TIME Magazine October 12, 2009 Vol. 174 No.

14

© 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved

Edition: U.S.

The War Up Close

PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY ADAM FERGUSON/VII MENTOR. INSET: THE DENVER
POST/ZUMA
COVER

A Window On the War in Afghanistan

By Richard Lacayo Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

Specialist Codey Johnson is crying, trying to comfort his best friend, Specialist T.J. Fecteau.
Adam Ferguson / VII Mentor for TIME

The war in Afghanistan is at a crossroads. President Obama will soon decide whether
to commit more U.S. troops to a conflict that's already on the verge of becoming the
longest military action in American history--or perhaps begin to dial back our
commitment there. It's been more than eight years since the war began, and for
much of that time, it was a conflict that took place at the margins of our awareness.
First the quick fall of the Taliban regime made Afghanistan seem like a problem
largely solved. Then the extended agony of the Iraq war drew all eyes in that
direction. But the problem wasn't solved, the Taliban insurgency sprang back to life,
and now Afghanistan is a military and political conundrum: Is it in our national
interest to double down, or is the conflict an impossible one that will only come to
grief?

In August, photojournalist Adam Ferguson, who has visited Afghanistan repeatedly to

document the lives of U.S. infantrymen, landed there again, this time on assignment
for TIME. His mission was to join Apache company, a detachment of 102 soldiers
who had arrived a month earlier to establish a combat-operations post in the Tangi
Valley, not far from Kabul. An incongruous strip of greenery between two bone-dry
mountain ranges, the valley has become a flash point for the Afghan insurgency. By
the time Ferguson got there, 26 men of Apache company had been wounded in the
seven weeks since their arrival, and one had been killed in action--all from
improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the deadly little bombs that lurk anywhere.

To convey the truth of a soldier's life in a place like that, your pictures have to
delineate a wide range of experience, from pain and grief and anxiety to loneliness,
mischievousness and sheer boredom. The images have to find an equilibrium
between the war zone as a place of jangling danger and abrupt violence and the war
zone as the temporary quarters of young men far from home who are simply trying
to get through the day with some semblance of normality. There will be blood, but
there will also be mealtimes, horseplay and video games. Recall the old dictum by
the great photojournalist Robert Capa: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're
not close enough." What our photographer has attempted here is to get close
enough.

There have been cameras pointed at war zones since 1855, when the British
photographer Roger Fenton toted his tripod and glass-plate negatives to the scenes
of the Crimean War. A few years later, Matthew Brady and his team made their
unprecedented record of battlefield deaths and civilian devastation in the Civil War.
For most of us, our memories of war in the 20th century are from an image bank of
photographs, from D-day to Korea and Vietnam--pictures that not only recorded
those wars but also informed the way people felt about them.
In the end, countless arguments will be made to chart our course in Afghanistan. But
in those debates, pictures will have their place. They bring their own kind of
information to the table: news about the look and feel of a place, the light, the dust,
the weather. They say something about the emotional climate too--like the difficulty
of identifying the enemy in a place where the distinction between the insurgents and
the local population may be indiscernible.

The photographs in the following pages won't tell us what the grand arc of U.S.
policy in South Asia should be. What they try to tell us is something about what life is
like for the brave men who carry out that policy, one day at a time. If it's true that
sometimes we've let ourselves lose sight of Afghanistan, then as a start, let's look
here.

Are More Troops the Answer?

Peter Bergen and Leslie H. Gelb face off over the Obama Administration's choices in
Afghanistan (see pages 40-41)

A Photographer's View
Two Arguments for What to Do in
Afghanistan
By Peter Bergen and Leslie H. Gelb Monday, Oct. 05, 2009

U.S. Army soldiers prepare for a patrol in the Tangi Valley, in Wardak Province, Afghanistan.
Adam Ferguson / VII Mentor for TIME

Give It Time
Peter Bergen

In August, President Obama laid out the rationale for stepping up the fight in
Afghanistan: If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe
haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a
war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people. Obamas Af-Pak
plan is, in essence, a countersanctuary strategy that denies safe havens to the
Taliban and al-Qaeda, with the overriding goal of making America and its allies safer.
Under Obama, the Pentagon has already sent a surge of 21,000 troops to
Afghanistan, and the Administration is even weighing the possibility of deploying as
many as 40,000 more.

This is a sound policy. If U.S. forces were not in Afghanistan, the Taliban, with its al-
Qaeda allies in tow, would seize control of the country's south and east and might
even take it over entirely. A senior Afghan politician told me that the Taliban would
be in Kabul within 24 hours without the presence of international forces. This is not
because the Taliban is so strong; generous estimates suggest it numbers no more
than 20,000 fighters. It is because the Afghan government and the 90,000-man
Afghan army are still so weak.

The objections to an increased U.S. military commitment in South Asia rest on a

number of flawed assumptions. The first is that Afghans always treat foreign forces
as antibodies. In fact, poll after poll since the fall of the Taliban has found that a
majority of Afghans have a favorable view of the international forces in their country.
A BBC/ABC News poll conducted this year, for instance, showed that 63% of Afghans
have a favorable view of the U.S. military. To those who say you cant trust polls
taken in Afghanistan, its worth noting that the same type of poll consistently finds
neighboring Pakistan to be one of the most anti-American countries in the world.

Another common criticism is that Afghanistan is a cobbled-together agglomeration of

warring tribes and ethnic factions that is not amenable to anything approaching
nation-building. In fact, the first Afghan state emerged with the Durrani Empire in
1747, making it a nation older than the U.S. Afghans lack no sense of nationhood;
rather, they have always been ruled by a weak central state.

A third critique is that Afghanistan is simply too violent for anything constituting
success to happen there. This is highly misleading. While violence is on the rise, it is
nothing on the scale of what occurred during the Iraq war — or even what happened
in U.S. cities as recently as 1991, when an American was statistically more likely to
be killed than an Afghan civilian was last year. Finally, critics of greater U.S.
involvement suggest that there is no realistic model for a successful end state in
Afghanistan. In fact, there is a good one relatively close at hand: Afghanistan as it
was in the 1970s, a country at peace internally and with its neighbors, whose
towering mountains and exotic peoples drew tourists from around the world.

These flawed assumptions underlie the misguided argument that the war in
Afghanistan is unwinnable. Some voices have begun to advocate a much smaller
mission in Afghanistan, fewer troops and a decapitation strategy aimed at militant
leaders carried out by special forces and drone attacks. Superficially, this sounds
reasonable. But it has a back-to-the-future flavor because it is more or less the exact
same policy that the Bush Administration followed in the first years of the
occupation: a light footprint of several thousand U.S. soldiers who were confined to
counterterrorism missions. That approach helped foster the resurgence of the
Taliban, which continues to receive material support from elements in Pakistan. If a
pared-down counterterrorism strategy works no better the second time around, will
we have to invade Afghanistan all over again in the event of a spectacular Taliban
comeback?

Having overthrown the ruling government in 2001, the U.S. has an obligation to
leave to Afghans a country that is somewhat stable. And a stabilized Afghanistan is a
necessary precondition for a peaceful South Asia, which is today the epicenter of
global terrorism and the most likely setting of a nuclear war. Obamas Af-Pak plan has
a real chance to achieve a stable Afghanistan if it is given some time to work.

Bergen, a frequent visitor to Afghanistan since 1993, is the author of Holy War, Inc.
and The Osama bin Laden I Know.

Turn It Over
Leslie H. Gelb

Hawks on Afghan policy — those who favor defeating al-Qaeda through a full-blown
counterinsurgency strategy involving up to 40,000 more U.S. troops — have divined
a politically clever line of argument: Win or get out.

Its a phony choice. The hawks know there's no chance of our simply pulling out of
Afghanistan. That option isn't even on the White House table, despite growing public
desire to end the war. The true aim of the hawks, or all-outers, in this maneuver is
to discredit the real policy alternative — the middle ground. Their ploy is to portray
the middle way as simply a cover for getting out.

But there is a real and strong middle option: to put ourselves and friendly Afghans in
a position to manage future terrorist threats in that country without a major U.S.
combat role. We can accomplish this by doing what we actually know how to do:
arm, train, divide the enemy, contain and deter.

There are four main prescriptions for a more realistic strategy in Afghanistan. First,
stop trying to do the impossible, i.e., build an effective government in Kabul and
enlarge Afghan security forces. Corruption, inefficiency and addiction are endemic to
Afghan society. We should instead focus on forging a smaller army, say 75,000 or
100,000, that can and will actually fight, and concentrate on arming and training
local warlords and tribal leaders who can defend themselves. This, backed by good
U.S. logistics and intelligence, could block a Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan.

Second, divide and rent the Taliban. Like the British, we can propose deals that split
the moderates (those content with exerting power in Afghanistan alone) from the
fanatics (those obsessed with global jihad). We can also attract Taliban fighters by
paying them more than the Taliban leadership can afford.

Third, surge about 10,000 new combat forces on top of the 68,000 already
authorized and create an additional 5,000 dedicated trainers. Such a surge should be
sufficient to handle immediate troubles.

Fourth, start doing what the U.S. does well — deterrence and containment. To deter,
we must maintain a small, residual capability in Afghanistan for a few years, as well
as offshore air and missile capabilities to inflict harsh punishment when necessary.
To contain threats, Washington needs to form alliances with neighboring states like
Pakistan, India, China, Russia and even Iran, which supported us in the early days of
the war. All share an interest in combatting Sunni-based religious extremism as well
as the drug trade.
These actions can be in place within one to two years and allow the U.S. to be
mostly withdrawn from combat within three. This strategy rests on a time guideline,
not a fixed timetable. It is in keeping with our overriding interests: first, to check
terrorist threats worldwide and not place disproportionate bets in Afghanistan; and
second, to extricate ourselves from unending major wars so that our leaders can
focus sharply on reconstituting what makes the U.S. the leading world power — our
economy.

But by far the strongest argument for this middle course is that the all-out alternative
simply defies realities. The all-out strategy calls for an additional 40,000 or so troops,
most of whom wont be deployed in the field in less than a year; they would thus do
little to protect against the near-term dangers that General Stanley McChrystal has
warned of. Perhaps most fundamental, the middle way avoids the quicksand on
which the counterinsurgency strategy is built: the absolute need for nation-building.
Counterinsurgency strategy requires clearing and holding territory, which cannot be
done without transforming a corruption-riddled, anarchic and poverty-stricken state
into a functioning market democracy. That goal is totally beyond American interests
and capabilities and promises only endless war. Nor does the all-out approach help
us in Pakistan, whose leaders continue to nurture long-standing alliances with the
Taliban as a counterweight to India, Islamabad's real worry. Finally, the all-outers
slight the U.S. voters who have run out of patience with the loss of American lives
and treasure for a war whose aims they can no longer fathom.

The U.S. has never won a classic civil war or a fight against an insurgency in which it
bore the brunt of battle and became the local villain. Vietnam is the obvious
example. For the sake of friendly Afghans and for our own security, our goal now
should be to make this their war, not our war.

Gelb is the author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American
Foreign Policy and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
NATION

An Enemy Within: The Making of

Najibullah Zazi
By David Von Drehle and Bobby Ghosh Thursday, Oct. 01, 2009

Najibullah Zazi
Ed Andrieski / AP

You'd think Najibullah Zazi would stand out on the high, dry plains southeast of
Denver, where the earth is as flat as a starched shirt and mere wrinkles count as
topography. But if heartland suburbs were ever enclaves of uniformity, that day is
long gone. Aurora, Colo., is a city of people from somewhere else, a low-slung
municipality of 315,000 that includes extremes of both poverty and prosperity.
Aurora is vast — nearly 154 sq. mi. (400 sq km) — and dense, with a high
concentration of multifamily housing units, apartment buildings, townhouses and
condominiums. Those homes contain a patchwork of races, ethnicities and tribes:
Aurora is 23% Hispanic; 13% black; 15% Asian, Native American and other. Nearly
100 languages are spoken by students in the Aurora public schools. It is, in short, an
excellent place for a young man with a laptop and a recipe for bombs to hide in plain
sight.

Even while allegedly buying gallons of chemicals at beauty-supply shops and renting
a cheap hotel suite to cook them in, Zazi might have remained anonymous long
enough to strike and kill, except that U.S. Homeland Security is a sharper instrument
than it was in the summer of 2001. The dysfunctional system that failed to connect
the dots before 9/11 managed, eight years later, to spot and disrupt a plot in
progress. Zazi has denied charges he conspired to bomb targets in the U.S., but
government officials are confident they've got their man. Authorities took notice
when Zazi traveled last year to Pakistan, while his unsavory associations there — the
FBI charges that Zazi attended terrorist training camps — heightened their interest.
The government caught Zazi about a month ago talking about chemicals on his cell
phone. From then on, virtually the entire FBI Denver field office was on his trail.

That's the good news. Perhaps the fact that he was caught in time — and the same
week that two other alleged bombing attempts were foiled in Middle America — tells
us that post-9/11 security measures, many of them highly controversial, are working.
But there is bad news too. Zazi's alleged project, from the training camp in Pakistan
to his bomb recipe and backpack delivery system, bears the marks not of some fluky
local scheme of the kind that the feds have sniffed out in the past but of a plausible
al-Qaeda operation. Nor does Zazi appear to be a lone sympathizer or a copycat
egged on by an FBI informant. He apparently had marching orders, accomplices and
a quiet determination to deliver a stunning blow. In all these respects, Zazi
resembles the al-Qaeda bombers who attacked the London subway in 2005. Indeed,
if the charges against him prove true, Zazi was the recruit al-Qaeda had long sought:
entirely legal, completely acculturated, seemingly innocuous. In his utter
ordinariness, he was a terror master's dream. As such, Zazi suggests that the
network of Osama bin Laden, weakened though it might be, can still project violence
into the U.S.
Roots of Rebellion
Zazi's story begins 24 years ago, in the midst of a war in Afghanistan's Paktia
province, a violent region of jagged mountains, ominous caves and boulder-strewn
ravines. The war pitted U.S.-backed Islamic fundamentalists against troops of the
Soviet occupation. Little is known of Zazi's childhood, but around the time he was
born, there was a newcomer in Paktia: a zealous Saudi millionaire named Osama bin
Laden. He had come to see jihad in action, and he was thrilled and inspired by the
experience of combat. Bin Laden built mosques and schools on both sides of the
border with Pakistan, but he was a warrior at heart. So he decided to attract his own
army and construct a fortress for the jihad. He chose a site near the tribal village of
Jaji. Using bulldozers and explosives, bin Laden connected some 500 mountain caves
into a network of underground rooms. He called the place al-Masada, or the Lion's
Den — and he was the lion. There, in the spring of 1987, the mujahedin repelled
attacks by élite Soviet troops backed by bomber jets and pro-Soviet Afghan fighters.
Victory in the Battle of Jaji, during which bin Laden may have been wounded,
became the cradle of Osama's myth. A generation later, halfway around the world,
we are still living with the consequences.

It's easy to imagine that a little boy growing up in Paktia province might have heard
heroic tales of the Battle of Jaji and its hero, bin Laden. When Zazi was about 7
years old, his father moved the family across the border into Pakistan, near
Peshawar, another zone of bin Laden influence and a hotbed of jihadist activity.

The father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, eventually immigrated to New York City, where he
found work as a taxi driver, saving his money until he had enough to bring his wife
and children to the U.S. (The older Zazi became a naturalized U.S. citizen.) Once in
New York City, Najibullah proved to be an indifferent student at Flushing High School
in Queens, more interested in basketball than in books, and he was a silent watcher
at the Hazrat-i-Abubakr Sadiq mosque. His imam in those days, Mohammed Sherzad,
remembers Zazi's visits to the white two-story building topped with a blue dome and
minaret: "Every Saturday and Sunday, I had a class for the younger generation.
Some students would ask me questions, but Najibullah never asked — he was
listening."
When Zazi was 16, bin Laden's army delivered a stunning attack on New York City
and Washington. The destruction of the World Trade Center towers drove a wedge
into the community of Afghan immigrants in Queens, Sherzad recalls, and the
mosque was torn apart over the imam's criticism of the Taliban government that
shielded bin Laden in Afghanistan. The Zazi family sided against Sherzad, he recalls,
and afterward Zazi refused to meet the imam's gaze when they passed each other
on the street. Still, an acquaintance told the New York Times that Zazi was baffled by
the suicide hijackers. "I don't know how people could do things like this," Zazi
reportedly said of the attacks. "I'd never do anything like that."

There are hints that the young man began to change after 9/11. He dropped out of
school and took his place working at a family coffee cart near Wall Street, not far
from ground zero. Though gregarious with customers, Zazi grew stern with his
friends, chastising them for their interest in popular music and expressing other
fundamentalist views. On certain occasions, he replaced his Western clothing with a
traditional tunic, and he let his whiskers grow. "Najib is completely different," a
neighborhood man told Sherzad a few years ago. "He looks like a Taliban. He has a
big beard. He's talking different."

