Ingmar Bergman, the “poet with the camera” who is considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history, died today on the small island of Faro where he lived on the Baltic coast of Sweden, Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, said. Bergman was 89.

Critics called Mr. Bergman one of the directors — the others being Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa — who dominated the world of serious film making in the second half of the 20th century.

He moved from the comic romp of lovers in “Smiles of a Summer Night” to the Crusader’s search for God in “The Seventh Seal,” and from the gripping portrayal of fatal illness in “Cries and Whispers” to the alternately humorous and horrifying depiction of family life in “Fanny and Alexander.”

Mr. Bergman dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love; in Mr. Bergman’s films, “this world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times Magazine in a profile of the director. God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires.

For many filmgoers and critics, it was Mr. Bergman more than any other director who in the 1950s brought a new seriousness to film making.

“Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics — religion, death, existentialism — to the screen,” Bertrand Tavernier, the French film director, once said. “But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity.”

He influenced many other film makers, including Woody Allen, who according to The Associated Press said in a tribute in 1988 that Mr. Bergman was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”

In his more than 40 years in the cinema, Mr. Bergman made about 50 films, often focusing on two themes — the relationship between the sexes, and the relationship between mankind and God. Mr. Bergman found in cinema, he wrote in a 1965 essay, “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect.”

In Bergman, the mind is constantly seeking, constantly inquiring, constantly puzzled.

Mr. Bergman often acknowledged that his work was autobiographical, but only “in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.”

He carried out a simultaneous career in the theater, becoming a director of Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater. He married multiple times and had highly publicized and passionate liaisons with his leading ladies.

Mr. Bergman broke upon the international film scene in the mid-1950s with four films that shook the movie world, films that became identified with him and symbols of his career — “Smiles of a Summer Night,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “The Magician.”

He had been a director for 10 years, but was little known outside Sweden. Then, in 1956, “Smiles” won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The next year, the haunting and eloquent “Seventh Seal,” with its memorable medieval visions of a knight (Max von Sydow) playing chess with death in a world terrorized by the plague, won another special prize at Cannes. And in 1959, “The Magician” took the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Audiences flocked to art cinemas all over the world to see his films. Then, in 1960, “The Virgin Spring”, told of a rape and its mysterious aftermath in medieval Scandinavia; it won the Academy Award as best foreign film. In a few years, he had become both a cult figure and a box-office success.

Throughout his career, Mr. Bergman often talked about what he considered the dual nature of his creative and private personalities. “I am very much aware of my own double self,” he once said. “The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work — he is in touch with the child. He is not rational, he is impulsive and extremely emotional.”

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, in the university town of Uppsala, Sweden. His father, Erik, a Lutheran clergyman who later became chaplain to the Swedish royal family, believed in strict discipline, including caning and locking his children in closets. His mother, Karin, was moody and unpredictable.

“I was very much in love with my mother,” he told Alan Riding of The New York Times in a 1995 interview. “She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.”

The young Mr. Bergman accompanied his father on preaching rounds of small country churches near Stockholm.

“While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang or listened,” he once recalled, “I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans.”

His earliest memories, he once said, were of light and death:

“I remember how the sunlight hit the edge of my dish when I was eating spinach and, by moving the dish slightly from side to side, I was able to make different figures out of the light. I also remember sitting with my brother, in the backyard of my flat, aiming with slingshots at enormous black rats scurrying around. And I also remember being forced to sit in church, listening to a very boring sermon, but it was a very beautiful church, and I loved the music and the light streaming through the windows. I used to sit up in the loft beside the organ, and when there were funerals, I had this marvelous long-shot view of the proceedings, with the coffin and the black drapes, and then later at the graveyard, watching the coffin lowered into the ground. I was never frightened by these sights. I was fascinated.”

At the age of 9, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a battered magic lantern, a possession that altered the course of his life. Within a year, he had created, by playing with this toy, a private world, he later recalled, in which he felt completely at home. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he spoke all the parts.

He entered the University of Stockholm in 1937, nominally to study the history of literature but actually to spend most of his time working in amateur theater. He soon left home and university for a career in the theater and the movies.

He split his time between film and theater beginning in the early 1940s, when he first was taken into the script department of Svensk Filmindustri — a youth, as his first boss described him, “shabby, rude and scampish with a laugh born out of the darkest depths of the inferno.”

In his theater career, he became head of the municipal theater in the southern Swedish city of Halsingborg in 1944; in 1946, he switched to Goteborg for four years, then spent two years as a guest producer in a couple of cities before going to Malmo in 1952 to become associated with the municipal theater there.

In films, he wrote many scenarios as well as directed. His name first appeared on the screen in 1944 in “Torment,” which he wrote and Alf Sjoberg, one of the dominant figures in Swedish film, directed. The film, based on a story Bergman wrote about his final, torturous year at school, won eight Swedish awards as well as the Grand Prix du Cinema at Cannes. It made an international star of its leading performer, Mai Zetterling, who portrayed a shop girl loved by a young student and shadowed by the student’s sadistic teacher.

Mr. Bergman got his first chance to direct the next year. His early films were essentially training films — basically soap operas that enabled him to experiment with directorial style.

Most experts agree that his first film of note was “Prison,” his sixth movie and the first all-Bergman production. The film is the story of a prostitute who committed suicide. He made it in 18 days, and while critics have called it cruel, disjointed and in many ways sophomoric, it was an early favorite of his.

In the next few years, he made “Summer Interlude” (1950), a tragedy of teen-age lovers; “Waiting Women” (1952), his first successful comedy; “Sawdust and Tinsel” set in a traveling circus and originally released in the United States as “The Naked Night”; “A Lesson in Love” (1953), a witty comedy of marital infidelity, and, finally, “Smiles of a Summer Night” and “The Seventh Seal,” his breakthroughs to fame.

In 1957, the same year as “Seventh Seal,” Mr. Bergman also directed “Wild Strawberries,” his acclaimed study of old age. In the film, the 78-year-old Isak Borg (played by the silent-film director and actor Victor Sjostrom), drives through the countryside, stops at his childhood home, relives the memory of his first love and comes to terms with his emotional isolation. “I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through,” Mr. Bergman has said. “I was then 37, cut off from all human emotions.”

Mr. Bergman won his second Academy Award in 1961 for “Through a Glass Darkly,” and then came the turning point in his career — “Winter Light,” which he made in 1963, the second of his trilogy of the early 60s that ended with “The Silence” and portrayed the loneliness and vulnerability of modern man, without faith or love. Many of his earlier films had been animated by an anguished search for belief, Ms. Kakutani wrote, but “Winter Light” — which shows a minister’s own loss of faith — implies that whatever answers there are are to be found on earth.

