devastating effects.On June 30,1908,an object the size of 15-story-building fell in a remote part of Sibera called Tunguska.The object-an asteroid or a small comet-exploded a few miles before impact,scorching and blowing down trees across 800 square miles.The night sky was so bright with dust from the explosion.or icy clouds from the water vapor it blasted into the upper atmosphere,that for days people in Europe could read newspapers outdoors at night.On Tunguska's hundredth anniversary,it's unsettling to note that objects this size crash into Earth every few centuries or so.The next time the sky falls,we may be taken by surprise.The vast majoriity of these smallish bodies,capable of wiping a city off the map,are not yet on our radar screens.Ignorance is bliss,in that if you don't know about these things,you just go about your merry way,says Lu.Over the next decade,however sky surveys like Tholen's should begin filling that gap,cataloging asteroids by the thousands.Every couple of weeks,says Lu,we're going to be finding another asteroid with like a one-in-a-thousand chance of hitting the Earth.


The goal is not just to foretell the date and time of a potential catastrophe.The goal is to forestall it.With years or decades of warning,a spacecraft,using its own minuscule gravity,might nudge a threatening asteroid off course.For objects requiring a bigger kick,a kamikaze spacecraft or a nuclear bomb might do the job.Vexing dilemma would attend this showdown in space.How will governments decide to act?This is a class of problem that the world isn't set up to deal with,says physicist David Dearborn,an advocate of a nuclear strike against an incoming asteroid.Two facts are clear,Whether in 10 years or 500,a day of reckoning is inevitable.More heartening,for the first time ever we have the means to prevent a natural disaster of epic proportions.Everydays dozens of tons of detritus from other space-dust from comets,tiny shard of asteroid-burn up in the earth's upper atmosphere,leaving bright meteor trails at night.Most days a chunk or two of rock or metal,fist size or bigger,survives the fiery plunge.



Yet the odds of seeing a meteorite hit the ground,let alone being struck,are phenomenally low.Only one is knwon to hit a person.Around 1 p.m. on November 30 1954,a meteorite tore through the roof of a house near Sylacauga,Alabama,across the street from the Comet drive in Theatre.The rock,about the size of a softball,caromed off a console radio and clipped Ann Hodges as she snoozed on her couch,bruising her left hip and wrist.She was hospitalized to recover from the shock.Since then there have been spectacular near misses.On Auguest 10 1972,an object around 15 feet across and weighing 150 tons skipped off the upper atmosphere.Hundreds of eyewitnesses saw the glowing streak,dazzling on a sunny afternoon,as it traversed the sky from Utah to Alberta before whizzing back out into space.On March 22,1989,a rock as much as a thousand feet across came within a few hundreds thousands miles of Earth-an uncomfortably close shave.Erosion and vegetation have erased most of the scars left by impacts in the geologic past.Perhaps the best preserved lies about half an hour east of Flagstaff,Arizona.On a late autumn morning Carolyn Shoemarker and I pull off Interstate40 and wind through scrubby desert toward a low rise marking the rim of the crater.Fifty thousand years ago this was a forested plain inhabited by mammoths,giant ground sloths,and other ice age animals.Shoemaker,an asteroid expert with the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff,image the day the sky fell.Suddenly,there's a terrific,brilliant light,she says.In a flash,a searing hot iron nickle mass,150 feet wide and weighing 300000 tons,tears into the Coconini sandstone,flinging boulders and molten iron for miles.A blast of wind more powerful than any earthly tornado scours the landscape.



All that's left of the catalysm now is a chasm three-fourths of a mile wide and 570 feet deep,fringed with Mormon tea bushes.At the turn of the 20th century,an engineer named Daniel Moreau Barringer was convinced that a massive iron meteorite lay beneath the crater and obtained the mining rights to the land.But after a series of shafts revealed nothing,many prominent geologists concluded that a volcanic eruption,not a meteorite,had formed the crater.Carolyn's husband,Gene,made Meteor Crater one of America's most recognizable landmarks.In the late 1950s he mapped the overturned rock around the crater and pointed out similarities to the Teapot Ess crater in Nevada,formed by a nuclear test.His date showed that Barringer was right.A meteorite had gouged the crater,although most of the iron had melted into tiny droplets.Several of Barringer's shafts can still be seen from the rim,along with a full size cutout of a waving astronaut-a nod to NASA,which once used the crater as a training ground.Some visitors whisper and point at Carolyn,and one man plucks up the courage to come over and request her autograph.Carolyn is famous in her own right.She discovered a comet that,in 1994,vividly demonstrated the cosmic threat we face.



In 1980,their children grown and out the door,Gene suggestes that Carolyn start a career as an asteroid hunter.I'm a morning person.She says.I had never stayed awake all night in my life.I don't know if I can do that.But she decided to give asteroid hunting a shot.Gene had access to the Palomar Observatory near San Diego.After a couple years,I learned how to discover things.She says,modestly.She has 32 comets and 367 asteroids to her credit.Some are more interesting than others.

Three station part two Sasha and I took the pedestrian underpass from Kazan Station because the more distance between us and the Cat in the Hat better

And it was reassuring to find two uniformed security men sitting in the walkway,even if one was reading a comic book and the other was asleep.The shop stalls in the tunnel were shuttered except for one window displaying mobile phones.We emerged in front of Yaroslavl Station.It was 3 a.m.,and all the civilians had retreated to the waiting rooms and ceded the night to vodka zombies,prostitutes,and teenage gangs too spaced from huffing glue to notice us.Incredibly,with one step into the waiting hall we reentered the normal world.There were cafes,a bookshop,a playpen,closed,to be sure,but evidence of normal life.Normal people were asleep in chairs.Healthy babies curled up on their mother's laps.In some parts of the world people share a river with crocodiles.You just had to be careful.But there was more.Returing through the underpass we came upon two men robbing a drunk.One lifted the victim by the neck while the second went through his pocket,although the way the drunk flopped back and forth made the task difficult.We had to get around them to the action and me.The security men stayed seated and watched with mild curiosity,they were paid to protect the window of mobile phones,nothing else.What happened took ten seconds.Essentially,the thieves took the money and ran.They wrested a roll of bills from the drunk inside jacket pocket,let him drop,and vanished up the stairs to the street.The drunk spat blood and sighed.He rolled to a sitting position and waves off any help.At night?At three Stations?Nothing happened.




Diaghilev Amid clouds of smoke,strobe lights,and the deafening beat of house music,the new lords of oil,nickel,and natural gas arrived at Diaghilev with women as mute and beautiful as cheetahs on a leash.In this cacophony a millionaire could expand and relax.For one thing,no guns are allowed inside Diaghilev.The club had a 40 man security force,and any customer who felt in drive need of protection was assigned a personal bodyguard.A bomb dog had sniffed the chairs,and a security briefing had alerted the staff about special needs,such as guests from Iran who did not want to be photographed drinking champane with scantily clad models.I had followed Yegor through a back door.How Yegor arranged my visit I did not know,but the chief of security was not pleased.The club incorporated relentless sound,color,and motion.Psychedelic visions splashed across screens and vodka bars.A UFO and a crystal chandelier contested air space,and a contortionist added a touch of Cirque du Soleil.It was a simple system.Face control admitted more women than men and only enough guests to achieve critical mass.The more people who were turned away the more people who wanted to get in.The real Diaghilev was the fur-trimmed impresario who founded the Ballets Russes a hundred years ago.First of all,he was a showman.He would have loved this.




New Russians climbed to their VIP tables,waving to fellow New Russians and Celebrities.Television personalities and Eurotrash leavened the mix,and soon the floor was so crowded people could only dance in place,something six-foot models in six-inches heels managed gracefully.Yegor kept asking a question I finally understood over the din,Are you happy?Did you get what you came for?I didn't knwo.Was this what millions of Russians died for in wars and prison camps?Had they foced down a KGB coup and dismantled an empire so a few gluttons could party through the night?Gogol had likened Russia to a troika of speeding horses,not a Bentley in a ditch.Suddenly,the speakers went silent for a booming,I love Moscow!On the runway an American singer had taken over the microphone.She was black-not many in Moscow-and she sang the blues.The boys on the VIP tier went on chatting at a shout and pouring each other cognac.Then the entire crowd joined in one refrain in English,What are we supposed to do afrer all that we've been through?I had no idea what song it was.They sang it over and over.What are we supposed to do after all that we've been through?Soon after Diaghilev was,in a time-honored tradition of nightcluns,gutted by fire.Now it is better than hot,it is legend.