And listening differently too. A friend from that period tells TIME that Zazi became
enchanted with the controversial Indian Muslim televangelist Dr. Zakir Naik, who
preaches a wild mix of harsh Islamic rhetoric and unorthodox Muslim theology. His
videos reach a global audience online. On the topic of jihad and terrorism, Naik was
far from the most incendiary voice, but he managed in his own way to make clear
the choice between bin Laden and Uncle Sam. "If [bin Laden] is fighting enemies of
Islam, I am for him," the former medical doctor says in one YouTube clip. "If he is
terrorizing America — the terrorist, biggest terrorist — I am with him. Every Muslim
should be a terrorist." In an interview with TIME after Zazi's arrest, Naik insisted, "I
have always condemned terrorism, because according to the glorious Koran, if you
kill one innocent person, then you have killed the whole of humanity."

Naik's preaching may have given Zazi a mirror for his own confused feelings as he
struggled to start a family and make ends meet. The streets of America weren't
paved with gold for Zazi. He fell deeply into debt. Starting around 2006, when he
traveled to Pakistan to marry a 19-year-old cousin, Zazi began dividing his time
between New York City and the increasingly radical milieu of Hayatabad, a relatively
prosperous city near Peshawar where bin Laden's influence was deeply felt. Visits in
2006 and 2007 produced two children, and he hoped to bring his family to the U.S.
someday. It was a dim hope, as Zazi spiraled toward bankruptcy.

Then, in 2008, a third trip generated an entirely different result. According to court
documents filed by the FBI, Zazi and an unspecified number of companions flew on
Aug. 28 to Peshawar via Geneva and Doha. According to knowledgeable sources,
something about this trip inspired U.S. officials to ask Pakistani authorities to keep an
eye on Zazi, and what they saw was unsettling. "There was reason to believe that
Zazi met with terrorists in Pakistan," a U.S. counterterrorism official tells TIME. The
FBI confirms this, saying that since his arrest, Zazi has admitted to attending an al-
Qaeda training camp, where he received instruction in weapons and explosives. "The
nature of terrorist-training camps in Pakistan varies considerably," the
counterterrorism official explains. "Some are fixed locations, while others are mobile.
Some have better infrastructure and support than others. But they all have one thing
in common — they're dangerous and are thus of significant concern to us and our
allies."

Why did Zazi take this step? "It's sometimes difficult to determine exactly at what
point it was that somebody becomes radicalized and then decides to become a
terrorist," a senior Obama Administration official tells TIME. "Usually it's an
evolutionary process." And what does it mean to have an Afghan immigrant take up
al-Qaeda's cause? The worst-case scenario, according to experts, is that Zazi may
represent an effort by the Taliban to expand its attacks on U.S. interests. Robert
Grenier, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, believes the Taliban's worldview has
changed since the U.S.-led invasion ousted it from power in late 2001. "Many of the
leaders now see themselves as part of the global jihad," says Grenier, who heads the
consulting firm ERG Partners. "Lots of Afghans see the U.S. presence as an
occupation, and I can easily see how some of them would be motivated to strike at
the U.S. wherever they can." If Grenier is right and the Taliban has joined al-Qaeda
in taking the fight beyond central Asia, Western authorities will need to widen the
scope of their operations at home and abroad. "If he's Taliban, then it greatly
expands the universe of people you want to put under surveillance," says Bill
Rosenau, a counterterrorism expert at the Rand Corp.

This much is clear: when Zazi returned to the U.S. in January of this year, law-
enforcement agencies began keeping track of him.

The Manhunt
Triacetone triperoxide (TATP) is a notoriously unstable chemical compound known
among Palestinian militants as umm shaitan, or the mother of Satan. Many would-be
bombmakers have suffered severe burns while trying to mix the explosive in
makeshift laboratories. For terrorist groups, however, the risks of TATP are
outweighed by the advantages. The white, sugarlike powder is lightweight and nearly
odorless (the better to evade bomb-sniffing dogs) and contains no nitrogen (foiling
scanners that detect nitrogenous bombs). Its basic ingredients — acetone, hydrogen
peroxide and acid — are readily available in beauty supplies and home-improvement
products. Al-Qaeda operatives have been using the stuff for years.

After his bomb training in Pakistan, Zazi returned to New York City and then moved
to Aurora, joining relatives in a house on East Ontario Drive, a few doors down from
the chief of police. Why Aurora? The answer may be as simple as the low cost of
living, the presence of a few relatives and the familiar terrain. The dry plains, thin air
and faraway peaks bear no small resemblance to northern Pakistan and Paktia
province. Zazi passed a background check to qualify as an airport-shuttle driver, and
if he was notable for anything, it was his appetite for work. Other drivers describe his
recruiting customers while standing in front of a white van bearing the company's
name — First ABC Transportation Inc. Unlike most drivers at ABC, who pulled eight-
or nine-hour shifts, Zazi routinely put in 16-to-18-hour days, sometimes 80 hours a
week. "He was a regular kind of guy, but he worked hard, and he wanted money,"
says Hicham Semmaml, a Moroccan-born driver for ABC. When he was not working,
Zazi occasionally attended the Colorado Muslim Society mosque, a moderate, friendly
place light-years from the radical mosques built by bin Laden in Pakistan.
He moved to his own apartment on East Smoky Hill Road in a middle-class complex
— the Vistas at Saddle Rock — which had a sparkling swimming pool and sat just
beyond the city limits. Other residents noticed nothing about him except for his
shuttle van. "We have people of all walks here," says Mike Callender, a warehouse
manager who lives in Building B. "And everyone gets along." The perfect cover, in
effect, was no cover at all. "We've known for a long time that al-Qaeda's ideal recruit
is someone who is legally in the U.S., has no criminal record," says Rosenau,
"someone completely invisible to authorities."

Except by then, Zazi wasn't. It's unclear exactly when the authorities first listened in
on Zazi's phone calls, but sometime around late August, according to an intelligence
official briefed on the case, he was heard talking "about chemical mixtures and other
things." At that point, the FBI shifted into high gear. Agents quickly picked up the
trail and discovered, according to court documents and other sources, that Zazi and
at least three associates were shopping for chemicals at beauty-supply stores in the
Denver area using stolen credit cards. At the Beauty Supply Warehouse on East Sixth
Avenue, a cornucopia of hair extensions, gels and wigs arrayed in a former skating
rink, investigators found Zazi's image on security tapes. He was pushing a cart full of
hydrogen peroxide–based products down the aisle.

Agents also found evidence that Zazi had booked a room with a kitchenette at the
Homestead Studio Suites a couple of miles south of the cosmetics store. When FBI
technicians examined the room, they scraped traces of acetone, found in nail-polish
remover, from the vent over the stove — indicating that someone had been cooking
a bomb.

Intelligence sources are mum on exactly when the White House got involved, but a
senior Administration official tells TIME that President Obama was briefed within 24
hours of the moment officials realized that Zazi could be a "red blinking light." The
unfolding investigation became a part of Obama's daily briefing, and he returned to
the subject in meetings with his intelligence and Homeland Security briefers. Agents
were watching Zazi as he and his accomplices assembled the pieces of their alleged
plot. Intelligence officials wanted to know who was running the show, the extent of
the conspiracy, what the targets might be. But while Obama understood the need for
more information, sources tell TIME, he quizzed advisers about their decision to
initially hold off on arrests. "He would ask, understandably, 'O.K., when are you
going to arrest these guys? Are we confident that there is not something out there
that may in fact go boom?' " the senior Administration official recalls.

On Sept. 6, Zazi returned to the kitchenette for another night over the stove,
punctuated by frantic calls to still unknown accomplices seeking bombmaking advice.
On Sept. 8, he rented a car, arranging to drop it off in New York City. At that point,
the investigation "amped up" again, the intelligence official says, as agents asked
themselves the obvious question, "What does he have in his car that he can't put in
an airplane? And who's waiting on the other end?" The timing was alarming: the
eighth anniversary of 9/11 loomed, and Obama was due in Manhattan days later.
Still, the feds didn't move to arrest Zazi: "We saw him as a possible plotter, a
possible actor and a possible intelligence-collecting platform — someone who could
lead us to a picture or a wider network."

As the alleged bomber set out for New York City on Sept. 9, the FBI drew the New
York Police Department into the investigation, and NYPD detectives showed pictures
of Zazi and three suspected accomplices to an imam they had developed as a
possible informant. Sure enough, the imam, Ahmad Afzali, recognized Zazi. But
according to the FBI, he called Zazi and his father to tell them of the NYPD's
inquiries. And that was that. Zazi reached New York City just as the investigation was
blowing up.

A flurry of search warrants and interrogations quickly followed. In Zazi's rental car,
agents allegedly found a laptop containing nine pages of bombmaking instructions.
Zazi returned to Denver and volunteered for FBI interviews; when he stopped
cooperating, he was arrested, initially for giving false statements. He was indicted on
Sept. 24 for "conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction." Beyond that, it's
unclear where the evidence stands. Have bombs been found? Are the targets
known? How close was Zazi to taking action? Will other suspects be charged?
Officials aren't saying. The picture "will get clearer as time goes on," the intelligence
official promises.

Needles in Haystacks
If Zazi represents a new kind of menace for the U.S., his arrest could be a double
blessing, a counterterrorism official offers. Not only did it thwart a plot but it could
also lead to a mother lode of information on al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the state of
the global jihad. But there are other, less reassuring lessons from Zazi and from the
alleged lone-wolf wannabe terrorists snared by the FBI in Texas and Illinois. For
starters: hatred is patient. The American struggle against Islamic terrorism, already
one of the longest wars in the nation's history, is not winding down. The longer it
goes on, the more likely that the enemy will try to find new fronts closer to home.
The hard debates over the use of force, surveillance tactics, interrogation methods
and the rights of terrorists have many chapters yet to be written. Aurora Mayor Ed
Tauer puts the idea slightly differently: "The lesson is that even if you don't see
yourself as one of those high-visibility targets, you can wake up to find a terrorist
down the block."

Out in Aurora, the feds may have found a needle in a haystack. But how many are in
the process of disappearing right now? How much more should be done to find
them? And how long will it be before one of them jabs us again?

— With reporting by Michael Scherer / Washington, S. Hussain Zaidi / Mumbai, Aryn

Baker / Kabul, Randy James and M.J. Stephey / New York and Gretchen Peters /
Aurora
ESSAY

The Democrats' Phantom Fix on Health

Care
By Christopher Caldwell Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

Under Max Baucus' plan, Americans would have to buy coverage or pay a fine.
Alex Wong / Getty

Democrats have a tiger by the tail. It is dawning on them that the people screaming
at those town-hall meetings over the summer were not just feigning anger or
sublimating their personal neuroses. Cherish is not too strong a word for how
Americans feel about what they get out of their health-care plans, however much
they grouse about access and cost. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 92%
of Americans who do have health insurance are very or somewhat satisfied with their
choice of doctors and hospitals; 95% are very or somewhat satisfied with the quality
of their care more generally. While about two-thirds of Democratic voters (71%)
back reform and two-thirds of Republicans (67%) oppose it, independents have
moved steadily into opposition. Any party that signed the old system's death warrant
single-handedly would be signing its own.

Democratic reform efforts once focused on building a European-style single-payer

Utopia. They now focus on enlisting Republicans, if only a few, to share responsibility
for a plan that Democrats, if they were sufficiently contemptuous of public
sentiment, would have the votes to pass on their own. The centerpiece of the current
effort is the individual mandate--basically a requirement that everyone buy health
insurance. Worked up in the office of Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus
and increasingly touted by President Obama, it is modeled on systems of no-fault
auto insurance that states began to enact in the 1970s. Back then there was a moral
hazard. If someone with insurance dinged your bumper, you could collect. If he
didn't have insurance, you were out of luck, unless you wanted to chase him through
the courts. So states made it mandatory to insure your own car.

The President sees parallels with health care. If you have insurance and get sick,
insurance pays. If you don't, your emergency-room bills get passed on to others in
the form of higher premiums. "Those of us with health insurance," says the
President, "are paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it." So as liberals
see it, conservatives ought to like the individual mandate. It relies on personal
responsibility rather than government handouts. It is tough on freeloaders, charging
up to $1,900 in fines for not buying in.

For those too poor to buy insurance, there will be a sliding scale of federal subsidies.
That is where the problems start. If subsidies are too generous, you get socialist
medicine by stealth. If the subsidies are too stingy, you get a huge new burden
placed on the middle and working classes. Is it fair to call a requirement that we all
buy insurance a tax? Conservatives say it is, although they would. A larger question
is whether it is constitutional for the Federal Government to order citizens to engage
in private business transactions. It's hard to say. Few governments have had the
effrontery to try it.
A human life is a different kind of commodity than a car. Supply equals one. Demand
equals infinity. A person who flat-out refuses to insure his car can be deprived of the
right to drive it. What do you do with someone who flat-out refuses to insure his
body? For reasons that owe more to the Hippocratic oath and the Golden Rule than
to the U.S. Constitution, you must treat him anyway. So what does it mean to
promise, as the President does, that illegal immigrants won't participate in our new
health-care system? It seems to mean they won't participate in paying for it.

Sooner or later, Americans will pay for insuring the indigent through taxes rather
than premiums. Perhaps that will be more transparent for accountants, but it
essentially addresses health-care reform's hidden costs by relabeling and
destigmatizing them. Under the surface, it promises only an extended version of the
old system--or at least the less effective parts of it. The Baucus plan would pay for
this extension by taxing top-end insurance plans. Since many of these plans were
won by hard union bargaining, the tax will hit Joe Lunchpail as hard as Gordon
Gekko. You cannot expect the public to be terribly impressed.

That is the tiger Democrats have by the tail. Health reform is beginning to look like a
run-of-the-mill "fix" of the sort Washington applies whenever a big-spending program
spins out of control. When people get attached to benefits they haven't paid for, the
solution is seldom to cut the benefits. It is to rope in a set of dupes (in this case,
young, healthy people) to pay for benefits they won't receive. Far from breaking with
the me-first ethos that brought us to the brink of economic ruin, the individual
mandate fits squarely within the time-honored Capitol Hill tradition of identifying
resources that can be dislodged from future generations, and transferring them to
the generation in power.
Ahmadinejad: Iran's Man of Mystery
By Joe Klein Thursday, Oct. 01, 2009

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Morteza Nikoubazl / Reuters

At precisely the moment that Barack Obama plus the leaders of Britain and France
were announcing the existence of the secret Iranian nuclear facility near Qum, a
group of TIME editors were sitting down to interview Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad at his New York City hotel. Our strategy was to avoid the obvious
questions — Ahmadinejad has been grilled relentlessly about his heinous views on
the Holocaust — but there was an obvious question that needed to be asked
immediately: What was his reaction to the impending Obama statement? He seemed
befuddled. His first response was incomprehensible: "So, is all the information that
Mr. Obama receives of the same nature?" TIME's managing editor, Rick Stengel,
asked the question again, and this time the response was thin defiance — "If I were
Mr. Obama's adviser, I would definitely ask him to refrain from making this
statement, because it is definitely a mistake" — followed by the standard claim that
Iran was in full compliance with the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
that it had signed — "We have no secrecy, and we work within the framework of the
IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]."

The last claim is palpably untrue. Iran has refused to provide all the information
required under the treaty, which is why it is the subject of U.N. sanctions. The Qum
facility may not be a smoking gun — it hasn't even been loaded yet — but it is a
covert operation of some sort, perhaps a bomb-making facility, perhaps a research-
and-development shop. It is the latest evidence in Iran's history of attempting to
hoodwink the rest of the world about its nuclear program. A similar game was played
with the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, which was exposed in 2002.

But for those of us who sat with Ahmadinejad, the real headline was his apparent
cluelessness. It was almost as if Obama's announcement had taken him by surprise.
It is well known that Ahmadinejad doesn't have operational control over the nuclear
program or Iranian foreign policy — that resides with Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali
Khamenei — but the exact extent of his powers, beyond management of the
domestic economy, remains a mystery. He did not seem very powerful to us. His
answers to our questions were sometimes opaque, often blatantly false, though not
confrontational. Almost every question brought forth a flurry of crib notes hastily
scribbled and shoved in his hands by his advisers. It was all very odd.

He refused to say what he had done during the national trauma of the Iran-Iraq war,
whether he had seen combat or lost friends. When I asked his opinion of former
President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's famous 2001 Quds Day speech, in which he
called for an "Islamic bomb" to counter Israel's nuclear arsenal, Ahmadinejad denied
that Rafsanjani had ever made such a speech. I said that I'd been there, using an
official Iranian translator, and that the speech had made headlines worldwide. "None
of the Iranians here around the table recall such a statement," he said — and the
assembled Marx brothers turned to stone. Well, I asked, what about the argument
itself, that Iran needed a nuclear weapon to deter Israel? "We believe that the
Zionist regime is too little to be able to pose a threat to Iran," he said. "We feel
nuclear weapons have no application whatsoever in this time and age ... In my
opinion, in our opinion, the atomic bomb is a concept that belongs to the previous
century."

Do you believe him? Nope, me neither — but I am also not convinced that Iran
intends to build a nuclear weapon. "I think they're hedging," says Jim Walsh of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a nonproliferation expert who speaks
frequently with the Iranians. "I don't think they've made a weapon decision, but I do
think they want breakout capability" — the ability, similar to Japan's, to quickly
assemble a bomb if necessary. "If you actually build a bomb, you start incurring real
international costs, as the North Koreans have," added Walsh, referring to the fact
that the Russians and Chinese have joined the West in applying strict sanctions and
other countermeasures against the regime in Pyongyang.

