IHT Rendezvous: Muslims Seek Dialogue With Next Pope

LONDON — As the Catholic Church’s cardinal electors gather at the Vatican to choose a new pope, Muslim leaders are urging a revival of the often troubled dialogue between the two faiths.

During the papacy of Benedict XVI, relations between the world’s two largest religions were overshadowed by remarks he made in 2006 that were widely condemned as an attack on Islam.

In a speech at Regensburg University in his native Germany, Benedict quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor as saying, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

In the face of protests from the Muslim world, the Vatican said the pope’s remarks had been misinterpreted and that he “deeply regretted” that the speech “sounded offensive to the sensibility of Muslim believers.”

For many in the Muslim world, however, the damage was done and the perception persisted that Benedict was hostile to Islam.

Juan Cole, a U.S. commentator on the Middle East, has suggested that although the pope backed down on some of his positions, “Pope Benedict roiled those relationships with needlessly provocative and sometimes offensive statements about Islam and Muslims.”

Despite the Vatican’s efforts to renew the interfaith dialogue by hosting a meeting with Muslim scholars, hostilities resumed in 2011 when the pope condemned alleged discrimination against Egypt’s Coptic Christians in the wake of a church bombing in Alexandria.

Al Azhar University in Cairo, the center of Islamic learning, froze relations with the Vatican in protest.

Following the pope’s decision to step down, Mahmud Azab, an adviser on interfaith dialogue to the head of Al Azhar, said, “The resumption of ties with the Vatican hinges on the new atmosphere created by the new pope. The initiative is now in the Vatican’s hands.”

Mahmoud Ashour, a senior Al Azhar cleric, insisted that “the new pope must not attack Islam,” according to remarks quoted by Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, and said the two religions should “complete one another, rather than compete.”

A French Muslim leader, meanwhile, has called for a fresh start in the dialogue with a new pope.

In an interview with Der Spiegel of Germany this week, Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris, said of Benedict, “He was not able to understand Muslims. He had no direct experience with Islam, and he found nothing positive to say about our beliefs.”

Reem Nasr, writing at the policy debate Web site, Policymic, this week offered Benedict’s successor a five-point program to bridge the Catholic and Muslim worlds.

These included mutual respect, more papal contacts with Muslim leaders and a greater focus on what the religions had in common.

“There has been a long history of mistrust that can be overcome,” she wrote. “No one should give up just yet.”

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At War Blog: Remembering a Silent Success in Afghanistan

December in the mountains of southern Afghanistan greeted me and my men with strong and seemingly endless gusts of wind. The frigid temperatures were equally unforgiving. Our living quarters were constructed out of cardboard boxes and plastic sheeting, which didn’t create much of an escape. The highlight of my day, despite the obvious threat, was leading patrols as a squad leader. The physical activity kept me comfortably warm and allowed me to distance my mind from our frosty reality.

Despite daily patrols, it took me a few months to build rapport with the residents of Kunjak in Helmand Province. During the first month of my deployment in 2010, barely any villagers talked to me. This is when my interpreter, who we called H.B., suggested I start inviting the elders to our base for a meeting, or shura. He assured me this would build a mutual trust.

Soon, my Sunday mornings consisted of two to three hours of conversing with dozens of village elders. At 9 a.m., my interpreter and I would greet them as they climbed the steep and sandy hill to my remote outpost. To present a less hostile environment, I chose to meet them without my body armor or weapon.

We sat outside, suffering in the wind together. My interpreter would make chai, but I always brewed a pot of Starbucks coffee and offered some to my guests. Some liked it, some didn’t. I would like to think my generosity was appreciated.

The shuras were full of requests for new wells and mosques. But if there are two things Afghanistan has a plethora of, it’s those two things. I chose to propose something different, which thrilled them all.

We would build a school.

The Taliban had prevented them from being able to send their kids to school for years. With one suggestion, I had won over the villagers.

As the sun rose the following day, despite not having a school yet, I had over a dozen children waiting outside my base. Many had traveled from afar to attend what they thought was the first day of class. The last thing I wanted to do was send the children away. We invited them on the base, and H.B. taught them the Pashtu alphabet on our dry-erase board. It was on that Monday morning I realized I had to do something fast.

