Raindeer Games in Hong Kong

HONG KONG - Hong Kong has one of the most expensive and crowded property markets in the world, and CBRE, the commercial real estate services firm with offices here, can be highly imaginative when illustrating that point.

The CBRE team has released a hilarious Christmas video with the tongue-in-cheek announcement that Santa Claus, “the world's leading toy distributor,” had found a solution to the tricky issue of where to stable his “global distribution mechanisms.” That is, the reindeer.

Santa Claus moved to Hong Kong last year, CBRE reported in its equally funny 2011 Christmas video, to take advantage of the lucrative mainland Chinese market and locate its base of operations closer to the major toy-sourcing region of the Pearl River Delta.

As I wrote here recently, Hong Kong's space constraints are becoming an increasingly serious problem.

No wonder, then, that Santa has come up against space constraints.

“The reindeer stabling problem that Santa Claus is facing is not a seasonal issue but rather a reflection of a wider problem that Hong Kong must urgently address,” CBRE's head of research for Hong Kong, Edward Farrelly, noted in the spoof announcement. “Basically, there is an acute shortage of available space across all real estate sectors.”

The solution that the firm found for its high-profile client: Stabling the creatures at the Hong Kong Jockey Club, which organizes the city's horse racing activities - on condition that they, too, join the races, once the Christmas delivery rush is over.

\'Fragile\' Australian Radio Hosts Get Counseling After Nurse\'s Death

HONG KONG - Anger and outrage continued to grow over the weekend after two Australian radio hosts made a prank call to the London hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, was being treated for acute morning sickness.

Mel Greig and Michael Christian, the hosts of the 2Day FM show, pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles, talked their way past a nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, to get information on the duchess's condition last Tuesday. The stunt drew worldwide attention, although Ms. Saldanha, 46, the mother of two, was found dead on Friday in a suspected suicide.

A recording of the hoax call is here.

Thousands of pointed complaints were posted on social media sites, advertisers pulled their spots from the show and the hospital's chairman assailed the radio network. The two hosts have been taken off the air and told not to comment, and they have reportedly disabled their Twitter accounts.

But a number of voices also were being raised in defense of the hosts, who were said to be in a “fragile” condition because of the uproar, according to their employer, the Southern Cross Austereo network.

Rhys Holleran, the network's chief executive, told reporters that the hosts were “understandably incredibly distraught, too, and we're concerned for both their well-being.”

The company said it was providing intensive psychological counseling to Ms. Greig and Mr. Christian.

“I spoke to both presenters early this morning, and it's fair to say they're completely shattered,” said Mr. Holleran, quoted on The Lede blog. “These people aren't machines, they're human beings. We're all affected by this.”

Mr. Holleran added that the network was “very confident that we haven't done anything illegal.”

Jeff Kennett, the director of Beyondblue, a government-led initiative to spread awareness of depression and related mental illnesses, appealed for understanding.

“I just hope the Australian community will give them all the support they're going to need to come to grips with this horrible outcome,” said Mr. Kennett, a former member of parliament, who in a radio interview described the call as a joke and a prank.

“Nothing they did was offensive,” he said. “We've got to be careful we don't become so PC that we deny ourselves the opportunity to extend to these two all the support we can.”

The Sydney Morning Herald wrote: “Leading psychiatrist Patrick McGorry called for calm, saying suicide was unlikely to be caused by one individual factor. “I feel sorry for them because they obviously had no intention of causing any harm. Blame is hardly ever useful.”

No direct connection has yet been made between the hoax call and Ms. Saldanha's death. Still, many Australians were angered and offended. In a commentary in the Morning Herald, Michael Idato called the prank “not funny.”

“It wasn't funny when it was played,” Mr. Idato said. “Not for some hand-wringing sense of righteous judgment, but simply because one of its targets - a mother to be whose pregnancy was causing so much discomfort that she had to be hospitalized - was so vulnerable, and its effect - to have details of her medical condition broadcast on radio - was an appalling breach of privacy.

“What holds a civilized society together is an understanding of action and consequence, a duty of care to each other that allows some elasticity for fair mischief and good humor, but does not contravene a handful of basic tenets: humanity, dignity, compassion, respect.”

What's your take on the incident? Was it merely a harmless prank that went horribly wrong? Or was it an insensitive and foolhardy stunt, an invasion of privacy that requires some sort of punishment of the radio hosts and their network?

Scientists: Romany European 500 Years Earlier Than Previously Thought

LONDON - The Romany people constitute Europe's largest and, arguably, now its most persecuted minority.

A new genetic study published this week suggests their ancestors arrived in Europe from northwestern India in a single wave around 1,500 years ago, half a millennium earlier than previously thought.

The international authors of the peer-reviewed paper in Current Biology journal said their study is the most comprehensive ever of the demographic history of the Romany. They said it reveals the origins of a people who “constitute a mosaic of languages, religions, and lifestyles while sharing a distinct social heritage.”

Scientific American noted that earlier studies of the Romany language and cursory analysis of genetic patterns had determined India was the group's place of origin. But the new study points to a single migration from northwestern India around 500 CE.

Previous studies largely overlooked the place of Europe's 11 million Romany in the Continent's gene pool. That was partly a consequence of their continued isolation and marginalization, and partly due to a history of oppression that in many countries continues to this day.

The prejudice has historically been most evident in Eastern European countries with large Romany populations. But recent tensions have spread, including to Romany families seeking a new life in the west.

In one incident in late September, a mob in Marseille, France set fire to an encampment of 35 foreign Roma. As many as 20,000 foreign Roma are said to live in France, most of them Romanians or Bulgarians.