On my last night in Moscow Yegor showed me the future.We drove beyond the Garden Ring and followed the river to the dark industrial area,where we parked and walked along the chain-link fence.If this was the future.I wasn't impressed.Look up.Yegor said.I don't see anything.Look higher!Aganist the night stood a ladder of lights so high I couldn't be sure where it stopped,until a red beam crawled to the edge of an open floor somewhere near Mars.Moscow City he said.A cith within a city.It was a magic beanstalk,a complex of 14 building,including the Russian Tower,at 113 floors projected to be the tallest skyscrapper in Europe.A giant crane performed a pirouette at the top of what will be the Moscow Tower,A mere 72 stories high.Work was going on day and night.A floodlight revealed figures in yellow vests clambering over the load the crane had delivered.From what the seemed an incredible distance we heard the stutter of a rivet gun,the clap of metal plates,even voices,creating a curious intimacy.Buildings were in very stage of construction.Those already completed resembled silver spaceships about the depart.The scale was enormous.The excavation alone could swallow the pyramids of Giza.The complex is planned to house City Hall,offices,and luxury apartments with views halfway to Finland.This is the advantage of being in Moscow after dark.In the daytime you see only architecture.At night you see blazing ambition.

Soberity It was late in the afternoon,the sun dissolving into afterglow by the time I arrived for lunch at Alexi's apartment not his real name.Alxei

and Andrew were halfway through a second bottle of vodka,and the best I could do was try to catch up.I was outclassed.Thin as a drinking straw,Alexei was an art critic,scholar,and collector of fine porcelains,an intellectual who became more animated with each round.Andrew was British but did business in Russia and stayed in practice vodka-wise,so to speak.Right off the bat Alexei swore he had seen a video that caught the President of the United States as he stuck a wad of chewing gum under a table of inlaid stones at the Hermitage Museum.Alexei was sure that Geroge.W.Bush had declared war on Russian culture.It turned out he had just gone through the humiliating experience of being denied an American visa.He said the State Department as good as accused him of trying to sneak into the United States was invading Russia through gentrification.There was even a neighborhood in Moscow that had banned Russian cars,he'd heard.Only foreign cars were allowed!Anyway,why would he want to be American,he asked?Moscow was safer at night than New York.He could walk around the center of Moscow at any hour,drunk or sober.




Alexei gave an example,A week ago he had visited an artist's studio.This artist had an interest in Nazi art,in its narcissism and banality.It was a deep discussion,and around two in the morning they ran out of vodka.They were nearly drunk,but Alexei knew a shop across town that was open.They walked blocks and blocks discussing Fascist paintings,sculpture,and architecture.At the shop they bought a few bottles,turned to leave,and found their way blocked by four skinheads tattooed with swastikas and porttaits of Hitler.The biggest of the lot demanded to know why they were bad-mounthing the Fuhrer.Alexei expected to suffer a beating,at least a little kicking and stomping,when the artist,although nearly drunk,opened a bottle,tossed aside the cap,and invited the skinheads to his studio.On the way they passed the bottle around while the artist held forth on modern art,starting with Cezanne.The lecture was so boring and the skinheads became so inebriated they couldn't walk unaided.So Alexei and the artist dumped them one by one in various countryards,and that was the difference between being drunk and being nearly drunk.What this had to do with the safety of Moscow's streets escaped me,but I was in no condition to give chase.Somehow it had gotten dark.Alexei opened a window to the background din of the city,which prompted me to ask if he'd ever heard about late-night racing of cars and motorcycles in Moscow.It was stretch,but I asked.On the Garden ring?Alexei said.That he knew even that much surprised me.Yes.The record time for a car to go completely around is six minutes.Five minutes,he corrected me.Have you?Nine minutes.He signed for the glory that might have been.I stopped for red lights.




Casino Andrei Sychev looked out over the 220 slot machines,30 gaming tablets,sport bar,and VIP hall and confided that he felt like the captain of a sinking ship.As an employee of the Ukarnik Casino he did not understand why city hall wanted to shut it down and kill a goose that lays nothing but golden eggs.Each slot,for example,generated a generous profit every month,and yet the government accused casinos of moral damage,having closed some already and vowed to relocate others to Las Vegas zoness on the far borders of the Russian Federation by the end of next year.To some,a Moscow night without the bright lights of casino marquees may seem like a year without spring,but officals have already closed hundred of gaming sites large and small.Who would be mext?Some of Sychev's dealers had already jumped ship for employment with better security.This created a ripple effect because regular customers like to play with a favorite dealer.Was the Udarnik Casino a criminal enterprise?Abosolutely not,according to Sychev.That is,no more than any other enterprise.Maybe 10 percent.For their own protection everybody had a roof.Don't think of it as the mafia,Think of it as alternative police.Alexei had told me that Americans would never understand Russia because Americans saw things as black or white,nothing in between,while Russian saw a gary area of perhaps 80 percent.Which bring us to...The mayor Not since Stalin has anymore left his stamp on Moscow as much as mayor Yuri Luzhkov.A sawed-off colossus,he raises skyscrappers with one hand and flattens histroic neighborhoods with the other.The floodlights that illuminate Moscow's classical palaces at night are under his command.He garnishes the cith with statues that infuriate the critics,whom he ignores.He is what Russians call a muzhik,a man of the earth,although he and Vladimir Putian have been rivals in the past,they seem to agree that gaudy casinos are out of step with Moscow's new maturity and dignity.Even if Putin reportedly complains that he never knows that what the skyline of Moscow will look like when he gets out of bed in the morning.The feeling in Moscow is that Luzhkov may be corrupt,but he gets things done.When construction funds ran short for the behemoth Cathedral of Christ the Savior,the story goes,he didn't hesitate to shake down businessmen and mafia alike to finish the job.According to one estimate,in 2005 Russinans shelled out $316 billion in bribes.Why not a donation for a worthy cause?It was a happy coincidence that a company owned by the mayor's wife,Yelena Baturina,laned so many construction contracts in the city.In fact,Baturina is the only woman among Moscow's billionaires.

Three stations-part one If Diaghilev is Moscow's Mount Olympus,Three Stations is its lower depths.

Officially Three Stations is Komsomol Square,but the locals know it by the railway terminals that converge there.Yaroslavl and Leningrad Satation on the north side and Kazan Station on the south.A statue of Lenin stands on a side plaza.The firebrand of the Russian Revolution holds the label of his coat with his left hand and with his right reaches for a back pocket,He appears to have just realized his wallet is gone.That's Three stations.Everyday day thousands of commuters arrive and pour out onto the wide pavement against a counterflow of traders dragging in suitcases stuffed with clothes and shoes for resale in the provinces.Street vendors offer rabbit fur hats,Soviet kitsch,roses wrapped in cellophone,pirated CDs.Tourists stagger under backpacks.Women from Central Asia brush by in voluminous skirts the colors of poppies,while soldiers search for game arcades.



Every kind of face surfaces.Blue-eyed Ukrainiams,hawklike men from the Caucasus,Uzbeks in caps,Mongolians,and especially Tajiks.A demographic time bomb facing Russia is its declining population and the influx of Tajiks.Who are known to be sober,hardworking and willing to do jobs Russians won't.But at 2 a.m.the square was vast and still.The misty light of streetlamps revealed what the traffic of the daytime,the coming and going of travelers and peddlers,had hidden.The drunks around Kazan Station were difficult to see at first because they were as gary as the pavement.These were not casual drunks or men on a bender but dedicated alcoholics literally pickled in vodka.So many were bandaged or bloody they could have been a battlefield tableau.One held up a cardboard sign that said Give us money or We'll die.Behind the station lay a dark alley of shuttered kiosks and homeless people wrapped in rags and newpaper.Those capable of standing staggered sideways.In the faint light a women dressed in rags tied a bouquet of lavender.The one kiosk that was open sold vodka,of course.Shadows dashed by.Street kids.There are free people,Sasha said.You man homeless.No,there are shelters.They choose this.Free people.We watched prostitutes in tight pants grind by.They have a reputation for breaking clonidine pills into soluble powder.Clonidine is a powerful blood pressure medication.One spiked vodka and the customer passes out,ready to be stripped.When the victim wakes in his under-clothes,he probably won't run to the nearest militia officer.Drunk or not,he should know that at Three Stations the police are the pimps.As we moved farther into the shadows behind the station,we came upon a scuffle between two gangs,Russian versus Tajik,about eight on each side,ages from 10 to 20.No knives were in sight,although a Tajik had a Russian down and was pounding his face into the concrete.

