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IHT Quick Read: Jan. 31

NEWS For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees. Nicole Perlroth reports from San Francisco.

South Korea succeeded in thrusting a satellite into orbit for the first time on Wednesday, joining an elite club of space technology leaders seven weeks after the successful launching of a satellite by its rival, North Korea. Choe Sang-Hun reports from Seoul.

A promised referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union on new terms, or quit the bloc, provoked fresh tensions within the ritish government on Wednesday and more blunt warnings from abroad. Stephen Castle reports from London, and James Kanter from Brussels.

A group of lawyers investigating a violent crackdown in Myanmar in November that left Buddhist monks and villagers with serious burns contends that the police used white phosphorus, a munition normally reserved for warfare, to disperse protesters. Thomas Fuller reports from Bangkok.

As war rages across the border in Syria, the semiautonomous Kurdish region of Iraq has emerged as a lead backer of Syrian Kurds , hoping another empowered Kurdish entity like itself will emerge should the S! yrian regime fall. Ben Gittleson reports from Erbil, Iraq.

Beset by hard economic times, some say underground restaurants in Spain are providing a needed refuge in a country where even Michelin-starred restaurants have been forced to close under economic pressure. Dan Bilefsky reports from Barcelona.

U.S. citizens’ ability to vote from abroad continued to become easier in last year’s U.S. election, thanks to the combined effects of federal law and Internet resources, according to a new study by the Overseas Vote Foundation, a nonpartisan voter-assistance group. Brian Knowlton reports from Washington.

Two studies of malnourished children offer the first major new scientific findings in a decade about the causes and treatment of severe malnutrition, which affects more than 20 million children around the world and contributes to the deaths of more than a million a year. Merely giving children a cheap antibiotic along with the usual nutritional treatment could save tens of thousands of lives a year, researchers found. Denise Grady reports.

In a legal dispute that had been closely watched by multinational companies and environmental organizations, a Dutch court Wednesday dismissed most of the claims brought by Nigerian farmers seeking to hold Royal Dutch Shell accountable for damage by oil spilled from its pipelin! es. David Jolly and Stanley Reed report.

ARTS Contemporary artists in Indonesia, taking advantage of new liberties, are expressing their feelings in their works and getting noticed far outside of their country. Ginanne Brownell reports from Jakarta.

SPORTS Who governs soccer The laws of the global game remain FIFA’s to impose. But while there is a vacuum of leadership, three of the principal European soccer nations appear to be making their own arrangements. Rob Hughes reports from London.

A year ago, it looked like things migt be turning around for New Zealand’s national cricket team. Then the chaos returned. Emma Stoney reports from Wellington.



Report Highlights Challenges to Press Freedom in Asia

BEIJING â€" If the world were divided into six regions where the press is most free and where it’s least free, Asia, where nearly 60 percent of the world’s people live, would come in fourth, Reporters Without Borders says in its Press Freedom Index 2013.

That’s ahead of the nations in the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East and North Africa (which comes last), but behind Europe (first), the Americas and Africa, in that order.

The assessment is one of several new pieces of information in the just-out index, which tells us other interesting facts: China, as before, is in the bottom 10 of 179 countries; the United States’s position is far lower than many might think at 32 (behind Suriname); and Thailand, popularly viewed as one of the most freewheeling countries in Asia, comes in at a very low 135.

As my colleague, Thomas Fuller, reported from Bangkok last week, a recent case there highlighted a problem facing te media: powerful laws protecting the reputation of the royal family which led to the sentencing of the activist and editor Somyot Pruksakasemsuk to 10 years in prison for insulting Thailand’s king, “the latest in a string of convictions under the country’s strict lèse-majesté law,” Thomas wrote. (Somyot was given an additional year in jail for libeling a general.)

Just how severe Thailand’s laws are is illustrated by the fact that Somyot didn’t even write the two articles that got him jailed (though he was editor of the magazine where they appeared), nor did they mention the king, Thomas wrote.

The sentencing drew a rebuke from the United Nations human rights chief, Navi Pillay, who criticized the “extremely harsh” sentence as a s! etback for protection of human rights in Thailand and expressed her support for moves to amend the lèse-majesté laws.