Thousands were deported and their encampments razed during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, as my colleague Scott Sayare recalled in an article in August, although François Hollande, his successor, has promised to better integrate the newcomers into French society.

A more activist Romany population has found a voice, however, showing it is no longer prepared to take the old prejudices lying down.

Some even reject the word Gypsy because of its historically negative connotations, a perception borne out when Lindsay Lohan used the term last week as an allegedly racial slur during a nightclub altercation.

Romany protestors last year turned out in Rome to demand better living conditions after four children died in a fire that destroyed their illegal camp.

And Romany families last month won a pledge from the Czech education ministry that it would finally end widespread discrimination against their children in schools after a landmark 2007 case in the European Court of Human Rights.

The European Roma Rights Center, based in Budapest, is active in pushing similar cases in European courts to combat anti-Romany racism.

My colleague Chris Cottrell wrote in October of continuing discrimination in a report on a ceremony in Berlin to unveil a memorial commemorating an estimated half million Romany who died in the Holocaust.

He quoted Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany saying, “Let's not beat around the bush. Sinti and Roma suffer today from discrimination and exclusion.”

The latest genetic study may at least contribute to establishing the Romany's rightful place in European history - for the last millennium and a half.

The scientists, who revealed a strong admixture of non-Romany genes in northern and western countries during their migrations, said further studies would help define the identity of their Indian ancestors and provide further details of their migration and subsequent history in Europe.

Art Basel Miami Beach: Art, Commerce and Backlash

An Art World Gathering, Divided by Money

Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times

Visitors at the V.I.P. opening of Art Basel Miami Beach.

MIAMI - Mera Rubell was taking time out from greeting the hundreds of visitors at her family's sprawling contemporary art center here to vent.

Visitors at Art Basel Miami Beach looked at a sculpture by Saint Clair Cemin.

“It's the height of arrogance to dismiss - - ,” she began.

Jason, her son, interrupted: “It's arrogance. It's a completely uninteresting story.”

For the moment her husband, Don, had given up on trying to get a word in.

The Rubells, deans of Miami's bustling art scene, were pushing back against a chorus of complaints that has been growing louder in the weeks leading up to Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual art pilgrimage that began Wednesday and ends Sunday.

Prominent art writers and critics, including Sarah Thornton, Felix Salmon, Will Gompertz and Dave Hickey, have been attacking the art world, arguing that the staggering sums of money being spent on works are distorting judgments about art and undermining its long-term cultural significance.

“Money talks loudly and easily drowns out other meanings,” Ms. Thornton wrote in TAR magazine in a recent article, “Top 10 Reasons NOT to Write About the Art Market.”

In its special edition for the opening day of the fair, The Art Newspaper asked whether “the art world is facing a crisis of values” because of the “pernicious influence of the market on art.”

And in the eyes of many critics, Art Basel Miami Beach - or what Simon Doonan, writing in Slate last week, labeled a “promo-party cheese-fest” - has become a symbol of everything that's wrong with the art market. The fair's extraordinary success in just over a decade, and its celebration of wretched excess, have triggered a backlash.

But the Rubells, along with a growing number of other prominent collectors, art dealers and curators, are having none of it. The backlash against the backlash has begun.

“The market supports artists,” Jason Rubell said. Given the limited amount of government support for the arts, he added, “it's an industry that without commerce doesn't exist. What do people want - to go back to the recession?”

Ms. Rubell was annoyed that critics seemed to ignore the social, economic and cultural transformation of Miami that the fair and collectors like her have helped bring about. She noted that the Rubells' 45,000-square-foot art center - where one huge gallery is now filled with works by Oscar Murillo, a 26-year-old Colombian immigrant who lived with and was supported by the Rubells while he created dozens of mural-sized canvases - used to be a Drug Enforcement Administration storage center.

Outside, in the center's courtyard, visitors like Martha Stewart admired the French artist Bernar Venet's collaboration with Bugatti, the superluxury sports car brand, on a one-of-a-kind Veyron Grand Sport Venet car (a price hasn't been set, a Bugatti spokeswoman said, but will undoubtedly be in “the higher end of the millions”).

“I'm grateful to Bugatti, Perrier, Bank of America and other companies,” Ms. Rubell declared. “Their support helps facilitate quality programs and opens exhibits like this” - the Murillo show - “to the public.”

In Miami Beach, at the main fair, the consumer-oriented glitter abounds this week: coffee carts with $20-a-glass Ruinart Champagne; Davidoff cigar rollers; BMW's artist-designed cars; and Takashi Murakami's $70,000-and-up commissioned portraits. One could almost imagine that the Barbara Kruger work on display at L&M gallery - a super-sized sign reading “Greedy” on one line and an unprintable expletive on the next - had an invisible subtitle telling the wealthy V.I.P.'s who had come to shop, “I'm Talking to You - Yeah, You!”

Of course, rich patrons have always supported artists, Don Rubell pointed out, from the pharaohs to the Medicis. Today, multimillion-dollar sales represent only a silk-thin layer of a deeply varied and thriving art market. The art world, Mr. Rubell asserted, is “actually becoming more democratic.”

“There's 20 ancillary fairs” in addition to the high-end main event of Art Basel, he said. “Whatever amount of money you have in your pocket, you can enter this magical world of art.”

The notion that the art market contains multitudes is one with which Marc Glimcher, part of the family dynasty that runs the Pace Gallery, said he agreed.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 8, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Art World Gathering, Divided by Money.

Art Basel Miami Beach: Art, Commerce and Backlash

Prominent art writers and critics have been attacking the art world, arguing that the staggering sums of money being spent on works are distorting judgments about art and undermining its long-term cultural significance. But a growing number of prominent collectors, art dealers and curators, are having none of it.