Moscow never sleeps A shopper scythes through bitter cold to reach a boutique on Red Square.

These materialistic days,Max and Lenin can't compete with Dior and Armani for the hearts of Moscow's consuming class.The dance floor heats up at Propaganda,one of hundreds of clubs throbbing until dawn in liberated Moscow.Elite clubs parctice ruthless face control admitting only the beautiful and the connected.Darkness falls as a building rises along the Moscow River.Laborers,most from former Soviet republics,toil round the clock in a new business district that will boast the tallest skyscraper in Europe.Friends Yevgeny,Anatoly,and Viktor polish off an evening with fistfuls of beer and smoked fish at the 200 year old Sanduny baths,traditional gathering place for Moscow's workaday crowd.In the opulent Turandot restaurant,Mozart is merely background to conspicuous consumption that has fueled Moscow's abrupt ascent to the ranks of the world's most expensive cities.



Moscow at night is a fairy tale with menace.A Cinderella who doesn't leave the Kremlin by midnight could lose more than a glass slipper.At midnight the city is a brilliant grid of light that includes the gilded dome of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior,the Stalinst horror of the Ukraine Hotal,and a dark loop of the Moscow River.Downstream the lights of round the clock construction hang in the air while steel and concrete disappear.The clutter of the day is gone.The night brings clarity,and lights trace the future.On Sparrow hills,however,all eyes were on an unsanctioned really of motocycles.Japanese bikes as bright as toys,dour Russian Vostoks,monster Ducatis,Harlets with exhaust pipes of polished chrome.Hundreds of bikers and admirers filled the vista terrace to see machine that posed on their stands in the negligent fashion of movie star.A Harley merely had to clear its throat to thrill the crowd.Some bikers were so customized it was difficult to determine what they started us.A ural that usually hauled sacks of potatoes in its sidecar had been transformed into a stealth-black predator bristling with rockets and machine guns.As the machine-gun barrels were chair leg and the handlebars were crutches,the effect was more theatrical than threatening.Despite the displat of leather and studs,the same could be said of the bikers.I ask an ogre with a shaved head and bandanna what his day job was.In a growl,I sleep.To which his girlfriend added.Fievel's a computer programmer.Geek by day,bandit by night.My friends Sasha was along.Sasha is so soft-spoken he seems shy,when in fact he is homicide detective who weighs his words.In the army he competed in biathlons,the sport of racing on skis with a rifle and then stopping to shoot at a target as his heart pounded against his ribs,He still has that calm.



We first met years ago in an Irish bar in Moscow.My highly intelligent colleagye Lyuba and I were celebrating the end of two weeks of on the ground research and interviews for one of my novels.Sasha had just dragged some dead mafiafrom a swamp and was in no mood for fitional heroes.Now that he is married to Lyuba,he is forced to endure my constant questions,although he gripes that my Investigator Renko should be a regular detective like him.Racing began across the boulevard.Compettiors were a blur between spectators,the smaller bikes accelerating with a whine while the heavy-weights produced a roar that made the ground tremble.The final line was negotiable,anywhere from a hundred meters to a circut of the Garden Ring,the peripheral road around the center of Moscow,where bikes could reach 120 miles an hour,depending on traffic.Car races also took place,or did until the crackdown after Youtube feature videos of drivers weaving in and out of Ring Traffic at three times the speed limit.A biker in a padded leather outfit-more a belief system than actual protection-mounted a Kawasaki,maybe 750cc.What did I know?I once rode a Vespa scooter from Rome to the south of Spain,that's the extent of my expertise,and I worried when a teenage girl wearing little more than a helmet hopped on behind.As soon as she had a grip,they glided toward the race lanes.The girl looked so frail I had to ask,who is in charge?Where are the police?Sasha pointed at a group of militia officers who stood bashfully to one side.Its out of their control.The bikes blasted off the mark.In seconds the kids were taillights that faded away.Who is in charge?Vladimir Putin?His successor,Dmitry Medvedev?The legendary oligarchs?The KGB disguised as a kinder FSB?There does seem to be an active or former secret agent on the board of every major company.Well,as they say in Russia,Those who know,know what is certain is that Moscow is afloat in petrodollars,there are more billionaires in Moscow tha in any other city in the world.More than New York,London,or Dubai.Millionaires are as common as pigeons.Together the rich and mega-rich constitute a social class who were loosely called New Russians when they first appeared in the 1990's.Half of them are survivors of industraial shake-ups like the alumium war of ten years ago,when executive were killed left and right.Half have discovered that starting a bank is more profitable than robbing one.Half are young financial trapeze artists swinging from one hedge fund to another.You can have three halves in Russia.




But what a change.When I first visited Moscow in 1973,the entire population of the city seemed a retire to a crypt as soon as the sun went down.The few cars on the street were small,dyspeptic Zhigulis.A shop window display might be a single dried fish.Res Square was empty except for the honor guard at Lenin's Tomb,and billboards featured the stony visage of General Secretary Brezhnev.Banners delcared,The Communist Party is the Vanguard of the Working Class!That was the world that today's New Russians grew up in,and it is no wonder that their repressed energy and frustration have erupted with a passion.Russians are over the top.They're not old money hiding behind ivy-covered walls.In fact,they often refuse old money.It's new money,crisp American $100 bills flown in daily and spent almost as fast.Think about it.A billion dollars is a thousand million dollars.How do you celebrate success on such a scale?How much caviar can you eat?How much bubbly can you drink?Et cetera.That's why clubs were invented.Clubs give the rich the chance to flaunt it,baby , flaunt it,assured that face control will stop undesirables at the door.Face control is executed by men who in a glance can determine you finanical profile and celebrity status.And whether you are carrying a gun.The first sign that the GQ bar was hot was the number of Bentleys and Lamborghubus linted up at the curb.I was visiting with writer Lana Kaprizbaya and journalist Yegor Tolstyakov.Lana is dark haired,petite,about a hunderd ponds,including cigarette smoke.She is an acerbic chronicler of the follies of New Russians.Yegor has a voice meant for a dirge,but see him,and he's smiling.Think of the GQ as a body's club,Lana said.A boy's club with bodyguards. New arrivals were greeted by women who were beautiful on a surreal level.Big air kiss.Big air kiss.The GQ bar is licensed by the magazine publisher Conde Nast International,which provides a steady supply for models who sip water at $20 a bottle and pick at Kamchatka crab,a giant crustocean served with six sauces.The interior design is out of Somerset Maugham,all dark woods and lazy ceiling fans.Not hungry?Nyet problem.GQ's VIP lounge is a watering hole for lions only.Here a man can sip Johnnie Walker Blue,light a Cuban cigar,sip a brandy,unwind,and make more money.New Russians are social animals,they squeeze business and pleasure together the way Russian drivers squeeze five lanes out of four.The office is full of petty distractions,meetings,phone calls,endless details.Billion-dollar deals await the cool hours of the evening.There is a Russian tradition that you can't trust or do business with a man until you have been drunk together.Food,vodka,money,they go hand in hand.More astonishing than the grooming of men is the transformation of women.In the few years since the collapse of the Soviet Union,Russian women have metamorphosed from hefty builder of socialism to tennis stars who stand a head taller than the general population.During the day,clones of Maria Sharapove move from spa to spa.At night,they go from club to club in the giddy hope of meeting their own millionaire.




