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The financial assets of Peter Madoff — brother of convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff — have been frozen until an April 3 court hearing by Nassau Supreme Court Justice Stephen Bucaria, according to an order the judge filed on Wednesday.
Two retired Turkish generals are accused of masterminding a plot to overthrow the government, according to an indictment officially released Wednesday that charged more than 50 others as their accomplices.
The last flood even near that level was in 1997, when the river crested at 39.6 feet. The record for the Red River in Fargo, the state’s most populous city, was set in 1897 at 40.1 feet, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Red River was one of many rivers that were at flood level early Thursday in North Dakota. The threat from the Missouri River caused more than 1,000 people to be evacuated from an area near Bismarck on Tuesday. On Wednesday, authorities blasted ice jams from the river in effort to keep it from rising even higher. But the Red River posed the gravest threat as it rose toward historic levels, officials said. “Nobody that’s alive today has ever seen it at 41 feet,” said Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker. “They need to take this extremely seriously.” Walaker said it’s only “smart” for city officials and residents to think about worst-case scenarios, which could include a citywide evacuation. “If they have people that are infirm or have difficulty getting around, they [residents] should consider taking them out of the city” before any evacuation is ordered, he said. Watch flooding compounded by snow » “If you have kids that are small and so forth, evacuation would scare the tar out of them.” City officials had been hoping that the river would top out at 39 feet, which would mean that their plan of getting all dikes to a 42-foot level would be fine.
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But with the 41-foot-crest predicted, officials and volunteers will need to add an extra foot on the levees containing the river. Officials called on volunteers Wednesday to help out day or night at two locations. Both the University of North Dakota’s arena, the Fargodome, and a central location will continue operating around the clock, officials said. Watch volunteers heed the call to help » Earlier Wednesday, emergency crews responded to an upscale neighborhood in the town of Oxbow, situated directly along the Red River about 15 miles from Fargo. Almost all of the 60 or so houses in the neighborhood had been evacuated, but the U.S. Coast Guard used an airboat to rescue nine people, including a man who had climbed a tree to avoid deepening water. “I know one call came in — the water smashed through the basement windows and was filling all the way up to the main level,” said Sheriff Paul D. Laney. Some homeowners had built sandbag dikes around their homes, many of which had been breached. By mid-afternoon, water was overtaking mailboxes. Watch North Dakota brace for record flood » Five adults and an infant had to be rescued by helicopter in nearby Abercrombie. Walaker said some arrests had been made to keep people off the dikes, because with an ice-and-snow mixture, the areas on and around the dikes are dangerous. Walaker did not elaborate on the arrests beyond saying there were just a few. Laney offered a stern warning to anyone in area without a good reason. See map of affected area »
“I’m going say it as blunt as I can be: Stay out of our operation area if you don’t belong here,” Laney said. “I’ve put an arrest team out up and down the corridor.” “Peoples’ lives are at stake,” Laney added. “Peoples’ houses and properties are on the line.”
City officials spent much of Wednesday working on a revised plan after the National Weather Service issued a foreboding forecast for the Red River: a 41-foot crest predicted to hit Saturday.
The last flood even near that level was in 1997, when the river crested at 39.6 feet. The record for the Red River in Fargo, the state’s most populous city, was set in 1897 at 40.1 feet, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Red River was one of many rivers that were at flood level early Thursday in North Dakota. The threat from the Missouri River caused more than 1,000 people to be evacuated from an area near Bismarck on Tuesday. On Wednesday, authorities blasted ice jams from the river in effort to keep it from rising even higher. But the Red River posed the gravest threat as it rose toward historic levels, officials said. “Nobody that’s alive today has ever seen it at 41 feet,” said Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker. “They need to take this extremely seriously.” Walaker said it’s only “smart” for city officials and residents to think about worst-case scenarios, which could include a citywide evacuation. “If they have people that are infirm or have difficulty getting around, they [residents] should consider taking them out of the city” before any evacuation is ordered, he said. Watch flooding compounded by snow » “If you have kids that are small and so forth, evacuation would scare the tar out of them.” City officials had been hoping that the river would top out at 39 feet, which would mean that their plan of getting all dikes to a 42-foot level would be fine.
