IHT Quick Read: Feb. 9

After a failed attempt to set spending targets at a summit meeting in November and in a 24-hour marathon of talks this week, European leaders finally agreed late Friday to a common budget for the next seven years. The new budget, which is slightly smaller than its predecessor â€" the first decrease in the European Union’s history â€" reflects the climate of austerity across a Continent still struggling to emerge from a crippling debt crisis. James Kanter and Andrew Higgins report from Brussels.

Few things divide British eating habits from those of Continental Europe as clearly as a distaste for consuming horse meat, so news that many Britons have unknowingly done so has prompted alarm among shoppers and plunged the country’s food industry into crisis. A trickle of discoveries of horse meat in hamburgers, starting in Ireland last month, has turned into a steady stream of revelations, includig, on Friday, that lasagna labeled beef from one international distributor of frozen food, Findus, contained in some cases 100 percent horse meat. Stephen Castle reports from London.

The coaches of England’s Premier League are an aggressively unstylish bunch, stalking the sideline in the most scrutinized sport in the world with wardrobes that speak less of Savile Row than of the remainder rack on the Island of Misfit Clothes. The way the coaches dress, there’s no mistaking the English Premier League sideline for a fashion runway. Sarah Lyall reports from London.

With only two weeks to go before national elections, the Italian campaign has become a surreal spectacle in which a candidate many had given up for dead, former Prime Minister S! ilvio Berlusconi, has surged. Although he is not expected ever to govern again, with his media savvy and pie-in-the-sky offers of tax refunds, Mr. Berlusconi now trails the front-runner, Pierluigi Bersani, the leader of the Democratic Party, by about five or six points, according to a range of opinion polls published on Friday. Rachel Donadio reports from Rome.

ARTS The auction of Impressionist and Modern art followed by Surrealist works that took place at Sotheby’s on Tuesday evening ended with 52 lots fetching £121 million. It will be remembered by auction house professionals as the second most successful sale in the field held at Sotheby’s London and, by some of those attending, as the strangest session in living memory. Souren Melikian reports from New York.

SPORTS If size or the weight of history were the sole determining factors in a soccer match, then you might wonder why Burkina Faso would even bother to turn up against Nigeria in the Africa Cup final. Rob Hughes reports from London.

Drones, Brennan and Obama\'s Legacy of Secrecy

NEW YORK â€" John O. Brennan’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday was representative of the Obama administration’s approach to counter-terrorism: right-sounding assurances with little transparency.

Mr. Brennan, the president’s choice to be the next head of the Central Intelligence Agency, said the United States should publicly disclose when American drone attacks kill civilians. He called water boarding “reprehensible” and vowed it would never occur under his watch. And he said that countering militancy should be “comprehensive,” not just “kinetic,” and involve diplomatic and development efforts as well.

What any of that means in practice, critics say, remains unknown.

Mr. Brennan failed to clearly answer questions about the administration’s excssive embrace of drone strikes and secrecy.
He flatly defended the quadrupling of drone strikes that has occurred on President Obama’s watch. He gave no clear explanation for why the public has been denied access to Justice Department legal opinions that give the president the power to kill U.S. citizens without judicial review. And his statement that the establishment of a special court to review the targeting of Americans was “worthy of discussion” was noncommittal.

Before the hearing administration officials defended the career CIA officer who has served as the president’s chief counter-terrorism adviser throughout his first term. A senior administration official who asked not be named said that Mr. Brennan has actively worked to reduce drone attacks and increase transparency.

Officials described him as a traditionalist who would move the CIA away from the paramilitary attacks that have come to define its missi! on since 2001. Instead, the agency would move back to espionage and hand over lethal strikes, including drone attacks, to the military’s Special Operations forces.

Over the last two years, drone strikes in Pakistan have, in fact, decreased by nearly two-thirds from a peak of 122 in 2010 to 48 last year, according to The New American Foundation. At the same time, strikes in Yemen have increased, killing an estimated 400 people including 80 civilians.

From his office in the basement of the White House, Mr. Brennan has been at the center of it all. Daniel Benjamin, who recently stepped down as the State Department’s top counterterrorism official, told the New York Times this week that Mr. Brennan had sweeping authority.

“He’s probably had more power and influence than anyone in a comarable position in the last 20 years,” said Mr. Benjamin. “He’s had enormous sway over the intelligence community. He’s had a profound impact on how the military does counterterrorism.”

