IHT Quick Read: Nov. 29

NEWS Leaders of the Egyptian assembly drafting a new constitution said Wednesday that they would complete their work by the next morning, a move that appeared aimed at trying to defuse a political crisis that has gripped the country since the president issued an edict that put his decisions above judicial scrutiny. David D. Kirkpatrick reports from Cairo.

The European Commission on Wednesday approved a payment of 37 billion euros, or $48 billion, from the euro zone bailout fund to four Spanish banks on the condition that they lay off thousands of employees and close offices. Raphael Minder reports from Madrid and James Kanter from Brussels.

With Greece's coffers nearly empty, the government said Wednesday that it would have to borrow 10 billion to 14 billion euros to pay for a debt buyback that its international creditors have demanded in exchange for releasing more bailout money to the troubled country. Niki Kitsantonis reports from Athens and Liz Alderman fro m Paris.

The new Khalifa shipping port in Abu Dhabi is part of a large-scale project meant to revamp transportation and trade in the emirate. Sara Hamdan reports from Abu Dhabi.

Google is fighting a proposal that would force it and other online aggregators to pay German newspaper and magazine publishers to display snippets of news in Web searches. Kevin J. O'Brien reports from Berlin.

The United States government has temporarily banned the British oil company BP from new federal contracts, citing the company's “lack of business integrity.” John M. Broder reports from Washington and Stanley Reed from London.

This year has ranked among the nine warmest since records began more than 160 years ago, continuing a trend for the planet that is increasing the dangers of extreme weather events, according to United Nations meteorologists. Nick Cumming-Bruce reports from Geneva.

ARTS Many of the artworks owned by the aristocratic Alba family will b e displayed starting Friday in a new gallery space within Madrid's city hall - an unusual event for Spain, which does not have the tradition of historic British families who open their properties and collections to the general public. Raphael Minder reports from Madrid.

Indonesia and Others See \'Embarrassing\' Rise in H.I.V. Infections

HONG KONG - A new United Nations report on H.I.V.-AIDS has some encouraging findings, notably dramatic reductions in new infections in southern Africa, although several countries in Asia now have infection rates 25 percent higher than they were a decade ago.

One of those countries is Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation. The health minister, Nafsiah Mboi, called the U.N. findings “so embarrassing,” especially in light of large expenditures on prevention programs in Indonesia.

“I don't know what mistakes I have made,” she told reporters. “It was shocking to me.”

Statistics from Indonesia's National AIDS Commission cited by The Jakarta Post show that condom use remains low, especially consistent use among sex workers. Ms. Nafsiah, the paper said, has backed the distribution of free condoms to young people, an effort opposed by conservative lawmakers and religious groups in the predominantly Muslim country.

Cho Kah Sin, the co untry director for the Unaids agency, suggested that Indonesia's infection numbers appear higher because the epidemic reached full force there later than it did in other countries.

Another country with worrisome statistics is the Philippines.

Teresita Marie Bagasao, head of the Manila office of Unaids, told The Philippine Daily Inquirer that “while the absolute number of H.I.V. infections in the Philippines is still relatively low, the rate of increase in the number of cases is a cause for concern.”

The Philippine Department of Health said there were an estimated 600 H.I.V. cases in 2001. Last year, the number of new infections was 4,600.

“The Philippines is still one of only seven countries in the world to have recorded a sharp increase in the number of H.I.V. cases,” Ms. Bagasao said. “While other countries managed to stabilize their epidemics, the Philippines still needs to muster the political will to face the challenge posed by this gro wing epidemic.”

The news site Rappler, citing a national health survey, reported that “the proliferation of social media networks and online dating sites in the Philippines have also made casual sexual encounters extremely accessible among the MSM (men who have sex with men) community.”

The U.N. report, issued in conjunction with World AIDS Day this Saturday, shows nine countries with at least 25 percent increases in infection rates since 2001. Six of those countries are in Asia - Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan - in addition to Georgia, Guinea-Bissau and Moldova.

Some 34 million people were living with H.I.V. last year, compared to 29.4 million in 2001, the report said.

“Still, 25 countries have witnessed a decline of 50 percent or more in new H.I.V. infections since 2001,” according to the Web site CSR-Asia. “Among the countries with the greatest declines are Papua New Guinea, Thailand, India and Cambodia.”

As Donald G. McNeil Jr. reported in The Times, the annual U.N. report shows that “globally, progress is steady but slow.”

“By the usual measure of whether the fight against AIDS is being won,” he wrote, “it is still being lost: 2.5 million people became infected last year, while only 1.4 million received lifesaving treatment for the first time.”

Donald cited comments by Michel Sidibé, the executive director of Unaids, about the successes in reducing infection rates, particularly in Africa:

The most important factor, Mr. Sidibé said, was not nationwide billboard campaigns to get people to use condoms or abstain from sex. Nor was it male circumcision, a practice becoming more common in Africa.