Overall, democracies protect freedom of press better than dictatorships, the group said. But the report pointed to problems in democracies too.

There, “news providers have to cope with the media’s economic crises and conflicts of interest,” said its secretary-general, Christophe Deloire.

The situations of a dictatorship and democracy are “not always comparable,” but “we should pay tribute to all those who resist pressure whether it is aggressively focused or diffuse,” he said.

So where is the press doing well As usual, western democracies such as Finland, the Netherlands and Norway lead the table.

In Asia, outside of Australia (at 26th place), the freest press is in Taiwan, which ranks 47. South Korea is next, then Japan - though the report calls that country one of the “big falls,” having dropped a startling 31 places.

Japan “hasbeen affected by a lack of transparency and almost zero respect for access to information on subjects directly or indirectly related to Fukushima,” the nuclear plant disaster in 2011, Reporters Without Borders wrote. The Guardian reports that, according to the European Environment Agency, “the Fukushima disaster in 2011 may have released twice as much radiation as the Japanese government admitted.”

“This sharp fall should sound an alarm,” Reporters Without Borders said.

Myanmar was the brightest spot in terms of improvement, climbing 18 places to 151, “thanks to the Burmese spring’s unprecedented reforms.”

Yet other places in Asia dragged the region down to fourth in the world: Malaysia, dropping 23 places to 145, “its lowest-ever position because access to information is becoming more and more limited,” the group said. India, at 140, is “at its lowest since 2002 because of increasing impunity for vi! olence ag! ainst journalists and because Internet censorship continues to grow.”

And China, long a very poor performer, “shows no sign of improving. Its prisons still hold many journalists and netizens, while increasingly unpopular Internet censorship continues to be a major obstacle to access to information.”



Dutch Arts Groups Shut Down as Funding Vanishes

AMSTERDAM â€" In the 1980s and ’90s, the Netherlands had a reputation as a kind of paradise for artists. Graduates of fine arts academies could receive long-term grants and special housing subsidies to support them so they wouldn’t have to get day jobs. Edgy theater groups and small contemporary classical ensembles were fully financed to create innovative and experimental work. The government even bought art directly from artists who weren’t particularly commercial, maintaining it in large storage facilities, simply to support artistic production.

That all started to change during the first decade of this century as the Netherlands lawmakers became more conservative and budgets began to shrink. After the financial crisis hit Holland in 2008, the controversy about spending on the arts began to mount, reaching a fever pitch in 2011 and 2012, as the conservative-led coalition government took aim at culture.

As I wrote today in an article for the IHT, now some two dozen cultural organizations across the Netherlands are shutting their doors as dramatic Dutch cuts to the nation’s arts budgets have begun to take effect. Dance companies, orchestras, musical heritage foundations and nonprofit art galleries are closing down, some of which have been operating for decades.

Among the victims of the first round of cuts have been the Theater Institute Netherlands, which houses the nation’s theater museum, the acclaimed contemporary dance ensemble Dansgroep Amsterdam, and the Radio Chamber Philharmonic, a classical orchestra whose performances have been broadcast since the end of World War II.

Starting on Jan. 1, 2013, federal financing for the arts dropped by 22 percent, while regional, provincial and local governments cut anywhere from 10 to 20 percent out of their arts budgets, resulting in an overall loss of about 470 million in subsidies to the culture sector as a whole. Most of the countryâ! €™s established institutions, such as the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, are faring with slightly lower budgets, but some others have seen their subsidies vanish overnight.

“You will see that most of the institutions that will collapse or that will fall out of the system are the mid-sized or smaller ones,” said Jeroen Bartlese, secretary general of the Raad voor Cultuur, or Dutch Culture Council. “There will be fewer performances, there will be less things to see, culture will be less diverse. The Netherlands has been known as internationally as being a haven, a good place for talents to experiment, to show off, to learn and to develop their talent. I certainly hope that won’t go away, and maybe it won’t because you don’t break down a tradition that easily, but at the moment there are quite a few organizations that fall away, and that is cocerning.”