While a GQ deputy director named Sergei gave us a tour,Lana described the buy list of a New Russian,a flat in Moscow,a town house in Belgravia,a villa in St-Tropez,a ski chalet in Courchevel,foreign schools for his children,foreign banks for his money,and,finally,a private jet to fly away in.This is a sore point in Russia.Even in the worst days under Stalin there was a general sense of classlessness.People didn't have money,they had perks,a larger ration of sausage,an extra week at a sanatorium,access to foreign films.The New Russians have emerged in a cloudburst of dollars,and they are,in the eyes of most people,thieves.Their lifestyle is both envied and abhorredmand since Moscow is the center,there are imitations of its club scene across the country.It is fair to say that for many young Russians,clubs define the night.Sergei described the clubbing schedule,10 to 12 is for pre-party socializing in the restaurant,12 to 4 for partying in the clubs,4 to 6 for post-party cooling off.He informed me that when Mickey Rourke is in Moscow,he parties at GQ.I can imagine Rourke partying until dawn.I imagine myself in bed,my haed on a pillow.We flet GQ and hit a club that was launching either a new BMW or a new Vodka or both.Then to a club in Gorky Park for a more democratic crowd where,besides playing Whac-A-Mole with a rubber mallet,you can walk on a man-made beach.Nice place.Nonetheless,I felt that I was missing something.What was the very best club in Moscow?Which was the most fantastic?Well,Lana said,there's Diaghilev.What makes it so populat?No one can get in.

In the year 1551 a strange male animal was put on public display in Augsburg Germany.

He had humanlike fingers on his hands and feet,observes noted,and a cheerful creature,although he also had a tendency to turn his backside to viewers.Based on an illustration of the creature,biologist think it was most likely a drill,a baboonlike primate,Even today,more than 450 years later,drills are studied so infrequently in the wild that when a samll team of biologist recently spotted a troop of them on Equatorial Guinea's Bioko Island,they collectively gasped,then sat down on the rain forests floor to watch.The drill,the largest primates on Bioko,were climbing and feeding in a fig tree at the floor of the island's 70000-foot-high Gran Caldera.Earlier that morning the scientists had spotted troops each five thirty strong of chattering monkeys,red eared,black colobus,and red colobus,the latter one of the most threatened of all primates.Biologist regard Bioko Island as a living laboratory for studying how plants and animals evolve in isolation.It lies in the Gulf of Guinea,20 miles off the west coast of Africa,one of four islands in an archipelago.The three others-Sao Tome,Principe,and Annobon-are deepwater isles formed tens of millions of years ago and colonized by plants and animals from Africa that arrived on their shores by chance.




Bioko however,was connected to the Africa mainland during each ice age,most recently about 12000 years ago.Like an exclusive ark,the island shelters an isolated set of subspecies evolved separately from those on the mainland.There are seven species of monkeys,including the drills,four galagos bush babies,two small antelopes duikers,one species of porcupine,one species of tree hyrax,one species of pouched rat,and three species of scaly-tailed squirrels.There are catlike linsang but no lions or leopards.The roster once included forest buffalo,but they were hunted to extinction a century ago.Add orchids,land snails,freshwater fish,amphibians,spiders,and inspects-all evovling apart from their mainland relatives.In the island's interior,grasslands,woodlands,and rain forest remain much as they were when the first Portuguese explorers stepped ashore in the 15th century,largely untouched and beautiful.It's as closely to prisine as any place I've seen,said Gail Hearn,one of the researchers leading the expedition into the Gran Caldera-her 13th trip into its forested depths.A primatologist at Pennsylvania's Drexel Univeristy,Hearn made her first trip here in 1990,intending to start to a long term study of Bioko Island drills.Instead,I just fell in love with the whole place.she said We've done so much damage to this planet.Here it's undamaged and impossibly beautiful.It feels like a place where one person could make a difference.Hearn organized the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Progarm BBPP.Each January she brings together teams of scientists and American and Equatorial Guinean students for comprehensive biodiversity surveys.This year a team sponsored by National Geographic magazine,Conservation International,and the International League of Conservation Photographers joined her for a 12 day RAVE Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition to document as many monkeys as possible,along the rest of Bioko's stunning variety of other speices-a richness protected by the island's history but now threatened by rampant hunting.Bioko's flora and fauna so impressed the first European visitor,15th century Portuguese explorer Fernao do Po,that he named the island Formosa,beautiful.European who followed wanted to plant their first American colony here.

They can't control what's inside us

Thanks to Ferdowsi,the Iranians always had their language to unite them and keep them different from the outside world-and they also took pain to safeguard their cultural touchstones.Take the new year.Nowruz,a 13-day extravaganza during which everything shuts down and the people eat a lot,dance,recite poetry,and build fires that they jump back and forth over.It's a thankgiving of sorts,celebrated around the spring equinox,and a holdover holiday from Zoro-astrianism,at one time the state religion of the Persian.Zoroastrianism's teachings-good and evil,free will,final judgement,heaven and hell,one almightly God-have influenced many religions,including the world's three main faiths,Judaism,Christianity,and Islam.By the time the Arabs arrived,bringing what was for them the new idea of worshipping a single God,Persians had been doing it for more than a millennium.Oil was at the root of a 1953 event that is still a sore subject for many Iranians,the CIA-backed overthrow,instigated and supported by the British government,of Iran's elected and popular prime minister,Mohammad Mossadegh.Mossafegh had kick out the British after the Iranian oil industry,controlled through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company late BP,was nationalized,and the British had retaliated with an economic blockade.With the Cold war on and the Soviet bloc loacted just to the north,the U.S. feared that a Soviet-backed communism in Iran could shift the balance of world power and jeopardize Western interests in the region.The coup-Operation TP-Ajax-is believed to have been the CIA's first.Kermit Roosevet,Jr,Teddy's grandson,ran the show,and H.Norman Schwarzkopf,the father of the Persian Gulf war commander,was enlisted to coax the shah into playing his part.Its base of operation was the U.S. embassy in Tehran,the future nest of spies to the Iranians,where 52 U.S. hostages were taken in 1979.After ward,the shah,Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,was returned to power,commercial oil rights fell largely to British and U.S. oil companies,and Mossadegh was imprisoned and later placed under horse arrest until he died in 1967.To Iranians like Shabbam Rezaei,who has created the online magazine Persian Mirror to promote Iran's cultural identity,Operation TP-Ajax set the stage for later decades of oppression and Islamic fundamentalism.I think if we had been allowed to have a democratic government.she said we could have been the New York of the middle East-of all of Asia,frankly a center for finance,industry ,commerce,culture,and a modern way of thinking.The shah had his own uses for Persian identity.He was big on promoting Persepolis and Cyrus while at the same time pouring Western music.dress,behaviors,and business interests into Iran.One attempt to instill nationalistic pride,which backfired and helped turn public opinion against him,was the ostentatious celebration he staged in 1971 to commemorate the 2500th anniversary of Persian monarchy.It featured a luxurious tent city outside the entrance to Persepolis,VIP apartments with marble bathrooms,food flown in from Paris,and a guest list that included dignitaries from around the world but few Iranians.




To shah's vision apparently involved too much modernizing too fast,and many Iranians bristled.We were getting westernized,said Farin Zahedi,a drama professor at the university of Tehran.But it was superficial,because the public had no real understanding of Western culture.Iranians experienced it as a cultural attack and rebelled in the press and with street demonstrations.The more paranoid the shah became,the more heavy-handed were his secret police-Savak,created in 1957 with the help of America and Israeli advisers.At least hundred of poeple are believed to have been executed by SAVAK,many others were imprisoned,tortured,and exiled,and more than a thousand were killed by the army during demostrations.So when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spoke in late 1970's of liberating the people from this latest yoke,they were moved by his eloquence and moral rectitude,and for a time the reemergence of religion after the shah's relentless modernism felt like a cleansing.Yet many Iranians by nature are not particularly religious,in the sense of being mosque-goers and fasters.They have a powerful soul and spirit,said carpet salesman named Arsha,but that is not the same.There's a tendency to follow more of a Zoroastrian model from antiquity,with its disdain for rules and for the presumption that an intermediary,such as a mullah,is required to know Allah.The spiritual journey has tended to be more inward,in keeping with the Persian proverb knowledge of self is knowledge of God.So while Iranians at first were open to the idea of an increased role of Islam in public life,they weren't prepared for it to be forced on them with such rigor,especially given the Koran's specific instruction that there should be no compulsion in religion.They certainly didn't expect the clerics to take over commerce,government administration,the courts,and day to day life,down to and including how to go to the bathroom abd how to have sex.Punishments reminiscent of the Dark Ages-public stonings,hangings,the cutting off of fingers and limbs-were put into effect.The central government now discourages some of these archaic practices,but stubborn conservative mullahs out in the provinces cling to the old ways.Beneath it all is the spiritual aim to serve Allah and prepare for paradise.




