TIME 2007 PERSON OF THE YEAR 31/12/2007............................................................ 2 Person of the Year ............................................................................................................ 2 A Tsar Is Born....................................................................................................................

. 4 Putin and TIME: The View From Russia........................................................................ 14 A Bible, But No E-mail .................................................................................................... 16 Russia Needs Putin......................................................................................................... 19 Kissinger on Putin: "He Thinks He is a Reformer" ...................................................... 20 His Place in History......................................................................................................... 24 In Search of Russia's Big Idea ....................................................................................... 26 And Moscow Makes Me Sing And Shout ...................................................................... 33 Choosing Order Before Freedom .................................................................................. 36 The Gore Interview.......................................................................................................... 38 Al Gore ............................................................................................................................. 41 J.K. Rowling..................................................................................................................... 43 Rowling Answers 10 Questions About Harry ............................................................... 48 David Petraeus ................................................................................................................ 50 Hu Jintao.......................................................................................................................... 52 The Year of Them ............................................................................................................ 61 It's Payback Time ............................................................................................................ 63 Striving Valiantly ............................................................................................................. 65 Postcard: Bethlehem ...................................................................................................... 67 10 Questions for Richard Branson ................................................................................ 69 The Rolls-Royce Rebound.............................................................................................. 71 A SWF Kick ...................................................................................................................... 73 Canadian Conundrum..................................................................................................... 76 Seaworthy Idea................................................................................................................ 78 Verbatim........................................................................................................................... 79 Numbers .......................................................................................................................... 81 Did GIs Sell Guns in Iraq? .............................................................................................. 83 Inbox ................................................................................................................................ 84 ASIA VERSION SAME ..................................................................................................... 89 Road Test......................................................................................................................... 90 Lord of the Jungle........................................................................................................... 92 Criminal Mind .................................................................................................................. 94 The Mod Squad ............................................................................................................... 96 Casualties of War ............................................................................................................ 98 Peak Performance........................................................................................................... 99 Happy Havens in Mauritius .......................................................................................... 101 Step Back in Time at Castle Leslie .............................................................................. 102 Cassoulet: Savory Taken Seriously ............................................................................ 103 Verbatim......................................................................................................................... 104 Inbox .............................................................................................................................. 105 EUROPE VERSION........................................................................................................ 110 Germany's Battle Against Scientology ....................................................................... 110 A Short History of White House Fires ......................................................................... 112

TIME 2007 PERSON OF THE YEAR 31/12/2007

Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Person of the Year

By Richard Stengel, Managing Editor

People tend to think that choosing the Person of the Year is a scientific process. It's not; it's a subjective one. There's no Person of the Year measuring stick or algorithm. In the fall, I ask our writers, editors and correspondents to send in suggestions. We have meetings. I talk to wise men and women--some of them previous Persons of the Year. But in the end, it has to be someone or something that feels right, something that's a little unexpected, someone our readers will be eager to know more about. After selecting You and the rise of user-generated content last year, I was keen to select a person this year. I think part of the excitement of POY (as we call it internally)--and part of the challenge--is picking one individual who fits the description of the person who has most profoundly influenced the world during the past year, for better or for worse. I believe individuals can and do change the course of history, but it's often hard to tease out one person's vision and influence from the hurly-burly of events.

Vladimir Putin made that task easier. With an iron will--and at significant cost to the principles that free nations prize--Putin has brought Russia back as a world power. It was his year. I made up my mind about President Putin a few months ago, but it was only at the last minute that he sat down for an interview. So on a snowy Moscow day, our team left the city for the drive to Putin's presidential dacha. Despite the fact that President Putin knew he was potentially the Person of the Year, he made little effort to be agreeable. Charm is not part of his arsenal. I've spent a lot of time around politicians, but he's the first who didn't seem to care whether we liked him or not. We had an unparalleled team in Russia. The fascinating cover story on Putin was written by deputy managing editor Adi Ignatius. Adi served as the Wall Street Journal's Moscow bureau chief in the early 1990s and was eager to get back to Russia. Moscow correspondent Yuri Zarakhovich knows all the right questions and the people who can answer them. Senior editor Nathan Thornburgh, who wrote the beautiful story retracing a famous journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg, has followed Russia since his first visit as a 15-year-old exchange student. Yuri Kozyrev, who took the superb pictures for Nathan's piece, is a Russian national who has distinguished himself with his coverage of Iraq since 2002. If Putin eschews charm, Platon, the great English portrait photographer, exudes it. Putin, we were told, does not pose for portraits. He did for Platon, who was able to tease out of the President a fact that several journalists could not. Putin's favorite Beatles song? Yesterday. Richard Stengel, MANAGING EDITOR Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697396,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Tuesday, Dec. 04, 2007

A Tsar Is Born
By Adi Ignatius

No one is born with a stare like Vladimir Putin's. The Russian President's pale blue eyes are so cool, so devoid of emotion that the stare must have begun as an affect, the gesture of someone who understood that power might be achieved by the suppression of ordinary needs, like blinking. The affect is now seamless, which makes talking to the Russian President not just exhausting but often chilling. It's a gaze that says, I'm in charge. This may explain why there is so little visible security at Putin's dacha, Novo-Ogarevo, the grand Russian presidential retreat set inside a birch- and fir-forested compound west of Moscow. To get there from the capital requires a 25-minute drive through the soul of modern Russia, past decrepit Soviet-era apartment blocks, the mashed-up French Tudorvilla McMansions of the new oligarchs and a shopping mall that boasts not just the routine spoils of affluence like Prada and Gucci but Lamborghinis and Ferraris too.

When you arrive at the dacha's faux-neoclassical gate, you have to leave your car and hop into one of the Kremlin's vehicles that slowly wind their way through a silent forest of snowtipped firs. Aides warn you not to stray, lest you tempt the snipers positioned in the shadows around the compound. This is where Putin, 55, works. (He lives with his wife and two twentysomething daughters in another mansion deeper in the woods.) The rooms feel vast, newly redone and mostly empty. As we prepare to enter his spacious but spartan office, out walk some of Russia's most powerful men: Putin's chief of staff, his ideologist, the speaker of parliamentall of them wearing expensive bespoke suits and carrying sleek black briefcases. Putin, who rarely meets with the foreign press, then gives us 3 1/2 hours of his time, first in a formal interview in his office and then upstairs over an elaborate dinner of lobster-and-shiitake-mushroom salad, "crab fingers with hot sauce" and impressive vintages of Puligny-Montrachet and a Chilean Cabernet. Vladimir Putin gives a first impression of contained power: he is compact and moves stiffly but efficiently. He is fit, thanks to years spent honing his black-belt judo skills and, these days, early-morning swims of an hour or more. And while he is diminutive5 ft. 6 in. (about 1.7 m) seems a reasonable guesshe projects steely confidence and strength. Putin is unmistakably Russian, with chiseled facial features and those penetrating eyes. Charm is not part of his presentation of selfhe makes no effort to be ingratiating. One senses that he pays constant obeisance to a determined inner discipline. The successor to the boozy and ultimately tragic Boris Yeltsin, Putin is temperate, sipping his wine only when the protocol of toasts and greetings requires it; mostly he just twirls the Montrachet in his glass. He eats little, though he twitchily picks the crusts off the bread rolls on his plate. Putin grudgingly reveals a few personal details between intermittent bites of food: He relaxes, he says, by listening to classical composers like Brahms, Mozart, Tchaikovsky. His favorite Beatles song is Yesterday. He has never sent an e-mail in his life. And while he grew up in an officially atheist country, he is a believer and often reads from a Bible that he keeps on his state plane. He is impatient to the point of rudeness with small talk, and he is in complete control of his own message. He is clear about Russia's role in the world. He is passionate in his belief that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, particularly since overnight it stranded 25 million ethnic Russians in "foreign" lands. But he says he has no intention of trying to rebuild the U.S.S.R. or re-establish military or political blocs. And he praises his predecessors Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev for destroying a system that had lost the people's support. "I'm not sure I could have had the guts to do that myself," he tells us. Putin is, above all, a pragmatist, and has cobbled together a systemnot unlike China's that embraces the free market (albeit with a heavy dose of corruption) but relies on a strong state hand to keep order. Like President George W. Bush, he sees terrorism as one of the most profound threats of the new century, but he is wary of labeling it Islamic. "Radicals," he says, "can be found in any environment." Putin reveals that Russian intelligence recently uncovered a "specific" terrorist threat against both Russia and the U.S. and that he spoke by phone with Bush about it. What gets Putin agitatedand he was frequently agitated during our talkis his perception that Americans are out to interfere in Russia's affairs. He says he wants Russia and America to be partners but feels the U.S. treats Russia like the uninvited guest at a party. "We want to be a friend of America," he says. "Sometimes we get the impression

that America does not need friends" but only "auxiliary subjects to command." Asked if he'd like to correct any American misconceptions about Russia, Putin leans forward and says, "I don't believe these are misconceptions. I think this is a purposeful attempt by some to create an image of Russia based on which one could influence our internal and foreign policies. This is the reason why everybody is made to believe...[Russians] are a little bit savage still or they just climbed down from the trees, you know, and probably need to have...the dirt washed out of their beards and hair." The veins on his forehead seem ready to pop. Elected Emperor Putin has said that next spring, at the end of his second term as President, he will assume the nominally lesser role of Prime Minister. In fact, having nominated his loyal former chief of staff (and current Deputy Prime Minister) Dmitri Medvedev to succeed him as President, Putin will surely remain the supreme leader, master of Russia's destiny, which will allow him to complete the job he started. In his eight years as President, he has guided his nation through a remarkable transformation. He has restored stability and a sense of pride among citizens who, after years of Soviet stagnation, rode the heartbreaking roller coaster of raised and dashed expectations when Gorbachev and then Yeltsin were in charge. A basket case in the 1990s, Russia's economy has grown an average of 7% a year for the past five years. The country has paid off a foreign debt that once neared $200 billion. Russia's rich have gotten richer, often obscenely so. But the poor are doing better too: workers' salaries have more than doubled since 2003. True, this is partly a result of oil at $90 a barrel, and oil is a commodity Russia has in large supply. But Putin has deftly managed the windfall and spread the wealth enough so that people feel hopeful. Russia's revival is changing the course of the modern world. After decades of slumbering underachievement, the Bear is back. Its billionaires now play on the global stage, buying up property, sports franchises, places at lite schools. Moscow exerts international influence not just with arms but also with a new arsenal of weapons: oil, gas, timber. On global issues, it offers alternatives to America's waning influence, helping broker deals in North Korea, the Middle East, Iran. Russia just made its first shipment of nuclear fuel to Irana sign that Russia is taking the lead on that vexsome issue, particularly after the latest U.S. intelligence report suggested that the Bush Administration has been wrong about Iran's nuclear-weapons development. And Putin is far from done. The premiership is a perch that will allow him to become the longest-serving statesman among the great powers, long after such leaders as Bush and Tony Blair have faded from the scene. But all this has a dark side. To achieve stability, Putin and his administration have dramatically curtailed freedoms. His government has shut down TV stations and newspapers, jailed businessmen whose wealth and influence challenged the Kremlin's hold on power, defanged opposition political parties and arrested those who confront his rule. Yet this grand bargainof freedom for securityappeals to his Russian subjects, who had grown cynical over earlier regimes' promises of the magical fruits of Westernstyle democracy. Putin's popularity ratings are routinely around 70%. "He is emerging as an elected emperor, whom many people compare to Peter the Great," says Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center and a well-connected expert on contemporary Russia. Putin's global ambitions seem straightforward. He certainly wants a seat at the table on the big international issues. But more important, he wants free rein inside Russia, without foreign interference, to run the political system as he sees fit, to use whatever force he needs to quiet seething outlying republics, to exert influence over Russia's former Soviet

neighbors. What he's given up is Yeltsin's calculation that Russia's future requires broad acceptance on the West's terms. That means that on big global issues, says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former point man on Russia policy for the Clinton Administration, "sometimes Russia will be helpful to Western interests, and sometimes it will be the spoiler." Up from the Ruins How do Russians see Putin? For generations they have defined their leaders through political jokes. It's partly a coping mechanism, partly a glimpse into the Russian soul. In the oft told anecdotes, Leonid Brezhnev was always the dolt, Gorbachev the bumbling reformer, Yeltsin the drunk. Putin, in current punch lines, is the despot. Here's an example: Stalin's ghost appears to Putin in a dream, and Putin asks for his help running the country. Stalin says, "Round up and shoot all the democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue." "Why blue?" Putin asks. "Ha!" says Stalin. "I knew you wouldn't ask me about the first part." Putin himself is sardonic but humorless. In our hours together, he didn't attempt a joke, and he misread several of our attempts at playfulness. As Henry Kissinger, who has met and interacted with Russian leaders since Brezhnev, puts it, "He does not rely on personal charm. It is a combination of aloofness, considerable intelligence, strategic grasp and Russian nationalism" (see Kissinger interview). To fully understand Putin's accomplishments and his appeal, one has to step back into the tumult of the 1990s. At the end of 1991, just a few months after Yeltsin dramatically stood on a tank outside the parliament in Moscow to denounceand deflatea coup attempt by hard-liners, the Soviet Union simply ceased to exist. Yeltsin took the reins in Russia and, amid great hope and pledges of help from around the world, promised to launch an era of democracy and economic freedom. I arrived in Moscow a week later, beginning a threeyear stint as a Russia correspondent. I retain three indelible images from that time. The first: the legions of Ivy Leagueand other Western-educated "experts" who roamed the halls of the Kremlin and the government, offering advice, all ultimately ineffective, on everything from conducting free elections to using "shock therapy" to juice the economy to privatizing state-owned assets. The second: the long lines of impoverished old women standing in the Moscow cold, selling whatever they could scrounge from their homesa silver candleholder, perhaps, or just a pair of socks. The third, more familiar image: a discouraged and embattled Yeltsin in 1993 calling in Russian-army tanks to shell his own parliament to break a deadlock with the defiant legislature when everything he was trying to do was going wrong. Yeltsin bombed his way out of the threat of civil war and managed to hang on to power, but Russia was left hobbled. Virtually every significant assetoil, banks, the media ended up in the hands of a few "oligarchs" close to the President. Corruption and crime were rampant; the cities became violent. Paychecks weren't issued; pensions were ignored. Russia in 1998 defaulted on its foreign debt. The ruble and the financial markets collapsed, and Yeltsin was a spent force. "The '90s sucked," says Stephen Sestanovich, a Columbia University professor who was the State Department's special adviser for the new Independent States of the former Soviet Union under President Bill Clinton. "Putin managed to play on the resentment that Russians everywere were feeling." Indeed, by the time Putin took over in late 1999, there was nowhere to fall but up.

Path to Power That Russia needed fixing was acknowledged by all. But how was it that Putin got the call? What was it that lifted him to power, and to the dacha in Novo-Ogarevo? Putin's rise continues to perplex even devoted Kremlin observers. He was born into humble circumstances in St. Petersburg in 1952. His father had fought in World War II and later labored in a train-car factory. Putin's mother, a devout Orthodox Christian, had little education and took on a series of menial jobs. The family lived in a drab fifth-floor walk-up in St. Petersburg; Putin had to step over swarms of rats occupying the entranceway on his way to school. Putin's only ancestor of note was his paternal grandfather, who had served as a cook for both Lenin and Stalin, though there's no sign that this gave his family any special status or connections. Putin describes his younger self as a poor student and a "hooligan." Small for his age, he got roughed up by his contemporaries. So he took up samboa Soviet-era blend of judo and wrestlingand later just judo. From all accounts, he devoted himself to the martial art, attracted by both its physical demands and its contemplative philosophical core. "It's respect for your elders and opponents," he says in First Person, his question-and-answer memoir published in 2000. "It's not for weaklings." It was the KGB that rescued Putin from obscurityand turned the child into the man. Putin had begun to apply himself to schoolwork, and in 1975, during his senior year at Leningrad State University, he was approached by an impressive stranger who said, "I need to talk to you about your career assignment. I wouldn't like to specify exactly what it is yet." Putin, who had dreamed of becoming a spy, was intrigued. Within months he was being trained in counterintelligence. By the mid-1980s he was assigned to East Germany, where he worked undercover, pursuing intelligence on NATO and German politicians. He was in Dresden, not Berlin where the action was, and probably would have been only a bit player in the Le Carr version of the cold war. But when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, so did Putin's KGB career. As angry crowds moved on the local KGB headquarters, Putin and his colleagues feverishly burned files that detailed agents' names and networksso much paper, he recalls in the memoir, that "the furnace burst." Then he slipped into the crowd and watched as the newly liberated mobs sacked the detested building. Within two years, he left the KGB altogether. Putin's big break was a friend's introduction to Anatoli Sobchak, the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg, who was happy to bring in an intelligent, no-nonsense outsider to help push his reformist agenda. Putin ran the office that registered businesses and promoted foreign investment. He was responsible for ensuring that President Clinton's visit to the city in 1996 went smoothlyit was the first time American officials saw Putin in action. But later that year, Sobchak, damaged by a perception of ineffectiveness and rumors of corruption, lost his re-election bid. As Putin tells us at the dacha, as a member of the losing team, he was suddenly untouchable. "Nobody would hire me there," he says. So Putin headed to Moscow. What transpired next seemed to Kremlin watchers as unlikely as Chauncey Gardiner's unwitting rise to power in the Jerzy Kosinski novel Being There. Although Putin often says that he had no connections when he arrived in the capital in mid-1996, he had several powerful allies who landed him work in the Kremlin. He became deputy to the head of Yeltsin's general-affairs department. Within two years he was asked to head the FSB, the spy-agency successor to the disbanded KGB. Putin, in his memoir, says he received a call out of the blue asking him to head to the airport to meet Russia's

Prime Minister, Sergei Kirienko. Kirienko offered congratulations. When Putin asked why, he replied, "The decree is signed. You have been appointed director of the FSB." Then, in August 1999, Putin was named Prime Minister. It's a grand title, but it doesn't come with much security: Putin was Yeltsin's fifth Prime Minister in 17 months. But Putin did far better than survive; within four months a declining Yeltsin asked Putin to take over as acting President. Putin tells us he initially declined but that Yeltsin raised it again, saying, "Don't say no." By the last day of 1999 Putin was running the country. We ask if it had ever occurred to Putin that history would place him in such a role. "It never occurred to me," he says. "It still surprises me." Experts generally believe that Putin won Yeltsin's endorsement because he was competent, because he wasn't part of any of the major Moscow factions competing for power and because his KGB past gave him a source of authority. But they also widely assume that he made a deal with Yeltsin and his family: in return for Yeltsin's endorsement, Putin would not pursue corruption charges against the outgoing President and his relatives, despite the rumors that surrounded the family's dealings. It's impossible to verify, but neither Yeltsin, who died this year, nor his well-connected daughter Tatyana Dyachenko was ever a subject of public investigation (though Putin quickly fired her from her position as a Kremlin image consultant). Indeed, Putin's first decree guaranteed Yeltsin and his family immunity from such probes. Putin explains things to us this way: "Mr. Yeltsin realized that I would be totally sincere and would spare no effort to fulfill my duties and would be honest and see that the interest of the country could be secured." Eight years on, one can't help seeing a parallel with the latest maneuverings in the Kremlin: just as Yeltsin rewarded Putin for his loyalty, now Putin is doing the same for his anointed successor, Medvedev. There is already a new Putin joke: Putin goes to a restaurant with Medvedev and orders a steak. The waiter asks, "And what about the vegetable?" Putin answers, "The vegetable will have steak too." Taking Control Putin is no vegetable. In 1999, when he assumed the role of acting President, he was a relative unknown. It was his response to a Chechen rebel incursion in the Russian republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus that quickly set him on a path toward national glory. Alexei Gromov, who has served with Putin as press secretary since he came to power, remembers being in the room when Putin told his wife Lyudmila that he was preparing to go on a New Year's Eve trip to the war zone to meet with the troops. She was worried about his safety and went along with him. In the end, the trip may have been no more than a calculated, if risky, photo op, but it was effective. Russians met their new leader and admired his courage and energy. The following year Putin stepped up Russia's invasion of the breakaway republic of Chechnya. Rambo-style, he promised a quick and decisive victory, reiterating his earlier pledge to defeat enemy fighters "even in the toilet." Grozny, Chechnya's capital, was all but obliterated; Russia reassumed power and installed a puppet leader. Despite heartbreaking subsequent Chechen terrorist attacksincluding a 2004 assault on a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, where 339 civilians, most of them children, were killed Russians by and large admire Putin for drawing the line in the south. Having watched Eastern Europe and the Soviet republics slip from Moscow's grip, Russians were happy to keep Chechnyaeven a bombed-out Chechnyain the fold.

To the West, meanwhile, Putin was a mystery. Russia watchers debated endlessly: Was he a pro-Western reformer? (He had worked for Sobchak.) Or a hard-liner? (He was a career KGB man.) Yet just as 9/11 helped define President Bush, so did external challenges allow Putin to grow into a leader. His first steps on the world stage were tentative. His global coming-out had occurred in Auckland at a 1999 meeting of heads of APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) nations. Sestanovich, who was traveling with President Clinton, remembers meeting Putin at Clinton's hotel suite. "He was new on the job then," says Sestanovich, "not at all sure of himself." But Clinton was willing to work with him. Putin tells us how, at an APEC dinner at which he was feeling somewhat lost, Clinton crossed the room past other world leaders and leaned down to talk to him. "Volodya," Clinton said, using the familiar form of the name Vladimir, "I suggest we walk out together from this room." Putin rose to his feet, and the two men strolled out together. "Everyone applauded," Putin recalls. "I will remember that forever." It was Putin's only sign of softness during the 3 hours we spoke. Clinton was not the only American who found something to like about Putin. Two years later, in a line that has haunted him ever since, President Bush declared that he had looked inside Putin's soul. It was their first meeting, at a summit in Slovenia, and Bush said, "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy...I was able to get a sense of his soul." We ask Putin to return the favor, to describe what he has sensed of the U.S. President's soul. He declines to get personal. "I have a very good personal relationship with Mr. Bush," he says. "He is a very reliable partner, a man of honor." The terrorist attacks on 9/11 provided Putin with another defining moment. He was one of the first world leaders to offer condolences and help to President Bush. That probably led the U.S. to back off from stridently criticizing the Chechnya adventure. But the initial shared objectives between Putin and the Bush Administration did not last. Putin strongly opposed America's invasion of Iraq and established Russia as a steady voice of opposition to Bush's adventure, demanding that decisions on Iraq be made at the U.N. (where Russia, of course, has Security Council veto power). America's occupation of Iraq has affirmed Putin's sense that he was right. "If one looks at the map of the world, it's difficult to find Iraq, and one would think it rather easy to subdue such a small country," Putin tell us. "But this undertaking is enormous. Iraq is a small but very proud nation." The debacle in Iraq plays into what is perhaps Putin's most cherished foreign-policy dictum: that nations shouldn't interfere in one another's affairs. And what that really means, of course, is that no one should interfere in Russia's affairs. Another Putin joke: Putin and Bush are fishing on the Volga River. After half an hour Bush complains, "Vladimir, I'm getting bitten like crazy by mosquitoes, but I haven't seen a single one bothering you." Putin: "They know better than that." A Ruthless Streak Now that Putin has solidified his grip on power, he no longer seems overly concerned with courting Western approval. Despite a chorus of disapproving clucks from the West, Putin has shackled the press, muted the opposition, jailed tycoons who don't pledge fealty. In Russia this has been a terrible time to be a democrat, a journalist, an independent businessman. Just ask Garry Kasparov. The chess grandmasterthe highest-rated player of all timeis a far cry from stereotypically dysfunctional champions like Bobby Fischer. Kasparov has a keen political mind and a lively sense of humor. For years he has fought an increasingly lonely struggle as a democratic activist facing an uncompromising state.

