IHT Quick Read: Feb. 8

NEWS Hewlett-Packard, one of the world’s largest makers of computers and other electronics, is imposing new limits on the employment of students and temporary agency workers at factories across China. The move, following recent efforts by Apple to increase scrutiny of student workers, reflects a significant shift in how electronics companies view problematic labor practices in China. Keith Bradsher reports from Hong Kong and David Barboza from Shanghai.

Engaging a high-ranking Obama administration official for the first time in an extensive public discussion of the use of drones for targeted killing, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday pressed John O. Brennan, President Obama’s nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, about the secrecy of th strikes, their legal basis and the reported backlash they have produced in Pakistan and Yemen. Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane report from Washington.

E.U. leaders have begun a two-day summit meeting, warning of obstacles to reaching agreement on a nearly €1 trillion budget to support farming, transportation and other infrastructure, as well as big research projects for the 27-nation bloc. James Kanter reports from Brussels.

The 2014 Olympic Games have been a pet project for President Vladimir V. Putin, but critics see Russia’s role as inviting international scrutiny on issues like human rights and civil liberties. David M. Herszenhorn reports from Sochi, Russia.

Recent photographs from Mali suggest that weapons from Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s looted stockpiles may have found their way to militants in sub-Saharan Africa. C.J. Chivers reports.

The Irish government, trying to lighten the staggering debt burden of bailing out some of its biggest banks four years ago, reached a deal on Thursday with the European Central Bank to give the country more time to repay some of those loans. Mark Scott reports from London.

Humankind’s common ancestor with other mammals may have been a roughly rat-size animal that weighed no more than a half a pound, had a long furry tail and lived on insects, according to a report in the journal Science. John Noble Wilford reports.

A group of small-factory owners in the ailing Ota district of Tokyo has built a bobsled in an effort to show others that a better future lies in a shift to producing precision products. Martin Fackler reports from Tokyo.

How a porcelain company founded in 1735 went bankrupt is the subject of considerable debate in Italy. The answers say a! s much ab! out the demise of the Richard Ginori factory as they do about the larger forces buffeting nearly all of the country’s small- and medium-size manufacturers at a time of increased global competition and domestic economic crisis. Elisabetta Povoledo reports from Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.

Burberry, the British fashion brand, on Thursday named the former chief executive of BBC Worldwide as its chief operating officer, part of its plan to increase the use of digital media to win customers. Julia Werdigier reports from London.

ARTS A new exhibition of Mozart portraits in Austria aims to focus attention onwhat he really looked like. Daniel J. Wakin reports.

SPORTS Carlin Isles, who was ranked in the top 40 in the United States in the 100 meters, has become the talk of his new sport, rugby sevens, for his ability to outrun opponents. Emma Stoney reports from Wellington.

The British introduced Brazilians to soccer more than a century ago and since then have spent an awful lot of time trying to get their ball back. On Wednesday, albeit in a friendly game that counted for no points, England beat Brazil, 2-1, at the rebuilt 90,000-seat Wembley Stadium. Rob Hughes reports from London.

Stark Numbers Reveal the Scale of Elephant Killings

HONG KONG â€" The past couple of years has seen a stream of news about elephant killings and increasingly massive ivory seizures, a stream so relentless that it has become numbing.

A study released on Wednesday, however, still has the power to shock. Over the past eight years or so, according to the study, 11,000 elephants have been killed by poachers in the western African state of Gabon, where the Minkébé National Park once held the continent’s largest forest elephant population. Two-thirds of the park’s elephant population has been wiped out since 2004.

“The situation is out of control. We are witnessing the systematic slaughter of the world’s largest land mammal,” said Bas Huijbregts, head of the Central African strand of WWF’s global campaign against illegal wildlife trade, Wildlife Conservation Society, which conducted the study with the WWF and the Gabonese National Parks Agency, said the data represented trends across all remaining forest elephant strongholds in the region, and pointed to a “regional crisis.”

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, in central Africa, is believed to have between 7,000 and 10,000 elephants â€" less than 10 percent of its population 20 years ago.

In the Central African Republic, which had as many as 80,000 elephants in the mid-1980s, the numbers are now down to just a few thousand as poachers are taking advantage of the political instability in the country to hunt the creatures.

And last year, hundreds of elephants were killed for their tusks in Cameroon, another western African nation.

Moreover, the Gabon slaughter has taken place in a country that had been ! thought to be less badly hit by poaching than other parts of Africa.

