IHT Quick Read: Feb. 1

NEWS After nearly 10 months of occupation by Islamists fighters, many of them linked with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the people of Timbuktu, Mali, recounted how they survived the upending of their tranquil lives. Lydia Polgreen reports from Timbuktu, Mali.

Israel has pursued a creeping annexation of the Palestinian territories through the creation of Jewish settlements and committed multiple violations of international law, possibly including war crimes, a United Nations panel said Thursday, calling for an immediate halt to all settlement activity and the withdrawal of all settlers. Nick Cumming-Bruce reported from Gneva, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.

Just as Spain’s financial troubles seemed to be diminishing, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has become engulfed in a widening corruption scandal involving payments to the leaders of his Popular Party. Raphael Minder reports from Madrid.

One day after The New York Times reported that Chinese hackers had infiltrated its computers and stolen passwords for its employees, The Wall Street Journal announced that it too had been hacked. Nicole Perlroth reports.

European antitrust officials on Thursday accused the drug giants Johnson & Johnson and Novartis o! f colluding to delay the availability of a less expensive generic version of a powerful medication often used to ease severe pain in cancer patients. James Kanter reports from Brussels and Katie Thomas from New York.

Across Asia and the Middle East, musicians from the Philippines are seemingly ubiquitous in bars, lounges and clubs. But they are also helping to bolster the Philippine economy. Floyd Whaley reports from Manila.

Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest lender, reported a surprise quarterly net loss of $3 billion on Thursday, as new management tallied the cost of past mistakes and tried to draw a line uder the bank’s troubled past. Jack Ewing reports from Frankfurt.

Some see the central coastline of Vietnam becoming a world-class beachfront destination along the lines of Phuket and Bali, though regulations for acquisition of property by foreigners remain murky. Mike Ives reports from Da Nang, Vietnam.

ARTS World records were set for some Old Masters on Wednesday. Souren Melikian reports from New York.

SPORTS Almost six years after departing mainstream soccer to pitch camp close to Hollywood,! David Be! ckham will join Paris Saint-Germain. Rob Hughes reports.

For rugby players from Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England, playing well in the Six Nations tournament will be the best way to ensure selection for the famed British and Irish Lions team later this year. Emma Stoney reports from Wellington.

What\'s the Worst - and Best - Metro in the World

Chris Jackson/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Prince Charles and his wife Camilla traveled on a London underground train from Farringdon to Kings Cross on Wednesday.

LONDON â€" Prince Charles on the London tube! What’s next

The heir to the British throne hopped aboard on Wednesday for what was reported to be his first trip on the London Underground in 27 years, accompanied by his wife, Camilla. Originally, the press reported it had been 33 years.

The occasion did notmark the scaling down of royal expenditure in an era of austerity â€" the couple arrived at London’s Farringdon Station by limousine â€" but rather the 150th anniversary of the launch of subterranean travel in the British capital.

London was the pioneer of underground transit, a method of cheap and speedy commuter transport that changed the face of the city and has since spread across the world.

You either like it or you endure it. Prince Charles and Camilla endured only a one-stop trip and who knows if they liked it.

Over the years, the subway systems of the world’s major cities have come almost to represent and reflect the local character.

Some Paris Metro trains purr silkily along on rubber wheels, while in New York subway travelers commute on thundering steel dragons between stations that often resemble something out of a post-Apocalypse movie.

In London, some stops reflect a fading Edwardian or modernist charm that is so valued that they are protected buildings.! In Tokyo, the world’s most-used subway system is smart, bright, efficient and frequently overcrowded.

Moscow meanwhile delights in an over-the-top Soviet-era extravaganza that was built to display the glories of the Communist system.

To an extent, travelers get what they pay for. Some of New York’s subway stations may be crumbling and peeling, but you can get from one-end of the five boroughs to the other for $2.25.

In London, Prince Charles’ one-stop trip would have cost him £4.50, or $7. The good news is that, like other over-60s, he is entitled to a Freedom Pass â€" an access-all-areas swipe card that grants free access to the whole of the city’s transport system.

We would like to know what you think of your subway/Metro/underground. Let us know your subway experiences, whether from New York or Paris, Rio or Tehran. And tell which is your favorite. Happy travels.