Despite the rants about "mad mullahs" and neoconservative calls for regime change,
the Iranians have been careful about their foreign policy in recent years. As the 2007
National Intelligence Estimate found, they respond to international pressure. They
are an obnoxious regime, but only a second-level danger to the U.S. The Obama
Administration should continue its attempts to engage the Iranians while preparing
to contain and deter them if they actually try to build a bomb. It should not revert to
the foolish bellicosity of the last Administration. And there is good news:
Ahmadinejad assured us that he would not attempt to change Iran's constitution and
run for a third term in 2013. That should come as some small relief to the mass of
Iranians who yearn to breathe free.
The Tough-Love Dictator of My Dreams
By Joel Stein Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

Illustration by John Ueland for TIME

I have voted for two libertarian candidates for President, believe in drug legalization
and have done many things that would have gotten me caned in Singapore, a
Catholic school or anyplace someone happened to be near a cane. I've fought the
left's paternalism of the body and the right's paternalism of the soul. But recently
I've been wondering if my political assumptions are wrong, if America might not be
better off under a dictatorship. I've also been wondering if somewhere deep inside, I
secretly want to be caned.

My opinion shifted after New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned smoking in
bars. At the time, I believed having a scotch in one hand and a butt in the other
wasn't just essential to the pursuit of happiness but a necessary means for Jersey
women to let people know that they weren't going home alone. I was outraged by
Bloomberg's hubris. Was he also going to outlaw short skirts, hair spray and singing
along to "Livin' on a Prayer"?

But almost seven years later, smoking in bars and restaurants seems insane. It went
from dictator Bloomberg's horrible idea to something you wouldn't think of doing
anywhere, including Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong and Istanbul. Not only do I go to far
more bars now, but I even bring my baby. Which is something Bloomberg should
probably also make illegal.

Social change may happen fast, but no one stops polluting unless an Indian cries on
TV. My point isn't that activists and advocates don't shift the way we think; public
opinion shifts in various ways, the prolonged explanation of each of which has made
Malcolm Gladwell millions of dollars. My point is simply that, everything being equal,
a dictator can make an Indian cry fastest.

And people love a good dictator — or at least get over their hatred of one pretty
quickly — provided that the dictator doesn't put up too many pictures of himself. We
instinctively object to new forms of paternalism, but we also quickly accept them:
laws requiring seat belts and motorcycle helmets, forced retirement savings through
Social Security, waiting periods for marriage and gun licenses. Though you're not
hurting anyone else, you can't commit suicide, have sex with your dog, drink in
public, do drugs, be a prostitute, swim at a beach without a lifeguard, eat
unpasteurized cheese or do most things that are crucial to the plot of independent
movies.

President Obama should probably get a little bit dictatorial up in here. He's the only
person in the U.S. unaware that we elected him dictator, giving him both houses of
Congress and the major television networks whenever he wants them. Instead of
ignoring people's objections until they get socialized medicine and realize they like it,
as England's leaders did, Obama is worried about seducing Olympia Snowe so he can
say his health bill is bipartisan. Do you know how long it takes to charm people from
Maine? They're uptight white people coated with a hard exterior made from other
uptight white people. While Obama negotiates on climate change, the Chinese
government has forced China's entire tech industry to focus on energy efficiency,
and soon we'll all buy Chinese products because they'll be far cheaper to power —
and people can stay mad about poisoned babies and puppies for only so long. The
lesson for Obama isn't that we didn't like George W. Bush because he bossed us
around. We just wanted to be bossed around far, far better.

In fact, we need a dictator to do all kinds of things. I want a law making all Internet
browsers' default setting block pornography and for that setting to be difficult, but
not too difficult, to change. I want all alarm clocks, when they go off, to mention
going to the gym. I think there should be limits on when you can sue, a ban on guns
not used for hunting, parenting licenses enforced by social-services visits, more
obstacles to post-first-trimester abortions and a European-size tax on gasoline. Soda
should be sold in containers no bigger than 8 oz. People should pay for their garbage
by weight. And their plane tickets.

Despite what you're thinking, I don't want to be the dictator. That's mostly because
I'm already prone to bad haircuts. But also because instead of an actual dictator, I
think what we need is to recognize that social mores require government nudges like
the ones Bloomberg creates and Obama adviser Cass Sunstein advocates. We live in
a connected age in which our liberties bump against one another. I know this is all
easy to say since I'm not a smoker, a soda drinker or a columnist whom politicians
listen to. But in an age of overwhelming choice, some dictatorial direction would
help. Plus, then Obama wouldn't have to be on TV so much.
WORLD

Following in the Footsteps of the Mud God

By Eben Harrell Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

At low tide, mudlark Steve Brooker digs for artifacts along the banks of the Thames.
Steve Brooker / The Searcher Magazine

Steve Brooker, 6 ft. 5 in. former professional skateboarder, sub-3-hr.-marathon

runner, survivor of multiple strokes and the self-appointed tutelary spirit of the
Thames, thinks he has found something. To me it looks like mud, but I'm not in a
position to argue. Brooker, 48, is a member of the Mudlarks, a society of amateur
archaeologists who are licensed by the Port of London Authority to scavenge the
banks of the Thames for historical artifacts. Because of Brooker's oversize frame, his
talent for major discoveries and his overall awesomeness, he is known by admirers
as the Mud God.
Brooker rubs a big blackened thumb over the clod of dirt in his hand, and a coin
appears — minted, it turns out, sometime from 1625 to 1649. "That's a Charles I
rose farthing," he explains, pointing to the vague outline of a royal crest. On the
open market, it's not worth much — maybe $60 — but "to a mudlark, your first
Charles I should be priceless." He tosses it into the bucket with the rest of our haul
for the morning, which includes several Tudor hairpins, Victorian clay pipes and a
17th century ferry token.

Britain is crawling with so-called metal detectorists, who make a hobby — and often
an obsession — out of unearthing treasure from the country's rich past. Occasionally
they strike gold, like Terry Herbert, a 55-year-old Staffordshire man who, it was
announced Sept. 24, discovered more than 11 lb. of Anglo-Saxon gold on a farm
north of Birmingham. But mudlarks, who consider themselves élite archaeologists,
tend to view treasure seekers with disdain. While anyone can obtain a permit to
search the five or so miles of the river's southern foreshore between Westminster
and Wapping, the 51 licensed mudlarks are the only people allowed to excavate the
historically rich north side of the river, which since A.D. 50 has provided docking
points for Roman, Saxon, Viking and Norman occupiers and, more recently, for
British trade boats and royal ships. (The south bank, Shakespeare's side, is notable
for its abundance of brothel paraphernalia.)

Mudlarks follow a strict code of conduct. All objects more than 300 years old are
taken to the Museum of London to be logged. Thames mud is particularly dense, and
its anaerobic environment aids preservation. Curator Kate Sumnall says the museum
receives about 500 objects of historical significance a year from mudlarks. Past
discoveries include medieval pottery, 16th century oil pots, pewter badges worn by
pilgrims returning from Canterbury Cathedral, decorative mounts from Viking chests
and Hindu lamps from circa 1895 — the year the Thames was sanctified as a
substitute for the Ganges as a place for the devout to leave offerings during Diwali.
In August, Brooker made global headlines by unearthing a 17th century ball and
chain — minus the leg it had once encased — belonging to an escaped or drowned
prisoner.
This being Britain, mudlarks follow protocol from a higher power. Codifying a
centuries-old tradition, the Treasure Act of 1996 dictates that any object dating from
before 1709 and containing more than 10% gold or silver belongs to the Queen,
although the finder and the landowner must be compensated. (The Staffordshire
gold has been tentatively valued at more than $1.6 million.) But mudlarks are more
interested in connections to history than they are in bounty, Brooker emphasizes.
Objects with emblems, seals and signatures are the most prized because they
identify their former owner. "Everybody should have someone to remember them,"
he says.

Memories are especially important to Brooker. Three years ago, while buying a
history book at a shop in Kent, he looked down and found that he was unable to
count the money in his hand. Tests revealed that a congenital heart defect had
caused a series of ministrokes. Talking to his wife, he realized that large portions of
his memory were gone forever. He has had surgery and feels better about things
now. And on the days when the tide is out, you can find him on the foreshore of the
Thames, down on his knees, his large hands digging through the muck for mementos
of the past.
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

No Laugh Track Required: The Comeback

of the Sitcom
By James Poniewozik Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

Fox's choral comedy Glee

Alinari Archives / Corbis

Once upon a time, kids, there was a TV show called Seinfeld. It was a "sitcom." This
was a term for a popular genre — watched by tens of millions of viewers — in which
amusing things were said and done not by politicians trying to dance or amateurs
trying to sing but by professional actors pretending to be real people, for 22 minutes
at a time. When Seinfeld aired its finale in 1998, about 76 million people tuned in.
Starting Oct. 4, the cast of Seinfeld reunites for five episodes on Curb Your
Enthusiasm, the HBO sitcom from Seinfeld co-creator Larry David that a couple
million people watch on Sunday night on a good week. Which sums up what's
happened in the sitcom world since Seinfeld left. There have been sitcoms in the
decade since — even great ones, like Curb and Arrested Development — but no
monster hits. As the great comedy explosion of the '90s faded, networks made fewer
and fewer new sitcoms, and those that got on the air were eclipsed by dramas and
reality shows.

Now a funny thing — literally — is happening in prime time. Sitcoms don't have the
ratings or reach Seinfeld did, and probably no single one will again. But collectively,
TV sitcoms are better and more diverse than they have been in years. Any roundup
of the best new TV shows of 2009 would be mostly, if not entirely, comedies. And
they're expanding the definition of what sitcoms can be: musical, complex, more
than a half-hour long and sometimes even dead serious.

Tracking the Laughs

The truth is, comedy didn't go away when sitcoms did; it just moved. Even as TV
dramas became more complicated and dark, many of them, like Lost, Rescue Me and
The Sopranos, also provided some of the funniest moments on television. (Think
Christopher and Paulie Walnuts stuck in the Pine Barrens.) And one reason audiences
flock to reality shows is that they are often funny — be it because of Tim Gunn's
witticisms or Donald Trump's hair.

Today's best sitcoms have adapted by relearning their art from the genres that
superseded them. The Office borrows its mockumentary format and the device of
interviewing characters in "confessionals" from reality TV. This is a perfect fit for a
show that's about the mundane routine of work life, but the filming technique — in
which the handheld camera reacts almost like another character — also lends itself
to sitcom wackiness. The opening of its post–Super Bowl episode (a fire drill goes
wrong, leading to chaos that includes a cat being thrown through a ceiling panel)
was probably the funniest scene on TV this year.
The Office's quasi spin-off Parks and Recreation applies the same technique to
politics, with Amy Poehler playing an overzealous Indiana bureaucrat seeking to build
a park on an abandoned development site occupied by a giant pit. (Throwing
stimulus money into a literal hole in the ground left behind by the real estate bust:
it's the official sitcom of the Great Recession.) And Modern Family, a hilarious new
mock-doc on ABC, adapts the style to domestic comedy. When one half of a gay
couple blames his weight gain on a nesting instinct spurred by their adoption of a
baby, the scene cuts to night-vision-camera footage of him binge-eating in the
pantry.

An old-school sitcom would have told this joke as a zinger ("Yeah, well, tell your
nesting instinct it left a Ding-Dong wrapper on the kitchen counter!" [Canned
laughter]). This screwball-vérité style, by adding a layer of visual irony, allows
Modern Family to pack its jokes tighter (the straight line and the contradiction are
simultaneous) and connects the audience more intimately. You're not just a fan;
you're a voyeur.

The Comedy of Drama

Not coincidentally, none of these shows — with their filmlike editing and numerous
outdoor and location scenes — look much like the sitcoms of a decade ago. One
reason sitcoms guttered out after Seinfeld may have been their predictability: too
many people sitting on couches, peeling off one-liners. Seinfeld was the apotheosis
of this kind of comedy, but like Raymond Carver, it inspired numerous lesser
imitators that made the same approach seem stale and empty. It takes real genius to
pull off a show about nothing.

So what do you do instead? Make a show about something. Showtime's Nurse Jackie
(starring The Sopranos' Edie Falco), which aired over the summer, is a sort of civilian
M*A*S*H, focusing on a pill-popping, overworked nurse, devoted to her work but
cheating on her husband. Likewise, while it has polarized critics, HBO's Hung (about
a high school coach turned gigolo in suburban Detroit) is at its best a darkly comic
story about surviving after an economic bubble pops. These shows (like Showtime's
multiple-personality comedy United States of Tara) handle deeper, more mature
themes than many network cop shows. What is the difference between these
comedies and an HBO or Showtime drama? Mainly, about a half-hour.

Nor is it only dark cable comedies that have borrowed tricks from dramas. (The
Office and Parks are also willing to take their characters into dramatic territory.)
CBS's How I Met Your Mother is like a sitcom version of Lost: it's built around a
central mystery — how the protagonist meets his eventual wife — and likes to play
with nonlinear narratives, story lines that jump around in time. It's a light show, but
it expects its viewers to pay much closer attention than did the sitcoms of a
generation ago (as does Emmy-winning 30 Rock, which is shot through with inside
jokes and tightly woven callbacks to past episodes).

Fox's hour-long musical comedy Glee, about a misfit show choir at an Ohio high
school, has a different set of dramatic inspirations: High School Musical and teen
soaps, which it throws in a blender with a squirt of pop-candy syrup and a generous
dose of acid. But Glee is more than a send-up. Like its Fox sibling American Idol, it's
equal parts laughing at and thrilling with; if it didn't also genuinely, earnestly love its
music and its characters, it would become sour and unwatchable quick. Seeing a
football team do a choreographed play to Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on
It)" may be funny, but it wouldn't be fun unless the routine was truly awesome. It's
Glee's ability to inspire both kinds of glee at once — satiric laughs and unironic
pleasure — that makes it such a treat.

Funny Is Funny, but Different

Glee's popularity-contest story also recalls the film Election, and more and more TV
comedies are finding inspiration in movies. This is only fair, since perhaps the hottest
school of movie comedy — that of Judd Apatow and his disciples — comes straight
from Apatow's work on TV shows like Freaks and Geeks.

This year's Starz sitcom Party Down (gearing up for a second season next year),
about aspiring showbiz types working for a catering company in L.A., perfectly
captures the Apatow vibe of improv-like, conversational comedy. Likewise, HBO's
Bored to Death, a literary slacker-com about a writer (Jason Schwartzman) posing as
a detective, has a voice and offbeat style that recall indie-film comedies — the kind,
like Rushmore, that star Jason Schwartzman.

There are still sitcoms that just aspire to be sitcoms. The highest-rated comedy on
TV, Two and a Half Men, is devoutly of the guys-wisecracking-on-a-couch school,
and this fall brings plenty of weak, high-concept sitcoms like Hank, which features
Kelsey Grammer as a downsized CEO. Even some more-inventive sitcoms are familiar
types: FX's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is like a raucous, lowlife Seinfeld,
and ABC's Better Off Ted, a workplace satire with a weird but sincere heart. But one
look at Seinfeld's old home, NBC's Thursday night — with The Office, Parks, 30 Rock
and the bright new outcasts-in-junior-college comedy Community — and we can see
how sitcoms have become more ambitious and strong.

The final evidence of this, actually, is Seinfeld, or the resurrected version of it on

Curb. When Larry David (playing himself) pitches Jerry Seinfeld his reunion idea
(with an ulterior motive), they have a very Seinfeldian exchange about why David
has "shifted" on his previous belief that reunions are pathetic: "I haven't shifted."
"No, you've shifted." "No, there's no shift." "You've shifted!" "No shift!"

But the reunion is a distinctly HBO version of Seinfeld — very show-biz-insidery, and
much more R-rated than the original ever could have been on NBC. Which shows
that, while Seinfeld's glory days may never come back, funny is still funny, and
successors like Curb have found ways to become more uncompromising and
uncensored. And there's not, to paraphrase the masters, anything wrong with that.
Pants on Fire! The Inspired Invention of
Lying
By RICHARD CORLISS Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

Louis C.K. as Greg, left, Ricky Gervais as Mark Bellison and Jennifer Garner as Anna
McDoogles in The Invention of Lying

Ricky Gervais must know he's cute. Cute like the grinning kid in the back row of a
sixth-grade classroom, smiling at the teacher as he mutters a rude observation about
how she looks from behind. He's cartoon-animal round and ingratiatingly impish. Yet
Gervais, in films and on TV, keeps harping on his diminutive stature and lack of a
heroic jawline. He might almost be begging for the viewer to reply, "No, you're not at
all tremendously unattractive. The word for you, Ricky, would be cute."