They're forcing heaven on me!Ali said,sat in a circle and confided how awful it was to be trapped in an environment of fear and secrecy,not knowing if a friends or a loved one has been put in a position to make reports on what you're thinking and saying and doing.The ayatollahs and the ordinary people-everyone has to pretend,said a sofe-spoken locksmith with a huge mustache name Minister D.You don't know who is telling the truth,you don't know who is really religious and who isn't.The Persians have a saying.The walls have mice,and the mice have ears.You can't trust your own eyes,Ali said,If you breathe in or breathe out,Master D said they know.As for the revolution's effect on Persian identity?A typically Iranian thing seems to have happened.For ten years the doors to the West were closed,and conservative clerics running the government went about trying to minimize any cultural identification that was pre-Islamic,a period refered to in much of the Muslim world as Jahiliya,age of ignorance.In offical documents,where possible,references to Iran were replaced with references to IsIamic.Zoroastrian symbols were replaced with Islamic symbols,streets were renamed,and references to the Persian Empire disappeared from schoolbooks.For a time it seemed that Ferdowsi's tomb-a big,pale-stone mausoleum ousside the holy city of Mashhad,with a beautiful reflecting pool leading up to it and chirping birds racing about the columns-might be destoryed.Even Persepolis was in danger of being razed.But they realized this would unite the people against them Ali said,and they had to give up.



The people had welcome the removal of cultural junk from the West,said Farin,the drama professor,as we sipped tea in her tasteful Tehran apartment.But we soon realized that the identity the government was introducing also was not exactly who we were.In the cultural confusion.elements of the old culture-traditional music,Persian paintings,reading from Ferdowsi-were rekindled.We call it the forgotten empire.A young underground Persian rap singer named Yas joined us then,He had black spiky hair,stylishly long sideburns,handsome eyebrows shaped like two black bananas,and around his neck he wore a silver fracahar,the Zoroastrian winged disk that signifies the soul's upward progress through good thoughts,words,and deeds.He's part of the Generation of the Revolution,who grew up after 1979 and account for more than tow-thirds of the country's 70 million people.Variously described as jaded and lacking belief in their futures-a burned generation,as Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi put it-they are increasingly leaving for Europe and elsewhere.Some have a rich consciousness of their Persian past while at the same time supporting the idea of Islamic unity,some feel only Persian or only Islamic,and others immerse themselves in Western culture through television programming received on illegal satellite dishes.Farin said They are schizophrenic.Yas raps about Persian poets,grandparents,and the history of Iran.One of his most popular cut,My identity,was in response to the movie 300,about the famous battle at Thermopylae between the Spartans of Greece and the so-called Persian immortals.The Greeks were portrayed as heroic,innocent,and civilized,Yas said.The Persian were shown as ugly savages with a method of fighting that was unfair.The movie set off a tirade from Iranians here and abroad,who experienced it as a cultural attack.In defense,Yas rapped about Persepolis and Cyrus but also chastised his fellow citizens for resting on the laureals of greatness past.



An irony is that the Islamic revolution-at times refered to here as the second Arab invasion-appears to have strengthened the very ties to antiquity that it tried so hard to sever,it has roused that part of the national identity that remains connected to the idea,memorialized in places like Persepolos and Pasargadae,of Iranians as direct descendants of some of the world's most ancient continuous people.A civil engineer named Hashem told me of a recent impromptu celebration at Cyrus's tomb.People text messaged each other on their cell phones,and a couple of thousand coincidentally showed up,buying multiple entrance tickets to support restoration of the tomb.The celebration was informal.No speeches,no ceremony.Just to honor Cyrus and show solidarity.As farin put it,shaking her lowered head with an air of world-weariness,there has been this constant onslaught on our identity,and the reaction has always has been to return to that deepest identity.Inside every Iranian there is an emperor or an empress.That is for sure.

The cult of Feedowsi The Iranians spoke Farsi anyway.Tha national languages has been Arabized to some extent

But Old Persian remains at its root.The man credited with helping save the languages,and the history,from oblivion is a tenth-century poet named Ferdowsi.Frerdowsi is Iran's Homer.Iranians idolize their poets-among many,Rumi,Said,Omar Khayyam,Hafez whose works are said to be consulted for guidence about love and life as much as,if not more than,the Islamic holy book,the Koran.When the people were oppressed by the latest invader and couldn't safety speak their minds,the poets did it for them,cleverly disguised in verse.Sometimes they were executed.said Youssef the archaeologist,but they did it anyway.So today,although Iran is home to many cultural denominations and languages other than Persian-Turkman,Arab,Azeri,Baluchi,Kurd,and others-everyone can speak Farsi,he said,which is one of the oldest living languages in the world.The people hero-Ferdowsi,a sincere Muslim who resented the Arab influence,spent 30 years writing,in verse with minimal use of Arabic-derived words,an epic history of Iran called the Shahnameh,or Book of kings.This panorama of conflict and adventure chronicles 50 monarchies-their accessions to the throne,their deaths,the frequent abdications and forcible overthrows-and ends with the Arab conquest,depicted as a disaster.The most heralded character is Rostam,a chivalrous figure of courage and integrity,a nation savior and trickster hero,according to Dick Davis,a Persian scholar at Ohio State University who has translated the Shahnameh into English.The stories of Rostam are their myths,he said.This is how the Iranians see themselves.



The tales involve feuding kings and hero champions,in which the latter are almost always represented as ethically superior to the king they serve,facing the dilemmas of good men living under an evil or incompetent government.The work is haunted by the idea that those ethically most fitted to rule are precisely the ones mose relcutant to rule,preferring instead to devote themselves to humankind's chief concerns,the nature of wisdom,the fate of the human soul,and the incomprehensibility of God's purposes.The original Shahnameh is long gone,and all that's left are copies,including one in Tehran's Golestan Palace museum.Its caretaker,a sweet-faced young woman named Behnaz Tabrizi,cleared a large table and covered it with a green felt sheet.She retrieved a black box from a safe in an adjoining bulletproof room equipped with fire and earthquake alarms and climate control and laid a red velet cloth on top of the green felt cloth,because the Iranians like to make little ceremonies out of everything,if they can.I had to wear a sirgical mask to protect the manuscript from stray saliva and the condensation from my breath,and Behnaz put on white cotton gloves.She gently lifted the book,which dates to about 1430,out of its box and gingerly turned the pages with the tips of her fingers while I examined its illustrations with a magnifying glass.They depicted scenes the collective cultural memory is steeped in- someone tied to a tree while awaiting his fate,Rostam unwrittingly killing his own son,Sohrab,in battle,men on horseback with spears fighting invaders on elephants-all precisely drawn and vibrantly colored,using inks that were made from crushed stones mixed with the liquid squeezed from flower petals.




It is said that just about anybody on the street.regardless of education,can recite some Ferdowsi,and there are usually readings going on at colleges or someone's apartment or traditional Persian teahouses,like one in south Teharn called Azari.The walls were covered with scenes from the the Shahnameh,among them the one of Rostam killing Sohrab.A storyteller did a one man dramatic reading, and afterward musicians played traditional music and sang about yearning for the love of a women or for the love of Allah.People sat together at long tables or stretched out on platforms covered with Persian rugs,smoking their tiny Bahman cigarettes and clapping to the music,while waiters brought dates and cookies and tea in delicate little glasses with little spoons,followed by kebabs,yogurt milk,pickles,and beet salad.Children danced on the tabletops as the patrons cheered them on and took pictures with their cell phones.