Rather, it was focusing treatment on high-risk groups. While saving babies is always politically popular, saving gay men, drug addicts and prostitutes is not, so presidents and religious leaders often had to be per suaded to help them. Much of Mr. Sidibé's nearly four years in his post has been spent doing just that.

Many leaders are now taking “a more targeted, pragmatic approach,” he said, and are “not blocking people from services because of their status.”

The Chinese health authorities last week ordered hospitals to stop refusing treatment to H.I.V. positive patients, state media reported.

The order came after social-media messages began circulating about a 25-year-old man with lung cancer who was denied surgery at a hospital in Tianjin because he was H.I.V. positive. He went to another hospital, did not reveal his infection and got the surgery, according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.

The U.N. report said the number of people on H.I.V. treatment in China has increased nearly 50 percent in the last year.

An excerpt from a recent report on NPR:

New infections in China have nearly quadrupled since 20 07, the report found. HIV prevalence is still generally low in China compared to that in many African countries, but China had nearly 40,000 new diagnoses in 2011, and the steady incline is concerning.

“There is a significant epidemic in men having sex with men in China, which happens in almost all of the major cities,” said Dr. Bernard Schwartlander, a director at Unaids. “The Chinese are very pragmatic people. They have recognized the problem, and they have started a strong and proactive program to reach these populations.”

“They are completely controlling the epidemic among people who are injecting drugs,” said Mr. Sidibé. Even so, the epidemic is growing among homosexual men, he said, with over 30 percent of the new infections occurring among them.

New Geometry in Women\'s Fashion

Go RunwayStripes, checks and digitally generated prints all came down the spring runways.

When I was a sweet 7 years old, my doll drawings were all curves. I drew curly hair, circular eyes, puff-sleeved dresses with full skirts. Even the shoes were round-toed, not pointy like Cinderella's glass slippers. Today, however, any little girl who has her mind set on a career in fashion would do well to add a ruler and a T square to her box of crayons.

Were there anything but straight lines in the spring-summer collections that will hit the stores by the end of the holiday season? The cut was streamlined - lean tunics and pants were practically ubiquito us. Blouses were mostly crisp and collared rather than the full-sleeved peasant variety. Dresses followed a narrow A-line and stood away from the body.

Then there were all of those intersecting prints: straight lines, bold squares or diamond shapes, often raked at an angle (and often inspired by the Miu Miu collection from last season). Sure, polka dots are still around - the residue of Marc Jacobs's fascination with the work of the obsessive Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and his collaboration with her for Louis Vuitton. But one look at Jacobs's Vuitton collection for spring and you have the motif of the entire season ahead: dresses with stripes and checks and one, two, three different hem lengths. As the models descended a pair of escalators at the Vuitton show in Paris, there were nothing but straight lines as far as the eye could see. Jacobs says he was inspired by the artist Daniel Buren's installation of round pegs in the gardens of the Palais Royal, but in fact th ose clothes - not to mention the vertical and horizontal lines in Jacobs's namesake collection - brought to mind the Op Art era of the 1960s.

The geometry of fashion favors either a compass or a ruler. Had I grown up a hundred years ago, at the end of the belle époque, my rounded drawings would have been perfectly in style: circular hats balanced on pouffed up-dos, a bust swelling out like a balcony and a bustle at the rear. The 1920s gal swapped curves for angles, with straight shimmy dresses and neat, cropped hair. This kind of straight-edge dressing may go in and out of fashion, but it always signals a forward march. In the 1960s, linear looks of the space age made a dynamic thrust against the ladylike clothes of the postwar period - all nipped-in New Look jackets and big skirts - just as broad shoulders and sharp tailoring of the '80s would knock out the floppy Woodstock look.

The one word that defines spring 2013 is “graphic. ” If I shut my eyes and wait for fashion images to pop up, I see first the checkered Louis Vuitton collection, then Junya Watanabe's dynamic color blocks on athletic stretch sportswear. I pick up that color blocking again on the zippered, calf-high boots at Jil Sander. I see stripes cutting through the southern Italian poster prints at Dolce & Gabbana; complex, crafted pieces-of-a-puzzle at Proenza Schouler; and the carefree stripes, blocks and zigzags from Yoshiyuki Miyamae at Issey Miyake. But most of all, I see black lines, zapped like strips of electrical tape over airy pink chiffon at Christopher Kane. There could not be a more symbolic way of declaring that fashion is x-ing out femininity.

