IHT Quick Read: Feb. 26

NEWS Italian voters delivered a rousing anti-austerity message and a strong rebuke to the existing political order in national elections on Monday, plunging the country into political paralysis after results failed to produce a clear winner. Rachel Donadio reports from Rome.

The U.S. secretary of state, John Kerry, said on Monday that the Obama administration has been considering new steps to increase support for the Syrian opposition and hasten the departure of President Bashar al-Assad, and that some of them would be decided at an international conference in Rome this week. Michael R. Gordon reports from Berlin, and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon.

ritain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, announced his resignation on Monday, a day after being accused of “inappropriate acts” with priests, saying he would not attend the conclave to elect a new pope. Rachel Donadio reports from Vatican City, and John F. Burns from London.

Talks between Iran and six world powers over its nuclear program resume on Tuesday after a break of eight months, but there is a general atmosphere of gloom about their prospects for success, even if narrowly defined. Steven Erlanger reports from Almaty, Kaza! khstan.

About 30 percent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease can be prevented in people at high risk if they switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables, and even drink wine with meals, a large and rigorous new study has found. Gina Kolata reports.

The furniture giant Ikea joined a growing list of brands that have been touched by Europe’s food scandal on Monday and withdrew its signature Swedish meatballs from its markets and cafeterias across most of Europe after one batch was found to contain traces of horse meat. Stephen Castle reports from Lodon, and Andrew Higgins from Brussels.

The Japanese government is set to loosen its grip on Japan Tobacco, one of the world’s largest tobacco companies, by selling a third of its stake in a sale that will net the country about $10 billion. Hiroko Tabuchi reports from Tokyo.

FASHION Sites like Marc Jacobs and House of Holland hope that social networking will improve their online sales. Fleur Britten reports.

ARTS Wolfgang Sawallisch, one of the last of the old-school German conductors, who led the Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly a decade and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich for two decades before that, died on Friday at his home in Grassau, German! y. He was! 89. Annette Midgette reports.

SPORTS For two countries that have a long history of tangling politically, often extending that rivalry into sports, the cooperation this week between the U.S. and Russian ski teams at the Rosa Khutor Alpine Resort could strike many as unexpected. Brian Pinelli reports from Krasnaya Polyana, Russia.

Thank you, Xiexie, Namaste: a Movie Undercuts Old Rivalries

BEIJING â€" After the Taiwanese film director Ang Lee won big at the Oscars on Sunday evening in Los Angeles, including scooping Best Director for “Life of Pi,” he effusively thanked his place of birth. But his thanks didn’t make it into China, at least not via the official media.

Why At almost the same time as Mr. Lee’s speech there was a meeting in Beijing between Xi Jinping, the head of China’s Communist Party, and Lien Chan, the honorary chairman of Taiwan’s Kuomintang party, the latest twist in a political rivalry now dating back 64 years to the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, when the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan and set up the Republic of China. Communist Party-run China, the People’s Republic of China, still claims Taiwan and has not dropped threats to take it by force, if necessary. Even for Xinhua to quote Mr. Lee thanking Taiwan would be t unacceptably recognize the de facto reality that Taiwan is a separate state.

It’s all deep politics, with Mr. Lee’s victory bound to lead to a debate about whether Mr. Lee is “Chinese or not.” Mr. Lee, who has never denied he is culturally Chinese and appears keen to work in and with the mainland of China, is known to be proud of his Taiwan roots and sees himself as an internationalist.

In its account of the event, Xinhua, the official news agency, merely described him as “Coming from China’s Taiwan”, which fits into China’s ongoing claims.

Here’s what Mr. Lee said about Taiwan: “I cannot make this movie without the help of Taiwan. We shot there. I want to thank everybody there helped us. Especially the city of Tai Chong.” He went on to thank “My family in Taiwan.”

