Byline: By armand limnande section: Section mm; Column 0; T: Men's Fashion Magazine; Pg. 76 Length
URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT
Download 3.51 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- ORGANIZATION
- March
- INDUSTRY
- DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review PUBLICATION-TYPE
URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: PHILANTHROPY (91%); CHARITIES (90%); FOUNDATIONS (90%); RANKINGS (90%); GRANTS & GIFTS (89%); INTERVIEWS (79%); CHARITABLE GIVING (79%); DISASTER RELIEF (77%); PRIVATE EQUITY (76%); RELIEF ORGANIZATIONS (70%); HOTEL CHAINS (69%); HOTELS & MOTELS (69%); NATURAL DISASTERS (65%); HEDGE FUNDS (56%) ORGANIZATION: BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION (59%) PERSON: GEORGE SOROS (56%); MICHAEL BLOOMBERG (56%); JAY ROCKEFELLER (50%); MICHAEL MCMAHON (52%) GEOGRAPHIC: CAMBODIA (93%); AFRICA (90%); UNITED STATES (79%) LOAD-DATE: March 9, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: DRAWING: A NEW GREEN REVOLUTION?: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa is trying to improve the lives of small farmers -- and all Africans -- by increasing crop yields and creating better access to markets. Since it was announced in 2006, the alliance, which is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has awarded some $34 million in grants. (Source: Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) (DRAWING BY LORENZO PETRANTONI) PHOTO: Socheata Poeuv 27, Khmer Legacies, New Haven Poeuv was born in a Thai refugee camp to Cambodian parents who fled the Khmer Rouge. She was 22 when her parents revealed that the two women she thought were her older sisters were in fact her mother's sister's daughters, orphaned by Pol Pot's regime. She also discovered that her older brother was her half brother -- a surviving child from her mother's murdered first husband. Her curiosity about her parents' long silence led her to make a film about her personal history, called ''New Year Baby.'' She has now started ''Khmer Legacies,'' a project in which children interview their parents about surviving the Cambodian genocide and which she hopes will result in 10,000 videotaped testimonials. ''You've got to change the silence that surrounds this, and the way that Cambodian parents talk to their children and children talk to their parents. There really is a threat of this culture being completely invisible if people don't step forward to remember and distinguish it.'' (PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIAN OTH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1007 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final The Giving Age SECTION: Section MM; Column 0; Magazine; Pg. 37 LENGTH: 121 words Faces of Social Entrepreneurship On the following pages you will meet four people who might broadly be defined as ''social entrepreneurs'' -- people who have sought to fill a societal need by starting their own organizations. With support from grant-giving nonprofits like Ashoka's Youth Venture and Echoing Green -- both of which provide seed financing to people with ideas for social change -- these men and women have sought to remake the world around them. ''Our generation is replacing signs and protests with individual actions,'' says Kyle Taylor, 23, an advocate for the social-entrepreneur movement who started his own mentoring organization. ''This is our civil rights movement and what will define our generation.'' URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: ENTREPRENEURSHIP (92%); CIVIL RIGHTS (65%) LOAD-DATE: March 9, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: PHOTOS PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1008 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Gains Cited in Hunt for Liberia Ex-Warlord's Fortune BYLINE: By MARLISE SIMONS SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg. 4 LENGTH: 1015 words DATELINE: THE HAGUE For two years, Charles Taylor, the West African warlord and former president of Liberia, has been locked in a Dutch high-security jail, leaving the compound only in an armored car that speeds across The Hague as it delivers him to his war crimes trial. But while he is in the dock, the hunt is still on for his legendary missing fortune. Prosecutors say the most exhaustive effort to date is under way to pinpoint the money the former dictator is believed to have amassed by pilfering the coffers of his country and running smuggling operations, particularly of diamonds, deep inside neighboring states. No money has been seized, but investigators say they have made some breakthroughs recently. ''We have new information that more than $1 billion passed through Taylor's personal bank accounts between 1997 and 2003 when he was president,'' said Stephen Rapp, the chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which is trying Mr. Taylor at an outpost in The Hague. Last year, experts advising the United Nations Security Council estimated Mr. Taylor's fortune at half that amount. Newly traced bank records and other documents show Liberian money flowing into Mr. Taylor's accounts, as well as large cash withdrawals and transfers to foreign banks, Mr. Rapp said. ''The records showed he controlled enormous funds which he hid,'' the prosecutor said. ''The big