As my colleague Jeffrey Gettleman reported last year, Gabon’s government, blessed with billions of dollars of oil money, has made many of the right moves to protect its animals, setting aside chunks of land for national parks, and even lighting a pyramid of 10,000 pounds of ivory on fire to make the point that the trade was reprehensible.

As I wrote last year, demand for ivory from China is the leading driver behind the illegal trade, compounded by improved transport, trade links and a rise in the presence of Chinese nationals in Africa. And although the Chinese authorities are helping with awareness campaigns, what is really needed is on-the-ground enforcement, to help trace and combat the acivities of Chinese middlemen in the illicit trade, experts have said.

For the crisis to be comprehensively addressed, Mr. Huijbregts of the WWF commented Wednesday, “the international intelligence community needs to get involved in this fight as soon as possible, in order to identify, track and put out of business these global criminal networks, which corrupt governments, erode national security and hamper economic development prospects.”

Unless the governments of the region and demand countries treat this issue as an international emergency, he said, “we cannot rule out that, in our lifetime, there will no longer be any viable elephant populations in Central Africa.”

Baron Von Fancy Goes to Paris

PARISâ€"Baron Von Fancy’s name may belong in an 18th-century German royal court, but he is very much a 20th-century child. He’s a multimedia artist who lives in New York and surfs on the vintage-is-cool wave, using social media as his manager, agent and public relations firm.

His latest exhibition, “A Thing Called Love,” opened on Monday at the Paris Colette shop, a European mecca of all things fashionable, and runs through Feb. 23. It’s his first big break. “I’m honored to be shown in Colette. I couldn’t have asked for more,” said Baron Von Fancy, who is 28, while sipping tea in a cafe across the street from the store.

The exhibition is a collection of handpainted 1950s-looking signs of catchphrases overheard in the subway and in conversation. Some of them are poetic, some are jokes and some clichés. The theme for the show, whose run encompasses Valentine’s ay, is love. “Crazy About You,” “To the Moon and Back,” “Just Kids” (referencing Patti Smith’s book) are a few examples. He added “Bisous,” and “Loin des yeux, loin du coeur,” as a nod to his new French audience. He also redesigned Colette’s Water Bar menu and painted huge murals. The one behind the cash register reads “The Thrill Is Gone.”

Outside, along the wall, he had started painting the words Very Fancy, but the person who was supposed to help him paint was late and he didn’t have time to finish before the opening of the show. Welcome to France, Mr. Fancy.



Baron Von Fancy isn’t - surprise, surprise - his real name. He was born Gordon Stevenson, in New York, in the early 1980s, one of seven siblings and half-siblings. He is not without connections: his father, Charles Stevenson, is an investor; his stepmother is the writer Alex Kuczynski, who contributes to The New York Times. The story behind his strange but catchy moniker is a mix of many an! ecdotes including a nickname of an ex-girlfriend’s dog and his fancy collection of vintage Versace jeans.

Baron Von Fancy (why call him Gordon when you can call him Baron Von Fancy) epitomizes Generation Y, also known as Generation Sell. He creates art under both names, but uses Baron Von Fancy as a brand for his more commercial art. As Gordon Stevenson, he paints, dyes waterfalls, and does light installations. When he is Baron, as he says his mother now often calls him, he does lighters, bow ties, socks and his painted signs.

Baron doesn’t whip out a battered Moleskine when he has an idea, he uses Twitter is his notebook. He tweets several times a day, to more than a thousand people, phrases that could end up on a sign in an exhibition.

His Instagram account has more than 4,000 subscribers, and serves as his PR office.

As it happens, Instagram, the photo-sharing application with  90 million users, had a key role in securing his Colette exhibition. 

Several months ago, one of Baron Von Fancy’s friends noticed a picture of a T-shirt on Colette’s Instagram account with what looked like a Baron Von Fancy sign, and notified him. He wrote to Colette’s owner Sarah Andelman and showed her a picture of his art. She agreed the brand they were selling must have copied Baron Von Fancy’s art and invited him to exhibit his work in her store.

!

“I c! an’t help but thank Instagram,” says Baron Von Fancy with a laugh. “I realize how crazy that sounds, and people may say I take Instagram too seriously, but it has done so much for me. It has changed my life.”

You can already here a vast group of people shriek and shake their heads at his statement but the fact is that today social media is the way young artists to get themselves known. 

