IHT Quick Read: Jan. 29

NEWS Protests in the Suez Canal city of Port Said and new clashes in Cairo on Monday came a day after President Mohamed Morsi declared a state of emergency and a curfew in three major cities. David Kirkpatrick reports from Port Said, Egypt.

The rapid advance to Timbuktu, a day after French and African troops took control of the rebel stronghold of Gao, could signal the beginning of the end of France’s major involvement in Mali. Lydia Polgreen reports from Segou, Mali, and Scott Sayare from Paris.

Based on the global reputation and overall popularity of Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany appears from the outside tobe a country where equality between men and women has long been established. But thousands have taken to social media in recent days to tell a radically different story about equality in a country with a female chancellor. Melissa Eddy and Chris Cottrell report from Berlin.

The Tang Prize, a new award set up by Taiwanese billionaire Samuel Yin, will pay more than the Nobel Prize, and joins a growing list of prizes in the region as Asian wealth and philanthropy spread. Didi Kirsten Tatlow reports from Beijing.

Past losses at Monte dei Paschi di Siena have raised questions about the degree of scrutiny applied by Mario Draghi when he led the Italian central bank. Elisabetta Povoledo reports from Milan and Jack Ewing from Frankfurt.

Iceland won a landmark case at a European court, ending an acrimonious legacy from the collapse of its banking system more than four years ago. Andrew Higgins reports from Brussels.

The European Union must push harder to end a three-year deadlock over mackerel quotas with Iceland and the Faroe Islands, a key British official said Monday, in order to resolve a dispute that has led to warnings that the fish is being dangerously overexploited. David Jolly reports from Paris.

ARTS Detectives have been workig their way through the ranks of the Bolshoi Ballet for 10 days now, ever since a masked assailant threw a jar of acid into the face of Sergei Filin, its artistic director. Among their tasks is to peer into the dark side of the ballet company: old rivalries and professional grudges that Bolshoi officials believe may have motivated the attack. But the show goes on. Ellen Barry reports from Moscow.

FASHION In the Chinese Year of the Snake, the fine jewelers of the Place Vendôme â€" where clients from the Far East are legion â€" have embraced reptile motifs. Suzy Menkes reports.

SPORTS After all that fuss, sweat and suspense â€" after late-night finishes, medical timeouts and a major upset of Serena Willia! ms â€" th! e 2013 Australian Open will look like business as usual in the tennis history books. The defending champions in singles remain Victoria Azarenka and Novak Djokovic. Both are proud and powerful. Both had to sacrifice a normal childhood and leave their families for an extended period in their early teens in order to progress. But they remain very different public figures. Christopher Clarey reports from Melbourne.

As Asia Grows, So Do Prizes

BEIJING â€" A new Asian prize that pays more than the Nobel Prize will launch next year, joining a expanding list of cash-rich awards in the region as prosperity and philanthropy grow. Yet one prize - China’s Confucius Peace Prize - set up in 2010 in apparently outraged response to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo - seems to be unable to establish itself. In fact, as one commentator wrote in the state-run Global Times late last year, “the award has been widely mocked.”

That is unlikely to happen to the Tang Prize, set up by Samuel Yin, a multibillionaire from Taiwan who has pledged to give away nearly all his wealth.

The new prize will award $1.7 million every other year to winners in each of four fields: sustainable development, bipharmaceutical science, Sinology, and the rule of law, Science magazine reported. The money will be divided into two parts, an award and a research fund, with the bulk going to the award.

Mr. Yin, head of Ruentex Group, is Taiwan’s seventh-richest person, according to Forbes magazine, worth about $3.1 billion from diversified investments including a hypermarket, insurance and Taiwanese real estate.

The award, announced on Monday in Taipei, “lengthens the list of rich science prizes funded by Asian philanthropists,” Science magazine reported. “Run Run Shaw, a Hong Kong media mogul, in 2002 established the Shaw Prize, which annually confers $1 million for work in astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences.”

“Three other major science prizes in Japan hand out about $550,000 to each winner annually,” including the Kyoto Prize (technology, basic science, arts and philosophy),! the Japan Prize (environment, energy and infrastructure, and health care and medical technology), and the Blue Planet Prize (environmental research.)

Mr. Yin hopes the new prize will “encourage more research that is beneficial to the world and humankind, promote Chinese culture, and make the world a better place,” according to a press release.

Academia Sinica, which oversees Taiwan’s premier research labs, will be responsible for the nomination and selection process, Science reported. The prize is named after the Tang dynasty, a high point in Chinese civilization and multiculturalism.