On Nov. 24, while holding a political rally in Moscow, he was arrested on a technicality and spent five days at Moscow's Petrovka 38 jail. A week or so after Kasparov's release, we are sitting in Moscow's Cosmos Hotel, where he is taking part in a human-rights meeting. Assembled is a ragtag group of Russian activists, and here Kasparov is a star. (Even here his two bodyguards sandwich him whenever he walks about.) Unlike many of Putin's other critics, who seem fearful of chastising their leader openly, Kasparov isn't cowed. "Putin wants to rule like Stalin but live like Abramovich," he says, referring to Roman Abramovich, the billionaire Russian oil trader who owns London's Chelsea soccer team. "Putin's system is more like Mafia than democracy." Putin's administration has blocked democrats like Kasparov from participating effectively in politics by making it all but impossible for them to meet the entry requirements. The President, in our discussion, routinely suggests that Kasparov is a stooge of the West because he spoke to the foreign press in English after his arrest. "If you aspire to be a leader of your own country, you must speak your own language, for God's sake," he says. Kasparov recently gave up his long-shot race for President. Dmitri Muratov also knows the difficulties of life in the Putin era. A softspoken, heavyset man whose neatly trimmed beard is turning gray, Muratov is the editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta, a Moscow newspaper, published twice a week, with a reputation for pursuing tough investigative pieces. In the past seven years, three of his journalists have been murdered; all were looking into corruption and wrongdoing. After the third murder, Muratov decided to close the 14-year-old paper to avoid putting any other journalist at risk. But his staff talked him out of it. The paper is perpetually harassed by officials around the country, but, Muratov notes with a weary smile, "we're still alive." The last of Muratov's journalists to die, Anna Politkovskaya, was shot in the elevator of her apartment building last year on Oct. 7. Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned government critic living in London, accused Putin of sanctioning the killing. Within weeks, Litvinenko himself was dead too, killed by radiation poisoning from a mysterious dose of polonium 210. (Britain wants to charge a former KGB officer, Andre Lugovoy, who has just been elected to Russia's parliament, with the killing. He denies it, and Russian law prevents the extradition of Russian citizens.) Muratov, for his part, doesn't know who ordered his journalists' killings. He says only that he blames "corruption," which has flourished during Putin's eight years. Although few Russians seem to think Putin himself is corrupt, it is commonly believed that he is surrounded by business and political heavies who are amassing millions in payoffs. Indeed, if anything can bring him down, it may well be graft. As long as living standards rise, people are more likely to forgive the perception that officials are getting obscenely rich by demanding illicit payoffs. But if the economy stops growingif the price of oil falls back to earthPutin will face a challenge, whether from the masses in the streets or from military and civilian challengers. One insider, who asked that his identity be protected, spelled out for us just one example of how the game is played, detailing the payments a prospective regional governor has to make to political bagmen in Moscow in order to get the Kremlin's nod for the post. For wealthier regions, such an endorsement can cost as much as $20 million, money that the

politicians raise quietly from corporate "sponsors" that expect special treatment in return. The amount of money flowing to kingmakers in the Kremlin, in other words, is staggering. When we ask about the view that he is surrounded by corrupt officials, Putin turns testy: "If you are so confident, then I presume you know the names and the systems and the tools...Write to us." As for Politkovskaya, who had been investigating policy failures and human-rights abuses in Chechnya when she was killedand who authored the 2004 book Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing DemocracyPutin says he believes she was murdered by a provocateur to cast suspicion on his administration. For all the attention the outside world pays to such cases, formal polls make it clear that within Russia, Putin's critics are in the minority. For every journalist distressed at the rollback of freedoms, there are scores of Russians who quietly applaud Putin's efforts to reassert stability. Once a year, when Putin takes phone calls from citizens around the country, tens of thousands of people try to get through. Listening to the calls, however screened and rehearsed they may be, one is struck by the ardor of the appeals to the President to get things done and by the broad range of information at Putin's fingertips. (A woman who lives on an island off Vladivostok complained about the local ferry service. Putin told her a bridge will soon be built to link the island to the mainland.) Certainly life in Russia today is better than it has been for years. The stores are stocked with goods. The once worthless ruble is a genuine currency, strengthening against the dollar these days. Crime persists, but the cities are not as rough as in previous years. And then there are the President's loudest and most visible defenders: members of Nashi (Ours, in Russian), the cultish pro-Putin youth movement. In mid-December, about 20,000 of the Nashi faithful from all over Russia gathered for a rally by the Kremlin walls to celebrate the recent victory of Putin's United Russia Party in elections to the parliament. From the stage, speakers, rock singers and rappers declared their patriotism and love for the President. A banner read, into the future with putin! Someone introduced Dasha, a 10year-old member of Mishki (Bear Cubs), the new children's division of Nashi. "I love Russia," said Dasha. "I love teddy bears. I love Putin. Together we will win!" I went to Nashi's Moscow headquarters a few days later and met with Lyubov Serikova, a pretty 22-year-old redhead from Russia's Chuvash Republic who is a rising star in the organization. She was thrilled with the recent election and credited Nashi with helping thwart an unnamed enemy's attempt to launch an "orange revolution" in Russia. Her world seemed conspiratorial, and she echoed Putin's own statements: those who run against the President were trying to bring the country down. Putin, she said, "has made Russia a leading country in just a few years." When we finish talking, I take a look at an official Nashi poster hanging outside her office, which excoriates U.S. policies. It's reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda with its non sequitur acceleration of hysteria: "Tomorrow there will be war in Iran. The day after tomorrow Russia will be governed externally!" But this is no fringe group. Putin frequently visits Nashi's training camps and meets with its leaders. And from there he sometimes launches anti-Western tirades, including a recent blast at London authorities who are demanding the extradition of the suspected killer of Litvinenko. Putin's mission is not to win over the West. It is to restore to Russians a sense of their nation's greatness, something they have not known for years. This is not idle dreaming. When historians talk about Putin's place in Russian history, they draw parallels with Stalin

or the Tsars. Putin, one can't stress enough, is not a Stalin. There are no mass purges in Russia today, no broad climate of terror. But Putin is reconstituting a strong state, and anyone who stands in his way will pay for it. "Putin has returned to the mechanism of oneman rule," says Talbott of the Brookings Institution. "Yet it's a new kind of state, with elements that are contemporary and elements from the past." And there's plenty that could go wrong. The depth of corruption, the pockets of militant unrest, the ever present vulnerability of the economy to swings in commodity pricesall this threatens to unravel the gains that have been made. But Putin has played his own hand well. As Prime Minister, he is set to see out the rest of the drama of Russia's reemergence. And almost no one in Russia is in a position to stop him. If he succeeds, Russia will become a political competitor to the U.S. and to rising nations like China and India. It will be one of the great powers of the new world. Back at the dacha, with snow falling lightly outside, our dinner and discussion continue. Putin has been irritable throughout, a grudging host. Suddenly, at 10 o'clock, he stands and abruptly ends the evening. "We've finished eating, there's nothing more on the table, so let's call it a day," he declares. Actually, the main course (choice of sturgeon or veal) and dessert ("bird's milk" cake)lovingly printed in gold ink on the prepared menu cards haven't yet been served. The Russian President's brusqueness is jarring. Have our questions angered him? Bored him? Does he have another appointment? It's not clear. "Bye bye," says Putinin Englishas he walks briskly out of the room. The work of rebuilding Russia, apparently, is never done. with reporting by Yuri Zarakhovich and Dario Thuburn/Moscow Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169075 7_1690766,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

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Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Putin and TIME: The View From Russia

By Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

"How could you take part in this outrage?" The first such call came from a friend on Wednesday, close to midnight, just after I had stopped surfing Russian TV newscasts, all full of proud reports that TIME had named Russian President Vladimir Putin its Person of the Year. "Is this the Moscow correspondent of the U.S. magazine most loyal to Putin?" wondered the next caller. A friend in the U.S. e-mailed me: "Putin's Time's POY? Well...But we still love you." All these old friends intellectuals and members of the social elite, for the most part were teasing me. But not entirely. "Every joke contains a bit of the truth," one of them remarked in passing. As we discussed Russian TV's positive though shrill initial reactions to TIME's announcement, I realized that Putin was not all that far from the truth when he told the magazine's editors at the Person of the Year interview that Russian TV, however statecontrolled, was free. Most commentators freely hailed Putin's achievment of putting Russia back on the world map and just as freely pruned TIME's analysis of what happened on his road to achieving it: the suppression of democratic freedoms. "How do you think this coverage will affect the ordinary people?" asked a friend that night. "Those who will never enter TIME.com or read TIME's print version?" He believed they would stay brainwashed into thinking that TIME magazine endorsed and promoted Putin and his politics. Then, I received a call from Echo Moskvi, the last liberal Moscow Radio station, which is something of an on-air Hyde Park for limited numbers of intellectuals, a small arena for them to spout off, not unlike the old Soviet-era Literaturnaya Gazeta. I explained as briefly as I could: it's not an endorsement or a distinction. Hitler and Stalin were Men of the Year, because they left indelible imprints on their respective years' events, which were to influence history. TIME journalists are like investigators who explore, gather and present facts on the assigned case as thoroughly and conscientiously as possible, allowing our audience to make decisions and pass independent verdicts on whether a given person has made such an impact for better or worse. In Putin's case, I told the radio interviewer, it was crucial to the Person of the Year decision that he had revived Russia, returning it once again to its integral role in international politics and the global economy. But Putin had accomplished this by suppressing the freedoms, however frail and imperfect, that Russians enjoyed in the 1980s and '90s. The majority of the Russian people supported Putin in his policy of swapping freedoms and democracy for stability and order or, in the eyes of critics like myself, for the illusion of stability and order. Ordinary Russians believe Putin's impact is for the better. I told Echo Moskvi that I thought his impact was for worse. Only time (and TIME) will tell. They

thanked me and cut off. After hearing my views on the air, other friends called to express appreciation. One peculiarity of my almost 20 years experience as the only Russian citizen among the select corps of TIME correspondents is that I often enough fail to see Russian matters eye-to-eye with my friends and colleagues at the magazine. Not that I always prove right. Still, I believe I'm right about this: Putin's formal emergence as the only viable national leader, and his tacit acceptance of the role, mark for Russia a point of no return in its slide into a new authoritarianism, the shape and nature of which cannot yet be fully defined. I'm sure that the period of Putin's rule which I predict will be long will once again put the country in the situation described by the great Russian historian Vasili Klyuchevsky almost a century ago: "The state was swelling up, the people were withering." Nor do I agree with the view, espoused by some of my American colleagues, that this regime is dangerous for Russia only: the export of corruption, merged with the state machinery, is no better than the export of revolution. And that is why I believe that Putin was the correct choice as Person of the Year because no other person this year made a deeper or more fateful impact on history, present and yet to come. As I walked outside my dacha gate this morning, my friend Volodya was fiddling with his car. I asked what he thought of the coverage the Russian electronic media had been giving Putin as the magazine's choice. "What's that all about?," he asked, while fixing something in the engine compartment. "I was busy all day yesterday first work, then picking up my kid from his nursery school, then running my wife's errands." I told him that the Russian President had been picked by TIME as the Person who made the deepest impact on this year's events. "I dunno," said Volodya. "I'm just making my living. And who cares, anyway?" Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1697072,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

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Click to Print Wednesday, Dec. 05, 2007

A Bible, But No E-mail

By Richard Stengel and Adi Ignatius

On Dec. 12, editor-in-chief John Huey, managing editor Richard Stengel, deputy managing editor Adi Ignatius and Moscow correspondent Yuri Zarakhovich met with Putin at the presidential dacha for 3 1/2 hours. Here are excerpts How do you see the relationship between Russia and the U.S., going forward? Russia and the U.S. were allies during the Second and the First World Wars, which allows us to think there's something objectively bringing us together in difficult times. Today to be successful, one must be able to reach agreements. The ability to compromise is not a diplomatic politeness but rather taking into account and respecting your partner's legitimate interests. Can you give an example? The North Korean nuclear issue. We treated the issue very seriously. We were thinking about each other's interests and about the interests of the country in question. In the end we resolved the issue to a large extent. What should be done in Iraq? From the very beginning, I considered that it was a mistake. As for what we do today and in the near future, overall I agree with President Bush that everything must be done so that the Iraqi authorities are able to deal with security issues on their own. What we differ over is that the U.S. believes it is impossible to impose time frames for the withdrawal. In my view, that would prompt the Iraqi authorities to be more proactive. Americans wonder why the recent Russian elections could not have been more open and why, for example, Garry Kasparov was put in jail. Why did Mr. Kasparov, when arrested, speak out in English rather than Russian? When a politician works the crowd of other nations rather than the Russian nation, it tells you something. Do you think the U.S. wants to see a strong Russia or a weak Russia? I believe the U.S. already understands that only a strong Russia will respond to the genuine interests of the U.S. What is NATO's purpose today? If Russia were invited to join, would it do so? I wouldn't call NATO a putrid corpse of the Cold War, but it is a leftover of the past. How can NATO efficiently fight terrorism? Did it stop the terrorists on 9/11? Where was NATO then? Russia has no intention of joining military-political blocs because that would be tantamount to restricting its sovereignty. One of the perceptions that Americans have about Russia is that corruption is endemic. How do you handle that? Badly. I must say that in the transitional economy, it is difficult to address such problems. But I'm fully convinced that down the road, [they] will be tackled more efficiently.

What role does faith play in your leadership? First and foremost, we should be governed by common sense. But common sense should be based on moral principles first. And it is not possible today to have morality separated from religious values. How does a lifelong KGB man raised in the Soviet Union become a believer in free markets? One doesn't have to be a particularly bright highbrow to see the obvious, that the market economy has major advantages over an administrative system. We have had GDP growth of about 7% a year on average over the past seven or eight years. We have paid off all our debt. Real income growth is about 12% for the population, and for me, that is the main achievement. You must feel lucky that the price of oil is so high. Fools are lucky. We work day and night! The government has arrested some Russian industrialists and seized their assets. Why? Well, "Thou shalt not steal." They didn't have difficulties with me. They had difficulties with the people of the country and with the law. Has your KGB training helped you as President? There's an old saying "Once a spy, always a spy." Well, those are lies. Naturally, some of that background can be of help. They taught me to think independently. They taught me to gather objective information, first and foremost. The second thing, from working in intelligence, is learning the skill of working with people. Above all, to respect the people you're dealing with. In Russia, a number of journalists have been murdered. Is there some kind of pattern? Is there something that you or the government can do to prevent it? First, many people, including journalists, are tempted to make a little bit more money here and there, which means they get involved with entrepreneurs, sometimes with criminal businessmen. Then there are genuine fighters against corruption, against the criminal elements. Where such losses have occurred, I take them personally. What do you think are American misconceptions about Russia? Well, you know, I don't believe these are misconceptions. I think this is a purposeful attempt by some to create an image of Russia based on which one could influence our internal and foreign policies. This is the reason why everybody is made to believe, like, it's O.K. to pinch the Russians somewhat. They are a little bit savage still, or they just climbed down from the trees and probably need to have their hair brushed and their beards trimmed. Can you tell us more about Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev? They moved toward destruction of the system that no longer could sustain the Soviet people. I'm not sure I could have had the guts to do that myself. This is a very important change. It gave Russia her freedom. What about the conflicts you've had with former Soviet republics on gas prices? What conflicts? There are world prices for gas. Why should we sell to anyone below the world-market prices? Do Americans? Could you come to a store in the U.S. and ask, "Well, I'm from Canada. We Canadians are close neighbors. Give me that Chrysler at half price"? What would you hear from the salesman? "Go away!"

President George W. Bush said he looked into your eyes and got a sense of your soul. Have you gotten a sense of his soul? I consider him a very reliable partner, a man of honor. Yes, Iraq was a mistake, but he is a fair and honest man. Do you think there was a missed opportunity after 9/11 for the U.S. and Russia to work more closely on the antiterrorism front because of Iraq? We could have acted in a more coordinated and therefore more efficient way. That is true. But cooperation between our secret services is happening and is achieving results. Can you describe this cooperation? Are there institutional structures that exist between American and Russian intelligence in the field of fighting terrorism? Yes, the so-called partnership channels. And recently the work has been quite successful, including cooperation to prevent terrorist acts against the citizens of the Russian Federation and the U.S. I recently discussed this with President Bush over the telephone. Earlier you used the phrase Thou shalt not steal. Have you read the Bible? Yes, I have. And the Bible is on my plane. Do you use e-mail? Do you blog? Well, it's a big shame. I don't use these technologies. I don't even use a telephone. My staff do it for me. But they do it wonderfully. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169075

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Back to Article Click to Print Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007

Russia Needs Putin

By Mikhail Gorbachev

Vladimir Putin has done a lot for Russia. After the chaos of the 1990s, it was vital to consolidate the state and prevent its breakup. Under such conditions, a leader has to take certain steps of an authoritarian nature, although some of them were avoidable for instance, the restrictive changes in the election laws and controls over electronic media. I disagree with those who say Putin has retreated from democracy. He has not crossed the line that would turn Russia's system into an authoritarian regime.

I commend Putin's decision not to run for President a third time. And I see nothing wrong in his desire to influence events even after the end of his term. That's his right and Russia will need his experience to smooth our transition to a fully sustainable democracy. There are many challenges ahead. While there is real growth in the economy, there is also inflation, a huge income gap and persistent poverty. The stranglehold of bureaucracy is becoming unbearable; the battle against corruption has yet to start. The authorities are not doing enough to fight organized crime. We need an effective opposition, accountable government and a greater role for parliament and the judiciary. We also need understanding from our partners. Unfair criticism and unwarranted demands of Russia are not conducive to good relations with the West. But I am convinced that Russia will make new strides on the path of democracy, in a manner that befits a world power: without upheaval or revolutions and with dignity. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169075 7_1696171,00.html

Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

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Kissinger on Putin: "He Thinks He is a Reformer"

By Romesh Ratnesar

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is well acquainted with Vladimir Putin. TIME met with Kissinger in Washington and they discussed the Russian President's recent moves, his legacy, and how the U.S. should deal with a resurgent Russia. Vladimir Putin's chosen successor, Dmitiri Medvedev, says he would like President Putin to stay in the Kremlin as Prime Minister. That doesn't sound much like a democratic transition. Clearly Putin is the dominant personality in Russia today. Having headed the ballot of the United Russia Party that gained 64.3% of the vote, he controls the Russian parliament, the Duma. At the same time, I do not consider Russia a dictatorial state. A vote of 64.3% shows that there is a significant part of the population that did not vote for Putin. The position of Prime Minister has a different constitutional basis than president. There is therefore considerable scope for evolution. America must not confuse foreign policy towards Russia with seeking to prescribe historical processes. It is important to get our priorities right. Restructuring the domestic situation of Russia cannot be achieved by American designs particularly in the short term. Russia is a vast country adjoining China, the Islamic world and Europe. Cooperative relations with it are important for peace and global solutions. Of course we have our preferences, and of course we have our sympathies, but we also have to deal with a government in Russia that exists. And we need some understanding for the adjustments required by a country in a period of transition.

How do you explain the gap between how President Putin is perceived by some in the West as aggressive, authoritarian, undemocratic and the support he enjoys among Russians? In Russia, he is popular because he became President at what Russians consider a low point in their history. Putin became President during a period when the Soviet Empire had disintegrated and with it 300 years of Russian history. Economically, the Russian ruble collapsed. The Russian people judge him by the difference in the standard of living today compared to what existed when he took over. They also value him for having restored Russia, in their mind, to a respected place in the international system. And probably many of them think that the system is more responsive to the public than previous systems, though we would not call it democratic by Western standards. You've met him many times. What is he like in person? He is extremely intelligent, very focused on the subject under discussion and very familiar with the issues in foreign policy. He does not try to sweep you away with personal charm. It is a combination of aloofness, considerable intelligence, strategic grasp and Russian nationalism. What kind of relationship does he want Russia to have with the West? I don't believe he looks at the West as a unified bloc. Since he conducts foreign policy by his perception of the national interest, he is not beyond exploiting the differences within the West to enhance Russia's position. The idea that Russia will join a democratic community, or even a Western community, is not his principal motivation. What he seeks, above all, is respect for a Russia defining its own identity. In my opinion, he would value friendly relations and cooperative relations with the United States but on the basis of a clear perception by each side of its national interests and respect for them. So how would you assess the state of relations between Moscow and Washington? Putin's personal relations with Bush are very good. When Bush at their very first meeting said he had looked into Putin's eyes and discovered a compatible soul, that was ridiculed in the American press. But to Putin, it was a recognition of equality and eligibility for equal partnernership with the U.S. What he has respected about Bush is that [the President] generally does not lecture him. He does not mind that Bush is tough in his defense of the American national interest, because that is what he expects statesmen to do. On other levels, there have occasionally been problems. Both sides in theory want to cooperate with each other, but both sides do things which get under the skin of the other. It gets under the Russian skin when we lecture them about their domestic situation. Or when leading Americans ostentatiously meet with opponents of the regime on high-level visits to Moscow. Or when we extend NATO into territories close to the Russian border. We are irritated when Russian leaders don't treat neighboring countries as truly independent. And there are many Americans who have very strong views about the Russian domestic situation. So there are cycles, and some of the issues have a long history.

On the other hand, there is a profound need for cooperation. There is too much of a tendency to treat Russia as if it were a global threat to the U.S. Russia has enormous problems of its own. It has long and unstable frontiers. It has a truly appalling death rate. It has a declining population. And so Russia should not be viewed as a global threat. But it wants to be respected as a significant power. The issue is whether we can develop a constructive relationship with a country whose cooperation we need in relation to Iran and to some extent Iraq and with a Middle East peace settlement. They are also an essential partner for new issues like energy and environment that can only be solved on a global basis rather than competition. You mentioned Iran. Do you believe that what's come out of the latest NIE report will make it more difficult for the U.S. to convince Russia to maintain a united front with us against Iran's nuclear program? In my view, the Russians' strategic assessment of the nuclear problem posed by Iran is almost the same as ours. The tactical conclusions they draw for the immediate future are different, however. They differ as to the imminence of the Iranian strategic threat. But if Russians became convinced that the threat were imminent, then we would be together. The question is whether this isn't so late in the process that you can't act meaningfully anymore. We've talked briefly about the domestic situation in Russia. Doesn't the U.S. have an interest in speaking out about things like the curtailing of political freedom and civil liberties? It is important to understand what Putin represents. Putin is not a Stalin who feels obliged to destroy anyone who might potentially at some future point disagree with him. Putin is somebody who wants to amass the power needed to accomplish his immediate task. Therefore we do not observe a general assault on civil liberties. We do see the infringement of civil liberties of groups who, in his view, threaten the regime. The process is uneven. Television is controlled; newspapers are substantially free. But the idea that America has the power to change Russia's domestic structure by threats is an invitation to permanent crisis. America has to stand for democratic values. And it should seek to advocate human rights. But it has to bring these goals into relationship with other objectives. Both Putin and Bush are entering their last year as Presidents. You speak to both of them. What can they achieve together before they leave office? Putin does not want to see a hegemonical United States, because a hegemonical United States by definition has no restraints on it as far as Russia is concerned. So where he can, he will try to balance us: not deprive us of where we are but keep us from going further. At the same time, in Putin's geostrategic conception, America would be the logical partner for Russia. We're not on Russia's border. We don't want any of Russia's territory. We have no history of wanting Russian territory, and we are very powerful. We can collaborate on global security. And prestige attaches to Russia for being associated with us. All this reality provides opportunities if we can relate our missionary bent to strategic objectives. Iran, the Middle East peace process, a global approach to non-proliferation are all opportunities. What does Russia believe it has to gain from a partnership with the U.S.?

First of all, security. Secondly, prestige. Thirdly, economic cooperation on global issues. Russia touches Asia, the Middle East and Europe. And it has no natural allies anywhere. It has no tradition of willing allies where it had no soldiers. Historically, it identified its greatness with an expansionist foreign policy. Now the imperialist aspect of Russian policy has ended the cold war. They no longer have the resources to do it. That requires a new Russian policy but also some time to develop it and get used to it. How will historians assess Putin's presidency and his significance? For Americans it's hard to get into the Russian psyche. If you take the great Russian reformers, like Peter the Great or Catherine the Great, they were very autocratic at home and yet progressive by contemporary Western standards. Catherine the Great had close relations with the philosophes. Peter the Great lived in Europe for a year and constantly sent missions to Europe. Yet internally they thought Russia had to be organized so that the maximum abilities of the society could be concentrated on the state. If you look at Putin in this context, he thinks he is a reformer. He probably will be considered a seminal figure in his country's history, but he is not a democrat. How will he be rated? Too early to tell. Certainly as significant. Great? Well, we'll have to see. A leader becomes great if he institutionalizes a system, if it doesn't become totally dependent on one person. It remains to be seen whether Putin is able to do that. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169075 7_1691285,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Humble Origins Born in Leningrad (today's St. Petersburg) Putin (in circle) is the son of a sailor and a factory worker. In this photograph, taken in 1966, he is approximately 14 years old.

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His Place in History

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

The more successful a russian leader becomes, the more insecure he feels. When Emperor Alexander I had taken Napoleonic Paris and when Marshal Stalin had conquered Hitlerite Berlin, they were the arbiters of Europe, yet both had to resist strong tides of liberal expectation not so much from their people as from their lite grandees. In Russian politics, it is not the ordinary people who matter most of the time. The ruler truly fears the dangerous, treacherous and greedy clique closest to him. Russian leaders are most often removed in palace coups; even the tsarist system was once described as an "autocracy tempered by assassination." Peter III and Paul I were murdered by those closest to them; Lavrenti Beria, the strongman for three months after Stalin's death, was arrested and then executed; when Nikita Khrushchev was overthrown in 1964, some key plotters close to Leonid Brezhnev discussed having him killed; and a failed 1991 coup by security bosses undermined Mikhail Gorbachev. That is why Tsar Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Stalin turned on their lites, killing many and trying to create new inner circles of their own. Putin is subtler than that. We may never know all the details of what is happening behind the scenes today, but it is clear that Putin is deftly managing the struggle for power and spoils among the factions that swirl around him. Throughout Russian history, the ruler has never been able to simply leave power, for fear of exposing himself and his henchmen to vengeance from their rivals. Thus, even at his most powerful, Putin could not afford to walk away, even if he really wanted to. Putin has worked hard to emasculate the Duma, press and opposition, but in a sense this makes him more vulnerable because his system is so rigid that only something like the

Rose Revolution in Georgia or the Orange one in Ukraine could destroy it. This explains his cultivation of xenophobic paranoia and use of clumsy repression even when he is so popular, they hardly seem necessary. Another reason for this vulnerability is that his success is based on oil: prices could fall one day and leave him an emperor with no clothes. When he steps down as President, he has said he will become Prime Minister. He will probably keep overseeing the "power ministries"defense, security and foreign affairs by controlling his puppet President and protg, Dmitri Medvedev. But this is a dangerous maneuver: What if the puppet turns on his master, as Putin turned on the Yeltsin "Family" of billionaires and bureaucrats who created him? Putin's cult of personality is his best protection: it is a shield that gives an invulnerable prestige that would be hard for an understudy like Medvedev to ignore, even if he planned a creeping palace coup. Putin is a unique combination of styles: he projects the sumptuous majesty of the Tsars and the distant power of the Soviet General Secretaries, combined with a nationalist populism. When he allowed himself to be photographed shirtless on a fishing trip, he could have been channeling Peter the Great, who projected a virile style by posing as an ordinary sailor, or Catherine the Great's favorite, Prince Potemkin, who wore a caftan without trousers to receive ambassadors. Putin started his presidency projecting himself as absolutist but liberal along the lines of Catherine. These days he presents himself as a tough, nationalistic authoritarian. He is not a Stalinist or a Marxist; Russia's "sovereign democracy" is much freer than Soviet rule, and there is no mass terror, but he has made the security organs as powerful as they were in the 1920s through the 1950s or during the 15-month-long reign of the ailing former KGB boss and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. This should be no surprise: the Soviet secret police was never designed as a discrete institutionit was the backbone of state power, the knighthood of the revolution, qualified to protect and purify Russia. History lives in Russia. Stalin was obsessed with history and based part of his style on the brutal Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. "The Russian people need tsardom," Stalin said. When he walked around the Kremlin, he reflected, "Ivan once walked here." Now Stalin has become the best barometer of Russian leadership style. New state textbooks hail Stalin as "the most successful Russian leader ever" and a state builder along the lines of Peter the Great and Bismarck. Putin has one unexpected connection to the past: his grandfather was a chef who cooked for Rasputin, Lenin and Stalin. Half of Stalin's huge library, with marginal notes in his red crayon, remains in Putin's office, and when he is bored, it is said, he takes down a book and discusses the notes with his visitors. Ironically, Stalin the Marxistborn a Georgian cobbler's sonhas become the icon and prototype of the strong Russian Tsar, the hero of a resurgent, capitalist Russia. Montefiore is the author of Young Stalin and Catherine the Great and Potemkin Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169075 7_1695993,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

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Back to Article Click to Print Monday, Dec. 17, 2007