He uses the application to share his vision and show his inspiration, but also to showcase his work.

“All I think of when I wake up in the morning is create,” he says. And although he makes a living writing sentences, he says he’s not a writer, but expresses himself visually. “I’m not very good a keeping a blog, but Instagram is a perfect way to communicate and get visibility.”

p>Technology has opened many opportunities for him. Through social media, he has started a collaboration with the clothing brand Patagonia (the New York art director followed his Instagram account) and a collaboration with a rapper on socks.

Although Baron Von Fancy is very much an artist of our time, his art is turned toward the past, inspired by old-school classic sign painting. “Today everyone uses computer-generated fonts,” he says, looking out the window at the Parisian store fronts, “but I think that in general there is a real movement of people who are going back to things being made by hand and with care.”

To learn the art of handmade signs, Baron Von Fancy turned toward a old Latvian man called Fred who has a sign store in Queens, New York, and who taught him his art. “I sat there and looked at how he moved his hand,” he explains.

Fred has always worked in Queens, and has no idea what Colette is. He has no idea that this show means his student plays with the big! boys now! . “He doesn’t even get why I use most of my catchphrases,” says Baron Von Fancy.

But that is exactly what Baron Von Fancy does, and why he’s representative of his generation. He takes something basic and old, and turns into something nostalgically new and cool. Fancy, as it were.

Calling Henry Higgins: School Makes a Case for Standard English

LONDON â€" A school in the northeast of England has opened a can of worms by urging parents to make sure their offspring learn when to use the Queen’s English rather than their distinctive local dialect, if they want to get on in life.

The Sacred Heart School in Middlesbrough, in the Teesside region, wants its 5 to 11-year-old pupils to avoid localisms in their writing and speech and has included a handy guide in a letter to parents.

Examples: avoid “gizit ere” and stick to “please give me it”. It’s “letter” and “butter”, not “letta” and “butta”. And always say “you”, not “yous”, even when there are more than one of yous.

“I believe that basic communication skills are essential for life,” Carol Walker, the school’s head teacher, said this week. “We would like to equip our children to go into the world of work and not be disadvantaged.”

She said she was not asking children to change their dialect or accents. But she did not want them to enter the world of work without knowing about standard English.

It sounds like commonsensical advice in what careers advisers would call the modern competitive workplace. But tradition-loving regionalists might be forgiven for discerning it as part of a broader trend toward conformity and homogenization.

Academics consulted by the Evening Gazette, the local Teesside newspaper, were broadly supportive of the school’s initiative, while also defending the role of regional dialects.

It quoted Mike Davenport, head of Durham University’s English Language Center, as saying it w! as a tricky balance to find.

Children needed to know standard English, he said, but added: “Accent and dialect is a badge. It’s a way of showing what group you belong to and that’s why we switch to it.”

Peter Stockwell, a Teessider and a linguistics professor at Nottingham University, told the newspaper: “Fortunately, in spite of the best efforts of teachers and professors, language loyalty is stronger than the desire to sound like people from outside the town.”

One linguist based in the northern city of Lancaster expressed sympathy for the children:

Like so much in English society, accent and dialect continue to be linked, consciously or otherwise, to issues of class.

It is hard to believe that the BBC once caused a stir by employing J.B. Priestley, the Yorkshire author, to make wartime broadcasts in which “the contrast between the cut-glass accent of the presenter ad Priestley’s warmer Yorkshire tones was striking.”

These days, in public life and broadcasting, regional accents are the norm and the clipped upper-class accent of yesteryear is the exception.

Steph McGovern, a BBC business reporter, Tweeted defiantly this week in response to the school diktat:

Even the younger members of the royal family are accused of lapsing into Estuary, a Cockney-derived patois of glottal stops and dropped h’s that has swamped the southeast of England.

A hierarchy of dialects has nevertheless emerged, with authentic Cockney (London), Brummy (Birmingham), and Scouse (Liverpool) at the bottom of the heap.

According to the British Library’s language Web site:

For many years, certain English dialects have been viewed more positively than others. Many of us make assumptions based on the way pe! ople spea! k â€" judging certain dialects or accents as too posh, harsh, aggressive, unfriendly, ‘unintelligent’ or ‘common’.

Unfortunately many individuals have suffered as a result of this irrational prejudice. No one dialect is better at communicating meaning than another. The fact some dialects and accents are seen to be more prestigious than others is more a reflection of judgements based on social, rather than linguistic, criteria.