Rendezvous’ editor, Marcus Mabry, a New Yorker who lives in London, in typically usporting American fashion, demanded to get in the first word:

In London you often do not get what you pay for! Sections of lines close all the time â€" even during rush hour â€" because of “signal failure,” one of the most dreaded phrases for the London commuter. The others are “planned engineer works” â€" since, unlike New York, there is only one track and not an express and local track, whenever a Tube line needs repairs, which is all the time on London’s antediluvian system, the Underground simply closes a section of the line. The system is so overcrowded that it’s normal for high-traffic stations, like Holborn, to be temporarily closed during rush hour to allow the crowds to dissipate. The entire Underground shuts down on Christmas Day, which is nice for the workers but what about all the people who have no other way to get around â€" or who don’t observe Christmas Have they never heard of Jews and Muslims

My favorite metros are Berlin’s, built for a city twice the si! ze, and B! udapest’s, the Continent’s oldest.

But Harvey is right about how the subterranean ride reflects nature of its city. The Britons’ famous stiff upper lip allows them to take all this in stride. If the subway or the Metro were as unreliable as the Tube, the French and the Americans, given their penchant for complaining loudly, would revolt.

The Indian State is a Coward

The language of the Indian state is often sentimental, but in reality it is a practical corporation that tries to appease in the easiest ways possible its most valued consumers. Which is not a bad thing. But, like most practical people, the state is a coward. It wants to completely eliminate imaginary risks to its survival and is willing to do even stupid things that have no meaning to achieve that.

Hopper Show Pulls Some All-Nighters

PARISâ€"Many of Edward Hopper’s paintings are set at night, so it seems appropriate for the museum to offer its visitors a chance to see “Edward Hopper,” on view in the Grand Palais, after dark. After midnight, even.

This weekend, Parisians will be able to see works including “Conference at Night,” “Office at Night” and “Soir Bleu” in the darkest hours of the night. The museum will be open for 62 hours straight, from 9 a.m. Friday through 11 p.m. Sunday.

This is the third time the Grand Palais has kept open its doors around the clock.

“The idea is to attract a more diverse crowd,†said Jean-Paul Cluzel, the president of both the Réunion des musées nationaux and the Grand Palais, in a telephone interview. “A younger crowd that probably wouldn’t have come to see the show otherwise.”

In 2009, the show “Picasso et les Maîtres” stayed open for 4 days and 3 nights, welcoming 30,000 night owls. Then, in 2011, the museum tried the experiment again with “Claude Monet,” one of the most visited exhibitions in 40 years in France. The doors were open to the public for 83 hours. “People come after dinner, after a show, and they come with a different frame of mind, they’re in a different atmosphere,” said Mr. Cluzel.

Since ! it opened in October 2012, the Hopper exhibition has attracted 580,000 visitors, with a goal of 700,000 by Sunday, the last day of the show. Those numbers are far lower than the attendance for the Monet exhibition, which set a record in 2011 with more than 900,000 visitors.

But Mr. Cluzel said the round-the-clock event isn’t about the number of visitors. “This isn’t a financial operation,” he said, noting that the exhibition cost around €4 million, and calculated that, with an average visitor paying about €12, the museum broke even after 300,000 visitors. “The extra 30,000 people a night who will come this weekend won’t make that much of a difference for us financially,” Mr Cluzel said.

The Hopper show had originally been scheduled to end on Tuesday. The extra days, Mr. Cluzel said, involved “a lot of organizing. We started planning this weekend two months ago.”

The owners of the art â€" museums and private collectors â€" had to be contacted to ask if the pieces couldremain at the Grand Palais for an extra week.

“Once we contacted everyone and they agreed to let us keep the paintings,” Mr. Cluzel explained, “we had to make sure we had a schedule for the staff, the security, the cleaning.” Overall, about 300 people will work over the whole weekend.

