Which Companies\' Sustainability Promises Do You Believe

Leon Neal/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images An H&M store in central London.

H&M, the Swedish clothing retail giant, has vowed to become greener and more sustainable when it comes to the water it uses to make its clothes.

“Water is a key resource for H&M, and we are committed to ensuring water is used responsibly throughout our value chain. We do this to minimize risks in our operations, protect the environment and secure availability of water for present and future generations,” said Karl-Johan Persson, the head of H&M, according to a press statment released yesterday.

The World Wildlife Fund, the venerable environmental group, will monitor the effort and collaborate with H&M in a campaign called “Pioneering Water Stewardship for Fashion” over the next three years.

With 94,000 employees selling clothes in 48 countries and 750 direct suppliers, H&M is a significant global force in the garment industry.

WWF sees H&M’s commitment to changing all aspects of its water use â€" from cotton to the customer â€" as a chance to change the way an entire industry deals with water use and pollution. (H&M’s new corporate water strategy)

“This partnership marks an evolution in the corporate approach to water,” said Jim Leape, Director General of WWF International, according to the statement.

Just two years ago Greenpeace UK co! ndemned H&M for wasting water, shaming it with commitments Puma, Adidas and Nike had made to do better. At the time Greenpeace charged: “H&M had links to factories discharging a range of hazardous chemicals into China’s rivers.”

The German sportswear-maker Puma (owned by the French PPR) has been scoring points with environmentalists on several sustainability campaigns. Two years ago, the company introduced an accounting tool that measures the sustainability of products in terms of the greenhouse gases emitted and water consumed to make them. More visible to consumers, the company has received much praise for its environmentally friendly packaging.

Even the corporate behemoth Nike, which in the 90s was forced to fightagainst the image of profiting from child labor, has long vowed to be a good and sustainable corporate citizen. In 2011, it announced it wanted to stop discharging hazardous chemicals by 2020.

Join our sustainability discussion. Do you trust these multinational companies when they announce sustainability plans Or are such announcements more public relations and marketing than honest goals

IHT Quick Read: Jan. 25

NEWS A blunt and explicit threat on Thursday from North Korea that its weapons programs would “target” the United States, and that it would proceed with a third and “higher-level” nuclear test, poses a stark challenge to the Obama administration at a time when it hoped to focus its major diplomatic effort on restraining Iran’s less-advanced nuclear program. David E. Sanger reports from Washington and Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul.

Ansar Dine, one of the main Islamic militant groups fighting to control Mali, split in two on Thursday when one of its leaders said in a statement published by Radio France Internationale that he would form his own group to seek negotiations to settle the country’s crisis. Lydia Polgreen reports from Ségou, Mali.

The proportion of women taking positions on corporate boards in the European Union is rising at the fastest pace in a decade as a push for laws on gender balance gains momentum, the bloc’s top justice official said Thursday. James Kanter reports from Brussels.

Karel Schwarzenberg, a 75-year-old prince, is running for president of the Czech Republic with an advertising campaign that has him wearing a pink mohawk. Dan Bilefsky reports from Prague.

This year at Davos, the Russians are working hard to m! ake a splash. A panel audience, in the presence of Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev, urged governmental changes. But investors were less inclined to be critical. Alison Smale reports from Davos, Switzerland.

China’s swift expansion in education over the last decade, including a quadrupling of the number of college graduates each year, has created millions of engineers and scientists. The best can have their pick of jobs at Chinese companies that are aiming to become even more competitive globally. But China is also churning out millions of graduates with few marketable skills, coupled with a conviction that they are entitled to office jobs with respectable salaries. Keith Bradsher reports from Guangzhou, China.

A French court on Thursday told Twitter to identify people who had posted anti-Semitic and racist entries on the social network, but Twitter is not sure it will comply with the order. Eric Pfanner reports from Paris and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco.

ARTS Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer and a former principal at New York City Ballet, will be the new director of dance at the Paris Opera Ballet, starting in September 2014. Roslyn Sulcas reports from Paris.

SPORTS The last time a Japanese wrestler won a grand sumo tournament wa! s in 2006! , with Mongolians taking most of the success since then, but some observers say it is just a matter of time before the current wave of foreign dominance passes and a Japanese wrestler gets promoted to the rank of grand champion once again. Daniel Krieger reports from Tokyo.

It will be a true David vs. Goliath in cricket this weekend when Saurashtra takes on Mumbai for the Ranji Trophy in India starting this Saturday. Huw Richards reports.

Where Science and Religion Coexist

MUNDGOD, India â€" Religion and science have not always been easy friends, as Galileo could attest.