It advises that, in an increasingly homogeneous society, the vocabulary, structure and sounds that define the speech of a particular region, should be a source of great pride and an important expression of cultural identity.

Ken Hurst, a journalist from rustic Norfolk County, wrote in a blog on Thursday that regional dialects could also be a barrier that is often deliberately applied to encourage insularity and exclude outsiders.

“Regional speech and, worse, writig, serve only to accentuate narrow social, economic and educational horizons that constrain ambition, opportunity and the ability to engage fully with the wider world,” he wrote.

What do you think Are dialects valid, or should we all try to speak the same way Are accents a proud expression of regional origin or a barrier to communication

Calling Henry Higgins: School Makes a Case for Standard English

LONDON â€" A school in the northeast of England has opened a can of worms by urging parents to make sure their offspring learn when to use the Queen’s English rather than their distinctive local dialect, if they want to get on in life.

The Sacred Heart School in Middlesbrough, in the Teesside region, wants its 5 to 11-year-old pupils to avoid localisms in their writing and speech and has included a handy guide in a letter to parents.

Examples: avoid “gizit ere” and stick to “please give me it”. It’s “letter” and “butter”, not “letta” and “butta”. And always say “you”, not “yous”, even when there are more than one of yous.

“I believe that basic communication skills are essential for life,” Carol Walker, the school’s head teacher, said this week. “We would like to equip our children to go into the world of work and not be disadvantaged.”

She said she was not asking children to change their dialect or accents. But she did not want them to enter the world of work without knowing about standard English.

It sounds like commonsensical advice in what careers advisers would call the modern competitive workplace. But tradition-loving regionalists might be forgiven for discerning it as part of a broader trend toward conformity and homogenization.

Academics consulted by the Evening Gazette, the local Teesside newspaper, were broadly supportive of the school’s initiative, while also defending the role of regional dialects.

It quoted Mike Davenport, head of Durham University’s English Language Center, as saying it w! as a tricky balance to find.

Children needed to know standard English, he said, but added: “Accent and dialect is a badge. It’s a way of showing what group you belong to and that’s why we switch to it.”

Peter Stockwell, a Teessider and a linguistics professor at Nottingham University, told the newspaper: “Fortunately, in spite of the best efforts of teachers and professors, language loyalty is stronger than the desire to sound like people from outside the town.”

One linguist based in the northern city of Lancaster expressed sympathy for the children:

Like so much in English society, accent and dialect continue to be linked, consciously or otherwise, to issues of class.

It is hard to believe that the BBC once caused a stir by employing J.B. Priestley, the Yorkshire author, to make wartime broadcasts in which “the contrast between the cut-glass accent of the presenter ad Priestley’s warmer Yorkshire tones was striking.”

These days, in public life and broadcasting, regional accents are the norm and the clipped upper-class accent of yesteryear is the exception.

Steph McGovern, a BBC business reporter, Tweeted defiantly this week in response to the school diktat:

Even the younger members of the royal family are accused of lapsing into Estuary, a Cockney-derived patois of glottal stops and dropped h’s that has swamped the southeast of England.

A hierarchy of dialects has nevertheless emerged, with authentic Cockney (London), Brummy (Birmingham), and Scouse (Liverpool) at the bottom of the heap.

According to the British Library’s language Web site:

For many years, certain English dialects have been viewed more positively than others. Many of us make assumptions based on the way pe! ople spea! k â€" judging certain dialects or accents as too posh, harsh, aggressive, unfriendly, ‘unintelligent’ or ‘common’.

Unfortunately many individuals have suffered as a result of this irrational prejudice. No one dialect is better at communicating meaning than another. The fact some dialects and accents are seen to be more prestigious than others is more a reflection of judgements based on social, rather than linguistic, criteria.

It advises that, in an increasingly homogeneous society, the vocabulary, structure and sounds that define the speech of a particular region, should be a source of great pride and an important expression of cultural identity.

Ken Hurst, a journalist from rustic Norfolk County, wrote in a blog on Thursday that regional dialects could also be a barrier that is often deliberately applied to encourage insularity and exclude outsiders.

“Regional speech and, worse, writig, serve only to accentuate narrow social, economic and educational horizons that constrain ambition, opportunity and the ability to engage fully with the wider world,” he wrote.

What do you think Are dialects valid, or should we all try to speak the same way Are accents a proud expression of regional origin or a barrier to communication