Although the conservative-led government was replaced with a more moderate Dutch parliament in September, the cuts to the cultural sector have not been rolled back. And the rhetoric that was used to justify the slicing has had a demoralizing effect as well.

“The Rutte government painted artist as elitist, parasitic, sophisticated beggars, living off state subsidies, basically procrastinating,” said Ann Demeester, director of De Appel art center in Amsterdam.

Efforts to find alternative and private sources of funding for the arts are underway, but it’s unlikely that such funding will come in time to save many of the groups that have lost their subsidies already this year.

“The way it was done was just too big and too quick, which may have led to the disappearance, and the end, of some institutions,” said Mr. Bartlese. “More than was necessary, if it had been phased in properly.”

How should the country’s arts groups go about rebuilding t! hemselves! Will they be able to find private sources of funding to fill in the gaps Are there other regions where arts organizations have found ways to generate the funding they need to stay afloat that can serve as models for those in the Netherlands



A Story Known Far and Wide, in Denmark at Least

Mads Mikkelsen and Alicia Vikander in Magnolia Pictures Mads Mikkelsen and Alicia Vikander in “A Royal Affair.”

Until this month, if the Danish director and screenwriter Nikolaj Arcel was known at all in the English-speaking world, it was as the co-writer of the screenplay for the original version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” But after winning two prizes at the Berlin Film Festival a year ago, the latest film he directed, “A Royal Affair,” is now getting attention in Hollywood as one of the five contenders nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Nikolaj ArcelPaul A. Hebert/Getty Images Nikolaj Arcel

“A Royal Affair” is set in the late 18th century, in the court of Christian VII, the mentally ill king of Denmark. A German doctor with progressive political and medical ideas, Johann Friederich Struensee, is hired to attend him, but after some initial improvement in the king’s behavior, things begin to take an unexpected direction: the doctor fills Christian with the revolutionary ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau at the same time he secretly becomes the lover of the young English-born queen, Caroline.

The film is the fifth Mr. Arcel has directed and features Mads Mikkelsen, who has appeared in “Casino Royale” and “Clash of the Titans,” as Struensee and Alicia Vikander, seen most recently in “Anna Karenina,” as Caroline. This week Mr. Arcel, 40, spoke b! y telephone from Denmark, where he is at work on a new project, about the genesis and objectives of “A Royal Affair.” Here are edited excerpts from that interview:

Q.

Your film portrays an episode virtually unknown outside Denmark. How well-known is it among Danes in the 21st century

A.

This is probably one of the most famous historic episodes in Denmark, and I would say that every single Dane knows about it. But it’s funny, because as soon as you cross the border, nobody knows it. So basically it’s only Denmark, where it’s taught in schools.

Q.

Did this story fascinate you as a child

A.

Yes, as it did most Danish kids. Of course you can’t understand the complexities of it when you’re in second or third grade, but what you can understand is that a beautiful young girl married a crazy king and had an affair with a rebellious revolutinary doctor. The adventure of it got to me as a kid.

Q.

So why hadn’t a movie version of this story been made earlier

A.

It’s a very ambitious project. I knew a lot of people had been trying to make the film for many, many years; obviously it’s been a bit of a holy grail for Danish filmmakers. But of course because of financing and various other problems, I guess it didn’t get made.

I never thought I would be crazy enough to try and do it. But then eventually after my third film, I thought, “O.K., if nobody is going to do this film, maybe I should give it a go.” Then cut to five years later, because it did actually take that long to get it done.

Q.

To tell the story, you opted to make a genre film, somewhat in the style of the costume dramas that the British do so well. Why did you take that approach

A.

Denmark is known for smaller sort of films, the Dogme films and small dramas, but what my entire career has been about has been making films that are very non-Danish in their look and way of storytelling. So I always find joy in trying to do something that has never been done in Denmark before. In this case it was the big, epic, lavish sort of costume drama.

Q.

When you talking about your films looking non-Danish, what do you mean

A.

I was part of a generation raised on American films, on the films of the ’70s, the new Hollywood, and I was a big fan of those. We grew up with a healthy mix of Hal Ashby, Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas, and you can see that in other filmmakers my age now in Denmark. They have a slightly more Americanized way of telling stories, a slightly more lavish scope and are making films that are a little bit more genre and not so much dramas that are about divorce and death and faily. We like to tell slightly bigger stories. I’m a big political nut myself, so a lot of my films have politics.