But over the last week scientists and Buddhist scholars have been working in this small Tibetan enclave in southern India to prove that these two worlds can not only co-exist â€" but benefit each another.

It is the 26th edition of the Mind & Life Conference and the first held in a monastery, for thousands of Buddhist monks gathered here. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, greeted the scientists last Friday and introduced the week-long dialogue about science and religion.

The examination is rooted in the personal story of the Dalai Lama. During his secluded training as a child in Tibet, he would gaze at the night sky through a telescope on the roof of the Potala Palace. He looked at the moon wit such intensity he realized the shadows and asperities on its surface contradicted the Tibetan belief that it was lit from within. He took his findings to his tutors.

“When I told my tutors of my interest in science, they replied that it made sense,” said the Dalai Lama during his welcome speech to the conference. “However, although we have an interest in science, that doesn’t mean we have to devote all our energy to it. I spend the majority of my time in meditation on love, compassion and wisdom, which is the source of my interest in science.”

It is this interest he is trying to spark in all Tibetan monks by adding science to their instruction.

“In the Buddhist investigation of reality we traditionally employ four principles of reasoning: dependence, function, nature and evidence,” said the Dalai Lama. Not a far stretch from the way scientists look for evidence. “Both approaches seem to work in paralle! l,” he said.

The thousands of monks of the Mundgod monasteries have been asked to follow the discussions â€" whose topics range from Quantum physics to neuroscience â€" in the Drepung Loseling Monastery’s assembly hall here. Monks who can’t fit into the hall watch the discussions on overflow screens outside on the monastery grounds.

With a strong emphasis on training the mind through meditation, looking within and constant questioning, the long and arduous teaching young monks have to follow in the monasteries requires the same attention to analysis and logic as any scientific curriculum. One difference Isolation. In Tibet, before the Chinese invasion, the monks were kept from the outside world, practicing their faith in seclusion.

According to Rato Khen Rinpoche, the abbot of Rato Drepung, another Mundgod monastery, “Monastic vocation used to be cocooned by a geographic isolation.”

Today, things have changed. “Maintaining that tradition is not the way to form the 21st cetury monk,” he explained during an interview at the monastery.

Rato Khen Rinpoche, the first Westerner appointed abbot of a Tibetan monastery (his given name is Nicholas Vreeland), became a monk at thirty. Before he turned to Buddhism he studied and worked as a photographer.

His worldliness did not deter him from becoming a geshe â€" the equivalent of a Ph.D. in Buddhism, which requires up to twenty years of study â€" and now an abbot.

“Bringing science to Buddhist monks does not mean bending the belief system,” he insists, “they are parallel, there is no attempt to harmonize the two.”

For the science conference, Rato Monastery has transformed its prayer hall into a conference hall where 40 monks are getting together to edit a Tibetan science and Buddhist philosophy compendium.

The monks are Tibetan scholars from all monasteries who followed a multiple-year science course and are now asked by the Dalai Lama to compile what they learned into a book for their fel! low monks! . “These are monks who have spent from early morning to late night memorizing ancient texts, having them explained by wise elders and debating them long into the night,” says Rato’s abbot. “They had to leave behind Tibetan beliefs in place for centuries and apply the same strict discipline they had in their Buddhist studies to modern science.”

This is the strength of mind required of the modern monk, he says: a capacity for knowledge, open mindedness and debate, carried alongside the absolute belief in Buddha’s words.

The book will cover, along with Buddhist philosophy, the history of Science â€" from Galileo’s discovery of the planets’ movements to Darwin’s theory on evolution â€" tackling basic physics, biology and chemistry topics. Once the editing is over, the monks will go back to their respective monasteries and become the first Tibetan monks science teachers for their fellow monks and nuns.

But the curiosity goes both ways. Scientists have long been fascinated by te effect of the Buddhist practice of meditation on the brain. Richard Davidson, director of the laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has conducted experiments on a dozen of Tibetan Buddhist monks’ brains.

His findings created a stir in brain science circles by suggesting that after meditating for thousands of hours, monks altered the functioning and structure of their brains.

As part of his ongoing research, Dr. Davidson last year connected French monk Matthieu Ricard to 256 sensors and asked him to meditate on compassion. The scans of his brain showed an extraordinary level of gamma waves (activity linked to consciousness, learning and memory), “levels never reported before in the neuroscience literature”, the scientist said.

The left prefrontal cortex also saw increased act! ivity, pr! oof of a larger capacity for “happiness.”

On Sunday, the topic of discussion between the scientists and the Buddhist scholars was the nature of consciousness. The Dalai Lama asked the scientists where the basis for consciousness lies.

