IHT Quick Read: Nov. 28

NEWS While finance ministers from the euro zone and the International Monetary Fund bridged their main differences over a bailout for Greece early Tuesday, bringing closer the release of long-delayed emergency aid, what they left undecided means this long-running drama - and the cohesion of the euro union - is far from settled. James Kanter reports from Brussels.

North Korea has stepped up what could be preparations to send up a new rocket from its northwestern launching station in defiance of a United Nations ban, the satellite operator DigitalGlobe said Tuesday, citing recent satellite imagery of the facility. Choe Sang-hun reports from Seoul.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has preached austerity, even as public spending cuts have deepened recessions in the periphery, actually increasing the debt load. Nicholas Kulish reports from Berlin.

Rebel leaders in the Democratic Republic of Congo sent out mixed signals on Tuesday, with some saying they were withdrawing troops from the strategic city of Goma, which they captured last week, while others maintained that such a pullout would occur only if the Congolese government met a lengthy list of demands. Jeffrey Gettleman reports from Nairobi.

Thousands of workers in Italy stormed the locked gates of Europe's largest steel plant on Tuesday after the company halted production and said that a court ruling warning of serious environmental problems would force it to shut down. Rachel Donadio reports from Rome.

With envoys from more than 100 nations convening in Dubai to discuss telecommunications, diverse groups are warning of plans to censor the Internet. But analysts say the real debate is about business. Eric Pfanner reports from Paris.

ARTS “Twelfth Night” is a success in London, with Mark Rylance set to make waves again in the role of Olivia, while “The Magistrate” leaves some room for improvement. Matt Wolf reviews from London.

SPORTS The el ders of Brazilian soccer gave no explanation for the most recent firing of the national team coach, and they now seem determined to reach into the past for the next one. Rob Hughes reports from London.

Growth in China\'s Drone Program Called \'Alarming\'

HONG KONG - Earlier this month, at China's biennial air show in Zhuhai, an imposing fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles was seen on the tarmac - drones bearing a striking resemblance to the American aircraft that have proved so deadly in attacks on insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Israel, Britain and the United States have pretty much had a corner on the global drone market, but the recent Chinese air show and a Pentagon report have exploded that notion.

“In a worrisome trend, China has ramped up research in recent years faster than any other country,” said the unclassified analysis published in July by the Defense Science Board. “It displayed its first unmanned system model at the Zhuhai air show five years ago, and now every major manufacturer for the Chinese military has a research center devoted to unmanned systems.”

The report, which said “the military significance of China's move into unmanned systems is alarming,” suggested that Ch ina could “easily match or outpace U.S. spending on unmanned systems, rapidly close the technology gaps and become a formidable global competitor in unmanned systems.”

Two Chinese models on display at the Zhuhai show - the CH-4 and the Wing Loong, or Pterodactyl - appeared to be clones of the Reaper and Predator drones that are fixtures in the U.S. arsenal. A larger drone, the Xianglong, or Soaring Dragon, is a long-range, high-altitude model that would seem to be a cousin of the RQ-4 Global Hawk.

Huang Wei, the director of the CH-4 program at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, told the state-run newspaper Global Times that his lightweight drone can carry cameras, ground-searching radar, missiles and smart bombs.

The paper reported that the drone's range of 3,500 kilometers, or about 2,200 miles, made it “ideal to conduct surveillance missions” over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, which are claimed by Beijing, Tokyo and Taipei.

< p>“As the Americans say,” Mr. Huang said, “the U.A.V. is fit for missions that are dirty, dangerous and dull.”

My colleague Scott Shane, in an article on drone warfare last year, posed a few of the tough questions about the spread and use of drone warfare:

If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say? What if India uses remotely controlled craft to hit terrorism suspects in Kashmir, or Russia sends drones after militants in the Caucasus? American officials who protest will likely find their own example thrown back at them.

“The problem is that we're creating an international norm” - asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Missile Contagion,” who has called for tougher expor t controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.”

The qualities that have made lethal drones so attractive to the Obama administration for counterterrorism appeal to many countries and, conceivably, to terrorist groups: a capacity for leisurely surveillance and precise strikes, modest cost, and most important, no danger to the operator, who may sit in safety thousands of miles from the target.

Dozens of countries have bought or built their own unmanned aircraft, primarily for surveillance, although as Scott points out, “adding missiles or bombs is hardly a technical challenge.”

There were no drone flights or demonstrations reported this year at Zhuhai, although the Global Times suggested that 20 red stars and 15 rocket outlines painted on the fuselage of a Pterodactyl stood for 20 airborne missions and 15 missile firings.