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But with the 41-foot-crest predicted, officials and volunteers will need to add an extra foot on the levees containing the river. Officials called on volunteers Wednesday to help out day or night at two locations. Both the University of North Dakota’s arena, the Fargodome, and a central location will continue operating around the clock, officials said. Watch volunteers heed the call to help » Earlier Wednesday, emergency crews responded to an upscale neighborhood in the town of Oxbow, situated directly along the Red River about 15 miles from Fargo. Almost all of the 60 or so houses in the neighborhood had been evacuated, but the U.S. Coast Guard used an airboat to rescue nine people, including a man who had climbed a tree to avoid deepening water. “I know one call came in — the water smashed through the basement windows and was filling all the way up to the main level,” said Sheriff Paul D. Laney. Some homeowners had built sandbag dikes around their homes, many of which had been breached. By mid-afternoon, water was overtaking mailboxes. Watch North Dakota brace for record flood » Five adults and an infant had to be rescued by helicopter in nearby Abercrombie. Walaker said some arrests had been made to keep people off the dikes, because with an ice-and-snow mixture, the areas on and around the dikes are dangerous. Walaker did not elaborate on the arrests beyond saying there were just a few. Laney offered a stern warning to anyone in area without a good reason. See map of affected area »
“I’m going say it as blunt as I can be: Stay out of our operation area if you don’t belong here,” Laney said. “I’ve put an arrest team out up and down the corridor.” “Peoples’ lives are at stake,” Laney added. “Peoples’ houses and properties are on the line.”
The Obama administration’s initiative to deploy additional federal resources in the fight against rising drug-related violence along the Mexican border was criticized as insufficient in a Senate committee hearing Wednesday.
The administration’s plan to send hundreds of extra federal agents and new crime-fighting equipment to the border “represents a significant step forward” but is not enough, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, said. Mexican drug cartels, believed to be operating in more than 230 American cities “from Appalachia to Alaska,” represent a “clear and present” danger to the United States, Lieberman said at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on border violence. “I think you’re going to need more resources to get this job done,” he told Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. The United States needs to “make life miserable” for the drug cartels so “life is better for us,” he said. Committee member Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, also praised the Obama administration’s plan, but agreed more needs to be done. The cartels are believed to be responsible for the deaths of more than 6,000 Mexicans last year. Some of that violence has spilled over into the United States as traffickers purchase American firearms and fuel a high U.S. demand for illegal narcotics. Watch Napolitano discuss the plan to curb border violence » Lieberman, who chairs the committee, called for an additional $250 million to be used for the hiring of 1,600 additional customs and border protection officers. He said that another $50 million should be allocated to immigration and customs agents investigating firearms distribution and violence near the border.
He also called on Congress to close “the gun show loophole … that allows purchasers to circumvent background checks that occur at gun stores.” Finally, he argued that U.S. laws need to be updated to help authorities better track money from American drug sales, “the lifeblood” of the cartels. Drug sale proceeds, he noted, are “increasingly being smuggled back to Mexico in stored-value cards. A single card can hold thousands of dollars, is far less conspicuous than bundled cash and does not have to be, as a matter of law, declared at the border,” he said. The cards are “not considered legal monetary instruments,” he noted, and officials therefore have little authority to police them. Lieberman said additional funds and legal reforms are necessary to combat cartel violence that has started to resemble tactics used by extremists in the war on terror. The cartels are “attacking police stations and other government facilities (and) kidnapping and killing family members or associates,” he said. Lieberman’s remarks came one day after Napolitano announced the Obama administration’s plan to combat drug-related violence along the border. Watch Obama discuss the plan » The Obama plan calls for doubling the number of border security task force teams, as well as moving a significant number of other federal agents, equipment and resources to the border. It also involves greater intelligence sharing aimed at cracking down on the flow into Mexico of money and weapons that help fuel the drug trade. The plan commits $700 million to bolster Mexican law-enforcement and crime-prevention efforts. It also calls for tripling the number of Department of Homeland Security intelligence analysts dedicated to stopping Mexican-related violence.