Yet if awarding prizes for science is relatively straightforward, awarding prizes for peace is far more controversial, as the ongoing debacle with the Confucius Peace Prize shows.

Its travails have been widely reported, with this story i Time magazine summing up some of the major issues, which include “wacky” nominee lists and a controversial founder, the Peking University professor and staunch Chinese ultra-nationalist Kong Qingdong, who claims to be a 73rd-generation offspring of Confucius himself and who early last year caused a storm of controversy after calling Hong Kong people “dogs” and “thieves.”

Time said the prize, awarded by “an obscure mainland group” (the China International Peace Research Center) was “a clumsy attempt to divert attention from the fact that the world’s most famous peace prize had just gone to a jailed Chinese dissident.” The government has reportedly dissociated itself from the award.

In 2010 and 2011 it was awarded, respectively, to a Taiwanese politician, Lien Chan, and to the Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Neither showed up for the ceremony.

Instead, wrote Xue Lei, a research fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies in the Global Times, “th! e award w! as given to a terrified small child” who was supposed to represent Mr. Lien, and to “two Russian hotties, supposed to represent Russian President Vladimir Putin,” all of which “just added to the entertainment value.”

Now, it appears to be slipping below the radar altogether.

Only a determined search of the Chinese internet showed up a report, dated Dec. 28, that suggested that last year a prize committee of 39 “experts and scholars” had in fact picked two winners for the 2012 award: Yuan Longping, known as “the father of hybrid rice,” a well-known scientist who for decades has worked to increase rice yields; and Kofi Annan, the former secretary-general of the United Nations.

But as the report on clubkdnet, an online chat forum, said, “there are no photographs on the internet of them receiving their prizes.”

Regulating the British Press

LONDON â€" News doesn’t just travel fast here. It happens fast, too. And once it has happened, new news overtakes the old: the dogs bark, as the old Middle Eastern adage has it, but the caravan moves on.

So it has seemed in the almost two months since the publication of the bulky Leveson Report into the culture and behavior of the British press. The land has been swamped by a procession of other front-page stories â€" British hostages in Algeria! Referendum on Europe! â€" and the urgency of Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson’s call for statutory oversight of the rambunctious press here seems to have dissipated.

But a couple of developments in recent days have recalled some of the issues â€" quite apart from a steady trickle of arrests linked to the phone hacking and allied scandals that prompted the Leveson inquiry in the first place.

One was the return from duty in Afghanistan of Prince Harry, the third in line to the British throne, who, s I describe in my latest column on Page Two of The International Herald Tribune, stirred a media frenzy by acknowledging that â€" no real surprise here â€" as the gunner co-pilot of an Apache attack helicopter, he was expected to fire on Taliban insurgents.

But there was a sub-plot.

Prince Harry’s aversion to the British media â€" equally unsurprising in light of the tangled relationship between his mother, Princess Diana, and the world’s newspapers, photographers and broadcasters â€" appears to be growing to the extent that he accused the British press of always writing “rubbish” about him.

A video report from Britain’s Channel 4 News shot during Prince Harry’s recent deployment to Afghanistan.

And yet, for the 20 weeks of Prince Harry’s deployment in Afghanistan, most news outlets in Britain had largely agreed with Buckingham Palace and the Ministry of! Defense not to cover closely his role in the war, in return for guaranteed access at the end of his tour â€" a gesture of what the authorities would doubtless call responsibility on the part of that same press the prince dismissed.

The prince’s comments drew a tart response from Peter Barron, the editor of the regional Northern Echo. “It would have been nice if Prince Harry had resisted getting out his huge tar brush to blacken the entire British press and acknowledged that there are good and bad in every profession â€" including the armed forces,” he said.

The broader issue of how Britain regulates its media is still the object of closed-door talks among editors and executives and between politicians. But it could well resurface publicly next month.

“This is not about politicians determining what journalists do or do nt write. The freedom of the press is essential,” Harriet Harman, the spokeswoman on media affairs for the opposition Labour Party, told a gathering in Oxford, England, last week. “But so is that other freedom: the freedom of a private citizen to go about their business without harassment, intrusion or the gross invasion of their grief and trauma. Those two freedoms are not incompatible.”

She challenged the government directly to set out its own proposals for the future regulation of the press.

“It is now time for the government to have the courage of its convictions,” she said, adding: “The public must be able to scrutinize the proposals. And Parliament â€" to whom Lord Justice Leveson trusted a key role in setting up the new system â€" must be able to decide.”