Welcome to Aratta The earliest reports of human settlement in Iran go back at at least 10000 years,

And the country's name derives from Aryans who migrated here beginning around 1500 B.C. Layers of civilization tens of thousands of archaeological sites-are yet to be excavated.One recent find quickening some hearts was unearthed in 2000 near the city of Jiroft,when flash floods along the Halil River in the southeast exposed thousands of old tombs.The excavation is just six seasons old,and there isn't much to see yet.But intriguing artifacts have been found including a bronze goat's head dating back perhaps 5000 years,and Jiroft is spoken of as possibly an early center of civilization contemporary with Mesopotamia.Youssef the archaeologist,an authority on the third millennium B.C.,directs the digs.He used to run the archaeology department at the University of Tehran but lots his job after the revolution and moved to France.Over the years,he said,things changed.Interest in archaeology revived,and he was invited back to run Jiroft.Youssef thinks it may be the fabled lost Bronze Age land of Aratta,circa 2700 B.C.,reputedly legendary for magnificent crafts that found their way to Mesopotamia.But thus far there's no proof,and other scholars are skeptical.What would be have to find to put the matter unequivocally to rest?He chuckled wistfully.The equivalent of an engraved arch that says,Welcome to Aratta.Prospects for more digs at the thousands of unexplored sites seem daunting.In Iran the price of meat is high,there aren't enough jobs,the bureaucracy is inscrutable,bloated,and inefficient,and state corruption-as described to me by three different people-is an open secret,worse than ever,and institutionalized.The country has many needs,Youssef said,and certainly archaeology is not the main subject.But since Jiroft,all the provinces are interested in excavating and every little town wants to be known around the world like Jiroft.They're proud,and there are rivalries.Youssef was slouched happily in a fauxl-eather chair in the offices of his publisher,munching tiny green grapes while musing about why Iranians are the way they are.As much as anything else,he thought,it was the geography,for when the Iranians were being overrun time after time,where could they go-the desert?There was no place to run and hide.They stayed,they got along,they pretended and made taarof.The tree here are very deep roots.The legacy from anitquity that has always seemed to loom large in the national psyche is this.The concepts of freedom and human rights may not have originated with the classical Greeks but in Iran,as early as the sixth century B.C. under the Achaemenid emperor Cyrus the Great,who established the first Persian Empire,which would become the largest,most powerful kingdom on Earth.Among other things,Cyrus reputedly a brave and humle good guy,freed the enslaved Jews of Babylon in 539 B,C,sending them back to Jersalem to rebuild their temple with money he gave them,and established what has been called the world's first religiously and culturally tolerant empire.Ultimately it comprised more than 23 different peoples who coexisted peacefully under a central government,originally based in Pasargadae-a kingdom that at its height,under Cyrus's successor,Darius,extended from the Meditterrannean to the Indus RIver.So Persia was arguably the world's first superpower.We have a nostaligia to be a superpower again,said Saeed Laylaz,an economic and political analyst in Tehran,and the country's nuclear ambitions are directly related to this desire,The headlines are familiar.A consensus report of key U.S. spy agencies-the National Intelligence Estimate-concluded last December that a military-run program to develop nuclear pwoer weapons in Iran was halted in 2003.Iran continues to enrich uranium,insisting that it wants only to produce fuel for its nuclear power plants,but highly enriched uranium is also a key ingredient for a nuclear bomb.As a deterrent,the UN has imposed increasing economic sanctions.But Iran's president Mahmoud Ahamadinejad,a conservative hardliner,is giving no ground while at the same time making frequent threatening remarks about nearby Israel,denying the Holocaust,and,according to the U.S. government,sending weapons and munitions to extremist militias in Iraq that are being used against Iraqis and U.S. forces there.




At one time the area of the country was triple what it is now,and it was a stable superpower for more than a thousand years,said Saeed,a slender refined man in glasses and starched shirtsleeves rolled to three quarter length,sitting in his elegant apartment next to a lamp resemnling a cockatoo,with real feathers.The empire once encompassed today's Iraq,Pakistan,Afghanistan,Turkmenistan,Uzbekistan,Tajikistan,Turken ,Jordan,Cyprus,Syria.Lebanon,Israel,Egypt,and the Caucasus region.The borders have moved in over the centuries,but this superpower nostalgia,so in contradiction to reality,he said,is all because of the history.At the foundation of which,again,is Cyrus,and in particular something called the Cyrus Cylinder-perhaps Iran's most exalted artifact-housed at the British Museum in London,with a replica residing at UN headquarters in New York City.The cylinder resembles a corncob made of clay,inscribed on it,in cuneiform,is a decree that has been described as the first charter of human rights-predateing the Magna Carta by nearly two millennia.It can be read as a call for religious and ethnic freedom,it banned slavery and oppression of any kind,the taking of property by force or without compensation,and it gave member states the right to subject themselves to Cyrus's crown,or not.I never resolve on war to reign.To know Iran and what Iran really is,just read that transcripition from Cyrus,said Shirin Ebadi,the Iranian lawyer who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Price.We were in her central Tehran apartment building,in a basement office lined with mahogany-and-glass bookcases.Inside one was a tiny gold copy of the cylinder,encased in a Plexiglas box that she held out to me as if presenting a newborn child.Such greatness as the cylinder has been shown many times in Iran,but the world doesn't know it,she said.When I go abroad,people get surprised when they realize that 65 percent of the college students here are girls.Or when they see Iranian paintings and Iranian atchitecture,they are shcoked.They are judging a civilization just by what they have heard in the last 30 years.The Islamic revolution,the rollbacks of personal freedoms,particularly for women,the nuclear program and antagonism with the west.They know nothing of the thousands of years that came before,she said-what the Iranians went throught to remain distinct from their invaders,and how they did it.For instance,she said,after the Arabs came,and Iran converted to Islam,eventually we turned to the Shiite sect,which was different from the Arabs,who are Sunni.They were still Muslims,but not Arabs.We were Iranian.In fact,the first thing people said when I asked what they wanted the world to know about them was,We are not Arabs! followed closely by we are not terriorists!!.A certain Persian chauvinism creeps into the dialogue.Even though economically they're not performing as well as Arab states like Dubai and Qatar,they still feel exceptional.The Arabs who conquered Iran are commonly regarded as having been little more than Bedouin living in tents,with no culture of their own aside from what Iran gave them,and from the vehemence with which they are still railed against,you would think it happened not 14 centuries ago but last week.I met a woman at a weddingwho gave off the air of an aging movie star,her dapper husband beside her wearing his white dinner jacket and smoking out of a cigarette holder,and it wasn't five minutes before she lit into the Arabs.

Everything went down after they came,and we have never been the same!she said,wringing someone's neck in the air.And a friend I made here,an English teacher named Ali,spoke of how the loss of the empire still weighed on the national consciousness.Brfore they came we were a great and civilized power.he said,as we drvoe to his home on the outskirts of Shiraz,dodging motocycles and tailgaters.Echoing commonly started though disputed lore,he added,they burned our books and raped out women,and we couldn'd speak Rarsi in public for 300 years,or they took out out tongues.

What's so striking about the ruins of Persepolis in southern Iran,an ancient capital of the Persian Empire that was burned down after being conquered

by Alexander the Great,is the absence of violent imagery on what's left of its stone walls.Among the carvings there soliders,but they're not fighting,there are weapons,but they're not drwan.Mainly you emblems suggesting that something humane went on here instead people of different nations gathering peacefully,bearing gifts,draping their hands amiably on one another's shoudlers.In an era noted for its barbarity,Persepolis,it seems,was a relatively cosmopolitan place-and for many Iranians today its ruins are a breathtaking reminder of who their Persian ancestors were and what they did.The recorded history of the country itself spans some 2500 years,culminating in today's Islamic Republic of Iran,formed in 1979 after a revolution inspired in part by conserverative clerics cast out the Western-backed shah.It's arguably the world's first modern constitutional theocracy and a grand experiment,Can a country be run effectively by holy men imposing an extreme version of Islam on a people soaked in such a rich Persian past?Persia was a conquering empire but also regarded in some ways as one of the more glorious and benevolent civilizations of antiquity.and I wondered how strongly people might still identify with the part of their history that's illustrated in those surviving friezes.So I set out to explore what Persain means to Iranians,who at the time of my two visits last year were being shunned by the international community,their culture demonized in Western cinema,and their leaders cast,in an escalating war of words with Washington,D.C.,as menacing would be terrorists out to build the bomb.You can't really separate out Iranian identity as one thing or another-broadly speaking it's part Persian,part Islamic,and part western,and the paradoxes all exist together.But there is a Persian identity that has nothing to do with Islam,which at the same time has blended with the culture of Islam as evidenced by the Muslim call to prayer that booms from loudspeakers situated around Persepolis,a cue to visitors that they are not only in a Persian kingdom but also in an Islamic republic.This would be a story about those Iranians who still,at least in part,identify with their Persian roots.Perhaps some millennial spillover runs through the makeup of what is now one of the world's ticking hot spots.Are vestiges of the life-loving Persian nature wine,love,poetry,song woven into the fabric of abstinence,prayer,and fatalism often associated with Islam-like a secret computer program running quietly in the background? Iran's capital city of Tehran is an exciting,polluted-choked metropolis at the foot of the Elburz Mountains.Many of the buildings are made of tiny beige bricks and girded with metal railings.giveing the impression of small compounds coming one after the other,punctuated by halted construction projects and parks.There are still some beautiful gardens here,a Persian inheritance,and private ones,with fruit trees amd fountains,fishponds amd aviaries,flourishing inside the brick walls.