Mr. Bergman explained that the philosophical shift occurred during a brief hospital stay. Awakening from the anesthesia, he realized that he was no longer scared of death, and that the question of death had suddenly disappeared. Since then, many critics feel, his films have contained a kind of humanism in which human love is the only hope of salvation.

Some critics lashed at individual films as obscure, pretentious and meaningless.

But every time he made a failure, he managed to win back critics and audiences quickly with such films as “Persona” — in which the personalities of two women break down and merge — “The Passion of Anna,” “Cries and Whispers” — a stark portrait of three sisters — and “Fanny and Alexander.”

Mr. Bergman often used what amounted to a repertory company — a group of actors who appeared in many of his films. They included Mr. von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson and, above all, Liv Ullmann, with whom he had a long personal relationship and with whom he had a child. He also for many years used the same cinematographer, Sven Nykvist.

The ideas for his films, he said, came to him in many ways. “Persona,” the study of two women in neurotic intimacy, came to life, he said, when one day he saw two women sitting together comparing hands. “I thought to myself,” he said, “that one of them is mute and the other speaks.”

The germ for “The Silence” — in which a dying woman and her sister are in a foreign country with no means of communication — came from a hospital visit, he said, where “I noticed from a window a very old man, enormously fat and paralyzed, sitting in a chair under a tree in the park.”

“As I watched,” he said, “four jolly, good-natured nurses came marching out, lifted him up, chair and all, and carried him back into the hospital. The image of being carried away like a dummy stayed in my mind.”

In other cases, films were suggested by essays, novels, pieces of music. In every case, he said, some outside event had turned the key on some deep-seated memory — each film was a projection of some past experience.

“I have maintained open channels with my childhood,” he told Ms. Kakutani. “I think it may be that way with many artists. Sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was — with lights, smells, sounds and people . . . I remember the silent street where my grandmother lived, the sudden aggressivity of the grown-up world, the terror of the unknown and the fear from the tension between my father and mother.”

Mr. Bergman used his memories in many other films: “Scenes From a Marriage” (which was originally done for television), “Autumn Sonata,” “From the Life of the Marionettes,” “Hour of the Wolf,” “Shame,” “Face to Face” and his version of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” considered by many to be the most successful film ever made of an opera.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, Mr. Bergman maintained his successful theatrical career in Sweden. It was while rehearsing Strindberg’s “Dance of Death” at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm in 1976 that he was arrested for tax evasion. The incident received a great deal of publicity, and while the charges were later dropped and the Swedish Government issued a formal apology, Mr. Bergman exiled himself from Sweden to West Germany, where he made “The Serpent’s Egg.” He had a nervous breakdown over the incident and was hospitalized for a time. The exile lasted for a number of years and he only returned permanently to his native country in the mid-80s.

In 1982, Mr. Bergman announced that he had just made his last theatrical film — it was “Fanny and Alexander,” a look at high society in a Swedish town early in the last century that was in part inspired by his own childhood.

“Making ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was such a joy that I thought that feeling will never come back,” he told Ms. Kakutani. “I will try to explain: When I was at university many years ago, we were all in love with this extremely beautiful girl. She said no to all of us, and we didn’t understand. She had had a love affair with a prince from Egypt and, for her, everything after this love affair had to be a failure. So she rejected all our proposals. I would like to say the same thing. The time with ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. I have had my prince of Egypt.”

“Fanny and Alexander” won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1984.

Mr. Bergman did not, however, leave the world of film altogether. He spent much of his time on Faro, a sparsely populated island that visitors described as chilly and desolate but that he considered the one place he felt safe, secure and at home. And he would devote his mornings to working on his plays, novels and television scripts.

He made a television film, “After the Rehearsal” — about three actors working on a production of Strindberg’s “Dream Play” — which was released theatrically in the United States. He wrote “The Best Intentions,” first as a novel and then in 1991 as an eloquent six-hour film directed by Billie August about Mr. Bergman’s parents’ troubled marriage just before his birth.

“The slightly fictional Anna and Henrik Bergman are complex, stubborn, well-meaning people who share a heartbreaking inability to be happy no matter what they try,” Ms. James wrote, and Mr. Bergman “is a benevolent ghost hovering over the film.”

Mr. Bergman said in an interview in Sweden that the act of writing the film had changed his attitude toward his parents. “After this,” he said, “every form of reproach, blame, bitterness or even vague feeling that they have messed up my life is gone forever from my mind.”

“The Best Intentions” was one of three novels he wrote in the 80s and 90s about his parents. The second, “Sunday’s Children,” was made into a film and directed by his son Daniel. The third, “Private Confessions,” about his mother, became a film directed by Ms. Ullmann.

In 1997, he directed a two-hour made-for-television movie, “In the Presence of Clowns,” set in the 1920s and based on a story he discovered among the papers left by an uncle who appeared as a main character in “Fanny and Alexander” and “Best Intentions” and was played in all three films by Borje Ahlstedt.

He directed two plays every year at the Royal Dramatic Theater. In May 1995 the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of a New York Bergman Festival that included retrospectives by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Television and Radio, presented the Royal Theater in two plays Mr. Bergman directed, Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale” and Yukio Mishima’s “Madame de Sade.”

He also directed operas, and wrote many plays and television dramas, several novels and a 1987 memoir, “The Magic Lantern.”

[In the fall of 2002, Bergman, at age 84, started production on “Saraband,” a 120-minute television movie based on the two main characters in “Scenes From a Marriage,” The Associated Press reported. In a news conference, the director said he wrote the story after realizing he was “pregnant with a play.” “At first I felt sick, very sick,” he said. “It was strange. Like Abraham and Sarah, who suddenly realized she was pregnant,” he said, referring to biblical characters. “It was lots of fun, suddenly to feel this urge returning.”]

In addition to Oscars and prizes at film festivals, Mr. Bergman’s films won many awards from the New York Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics, among others. In 1977, he was given the Swedish Academy of Letters’ Great Gold Medal, one of only 17 people to have received it in this century.

Mr. Bergman’s fifth wife, Ingrid Karlebo Bergman, died in 1995. He had many children from his marriages and relationships.

Once, when asked by the critic Andrew Sarris why he did what he did, Mr. Bergman told the story of the rebuilding of Chartres Cathedral in the Middle Ages by thousands of anonymous artisans.

“I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain,” he said. “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”

Mr. Bergman’s celluloid carvings often revealed an obsession with death. But in later life he said that the obsession had abated. “When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying,” he said. “But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.”

According to The A.P., which cited TT, the Swedish news agency, the date of Mr. Bergman’s funeral has not been set but will be attended by a close group of his friends and family.

Jul 26th 2007

From The Economist print edition

Worries about a population explosion have been replaced by fears of decline

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THE population of bugs in a Petri dish typically increases in an S-shaped curve. To start with, the line is flat because the colony is barely growing. Then the slope rises ever more steeply as bacteria proliferate until it reaches an inflection point. After that, the curve flattens out as the colony stops growing.

Overcrowding and a shortage of resources constrain bug populations. The reasons for the growth of the human population may be different, but the pattern may be surprisingly similar. For thousands of years, the number of people in the world inched up. Then there was a sudden spurt during the industrial revolution which produced, between 1900 and 2000, a near-quadrupling of the world's population.

Numbers are still growing; but recently—it is impossible to know exactly when—an inflection point seems to have been reached. The rate of population increase began to slow. In more and more countries, women started having fewer children than the number required to keep populations stable. Four out of nine people already live in countries in which the fertility rate has dipped below the replacement rate. Last year the United Nations said it thought the world's average fertility would fall below replacement by 2025. Demographers expect the global population to peak at around 10 billion (it is now 6.5 billion) by mid-century.

As population predictions have changed in the past few years, so have attitudes. The panic about resource constraints that prevailed during the 1970s and 1980s, when the population was rising through the steep part of the S-curve, has given way to a new concern: that the number of people in the world is likely to start falling.

Some regard this as a cause for celebration, on the ground that there are obviously too many people on the planet. But too many for what? There doesn't seem to be much danger of a Malthusian catastrophe. Mankind appropriates about a quarter of what is known as the net primary production of the Earth (this is the plant tissue created by photosynthesis)—a lot, but hardly near the point of exhaustion. The price of raw materials reflects their scarcity and, despite recent rises, commodity prices have fallen sharply in real terms during the past century. By that measure, raw materials have become more abundant, not scarcer. Certainly, the impact that people have on the climate is a problem; but the solution lies in consuming less fossil fuel, not in manipulating population levels.

Nor does the opposite problem—that the population will fall so fast or so far that civilisation is threatened—seem a real danger. The projections suggest a flattening off and then a slight decline in the foreseeable future.

If the world's population does not look like rising or shrinking to unmanageable levels, surely governments can watch its progress with equanimity? Not quite. Adjusting to decline poses problems, which three areas of the world—central and eastern Europe, from Germany to Russia; the northern Mediterranean; and parts of East Asia, including Japan and South Korea—are already facing.

Think of twentysomethings as a single workforce, the best educated there is. In Japan (see article), that workforce will shrink by a fifth in the next decade—a considerable loss of knowledge and skills. At the other end of the age spectrum, state pensions systems face difficulties now, when there are four people of working age to each retired person. By 2030, Japan and Italy will have only two per retiree; by 2050, the ratio will be three to two. An ageing, shrinking population poses problems in other, surprising ways. The Russian army has had to tighten up conscription because there are not enough young men around. In Japan, rural areas have borne the brunt of population decline, which is so bad that one village wants to give up and turn itself into an industrial-waste dump.

States should not be in the business of pushing people to have babies. If women decide to spend their 20s clubbing rather than child-rearing, and their cash on handbags rather than nappies, that's up to them. But the transition to a lower population can be a difficult one, and it is up to governments to ease it. Fortunately, there are a number of ways of going about it—most of which involve social changes that are desirable in themselves.

The best way to ease the transition towards a smaller population would be to encourage people to work for longer, and remove the barriers that prevent them from doing so. State pension ages need raising. Mandatory retirement ages need to go. They're bad not just for society, which has to pay the pensions of perfectly capable people who have been put out to grass, but also for companies, which would do better to use performance, rather than age, as a criterion for employing people. Rigid salary structures in which pay rises with seniority (as in Japan) should also be replaced with more flexible ones. More immigration would ease labour shortages, though it would not stop the ageing of societies because the numbers required would be too vast. Policies to encourage women into the workplace, through better provisions for child care and parental leave, can also help redress the balance between workers and retirees.

Some of those measures might have an interesting side-effect. America and north-western Europe once also faced demographic decline, but are growing again, and not just because of immigration. All sorts of factors may be involved; but one obvious candidate is the efforts those countries have made to ease the business of being a working parent. Most of the changes had nothing to do with population policy: they were carried out to make labour markets efficient or advance sexual equality. But they had the effect of increasing fertility. As traditional societies modernise, fertility falls. In traditional societies with modern economies—Japan and Italy, for instance—fertility falls the most. And in societies which make breeding and working compatible, by contrast, women tend to do both.

Jul 26th 2007 | MOSCOW

From Economist.com

Russia’s opposition is feeble, floundering and fading

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AT A recent gathering of Other Russia, a loose coalition of liberals, nationalists and communists who oppose President Vladimir Putin, a pro-Kremlin youth group lit candles and played a funeral march. The stunt cut close to the bone.

Russia’s opposition may not yet be dead, but it is in a deep coma. The Kremlin has hollowed out politics by rigging rules on parties and elections. It has made it hard for the opposition to put its case on television and sent truncheon-wielding police to dispel protesters. But infighting, lack of ideas and above all low public support have done as much to hurt the opposition. Just four months before a parliamentary election and eight months before the presidential poll, it is divided, demoralised and lacks a single candidate. Mr Putin’s approval rating, meanwhile, stands at a majestic, if propaganda-fuelled, 85%.

Some of Other Russia’s important figures, including Mikhail Kasyanov, an ex-prime minister, and Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent member of parliament, have left after a split with Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion turned activist, largely because of clashing ambitions and trivial rows over procedure. Mr Kasparov and Mr Kasyanov, who says he wants to be president, argued for seven hours just over how to nominate candidates for parliament and the presidency. Their bickering has let down those who have risked attending Other Russia protests. “The bear has not yet been killed, but they’re already trying to divide its skin,” says Eduard Limonov, leader of the banned National Bolshevik Party.

The two older liberal parties, Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces (SPS), have hardly fared better. For years they have failed to combine, though both seek votes from the same sort of people; neither passed the 5% threshold for representation at the last parliamentary election, four years ago. That threshold has now been raised to 7%; the latest polls suggest that neither has a chance of getting over it. “I’m not scared of the Kremlin, but when you can’t agree among your own people, it’s time to leave politics,” says Irina Khakamada, who was a candidate for the presidency in 2004.

But the truth is that both SPS and Yabloko anyway tend to stay within bounds set by the Kremlin. SPS was founded and is funded by Anatoly Chubais, who runs Russia’s state-backed electricity monopoly. He gets on well with Mr Putin and relies on his support for electricity reform. SPS is not planning to put up its own challenger for the presidency (which the Kremlin’s candidate will almost certainly win). It is even nervous about putting some of its more outspoken activists on its list for the parliamentary elections.

The problem, however, runs deeper. As Boris Nemtsov, one of the SPS’s more plausible leaders, says: “There is no real demand for a liberal opposition in Russian society.” Many Russians still associate liberals such as Messrs Nemtsov and Chubais with impoverishment, chaos and loss of national pride in the 1990s. As members of Boris Yeltsin’s government, they talked of macroeconomic stability and fiscal discipline but never presented policies that resonated among ordinary Russians. Some of their oft-maligned reforms have come to fruition, ironically, under Mr Putin: helped by high oil prices, the economy is growing around 7% a year, the government budget is in surplus, inflation has been tamed and debt paid off.

Few Russians care enough about freedom of speech or human rights to risk their improving lifestyle. “The Kremlin has done a deal with the Russian people,” says Mr Kasyanov. ‘“Citizens! Enjoy life, travel abroad, buy cars, but don’t get involved in politicsIf your patriotic feelings start to stir, we’ll satisfy them.’”

Indeed, whereas the appetite for liberal ideas is weak, nationalism remains strong. The Kremlin has set up parties of every hue to split and steal the opposition vote, while squashing any party it cannot control—and the nationalist simulacrums have fared worryingly well. If anyone breaks through the Kremlin’s stranglehold, it is unlikely to be the liberals.

HONG KONG, July 27 — Stock markets across Asia suffered one of the worst falls of the year Friday as contagion spread from Wall Street. By midafternoon some market indexes in the region were down by more than 4 percent as investors deserted riskier assets.

Among the companies worst hit were consumer goods manufacturers heavily dependent on the U.S. market, such as makers of cars, semiconductors and electronic appliances.

Samsung Electronics was down 4.8 percent to 596,000 won on top of earlier declines over the previous four days. Taiwan Semiconductor, the world’s largest custom-chip maker, fell 5.4 percent to 64.50 Taiwan dollars.

None of the region’s major markets was spared. The Nikkei 225 in Japan closed down 418.28 points, or 2.4 percent, to 17,283.81. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 closed down 2.81 percent. By early afternoon, the Taiex, in Taiwan, fell by 4.2 percent, the Singapore Straits Times index fell 3.2 percent and the Hang Seng, in Hong Kong, fell 1.9 percent.

But some analysts said the stock market falls in Asia — the worst in four months — might only be temporary, despite concerns about the health of the U.S. economy and in particular the state of the housing market.

Chris Lobello, a risk and trading strategist at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets in Hong Kong, said Asian markets were gradually becoming “less hostage” to trends in U.S. markets.

“The truth is that looking back over 10 years of history we are seeing Asia decouple a bit from the U.S.,” he said.

Mr. Lobello predicted that Asian markets would recover in the coming weeks, barring a major meltdown in the U.S. economy.

Other analysts were less sanguine. Andrew Wang, a fund manager at Prudential Financial Securities Investment Trust Enterprise in Taipei, said the sell-off in Asia was not “the end of the bull market,” Bloomberg News reported. But he added: “It must feel like that for some panicky investors.”

Jul 19th 2007

From The Economist print edition

Iran's leaders think a nuclear weapon could rejuvenate their tired revolution. How can they be stopped?

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“THE Iranian regime is basically a messianic apocalyptic cult.” So says Israel's once and perhaps future prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. If he is right the world is teetering on the edge of a terrifying crisis.

While the world has been distracted by Iraq, Afghanistan and much else, Iran has been moving relentlessly closer to the point where it could build an atomic bomb. It has converted yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride gas. Now it is spinning the gas through thousands of centrifuges it has installed at the underground enrichment plant it built secretly in Natanz, south of Tehran. A common guess is that if it can run 3,000 centrifuges at high speed for a year, it will end up with enough fuel for its first bomb.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, Iran could have 3,000 centrifuges hooked up by the end of this month. The Iranians say their next aim is to scale up to 54,000 centrifuges. Figuring out how to put the fuel into a usable weapon will also take time—perhaps a year or more. But for would-be bomb-builders, making the fuel is by far the hardest part. The upshot, say Israel and some American experts, is that Iran may have a bomb by the end of 2009. Mohammed ElBaradei, the IAEA's director-general, is more cautious. But even he says that if Iran really wants a bomb it could now build one within three to eight years.

What Iran is doing at Natanz is entirely illegal. It has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and says its nuclear aims are peaceful. But having spent decades deceiving nuclear inspectors, it is disbelieved even by its friends. A year ago this month Russia and China therefore joined the rest of the UN Security Council in ordering Iran to stop. It carried on regardless. The Security Council followed up with two resolutions, in December 2006 and March this year, repeating its demands and applying sanctions. The centrifuges spin defiantly on.

So what next? This story could have at least three unhappy endings. In one, Iran ends up with nuclear weapons, bringing new instability and a hair-trigger face-off with nuclear Israel into one of the world's least-safe neighbourhoods. In another, America or Israel take pre-emptive military action and manage to stop it, even though such an attack would almost certainly have very dangerous consequences of its own. In the third ending, Iran is attacked, and enraged, and retaliates—and still ends up with a bomb anyway.

It is vital to understand that this third finale is not a nightmare dreamt up by editorial writers. After the false intelligence that led America into Iraq, and the mayhem that followed, it may seem hard to believe that America or Israel are pondering an attack on a much bigger Muslim country. But they are—and they are not mad. This time, after all, there is no question of false intelligence: the world's fears are based on capabilities that Iran itself boasts about openly. Nor would there be another invasion: this would be an attack from the air, aimed at disabling or destroying Iran's nuclear sites. From a technical point of view, launching such an attack is well within America's capabilities (America has lately reinforced its carrier fleet in the Persian Gulf) and perhaps within Israel's, too.

Yet such an attack would nonetheless be a huge gamble. Even if it delayed or stopped Iran's nuclear programme, it would knock new holes in America's relations with the Muslim world. And if only for the sake of their domestic political survival, Iran's leaders would almost certainly hit back. Iran could fire hundreds of missiles at Israel, attack American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, organise terrorist attacks in the West or choke off tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the world's oil windpipe. How could any Western leader in his right mind risk initiating such a sequence of events?

The succinct answer of Senator John McCain is that although attacking Iran would be bad, an Iran with nuclear weapons would be worse. He is not alone: most of America's presidential candidates would consider military force.

If Iran really is no more than the “messianic cult” of Mr Netanyahu's imagination, it would be worth running almost any risk to stop it acquiring nuclear weapons. But as our special report argues, Iran is not that easy to read.

Iran is a self-proclaimed theocracy. Yet it has conducted foreign relations since the revolution of 1979 in a way that seems perfectly rational even if it is not pleasant. Its president, the Holocaust-questioning Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is widely reported to have threatened to “wipe Israel off the map”. But in fact he may never have uttered those precise words, and there is both ambiguity and calculation behind the bluster. Look closer and Mr Ahmadinejad is vague about whether he means that Iran should destroy Israel or just that he hopes for Israel's disappearance. Knowing that a nuclear attack on Israel or America would result in its own prompt annihilation, Iran could probably be deterred, just as other nuclear powers have been. Didn't Nikita Khrushchev promise to “bury” the West?

Since Israel has memories of a real Holocaust, it may not set much store by that “probably”. This newspaper continues to believe that even for Israel containment of a nuclear Iran would be less awful than a risky pre-emptive attack that would probably cause mayhem, strengthen the regime and merely delay the day Iran gets a bomb. Yet the whole world still has a huge interest in preventing that day from coming. Even if Iran never used its bomb, mere possession of it might encourage it to adopt a more aggressive foreign policy than the one it is already pursuing in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. And once Iran went nuclear other countries in the region—such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and perhaps Turkey—would probably feel compelled to follow suit, thereby entangling the Middle East in a cat's cradle of nuclear tripwires.

Is there a way to avoid all of the unhappy endings by finding a peaceful way to stop Iran going nuclear? The Europeans hoped they had stumbled on such a solution last year, when they at last talked Russia and China into imposing sanctions and George Bush into dangling the prospect of normal relations with Iran once enrichment stopped. But the mild sanctions imposed so far are not working, and now the technological clock in Natanz is outrunning the diplomatic clock at the United Nations. Iran may soon work out how to spin its centrifuges at full speed for long periods; and once it learns how to do that the odds of stopping it from building a bomb will rapidly lengthen. This suggests that a third sanctions resolution, with sharper teeth, needs to be enacted without delay.

Iran is obstinate, paranoid and ambitious. But it is also vulnerable. A young population with no memory of the revolution is desperate for jobs its leaders have failed to provide. Sanctions that cut off equipment for its decrepit oilfields or struck hard at the financial interests of the regime and its protectors in the Revolutionary Guards would have an immediate impact on its own assessment of the cost of its nuclear programme. That on its own is unlikely to change the regime's mind. If at the same time Iran was offered a dignified ladder to climb down—above all a credible promise of an historic reconciliation with the United States—the troubled leadership of a tired revolution might just grab it. But time is short.

Bare Feet, Sand Stairs and Isolation to Suit a Prince

WHEN your boat cuts its engine at Mike’s Camp, you know it’s time to turn the BlackBerry off. The dock at this Indian Ocean resort, perched on the spine of Kiwayu Island, off the coast of Kenya, is pure Gilligan’s Island, a stick and twine arrangement jutting out from the bush. It leads to a flight of stairs made of sand (I know, it doesn’t sound possible, but it is). Glancing back, past where you have just stepped off your boat, all you see are ribbons of water, green islands and sky.

You’re climbing, but you’re also sinking into vacation mode. The guide tells you to lose your shoes so you can walk better in the sand. He takes your bag. And then you arrive, barefoot and maybe a little thirsty, which is perfect for the cold cocktail that is about to be thrust into your hand, at big thatched-roof bungalow. Everyone — and everything — is in total relaxation mode. Mike’s dog Tigger is prostrate on the palm-matted floor, a few fuzzy cats bask in the sun, and other than the shell mobiles tinkling in the breeze, everything is still.

Mike’s Camp has a lot going for it — the Zen vibe, the tasty Swahili food, the beaches straight out of the paradise manual, and the bucket shower. Call it rough-lux. It’s located on a choice strip of the Kenyan coast that is wild and beautiful but gets very few visitors.

While Lamu, another Indian Ocean island about 30 miles south of Kiwayu, has been thoroughly discovered, and the coastal city of Mombasa has the big hotels, the long arm of the tourist trade has barely touched Kiwayu. There are just two exclusive resorts, Mike’s Camp, also known as Munira Island Camp, and Kiwayu Safari Village. Both are stunning. Neither is especially easy on the wallet. And because of their seclusion and privacy, the two of them have become something of a hide-out for folks like Prince William and Mick Jagger.

Kiwayu may be remote, but it is actually not all that hard to get to. SafariLink, an airline based in Nairobi, makes stops in Kiwayu en route to Lamu if there are two or more passengers, which usually translates into daily service and an easy leg to add to any East African safari. On the two-hour flight, I couldn’t get over how green and forested this part of Kenya is. The trees are packed so closely together, it looks as if you couldn’t slide a credit card between them. When we landed at a dirt airstrip, there was just a single Land Rover waiting in the shade, which took us to Kiwayu Safari Village, a resort owned by an Italian family.

How else to judge their influence but by the food? Lunches were the classic Italian two-step of primi piatti and secondi like risotto with asparagus and cracked crab.

And dinners were definitely something to write home about. At the conch shell’s call, my wife, Courtenay, and I, along with another couple we were traveling with, were summoned to the lounge for seaweed tempura and mini raw oysters — gourmet hors d’oeuvres masquerading as bar snacks. We then walked to the beach, where we feasted on calamari and enormous skewered shrimp at a candle-lit table planted in the sand. The sky was wallpapered with stars, all the way down to the horizon. (After dinner, we were presented with the only hunk of Taleggio I have seen on the continent.)

We waddled back to our room, a luxurious bungalow with soft lighting, a solar-heated shower and a giant clam shell at the entrance to rinse our feet. There were no doors, no hinges and no glass.

While I sank into bed, thinking, if this is good enough for Mick, it’s good enough for me, I heard something, something clicking.

Claws? The mosquito net apparently kept out more than just mosquitoes: a pink crab was scaling the wall of fabric. A gentle swat sent it sidestepping back to the sand.

The next morning, we explored nearby Mkokoni village, where the women offered us toy fish carved from washed up flip-flops.

Trolling the endless beaches is just one way to spend the day. Other options include picnics, dhow sailing or game drives into the bush right behind the resort, which is teeming with lions, giraffes, buffaloes and elephants. But most guests, the manager said, “just sit back and read books and love it.”

Sounds about right, I thought as I scanned the cushion-filled lounge, where two women in bikinis were dozing off to Norah Jones. I pondered the collision of this joint’s classy, European style with the predominantly Muslim local customs, remembering the laminated card in my room that warned “in the unlikely event of being approached when naked on the vast adjacent beaches, please cover yourselves.”

The owners of Kiwayu’s two resorts, thank goodness, are more friendly than competitive, and when it came time to go to Mike’s Camp, the staff at the safari village hailed Mike Kennedy, the camp’s owner, on the radio to send over a speedboat.

As soon as we arrived at the camp, one friend sighed: “Ah, the hippie version!” At Mike’s, instead of his and hers porcelain basins in the bungalow, there was a silver bowl for a sink. The shower was a bucket on a pulley. The toilet? Fill it yourself.

All the bungalows have priceless views, with miles of creeks and islands stretching to the west and the wide open Indian Ocean to the east. Space. That was the sense I had looking out from my room. Lots of space. I could even see Somalia, whose border is about 25 miles north, though none of that country’s chaos seemed able to reach me.

I spent my days in the water: water-skiing, snorkeling, boogie-boarding and diving off a coral cliff in a nearby village with 20 naked kids splashing and giggling around me. The resort is part of the Kiunga Marine National Reserve and home to sea tortoises and dugongs, a manateelike creature. But you’re allowed to fish, and Mike can arrange boats. He insisted that it’s easy to catch marlin, barracuda, swordfish, sailfish, wahoo, snapper and tuna. “It’s like a supermarket out there,” Mike said.

And that’s the thing about Mike’s. It’s really all about, well, Mike. He’s a cheery, freckled, 50-year-old Kenyan, whose father was a colonial tea farmer from Britain. He joined us for a snorkel and hung out with us afterward at the beach hut he built, strung with hammocks. He sipped a sundowner with us that evening, as the African sky glowed orange and purple and pink. During dinner, family-style, of course, he regaled us with stories about sailing up and down the Swahili coast and exploring little islands. “They’re wonderful,” he said. “You just sit there and chip oysters off the rocks with your white wine and Tabasco sauce.”

Mike’s a foodie, and he served a lip-smacking crab curry our first night. Then he said good night and padded down the sandy, moonlit path to his own bungalow.

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

Kiwayu is easily accessible by air from Nairobi’s Wilson Airport. SafariLink Aviation offers daily flights, at $365 round trip, from mid-December until mid-April and from July until the end of October, provided there are at least two passengers. For details, contact SafariLink at (254-720) 888111 or see www.safarilink-kenya.com/safari/. United States citizens need a visa to enter Kenya, which can be purchased on arrival for $50. (Many prices are given in United States dollars, which businesses readily accept.)

You can also hire a speedboat or dhow (a traditional sailboat) to Kiwayu from Lamu, a popular tourist destination 30 miles to the south. Speedboats take about one and a half hours and cost approximately $350. Dhows take about six hours and set you back $220.

WHERE TO STAY

There are only two resorts. The more luxurious is Kiwayu Safari Village, on Kenya’s mainland across the bay from Kiwayu Island, consisting of 18 thatched-roof bungalows strung along the shore, plus one off-shore honeymoon suite on Kiwayu Island. All are open-air and decorated with bright cloths, pillowed hammocks and traditional Swahili furniture. Italian meals with a coastal flair are served in the main lodge.

Bookings can be made at (254-735) 598858 or by sending e-mail to a reservation agent at kiwayu@kiwayu.com. Additional information can be found at www.kiwayu.com. The cost is $700 a night per couple, including all meals. Higher rates apply over the year-end holiday period, and there is an additional $20-a-day conservation fee. Payment can be made by credit card, although bank transfers are preferred. The resort is closed during the rainy season, April 15 to July 31.

Mike’s Camp, also known as Munira Island Camp, is on Kiwayu Island itself. The trip by motorboat from Kiwayu Safari Village takes about 15 minutes. The camp has only seven rustic bungalows nestled along the ridge of the island, with exceptional views of the Indian Ocean to the east and watery mangrove forests to the west. Mike Kennedy, the resort’s personable owner, gives this place a relaxed, homey feel. Bookings can be made at (254-20) 512213 or by e-mail at bigblue@africaonline.co.ke. A bungalow with full board is $440 a night for two people The resort is closed May through the middle of July.

WHAT TO DO

Kiwayu is a great place for relaxing with a good book and a fruity cocktail. Or taking long walks on the beach, either toward a deserted cove or a fishing village. For water lovers, there’s snorkeling, water-skiing, boogie-boarding, windsurfing, sailing and deep-sea fishing. The two resorts are smack in the middle of the Kiunga Marine National Reserve and the Dodori and Boni reserves, where you can see cheetahs, giraffes, lions and elephants.

So, here it is at last: The final confrontation between Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, the Chosen One, the “symbol of hope” for both the Wizard and Muggle worlds, and Lord Voldemort, He Who Must Not Be Named, the nefarious leader of the Death Eaters and would-be ruler of all. Good versus Evil. Love versus Hate. The Seeker versus the Dark Lord.

 

J. K. Rowling’s monumental, spellbinding epic, 10 years in the making, is deeply rooted in traditional literature and Hollywood sagas — from the Greek myths to Dickens and Tolkien to “Star Wars.” And true to its roots, it ends not with modernist, “Soprano”-esque equivocation, but with good old-fashioned closure: a big-screen, heart-racing, bone-chilling confrontation and an epilogue that clearly lays out people’s fates. Getting to the finish line is not seamless — the last part of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final book in the series, has some lumpy passages of exposition and a couple of clunky detours — but the overall conclusion and its determination of the main characters’ story lines possess a convincing inevitability that make some of the prepublication speculation seem curiously blinkered in retrospect.

With each installment, the “Potter” series has grown increasingly dark, and this volume — a copy of which was purchased at a New York City store yesterday, though the book is embargoed for release until 12:01 a.m. on Saturday — is no exception. While Ms. Rowling’s astonishingly limber voice still moves effortlessly between Ron’s adolescent sarcasm and Harry’s growing solemnity, from youthful exuberance to more philosophical gravity, “Deathly Hallows” is, for the most part, a somber book that marks Harry’s final initiation into the complexities and sadnesses of adulthood.

From his first days at Hogwarts, the young, green-eyed boy bore the burden of his destiny as a leader, coping with the expectations and duties of his role, and in this volume he is clearly more Henry V than Prince Hal, more King Arthur than young Wart: high-spirited war games of Quidditch have given way to real war, and Harry often wishes he were not the de facto leader of the Resistance movement, shouldering terrifying responsibilities, but an ordinary teenage boy — free to romance Ginny Weasley and hang out with his friends.

Harry has already lost his parents, his godfather Sirius and his teacher Professor Dumbledore (all mentors he might have once received instruction from) and in this volume, the losses mount with unnerving speed: at least a half-dozen characters we have come to know die in these pages, and many others are wounded or tortured. Voldemort and his followers have infiltrated Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic, creating havoc and terror in the Wizard and Muggle worlds alike, and the members of various populations — including elves, goblins and centaurs — are choosing sides.

No wonder then that Harry often seems overwhelmed with disillusionment and doubt in the final installment of this seven-volume bildungsroman. He continues to struggle to control his temper, and as he and Ron and Hermione search for the missing Horcruxes (secret magical objects in which Voldemort has stashed parts of his soul, objects that Harry must destroy if he hopes to kill the evil lord), he literally enters a dark wood, in which he must do battle not only with the Death Eaters, but also with the temptations of hubris and despair.

Harry’s weird psychic connection with Voldemort (symbolized by the lightning-bolt forehead scar he bears as a result of the Dark Lord’s attack on him as a baby) seems to have grown stronger too, giving him clues to Voldemort’s actions and whereabouts, even as it lures him ever closer to the dark side. One of the plot’s significant turning points concerns Harry’s decision on whether to continue looking for the Horcruxes — the mission assigned to him by the late Dumbledore — or to pursue the Hallows, three magical objects said to make their possessor the master of Death.

Harry’s journey will propel him forward to a final showdown with his arch enemy, and also send him backward into the past, to the house in Godric’s Hollow where his parents died, to learn about his family history and the equally mysterious history of Dumbledore’s family. At the same time, he will be forced to ponder the equation between fraternity and independence, free will and fate, and to come to terms with his own frailties and those of others. Indeed, ambiguities proliferate throughout “The Deathly Hallows”: we are made to see that kindly Dumbledore, sinister Severus Snape and perhaps even the awful Muggle cousin Dudley Dursley may be more complicated than they initially seem, that all of them, like Harry, have hidden aspects to their personalities, and that choice — more than talent or predisposition — matters most of all.

It is Ms. Rowling’s achievement in this series that she manages to make Harry both a familiar adolescent — coping with the banal frustrations of school and dating — and an epic hero, kin to everyone from the young King Arthur to Spider-Man and Luke Skywalker. This same magpie talent has enabled her to create a narrative that effortlessly mixes up allusions to Homer, Milton, Shakespeare and Kafka, with silly kid jokes about vomit-flavored candies, a narrative that fuses a plethora of genres (from the boarding-school novel to the detective story to the epic quest) into a story that could be Exhibit A in a Joseph Campbell survey of mythic archetypes.

In doing so, J. K. Rowling has created a world as fully detailed as L. Frank Baum’s Oz or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a world so minutely imagined in terms of its history and rituals and rules that it qualifies as an alternate universe, which may be one reason the “Potter” books have spawned such a passionate following and such fervent exegesis. With this volume, the reader realizes that small incidents and asides in earlier installments (hidden among a huge number of red herrings) create a breadcrumb trail of clues to the plot, that Ms. Rowling has fitted together the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of this long undertaking with Dickensian ingenuity and ardor. Objects and spells from earlier books — like the invisibility cloak, Polyjuice Potion, Dumbledore’s Pensieve and Sirius’s flying motorcycle — play important roles in this volume, and characters encountered before, like the house-elf Dobby and Mr. Ollivander the wandmaker, resurface, too.

The world of Harry Potter is a place where the mundane and the marvelous, the ordinary and the surreal coexist. It’s a place where cars can fly and owls can deliver the mail, a place where paintings talk and a mirror reflects people’s innermost desires. It’s also a place utterly recognizable to readers, a place where death and the catastrophes of daily life are inevitable, and people’s lives are defined by love and loss and hope — the same way they are in our own mortal world.

1.) Fine : This is the word women use to end an argument when they are
right and you need to shut up.

2.) Five Minutes : If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour.
Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more
minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.

3.) Nothing : This is the calm before the storm. This means something,
and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing
usually end in fine.

4.) Go Ahead : This is a dare, not permission. Don't Do It!

5.) Loud Sigh : This is actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement
often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an
idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing
with you about nothing. (Refer back to #3 for the meaning of nothing.)

6.) That's Okay : This is one of the most dangerous statements a woman
can make to a man. That's okay means she wants to think long and hard
before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.

7.) Thanks : A woman is thanking you, do not question, or Faint. Just
say you're welcome.

8.) Whatever : Is a women's way of saying F@!K YOU!

9.) Don't worry about it, I got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning
this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but
is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking 'What's
wrong?' For the woman's response refer to #3.

Send this to the men you know, to warn them about arguments they can
avoid if they remember the terminology.

Send this to all the women you know to give them a good laugh, cause
they know it's true.

Frustrating perhaps the most elaborately orchestrated marketing machine ever mobilized for a book, photographs of what appeared to be every single page of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the breathlessly awaited seventh and final installment in the series by J. K. Rowling, were circulating on the Web yesterday.

To the publishers of Harry Potter, there is no time or date more sacred than what they are calling “midnight magic,” 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. Then, and only then, can readers buy their copies of “Deathly Hallows.” Both Bloomsbury, the British publisher, and Scholastic, the publisher in the United States, have gone to great lengths to safeguard the book’s content and release date, ordering booksellers not to sell a single book a minute earlier than the official time.

But those less mindful of the publishers’ wishes could go onto various file-sharing Web sites yesterday to look at amateur-seeming photographs of what appeared to be each pair of facing pages of a copy of the book. The pictures, which could be downloaded through sites like the Pirate Bay and MediaFire, showed the book laid out on a green-and-red-flecked beige looped carpet, with fingers holding the pages open. Some of the photos made the text difficult to read, but the fiercely protected ending was definitely legible.

Lisa Holton, president of Scholastic’s trade and book fairs division, said the company was asking various Web site hosts to take the photos down. “We’re not confirming if anything is real,” she said. “But in the spirit of getting to midnight magic without a lot of hoo-ha, can you just take some of this stuff down.”

The company’s lawyers were also pursuing the identity of the person who posted the pictures.

On Monday, the company issued a subpoena to Gaia Online, a social networking and gaming site, ordering it to take down a link to some photos purporting to be “Deathly Hallows” pages posted by a user. Bill Danon, a Gaia spokesman, said that within hours of the subpoena, Gaia removed the photos and banned the user for 14 days.

Some fans were convinced that the images posted around the Web were authentic. Emerson Spartz, the founder and Web master of MuggleNet.com, one of the biggest Harry Potter fan sites, said he thought the photos were the real deal.

“I read enough of it to where I could tell,” he said. Although he did not read to the end, he said: “I’m not even really hopeful that it won’t get spoiled for me. I’m just expecting it anytime I log on to check e-mail.”

Doris Herrmann, an English teacher in Clear Lake, Tex., who is also a project coordinator for the Leaky Cauldron (leakynews.com), another big fan site, said: “I hate to say it, but it really does look authentic.” She said that while it was possible to work wonders with Photoshop or other programs, it would be difficult to write a whole manuscript, typeset it like the originals and then photograph the whole thing.

Tens of thousands of people downloaded the files yesterday, according to BigChampagne, a research firm that tracks file-sharing. By midday, many of the Web links were no longer working.

On the link-sharing site Digg yesterday, a person using the name TocsinFilms appeared to take credit for uploading the images, then said he was simply “one of the first” to do so. He wrote on Digg in May that he had obtained a copy of the book from “someone who works for a Scholastic Distributing company for Waldenbooks” and had posted photos of its pages online. Those photos have since been taken down. This person did not respond to e-mail or telephone inquiries.

Some who say they have copies of the book or knowledge of the plot have been posting snippets and scans of supposed manuscript pages for weeks. Ms. Holton acknowledged that some of the photos looked genuine. But, she added, “it’s a bunch of people who are going to extraordinary lengths to make it look like they have the authentic book.”

There were also six photos posted on Flickr, the picture-sharing site, by a user named hermionepotter77, a reference to one of Harry’s best friends. Over the caption “Here ya go kids, the Deathly Hallows ending!” one appeared to show the first page of the final chapter; others showed the table of contents and more pages. This material was almost entirely different from what appeared in the images of the full book, meaning one or both had to be fake.

“This happens with every book, and there are a lot of them out there, and we appeal to everybody not to put them up,” said Sarah Beal, a spokeswoman for Bloomsbury in London. “It’s amazing how creative people can be. It may look real, but it doesn’t mean they are.”

Hype and frenzy have been building for weeks as readers anticipate the release of this final Harry Potter book. Ms. Rowling has hinted that two or more characters are likely to die, leading to speculation from many fans that Harry may not survive his own series. Fans have been hypothesizing about other important plot points, too, like who will end up with whom and whether Prof. Severus Snape, a character whose moral character has been in question, is genuinely evil.

Despite the possible leak, bookstores across the country continued to gear up for festivities on Friday night, expecting long lines of readers at midnight. Scholastic is publishing a record 12 million copies, and Ms. Holton said the company had no plans to move up the release date.

“If in fact the book is posted online or the ending is revealed prior to midnight on Friday, it will not result in us selling a single less copy of the book,” said Steve Riggio, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, which has 1.3 million orders for “Deathly Hallows.” As far as Mr. Riggio is concerned, the press coverage generated by potential spoilers just increases advance orders.

Judy Bulow, children’s book buyer for the three Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, said she doubted that Web spoilers would deter readers from buying the book or attending the midnight parties.

“I think kids are still wanting the great big book,” she said. Tattered Cover is planning parties at two locations and will raffle off the chance to be first in line to buy a copy.

Jul 16th 2007

From Economist.com

A step in the right direction

AFP

THE system of checks and balances deemed so vital to good government does not work so well in the realm of corporate governance. The recent troubles at Airbus and its parent company, EADS, provide a fine example of the industrial bother of loading evenly the scales of corporate power for the sake of politics. So a decision on Monday July 16th to reshape the management of the European Aerospace giant should be greeted with some good cheer. Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s new president, was in expansive mood. He emerged from a meeting in Toulouse, at Airbus’s headquarters, with Angela Merkel, his German counterpart, proclaiming it a “great day for the Franco-German axis”.

Although the deal maintains a rough balance of power at the top of the two firms it does away with a cumbersome dual-management structure at EADS. Instead of two chairmen and chief executives representing the countries that control the bulk of shares in EADS the firm will now make do with one of each. Rüdiger Grube, a German, will become chairman while Louis Gallois, a Frenchman, will remain as chief executive but without a German shadow. His former cohabitee, Thomas Enders, will become boss of Airbus while France’s Fabrice Brégier will become the jetmaker’s chief operating officer. EADS will also get more independent board members.

This will bring some clarity to the chain of command, with luck improving the running of EADS and Airbus. Last month an earnest report from the French parliament pointed out the obvious: infighting had hampered Airbus in its efforts to compete with Boeing, its American arch-rival. As a measure of the turmoil, last year EADS and Airbus said goodbye to three chief executives. The report singled out rivalry between two French EADS bosses, Phillippe Camus and Noël Forgeard, as an unwanted distraction as the firm struggled to overcome problems with the A380, its superjumbo. Delays to delivery of the new plane pushed EADS into losses last year.

The losses will continue this year, even though demand for passenger jets is booming. Despite unveiling an extraordinary armada of orders and commitments for over 600 planes at the Paris Air Show last month Airbus still faces an uncertain future. Mr Sarkozy’s new-boy enthusiasm and Ms Merkel’s diplomatic skills may be lauded for producing an agreement to rebalance the management. Elsewhere much remains the same. The French government owns 15% of EADS, and Lagardère, a French conglomerate, owns 7.5%; DaimlerChrysler and German banks hold 22.5%. The governments have ensured that the split remains even to ensure that jobs are apportioned equally.

Now job losses are to be shared out equally too. The firm’s unions are unhappy that, despite the bulging order book, Airbus is in the midst of a cost-cutting effort that will see 10,000 workers depart and the sale of six factories to industrial partners in the hope of saving €2 billion a year. But Airbus is caught in a currency trap. Planes are sold for cheap dollars while Airbus’s expenses are in pricey euros. The firm reckons that every €0.10 that the euro falls against the dollar costs it €1 billion.

The revamped management team might have better luck with efforts to ape Boeing. But outsourcing jobs to countries beyond the euro-area and allying with more risk-sharing partners will be tricky even for the slimmed down executive team if political concerns must be considered. Worryingly, Mr Sarkozy’s electioneering included a promise to defend French industry vigorously. His free-market instincts are tempered by an interventionist streak that might make it hard to accept further cuts even if Ms Merkel were willing to see Germans sharing the pain.

Fixing the bloated management should give cause for optimism. Mr Sarkozy has indicated that at some point the French government would be prepared to sell its stake in EADS. If the firms were eventually freed from their political shackles, that would be cause for considerable celebration.