So far the Grand Palais seems to be the only museum in Paris to pull all-nighters, but it’s happened with some frequency in the United States. Last week, the Denver Art Museum held a 40-hour marathon for the last weekend of the exhibition “Becoming Van Gogh.” The Museum of Modern Art in New York held a 24-hour exhibition of Christian Marclay’s installation “The Clock” this month. In 2010, for ! the Whitn! ey Biennale, the artist Michael Asher kept the museum open overnight. A must for the city that never sleeps, he said, mentioning Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” as an inspiration.

This is the first time Edward Hopper has a retrospective in France, Mr. Cluzel has said. Though the artist’s name isn’t as well known in France as it is in the United States, Mr. Cluzel says some of his work has seeped into French culture: Many of his paintings have been used as book covers or have been seen in movies. He wasn’t surprised the exhibition was a success. “Hopper’s art is very representative of 1930s America, a period of crisis and depressio.. Our visitors recognize the atmosphere in Hopper’s work as it echoes that of today.”

Hopper won’t be the only American artist to have a retrospective in Paris this year: There’s a Keith Haring exhibition opening in April at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Centre Pompidou is hosting a Roy Lichtenstein show.

Europeans Dismantle People-Smuggling Ring

LONDON â€" European police said on Wednesday that they had dismantled a criminal network that smuggled illegal migrants into the European Union, arresting more than 100 suspects across the Continent, from France to the Balkans.

The network smuggled people principally from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Turkey.

Europol, a joint law enforcement agency set up to fight serious crime in the 27-member Union, said 117 house searches had been carried out in operations in the early hours of Tuesday morning that involved more than 1,200 police officers.

The latest crackdown on people-smugglers highlighted a chronic problem for European authorities as would-be migrants, desperate to escape poverty and conflict in their home countries, put their fate in the hands of organized criminal gangs to take a well-worn route via Turkey and the Balkans.

Interol says the traffic is a high-profit, low-risk enterprise for transnational criminal syndicates.

“People smuggling syndicates are drawn by the huge profits that can be made, while benefiting from weak legislation and the relatively low risk of detection, prosecution and arrest,” according to the international police organization.

The International Organization for Migration (I.O.M.) said in a 2011 report that the activity earns organized crime groups an estimated $3 to $10 billion a year worldwide.

Europol described this week’s action as one of the largest coordinated efforts against people smugglers at a European level. It was also the latest indication that countries are pooling resources to fight international organized crime gangs.

Police and migrat! ion experts say there is a difference between people-smuggling, in which would-be migrants voluntarily pay to illegally cross transnational borders, and people-trafficking, which involves the criminal exploitation of duped or unwilling victims.

“Smuggling implies the procurement of irregular entry into a state of which the individual is neither a citizen nor a permanent resident, for financial or material gain,” according to the I.O.M. “Trafficking, on the other hand, occurs for the purpose of exploitation, often involving forced labor and prostitution.”

However, that may turn out to be a fine distinction for would-be illegal migrants who face abuse at the hands of the crime gangs.

Europol said migrants were often smuggled in inhuman and dangerous conditions in small hidden compartments in the floor of buses or trucks, in freight trains or on boats.

Gangs operating on the so-called West Balkans smuggling route have proved to be innovative and flexible in the face of increasedinternational cooperation to tackle the trade.

Greek police broke up a smuggling network in 2007 that was transporting Albanian migrants across a dangerous mountain route. The smugglers then switched to alternative routes via Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia to Italy, Hungary and Slovenia.

The main destinations of the illegal migrants are France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Belgium. The raids this week involved operations in France and Germany as well as eastern Europe and Turkey.

Europol reported 103 arrests and said cell phones, computers, cash and a semi-automatic rifle with a large amount of ammunition were among the items seized.

In November, British immigration officers arrested eight suspects in an alleged criminal network suspected of helping Iranian migrants reach Britain from mainland Europe. That followed a joint investigation with Spain’s Guardia Civil that led to 11 other arrests in Madrid and Alicante.

http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/newsarticle! s/2012/no! vember/54-people-smuggling

Although the illegal immigrants may be traveling willingly in the search of a better life, people-smuggling is not a victimless crime.

The I.O.M. said in its 2011 report: “Numerous other crimes are oftentimes linked to people smuggling - human trafficking, identity fraud, corruption and money laundering - creating shadow governance systems that undercut the rule of law.”