A Japanese military plane recently took photos of a drone circling some Chinese naval vessels on a training exercise near Okinawa. The Pentagon believes the drone had been deployed from one of the Chinese ships.

There was no sign this year of Anjian, or the Dark Sword, part of a rumored new generation of Chinese stealth drones. The Pentagon study said the Anjian “represents the aspirations of the Chinese to design something even the Western powers don't have - a supersonic drone capable of air-to-air combat as well as ground strikes.”

Defense News reported recently from Zhuhai that there was a change in tone in how the Chinese were marketing their drones. At the show in 2010, videos and publicity material showed unmanned aircraft attacking American naval vessels, “swarming over aircraft carrier battle groups like angry bees,” Defense News said. This year, however, “a stealthy Blue Shark” drone was shown attacking a Russian carrier.

In March, China announced an 11.2 percent increase in military spending. Its navy has held blue-water trials of the country's first and only aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, a refitted Soviet-era castoff. And the official Xinhua news agency reported Sunday that a Chinese-made J-15 jet fighter had successfully taken off and landed on the carrier, as Edward Wong reported from Beijing.

Michael Schiffer, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia, said last summer that Beijing's broad and rapid military buildup is “potentially destabilizing” in the Pacific, as my colleague Elisabeth Bumiller reported. That buildup was detailed in this Pentagon report.

“Mr. Schiffer said that no single development led him to describe China's arms buildup as ‘potentially destabilizing,' although Pentagon officials had increasingly said they were concerned about China's military intentions in the Pacific,” Elisabeth wrote. “Instead, he said, he used the phrase because of China's lack of transparency and its trends in military prowess.”

Th at prowess would seem to include drones.

“The scope and speed of unmanned-aircraft development in China is a wake-up call that has both industrial and military implications,” said the report by the Defense Science Board. “U.S. exports of unmanned systems are highly constrained. China, with no such constraints, has made U.A.V.s a new focus of military exports.”

The analysis recommended that U.S. military planners and the Defense Intelligence Agency should “aggressively” incorporate drones and drone warfare into their war games, simulations and exercises.

Alex Ross Inspires a Festival: All 20th-Century Music, All the Time

LONDON - First there was the book. Now there is the festival. The Southbank Centre announced the details Tuesday morning of The Rest Is Noise, a year-long festival of 20th-century music inspired by Alex Ross's 2007 book of the same name. Mr. Ross, a music critic for The New Yorker magazine, won considerable acclaim for “The Rest Is Noise,” a sweeping survey of 20th-century classical music.

“When I read the book in its proof form, I called up Alex Ross right away,” said Jude Kelly, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre, speaking to journalists and music professionals at the press launch. “I said, let me stage this.”

Ms. Kelly stressed that Mr. Ross, while giving his blessing to the festival, has had no involvement in the programming. That has been largely carried out by Ms. Kelly and Gillian Moore, the head of classical music at the Southbank Centre, and Timothy Walker, the artistic director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

The a mbitious plan is to survey 20th-century music and arts chronologically. Twelve intensive weekend programs throughout 2013 will aim to contextualize the music through talks, workshops and films. (The festival opens with the first of the weekends, “Here Comes the 20th Century,” on Jan. 19.)

Ms. Kelly said that she hoped to give audiences the chance not just to discover and explore 20th-century music, but to link the music to “the history of science, technology, philosophical and political movements,” and to ‘the ideas and individuals that shaped the 20th century and the music that was its soundtrack.” The packed schedule of talks over the 12 weekends includes several by Mr. Ross, as well as figures from diverse fields, including the mathematician Marcos Du Sautoy, the historian Orlando Figes, and Jane Pritchard, the dance curator of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The music program, beginning with works by Richard Strauss and concluding with John Adams, will be the centerpiece of the festival, with 100 concerts given by 18 orchestras, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Southbank Sinfonia, the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. An accompanying BBC series, “The Sound of Fury: A Century of Modern Music,” will run during the festival.

Vladimir Jurowski, the principal conductor of the London Philharmonic, which is resident at the Southbank Centre, claimed that his orchestra will be the first in the world to devote an entire year's program to 20th-century music. “If I had my way, we would be the first in the world to devote a year to playing just 21st-century music,” Mr. Jurowski added. “Perhaps that's the next project.”

Mr. Ross, are you listening?

In Cairo, Politics on Screen Delayed by Uprising in the Streets

After going dark last year because of political revolution, the Cairo Film Festival was set to come back in 2012 stronger than ever: entries from 64 countries, 3 competitions and a slate of political, edgy movies. But the opening of the festival, which was scheduled for Tuesday, had to be postponed once again because of political unrest in the city. Opening night is now scheduled for Wednesday.