Q.

It’s interesting to hear you say that, because I thought you were using the costume drama and romantic triangle in “A Royal Affair” to deal a lot with politics, and not just 18th-century politics but also issues that confront us today.

A.

Yes, the big fight between conservatism and idealism. When I was writing, it was general feelings that I had about things that are still being discussed. When we were at Berlin, it was very timely because of the Arab Spring. Everybody thought we had done a film about the Arab Spring. And then when it came to America, it was the presidential election, and everybody in the U.S. thought we did a film that spoke to the American political situation. But this just goes to show that these are discussions that never end. We’re still discussing the same issues.

Q.

! So the debate in the film about whether to inoculate the population against smallpox is a kind of stand-in for current issues like global warming and whether the 1 percent should pay more in taxes

A.

Yes, and you can even relate it to the health care discussion: should we use money to make sure that people are healthy The conservatives at court are saying we don’t have money for that, we’ll just inoculate the wealthyâ€" which is something that still goes on, I think.

Q.

Lars von Trier is listed as one of the executive producers of “A Royal Affair.” Could you talk a bit about his participation in the project

A.

He’s a friend and obviously a mentor to me and to almost every Danish filmmaker. I asked him to be the main consultant for the screenplay and also in the editing. He came in and read the screenplay at various stages and gave his notes and came up with some ideas. He was the one, for example, who sggested that we follow both Caroline and Struensee instead of following just one of them. He said, “You should go epic and spend the time it takes to be with both of them, instead of just one.” And that was very good advice.

Q.

And in the editing process

A.

He also came into the editing room and sat with us for a couple of weeks. He gives very good, concise notes, he’s very good at that. The good thing about Lars is that he’s a brutal guy. He will just tell you if something doesn’t work, and he will tell you right away ‘I hate that’ or ‘I love that.’ (Laughs)

Specifically, he did help us take out some overexplaining at certain points. We thought the audience wouldn’t get certain things, but he said, “Take this out, delete this scene, you don’t need that.” He is basically the mentor of this film.

Q.

I know you’re being told you’ve got an uphill climb, being in the same cat! egory as ! Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” but you sound like you’re pleased just to be one of the nominees.

A.

Yes, of course. I mean, who wouldn’t be I think that being nominated for an Oscar is something quite joyful and if you start really stressing that you want to win, then you get … I think winning is not the important thing. It’s really an honor to be in the company of Haneke and some of these other directors. I’ll just be happy with that for now. (Laughs)



A Story Known Far and Wide, in Denmark at Least

Mads Mikkelsen and Alicia Vikander in Magnolia Pictures Mads Mikkelsen and Alicia Vikander in “A Royal Affair.”

Until this month, if the Danish director and screenwriter Nikolaj Arcel was known at all in the English-speaking world, it was as the co-writer of the screenplay for the original version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” But after winning two prizes at the Berlin Film Festival a year ago, the latest film he directed, “A Royal Affair,” is now getting attention in Hollywood as one of the five contenders nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Nikolaj ArcelPaul A. Hebert/Getty Images Nikolaj Arcel

“A Royal Affair” is set in the late 18th century, in the court of Christian VII, the mentally ill king of Denmark. A German doctor with progressive political and medical ideas, Johann Friederich Struensee, is hired to attend him, but after some initial improvement in the king’s behavior, things begin to take an unexpected direction: the doctor fills Christian with the revolutionary ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau at the same time he secretly becomes the lover of the young English-born queen, Caroline.

The film is the fifth Mr. Arcel has directed and features Mads Mikkelsen, who has appeared in “Casino Royale” and “Clash of the Titans,” as Struensee and Alicia Vikander, seen most recently in “Anna Karenina,” as Caroline. This week Mr. Arcel, 40, spoke b! y telephone from Denmark, where he is at work on a new project, about the genesis and objectives of “A Royal Affair.” Here are edited excerpts from that interview:

Q.