question is how much of that wealth is still left.'' The court now has the aid of a London law firm with experience in recovering wealth stolen by dictators and other leaders. Court officials said the firm was being paid by Western governments but they would not release other details, saying that could jeopardize the investigation. Mr. Taylor, 60, has been charged with pillaging, but his hidden accounts and assets are also central to his prosecution on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecutors want to demonstrate how he financed operations that dragged neighboring Sierra Leone into a civil war that lasted more than a decade. Prosecutors argue that in his drive to expand his power in the region, Mr. Taylor used stolen millions, including profits from smuggled diamonds, to buy the loyalty, weapons and supplies for rebels in Sierra Leone and other neighboring countries. His indictment holds him accountable for the rebels' barbaric methods, as they pillaged, killed, raped, used children as soldiers and hacked off hands or feet of innocent civilians. No one knows how much money was stolen in the region or raised from the diamond fields of Sierra Leone and parts of Guinea. Evidence presented at the trial showed that enslaved laborers were often forced to dig for diamonds at gunpoint and could be executed for keeping a stone. Court investigators have said diamonds were often sold cheaply and used to pay for clandestine weapons shipments. Millions of dollars of income from government timber concessions and Liberia's shipping flags of convenience often went directly to Mr. Taylor, Western diplomats have said. If the international judges' panel finds him guilty of pillaging, the court can seize assets proved to belong to him or his associates and use the money for restitution. The list of claimants is likely to be long. Trust funds have been set up in Liberia and Sierra Leone for war victims, among them the thousands who were mutilated by machetes. Each country may have claims for war damages and for pilfering state coffers and resources like diamonds and timber, prosecutors have said. Not least, the court could claim funds for its expenses on Mr. Taylor's defense. The former Liberian dictator, who arrives for court in tinted glasses and impeccable suits, has insisted he has almost no money and cannot even pay for his defense. The governments of Nigeria and Liberia, where Mr. Taylor is believed to have considerable investments and real estate, have not cooperated with the court's requests for information and freezing his assets, prosecutors said. As a result, the court is paying $70,000 per month to his defense team, which includes a dozen people. It pays an additional $30,000 per month in other expenses, like the team's office rent and salaries for the four investigators assigned to him. Mr. Taylor, who had fretted about what he called the ''low level'' of his court-appointed defense team, obtained a court order last summer providing him with a large team of more senior lawyers. If Mr. Taylor's assets are found, the court could bill him for his defense, expected to cost $3 million to $4 million. Such costs are now paid by the governments who help finance the United Nations-backed court. The United States, which had high hopes for Mr. Taylor in 1997 when he was elected president, and backed him with aid and assistance, is a major donor. Investigators say Mr. Taylor has demonstrated his skills in hiding money and fooling people, including the court, before. He built his first fortune as a government official in the 1980s and pocketed more than $900,000 before fleeing an embezzling charge. He was arrested in Boston, but while awaiting extradition he escaped from a Massachusetts jail and disappeared. He is believed to have collected millions as a warlord in the 1990s from entrepreneurs in exchange for favors. ''We know now that many of Taylor's assets are hidden off-shore or behind the names of his associates,'' said Mr. Rapp, the chief prosecutor. But large cash withdrawals during his tenure as president suggest that he spent much of it on the war effort, according to investigators. The United Nations has frozen $6 million in assets, in the name of Mr. Taylor or his associates, in 10 countries. ''It's a start, but it can't be seized until we prove it's Taylor's money,'' Mr. Rapp said. The London lawyers are enlisting law enforcement agencies to press banks in several financial havens to cooperate, according to Mr. Rapp, who said that some countries, including the Bahamas and Switzerland, are already helping. ''Enough progress has already been made to show that more can be found,'' he said.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1009 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final WOK ON BYLINE: By JANE and MICHAEL STERN. JANE AND MICHAEL STERN ARE THE AUTHORS OF ''ROADFOOD.'' SECTION: Section BR; Column 0; Book Review Desk; Pg. 19 LENGTH: 944 words THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. By Jennifer 8. Lee. 307 pp. Twelve. $24.99. Chinese restaurants are more American than apple pie, says Jennifer 8. Lee in ''The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food.'' There are twice as many of these restaurants as there are McDonald's franchises, and the food they serve is every bit as predictable. ''What Chinese restaurant menu doesn't offer beef with broccoli, sesame chicken, roast pork lo mein, fried wontons, egg rolls and egg drop soup?'' asks the author, an ''American-born Chinese'' who cheerfully admits to an obsession with Chinese restaurants. Intrigued by the Powerball drawing of March 30, 2005, which produced an inordinate quantity of winning lottery tickets because the lucky numbers had turned up in fortune cookies all around the country, Lee rides her obsession on a three-year, 42-state, 23-country journey during which she discovers that fortune cookies, like so much about America's Chinese restaurants, aren't really Chinese. They originated in 19th-century Japan and were sold in Japanese confectionery shops in San Francisco until World War II, when Japanese-Americans were interned, at which point Chinese entrepreneurs took over the business. Lee tracks down Donald Lau, who spent a decade writing fortunes for the biggest cookie manufacturer until he suffered writer's block and had to retire in 1995. Lee is a city-beat reporter for The New York Times. Her inclination as a journalist is to trace a story all the way to its genesis, but not without taking some fascinating detours. On the way to finding the origin of fortune cookies, she pinpoints the beginning of door-to-door delivery in New York and its attendant scourge of free menus. And she gives us the possible origin of chop suey (a joke played by a Chinese chef in San Francisco whose boss wanted him to concoct something that ''would pass as Chinese.'') Lee travels to Hunan to see if the actual General Tso had anything to do with the chicken dish that bears his name, only to discover it most likely began as General Ching's chicken, named after General Tso's mentor. She also reveals that the white cardboard Fold-Pak cartons for takeout food, originally used to hold shucked oysters, are unknown in China, where Chinese takeout food is virtually nonexistent. But there's a demand for them elsewhere -- because European and African television viewers want the product they see on ''Seinfeld'' and ''Friends.'' Lee presents an intriguing idea in a chapter called ''Open-Source Chinese Restaurants,'' contending that ''if McDonald's is the Windows of the dining world (where one company controls the standards), then Chinese restaurants are akin to the Linux operating system, where a decentralized network of programmers contributes to the underlying source code.'' She contrasts the decade of ''failed experimentation'' before the success of Chicken McNuggets to the breathtaking speed with which chop suey, fortune cookies and General Tso's chicken took hold in Chinese restaurants everywhere thanks to a ''self-organizing'' system in which good ideas spread like urban legends. It's fun to read about the Jewish passion for ''safe treyf'' (Yiddish for nonkosher food) and to accompany Lee on an exhaustive hunt for ''The Greatest Chinese Restaurant in the World'' outside China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. But amusing as such diversions are, Lee's book is more serious than its jolly subtitle suggests, exposing some very ugly sides of the business. She journeys to the province of Fujian, which is ''the single largest exporter of Chinese restaurant workers in the world today,'' and documents the ordeal of a teenager named Michael from the fishing village of Houyu, which has sent more than three-quarters of its population to the United States and where a school teaches restaurant English to the young. Michael spends a harrowing two years trying to get to America, winding up on the notorious Golden Venture, the ship that ran aground off Rockaway Beach in 1993 and raised public awareness of human smuggling. She writes about the vulnerability of Chinese deliverymen, for whom homicide is a leading cause of on-the-job death. And she tells the tragic story of an immigrant couple who try to make a go of a small Chinese restaurant in northern Georgia but are left broke and broken by the experience. Inevitably, Lee's investigative trail leads back to the mass arrival of Chinese immigrants in California during the Gold Rush, when they became known as Celestials because they seemed so otherworldly. Their eating habits were especially distressing -- using chopsticks instead of forks, they consumed strange sea creatures and animals considered vermin, not game. ''The embers of culinary xenophobia smoldered,'' Lee writes, citing a pamphlet published by the labor leader Samuel Gompers titled ''Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat Versus Rice, American Manhood Versus Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive?'' The Chinese Exclusion Act, restricting immigration and preventing Chinese from becoming citizens, effectively barred an entire ethnic group from jobs in agriculture, mining and manufacturing. The result? The Chinese opened laundries and restaurants. ''Cleaning and cooking were both women's work,'' Lee explains. ''They were not threatening to white laborers.'' Nor did the food in the restaurants the Chinese opened threaten American taste. It was, and mostly remains, ''streamlined, palatable and digestible'' -- American food that looks foreign, with the Chinese who cook and serve it, according to Lee, ''just the middlemen.''
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1010 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Prelates and Rappers Strike a Pose BYLINE: By CAROL KINO SECTION: Section AR; Column 0; Arts and Leisure Desk; ART; Pg. 8 LENGTH: 1807 words IN nearly four decades of collaboration Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar were known for conceptual art projects that both celebrated and skewered mass culture. In the early 1970s in Moscow they created paintings that purported to examine Socialist Realism, but the work's irony was so obvious that they were branded as political dissidents. By the late 1990s they were training their satirical sights on elephants and the art world, teaching the beasts to paint and establishing an international market for their work. Yet in 2004 their partnership abruptly ended. While Mr. Komar continued to show his work in galleries, the gregarious Mr. Melamid seemed to go underground. Some wondered if he had given up on making art. It turns out that Mr. Melamid has been hard at work, as was clear on a recent afternoon in his cavernous studio in Chelsea. Propped against the walls were some impressively monumental oil portraits of cardinals, monks, priests and nuns, curious subjects for someone who often describes himself as ''an old Jew from Russia.'' ''I am repenting for my sins,'' he proclaimed theatrically in heavily accented English. ''I am born-again artist.'' Joking aside, Mr. Melamid's career does seem renewed. Among the obvious signs is his first solo show, ''Holy Hip-Hop!,'' which opened recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. It gathers a dozen portraits of men in the hip-hop world, including the entrepreneur Russell Simmons, the fashion designer and graffiti champion Marc Ecko, and the rappers Kanye West, Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent. As with the clerical figures in his studio, the rappers sport their typical vestments: jeans, Louis Vuitton backpacks, flashy watches and diamond-encrusted medallions and crosses. Mr. Melamid has rendered each figure larger than life with loosely expressionistic brush strokes against a dark abstracted background in a style that recalls the court portraits of Velazquez. Over the coming year he intends to paint a dozen more portraits, this time focusing on contemporary Russian captains of industry. A trilogy of religious, rap and new-money portraits will be exhibited and offered for sale at Phillips de Pury in London in April 2009. At first glance the new paintings recall the kitschy pictures of Stalin, Lenin and George Washington that Komar and Melamid showed in New York a few years after they immigrated to the United States in 1978. The idea of Mr. Melamid serving as a court portraitist to the rich, powerful and famous seems inherently satirical. Yet these paintings have a hauntingly complex and enigmatic quality. ''Then, I wanted to paint as bad as possible,'' Mr. Melamid said of the old days. ''Now, I make as good as possible.'' His sudden embrace of serious painting is not as surprising as it may seem. As a duo Komar and Melamid often turned to the medium, starting with the faux Soviet works of the early 1970s in which they recast their family members as Lenin, Stalin or heroic workers. And ''The People's Choice,'' a project that began in 1993 with a telephone opinion poll that surveyed popular tastes, by 2004 had resulted in 36 strange paintings that purported to give the people what they wanted. Celebrated as that project was, the resulting paintings and their underlying spirit sometimes seemed confused. They prompted Mr. Melamid -- he made most of the paintings and now terms them ''horrible'' -- to end the collaboration with Mr. Komar. ''My partner and myself, we were very ironic about art,'' he said. ''But at a certain point I realize that I just cannot go this way because it is totally ridiculous, the art itself. I just lost my faith.'' Around the same time he spent two months in Moscow caring for his elderly mother while she underwent treatment for stomach cancer. ''Somehow the world fell apart,'' he said. Yet while staying in her apartment he discovered something that knit it back together: his first oil painting, a seascape he made when he was 12 and believed that painting was ''a sacred and amazing thing,'' he said. ''That experience was overwhelming,'' he recalled. Later, when he was casting around for what to do next, ''I said: 'Listen, maybe I have to continue to paint. Maybe I really can concentrate and go back to my dream.' '' Being a conceptual artist, however, he was slightly at a loss for subject matter. ''Paint what, my wife?'' he wondered. ''A still life?'' Then he thought of his youngest son, Daniel, a video director known in the rap music business as Dan the Man. At the time Dan the Man was working for 50 Cent's G-Unit label, making the videos for ''The Massacre (Special Edition).'' He arranged for his business partner, DJ Whoo Kid -- 50 Cent's D.J. -- to visit Mr. Melamid's studio, then in SoHo, to pose for a trial portrait. After that, 50 Cent paid a visit. He sat in a chair, rapping, while Dan the Man shot video and Mr. Melamid made preparatory sketches and photographs. The resulting portrait, which Mr. Melamid said took about a month to figure out, shows the rapper slouched in the chair, looking slightly wary. (The work, together with Mr. Melamid's brush and palette, appear in the video for 50 Cent's ''God Gave Me Style.'') Before long Mr. Melamid had two new collaborators -- his son and Whoo Kid -- bent on finding him subjects. ''He painted 50, and then I'm like wow,'' Dan the Man said. Whoo Kid was also enthusiastic. ''I was like, 'Why don't we get him to do some Guggenheimer museumlike tour, where we showcase all the famous hip-hop artists who change the way we live or change the way we see music?' '' he said. At the time Dan the Man was Whoo Kid's co-host on a hip-hop radio show. When they had the right guest lined up, ''I would call my dad,'' Dan the Man said. And Whoo Kid often tried to bring Mr. Melamid along to his other gigs too. He would introduce him casually, Whoo Kid said, usually by saying something like: ''He's not Ja Rule, he's not somebody who's going to kill somebody. He's a nice old guy. He's Dan the Man's father.'' (Most of the rappers never fully realized why Mr. Melamid was there, he added, but were tickled by his striking resemblance to Albert Einstein.) That's how Mr. Melamid came to spend two days at Snoop Dogg's Los Angeles compound, waiting through the night in clouds of marijuana smoke, he said, as Snoop finished a track for his ''Blue Carpet Treatment'' album. Snoop's employees kept warning him, ''You cannot bother him, the artist is at work,'' Mr. Melamid said. ''It was really this romantic idea of a genius. I loved it. I was trying to explain to them that I was genius myself.'' Yet in the painting Snoop Dogg simply comes off as a workaholic. He is shown sitting at a desk, gazing blearily into a light that seems to emanate from a computer screen. Because Mr. Melamid was a naif where rap was concerned, he made a few bloopers. During the 48 hours he waited around for Snoop Dogg, he photographed and drew someone he presumed was the rapper Doug E. Fresh. ''I'm like, 'Dad, that's going to be great -- Doug E. Fresh is a legend!' '' Dan the Man recalled. ''Then me and Whoo Kid go to see the final works, and my jaw drops. It's such a beautiful painting, but who is this guy?'' (He turned out to be a minor producer called Duke, Mr. Melamid said.) ''My father, he's a great painter,'' Dan the Man said, ''but he does not know anything about rap music.'' Yet Mr. Melamid has managed to catch a few big fish on his own. Recently he began painting the producer Marley Marl, whom he persuaded to pose after months of phone calls. He also landed Mr. Ecko, who was so taken with Mr. Melamid that he offered him a free studio in his company's headquarters on West 23rd Street, the space Mr. Melamid occupies today. ''I'm intrigued by the body of work he's created,'' Mr. Ecko said. ''He's, like, my muse.'' In early 2006 Mr. Melamid sold the hip-hop portraits to a group of American investors who instigated the Detroit show. (If the exhibition is a bid to enhance the value of the portraits in advance of their resale, Mr. Melamid may well trump the investors. He and his son kept saying they hoped Mr. Melamid would have another dozen hip-hop portraits to substitute for the Detroit dozen in the Phillips show, which Mr. Melamid is organizing himself.) With the proceeds from the portraits he sold, Mr. Melamid and his wife, the writer and illustrator Katya Arnold, were able to spend a year in Rome. ''I wanted to go because it's the beginning of European art, of oil painting, the beginning where it all started,'' he said. Once there, it seemed a logical step to seek out nuns and clergymen to paint. ''Without the Catholic Church, there would be no art as we know it,'' Mr. Melamid said. ''I wanted to go to the source.'' He spent the next year trying to infiltrate different Catholic institutions throughout the city, and mostly succeeding. Priests were easier to get to than rappers, he said. ''You go to a church, and you ask them to pose, and they're not famous.'' In Rome, he added, ''being an artist opened unimaginable doors.'' He was highly impressed by the organization Opus Dei and painted a monsignor, Giuseppe Azeglio Manzetti. ''Very well run, like the Mormons,'' he said of the Rome chapter. ''Computers buzzing, young boys running around.'' And the atmosphere at the Vatican struck him as strangely familiar. ''There are no computers, it smells of mice,'' Mr. Melamid said. ''It reminded me of Party headquarters'' back in Moscow. It was at the Vatican that he painted Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, the prelate who oversees the canonization of saints. ''A charming, absolutely adorable man,'' Mr. Melamid said. They two spent hours conversing through a translator as he painted Cardinal Martins in his red robe and cassock. ''He has so much common sense because it is sort of an insane occupation,'' Mr. Melamid mused. ''We got close, believe it or not.'' (Oddly the cardinal chose the same pose as 50 Cent.) Now, back in New York, Mr. Melamid has begun his hunt for Russian oligarchs. He has one so far: Peter Aven, president of Alfa Bank, one of Russia's largest. Though Mr. Melamid seems a little nervous about spending time in his native land, it fascinates him. ''There's a new Russia, about which I have no clue,'' he said. ''Who the hell are they? It's pure curiosity.'' He also jokes that his paintings will provide ''image laundering'' for the oligarchs, not to mention the clergymen and rappers. On the surface Mr. Melamid still presents himself as a laugh-a-minute hustler, full of wild conceptual and moneymaking schemes. Yet from time to time his conversation turns serious. ''Art was used in the 20th century as a great divider,'' he said. But what he has since discovered, he added, ''is that art can unite people.'' He sounded as though he meant it. Directory: ~hesterj -> Entrepreneur Entrepreneur -> Byline: By richard siklos section: Section C; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 Length Download 3.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
|