martes, 25 de enero de 2011

Deadly Blast Comes at Sensitive Time for Russia

Ivan Sekretarev/Associated Press

Investigators worked near the body a man killed in a bombing on Monday at Domodedovo, Moscow’s busiest airport. More Photos »

By ELLEN BARRY

Published: January 24, 2011

REPRINTS

MOSCOW — A suicide bomber attacked Moscow’s busiest airport on Monday, killing dozens of people and injecting new pain into a country already split along ethnic lines.

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Back Story With The Times's Ellen Barry and Andrew E. Kramer

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Suicide Bombing at Moscow Airport

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Deadly Blast at a Moscow Airport

After the Bombing, It’s Business as Usual (January 25, 2011)
The Lede Blog: Video Shows Aftermath of Explosion at Moscow Airport (January 24, 2011)
On the Road: By Nature, Airports Have Risks (January 25, 2011)

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Ivan Sekretarev/Associated Press

A man wounded in a blast was carried away at Domodedovo airport in Moscow on Monday. More Photos »

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Ivan Sekretarev/Associated Press

A man wounded in a blast at Domodedovo airport in Moscow. More Photos »

There was no indication on Monday night of who was behind the blast. Past terrorist attacks have been traced to militants in the North Caucasus, a predominantly Muslim region in the south of Russia. And the city was on edge even before the attacks, after ethnic Russian nationalists lashed out violently at migrants from the troubled region in mid-December.

The attack inflicted a deep injury on Moscow’s image just as President Dmitri A. Medvedev prepared to woo foreign investors at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The bomb — set off in the international arrivals hall of Domodedovo, the city’s glittering showcase airport — killed and wounded visitors from the West, something that has occurred very rarely in previous terrorist attacks.

But Russians were too shocked Monday night to focus on the implications.

The smoke was so thick after the blast that it was hard to count the dead. Hours later arriving passengers stepped into the hall to see the wounded still being loaded onto stretchers. Ambulances sped away crowded with three or four patients apiece, bleeding heavily from shrapnel wounds. By nightfall, officials reported that at least 35 people had been killed and 168 wounded.

“They pushed them away on baggage carts,” said Aleksei Spiridonov, who works at an auto rental booth a few yards from the site of the blast. “They were wheeling them out on whatever they could find.”

Russia’s leaders have struggled, with a good measure of success, to keep militants from the North Caucasus from striking in the heartland. In March, two female suicide bombers detonated themselves on the city’s subway, killing more than 40 people — an act that the Chechen militant leader Doku Umarov claimed to have ordered, promising Russians that “the war will come to your streets.”

Mr. Umarov’s organization also took responsibility for the bombing of a luxury train, the Nevsky Express, which killed 28 in November 2009.

Monday’s attack could also have political implications, coming after a period of tentative liberalization. In the past, such attacks have strengthened the influence of Russian security forces and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin by firmly establishing security as the country’s top priority.

The bomber apparently entered the international arrivals terminal from outside, advancing to the cordon where taxi drivers and relatives wait to greet arriving passengers. The area is open to the general public, said Yelena Galanova, an airport spokeswoman, according to the Interfax news service.

Artyom Zhilenkov, a taxi driver who was in that crowd, said he was standing about 10 yards from a short, dark-complexioned man with a suitcase — the bomber, he believes. Authorities said the blast occurred at 4:32 p.m. local time, as passengers from Italy, Tajikistan and Germany emerged from customs.

“How did I manage to save myself? I don’t know,” Mr. Zhilenkov said, his track suit dotted with blood and small ragged holes. “The people behind me on my left and right were blown apart. Maybe because of that.”

Another witness, Yuri, who did not give his last name, told Russia’s state-run First Channel TV that the shock wave was strong enough to throw him to the floor and blow his hat away.

After that, the hall filled with thick smoke and part of the ceiling collapsed, said Mr. Spiridonov, the auto rental worker.

Thirty-one people died at the site of the explosion, one in an ambulance and three in hospitals, the Health Ministry said. Among the wounded were French and Italian citizens, according to the Health and Social Development Ministry. At least two Britons died, said a spokesman for the Investigative Committee.

Witnesses said many of the victims suffered terrible wounds to their faces, limbs and bodies.

“One person came out and fell,” Olga Yaholnikova told RenTV television. “And there was a man with half of his body torn away.”