In another story, Xinhua also left out Mr. Lee’s thanks to Taiwan, quoting only this version of his words: “Thank you, movie God. I really need to share this with all 3,000, everybody who worked with me in ‘Life of Pi’, I want to thank you for, I really want to thank you for believing this story, and sharing this incredible journey with me. Thank you, Academy, xie xie, namaste.”

Readers of the Taipei Times, however, learned also that backstage, “Lee thanked his home country, where he said 90 percent of the film was shot. ‘They gave us a lot of physical help and financial help,’ he said. ‘I’m glad that Taiwan contribute this much to the film. I feel like this movie belongs to the world,’” he said in a story carried by the Taiwan newspaper.

As the Taipei Times cited Mr. Lien as saying in the meeting with Mr. Xi, “core issues” remain unresolved. Taiwan and China can work out a reasonable arrangement, Mr. Lian said, according to the newspaper, sounding pragmatic.

Mr. Xi’s had a different, more dramatic take of the situation, speaking of China and Taiwan working together for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” in the China Daily’s words, reflecting speeches he has made frequently since becoming party leader.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lee offered something completely different in his speech: a multicultural, multilingual salutation that reflected the deeply globalized nature of his movie, which explores human survival, animals, and religions.

“Thank you, Academy. Xie xie, Namaste,” he said, in English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi.

Horsemeat Scandal Grows More Serious and More Bizarre

LONDON â€" As European governments struggle in vain to draw a line under the scandal over horsemeat being sold as beef, the affair seems only to be widening, in sometimes bizarre ways.

Two German politicians, for instance, suggested over the weekend that one practical use for tainted products, such as tens of thousands of packs of lasagna pulled from supermarket shelves because they contained horsemeat, would be to distribute them to the poor.

The idea began with Hartwig Fischer, a lawmaker from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, who told the mass-circulation Bild Zeitung newspaper on Saturday that products shouldn’t just be thrown away. To prove his point, he was photographed and filmed eating one of the offending lasagna meals and declaring that he could not tell the difference from any other lasagna.

The development ministr, Dirk Niebel, supported him, saying that, with hundreds of millions of starving people around the world, and people at home struggling to put food on the table, “I think we cannot throw away good food here in Germany.”

The idea did not meet with universal approval. The social affairs minister, Ursula von der Leyen, called it “absurd.” Some said transferring food without knowing the origin or nature of its ingredients could be illegal. And Andrea Nahles, general secretary of the opposition Social Democrats, called the very notion “an insult to people with low incomes.”

As I explore in my latest Letter From Europe column, the sensitivities about eating food packaged as beef but containing horsemeat are particularly acute in Britain.

But other nations are lining up to demand greater regulation of what goes into their processed food. On Monday, inspectors in the Czech Republic said they found ! horsemeat in the signature meatballs made in Sweden for the IKEA furniture group - not just food, but also a national emblem. The meatballs were distributed in the Czech Republic, Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium, IKEA said, reflecting the gravity of the crisis and the likelihood that it will spread much further.

How Syria Is Becoming Bosnia

Typhoid and hepatitis outbreaks are spreading. An estimated 70,000 people are dead, and another 850,000 are refugees. After covering the battle for Damascus for a month, photographer Goran Tomasevic of Reuters declared the situation a “bloody stalemate.”

“I watched both sides mount assaults, some trying to gain just a house or two, others for bigger prizes, only to be forced back by sharpshooters, mortars or sprays of machine-gun fire,” Mr. Tomasevic, a gifted and brave photographer, wrote in a chilling first-hand account. “As in the ruins of Beirut, Sarajevo or Stalingrad, it is a sniper’s war.”

Many analysts believe the Obama administrationâ™s policy toward Syria is a failure.

Iran, Hezbollah and Russia are funneling more aid, armaments and diplomatic cover to Bashar al-Assad. And Syrian rebels who once hailed the United States now loathe it.

Across the country, pro-Assad forces use airplanes, Scud ballistic missiles and artillery to level rebel controlled neighborhoods. While Syrian insurgents fight with the tragi-comic “D.I.Y. weapons” displayed in this Atlantic slide show.

In an incisive essay published last week in the London Review of Books, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, a journalist with the Guardian, described the continued atomization of the Syrian opposition.

Mr. Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi who covered the dissolution of his own nation, freely admits that “we in the Middle East have always had a strong appetite for! factionalism.” But then he delivers a damning description of how prevarication in Washington creates deepening anti-Americanism among the rebels.

“Why are the Americans doing this to us” one rebel commander demands. “They told us they wouldn’t send us weapons until we united. So we united in Doha. Now what’s their excuse”

In the meantime, hard-line jihadists and their funders in the Persian Gulf are filling the void.

“Maybe we should all become jihadis,” the exasperated commander declares. “Maybe then we’ll get money and support.”

Many believe the time has come for the Obama administration to mount a new policy in Syria. But don’t expect one anytime soon.

In an interview on Thursday, a senior administration official played down a report in the The New York Times that President Barack Obama might reconsider arming Syria’s opposition. The official confirmed that President Obama rejected a proposal last year from four of his top national security advisers that the United States arm the rebels.

But he said a subsequent review by American intelligence officials had concluded that only a large infusion of sophisticated weaponry would tip the military balance against the Assad regime.

“We have to assess what it would take to change the calculus,” the official said, “and hasten the transition.”

Repeating prior arguments, the official said the administration opposed supplying the rebels with anti-aircraft missiles out of concern that the weapons could fall into the hands of jihadists.
“God forbid a U.S. weapon be used to strike an Israeli passenger plane or land in Israel,” said the official.

The problem, though, is that jihadists are becoming the most influential and well-armed insurgents in Syria. The London Review of Books essay, “How to Start a Battalion in Five Easy Lessons,” begins wit! h a descr! iption of a rebel commander withdrawing his fighters from an important rebel defensive position in Aleppo because a donor in the Gulf is willing to provide him with more funds and weapons.

“He says he will pay for our ammunition and we get to keep all the spoils of the fighting,” the rebel commander says. “We just have to supply him with videos.”

Meanwhile, assistance to the Assad regime is growing. A recent New Yorker piece detailed stepped-up military aid from Hezbollah.

“If Bashar goes down,” one Hezbollah commander told the magazine, “we’re next.”

And the White House official called the extent of Iranian assistance to Mr. Assad “stunning.”

“They are all in,” the official said. “They are doing everything they can to support the Assad regime and putting in enormos amounts of arms and individuals.”

Why, then, isn’t the United States even partly in

In the London Review piece, rebels complained that the United States was blocking countries in the region from providing sophisticated anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles to them. The White House official denied that was true, saying the armed opposition remained deeply divided and the situation was confused on the ground.

He said the administration was trying to learn from the past, particularly Iraq.

“The United States has a long history of picking winners and losers based on the guy who speaks English well,” the official said. “It’s just trying to learn the lessons and be humble. We don’t have perfect visibility into the situation. Interjecting that forcefully in an armed way has huge risk.”

American fear of inadvertently arming jihadists is paralyzing efforts and limiting out options. There are no simple solutions in Syria but the West is missing a strategic opportu! nity to w! eaken Iran and Hezbollah.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar could be allowed to fully arm the rebels. Supplying them with sophisticated anti-tank missiles and other conventional weapons, not surface-to-air missiles, could help turn the tide. And if the West is serious about a diplomatic effort, it must redouble its efforts instead of deferring to Russian promises that have so far proven hollow.

Two years after the uprising began as a non-violent protest movement, the death toll in Syria is approaching the roughly 100,000 dead of Iraq and Bosnia. While it may not have a political cost in Washington, the White House is sending a clear message across the Middle East: American and Israeli lives matter, not Syrian ones. The figure is 70,000 and counting. That number will come back to haunt us.

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 Inflence in a New Middle East” will be published in March 2013.

How Syria Is Becoming Bosnia

Typhoid and hepatitis outbreaks are spreading. An estimated 70,000 people are dead, and another 850,000 are refugees. After covering the battle for Damascus for a month, photographer Goran Tomasevic of Reuters declared the situation a “bloody stalemate.”

“I watched both sides mount assaults, some trying to gain just a house or two, others for bigger prizes, only to be forced back by sharpshooters, mortars or sprays of machine-gun fire,” Mr. Tomasevic, a gifted and brave photographer, wrote in a chilling first-hand account. “As in the ruins of Beirut, Sarajevo or Stalingrad, it is a sniper’s war.”

Many analysts believe the Obama administrationâ™s policy toward Syria is a failure.

Iran, Hezbollah and Russia are funneling more aid, armaments and diplomatic cover to Bashar al-Assad. And Syrian rebels who once hailed the United States now loathe it.

Across the country, pro-Assad forces use airplanes, Scud ballistic missiles and artillery to level rebel controlled neighborhoods. While Syrian insurgents fight with the tragi-comic “D.I.Y. weapons” displayed in this Atlantic slide show.

In an incisive essay published last week in the London Review of Books, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, a journalist with the Guardian, described the continued atomization of the Syrian opposition.

Mr. Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi who covered the dissolution of his own nation, freely admits that “we in the Middle East have always had a strong appetite for! factionalism.” But then he delivers a damning description of how prevarication in Washington creates deepening anti-Americanism among the rebels.

“Why are the Americans doing this to us” one rebel commander demands. “They told us they wouldn’t send us weapons until we united. So we united in Doha. Now what’s their excuse”

In the meantime, hard-line jihadists and their funders in the Persian Gulf are filling the void.

“Maybe we should all become jihadis,” the exasperated commander declares. “Maybe then we’ll get money and support.”

Many believe the time has come for the Obama administration to mount a new policy in Syria. But don’t expect one anytime soon.

In an interview on Thursday, a senior administration official played down a report in the The New York Times that President Barack Obama might reconsider arming Syria’s opposition. The official confirmed that President Obama rejected a proposal last year from four of his top national security advisers that the United States arm the rebels.

But he said a subsequent review by American intelligence officials had concluded that only a large infusion of sophisticated weaponry would tip the military balance against the Assad regime.

“We have to assess what it would take to change the calculus,” the official said, “and hasten the transition.”

Repeating prior arguments, the official said the administration opposed supplying the rebels with anti-aircraft missiles out of concern that the weapons could fall into the hands of jihadists.
“God forbid a U.S. weapon be used to strike an Israeli passenger plane or land in Israel,” said the official.

The problem, though, is that jihadists are becoming the most influential and well-armed insurgents in Syria. The London Review of Books essay, “How to Start a Battalion in Five Easy Lessons,” begins wit! h a descr! iption of a rebel commander withdrawing his fighters from an important rebel defensive position in Aleppo because a donor in the Gulf is willing to provide him with more funds and weapons.

“He says he will pay for our ammunition and we get to keep all the spoils of the fighting,” the rebel commander says. “We just have to supply him with videos.”

Meanwhile, assistance to the Assad regime is growing. A recent New Yorker piece detailed stepped-up military aid from Hezbollah.

“If Bashar goes down,” one Hezbollah commander told the magazine, “we’re next.”

And the White House official called the extent of Iranian assistance to Mr. Assad “stunning.”

“They are all in,” the official said. “They are doing everything they can to support the Assad regime and putting in enormos amounts of arms and individuals.”

Why, then, isn’t the United States even partly in

In the London Review piece, rebels complained that the United States was blocking countries in the region from providing sophisticated anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles to them. The White House official denied that was true, saying the armed opposition remained deeply divided and the situation was confused on the ground.

He said the administration was trying to learn from the past, particularly Iraq.

“The United States has a long history of picking winners and losers based on the guy who speaks English well,” the official said. “It’s just trying to learn the lessons and be humble. We don’t have perfect visibility into the situation. Interjecting that forcefully in an armed way has huge risk.”

American fear of inadvertently arming jihadists is paralyzing efforts and limiting out options. There are no simple solutions in Syria but the West is missing a strategic opportu! nity to w! eaken Iran and Hezbollah.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar could be allowed to fully arm the rebels. Supplying them with sophisticated anti-tank missiles and other conventional weapons, not surface-to-air missiles, could help turn the tide. And if the West is serious about a diplomatic effort, it must redouble its efforts instead of deferring to Russian promises that have so far proven hollow.

Two years after the uprising began as a non-violent protest movement, the death toll in Syria is approaching the roughly 100,000 dead of Iraq and Bosnia. While it may not have a political cost in Washington, the White House is sending a clear message across the Middle East: American and Israeli lives matter, not Syrian ones. The figure is 70,000 and counting. That number will come back to haunt us.

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 Inflence in a New Middle East” will be published in March 2013.

‘There Is No Sustainable Business.’

BARCELONA â€" Sustainable entrepreneurship â€" a buzzword in an increasingly eco-conscious business world â€" is often described as a balance between profit and environmental impact.

It’s a subject that Douglas Tompkins seems to have thought a lot about. He founded Esprit and The North Face, two of America’s most iconic clothing and fashion brands, only to quit the business world to become a staunch conservationalist, environmentalist and critic.

“Remove ‘sustainable’ from your dictionary, there is no sustainable business. Only biological sustainability counts,” he told a room full of business students at the IESE business school Doing Great and Doing Good conference on responsible business. (Disclosure: I moderated a panel at the same conference).

“Economic activity has impact and we are just now doing a better job of measuring what those impacts are,” said Mr. Tompkins in an interview.

A strict conservationalist, he rejects the idea that big business can reform itelf and thinks the answer lies outside what he calls the “techno-industrial culture.” He thinks measuring biodiversity is a yardstick for how society is doing.

“Healthy biodiversity is at the base of everything,” he said, with species extinction being the ultimate catastrophe. “We’ll be living on a sand heap with a Norwegian rat and a few cockroaches at the end.”

Despite having co-founded ESPRIT, the multinational clothing giant, and The North Face, the maker of outdoor equipment, in the 1960s and having earned millions of the sale of the former, Mr. Tompkins is critical of business’s paradigms.

“We have an economy that’s based on growth without limits,” he said. “How is that possible”

“To grow and grow and grow without limits is out of the question,” he said.

Even the companies that he is famous for launching do not escape his disapproval.

“My two companies are two monsters now,” he said.

His conversion from fashion to conse! rvation work took place around 1990, however Mr. Tompkins still retains his sense of simple beauty.

“If we just use the aesthetic rule of thumb of saying if it looks bad, it is bad and if it looks good, it - probably - is good,” we’d get a lot further than with arcane and complex economic theories.”

But Mr. Tompkins is much more than an anti-business theorist or a conservation advocate. In the last two decades he and his wife have managed to conserve land that will ultimately enlarge or create national parks in Chile and Argentina.

Mr. Tompkins started his drive toward conservation and reclaiming natural habitat in 1990, right around the time he had sold his share of Esprit for a reported $150 million. (He sold his interest in The North Face much earlier in his career and at a much lower price.)

To date, he and his wife have bought up 1.1 million hectares (or almost 2.5 million acres) in South America, through several of his conservation foundations. The land conserved or in he process of being restored, is open to public use, with conditions, until it is donated to the countries’ national park systems. (My colleague Larry Rohter visited Mr. Tompkins in 2007 and wrote about the political implications of an American buying up so much land in Chile.)

Besides their work restoring land for parks, the Tompkins are developing sustainable farms (he doesn’t like to call it sustainable, just less unsustainable) in both Chile and Argentina.

At Laguna Blanca in northeastern Argentina, the Tompkins have bought and reconstituted land for a sustainable farm project.

Organic crops are planted using small-scale methods not in square plots, as is common in commercial farming, but following the contours of nature. Passages for wildlife are integrated into the fields.

The farm products are then sold to the surrounding community, with profit going toward his conservation effor! ts.