Why now? The tougher and more masculine geometric angle is a direct response to the girly, fluttery dress-and-cardigan look of the early 2000s. It is also the result of technology. Color blocking achieves a new dimension when it is superimposed on a floral pattern or intermin gled with other graphic prints. Similarly, the sort of body mapping, best illustrated by the queen of prints Mary Katrantzou, could not have been achieved before the advent of digital design. When prints and grids fit convincingly on a garment whose silhouette already succeeds in flattening the body onto one smooth plane, the geometry adds up to a modern look.

So if I take a step back to my childhood, how would my doll drawing look now? An elongated rectangle, crisscrossed with squares and stripes set at an angle. The head is outlined by a sharp bob. The feet might be in pumps with a square block of a heel and a ball as decoration.

Note to you American Dolls: time for an update.

Europe Divided Ahead of U.N. Palestinian Vote

LONDON - Spain has followed France in announcing it will support a Palestinian bid for enhanced status at the United Nations when the issue goes to a vote of the General Assembly.

Within hours, however, Britain indicated on Wednesday that it would abstain unless the Palestinians met its conditions for a “yes” vote.

After the announcements from Paris and Madrid, the Palestinians could have been forgiven for spotting an emerging consensus among the Europeans in favor of its bid on Thursday to achieve recognition as a non-member observer state.

But Britain's likely abstention served to underline the continuing divisions within Europe, some tactical and others fundamental, over how to advance the Mideast peace process. European governments remain almost equally divided over how to address the issue of upgrading Palestine's status. The United States has made it clear it will veto the proposal.

William Hague, the British foreign minister, said he was still prepared to vote in favor if he received assurances that the Palestinians would immediately return to the negotiating table with Israel and not attempt to use their enhanced U.N. status to pursue legal action against Israel for its conduct in the occupied territories.

There is nothing quite like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for highlighting the difficulties of achieving a common foreign policy among the 27 members of the European Union.

The divisions were apparent in a vote late last year in which 11 European states voted to allow the Palestinians to join UNESCO, the U.N.'s cultural heritage body. Five countries were opposed and 11 abstained.

Announcing Spain's intention to support enhanced status for the Palestinians on Wednesday, José Manuel Garcia-Margallo, the foreign minister, said Madrid would have preferred that the European Union vote together.

“Up to the last second we have been working to achieve consensus among the 27 member s tates,” he told Parliament. “It was not possible and we have had to take the unilateral option.”

Pro-Israeli stalwarts such as the Netherlands have said in advance that they will not support the Palestinian bid. Frans Timmermans, the Dutch foreign minister, said it would not contribute to the peace process.

As long-term Middle East-watchers are fond of remarking, the peace process is sadly all process and no peace.

But the failure of a long run of now almost forgotten initiatives to achieve a lasting peace, and the lack of a common position among the Europeans, has not deterred the Continent's leaders from insisting on a central role in attempts to resolve the conflict.

The European Union is one quarter of the so-far largely ineffectual Middle East Quartet. Non-E.U. Norway oversaw the Oslo peace process, and the 1991 Middle East peace conference was held in Madrid.

Since then, Europe has become the major source of the funds that prop up th e economy of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

Following the latest round of Israeli raids against Gaza, the European taxpayer is likely to pick up much of the bill for putting the territory back together.

But, in spite of this diplomatic and financial commitment, Europe remains in, at best, a supporting role in the peace process amid occasional efforts to elbow its way to the front, as in the long-forgotten Venice Declaration of 1980.

The Palestinians have an interest in bringing Europe into the debate over issues such as U.N. status. On the broader issue of a comprehensive peace, Israel is insistent that only the United States is acceptable as the ultimate mediator.

Mr. Hague acknowledged the centrality of the United States when he told the British Parliament on Wednesday that he had urged Washington to launch a new peace initiative in the region.

Germany's Der Spiegel, writing in September ahead of the first statement by a preside nt of the European Council to the U.N. General Assembly, correctly predicted that Herman van Rompuy would avoid any new policy on Israeli-Palestinian peace for fear of stirring up European divisions.

The omission, on a central issue before the world body, the German weekly wrote, “shows how at odds the Europeans remain on the Palestinian question.”

The Source of Congo\'s Bleeding

Yet another of those recurrent headlines just surfaced - “Congo Slips Into Chaos Again as Rebels Gain” - and I tried to add up the death toll since I first covered the Congo in 1967. It can approach 10 million, depending on how you count. Then I tried to work out why.

It is too easy to blame an innate heart of darkness or a soul poisoned by King Leopold's colonial cruelty. That leaves out the part about how big powers did - and do - geopolitics.

When Belgium freed Congo in 1960, its leader, Patrice Lumumba, veered left. CIA and Belgian agents helped to kill him. In the mayhem that followed, Washington backed Joseph-Desire Mobutu (Mobutu Sese Seko) and stuck by him almost to the bitter end. The chosen despot, various U.S. diplomats told me over the decades, provided stability.