Some former military and intelligence officials have warned that the administration’s drone strikes have shifted from an attempt to only target senior militants to a de facto bombing campaign against low-level fighters. They say such a policy creates high levels of public animosity toward the United States with questionable results.

In a recent interview with Reuters, retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of American forces in Afghanistan, said drones were useful tools, but they are “hated on a visceral level” in many countries and contribute to a “perception of American arrogance.”

In Thursday’s hearing, Mr. Brennan showed an awareness of how excessive use! of force! can be counterproductive. He also aggressively defended the need for the United States to abide by the rule of law, a vital practice if the US is going to ever gain popular support in the region.

In one of his strongest moments, Mr. Brennan flatly rejected suggestions by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida that U.S. officials should have pressured Tunisian officials to improperly detain a suspect in the fatal attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Mr. Brennan said Tunisian officials had no evidence linking the man to the incident.

“Senator, this country needs to make sure we are setting an example and a standard for the world,” he said, adding that Washington had to “respect the rights of these governments to enforce their laws independently.”

Mr. Brennan also argued that opponents of the program misunderstood it. He said the United States only used drone strikes as a “last resort,”and the administration goes through “agony” before launching drone strikes in order to avoid civilian casualties.

In truth, the administration’s insistence on keeping the drone program secret fuels public suspicion. Declaring a program “covert” when it is reported on by the global media on a daily basis is increasingly absurd: as Joshua Foust, an analyst and former U.S. intelligence official, has argued, keeping the program secret cedes the debate to critics who say the strikes only kill vast numbers of civilians.

It is easy to see why many analysts say the United States should continue to carry out drone strikes - they are a military necessity - but keep them to a minimum. And details such as why an attack is carried out, who is killed and any civilian casualties should be publicly disclosed.

Mr. Brennan’s statement that drone strikes have decimated al Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan’s tribal area! s was lar! gely accurate. But despite the increase in strikes under Mr. Obama, the attacks have failed to do the same to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban operating out of the same area. Drone strikes will never be a silver bullet. They have created a stalemate in Pakistan, weakening militant groups but not eliminating them.

After the hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she was considering drafting legislation that would create a special court to review requests by the president to target Americans under certain circumstances. The new body would be similar to the court that currently reviews government requests to wiretap citizens.

Critics point out that the Obama administration has a long record of promising transparency and then embracing secrecy â€" from drone strikes to legal memos to unprecedented prosecutions of government officials for leaking to the news media.

Overall, Mr. Brennan impressed those wathching yesterday. We will see if e moves the CIA and the administration toward greater transparency. What he and the president plan remains secret.

David Rohde is a columnist for Reuters, former reporter for The New York Times and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. His forthcoming book, “Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East” will be published in March 2013.

Full Spectrum of a Photographer Who Made Color Cool

PARIS â€" A half century ago, when photographic purity was seemingly defined by the classical black-and-white images of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams and Marc Riboud, the American artist Joel Meyerowitz’s first step in his chosen career looked like a serious mistake: He shot in color.

“Most serious photographers were saying that color was for amateurs or for advertising,” Mr. Meyerowitz recently recalled by phone from Provence, where he and his wife have rented a house for the winter. “But I came into this at 24, and all 24-year-olds are rebellious.” Like the pop artists of his time, he said, he was “looking at comic books, advertising and there was this sense that everyday colorful reality was full of possibilities.”

Seen through his eyes, it was. Now at 74, Mr. Meyerowitz is regarded as one of the pioneers, along with William Eggleston, Ernst Haas and Stephen Shore, in winning recognition for color photography as an art form in its own right. His most recent retrospectiv has opened at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, known as M.E.P., and runs through April 7.

“Joel Meyerowitz is the missing link”, said Jean-Luc Monterosso, the director of M.E.P., referring to the gradual move of photography in the second half of the 20th century from black and white to color.

The new show displays 131 images selected from the 600 included in Mr. Meyerowitz’s latest book, “Taking My Time,” a sweeping overview of his career. “He was very involved in the selection process,” said Laurie Hurwitz, who co-curated the exhibition with Mr. Meyerowitz. “I wanted to create for the audience a trip through both my personal experience of 50 years but also the changes that photography has gone through in the past 50 years,” Mr. Meyerowitz said in an interview.