Responses from the scientists differed strongly.

Christof Koch, a University of California neuroscience best know for his work on consciousness, said we could speculate but ultimately we don’t know where it lies beyond the brain, its physical basis. He added that all mammals have consciousness but it is impossible to know where it lies (for example, our immune system can function without it).

Matthieu Ricard, the French monk who was a genetics scientist before taking up the monastic life, turned towards his Buddhist teaching more than his scientific past.

“By honest introspection, by following one line of inquiry which is pure experience,” one can reach an understaning of consciousness, he said.

Ricard then addressed the topic of reincarnation and some individuals’ ability to remember past lives.

Arthur Zajonc, a professor emeritus of physics at Harvard, doesn’t consider himself a Buddhist he said. Yet, he added, “I meditate and through that, have come to believe in the possibility of reincarnation.”

The benefits of meditation and contemplative practice should not only be reserved to monks, Mr. Zajonc added. He explained that they could contribute to the education of any college undergraduate before quoting Albert Einstein: “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”

Kissinger: Political Threats to Global Economy Abound

DAVOS, Switzerland â€" Henry A. Kissinger has never shied from unvarnished political assessments and during an hour-long address to the World Economic Forum on Thursday, the former American secretary of state delivered a list of sober warnings about rising threats on the world stage.

Executives and policymakers here, fixated on economic gyrations and the environment for deals, sat riveted as the elder statesman, speaking in his trademark slow and sonorous tone, warned of political threats to the world order. And a nuclear Iran, Mr. Kissinger said, poses perhaps the biggest near-term threat to stability and diplomacy in the Middle East.

The United States and other Western countries have accused Iran of developing a nuclear weapons program, while Iran has insisted its nuclear program is peaceful. Mr. Kissinger urged President Barack Obama to give negotiations with Iran a chance. At the same time, he said, Iran must ask itself whether a failure to build nuclear capability is truly a challenge to he Iranian national identity.

A nuclear Iran “is approaching,” he told the gathering. So in a few years, people will have to come to a determination of how to react, or the consequences of non-reaction,” he said.

Unilateral intervention by Israel would be a “desperate last resort,” Mr. Kissinger added. But if Iran continues to use negotiations simply to buy time to advance its nuclear program, “the consequences will be extremely dangerous.” Surrounding Arab and Gulf states, which already have nuclear power programs, could make nuclear weapons their arsenal of choice.

“If a nuclear conflict arises,” Mr. Kissinger said, “that would be a turning point for human history. So negotiations must move forward.”

The tension is building as conflicts elsewhere in the region rage. The war in Syria remains a challenge for Western powers. He called on the United States and Russia to work together to resolve the crisis, but to step gingerly. If the outside world interve! nes militarily, he said, “it will be in the middle of a vast ethnic conflict; and if it doesn’t intervene militarily, it will be caught in a humanitarian tragedy.”

A number of outcomes are possible in Syria, he added, including President Assad remaining in power, a victory by Sunni rebels, or the emergence of a loose coterie of ethnic groups. Whatever the outcome, “the more the outside world competes, the worse it gets,” he said referring to Russia and the West, who have often worked at cross purposes.

Turning to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Kissinger said that while a consensus has developed on a desired outcome, “no one has been able to determine how to get there.”

Only one thing was clear, he added. Any settlement would “require significant sacrifices on the Israeli side from the position they now hold,” he said. And “there has to be some reciprocity from the Arab side other than uttering the word ‘peace.’”

As for the festering European crisis, M.. Kissinger advocated a political solution if an economic one ultimately stumbles. “The issue that needs to be resolved is the relationship between austerity and growth. And if there is no growth, how the economic void will be
filled,” he said. In diplomacy terms, the question is the extent to which countries with money are willing to help those that are still flagging.

“If the answer is negative” then the idea of European unity is called into question, he said. Europe may need to shift its approach to unity through an economic construction to one of “political construction,” he said.

At the end of the day, he added, “Europe should be maintained as an idea even if the ideal solution does not emerge.”

Denying American Scots Their Holiday Haggis

LONDON â€" Scots at home and abroad will be sitting down on Friday night for Burns Night suppers to commemorate their national poet with a feast of haggis.

Robert Burns’ “great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race,” a mix of sheep’s innards and oats tied up in a sheep’s stomach, is the centerpiece of the annual celebration of Scottishness.

It is a pleasure that will once again be denied to Scots-Americans this year, as the BBC’s John Kelly wrote this week in a report that blew a breeze through the heather of the haggis-loving community.

