 Quebec City: Your shortcut to Europe |  |  |
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Quebec City
Easter Island
Easter Island
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2400 miles west of Chile, lies the world’s most remote inhabited island: enigmatic Easter Island. Discovered by a Dutch explorer in 1722, this stunning isle is home to one of the world’s most fascinating sights – remarkable stone statues of unexplained origin. These figures have mystified archeologists and visitors alike for centuries; now you can admire them up close
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2400 miles west of Chile, lies the world’s most remote inhabited island: enigmatic Easter Island. Discovered by a Dutch explorer in 1722, this stunning isle is home to one of the world’s most fascinating sights – remarkable stone statues of unexplained origin. These figures have mystified archeologists and visitors alike for centuries; now you can admire them up close
Monday, June 13, 2005
2012 Olympic Bid Survives as Mets Commit to Stadium Deal
Published: June 13, 2005
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg committed last night to help the Mets build a stadium that could be converted into the centerpiece for the 2012 Olympics in an 11th-hour deal to salvage the city's bid for the Games.
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Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
After state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver rejected plans for a stadium on Manhattan's West Side last week, the city and the Mets opened talks about a new stadium in the Willets Point section of Queens near Shea.
Vincent Laforet/The New York Times
The Mets' new stadium would be converted to Olympic use - if New York is chosen as host of the Olympics.
The Mets would pay the cost of the stadium, which would open in 2009 and be built adjacent to the existing Shea Stadium in Queens. It would be converted for use for the Olympics if the city is chosen as the host for the Games.
The city and state would contribute $180 million for improvements to the infrastructure around the stadium and would pay an additional $100 million to convert the stadium to Olympic use.
The Mets' principal owner, Fred Wilpon, said he would not know the cost of the stadium until a design was selected, but he estimated that it would be $600 million.
Mr. Wilpon has previously prepared plans for a stadium that would be modeled after Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, but few details were given about this new plan. Mr. Bloomberg said the stadium would have a capacity of about 45,000, which would temporarily be expanded to 80,000 for the Olympics.
The deal was put together in 72 hours after long-held plans to construct an Olympic stadium on the West Side of Manhattan were killed last week.
The new plan seems free of the political problems that were fatal to the West Side plan and will enable the organizing committee, NYC2012, to meet today's deadline to respond to a report by the International Olympic Committee's evaluation commission in which New York's lack of a stadium was specifically noted as a concern.
Mr. Bloomberg had long talked down the idea of putting the Olympic stadium in Queens, saying it lacked the glamour of Manhattan, where the city skyline would add drama to the Games. "This was not our first choice," Mr. Bloomberg said last night at a news conference at City Hall. "But when you don't get your first choice, you find what you do have and fight harder to win with that one."
The host city for the 2012 Games will be chosen in a little more than three weeks, on July 6, when the I.O.C. meets in Singapore to select the winner among the five finalists - New York, Paris, London, Madrid and Moscow.
The I.O.C. gave NYC2012 permission to alter its bid last week after the proposal to finance the West Side stadium plan was derailed when state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and state Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno refused to approve it. The planned $2.2 billion stadium project, for which the Jets were to pay $1.6 billion, would have required a $600 million public subsidy, half of which was to come from the state.
Mr. Bloomberg said the new stadium proposal would have to go through the normal budget process, including approval by the City Council and the state, not to mention reaction from the surrounding community.
Mr. Bloomberg, however, said Mr. Silver and Mr. Bruno had already endorsed the new plan, which changes the focus of the Olympic bid from Manhattan to Queens. Not only would the Olympic stadium move there, but Mr. Bloomberg said the main press center and the International Broadcast Center would also be located in Willets Point, adjacent to the new stadium and part of a redevelopment of that area, now filled with junkyards and auto shops.
"I'm glad that the mayor could put together an alternative so fast and that we will be competitive for the 2012 Olympics," Mr. Silver said in an interview last night.
Mr. Silver said that he and Mr. Bruno would join Gov. George E. Pataki in giving Mr. Bloomberg a signed letter committing to the deal, which the mayor could give to the I.O.C. Mr. Silver said that the state's contribution to the plan, $75 million, would not need to go before the Public Authorities Control Board, the board that Mr. Silver used to thwart the West Side stadium.