In Search of Russia's Big Idea

By Nathan Thornburgh

"Like a Soviet officer, dammit!" Vladimir slapped at my elbow to make sure my arm was in the commissar-approved position for drinking elbow out shoulder-high, like that of a soldier marching in front of Lenin's tomb, except with a shot glass at the lips. "To America!" he bellowed, and the three of us drank another round of Johnnie Walker Red at the FEP restaurant in Ostashkov, a drowsy lakeside town in Russia's Tver province north of Moscow. Vladimir, a state senator in the province, with a buzz cut and a nose as red as fire, sat back down in his seat. A few minutes earlier, we had been in the restaurant's kitchen, watching the cook loosely butcher a massive pike and throw all the parts head, fins, body, entrails into a pot of boiling oil. Vladimir was now picking through the platter of fried fish innards. To his left, Sasha, the restaurant's owner, a local businessman built like a boxer, wasn't done with me yet. "Russia should be a strong country. It's better that way, even for our friends in America," he said. And with that, he grabbed my face and planted a vinegary kiss on my cheek. It was not yet noon on a sunny September morning, and we were only a few hours' drive from the glistening slick of petrodollars that is Moscow. These men are economic and political successes in Vladimir Putin's Russia. But here they were, drinking themselves warm on whisky and eating the fatty innards of a lake predator as if they were ice fishermen from a century ago. It reminded me of something a friend had told me a dozen years earlier in Moscow: in the heart of a Russian, it's always winter. I had come to the Russian countryside, though, to get beyond proverbs and beyond Moscow in search of what Russians like to call the National Idea. It's often said that Russia is truly in trouble when it can't articulate what it stands for. The Soviet National Idea

of exporting revolution, conquering space and winning Olympic medals was a strange mix, but at least it was steady. By 1995, the last time I lived there, Russia had disintegrated into a rudderless mess, defined most by a bestial crime rate and Boris Yeltsin's kleptocracy in the Kremlin. Russia is now resurgent, and the West sees a new menace in all Putin's movements: the way he mocks the U.S. and Europe abroad and strangles democracy at home. But he does so with the full support of the Russian people; to understand their mind-set today is to understand where Russia may be headed. To find Russia's current big idea, I traced the path of a long-dead St. Petersburg customs official named Alexander Radischev. In 1790, the 28th year of Catherine the Great's reign, the middle-aged father of four wrote a book called A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow. In the book, Radischev bundled his experiences from the long carriage ride between the two capitals into a collection of anecdotes and allegories about the condition of his country. It is artless literature, didactic and cringingly sentimental. But its political ideas are astonishing: his sketches of venal bureaucrats, reckless aristocrats and heartbroken peasants formed an unprecedented challenge to serfdom and the monarchy. More than 200 years later, the book remains a staple of Russian education, a sort of Slavic Uncle Tom's Cabin. Radischev's route is 430 miles (700 km). With plenty of detours, I visited hospitals, farmsteads, nightclubs and monasteries. At nearly every stop, I heard something that isn't yet a fully formed National Idea but is perhaps more of a slogan: "Everything is coming back." This meant a lot of things. Some were talking about rising salaries, others about how Russia had re-emerged as a counterweight to America. But more than anything, they were talking about a return to Russia's prerevolutionary sense of itself, strong and traditionbound, rooted in religion and autocracy but with a full bank account and a sleek new weapon in oil. Yes, Mammon is back in Moscow. There are more billionaires there than in any other city on earth. But in an autocracy, as Radischev once wrote, the leader is like the sun: "Where it shines, there is life. Where it is absent, everything perishes." Beyond Moscow is a country where the average man doesn't live to see 60, where the average income is still just $540 a month. A hundred miles outside Moscow, the main federal highway melts into another century, becoming a four-lane road lined by weathered wooden houses. Old women sit by the shoulder of the road selling apples. There are a few modern rest stops, but just as common are places like Kresttsy, where villagers chop kindling to fire traditional samovar kettles and sell tea and mushroom pierogi, just as they did in Radischev's day, to weary travelers. One of my first detours on the journey was to a village called Happiness (Radost in Russian), which has kept its upbeat name through grim times in the Soviet era and afterward. But Putin's sun does not shine there yet. "What kind of fool called this place Happiness?" spat Matryona Polikhina, 81, as she sat on the edge of her disheveled barn lot sharpening a knife. Down the road, a 69-year-old neighbor who introduced himself as Uncle Tolya, in the way that peasants in Chekhov stories do, had an equally sharp answer: "What the hell do I know how it got the name Happiness? Better to call it Gloom." As Moscow booms, Happiness withers. There are no children here, and the school down the road is closing, victim of the so-called perestroika generation a demographic collapse that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. With a low birth rate and lack of opportunities, villages are few and far between, separated by miles of forest and fallow fields. Putin has named agricultural development one of his four National Priority Projects,

calling for increased lending and federal spending to support rural economies. But fertilizer is still expensive. So is machinery. There is not much credit available to farmers. So the majority of people I met seemed content to live off their minuscule pensions, which average $140 a month, rather than risk going into agriculture on their own. If they are grateful to Putin, it's not because of jobs; it's because he has raised their pensions each year by small but significant increments. While the countryside is economically stagnant, it is undergoing a spiritual renaissance. Eastern Orthodox churches and monasteries have sprung up like mushrooms after rain. And they are catering not just to the older generation. At the Boris and Gleb monastery overlooking the Tvertsa River in the town of Torzhok, all the monks are younger than 40. Two are 19. "In the fight against Western culture, our spirituality is winning," said Alexander Salov, an altarnik at the monastery. Russia, Born Again This is the path for a growing number of youth in the new Russia: shunning the modern world to join an anachronistic brotherhood that a British observer once described as "grubby and superstitious." They pray from sunup to sundown, living within a rigid hierarchy of metropolitans, archimandrites and protopopes. They don't shave, and with their long, matted hair and fierce beards, they look more like metalheads than monks. They are often exquisitely reserved these are not the smiling deacons of U.S. megachurches welcoming you in with coffee and doughnuts. Eastern Orthodoxy seems at times purposefully unfathomable, as if its clerics were more the keepers of dark secrets than spreaders of the Good Word. Their faith suffered terribly at the hands of the Soviets. The Boris and Gleb monastery endured a typical fate: Stalin had all the monks and priests killed and turned the monastery into a prison for the next 50 years. There's joy and relief at the return of Russia's religion, and expressions of faith some extreme, others odd, but all exuberant have become commonplace. I met a monk on the side of the M10 highway who had been wandering possessionless for nine years, a vow of poverty so extreme that church elders had finally ordered him to return to his monastery. Another day we happened on a baptism of a car. Father Aleksandr stood by his church in Rashkino, wafting incense into a young couple's car, then flicking holy water onto the engine block. When we stopped, he did the same for our Lada Sputnik hatchback. Remembering the fatal mangle of a motorcycle accident we had passed earlier that day Russia's roads are among the world's deadliest I was glad for the blessing. The Orthodox revival has heavy political implications. Of all the factors that led to the downfall of the Soviet Union, few were more important than the 1988 celebrations marking the 1,000-year anniversary of the Christian conversion of Russia. Millions joined in the celebration, a spontaneous mobilization that seemed to remind the Russians that they were a Christian people. Three years later, the Soviet Union was gone. But if the Eastern Orthodox Church was revolutionary in 1988, it is reactionary now. Flush with Kremlin support, the church and its adherents are trying hard to re-establish its old spiritual hegemony in the country. In Novgorod province, I met a young college lecturer named Aleksandr Chausov, who teaches a class called "The Basics of Religious Safety." In classroom lessons and in lectures he gives as a leader of Rage, an advocacy group he co-founded, Chausov warns about the dangers of what Russians call sects the minor faiths that have gained influence since the fall of the Soviet Union. Somewhat dangerous

are "classic sects," he said, like Evangelicals and Southern Baptists, which he said are fine in the U.S. but don't belong in Russia. Worse are "totalitarian sects," defined as new religions that fleece the faithful. He said this includes Scientologists, Hare Krishnas and Mormons. As a patriot and devout Eastern Orthodox Christian, he said, he feels it's his job to sound the alarm. "The totalitarian sects are a threat to the Russian state," he said. "They prey on our people, who have no cultural background for other religions, and brainwash them." For a thousand years, Russia had no concept of a church and a state that could be easily separated. Rather, there were just two branches of the church: the government and the priesthood. God anointed the Tzar, and those who followed God were to follow the Tzar. At the Voznesensky Orshin convent, built near a well where the mystic Savvatie cured the sick 600 years ago (I drank the water, and it works wonders, at least for hangovers), the cult of Tzar Nicholas II is resurgent. "The Tzar and his family lived their lives as Christian icons," said Sister Varsofonia, who joined the convent after leaving a career in Moscow. Another nun chimed in, "He was like an instrument in the hands of God." After the Bolsheviks slaughtered him and his family in 1918, Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, became known to the faithful simply as Nicholas the Martyr. Putin has been keen to capitalize on this perfect circle of faith and obeisance. He famously won over George W. Bush with his religious testimony, and he has done the same at home, profiting greatly from being the first believer to lead Russia since the Tzar. "Of course you need a leader who prays," said Sister Varsofonia approvingly. "All power comes from God." Who Needs Freedom? In politics, though, that reverence becomes resignation. Russians are turning inward at the very moment that the Kremlin is mounting a brazen power grab. Governors are no longer elected, just appointed by the President. Opposition leaders are harassed with new antiterrorism laws. Putin's United Russia Party won a grossly uncompetitive election on Dec. 2. By and large, the Russian people offer little protest. This raises an old question: Do Russians really want to be free? Russians are, after all, the people who actually begged Ivan the Terrible to return to rule them after he threatened to abdicate. As Radischev put it, Russians "come to love their bonds." These bonds and their modern equivalent, Putin's paper-thin democracy are increasingly seen as not only tolerable but also intrinsically, uniquely, gloriously Russian. The Kremlin and its backers use new catchphrases like sovereign democracy to intone that they have their unique form of freedom. The West just wouldn't understand. Russian exceptionalism is an old argument, with an equally long history of detractors. As the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev lamented during the bloody Bolshevik Revolution, "Russia has its own mission, [but] we have mistaken our backwardness for a point of excellence, as a sign of our high calling and our greatness." Russians are still looking for greatness, on their terms. It's easy to see why, after the humiliations of the 1990s, when Harvard M.B.A.s flooded Russia, preaching Western-style democracy and capitalism, only to let a small cabal of criminals bleed the country dry. Oil wealth and political stability have allowed Russia to dust itself off, send the foreign consultants packing and go about looking for its own values. At the Voznesensky Orshin convent, the dorm used to house only homeless girls and orphans. Now, increasingly, the

girls come from well-off families that want them to have a traditional spiritual upbringing and education. In Torzhok, a girls' boarding school has begun teaching needlework as a primary subject, not just because it's a marketable skill but also because, in the words of the headmistress, "girls will be better mothers and wives if they learn domestic skills like sewing and stitching, as it was in the old days." In Kronstadt, the legendary island fortress that staged the last armed uprising against the Bolsheviks, Putin was on hand in 1994, as vice mayor of nearby St. Petersburg, to reopen the former imperial Kronstadt Naval Cadet Academy. There, boys as young as 10 live in barracks, wear tzarist-era uniforms and sing hymns of the Imperial Navy. These are the future leaders of Russia's nuclear fleet, and they will have been inculcated largely with prerevolutionary ideals. A similar nostalgia informs the unsubtle Moscow ad campaign of Anton Ryabinin's real estate company, Good Fortune: "Now you, just like the landed gentry of Imperial Russia, can buy your own village!" Ryabinin can negotiate the sale and development of entire settlements, houses and all, whether or not people are living in them. Standing next to a half-collapsed wooden home in Syekirino, a mostly abandoned village near Tver, Ryabinin outlined what a client might be able to do with the land: build a colonnaded manor tucked into the forest's edge and new housing for a dozen peasants closer to the road. By the river, there's room for a formal English garden or maybe a promenade. "I don't sell real estate," he said. "I sell heritage." The Russian nobleman and his country home were the center of intellectual and economic life, he explained. Villagers were happy. To Ryabinin, there is no higher calling than helping Russia's new aristocracy re-create that community, casting themselves as the barons of old. When Catherine the Great got a copy of Radischev's book, she handwrote angry rebuttals along the margins of each chapter. Among her many quarrels was his account of Novgorod's sacking by Ivan the Terrible. Radischev thought it a crime against humanity; Catherine II saw only a firm ruler consolidating power. When I visited Great Novgorod (its honorific was restored in 1998), I found a city that is still squabbling about its lesson for Russia. Alone among Slavic city-states, it was never conquered by the Mongols the ancient proverb "Who can stand against the gods and Great Novgorod?" gives a sense of its military power. But it was also a remarkably progressive city, a republic on the Roman model. All its official business was done in a public senate called the vyeche, where the 300 Golden Belts the city's gentry would listen to and vote on the complaints of the people. When Ivan the Terrible finally conquered the city, he committed his standard atrocities. But in a sign of just how important and dangerous the freedoms of Novgorod's citizens were, Ivan confiscated the city's charter and took the bell that called the vyeche to session with him back to Moscow. Novgorod was great no more. Almost 500 years later, Sergey Troianovsky has established a unique profession for himself in Novgorod as a sort of dissident archaeologist. He leads a volunteer group of activists and academics who try to preserve and promote relics of the vyeche era. He's interested in cultural heritage and also in political pedagogy. To him, there's a clear moral to Novgorod's history. "We are not a political group," he said. "But we want to show people that democracy is not an idea forced on us by the European Union. It's part of our past." War over Words Radischev's book was made possible by a slight liberalization that Catherine the Great surely came to regret: allowing private citizens to operate their own printing presses. By publishing his manuscript on the ground floor of his home, he began a war for press freedom that still rages. Today, for example, the Russian government doesn't just have

supporters at the national television stations; it owns the stations outright. In a meeting at the Kremlin before I began my trip, Putin's spokesman didn't even try to deny that national news was slanted in the government's favor. But he said the regional media were thriving and independent. Study them, he said, and "you will understand that this is the freest country in the world." I met journalists throughout my travels and found the Kremlin's assessment disingenuous at best. "In America, you are free to criticize Bush," a television talk-show host told me in his kitchen in Novgorod. "Me too. I am also free to criticize Bush." He laughed. Then, not smiling, he said, "I'm actually scared to be talking to you. TIME magazine is far away. But if I express my opinions, I'll have to face the authorities not Putin, but someone here on a local or provincial level. I'll lose my job." In most cases, the Kremlin doesn't have to sign an order stifling dissent. What is required is simply understood by functionaries across all levels of government. Call it grass-roots autocracy. This is a new phenomenon in the post-Soviet era, but, in the words of the talkshow host, Russians have "historical experience" of voluntarily and enthusiastically carrying out the perceived will of the supreme leader. The press in Russia does a fine job of undermining itself. In Tver, one newspaper charges up to $1,225 for a full-page political ad. For an extra $1,400, the paper will print the ad to look like a regular article. Small wonder that there was little faith in editorial independence even before Putin's crackdown. In Novgorod, I met a group of young Russians who called themselves journalists and wrote for various papers and Web outlets. They were also activists for Putin's United Russia Party. In their opinion, media liberties had fueled the instability of the Yeltsin era. "There was too much freedom of the press in the 1990s," said Emin Kalantarov, 23. "People swung from one point of view to the next like monkeys at the zoo. What we're doing now is systemizing political discourse." His main job as a journalist, he said, is to explain the ruling party's policies to readers. Catherine the Great's chief of secret police was known to torture detainees with a particularly cruel Russian innovation, a rawhide whip with metal hooks called a knout. When Radischev was discovered to be the writer of A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, he was arrested by the authorities and jailed in the Peter and Paul Fortress. He repented almost immediately, giving a full, miserable confession. The book, he said, was just a foolish attempt to "win renown as an author." In no way had he meant to impugn the Empress. His efforts to appease failed. In a show trial that was watched with interest as far away as Britain and France, Radischev was sentenced to death. That sentence was commuted to a 10-year exile in Siberia, but it was still the beginning of the end. Radischev eventually returned from exile, but nothing in Russia had changed. He tried again to push for reform but failed as before. Radischev died by his own hand, having drunk a cup of nitric acid, on Sept. 24, 1802. He was 53. But his ideas lived on. His faith that the Enlightenment could liberate his beloved Russia is as vital and inspiring today as it was then. On the 205th anniversary of his death a Monday afternoon I was sitting in the backseat of our Lada as we drove north along his route toward Petersburg. Tired of watching the birch forests and semi trucks roll by, I flipped through a book on the great Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin. There, in his words, was quite possibly the perfect homage to his literary predecessor: "Following Radischev, I chanted liberty." That call to freedom, too, is a part of Russia's heritage.

Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169075 7_1695382,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Mentor Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St. Petersburg, gave the future president his first job in politics, as an adviser on international politics.

Back to Article Click to Print Monday, Dec. 17, 2007

And Moscow Makes Me Sing And Shout

By Peter Savodnik

I'm standing in a laser-lit pit enveloped by the loudest, most hyperkinetic music I've ever heard, surrounded by the most unbelievably beautiful young women I've ever seen. Turquoise amoebas crawl across movie screens on the walls. Bartenders in black-andwhite uniforms dole out $25 gin-and-tonics. The beautiful women take pictures of themselves with cell phones. Photographers from celebrity websites take pictures of the women. The men the rich men watch, lurk, smirk. They have a certain look: bald or mostly bald, in suits, straight-collar shirts, no tie. They buy cocktails for the women they want to take back to one of their apartments, somewhere their wives won't be. Everyone is heavily scented. There are flashes, explosions of synthesized snare drums, a ghostly light emanating from the chandeliers hanging from a cavernous ceiling. Everybody who should be here is here: models, would-be models, oil barons, metals magnates, media tycoons, an actor, a director, a Duma Deputy, a gaggle of designers, the occasional expat (mouth agape). Outside, the masses line up in the snow to get a peek at how royalty spends its weekends; most of them will never make it past the turtlenecked thugs with the earpieces. But what do I care? I'm in Diaghilev Project Moscow's hottest, trippiest nightcluband everyone wants to be me. Three hours earlier ... The bouncer known as Pasha Face Control sits in a purple crushed-velvet booth at the entrance. Diaghilev Project is quiet except for the bartenders getting their nightly, premadness briefing from the floor manager. A thin light permeates the club. Standing 5 ft. 9 in. (just over 1.7 m), with a slight build and a languorous gaze stretched across his face, Pasha Face Control hardly looks like a bouncer, let alone Moscow's most famous front man. But that is exactly what he is. As he explains to me who gets into Diaghilev, he speaks with an almost Talmudic earnestness. Everywhere else, Pavel Pichugin, with his blue jeans, button-down shirt and windbreaker, would look totally unremarkable, but in Moscow at this particular post-Soviet juncture, he is not Pavel; he is Pasha Face Control, the Arbiter of Cool. That's something you must never forget, not if you want to meet the most amazing women on the planet and feel important and drop a few hundred dollars on drinks; or a few thousand on one of Diaghilev's vip booths; or $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 on one of its five ultraluxe lounges. The man who holds the keys to this world is Pasha Face Control, who is loved and hated, who routinely fields death threats on his cell phone, who has his own security detail. "I look at everything," he says in a soft voice: "clothes, face, hair, hairstyle, teeth, the whole person, the way this person communicates." He won't reveal exactly what impresses him; you just have to know. You have to look a certain way, and then, assuming the celestial alignments are in order, Pasha Face Control may nod ever so slightly and the turtlenecked thugs will allow you to proceed, without fear of pummeling, through a shadowy tunnel all the way to Shangri-la. Sometimes Pasha may force a sort of Sophie's

choice on would-be clubgoers: You, with the two supermodels on either arm, you think that impresses me? Daladno! (Come on!) Pick one. No room for extras tonight. Moscow clubbers take "face controllers" like Pasha ultraseriously, according them the sort of exaltation that New York City epicures bestow on top chefs. Nobody's as famous as Pasha heck, there's even a Russian rap song about him. But everywhere you go, there's the same routine. First the guy at the front door takes a look. If he likes what he sees, he whispers something into a microphone on his lapel or maybe a cell phone. Moments later, someone else comes out of some shadowy cave that would be whoever is in charge of face control and this guy makes the final call. Pasha took his first job seven years ago, at a friend's bar, and became an instant hit. His mission is simple: make sure Diaghilev's customers have the best time of their lives. If they don't, it's probably because he let the wrong people in. That's what he's thinking when he gives the 10,000th cover girl of the night a thumbs-down. "If you don't let someone in, people take it very personally," Pasha says. Hence the security detail. The men with the money who come to Diaghilev are known to the people who own the clubs, the people who man the doors, the bartenders, the old women who clean the restrooms. But they don't want anyone else knowing they're there. The more money they have, the more secretive they are. They sit in their ultraluxe lounges, Gatsby-style, rarely venturing down to the pit, ordering drinks for the girls they spot, racking up tabs that can be $10,000 or more. Each of the five lounges comes with its own restroom, accessible via a spiral staircase leading downstairs, and is fully equipped with plush couches and oversize paintings of naked Renaissance women. The men do not stay for long, dropping in around 12:30 or 1 a.m. and usually leaving by 3 or 4 a.m. When I ask Pasha who these men are, all he will say is that the head of a top vodka distillery has reserved one of the lounges for a whole year. As hedonistic as Diaghilev's patrons may seem, they actually represent a more restrained, acceptable face of Russian capitalism than their immediate predecessors. Ten years ago, Russia's rich were universally regarded as criminals: oligarchs and minigarchs who had "privatized" plundered state assets in the wake of the 1991 Soviet collapse. Under Putin's silnaya ruka (strong hand), the country's business lite has been brought to heel. Most Russians still consider anyone rich little more than a well-dressed extortionist, but there is a growing consensus in Moscow and St. Petersburg at least that today's businessmen are not the criminals they used to be. And commerce is viewed less as stealing from ailing pensioners and more as contributing to Russia's growing international prestige. What has helped soften the image of the upper classes is that after eight years of rapid-fire growth, most everyone in Russia is better off. "Inequality has become less of a concern and less of a political problem," says Konstantin Sonin, an economist at the Center for Economic and Financial Research. Mixed in with the new rich is something Russia has not seen in nearly a century: second-generation wealth. "These are very trendy young people who got their money from their parents," says Anna Lebsak-Kleimans, president of the Fashion Consulting Group. "This is the first generation born rich or at least raised rich." Whether they earned their millions or inherited them, there are lots of rich Russians going around119,000 millionaires and 53 billionaires. And that means Moscow's A-list clubs, cafs and bars places like Diaghilev, Roof, First and GQ Bar are no longer the preserve of well-heeled expats. Don't think Pasha will let you in just because you speak English. Another telling sign of the times: those beautiful women massing in Diaghilev are no longer so keen on American hedge-fund managers. Their No. 1 target these days is a

Russian oligarch like Roman Abramovich, the recently divorced owner of the Chelsea soccer club in London and the governor of Chukotka, in the far east, or Mikhail Prokhorov, a metals magnate who happens to be a bachelor. If the lifestyles of the Russian rich have changed dramatically in the past decade, there remains the possibility that even more change is to come. The club scene is a constant work in progress. Few clubs last longer than six months; Diaghilev, at almost two years old, is a senior citizen. Even the all powerful Pasha is on his way out. After seven years as Pasha Face Control, he's ready to become Pavel Pichugin. Actually, make that Dr. Pavel Pichugin. "I'll do this for another year," he tells me. "Then I'll be a dentist; that's what I studied to be." That could be a brilliant career move: in a country determined to drill, fill, stain and otherwise whitewash into nonexistence its Soviet past, celebrity dentists are in huge demand. But great teeth alone won't get you into Diaghilev. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169075 7_1695437,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Rise to Power In 1998, Putin was tapped to run the FSB (successor to the KGB) by then Russian President Boris Yeltsin. When Yeltsin resigned shortly before the end of his second term, Putin was chosen to serve as acting President, putting him in an ideal position to win the office in the election that followed.

Back to Article Click to Print Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007

Choosing Order Before Freedom

By Richard Stengel

In a year when Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize and green became the new red, white and blue; when the combat in Iraq showed signs of cooling but Baghdad's politicians showed no signs of statesmanship; when China, the rising superpower, juggled its pride in hosting next summer's Olympic Games with its embarrassment at shipping toxic toys around the world; and when J.K. Rowling set millions of minds and hearts on fire with the final volume of her 17-year sagaone nation that had fallen off our mental map, led by one steely and determined man, emerged as a critical linchpin of the 21st century. Russia lives in historyand history lives in Russia. Throughout much of the 20th century, the Soviet Union cast an ominous shadow over the world. It was the U.S.'s dark twin. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia receded from the American consciousness as we became mired in our own polarized politics. And it lost its place in the great game of geopolitics, its significance dwarfed not just by the U.S. but also by the rising giants of China and India. That view was always naive. Russia is central to our worldand the new world that is being born. It is the largest country on earth; it shares a 2,600-mile (4,200 km) border with China; it has a significant and restive Islamic population; it has the world's largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and a lethal nuclear arsenal; it is the world's second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia; and it is an indispensable player in whatever happens in the Middle East. For all these reasons, if Russia fails, all bets are off for the 21st century. And if Russia succeeds as a nation-state in the family of nations, it will owe much of that success to one man, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. No one would label Putin a child of destiny. The only surviving son of a Leningrad factory worker, he was born after what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War, in which they lost more than 26 million people. The only evidence that fate played a part in Putin's story

comes from his grandfather's job: he cooked for Joseph Stalin, the dictator who inflicted ungodly terrors on his nation. When this intense and brooding KGB agent took over as President of Russia in 2000, he found a country on the verge of becoming a failed state. With dauntless persistence, a sharp vision of what Russia should become and a sense that he embodied the spirit of Mother Russia, Putin has put his country back on the map. And he intends to redraw it himself. Though he will step down as Russia's President in March, he will continue to lead his country as its Prime Minister and attempt to transform it into a new kind of nation, beholden to neither East nor West. TIME's Person of the Year is not and never has been an honor. It is not an endorsement. It is not a popularity contest. At its best, it is a clear-eyed recognition of the world as it is and of the most powerful individuals and forces shaping that worldfor better or for worse. It is ultimately about leadershipbold, earth-changing leadership. Putin is not a boy scout. He is not a democrat in any way that the West would define it. He is not a paragon of free speech. He stands, above all, for stabilitystability before freedom, stability before choice, stability in a country that has hardly seen it for a hundred years. Whether he becomes more like the man for whom his grandfather prepared bliniswho himself was twice TIME's Person of the Yearor like Peter the Great, the historical figure he most admires; whether he proves to be a reformer or an autocrat who takes Russia back to an era of repressionthis we will know only over the next decade. At significant cost to the principles and ideas that free nations prize, he has performed an extraordinary feat of leadership in imposing stability on a nation that has rarely known it and brought Russia back to the table of world power. For that reason, Vladimir Putin is TIME's 2007 Person of the Year. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169075 7_1696150,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Swearing In On May 7, 2000, Putin took the oath of office at a ceremony inside the Kremlin, becoming the second democratically elected president in Russia's history.

Back to Article Click to Print Monday, Dec. 17, 2007

The Gore Interview

By Bryan Walsh

Al Gore was busy polishing his Nobel acceptance speech when TIME recently visited him. Before Gore jetted off for Oslo, we asked him about the state of the planet, his growing celebrity and whether he ever plans to fill that one blank line on his rsum. Take us back to the moment when you won the Nobel Peace Prize. What did it feel like to get that call? Actually, I didn't get a call. My staff was informed that in the event the committee had selected me, I would receive a phone call 15 minutes before the global press conference. My wife Tipper and I were in California at the time, and we stayed up until 1:45 a.m. I have to admit, I looked at the telephone when it didn't ring. A few minutes [before the announcement at 2 a.m.,] I said, "Let's turn on the TV and see who did win." The chairman was speaking Norwegian, and my wife perhaps because of her Swedish heritage heard something I didn't, turned to me and said, "You won!" Do you view the prize as a personal vindication, given the criticism you've received in the past? I have honestly not put it into that context at all. My focus is on continuing to galvanize a global response. It's the greatest honor I could ever have, but it's hard to celebrate recognition of an effort that has thus far failed. I'm not finished, but thus far, I have failed. We have all failed. Why use the word failed? Today we're dumping 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the environment, and tomorrow we will dump more, and there is no effective worldwide response. Until we start sharply reducing global-warming pollution, I will feel that I have failed. There is no precedent for the mobilization required. The closest examples are when nations mobilize for war. So you would argue that this crisis is on par with World War II or the Great Depression? The north polar ice cap, according to the best scientists in the world, fell off a cliff this fall. The signs that the world is spinning out of kilter are increasingly difficult to misinterpret. The question is how to convince enough people to join a critical mass of urgent opinion, in the U.S. and the rest of the world. Why hasn't that message been fully received yet? I spend a lot of time asking myself that question. I think we're making progress; it's just that nothing has matched the scale of the response that is truly needed. The unprecedented nature of this crisis does make it difficult to communicate. We naturally tend to confuse the unprecedented with the improbable. But we have become capable of doing catastrophic damage without realizing it. We've quadrupled population in less than a century, amplified the power of technology many thousands of times over, and we haven't matched those changes with a shift in our thinking that lets us take into account the long-term consequences of our actions. The President of the U.S. can better shape the response to climate change than any other person in the world. Given the importance of this issue and the fact that you have emerged

as its global spokesman, don't you have a moral obligation to put yourself forward for the presidency? I appreciate the question, but I have seen firsthand during eight years as Vice President the other prerequisites for the kind of galvanizing response that is needed. I believe this is the rare crisis that requires a fundamental shift in public opinion at the grass-roots level to embolden members of the Legislative Branch to take action. If I felt the best use of my talents was to pursue these solutions by becoming a candidate for President, I would do that. I have not completely ruled out the possibility that at some point in the future, I would do that. But I don't expect to. What feels right to me is to wage this different sort of campaign. For all the momentum we're seeing, climate change hasn't really emerged as a top issue on the campaign trail. I agree, and that tells me that the highest use of whatever experience I've gained along the way is best applied to the task of changing public opinion. If these candidates walk down the street in Manchester, N.H., and every other person they encounter buttonholes them about climate change, you would hear very different stump speeches. I'm doing everything I know to bring about that change. Might there come a time when the opportunity appears to make more headway and bring about more progress as a candidate? I doubt it, but maybe. I'm open to the possibility emerging. John Doerr, your new partner at the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins, has said of climate change, 'Sometimes panic is an appropriate response.' How do you remain optimistic? I do genuinely believe that the political system is not linear. When it reaches a tipping point fashioned by a critical mass of opinion, the slow pace of change we're used to will no longer be the norm. I see a lot of signs every day that we're moving closer and closer to that tipping point. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169538 8_1695516,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Monday, Dec. 17, 2007

Al Gore
By Bono

As 2007 closes and 2008 begins, one of the great questions that hangs in the cynical European air is how America will carry itself in the world next year. From the outside, the coming election seems less about "the economy, stupid" and more about America's role in the future of the planet. I think it's even deeper than that. I think this election is about how America sees itself. That's not really an existential question, or a spiritual one; mostly, it's a practical question. In this election year, Americans are looking for leadership that can turn spiritual yearnings into practical realities. Al Gore is the kind of leader these times require. Not as President God and the Electoral College have given him a different job. As it happens, Al is at work repositioning his country from the inside out as a leader in clean energy; and along the way restoring faith in the U.S. as a moral powerhouse that can lead a great, global spiritual revival as the temperature rises. That's right, a spiritual revival. Because this apostle of all things digital is the first to admit that technology alone will not reverse the damage done. He says it's going to take "a shift in consciousness." This isn't loopy Sixties stuff, or I wouldn't tune in. Al is tough-minded. He marshals history to make his argument, and countless examples of civilizations changing course and attitudes midstream roll off his tongue.

For Al, 2008 is a rendezvous with destiny and an appointment with the enemy. The foe he sees is our own indifference to the future and a lack of faith in our ability to do anything about it. He stresses that through crisis we can find opportunity. His language is pretty Biblical, but, then, doesn't the Bible say something about floods? He is like an Old Testament prophet amped up with PowerPoint and an army of the world's scientists at his disposal. The right response to the global-warming crisis, he explains, will be a mosaic of solutions that will kick off a whole new economic boom, one that is low-carbon and highproductivity, with truly sustainable development, and an atlas for planet management using not New Age technology but old age wisdom generating sustainable solutions. Is he Noah or are we King Canute? Are we prepared to make difficult choices on behalf of children not yet born? We cannot let the children of the developing world become canaries in the coal mine. If the tide should rise by 3 ft. (1 m), there could be over 100 million climate refugees in low-lying areas such as Bangladesh. If the tide rises 20 ft. (6 m), it's not just the summer homes of rock stars that will take sail; 400 million poor people could be uprooted and at sea. And one man's flood is another's drought: as coastal areas in Africa are drowned, travel inland and anything that isn't underwater will be even more parched than before. Think Sudan. People forget that extreme poverty as a result of desertification explains much of that country's travails. Over the past year, "mild green" (me) and "khaki green" (him) have talked about how the fight against extreme poverty in the developing world and the struggle against climate change can reinforce each other. The poorest will be hit first and hardest by climate change. We can help them adapt, but they can help us, too. Vulnerable as the poor are, they can be powerful allies in stopping the cycle of environmental damage and extreme poverty. With the poor as partners we can slow overpopulation as we must, because more population means more pollution. And we can help developing countries rev up their economies in a cleaner way than we did during the Industrial Revolution. The choices of the poor affect us, just as ours affect them; we are all part of one world, one moral universe, sharing one oxygen tank. Desmond Tutu often uses the word ubuntu, meaning "I am because we are." It's my favorite epithet, an ode to interdependence. When I told Al that, he responded with Gandhi: Satyagraha, meaning "hold tight to the truth." Personally, I'm trying to live up to both words, but it's hard. Like a lot of folks, I've got a lot on my plate without trying to make sure the dishwasher liquid is in a biodegradable container. (It is, but were it not for the eco-warrior with whom I share a bed, I would have fallen behind.) As Al leaves our house, I fall over myself to explain that my fancy car runs on ethanol, then laugh nervously, like when you meet a parish priest in the supermarket and it turns into confession. Al isn't like that at all. He leads from the front, and if some sheep in the family stray, he's not stressed. He's not a zealot. Leaders often shout orders; generals bark; bellicose preachers, to save our souls, get gothic on our asses. But Al speaks in measured tones. He shows slides. He has an almost embarrassing faith in the power of facts to persuade both believer and skeptic. His enduring and overarching trait is, as it turns out, the pursuit of truth ... scientific truth, spiritual truth. That and grace. Right now, he is an America the world needs to meet. Click to Print Find this article at:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169538 8_1695515,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Monday, Dec. 17, 2007

J.K. Rowling
By Nancy Gibbs

When the last battle was over and the last secrets of the seven-book, 17-year journey were spilled, Jo Rowling did what grieving, grateful and emotionally exhausted people do: she ransacked the minibar. She'd known from the start that Harry Potter would survive his ordeal; the question was how she would handle her own. This time a year ago, she was holed up on deadline in the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh to escape the bedlam at home, writing the climactic chapter in which her hero walks into the dark forest to give his life for those he loves. And while she knew that all would be well in the end, "I really was walking him to his death, because I was about to finish writing about him," she says. It's her favorite chapter in her favorite book but when she finished, "I just burst into tears and couldn't stop crying. I opened up the minibar and drank down one of those pathetic little bottles of champagne." Rowling calls her time with Harry "one of the longest relationships of my adult life," her rock through bereavement, a turbulent marriage and divorce, single motherhood, changes of country, fear of failure and transcendent joy, on the day a wise man at Bloomsbury

offered her $2,250 and agreed to print 1,000 books. When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows went on sale last July, it sold 15 million copies worldwide in 24 hours, breaking the record that had been held by each of the previous three books. (To put that in perspective, 2005's Half-Blood Prince moved more copies on its first day than The Da Vinci Code did in an entire year.) Meanwhile, the movie version of Book 5 Order of the Phoenix made $645 million, and plans for an Orlando, Fla., theme park were unveiled. Forbes magazine put Rowling second only to Oprah as the richest woman in entertainment, ahead of Martha Stewart and Madonna and as the first person to become a billionaire by writing books. So the journey that began in 1990 finally ended in 2007, leaving Rowling a little more margin to savor ballet recitals and grocery shopping and intensive, often ingenious charitable work. A woman of high energy and a short fuse, she looks almost serene now, dressed in black with a long gray belted sweater, dark red nails and a funky black ring the size of a walnut. But as we sit and talk over coffee, you hear the longing when the conversation shifts back to Hogwarts, as though we've retreated to a safe place but can't stay there long. "I can only say, and many of my more militant fans will find this almost impossible to believe," she says, "but I don't think anyone has mourned more than I have. It's left the most enormous gaping hole in my life." You can tell that she still doesn't give many interviews. She's funny and self-mocking and earnest by turns but always unguarded and unrehearsed, especially since now, after all this time, she can talk about the things she had to keep secret because her readers did not want their pleasure spoiled by knowing how things would turn out. "It's a massive, massive sense of release," she says, to be able to answer any question, tell the backstory in Web chats with obsessive fans who want to know the middle names of characters down to the third generation. She doesn't actually need to talk to Barbara Walters (who named her the most fascinating person of the year), because her fans know where to find her: her website, which includes news, a diary, a rubbish bin for addressing the more idiotic rumors, and answers to both the frequently and the never asked questions. She has them all in her head or her notebooks, with nothing to hide anymore. It's not just Harry's secrets that can now be revealed. It is hers as well. The biggest mystery, appropriately, had to do with Rowling's own soul. As soon as her tales achieved fame, they were denounced by fundamentalist clerics from the U.S. to Russia to the Muslim world. The Pope warned about their "subtle seductions" that might "distort Christianity in the soul." One day when Rowling was shopping for toys in New York City, a man recognized her. Her voice gets hard as she recalls how he brought his face very close to hers. "He says, 'I'm praying for you,' in tones that were more appropriate to saying, 'Burn in hell,'" she says, "and I didn't like that 'cause I was with my kids. It was unnerving. If ever I expected to come face to face with an angry Christian fundamentalist, it wasn't in FAO Schwarz." Through it all, Rowling didn't really fight back. Talk too much about her faith, she feared, and it would become clear who would live and who would die and who might actually do both. After six books with no mention of God or Scripture, in the last book Harry discovers on his parents' graves a Bible verse that, Rowling says, is the theme for the entire series. It's a passage from I Corinthians in which Paul discusses Jesus' Resurrection: "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." It turns out that Rowling, like her hero, is a Seeker. She talks about having a great religious curiosity, going back to childhood. "No one in my family was a believer. But I was very drawn to faith, even while doubting," she says. "I certainly had this need for

something that I wasn't getting at home, so I was the one who went out looking for religion." As a girl, she would go to church by herself. She still attends regularly, and her children were all christened. Her Christian defenders always thought her faith shined through her stories. One called the books the "greatest evangelistic opportunity the church has ever missed." But Rowling notes that there was always another side to the holy war. "At least as much as they've been attacked from a theological point of view," she says, the books "have been lauded and taken into pulpit, and most interesting and satisfying for me, it's been by several different faiths." The values in the books, she observes, are by no means exclusively Christian, and she is wary of appearing to promote one faith over another rather than inviting people to explore and struggle with the hard questions. Rowling's religious agenda is very clear: she does not have one. "I did not set out to convert anyone to Christianity. I wasn't trying to do what C.S. Lewis did. It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it's perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God." And now she climbs into a pulpit of her own, and you can tell how much this all matters to her, if it weren't already clear from her 4,100-page treatise on tolerance. "I'm opposed to fundamentalism in any form," she says. "And that includes in my own religion." She has certainly found her disciples. Critics can dismiss Rowling's grownup fans as "kidults," but especially as the series unfolded, her audience expanded far beyond children and her impact well beyond entertainment. In addition to some 300 wizard rock bands, reams of fan fiction and countless websites, the books have inspired outfits like the Harry Potter Alliance, an online group founded by Andrew Slack, 28, a consultant in Boston, around the rallying cry "The weapon we have is love." When Deathly Hallows was released, the group organized house parties from Australia to South America and coast to coast in the U.S. to raise awareness of genocide in Darfur, in a kind of "What Would Harry Do?" campaign. The parties featured performances by such bands as the Remus Lupins and the Moaning Myrtles and a podcast by Africa experts, including Joe Wilson, a.k.a. Mr. Valerie Plame. "We can be like Dumbledore's army, who woke the world up to Voldemort's return, and wake our ministries and our world to ending the genocide in Darfur," Slack urged Harry Potter Alliance members in tones of earnest camaraderie. In the days that followed, the student antigenocide coalition stand saw a 40% increase in sign-ups for high school chapters and a 52% increase in calls to its hotline, 1-800-GENOCIDE. When asked about the group, Rowling practically levitates off the couch, spilling her coffee along the way. "It's incredible, it's humbling, and it's uplifting to see people going out there and doing that in the name of your character," she says. She's especially pleased by the group's choice of mission, and the old Amnesty International worker in her surfaces. "What did my books preach against throughout? Bigotry, violence, struggles for power, no matter what. All of these things are happening in Darfur. So they really couldn't have chosen a better cause." But it's also one more example of how she will never really be in control of Harry again. She knows he's bigger than she is now and not always in ways she likes. Parents may need to let go of their children, but artists want eternal ownership, and you can feel her ambivalence or even something more fierce and protective at the prospect of legions of writers who want to take up Harry's story as their own. One declared at last summer's biggest Potterfest that, as Rowling had left the sandbox, it was open for all to play in. But this is no game to her. She can tell you exactly which character she was sketching on New Year's Eve 1990 at the moment her mother died. (It was Professor Sprout, McGonagall's "pragmatic foil," she says. "I was six months in, and I was finalizing the composition of the

head table.") Knowing where you were when you first read Harry Potter, she says, is not the same as knowing where you were when you created him. If you can solve the puzzles and break the codes on her website, you can see her earliest drawings and edited manuscript pages and glimpse just how deep her devotion goes. "He's still mine," she says. "Many people may feel that they own him. But he's a very real character to me, and no one's thought about him more than I have." He is also a billion-dollar media property and a global cultural figure. Now translated into 65 languages, the books have joined a canon that stretches from Cinderella to Star Wars, giving people a way to discuss culture and commerce, politics and values. Princeton English professor William Gleason compares the series' impact to the frenzy that surrounded Uncle Tom's Cabin before the Civil War. "That book penetrated all levels of society," he says. "It's remarkable how similar the two moments are." And he does not see this as a passing fad or some triumph of clever marketing. "They've spoken profoundly to enough readers that they will be read and reread by children and by adults for a long time," he says. Feminist scholars write papers on Hermione's road to self-determination. Law professors cite Dobby's tale to teach contract law and civil rights. University of Tennessee law professor Benjamin Barton published "Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy," in the Michigan Law Review, which examined Rowling's view of the legitimacy of government. His conclusion? "Rowling may do more for libertarianism than anyone since John Stuart Mill." A Rutgers researcher named a rare rain-forest plant in Ecuador apparata after her verb apparate because it seemed to appear out of nowhere. French intellectuals debate whether the stories indoctrinate kids into free-market capitalism. In Turkey, the books were absorbed into the argument over Turkey's cultural geography: Is Harry a symbol of Western imperialism or of lost Eastern traditions of mysticism and alchemy? A seventh-grade teacher in Pakistan in November invited her class to compare the country's crisis to Harry Potter. The class immediately cast Pervez Musharraf as Voldemort and Benazir Bhutto as Bellatrix. "Potter is like a Rorschach blot," says Georgetown government professor Daniel Nexon, "for people articulating concerns about globalization in their cultural setting. It's incredibly significant that Potter even enters these debates." And that is on top of the impact, even her critics acknowledge, of inspiring a generation of obsessive readers unafraid of fat books and complex plots. "They're easy to underestimate because of what I call the three Deathly Hallows for academics," says James Thomas, a professor of English at Pepperdine University. "They couldn't possibly be good because they're too recent, they're too popular, and they're too juvenile." But he argues that the books do more than entertain. "They've made millions of kids smarter, more sensitive, certainly more literate and probably more ethical and aware of hypocrisy and lust for power. They've made children better adults, I think. I don't know of any books that have worked that kind of magic on so many millions of readers in so short a time in the history of publications." It was the end of a long January day when the last page of the last chapter was complete. Rowling had finished putting on the page numbers and found herself alone in her suite at the Balmoral feeling, she recalls, some "end-of-epic euphoria." So she danced around the room a bit and then in a fit of creative destruction took out her pen and wrote on the base of the bust of Hermes that stood in the window alcove, "J.K. Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this room (552) on 11th Jan 2007." The ending, naturally, was the most controversial part of the book. It would have been so much neater just to kill Harry. "I've known that all along," she says, but that was never her plan. To her, the most noble thing, the real bravery, is to rebuild after a trauma. Some fans

were disappointed that after all his adventures, Harry's greatest concern in the end is whether his son will fit in at Hogwarts. "It's a bittersweet ending," she says. "But that's perfect, because that is what happens to our heroes. We're human. I kept arguing that 'love is the most important force, love is the most important force.' So I wanted to show him loving. Sometimes it's dramatic: it means you lay down your life. But sometimes it means making sure someone's trunk is packed and hoping they'll be O.K. at school." Rowling has some rebuilding of her own to do. Her time, she says, will be divided among her children, her charities and her writing. But she has only to look at George Lucas to appreciate that the pressure to return to Hogwarts will be ferocious and some of it selfinflicted. She's already had to cope with the pressure of not disappointing the fan closest to her: her daughter Jessica, 14. What will happen when her two younger children a decade from now discover the stories for themselves and know that Mom has the power to make more of them? "There have been times since finishing, weak moments," she says, "when I've said, 'Yeah, all right,' to the eighth novel." But she's convinced she's doing the right thing to take some time away, do something else. She's working on two projects now, an adult novel and a "political fairy tale." "If, and it's a big if, I ever write an eighth book about the [wizarding ] world, I doubt that Harry would be the central character," she says. "I feel like I've already told his story. But these are big ifs. Let's give it 10 years and see how we feel then." It's a pretty safe bet how her audience will feel. But we'll just have to wait and prepare to be surprised. with reporting by Gina Elliott and Laura Fitzpatrick/New York and Laura Blue/London Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169538 8_1695436,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Monday, Dec. 17, 2007

Rowling Answers 10 Questions About Harry

In her interview with TIME and in webchats with fans, the Harry Potter author reveals a few more secrets 1. Why doesn't Fred appear in the woods at the end as well? "Do you know what? I never even thought of Fred coming back. That's how I always planned it, from when the first book was finished, that the three marauders and his mother would come back. There were four heroes as it were in the previous generation and one of them betrayed the others, and then there were the three. So I wanted Harry to be surrounded by his mother and James and Sirius and Lupin, all of whom had died in a way for him. You know Lupin had laid down his life in Harry's battle, he didn't have to come back, he didn't have to fight. James had died trying to protect the family; Sirius very obviously had died fighting along with Harry, and then his mum who most explicitly had died for him. I never thought of bringing Fred back at all. It was all the previous generation, and they were all strongly parental figures for Harry."

2. Did Harry die? Rowling wrote this very carefully, so it could be read two ways. "Did he just go into a state of unconsciousness in which his subconscious tells him everything he needs to know? Dumbledore doesn't tell him anything he couldn't have figured out with some educated guesses." But in her mind, Harry entered a limbo between life and death, and faced a choice about which way to go. She explains on her website that this encounter involves some very deep laws of magic, which Voldemort himself did not understand: "Having taken Harry's blood into himself, Voldemort is keeping alive Lily's protective power over Harry except that the power of Lily's sacrifice is a positive force that not only continues to tether Harry to life, but gives Voldemort himself one last chance ... Voldemort has unwittingly put a few drops of goodness back inside himself; if he had repented, he could have been healed more deeply than anyone would have supposed. But of course, he refused to feel remorse." Also, since Voldemort is using the Elder wand, which actually belongs to Harry, neither the Cruciatus or the killing curse work properly. "The Avada Kedavra curse, however, is so powerful that it does hurt Harry, and also succeeds in killing the part of him that is not truly him, in other words, the fragment of Voldemort's own soul that is still clinging to his. The curse also disables Harry severely enough that he could have succumbed to death if he had chosen that path." 3. The question that surprises her: What was that creature in the corner at King's Cross? "Harry's impulse, to the point of utter wrongheadedness, is to save. His deepest nature is to try and save, even when he's wrong to do so, when he's led into traps 'I've got to save, I've got to try to protect' because he's been left with this very demanding legacy of his mother's that she sacrificed herself for him and now he goes off and tries to save as many people as he can."

But this encounter with Voldemort is different. "For the first time ever he approaches this vulnerable, naked, mutilated creature and he wants to help, but he feels repulsed for the first time ever by suffering. And he's right to feel that. This is something that has deliberately self mutilated as it were, that's the last maimed fragment of Voldemort's soul. I have to explain because so many have asked.") 4. The question she feared getting: What was Dumbledore's wand made of? "That would have been quite a telling question. Because I had this elder thing in my mind, cause elder has this association in folklore, it's the death tree. I thought 'what am I going to say?'" It would have given away too big a clue. But no one asked. 5. What did Dumbledore really see in the Mirror of Erised? His family, alive and whole and reconciled. 6. Where do wizard children go to school before Hogwarts? Most are homeschooled, because they aren't really able to control their powers so it would be too dangerous to let them out and about. 7. Are Harry and Voldemort related? Yes, distantly, through the Peverells; but nearly all wizarding families are related if you go back far enough. 8. Who does Draco Malfoy marry? Astoria Greengrass, younger sister of the Greengrass family. We meet Daphne Greengrass, part of Pansy Parkinson's Slytherin posse, in Book V when Hermione takes her O.W.L.s. Neville marries Hannah Abbott, who becomes the owner of The Leaky Cauldron. "I do have it all worked out in my mind because I couldn't stop myself doing that." 9. Where do the main characters work as adults? Harry and Hermione are at the Ministry: he ends up leading the Auror department. Ron helps George at the joke shop and does very well. Ginny becomes a professional Quidditch player and then sportswriter for the Daily Prophet. 10. Was Teddy Lupin a werewolf? No he was a Metamorphmagus, like Tonks (who, incidentally, was a Hufflepuff). Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169538 8_1695569,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Monday, Dec. 17, 2007

David Petraeus
By Joe Klein On the day after he assumed command of the Multi-National Forces in Iraq last February, David Petraeus toured some of the neighborhoods of Baghdad and was shocked. "They were ghost towns, blasted, abandoned. AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] was active in most of them," he told me recently. "I knew those areas Dora, Ghazaliya, Amariya from the last time I was in Baghdad, in 2005. I remembered thriving markets and community life. I simply hadn't grasped the magnitude of the destruction, not just the sectarian violence but the [intra-sect] violence of al-Qaeda on Sunnis." There were other shocks. Petraeus had spent most of 2005 in Baghdad trying to train Iraqi Army units. In 2006, while he was serving as commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., much of the Iraqi security forces, and especially the national police, had slipped under the control of various Shi'ite and Kurdish militias. The situation on the ground was dire; the prognosis among Petraeus' military peers was pessimistic. At a Pentagon meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in December 2006, President Bush asked the Chiefs how many supported the idea of a surge the deployment of more troops (which Petraeus would command) into Baghdad to secure the city and create the conditions necessary for a reconciliation of the various Iraqi political factions. The Chiefs were unanimously opposed. Many of Petraeus' Pentagon peers who were always suspicious of their colorful rival, with his penchant for push-up contests and a doctorate from Princeton in international relations are still opposed to what he is doing in Iraq. They believe too many U.S.

troops and too much equipment are engaged in a struggle likely to have a futile outcome. The Iraqi political leaders remain recalcitrant, their government a dysfunctional mess. The true loyalties of the Iraqi security forces remain questionable. Much of the American public has tired of the war, although tolerance for the effort seems to be creeping upward in some polls as the level of violence in Iraq abates. And yet Petraeus has not failed, which, given the anarchy and pessimism of February, must be considered something of a triumph. The sketchy progress he has made is the result of equal parts luck and skill. The Sunni tribal revolt against the violent grip of Salafist extremists (most notably, al-Qaeda in Iraq) was already under way when Petraeus arrived. But he was smart enough to encourage and fund the Anbar Awakening, even though Iraq's Shi'ite-dominated central government was opposed. The pacification of Anbar, the most violent province in 2006, has been the signal success of 2007. But the most significant change that Petraeus brought to Iraq has to do with how troops are deployed. Previously, most U.S. troops had been sequestered in five huge military bases. They would patrol the collapsing cities, usually in motorcades, and then return to their fortresses. But Petraeus established a network of joint security stations in the neighborhoods of Baghdad and its environs where U.S. troops and Iraqi forces live and work together. That created a constant military presence in the streets. This heavily armed version of community policing was a central tenet of the counterinsurgency doctrine that Petraeus helped develop during his time at Fort Leavenworth. It is not entirely responsible for the diminution of violence in Baghdad ethnic cleansing has limited the inter-sect strife but it certainly has helped bring life, and a sense of security, back to some of the neighborhoods Petraeus toured in February. "People keep asking me if we've reached a turning point," Petraeus says, "and I can't say that we have. We'll probably realize we passed a turning point six months after we reach it." In fact, the general has been very cautious in his assessments of the war, saying repeatedly, to the dismay of many hawks, that "military victory is not possible." Petraeus also disputes me when I suggest that he's an optimist: "Please don't write that. I'm a realist." But many of his troops, especially his protgs in the command structure, disagree. Military officers are trained to complete a mission, no matter how difficult it might seem, and Petraeus appears quite incapable of imagining that he might not succeed, which is optimism of a sort. "Blindingly optimistic, even for our culture," a senior military officer in Baghdad told me. The general can be overly impressed by credentials, military and academic. "But he's scary smart," the officer continues. "He networks down as well as up, and he absolutely supports his people." Most Americans know Petraeus best from his performance at congressional hearings in Washington last September, a moment of some discomfort for him. One suspects, though, that the general takes greater satisfaction from the innocent humanity he sees spilling back into the Baghdad streets on his regular helicopter tours of the city at dusk and from the knowledge that he may be remembered as the man who taught the U.S. military how to transform anarchic war zones into communities again. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169538 8_1695379,00.html

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Back to Article Click to Print Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007

Hu Jintao
By Orville Schell

Right now, China, the most populous, economically dynamic and politically intriguing nation in the world, is on everybody's mind. As the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing draw nearer, China's role as industrial park to the world has been highlighted, brought into focus by product-safety scandals, environmental disasters and trade disputes. How can this infinitely complex nation be led? And what do we know about the man who leads it, Hu Jintao? Not much. Hu, who became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2002 and President of China the following year, has never granted a free-ranging interview. Nor has he cultivated the kind of flamboyant style with which his country became well acquainted in larger-than-life leaders from Chiang Kai-shek to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. But politics in China has changed since the time of such giants. Competition within the Chinese leadership and a distrust of one-man rule have meant that Hu has had to lead by consensus. The fact that he is said to be patient and less ego-driven than his challengers has conferred on him a certain advantage. As the Chinese aphorism puts it, Tall trees attract wind. Someone who was more overtly ambitious might have lost his cool over

challenges, but Hu has managed to convey an air of composure, the better to maintain a semblance of accord between fractious leaders. So we would miss something important about Hu's leadership if we were to simply assume that his restraint was a sign of weakness. In reality, the way Hu has negotiated a difficult situation says much about him as a person and about his evolving and distinctive political philosophy. Even though China's revolutionaries spent decades trying to expunge "feudal" culture, Hu has ended up as something of a closet traditionalist whose sense of a political true north derives as much from the Chinese classics, to which he has turned in search of models of concord, as it does from Mao and Marx. In February 2005, for example, Hu quoted Confucius to party officials, declaring that "harmony is something to be cherished." He and Premier Wen Jiabao regularly proclaim an aspiration to hexie shehui, or a harmonious society. And they often use another slogan, heping jueqi, or peaceful rise, a phrase designed to soothe foreigners worried about the double threat of China's fireball economy and rapidly modernizing military. Such traditional-sounding rhetoric about harmony and peace the antithesis of Maoist phrases about class contradictions and anti-imperialist struggle has been spilling from party propaganda organs. Weary of struggle and strife, contemporary Chinese react almost autonomically to such rhetoric, which evokes the datong, the great harmony, a utopian ideal from the ancient Book of Rites. Hu hopes to attain a latter-day datong through what he calls a "scientific outlook on development," or a pragmatic refocusing on the challenges of poverty, social justice and the environment. Much of his political demeanor seems to suggest a yearning for leadership in the style of a Confucian junzi, or gentleman one who governs by virtuous example and thus radiates benevolence throughout society. How, in practice, Hu can use such classical nostrums to help him rule China is far from clear. Rebranding the office of the party General Secretary through rhetorical associations with the past is not guaranteed to help deal with Sudan, Burma, Taiwan and the U.S., never mind China's domestic challenges. Hu, says Yale historian Jonathan Spence, "uses a language that preaches caution and the avoidance of extremes, but seems to have little sense of how to implement changes that will boldly address China's formidable problems." Indeed, just beneath Hu's exhortations about harmony, peaceful rise and benevolent leadership, old Maoist structures remain. Far from wanting to weaken party control, Hu would like to reinforce it, to inspire officials to live up to the old ideals of "serving the people." And it is important to remember that China's early philosopher-kings were not democrats. Indeed, the majority of them shared with Leninists a veneration for authority, discipline and orthodoxy. Confucius hoped that leaders would study the past to make the existing order more effective and fair, just as Hu would like to return China to some of the better ideals of socialism. Sipping at the well of the classics is a way for him to add a mantle of traditionalism to his rule and remain indelibly Chinese while avoiding any unsettling political reforms, much less a Western democratic path. Trying to fully understand Hu, then, is like reading tea leaves. When once asked by an overseas journalist why he chose to remain so enigmatic, Hu said simply, "It's not fair to call me mysterious." But, mysterious or not, Hu, with his modesty, reserve and ability to balance contending forces, is, for now, serving China well.

Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169538 8_1695753,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

The World of Harry Potter A child reads the final installment of the series at a bookstore in China. The books have been translated into 65 languages. Portrait of the Artist The idea for Potter, Rowling says, came to her during a 1990 train trip.

The Philosopher's Stone Rowling wrote the first book in the series, re-titled to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone when it was released in the U.S., while she was unemployed and on state benefits. A signed first edition of the book sold for $40,000 at auction in 2007.

Which Craft

After an initial print run of just 1,000 copies, Philosopher's Stone became a huge success, garnering numerous awards and attracting the attention of American publishers.

Hollywood In 2001, Philosopher's Stone was turned into a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe. The extraordinary success of the film at the box office virtually ensured that the entire series would someday make it into theaters.

Potter Fever Since early on in the series, the release of a new Harry Potter book was awaited with extraordinary anticipation.

The Global Harry The series is sold in more than 90 countries, including the Philippines, above.

Chinese Edition The series enjoys extraordinary popularity in China, where it outsells traditional Chinese children's stories.

Order of the Phoenix A bus advertises the arrival of the fifth book in the series in June of 2003.

Reaction Not everyone loves Harry. Some religious groups regard the series as "satanic deception." A church group in New Mexico burned copies of the Potter books in a bonfire in 2001.

Enduring

The protests did little to dent Potter fans' enthusiasm.

Superstar Rowling signs copies of her work at the movie premiere of Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix.

y of Order of the Phoenix; Kristen Turgeon, of Boston, reads a Braille version of Deathly Hallows.

Back to Article Click to Print Monday, Dec. 17, 2007

The Year of Them

By James Poniewozik

Hey there, you! It's been, what, a year? I don't think I've seen You since we named You Person of the Year 2006. What did we praise You for again? Oh, right: "for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game." Remember? You wrote about it on Your blog! We cornered the world market in reflective film for all those mirror covers! Good times, those. Hey, You've lost weight, haven't You? So I see You've been flipping through this issue. Ahem. This is a little awkward. Well, as You can see, we ... we went in another direction this year. Please don't take it personally. We still love You. But let's face it: You had kind of an off year. It's not like You ran for President or anything. O.K., a few of You did, but to be fair, Rudy was already Person of the Year once.

Don't get me wrong: all the things that made You You in 2006 are still there. All year long, You were YouTubing, Facebooking, Twittering, chronicling Your life and community, scrutinizing the candidates and the media, videotaping Yourself getting upset on behalf of Britney Spears. But who made the big noise in the Web 2.0 world this year? It was Them. The professionals, the old-media people, the moneymen all of Them, conscious that there was profit in Your little labor-of-love socialist paradise. Story of Your life, right? You make the discoveries, They make the Benjamins. So if 2006 was the year of You, 2007 was the year of Them. Big media companies (like this one) stuffed their sites with blogs, podcasts and video. Celebrities became Web entrepreneurs. Hillary Clinton made a Sopranos-parody viral video. In 2006 the Web was a proving ground where new musicians could take their art directly to the public. And maybe it still is, but what band struck it big selling its new album online this year? A little undiscovered combo called Radiohead. Meanwhile, Will Ferrell launched funnyordie.com, where he posted comedy videos starring himself and celebrities like Bill Murray. Because, You know, Ferrell's comic vision is just too avant-garde for mainstream Hollywood. The list goes on. Last year You gave us lonelygirl15, the cult-hit, independent online video series. In 2007, NBC bought an original online series and made it the first of its kind to air on broadcast television but the show, quarterlife, was created by a couple of Them: Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, producers of classic TV shows thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. It debuts on NBC in February. I hope You're getting a piece of that action.

Because that's what it was about in '07: getting a piece. Last year You shared the POY package with the founders of YouTube. This year Viacom sued YouTube for hosting its content posted by You, fans of Viacom shows like The Daily Show, who wanted to celebrate and engage with your favorite programs. When the TV and movie screenwriters walked off the job, they grabbed pens and cameras and used the Web to end-around the old-content distributors and take their case directly to the public. Very You-school. But this was still about one set of Them (pro writers) fighting an even richer set of Them (media moguls) over the money to be made by moving in on Your territory, online video. Maybe what really happened in 2007 was not that They took over from You but that the boundaries between You and Them blurred. In some cases, You became one of Them, by cashing in on old-media celebrity. In 2007 MySpace pinup and recording star Tila Tequila, profiled in last year's POY issue, made A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, a bisexual dating show that was MTV's most popular new show of the year. Perez Hilton went from online gossip renegade to VH1 host. Chris Crocker, of the notorious leave-Britney-alone video, signed a deal for a reality show. And then there's 2008. The election is shaping up to be a delicate act of power sharing between You and Them. On the one hand, They've tried to keep control: CNN political comic relief: Obama Girl, the global-warming snowman video. On the other hand, You raised $4 million in one day for Ron Paul and freelanced that brilliant "1984" parody ad against Hillary on behalf of Barack Obama. You seem determined to go into 2008 not as a follower but as a player. (Although: Hillary invited You to help pick her campaign theme song on her website, and You went with Celine Dion? Dude.)

Of course, all this assumes You define success in Their terms: signing contracts, getting paid, making the cover of this magazine. Fact is, You're probably just as glad to take off that POY 2006 tiara and go back to dreaming up the future and getting recognized for it, much later, by the rest of us. It's still Your world, after all. They just pretend to run it. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169541 7_1695397,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007

It's Payback Time

By Joel Stein

This was a year of comeuppance, a year when the public decided it wasn't going to take it and slapped down our leaders faster than a group of 6-ft.-tall athletes would take down a skinny, 66-year-old wannabe cowboy who called them "nappy-headed hos." Heads of state, CEOs, celebritiesno one escaped retribution. It was sort of like a revolution, only instead of taking up arms, people sat at home and made fun of stuff on the Web. Which worked even better. Because if you think hurling rocks is the most effective way to scare someone into reforming, then you've never suffered through an unflattering self-Google. Cultures have long used the afterlife as a way of dealing with the lack of justice in this world. No more. Thanks to the Web, cell-phone cameras and those billboards that feature the head shots of people convicted of DUIs, we have become a world where everyone is busy stitching virtual scarlet letters. It was a year when the powerful were so scared of the public that they were willing to endure a cruel test of an old Zen koan: If presidential

candidates debate 100 times and no one is watching, will CNN eventually switch to more exciting footage of a tree falling? In this year of payback, the masses, as always, went after the cocky, and the cocky, as always, thought the masses still liked them. Bill O'Reilly became so sure of himself that he figured he was qualified to review restaurants in Harlem, noting that the atmosphere at Sylvia's exceeded his expectations since none of the patrons yelled, "M.F.-er, I want more iced tea." Steve Jobs, who has never retreated from anythingincluding a style choice he apparently made in 1989 while watching "Sprockets"charged so much for his iPhone that he later had to drop his price and hand out refunds. China, its head swollen from reading too many Thomas Friedman columns, thought it could speed up its world dominance by poisoning everyone else. Larry Craig, for decades so brazen about his gayness that he was part of a Senate barbershop quartet, figured, wrongly, that no one would care if he made like George Michael in a Minnesota-airport men's room. And George W. Bush got so used to seven years of unilateralism, he interpreted the country's November 2006 electoral mandate to get out of Iraq as a passive-aggressive desire to send a lot more troops there. Bush made his entire party so unpopular that Craig decided he could stick around the Senate. It was the kind of year when Americans of all races could put aside their differences and decide that, you know what, O.J. Simpson should be in jail after all. The powerful themselves brought this on, finally pushing just a little too far. Dog lovers, whose major triumph thus far had been keeping Marmaduke in local papers, sent Michael Vick to prison for longer than most people serve for manslaughter. Hugo Chavez was told to shut up by the King of Spain, who hasn't done anything notable since he split the world with Portugal in 1494. The brutal military regime of Burma was attacked by monks. In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf's regime was attacked by an even wimpier group, lawyers. Hollywood was shut down by its worst-looking inhabitants, writers. Barry Bonds broke the manliest record in baseball, and the ball was sent to Cooperstown, N.Y., with an asterisk drawn on it byand this is the painful partthe fashion designer who bought it. Congress, even less popular than the President, proposed the Video Game Decency Act, and teenage boys responded by spending $170 million on Halo 3 on its first day of release, making it more popular than any movie this year. And it wasn't even produced by Judd Apatow. Celebrities, who seemed safe since their job is to be celebrated, were turned upon too. Paris Hilton went to jail, Lindsay Lohan went to rehab, and Britney Spears completed her transmogrification into Elizabeth Taylor. American Idol producers, meaner than ever, were punished by having viewers vote, week after week, for that Indian kid who couldn't sing. And what about the U.S. dollar, strutting around and showing off all her pretty little redesigns? She's selling herself for 49 pence, like some cheap Argentine peso. In a year when our heroes were toppled, we were so desperate to give our respect to someone, we handed it to Bob Barkera man whose main accomplishment was not appearing bored despite his occupation. The most successful person on earth this year was Al Gore, who made the brilliant choice to do absolutely nothing. Sitting out 2007 was the best decision anyone could have made. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169541 7_1695754,00.html

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Back to Article Click to Print Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007

Striving Valiantly
By Joe Klein

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again ... who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly." Another year gone. Time again for this column which was inspired by the Theodore Roosevelt quotation cited above to take note of some of the people who performed honorably as winners and losers in the public arena. A presidential campaign usually isn't conducive to courage, but, happily, there are honorees on both sides of the aisle this year. Given the lacerating politics of the times, it takes a certain amount of courage to call for sacrifice a euphemism for higher taxes but each of the leading Democratic candidates took that risk during the campaign. Hillary Clinton took the additional risk of revisiting the scene of her signal disaster, health-insurance reform, and producing what I thought was the best plan for universal care of any of the candidates.

But there isn't that much short-term risk in calling for higher taxes (on the wealthy, inevitably) in a Democratic primary. Far riskier and worthy of a Teddy Award is telling party loyalists things they don't want to hear. Two candidates met that test this year. At a moment when other Democrats, like Clinton and Barack Obama, were voting against funding the war in Iraq for political reasons, Joe Biden voted for the funding for the best of all possible reasons: because money was included for bomb-resistant vehicles that will save lives in Iraq. Biden is a long shot, and long shots are expected to be courageous. Obama has been a top-tier candidate from the start, and he wins a Teddy this year for an act of courage that really shouldn't be: in the mildest possible manner, he told the teachers' unions, arguably the most powerful Democratic special-interest group, that he disagreed with them on one of their biggest issues merit pay. He's for it; they aren't. As a result, he lost the endorsements of most teachers' unions, and the army of workers that goes with them. It isn't news that John McCain is courageous. It was news last year when he wasn't courageous, when he tried to be a standard-issue, all-purpose political panderer, nuzzling up to the likes of Jerry Falwell and changing his position on George W. Bush's irresponsible tax cuts. That didn't work, in large part because McCain couldn't bring himself to change his position on an issue that most likely killed his campaign: his support for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. That's wildly unpopular in his party. His opposition to the use of torture, including waterboarding, also dismayed hard-core Republicans at a focus group I attended during one of the debates. McCain gets a Teddy Award with oak-leaf cluster for failing "while daring greatly." Mike Huckabee gets an honorable mention for standing by his position in favor of scholarships to public colleges for illegal immigrants who do well in high school. "We never should grind our heel in the face of a child" is a sentiment that should go without saying, but needed to be said to his Republican colleagues. Speaking of Republicans, GOP Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa gets a Teddy this year for crossing over to the House side and lobbying Republican Congressmen to override President Bush's tawdry veto of a bill to provide health insurance to the children of the working poor. "The House Republican caucus vilified him for that," said Iowa Democrat Bruce Braley, who tells audiences back home about Grassley's courage. "But I was proud he came from Iowa." Secretary of Defense Robert Gates rates a Teddy for the speed with which his rational professionalism restored morale at the Pentagon after the arrogant, witless reign of Donald Rumsfeld. In a series of smart, consequential speeches, Gates has separated himself from the ill-considered ideological hawkery of the neoconservatives in one speech, he actually called for an increase in the State Department's budget, which is the first time I've ever heard a SecDef asking for money for diplomats instead of bullets. And finally, I'd like to thank the men and women Gates leads, the members of the U.S. military, especially those I was privileged to meet in places like Baqubah, Yusufia and Baghdad this year. We are honored by your courage, your determination your all-American informality and good humor in the ultimate bloody, dust-blasted arena. Please be safe over there, and in Afghanistan, too. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_169541 7_1696037,00.html

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Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Postcard: Bethlehem
By Jamil Hamad

Christmas in Bethlehem makes me feel lonely. Walking around Manger Square, past the shops selling olive-wood kings and shepherds to busloads of Christian tourists, I realize how many of my old friends have emigrated, how much the city has changed beyond recognition. Today in Bethlehem, the sound of the Muslim call to prayer, ringing from dozens of mosques, all but drowns out the gentle church chimes. I was 8 when my family moved to Bethlehem in 1949. We were Muslim refugees from the newly created Israel. Back then, nearly all the townspeople were Christian. I went to a Christian school and sang in a church choir. I loved to go to Sunday service and shut my eyes, listening to the cadences of Latin Mass--which I didn't understand--and breathing in the fragrance of incense. Back then, "Christian" and "Muslim" were labels we kept in our pockets. It didn't matter what religion you belonged to. It was common for us Muslims to attend Sunday Mass, since we honor Jesus and Mary, or, as we call them in Arabic, Issa and Miriam. Muslim women prayed at the Milk Grotto, where Mary is said to have nursed Jesus, in order to be blessed with a child. We visited the homes of our Christian friends and picnicked with them in the spring, when the apricot trees blossom on the hills. At Christmas, Muslim and Christian children would dress in their finest, most colorful clothes. There were lights everywhere; as a child, I was dazzled. There are still strings of lights draped around Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity--perhaps many more lights--but for me, every one of them burns with a memory of those splendid days lost and of my Christian friends who have left. Why did they go? After

all, some of their families had lived here since the birth of Christ or even longer. The simple explanation is that Bethlehem's Christians are caught between the rise of Islamic extremism and the rigors of Israeli occupation. Because the city is under the control of the Palestinian Authority, Israeli security forces are building a 26-ft. (8 m) high concrete wall around it. The Israelis lump Christians in with all Palestinians as possible terrorists. My wife's hairdresser is a Christian who is moving to Australia because he is worried about his daughters. Walking home from school, the teenage girls are taunted by members of an Islamic militant group, just because they wear crosses. "I don't want my children to grow up in a bigoted society," he says. Wearing a cross at Israeli checkpoints doesn't help. To security personnel, we're all Palestinians and all dangerous. Even with the permit, Bethlehem residents need to make the short drive to Jerusalem. Sometimes it can take an hour to clear the checkpoint. As a Christian university student said the other day, "Jesus Christ wouldn't be able to leave Bethlehem today unless he showed a magnetic ID card, a permit and his thumbprint." At least the Israeli security wall is attracting a new kind of tourist, the graffiti guerrilla. The phantom British artist Banksy recently led a posse of foreign artists to the wall. He spraypainted a picture of a peace dove in a flak jacket that was captured in a sniper's crosshairs. And on the side of a house, he drew a little girl in a pink dress frisking an Israeli soldier. At times, the graffiti lifts my spirit. Other times, when I'm angry after being delayed at the checkpoint, I think that art alone can't bring down that wall around my Bethlehem. But what makes me laugh--with some bitterness, I admit--is the sign the Israeli military put up over the checkpoint at the entrance to Bethlehem. It reads: PEACE BE WITH YOU. Oddly, that's not a vain hope. My son has put up a tree in his Muslim home; I've been told to find a Santa suit, and my grandkids are learning carols. This is the peace I find in Bethlehem at Christmas. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697404,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

10 Questions for Richard Branson

Nicknamed the Rebel Billionaire for his daredevil stunts, the Virgin megabrand founder was just dubbed Citizen of the Year by the U.N. for his eco-advocacy. Richard Branson will now take your questions. You own an airline. Isn't it hypocritical to be preaching about global warming? Mandy Johnson, Des Moines, Iowa I could sell the airline and those planes would carry on damaging the environment, or I could pledge 100% of the profitswhich I have doneto developing clean fuels. Next year we plan to fly one of our 747s using a clean fuel to prove it can be done. Do you think the government should push Big Business to be more environmentally friendly? Emily James, Seattle Yes. Without government leading the way, it is difficult for the whole country to cut back on our carbon footprint. The government needs to reduce taxes on people who are driving green cars or making their homes more energy efficient. How are Virgin Megastores adapting to the downloading of movies and music? Strickland Maney, Los Angeles Music retailing is having an extremely hard time. Stores have had to reinvent themselves. For instance, we launched Virgin Mobile [a cellular provider heavy on hip downloads] and started selling other products like books and games that young people like. Virgin is perhaps one of the most adaptable companies in the world. If one of our industries gets hit, hopefully it is by another industry we are in. How do you balance your desire for daredevil adventure with the risk of death? Mengqiao Wang, Ithaca, N.Y. As an adventurer, if I try to do something man has not done beforelike cross the Atlantic in a hot-air balloonI try to protect against the downside. I make sure I have covered as many eventualities as I can. In the end, though, you've got to take calculated risks; otherwise, you're going to sit in mothballs all day and do nothing. Life is a helluva lot more fun if you say yes rather than no. Has your outlook been affected by the passing of your friend, the adventurer Steve Fossett? Joshua Foster, Spartanburg, S.C. People who really try to push boundaries often do not die in those pursuits. Lawrence of Arabia spent years fighting battles and got killed in a motorbike accident. When you're trying to achieve things man hasn't achieved before, you're trained for it. It's when you're off guard that things can be dangerous. How do you decide which humanitarian projects to get involved with? Dawn Gibson, Pasadena, Calif.

There are numerous, numerous problems out there, and we just try to use our entrepreneurial skills to make sure that the money we give helps as many people as possible. I am terrible at saying no. At work, my nickname is Dr. Yes. Has your dyslexia hindered you in the business world? Skye O'Brien, Dartmouth, Mass. Strangely, I think my dyslexia has helped. When I launch a new company, I need to understand the advertising. If I can understand it, then I believe anybody can. Virgin speaks in normal language instead of using phrases that nobody understands, like "financial-service industry." What is your beef with Rupert Murdoch? Linda Weir, Santa Monica, Calif. I have no personal beef with him. He made one or two moves that we believe were anticompetitive, so we've taken that to the authorities, who will decide if he's behaving in an anticompetitive way. But if he invited me to dinner, I would be happy to go with him. Why did you name a plane after Stephen Colbert? Brandy Weisman, London I like to make people smile, and Colbert achieves that a lot. I love the way he mercilessly "takes the mickey" or has fun with the more extreme members of the Republican Party and, of course, pretends to be a Republican himself in such a clever way. Will you ever cut your hair? Elijah Alexander, Tunis [Laughs.] I am lucky enough to still have it, so while I still do, I will keep as much as I can. Online only: Extra questions Does your thrill-seeking spirit help or hurt you in business? Horacio Coutio, Mexico City I think it helps. Entrepreneurs are adventurous people who are trying to do things that have never been done before. Sometimes you fall flat on your face, but I think by going out there and giving it a go, in the end you might actually succeed. Do you believe you have already faced your biggest challenges, or do they still lie ahead? Michael Crayton, Seattle The absolute biggest challenge for us all is global warming. I wish the American government would wake up to this fact, because it is going to have an effect on our children. Now, what is the answer to that problem? It could be that we are already too late and that the world is destined to heat up dramatically. That is why we have set up this $25 million prize that will be awarded to the person who finds a solution to global warming. What is the most viable solution to our dependence on fossil fuels? John Hall, Minot, N.D. If there were one quick move, I would get rid of the importation duty on sugar. All cars and buses in America could be run on sugar-based ethanolit is seven times more efficient to produce than corn-based ethanol. Interestingly, American cars used to run on ethanol. It was only when Prohibition came in, and people became concerned that car owners would drink petrol, that dirty oil replaced it. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697419,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

A Guide to Retirement Planning from TIME Where Fools Rush In Income to Count On Never Too Late to Save Where Pensions are Golden The Rest of Your Life Living It Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

The Rolls-Royce Rebound

By Thomas K. Grose / Westhampnett

Toward the end of every calendar year, Ian Robertson puts his small arsenal of expensive fountain pens into overdrive. That's when Rolls-Royce Motor Cars sends a yearbook to customers who have purchased a Rolls since Jan. 1, 2003, when production began under the German automaker BMW. As head of Rolls-Royce, Robertson personally signs each book's accompanying cover letter. The bespoke touch is appreciated by the company's superrich clientele--which numbered 2,800 when Robertson performed the task last year. "With that many customers," he says, "I could just about do it." This year Robertson may need an autopen. The iconic British car company is expecting already rising sales to soar, relatively speaking. This is, after all, a company whose ambition is to sell a mere 1,000 cars a year. That's a goal within reach, thanks to upcoming expansions of the product line, increasing numbers of extremely rich potential buyers and fast-growing Asian markets. Last year Rolls sold 805 Phantoms, its main model, slightly more than the previous year. Revenues were also up--the company won't say by how much--largely because of the newly introduced extended-wheelbase Phantom, which has a base price of $403,000, or $63,000 more than the standard version. Garel Rhys, emeritus professor of automotive economics at Cardiff Business School in Wales, applauds the company's performance since its acquisition by BMW: "You couldn't expect much better." In July, it rolled out the Drophead Coupe, a two-door convertible Phantom

starting at $407,000. Overall, Robertson predicts, the firm should enjoy double-digit sales growth this year. The company began life in 1904, when Charles Rolls, an aristocratic automobile aficionado and dealership owner, joined forces with fledgling carmaker Henry Royce. Then and now, the company's cars were big, powerful, stately and silent. In 1931, Rolls acquired the more sporty, slightly less expensive rival Bentley. When Rolls--which also made aircraft engines--went bust in 1971, the auto and aerospace units became separate companies. After a variety of owners, BMW took over. It now builds the cars at a plant in Sussex, England, operating one line and one shift that turns out four or five hand-built cars a day. The 550 employees include craftsmen--skilled cabinet- and saddlemakers, for example. Most Rolls are made to order; on average, customers pay $20,000 to have their car customized. The company is adding a second line next year and a second shift in 2009 to handle (at the same careful pace) both the Drophead and other planned new cars. For its first Rolls, BMW opted to resurrect the Phantom--a big sedan limousine that all but begs to be chauffeur-driven. That meant targeting the very rich, whose legions are growing fast. Rolls wants to increase its market share while still remaining at the price pinnacle. Next year it's introducing a hardtop coupe version of the Phantom and launching a smaller, as-yet-unnamed sedan. So who is willing to pay a small ransom to own a Roller? Buyers tend to be entrepreneurs, show-business celebrities or sports stars; few are corporate executives. One factor working for Rolls in developing economies: showing off one's megabucks is culturally acceptable in China. That helps explain why China is now Rolls' third largest and fastestgrowing market, accounting for 10% of sales. (The U.S. still accounts for 45%.) It was a Beijing property developer who last year paid a record $2.3 million for a superstretch Phantom. BMW will certainly be happy to see Rolls generating profits, given the $1.2 billion Rhys estimates it put into the company. Rolls won't budge Beemer's bottom line, given the parent company's $65 billion in sales. But owning Rolls-Royce gives BMW prestige and bragging rights. It proves it can sell cars that sweep the breadth of the market, from budget to budget-busting. Should the world's economy sputter and car sales drop off a cliff, "RollsRoyce would probably be the first thing to go," Rhys says. But for now, like that iconic spirit of ecstasy that makes up its hood ornament, Rolls-Royce looks poised to speed ahead. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697403,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy Add TIME Headlines to your Site Contact Us Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

A SWF Kick
By Bill Powell

To banks and other financial-services companies starved for cash by the subprime-credit crises, where they obtain bailout money is less important than the fact that it's available at all. Just ask investors in Citigroup or UBS. The big Swiss bank had to take a $10 billion write-down--it had already taken a $4.4 billion hit--on the value of its "super-senior" subprime portfolio, those formerly top-rated bonds. To restore its capital base, UBS sold $8.9 billion in convertible notes to the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. (GIC) and an additional $1.8 billion to a mystery Middle East investor. In other words, up to 12.4% of a conservative Swiss bank was sold to foreign entities. Weeks before, shaky Citi, also in need of capital to repair its subprime-holed balance sheet, was handed a lifeline by a similarly unlikely rescuer. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, a $625 billion sovereign wealth fund (SWF) run by the tiny Persian Gulf emirate, announced it was forking over $7.6 billion for a 4.9% stake in Citi. Though Citi still faces difficulties, the cash infusion helped stabilize its plunging stock price and signaled to rattled markets that money was available to help subprime victims survive the turmoil. Is it ever. The investments by GIC and Abu Dhabi, part of the United Arab Emirates, marks a turning point of sorts for SWFs. These enormous pools of wealth, controlled by governments in countries that have been getting fat off high oil prices and a booming global economy, are viewed suspiciously by those who fear foreign powers might use them to gain competitive advantages or push political agendas. But now, thanks in part to the bank deals, some fears have been allayed; companies in need of capital are courting investments from oil- and gas-rich states such as Abu Dhabi and Russia as well as from rising economies like China, which recently formed a $200 billion SWF to help the government invest its burgeoning foreign exchange reserves. SWFs, says a senior banker

at JPMorgan Chase, "are the new It girl of global finance. Everyone wants a piece of them." The reason for that is clear enough. At a time of extreme stress in global-equity and credit markets, many governments have surplus foreign exchange to play with--and because of the falling U.S. dollar, they are increasingly interested in investing their cash where it can earn greater returns than it would from U.S. Treasury debt, the traditional haven. The largest SWFs--the so-called Super Seven, comprising China, Russia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Norway and two Singapore funds--control up to $1.8 trillion. By 2011, assets held by SWFs worldwide are projected to grow almost fourfold, to nearly $8 trillion, according to Merrill Lynch. By comparison, hedge funds--unregulated private investment pools--control a paltry $1.5 trillion to $2.6 trillion, according to estimates. The rush of SWF money into Western markets is making bankers a lot happier than it is governments and politicians. At a G-7 meeting of finance ministers held in Washington in October, SWFs were a major topic of discussion, partly owing to concern about their potential impact on markets. SWF "investment policies, minor comments or rumors could spark volatility," said Clay Lowery, assistant secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department, in a speech last summer. "It is hard to dismiss entirely the possibility of unseen, imprudent risk management with broader consequences." Even presidential candidate Hillary Clinton weighed in recently, saying in a Financial Times interview that SWFs pose a potential threat to U.S. economic sovereignty. "I think vigilance is in order when the investor is a foreign government," Clinton said. "My principal concern is to increase transparency so that there is a clear understanding of where these funds are coming from ... and what the potential downsides might be of having a foreign government control certain assets in our country." Clinton is merely voicing concerns shared by others. In Europe, where the concept of "national champions" in a variety of industries is still taken seriously, some of the countries that have established huge SWFs, such as China and Russia, are not necessarily "friendlies, as far as the West is concerned," as a Democratic staffer on a key House committee overseeing international trade puts it. Even U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox, an avowed free trader, has acknowledged that government investment funds could use "the vast amounts of covert information" their spy agencies collect, making it "the ultimate inside-trading tool." Investments by SWFs can be politically risky too. In 2006, Temasek Holdings, an investment arm of the Singapore government, bought Shin Corp., Thailand's major telecommunications company, for $3.8 billion from the family of Thaksin Shinawatra, who at the time was Thailand's Prime Minister. Public outrage in Thailand over the sale of what was considered an important national asset to a Southeast Asia rival contributed to Thaksin's ouster as Prime Minister in a military coup in September 2006. The U.S. is trying to lay down an informal road map for increasing SWF transparency. At the October G-7 meeting, with support from the other participants, Washington urged SWFs to make public their annual reports, to offer detailed descriptions of their investment philosophies and to provide assurances that good returns--and not murky foreign-policy objectives--are what's driving them. In other words, the U.S. wants the new kids on the block to be more like Norway. Oslo's Government Pension Fund-Global, which invests up to 60% of its $353 billion in equities, has money in 3,500 companies around the world, including Google and General Electric.

But it owns no more than 1.5% of any single one, and it spells out all its investments in an annual report. But even if such policies were in place, trade hawks in the U.S., Europe and Japan wonder why they should throw themselves open to investment arms controlled by governments that limit foreign access to their own markets. Beijing, they point out, has strict limits and an opaque review process for foreign companies that seek to buy significant stakes in many Chinese companies. "So we're just supposed to roll over and let them buy whatever they want here?" says the congressional staffer. "Why would we do that?" Some SWF officials say they are adjusting their investment plans to match a world in which protectionist sentiment is rising. Singapore's Temasek has already said it is becoming more cautious. "In every country, whether it is in Asia or Europe, there is an increasing tide of nationalism," Temasek chairman Suppiah Dhanabalan told Singapore's Straits Times. "We've got to take various factors into account, such as whether the company or the activity is iconic for that country, whether it will arouse all kinds of emotional sentiment." It isn't just the prospect of riling trade partners that is persuading SWFs to curb high-profile foreign investments. To much fanfare, China's fledgling SWF, China Investment Corp. (CIC), earlier this year invested in the Blackstone Group shortly before the big New York City private-equity firm went public. But Blackstone's share price has sunk 38% below its June 2007 listing price of $31, costing CIC more than $1 billion. That pratfall appears to have prompted CIC to rein in its ambitions. Instead of making splashy investments in the U.S. and Europe, the fund is now looking closer to home. It recently bought into Central Huijin Investment Co., a government agency with stakes in several of China's biggest state-run banks and brokerages, and will reportedly plunk an additional $66 billion into the Agricultural Bank of China. To the extent that CIC looks for investments abroad, its chairman, Lou Jiwei, said in a late-November speech, it will stick to index funds--equities linked to the performance of entire markets, not individual companies. That's a conservative strategy, considering the bargains that may be available from investing in subprime-stressed financial institutions in the West. After all, Abu Dhabi's SWF will reap an 11% annual yield from its Citigroup stake, nearly double the dividend yield currently available to ordinary shareholders. Having been burned once by Blackstone, the Chinese are now twice shy. But other sovereign wealth funds out there are flush with cash-and fortune favors the bold.n Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697406,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Canadian Conundrum
By Erik Heinrich / Toronto

Chris Carrier has been hammered with two plant closures in less than a year. First Alcoa shut its wheel-rim plant in June after more than two decades in operation, idling 365 people. Then last month Goodyear Canada did the same at its engine-hose plant, forcing 165 out of work. "It's created a great deal of turmoil," says Carrier, mayor of Collingwood, Ont., a town of 25,000 north of Toronto. "Families aren't sure how they're going to pay bills. Some have moved away." The closures mean not only lost jobs but also a loss of nearly $5 million in annual wages and taxes for the local economy. Both Alcoa and Goodyear had operated well below capacity for a number of years, so it came as no surprise when they announced plans to move production to Venezuela and Mexico, respectively. Unfortunately, Collingwood's tale of economic woe is being repeated in communities across Ontario and Quebec--Canada's industrial heartland. "A high Canadian dollar is an absolute killer," says Peter Nygard, chairman of Nygard International Ltd., a manufacturer of women's clothing in Winnipeg, Man., whose $1 billion in annual revenue comes largely from the U.S. It's the reverse side of the strong loonie, the $1 Canadian coin that gets its name from the lake bird pictured on it. Canadians have been pouring over the border to bargain hunt, and the unemployment rate hit a 33-year low of 5.8% in October, owing to gains in the natural resource and service sectors. But the world's eighth largest economy has lost 329,800 manufacturing jobs since the Canadian dollar began its marathon climb five years ago. From an all-time low of 62 in 2002, the turbocharged loonie shot past the U.S. greenback for the first time in nearly 31 years this September and kept right on soaring. Fueled by record prices for Canadian commodities, a surge in foreign investment and anxiety over the subprime-mortgage meltdown, the loonie broke the $1.10 barrier in early November. It has since settled close to parity. "The U.S. dollar is going to stay weak against major currencies for a while," says Dan Katzive, director of currency strategy at Credit Suisse in New York City.

Although Katzive predicts the loonie will drop below par by the end of 2008, that may be too little too late for many. "No one can adjust cost and pricing fast enough," says Jayson Myers, president of Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, the country's largest trade and industry association, referring to the loonie's 18% run-up over the past 10 months. "We're going to see more manufacturers close down as a result." Canada and the U.S. are each other's top economic partners, with two-way trade valued at $625.9 billion. Normally, Canada's exports significantly outpace imports, but in September the country's trade surplus with the U.S. dwindled to $6.2 billion, according to Statistics Canada. The main reason is that the automotive sector, which includes cars, trucks and parts, posted monthly deficits from April to September. At the same time, auto-parts makers are expected to see profits drop nearly 41%, to about $1 billion in 2007, according to the Conference Board of Canada, a leading economicresearch group. Not everyone is equally affected. "You have to be smart to offset the impact of foreign-exchange fluctuations," says Mark Hogan, president of Magna International, based in Aurora, Ont. The $24.2 billion company--a strategic supplier to the world's leading automakers with operations in North America, Europe and Asia--moved more than 300 jobs from Canada to Mexico in the past two years in anticipation of a stronger loonie. "When you're supplying new vehicles, you have to make sourcing decisions three or four years ahead of production," says Hogan, who is asking his 52 remaining Canadian plants for annual productivity gains of 6% to 10% to avoid offshoring more jobs. Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, says his industry can adjust to a strong loonie rivaling the greenback, but there will be consequences. "We're going to shrink dramatically if the Canadian dollar stays where it's at," says Fedchun. Clothier Nygard was ahead of the curve, having outsourced most of his company's production to Asia years ago. He's not alone; annual manufacturing shipments of made-inCanada garments have plummeted more than 35%, to about $4.5 billion, since 2002. "With the rising dollar, we couldn't afford to make everything in this country anymore," says Elliot Lifson, vice chairman of Montreal-based Peerless Clothing, which has outsourced 70% of its production to plants in China, India and Vietnam over the past three years. Once the loonie passed 80, the $500 million company, which has exclusive licensing agreements with top designers, including Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Michael Kors, exporting to the U.S. became problematic. "Our margins would have been eaten up," says Lifson. Peerless continues to make its most expensive garments at a Montreal plant that employs 2,000 because of its proximity to the company's main distribution center in St. Albans, Vt. "It costs money to have inventory sitting for weeks on a slow ship from China," says Lifson. Quebec Premier Jean Charest recently announced a $620 million aid package to help his French-speaking province's ailing manufacturers and has urged the federal government to follow his lead. In the meantime, Mayor Eddie Francis of Windsor, Ont., near Detroit, is trying to cope with an 8.6% unemployment rate in a town known as the automotive capital of Canada. "It's a challenge and we're going to have to get through it," he says. The strong loonie may be great for cross-border shopping excursions, but it's of little help to anyone without a paycheck. Click to Print Find this article at:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697422,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Seaworthy Idea
By Coeli Carr

Tandem technologies' ship had sailed. Literally. The cargo vessel promised to the young water-treatment company by the U.S. Maritime Administration was instead deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2002. Tandem's founder, Robert Lyles III, a recent graduate of Kenyon College, had planned to conduct research on the ship that would prove to investors the promise of the technique he had developed for treating the ballast water taken on by ships. And no ship could mean no funding. The sudden setback might have sunk Tandem. But surprisingly, it set the company on an unexpected new course--skin care. Lyles, who pursued biology and environmental studies in college, is impassioned about an increasingly pernicious environmental problem caused by ballast water, which cargo and other ships take on, carry and release to help stabilize and balance them. "There's a smorgasbord of bacteria, viruses, crustaceans and small fish in ballast," Lyles says. And when flushed into strange waters, these organisms can take over, with devastating effect. An infestation of zebra mussels began to radically change the Great Lakes ecosystem in the 1980s, and the MSX virus depleted the oyster population of Chesapeake Bay in the 1950s. Scientists have traced both disruptions to ballast water. The federal Aquatic Invasive Species Act, passed in 1990, requires ships to disinfect their ballast before discharging it, but critics say its standards aren't tough enough. (A stricter version of the law is pending.) Lyles' electrochemical technology promises more pristine ballast. Tandem, based in Ashburn, Va., was testing its process in the lab in early 2001, and Emily Durham was working regularly with the treated water. She noticed something unusual: her forearms and hands looked and felt softer. Durham and the rest of the Tandem team didn't think much of this unusual fringe benefit. "We said, 'Hey, that's great,' but didn't want to deviate from our original goal," Lyles says. After their ship didn't show, they changed their minds. Lyles, Durham and consultant Paul Gray decided in 2004 to create a skin-care company--with Tandem's seawater as the marquee ingredient--and siphon most of their new company's revenues back into Tandem's research. Less than a year later, C'watre was born. The name--a reconfigured spelling of "seawater"--is meant to reflect the technologically transformed ocean water that is the sole ingredient in Haeru Activating Ageless Serum and the first ingredient in the company's other skin-care products, which range in price from

$25 to $75. The natural targets for C'watre's marketing are spas and wellness centers. Heike Muschik, owner of Sunpoint Retreat, a spa in New York City, sells C'watre's entire line; her staff uses its professional products. "Our clients say that the skin appears invigorated after using them," she says. C'watre sales are on course for $2 million next year. So what's the secret? Even Lyles isn't entirely sure. The zapped water has been ionized, he notes, and this may account for how it behaves on and in the skin. Stig Friberg, a colloid chemist, expert in skin structure and distinguished research professor at the University of Utah in St. George, suggests that C'watre's technology may alter the properties of the ocean water, which might in turn allow the treated water to better penetrate the skin. C'watre may be riding the crest of a trendsetting ocean wave. Major skin-care companies are looking at these "enhanced" waters with great interest, says David Fowler, CEO of Wellness Enterprises, which produces water filters and water for skin-care manufacturers. "These waters hydrate better and are biologically stable," he says. "Fungus can't grow in them, so you don't need to add preservatives." Despite their success in turning ballast into beauty, Lyles and Durham plan to hire new managers for C'watre, then head back to their original research next year. By then, Lyles hopes, tougher regulations on ballast water may have passed, boosting demand for Tandem's technology. Meanwhile, it will be known for the ship that launched a thousand face creams. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697418,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Verbatim
'Everyone involved in baseball--the commissioners, club officials, the Players Association, players--shares responsibility.' GEORGE MITCHELL, former Senate majority leader, on his report implicating 82 major league players as having taken performance-enhancing drugs 'They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world.'

JALIL KHALAF, Iraqi police commander in Basra, on British forces withdrawing from the city and surrounding province 'My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali--we all know that.' AL GORE, Nobel Prize winner, on efforts at the U.N. climate-change summit to hatch a plan to cut greenhouse gases 'As long as I am President of Serbia, I will never accept the independence of Kosovo.' BORIS TADIC, Serbian President, on the autonomous province of Kosovo, which is expected to unilaterally declare independence in the coming weeks 'With the New Year upon us, I am left with a difficult decision: either go back to work and keep my staff employed or stay dark and allow 80 people ... to lose their jobs.' CONAN O'BRIEN, late-night TV host, on his plan to resume programming on Jan. 2 after two months of honoring the Hollywood writers' strike 'I'm trying to elongate the evening.' CELINE DION, singer, who ended the last of her 717 performances at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas with seven costume changes and several speeches about her career and family MORE OF THE BEST QUOTES AT TIME.COM For daily sound bites, visit time.com/quotes Sources: Salt Lake Tribune; Guardian; UPI; Reuters; Washington Post; New York Times Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697425,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Numbers
HEALTH 7.6 million Estimated number of people worldwide killed by cancer in 2007, according to the American Cancer Society 45% Percentage of the estimated 12 million cancer cases worldwide diagnosed in 2007 that were in more affluent, developed nations DATA THEFT 162 million Number of personal-data records affected in security breaches reported by 302 organizations in 2007

19 Number of these security-breach cases in which arrests or prosecutions have been made MUSIC $212 million Gross for more than 1.8 million tickets for the Police reunion-concert series, making it 2007's top-selling tour. Second and third place went to Genesis' Turn It On Again tour, at $129 million, and Justin Timberlake's FutureSex LoveShow, at $126.8 million

$2.6 billion North American gross concert dollars in 2007, down 10.2% from a record-setting 2006. With 51 million concertgoers, attendance fell 19.2% from the previous year INTERNET USE 47% Percentage of adult Internet users in the U.S. who said in a new survey that they had used Google or a similar search engine to look for information about themselves 22% Percentage of Internet users surveyed in 2002 who had searched online for their name Sources: U.S. News & World Report (2); USA Today (2); Billboard (2); Pew Internet and American Life Project (2) Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697410,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Did GIs Sell Guns in Iraq?

By Brian Bennett

The Pentagon is investigating whether some of the 190,000 weapons the U.S. military lost track of while training Iraqi troops were peddled on the black market by American soldiers and contractors, federal law-enforcement and congressional sources tell TIME. In recent weeks, Claude Kicklighter, the Pentagon's inspector general, has privately told lawmakers that the Defense Criminal Investigative Service has launched a probe into whether U.S. military and civilian contractors intercepted up to 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 80,000 pistols intended for Iraqi security forces in 2004 and '05 to sell on the Iraqi black market. A Pentagon official declined comment. The case was opened, according to a congressional aide who attended one of the briefings, after the Government Accountability Office revealed in July that some 30% of all U.S. weapons bound for Iraqi security forces had gone missing. The report cited, among other factors, "insufficient staffing" and a failure to follow established distribution procedures as contributing to the disappearance of thousands of weapons. Particularly unsettling for lawmakers was the realization that General David Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces--which has cost more than $19.2 billion since 2003--during the time the weapons went missing. Despite having the ultimate responsibility for overseeing

the training, however, Petraeus, now the commanding general in Iraq, has not been implicated in any wrongdoing. Revelations that U.S. soldiers are suspected of illegal arms sales in Iraq could prove to be another example, like leaving depots unguarded, of how U.S. actions have put weapons in the hands of anti-U.S. insurgents. "[The problem] goes back," says a congressional aide, "to not having enough troops." Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697426,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Inbox
U.S. Intelligence on Iran

Joe Klein's article about the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report on the Iranian nuclear program and President George W. Bush's response to it was quite disturbing [Dec. 17]. Before the NIE findings, how close did Bush push us into yet another military engagement? When Bush talks about winning in Iraq, what is it that we will have won? Will it be worth our military losses of more than 3,800 Americans killed and thousands more maimed or mentally affected? The NIE report is a reminder of Bush's disconnect with the reality that we Americans are forced to live with. PHIL WILT, VAN NUYS, CALIF. I don't think all the Republican candidates "had noisily rattled sabers about Iran." I can't even begin to imagine Ron Paul wanting to go to war with Iran. He didn't even want to go to war with Iraq. You did a great disservice to Paul by using such a blanket statement. SCOTT SPENCER, HAMPTON, VA. With the American public as his audience, Bush regularly takes center stage to perform well-rehearsed and accomplished lies. His latest tour de force? Because of Iran's supposed continuous pursuit of nuclear weapons, only an aggressive foreign policy can prevent World War III. When the U.S. intelligence community reports that Iran halted its nuclear program in 2003, it shares the stage with the President. Do we applaud fabrications or facts? D. KENT LLOYD, GLADSTONE, ORE. Thanks to Klein for his article's poetic conclusion. Along with Joe Biden's assessment of Bush as possibly "one of the most incompetent Presidents in modern American history," the truth that many of us have known finally wins out. So much for legacy. DEAN PAPPAS, SALT LAKE CITY Klein's cover story was very dangerous and misleading. No matter what the latest conclusion is from some of the government's analysts, the President of Iran has threatened a U.S. ally with extinction. It is a suicidal ideation to believe that he is not one of the most dangerous people on the planet. When Iran becomes a greater threat, perhaps more Americans will finally understand that his pockets may have been empty, but not his armory. SILAS MARIANO, OCEANSIDE, CALIF. Why the excitement over the latest NIE report? Since Bush hasn't regarded intelligence in the past, why should he change now? HENRY PENNYMON, ORLANDO, FLA. Sine Iran has demonstrated its contempt for international nuclear requirements and the potential to arm itself as a significant threat to the rest of the world, I would feel a lot safer with a policy that denies Iran any nuclear capabilities. I hope the price we pay later for letting Iran off the hook will not be too high. RICK DONALD, PORTLAND, ME.

Should We Stay Firm on Iran? Charles Krauthammer's viewpoint "Keep Up the Pressure" was a balanced response to Joe Klein's article [Dec. 17]. The problem I have with the whole debate is that everyone looks at Iran's approach to nuclear-weapons development from a traditional-warfare point of view. Think of the disruption a well-placed bomb could cause if it were set off in key strategic locations, like midtown Manhattan and outside the Capitol. I would be more concerned with the enrichment program than with the weaponization or delivery-systems side. Developing systems to detect and track this material would be my priority. TOM OCKULY, GLENWOOD, MD. In Denial About Immigration? Michael Kinsley's article in immigration is enlightening, but it doesn't address the core problem: What should we do with the millions of illegal immigrants who are already in our country [Dec. 17]? It would be easy to think that we could wipe the slate clean, send everyone home, establish a threshold for the number of immigrants we want and create an orderly process for admission. Obviously, this will never happen. Why not admit that allowing illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. provides cheap labor to fuel our country's economic growth? Illegal immigrants are here because we needed them--and we probably still do. We should stop the political posturing, face reality, legalize their status now, take serious steps to close the borders and admit future immigrants in accordance with predetermined thresholds. RICHARD SLUSKY, WINDSOR, VT. Hardworking immigrants only want what our forefathers wanted: a chance to work and educate their children like everyone else. But they also want ballots and public signs in Spanish and English. They want bilingual education in schools. They want welfare benefits even though some of their earnings go back home to provide the second largest source of income in Mexico. PAT BURKE, RICHARDSON, TEXAS Kinsley's perspective-that the debate is not about illegal immigration but about immigration--might be accurate. But the negative impact of millions of immigrants on our crowded schools, strained social services and insufficient infrastructure is real and shows that we already have too many immigrants in the country. Regarding his assertion that illegal immigrants do our dirty work, there are plenty of legal residents who would take those jobs if not for illegal immigrants who are willing to work for almost nothing, creating unfair competition for U.S. citizens. LORENZO FERNANDEZ, BOCA RATON, FLA. As the son of immigrants I know the sacrifices immigrants make and their benefit for this country. Kinsley mentioned the Americans who strongly oppose illegal immigration. How about the Americans who want to prove their open-mindedness by ignoring this problem? If I can understand that immigrants must be processed and checked for disease, then certainly U.S.-born citizens can too. Anyone can flaunt his politically correct chutzpah, but it doesn't change the fact that a country without borders isn't really a country.

DAN SABER, REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. The New Baby Boom Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's "The More the Merrier" brought back memories of growing up as the oldest of seven children [Dec. 17]. Every summer my family would pile into our Ford station wagon for a trip back to Pennsylvania to visit the grandparents. It was guaranteed to be a hot, noisy, cramped trip. But watching drivers' mouths move as they counted each one of us packed into that car made it fun. We often thought of placing a sign on the window that said, YEP, THERE'S NINE OF US IN HERE! The size of my family never failed to elicit a reaction from passersby. GINNY CHIAPEL, PLANTATION, FLA. Have these people no understanding of the negative effects of having so many children? Our planet is choking to death because it's overburdened by people, especially in the developed world. One Western child uses 30 times the resources a child born in a Third World country does. If wealthy people are going to have larger families, they should be taxed according to how much they burden the overall system. Instead, we now give credits for having children. If you love children and want a big family, adopt someone already here. JO NOL, WEST SIMSBURY, CONN. Mother Laura Bennett seems to miss the point of the kindergarten-stage debut. Sure, she gets to do everything six times, but her children are separate individuals with their own needs, and she is their one and only mother. It's important to know that motherhood is not always glamorous. NANCY BENGTSON, TISKILWA, ILL. I was disappointed to learn that some affluent--and inconsiderate--couples are opting to have four children or more. These folks may be highly educated and able to afford a large brood, but they're naive if they think Mother Earth has infinite resources to deal with the current population explosion. Sadly, these poor kids will be around to endure the consequences. BILL LONG, FREMONT, CALIF. A Crash Course in Safety I couldn't help being amused by Kay Johnson's article "Postcard: Hanoi," which reminded me of my first experience visiting Ho Chi Minh City [Dec. 17]. My entire time there centered on trying to figure out ways to cross the streets with few regulated crosswalks and with often ignored traffic lights. On more than one occasion, I tried to get up the nerve to step out into the oncoming sea of scooters; a kind Vietnamese would take my hand and lead me across, and on the other side, we both would laugh, knowing that for a foreigner, navigating the scooter-packed streets on foot was a major challenge. But I must say it added to my beautiful experience visiting such an amazing country. JULIE H. CLARK, RISING FAWN, GA.

Senses in Overdrive Thank you so much for Claudia Wallis' article on sensory processing disorder [Dec. 10]. As a mother of two boys with SPD, I cannot begin to describe what we face each day with our sons' sensory challenges and the discrimination we experience because of their unusual reactions to the world around them. Our boys could not live without the occupational therapy they receive to help them cope and learn how to properly process sensory input. Please keep writing about this issue. You may be saving a family's life. WENDY PARK, RICHARDSON, TEXAS As a mother of five children and an occupational therapist working with children who have received a diagnosis of autism, I am keenly aware of the different ways that people respond to sensory information, and I was thrilled to read Wallis' article. TIME called attention to an area that needs further research and more public awareness. I believe that with improved insight into sensory processing, many individuals will find ways to better enjoy their surroundings and learn more from their experiences. MARIA GARDNER, COLUMBUS, OHIO It's Not So Scary Living Green RE Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's "It's Inconvenient Being Green" [Dec. 3]: Ever since I visited Asia 25 years ago, I've known how to go without toilet paper--and have never been so clean! As long as we have soap and water, we can emerge cleaner than ever. So, Lisa, help save a tree! ROBERTO LAMOUREUX SURIGAO DEL NORTE, THE PHILIPPINES While real humor could provide a welcome bromide for our suddenly acute case of environmental awareness, Cullen's essay only got my blood boiling. She says green consciousness "forces Americans to add environmentalism to their already endless checklist of things to fret about." She worries that the effects of her family's habits are the "Sasquatch of carbon footprints." It's so easy to make a difference every time we shop for cars, food or lightbulbs. I have a prescription for Cullen's eco-anxiety: Stop poking fun at people taking action, and just get with the program. SUSIE ALMGREN, MONTREAL Academically Accelerated Tots To those parents who enroll their preschoolers in tutoring programs [Dec. 3], I say, Let children be children! At my daughter's preschool, the students learn how to cook. They are encouraged at age 4 to write their own names. My daughter speaks English and French fluently and wants to learn Spanish. She loves being a kid, and we enjoy learning together. For now, I'm enjoying seeing her learn at her own pace and encouraging her. At such a young age, being with parents after school is better than sending them off to another classroom. ELISABETH SZENTKERESZTY DE ZAGON BRUSSELS LETTER FROM A FUTURE BRIDE

WED ON THE WEB In Jeninne Lee-St. John's story on Internet weddings, Anna Post says the best thing we get out of technology is staying connected to the people we care about [Dec. 10]. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always thought a real, traditional wedding was a very good occasion for not only staying connected to but also dancing with and hugging all the people we care about. I know if my groom couldn't make it to our own wedding, I would turn him down and the webcam off. SUSANNE ULZHFER, AUGSBURG, GERMANY A YEAR IN TIME Each week we receive about 1,400 letters to the editor from readers eager to share their opinions on the events, people and trends that affect our world. Some letter writers are happy with our coverage, and some aren't. Here are the cover stories that generated the most mail in 2007: Why We Should Teach the Bible in Public Schools, April 2..............1,605 TIME 100, May 14..................................635 Mother Teresa, Sept. 3........................494 Global Warming, April 9..................474 Virginia Tech, April 30.......................424 HOW TO REACH US Our e-mail address is letters@time.com Please do not send attachments. Our fax number is 1-212-522-8949. Or you can send your letter to: TIME Magazine Letters, Time & Life Building, Rockefeller Center, New York, N.Y. 10020. Letters should include the writer's full name, address and home telephone and may be edited for purposes of clarity and space.

Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697393,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

ASIA VERSION SAME

Back to Article Click to Print Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007

Road Test
By Joyce Man/Moscow

Yelabuga, an economically depressed city of 70,000 in Russia's republic of Tatarstan, is an unlikely staging area for the march of globalization. The city's biggest claim to fame: it's where noted Soviet-era poet Marina Tsvetayeva spent her final days before committing suicide. But things are looking up. Yelabuga may be getting some economic help from an unlikely quarter. On the outskirts of the city lies the Alabuga special economic zone (SEZ) where, among a smattering of grime-encrusted buildings and two unfinished helipads, Great Wall Motor, one of China's up-and-coming automakers, plans to build a $70 million factory capable of churning out 50,000 cars and SUVs a year. If it gets a green light from Russian officials, the factory will be Great Wall Motor's sixth overseas manufacturing facility and one of the company's launching pads in an effort to become a multinational manufacturer. Great Wall is not the only Chinese car company on the ground in Russia. While there has been a lot of noise about fledgling efforts by Chinese carmakers Chery Automobile and Brilliance China Automotive to break into the hugely competitive U.S., Russia is currently the world's largest overseas market for Chinese cars. It's home to three joint ChineseRussian factories assembling cars for seven mainland marques, including Chery, Great Wall, Geely and BYD Auto. While China's overall share of Russia's foreign-car market is relatively small just 3% in mid-2007 sales jumped 472% in the first half of the year and are projected to double in 2008 to between 100,000 and 150,000 units, says Moscowbased Ernst & Young auto analyst Ivan Bonchev. "The Russian market is growing extremely fast, with heavy demand for cars, which domestic makers far from satisfy," says Great Wall Motor president Wang Fengying.

Russia offers more to China's carmakers than the opportunity for fast growth. It may take decades for Chinese cars which today are cheap, technologically unsophisticated and unable to meet tough Western safety and emissions standards to be accepted by U.S. and European consumers. Russians, though, are snapping them up, giving Chinese companies a chance to gain experience navigating the overseas market while the training wheels are still attached. Russia is a "guinea-pig market," says Bonchev. That doesn't mean it's insignificant. Russia's growing middle class provides a big pool of would-be car owners. Viktor Semyonov, deputy industry director at the Ministry of Industry and Energy in Moscow, says the number of cars sold in Russia topped 2 million in 2006 a 20% increase and was up 28% in the first half of 2007. If growth rates continue, Russia could rank fifth in the world in sales by 2010, overtaking England, France and Italy, Bonchev says. Chinese cars are well positioned to tap that growth because they are seen as more reliable than Russian-made models and are significantly cheaper than Korean and Japanese imports. The average Russian blanches at the thought of paying more than $10,000 for a car. At the low end of the price spectrum, "it's better to buy Chinese models, like the Chery Amulet," says Rustam Gubazov, a 34-year-old taxi driver in Kazan, Tatarstan's capital. Gubazov says he has owned eight cars in eight years, including four Russian-made Zhigulis. The Amulet, the top-selling Chinese car in Russia, lasts longer, he says, and it has a base price of $9,000, about 30% cheaper than one of its chief competitors, the Hyundai Accent. With that kind of word-of-mouth, Chinese cars could account for 10% of Russia's foreignauto market in 10 years, says Bonchev. But profits may depend on whether Chinese manufacturers are able to own and operate factories independently on Russian soil. Currently, mainland automakers are forced to rely on joint-venture assembly plants and licensing agreements to sell cars to Russians. To protect its domestic car companies, Moscow may keep it that way. Though four Chinese automakers have applied to open their own Russian plants, none have been approved, according to the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade. Indeed, there appears to be a growing backlash against Chinese manufacturers. Earlier this year, a Russian car magazine crash-tested a Chery Amulet at facilities owned by the country's biggest carmaker, OAO AvtoVAZ. The magazine, AvtoRevu, claimed the Amulet was so badly mangled in the crash that the car should be pulled from the market for safety reasons. Chery said the test was unfair. Meanwhile, Great Wall Motors is waiting for Russia's Ministry of Industry and Energy and the Federal Customs Service to give the go-ahead to build its planned factory in the Alabuga SEZ. Wang, the Great Wall Motor president, says her company "cannot lose the Russian market," partly because Russia is seen as a stepping-stone to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. But if Moscow decides to throw up roadblocks, Chinese carmakers and Yelabuga could be stuck in neutral for years to come. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1696904,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007

Lord of the Jungle

By Tim Kindseth

Geoffrey Bawa is well known in his native Sri Lanka and in design circles, but wider fame has eluded the architect who died in 2003 at the age of 84. Part of the reason is that the building style Bawa pioneered melding Asian and global design traditions in a way that suited the requirements of monsoon climates has become ubiquitous. Verandahs, water features, local craftwork, lush landscaping: today these kinds of elements are taken for granted in resorts, spas and villas all over the region, and it is easy to believe that it was ever thus. But had it not been for Bawa, things may have looked very different. The publication of David Robson's Beyond Bawa: Modern Masterworks of Monsoon Asia a highly informative study, if at times a little dryly written will hopefully boost the architect's posthumous profile. It also confronts Bawa's reputation for snobbery. Bawa, grants Robson, was a "paternalistic employer" who paid people poorly and seemed "to have had little understanding of how his assistants actually made ends meet." (Such notoriety dogged Bawa throughout his career. When, in 1986, a retrospective of his work was organized at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London the first large-scale Bawa exhibit outside Sri Lanka the only real attention given was a snarky article in Building Design by London-based Sri Lankan architect Shanti Jayawardene, slamming Bawa as an litist from a privileged background who catered only to the rich.) Born in 1919 to Eurasian parents his father was a wealthy Muslim-English lawyer, his mother German-Scottish-Sinhalese Bawa was, yes, raised with that proverbial silver spoon. Cambridge-educated, he enjoyed an aimless youth of profligate spending, sumptuous taste and spiffy automobiles. The title page of Geoffrey Bawa, a seminal Singaporean monograph published to coincide with the London exhibition, is a money shot of Bawa's twinkling Rolls-Royce. Contemporary Donald Friend a peripatetic, chain-

smoking Australian artist and compulsive diarist grumbled about Bawa's "grand ducal airs." Robson points out, though, that many of Bawa's projects were anything but patrician, like the Hanwella Convent Farm (Sri Lanka, 1971) and the Bandarawela Chapel (Sri Lanka, 1961), erected as a modest hill retreat for nuns. The austere geometric forms of the chapel owed much to the prevailing international Modernism of the moment, which Bawa was steeped in from his days as a student at the famed Architectural Association in London during the late 1950s. But Bawa's almost exclusive use of local materials was an incipient sign of the homespun revolution to come. His signature "Contemporary Vernacular" style, fusing Modernist elements with traditional design, would fully develop and forever remodel the architectural face of tropical Asia. Bawa's impact on Asian architects Sri Lankan Milroy Perera, Singaporean Mok Wei Wei and many others documented by Robson is certainly plain to see. All have adapted the basic regionalist Bawa style, which Bawa only loosely outlined. First, he wrote in a 1968 article, "a building must, at the very least, satisfy the needs that gave it birth, both physical and spiritual." Second, it "must be in accord and in sympathy with the ambience [of its setting]." And "there must be a knowledgeable and true use of the materials with which you build." Thus both Lalyn Collure's forested Boulder Garden Hotel (Sri Lanka, 2002) and Bawa's landmark Polontalawa Estate Bungalow (Sri Lanka, 1964) where the main roof appears to rest, at either end, upon two colossal rocks emphasize harmony with nature. The most striking photograph in Robson's book shows the candlelit open-air restaurant of Collure's hotel sublimely canopied by a jumbo black boulder. Mok's Morley Road House (Singapore, 1996) blends ancient Chinese garden designs a koi pond, bamboo hedges with sharp Modernist forms while blurring inside/outside spatial distinctions. Just so, Bawa's naturally ventilated Ena de Silva House (Sri Lanka, 1960) borrowed from Sinhalese manor houses and Kandyan spaces shrine room, verandahs to create something new: an innovative, urban courtyard home with windows that could be used, according to the client's wishes, "for serenading at night." We live these days with rock-star architects Gehry, Koolhaas, Libeskind hailed as heroic and solitary prodigies, bringing forth great edifices. While it is tempting to lobby for Bawa's inclusion in this pantheon, Robson argues that he "should not be viewed as a lone genius, but rather as someone who operated within a circle of sympathetic friends." In fact, no architect is an island, and several individuals notably Friend, Danish architect Ulrik Plesner, and artists Barbara Sansoni and Laki Senanayake influenced Bawa's vernacular experiments. As Robson's title suggests, Bawa's legacy, if not his personal renown, continues to thrive because he was not aloof but a collaborator, and because the ideas behind his aristocratic demeanor were essentially democratic namely, that local tradition must be valued in a globalized world, and the future and the past need not dwell in separate houses. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1696906,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007

Criminal Mind
By Peter Ritter

When Qiu Xiaolong was a boy in Shanghai, Red Guards loyal to Mao Zedong ransacked his parents' home. The thugs took jewelry, books and anything else associated with a bourgeois lifestyle. But they left a few photo magazines. In one, Qiu saw a picture of a woman wearing a red qipao, the form-hugging Chinese dress that became an emblem of capitalist decadence during the Cultural Revolution. "When I first saw that picture, I was amazed by the beauty," says Qiu, now 54 years old and possessed of the pleasantly bookish air of a college professor. "It was kind of natural to conclude the people in it were from a bourgeois family background, so they must have suffered during the Cultural Revolution. I thought, What could have happened to them?" Decades later, the stirred memory of that photo suggested the plot of Qiu's Red Mandarin Dress, the fifth and latest of his popular, Shanghai-set Inspector Chen detective novels. This time, Qiu's hero, a cop and poet, is on the trail of a serial killer who dresses his female victims in tailored qipao dresses a macabre gesture freighted with political meaning. As in the previous books, the investigation leads Inspector Chen to a brutal legacy from the past, for even the most vicious of Qiu's criminals are victims of China's bloody history. So, incidentally, are many of the people close to the author. "My mother had a nervous breakdown at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and she never really

recovered," Qiu says. "But I also have friends who suffered even worse things. I'm not saying they're dead or anything. But they're really ruined. Their life, dreams, career gone." Qiu's preoccupation with China's tumultuous recent past was foreordained. One of his formative experiences as an author was, after all, ghostwriting a self-criticism for his father, a businessman persecuted during the Red Guards' reign of terror. Qiu says he never set out to write Chinese crime novels. A poet and translator himself his credits include two books of translated poetry, Treasury of Chinese Love Poems (2003) and Evoking Tang (2007), as well as a volume of his own verse, Lines Around China (2003) Qiu permanently quit China in 1988 to study at Washington University in St. Louis, a city he chose because it was T.S. Eliot's birthplace. But in the mid-1990s, when he felt the urge to write a book about the dizzying changes taking place in his homeland, Qiu discovered that the detective novel provided the best framework for his ideas and, not coincidentally, enabled him to write with a free hand about several issues still taboo in China. In the course of duty, Inspector Chen has tackled political corruption (Death of a Red Heroine, 2000) and human trafficking (A Loyal Character Dancer, 2002). Qiu's 2006 mystery, A Case of Two Cities, was a virtual blueprint for the pension scandal that roiled Shanghai's highest political aeries last year and led to the resignation of the city's Communist Party chief. "A cop walks around and knocks on people's doors, asks questions," Qiu says. "It's become a convenient way to write about things I want to explore." Qiu's novels have been published in China, but not without some mysterious changes. The city of Shanghai, for instance, is referred to as "H," which manages to sound even more Kafkaesque than anything Qiu could invent. But writing crime novels has allowed him remarkable freedom to limn China's shifting moral standards. "In the past, Chinese people believed in Confucianism," Qiu says. "That's basically an ethical system: what you should do and what you should not do. Then people believed in Mao and communism. In a way, that was also about what you should and should not do. Now it's like Nietzsche's time: God is dead. So you can do anything." Perhaps reflecting his creator's donnish temperament, Inspector Chen is somewhat ambivalent about the door-knocking and petty politicking that go along with police work. In the course of his investigations, Qiu's hero frequently cites literary theory or quotes Tang dynasty poetry. Chen is less a cop moonlighting as a poet than a poet daylighting as a cop. In Red Mandarin Dress, Chen has retreated further than ever from day-to-day policing, and, perhaps inevitably, the novel's crime plot often gets enjoyably lost in a thicket of Chinese history, literature and food. Yet Qiu also adeptly follows the genre's conventions and, when Inspector Chen's investigation gains momentum, the mystery of the women in the red dresses predictably returns to a buried crime from the Cultural Revolution: the sins of the nation's past revisited upon the present. Already, Qiu says, he's at work on the next novel in the series, which will be set at least partially in Beijing. For both Chen and Qiu, the mystery of China's modern social revolution remains unsolved. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1696222,00.html

Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007

The Mod Squad

By Jason Tedjasukmana/Jakarta

You wouldn't have put money on it, but one of the sweetest sounds in underground music today pays homage to Indonesian film scores and pop acts of the 1960s. White Shoes & the Couples Company, a Jakarta-based six-piece, have parlayed not only a musical but sartorial fascination with their nation's pop culture into a sound and look that have seen them hailed as one of the most "crush worthy" bands of 2006 by influential music site allmusic.com, and "the most blog worthy band on the planet" by Ken Micallef, music critic at Yahoo! Music. Last year rollingstone.com named them one of the best bands on MySpace now established as a crucial forum for breaking acts. "They have all the makings of a cult act that could have a decent following in Asia," says Hasief Ardiasyah, associate editor of Rolling Stone Indonesia. It was the band's MySpace profile that attracted the attention of Minty Fresh, a Chicagobased record label that is home to college-friendly bands like the Cardigans, Liz Phair, Veruca Salt and Tahiti 80. "The band's music possesses a charm, melodicism and style that we fell in love with immediately," says label head Jim Powers, who signed White Shoes and re-released their self-titled 2005 debut album in the U.S. in September. What American listeners will make of White Shoes' fey and shimmering songs mostly recorded in Indonesian, with one or two in English remains to be seen however. Indonesia's biggest stars platinum-selling bands such as Dewa and Gigi have never had any impact on the U.S. market. When they tour the States, it's to play to the small handfuls of Indonesian students on American campuses. It is just possible, though, that White Shoes will be able to leverage its Internet buzz and get noticed by college trendsetters on the lookout for musical exotica. The debut album

treads a daring line between cool and camp, filtering Paris of the 1960s, or swinging London, through an Asian prism. The tunes call to mind not only film soundtracks but also TV themes and tacky advertising jingles from consumerism's golden age. It's a deliciously anachronistic sound, underscored by the lack of digital instrumentation (the band's lineup includes three classically-trained musicians). "We call it Indonesian pop," says 26-year-old vocalist Aprilia Apsari. That's not because it bears any resemblance to the Top 40 fodder on sale in the country's malls and markets, but because it is steeped in the spirit of vintage Indonesian acts like Ismail Marzuki, Jack Lesmana, Noor Bersaudara and Guruh Gipsy. White Shoes is "unafraid to embrace the kitsch aspect of the past and have fun with it in their music and image," explains Ardiasyah. "Hipster kids can relate to their image, which is pop but not cheesy mainstream." The band's style has been carefully crafted since its formation at the Jakarta Institute for the Arts in the summer of 2002, when Apsari, her guitarist boyfriend Yusmario Farabi and guitarist Saleh came together. They later recruited cellist Ricky Surya Virgana and pianist Aprimela Prawidyanti Virgana, a married couple playing in local orchestras and teaching music. Percussionist and vibraphone player John Navid completed the lineup in 2004. After developing a strong following on the local bar and college circuit, they signed to Jakarta's premier indie label, Aksara Records, in 2005 and quickly became its top-selling act, shifting 15,000 copies of the White Shoes album. "These guys had a lot of fans before they signed with us," says Hanin Sidharta, Aksara's co-founder. "And they have used their art-school background to create a look and sound that is unique." That look includes a special line of (what else?) White Shoes sneakers designed by Bandung-based clothing retailer 347, as well as their own model of Vespa scooter the ultimate Mod accessory. Artwork for the band's latest release, the five-song EP Skenario Masa Muda, reveals an abiding passion for Mod style. In a photograph mocked-up to resemble a 1960s postcard, band members are shown posing in a tailor's shop, like a clutch of Carnaby Street dandies. White Shoes will travel to the U.S. in March to play the SXSW Music Conference and Festival, an industry showcase held annually in Austin, Texas. For now, though, there are more songs to write, and more film soundtracks, vinyl LPs and magazines from the 1960s to scour. How charming that the biggest leap forward in Indonesian pop music should actually be a giant step back in time. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1696220,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

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Click to Print Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007

Casualties of War
By Kay Johnson

The story of how a woman became Vietnam's best-selling author 35 years after her death is almost as compelling as what she wrote. In 1970, as the Vietnam War raged, U.S. intelligence officer Fred Whitehurst was burning a stack of captured enemy documents in Quang Ngai province when his translator begged him to spare a tiny cardboard-wrapped bundle because "it has fire in it already." Intrigued, the American asked his translator to read from the papers, which turned out to be the war diaries of Dr. Dang Thuy Tram, a North Vietnamese field surgeon shot by an American patrol days earlier at the age of 27. Whitehurst was so moved by what he heard that he defied orders and kept the diaries, smuggling them home when his tour of duty ended. Decades later, Whitehurst managed to track down Tram's family in Hanoi and returned a copy of the diaries to them. What happened next surprised almost everyone. Published in Vietnam in mid-2005, the war diaries became a runaway hit, selling some 430,000 copies in a country where few books have a print run greater than 5,000. Tram herself became a national hero, with hundreds of people visiting her grave site and a hospital named after her. For the younger generation of Vietnamese (nearly 60% of the population was born after the war's end in 1975), Tram's ardent accounts of bloody conflict offer a vivid connection to a time their parents find difficult to speak about. Now translated into English as Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, the diaries provide international readers with a Vietnamese perspective of the "American War," as it was known to Tram and her compatriots a catastrophe that killed 3 million Vietnamese and traumatized untold others. Educated and from a well-off northern family, Tram volunteered for battlefield duty on the southern front at the tender age of 24, just after graduating from medical school. She spent three and a half years operating a clandestine field clinic for communist soldiers in the jungles of Quang Ngai, in what was then South Vietnam, and began keeping a diary shortly after arrival. "Operated on one case of appendicitis with inadequate anesthesia," reads her first entry, dated April 8, 1968. "I had only a few meager vials of Novocain to give the soldier, but he never groaned once ... He even smiled to encourage me." Though she was to become quickly battle-hardened, Tram retained a girlish, almost naive idealism at her core, and her romanticized musings give the diaries a dimension besides the unending carnage of the front line. She pines for a lost love a communist soldier she names only as "M," but he has vowed to be married only to the cause. She fends off seemingly endless declarations of love from patients. She also records passionate but platonic friendships with at least three younger soldiers, and an older Communist Party cadre, but is dismayed at the gossip these chaste relationships stir up. People "see only materialistic things, only sex!" she writes on April 5, 1970. "Oh, how detestable." (Not that Tram, living under the strain of war, is above amorous emotions. She becomes jealous when one of her platonic "little brothers" finds a girlfriend, insisting that he "place our relationship above everything else.")

Romanticism is in fact Tram's great animator. She romanticizes the Communist Party and upbraids herself for her bourgeois sentimentalism: "Oh, why was I born a dreamy girl, demanding so much of life?" But commitment to the cause notwithstanding, she remains hopelessly enchanted with Western literature, music and poetry, referencing Victor Hugo and Johann Strauss. Indeed, despite her contribution to the war effort, her party overseers conclude that "certain bourgeois characteristics still remain" within her. Insofar as those characteristics include literary sensibilities, then that's no bad thing. Tram's observations of the war's everyday agonies are powerful and haunting. On July 29, 1969, she describes the flesh falling off a 20-year-old soldier brought to her after being burned by a U.S. phosphorus bomb: "His smiling, joyful black eyes have been reduced to two little holes the yellowish eyelids are cooked. The reeking burn of phosphorus smoke still rises from his body." Later, she rages against the American enemy that has killed so many of her friends: "Hatred is bruising my liver, blackening my gut." Translated by Andrew X. Pham and annotated by Tram's younger sister, Dang Kim Tram, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace offers a rare combination of lyricism, grit, passion and humanity. "What am I?" Tram asks at one point. "I am a girl with a heart brimming with emotions, yet with a mind that never falters before a complex and dangerous situation." She might have been speaking for a generation of idealistic young Vietnamese who never returned from the battlefields. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1696217,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Peak Performance
By EBEN HARRELL

Fresh snow has fallen on the alps, lending Europe's ski season a crisp sense of possibility. If it's time for a similar renewal of your ski gear, here are some options. Artisanal manufacturer Bohme in Lubin, France www.boheme.fr until now something of a connoisseur's secret is taking its handsome, handcrafted skis global. Each pair (around $2,000) requires an average of 37 hours to construct: space-age materials are sandwiched to a beech and poplar core, then finished with a thin layer of one of 11 different wooden claddings, including walnut, ebony and rosewood. Thick edges help these beauties carve a precise track down any mountainside. Compared to the sleek Bohmes, the Skate Banana (around $600; www.lib-tech.com) seems rough around the edges but that's the point. Lib-Tech, a U.S.-based design company, last year introduced what it calls "magnetraction technology" edges that are serrated like a bread knife and has combined it with a body curved to slide over powder and crud. The result is a snowboard that grips when you need it to and otherwise slips over everything like, yes, a banana peel. A stiffened tip and tail increase stability off big landings in the terrain park, which is where the board's garish yellow color and unorthodox design will probably find its biggest fans. Atomic has figured out how to give its Hawx ski boots (around $500; www.atomicsnow.com) "forefoot flexibility," which promises sturdy performance without crippling foot pain and leg fatigue. At the beginning of a turn, the Hawx boots flex under the ball of the foot, sending weight into the ski's sweet spot. Atomic's innovation may also ease the ungainly gait of the skier striding to the aprs-ski lounge. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697000,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

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Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Happy Havens in Mauritius

By ALEX PERRY

A villa in the sun is many people's dream. Almost too many it's frustratingly un-exclusive these days. To stand out, you want one designed by Norman Foster, nestled in a palmtree jungle and within a short walk of a white-sand Indian Ocean beach, an 18 hole golf course and a five-star hotel with a spa and top-class restaurants. You want, in other words, Corniche Bay, a development of 115 such villas and a 75-bedroom hotel on the secluded southwestern tip of Mauritius. It's one of a few high-end resorts on the island that, for the first time, allow nonresident foreigners to buy property. Each villa has its own uninterrupted sea view angled toward the sunset, an infinity pool and a lush, landscaped garden. The resort is huge, mostly car-free and backed by spectacular volcanic peaks. Sales open on Jan. 7. The price? From $1 million to $3 million. That may seem like a hefty chunk of change for a holiday home, until you consider that it also buys you one of the greatest luxuries of all: a tax break. In its bid to become an international financial center, Mauritius secured double taxation-avoidance treaties with 33 countries, and 14 more are pending. Since villa ownership grants Mauritian residency, even if you live and earn in, say, Britain or France or India or China (almost anywhere, in fact, except Japan and the U.S.), you can legally pay income tax in Mauritius at 15%. So anyone who buys a villa in Corniche Bay will, over the course of an average working life, save in tax what they paid in the first place. Effectively, the villa is free, while the owner can even earn extra cash by renting it out. And what did the Mauritian government name its brainwave? The Integrated Resort Scheme or irs. It's enough to make the tax man see green. www.cornichebay. com Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697001,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007

Step Back in Time at Castle Leslie

By JEROEN BERGMANS

The champagne is flowing again at Castle Leslie, a fairy-tale 19th century estate in Ireland's County Monaghan. After languishing for years in a crumbling state of neglect, the place has reclaimed its former role as a playground for well-heeled eccentrics and sophisticated bohemians. The Leslie clan can trace its lineage back to Attila the Hun and was granted what was originally a 45,000-acre (18,000 ha.) estate by King Charles II as thanks for helping to keep Oliver Cromwell at bay. Sir John Leslie built the castle itself in 1870, and invited all his pre-Raphaelite artist friends including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin and Frederic Leighton to stay. Through marriage, friendship and patronage, the Duke of Wellington, the Roosevelts, Wallis Simpson and Winston Churchill (whose christening robes are still on display) made up the Leslies' inner circle and were frequent guests. But by the '60s, inheritance taxes had eroded the castle's fortunes, and its complexion began to change. Desmond Leslie, an experimental musician, set up a nightclub in the grounds. Called Annabel's on the Bog (named after the famous society nightspot in London's Mayfair), it attracted the likes of Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. Then the Troubles came to Northern Ireland, which borders on County Monaghan, and the great and the glamorous stayed away. But in the mid-'90s, the current lady of the manor, the sprightly Samantha (Sammy) Leslie, started to renovate and reinvent this historic estate, gradually transforming it into a stunning country getaway. Last summer she opened a cookery school, where award-winning chef Noel McMeel runs quirky courses like GuiltFree Cooking, Food & Erotica and Men Only. And earlier this year she launched an exclusive club that offers members unlimited stays, visiting rights to Leslie "outposts" in France and Italy, and reciprocal arrangements with other clubs, such as London's Groucho Club. The 35-bedroom hunting lodge houses a Victorian spa with steam boxes and organic treatments, and at the $14.8 million equestrian center a mechanical horse helps break in any novices. But the castle itself and its colorful past is still the main attraction. Request a tour with great-uncle Jack Leslie to hear tales of its illustrious guests, and see if Sammy is around for a chat. After all, it's her passion that brought the rambling Castle Leslie and its vast, landscaped grounds back to life. www.castleleslie.com Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697006,00.html

Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

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Cassoulet: Savory Taken Seriously

By JEFFREY T. IVERSON

No French dish is as steeped in history, myth and religion as cassoulet. Natives of southwestern France's Languedoc region link their very cultural identity to the archetypical peasant dish, a rich, earthy casserole of beans, meat and herbs. Cassoulet is said to date back to the 14th century siege of Castelnaudary during the Hundred Years' War, when citizens created a communal dish so hearty their revivified soldiers sent the invaders packing. But since then several cities have laid claim to the true recipe. In a conciliatory gesture, chef Prosper Montagn decreed in 1929 that "God the father is the cassoulet of Castelnaudary, God the Son that of Carcassonne, and the Holy Spirit that of Toulouse." Today, Montagn's spiritual heirs gather under the banner of the Acadmie Universelle du Cassoulet, a group of chefs dedicated to cooking traditional cassoulet across Languedoc and beyond. The Academy's Route des Cassoulets offers a visitor's guide to the region, directing the hungry and the curious to restaurants where they can experience all the tastes of the dish. "Cuisine is my religion," says Academy founder Jean-Claude Rodriguez. "Montagn wrote about cassoulet with love, and I try to cook that way." At Restaurant Chteau Saint-Martin in Carcassonne, Rodriguez faithfully recreates cassoulet l'ancienne, with white beans from the village of Mazres, aged ham, pork rind, pig's foot and knuckle meat. And in season, Rodriguez adds (on request) the authentic Carcassonne touch: wild partridge in lieu of duck confit. Rodriguez acknowledges Castelnaudary's status as the capital of cassoulet, but shudders at the sheer volume of the stuff generated in the town's environs: an average of 120 tons is factory-canned there every day. Luckily, at his lively restaurant Au Petit Gazouillis, Alain van Ees Beeck has been cooking Castelnaudary cassoulet from scratch for nearly 20 years. With peppery Montagne Noire sausage, creamy Lauragais beans slow-cooked with ham hock for a rich, smoky taste and the farm-raised duck confit famous in Castelnaudary, Van Ees Beeck can boast an authenticity no mass-produced cassoulet can match. Philippe Puel, chef at the elegant Le Cantou in Toulouse, agrees, but says to assure the dish's longevity a chef must "adapt these ancient recipes to our modern lifestyle." He adds fresh Toulouse sausage as tradition there demands, but uses a lighter, sweeter Tarbes bean, finely sliced pork rind and leaner duck confit, and trades cassoulet's typical black

crust, the result of hours spent in the oven, for a lightly browned one. It's not his grandmother's cassoulet, but you won't need a nap after finishing it, either. In the end, the true liturgy of cassoulet isn't in the recipe, says Rodriguez, but rather in the special moment when friends gather around a large, steaming earthenware cala and meal becomes Mass. "Cassoulet has such a religion around it because it's the plat de partage the dish of sharing," he says. "When a cassoulet arrives at the table, bubbling with aromas, something magical happens it's Communion around a dish." Amen! www.routedescassoulets.com Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697005,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007

Verbatim
I cannot tell how much pain the nation and I suffered due to this conspiracy. PERVEZ MUSHARRAF, President of Pakistan, lifting a six-week state of emergency on Dec. 15 that he said was imposed to counter an alleged plot to undermine the country's democratization They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world. JALIL KHALAF, Iraqi police commander in Basra, on British forces withdrawing from the city and surrounding province My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali we all know that. AL GORE, Nobel Prize winner, on efforts at the U.N. climate-change summit to hatch a plan to cut greenhouse gases As long as I am President of Serbia, I will never accept the independence of Kosovo. BORIS TADIC, Serbian President, on the autonomous province of Kosovo, which is expected to unilaterally declare independence in the coming weeks

With the New Year upon us, I am left with a difficult decision: either go back to work and keep my staff employed or stay dark and allow 80 people ... to lose their jobs. CONAN O'BRIEN, late-night TV host, on his plan to resume programming on Jan. 2 after two months of honoring the Hollywood writers' strike I'm trying to elongate the evening. CELINE DION, singer, who ended the last of her 717 performances at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas with seven costume changes and several speeches about her career and family With reporting by Sources: ABC; Guardian; BBC; Reuters; Washington Post; New York Times Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1696905,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service Back to Article Click to Print Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007

Inbox
Obama on the Offensive Despite what the naysayers tell us about Senator Barack Obama's supposed inexperience, he is what this country needs after seven years of outrageous mismanagement by the grossly incompetent incumbent [Dec. 10]. In my native land, the pessimists said Corazon Aquino and her lack of experience didn't stand a chance against President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. History proved them wrong. A unifying figure like Aquino, without the usual political baggage that accompanies experience, was what the Philippines needed at the time. Obama presents himself as a conciliatory figure whose crossover appeal can help bridge the gap between blue and red staters. He is a much needed breath of fresh air in the musty corridors of power. As John F. Kennedy said, it is time for the torch to be passed on to a new generation. Let Obama be that torchbearer. He will put this nation back on the right track and make us proud to be citizens of the world once again. Cheers Echevarria-Leary, Pinole, Calif., U.S. Like me, my eightysomething mother, a politically savvy liberal who has loved Oprah Winfrey for years, is deeply disappointed by Winfrey's support for Obama. Yes, we have to consider that there are men who will vote for anyone but a woman, and especially anyone but Hillary Clinton. But for "O" to support Obama, who's vastly less experienced than Clinton, makes Oprah's decision seem divisive, racist and against the best interests of the

country as a whole. This next presidential vote cannot be about color or sex. It's got to be about qualifications. Her choice is an example of reverse racism, a subject white people feel too guilty to discuss. Susan Mather, San Francisco I would like to see an article that omits the candidates' faces and party affiliations and lists only their names and their stances on important issues. It embarrasses me to be an American when fellow citizens vote on the basis of celebrity endorsements, sex and race. I think we need to look at the real issues of Iraq, immigration, education, poverty, health care, national security, maintenance of our roads and bridges, English as our national language, etc. I want to know how these issues would be handled. Then I will make my decision. Suzanne Caravella, East Windsor, N.J., U.S. I am 75 years old, and my husband is 80. We have an annual income considerably less than $50,000. We no longer have children to raise or educate, our medical insurance is adequate, and we take advantage of the elderly tax credit. Obama has proposed eliminating income taxes for senior citizens at our income level, but why should we not be expected to pay our fair share of federal taxes? I surely hope that he does not believe our votes are for sale. Patricia Gershon, Laverne, Calif., U.S. Obama the contender? You sure got that right. Now I can't wait to see your cover story on the winner of the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucuses: John Edwards. Karol Pfeifer Howard, Toluca Lake, Calif., U.S. Caught Between Color Lines In "The Identity Card," Shelby Steele offered an insightful, thought-provoking examination of race in politics [Dec. 10]. I have a couple of questions, though. What exactly are black values vs. white values? What white shame does he believe binds my actions? He stated that "racist societies make race into a hard fate," yet he perpetuated racist beliefs in his article. Each individual is a cornucopia of various physical and behavioral traits. No single trait, most certainly not the pigment in one's skin, remotely defines any of us. If we want to end racism, let us end the practice of using accepted but clearly racist words to define individuals. The truth will set us free; let's open our eyes to that truth. John Conlin, Littleton, Colo., U.S. It may be simplistic to think that whites are desperately wanting blacks to give them approval for their "enlightened" racial views. As someone who for the past 20 years has spent time in black neighborhoods doing everything from feeding the homeless to tutoring students in college math, I am painfully aware that many blacks are themselves racist. Many of those I know think that discrimination against whites is a mark of racial solidarity rather than a prejudice to be minimized and eventually abandoned. So I'm doing what I do because I was poor once myself, and I know how the soul of many can be impoverished by being poor. Personal approval is only a rare bit of icing on the cake. Most likely, Steele has a few masks of his own that become apparent only by reading between the lines of his article.

Frank Kizer, Bartlett, Tenn., U.S. I think the points steele explored have been swimming through the minds of many Americans without quite reaching the surface. I especially loved his description of black public figures as either "bargainers" or "challengers" and how he aptly identified the merits and liabilities of each. It's interesting that Obama might lose some of the black vote to Clinton, but she might lose some of the women's vote to him. I am torn between wanting Obama to be a challenger and being thankful he is a bargainer, but more than that, I agree with Steele in calling for Obama "to reveal what he truly believes as an individual." Raquel Gonzalez, Harrisburg, Pa., U.S. Is Steele trying to reduce the remarkable achievements of Winfrey and Obama two of our country's most compelling citizens to their ability to make whites "think well of themselves"? Those who accept Steele's soul-crushingly cynical view should realize that they are also embracing the belief that no progress has been made on racism in the U.S., and it will always be an insurmountable problem. How can Steele so blithely discount the tantalizing possibility that we are witnessing a truly new day? Millions of black and white Americans deeply admire Oprah Winfrey and Senator Obama for their character, energy and ideas, not because of skin color or guilt. Every step Americans take toward common ground will bring all those who sell hopelessness a step closer to a richly deserved obscurity. Margaret E. Young, Weatherford, Texas, U.S. As an almost 50-year-old white female, I won't vote for Obama. It has nothing to do with his being "too black" or "too white." He is just too green to be President of the U.S. Angela M. Lombardi, Miami In his book The Content of Our Character, Steele promoted the notion that the U.S. suffers from "race fatigue." America may be tired, but Steele seems exhausted. He now reminds us blacks why we view his analysis as suspect and influenced by self-hate. Steele seems desperate to transfer his racial baggage to Obama. Steele places him in a racial box and then explains to us why he belongs there, refusing to accept that Obama can authentically view himself as an individual who happily lives his life as a black man embracing the American Dream. Steele's simplistic labels ("bargainers" and "challengers") disregard the subtleties we employ to navigate our way through the racial land mines of mainstream America. Perhaps he is the one who needs labels and identity cards to know who he is. Preston Foster, Lawrenceville, N.J., U.S. Mending a Split City After reading "Jerusalem Divided," I can't believe that no one has put forward the obvious solution: make it a federal district similar to Washington or Canberra [Dec. 3]. Palestine and Israel could base their federal government headquarters in the city, which could be ruled by a council made up of equal numbers of Christians, Muslims and Jews. That way, the important religious shrines and places of worship would be available to all, city services would be controlled by people who actually live there, and perhaps emergency personnel would be free to respond to anyone who needs their services without waiting for a police escort. This is surely a better plan than trying to figure out how to subdivide a city

that is thousands of years old and whose residents refuse to settle into Jewish-only or Muslim-only enclaves. Clayton Philbrook, Matinicus, Maine, U.S. Jerusalem's Jewish leaders should treat Arab residents of the city as equals to end the suffering and anguish that is poisoning life in our Holy City and Holy Land. By our, I speak for all Christians, Muslims and Jews (in no particular order). Daniel Berenyi, Honolulu A Stem-Cell Breakthrough? Michael Kinsley's commentary about stem-cell research was disappointing, especially in that he let emotional rhetoric overshadow scientific evidence [Dec. 10]. Many cures and treatments have been derived from stem cells but none from embryonic cells. Ethically sound adult stem cells, which have been studied for 30 years, are a proven source of medical advances, so we haven't "lost years" of treatment development. Moreover, taxpayer dollars weren't used to fund the destruction of human life in that time. It was a moral stand President George W. Bush made. Let's move on with consensus on this new research. Ronald Simpson, M.D., University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Mountain View, Ark., U.S. Kinsley is on solid moral ground in excoriating Bush for disallowing stem-cell research during the almost seven years of his regime. It is heartbreaking to think how many lives could have been saved had scientists been allowed more leverage in their approach to curing many of the diseases that ravage humanity. The Administration's posture on this issue is a symptom of a broader problem: the gradual incursion of personal religious beliefs into the fabric of our government. The integration of church and state is a dangerous trend threatening the personal freedoms that America has always respected. Bill Gottdenker, Mountainside, N.J., U.S. Treating Parkinson's disease is much more complicated than just using stem cells to produce more dopamine, as Kinsley wishes. Stem-cell growth and dopamine production can't always be controlled, and too much dopamine can cause involuntary movements and hallucinations. Embryonic stem cells transplanted or injected into the brain have produced mixed results in both animals and humans. Parkinson's affects the whole brain, and dopamine alone cannot cure it. Why should I hope for an ethical cure? My wife has been living with Parkinson's for nine years. Steve Maloney, Franklin, Ky., U.S. Kinsley said the moral dilemma over embryonic stem cells is not real and never was. That is not the view of James Thomson, who was the first scientist to isolate human embryonic stem cells and who asserted that "if human embryonic-cell research does not make you a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough." Would I be more certain about the lack of moral questions related to this research if I suffered from Parkinson's disease, as Kinsley does? I doubt it. My mother died from the disease, and my brother battles it every day. And though I hope that stem-cell research will yield untold benefits, my excitement is muted perhaps because I was a research chemist for more than 40 years.

Only when we see giant corporations risk their own dollars to support the research will we see progress. Joseph K. Valaitis, Brecksville, Ohio, U.S. The Great Escape Why are the Iraq-war films failing [Nov. 26]? Hollywood should realize by now that it can't use every war as an opportunity to make money. The reality is that movies are still perceived as a source of sheer entertainment; moviegoers go to the theaters to laugh, cry or just be impressed by the cool special effects. You don't really get that amusement when you're watching a movie that is all about how your government made the wrong choices and your countrymen are dying as a result. Even if the motive of a movie is to teach a moral lesson, it's not easy to stick to the facts and dramatize at the same time. It is not a simple issue of recruiting A-list actors and using emotional appeal. The great Iraq-war movie won't be appearing for quite some time, because for now it's just too close to reality. Viewers want to forget momentarily about bad things that are going on around them. Besides, they only have to switch on the TV or read the headlines to be reminded of how bad the war is. Hannah Jung, Seoul Pushing Preschoolers To those parents who enroll their preschoolers in tutoring programs, I say let children be children [Dec. 3]! At my daughter's preschool, the students learn how to cook. It's a great way to learn about following procedures and measuring results. They are encouraged at age 4 to write their own names and recognize those of their peers. We measure our daughter's height regularly. In return, she's always asking about how much something measures and is very interested in numbers and words. Teach them a second language. My daughter speaks English and French fluently and wants to learn Spanish. I have a fulltime job, but I spend as much time with her as I can. She loves being a kid, and we enjoy learning together. For now, I'm enjoying seeing her grow and learn at her own pace and, of course, helping and encouraging her in whatever she wants to learn. At such a young age, being with the parents after school is better than sending children off to another classroom. Love rules! Elisabeth Szentkereszty de Zagon, Brussels As an educator I found that bright children sent unprepared to school by clueless parents often surpassed their well-trained peers in reading by the end of second grade. The ageold and inexpensive adage that children read to become readers holds true in spite of anxious parents trying to give an edge to their preschoolers. Suzan Davis, Irvine, Calif., U.S. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1696219,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

EUROPE VERSION

Back to Article Click to Print Monday, Dec. 17, 2007

Germany's Battle Against Scientology

By Andrew Purvis/Berlin

The interior ministers of Germany's 16 states have launched an investigation into the activities of the Church of Scientology, hoping to assemble the evidence to support banning the U.S.-based organization from operating in Germany. But skeptics question whether such a move is politically and legally tenable or wise. A similar move by the state-level interior ministers in 1997 concluded, in its report, that "the Scientology organization, agenda and activities are marked by objectives that are fundamentally and permanently directed at abolishing the free democratic basic order," but that more time was needed to "conclusively evaluate" the group. In the intervening years, the Church of Scientology organization has continued to work in most of Germany's states. The new effort to close the group down may have been spurred by its raised profile in Germany over the past year. The opening of its new headquarters in Berlin last January put the organization back in the headlines, and it became the center of a national furor last summer when the German Defense Ministry initially barred access to a key location for the filming of a movie about about anti-Nazi hero Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg because the title role was played by high-profile Scientologist Tom Cruise. (Germany later relented. Those behind the new effort to outlaw Scientology believe their prospects have improved since 1997. Ulrike Sweden, a spokesperson for the Hamburg Ministry of Interior, which has taken the lead in the latest efforts, says the most significant change is a 2004 ruling by a Cologne judge in a case brought by Scientologists to end surveillance by state intelligence agencies. The judge ruled that the monitoring was warranted because the activities of the Scientologists were a threat to German constitutional protections, and in particular the right of Germans to exercise their political will, the right to equal treatment,

and guarantees against bodily harm. (The judge ruled, among other things, that the group brainwashes members.) Says Sweden, "For the first time we had a judge, and not just rumors, stating that the group was dangerous." (Since 1995, the Church of Scientology has not enjoyed the legal protections accorded to religions in Germany, after a judge ruled that it was not a religion but a group "masquerading as a religion in order to make a profit.") A spokesperson for Scientology in Germany denies that the group brainwashes members or has a political agenda. The effort to compile information toward a ban is simply a "waste of taxpayer euros," the spokesperson said. The new initiative requires Germany's intelligence agencies in each state to compile a dossier on Scientology activities that might violate the German constitution. Their report will probably be presented at the next meeting of interior ministers in the spring, and then delivered to Germany's federal interior minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, who will have to decide whether or not to initiate a federal-level investigation. The Hamburg officials are hoping that in 2008 or 2009 a process will be initiated that will result in a federal ban on the organization, potentially freezing its assets and outlawing fund-raising and recruitment restrictions similar to those that apply to several neo-Nazi organizations. But German analysts, and some government officials speaking on condition of anonymity, doubt that the new effort will get very far. "It is not only unlikely, it won't happen," said one official familiar with the process. Having been alerted to the state-level investigation now under way, the Church of Scientology is likely be extra careful not to transgress the law. "If you really want to do this kind of thing, you keep quiet, you don't announce that you are going to do it, " said the official. Moreover, even if courts could uncover illegal behavior, it's a long step to banning the group altogether. "There are a lot of pedophiles in the Catholic Church but no one is talking about outlawing" the church, notes Ulrich Battis, professor of constitutional law at Berlin's Humboldt University, And bringing the full weight of the Federal government to bear on an organization that officials say has only 6,000 members in Germany would be seen as a disproportionate response given the political cost Germany has been criticized by the U.S. State Department for restrictions it already places on Scientology. As one official put it, "We have other things to worry about." Scientology's claim to be a church despite the German courts' ruling denying it such status could also cause problems for the government at home, where many Germans believe the question of what qualifies as a religion is a matter of personal conscience rather than government authority. Skeptics warn that taking steps to ban Scientology could backfire, either by driving members underground or by making them appear as victims of state persecution. The 1997 government probe prompted several Hollywood stars, including Dustin Hoffman and Goldie Hawn, to sign an advertisement printed in German newspapers comparing the move to the repression of Jews under Nazism. Writing in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, religion commentator Matthias Drobinski argued that Scientology is actually in decline in Germany, and that its gleaming new Berlin headquarters is "a shimmering faade". Drobinksi credited its decline to the anti-Scientology monitoring and educational efforts by "the state, political parties, the established church and trade unions." Banning the group would simply give them an undeserved boost, he argued: "The demonization of the flagging troupe may only benefit one group Scientology itself. " Still, the state interior ministers appear determined to press ahead, portraying themselves as protectors of their citizens from a "threat," and suggesting, in the words of one government statement, that Germany's Nazi past obliges the government "to monitor the

development of any extreme groups within its borders even when the group's members are small in number." Speaking to reporters last week, Ralf Stegner, the interior minister for the state of Schleswig-Holstein, called Scientology a "totalitarian" organization. "They want to break people's will," he said. "That's why we have to fight them." Federal interior Minister Schaeuble, however, has yet to tip his hand on how he will respond to the states' initiative. His ministry has said that the group is unconstitutional, but in a statement Schaeuble himself said that the best way to deal with it was through "prevention and education." That suggests a legal ban on Scientology may not be imminent. With reporting by Stephanie Kirchner/Berlin Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1695514,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service

Back to Article Click to Print Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007

A Short History of White House Fires

By Amanda Ripley

Putting aside the bizarre incidents like the time an FBI informant set himself on fire in front of the White House in 2004 or the time a small plane crashed into the White House in 1994 regular, workaday fires like the one that happened this morning in Vice President Dick Cheney's ceremonial suite at the Old Executive Office are not actually all that common on the White House grounds. Given the 27 wood-burning fireplaces, high volume of bureaucratic traffic and constant maintenance and refurbishing, it is not too bad a record.

In modern times, fires break out roughly two times every decade at the White House. The last real bonfire was way back in 1929 on Christmas Eve, when the West Wing was gutted by a massive conflagration. President Herbert Hoover had to leave his Christmas party to oversee the removal of important papers from the Oval Office. (But the Marine Band played on, and the First lady kept the party going.) The doozy, of course, was in 1814, when the invading Brits set the White House on fire. (Dolley Madison had to smuggle out the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington before the British troops got to the mansion.) Only the outside walls remained standing and that was probably because of a timely thunderstorm that helped contain the fire. Scorch marks from that blaze are still apparent in some walls in the White House. More recently, a small fire broke out on the exterior of the East Wing in 2000. That one started the way most White House fires start as workers were painting or removing paint or otherwise refurbishing some corner of the place. In 1995, a tour bus burst into flames on Pennsylvania Avenue, across from the White House. The heat peeled the paint at Blair House, the presidential guesthouse. In the 1980s, there was a string of fire and smoke incidents under President Ronald Reagan, including one in the mess. But none did much damage. Why haven't there been more fires at the White House? A serious fire detection system was installed in 1965. And it's very sensitive. When a sensor detects smoke, a warning goes off in the Secret Service's control center in the White House. The D.C. Fire Department is quickly called, and at least five engines and two ladder trucks respond from any one of several surrounding stations.(A unit is on hand anytime a helicopter takes off or lands at the White House.) The response is slowed slightly by the Secret Service, which checks the ID of all the firefighters and then escorts them to the smoke. But the two organizations have fairly good relations these days, and the delay is usually only a minute or two. The best fire prevention system, though, is probably the security and the workaholics. "If you had somebody walking through your house every floor, every day, you wouldn't have any problems either," says Walter Gold, executive director of the DC Fire Department Museum who responded in his volunteer capacity to the fire at the White House today. "It wasn't much of a fire," he says. Click to Print Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1696435,00.html Copyright 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy|Add TIME Headlines to your Site|Contact Us|Customer Service