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In addition, it calls for increasing the number of U.S. immigration officials working in Mexico, strengthening the presence of border canine units and quadrupling the number of border liaison officers working with Mexican law enforcement agencies. McCain voiced praise in Wednesday’s hearing for Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s efforts to combat the cartels. He said Calderon is facing an uphill struggle in part because “corruption penetrates to literally the highest levels of (the Mexican) government.” The drug war “is an existential threat to the government of Mexico,” McCain said. “If the Mexican government fails and is taken over by the drug cartels … it not only has profound consequences for Mexico, it certainly has the most profound consequences for the United States of America.” McCain noted that the city of Phoenix, Arizona, now has the second-highest kidnapping rate in the world, behind only Mexico City. A recent rise in the number of kidnappings in Phoenix has been tied to the drug cartels. On Tuesday, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon called the administration’s initiative “a great first step,” but added, “it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of what is needed.” Phoenix finds itself at the center of a “perfect storm” of drug runners and human smugglers, he said. While most traditional crimes are down, crimes such as drug-related kidnappings and torturing are overwhelming Gordon’s police department. “Most nights we have over 60 Phoenix police officers (and) some federal agents rushing to rescue those on a reactive basis,” Gordon said. Texas Gov. Rick Perry also issued a mixed response on Tuesday to the administration’s announcement. “While we appreciate the additional investigative resources, what we really need are more border patrol agents and officers at the bridges to conduct increased northbound and southbound inspections, as well as additional funding for local law enforcement along the border to deny Mexican drug cartels access to the United States,” he said in a statement. “I have asked the administration for an immediate deployment of 1,000 additional National Guard troops to support civilian law enforcement and border patrol agents and remain hopeful that we will get the resources we need. The state of Texas will continue to fill in the gaps until the federal government provides adequate resources necessary to secure our border and protect our citizens from those seeking to do us harm.” The Homeland Security Committee hearing was held as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began a visit to Mexico on Wednesday for two days of meetings with top officials. Watch more on Clinton’s mission » Clinton said the United States takes responsibility for its role in the drug wars and is committed to working with Mexico and helping it come out of the drug war stronger.
“Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” she said en route to Mexico City, Mexico, according to pool reports. “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians. So, yes, I feel very strongly we have a co-responsibility.”
Florida police said a woman accused of abducting an infant by posing as an immigration officer is refusing to say anything about the case. She turned the baby over to authorities Tuesday.
“We may never know what she was thinking or what she was planning to do with the baby,” Plant City, Florida, police spokesman Capt. Darrell Wilson said Wednesday. “She invoked the right to remain silent, so all questioning stopped,” Wilson added. The infant was turned over to sheriff’s deputies Tuesday evening some 10 hours after a statewide Amber Alert was issued. Authorities said the child appeared to be in good health. Bond was set Wednesday at $750,000 for the suspect, 43-year-old Amalia Tabata Pereira, during a hearing in Manatee County court. Pereira, the wife of a minor-league baseball player in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, faces charges of interference with child custody, kidnapping, false imprisonment and child abuse, authorities said. According to police, a woman claiming to be an immigration official spoke to migrant worker Rosa Sirilo-Francisco at the Hillsborough County Health Department and told her she had to turn over her 2-month-old daughter Sandra Cruz-Francisco or face deportation. The baby’s parents are from Mexico and had taken the child to the clinic for a routine check-up, according to Wilson. After giving up the child, the mother was told by a relative in Georgia that federal immigration officials would not follow such a procedure, so the parents reported their daughter missing. Ten hours later, Pereira surrendered the child to Manatee County sheriff’s deputies, according to authorities. Pereira’s husband, Jose Tabata, issued a statement saying he was “shocked to be told today that my wife has been arrested for kidnapping. I am hurt, frustrated, and confused by her actions.” Pirates President Frank Coonelly said in a written statement: “The Pirates organization will continue to do anything and everything we can to assist and support Jose during this difficult personal time.” Police say Tabata is not a suspect. “Our primary focus is and was on her, we got the right person and he had no knowledge or anything to do with this,” said Wilson of the Plant City police, referring to Pereira.
Like nose-picking and a preoccupation with feculence, the inability to sit still for long periods is a defining characteristic of childhood. But children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder often squirm constantly, even when other kids can remain still. Many parents and teachers respond by trying to get ADHD kids, at any cost, to stop fidgeting. The assumption is that if they could just stop wriggling, they would be able to focus and learn.
But a new study suggests that a better approach for ADHD kids is to let them move all they want. That’s because many kids use their movements — like swiveling in a chair or folding a leg underneath themselves and bouncing in a desk seat or repeatedly lolling and righting their head — the way many adults use caffeine: to stay focused. In other words, it may be that excessive movement doesn’t prevent learning but actually facilitates it.
