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jueves, 27 de enero de 2011

Protesters in Egypt Defy Ban as Government Cracks Down

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Riot police clashed with protesters in Cairo on Wednesday. More Photos »

By KAREEM FAHIM and LIAM STACK

Published: January 26, 2011

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CAIRO — The Egyptian government intensified efforts to crush a fresh wave of protests on Wednesday, banning public gatherings, detaining hundreds of people and sending police officers to scatter protesters who defied the ban and demanded an end to the government of President Hosni Mubarak.

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The skirmishes started early in the afternoon, and soon, small fires illuminated large clashes under an overpass. Riot police officers using batons, tear gas and rubber-coated bullets cleared busy avenues; other officers set upon fleeing protesters, beating them with bamboo staves.

Egypt has an extensive and widely feared security apparatus, and it deployed its might in an effort to crush the protests. But it was not clear whether the security forces were succeeding in intimidating protesters or rather inciting them to further defiance.

In contrast to the thousands who marched through Cairo and other cities on Tuesday, the groups of protesters were relatively small. Armored troop carriers rumbled throughout Cairo’s downtown on Wednesday to the thud of tear-gas guns. There were signs that the crackdown was being carefully calibrated, with security forces using their cudgels and sometimes throwing rocks, rather than opening fire.

But again and again, despite the efforts of the police, the protesters in Cairo regrouped and at one point even forced security officers, sitting in the safety of two troop carriers, to retreat.

“This is do or die,” said Mustafa Youssef, 22, a student who marched from skirmish to skirmish with friends, including one nursing a rubber-bullet wound. “The most important thing to do is to keep confronting them.”

Late on Wednesday, Reuters reported, protesters in Suez set a government building on fire, according to security officials and witnesses; the fire spread through parts of the provincial administration office but was put out before the flames engulfed the entire building.

Dozens of protesters also threw gasoline bombs at the office of the ruling party in Suez, Reuters reported, but they did not set it on fire. Police officers fired tear gas to push back the demonstrators.

Elsewhere, the authorities had better success smothering the unrest. A significant police presence in Alexandria, where protesters on Tuesday tore down a portrait of Mr. Mubarak, managed to contain demonstrations quickly when they began Wednesday. Several dozen young men tried to gather on the Corniche, a boulevard along the Mediterranean, but the gathering was quickly broken up by more than 100 police officers in riot gear assisted by plainclothes security officers. The baton-wielding officers arrested several protesters as the rest scattered.

In the poor Alexandria neighborhood of Abu Suleiman, a demonstration lasted for more than half an hour before it was shut down by the police. Nearly 100 people wended their way through narrow back streets, chanting, “Come down, come down, Egyptians,” to neighbors, who peered down on them from windows on the higher floors.

The Associated Press, quoting witnesses, said that riot police officers with batons attacked about 100 protesters in the central Egyptian city of Asyut, arresting nearly half of them.

The government said about 800 people had been arrested throughout the country since Tuesday morning, but human rights groups said there had been more than 2,000 arrests.

Abroad, there were growing expressions of concern from Egypt’s allies. The United States ambassador in Cairo, Margaret Scobey, called on the government “to allow peaceful public demonstrations,” and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated that call in blunt remarks to reporters. The German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, speaking to reporters, said, “We are very worried about how the situation in Egypt is developing.”

But despite signs that the protests were taking a domestic toll — the country’s benchmark stock index fell more than 6 percent — Egyptian officials, at least publicly, were mostly dismissive.

In a statement, Mr. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party reiterated the government’s assertion that the protests were engineered by the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition movement. “The Brotherhood organization is illegal, and a number of parties are exploiting the enthusiasm of youth to achieve chaos,” the statement said. Abdel Moneim Said, a member of the N.D.P. and the chairman of Al Ahram, which publishes the state-owned newspaper of the same name, explained the government’s lack of concern.

“The state is strong,” he said. “There is a history of there being a moment of exhaustion, and there is a kind of resilience on the part of the government. It happened with the terrorist groups.”