In his funny, agreeable, airily subversive parable The Invention of Lying, on which he
shared writing and directing chores with Matthew Robinson, Gervais is at it again. His
character, Mark Bellison, describes himself as a "chubby little loser." Mind you, that's
what everyone else calls him too; for the movie posits a world in which people are
compelled to speak the truth, however harsh it sounds, because they haven't
recognized either the social utility of telling folks what they want to hear or the
potential for career advancement--not to mention bank-robbing--in bending the
facts. So Mark's colleagues at the film studio where he's a writer feel obliged to
inform him that he's about to be fired. And when he finally snags a date with his
adored co-worker Anna (Jennifer Garner), she greets him by saying, "Hi. You're
early. I was just masturbating."
In the film's solid three-act structure, Act 1 gets good mileage from the bitter-truth
premise. In this world, a retirement home is called "A Sad Place for Hopeless Old
People"; a motel is "A Cheap Place to Have Intercourse with a Near Stranger."
There's even truth in advertising, as indicated by the slogans for Coke ("It's very
famous") and Pepsi ("When they don't have Coke").

Mark, of course, must somehow invent lying--in Act II--which in the land of blind
truth tellers makes him king. He takes his friend Greg (Louis C.K.) to a casino, moves
the chips on the roulette table after the ball has landed and pockets a bundle. Then,
to soothe his dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan), he concocts his biggest whopper
yet: Heaven. Word gets around about this great news, life after death, and in a fairly
bold Act III Mark reveals to his swelling flock of acolytes the truth, or the inspired lie,
of the "big man who lives in the sky."

Lying: it's the fundament of all fiction--and what comedians, those unbeautiful little
people, do to get attention. This film also says it's the root of all religions, a placebo
for troubled minds. But the oily sadist Gervais played on The Office is not the movie
Ricky (seen here and in last year's Ghost Town), who'd rather have a hug than a slap
in the face. Mark, getting in deeper before he has to make a public declaration of his
sins, may deserve both, but ultimately he could be the hero of a Frank Capra fable, if
Capra had been an atheist. The Invention of Lying is likely to leave people, believers
or not, with a smile. You're pretty cute, Ricky, they'll say. And so is your movie.
A Serious Man: The Coen Brothers' Jewish
Question
By Richard Corliss Saturday, Sep. 12, 2009

Michael Stuhlbarg stars in Joel and Ethan Coen's 1967-set A Serious Man
Wilson Webb / Focus Features

Stay through the end credits of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man and you'll find
the disclaimer: "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture." That
statement is open to dispute, since most of the film's characters are Jewish —
residents of suburban Minneapolis in 1967 — and just about all of them, it seems,
are out to harm the Coens' hapless hero, college physics professor Larry Gopnik
(Michael Stuhlberg), either intentionally or just by ignoring his mostly mute cries for
help.

Not that the Coen brothers — who were raised in an academic Jewish family in
Minneapolis, and were 13 and 10 respectively when the movie takes place — are self
or other-hating Jews. But as filmmakers (and Oscar-winners, last year, for No
Country for Old Men), they've always enjoyed anatomizing humanity's weak points
and turning them into a kind of comedy. The lynch party, composed of Jews and
gentiles, that assembles around Larry is full of these caricatures. And Larry was
made to be intimidated, ignored, abused. He is a passive protagonist whose plight
earns him as much pity as sympathy. So A Serious Man, which has its world premiere
tonight at the Toronto Film Festival before opening in theaters Oct. 2, is a rare event
in movies, where action is character. It's certainly rare for the Coens, in that this is
one fable — Miller's Crossing might be another — that is worth taking seriously.

In the two weeks leading up to his son's bar mitzvah, Larry is subject to a catalog of
social crimes, small and large. His wife Judy (Sari Lennick) has become close with
family friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed); she wants Sy to move in and Larry to stay
at the Jolly Roger. Larry and Judith's son (Aaron Wolff) is slumming through Hebrew
school and harangues Dad to adjust the rooftop TV aerial so F Troop can come in
clearly. Their daughter (Jessica McManus) thinks only getting a nose job and washing
her hair, which she can't do nearly enough of because Larry's live-in, layabout
brother (Richard Kind) spends a lot of time in the bathroom medicating his neck cyst.

At work, where Larry is up for tenure, a Korean student to whom he gave a failing
grade leaves him an envelope full of bribe money; when Larry refuses, the student's
father drops by to say he may sue the professor for defamation. The neighbor on
one side is a belligerent, moose-killing goy; on the other side is not threat but
temptation in the form of a pretty woman (Amy Landecker) who smokes pot while
sunbathing nude. Anything else? Larry's legal bills are piling up, he just crashed his
car, he needs to visit his doctor, and the guy from the Columbia Record Club keeps
calling to dun him for a membership Larry never took out. According to those in his
local synagogue, he isn't even the serious man of the title; that honorific goes to the
oleaginous, wife-stealing Sy. Compared to Larry, Job had it easy.

Larry is a familiar figure from Jewish literature that dates back to the Old Testament
and up to Bruce Jay Friedman's 1962 novel Stern, about a Jew who moves to the
suburbs and endures a plague of abuse from neighbors and nature. The men at the
center of Philip Roth's novels may rage and flail, but Larry doesn't dish out insults, he
takes them. When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, just
suck it up and hope you don't explode. That's Larry's method of coping. In
Stuhlberg's precise embodiment, Larry accepts all tribulations with a mouth pressed
into pruny silence, as if he had bitten into something rancid but doesn't want to be
seen spitting it out. Wouldn't matter if he did: no one gives him a moment to
articulate the psychic pains he harbors.

The movie has no stars, few recognizable faces. And unlike so many American films,
which cast gentiles in Jewish roles (Imelda Staunton, for example, as the stereotype
mother in Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, also about suburban Jews in the '60s), this
one actually has ethnic-appropriate casting. The Jews here are sometimes broadly
drawn — Larry's family slurps soup at a decibel level that even the Simpsons would
find deafening — but they're fully assimilated. Nobody says, "Oy vey!" or talks shtick.
If people answer a question with a question, the first would be Larry's plaintive "Why
me?" when he seeks legal, emotional or spiritual help, and the second the world's
"Who cares?"

As Fate keeps stomping him, he embraces Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. What

he tells his class about the theory — "Even if you can't figure it out, you're still
responsible for it on the midterm" — applies, in spades, to his crumbling life. And yet
for most of the movie he hangs in there, behaving honorably, seeking the wisdom of
his ancestors, trying to observe the Jewish concept of Hashem. "Receive with
simplicity everything that happens to you," says Elie Wiesel's Rashi. To absorb God's
body blows, this disquieting, haunting movie says, is to be fully alive. To do
otherwise could kill you.
BUSINESS

Get Homes off Welfare

By Justin Fox Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

Illustration by Harry Campbell for TIME

For a nation whose citizens pride themselves on self-reliance, the U.S. doles out an
awful lot of welfare. Corporations get it. Farmers get it. Even poor people get it. But
no other interest group makes out quite the way homeowners do. They — or we, I
should say, for I'm a homeowner too — are at the receiving end of a truly staggering
array of subsidies and tax breaks. Putting an exact price tag on all of them is
impossible, but the value is clearly in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Even with all this aid, though, U.S. homeowners haven't been doing so well. The
value of their real estate holdings has fallen by $4 trillion since 2006, according to
the Federal Reserve. Millions of people have been booted from their dwellings over
the past couple of years because they couldn't make their mortgage payments.
Millions more foreclosures are on the way. The housing market, despite some
hopeful signs over the summer, remains a terrible mess.

Washington's reading seems to be that we're not subsidizing housing enough.

Congress, the Bush and Obama administrations and the Fed have been piling on new
aid. For now, they may be correct to do so. With the banking system still shaky,
further big declines in house prices could bring disaster. Slowing a price collapse is a
reasonable aim of government policy. But as we dig out of this mess, we ought to
ask whether the vast infrastructure of government support for homeownership that
has been built up since the 1930s is really such a wise policy.

How do we subsidize homeownership? Let me count the ways. First, more than 80%
of the mortgage loans made in the U.S. so far this year have been bought by the
government-sponsored entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae.
That keeps the interest rates on those GSE-backed mortgages substantially lower
than on mortgages that can be sold only on private markets, because taxpayers are
on the hook for defaults on the former. That risk, long hypothetical, became reality
as we got stuck with a $291 billion rescue bill for Fannie and Freddie in the fiscal
year that ended in September. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is doing its part to
artificially lower interest rates by buying $1.25 trillion of Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie
mortgage securities this year and next.

Then come the tax breaks. The stimulus bill approved in February included an $8,000
tax credit for first-time home buyers — at a cost of about $14 billion for the year.
That's set to expire, but there's talk in Congress of extending or even expanding it. A
much bigger deal is the income tax deduction for mortgage interest paid — which
has been with us as long as there's been an income tax — at a cost estimated by the
Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation at $80 billion this year. The deduction for
property taxes costs an additional $16 billion, as does the tax break on capital gains
on the sale of owner-occupied houses.

There are many other, smaller subsidies aimed at low-income home buyers. But the
bulk of the tax benefits flow to the upper end of the income spectrum. And to the
coasts as well: a study by two Wharton School economists found that homeowners in
high-priced regions in California and on the Eastern seaboard suck up most of the
gains.

Housing subsidies have side effects too. For one thing, they push us to buy rather
than rent. There's a positive side to this, as homeowners tend to take better care of
their property and their neighborhood than renters do. But there's a negative one
too, particularly in times of economic upheaval like this, as homeownership becomes
an economic ball and chain that keeps workers from moving to areas where jobs are
more plentiful. Subsidies also tempt us to buy more house than we would otherwise,
a wasteful use of capital — not to mention of the energy it takes to heat and cool
large houses. Finally, subsidizing house purchases drives up prices. That can be a
boon to some sellers but not to renters or first-time buyers.

Rising prices are always good news, though, for real estate agents, mortgage lenders
and homebuilders. The higher prices go, the bigger their cut of the action. These
groups are powers in Washington. The National Association of Realtors gave more
money than any other group to candidates in the last elections ($4 million),
according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and its 1.1 million members can do a
lot of lobbying. Hence the subsidies for homeownership that never go away. In 1961
departing President Dwight Eisenhower warned of "the acquisition of unwarranted
influence" by what he dubbed the military-industrial complex. Maybe it's time to call
out the real estate — industrial complex.
SCIENCE

Ardi Is a New Piece for the Evolution

Puzzle
By Michael D. Lemonick and Andrea Dorfman Thursday, Oct. 01, 2009

Science magazine with the skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, aka "Ardi."

T. White

Figuring out the story of human origins is like assembling a huge, complicated jigsaw
puzzle that has lost most of its pieces. Many will never be found, and those that do
turn up are sometimes hard to place. Every so often, though, fossil hunters stumble
upon a discovery that fills in a big chunk of the puzzle all at once — and
simultaneously reshapes the very picture they thought they were building.

The path of just such a discovery began in November 1994 with the unearthing of
two pieces of bone from the palm of a hominid hand in the dusty Middle Awash
region of Ethiopia. Within weeks, more than 100 additional bone fragments were
found during an intensive search-and-reconstruction effort that would go on for the
next 15 years and culminate in a key piece of evolutionary evidence revealed this
week: the 4.4 million–year–old skeleton of a likely human ancestor known as
Ardipithecus ramidus (abbreviated Ar. ramidus).

In a series of studies published in the Oct. 2 special issue of Science — 11 papers by

a total of 47 authors from 10 countries — researchers unveiled Ardi, a 125-piece
hominid skeleton that is 1.2 million years older than the celebrated Lucy
(Australopithecus afarensis) and by far the oldest one ever found. Tim White of the
University of California, Berkeley, a co-leader of the Middle Awash research team that
discovered and studied the new fossils, says, "To understand the biology, the parts
you really want are the skull and teeth, the pelvis, the limbs and the hands and the
feet. And we have all of them."

That is the beauty of Ardi — good bones. The completeness of Ardi's remains, as
well as the more than 150,000 plant and animal fossils collected from surrounding
sediments of the same time period, has generated an unprecedented amount of
intelligence about one of our earliest potential forebears. The skeleton allows
scientists to compare Ardipithecus directly with Lucy's genus, Australopithecus, its
probable descendant. Perhaps most important, Ardi provides clues to what the last
common ancestor shared by humans and chimps might have looked like before their
lineages diverged about 7 million years ago.

Ardi is the earliest and best-documented descendant of that common ancestor. But
despite being "so close to the split," says White, the surprising thing is that she bears
little resemblance to chimpanzees, our closest living primate relatives. The elusive
common ancestor's bones have never been found, but scientists, working from the
evidence available — especially analyses of Australopithecus and modern African
apes — envisioned Great-Great-Grandpa to have looked most nearly like a knuckle-
walking, tree-swinging ape. But "[Ardi is] not chimplike," according to White, which
means that the last common ancestor probably wasn't either. "This skeleton flips our
understanding of human evolution," says Kent State University anthropologist C.
Owen Lovejoy, a member of the Middle Awash team. "It's clear that humans are not
merely a slight modification of chimps, despite their genomic similarity."

So what does that mean? Based on Ardi's anatomy, it appears that chimpanzees may
actually have evolved more than humans — in the scientific sense of having changed
more over the past 7 million years or so. That's not to say Ardi was more human-like
than chimplike. White describes her as an "interesting mosaic" with certain uniquely
human characteristics: bipedalism, for one. Ardi stood 47 in. (120 cm) tall and
weighed about 110 lb. (50 kg), making her roughly twice as heavy as Lucy. The
structure of Ardi's upper pelvis, leg bones and feet indicates she walked upright on
the ground, while still retaining the ability to climb. Her foot had an opposable big
toe for grasping tree limbs but lacked the flexibility that apes use to grab and scale
tree trunks and vines ("Gorilla and chimp feet are almost like hands," says Lovejoy),
nor did it have the arch that allowed Australopithecus and Homo to walk without
lurching side to side. Ardi had a dexterous hand, more maneuverable than a chimp's,
that made her better at catching things on the ground and carrying things while
walking on two legs. Her wrist, hand and shoulder bones show that she wasn't a
knuckle walker and didn't spend much time hanging or swinging ape-style in trees.
Rather, she moved along branches using a primitive method of palm-walking typical
of extinct apes. "[Ardi is] a lovely Darwinian creature," says Penn State
paleoanthropologist Alan Walker, who was not involved in the discovery. "It has
features that are intermediate between the last common ancestor and
australopithecines."

Scientists know this because they've studied not only Ardi's fossils but also 110 other
remnants they uncovered, which belonged to at least 35 Ar. ramidus individuals.
Combine those bones with the thousands of plant and animal fossils from the site
and they get a remarkably clear picture of the habitat Ardi roamed some 200,000
generations ago. It was a grassy woodland with patches of denser forest and
freshwater springs. Colobus monkeys chattered in the trees, while baboons,
elephants, spiral-horned antelopes and hyenas roamed the terrain. Shrews, hares,
porcupines and small carnivores scuttled in the underbrush. There were an
assortment of bats and at least 29 species of birds, including peacocks, doves,
lovebirds, swifts and owls. Buried in the Ethiopian sediments were hackberry seeds,
fossilized palm wood and traces of pollen from fig trees, whose fruit the omnivorous
Ar. ramidus undoubtedly ate.

This tableau demolishes one aspect of what had been conventional evolutionary
wisdom. Paleoanthropologists once thought that what got our ancestors walking on
two legs in the first place was a change in climate that transformed African forest
into savanna. In such an environment, goes the reasoning, upright-standing primates
would have had the advantage over knuckle walkers because they could see over tall
grasses to find food and avoid predators. The fact that Lucy's species sometimes
lived in a more wooded environment began to undermine that theory. The fact that
Ardi walked upright in a similar environment many hundreds of thousands of years
earlier makes it clear that there must have been another reason.

No one knows what that reason was, but a theory about Ardi's social behavior may
hold a clue. Lovejoy thinks Ar. ramidus had a social system found in no other
primates except humans. Among gorillas and chimps, males viciously fight other
males for the attention of females. But among Ardipithecus, says Lovejoy, males may
have abandoned such competition, opting instead to pair-bond with females and stay
together in order to rear their offspring (though not necessarily monogamously or for
life). The evidence of this harmonious existence comes from, of all things,
Ardipithecus' teeth: its canine teeth are relatively stubby compared with the sharp,
dagger-like upper fangs that male chimps and gorillas use to do battle. "The male
canine tooth," says Lovejoy, "is no longer projecting or sharp. It's no longer
weaponry."

That suggests that females mated preferentially with smaller-fanged males. In order
for females to have had so much power, Lovejoy argues, Ar. ramidus must have
developed a social system in which males were cooperative. Males probably helped
females, and their own offspring, by foraging for and sharing food, for example — a
change in behavior that could help explain why bipedality arose. Carrying food is
difficult in the woods, after all, if you can't free up your forelimbs by walking erect.
Deducing such details of social behavior is, admittedly, speculative — and several
researchers are quick to note that some of the authors' other major conclusions need
further discussion as well. One problem is that some portions of Ardi's skeleton were
found crushed nearly to smithereens and needed extensive digital reconstruction.
"Tim [White] showed me pictures of the pelvis in the ground, and it looked like an
Irish stew," says Walker. Indeed, looking at the evidence, different
paleoanthropologists may have different interpretations of how Ardi moved or what
she reveals about the last common ancestor of humans and chimps.