After President Mohamed Morsi seized new powers last week, police and demonstrators clashed in Tahrir Square. The film festival's director, Ezzat Abo Ouf, decided to postpone opening night, according to the Egyptian news agency Ahram.

Even before its planned start, the festival, which began in 1976, was already deeply engaged politically. This year's festival honors those who died in the 25th of January Revolution. The opening night movie, “Winter of Discontent,” by the Egyptian director Ibrahim El Batout, is an account of last winter's events on the streets of C airo. It recounts the lives of an activist, a journalist and a state security officer as the revolution approaches.

In the light of the anti-government uproar, the festival's sponsorship by the ministry of culture has taken on new significance. Wael Omar, one of the directors of the Egyptian film “In Search of Oil and Sand,” declared:

“I refuse to participate in a film festival associated with the ministry of culture when the Egyptian government is attacking citizens on the streets as they voice their disagreement with Morsi's undemocratic and unprecedented Constitutional Declaration, which placed him as a dictator.”

Mr. Omar and his co-director have withdrawn their movie from the competition.

Shirin Neshat: An Artist - Iranian, Muslim and Female - Engages

I first interviewed Shirin Neshat two years ago, in the dimly lighted backroom of an upscale New York restaurant, on the release of the Iranian artist's directorial debut, “Women Without Men.” The movie about the 1953 coup d'état in Iran earned her the Silver Lion as best director at the 66th Venice Film Festival.

The complexities of Ms. Neshat's work has captivated me ever since she first attained international recognition in the mid ‘90s. I was intrigued by our parallel worlds â€" two Muslim Middle Eastern women, eyes lined with pencils of coal, residing in the United States. More than two decades separate us in age, a full generation in either of our respective homelands, Iran and Turkey, but the much longer continuum of culture and gender awareness unite us.

Last week I called her up, having just seen her exhibition, “The Book of Kings,” at the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont in Paris. The phone rang â€" once, twice â€" while I rehearsed a message to leave, and then a voice surfaced. Shirin remembered me, said she was leaving soon for Egypt. Could I come to her SoHo studio? We were on.

This new body of work â€" black-and-white photo portraits and a video installation â€" taps the Arab Spring for themes of violence, submission, power, authority, love, Islam as religion and Islam as politics. The work marks a turning point in the artist's career, where she lifts her eyes from her native Iran to explore the larger questions of life in the Middle East.

Read the interview and view intimate photographs of Shirin Neshat's studio taken by me after our conversation in the pages of the IHT.

Canadian Welcomed as \'Team England\' Bank Boss

LONDON - Britain's press reached for the soccer analogy to explain why a foreigner had been picked to head the Bank of England, the country's central bank.

Reporting the surprise announcement that Mark J. Carney, the governor of the Bank of Canada, is to take on the key financial post, newspapers commented that it was much like appointing an outsider to head a top soccer team, as long as he was the best man for the job.

The Guardian dubbed Mr. Carney “the Treasury's Sven-Göran Eriksson, ” referring to the Swedish soccer manager who guided the England national team from 2001 to 2006.

Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph, in one of many media commentaries that praised the government's choice, acknowledged that some “will wonder why we need to be bringing in a foreigner in the first place. This not premier league football after all.”

Reuters explained to its international readers that “Britons are used to not worrying about nationality and embrac ing professional credentials instead, allowing foreigners to run their national football teams as well as top companies.” It said the choice could usher central bankers into the realm of globe-trotting elites that dominate the top jobs in business and sports.

Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, hailed the extraordinary and admirable choice of a foreigner such as Mr. Carney to assume the country's most important official position, “even if Canadians are not very foreign.”

He cautioned, however, “It is a gamble because a foreign national will be assuming a job that is inescapably political and, in the current difficult economic and financial circumstances of the U.K., even more political than usual.”

The Daily Express, which was not alone in describing the 47-year-old Mr. Carney as a George Clooney lookalike, said he was unlikely to fail the Britishness test when he made his application for citizenship - “His wife is E nglish, he studied at Oxford and for many years worked in London.”

The Daily Telegraph introduced its readers to Diana, the central banker's British wife, by describing her as an eco-warrior and outspoken critic of global financial institutions who had expressed sympathy for the Occupy movement.

Mr. Carney will embark on his new post with considerable cross-party goodwill. Leaders of the opposition Labour party were falling over each other to welcome his appointment.

“In my view this is a good choice, a good judgment, and his experience will be invaluable,” according to Ed Balls, Labour's financial spokesman in the House of Commons.