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Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Demonstrators calling for the removal of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt faced riot police in Cairo on Wednesday. More Photos »

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Egypt Cracks Down on Protesters

Protesters Defy Egypt's Govermnent

The Long U.S. Relationship With Mubarak

Egypt’s Young Seize Role of Key Opposition to Mubarak (January 27, 2011)
Warily Eyeing Egypt, Israelis Feel Like Spectators (January 27, 2011)
The Lede Blog: Egyptian Bloggers Report on New Unrest(January 26, 2011)
A Call for Calm in Tunis(January 26, 2011)
Lens Blog: Photographer Attacked by Police in Tunisia(January 25, 2011)
The Lede Blog: YouTube Video of Protests in Egypt (January 25, 2011)
Ousted Lebanese Leader Swallows Rivals’ Bitter Pill(January 26, 2011)

Related in Opinion

Editorial: Mr. Mubarak Is Put on Notice (January 27, 2011)

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Mohammed Abu Zaid/Associated Press

The scene in downtown Cairo on Tuesday. More Photos »

As the protesters marched against a backdrop of Beaux-Arts buildings and bustling shops in downtown Cairo, they showed few signs of fatigue. They pressed their demands with antigovernment chants, threw stones and set fire to trash and rows of tires. They seemed undaunted by the police officers in padded black riot gear, members of the central security forces, who formed lines to interrupt their roaming demonstrations.

The protesters seemed far more worried about burly plainclothes officers, part of the feared state security services. The officers carried wooden planks, short clubs and other crude weapons, and as they stormed the gatherings, they beat anyone who happened to be standing in the way, including reporters.

The police set the tone as the day’s skirmishes began, beating several protesters with bamboo canes outside the Egyptian lawyers’ syndicate building.

Later, the clashes spilled into the streets of the working-class neighborhood of Boulaq, where residents and a few workers joined the protesters.

There was a tense standoff on Galaa Street, as nervous officers, surrounded by small fires, faced an army of angry young men who hurled pieces of broken concrete. An officer sitting atop an armored jeep fired tear-gas canisters that scattered the demonstrators. The officers took off their helmets and smiled, celebrating their victory.

It lasted only a few minutes, because soon the protesters regrouped and charged two personnel carriers. The protest wound its way past an upscale hotel and onto the Corniche, where plainclothes officers chased down the protesters, dragging several away as their friends tried to intervene. At one point, the officers ordered out the passengers on a public bus and used it as a detention center.

Half an hour later, Mr. Youssef, the student, and his friends met up with a large group of protesters who waved flags as they hopped through a clothing market. The young men, like many of the protesters interviewed since Tuesday, said they were not affiliated with any political party.

“If we were Ikhwan,” Mr. Youssef said, referring to the Muslim Brotherhood, “we’d be much better organized.”

The vendors in the market stalls shouted words of encouragement. The police, for a moment, were nowhere to be seen. One vendor, Mohamed Abdul Aziz, said that Mr. Mubarak had brought the protests on himself. “I hope this doesn’t end until he leaves,” he said.

A few minutes later, tear gas filled the market.

Reporting was contributed by Mona El-Naggar and Dawlat Magdy from Cairo, and Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet from Alexandria, Egypt.

Drawing an Escape From the Chill of Winter

ART REVIEW

Drawing an Escape From the Chill of Winter

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: January 26, 2011

REPRINTS

January may be the cruelest month for people with serious art gallery habits. It snows, it freezes, it daunts. Still, this week brings alternatives. The Winter Antiques Show is in full swing at the Park Avenue Armory, and armchair art lovers can log onto the VIP Art Fair — which bills itself as the world’s first online version — although apparently its system is so taxed that digital browsing has been at times a challenge.