The genuine article has been outlawed in the United States for more than 40 years as a result of a ban on one of its key ingredients â€" sheep’s lung.

A 1989 health ban on all British offal extended the restriction to hearts and livers, also vital for a true Scottish haggis.

“For many expat Scots ad Scots-Americans, the notion of Burns Supper without haggis is as unthinkable as Thanksgiving without turkey,” Mr. Kelly wrote in a report from Washington that revealed aficionados would have to make do with ersatz versions of the Scottish national dish or even â€" horror of horrors â€" vegetarian ones.

His report provoked some indignant comments on social media from haggis lovers who pointed out that their favorite sausage was probably a lot safer than the kind of weaponry freely available to U.S. consumers.

Others noted that haggis was no more esoteric than some of the extremes of American cuisine.

And some advised offal-adverse Americans to take a more “waste not, want not” attitude to their food.

As many as 30 million Americans, predominantly in the southeastern states and Texas, have some Scottish ancestry.

Many of their forebears arrived in the New World via settlements in Northern Ireland, an odyssey celebrated by one of their number, former Sen. Jim Webb o! f Virginia, in his 2004 book “Born Fighting.”

One of their imports, fried chicken, has thrived. But not so the humble haggis.

Scottish producers have attempted to fight back against the ban and two years ago the Scottish regional government invited U.S. health officials to come and try the real thing.

“Scotland’s produce is amongst the best in the world and I’ve asked U.S. Department of Agriculture officials to come here to see for themselves the high standards we have in animal health and processing,” Richard Lochhead, Scotland’s rural affairs minister, said.

U.S. authorities have resisted such blandishments. President George W. Bush passed up an opportunity to taste the delicacy at an international summit in Gleneagles in 2005. “Yes,I was briefed on haggis,” he commented unenthusiastically at the time.

Personally, I’m a fan. A culinary tip: if you manage to get your hands on a real haggis, cook slowly at a simmer and never allow to boil. Eat with a mash of neeps and tatties â€" swede (or rutabaga) and potato. And don’t forget the compulsory whiskey accompaniment â€" Scotch, of course.

Save a Tree, Use Real Cork

ESTREMOZ, Portugalâ€" I had always thought plastic wine corks and screw caps were tacky, but now I have a good reason for avoiding them.

Buying wine with real corks helps preserve the cork forests of Portugal and the wider western Mediterranean, which are, it turns out, ecological marvels. I write about the discovery, on a recent trip to Portugal, in my latest Green column.

Cork oaks and their scrubby cousins, holm oaks, are well adapted to the hot dry summers of the region. They help prevent these places from turning into deserts. Their stands are rich in plants and â€" when the farmers restrain themselves from shooting everything in sight â€" animals, especially birds.

What’s unique about cork is that the thick bark can be harvested from the trees without cutting them down. A skilled crew hacks the bark off with axes. If done right, it grows back. You can see the process in this introductio to cork forests by Luisa Nunes and Carlos Reis:

So the cork oaks form the basis of a sustainable industry that has existed for centuries. The cork is harvested every summer for wine stoppers and other uses. The trees don’t need fertilizer. They are hard not to love.

Synthetic corks are the enemy of this ecologist’s heaven. They have slashed the world market share of real cork by perhaps 20 percent in the last decade, according to Wine Intelligence, a London research concern. That has brought down prices, reducing incentives to grow and maintain cork groves.

One needs a lot of patience and dedication to grow cork. The trees can only be harvested every decade or so and require yearsâ€"some people say up to 50â€"from the time they are originally planted to when they can be first harvested. You are doing it for your grandchildren or for the ecosystem, and that is not always an easy sell in the 21st century.

Fortunately, cork trees are protected in Portugal, the leading produc! er.

Benjamin Millepied to Head Paris Opera Ballet

Millepied Will Be New Director of Paris Opera Ballet

PARIS â€" Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer and a former principal at New York City Ballet, will be the new director of dance at the Paris Opera Ballet, starting in September 2014.

Benjamin Millepied.

Benjamin Millepied currently leads L.A. Dance Project.

The announcement, to be made on Thursday morning at the Palais Garnier by the general director of the Paris Opera, Nicolas Joel, will end months of intense speculation surrounding the successor to Brigitte Lefèvre, the director of dance at the Paris Opera since 1995 who plans to retire at the end of the 2013-14 season.

Mr. Millepied’s appointment comes as a surprise as it was generally expected that a current or former company member would be chosen to lead one of the world’s grandest and most traditional ensembles. The shortlist was considered to come from a small group of Paris Opera Ballet insiders, including the star dancers, or étoiles, Nicolas Le Riche, due to retire in 2014, and Laurent Hilaire, a ballet master with the company and Ms. Lefèvre’s right-hand man.

