15/10 Múa cột để tìm bạn đời trên tàu điện ngầm

(10/15/2010 9:47:26 AM)

Múa cột tìm chồng trên tàu điện ngầm

Sau 5 phút nhảy múa, quay cuồng, cô ta rút ra một tấm bảng ghi dòng chữ “tìm bạn đời”để giải thích cho hành động của mình.

Mới đây, clip một cô gái đột nhiên cởi áo khoác ngoài và mặc bộ bikini màu đỏ múa cột trên chuyến tàu điện ngầm số 9 ở Thượng Hải (Trung Quốc) để tìm chồng đã lan nhanh trên mạng.

Hành động kỳ lạ của cô gái này khiến những người đi cùng chuyến tàu không khỏi ngỡ ngàng và lấy điện thoại ra ghi lại. Thế nhưng, cô gái này vẫn nhảy nhiệt tình và không thèm quan tâm tới xung quanh. Sau 5 phút nhảy múa, quay cuồng, cô ta rút ra một tấm bảng ghi dòng chữ “tìm bạn đời”để giải thích cho hành động của mình.


Được biết, cô gái này năm nay 20 tuổi, hiện đang làm giáo viên dạy múa. Yêu cầu tìm bạn đời của cô là thành đạt, chân thành và biết cảm thông, đặc biệt là những chàng trai thật thà và có phẩm chất.

Thật trùng hợp khi ở Quảng Châu và Nam Kinh cùng nhiều địa phương khác ở Trung Quốc cũng xuất hiện nhiều cô gái múa cột trên tàu điện ngầm để tìm chồng trong năm nay. Tuy nhiên, điệu nhảy của Maurice Rice đến từ Chile trên tàu điện ngầm ở Nam Kinh được cư dân mạng đánh giá cao vì tính chuyên nghiệp. Thế nhưng, Maurice lại cho rằng đó chỉ là một cách để nhắc nhở mọi người bao dung đối với những quan điểm khác nhau.

Theo VietNamNet

16/10 Ngủ với sếp để tiến thân

(10/16/2010 9:25:06 AM)

Office Affair

Theo khảo sát riêng của CNBC với 9.325 độc giả, có tới 15% cho biết đã có quan hệ tình cảm với sếp, trong đó 5% quan hệ vì tình yêu và 9% để hòng thăng tiến.

7% nhân viên được hỏi tại Mỹ cho biết họ đã có mối quan hệ tình cảm với ông chủ, vì tình yêu thì ít mà để thăng tiến thì nhiều.


Lâu nay, dù ít nói ra nhưng ai cũng biết rằng dù ít dù nhiều, có một bộ phận nhân viên có mối quan hệ trên mức đồng nghiệp với các sếp.

Adecco Group, một công ty tư vấn nguồn nhân lực cho biết họ đã thực hiện khảo sát với 1.000 nhân viên Mỹ. Kết quả là 17% trong số này tin rằng nếu có mối quan hệ tình cảm với sếp thì sẽ chỉ có lợi, ví dụ như được thăng chức. Đáng chú ý, 7% trong số những người được hỏi cho biết họ đã 'lên giường' với sếp, theo thông tin mà tờ CNBC trích đăng.

Còn theo khảo sát riêng của CNBC với 9.325 độc giả, có tới 15% cho biết đã có quan hệ tình cảm với sếp, trong đó 5% quan hệ vì tình yêu và 9% để hòng thăng tiến. 11% khác cho biết chưa có gì xảy ra nhưng đang nghĩ đến điều đó và 75% khẳng định không bao giờ dây dưa với các sếp.

Tuy nhiên, bên trên tảng băng chìm này vẫn là mối quan hệ khá lạnh nhạt giữa ông chủ và người làm thuê. Cũng theo khảo sát của Adecco Group, cứ 6 nhân viên thì chỉ có một người kết bạn với sếp trên các mạng xã hội. Tuy nhiên, trong số những người đã trót kết bạn với ông chủ thì có tới một phần ba hối hận và một nửa giới hạn những thông tin và sếp có thể đọc được trên trang cá nhân của mình.

Các khảo sát này được đưa ra trước Ngày Ông chủ của Mỹ (National Boss Day) vào 16/10. Boss Day được xem là dịp để nhân viên bày tỏ lòng biết ơn đối với sếp vì đã đối xử một cách công bằng và tốt đẹp đối với họ.


Theo VnExpress.net

09/10 Test Your Savvy on Religion

October 9, 2010
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Time for a pop quiz.

The New York Times reported recently on a Pew Research Center poll in which religious people turned out to be remarkably uninformed about religion. Almost half of Catholics didn’t understand Communion. Most Protestants didn’t know that Martin Luther started the Reformation. Almost half of Jews didn’t realize Maimonides was Jewish. And atheists were among the best informed about religion.

So let me give everybody another chance. And given the uproar about Islam, I’ll focus on extremism and fundamentalism — and, as you’ll see, there’s a larger point to this quiz. Note that some questions have more than one correct choice; answers are at the end.

1. Which holy book stipulates that a girl who does not bleed on her wedding night should be stoned to death?
a. Koran
b. Old Testament
c. (Hindu) Upanishads

2. Which holy text declares: “Let there be no compulsion in religion”?
a. Koran
b. Gospel of Matthew
c. Letter of Paul to the Romans

3. The terrorists who pioneered the suicide vest in modern times, and the use of women in terror attacks, were affiliated with which major religion?
a. Islam
b. Christianity
c. Hinduism

4. "Every child is touched by the devil as soon as he is born and this contact makes him cry. Excepted are Mary and her Son.” This verse is from:
a. Letters of Paul to the Corinthians
b. The Book of Revelation
c. An Islamic hadith, or religious tale

5. Which holy text is sympathetic to slavery?
a. Old Testament
b. New Testament
c. Koran

6. In the New Testament, Jesus’ views of homosexuality are:
a. strongly condemnatory
b. forgiving
c. never mentioned

7. Which holy text urges responding to evil with kindness, saying: “repel the evil deed with one which is better.”
a. Gospel of Luke
b. Book of Isaiah
c. Koran

8. Which religious figure preaches tolerance by suggesting that God looks after all peoples and leads them all to their promised lands?
a. Muhammad
b. Amos
c. Jesus

9. Which of these religious leaders was a polygamist?
a. Jacob
b. King David
c. Muhammad

10. What characterizes Muhammad’s behavior toward the Jews of his time?
a. He killed them.
b. He married one.
c. He praised them as a chosen people.

11. Which holy scripture urges that the "little ones" of the enemy be dashed against the stones?
a. Book of Psalms
b. Koran
c. Leviticus

12. Which holy scripture suggests beating wives who misbehave?
a. Koran
b. Letters of Paul to the Corinthians
c. Book of Judges

13. Which religious leader is quoted as commanding women to be silent during services?
a. The first Dalai Lama
b. St. Paul
c. Muhammad

Answers:
1. b. Deuteronomy 22:21.
2. a. Koran, 2:256. But other sections of the Koran do describe coercion.
3. c. Most early suicide bombings were by Tamil Hindus (some secular) in Sri Lanka and India.
4. c. Hadith. Islam teaches that Jesus was a prophet to be revered.
5. All of the above.
6. c. Other parts of the New and Old Testaments object to homosexuality, but there’s no indication of Jesus’ views.
7. c. Koran, 41:34. Jesus says much the same thing in different words.
8. b. Amos 9:7
9. all of them
10. all of these. Muhammad’s Jewish wife was seized in battle, which undermines the spirit of the gesture. By some accounts he had a second Jewish wife as well.
11. a. Psalm 137
12. a. Koran 4:34
13. b. St. Paul, both in 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, but many scholars believe that neither section was actually written by Paul.

And yes, the point of this little quiz is that religion is more complicated than it sometimes seems, and that we should be wary of rushing to inflammatory conclusions about any faith, especially based on cherry-picking texts. The most crucial element is perhaps not what is in our scriptures, but what is in our hearts.


I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

07/10 Here’s the Pub, Church and Field for Public Sex

October 7, 2010
By SARAH LYALL
PUTTENHAM, England — There was the man they called “Bob the Builder,” who wore only a hard hat. There was the naked sunbather who remarked, “Nice day for it, isn’t it?” to a woman taking a walk. And there was the moment, Jules Perkins said, when the dizzying array of sexual forces that have somehow descended on her blameless Surrey village came together all at once, like a scene from a one-size-fits-all X-rated film.

“There were two blokes sitting side by side, watching a man and a woman having sex,” Ms. Perkins said, describing what happened as she strolled with her dog on the hill between her house and the Hog’s Back ridge. “Nearby, there were two men sunbathing together, wearing nothing but tight little white underpants.”

Later, she found a pink vibrator in the bushes.

“I gave it to the police,” she said. “They said, ‘What should we do with it?’ I said, ‘Put it in Lost Property.’ ”

Puttenham, about an hour’s drive from London, has fewer than 2,500 residents and is famous for its ancient church; its friendly pub, the Good Intent; and its proud inclusion in both the Domesday Book — an 11th-century survey of English lands — and “Brave New World.”

Unhappily for many people here, it is also famous for being featured on lists of good places to go “dogging” — that is, to have sex in public, sometimes with partners you have just met online, so that others can watch. So popular is the woodsy field below the ridge as a spot for gay sex (mostly during the day) and heterosexual sex (mostly at night) that the police have designated it a “public sex environment.”

Public sex is a popular — and quasi-legal — activity in Britain, according to the authorities and to the large number of Web sites that promote it. (It is treated as a crime only if someone witnesses it, is offended and is willing to make a formal complaint.) And the police tend to tread lightly in public sex environments, in part because of the bitter legacy of the time when gay sex was illegal and closeted men having anonymous sex in places like public bathrooms were routinely arrested and humiliated.

Enthusiasts’ Web sites alert practitioners to known dogging locations — more than 100 in Surrey alone — and offer handy etiquette tips for the confused or overly excited.