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Lowell Libson Ltd., London

Master Drawings New York 2011 includes Edward Lear’s “Cedars of Lebanon” at one of two dozen participating art galleries. More Photos »

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Monroe Warshaw, via Alexander Gallery

A 16th-century drawing by the Belgian artist Anthoni Bays found by the art dealer Monroe Warshaw. It is a study for a painting in a museum in the Czech Republic. A photo of the painting is also on display at the Alexander Gallery.More Photos »

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Jill Newhouse Gallery

A graphite on paper drawing from 1921 by Lovis Corinth is at the Jill Newhouse Gallery. More Photos »

A third possibility is Master Drawings New York 2011, tailor made for those who prefer actual art galleries and art in the flesh, but need motivation in inclement weather. This annual confab, now in its fifth year, consists of some two dozen drawing exhibitions mounted in galleries mostly on or near Madison Avenue, and can be seen through Saturday (or a bit longer in some cases).

Organized by both local and European dealers, most of whom usually work privately, these shows amount to a geographically dispersed art fair while offering total immersion in the most intimate of art mediums, presented in some of the city’s coziest gallery spaces. European material from late Renaissance to early Modern predominates, although there are many earlier examples, as well as detours into American and postwar works as well as the odd oil study or painting. The quality is up and down; some shows are overall a bit sleepier than last year, but each has at least a few treasures the likes of which you don’t often see. (A complete list of shows is available atmasterdrawingsinnewyork.com.)

For example, among much else of interest in the 19th-century European works at James McKinnon, a London dealer camped out at Clinton Howells Antiques at 150 East 72nd Street, you will encounter six small pencil portraits of soldiers made by Jean-Baptiste Wicar (1762-1834), a student of Ingres, during Napoleon’s Italian campaign.

Monroe Warshaw, a New York private dealer, has squeezed his display into a small, street-level space at the Alexander Gallery (942 Madison Avenue) where you may boggle at a very rare, elaborate study for a painting of a banquet scene from around 1578 by a Belgian artist named Anthoni Bays. Teeming with nearly 40 figures and intimating more than one vanishing point, it depicts the visit of a papal diplomat to the estate of Jacob Hannibal of Hohenem, in western Austria. With the help of a European curator Mr. Warshaw has located the painting — to which Bays added 14 more figures —in a municipal museum in Policka, Czech Republic, and included a photograph here.

Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art’s excellent display of 20th-century South American drawings at 23 East 73rd Street includes a fantastic if anomalous drawing by Frida Kahlotitled “The True Tease” (1946). A dense, extended doodle, it embeds a lexicon of Kahlo motifs — a hand, veins, some eyes, several breasts — in a geodesic constellation fraught with stars and spirals that seem straight out of late Kandinsky. Across the street, where the New York dealer Marianne Elrick-Manley has a show of drawings by 20th-century sculptors at Gallery Schlesinger (24 East 73rd Street), the same geodesic structure, greatly pared down, appears in a 1969 drawing by the Venezuelan artist Gego.

At Adler & Conkright Fine Art (24 East 71st Street) one of the main attractions among the mainly Russian and German early-20th-century works is “Bahnsteig,” a superb collage-drawing that shows Robert Michel (1897-1983) working brilliantly with ideas more familiar in the art of Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield and Max Ernst. A tribute to frenetic urban life, the work is dominated by an architectonic monster flanked by, among other things, two small color images of a man smoking — probably from cigar labels or lottery tickets — that suggest vacation-theme billboards.

This year’s Master Drawings shows resemble a pocketful of lenses, each offering its own magnified close-up of some aspect of drawings infinite variety. The perspectives range from narrow to broad according to style, period and nationality.

For highly focused I recommend the marvelous display of all things Dutch and Flemish (and the occasional German) that Mireille Mosler has assembled in her gallery at 35 East 67th Street, which features several dozen botanical watercolors of tulips clustered around an enticing facsimile of a cabinet of wonders. The works that Mia N. Weiner, has brought to L’Antiquaire & the Connoisseur (36 East 73rd Street) shine especially in the areas of French and Italian old masters, while Les Enluminures, the Paris dealer at C.G. Boerner(downstairs from Mary-Anne Martin at 23 East 73rd Street) only has eyes for miniatures and illuminated manuscripts. The star of its stunning exhibition of mostly 16th-century French material is a book of hours once owned by Francis I of France.