Mr. Carney will not be the first Canadian to hold a top post in the British establishment. Andrew Bonar Law, Conservative prime minister from 1922 to 1923, was born in New Brunswick in 1858 (although sticklers will point out that was nine years before the province joined the Canadian Confederation).

Ill-health cut short his term, which lasted only 209 days.

As for other foreigners in top jobs, London's Metro newspaper recalled Mr. Eriksson's “very conservative attitude on the pitch” in the six years that he managed the England soccer team.

Recalling the Swede's mixed record, Metro said it was hoped Mr. Carney's reign as governor of the Bank of England “will be significantly less tumultuous, and ultimately more successful, than Eriksson's fruitless time in charge of the Three Lions.”

Tips on Military Usage

I asked my colleague Jim Dao, who has done great reporting on the armed forces and military life, for suggestions on avoiding some common missteps in military references.

In writing about this or any specialized field, we want to shun jargon and be clear and accessible to all readers. But we should also take care to avoid lapses that would lead expert readers to question our reporting or our attention to detail.

Here are tips from Jim on a grab bag of military-related usage and style points:

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1. Decorated
Let's be careful - and, when possible, specific - in describing a service member as “decorated.”

There are highly significant medals (Silver Stars, Navy Crosses, etc.), and then there are lesser medals and campaign ribbons that some in the military joke are awarded for little more than breathing in a combat theater. Describing someone as “decorated” is vague and could be misleading.

Where the line should be drawn is deb atable, and need not be set in stone. But if a story describes someone as “decorated,” we should ask what the decoration is. If we don't know, let's not use the “decorated” description. And if we know that someone has earned a significant decoration, consider specifying.

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2. Earn, not win
On the subject of military decorations, we should avoid the phrases “won such-and-such medal” or was a “Silver Star winner.” It's not a game or a contest. The widely accepted style is to say Corporal Smith “earned” or “was awarded” the medal.

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3. Noncommissioned officers vs. officers
This was the subject of a recent correction. Noncommissioned officers are enlisted troops who are sergeants or petty officers and above. “Officer” is short for “commissioned officer,” the college-educated leaders who are appointed to their positions. NCOs are subordinate to commissioned officers. Hence NCOs should not be referred to as of ficers.

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4. Enlisted
There are two main tracks in the military: officer and enlisted. That means not all service members “enlist” when they sign up. Officers “join” or “are commissioned” after attending ROTC or a military academy or officer candidate school. Enlisted troops can be promoted to NCOs eventually, but they do not become officers unless they attend officer candidate school.

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5. Special Forces vs. Special Operations Forces
Not a mistake we make very often, but an easy trap to fall into. Special Forces are the Army unit better known as Green Berets. Navy SEALs are not Special Forces (they may conduct raids at your house if you call them this). Neither are other elite Army units like the Rangers. Both of those units are, however, part of the Special Operations Command and therefore can be called special operations forces, a class that includes units from the Air Force and Marine Corps as well.

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6. M arines are not soldiers
Neither are sailors or airmen. Soldiers are in the Army.

“G.I.'s” - a colloquial term that can be useful in headlines - refers to soldiers, or can describe troops in general. But it should not be used specifically to describe members of the Navy, Air Force or Marines.

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7. Retire vs. separation vs. discharge
There are different ways one can leave the military. Some distinctions are highly technical, but this can be a minefield and is worth special care.

The most basic point is that service members “retire” only after 20 years in service, at which point they become eligible for a military pension (or retirement pay, as veterans prefer to call it). A person who leaves after six years is not retiring (unless it is a medical retirement, which can be granted because of injuries in the line of duty).

A discharge ends one's military obligation. There are several categories, with honorable at the top and dis honorable at the bottom.

To separate from the military means the service member is leaving active duty but may still have an obligation to the reserves.

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8. Veterans
Veterans are those who have left the military and returned to civilian life. So the term should not generally be applied to someone who is still in the military.

 
In a Word

This week's grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.

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Factoid: Enjoys Hollywood films, including “The Godfather.”

“Factoid” suggests a piece of information that is trivial or even unsubstantiated. Let's not use it to mean “interesting fact” or “something you didn't know.”

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I cannot fathom how anyone could enter into this without a number of some sort in mind, so I decided to come up with a rough estimate of what it would cost my spouse and I to have a child.

Make it “my spouse and me,â € the indirect object of “cost.” (The direct object is “what.”)

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It may be that no college leader in the country was as well prepared to face this controversy than Biddy Martin, president of Amherst since September 2011.