“Only join in or move closer if you are asked,” advises one site, Swinging Heaven, which says it has more than one million registered members.

Richard Byrne, a senior lecturer in countryside management at Harper Adams University College in Shropshire, said that modern technology has made dogging much more convenient than it used to be, thanks to search engines, Facebook groups and people tweeting about their experiences. “And of course, everybody’s got mobiles,” he said.

Swinging Heaven says that the practice began in Britain in the 1970s, and that the term comes from the phenomenon of voyeurs “doggedly” following people having sex. Others say that practitioners claim to be “walking the dog” when they are, in fact, going out to meet naked strangers in fields.

Britons are a tolerant bunch, and most probably would not care who watched whom doing what in whatever configuration, as long as they all went somewhere else. Why, Puttenham residents wonder, do they have to do it 400 yards from the village nursery school?”

“We have nothing against gays or whoever it is up there,” said Lydia Paterson, who lives here. “It’s just the principle of, ‘What on earth is going on?’ ”

A stroll through the field the other day unearthed no doggers (it was raining) but revealed much evidence of their existence. Debris — used condoms, things made of rubber, pages torn from pornographic magazines, snack wrappers, discarded tea cups — littered the area. The paths were dotted with black mats that people had conveniently left behind for the next time.

Residents have been pressing the authorities to do something, arguing that the government should simply close the rest stop that provides access to the offending field, just off the busy A31 road. That way, people hoping to have sex would have nowhere to park.

But local government officials refused, saying closing it would unfairly penalize motorists who genuinely wanted just to rest and would deprive the owner of the Hog’s Back cafe, also at the rest stop, of his livelihood.

Alternative suggestions, discussed at a recent meeting of the Surrey County Council Cabinet, included deploying rangers to patrol the site on horseback; encouraging hikers to roust doggers with actual dogs; and filling the field with potentially bad-tempered bulls.

“It was like, ‘Are you taking this seriously?’ ” Ms. Paterson said. “One cabinet member said, ‘If you close this site, there could be an increase in suicides because these people have nowhere else to go.’ ”

Some older residents sympathize with the council. “Honestly, it’s been going on for so many years,” said Jennifer Debenham, 71, a customer at the Good Intent.

Referring to a nearby village, an elderly man at the bar piped up, “At Wisley, there are two sites, one for males and one for heteros.”

Mrs. Debenham said, “I think we should just let them get on with it.”

The man added, “If you want to find out more, just put ‘dogging’ into your search engine.”

Meanwhile, frazzled residents trade tales of woe: The half-dressed men who materialize from the shrubbery and theatrically pretend to be foraging for nuts and berries. The Internet reviews (“One site listed us as the No. 2 dogging site in Europe,” Ms. Perkins said wearily). The occasion when an unsuspecting motorist went for a bathroom break in the bushes, only to be surrounded by a crowd of eager men.

“It was the quickest pee he’d ever done in his life,” Ms. Paterson said.

The council has agreed to institute an “active management plan” that might include cutting down some shrubbery and putting in security patrols. And the police recently put up a sign warning people not to engage in “activities of an unacceptable nature.”

“There was a lot of debate over the wording for that sign,” Ms. Paterson said. “I guess they didn’t want to say, ‘Don’t have sex.’ ”

2 E-Books Cost More Than Amazon Hardcovers

October 4, 2010
By JULIE BOSMAN
Readers of e-books may not be able to turn paper pages, lend their copies to friends or file them away on living room bookshelves. But they do have the comfort of knowing that they paid less for them than for hardcovers.

Unless they bought “Fall of Giants” by Ken Follett, which was published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, last week. On Amazon.com, the price for the e-book was $19.99; the hardcover edition was $19.39.

Or “Don’t Blink,” by James Patterson and Howard Roughan, whose publisher, Little, Brown & Company, charged $14.99 for the e-book. Amazon priced the hardcover at $14.

Customers, unaccustomed to seeing a digital edition more expensive than the hardcover, howled at the price discrepancy, and promptly voiced their outrage with negative comments and one-star reviews on Amazon.

“Really, James Patterson?” wrote one reader from Elgin, Ill. “Why would it possibly cost more for a digital download than printed and bound ink on paper?”

Other customers directed their anger at the publishers. “They aren’t penguins,” a Web commenter from Paradise, Calif., wrote about Mr. Follett’s book. “They are pigs.”

Several major publishers said those two books were the first they knew of that cost more as e-books than in hardcover on Amazon.

The skirmish over prices is possible because of deals that publishers negotiated with Amazon this year that allowed the publishers to set their own prices on e-books, while Amazon continues to choose the discount from the list price on hardcovers.

That upended a previous understanding by Kindle customers, who were used to paying only $9.99 for an e-book.

“Amazon’s bait-and-switched us here,” said Janice Dinse, 63, a medical transcriptionist in Gastonia, N.C., who complained about the price on the novel by Mr. Patterson. “When I first got my Kindle, all the books were $9.99. I’m not going to pay for a book on my Kindle that’s more than $9.99. I just refuse to do it. I could buy the hardcover for that if I go to Sam’s or Wal-Mart.”

Amazon has tried to direct customer wrath over e-book prices at the publishers. After prices began to rise this year, routinely landing at $12.99 to $14.99, Amazon alerted readers by adding a line in italics below the Kindle price: “This price was set by the publisher.”

Publishers argue that Amazon charges too little for hardcovers and is intent on monopolizing the book market.

Even as hardcover and e-book prices inch closer together, it is rare that an e-book reaches the $19.99 mark. But “Fall of Giants” is a 1,008-page novel, and Mr. Follett is a best-selling author who commands handsome advances from his publisher.

Marilyn Ducksworth, a spokeswoman for Penguin, said only that sales had been strong since the Sept. 28 publication date.

“It’s a long and wonderful book, of which we have sold over 20,000 e-books in the last seven days,” Ms. Ducksworth said.

Sophie Cottrell, a spokeswoman for the Hachette Book Group, the parent of Little, Brown, which published “Don’t Blink” last week, pointed out that the e-book was steeply discounted from the suggested list price on the book. She said the e-book price would be $12.99 if the book made the New York Times best-seller list.

Russ Grandinetti, the vice president of Kindle content for Amazon, suggested that the publishers should lower their e-book prices in response to consumer complaints.

“Setting a price for a Kindle book that is higher than its print counterpart makes no sense,” Mr. Grandinetti said in a statement, although it was not clear who was the chicken and who the egg in this instance. “It’s bad for readers and authors, and is illogical given the cost savings of digital. We’ve seen publishers do this in a few cases, and we’ve been urging them to stop.”

But many readers seemed willing to pay nearly $20 for an e-book. On Monday evening, “Fall of Giants” remained at No. 7 on the Kindle best-seller list, which is updated hourly.

“What we are seeing is a sorting-out period as a new, very vibrant market for book content begins to develop with multiple platforms, multiple formats and multiple retailers,” said David Steinberger, the chief executive of the Perseus Books Group. “Ultimately as the competitive market develops and e-books go mainstream, pricing norms will develop. But that really hasn’t happened yet.”




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23/08 Rwandan Rebels Raped at Least 179 Women in Congo, Humanitarian Officials Say

August 23, 2010
By JOSH KRON

GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo — A mob of Rwandan rebels gang-raped at least 179 women last month during a weekend raid on a community of villages in eastern Congo, the United Nations said Monday.

The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or F.D.L.R., was blamed for the attack. The F.D.L.R. is an ethnic Hutu rebel group that has been terrorizing the hills of eastern Congo for years, preying on villages in a quest for the natural resources beneath them.

The raided villages are near the mining center of Walikale, known to be a rebel stronghold, and are “very insecure,” Stefania Trassari, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said Sunday. “Rape is something we get quite often.”

But she and other United Nations and humanitarian officials said that this attack was unusual because of the large number of victims and the fact that they were raped by more than one attacker simultaneously.

On the evening of July 30, armed men entered the village of Ruvungi, in North Kivu Province.

“They told the population that they were just there for food and rest and that they shouldn’t worry,” said Will F. Cragin, the International Medical Corps’ program coordinator for North Kivu, who visited the village a week after their arrival.

“Then after dark another group came,” said Mr. Cragin, referring to between 200 and 400 armed men who witnesses described as spending days and nights looting Ruvungi and nearby villages.

“They began to systematically rape the population,” he said, adding, “Most women were raped by two to six men at a time.”

The attackers often took the victims into the bush or into their homes, raping them “in front of their children and their families,” Mr. Cragin said. “If a car passed, they would hide.”

The rebels left on Aug. 3, he said, the same day the chief of the area traveled through the villages and reported horrific cases of sexual violence. “We thought at first he was exaggerating,” Mr. Cragin said, “but then we saw the scale of the attacks.”

Miel Hendrickson, a regional director for the International Medical Corps, which has been documenting the rape cases, said, “We had heard first 24 rapes, then 56, then 78, then 96, then 156.”

“The numbers keep rising,” she said. The United Nations maintains a military base approximately 20 miles from the villages, but United Nations officials said they did not know if the peacekeepers there were aware of the attack as it occurred. A United Nations military spokesman, Madnoje Mounoubai, said information was still being gathered.

The F.D.L.R., which began as a gathering of fugitives of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, has grown into a resilient and savage killing machine and an economic engine in the region.

The United Nations, Congo and Rwanda began a military offensive against the group in early 2009, but since then, humanitarian organizations say, cases of rape have risen drastically.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited eastern Congo in 2009 to raise awareness about widespread rape in the region, calling it “evil in its basest form,” and the United States pledged $17 million to the Congolese government to fight sexual violence. The raid came two weeks before three armed Indian peacekeepers were slaughtered during an ambush by Mai-Mai rebels who were carrying only spears and machetes.

31/08 U.N. E-Mail Shows Early Warning of Congo Rapes

August 31, 2010
By JOSH KRON and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
GOMA, Democratic Republic of the Congo —United Nations officials had been warned about rape ocurring in a remote Congolese area much earlier than officials originally said, according to an internal United Nations e-mail and a humanitarian bulletin.