This all requires a book, not a blog post. But among a half century of uncounted faceless victims, I focus on a single name, Baudouin Kayembe. Each week, his Présence Congolaise reported on what was going wrong. He was my stringer in 1967, but I wished that, instead, he had been president.

Gentle and wise, Baudouin chose words cautiously. But his message was clear. The country was preposterously rich in minerals and good land. With tribal accommodation and less obscene thievery by those in power, it could help a whole continent lift itself a notch above poverty.

Baudouin made so much sense that Mobutu threw him in prison, and soon after he was dead. Mobutu's looting rose into the billions, and foreign mercenaries beat back serial rebellion. Western donors bought his loyalty to counter Soviet incursion elsewhere in Africa. Large European and American companies made large profits.

Eventually, and inevitably, the Mobutu linchpin was unplugged. And then, the complex processes of Rwanda, Uganda, and long-exiled Congo warlords went into the mix.

There is, of course, much more to it. Within artificial borders drawn generations earl ier in Europe, traditionally hostile tribes don't accommodate without disinterested outside help. If there are riches to steal, and no real government, obscene thievery is inevitable.

By coincidence, when that headline appeared, I was reading about how Gertrude Bell drew those lines on a Mesopotamian map to define an Iraq within territory Britain wrested from Turkey after World War I. The French did the same with Syria and Lebanon while everyone quarreled over Palestine. I can almost hear colonial ghosts huddled around yet another bargaining table jibing at each other, “How's that working out for you?”

And there is South Asia, from old Persia's border with Afghanistan to a Bangladesh that was once East Pakistan. Or Central Asian borders that Moscow drew. And so on.

Perhaps it is asking too much of human nature to imagine things otherwise. But when death tolls soar from wanton slaughter and related suffering, there is much to consider. It is devilishly d ifficult to distribute blame.

The Chinese Censors\' Peculiar Movie Reviews

BEIJING - China's censorship of films, books and the Internet is far-reaching and persnickety. It can also be puzzling. Why do some movies pass and others don't? Sometimes, it may merely be a question of timing.

As I note in my Letter from China this week, the release of “The Last Supper,” a movie by the director Lu Chuan, was held up by the authorities for nearly five months; it was supposed to have opened last July. The authorities apparently did not want Chinese film-goers watching a tale of the bloody overthrow of the despotic Qin dynasty and the establishment of the Han dynasty - an event that happened about 2,200 years ago - before the power transfer here in Beijing in mid-November, when Xi Jinping became the new head of the ruling Communist Party, succeeding Hu Jintao.

Of course, November's leadership transfer was peaceful and nothing like the bloody ruckus of centuries past. What parallels might be drawn between the two events wasn't clear to this spectator, but the authorities' nervousness seemed to reflect a profound political anxiety.

In contrast, “Beijing Blues,” which won the world's most prestigious Chinese-language feature film prize at the Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan this week, had a smoother passage. It screened here in July, the month Mr. Lu's film was supposed to open, even though it portrays policemen, a topic the authorities watch carefully, too. Chinese movies are not permitted to show a policeman in a bad light.

Despite this fact, “Beijing Blues” manages to be wonderfully gritty and utterly authentic as it shows cops coping with ordinary Beijingers, quite a few of whom are short of money but long in bravado.

Its central character, a detective called “Hunter” Zhang, or Zhang Huiling, is middle-aged and kind, asthmatic and depressed by his job. But in the quirky fashion that characterizes the entire movie, Mr. Zhang is pleased with his recent discovery of the phrase “nega tive energy,” which, in one memorable scene, he rolls around his mouth as he uses it to describe, again and again, the feeling of being faced with the small-time thieves he must catch. Mr. Zhang estimates he's caught about 2,000 thieves so far and is resigned to a life filled with “annoying things,” he says.

“Beijing Blues” was a surprise choice for the prize - it's a low-budget film by the director Gao Qunshu, who is not among the most famous names. Its characters are played by an amateur cast that includes ordinary people as well as celebrities such as bloggers, publishers and T.V. presenters. The film captures Beijing's whitish, polluted skies, its bitter winter cold, its street humor and moments of darkness.

As Maggie Lee says in a review in Variety magazine, “Mr. Zhang has a number of farcical encounters with high-strung individuals and frenzied mobsters who self-righteously thrash suspects while the police look on with arms crossed.

“A p icture emerges of a metropolis whose inhabitants can be charmingly extroverted yet disturbingly aggressive, an implied comment on the pressures of city life. The moral ambiguity of such a society is underlined by recurring scenes of skeptical citizens unable to tell cops from criminals,” Ms. Lee writes.

“I don't have any big cases,” Mr. Zhang says in the movie. Still, “it's quite a disturbing job.”

Tell that to the censors.