While I was here,two Iranian-born American academics,home for a visit,had been locked up,accused of fomenting a velet revolution against the government.Eventually they were released.But back in the United State,people would say,wasn't I afraid to be in Iran?-the assumption being that I must have bee in danger of getting locked up myself.But I was guest in Iran,and in Iran a guest is accroded the high status,the sweetest piece of fruit,the most comfortable place to sit it.It's part of a complex system of ritual politeness- that governs the subtext of life here.Hospitality,courting,family affairs,political negotitations,taarof is the unwritten code for how people should treat each other.The word has Arabic root,meaning to know or acquire knowledge of.But the idea of taarof-to abase oneself while exalting the other person-is Persain in origin,said William O.Beeman,a linguistic anthropologist at the university of Minnesota.He described it as fighting for the lower hand,but in an exquisitely elegant way,making it possible,in a hierarchical society like Iran's,for people to paradoxically deal with each other as equals.Wherever I went,people fussed over me and made sure that all my needs were met.But they can get so caught up trying to please,or seeming to,and declining offers,or seeming to,that true intentions are hidden.There's a lot of mind reading and lighthearted,meaningless dialogue while the two parties go back and forth with entreaties and refusal until the truth reveals itself.Being smooth and seeming sincere while hiding your true feelings-artful pretending-is considered the height of taarof and an enormous social asset.You never show your intention or your real identity.said a former Iranian political prisoner now living in France.You're making sure you're not exposing yourself to danger,because throughout our history there has been a lot of danger there.




Indeed,the long course of Iranian history is saturated with wars,invasions,and martyrs,including the teenage boys during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s who carried plastic keys to heaven while clearing minefields by walking bravely across them.The underlying reason for all the drama is location.If you draw lines from the mediterranean to Beijing or Beijing to Cairo or Paris to Delhi,they all pass through Iran,which straddles a region where East to West.Over 26 centuries,a blending of the hemispheres has been going on here-trade,cultural interchange,friction-with Iran smack in the middle.Meanwhile because of its wealth and strategic location,the country was also overrun by one invader after another,and the Persian empire was established,lost,and reestablished a number of times-by the Achaemenids,the Parthians,and the Sassanids-before finally going under.Invaders have included the Turks,Genghis Khan and the Mongols,and,most significantly,Arabian tribesmen.Fired with the zeal of a new religion,Islam,they humbled the ancient Persian Empire for good in the seventh century and ushered in a period of Muslim greatness that was distinctly Persian.The Arab expansion is regarded as one of the most dramatic movements of any people in history.Persian was in its inexorable path,and ,ever since,Iranians have been finding ways to keep safe their idenity as distinct from the rest of the Muslim and Arab world.Iran is very big and very ancient,said Youssef Madjidzadeh,a leading Iranian archaeologist,and it's not easy to change the hearts and idenity of the people because of this.They like to say,for instance,that when invanders came to Iran,the Iranians did not become the conquerors were said to have gone Persian,vanquished Persian,adopted its cultural and administrative practices,took a Persian wife Roxana,and ordered thousands of his troops to do the same in a mass wedding.Iranians seem particularly proud of their capacity to get along with others by assimilating compatible aspects of the invaders ways without surrendering their own-a cultural elasticity that is at the heart of their Persian identity.

Dead-end road it clings to the Andes,a winding dirt path about ten feet wide and 22 miles long,descending 6500 feet.

Cliff loom,chasms gape.Few guardrails.Lots of landslides.Welcome to what some call the world's most dangerous road.Built in the 1930s by Paraguayan pows,Bolivia's Nor Yungas Road was once the only way from La Paz to Coroico.Drivers poured brooze on their tires to appease the goddess Pachamama,chewed coca leaves to stay alert.But prayers went unanswered,corss dot ledges where hundreds have perished.The worst accident,the 1983 crash of a produce truck carrying socres of people.Most died.My lord.I regret even takin a peek.I still have nightmares.Since 2006 a new road has offered safe passage.The old way now draws mostly bikers and tourists-but is still not safe.with cyclists dying this year. Says biking-company owner Alistair Matthew.People were more cautions when there were more cars.A truck negotiation Bolivia's Road of Death,from high plains to cloud forest.




How bees wing it.Don't tell the bees,but they aren't fit for flight.At least that's what a French mathematician concluded in 1934,so one story goes.of course.Bees fly just fine.early researchers simply had no way to gague the insects complex wing movements.Caltech biologist Michael Dickinson and colleagues report that while honeybee don't have it easy-their small wing to small size ratio means they must work harder to fly than other insects.Their unorthodox flapping method lets them hover,fight wind,evade predators,and get lift even when loaded up with nectar or pollen.Beat generation Studies show that many inspects move their wings in long,sweeping strokes 145 to 165 degrees at roughly 200 beats a second.But honeybees flap in short arcs about 90 degrees,so they have to compensate with speed.How much?Up to 240 beats a second-nearly twice what you'd expect given their size.Wind beneath and above their wings.To beat gravity,you need to generate an upward force.Fast flapping plus wing flipping does the trick for honeybees.Wings flap forward,creating a vortex above the bee and generating lift.Wings begin to rotate and slow down in preparation for the backward stroke.Wings finish rotating and start sweeping backward,utilizing the previous stroke's wake.Wings flap backward,creating a new vortex in the process.The cycle then repeats.







The shard war blame it on plastic.Sea glass-the bright bits of old bottles scoured by sand and salt water-is getting increasingly difficult to find.We're at the end of the sea glass window.Notes Mary Beth Beuke,president of the North American Sea glass association.There is less glass packaging now and more recycling.Much of the glass consigned to the waves decades ago,she says,is tumbled so tiny it's almost not worth picking up.Of course.it started out as something not worth keeping.Trash tossed off ships or washed from dumps must spend years in the water to become good sea glass.Wave churn,shore terrain,water acidity,and composition of the glass itself all play a part in creating the smoothed shards characteristic matte texture.Beuke,who finds sea glass all over the world,offers these tips for fellow beachcombers.Search at low tide and after a storm.Rocky shores are better than sandy.And leave clear,jagged pieces where they lie,she says.They are not finished yet.Sea glass is found worldwide.Red and orange are rare.White-which once was clear glass-is most common.

Golden fleece fabulously expensive and buttery soft sweaters may help save the vicuna.

Millions of the llama kin once capered in the Andes,warmed by fluffy coats ideal for high altitudes.The Inca clipped the wool for royal garments,but after the Spanish conquest vicunas were killed for their pelts.By the 1960's only a few thousand survived.As countries protected their herds and international laws banned vicuna products,the animal began to rebound.Vicuna couture is the latest boost.In 1994 Italian luxury clothier Loro Piana started a line using fleece sheared from Peruvian vicunas.Styles are classic.The fabric,usually undyed to preserve its softness,makes even cashmere seem harsh.Other fashion firms have jumped im.The result is a boon for Peru's vicunas-they now number about 150000 up from 62000 in 1981-and for villagers who sell wool from animals they've guarded and sheared.But some wild vicunas are being fenced.Feeding and inbreeding are concerns,poaching is on the rise.Putting vicuna on the runway has its costs.The making of a sweater Starting at age two,a vicuna is sheared every two years or so,yielding seven to eight ounces of fleece-the finest and softest used commercially.

In 1958 marchers carried their new signs to the Unite Kingdom's Atomic Weapons Establishment

Sign Language on a rainy Easter weekend 50 year ago,a crowd of protester set off from on a four day march for the fledgling cause of nuclear disarmament.A new movement need a new symbol,so they waved signs bearing a simple logo that has since gone on to become a universal emblem for peace.The peace symbol is neither the track of a dove nor a chicken,as hawks have sneered.Artist Gerald Holtom based it on the sema-phore initials for nuclear disarmament,although he later said that it also represented himself in despair,palms out and down.Purposely never copyrighted,used in everything from Vietnam War protesters to cigarette ads,the symbol is easy to recognize-and to misdraw.Pat Arrowsmith,78 helped plan the 1958 march and still goes to antinuclear and antiwar events.A common mistake-leaving out the middle leg-turns a peace sign into the Mercedes-Benz logo .She fixes that I get out my ballpoint immediately.