The United Nations’ beleaguered peacekeeping mission in Congo, which costs more than a billion dollars a year but has failed to stop widespread violence against civilians, has been harshly criticized since the news broke 10 days ago that United Nations peacekeepers did not respond to a rebel attack in which nearly 200 women were raped.

According to an e-mail sent within United Nations agencies on July 30, as the attack was unfolding, United Nations officials knew that the rebels had infiltrated the area and that at least one woman had been raped.

“The town of Mpofi, 52 kilometers from Walikale, has just fallen into the hands of the F.D.L.R. A woman was raped there,” said the e-mail, which was sent by the United Nations’ humanitarian office in eastern Congo to several other United Nations agencies and private aid groups. “Humanitarian workers are said not to go there,” the e-mail continued.

The F.D.L.R is the abbreviation for the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, a fearsome rebel group that includes former Rwandan genocidaires who have been hiding out in Congo for years and preying upon the local population. Over the next three days, from July 30 to Aug. 2, hundreds of F.D.L.R., along with gunmen from another rebel group, raped at least 179 women. Many victims said they were assaulted in front of their families, with up to six men raping them at the same time.

United Nations peacekeepers were stationed nearby, around 30 kilometers away, but none went to the area until Aug. 2, when a patrol passed through one of the stricken villages, though according to United Nations officials, none of the villagers came forward about the rapes.

On Aug. 10, a United Nations humanitarian bulletin reported that 25 people had been raped in the Mpofi area between July 30 and Aug. 1, in a reference to the same attack.

The two documents raise questions about earlier statements made by several United Nations officials that the peacekeeping mission was unaware of the rapes until an aid organization brought it to the mission’s attention on Aug. 12.

When asked about the e-mail sent on July 30, Roger Meece, a United Nations special representative to the peacekeeping mission, said: “At the time, there was one alleged rape and no reason to believe that this was happening on a mass-scale as later reported.”

Other United Nations officials said that it was fairly common to receive reports about rebel movements and that the Rwandan rebels had been in the area on and off since 1994, when Rwanda exploded in genocide.

Still, the criticism toward the United Nations’ Congo operations seems to be spreading, the latest blow to a peacekeeping mission that, since it began in 1999, has been hampered by corruption, thickly forested terrain, morphing rebel groups, sexual abuse scandals and complaints from the Congolese people and the Congolese government, which recently began pushing the United Nations to downsize the mission.

“There is a kind of general state of incompetence, which is linked to apathy,” said Karl Steinacker, a longtime United Nations official who worked in Congo until this year. “If you realize you can’t deal with the situation, you may just decide to do nothing.”

“If you do little, you do little mistakes,” he said. “We have seen it so many times.”

The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting last week in New York to discuss the rapes and the peacekeepers’ ability to respond to similar crises.

“We are reviewing a broad array of what we are doing,” Mr. Meece said. “We can’t do everything. We are not a government, and obviously there are always limits, especially given the vast size of the area to be covered and the difficulties of a lack of transport and communications infrastructure.”

He added, “That is not an excuse — we want and need to do better — but it is a reality.”

Analysts and some officials within the United Nations say the rapes in Mpofi area were not the first time that the United Nations mission in Congo delayed in sharing information about widespread atrocities.

The most prominent example may have been a massacre of approximately 300 villagers last December by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northeastern Congo, which was first publicized by the media in late March. According to a document on a Web site for humanitarian workers, United Nations officials were aware that the L.R.A. had killed more than 80 people in that attack, as far back as January.

As for the rapes in Mpofi, Madnoje Mounoubai, a United Nations spokesman in Congo, said the United Nations was first alerted to the attacks on Aug. 12, by International Medical Corps, a humanitarian organization working in the area.

International Medical Corps says it told the United Nations about the rapes on Aug. 6.


Josh Kron reported from Goma and Jeffrey Gettleman from Nairobi, Kenya

03/10 Frenzy of Rape in Congo Reveals U.N. Weakness

October 3, 2010
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

LUVUNGI, Democratic Republic of Congo — Four armed men barged into Anna Mburano’s hut, slapped the children and threw them down. They flipped Mrs. Mburano on her back, she said, and raped her, repeatedly.

It did not matter that dozens of United Nations peacekeepers were based just up the road. Or that Mrs. Mburano is around 80 years old.

“Grandsons!” she yelled. “Get off me!”

As soon as they finished, they moved house to house, along with hundreds of other marauding rebels, gang-raping at least 200 women.

What happened in this remote, thatched-roof village on July 30 and continued for at least three more days has become a searing embarrassment for the United Nations mission in Congo. Despite more than 10 years of experience and billions of dollars, the peacekeeping force still seems to be failing at its most elemental task: protecting civilians.

The United Nations’ blue-helmets are considered the last line of defense in eastern Congo, given that the nation’s own army has a long history of abuses, that the police are often invisible or drunk and that the hills are teeming with rebels.

But many critics contend that nowhere else in the world has the United Nations invested so much and accomplished so little. What happened in Luvungi, with nearby peacekeepers failing to respond to a village under siege, is similar to a massacre in Kiwanja in 2008, when rebels killed 150 people within earshot of a United Nations base.

“Congo is the U.N.’s crowning failure,” said Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues,” whose advocacy group, V-Day, has been working with Congolese women for years.

She blamed poor management, bad communication and racism. “If the women being raped were the daughters or wives or mothers of the power elites,” she said, “I can promise you this war would have ended about 12 years ago.”

United Nations officials admitted that the peacekeepers failed to respond fast enough to Luvungi, though they said the primary responsibility fell on the Congolese Army, which continues to be in grievous disarray.

“I felt personally guilty and guilty toward the people I met there,” said Atul Khare, the assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, who recently visited Luvungi. “They told me, ‘We’ve been raped, we’ve been brutalized, give us peace and security.’ Unfortunately, I said, that is something I cannot promise.”

Within peacekeeping circles, Congo is becoming known as “the African equivalent of Afghanistan,” said Annika Hilding-Norberg, a director at the Peace Operations Training Institute in Virginia, because of the conflict’s enduring violence and complexity.

Luvungi, a village of about 2,000 people, is a crucible where so many of Congo’s intractable problems converged: the scramble for minerals; the fragmentation of rebel groups; the perverse incentives among armed groups to commit atrocities to bolster their negotiating strength; the poverty that keeps villages cut off and incommunicado; and the disturbing fact that in Congo’s wars, the battleground is often women’s bodies. United Nations officials call the sexual violence in Congo the worst in the world.

A sense of menace hangs over this entire area, even the government-controlled outposts.

And people in the Luvungi area are now taking no chances. After the rapes, the United Nations set up a small base here, and just the presence of 20 or so peacekeepers in an abandoned mud-walled cinema draws countless refugees from surrounding areas to camp out at night around them.

During escorted trips to markets, thousands of villagers trudge up the hills behind a handful of Indian peacekeepers in trucks, begging the peacekeepers to drive “pole, pole” — or “slowly, slowly” — so as not to leave the slightest gap or opportunity for armed men to drop down from the jungle wall.

This area is spectacularly rich in gold, tin ore and fertile land, which is partly why it has been so bitterly contested by rebel groups and renegade army divisions. Surging brown rivers slice through the jungle, which is decorated with pink hibiscus flowers and birds of paradise. Rumbling up a road here is like driving through a greenhouse.

In mid-July, the Congolese Army contingent stationed in Luvungi suddenly pulled out, leaving the people here unguarded. The United Nations later learned that the soldiers had marched off to Bisie, where there is a huge tin ore mine — and illegal taxes to be extorted.

“This place was a total void,” said Maj. Radha Krishnan, an Indian peacekeeper.

Shortly after the rapes that month, the government ordered mines in eastern Congo temporarily closed, to starve armed groups of income. But the government does not control many of the mines or, for that matter, much of the area.

“The government’s able to dominate only the road,” explained Lt. Col. R. D. Sharma. “The rest,” he said, sweeping his hand over the treetops, “is the negative forces.”

The negative forces stormed into Luvungi on Friday, July 30, around 8 p.m. According to United Nations reports there were around 300 men, a mix of Rwandan rebels who have been terrorizing eastern Congo for years and fighters from a new Congolese rebel group, Mai Mai Cheka, which has been vying for attention as the government tries to absorb more rebels into the army.

Paradoxically enough, the effort to integrate certain rebel groups into the Congolese Army — intended to help stabilize the region — may have supplied a motivation for the rapes, analysts say. The more fearsome and powerful an armed group can appear, the more concessions it can extract in negotiations.

“These guys are trying to boost their ranks, to colonel or general,” said Lt. Hamisi Delfonte, a police officer in Walikale, about a two-hour drive from Luvungi.

The other day, several government soldiers suddenly unshouldered their rifles, clicked off their safeties and started chasing a man in camouflage pants through the middle of town. All heads swiveled in the same direction. Children broke away. “They’re going to kill that guy,” someone said.

But the soldiers did not shoot, and it was soon clear why. The fleeing man was an army major who had just pulled the pin on his grenade. It all stemmed from a dispute over 50 cents. The man was eventually talked down and arrested.

The Indian peacekeepers at the base nearest Luvungi, in Kibua, about 11 miles away, said that they started hearing reports of an attack on the following Sunday, but that they had been tricked many times before. Often, truck drivers claim a certain area is under attack, the peacekeepers said, when in fact they simply want a United Nations escort to the next town to ensure that no one steals their minerals.

Because there is no cellphone service in the area or electricity, it is not always simple to know when there is an attack. The United Nations, which has around 18,000 peacekeepers in Congo, is now trying to install solar-powered high-frequency radios in some villages.

On Aug. 2, that Monday, the peacekeepers agreed to escort truck drivers through Luvungi. Indian officers said that they saw ripped-up mattresses and clothes strewn along the road — evidence of looting — but that the villagers did not say anything about mass rapes.

“Sometimes,” Colonel Sharma said, “the women here are ashamed to tell a soldier, especially a male soldier, that they’ve been raped. And we don’t have any female soldiers.”