Mr. Medvedev, who was scheduled to give a keynote address in Davos on Wednesday, postponed his trip to manage the aftermath of the attack. He gave brief televised remarks almost immediately, telling Russians that he believed the blast was a terrorist act.

Mr. Putin also appeared on television on Monday night, gravely ordering the health minister to provide aid to all the bombing victims, visiting clinics one by one, if necessary, he said.

In Washington, President Obama condemned what he called an “outrageous act of terrorism” and offered assistance.

The State Department said it had not received confirmation of any Americans who had been killed or wounded at the airport.

The airport, southeast of the capital, is Russia’s largest airline hub, with more than 20 million passengers passing through last year.

Domodedovo was the site of a previous terror attack, in August 2004, when two Chechen suicide bombers boarded separate planes there, killing themselves and 88 others in midair. The attack exposed holes in security, since the two bombers, both women, had been detained shortly before boarding, but were released by a police supervisor. The authorities have since worked to tighten security.

The airport remained open on Monday evening, and passengers continued to flow through the hall where the bomb had exploded. Gerald Zapf, who landed shortly after the blast, said his airplane circled the airport several times before landing, and passengers were forced to wait for some time before they could debark.

When they finally made it into the airport, he said, he and the other passengers were led past sheets of blue plastic, which hid signs of the carnage. Meanwhile, transportation officials had ordered “100 percent control of passengers and visitors and their baggage, including their hand baggage,” resulting in long, snaking lines and shoving matches at the airport’s entrances.

Monday’s explosion pointed to the continuing fascination with air travel for militants and the difficulty of carrying out an attack aboard a jet, said Stephen A. Baker, a former official with the Department of Homeland Security. “They’d like to be bombing planes and they can’t, so they’re bombing airports,” he said.

Michael Schwirtz and Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting
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A version of this article appeared in print on January 25, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Google and Mozilla Announce New Privacy Features

January 24, 2011, 12:52 PM

Google and Mozilla Announce New Privacy Features

By TANZINA VEGA

Add two more Internet browser makers to the list of companies planning to offer Web users new ways to control how their personal data is collected online.

On Monday, Mozilla and Google announced features that would allow users of the Firefox and Chrome browsers to opt out of being tracked online by third-party advertisers. The companies made their announcements just weeks after the Federal Trade Commission issued a report that supported a “do not track” mechanism that would let consumers choose whether companies could monitor their online behavior.

In a blog post by Alex Fowler, Mozilla’s technology and privacy officer, the company unveiled a proposed feature for its Firefox browser that would send a signal to third-party advertisers and commercial Web sites indicating that a user did not want to be tracked. The mechanism, being called a Do Not Track HTTP header, would rely on companies that receive the information to agree not to collect data.

The approach differs from other options currently available to users that rely on cookies or user-generated lists. In December, Microsoft announced a feature called Tracking Protection for Internet Explorer 9 that would rely on lists that users create that indicate which sites they do not want to share information with.

“We believe the header-based approach has the potential to be better for the web in the long run because it is a clearer and more universal opt-out mechanism than cookies or blacklists,” said Mr. Fowler in the blog post.

In a statement, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commisson, Jon Leibowitz, said: “Mozilla’s initiative is to be commended. It recognizes that consumers want a choice about who is tracking their movements online, and it’s a first step toward giving consumers choice about who will have access to their data. It also signals that Do Not Track options are technically feasible.”

Google’s approach relies on a browser extension, or plug-in, called Keep My Opt-Outs that will work with all versions of its Chrome browser. The extension would allow users to permanently opt out of being tracked by online advertisers who already offer opt-out options through self-regulation programs, like the Digital Advertising Alliance and the Network Advertising Initiative.

In a blog post by Google, the company said it would offer the code for the extension to developers on an open-source basis and that it planned to make the feature available for other browsers in the future.

Regarding the Google announcement, an F.T.C. spokeswoman said, “We’re pleased that Google is engaged in the process, but Mozilla and Microsoft are clearly steps ahead.”

In a statement, Mike Zaneis, the senior vice president and general counsel for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an organization that supports industry self-regulation, said the Mozilla feature would require companies to voluntarily recognize a consumer’s choice and that it was still unclear how users could protect their privacy.

“The first analogy that comes to mind is, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, Google has ensured an audience to hear the sound of the tree falling by working with the established industry mechanism,” Mr. Zaneis said.