Pedigreed Pizza There is pizza,and there is pizza Napoletana.The two,connoisseurs say,have as much in common as a premier cru Bordeaux has with the plonk in a screw-top jug.Soon pedigreed Napolitan pizza will join the pantheon of European Union-certified edibles like Spanish serrano ham and English blue Stilton cheese.Warning.It takes longer to read the EU spacs for Neapolitan pizza than to bake one.To bear the imprimatur of Guaranteed Traditional Specialty,pizza must not stray over35 centimeters in diameter nor the crust exceed two centimeters in thickness.ingredients must inculde type 00 flour and up to 100 grams of tomatoes preferably Marzanos applied in a spiraling motion.The word pizza first appeared in an AD 997 manuscript from Gaeta,a southern Italian town.A millennium later,in 1997,separatist militans in northern Italy tried to boycott pizza-the icon of their southern nemesis.Neapolitans responded to the effect let them eat polenta,referring to the cornmeal-based mush dear to the wealthier.but alleagedly culinarily impoverished north.If only Naples had patented pizza,food writer Burton Anderson observed,It would be among Italy's wealthier cities instead of one of its poorest.

End of a Beginning Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf has faded away,but not the country's many troubles.

As a Pakistani,pleased though I am by Pervez Musharraf's resignation as President,I cannot but feat that this week's celebrations could prove to be short-lived.Yes,his departure will make Pakistan more democratic and was long overdue.But it will not in itself cure the myriad ills facing the country.Musharraf's legacy is a mixed one.Like many Pakistanis,I was appalled when he seized control of Pakistan in 1999.Pakistan had stagnated in the 1990s under the bickering and incompetent elected governments of Benazir Bhutto and her rival Nawaz SHarif.But I recalled the damage done by the oppressive dictatorship of General Zia ul-haq in the 1980s and had no desire to see Pakistan revert to military rule.I began to revise my opinion of Musharraf after 9 11.The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in response to terroism,and the terrorist attack on its parliament later that year led India to threaten to do the same to Pakistan.Musharraf seemed to offer firm leadership in this time of crisis,managing to reverse Pakistan's policy of support to the Taliban and embarking on a normalization process with India.By the midpoint of Musharraf's nine-year rule,a combnation of sound economic policies and foreign aid had resulted in rapid growth for Pakistan.Optimism was in the air,and Pakistani friends of mine who had lived abroad for years-artists,bankers,architects,professors-were flocking back home.


Musharraf spoke in favor of tolerance,women's rights and moderate interpretations of Islam.He liberalized the media,allowing dozens of private television channels to operate and freely criticize the government.And at first he seemed prepared to allow the judiciary to challenge the government.Unfortunately,Musharraf seemed unable to accept the logical conclusion of the project he had begun,his own departure.He spent the second half of his rule battling the very democratic forces that he had helped unleash.As he became more isloated and focused on self-preservation,his government took its eye off the economic management of the country.Poor policies eventually resulted in crippling electricity blackouts,dangerous food shortages and rampant inflation.His autocratic leadership style and refusal to share power with country's two biggest democratic parties also meant that the fight against religious militants in Pakistan came to be seen as Musharraf's war,utterly lacking in popular support.Large swathes of territory were overrun by Pakistani Taliban,army morale crumbled and the once unheard-of tactic of suicide bombing became commonplace in Pakistan.Now that Musharraf has goine,the country need to come together.Too much time has been spent blaming Musharraf rather than finding solutions to Pakistan's pressing problems.Pakistan must look to the future and break decisively from its past.For Sharif and Bhutto's parties,this means avoiding a return to the vindicticeness and squabbling that characterized relations between their parties in the 1990s and undermined Pakistan's previous experiment with democracy.Their first test will be the selection of a new presidnet,where it is essential that a nonpartisan,mutually acceptable candidate be chosen.Both sides must recognzie that building a stable democratic system will better serve their interests in the long run than engaging in a zero-sum conflict that sets the stage for another coup.Beyond that,they will need to work together to develop a plan for reviving the moribund economy and have a public debate on the unpopular war on terror.Pakistanis should not blindly follow America's lead,but they must recoginze the self-delusional nature of claims that the struggle against militancy is not their fight.Last year along more Pakistanis were killed in terrorist attacks than the number of Americans who died in 911.As for the army chief,General Ashfaq Kayani,he has done an admirable job of pulling the army out of politics.But the instinct will remain to focus on India as the main threat to Pakistan and to treat religious militants as asserts for projecting Pakistani Power,His challenge will be to recognzie that the army helped create the terroirsts who are now the country's biggest security risk,and to reverse the ambiguity that has characterized the military's commitment to confronting this menace.Democracy brings responsibility.With Musharrag gone,Pakistan's leaders would do well to remember that the public now has only them to blame.

Exploring Inner spaces

The streets of London are lined with architectural gems,futuristic towers,quickly homes,historic facades.But behind their door is an inner beauty that few get to see-expect for one weekend a year.On Sept 20 and 21,London holds its annual Open house,when hundreds of the city's most exciting buildings-many usually closed to the public-invite you to step inside.Here are four places worth a peek.Portcullis house built to hold new offices for members of parliament at a cost of $440 million,Portcullis house was the most expensive office block in Britian when it was finished in 2000.Imposing and elegant,it surrouds an airy courtyard,and seamlessly incorporates the ultramodern Westminster Underground station below.The foreign office This Victorian government building in whitehall is a picture of neoclassical grandeur and extravagance.The high-lights include the Grand Staircase with its marble columns and lavish murals,and the magnificent Durbar Court,three generous stories of granite arches and intricate friezes,capped by a glass roof.City Hall completed in 2002,the seat of London government is one of the more striking structures along the Thames.Designed by Foster and Partners,it resembles a giant steel-and-glass egg tilting in the wild.Inside,the spiral staircase at its core seems to float in midair,and the meeting chamber offers breathtaking IMAX-like views of the river.On the roof,solar pannel provide power and the building's green credentials.Crossness engines house Designed by Joseph Bazalgettem19th century creator of the London sewage system,the Crossness Engines house waste water pumping station is a feat of Victorian engineering.Inside is a rare marriage of brute power and beauty,four of the world's largest rotative beam engines,surrounded by ornate castiron work that has been carefully restored to stunning effect.



Magical mystery tour poeple say that John Keat's Ghost haunts his house below Rome's Spanish Steps.And,according to legend,a dragon lurks beneath the columns of Castor and Pollus's temple in the Forum.There are just a few of the tidbits to be found within the new Rome edition of the Ruyi,a series of guidebooks that turn visits to Italian cities into intriguing treasure hunts.Springing from the fertile imagination of Venetian writer Alberto Toso Fei,this game as guide centers on a hunt for the Ruyi of the title,a mythical magical scepter stolen from Kublai Khan by Marco Polo.In the story,the explorer takes the scepter back to Venice-where Toso Fei's first Ryui game is set-before it is donated to the Vatican.During the sack of Rome in 1527,the Pope commissions Florentine goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini to transform the Ruyi's appearance to keep it out of enemy hands.Players use clues to find the scepter,taking in a tour of the city as they search.To make the quest more challenging,each entry in the book has been sliced up and jumbled.The only way to reassemble it- and identify the site it describes-is to use a code sent to you by text.Then another text arrives with a question that can only be answered by visiting the site itself.Send the correct reply,and you get a new code to move on to the next site.The clues can lead to any of 60 landmarks and monuments throughout Rome,ranging from the obvious-the Colosseum-to the more obscure,such as a shrine marking the spot where Joan,the legendary female Pope of the 9th century,is said to have given birth.The game lasts from two to nine hours and can be played alone or in teams.Ultimately,the Ruyi always evades discovery.But the real treasures is in experiencing a fun new twist on sightseeing in the Eternal city.

Afghan researchers found the remain of 16 clay bodhisattvas arranged in a circle.

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