But Science doesn't put out special issues very often, and the extraordinary number
and variety of fossils described in these new papers mean that scientists are arguing
over real evidence, not the usual single tooth here or bit of foot bone there. "When
we started our work [in the Middle Awash]," says White, "the human fossil record
went back to about 3.7 million years." Now scientists have a trove of information
from an era some 700,000 years closer to the dawn of the human lineage. "This isn't
just a skeleton," he says. "We've been able to put together a fantastic, high-
resolution snapshot of a period that was a blank." The search for more pieces
continues, but the outlines of the puzzle, at least, are coming into focus.
SOCIETY

Cancer and Teen Tanning: Where's the

Regulation?
By Adi Narayan Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

Getty

Jodi Duke was 16 when she went to a tanning salon for the first time. The fair-
skinned redhead says she just wanted luminous, golden skin, like her friends' at
school.

It began with occasional 20-min. visits to the salon close to Duke's high school in
Denver. But soon the low-intensity tanning bed wasn't cutting it anymore. So Duke
switched to one with a more powerful sunlamp and started going to the salon more
often. "First it was once every couple of weeks. Then once every week. And later it
was every day," she says.

In 1996, three years after lying on her first sun bed, Duke went to see a doctor to
get a mole removed. Routine tests confirmed that the mole was a malignant tumor
— Duke had advanced-stage melanoma and was wheeled into surgery that week. A
chunk of flesh from her right arm was removed, and a year of intensive cancer
therapy followed. She survived without serious complications.

Duke thinks it was the years of regular tanning that caused her melanoma, and the
vast majority of scientific literature supports her theory. Exposure to ultraviolet light,
whether from the sun or a tanning bed, increases the risk of melanoma, the
deadliest type of skin cancer, and teenagers — especially pale-skinned redheads like
Duke — are considered among the most vulnerable. In July the cancer-research wing
of the World Health Organization (WHO) added tanning beds and sunlamps to its list
of human-cancer-causing agents. "The risk of cutaneous melanoma is increased by
75% when use of tanning devices starts before 30 years of age," reads a statement
on the WHO website.

Still, 13 years after Duke's diagnosis, there is no nationwide regulation governing the
use of tanning salons by young people. According to a 2004 survey, 1 in 10 youths
ages 11 to 18 uses a tanning bed each year. Wisconsin is the only state that bans
indoor tanning among kids under 16; in 28 other states, teens under 16 need
parental consent or accompaniment. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
recommendation — for adults — is to keep tanning-bed exposure to no more than
three times a week during the first week of tanning. And yet a survey of more than
3,600 tanning salons in 50 states has found that 71% would turn a blind eye to that
guideline when it came to teenage customers. Most salons said they would readily
allow teenagers to tan seven times a week.

The study was published in the September issue of the journal Archives of
Dermatology and was led by researchers at San Diego State University. Investigators
trained five female college students to pose as fair-skinned, 15-year-old first-time
tanners and had them call tanning salons to inquire about services. Each time, the
students asked the same questions: Could a 15-year-old use the tanning beds? How
many visits would be allowed in a week? Would a parent need to be present?

The majority of tanning salons required parental consent in the form of a phone call
or written statement. Only 5% said they would not allow a teenager to tan. And of
the establishments that allowed teen tanning, a mere 11% adhered to the FDA
guidelines and said they would cap visits at three per week. "The tanning industry
makes its profits off selling a carcinogen to teenagers and young adults. In that
sense, it is similar to the cigarette industry," says Dr. Martin Weinstock, a professor
of dermatology at Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School and an author of
the study.

The Indoor Tanning Association (ITA) dismisses such charges as mere ballyhoo,
pointing out that the UV light from tanning beds is no different from sunlight —
exposure to either one raises the risk of skin cancer — which is why the tanning
industry has always emphasized the importance of moderation, says John Overstreet,
executive director of the ITA. He adds that technicians at tanning salons are trained
to prevent overexposure and sunburns. "If clients get a sunburn, they are not going
to come back," says Overstreet.

For their part, skin-cancer experts recommend that people eliminate the risk of
overexposure from the start, by covering up in the sun with long sleeves and pants
or at the very least wearing sunscreen. That is especially true on summer vacations,
when people who have been indoors most of the year suddenly hit the beach for a
week. Melanoma is associated with intermittent exposure to intense sun, particularly
before the age of 18, so youngsters need to be extra careful about sun protection,
says Robert Dellavalle, chief of dermatology at the VA Medical Center in Denver.

If you insist on tanning, experts say spray-on glows are much safer than tanning
beds. But cancer survivor Jodi Duke takes exception to both. "I have become an
advocate for looking at yourself and knowing you are beautiful as you are," she says.
Peru's Plans for Global (Foodie) Conquest
By Lucien Chauvin / Lima Wednesday, Sep. 16, 2009

Peruvian chef Gaston Acurio works in his kitchen

Ines Menacho

Gastón Acurio is a name the foodie cognoscenti will recognize. Though not quite a
popular brand name like Mario Batali or Bobby Flay or Alain Ducasse, the Peruvian
chef has created destination restaurants in the otherwise gray city of Lima that
gourmands flock to whenever they can, eschewing the tourist havens of Machu
Picchu and Cuzco. Hailed as the "next superchef" by some magazines, Acurio now
has his eyes set on global conquest. His goal: to make Peruvian cuisine as familiar
around the world as Mexican, Chinese and Thai.

He established a bridgehead outside Latin America in September, opening La Mar in

San Francisco, which specializes in seafood and Peru's signature creation, ceviche.
But that is just the beginning. He sees New York City as the real launching pad for
rapid expansion. "If we make it in New York, we will be ready to green-light all of our
brands," he says. "But first we need to pass the test there." Acurio has scouts
checking out the city, looking for the right location for the right price. He hopes to
firm up a deal shortly.
Peruvian authorities, businesspeople and even Acurio's competitors in Peru are
cheering him on, hoping to cash in on an eventual boom in Peruvian food. Luis Kiser,
head of the Peruvian Franchise Chamber, believes that the country's cuisine will put
Peru on the map, opening the door for the export of other products, from
multicolored potatoes to pisco, a local brandy. "Mexico got jalapeños and tequila on
shelves in stores in the United States, with food leading the way," he says. "Peruvian
food is the tip of the iceberg for everything we have to offer."

Peruvian expansionism is already radiating across Latin America. Acurio's fine-dining

flagship, Astrid y Gastón, operates in seven countries outside Peru. La Mar has
restaurant in six countries, and Tanta, which offers light fare, just opened its first
locale outside of Peru in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. A number of other multi-star restaurants
have also branched out to neighboring countries. Twelve Peruvian restaurants have
franchised their formulas and are operating abroad, again mostly in the rest of Latin
America. Another 20 are in the process of expanding beyond Peru's borders, and
Kiser ticks off a long list of restaurants that could follow the same path. He expects
there to be at least 50 Peru-based food franchises operating by the end of the
decade. That's up from zero in 2000.

In the fast-food segment, Peru's Chinawok, which specializes in cuisine developed by

the descendants of the country's Chinese immigrants, is one of the fastest-growing
franchise businesses in Latin America, with 52 branches in operation and another 10
set to open by the end of the year. Bembos, a Peruvian hamburger joint, has
operations in other Latin American countries as well as two in India (serving a non-
beef burger).

Acurio takes heart from the success of Japanese cuisine around the world. He says
that 40 years ago, no one imagined that raw fish, seaweed and super-spicy wasabi
would be a worldwide craze. But now there are more than 40,000 top-quality sushi
bars in the world; last year they generated more than $150 billion, and another $40
billion in related products were sold. That example is warming the hearts of Acurio
and his compatriots who have visions of Peruvian restaurants on Main Street, U.S.A.,
serving up such staples as cuy (the national dish of roasted guinea pig), cow-heart
kebabs and purple corn juice.

Peruvians, however, do not want to wait decades to conquer the world's palates.
"We are living the same kind of moment Japan did decades ago, inventing a market
where one does not exist," says Acurio. The world is a different place from the one in
which Benihana first branched out of Japan and opened in the U.S. — in New York —
in 1964. Tastes have become more global and transportation allows fresh produce to
move from a farm in Peru to a restaurant kitchen in Europe or the U.S. in less than
24 hours, making it easy to start — and sustain — a trend.

Peru's private and public sectors are both pushing for internationalization. There has
been an explosion of cooking schools, with more than 6,000 students learning the art
of haute cuisine, and Peru is a constant presence at all major international
gastronomic fairs. The government passed a decree declaring that food is part of the
nation's heritage, saying it "contributes significantly to the consolidation of national
identity."

Ernesto Cabellos, who directed a documentary on Peruvian chefs and food called
Cooking up Dreams, says, "There are no loose ends. There is a systematic proposal
to expand Peruvian cuisine, and I am willing to bet that in 10 years, we will have
created a market that rivals Mexican food."
RELIGION

How Moses Shaped America

By Bruce Feiler Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

The Ten Commandments teach that freedom depends on law.

Alinari Archives / Corbis

"We are in the presence of a lot of Moseses," Barack Obama said on March 4, 2007,
three weeks after announcing his candidacy for President. He was speaking in Selma,
Ala., surrounded by civil rights pioneers. Obama cast his run for the White House as
a fulfillment of the Moses tradition of leading people out of bondage into freedom. "I
thank the Moses generation, but we've got to remember that Joshua still had a job to
do. As great as Moses was ... he didn't cross over the river to see the promised
land."
Eight months into his presidency, Obama might want to give Moses a second look.
On issues from health care to Afghanistan, the President faces doubts and rebellions,
from an entrenched pharaonic establishment on one hand and restless, stiff-necked
followers on the other. There's good reason, then, for Obama to heed the leadership
lessons of history's greatest leader. Like presidential predecessors from Washington
to Reagan, Obama can use the Moses story to help guide Americans in troubled
times. From the Pilgrims to the Founding Fathers, the Civil War to the civil rights
movement, Americans have turned to Moses in periods of crisis because his narrative
offers a road map of peril and promise.

Plight of the Pilgrims

The Moses story opens in the 13th century B.C.E. with the Israelites enslaved in
Egypt. After the pharaoh orders the slaughter of all Israelite male babies, Moses is
floated down the Nile, picked up by the pharaoh's daughter and raised in the palace.
An adult Moses murders an Egyptian for beating "one of his kinsmen," then flees to
the desert, where, later, a voice in a burning bush recruits him to free the Israelites.
This moment represents Moses' first leadership test: Will he cling to his unburdened
life or attempt to free a people enslaved for centuries?

The plight of the Israelites resonated with the earliest American settlers. For
centuries, the Catholic Church had banned the direct reading of Scripture. But the
Protestant Reformation, combined with the printing press, brought vernacular Bibles
to everyday readers. What Protestants discovered was a narrative that reminded
them of their sense of subjugation by the church and appealed to their dreams of a
Utopian New World. The Pilgrims stressed this aspect of Moses. When the band of
Protestant breakaways left England in 1620, they described themselves as the
chosen people fleeing their pharaoh, King James. On the Atlantic, they proclaimed
their journey to be as vital as "Moses and the Israelites when they went out of
Egypt." And when they got to Cape Cod, they thanked God for letting them pass
through their fiery Red Sea.

By the time of the Revolution, the theme of beleaguered people standing up to a

superpower had become the go-to narrative of American identity. The two best-
selling books of 1776 featured Moses. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, called King
George the "hardened, sullen tempered pharaoh." Samuel Sherwood, in The Church's
Flight into the Wilderness, said God would deliver the colonies from Egyptian
bondage. The Moses image was so pervasive that on July 4, after signing the
Declaration of Independence, the Congress asked Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin
Franklin and John Adams to propose a seal for the United States. Their
recommendation: Moses, leading the Israelites through the Red Sea as the water
overwhelms the pharaoh. In their eyes, Moses was America's true Founding Father.

But escaping bondage proved to be only half the story. After the Israelites arrive in
the desert, they face a period of lawlessness, which prompts the Ten
Commandments. Only by rallying around the new order can the people become a
nation. Freedom depends on law.

Americans faced a similar moment of chaos after the Revolution. One Connecticut
preacher noted that Moses took 40 years to quell the Israelites' grumbling: Now "we
are acting the same stupid part." And so just as a reluctant Moses led the Israelites
out of Egypt, then handed down the Ten Commandments, a reluctant George
Washington led the colonists to victory, then presided over the drafting of the
Constitution. The parallel was not lost. Two-thirds of the eulogies at Washington's
death compared the "leader and father of the American nation" to the "first
conductor of the Jewish nation."

Let My People Go
While Moses was a unifying presence during the founding era, a generation later he
got dragged into the issue that most divided the country. The Israelites' escape from
slavery was the dominant motif of slave spirituals, including "Turn Back Pharaoh's
Army," "I Am Bound for the Promised Land" and the most famous, "Go Down,
Moses," which was called the national anthem of slaves: "When Israel was in Egypt
Land,/ Let my people go;/ Oppressed so hard they could not stand,/ Let my people
go."
Spirituals sent coded messages. As Frederick Douglass wrote, when he and his
comrades sang, "O Canaan, sweet Canaan,/ I am bound for the land of Canaan,"
overseers believed they were worshipping the white god. But to them, it meant they
were about to escape on the Underground Railroad. The movement's famous
conductor, Harriet Tubman, was called the Moses of her people.

And yet even as abolitionists used the Exodus to attack slavery, Southerners used it
to defend the institution. The War Between the States became the War Between the
Moseses. Slaveholders cited a bevy of biblical passages — Abraham acquires slaves;
Moses invites slaves to the first Passover; Jesus does nothing to free slaves — to
claim the Bible endorsed slavery. The book that joined Americans together was torn
asunder by slavery.

It took America's most Bible-quoting President to reunite the country. Called a

pharaoh by his opponents, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves after a "vow before
God"; he invoked the Exodus at Gettysburg. When he died, Lincoln, like Washington
before him, was compared to Moses. "There is no historic figure more noble than
that of the Jewish lawgiver," Henry Ward Beecher eulogized. "There is scarcely
another event in history more touching than his death." Until now. "Again a great
leader of the people has passed through toil, sorrow, battle and war, and come near
to the promised land of peace, into which he might not pass over."

Lincoln's assassination initiated an even more long-lasting tribute to Moses, the

Statue of Liberty, given to America by the French to honor the slain President. The
sculptor, Frédéric Bartholdi, chose the goddess of liberty as his model, but he
enhanced her with two icons from Moses: the nimbus of light around her head and
the tablet in her arms, both from the moment Moses descends Mount Sinai with the
Ten Commandments. The message: Freedom comes with law.

Moses and Superman

With the rise of secularism and the declining influence of the Bible in the 20th
century, Moses might have melted away as a role model. But something curious
happened. He was so identified as a hero of the American Dream that he superseded
Scripture and entered the realm of popular culture, from novels to television.

Superman was modeled partly on Moses. The comic-book hero's creators, two
bookish Jews from Cleveland named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, drew their
character's backstory from the superhero of the Torah. Just as baby Moses is floated
down the Nile in a basket to escape annihilation, baby Superman is launched into
space in a rocket ship to avoid extinction. Just as Moses is raised in an alien world
before being summoned to liberate Israel, Superman is raised in an alien
environment before being called to assist humanity.

But it was Cecil B. DeMille who turned Moses into a symbol of American power in the
Cold War. The 1956 epic The Ten Commandments, which in its inflation-adjusted
total ranks as the fifth highest grossing movie of all time, opened with DeMille
appearing onscreen. "The theme of this picture is whether men ought to be ruled by
God's law or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator," he said. "The
same battle continues throughout the world today." To drive home his point, DeMille
cast mostly Americans as Israelites and Europeans as Egyptians. And in the film's
final shot, Charlton Heston adopts the pose of the Statue of Liberty and quotes the
line from the third book of Moses — Leviticus — inscribed on the Liberty Bell:
"Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."

To modern Americans, Moses' heartbreak, in many ways, ensures his ongoing

appeal. Though a champion of freedom, he was also a prophet of disappointment.
After leading the Israelites for 40 years, Moses is denied entry to the promised land
for disobeying God. No one understood this aspect of the Moses story better than
Martin Luther King Jr. In his first national speech, in 1956, he likened the U.S.
Supreme Court to Moses for splitting the Red Sea of segregation. On the night before
his death 12 years later, King predicted he would not fulfill his dream. "I've been to
the mountaintop," he declared. "And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised
land. And I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a
people will get to the promised land." Both Moses and King are reminders that even
the greatest leaders fall short.
So what lessons can the current occupant of the White House learn from a figure
that nearly every one of his predecessors has invoked?

First, sell the milk and honey. Obama is the first President to hold a Passover seder
in the White House, but he seems to be forgetting the main point of the service: the
story of Moses is, above all, a story. It's a narrative of hope. Details are fine for
negotiating policy, but it's the vision of milk and honey that gets people to plunge
into the Red Sea.

Second, remember the Nile. As he wrestles with whether to tackle immigration,

toughen regulations or insure all Americans, the President should recall that from the
moment God hears his people moaning under slavery, the entire moral focus of the
Moses story is to build a society that nurtures everyone. Thirty-six times, the Torah
urges the Israelites to befriend the stranger, for they were strangers in Egypt.