Your film portrays an episode virtually unknown outside Denmark. How well-known is it among Danes in the 21st century

A.

This is probably one of the most famous historic episodes in Denmark, and I would say that every single Dane knows about it. But it’s funny, because as soon as you cross the border, nobody knows it. So basically it’s only Denmark, where it’s taught in schools.

Q.

Did this story fascinate you as a child

A.

Yes, as it did most Danish kids. Of course you can’t understand the complexities of it when you’re in second or third grade, but what you can understand is that a beautiful young girl married a crazy king and had an affair with a rebellious revolutinary doctor. The adventure of it got to me as a kid.

Q.

So why hadn’t a movie version of this story been made earlier

A.

It’s a very ambitious project. I knew a lot of people had been trying to make the film for many, many years; obviously it’s been a bit of a holy grail for Danish filmmakers. But of course because of financing and various other problems, I guess it didn’t get made.

I never thought I would be crazy enough to try and do it. But then eventually after my third film, I thought, “O.K., if nobody is going to do this film, maybe I should give it a go.” Then cut to five years later, because it did actually take that long to get it done.

Q.

To tell the story, you opted to make a genre film, somewhat in the style of the costume dramas that the British do so well. Why did you take that approach

A.

Denmark is known for smaller sort of films, the Dogme films and small dramas, but what my entire career has been about has been making films that are very non-Danish in their look and way of storytelling. So I always find joy in trying to do something that has never been done in Denmark before. In this case it was the big, epic, lavish sort of costume drama.

Q.

When you talking about your films looking non-Danish, what do you mean

A.

I was part of a generation raised on American films, on the films of the ’70s, the new Hollywood, and I was a big fan of those. We grew up with a healthy mix of Hal Ashby, Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas, and you can see that in other filmmakers my age now in Denmark. They have a slightly more Americanized way of telling stories, a slightly more lavish scope and are making films that are a little bit more genre and not so much dramas that are about divorce and death and faily. We like to tell slightly bigger stories. I’m a big political nut myself, so a lot of my films have politics.

Q.

It’s interesting to hear you say that, because I thought you were using the costume drama and romantic triangle in “A Royal Affair” to deal a lot with politics, and not just 18th-century politics but also issues that confront us today.

A.

Yes, the big fight between conservatism and idealism. When I was writing, it was general feelings that I had about things that are still being discussed. When we were at Berlin, it was very timely because of the Arab Spring. Everybody thought we had done a film about the Arab Spring. And then when it came to America, it was the presidential election, and everybody in the U.S. thought we did a film that spoke to the American political situation. But this just goes to show that these are discussions that never end. We’re still discussing the same issues.

Q.

! So the debate in the film about whether to inoculate the population against smallpox is a kind of stand-in for current issues like global warming and whether the 1 percent should pay more in taxes

A.

Yes, and you can even relate it to the health care discussion: should we use money to make sure that people are healthy The conservatives at court are saying we don’t have money for that, we’ll just inoculate the wealthyâ€" which is something that still goes on, I think.

Q.

Lars von Trier is listed as one of the executive producers of “A Royal Affair.” Could you talk a bit about his participation in the project

A.

He’s a friend and obviously a mentor to me and to almost every Danish filmmaker. I asked him to be the main consultant for the screenplay and also in the editing. He came in and read the screenplay at various stages and gave his notes and came up with some ideas. He was the one, for example, who sggested that we follow both Caroline and Struensee instead of following just one of them. He said, “You should go epic and spend the time it takes to be with both of them, instead of just one.” And that was very good advice.

Q.

And in the editing process

A.

He also came into the editing room and sat with us for a couple of weeks. He gives very good, concise notes, he’s very good at that. The good thing about Lars is that he’s a brutal guy. He will just tell you if something doesn’t work, and he will tell you right away ‘I hate that’ or ‘I love that.’ (Laughs)

Specifically, he did help us take out some overexplaining at certain points. We thought the audience wouldn’t get certain things, but he said, “Take this out, delete this scene, you don’t need that.” He is basically the mentor of this film.

Q.

I know you’re being told you’ve got an uphill climb, being in the same cat! egory as ! Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” but you sound like you’re pleased just to be one of the nominees.