Lowell Libson, ensconced at Mitchell-Innes & Nash (1018 Madison Avenue, at 78th Street), has a nearly all-English presentation that includes several lively landscapes by Thomas Gainsborough and a small but majestic little study, “The Cedars of Lebanon” by Edward Lear, best known as the probable inventor of the limerick.

Next door at Graham Arader(1016 Madison Avenue, at 78th Street), José de la Mano, a Madrid dealer, appends a series of illustrations of the Spanish Civil War to several centuries worth of Spanish drawings. Commissioned in the late 1930s by none other than Gen. Francisco Franco and appropriately Social Realist in style, they are fascinating documents, full of muscular, heroic looking figures, even though they depict the misdeeds of the Republican opposition.

Andrew Wyld, a London dealerwho concentrates on English material and is visiting at Dickinson (19 East 66th Street), has several more alluring works by Lear, including an oil study of a sunny Sicilian shoreline that is a marvel of exquisite free-handedness. Also here: a small, eye-catching pencil portrait of a man appraising the world from beneath a wide-brimmed hat by George Romney.

At Shepherd & Derom (58 East 79th Street), Margot Gordon offers a judicious eclecticism that ranges from a sprightly ink drawing of two putti by Raphael to a strangely Symbolist-looking work in charcoal, chalk and ink from 1984-85 by the Arte Povera artist Giuseppe Penone. Crispian Riley-Smith, a British dealer sharing the space with Ms. Gordon, runs a slightly tighter ship, expanding beyond his focus on 17th and 18th-century European drawings, to include 19th-century Dutch drawings. Jan van Ravenswaay’s finely detailed farmyard scene, from 1822, pays tribute to a long national tradition but still achieves a life of its own.

In some instances the passion for drawings of all kinds seems to be the guiding principle. At Betty Krulik Fine Art (15 East 71st Street), Richard A. Berman’s material encompases both a mid-16th century study for “The Virgin Annunciate” by Andrea Meldolla (called Schiavone) so strangely mannered and modern looking it might almost be by Balthus, and “Stein 1964,” by Donald Evans (1945-1977), an American artist who specialized in delicate renderings of imaginary stamps. Those in this work commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.” Each stamp quotes a complete poem.

A similar omnivorousness prevails at Richard L. Feigen (34 East 69th Street), where a strikingly varied handful of drawings by Jean Dubuffet mingle with much earlier works, including a wonderfully charged ink and watercolor rendering of St. Jerome praying in the wilderness, with lion, by the 16th-century Flemish artist Jan Wierix. And at David Tunick (19 East 66th Street) the extremes include a large landscape capriccio from 1701 by Hendrik Soukens that is every bit as busy as Mr. Warshaw’s Anthoni Bays banquet scene and a spare circus act, in wiry ink lines, reminiscent of Calder but actually by Chagall.

The offerings from Nissman, Abromson, of Brookline, Mass., who have taken over one floor at Jill Newhouse (4 East 81st Street), run the gamut from 16th- to 20th-century Italian works, including a dark, especially taut factory scene from the 1940s by Mario Sironi. Upstairs Ms. Newhouse is concentrating on the decades around 1900, with a spectacular drawing of a girl spreading her too-knowing hands across a book, by Lovis Corinth, and a strikingly modern study for a menu by Degas. A large landscape in distemper by Vuillard may encourage a kinder view of his late work.

Elaborating one medium in such random yet rich detail, Master Drawings New York shakes up, reshuffles and expands art history, never a bad thing.

A version of this review appeared in print on January 27, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.

25 Years of Digital Vandalism

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

25 Years of Digital Vandalism

By WILLIAM GIBSON

Published: January 26, 2011

REPRINTS

VANCOUVER, British Columbia

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Mark Pernice

Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay(January 16, 2011)

Related in Opinion

Op-Ed Contributor: From Bullets to Megabytes (January 27, 2011)

IN January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest version of their heart-monitoring software from piracy. They called it Brain, and it was basically a wheel-clamp for PCs. Computers that ran their program, plus this new bit of code, would stop working after a year, though they cheerfully provided three telephone numbers, against the day. If you were a legitimate user, and could prove it, they’d unlock you.