What Africa Brought to the Table

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

What Africa Brought to the Table

By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: January 24, 2011

REPRINTS

“You hear a lot of jazz about soul food,” Eldridge Cleaver wrote in “Soul on Ice,” his 1968 prison memoir. Cleaver didn’t want that stuff on his plate every night. “The people in the ghetto want steaks. Beef steaks. I wish I had the power to see to it that the bourgeoisie really did have to make it on soul food.”

Kristy May

Jessica B. Harris

HIGH ON THE HOG

A Culinary Journey from Africa to America

By Jessica B. Harris

Illustrated. 291 pages. Bloomsbury. $26.

Excerpt: ‘High on the Hog’(January 24, 2011)

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From the book, "High on the Hog" by Jessica B. Harris (Bloomsbury)

A traditional market in Dakar, Senegal.

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Frances Benjamin Johnston/Library of Congress

A cooking class at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Va., around 1899.

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From "High on the Hog" by Jessica B. Harris (Bloomsbury)

A dinner at the home of the author of “High on the Hog,” Jessica B. Harris, in Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard.

Cleaver’s lines came back to me recently while I was sitting in Red Rooster, the new Harlem neo-soul restaurant owned by the Ethiopian-born celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson. The menu at Red Rooster — after the collard greens, the shrimp and grits, and the “fried yard bird” — ends with this showstopper: a $32 “uptown steak frites” with truffle béarnaise. Cleaver, who died in 1998, would have enjoyed this.

I thought about Cleaver’s lines, too, while reading Jessica B. Harris’s absorbing new book, “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America.” Ms. Harris zeroes in on what she sees as the two divergent strands of African-American cooking. The first reveres homey staples like corn pone, fried chicken and chitterlings (a pig’s small intestines), and embraces those cooks who can, as she writes, “put a hurtin’ on a mess of greens.”

The second strand is aspirational and omnivorous. Historically, it includes recipes from, she says, “Big House cooks who prepared lavish banquets, caterers who created a culinary cooperative in Philadelphia in the 19th century, a legion of black hoteliers and culinary moguls and a growing black middle and upper class.”

Ms. Harris belongs, firmly, to that black upper class. She’s a respected cookbook writer — her many books include “The Africa Cookbook” (1998) — who divides her time, according to the book’s dust jacket, among New York City, Martha’s Vineyard and New Orleans.

In “High on the Hog” she branches out into narrative nonfiction, with mostly toothsome results. Her plain, gently simmering prose will not make you forget Michael Pollan’s.But Ms. Harris has an eye for detail and an inquisitive manner on the page, qualities that take any writer a long way.

“High on the Hog” covers a lot of territory in terms of African-American eating habits. (Ms. Harris refers to those eating habits, widely construed, as “foodways,” and I wish she wouldn’t. It’s a vaguely sanctimonious term that’s caught on among food historians, especially Southern ones,in recent years. I await the books on sexways and toiletways.)

Ms. Harris examines West African staple foods in the centuries before slavery; she details the grim slop captives were fed during the terrors of the Middle Passage. She explores the life of George Washington’s revered black cook at Mount Vernon, Hercules, and Thomas Jefferson’s talented cook, James Hemings, the brother of Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemings, who some historians believe was Jefferson’s mistress. She dilates on black cowboys and Pullman porters and the authors of the earliest black cookbooks. Her true topic is, as she puts it, “the Africanizing of the Southern palate,” and ultimately of the American one.

I especially enjoyed the chapters that cover the second half of the 20th century and beyond. She quotes Ralph Ellison, in “Invisible Man,” describing a food cart “from which a stove pipe reeled off a thin spiral of smoke that drifted the odor of baking yams slowly to me, bringing a stab of swift nostalgia.” Ms. Harris loves this sentence. Yet she gently reproves Ellison, letting us know that he was almost certainly describing not yams, but sweet potatoes.

She lists the restaurants where important players in the civil rights movement liked to eat big. She detours into the dietary strictures of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, who urged his followers to get off the “slave diet.”

Muhammad wrote: “Just stop eating the swine flesh, and your life will be expanded. Stay off that grandmother’s old-fashioned corn bread and black-eyed peas, and those quick 15-minute biscuits made with baking powder.” So what did Muhammad eat? A lot of bean pies, Ms. Harris writes.

She is outraged at the “culinary apartheid” she found in some urban neighborhoods in America. “We were getting stuck with overprocessed foods, low-quality meats and second- or third-rate produce,” she writes. “It is a lesson I will not forget.”