Third, the one on Sinai takes the heat. The Bible outlines at least a dozen rebellions
in which the people attempt to overthrow Moses. In a striking parallel to Obama, the
Israelites even question Moses' birthright: "Who made you leader over us?" God
offers to destroy the people, but Moses brokers a compromise. The strongest leaders
face the harshest criticism and hold fast against their naysayers.

Finally, you may not enter the promised land. Forced to die across the Jordan on
Mount Nebo, Moses confronts his final choice: Will he fight or prepare the Israelites
for the future? He chooses the latter. "I have put before you this day life and
prosperity, death and adversity," he says. "Choose life."

These words capture what may be the most trying lesson of leadership: You may
fail, but your legacy is to prepare your followers to succeed without you. So plunge
into the waters, persevere through the dryness, and don't be surprised if you don't
reach your goal. For the true destination is not this year at all, but next.

Feiler is the author of America's Prophet: Moses and the American Story, from which
this article is adapted
SPECIAL SECTION

Dreaming of a Rebound
By Deirdre Van Dyk Thursday, Oct. 01, 2009

Uncluttered front desks, a bright logo, plush beds and a groovy bar have remade the Holiday
Inn in Stamford, Conn.
SHERI MANSON FOR TIME

Holiday Inn could hardly be considered a hip hotel. But in the '60s and '70s, it was
the category killer, with a new inn opening around the world every three days. The
first hotel for the age of mass travel, it was the go-to lodging for everyone from
families (kids clamored to stay there because of the pool every property had) to rock
stars (Elton John wrote an ode to the chain, and the Who had such a rollicking party
at a Holiday Inn in 1967 that its members were rumored to have been banned for
life; today's W would kill for that honor). Heading into the 21st century, the brand
got a bit threadbare. With more than 3,000 franchisees needing to be kept in line,
standards deviated. You never knew what you might get when you stepped across
the threshold. Other hotel brands, such as Hampton Inn and Marriott's Courtyard,
began to attract business guests in particular with fresh new buildings, efficient
business-travel-friendly design and larger rooms.

Two years ago, Holiday Inn, the largest division of InterContinental Hotel Group
(IHG), recognized that it risked being marginalized and embarked upon a total
refreshment of the brand: a new logo, a new bedding program, new showers and
new marketing and advertising. Holiday Inn is a franchise brand, meaning owners
pay a licensing fee and a percentage of their revenues, while the corporation takes
care of marketing, advertising and reservations. Those owners will collectively invest
$1 billion (including $60 million from IHG), making this the largest brand revamp in
hotel history. "Everything you touch and feel is new," says Jim Abrahamson, IHG's
president of the Americas.

Reviving an iconic if tarnished hospitality brand is tough enough. Suddenly having to

execute that plan in the midst of a global recession is going to show what IHG
management is made of. With 1,319 Holiday Inns and 2,018 Holiday Inn Expresses
worldwide, the brand launched by Kemmons Wilson in Memphis, Tenn., in 1952 is a
behemoth, far larger than its competitors. (Marriott's Courtyard has 800 locations
worldwide; Hilton Garden Inn, 350; and Hyatt Place, 150.) Helping drive IHG's $1.8
billion in sales, Holiday Inn aims to continue growing — with 362 new Holiday Inns
and 631 Expresses in the pipeline and China as one of its hottest markets — while
dumping hotels that fail to meet brand standards. So far, about a third of Holiday
Inns and Expresses have been refreshed, and IHG says that by December 2010 all
hotels worldwide will be converted.

The company is asking owners to invest that $1 billion at a cash-short time. Revenue
per available room (revPAR), the primary industry barometer, is down 18% year to
date industry-wide, according to Smith Travel Research. And in Holiday Inn's
segment, room revenues are down more than 17%, while occupancy is down almost
12%. Holiday Inn's category isn't the worst hit — that would be luxury hotels — but
it's not in great shape. The next segment down the line, midscale hotels that don't
offer food and beverage service (the Holiday Inn Express category), has fared better,
with room revenues down 9% and occupancy down 11%.

Investing during a downturn is challenging, says Kevin Kowalski, Holiday Inn's global
brand manager, but he lists brands that did — FedEx, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell — and
came out stronger. Hotels might even have an added advantage, in that they can
rework rooms that aren't occupied. "It's a bold move," says Abrahamson, "but you
have to make bold moves during tough times." For IHG, that means increasing its
sales force by 25% and ponying up for a multimillion-dollar ad buy. And despite
posting a 38% drop in operating profits so far this year, the company has been able
to hold market share.

No one thinks reinvesting in the brand is a bad idea. "What's the alternative?" asks
Bjorn Hanson, a hospitality professor at NYU's Tisch hotel school. "To stay still?" But
it's a tough sell on Wall Street and among some franchisees. The cost per hotel for
the refresh runs from $100,000 to $250,000. Those that have spent the money, says
Abrahamson, have seen a 5% rise in revPAR in a 10-month period, with a hotel in
Pittsburgh, Pa., even seeing a 17.7% rise, an uptick that IHG concedes is at the top
end. "Five percent is very attractive when that effectively drops through entirely to
hotel profits," says Simon Champion, an equity analyst at Deutsche Bank. "That
means that you could get payback within 12 to 24 months on a $150,000 investment
— a better return than you'd see if you put your money in most places."

Still, even with the promise of those returns, as many as 35,000 rooms may leave
the brand this year, and IHG has been questioned closely by Wall Street about the
number of removals. Chief executive Andrew Cosslett admitted in a May earnings call
that Holiday Inn could lose "a few more on the way than we originally planned" and
that the company is working with owners who are having a tough time financing.

Pity today's business travelers. They operate in an environment of painful budget

constraints and calamitous conditions for air travel. But midlevel hotels like Hyatt
Place and Hilton Garden Inn have responded by offering comfort, consumables and
great value: complimentary cocktails, free wi-fi, better beds, 24-hour sundry shops
and, of course, improved loyalty programs.

Holiday Inn hopes travelers will be won over by all its new goodies: a cheerful but
"kept-real" greeting as part of a new staff-training program, the scent of green tea
and ginger in the lobby (as opposed to chlorine from the pool) and a sound track
that includes Sting and Bruce Springsteen. And when you step into that room —
surprise — a pillow-top mattress with crisp white triple sheeting, a flat-screen
television, a bright bathroom with a starched shower curtain and upgraded amenities
from Bath & Body Works. Stuff you'd expect to find at higher-priced outfits. Which
may leave Holiday Inn better positioned at a time when travelers are trading down
but still demanding quality.

Yet it's not really luxury hotels that Holiday Inn is chasing. It's your home. In the
past decade, consumers have feathered their nests with duvets, technology and
plush couches as prices have retreated. So if the hotel is your home away from
home, IHG doesn't want you to be greeted by an old tube television if you own a
flat-screen. It's the same idea with the bedding. "At home, we don't have heavy old-
school floral bedspreads," says Kowalski. And travelers were never enthusiastic about
the possibility that those bedspreads weren't washed regularly. Now everything on
the bed is changed. The choice of four pillows — two soft and two hard — came,
says Abrahamson, from seeing guests check in with their pillows under their arms.

Of course, you can't spot these plush digs from the highway. Hence new signage,
from branding consultant Interbrand Design Forum, that's designed to signal this
new, modern spirit. The signature color was updated from forest green to a punchier
yellow-green. The famous script now slants to the right instead of the left.
"Handwriting analysis told us this was more forward-looking," says Amanda Yates of
Interbrand. Yup, they analyze this stuff. Green bulbs illuminate Holiday Inns; blue
beams shine up the walls of Holiday Inn Expresses. It's "an inexpensive way," says
Scott Smith, also of Interbrand, "to make all that different architecture look
cohesive."

Despite a ton of changes, the new Holiday Inn has met with mixed reaction from
"seen this before" industry analysts, one even likening the refresh to rearranging the
deck chairs on hospitality's Titanic. "They're too big a ship to steer a new course," he
says dismissively. Less dramatically, the analysts think the Holiday Inn model, with a
full restaurant dishing up three meals a day, is spent. Why would you want to eat at
a Holiday Inn when you can hit a nearby Chili's?

Mike Patel, whose Newcrest Management owns 19 hotels, including nine Expresses
and one Holiday Inn, likes the changes: "It was overdue. We really needed it." In
Stamford, Conn. — home to global financial firms like UBS — the outpost's makeover
has lifted it from the bottom of IHG's customer-satisfaction scores. "People say, 'Am I
at the right hotel?'" says general manager Mike Bennett. "Companies that wouldn't
consider us in the past are now staying with us."

Rick Takach, president of Vesta Hospitality, who recently spent $200,000 renovating
a Holiday Inn in Lincoln, Neb., says he's grabbed market share every month since
the April debut. The Washington-based owner, whose 11-hotel portfolio also includes
Hiltons and a Marriott, has a happier staff, and the relaunch has given him a shot at
recapturing lost clients.

The next 12 months are about getting the rest of the brand to the finish line.
"Convincing the first person to sign up is easy," says analyst Champion. "Convincing
the last person is much harder." IHG is going to have to do a good job of showing
cash-constrained owners what returns they can get — and proving to road warriors
that the changes have created a better hotel. "We've got to meet or exceed guest
expectations consistently across the brand," says Bill DeForest, who counts one
Holiday Inn among his 10 hotels and manages another, "or we're toast."
A Tough Vintage for Champagne
By Christopher Redman Monday, Sep. 28, 2009

Glut Champagne's vineyards have enjoyed good growing conditions. But sales are down
Nigel Blythe / Cephas

With this year's harvest almost in, Champagne's grape growers should be rubbing
their hands. It has been a good year in the vineyards, with enough rain and sunshine
when it mattered and very little disease to spoil the grapes. And so the growers — or
vignerons — were looking to sell a bumper crop to the Champagne houses such as
Moët et Chandon, Lanson and Mumm, who turn the grapes into bubbly and sell it
worldwide. The vignerons, who supply around 90% of Champagne's grapes, are
essentially paid by the weight of fruit, so a bountiful harvest usually means good
money. "This was shaping up to be a vintage year for us," says Patrick Le Brun,
president of the growers' union.

But the Champagne makers — the so-called négociants — had other ideas. In recent
years they have pushed for higher and higher yields to meet the growing global taste
for France's famous fizz. Even when regions such as Languedoc and Roussillon in
southern France suffered from massive overproduction, Champagne producers could
barely keep up with demand. Now, though, recession and the strong euro have
pummeled sales, notably in the U.S. and Britain, the two largest Champagne
markets, which together take nearly 40% of all exports. Back in 2007, when
economies were riding high, some 339 million bottles of Champagne were sold
worldwide. Last year that figure fell to 322 million and in 2009 sales of 270 million
bottles may be as good as it gets. Next year doesn't look much better, and with 1.2
billion unsold bottles still crowding their cellars, the last thing the négociants needed
this autumn was a hefty grape harvest. The obvious solution — price cuts to jump-
start sales — is a nonstarter since this would, the Champenois insist, undermine their
product's luxury (read expensive) image.

Come harvest time a testy standoff developed. The négociants, many of them cash-
strapped, offered to buy 7,500 kg of grapes per hectare (roughly 3 tons an acre)
from the growers — a whopping 47% reduction on last year. "We have no choice
other than to adapt to the economic climate," said Ghislain de Montgolfier, president
of the Union of Champagne Houses.

Predictably, the growers rejected the proposal as ruinous. Many blame the glut on
the négociants' overly ambitious sales projections and suspect the Champagne
houses of playing hardball in advance of negotiations to renew supply contracts. But
the two sides know they need to hang together. The growers, most of them
smallholders, depend on the négociants to buy their grapes and create the market
for bubbly; the Champagne houses, who are only about 10% self-sufficient in
grapes, are hostage to the growers. So it came as no surprise when Champagne's
governing body, CIVC, announced an eve-of-harvest compromise described by Le
Brun as "the least bad solution." The Champagne houses will buy 9,700 kg per
hectare but bottle only 8,000 kg per hectare, leaving the equivalent of 48 million
bottles to age in vats for 10 months, after which, they hope, demand will have
revived.

But will it? Much depends on an economic recovery. Just a few years ago the
Champenois argued that global demand for Champagne would bubble ever higher,
and lobbied successfully to extend the acreage of vineyards that can claim the
Champagne name. With the outlook uncertain, the industry must be relieved that it
will be 10 years or so before those extra vines come on stream. Meanwhile, like
OPEC, the Champenois must manage their cartel as best they can to ensure prices
stay high.
As any OPEC watcher knows, however, there is always the possibility that some
producers will break ranks and start discounting. Many Champagne houses are in
debt and cash-flow problems are endemic in the business, so the pressure to move
inventory will grow if credit remains tight. Already there are rumors of special deals.
If that happens Champagne lovers will be able to cash in — or at least enjoy a pause
in the relentless price hikes of recent years. For the moment the only certain
beneficiary of the latest decision is Champagne's bird population. They will get to eat
the thousands of tons of grapes that will be left on the vine as a result of the
reduced harvest. What is birdsong for cheers?
Cloud Cover
By Matt Villano Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

Qualys CEO Philippe Courtot says technology without a purpose is useless.

THOMAS BROENING FOR TIME

Data security used to be all about spending big bucks on firewalls to defend data at
the network perimeter and on antivirus software to protect individual computers.
Internet-based computing, or cloud computing, has changed all that, at the same
time expanding exponentially the chances for data thieves and hackers.

The cloud creates other opportunities too: a handful of security vendors now deliver
security as a service--a one-two punch of hardware and software that monitors and
manages an enterprise's data security and bills customers only for the computing
power they use. "For years, security was about big companies pushing technology to
their customers," says Qualys CEO and founder Philippe Courtot. "Now it's about the
customers pulling precisely what they need and providing them with those resources
on demand."

Qualys, a privately held company in Redwood Shores, Calif., was among the first to
embrace the service-oriented model, in 1999. Today four different modules of
QualysGuard, its flagship offering, are used by more than 3,500 organizations in 85
countries. The company performs more than 200 million security audits per year.

Courtot knows something about opportunity. The French entrepreneur arrived in

Silicon Valley in 1987 and has built a number of companies into big-time players,
including Signio, an electronic-payment start-up that was eventually sold to VeriSign
in a combined deal for more than $1 billion. As CEO, he rebuilt Verity and
transformed cc:Mail, a once unknown firm of 12 people, into a dominant e-mail
platform before Lotus acquired it in 1991. "Throughout my career, I've been able to
recognize that for a technology to succeed, it must have a purpose," he says.
"Technology itself has no value. It's what you do with it that counts."

Under the old paradigm, according to Courtot, enterprises overspent for stand-alone
security devices that became unruly and difficult to operate over the long term. He
says Qualys attacks the flaws in this strategy by streamlining security and tackling
most of the service delivery through the cloud. "We control the infrastructure,
software updates, quality assurance and just about everything in between," he says.
The firm unveiled QualysGuard in 2000. After an infusion of $25 million from the
venture firm Trident Capital and another $25 million from Courtot, Qualys tweaked
the service to focus mostly on vulnerability management.

Much of the company's current revenue--sales topped $50 million last year--is being
driven by a set of standards established by the Payment Card Industry Security
Standards Council (PCI SSC), a trade organization composed of credit-card
companies. The standards were created in 2006 to help organizations that process
card payments prevent fraud by tightening controls around customer data. One of
those controls: a quarterly audit for network vulnerabilities by a firm from a list of
approved vendors that includes Qualys. Analysts estimate that the PCI standards
have generated at least $2.5 billion for security vendors in the U.S. "It's been a
major driver of business for all of them, especially Qualys," says Avivah Litan, a vice
president and analyst at market-research firm Gartner. "When everyone has to
comply, there's a lot of work to go around."
Qualys aims to increase the depth of its vulnerability-scanning services, reaching
further into networks by auditing servers that host and operate certain Web
applications for self-propagating virus programs known as malware. It released a
special QualysGuard module in April 2008 to achieve this objective. After a series of
acquisitions this summer, an improved version will probably be forthcoming in the
next 12 to 18 months. "Because of the Internet, the enterprise network is
disappearing, and companies need to be ready to protect what's left," Courtot
forecasts. Security as a service, it turns out, is a pretty legit business.
A Lesson in Giving
By Melba Newsome Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

A letter from a former student to Obama about her school prompted Sagus to donate new
furniture to J.V. Martin, as school in Dillon, S.C.
BRYAN REGAN’S WONDERFUL MACHINE FOR TIME

Chicago-based Sagus International has been making furniture for schools in the U.S.
and U.K. for more than 40 years. In a billion-dollar industry built on securing
contracts from state and local school boards across the U.S., Sagus, which, according
to industry reports, has sales north of $100 million, clearly wins its share. It ranks at
or near the top of all segments of educational furnishings. Yet CEO Darryl Rosser felt
that a company so closely linked with education should be doing more than just
selling furniture. So in 2008, the gregarious Alabama native challenged his 800
employees to find a way to have a more direct impact on the ability of children to
learn.