But in the way of all emergent technologies, something entirely unintended happened. The Alvis’ wheel-clamp was soon copied by a certain stripe of computer hobbyist, who began to distribute it, concealed within various digital documents that people might be expected to want to open. Because almost all these booby-trapped files went out on floppy disks, the virus spread at a pre-Internet snail’s pace.

Still, it did wreak a certain amount of low-grade havoc, freezing computers across the world. The hobbyists did it because they could, or to proudly demonstrate that they could, or to see what would happen, or simply because they thought it was neat.

This proved hellishly embarrassing for the Alvi brothers, whose three telephone numbers were often inadvertently included in the files, and eventually they had to cut all three lines. There were far too many angry callers, mainly from the United States and Britain. In short, the road to our present universe teeming with viruses, worms and Trojan horses was paved, a quarter-century ago this month, with the Alvi brothers’ good intentions of securing their intellectual property.

At the time, I found it surprising that these virus-writers were apparently amateurs, civilians. I had imagined computer viruses as strategic military weapons, the business of governments, not practical jokers. Viruses might be sometimes purloined by specialist criminals looking for a big score but were never something one could cobble together at home.

But precisely the opposite happened. Virus-writers seemed, at least at first, to be in it for anything but money. The outcome was simply vandalism, as dull as someone smashing out the light fixtures in a bus shelter. Random bits of software or pieces of equipment would temporarily quit functioning. Random strangers were anonymously discommoded. Somewhere, I assumed, someone had a rather abstract giggle.

I wasn’t impressed, however arcane the know-how that was required. But I was embarrassed at how thoroughly I’d missed this in my fiction: the pettiness of most virus-writing, the banality of the result. I had never depicted, much less imagined, anyone doing anything as pointlessly ill-intentioned. (I began to try, on the margins of my work, to remedy that oversight, if only for the sake of naturalism.)

Last fall, when I learned of the Stuxnet attack on the computers running Iran’s nuclear program, I briefly thought that here, finally, was the real thing: a cyberweapon purpose-built by one state actor to strategically interfere with the business of another.

But as more details emerged, it began to look less like something new and more like a piece of hobbyist “street” technology, albeit one expensively optimized for a specific attack. The state actor — said to be Israel, perhaps working with the United States, though no one is sure — had simply built on the unpaid labor of generations of hobbyist vandals.

Stuxnet isn’t spectacularly original, as computer worms go, and those Iranian systems aren’t terribly exotic. They’re like ours. As a result, I expect we’ll see a wave of unpleasant backwash, with military money and technology beefing up the code, the digital DNA, of the descendants of Brain.

Any hobbyist worth his or her salt will, in turn, be admiring the Stuxnet code that shut down the Iranian centrifuges, looking to imitate and improve on it. And non-state players, from digital vandals to terrorists, will be casting an appraising eye, if they haven’t already, at the computers that monitor and control more ordinary but nonetheless critical systems: water treatment and distribution, sewage, oil and gas pipelines, electrical transmission lines, wind farms and nuclear power plants.

Should the lights go out in our online bus shelters one day, or some critical control system go spectacularly awry, it may in a sense, however distantly, be because Israel found a way to shut down Iran’s centrifuges. But in another way it will be the result of a bright idea two brothers once had, in the vicinity of Lahore Railway Station, to innocently clamp a digital pirate’s wheel.

William Gibson is the author, most recently, of the novel “Zero History.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 27, 2011, on page A31 of the New York edition.

miércoles, 26 de enero de 2011

Los diez hoteles más cutres de Europa

Por fortuna ningún hotel español forma parte de esta clasificación

BITACORAS / MADRID

Día 26/01/2011 - 10.56h

14 COMENTARIOS

No es la primera vez que os presentamos los resutados de un estudio elaborado en base a la opinión de los miles de usuarios que forman parte de TripAdvisor. Tras la celebración de los Premios Travellers’ Choice Hotels que, hace tan solo unos días, reconocían a los mejores hoteles del mundo en base a las valoraciones de los viajeros de esta comunidad virtual, se acaba de publicar un ranking que da la vuelta a la tortilla y presenta los diez hoteles más sucios de Europa. Nuestro país puede estar orgulloso por partida doble: no solamente porque los Premios Travellers' Choice premiaron a muchos establecimientos españoles en categorías mundiales y europeas, sino porque ningún hotel de España aparece en el deshonroso listado de los más mugrientos del continente. Por el contrario, holandeses, turcos e ingleses no deberían estar muy contentos.