The show ! proceeds chronologically from 1962, the year he first picked up a camera and started roaming the streets of his native New York City to capture “momentary narratives” â€" a term he preferred to Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.”

He also spent a year in Europe. A 1967 photograph taken in Paris shows a man in a suit bizarrely collapsed on the pavement, a hammer-wielding worker stepping over his body, passers-by mesmerized but unhelping, snarled traffic frozen in time. “I appeared just like the man with the hammer: by chance,” Mr. Meyerowitz said.

He shot alternatively in black and white or color, often carrying two cameras at once, as shown a series of amusing, quasi-identical scenes juxtaposed two by two.

Then in the early 1970s, Mr Meyerowitz set up a large-format view camera â€" a huge wooden leather box on a tripod â€" on the sandbars of Cape Cod, and to this day remembers being “immediately smitten with a new sense of time and light.” The landscapes on view hee â€" “Roseville Cottages, Truro, Massachusetts” or “Provincetown, Massachusetts” â€" have shades of deep blues, delicate lavenders, pinks or tangerine colors that exude what Jean-Luc Monterosso calls “a poetry of light”. Mr. Meyerowitz had crossed the color threshold never to turn back.

His subsequent street photographs, typically shot in bright daylight on Fifth Avenue in New York, vibrate with color, movement and an infinity of lively, sometimes comical details. Also included are panoramic prints from the early 1990s shot with three films in a large-format camera. “It’s fascinating because they were so innovative back then and in a way clairvoyant when you think of how today photographs are manipulated using digital equipment and software,” Ms. Hurwitz said.

A final section of the show includes a dozen prints selected from “Aftermath,” Mr. Meyerowitz’s body of work that documents the! titanic ! labor of clearing the rubble at ground zero after 9/11. It also touches on images of his most recent project, an effort to photograph the four elements, earth, air, water and fire. These, as all the other works on show, are modern prints with no glass to separate them from the viewers.

“I wanted them to be vulnerable,” said Mr. Meyerowitz.

French Communists Abandon Hammer and Sickle

LONDON â€" The Communist Party of France has sparked a revolution among the comrades by removing the hammer and sickle from their membership cards.

The iconic symbol of the international proletariat has been replaced with the star of the multi-party European Left alliance, much to the horror of traditionalists at the party’s 36th congress that opened near Paris on Thursday.

What was billed by the party leadership as a forward-looking move was denounced by others as revisionist backsliding and part of a conspiracy to abandon the movement to the embrace of social democracy.

Emmanuel Dang Tran, secretary of the party’s Paris section, told France Info radio that members were shocked at the abandoning of “what represents, for the working class of his country, a historic element in resistance against the politics of capitalism.”

An anonymous commenter on the radio’s website suggested wryly: “It’s natural that they’ve abandoned their tools. There’s no work anymore!”

Mr. Tran was among those who believed the symbol change amounted to the party paying allegiance to the European Left, a coalition of left-wing movements formed in 1999 to cooperate within the European Parliament.

He said the leadership was trying to create a social democracy mark-2 alongside “Greens, socialists, Trotskyists and I don’t know who else.”

Pierre Laurent, the party’s national secretary, defended the decision to dump the hammer and sickle, saying it no longer represented present-day realities. “We want to turn towards the future,” he said on Friday.

The internal spat was the latest upset for a communist party that was once powerful on the! left in France, with ministers serving in a number of Socialist-led administrations.

It remains the country’s largest left-wing party in terms of membership. But its standing has declined rapidly since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

For the first time last year, it failed to put up its own candidate at a presidential election and opted instead to support Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the Left Front.

Although the Communist Party is the largest grouping in the Left Front, hardliners complain it risks playing second fiddle to other movements in the alliance despite being its “sole historically revolutionary component.”

The 20Minutes news Website asked whether the loss of the hammer and sickle meant the party was becoming a “Communist Party light” and noted that this week’s congress had also adopted Mr. Mélenchon’s “people first” slogan.

“That is something to chew on for the many who fear the party will be dissolved into a Left Front led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon,” it wrote.

L’Humanité, the former official Communist newspaper that retains close links with the party, managed to remain upbeat as the congress opened. It ran a poll that indicated the party’s public image had improved since the creation of the Left Front.

It also interviewed the rank and file at the party congress who said that, among other things, they saw the gathering as an occasion for communists to go on the offensive, continue a citizens’ revolution, or simply spend a “fraternal moment with a! ll the co! mrades.”