We stumble surprisingly often over these kinds of comparisons involving “as” or “than” - perhaps because of hasty or incomplete revision. Make it “as well prepared … as.”

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The first Watson-Crick attempt to build a model of the DNA structure was a disaster. Dr. Watson had misremembered the figure for the water content of DNA that Franklin announced in a lecture. He and Crick proudly invited her and Wilkins to Cambridge to view the model and were humiliated when she instantly pointed out the error.

A reader who didn't know the intricacies of our guidelines on courtesy titles - or who didn't happen to know that Watson is alive, while Crick, Franklin and Wilkins are dead - would simply have been ba ffled about why one has a courtesy title and the others don't. Common sense cries out for consistency in a case like this.

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The seven men on the Politburo Standing Committee have forged close relations to previous party leaders, either through their families or institutional networks.

Not parallel. Repeat “through” or place it before “either.”

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The two coaches stood on the opposite ends of the court on Friday, each one believing their style of play was superior. …

Anthony, Chandler and Wallace - who Woodson used to defend the post - were all in foul trouble during the fourth quarter, which made it difficult for the Knicks to rally.

In the first sentence, make it “his” to agree with “each one.” In the second, make it “whom Woodson used.”

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In Long Beach, on Long Island, a couple bicycles through the autumn chill to the charging station at City Hall to keep their cellphones powered.

Treat “couple” as plural here; make the verb “bicycle,” or rephrase.

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Sir Rex Hunt, the governor of the Falkland Islands when Argentina invaded in 1982, with Lady Mavis at his investiture.

Check the stylebook; it should be “Lady Hunt.”

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I teach physics and the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and my Web site includes a photograph of myself right next to my e-mail address.

No call for the reflexive pronoun. Make it “a photograph of me.”

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At 11:45 a.m. last Tuesday, the editorial staff of The Washington Post was summoned on short notice to an announcement on the fifth floor of its building to hear something they already knew - that Marcus Brauchli would be leaving after four years as executive editor.

The plural “they” doesn't work with the singular “staff.” Rephrase.

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Olympe Bradna, a French-born dancer and actress who charmed Broadway as a child st ar of Paris's touring Folies Bergère and appeared in Hollywood films opposite Gary Cooper and Ronald Reagan before trading stardom for life as a wife and mother, died on Nov. 5 in Stockton, Calif.

It is in the stylebook, with a hyphen: Folies-Bergère.

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Mr. Spielberg's best art often emerges in passages of wordlessness, when the images speak for themselves, and the way he composes his pictures and cuts between them endow the speeches and debates with emotional force, and remind us of what is at stake.

The plural verbs don't agree with the singular subject “way.”

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The Tigers didn't take long to make this decision, bringing in Hunter for a visit on Monday and signing him on Wednesday. And it begs the question, are the Tigers becoming the new Yankees?

This is not what “beg the question” means.

IHT Quick Read: Nov. 27

NEWS Finance ministers from the euro zone and the International Monetary Fund patched up their differences over a bailout for Greece early Tuesday with a spate of measures bringing closer the release of long-delayed emergency aid. James Kanter reports from Brussels.

Japan's quiet resolve to edge past its longstanding reluctance and become more of a regional player comes as the United States and China are staking their own claims to power in Asia. Martin Fackler reports from Tokyo.

In Russia, media and protest circles are debating the social significance of “Sveta,” a young woman caught in a political circus since the pro-Putin fan stumbled into the limelight. Sophia Kishkovsky reports from Moscow.

This year's meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which opened Monday in Doha, Qatar, will focus on firming up pledges that had been negotiated in the summit meetings of the past few years. John Broder reports from Washington.

The decision to call a vote two years ahead of schedule backfired for Artur Mas, the president of Catalonia, who was apparently punished by voters for trying to shift the debate away from his unpopular austerity measures. Raphael Minder reports from Barcelona.

More than a week after the French center-right opposition party's leadership election, the two candidates continued to wrangle over the outcome on Monday after an attempt at mediation by a former prime minister ended in acrimony late Sunday and an internal panel continued to investigate allegations of electoral mismanagement and fraud. Nicola Clark reports from Paris.

Nationwide primaries to choose the candidate who will lead Italy's center-left Democratic Party in elections next spring have ended without a clear winner, setting the stage for a run-off on Sunday between a seasoned party stalwart and a young upstart who has threatened to shake up Italian politics. Elisabetta Povoledo reports from Rome .

FASHION Some fashion designers are applying computer techniques of digital photography to intensify colors in fabrics and their creations, making their patterns more vivid. Suzy Menkes reports from London.