Longtime ADHD researcher Mark Rapport supervised the study, which is set to be published in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. Rapport, a professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, notes that our activity level — how much we move around in everyday situations — is one of the most fixed parts of our personalities. If you are a fidgety kid, you will be a fidgety adult, even if you learn to manage your movements with caffeine, stress-reduction, a personal trainer or other adult accoutrements.
The idea that stimulants like caffeine can help you sit still and pay attention seems counterintuitive at first. But that surprising fact lies at the heart of Rapport’s work: stimulants augment your working, or short-term, memory, where information is stored temporarily and used to carry out deliberate tasks like, say, solving a challenging math problem. ADHD kids have a hard time with working memory because they lack adequate cortical arousal, and Rapport believes that their squirms and fidgets help stimulate that arousal.
His study was small — just 23 boys ages 8 to 12 participated — but uncompromisingly meticulous; it took four years to complete. Twelve of the boys had an ADHD diagnosis. The other 11 were developing normally. All underwent a battery of tests at Rapport’s lab over four consecutive Saturdays.
Since I’ve always been fidgety, I asked Rapport if he wouldn’t mind putting me through the same tests he gave the boys. And so last week I found myself at the UCF Psychology Department, where a grad student affixed a device called an actigraph to my left wrist. Actigraphs look like digital watches and generate a signal each time they are moved, even slightly. They allow researchers to measure, quite precisely, a subject’s kinetic activity. The boys in Rapport’s experiments wore actigraphs on their ankles as well as their wrists because kids are often just as twitchy below the waist as above.
Wearing the actigraph, I sat before a computer in a small windowless room and took working-memory tests. For one test, I had to recite aloud a series of numbers that appeared on the screen. I was asked not only to remember the numbers but also to restate them in proper numerical order. So if I saw 4, then 3, then 1, then 8, I had to say, “One, three, four, eight.” Each series of numbers also included a random letter, which I had to state at the end: “One, three, four, eight, D.”
At first the test sounded simple, not least because I knew an 8-year-old could ostensibly complete it. But I found it quite difficult. Working-memory tests require intense concentration, and I was distracted because I was nervous. Rapport, several of his grad students, a UCF public relations official and a friend of mine were all watching me through an open doorway while I performed the tests. I ended up scoring worse than some of Rapport’s kids.
My experience of being nervous was instructive because it mimicked, in a way, the cognitive strain under which an ADHD kid takes such tests. ADHD compromises the brain’s executive functioning — its ability to master unexpected exercises. The same way I got nervous, ADHD kids get momentarily lost, their attention fractured for a few seconds. Think about when you’re reading and get to the end of a paragraph and realize you haven’t been paying attention: that’s what it’s like for ADHD kids, all the time. My actigraph scores confirmed that I wasn’t operating normally for a 38-year-old adult. Instead, during the experiment, I displayed the involuntary body movements of a typical 12-year-old boy.
Rapport also conducted a control experiment with the boys in which they watched the pod-racing scene from Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. He showed me a video of a couple of the boys watching the scene, and I was shocked: even the ADHD kids who had spun around endlessly during their cognitive tests sat perfectly still while they watched the pod race. The film clip required almost no working memory, no concentrated effort. The scene simply washed over the passively watching boys, none of whom had to move around to stay alert.
Which suggests a classroom technique for ADHD kids: Don’t overly tax their working memory. Rapport, who used to be a school psychologist, says the average teacher doesn’t understand how ADHD kids process information. “If you go into a typical classroom,” he told me, “you might hear, ‘Take out the book. Turn to page 23. Do items 1 through 8, but don’t do 5.’ And you’ve just given them four or five directions. The child with working-memory problems has dropped three of them, and so he’s like, ‘Page 23 — what I am supposed to do’ ” Similarly, a parent might tell a kid, “Take my keys, go to the car, get your sister’s toy, and before you go, take the trash with you.” The ADHD kid will get to the car without remembering what else to do. Their instructions must be broken down carefully because their working memory is weak.
When I asked Rapport whether there’s a cure other than breaking down instructions, his answer was a bit depressing: no. ADHD is incurable. Drugs like Ritalin are a common answer for controlling the condition, which affects about 3% to 5% of children, but Rapport notes that they have proven to be only a limited solution. In the short term, they can facilitate a child’s ability to read — undoubtedly a crucial benefit — but Rapport says longitudinal studies have failed to show that Ritalin or other psychostimulants have consistent long-term behavioral effects. Rapport hopes that his work will lead to the development of early behavioral and cognitive interventions that could help the youngest ADHD kids recognize, predict and somehow avoid ADHD’s concentration gaps.
Such research is in its infancy, though, and if you have a child with ADHD, it’s important to understand that he processes the world in a different way. He might be running circles around you, but that may be his way of paying attention.
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You know those supersales at your local department store in which they offer great deals on a couple of things in the hopes of getting enough people in the door so they can move the crap too? That’s sort of what the Treasury Department and Tim Geithner are doing with the bank plan that was rolled out on Monday.
The problem facing America’s economy has always been how to sell the worst of the toxic assets that are clogging banks’ balance sheets. Geithner and his aides at Treasury cleverly realized that the best approach was to offer great prices on some of the more attractive stuff and hope the garbage would move too.
The plan has three parts. Most people have focused on the first part, which is run by the reliable Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and about which Geithner provided the most detail on Monday. It covers not the complex bundled loans that have received much attention in the media but troubled loans, like mortgages that haven’t been paid for three months or more. The plan offers very favorable financing for private investors who want to buy them. In an example provided by the Treasury, an investor would pay as little as $6 for a loan that had an original value of $100.
Those bad loans are a problem for banks. There are some $230 billion in loans that were overdue by 90 days or more as of Dec. 31, 2008, according to the FDIC. It’s a good idea to try and get those moving off banks’ books. But what of the bundled, securitized assets According to the FDIC, the total value of securities on banks’ books as of Dec. 31 was $1.7 trillion. How much of those securities are toxic and how does the Geithner plan move them to be sold
The second part of the program, run by the Federal Reserve, attempts to get at that part of the problem by expanding an existing program. But it covers only some of the toxic securities: residential mortgage-backed securities that were initially AAA-rated but are now toxic. It doesn’t cover commercial mortgage-backed securities and other asset-backed securities that are no longer AAA-rated.
According to TIME calculations, U.S. banks hold $153 billion in residential mortgage bonds that used to have AAA ratings but have since been downgraded. The calculations are based on numbers from the International Monetary Fund, Fitch Ratings and New York University professor Nouriel Roubini. To get those selling, the Fed offers some attractive financing, but it hasn’t made those details public and the financing is expected to be considerably less favorable than the FDIC rates. Treasury officials insist they have formulas worked out but are waiting to reveal details.
That leaves the commercial mortgage-backed securities and other asset-backed securities that were once AAA-rated but have since been downgraded. Those toxic assets will be sold, Treasury hopes, by at least five still untested public-private investment funds that will be created through open bidding among investment banks. Those assets, according to TIME’s calculations, amount to about $37 billion on banks’ books.
The financing for this part of the plan is much less attractive. For every dollar of equity an investor puts up, the government will put up a dollar of its own, plus up to another two dollars in financing, for a total of 3-1 leverage.
All told, the three plans address about $420 billion in toxic loans and assets that the government hopes to get off the balance sheets of banks. Will that be enough to nurse our nation’s biggest banks and financial markets back to health It’s not clear. The plan leaves out tens of billions of dollars in bonds that were never AAA-rated and were hard to sell even in good times. The plan triggered a strongly positive stock-market reaction on Monday, when the Dow Jones industrials soared nearly 500 points. On Tuesday the market slipped 1.5%, as doubts about a speedy bank recovery began to take shape.
“This plan is an important piece of the recovery, but it is by no means the solution,” says Joseph Mason, a professor of finance at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Wharton School.
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One of the perks of being a theater critic, in those dog days of the season when you find yourself struggling to sit through the latest Chekhov revival or pretentious little comedy about tightly wound New York singles, is the Broadway-musical revival. Yes, you can complain — as I often have — about unimaginative commercial producers who keep recycling surefire classics like Gypsy or Guys and Dolls. But there’s good reason they’re recycled so often: they are surefire — unfailingly entertaining, no matter how uninspired the production, the indomitable high points of a genre that is America’s great contribution to world theater.
As someone who likes to think I have a fairly complete education in the Broadway musical, however, one show holds a special place: West Side Story. Of all the widely accepted masterpieces of the genre, it’s the one I have never seen onstage. Nor even — until a few weeks ago, when I finally broke down and rented the DVD — the multiple-Oscar-winning 1961 movie. Of course, I know most of the Leonard Bernstein–Stephen Sondheim score; I’ve seen enough clips to be familiar with the famed Jerome Robbins choreography; and I’d have to be a pretty benighted theatergoer not to know at least the central conceit of the story — Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet transplanted to the street gangs of New York City in the 1950s.
Still, last week’s opening of a new revival of West Side Story — the first on Broadway since 1980 — gave me the rare opportunity of encountering an American musical classic in the way, by rights, every show ought to be encountered: as if for the first time. No memories of the original to protect — or, conversely, any need for a radical reinvention to renew my interest. No, I came to West Side Story simply to find out whether, in 2009, the show still entertains, excites, lives up to its gargantuan reputation. And my verdict, alas, is: Not quite.
To be sure, you can’t look at West Side Story totally removed from the era that produced it. When it opened, in 1957, Broadway musicals were almost all comedies, set in sentimental fantasylands, whether exotic , nostalgic or contemporary but cartoonish . Here, instead, was an effort to use the musical form to explore serious contemporary social issues: urban slums, race prejudice, the scourge of “juvenile delinquency.” It was also a groundbreaking marriage of pop entertainment and “high culture”: choreography that featured classical ballet moves, a score with elements of modernist art music, and a story whose tragic arc was as close to grand opera as the American musical had come.
In this new production, directed by Arthur Laurents — author of the original book and now 91 years old — the story is what seems least compelling. Partly this is due to the competent but bland cast. As Tony, leader of the Anglo gang the Jets, Matt Cavanaugh is an attractive, sweet-voiced Broadway leading man, but he doesn’t look like he could survive a game of touch football, must less a gang rumble. As Maria, the virginal Puerto Rican girl he falls for, newcomer Josefina Scaglione has a lovely voice and good energy but seems to be acting by the numbers.
But some of the fault, I think, lies in the original script, which might be hefty enough for a sung-through opera but here seems too thin to live up to its ambitions. I don’t expect a stage musical about street gangs to have the grit or nuance of the better Hollywood films of the same era, like Blackboard Jungle or Rebel Without a Cause . But I do want a love story with at least a hint of conviction, plausibility or sexual heat. The attraction of Maria and Tony is barely motivated to begin with; with two charisma-deficient stars in the roles, it left me cold.
The dancing holds up the best. Robbins’ iconic street ballets — adapted by Joey McNeely — are still vibrant and emotional, and they provide the show with its theatrical high points, especially the climactic rumble that ends Act I. Even so, I felt the production lacked some grandeur, largely because the dancers seemed a bit cramped on the stage of the Palace Theatre.
Yes, but what about that glorious score Well, this time around, it doesn’t sound all that glorious. I count 28 musicians listed in the program, but the orchestra sounded both undermanned and overmiked, sometimes drowning out the singers; in a couple of the early numbers, I couldn’t be entirely certain they were working from the same sheet music. What’s more — a heresy to even suggest — I wonder if this score really belongs in the very top rank of American musicals. The jazzy, modernist, Gershwinesque rhythms of some of Bernstein’s music — “The Jet Song,” “America” — are still striking and original. But is there a duller love ballad in any major American musical than “Maria” , or its Muzak-ready twin brother, “Tonight” Who would know that the lyricist would grow up to be Stephen Sondheim
Then there’s the revival’s one major innovation: two songs, and a good chunk of the dialogue in several scenes, are done in Spanish. This, the creators tell us, is an attempt to acknowledge the show’s multicultural theme more forcefully and to make the show more “realistic.” It’s a worthy sentiment and less of a distraction than I’d feared; enough English is tossed in to keep the Anglo customers from drifting off in confusion, and I, for one, do not miss the English lyrics to “I Feel Pretty.” Still, it seems like a gimmick: “realism” in a genre that depends on stylization for its very existence. This is a show where gang members do ballet leaps in the streets, for gosh sakes.
Is this West Side Story revival worth seeing Sure it is. The show’s daring, its social message, its innovative use of dance, are still impressive — for both a West Side Story veteran and a virgin. But unlike some other recent Broadway comebacks , I didn’t come away feeling that a great show had had its place in Broadway history triumphantly renewed. I left the theater with the gnawing sense that a revered Broadway classic may have seen better days.
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Belarus is in many ways a post-Soviet nation in name only. Its state security service is still called the KGB and the iron-fisted rule of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has led the U.S. State Department to dub the country “Europe’s last dictatorship.” U.S.-based nongovernmental organization Freedom House included the country in its “Worst of the Worst 2009” report released earlier this month, naming Belarus one of the 21 most repressive places in the world.