La imagen pertenece a una de las habitaciones del Park Hotel de Londres

1. Club Aqua Gumbet. en Mugla (Turquía). Leer algunas de las opiniones de los usuarios en torno a este establecimiento, es suficiente como para plantearse no pasar una noche en él. Comentarios como “no seguro para seres humanos”, “el infierno en la tierra” o “bienvenido a la edad de piedra” no dejan bien parado a estos apartamentos turcos.

2. Altin Orfe Hotel, en Mugla (Turquía). No abandonamos este país (ni la ciudad) porque allí se encuentra otro lugar non grato para los viajeros, que no lo recomiendan en un 95% de las ocasiones con descripciones como “entra bajo tu propio riesgo”, “¡encontramos una pistola cargada en la piscina!” o “no vayas si estás en tu sano juicio”.

3. Cromwell Crown, en Londres (Reino Unido). Parece ser que su situación "en pleno corazón londinense y cerca de las principales atraciones", es lo único bueno de este establecimiento cuyos usuarios han comentado “insalubre, en ruinas”, “recomiéndaselo a tu peor enemigo” y “cucarachas por todas partes”.

4. Corbigoe Hotel, en Londres (Reino Unido). Que la web del hotel no integre ni una imagen de sus habitaciones o instalaciones ya es poco alentador; los los viajeros que se han alojado aquí advierten que es “desastroso”, “una pesadilla” o incluso añaden “huya mientras puedas”.

5. Park Hotel, en Londres (Reino Unido). En este caso, remitimos a la propia página de opiniones en tripadvisor para que ustedes mismos juzguen por las fotografías. El porcentaje de usuarios que no lo recomiendan es del 94%, con valoraciones como “el terror en Londres”, “es un bunker” o “ni por una noche”.

6. Hotel Lantaerne, en Amsterdam (Holanda). En este caso, más allá de la ficha de hotel en Tripadvisor, hemos querido leer las opiniones que recoge la página de lugar ofrecida por Google y que ratifican la suciedad de este establecimiento. Algunos calificativos de los viajeros que lo han visitado son “asqueroso”, “el hotel más sucio de la historia”, y un sorprendente “¡un ratón en la habitación!”.

7. Hotel Y Boulevard, en Amsterdam (Holanda): sus dos estrellas parecen no estar a la altura de la relación calidad precio exigida por los usuarios, que denuncian “pague mucho por tener que dormir abrazado a sus pertenencias”, “antiguo y cutre” o “sucio, peligroso, y para nada como en sus fotografías”. No recomendado por el 84% de los usuarios que han pasado la noche aquí.

8. Blair Victoria & Tudor Inn Hotel, en Londres (Reino Unido): La fotogalería del hotel es tan misteriosa como que cuenta con 27 imágenes de las cuales sólo una presenta una tétrica mesita de una habitación. Comentarios como “triste”, “para echarse a llorar”, o “mi peor experiencia en un hotel” evidencian que estamos ante un establecimiento indeseable.

9. Hotel Manofa, en Amsterdam (Holanda). Volvemos al país de los tulipantes para encontrar no precisamente flora; “si te gustan los animalejos”, “¡chinches y pulgas!, ¡qué horror de viaje!”, o “entraron en nuestra habitación”, son algunas de las opiniones del 74% de los huéspedes que no lo recomiendan.

10. Hotel The Globe, en Amsterdam (Holanda). Terminamos con este hotel holandés que presume de tener una original cafetería ambientada en los deportes. Parece ser lo único bueno ya que los usuarios han declarado “preferiría dormir en la calle antes que quedarme en este agujero de chiches otra vez”, o “pensé que me había quedado en sitios horribles antes, hasta que llegué a The Globe”.