A.

Yes, of course. I mean, who wouldn’t be I think that being nominated for an Oscar is something quite joyful and if you start really stressing that you want to win, then you get … I think winning is not the important thing. It’s really an honor to be in the company of Haneke and some of these other directors. I’ll just be happy with that for now. (Laughs)



Mali\'s Culture War: The Fate of the Timbuktu Manuscripts

LONDON â€" Scholars are urgently trying to determine the fate of a treasure store of ancient manuscripts in the city of Timbuktu.

As French-led forces consolidated their hold on northern Mali, international scholars feared the worst: that retreating Islamic militants torched the Ahmed Baba Institute, home to 30,000 priceless items of scholarship dating back to the 13th century.

But many volumes may have escaped destruction by being hidden from fundamentalist forces that seized the north last year. The militants launched a campaign to eradicate historic vestiges of a medieval Muslim civilization that they deemed un-Islamic.

South African researchers involved in a project to preserve the Timbuktu manuscripts have had word that most of the treasures survived in private libraries and secure locations

Mohamed Mathee of the University of Johannesburg told eNews Channel Africa said, “It seems most of the manuscripts are OK. These manuscripts are with families and are safe.”

National Geographic News quoted Sidi Ahmed, a reporter who recently fled Islamist-controlled Timbuktu, as saying: “The people here have long memories. They are used to hiding their manuscripts. They go into the desert and bury them until it is safe.”

Whatever the fate of the city’s ancient texts, the French intervention came too late to save some of the city’s most valued monuments, including centuries-old shrines of Sufi saints demolished by the Islamists during their nine-month rule.

It was part of a culture war that th! ey waged to impose Sharia law after their capture of the north. The strict Sunni Salafists reject the worship of saints that is part of the Shia and Sufi tradition.

When UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural agency, placed Timbuktu on its list of endangered world heritage sites following the Islamist takeover, Oumar Ould Hamaha, a spokesman for the Ansar Dine militants, responded: “We are subject to religion and not to international opinion.”

Elsewhere in North Africa, militants have attacked Sufi shrines as well as remnants of the region’s pre-Islamic past.

Radical Islamists were blamed last October for the destruction of stone carvings in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains that dated back more than 8,000 years and depicted the sun as a pagan divinity.

It was rminiscent of the destruction of the Buddhist statues of Bamiyan, which were dynamited out of existence in 2001 by the Afghan Taliban despite appeals from fellow Muslims.

Such seemingly wanton acts of religiously inspired vandalism are not, of course, confined to Islamic fundamentalists, as my colleague Barbara Crossette wrote at the time.

“Certainly it evoked the religious triumphalism that plagues a broad swath of the world, from China to the Balkans,” she wrote, “the destruction of centuries-old mosques by Hindus at Ayodhya or by Serbs in Bosnia, or the assaults on heritage that defy peace itself in Jerusalem.”

From the Crusades to the conquest of the Americas, a militant Catholic Church also displayed a predilection for eradicating the artifacts of pagans and religious rivals alike. And, in the 17th century English Civil War, iconoclastic Puritans hacked down the statues of churches and c! athedrals! .

Recent events in Mali have highlighted how today’s ideological wars are fought with more than just weapons.

The Timbuktu manuscripts, which include texts on religion, medicine and mathematics, had been treasured by local families but largely neglected by the outside world until the end of French colonial rule in 1960.

That changed dramatically in recent years as rival African powers sought to use culture in their campaigns for influence in the region.

As my colleague Lydia Polgreen wrote from Timbuktu in 2007, both South Africa and the Libya of Col. Muammar Gaddafi were involved in efforts to revive the fortunes of the ancient city and its artifacts.

The South African initiative involved building a new library for the Ahmed Baba Institute, while Libya planned to build a luxurious 100-room resort to hold academic and religious conferences.

Charities and governments from Europe, the United States nd the Middle East also poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into transforming the city’s family libraries.

“Timbuktu’s new seekers have a variety of motives,” she wrote. “South Africa and Libya are vying for influence on the African stage, each promoting its vision of a resurgent Africa.”