Sagus started with two Chicago schools, remaking the science lab at high-performing
Walter Payton College Prep and the social-studies room at William R. Harper, a high
school at the opposite end of the spectrum. The redesigned classrooms created
more-collaborative learning environments in which teachers could use a variety of
teaching methods and students could work together on projects. "This is by far the
most efficient and user-friendly classroom I've ever worked in. Because of the
mobility, I'm still discovering more ways I can use it," says Walt Kinderman, a
chemistry teacher at Payton. "The results were pretty amazing," says Rosser. "After
that, we wanted to develop a whole-school concept that would be a model for a 21st
century school."

Rosser got new inspiration for his mission while listening to President Barack
Obama's Feb. 24 address to Congress. The President quoted from a letter from an
eighth-grader pleading for help for her school, J.V. Martin Middle School in Dillon,
S.C. Obama, who had visited the school during his campaign, described it as a "place
where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls and they have to stop teaching
six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom." Rosser found his next
project.

Three weeks later, he traveled to Dillon to see the school for himself. It was even
worse than he had imagined. The hodgepodge of buildings dated from 1896. The
auditorium had been condemned, and the 40-year-old desks were mismatched and
too small for the children.

J.V. Martin had been featured in Corridor of Shame, a 2005 documentary about the
condition of the poor, rural schools along the I-95 corridor in South Carolina. The
documentary had brought attention--and politicians--to the school but little else until
May 2, when four trucks with more than 2,000 pieces of custom furniture arrived in
Dillon. A crew of 25 worked around the clock to remove the school's old furniture
and install new Sagus furniture, worth roughly $250,000.

Educational furnishings have changed dramatically in the past decade. The scarcity
of state resources demands that each piece perform several functions. Rigid,
stationary desks and tables are out, replaced by flexible, mobile stations that are
suitable for a variety of teaching modalities. That is precisely what greeted the
students and teachers when they returned to school on May 4. They were blown
away. Their classrooms and cafeteria had been remade with state-of-the-art,
ergonomic and environmentally friendly desks and chairs.

The students' gratitude gave Rosser a warm and fuzzy feeling, but he says he
believes that working with educators to transform learning environments is good for
business too. Several small companies make furnishings for a specific segment of the
market, but Virco is the only manufacturer that competes with Sagus in every area.
"It helps us differentiate ourselves from our competitors. If we're fulfilling the needs
of education, we should be able to design products that are more effective in that
market," says Rosser.

J.V. Martin remains Rosser's top priority. He is working with the South Carolina
Department of Education to plan and raise money for a new facility, with a school
opening scheduled for the fall of 2011. The custom furniture will be transferred to
the new school. "When I finish my career, this will be one of the highlights," says
Rosser. "The spirit fueling the reinvention of J.V. Martin should characterize
education reform across the nation." By the same token, a little reinvention never
hurts a company either.
PEOPLE

10 Questions for Kofi Annan

Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

Kofi Annan
David Johnson for TIME

Has the Kyoto Protocol been effective in fighting climate change?

Eduardo Chikui

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL

It has been effective in the sense that it has helped raise awareness. Obviously, we
cannot pretend that we have achieved everything the Kyoto agreement had in mind,
but the awareness is there. People realize that unless we take steps to arrest climate
change, we are heading toward catastrophic consequences that will be irreversible.
Do you think world leaders are putting enough effort into combatting
global warming?

Sothyreak Pheng

MINNEAPOLIS

I don't think so. This is why we need the energy and involvement of everyone. This
is our planet. We cannot and should not leave it to the leaders alone.

What is the evidence for dangerous, man-made global warming?

Richard Treadgold, AUCKLAND

Highly respected scientists have come to a consensus as to the impact of global

warming. There is a broad consensus that we should reduce greenhouse-gas
emissions by 50% by the year 2050.

What connection do you think there is between global warming and

poverty?

Paulette Donald, LOS ANGELES

Global warming has had a real impact on economic development. There are farmers
who can no longer till the land that fed their parents and grandparents because it's
become almost desert. With changing rain patterns, we have a serious problem of
food production. Diseases are moving faster and farther. This is all on account of
climate change.

What do you consider to be the greatest achievement of the U.N. during

your tenure?

Stephen Ntsoane

GA-MPHAHLELE, SOUTH AFRICA

The fight against poverty and the fact that we got heads of state to agree to
development goals. For the first time, we came up with a common agenda for
development.

What was the greatest failure of the U.N. during your time there?

Heather Wright

PETROLIA, ONT.

Our failure to stop the war in Iraq. Some of us knew it was going to be a disaster
and tried very hard to stop it. We all have seen the results.

Do you think the U.N. should be given authority to intervene militarily in

situations like Darfur?

Dan Quigley

HOPKINTON, MASS.

I'm not sure the member states are ready to give the U.N. a standing army. For two
years, U.N. operations in Darfur have been asking for 18 helicopters. [Member
countries say] they don't have them. No one can pretend that the world cannot
produce 18 helicopters. It's a question of will. And I don't think you will see a U.N.
army.

What do you see as the biggest issues for the U.N. over the next decade?

Monica Mihai, SYDNEY

A world in which extreme poverty and immense wealth live side by side is simply not
sustainable. We're dealing with issues--crime, nuclear weapons, diseases, swine flu--
[that] no country can handle alone. How do we get governments to act cooperatively
in the common interest? We saw a bit of that during the financial crisis. There was a
sense of despair that pulled them together. Now that some people are rushing ahead
and saying we are out of the crisis, we are falling back on the old habits of protecting
our national interests.

Do you think the election of President Barack Obama has brought changes
in the world's perception of the U.S.?

Faizan Syed, COPENHAGEN

I think President Obama has started extremely well. There's lots of goodwill and
support for him around the world. He has enormous challenges both [in the U.S.]
and abroad. I think we all need to help him succeed, and we should start by
reducing expectations. High expectations can cause problems for politicians.

How does one become U.N. Secretary-General?

Jose Francisco Cruz, MANILA

By accident.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

Ayn Rand: Extremist or Visionary?

By Andrea Sachs Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

The books of Ayn Rand, above in 1964, are still popular a half-century later. More than 25
million copies have been sold.
LEONARD MCCOMBE / TIME LIFE PICTURES / GETTY

She knew how to make an entrance. Her dark hair cut in a severe pageboy, Ayn
Rand would sweep into a room with a long black cape, a dollar-sign pin on her lapel
and an ever present cigarette in an ivory holder. Melodramatic, yes, but Rand didn't
have time to be subtle. She had millions of people to convert to objectivism, her
philosophy of radical individualism, limited government and avoidance of altruism
and religion. Her adoring followers--some called them a cult--revered her as the high
priestess of laissez-faire capitalism until her death in 1982 at age 77.

The bad economy has been good news for Rand's legacy. Her fierce denunciations of
government regulation have sent sales of her two best-known novels, The
Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, soaring. Yet her me-first brand of capitalism has
been excoriated for fomenting the recent financial crisis. And her most famous
former acolyte--onetime Fed chairman Alan Greenspan--has been blamed for
inflating the housing bubble by refusing to intervene in the market.
In the midst of the newly rekindled debate, two excellent biographies have just been
published: Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller (Doubleday; 592
pages), is a comprehensive study, in novelistic detail, of Rand's personal life, and
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns
(Oxford; 369 pages), leans more heavily on Rand's theories and politics.

From her earliest years, Rand was a woman on a mission. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in
1905 to a bourgeois Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Rand was 12 when the
Bolshevik Revolution took place. Her family, suddenly poor, was forced to flee, and
Rand's hatred of communism and any sort of collectivism would guide her life.
Arriving in the U.S. in 1926 with a new name, Ayn (rhymes with fine) made her way
to Hollywood, where she had modest success as a screenwriter and married an
aspiring actor, Frank O'Connor. Her politicization came when she and her husband
worked on Republican Wendell Willkie's losing presidential campaign in 1940.
According to Burns, "Before Willkie she had been pro-capitalist yet pessimistic,
writing 'The capitalist world is low, unprincipled, and corrupt.' Now she celebrated
capitalism as the 'noblest, cleanest and most idealistic system of all.' "

The Fountainhead, an epic novel chronicling the struggles of an architect named

Howard Roark against conventional values, was her breakout work. In her race to
get the sprawling 700-page book to press, she began taking the amphetamine
Benzedrine to fuel her efforts. "Rand used it to power her last months of work on the
novel, including several 24-hour sessions correcting page proofs," writes Burns. The
book brought Rand financial security and fame.

Among the most enthusiastic readers of Rand's work were small-business owners.
Writes Burns: "Although Rand spoke in the coded language of individualism, her
business audience immediately sensed the political import of her ideas. Many
correctly assumed that her defense of individualism was an implicit argument against
expanded government and New Deal reforms." It's the same argument current
objectivists have against the government's virtual takeover of the banks and the auto
industry. As Burns notes, "Her novels touted anew by Rush Limbaugh, Rand was
once more a foundation of the right-wing worldview."
Rand's success brought her thousands of fan letters. One of them, from Nathan
Blumenthal, a 19-year-old freshman at UCLA, changed the 45-year-old novelist's life.
The student became a member of the close-knit circle of her followers nicknamed the
Collective, which included Greenspan. But before long, Blumenthal, by then named
Nathaniel Branden, was her declared "intellectual heir." Writes Heller: "A month
before her 50th birthday, she and Nathaniel received their partners' permission to
meet for sex twice a week ... The affair provided excitement and deep fulfillment at a
crucial, and essentially pleasureless, moment in her writing life." The book in
question was Atlas Shrugged, her 1,000-page 1957 masterwork about the
government's battle with captains of industry, led by John Galt, for control of the
economy. The next year, Branden established an institute to promote Rand's
philosophy of reason.

Alas, all of Rand's stern declarations about reason trumping emotion were of little
value in 1968, when Branden revealed an affair with a young actress, whom he later
married. Rand repudiated him, closed the institute and never spoke to her protégé of
19 years again.
NOTEBOOK

The Moment
By Amy Sullivan Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

Roman Polanski's arrest in Switzerland more than three decades after he was
convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old girl prompted howls of protest from his
defenders. France's Culture Minister said the filmmaker, who fled the U.S. in 1978,
had been "thrown to the lions"; Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and Woody Allen,
among others, signed a petition calling for his immediate release. Polanski had been
railroaded by a biased judge, sympathizers argued; even his victim no longer wanted
him imprisoned. The great auteur had suffered enough. And besides, it was a long
time ago.

News reports continue to describe Polanski's crime as "unlawful sex with a 13-year-
old." But it wasn't just her age that made it unlawful. It was the fact that the sex was
unwanted, that she repeatedly said no throughout the assault, that she had been
drugged. Polanski isn't being hounded for behavior--like homosexuality--once
thought to be deviant but now generally accepted as mainstream. In 2009, just as in
the 1970s, it is considered a bad thing to rape a child and run from the law. And so
will it be 30 years from now and 60 years from now. Even in Hollywood.
The World
By Harriet Barovick Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

1 | Tehran

A Secret Site Unearthed?

In the run-up to its Oct. 1 summit with Western powers, Russia and China, Iran
added fuel to the incendiary debate over its nuclear ambitions by revealing the
existence of a new uranium-enrichment facility outside the holy city of Qum. News of
the plant, the second of its kind in Iran, drew sharp criticism from Western leaders,
including President Obama, who condemned Tehran for "breaking rules" and
demanded that the country "cooperate fully and comprehensively" with International
Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran's Atomic Energy
Organization, insisted that plans for the plant were never secret and reiterated that
Iran's nuclear program is peaceful and focused on civilian energy needs rather than
on developing weapons.

2 | Honduras

A Standoff Drags On

Nearly two weeks after stealthily returning to the country, ousted Honduran
President Manuel Zelaya remained bunkered in the Brazilian embassy with dozens of
supporters. Honduras' de facto leader, Roberto Micheletti, gave Brazil's President 10
days to decide what to do with Zelaya but backed off a plan to limit news broadcasts
and restrict public meetings after lawmakers objected. The U.S. and other nations
have condemned the June 28 coup that forced Zelaya from office, though a U.S.
diplomat blasted Zelaya's "irresponsible and foolish" return from exile before a deal
was struck to resolve the crisis.

3 | Washington

U.S. Poverty on the Rise

According to new U.S. Census data, the recession has hit middle- and low-income
families hardest, widening the gulf between them and the rich. Lower incomes
boosted poverty rates in 31 states and Washington, D.C., from 2007 to 2008,
compared with increases in just 10 states the year before. Overall, the U.S. rate hit
an 11-year high of 13.2%, while the number of Americans receiving food stamps
rose 13%.

Poverty rates

[The following text appears within a chart. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual
chart.]

U.S.

CONNECTICUT

FLORIDA

HAWAII

CALIFORNIA

INDIANA

• 2007

• 2008

SOURCE: U.S. CENSUS BUREAU

4 | Guinea

After Coup, an Ugly Crackdown

Government soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians in the Guinean capital,

Conakry, killing at least 157 people and wounding some 1,200, in addition to raping
women, witnesses say. The U.N. called for an independent probe into the massacre,
which came as protesters denounced military leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara,
who seized power in a 2008 coup.

5 | Indonesia

Earthquake Shakes Sumatra

A 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck Padang, a city of 900,000 on the northwest

island of Sumatra, cutting power and telephone lines and trapping thousands of
people underneath collapsed buildings. The initial death toll of 75 is expected to rise
as victims are pulled from the rubble. Aftershocks triggered landslides and were felt
as far away as Malaysia and Singapore. Hours earlier, a quake in the Pacific had sent
a tsunami crashing into Samoa and American Samoa, killing at least 100.

6 | Brussels

He Started It

A much anticipated E.U. report on last year's five-day war between Russia and
Georgia held Tbilisi responsible for triggering the conflict but blamed Russia for
creating conditions that helped spark it. Both sides claimed vindication from the
1,000-page document, which also found that Russian allies committed ethnic
cleansing against Georgian civilians.

7 | Manila

AFTER THE FLOOD

Torrential rains brought on by Typhoon Ketsana ravaged the Philippine capital,

causing flooding that killed at least 250 people, displaced thousands and submerged
buildings beneath up to 20 ft. (6 m) of water. Several countries pledged aid, and
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo opened her palace to those left homeless. But
critics, who note that the city of 12 million has long been considered flood-prone and
lacking in proper drainage systems, blamed the government for not doing more to
head off the disaster.
8 | Chicago

Death After School

Four Chicago teens have been arrested in the murder of Derrion Albert, a 16-year-
old who was beaten to death on Sept. 24 after he stumbled onto a brawl between
rival gangs on his way home from school. The attack, captured by a cell-phone
camera, has ignited outrage in a city that witnessed the murders of 34 public-school
students last year.

9 | Berlin

A Win for Merkel, a Loss for the Left

Despite the pain of recent economic turmoil, German voters resoundingly reiterated
their faith in the free market during the country's Sept. 27 national elections. A
victory by Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union puts
the party on track to form a new center-right coalition with the smaller Free
Democratic Party, whose leader, Guido Westerwelle, is likely to be tapped as Vice
Chancellor. Merkel's previous coalition partner, the left-leaning Social Democratic
Party, suffered its worst election loss since World War II. Merkel and Westerwelle are
expected to cut taxes, promote business and strengthen Germany's political
partnership with the U.S.

Germany's election results

[The following text appears within a chart. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual
chart.]

Social Democratic Party 34% 23%

Christian Democratic Union 35% 34%

Free Democratic Party 10% 15%

Other 21% 28%

• 2005

• 2009

Source: DER SPIEGEL

10 | Washington

New Justice, New Term

The U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term on Oct. 5--its first with Obama-
appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the bench--and legal observers are watching
this session closely to see if conservative Justices move more forcefully to override
their liberal counterparts. Arguments will be heard on cases involving corporate
political donations, antitrust complaints brought against the NFL, and First
Amendment issues concerning the sale of videos depicting animal cruelty.

What's on the court's docket

OCT. 7, 2009

SALAZAR V. BUONO

Ninth Circuit

Will consider whether a cross erected in California's Mojave National Preserve

violates separation of church and state

NOV. 9, 2009

GRAHAM V. FLORIDA

Ninth Circuit

Will decide whether sentencing a juvenile to life in prison without parole is cruel and
unusual punishment
NOV. 9, 2009

BILSKI V. KAPPOS

Florida Supreme Court

Will determine whether a financial process can be patented; current laws grant
patents only for a concrete "machine or apparatus"

UNSCHEDULED

MCDONALD V. CITY OF CHICAGO

Seventh Circuit

Examines whether state and local gun laws must align with the constitutional right to
bear arms

* | What They're Celebrating in Beijing:

The eight days of festivities marking the 60th anniversary of China's communist
revolution on Oct. 1 include tanks, soldiers on parade, fireworks and a display of 40
million potted plants. But some things aren't happening: pigeons have been
grounded in the capital out of fear they'd endanger jet flyovers, one city has banned
divorces, and China Mobile customers aren't keeping their ring-back tones--the
government-run carrier has switched them to a patriotic song.
Spotlight: AIDS Vaccine
By Alice Park Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

A Thai technician tests blood taken from trial volunteers.

Apichart Weerawong / AP

After a two-decade drought of good news, AIDS-vaccine researchers are finally

dancing under the first raindrops of hope. It's not a downpour by any means or even
a soaking shower, but it's something. At the end of a six-year vaccine field trial--the
largest ever conducted--scientists have their first successful immunization against
HIV.