Several women in Luvungi said that after they were raped, the rebels hollered into the night, as if they were celebrating. Mrs. Mburano lay bleeding on her floor, listening.

“I know, I still look sick,” she said, though her cloudy eyes tried to smile as she spoke. “Just a few vegetables, that’s all I’ve eaten, since I was demolished.”

America's Smartest Cities

by Les Christie
Friday, October 1, 2010

Ever wonder what happened to your high school valedictorian? He or she might just have wound up in Washington, D.C. That metro area has the nation's highest percentage of residents with college degrees.


More from CNNMoney.com:

• America's Wealthiest (and Poorest) States

• America's Best Places to Live

• Highest Property Taxes in the Country


Call it America's brainiest place to live.

In the District and surrounding suburbs, 47.3% of people 25 years or older have bachelor's, master's, professional school or doctorate degrees, according to new Census Bureau data released Tuesday. The national average barely tips 25%.

The figures don't surprise John Schmidt, senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in D.C. The city is built on jobs that require degrees.



U.S. Census Dept.


"There's a very high share of federal government employees here," he said, "and people dealing with the federal government, including defense contractors, lobbyists, businesses that want to influence the regulatory process; there's lots of lawyers."

"Clearly, the biggest factor is still the presence of federal government jobs," he added. "But a lot of people in the 20s and 30s come here interested in public policy. There's an excitement about being in Washington, especially among young people who want to make a difference in the world."

In second-place San Francisco, 43.5% of residents have college degrees or better; San Jose, Calif., the hub of Silicon Valley, ranked third at 43.2%; and Raleigh, N.C., one of the points in that state's "Research Triangle," came in fourth at 42.2%.

Boston, where so many great universities are located, also boasts 42.2% of its population having a degree.



U.S. Census Dept.


Of course, salaries in those towns are also higher than the national average. That's because a highly educated population is a key to growth and prosperity. Washington, D.C., for example, has the highest median household income of any metro area of more than 1 million residents.

"There's a very high correlation between earnings and educational attainment," said Todd Gabe, an economics professor at the University of Maine. .

Cities also tend to specialize in the kinds of educated residents they attract. San Jose, for example, has a high percentage of residents whose degrees are in computer science or information technology.

That works great for those cities where degrees lead to high-paying jobs. But other areas may have just as many college-educated but salaries can be lower than you'd expect because the degrees are in lower paying fields like teaching or journalism.

"Some types of knowledge are much more highly compensated than others," said Gabe.

Many other "creative class" types -- the artists, web designers, innovative business entrepreneurs and other thinkers -- also tend to coalesce around cities with an educated population.

[15 Up-And-Coming Cities]

Places like New York, where 35.6% of over-25 population have degrees, exemplify that kind of city, as does Los Angeles (30.2%) and San Diego (30.6%).

The metro areas with the lowest levels of educational attainment tend to be the "Building or Comforting Regions," as coined by a Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto study.

Comforting Regions include resorts areas such as Las Vegas, which cater to vacationers, and where the percentage of residents with degrees is only 21.5%.

One good example of a Building city is Riverside, Calif., where only 19.2% of the population has degrees. When residential development was in full flower, there were good paying jobs available to construction workers and others without degrees.

Since the bust, however, the unemployment rate there has jumped to nearly 15% and income has declined. The median household income dropped more than 6% in 2009 to $53,815.

Mở rộng động mạch cổ làm giảm nguy cơ đột quỵ

Theo một kết quả nghiên cứu, được đăng trên tạp chí The Lancet, các nhà khoa học Anh đã phát hiện ra rằng phẫu thuật mở rộng động mạch cảnh nhằm tăng cường lưu lượng máu lên não có thể làm giảm nguy cơ đột quỵ trong khoảng thời gian 10 năm.

Động mạch cảnh có kích thước khá lớn, nằm ở cổ, gồm có động mạch cảnh trái và động mạch cảnh phải, ta có thể sờ thấy được nhịp đập của chúng ở hai bên cổ.

Động mạch cảnh có chức năng đưa máu từ tim lên nuôi dưỡng não. Việc phẫu thuật mở rộng động mạch này sẽ khôi phục dòng máu lưu thông lên não.

Tuy nhiên, các nhà khoa học cho rằng việc phẫu thuật cũng có nguy cơ khoảng 3% gây ra đột quỵ ngay lập tức. Đối với một số người già thì nguy cơ có thể cao hơn so với những lợi ích.

Trong nghiên cứu của mình, các nhà khoa học tại Đại học Oxford đã chọn ngẫu nhiên 3.120 bệnh nhân bị hẹp động mạch cảnh để phẫu thuật hoặc không phẫu thuật tùy thuộc vào điều kiện của từng trường hợp.

Tổng cộng có 1.979 ca phẫu thuật đã được thực hiện. Trong số những bệnh nhân này, nguy cơ xảy ra đột quỵ trong vòng 30 ngày là 3%, bao gồm 26 ca bị dạng nhẹ và 34 ca bị nặng hoặc đột quỵ gây tử vong.

Trong khoảng thời gian theo dõi trung bình năm năm sau đó, có 4,1% những người đã trải qua phẫu thuật bị đột quỵ, so với tỷ lệ 10% ở những người bị hẹp động mạch cảnh nhưng chưa phẫu thuật. Và nếu tính trong 10 năm thì có 10.8% những người đã phẫu thuật hẹp động mạch cảnh bị đột quỵ, so với tỷ lệ 16,9% ở những người chưa phẫu thuật.

Tai biến mạch máu não (hay còn gọi là đột quỵ) rất thường gặp và là nguyên nhân gây tử vong đứng hàng thứ ba sau bệnh tim mạch và ung thư.

Có nhiều nguyên nhân gây tai biến mạch máu não, trong đó hẹp động mạch cảnh là một trong những nguyên nhân khá thường gặp (chiếm khoảng 30% các trường hợp).

Hẹp động mạch cảnh là do các mảng xơ vữa bám lên thành động mạch, tại chỗ động mạch cảnh bị hẹp, các mảng xơ vữa và máu đông có thể gây tắc tại chỗ, hoặc tự vỡ ra tạo thành các mảnh nhỏ trôi theo dòng máu đến lấp một nhánh động mạch nào đó trong não, gây nên hoại tử một vùng não tương ứng do nhánh động mạch đó nuôi dưỡng./.


Khắc Hiếu (Vietnam+)

WP: Should Christians practice yoga? Shouldn't everyone?

By David Waters
Yoga, the Hindu-inspired spiritual practice that bears a strong resemblance to stretching, is said to relieve pain and lower blood pressure, boost mental (and spiritual) awareness and reduce stress.
Ironically, it's having the inverse effect on some religious leaders.
Earlier this week, Dr. R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (and On Faith panelist), set off a bit of an interfaith fuss by suggesting that Christians should not practice yoga. "Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with, a spiritual practice that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a 'post-Christian, spiritually polyglot' reality."
Seems to me there are many more serious threats to the spiritual lives of Christians: Greed, envy, lust, fear, hate, violence. But Mohler isn't the only religious leader stressed out by yoga's growing popularity in America. He isn't even the only concerned On Faith panelist.
Earlier this year, On Faith panelists Aseem Shukla and Deepak Chopra created a bit of a ruckus with their friendly debate about whether Americans had ripped yoga from its Hindu roots. "The severance of yoga from Hinduism disenfranchises millions of Hindu Americans from their spiritual heritage," Shukla wrote.
It would be easy to categorize these concerns as Y'all are Overreacting to God stuff Again. (YOGA). But the concerns expressed by Shukla and Mohler, in particular, shouldn't be summarily dismissed. In fact, from very different perspectives, these wise and learned men, neither of them reactionaries, are raising important questions for an increasingly pluralistic world.
Should we adopt, adapt or adjust the rituals and practices of other faiths for our own purposes?
According to the Hindu American Foundation, "Yoga is a combination of both physical and spiritual exercises, entails mastery over the body, mind and emotional self, and transcendence of desire. The ultimate goal is moksha, the attainment of liberation from worldly suffering and the cycle of birth and rebirth."
Moksha. Is that why you take yoga classes?
"The form of yoga that is practiced in much of the Western world is but merely a focus on a single limb of yoga: asana (posture) . . . which is only a form of exercise to control, tone and stretch muscles. Ignored are both the moral basis of the practice and the ultimate spiritual goal.
Does your yoga instructor discuss the moral basis and spiritual goals of yoga?
"Even when Yoga is practiced solely in the form of an exercise, it cannot be completely delinked from its Hindu roots. ..The Hindu American Foundation concludes from its research that Yoga, as an integral part of Hindu philosophy, is not simply physical exercise . . . but is in fact a Hindu way of life."
Some Hindus are concerned that yoga has been confiscated. Some Muslims are concerned that Hindus are using yoga as a tool of conversion. Buddhists remain detached from the issue. But some Christians are concerned that practicing yoga will lead to theological confusion.
Should Christians or Muslims or any non-Hindus practice yoga? If they practice the physical aspects of the ancient spiritual discpline, should they call it yoga?
More importantly, if it reduces stress, why aren't we all praticing yoga?

WP: Five myths about Facebook

By David Kirkpatrick
Sunday, September 26, 2010; B02



Movies often have Web sites, but it's not so often that Web sites have movies. Facebook, of course, is not just any Web site; in the 6 1/2 years since founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg started the social networking service in his Harvard dorm room, it has acquired 500 million active users worldwide. It may be the fastest-growing company in history. And now, yes, it is the inspiration for a movie, "The Social Network," opening Oct. 1. Even before Hollywood got involved, however, Facebook was the subject of quite a bit of lore -- not all of it true.

1. Facebook is used mostly by college kids.

When Zuckerberg started Facebook in the spring of 2004, it was just for his classmates -- but that chapter lasted only a matter of months. The site opened to students with e-mail addresses from other colleges later that year, to high schoolers in 2005 and to all adults in 2006. While Facebook's base still skews young, about two-thirds of its 134 million American members are older than 26. Outside the United States, Facebook's fastest growth has been among middle-age women.

In country after country, it has become so central to social life that if you are not on it -- regardless of your age -- you are probably not in very close contact with your friends. In my own research, for example, I have found that Facebook messaging is beginning to replace e-mail among the Italian educated elite and among businesspeople in Colombia. And in Indonesia, Facebook's third-largest country, if you use the Internet you are almost certainly a member: Of the 30 million people online there, 27.8 million of them use Facebook.

2. Facebook keeps changing to help sell advertising.

Zuckerberg is constantly making changes to Facebook's features and interface, and some of these changes have left users with less control over how their personal data is displayed to the outside world. In one such instance late last year, each user's list of friends was made public; the resulting outcry by privacy advocates and a small but vocal group of users forced Facebook to retreat this spring.

The company's critics presume that these changes reflect a profit motive -- they note that exposing users' data makes it easier for advertisers to target them. While it may, my many interviews with Zuckerberg suggest a different agenda. For one thing, he doesn't seem to see ad revenue as an end in itself; he sees it as a way to pay the bills as he expands his service. (If his primary motivation were short-term financial success, he might have accepted Microsoft's 2007 offer, which would have paid him, at age 23, more than $4 billion for his share of the company. He didn't even consider it.)

Zuckerberg seems to see himself less as an entrepreneur than as a social revolutionary who is using his company as a lever to change the world. "Making the world more open and connected" is the company's motto; for Zuckerberg, it is a mantra. He believes that Facebook offers people worldwide a broadcast platform, and he hopes they will use it to become more effective citizens. As a result, decisions at Facebook are calibrated not so much for short-term profitability as for their effect on extending the service to more users. Staffers unabashedly used the word "ubiquity" to describe the company's goal to me.

Zuckerberg's fixation on constant development is also motivated by a healthy dose of paranoia: Over the course of my conversations with him, it became clear that he believes that if Facebook ever stops changing, a smaller, nimbler competitor -- something like Facebook once was -- will sneak up and eat his lunch.

3. Facebook users are up in arms about privacy.

Some say they are, but actions speak louder than words, and Facebook has continued to grow through each privacy controversy. The biggest one took place in September 2006, when Facebook introduced its News Feed feature, which presents the latest information about each user to all of his or her friends. Although 10 percent of users initially joined Facebook groups protesting this change, the News Feed quickly became the most popular feature on the site. Today, it more or less defines Facebook.

Another indication that most users don't care much about privacy is that so many of them accept friend requests from people they don't know very well -- if at all. This is in part because a culture of competition, driven by a desire to rack up the most friends, has caught hold among many users. Others are uncertain about whether they can politely decline such requests. Yet, becoming someone's "friend" on Facebook typically means giving that person access to personal information. In an experiment, security firm Sophos invited Facebook users to befriend someone named Freddi Staur, whose profile contained almost no information but showed a photo of a small green plastic frog. The request was accepted by 41 percent of users.

4. Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from other students at Harvard.

Whether he did is the dramatic question at the heart of "The Social Network," based on Ben Mezrich's book "The Accidental Billionaires." Zuckerberg briefly worked for a group of older students who were building an online social network they called Harvard Connection (later renamed ConnectU), but he launched his own site, which he originally dubbed Thefacebook, before they could complete theirs. The older students felt betrayed and filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, charging that he'd ripped off their idea. He settled the claim out of court, reportedly paying the students stock worth tens of millions of dollars.

But a little context is helpful. Zuckerberg and the older students were greatly influenced by services already in operation, including Friendster, which launched in March 2003. Moreover, social networks were appearing at colleges all over the country that school year, including at Yale, Columbia and Baylor. A sophisticated service called Club Nexus had launched at Stanford in 2001.

So while Zuckerberg might have borrowed some ideas from Harvard Connection, many of these ideas were already borrowed -- from Friendster and Club Nexus.

5. Facebook could soon go the way of Friendster and MySpace.

Friendster was created by a guy who said part of his motivation was to help people find dates; MySpace (which launched in August 2003) was initially used for much the same purpose. Facebook, by contrast, was conceived as a much broader communication tool. Friendster and MySpace were never as technologically sophisticated as Facebook, nor did their leaders possess a fraction of Facebook's paranoia about competitors.

And neither of those services ever became nearly as large as Facebook. It is the largest service on the Internet by far in terms of hours of use, and it has become the world's largest repository of photos; its users would be loathe to abandon all those pictures, since many don't keep copies elsewhere.

All this means that Facebook has grown into something much more than a fad. It may eventually be replaced by something else, but not without a fight.

David Kirkpatrick is the author of "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World." He will be online to discuss this piece on Wednesday, Sept. 29, at 11 a.m. ET. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.

NYT: In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises

September 25, 2010
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Back in 2007, when the government here announced its plan for “the world’s first zero-carbon city” on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, many Westerners dismissed it as a gimmick — a faddish follow-up to neighboring Dubai’s half-mile-high tower in the desert and archipelago of man-made islands in the shape of palm trees.

Designed by Foster & Partners, a firm known for feats of technological wizardry, the city, called Masdar, would be a perfect square, nearly a mile on each side, raised on a 23-foot-high base to capture desert breezes. Beneath its labyrinth of pedestrian streets, a fleet of driverless electric cars would navigate silently through dimly lit tunnels. The project conjured both a walled medieval fortress and an upgraded version of the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland.

Well, those early assessments turned out to be wrong. By this past week, as people began moving into the first section of the project to be completed — a 3 ½-acre zone surrounding a sustainability-oriented research institute — it was clear that Masdar is something more daring and more noxious.

Norman Foster, the firm’s principal partner, has blended high-tech design and ancient construction practices into an intriguing model for a sustainable community, in a country whose oil money allows it to build almost anything, even as pressure grows to prepare for the day the wells run dry. And he has worked in an alluring social vision, in which local tradition and the drive toward modernization are no longer in conflict — a vision that, at first glance, seems to brim with hope.

But his design also reflects the gated-community mentality that has been spreading like a cancer around the globe for decades. Its utopian purity, and its isolation from the life of the real city next door, are grounded in the belief — accepted by most people today, it seems — that the only way to create a truly harmonious community, green or otherwise, is to cut it off from the world at large.

Mr. Foster is the right man for this kind of job. A lifelong tech buff who collaborated with Buckminster Fuller, he talks about architecture in terms of high performance, as if his buildings were sports cars. And to some extent his single-minded focus on the craft of architecture — its technological and material aspects — has been a convenient way of avoiding trickier discussions about its social impact. (It’s hard to imagine Mr. Foster embroiled in the kind of public battles over modern architecture that his former partner, Richard Rogers, has fought with the traditionalist Prince Charles in London.)

Not that Mr. Foster doesn’t have ideals. At Masdar, one aim was to create an alternative to the ugliness and inefficiency of the sort of development — suburban villas slathered in superficial Islamic-style décor, gargantuan air-conditioned malls — that has been eating away the fabric of Middle Eastern cities for decades.

He began with a meticulous study of old Arab settlements, including the ancient citadel of Aleppo in Syria and the mud-brick apartment towers of Shibam in Yemen, which date from the 16th century. “The point,” he said in an interview in New York, “was to go back and understand the fundamentals,” how these communities had been made livable in a region where the air can feel as hot as 150 degrees.

Among the findings his office made was that settlements were often built on high ground, not only for defensive reasons but also to take advantage of the stronger winds. Some also used tall, hollow “wind towers” to funnel air down to street level. And the narrowness of the streets — which were almost always at an angle to the sun’s east-west trajectory, to maximize shade — accelerated airflow through the city.

With the help of environmental consultants, Mr. Foster’s team estimated that by combining such approaches, they could make Masdar feel as much as 70 degrees cooler. In so doing, they could more than halve the amount of electricity needed to run the city. Of the power that is used, 90 percent is expected to be solar, and the rest generated by incinerating waste (which produces far less carbon than piling it up in dumps). The city itself will be treated as a kind of continuing experiment, with researchers and engineers regularly analyzing its performance, fine-tuning as they go along.

But Mr. Foster’s most radical move was the way he dealt with one of the most vexing urban design challenges of the past century: what to do with the car. Not only did he close Masdar entirely to combustion-engine vehicles, he buried their replacement — his network of electric cars — underneath the city. Then, to further reinforce the purity of his vision, he located almost all of the heavy-duty service functions — a 54-acre photovoltaic field and incineration and water treatment plants — outside the city.

The result, Mr. Foster acknowledged, feels a bit like Disneyland. “Disneyland is attractive because all the service is below ground,” he said. “We do the same here — it is literally a walled city. Traditional cars are stopped at the edges.”

Driving from downtown Abu Dhabi, 20 miles away, you follow a narrow road past an oil refinery and through desolate patches of desert before reaching the blank concrete wall of Masdar and find the city looming overhead. (Mr. Foster plans to camouflage the periphery behind fountains and flora.) From there a road tunnels through the base to a garage just underneath the city’s edge.

Stepping out of this space into one of the “Personal Rapid Transit” stations brings to mind the sets designed by Harry Lange for “2001: A Space Odyssey.” You are in a large, dark hall facing a row of white, pod-shaped cars lined up in rectangular glass bays. (The cars’ design was based on Buckminster Fuller’s proposal for a compact urban vehicle, the D-45, which helps explain their softly contoured, timelessly futuristic silhouettes.) Daylight spills down a rough concrete wall behind them, hinting at the life above.

The first 13 cars of a proposed fleet of hundreds were being tested the day I visited, but as soon as the system is up, within a few weeks, a user will be able to step into a car and choose a destination on an LCD screen. The car will then silently pull into traffic, seeming to drive itself. (There are no cables or rails.)

It’s only as people arrive at their destination that they will become aware of the degree to which everything has been engineered for high-function, low-consumption performance. The station’s elevators have been tucked discreetly out of sight to encourage use of a concrete staircase that corkscrews to the surface. And on reaching the streets — which were pretty breezy the day I visited — the only way to get around is on foot. (This is not only a matter of sustainability; Mr. Foster’s on-site partner, Austin Relton, told me that obesity has become a significant health issue in this part of the Arab world, largely because almost everyone drives to avoid the heat.)

The buildings that have gone up so far come in two contrasting styles. Laboratories devoted to developing new forms of sustainable energy and affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are housed in big concrete structures that are clad in pillowlike panels of ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene, a super-strong translucent plastic that has become fashionable in contemporary architecture circles for its sleek look and durability. Inside, big open floor slabs are designed for maximum flexibility.

The residential buildings, which for now will mostly house professors, students and their families, use a more traditional architectural vocabulary. To conform to Middle Eastern standards of privacy, Mr. Foster came up with an undulating facade of concrete latticework based on the mashrabiya screens common in the region. The latticework blocks direct sunlight and screens interiors from view, while the curves make for angled views to the outside, so that apartment dwellers never look directly into the windows of facing buildings. Such concerns are also reflected in the layout of the neighborhood. Like many Middle Eastern university campuses, it is segregated by sex, with women and families living at one end and single men at the other. Each end has a small public plaza, which acts as its social heart.

Still, one wonders, despite the technical brilliance and the sensitivity to local norms, how a project like Masdar can ever attain the richness and texture of a real city. Eventually, a light-rail system will connect it to Abu Dhabi, and street life will undoubtedly get livelier as the daytime population grows to a projected 90,000. (Although construction on a second, larger phase has already begun, the government-run developer, the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, refuses to give a completion date for the city, saying only that it will grow at its own pace.)

But the decision of who gets to live and work in Masdar, as in any large-scale development, will be outside the architect’s control. That will be decided by the landlord, in this case, the government.

And even if it were to become a perfect little urban melting pot, Masdar would have only limited relevance to the world most people live in. Mr. Foster’s inspired synthesis of ancient and new technologies could well have applications elsewhere; it should be looked at closely by other architects. But no one would argue that a city of a few million or more can be organized with such precision, and his fantasy world is only possible as a meticulously planned community, built from the ground up and of modest size.

What Masdar really represents, in fact, is the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance.

That’s obviously not how Mr. Foster sees it. He said the city was intended to house a cross-section of society, from students to service workers. “It is not about social exclusion,” he added.

And yet Masdar seems like the fulfillment of that idea. Ever since the notion that thoughtful planning could improve the lot of humankind died out, sometime in the 1970s, both the megarich and the educated middle classes have increasingly found solace by walling themselves off inside a variety of mini-utopias.

This has involved not only the proliferation of suburban gated communities, but also the transformation of city centers in places like Paris and New York into playgrounds for tourists and the rich. Masdar is the culmination of this trend: a self-sufficient society, lifted on a pedestal and outside the reach of most of the world’s citizens.

NYT: Sex Scandal Threatens a Georgia Pastor’s Empire

September 25, 2010
By JAMES C. McKINLEY and ROBBIE BROWN

LITHONIA, Ga. — Over the last two decades, Bishop Eddie L. Long has built a religious and financial empire from scratch, transforming a small, faltering church into a modern cathedral with one of the largest and most influential congregations in the country.

Today, Bishop Long’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church includes a multimillion-dollar network of charities and businesses, a private school and the Samson’s Health and Fitness Center, where he holds court and pumps iron with young people.

His message that God wants people to prosper has attracted celebrities, professional athletes and socialites, swelling the membership to 25,000. The church hosted four United States presidents for the funeral of Coretta Scott King in 2006.

The rapid expansion of the church — often called “Club New Birth” because it attracts so many young black singles — has also made Bishop Long a powerful political player, especially in DeKalb County, home to one of the wealthiest black communities in the country. The church has become a mandatory stop for many politicians — local, state and national — and Bishop Long supports candidates of both parties.

But Bishop Long’s reputation and sprawling enterprises now stand threatened by a sex scandal.

Four former members of a youth group he runs have accused him of repeatedly coercing them into homosexual sex acts, and of abusing his considerable moral authority over them while plying them with cash, new cars, lodging and lavish trips.

Bishop Long has denied the accusations in a letter sent to a local radio station and has promised to address them from the pulpit on Sunday. He declined, through his lawyer, to comment for this article.

The accusations are all the more explosive because Bishop Long styles himself a social conservative, rails against homosexuality and calls for a ban on same-sex marriage. His church even holds seminars promising to “cure” homosexuals.

“When this comes out, it gives at least the perception of hypocrisy — it’s like red meat to a lion, everyone’s pouncing on this story,” said the Rev. Timothy McDonald III, a friend of Bishop Long who heads the First Iconium Baptist Church. “This is the issue: how can you be against homosexuality and you are allegedly participating in it? That is the epitome of hypocrisy.”

The accusations center on the LongFellows Youth Academy, an exclusive group of teenage boys handpicked by Bishop Long for spiritual mentoring.

The boys went through a bonding ritual, known as a “covenant ceremony,” in which Bishop Long gave them jewelry and exchanged vows with them while quoting from Scripture as ceremonial candles burned, according to court complaints filed against the pastor. Reciting Bible verses, the pastor promised to protect them from harm and called them “spiritual sons.”

But four former members of the group now say the real purpose of the academy was to provide Bishop Long with young men whom he could lure into sex. The men say they were past the legal age of consent when Bishop Long initiated the relationships. Still, the charges have shaken Atlanta’s church-going society, spurring painful conversations from kitchen tables to talk radio.

Bishop Long cuts a flashy figure in Lithonia, the Atlanta suburb where he lives and has built his church. He is often seen in a Bentley attended by bodyguards. He tends to wear clothes that show off his muscular physique. He favors Gucci sunglasses, gold necklaces, diamond bracelets and Rolex watches. He lives in a 5,000-square-foot house with five bedrooms, which he bought for $1.1 million in 2005.

His lavish display of wealth is in keeping with his theology. In his sermons, he often tells his congregation that God wants them to be wealthy and asserts that Jesus was not a poor man. By all accounts, he has been well compensated for his leadership in building New Birth from a church with a few hundred members into the largest congregation in Georgia. His televised sermons reach 170 countries.

In 2005, for instance, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published tax records showing that from 1997 to 2000 Bishop Long had accepted $3 million in salary, housing, a car and other perks from a charity he controlled.

“We’re not just a church, we’re an international corporation,” he told the newspaper in justifying his compensation. “We’re not just a bumbling bunch of preachers who can’t talk and all we’re doing is baptizing babies. I deal with the White House. I deal with Tony Blair. I deal with presidents around this world. I pastor a multimillion-dollar congregation.”

After the article about his compensation, Bishop Long hired a public relations firm and went on a campaign to improve his image, Mr. McDonald said. He began charitable programs to feed the poor, help struggling people with mortgages and even offer haircuts to the homeless.

“The bishop used to be perceived as aloof, untouchable, with his entourage all around him,” Mr. McDonald said. “He started putting himself in a different light, a more positive light.”

Bishop Long’s critics and his defenders are waiting for an explanation of the accusations against him. Some members of the church believe he is the victim of a smear campaign by people in favor of gay rights, though they offer no proof.

“It’s propaganda, man,” said Anthony M. Harris, 30, a businessman who says Bishop Long has served as his role model. “It’s retaliation for the 2004 march, the anti-gay-marriage march.”

But the accusations have turned others away from Bishop Long. William Abernathy, 25, a music producer, said that he had attended the church several times this year and was considering joining, but that the accusations, coupled with Bishop Long’s opulent lifestyle, persuaded him to go elsewhere.

“I’m going to pass on that,” Mr. Abernathy said. “It’s like hot milk now, sitting on the curb, getting sour.”

Many in the congregation, meanwhile, have been wrestling with feelings of betrayal. “My heart just kind of sank,” said Cheryl Jenkins, 43, who owns an accounting firm. “If he says he didn’t do it, we believe in him. If it turns out that he did and he apologizes, we have to accept it. No one is above reproach.”

Bishop Long was born in Charlotte, N.C., where his father, Floyd Long, was a Baptist minister and owned a service station. In interviews and his books, he has described his father as a drinker and emotionally distant.

“To be candid, I’ve been working to remove the tentacles of nearly 40 years’ worth of pain and complications that came my way against my will during the first 12 years of my life, and my father was a preacher,” he wrote in his 2002 self-help book, “What a Man Wants, What a Woman Needs.”

He studied business at North Carolina Central University, then went to work as a sales representative for the Ford Motor Company, but was fired over inaccuracies in his expense accounts. He moved to Atlanta to study theology and became the pastor of a small church in Jonesboro, Ga.

In 1987, when he took over New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, it had only 300 members and a small building. He adopted a modern image, using slang and dressing like a hip-hop mogul. He borrowed ideas from evangelical and charismatic churches and expanded his reach through cable TV.

He also adopted what has become known as “muscular Christianity,” a male-dominated view that emphasizes a warriorlike man who serves as the spiritual authority and protector in a family. His books on relationships suggest that men get in touch with their inner “wild man” and channel their fighting instincts into taking responsibility for their lives. Women are to submit to their husbands, he says.

Bishop Long has been married twice and has four children.

B. J. Bernstein, a lawyer for the four young men who claim to have been coerced into sexual affairs with Bishop Long, said the pastor exerted a paternalistic and, at times, autocratic influence over young men.

The four complaints filed in court describe how Bishop Long arranged for the church to provide cars to the young men and put them on the church payroll. Two of them also said they received free lodging in church-owned houses, where, they said, Bishop Long visited them for sessions of kissing, oral sex or masturbation. He also took them on trips to other cities and abroad, sharing rooms with them, with the knowledge of several church officials, the complaints say.

“There are biblical and spiritual passages that were given to them to make them comfortable and make them believe that they were not gay,” Ms. Bernstein said.

In the letter to the radio station, Bishop Long called the accusations false. “We continue to categorically deny each and every one of these ugly charges,” he said.

NYT: A Thai Region Where Husbands Are Imported

September 24, 2010
By SETH MYDANS

UDON, THAILAND — The most dazzling creatures Nui Davis saw when she was a child were the village girls who had found foreign husbands, visiting in their Western finery and handing out candies to the children.

“For me, they were like a princess,” she said. “And I kept those pictures in my mind, and I made a wish that one day I would like to be one of those ladies.”

Today, at the age of 30, she lives with her husband, Joseph Davis of Fresno, California, in an air-conditioned, three-bedroom house with a driveway and basketball hoop, surrounded by flower beds and a well-kept lawn.

“My family keeps saying, ‘You got it. You got your dream now,”’ she said.

But unlike many other foreign husbands, Mr. Davis, 54, did not take his wife home with him, choosing instead to settle down in northeastern Thailand, a region known as Isaan.

He is part of an expanding population of nearly 11,000 foreign husbands in the region, drawn by the low cost of living, slow pace of life and the exotic reputation of Thai women — something like a brand name for Western men seeking Asian partners. “Thai women are a lot like women in America were 50 years ago,” said Mr. Davis, before they discovered their rights and became “strong-headed and opinionated.”

“The women now know they are equal,” said Mr. Davis, a retired Naval officer who has been divorced twice, “so the situation is not as relaxed and peaceful as it is between an American and a Thai lady.”

It is easy to spot the foreigners’ homes, with their sturdy walls and red-tiled roofs, an archipelago of affluence among the smaller, poorer houses of their new neighbors and in-laws.

Mixed couples are common on the streets and in the markets of Udon Thani. One street where Western men gather to eat and drink is popularly known as “Foreign Son-in-Law Street.”

“There are villages in Isaan that are almost entirely comprising foreign houses, where the whole village is almost entirely houses purchased by foreigners for their Thai ladies,” said Phil Nicks, author of “Love Entrepreneurs: Cross-Culture Relationship Deals in Thailand.”

Isaan is one of the poorest parts of the country, the source of most low-wage workers in Bangkok and the home of many of the women who work in the entertainment industry in the capital.

Some of the earliest Thai-American marriages were in Udon Thani, the site of a U.S. air base in the 1960s during the Vietnam War. In the following years, most Americans left, sometimes taking a Thai wife with them. Now the presence of American and European men is growing again. “In the northeast where this phenomenon is strongest, a huge majority of the women there are looking for a foreign boyfriend or husband, and I think some of them can be quite assertive, and aggressive in their pursuing of a foreign man,” said Mr. Nicks.

A clash of expectations strains many marriages, and more than half end in divorce, said Prayoon Thavon, manager of international services at Panyavejinter Hospital in Udon Thani.

While the men — many of them retired and living on pensions, many disappointed in their lives and marriages at home — may be seeking an emotional connection, the women are generally motivated by economics, said Mr. Prayoon, who provides counseling for mixed couples.

“For some ladies it is just money, money, money,” he said. “Getting married has become a business more than love. People want to improve their social status. Sometimes these ladies spend the husband’s money, use it all, then he’s cut out. There are many cases like that.”

Even though many men are retired and living on a fixed income, they are expected to help support their wives’ extended families, beginning with a dowry of several thousand dollars.

“When you get married in Thailand you are marrying the whole family, the whole village,” Mr. Prayoon said. “Often the lady expects that, but the man doesn’t understand.”

There seems to be less concern about differences in age, with many bridegrooms in their 50s or 60s or even 70s.

“Age is not a factor here,” said Mr. Davis. “In America if I marry a girl who is 24 years younger than me, all you’re going to get is eyes and bad talk, bad gossip. Here it’s not an issue. It happens every day.”

At the age of 63, Dennis Sorensen, a retired mathematics teacher, is 32 years older than his wife, Pennapa, whom he met eight years ago on a beach. He spends much of his time watching U.S. television through a satellite hookup and cooks his own hamburgers, but he said he has done his best to keep his wife and her family happy. He helps raise her teenage daughter from an earlier relationship as well as their 2-year-old son.

“There’s some adjustment there,” said Mr. Sorensen, for whom this is the first marriage, “and we’ve had issues where I run out of money and I cannot take care of everybody, and that has caused some crises, but we’ve overcome everything the best that we can.”

One barrier is language, as few foreigners learn Thai. “I can’t speak English so well, but I can live with him many years,” Ms. Sorensen said, speaking in Thai. “Sometimes when he is very upset I don’t understand what he is talking about but I understand the tone and I just walk away.”

But she added in English: “I think Dennis is good — good for take care of my family, take care of my daughter, take care of everything for me. Before, I don’t have anything. But right now I have a home, I have car, I not work and I only stay home and take care of my baby.”

Foreign marriage has become so common that it has lost much of its stigma here in Udon Thani, and many girls share Ms. Davis’s dream of becoming a princess. “It looks pretty good and they look pretty happy,” said Rojjana Udomsri, 30, who is married to a Thai man and has a 2-year-old son. “They have money to spend and they can go anywhere they want.”

But she said she had her doubts.

“I don’t know if they are really happy,” she said. “There were times I wanted to have a good life like them, but I can’t live with a person I don’t love. With someone I love I can go through all the hardships of life together.”

WP: In the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton lost but feminism won

By Connie Schultz
Sunday, September 19, 2010; B01



BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY

The Election That Changed Everything for American Women

By Rebecca Traister

Free Press. 336 pp. $26

In the early pages of "Big Girls Don't Cry," Salon's Rebecca Traister seems determined to alienate every female reader over 40. Had I fallen for her false start, I would have missed her considerable contributions to the ongoing feminist narrative described by Gloria Steinem as the "revolution from within."

At first, Traister gleefully harpoons the warriors of old to explain why her younger generation is done with antiquated notions of feminism. Consider, for example, her description of the women at a nonpartisan, pro-abortion-rights gathering: "It was a crowd of monied, Botoxed, electorally enthralled dames who, in the popular imagination of the time, should have had 'Hillary '08' mown into their Hamptons house topiary, if not their bikini lines." That comes a mere four pages after she argues that, if young women are to care about feminism, the "conversation had to be drained of some of its earnest piety. Talking about gender in the new millennium required us, I thought, to get over ourselves a little bit, to dispense with the sacred cows, to question power and cultivate new ideas and leaders."

Hillary Clinton had allowed her husband "to play her for a fool," Traister writes, before embarking on her quest to become "the most powerful girl on the Senate floor." A few pages later, Traister offers Princeton University associate professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell's parsing of Elizabeth Edwards's popularity: "A fat woman married to a good-looking man is always a good story, particularly if she is a breast cancer survivor who has lost a child."

Whew.

By the middle of Chapter 2, Traister's book felt increasingly like the minutes of the Mean Girls Club -- and a waste of this 53-year-old woman's time. But with age comes patience. Good thing, too. I ended up admiring Traister and loving her book. In its best parts, it is a raw and brave memoir of a journalist who discovered that all is not well for women in America, and a description of how she and other young women are laying claim to their rightful place in the fight.

Traister offers a first glimpse into her reluctant but hopeful heart when she describes following Michelle Obama on the campaign trail in late 2007: "It was November in rural Iowa, and between the Hopperesque towns in which we were stopping we drove through farmland, and brittle leaves blew across the road. I had thrown some CDs into my bag, and at some point on the drive to Michelle's next stump stomp, on a crisp bright day following this crisp, bright woman, Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are A Changing' began to play. I was thirty-three years old; I had no memories of the 1960s, in which the modern civil rights movement took hold, or of the 1970s, in which second-wave feminism bloomed. But I felt for a few minutes as though, on some small highway east of everything urban in Iowa, I was living in the most powerful historic moment of my lifetime, as if the country I'd grown up in, with its rules and limitations and assumptions about who can do what and who can be what, was finally beginning to fulfill Dylan's decades-old promise."

Traister started out supporting John Edwards and opposed even the notion of President Hillary Clinton, but ended up sobbing when Clinton conceded. The author is at her best when she explores the confusion and contradictions swirling within -- and without. Boldly, she takes on the "frat boys" at MSNBC, as well as the many young, white males on Daily Kos and in the Obama campaign who trafficked in sexist and misogynist attacks on Clinton.

"A pattern was emerging in the liberal, privileged, predominantly white climes in which I worked and lived: young men were starry-eyed about Obama and puffed with outsized antipathy toward Clinton. . . . I was made uncomfortable by the persistent note of aggression that marked their reactions to Clinton, and puzzled by the increasingly cult-like devotion to Obama, a man whose policy positions were not so different, after all, from those of his opponent. Hating Hillary had for decades been the provenance of Republican blowhards, but now men on the left were spewing vitriol about her voice, her looks, her presumption -- and without realizing it were radicalizing me in my support for Clinton more than the candidate herself ever could have."

Despite the setbacks and disappointments, Traister believes the 2008 presidential race breathed new life into the women's movement, in part because a new generation came to own it. Such a youthful embrace of the women's work yet to be done is exhilarating -- for her generation and for mine.

And therein lies my only caveat, which Traister may see as a matronly reprimand: Do resist tagging all of us over-50 feminists as dour discards. Your youthful vision is better than our crinkled eyes for navigating the future, but we hold your history in our hearts. We are still in the fight, increasingly with men foolish enough to mistake a woman's sags for surrender. We were once you, and one day you will be us.

Connie Schultz is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and an essayist for Parade magazine.

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NYT: Gucci: Somewhere in North Africa

September 22, 2010, 1:33 pm
By CATHY HORYN

Antonio Calanni/Associated Press The runway at the Spring 2011 Gucci show in Milan.
Merely as an exercise, I was trying to think this evening of a tweet-size summary of the Alberta Ferretti show, because I was pretty sure that if I wrote down peasant blouses, faded floral tiered skirts, long-sleeved linen dresses with white crochet trim, and floppy hats and rope sandals, you might get the wrong idea — that it was corny or something. But I guess I kept coming back to Nantucket in the summer of 1974 or ‘75 (I had my driver’s license). I was driving into town early one morning and I stopped to pick up a young couple hitchhiking on the Milestone Road. They had just been married on the beach, and the bride was wearing a dress with white crochet.

I like shows that make you think of something personal, because a lot of the time there isn’t much more you want to say about the clothes, and if they can evoke a place, then I figure they will do the same for someone else. What more do you want from chiffon?

Frida Giannini said in her press notes for Wednesday’s Gucci show that the “sensual colors” were meant to recall Marrakesh. But frankly, I didn’t see that. I think it’s pretty tough to evoke North Africa, or the American West, or Paris in the ’20s, without ending up with a big ball of khaki, or denim, or Lady Brett Ashley resting her head on poor Jake’s shoulder. Fashion just exploits everything, and you wind up with the YouTube version of a pair of Sahara pants.

One thing, though, that was puzzling about Ms. Giannini’s collection (oh, it was fine in the main) was that she seemed to have three separate shows in one. The opening part consisted of filmy black blouses with half-open backs worn with high-waist tulip skirts in deep purple, jade or iris blue. The outfits were nice but you wouldn’t cry over them. Then she was clearly somewhere in North Africa, with those beautiful leather Gucci jackets and soupy harem trousers we have seen enough of this year. Some of the jackets had sections thickly coated in fringe. The third mood was more exotic, with five dresses embroidered with feathers and beads; the patterns and textures evoked a standard African tribal motif as seen by Hollywood. And so we are back to the beginning.

It’s warm in Milan; amber light and voices outside my window.

See the full Gucci spring collection.

See the full Alberta Ferretti spring collection.

NYT: The Roman Spring of Mr. Lagerfeld

September 23, 2010, 11:40 am
By CATHY HORYN

Antonio Calanni/Associated Press Dresses from the spring 2011 Fendi collection in Milan.
In one sense, Karl Lagerfeld was right on message on Thursday at Fendi. He got the memo about longer lengths, soft volumes and a cool, vibrant palette. Let no one say that Mr. Lagerfeld was slacking.

But in another way, this collection hovered above the fray. The perspective was utterly sophisticated — a summer dress in cotton or a microdot cotton or print with lantern sleeves, an open neckline and a belted waist. This is a season of dresses, and Mr. Lagerfeld knew how to make his grown-up and different. There is nothing about these dresses — in colors like pale aqua, coral, and various peony shades, and with those beautiful sleeves, that makes a bid to be liked — to ingratiate with luxury wampum. He doesn’t solicit, Mr. Lagerfeld. But then good designers rarely do.

Was there a twinge of “another time” in this collection? It’s hard to know what Mr. Lagerfeld is able to glimpse in his rear-view mirror because (a) his view is enormous and (b) he is going too fast to catch much. But sometimes a glimpse is enough.

View the full Fendi spring 2011 collection.

NYT: On the Colombian Coast, Natural Beauty, Gritty Charm

September 15, 2010
By LIONEL BEEHNER

IT’S not called the Parque de Los Novios — Park of the Newlyweds — for nothing. Young couples lock arms as they stroll past rows of freshly planted flowers. A Sinatra love ballad sung in Spanish echoes from a corner dive bar. Aside from a few mustachioed, sombrero-clad men playing a board game, it seemed as if everyone on this breezy August evening was on a romantic sabbatical.

Yet this square in the center of Santa Marta, a port city along the Caribbean coast of Colombia, was not always a streetlamp-lighted refuge of romance. Just a few years back, the park was a tumbledown area trafficked mostly by prostitutes and petty criminals.

Wedged between the sea and the snow-capped Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta peaks, the city may be Colombia’s oldest, but it has always been seen as the grittier and more industrial counterpart to nearby Cartagena — at best, a stopover point for visitors looking to trek through Tayrona National Park or hike to the Lost City, a well-known archaeological site nearby.

“Until five years ago nobody would come here because of the guerrillas,” said Michael McMurdo, a New York City-trained chef who recently opened a Mexican restaurant, Agave Azul, in Santa Marta. “While there is still some sketchy stuff going on, I like it here because it still feels real and Colombian.”

The town’s transformation began with a government crackdown on illegal drug and paramilitary activity in the region. The efforts have paid off: tourism has now replaced crime as Santa Marta’s claim to fame. The number of international visitors to Colombia in 2009 spiked 17 percent from the previous year, helped along by the emergence of former rebel hideouts like Santa Marta as new tourist destinations.

The Colombian government has also spent plenty of money to revamp the city’s parks and convert streets into pedestrian zones. But what the government started, a wave of polyglot businesspeople like Mr. McMurdo — restaurateurs, hoteliers, real estate developers and night life impresarios — has continued, helping to resuscitate Santa Marta’s colonial center. Shops selling religious iconography and smoky billiards halls are giving way to Tuscan-style hotels and tapas spots that double as jazz bars. Even the once-grimy boardwalk now feels more like a smaller-scale version of Rio’s Ipanema.

Perhaps the perfect monument to this city’s rebirth is a gleaming new marina that anchors the waterfront; huge and visually spectacular, it wouldn’t look out of place in Dubai. The terminal, which opened this month, can handle more than 250 yachts and super-yachts.

On a recent late-summer evening, a stylish crowd of Colombians and expatriates mingled at Ben & Josep’s, a new steakhouse run by a Spanish-Belgian duo, down the boardwalk from the marina. The steakhouse is just one of the additions to the city’s seaside area, which has been spiffed up in recent years with greenery and dotted with statues of shapely, warrior-like indigenous women (also found in every souvenir shop around town).

Away from the beach, the city abounds with Spanish colonial charm. Among the streets off Parque Simón Bolívar, wanderers will find a whitewashed cathedral that claims to be South America’s oldest. It may, in fact, be a 17th-century amalgamation of architectural influences, rather than the original structure, but the chandeliers and marble altar are still worth a peek.

To stay cool, visitors can grab some coconut water, sold just outside the cathedral, or rest in the shade of the patio of the nearby Juan Valdez Café, Colombia’s go-to coffee chain.

Of course there’s more to Santa Marta’s culinary offerings than coffee. The jumble of fare here is as multicultural as the city’s mix of ethnicities and musical influences; African, Caribbean, European and Latin flavors vie for space on menus. At Gourmet Plaza Bistro, where the décor includes old TVs and typewriters, diners can sample home-cooked pechuga ricotta, a Colombian-Mediterranean hybrid, as well as tasty crepes. For gourmet ceviche, head to Donde Chucho, an upscale restaurant on a corner of Parque de Los Novios.

The city’s reputation as an up-and-coming party spot is also growing, with bars and clubs of all stripes seeming to open weekly. On a late-night jaunt through downtown, one is as likely to hear European techno as the native rhythms of cumbia or vallenato music.

That Latin flavor is evident at La Puerta (the Door), a chic dive bar with retro iconography plastered across its walls of red, yellow and blue (the national colors), where the floor fills with dancers gyrating to the sounds of Colombian rap and reggaetón.

Santa Marta also benefits from the bounty of virgin tropical forests just miles from the city center. For a relaxing getaway, grab a taxi or mini-bus to Taganga, a laid-back oceanside hamlet ringed by a horseshoe-shaped canopy of lush green hills. The strip of sand in town feels more like a dirt driveway than a tropical beach. But the sunsets are breathtaking, especially from the rooftop bar of the Mirador de Taganga Hotel along the town’s southern fringe. The Caribbean waters there are also perfect for scuba diving.

On the other side of Santa Marta lies El Rodadero, a Cancún-like strip of stylish restaurants, open-air markets and high-rise hotels along beaches that fill with well-to-do locals on weekends.

But aside from the protected shores of Tayrona National Park, the beaches around Santa Marta are not always the best places to relax. There is the occasional whiff of sewage, and vendors who can bombard tourists with offers of chairs, massages and — yes — drugs.

Though Santa Marta is no longer plagued by the kidnappings and killings that kept tourists away for decades, petty crime remains a problem. It’s not unusual to hear stories of police officers planting drugs on tourists to exact bribes, or of pickpockets roaming the boardwalk. But the city has made great strides toward putting its bloody, drug-riddled past behind it. Evan Dore, a shaggy-haired native of San Francisco, remembers driving through this part of Colombia four years ago with his brother, Ryan, in a 1981 VW bus. The pair left unimpressed. But two years later they decided to return and restore an 85-year-old mansion, now La Brisa Loca, a hostel and bar aimed at backpackers. They were attracted by Santa Marta’s authenticity, which it has maintained despite the recent development.

“The city is full of people going about their daily lives, going to work or selling things on the street with almost no interest in a foreigner walking around,” Mr. Dore said. “Santa Marta is the real South America I was searching for.”

IF YOU GO

GETTING THERE

Colombia-based Avianca offers flights directly from Fort Lauderdale to Barranquilla, which is about an hour to Santa Marta by bus or taxi. A recent Web search found round-trip flights in October starting at around $400. Another option is to fly directly to Bogotá, from which there are several direct flights to Santa Marta daily; they take just over an hour. Round-trip flights start at about $200.

WHERE TO STAY

Many of the hotels in Santa Marta feel musty and dated, but there are plenty of upscale hotels in the works. For now, try La Casa (Calle 18, 3-52; 57-311-390-4091), a gorgeous three-unit hotel with high ceilings, antiques and original marble floors. Doubles from 237,000 pesos, about $135 at 1,752 Colombian pesos to the dollar.

For backpackers, La Brisa Loca (Calle 14, 3-58; 57-3183-030-666; labrisaloca.com) is a friendly hostel with a festive bar, courtyard pool and rooftop patio, though be sure to book a private room (70,000 pesos).

WHERE TO EAT

Gourmet Plaza Bistro (Calle 18, 3-103; 57-317-453-93 55).

Donde Chucho (Calle 19, 2-17; 57-5-421-4663).

Ben & Josep’s (Carrera 1, 18-57; 57-317-280-5039).

Agave Azul (Calle 14, 3-58; 57-318-598-1858).