She casts an appraising eye at the recent crop of black culinary trailblazers. She mourns the early death, in 1998 at 42, of Patrick Clark, a black chef who made his name at Manhattan restaurants like Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg and Tavern on the Green. She explores the careers of Edna Lewis, Sylvia Woods — the owner of Sylvia’s, the popular Harlem restaurant — and the New Orleans Creole cook Leah Chase.

Ms. Harris flips on the TV and discusses, excellently, Pat and Gina Neely, the lively hosts of the Food Network show “Down Home with the Neelys.” This couple, she writes, “have become arguably the best-known African-American cooks in the country,” and thus worthy taking seriously.

Ms. Harris seems to approve of the Neelys, sort of, though there were bumps along the way. “At the show’s inception, most viewers were outraged by everything from the dishes prepared on the air to the dialogue,” she writes. “A strawberry cake prepared with cake mix, Jell-O, strawberries and whipped cream came under particular fire, as did the family’s ‘loud and boisterous’ manner.”

She goes on about the Neelys: “The level of sexual innuendo in the couple’s banter and the personal style of Gina Neely were other points of dismay. African-American viewers were particularly concerned that the show not be a throwback to behavior considered stereotypical and not a representation of the diversity and sophistication of African-American lifestyle and cooking.” She concludes, “Changes were made.”

Black cuisine is still too often viewed as “unhealthy, inelegant and hopelessly out of sync with the culinary canons that define healthy eating today,” Ms. Harris writes. She notes that most black families restrict those artery-clogging meals to Sundays, holidays and family reunions. And she declares, wistfully and yet with optimism, “The cooking of Africa has yet to have its moment on the foodie radar.”

A version of this review appeared in print on January 25, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.

The Sweeping Gestures of a Swiveling Maestro

MUSIC REVIEW

The Sweeping Gestures of a Swiveling Maestro

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: January 24, 2011

REPRINTS

James Levine devoted the Met Orchestra’s concert at Carnegie Hall on Sunday afternoon to two works, but they were big, demanding ones.Mozart’s “Posthorn” Serenade (K. 320), despite a title that suggests a light entertainment, is as grand as most of his symphonies and, at 45 minutes, twice as long as most of them. And “Das Lied von der Erde,” Mahler’s monumental setting of ancient Chinese poetry, is a symphony disguised as a song cycle.

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Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

The Met Orchestra, led by James Levine, performed Mozart and Mahler at Carnegie Hall on Sunday.

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Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

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Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Mr. Levine led the orchestra from his customary swivel chair.

Mr. Levine led these works with the energy and sweeping conducting gestures that he has brought to his work all season, and though he continues to walk with a cane, as he did at the opening of “Simon Boccanegra” at the Met on Thursday, he did not seem in the least frail, as he reportedly did then. He took the stage at a good clip, the cane apparently providing a measure of security. When he reached the podium, he handed the cane to the concertmaster and climbed onto his customary swivel chair.

And he swiveled: to the right and to the left and even, at one point in the Mozart, nearly all the way around to the audience.

Mr. Levine has long been an eloquent Mozartean. And if his interpretive approach has been largely unaffected by the findings and fashions of the period-instrument movement, he has always found ways to keep his performances trim and tightly focused while reveling in both the heft and the sonic sheen that a modern orchestra can provide.

Mostly, his account of the “Posthorn” achieved those qualities, thanks in great measure to the orchestra’s beautifully tuned brass chords, elegant flute and oboe playing, and a string sound that blended an often velvety tone with precise, unified ornamentation. Even when the reading veered toward heaviness, in both minuets, Mr. Levine usually applied an unexpected balance or a thoughtful phrasing touch that effectively disarmed any objections.

The orchestra’s playing was even more sumptuous in the Mahler, not surprisingly, and Mr. Levine’s reading was more highly personalized, for better and for worse. His penchant for lingering tempos and dramatic pauses made a certain sense in the finale, “Der Abschied,” which is, after all, a mystical account of a final, pained leave-taking, tinged with the disappointments of a troubled life. Yet at times Mr. Levine seemed to take these effects slightly too far. The sense of tension and expectation that his tempos occasioned can easily give way to impatience, and that began to happen toward the end of the performance.

The soloists were also a mixed success: Simon O’Neill’s tenor sounded thin against Mahler’s lush orchestral backdrop, and at times he had trouble making himself heard. Michelle DeYoung, the mezzo-soprano, was more powerful and more consistently pleasing, and in “Der Abschied,” her nuanced reading touched the core of the music.