Which makes the European Union’s March 20 decision to include Belarus in its “Eastern Partnership” initiative all the more surprising. The program foresees deeper political and economic ties between Brussels and six former Soviet states: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Closer ties, Europe hopes, will promote democracy and better human rights.
The E.U. seems to have decided that shunning Belarus has not worked. “Isolation is perceived to have failed as there has been little change in the political structure of the country or moves toward democratization,” says David Marples, a Belarus expert at the University of Alberta in Canada. With Russia badly hit by the sharp drop in the price of gas and oil, it’s also a good opportunity to increase Europe’s influence in the region.
Since the Georgia-Russia war last August, Brussels has been keen to draw Belarus away from Moscow and closer into its camp. The first step last October was the suspension of an E.U. visa ban against Belarus’ authoritarian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and other top officials. That relaxation of the travel restrictions, which were first instituted in 2006 after a rigged presidential election and violent crackdown on protestors, was renewed last week. In another sign of mending relations, the E.U.’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana visited Minsk on Feb. 19 for meetings with top Belarusian officials. E.U. leaders are now pondering inviting Lukashenka to the initiative’s formal launch in Prague on May 7.
Analysts say that while the Belarusian leader is looking to expand his options beyond traditional ally Russia, he is also trying to get as much as he can from both sides. “Lukashenka is feeling pressure from Russia both economically and politically,” says Marples, “He is very much sucked into the Russian orbit and seeks some release.” Belarus has in the last six months received a $2 billion loan from Russia, and is under pressure to recognize the Russian-backed breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia. E.U. politicians have warned against such a move.
The E.U. is pushing Belarus on the need to adopt political reforms. E.U. External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner has noted progress, with the release of political prisoners and registering of NGOs and newspapers. But she also said recently that while the E.U. was looking to “reach out” to Belarus, “for that to happen, we want to see more of the political reforms.”
But can Europe keep the pressure on even as it reaches out for closer ties Yes, say some in Minsk. “No normal person can be opposed to dialogue, cooperation, and aspirations to make the situation better,” former presidential candidate and political prisoner Alyaksandr Kazulin told Radio Free Europe recently.
Others disagree. “In effect, the E.U. has taken away its previous conditions of democracy and human rights,” says Valery Karbalevich, a Belarusian political analyst. “They still talk about them, but they don’t mean it.” And Lukashenka seems less than committed to living up to the initiative’s “shared values, including democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.” Just last week he said, “It’s wrong [for the E.U.] to disturb us over minor points,” and called the opposition “enemies of the Belarusian people.”
“There has been some progress, including the release of some political prisoners,” says Karbalevich. “But it’s a game for Lukashenka. He doesn’t intend to make any fundamental changes, just enough to satisfy European politicians.”
Proof of that may have come earlier this month when human-rights and opposition activist Yana Palyakova, was found hanged in her home in Salihorsk, in southern Belarus. Palyakova, 33, had committed suicide just days after being sentenced to two and a half years in detention and a $350 fine for slandering a police officer, whom she had accused of beating her while in police custody in November last year. The day before Palyakova’s death, the state-run newspaper Sovietskaya Belorussiya, or Soviet Belarus, had published an article mocking her and her complaint. “The state drove her to suicide,” says Valery Shchukin, a member of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee for human rights who worked with Palyakova. “The police wouldn’t leave her alone — ringing her late at night. The judgment was the end of the world for her. She was very frightened.”
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What to do with 50,000 used, possibly smelly and dirty prison mattresses that need to be disposed of every year?
Britain’s Prison Service won praise Thursday for its innovative solution to the problem: recycle the mattresses for carpet underlay, or break them down for fencing or even roof tiles. Most of the mattresses are sent to landfills. There are enough of them each year to fill 30 double-decker buses, the National Audit Office said Thursday. The Prison Service wanted to find a better way to dispose of the mattresses — a “zero-waste” solution that also cost less money, the NAO said. It worked with suppliers and launched a competition to find the best solution. They ended up coming up with several proposals to reuse the mattresses, and the Prison Service is now testing them out, the NAO said. Thursday’s report highlighted several other examples of ways that government departments have used innovation to their advantage. “We have selected them as good examples of innovative approaches which have lessons for how innovation can be managed in government,” the report said.