But success, especially in science, is relative. Yes, as media reports immediately

crowed, the vaccine was 31% effective at reducing the risk of HIV infection among
the 16,000 healthy volunteers in the study. But that's nowhere near the 70%-to-80%
rate that most public-health experts say is the minimum needed for an immunization
to be judged worthwhile. Consider also that circumcision can cut the risk of HIV
infection nearly twice as effectively, up to 60%.
The raw data from the trial, conducted in Thailand, will be presented at an AIDS-
vaccine meeting in Paris on Oct. 20. Until then, researchers have only some
intriguing and, frankly, puzzling snippets of information--and plenty of questions. The
trial actually tested two vaccines: one that primes the immune system by training
cells to recognize and destroy the virus and one that boosts that response. Neither
shot has proved effective alone, yet together they seemed to trigger a modest
immunity--although no one yet knows why. Fifty-one people who received the
vaccine became infected with HIV, compared with 74 who received a saltwater
placebo, a barely significant difference. And while a lower risk of infection normally
derives from a drop in the amount of virus circulating in the blood--with less virus
floating around, there is less chance that HIV can bind to healthy cells--that did not
happen in this study. Which means that although those who are vaccinated might be
protected, they are still very infectious and can continue to spread HIV--not an ideal
side effect of a vaccine meant to contain an infectious disease.

"Do we have a vaccine we would use to prevent HIV? No," says Dr. Anthony Fauci,
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which
picked up the bulk of the $105 million cost of the study. "But if it gives us enough
information that would be helpful in the next steps toward development of a vaccine,
then it's a successful trial."

The Thai study is already a winner in that researchers now have a population of
patients who are protected against infection with HIV after inoculation; they can
begin to analyze the patients' immune responses more closely to tease out the
elusive factors that shielded them from HIV. That's more than the last promising
vaccine provided. That candidate, made by Merck, not only failed to protect
volunteers from infection but also seemed to increase their risk of contracting HIV.

Remarkably, the current groundbreaking trial almost never saw the light of day.
NIAID inherited it from the Department of Defense in 2003, by which time 1,000
volunteers had already been enrolled. Fauci says he was loath to pull the rug out,
despite having rejected a trial for a similar pair of prime-and-boost vaccines that
came through the institute around the same time. "I was hoping when I made the
decision to allow this trial to go ahead that we would at least learn something from
it," says Fauci. "Guess what? We are." Maybe more than anyone could have
anticipated.
Verbatim
By DEPARTMENT Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

'More Czechs believe in infomercials on television than they do in religion.'

DOMINIK JUN, filmmaker, after Pope Benedict XVI used a Sept. 28 speech in the
Czech Republic to urge secular Czechs to rejoin the church

'It was never going to be easy.'

DAN PFEIFFER, White House deputy communications director, acknowledging that

the Obama Administration may not be able to fulfill its promise to close the U.S.
military prison at Guantánamo Bay by Jan. 22

'I am the happiest man in the world. I just climbed a beautiful mountain.'

CLIFTON MALONEY, husband of New York Representative Carolyn Maloney, after

summiting Cho Oyu, the sixth tallest mountain in the world, on Sept. 25. The 71-
year-old avid outdoorsman, who was said to be in excellent health, was found dead
the following morning

'This is a very noble way to destroy the enemies of Islam. This is not suicide.'

DANI PERMANA, an 18-year-old high school graduate from Indonesia, speaking in a

newly released video that identifies him as one of the suicide bombers responsible
for the July 17 attacks on two Jakarta hotels that killed seven people and wounded
dozens

'It's just devastating, like the wrath of God.'

VINCENT IULI, a villager in American Samoa, after an 8.3-magnitude earthquake on

Sept. 29 triggered a tsunami that swept away whole towns on the Pacific islands of
Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga, killing at least 100 people

'I thought it would make me happy.'

MARK DREIER, a disgraced financier currently serving 20 years in prison for fraud, on
why he hatched a $380 million Ponzi scheme that ran for four years beginning in
2004

'It's not a huge shift.'

EILEEN O'NEILL, president and general manager of cable network TLC, downplaying
Jon Gosselin's decision to leave the reality show Jon & Kate Plus 8, which followed
the Gosselins' lives as they raised eight young children. The couple announced their
separation in June; a new version of the show, retitled Kate Plus Eight, will premiere
Nov. 2

BACK & FORTH

Health Care

'I don't need maternity care, so requiring that to be in my insurance plan will make
my policy more expensive.'

JON KYL, Republican Senator from Arizona, arguing during markup sessions against
the inclusion of maternity care in the proposed health-care-reform bill

'I think your mom probably did.'

DEBBIE STABENOW, Democratic Senator from Michigan, responding to Kyl

Comedy

'The mayor of Newark, N.J., wants to set up a citywide program to improve

residents' health ... The health-care program would consist of a bus ticket out of
Newark.'

CONAN O'BRIEN, host of The Tonight Show, invoking the city's reputation for high
crime rates

'Try JFK, buddy!'

CORY BOOKER, Newark's mayor, joking in a YouTube video that he would put the
comedian on the no-fly list at Newark's international airport in retaliation for the
remark

LEXICON

Superfetation

n.--An additional conception that occurs during a pregnancy

USAGE: "The 31-year-old woman went for an ultrasound to check on her 11-week-
old fetus and was stunned to find out she had two. Doctors believe it's a rare case of
superfetation--a big word for what [the mom-to-be] said was a big shock."

--New York Daily News, Sept. 25, 2009

Sources: New York Times; Washington Post; AP (2); Guardian; Vanity Fair; AP
Brief History

Sanctions
By Alex Altman Tuesday, Sep. 29, 2009

Iran test-launches a short-range missile during war games in Qum on Sept. 27, 2009
Shaigan / AFP / Getty

In the wake of revelations that Iran had concealed a secret uranium-enrichment

facility near the holy city of Qum, the U.S. began working international back channels
to gauge support among its allies for a fresh round of sanctions against Tehran.
While the U.S. and U.N. have sanctions in place against the Iranian finance sector as
well as travel and trade restrictions, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Obama
Administration was investigating how to "broaden and deepen" the measures, while
Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted the menu of potential punishments was a
"pretty rich list to pick from" — including the suspension of investments in the
Iranian oil and gas industries and tighter restrictions on Iranian banks.

In a muscle-flexing response, Tehran announced that its Revolutionary Guards had

conducted new tests of medium- and short-range missiles — a sign that the threat of
further sanctions didn't seem to have made much impact. For one thing, Iran has
been dealing with such restrictions since the Islamic revolution in 1979. For another,
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is probably in on the open secret about
economic sanctions: they don't really work. Attempts to economically isolate
troublemaking nations are the leech treatments of international diplomacy: traditional
cure-alls that, though well-intentioned, rarely force regime change or prompt
significant policy shifts, particularly when done unilaterally — and often a greater
hardship for the citizens living under these regimes than for the leaders.

The first known use of economic sanctions took place in 432 B.C., when Athenian
officials, irked by the assistance the Greek state of Megara had afforded its rivals in
Corinth, banned Megaran merchants from its ports. The move didn't go over very
well — instead of reasserting Athenian supremacy, it helped trigger the 27-year-long
Peloponnesian War, which ultimately stripped Athens of its empire. But the tactic
caught on. Venice imposed sanctions against Bologna in 1270 in order to coerce
them into buying their wheat instead of grain from Ravenna, and in subsequent
centuries, the Hanseatic League tried trade bans against foreign adversaries like the
Russian principality of Novgorod.

Actual warfare has become infinitely more costly in recent generations — as the
bloody conflicts of the 20th century proved. Thus sanctions, by and large, have
become war by other means. The U.S. has applied such measures more than 100
times since World War I, against more than 75 countries. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt imposed them as a check on Japanese imperialism in 1940, Ronald Reagan
leveled them as a way to combat martial law in Poland, and a legion of leaders have
used sanctions in recognition of the atrocities perpetuated in Saddam Hussein's Iraq,
Kim Jong Il's North Korea and Burma under the military junta.

The practice has had some successes: President Dwight D. Eisenhower defused a
row over the Suez Canal with economic sanctions against Britain; Swiss banks were
forced to pay reparations to Holocaust survivors when faced with a boycott, led by
some U.S. states, for harboring pilfered assets; and stiff sanctions helped convince
Libya to disavow terrorism after the 1988 Lockerbie jetliner bombing. But those are
generally the exceptions. "Putting a sanction on a country always seems to be an
inexpensive way to address the problem," Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana has said.
"Unfortunately, almost none of these sanctions have brought about change." That's
particularly the case when they’re leveled unilaterally. A 1997 study by the Institute
for International Economics found that since 1970, unilateral U.S. sanctions met their
stated goals less than 20% of the time, while costing the U.S. at least $15 billion
annually in projected export revenues.

Sanctions can also strangle ordinary citizens instead of obstinate world leaders. More
than 1 million Iraqi civilians died from starvation and inadequate medical services as
a result of measures imposed against Saddam in the 1990s, according to some
estimates.

So far, it's unclear how deeply a new batch of sanctions against Iran would cut,
particularly since the U.S. needs Moscow and Beijing as signatories if it wants the
initiative to pack a punch. Russia and Iran have shared economic interests, and
according to some estimates, China has some $100 billion tied up in Iranian oil and
gas reserves. Both countries have been unwilling to rebuke their strategic partner in
the past. A watered-down set of sanctions might be disappointing to those, like
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who want to "cripple" Iran. But they
wouldn't be out of the ordinary; the U.S. has punished countries for everything from
harboring terrorists to mistreating animals. "Sanctions may not do much to the so-
called enemy, but they do feel warm to those imposing them," wrote Britain's
Independent in 2007. Still, if shaming Iran and expressing outrage is the primary
purpose of the exercise, the U.S. could always make Ahmadinejad wear a dunce cap.
The Skimmer
By M.J. Stephey Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done

By Cass R. Sunstein

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 112 pages

So much for the internet as a marketplace of ideas. As Cass Sunstein sees it, the
Web is largely an unregulated playground for rumormongers who understand that a
titillating lie often outpaces a mundane or complicated truth--especially if such gossip
reinforces what we think we already know. Which explains why some Americans still
believe Barack Obama is Muslim (he's not) or that Sarah Palin thinks the continent of
Africa is one country (she doesn't). As for those who believe more rumors will
produce more skeptics, Sunstein warns, Don't underestimate the natural human
tendency to believe what you hear. That the Web is full of misinformation is
irrefutable, but Sunstein's case for toughening libel laws and educating consumers on
how information spreads (which he approvingly predicts would have a chilling effect)
will most likely provoke debate--especially given the legal scholar's new role as head
of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

READ

SKIM [X]

TOSS
William Safire
By PEGGY NOONAN Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

As a speechwriter, he made Spiro Agnew sound fizzy--"nattering nabobs of

negativism" was his alliterative classic--and helped Richard Nixon explain his policies.
(He later explained Nixon himself in a historically rich memoir, Before the Fall.)
William Safire, who died Sept. 27 at 79, was not just a fighter--he was a champ. He
had brio, savvy and insight into human nature. That's why he could write novels:
because he was interested in what makes humans do what they do, in motives and
twists of fate and unintended consequences.

He enjoyed his rise and wanted others to as well. Once, when I got a tough book
review, he didn't call to commiserate; instead he joyfully barked, "Welcome to the
NFL!" At the time, it was not a cliché. He probably made it a cliché. He probably
coined it. But it was in his Pulitzer Prize--winning newspaper column that Safire
became Safire. There he mastered and honed a natural pugnacity--a desire to "mix it
up," as he put it. You really cared what he thought and weren't sure what he'd think
because he could surprise you. And boy, did he wade in. When everyone was putting
down Washington Mayor Marion Barry, he was alone in criticizing violations of Barry's
privacy. He voted for Bill Clinton but pulled no punches toward him or Hillary. He
gave me some of the best professional advice I've ever received: Write what you
see, because "what history needs more of is first-person testimony." "Never feel
guilty about reading; it's what you do to do what you do." "Never join a pile-on, but
it's O.K. to start one." And this: When I told him his column was great, he said, "It's
not a column, it's a pillar." It was.

Noonan is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a former speechwriter for
Ronald Reagan
Paul Fay
By M.J. Stephey Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

The friendship Paul Fay forged with John F. Kennedy began during a touch-football
game in 1942 at the PT Boat School in Melville, R.I. Fay, a California native who died
Sept. 23 at 91, had just enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was tossing the pigskin with a
few classmates when a skinny junior officer named Jack asked if he could play.

The chance encounter would shape both men's lives. After serving in the same
squadron during World War II--and recovering from Japanese attacks in the same
South Pacific--island hut--the two men became lifelong confidants. When Kennedy
moved into the White House, he rewarded Fay's efforts in Kennedy's early political
career with the No. 2 job in the Department of the Navy, over the objections of
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

In 1966, Fay wrote The Pleasure of His Company, which, unlike most Camelot
memoirs, was able to humanize Kennedy and offer an intimate glimpse into his
personality. Fay recounted witnessing Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch, scold his
children during a dinner in 1959 for spending too much money. After an
uncomfortable silence, JFK piped up, "We've come to the conclusion that the only
solution is to have Dad work harder." As Fay observed, it was classic Jack.
Susan Atkins
By Vincent Bugliosi Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

When she died of brain cancer on Sept. 24 at 61, Susan Atkins was in a women's
prison in California, serving a life sentence for eight of the most horrific murders in
the annals of American crime. Atkins, a Los Angeles native, was 15 when her mother
died; soon afterward, she left home to become a topless dancer in San Francisco. In
the hippie mecca of Haight-Ashbury she met cult leader Charles Manson, who
seduced her and his other young followers into believing that he was the second
coming of Christ--and that the way to bring about a new social order was to commit
mass murder and frame blacks, which would ignite an apocalyptic race war he called
Helter Skelter. When Manson dispatched his "family" to kill actress Sharon Tate and
others on two hot August nights in 1969, the murders drew the world's attention--
and marked the end of the '60s mantra of peace, love and sharing. In prison, Atkins
was able to begin a new life. She became a model prisoner and a born-again
Christian. She also renounced Manson, though she said she still prayed for him.

Bugliosi prosecuted the Manson murders

LETTERS

Inbox
By DEPARTMENT Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

That's Not Entertainment

Running a cover story on Glenn Beck is the equivalent of giving a terrorist publicity
for setting off a bomb [Sept. 28]. Beck is a charlatan: he has made himself rich off
people's fears without making the slightest constructive comment about national
issues. Instead, he has spread innuendo to keep his audience happy. He's a TV
evangelist who makes altar calls and then drives away in his Cadillac.

Alan Moen, entiat, WASH.

Beck is inquisitive and interesting. His broadcasts offer his opinion, and I choose
whether to investigate his ideas or not. He doesn't regurgitate the morning news. Bill
Maher's gibes are too personally directed. The arrogance Keith Olbermann displays is
foreign to me. Beck is adorable, even when I disagree with him. Is profitability not a
concern for TIME, Newsweek or Oprah? Politicians clearly despise middle-class
Americans who dare to question them. Should we trust Washington more? Please
recognize the real story of Beck's fans: we're everyday working people concerned
about the future of our country, and we don't like censorship.

Melissa Odom, MILTON, FLA.

David Von Drehle's profile highlighted some of what sets Beck outside the realm of
fact-based, civil political discourse--notably his statement that the President has a
"deep-seated hatred of white people." That statement is part of a consistent pattern
of race-baiting by Beck. This summer, ColorofChange.org began asking advertisers to
stop supporting Beck's TV show because our members are concerned about the way
he stokes racial paranoia and fear with inflammatory rhetoric that's not based in fact.
Dozens of companies listened and pulled their ads. It's clear that much of corporate
America already knows the answer to the question your headline poses. Indeed,
Glenn Beck is bad for America.

James Rucker, Executive Director, ColorofChange.org SAN FRANCISCO

By far the best cover you've run in years--a man we can trust to tell it "like it really
is." We little ol' unimportant taxpayers with no tax loopholes are just looking for
accountability and transparency in the government, as we were promised and as we
expect from the people who serve us. Glenn Beck for TIME's Person of the Year!

Lori Horan, MUSKEGON, MICH.

Deanna Frankowski, the beck fan mentioned in your article, is "sick and tired of
being ignored"? Give me a break! I had to wait through eight years of an
Administration that brought this country to the brink. Frankowski should sit down
quietly while the rest of us get to the task of cleaning up Bush's mess. Besides, this
health-care debate isn't about those over 30; it's about the millions of uninsured,
recently graduated young people saddled with loans we can't imagine paying off,
who are sick and tired of living in an abyss created by our elders' stupidity. Obama
would be smart to focus on college towns. Step aside, Grandma. We want health
care, and we want it now.

Agnieszka Marczak, LINCOLN, R.I.

Beck (and Olbermann, Limbaugh, et al.) are laughing all the way to the bank, yet we
continue to tune in and ask for more. I ask you, Who are the idiots in this picture?

Ward Silver, SEATTLE

Beck is a poor example of American citizenry. His rants, race-baiting and attacks on
our President are at best off the wall and at worst a call to violence. He is a danger
to America.

Danielle Bird, LOGAN, UTAH

© 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved