Now We Tweet; Then, It Was Front-Page News

‘‘Mrs. Bingham said her husband maintains an attitude of superiority and

considers her incapable of discussing questions of public affairs.”

So charged Mrs. Hiram Bingham in a divorce suit against her husband, the explorer, writer and former senator from Connecticut.

This allegation of marital condescension was front-page news on Saturday, March 27, 1937, in the European edition of The New York Herald Tribune, now The International Herald Tribune, which is celebrating its 125th anniversary. It was a tiny two-paragraph item tucked in the bottom right-hand corner of the page.

Back then, human interest often came in small doses, sitting incongruously amid the thunder of strikes, embargoes, plane crashes, ‘‘grave issues'' and prosecutions. Ruthlessly edited, pruned to their essence, the items were often elegant and poignant and sometimes focused on the bizarre. At some point in the evolution of newspapers, this front-page feature died or morphed into other forms.

Back to March 27, 1937: To the left of the Bingham split-up lies the headline ‘‘Editor Murdered in Newspaper Feud.'' Five paragraphs tell of the demise of Claude L. McCracken, editor of The Modern County Mail in Alturas, Calif. While dining in his home, he was shot by Harry French, son of Gertrude French, editor of The Alturas Plaindealer, the article said.

Although the two papers had been battling for two years over minor issues, few were aware of the intensity of the bitterness between between their editors.

Up in the middle of the page a few paragraphs told of Minerva (Mother) Hartman, 104, under the headline ‘‘Nurse of 4 Wars Burned to Death.''

Mother Hartman, who was on the scene in ‘‘the Indian, Civil, Crimean and Spanish-American'' wars, died in a fire at her ‘‘house on stilts'' in Colma, Calif. The house was put on stilts as a compromise when Mother Hartman refused to make way for a highway.

‘‘I won't move just to let a lot of old buzz wagons go by,'' she was quoted as saying.

But Mother Hartman's independent streak went only so far.

Veteran of countless war adventures, the nurse declared her philosophy was that women should stay home and read the Bible.

And so it went on March 27, 1937.

Front page from March 27, 1937.

Putin Under Fire From International Rights Groups

LONDON - An alliance of international human rights and citizen action groups has accused Vladimir V. Putin of cracking down on Russia's civil society since he returned to office as president in May.

Eight organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and the corruption watchdog Transparency International, urged the European Union to raise their concerns at a summit meeting with the Russians this week.

They cited current and pending legislation that they said called into question Russia's relationship with fellow European states and with the European Court of Human Rights.

“Since Putin's return to the presidency in May, Russia's Parliament has adopted a series of laws that imposed new restrictions on public assemblies and raised financial sanctions for violations to the level of criminal fines, re-criminalized li bel, and imposed new restrictions on Internet content,” according to Human Rights Watch.

The rights groups said that new laws branded nonprofit groups that received money from abroad “foreign agents,” while a new, broader definition of treason could potentially criminalize human rights and political activism.

Fines of up to $32,000 against those taking part in protests deemed illegal had had a “chilling effect on the right to peaceful assembly.” Other new measures threatened to control the Internet and curb free speech, according to the rights groups.

And a proposed law aimed at anyone “promoting” homosexuality to people under 18 was condemned as homophobic by Human Rights Watch.

Looking to the regular summit meeting of Russia and the European Union opening in Brussels on Thursday, Hugh Williamson, the Human Rights Watch director for Europe said, “The E.U. should convey a clear sense of alarm at the crackdown of the past six months on Russia's vibrant civil society.

“And the E.U. should press the Russian leadership to stop trying to choke off free speech and assembly and any sign of dissent.”

The joint appeal comes as Washington and Moscow are embroiled in a controversy over a new U.S. law that would punish alleged Russian human rights abusers.

The law, signed by President Barack Obama last week, bars those accused of rights abuses from traveling to the United States and from owning real estate or other assets in the country.

As my colleagues David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew Roth wrote this week, “It infuriated Russian officials, including President Vladimir V. Putin, who pledged to retali ate.” Russian lawmakers on Wednesday were considering a ban on adoptions of Russian children by American citizens.

How far the European Union can or will seek to go in reversing Russia's alleged bad behavior is a moot point. Friday's summit is expected to focus on economic issues rather than human rights.

European officials have nevertheless spoken out on Russia in terms not that different from the rights groups.

Catherine Ashton, the Union's foreign affairs chief, has said that since May, “we have been seeing less and less dialogue and openness on the side of the authorities, and rather more intolerance of any expression of dissenting views.”

In a speech to the European Parliament in September, she said, “Instead of stronger safeguards for the e xercise of fundamental rights and freedoms, we have seen a string of measures all chipping away at them.”

International and domestic criticism has thrown at least some Russian officials on the defensive.

In a televised interview this month, Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev, denied that the Kremlin had begun “tightening the screws” since Mr. Putin replaced him as president.

“I don't consider these laws reactionary,” he said of the contentious legislation. “If they are wrong, if they hurt citizens' interests, then they have to be corrected. But that's not the case yet.”

Does the Next Head of the Louvre Need to Be French?

PARIS-With the announced departure of the president of the Louvre, speculation is growing about who will succeed him in a fraught period when the new Socialist government is making cuts in the culture budget for the first time in 30 years.

After 12 years in charge of the museum, Henri Loyrette, 60, disclosed Monday that he would depart at the end of his term in April. As the youngest leader ever appointed at the Louvre in 2001, Mr. Loyrette presided over a period of exuberant expansion: a newly opened satellite, Louvre Lens in northern France; ongoing construction of the Abu Dhabi Louvre and the creation of a new Islamic Arts department with sizable donations from Middle Eastern royalty. On his watch, the number of Louvre visitors almost doubled from 5.1 million in 2001 to almost 10 million.

His successor will be the choice of the Socialists, headed by current President Francois Hollande. It is up to the minister of culture to make the appointment. That post is now held by Aurélie Filippetti; she has been making hard choices about the French culture budget, which has been reduced by more than four percent to 2.4 billion euros.

The new government has already clearly cramped the Louvre's ambitions with budget cutbacks that have stalled a reserve warehouse to store artworks in Cergy-Pontoise, northwest of Paris, and a Louvre project to create an annex in the hotel de la Marine, an 18th-century stone building at the Place de la Concorde.

Among the names of potential successors circulating in the French press are museum insiders like Vincent Pomarede, director of the Louvre's painting department, Jean-Luc Martinez, director of the Greek Antiquities department. There are also directors of other French museum whose names have emerged such as Michel Hilaire, of the Fabre Museum in Montpellier or Sylvain Amic, who recently took over at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen and Lourent Le Bon, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz.

The biggest wild card is the notion of appointing a complete outsider to lead the museum, which has become so international that foreigners make up more than 67 percent of its visitors, with the largest group from the United States.

Could the new head of the Louvre be from somewhere other than France? Some of the names circulating are Neil McGregor, director of the British Museum; Colin Bailey, chief curator at the Frick Collection in New York; and Gary Tinterow of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, who earlier this year received the Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French state.

To Japan-China Row, Add One Potential Provocateur

HONG KONG - The idea that armed conflict could break out in the Pacific over a handful of godforsaken islands is almost unthinkable, not only for the violence involved but also for the potentially calamitous economic and political repercussions. Political leaders, military officials and security analysts can barely utter the W-word out loud for fear they might be unbottling the genie.

But the dispute between China and Japan in the East China Sea took another harrowing turn last week when a Chinese plane overflew the islands and Japan scrambled some fighter jets in response. The Japanese Defense Ministry said it was “the first known violation of Japanese airspace by a Chinese plane” in half a century, as my colleague Hiroko Tabuchi reported.

Naval vessels from both countries have been patrolling the islands, which are known as the Senkaku in Japa n and the Diaoyu in China. Bilateral tensions have been high enough that a bumping or brushing incident at sea - even an accidental one - might well lead to actual fighting.

Sheila Smith, senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the dispute “has left both countries deeply suspicious of each other, and public antipathy on both sides of the East China Sea is running high.” In China there have been nasty anti-Japanese riots.

The way ahead - combat or compromise - could conceivably hang on one man, Shinzo Abe, 58, who is due to be sworn in next week as the new prime minister of Japan.

The entire region, along with the United States, is waiting to see which of Mr. Abe's political personalities emerges most forcefully - the conservative, nationalistic politician with a provocative streak when it comes to China, or the pragmatic statesman who would pu ll himself and his party back from the fire-breathing campaign rhetoric of recent weeks.

Worryingly, Mr. Abe appeared ready to add a ground dimension to the confrontation at the islands by pledging to station government workers or Coast Guard personnel there.

“If he follows through on what he's been saying, we could have serious problems,” Gerald L. Curtis, an expert on Japanese politics at Columbia University, told my colleague Martin Fackler. “Who the heck wants to go to war over the Senkakus?”

Naturally, Mr. Abe's posture in the region also concerns Washington, which is treaty-bound to defend Japan. “American analysts say the United States might balk at risking war with China if Japan is the one provoking a confrontation over the disputed islands,” Martin wrote.

Japan also has a separate but equally emotional and volatile dispute with South Korea: Both countries claim an atoll in the South China Sea known as the Dokdo islands in Korea and the Takeshima in Japan. (South Koreans went to the polls in a national election on Wednesday.)

Mr. Abe has “promised to push for a constitutional revision to convert Japan's Self-Defense Forces into a full-fledged military,” said Ayako Doi, an associate fellow at the Asia Society.

In the wake of the landslide triumph of Mr. Abe's Liberal Democratic Party earlier this week, the principal state-run news media in China have already been promising a tougher foreign policy line from the government, especially over the islands. The editorial tone has been almost baleful.

One sample, from Global Times, a daily newspaper affiliated with the Ch inese Communist Party:

Once Abe takes office, China should let him know about its firm stance. Only with such pressure will Abe hold China in esteem, otherwise he will think China is in a weak position. In recent years, every time Japan has switched to moderate policy toward China, it has been the result of China's strong stance rather than its concessions.

Beijing could understandably be anticipating a harder line from Tokyo. Mr. Abe has serious credentials as a nationalist, even a provocative and unapologetic one. In a previous tenure as prime minister, from 2006-7, he denied that the Japanese military had forced women, many of them Koreans, into sexual slavery during World War II.

He also has suggested a revision of Article 9 of the Constitution might be in order, the section that says “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.” The article also says that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.”

Mr. Abe has visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a Shinto temple that holds and honors the souls of Japan's war dead - among them a number of convicted Class A war criminals. These visits cause diplomatic apoplexy in Beijing and Seoul, as both capitals consider Japan to be insufficiently repentant about its military's atrocities in the war.

In 2007, as prime minister, he gave $425 for the planting of a 6-foot ceremonial evergreen at the shrine.

Mr. Abe went to Yasukuni two months ago in his role, as he pointed out, as the head of the Liberal Democra tic Party. And in a nod to his pragmatic side, he walked back an earlier promise that he hoped to visit the shrine one day as prime minister.

“In view of current Japan-China and Japan-South Korea relations, it's better not to say whether I will visit if I become prime minister,” he told reporters at the time.

In his first press briefing following the election this week, Abe the Conciliator showed up, saying, “China is an indispensable country for the Japanese economy to keep growing. We need to use some wisdom so that political problems will not develop and affect economic issues.”

But Abe the Provocateur also emerged, at the very same briefing, saying that the Senkaku/Diaoyu remain “the inherent territory of Japan.”

“We own and effectively control them,” he said. “There is no room for negotiations about that.”

IHT Quick Read: Dec. 19

Aleppo, Syria's largest city and the bloodied stage for a battle now running into its sixth month, is slipping into disaster. C.J. Chivers reports from Aleppo, Syria.

Gunmen shot dead five female health workers who were immunizing children against polio on Tuesday, causing the Pakistani government to suspend vaccinations in two cities and dealing a fresh setback to an eradication campaign dogged by Taliban resistance in a country that is one of the disease's last global strongholds. Declan Walsh reports from Islamabad and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York.

After losing a battle to stop the passage of a contentious birth control law, Roman Catholic Church officials on Tuesday dug in and instructed their millions of followers to campaign against the measure in communities, schools and homes. Floyd Whaley reports from Manila.

NEWS The gilded roofs of Buddhist temples are as much a part of Thailand's landscape as rice paddies and palm trees. The temples were once the heart of village life, serving as meeting places, guesthouses and community centers. But many have become little more than ornaments of the past, marginalized by a shortage of monks and an increasingly secular society. Thomas Fuller reports from Baan Pa Chi, Thailand.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague said Tuesday that it found testimony against a former rebel leader “too contradictory and too hazy” to convict him of a gruesome 2003 attack on a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo in which some 200 people were hacked to death and female survivors were raped and held in camps as sex slaves. Marlise Simons reports.

Samsung said on Tuesday that it had dropped its request for a ban on sales of certain Apple phones and tablet computers in Europe, a sharp tactical turn in a patent war that the companies have been fighting on multiple fronts around the world. Eric Pfanner reports.

Cerberus, the private equity giant, will sell its investment in the gunmaker Freedom Group after a rifle from the company's Bushmaster brand was used by the gunman in the school shootings in Connecticut. Peter Lattman reports.

SPORTS On Monday, the largest group of supporters of the Russian champion Zenit St. Petersburg posted a call on its Web site for the team to be exclusively white and heterosexual. Rob Hughes reports.

ARTS Covent Garden skimps in its production of Meyerbeer's “Robert Le Diable,” which historically has wowed audiences as a grand production and which Chopin called a “m asterpiece.” George Loomis reviews from London.

Director of Louvre to Step Down

Just days after the Louvre opened its nearly $200-million outpost in the industrial town of Lens in northern France, Henri Loyrette, the Louvre's longtime director who was a champion of the project, announced his resignation after having run the museum for 12 years.  He plans to leave in April.

According to The Art Newspaper, the Louvre issued a statement on Monday confirming Mr. Loyrette's decision. “Loyrette has informed the president of France and the minister of culture of his decision not to seek a renewal of his mandate,'' the statement read.

During his years at the Louvre attendance reached a record high of nearly 10 million visitors by the end of this year, almost double the 5.1 million people who came in 2001.  In September Mr. Loyrette opened new $125-million galleries for Islamic art gracefully tucked ino the museum's Visconti Courtyard. While the French government kicked in some support for the project, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia gave the Louvre $20 million for the galleries.

Besides his effective fund-raising skills Mr. Loyrette brought contemporary art into the Louvre, including a monumental installation by Anselm Kiefer in 2007 and a ceiling mural by Cy Twombly in 2010.  He also showed the work of other artists like Anish Kapoor, Wim Delvoye and Giuseppe Penone.

Mr. Loyrette is departing before the completion of the institution's most ambitious project to date, which started during his tenure:  A new Jean Nouvel-designed museum to be built on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates . It was originally scheduled to open next year but it has been delayed until at least 2015.  The Louvre will receive more than $500 million over the next 30 years from the United Arab Emirates authorities in exchange for use of its name.

Dead Sea Scrolls Go Digital

The Dead Sea Scrolls were buried in caves for centuries, and then enmeshed in controversy over scholarly access since their discovery in the late 1940s. But as of today, some 5,000 high-resolution images of the scrolls are readily available online, thanks to a collaboration between the Israel Antiquities Authority and Google.

“Only five conservators worldwide are authorized to handle the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Shuka Dorfman, the director of the authority, told The Associated Press. “Now, everyone can touch the scroll on the screen around the globe.”

The digitization project, the result of two years of scanning using technology developed by NASA, allows users to zoom in on details of the often highly fragmentary scrolls, which contain versions of every book of the Hebrew Bible (except the Book of Esther), including one of the oldest known copies of Genesis and a copy of Psalms containing one of the oldest known references to King David.

The scrolls, believed to have been written or collected by an ascetic Jewish sect that settled in the desert at Qumran in the Judean desert after fleeing Jerusalem sometime around the second and first centuries B.C., also include a number of non-biblical books that provide insight into the origins of Christianity. Five scrolls were previously digitized, and posted online by the Israel Museum last year.