Also excited about Sunday's development was the United States Olympic Committee, which had initially warned against any impulse to pull out of the bid altogether. Doing so would have damaged hopes for any American city to win a Games in the coming years.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Destination: Russia
Russia 
Churchill's 'riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma' remains an apt description of Russia; most outsiders have only a hazy idea of its realities. A composite of the extravagant glories of old Russia and the drab legacies of the Soviet era, it's a country that both befuddles and beguiles.
This is a land of snow and deadly winters, but also of rivers that meander across meadows and a midsummer sun that never sets. Its people, in the words of a Russian proverb, 'love to suffer', yet they also love to party and can be disarmingly generous and hospitable.
The unfolding effects of a deregulated market economy are surrounded by rumours of rampant crime and prostitution, relentless drug-trafficking, mile-long queues for nonexistent food and a general end-of-the-world aura. But with countless cultural treasures having withstood the tribulations of history and economics, and an artistic legacy running the gamut from Karenina to Zhivago, Russia remains a must-see destination.
Warning
The crashes of two passenger jets on August 24, 2004, the suicide bomber near Rizhskaya Metro station in Moscow on 31 August, the taking of hostages at a school in Beslan on 1 September and the discovery of a cache of weapons in a St Petersburg cinema all demonstrate that the threat of violence from terrorists within Russia is high. Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov was killed on March 3 and further violence has been threatened. Travellers are advised to be cautious and monitor any changes in Chechnya or Moscow.
Travellers are strongly advised against travel in Chechnya, Dagestan and neighbouring Ingushetia. Military clashes, kidnapping of aid workers and foreigners, violent crimes and muggings are prevalent.
Other neighbouring areas of concern include North Ossetia, Stavropol, Karachayevo-Cherkessiya and Kabardino-Balkariya. Events in all these places are difficult to understand and can change rapidly. On-the-ground consular support can be negligible or non-existent.
Full country name: Russian Federation
Area: 17.07 million sq km
Population: 144.53 million
Capital City: Moscow
People: 81% Russian, 4% Tatar, 3% Ukrainian and numerous ethnic minorities
Language: Russian
Religion: Russian Orthodox, Islam, Animist
Government: federation
Head of State: President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin
Head of Government: Premier Mikhail Fradkov
GDP: US$1.4 trillion
GDP per capita: US$8,900
Annual Growth: 4%
Inflation: 15.1%
Major Industries: Oil, coal, iron ore, timber, automotive, agricultural and construction equipment
Major Trading Partners: EU (esp. Germany), Belarus, Ukraine, USA, China
Member of EU: No
Thursday, June 02, 2005
From Thousand-Year-Old Sentinel to Traffickers' Booty
Published: June 2, 2005
ALERCE, Chile - The majestic tree that gives this town its name is one of Chile's principal national symbols. Streets, schools, suburban housing developments, hotels, gas stations, taxi fleets and even a record company and a brand of cellphone - all invoke and honor the towering and sturdy "sequoia of South America," as the alerce is sometimes called.
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Scott Dalton for The New York Times
In 1976, Chile declared the alerce tree a "national monument."
Scott Dalton for The New York Times
Luis Cárcamo, right, followed by his son Javier haul off trunks of the prized alerce. Cutting of live trees is illegal.
The New York Times
In Alerce, the tree that provided its name has all but vanished.
But here in Alerce, as in many other parts of southern Chile, there are scarcely any alerce trees to be found these days. Predatory cutting and burning in defiance of laws meant to protect the species have reduced its range and numbers by half and created a lucrative black market in which alerce timber can fetch as much as $5,000 per cubic yard, if successfully spirited abroad.
"The corruption is tremendous, involving very important people," said Adriana Hoffman, a former Environmental Protection Agency director. "There is always plenty of talk about saving the alerce, but nothing gets done and as a result, we are losing part of our patrimony. What is going on is truly scandalous."
Despite its resemblance to the North American redwood, the alerce (pronounced ah-LER-say) is actually a relative of the cypress, with a tough, water-resistant reddish-brown wood that makes it much sought-after for use in building construction and furniture making.
Slow-growing, largely because it favors soils poor in nutrients that other trees shun, it nonetheless grows to a height of 165 feet or more and a width of 15 feet, and some trees in protected areas are more than 3,600 years old.
Since 1975, the export of alerce timber from Chile for commercial purposes has been banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. To further protect the species, Chile in 1976 also approved laws that declared the alerce a "national monument" and prohibited the cutting down of any live trees.
But those regulations contained a loophole that loggers were quick to exploit. Since it is legal to harvest dead trees killed off by fire, lightning or disease, traffickers have been clandestinely helping the process along, environmental advocates say, in hopes of reaping big windfalls.
Most often, loggers simply strip trees of their bark or set forest fires to scorch them and make them eligible for the death certificates that are required before they can be cut down and trucked to sawmills. But the traffickers have also been known to "strangle" alerces with metal rings placed tightly around the trunk.
On a recent cold and drizzly Saturday morning, José Darío Cárcamo, 68, and his son and grandson were scavenging for the remnants of trunks in what had once been a grove of alerce trees here. Their plan was to recover as many stumps as they could with their axe and power saw and then sell the wood, either to neighbors for fuel or to local artisans who prize the alerce as the raw material for carved souvenirs or musical instruments. "When I was a young man, it seemed that there were still alerce forests everywhere," said Mr. Cárcamo, a former woodsman. "Now my grandson has only this, and God only knows what will be left for his grandson."
Government officials maintain that environmental groups here and abroad are exaggerating the threat. They argue that alerce stocks remain plentiful and that the official policy is working better than the alternatives suggested by critics.
"The alerce is not going to be wiped out this year or next, or in the next thousand years," Carlos Weber, director of the National Forestry Corporation, the government agency that oversees all aspects of Chile's forest management, said in an interview in Santiago. "We're not talking about 50 or 100 trees left, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of acres, far above what the market demands each year."
In an effort to safeguard the alerce, Chile has set up a network of national parks and other protected areas. But the government has crippled the environmental crimes division of the national police, and environmental advocates say they are worried at other signs of a lack of resources and political will to guarantee that the law is obeyed.
"It's an absurd responsibility and raises the question of whether the government is serious about enforcing environmental laws in southern Chile," said Aaron Sanger, the representative in Chile of Forest Ethics, an American environmental group. "The government has one ranger for every 900,000 acres in that region, so it is kind of hard for that ranger to do a good job of detecting illegal logging in these remote places."
Environmental groups charge that the illegal traffic in alerce wood is controlled by a mafia that has connections to powerful politicians. Last year, a judge near here received death threats after she began an investigation into charges that a federal senator had improperly pressured Mr. Weber to issue logging certificates to favored constituents.
More recently, the mayor of Fresia, west of here, Nelson Schwerter, was arrested and accused of being a middleman in an alerce-smuggling scheme. He has accused judicial authorities of a political vendetta, but five woodcutters have identified the mayor as the person to whom they sold illegally logged alerce.
Much of the alerce shipped abroad has been tracked to places like Britain and Japan. "The alerce is mixed with other woods that are not on the protected list, and the customs people are none the wiser," said Dr. Hoffman, now the director of Defenders of the Chilean Forest, a leading environmental group. "There is little control and even less knowledge."
Yet in spite of the high price that alerce commands on the black market, commercial loggers have shown little interest in replanting the tree, for obvious economic reasons. Pine and eucalyptus grow fast enough that they are ready for cutting in as little as 20 years, while the alerce requires 1,000 years or more.
Shanghai
Shanghai
If you're looking for an exotic city break this summer, here’s a unique urban fix: bustling Shanghai! You'll find this Chinese metropolis in the midst of an unparalleled urban renewal, with plenty of attractions – like a revived waterfront, some of the world's finest Art Deco architecture, evocative tea houses, and alluring street life – that are bound to sweep you off your feet. You can experience it all for seven days with this discounted air-and-hotel package we’ve found for just $989, including breakfast, transfers, and even a city tour! Full deal review
If you're looking for an exotic city break this summer, here’s a unique urban fix: bustling Shanghai! You'll find this Chinese metropolis in the midst of an unparalleled urban renewal, with plenty of attractions – like a revived waterfront, some of the world's finest Art Deco architecture, evocative tea houses, and alluring street life – that are bound to sweep you off your feet. You can experience it all for seven days with this discounted air-and-hotel package we’ve found for just $989, including breakfast, transfers, and even a city tour! Full deal review
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