Although Mr. Millepied, 35, was born in Bordeaux and trained at the Lyon Conservatory, he joined the School of American Ballet as a teenager. His subsequent professional career as a dancer was spent with City Ballet, where he rose quickly through the ranks to become a principal dancer in 2002. He retired in 2011 to focus on choreography, and moved to Los Angeles, where he founded the L.A. Dance Project last year.

In an interview on Wednesday at his hotel here, Mr. Millepied said he was approached relatively recently, in mid-November, by Stéphane Lissner, artistic director of La Scala, who is to succeed Mr. Joel as general director in 2015. In the Paris Opera hierarchy, the director of dance’s artistic policy is subject to the approval of the general director, but in past decades there has been little interference or involvement.

“I certainly knew about the position, but I also knew that there were candidates from within the company,” Mr. Millepied said. “I was surprised, but I felt very quickly that the artistic dialogue between us was an exciting one. After a while I did feel there was a really good chance I might get the position. Which made my head spin.”

Well it might.

Mr. Millepied will inherit one of the world’s greatest classical troupes. It has 150 dancers, a complex hierarchy of ranking and promotions and the sizable weight of history: the company is effectively an outgrowth of the very beginnings of ballet at the court of Louis XIV. Its dancers almost all come from the Paris Opera Ballet school, and they rarely leave to dance elsewhere once they have achieved a coveted position in the company.

They are also civil servants, with long-term contracts that run until their mandatory retirement, with pension, at 42. And with the notable exception of Ms. Lefèvre, directors tend to drop like flies at the Paris Opera. Even Rudolf Nureyev lasted only six stormy, if productive, years in the 1980s, while directors like John Taras and Violette Verdy managed just a few seasons.

The byzantine politics, scale and bureaucracy of the Paris Opera is worlds away from Mr. Millepied’s professional experience. He has long put together touring groups, and even at the peak of his dancing career was an indefatigable organizer of small choreographic projects and festivals with musicians and artists. He is a prolific choreographer who has created works for major companies (including American Ballet Theater, City Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet), and his public profile is high, thanks partly to his work on the Darren Aronofsky film “Black Swan” and his subsequent marriage to its star, Natalie Portman.

But his new company, the L.A. Dance Project, which made its debut in September in Los Angeles, is small and experimental in orientation. (Mr. Millepied said he planned to continue running the L.A. Dance Project until he began his new job, when he would move to Paris with Ms. Portman and their son. He said he hoped the company, which has a budget guaranteed for the next three years, would continue.)

A version of this article appeared in print on January 24, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Millepied Will Be New Director of Paris Opera Ballet.

IHT Quick Read: Jan. 24

NEWS In one of her final appearances as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday vigorously defended her handling of last September’s attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans and prompted a scathing review of State Department procedures. Michael R. Gordon reports from Washington.

North Korea vowed on Thursday to launch more long-range rockets and conduct its third nuclear test, ratcheting up tensions following the United Nations Security Council’s decision to tighten sanctions against the country for launching a rocket last month. Choe Sang-Hun reports from Seoul.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain has added to Europe’s malaise, vowing to reduce British entanglement with the European Unionâ€"or allow his people to vote in a referendum to leave the bloc altogether. Andrew Higgins reports from Brussels.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is lifting the U.S. military’s official ban on women in combat, which will open up hundreds of thousands of additional front-line jobs to them, senior defense officials said Wednesday. Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker report from Washington.

At the most recent count, there were 212,000 refugees in Lebanon, registered or aw! aiting registration with the United Nations refugee agency. A year ago, the agency had registered 5,000. The increase mirrors the intensification of a conflict across the border in Syria that the United Nations says has now killed 60,000. Josh Wood reports from Al-Minya, Lebanon.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, apologized again for the bank’s recent $6 billion trading loss, this time in front of an audience that included the elite of the financial world. But in keeping with his confident demeanor, it was a diet portion of humble pie. Jack Ewing reports from Davos, Switzerland.

ARTS Nearly 212,000 oil paintings in Britain ave been photographed and put online in a comprehensive project designed to make the country a cultural pioneer of the digital age. Stephen Castle reports from London.

FASHION The garden in all its summer enchantment has blossomed as the big theme of the Paris couture season. Suzy Menkes reviews from Paris.

SPORTS Li Na, one of China’s biggest sports stars, played one of the best big matches of her career to defeat Maria Sharapova, 6-2, 6-2 and reach the Australian Open final. Christopher Clarey reports from Melbour! ne, Austr! alia.