Our supplies were stored in a small tent at the back of our outpost, but I made the decision to move the tent to the base of our hill to serve as the school. By positioning it there, we could maintain its security, protecting it from Taliban attacks.

At 8:45 every morning, my Marines patrolled the school and used our metal detectors to sweep for improvised explosive devices. The safety of the children had to be paramount or our efforts would be for nothing. As the days passed, a growing number of children ranging in the age from 4 to 10 arrived for school. Within weeks we were teaching more than 40 boys and girls. During our time in Afghanistan, not a single child was injured at our school, and for the last four months of my deployment, the school was a giant success.

The Afghan National Police officers attached to my outpost did not participate much in the security of the school. In fact, many of them disapproved of it because it catered to girls as well as boys. I fear that as the American military presence draws down in Afghanistan, initiatives like our school will be abandoned by the Afghan government or destroyed by the Taliban. While the district mayor of Musa Qala knew of our efforts at the school, we received little to no local government support. Requests for a teacher, supplies and a permanent structure were either ignored or forgotten.

Stories like the one of our school tend to never make the limelight. Far too often the news is only about the horrors of war, or mistakes made by NATO troops, rather than their successes. It is easy to focus on the negative, especially as the United States plans to withdraw most of its forces by the end of 2014.

As I left Afghanistan in the spring of 2011, dozens of Afghans were attending our shuras, and they were full of varying requests. They no longer asked for wells and mosques. Now they wanted a community center and a larger school. I left before I could make those dreams come true for them. But I hoped the Marines who relieved me would be able to fulfill them.

I came home and listened and watched the news a lot. I kept hoping I would see or hear something good from Afghanistan. To no avail; the stories were depressing. After spending seven months in Afghanistan, I now knew good things were happening, but they just weren’t being shown.

I hope that my school wasn’t short-lived, and I would like to think that it is still operating safely. Whether it is or not, I still fondly remember our efforts. They led to one of the silent successes that have happened and, I believe, will continue to happen in Afghanistan.

Thomas James Brennan is a military affairs reporter with the Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C. Before being medically retired this fall, he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, and is a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. Follow him on Twitter at @thomasjbrennan.

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IHT Rendezvous: Q and A: Keeping ‘A Chorus Line’ in Step

LONDON — For a musical that’s all about dancers, there’s not a huge amount of dancing in “A Chorus Line,” which opened last week at the London Palladium — the first West End revival of the musical since it opened here in 1976, a year after its smash-hit debut on Broadway.

But the most dance-intensive moments are fundamental to our very idea of “A Chorus Line”: the “Aaaah-5-6-7-8!” that unleashes the explosion of movement with which the musical opens, and the slow sideways-moving line of gold-clad top-hatted dancers with which it closes. In between those moments is the meat of the show; the passage from anonymity as the dancers begin the audition, to individuality as they tell their stories — and then back again, to an impersonal line of identically dressed, identically moving performers.

On opening night at the Palladium, the audience greeted those first moments with a roaring cheer, a salute to the love-story that “A Chorus Line” tells — not between its characters, but between them and showbiz. The choreography may look stylized, but it doesn’t really matter. Watching, we are both in 1975 (as the opening projection tells us) and in 2013; leotard and dance styles might have changed, but the desire to be on Broadway has not.

Michael Bennett, who conceived of the show, choreographed and directed it, died in 1987, and it is his co-choreographer, Bob Avian, who has been responsible for directing the major “Chorus Line” revivals since.

So how much does the dance (and the dancing) matter in “A Chorus Line”? Two days after the London opening — greeted by a positive storm of approval by the critics — Mr. Avian flew to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a well-earned rest after several months of putting the musical together in London. Speaking by telephone, he discussed the choreography, his approach to staging the work, and why “A Chorus Line” still speaks to a contemporary audience.

Q.

How did you and Michael Bennett approach the choreography? Is the opening number really the kind of routine you would have asked an audition group to do?

A.

Michael and I were a good team, because he was a jazz dancer, and my training was classical. Between us we came up with a lot of choreography that was more integrated. A lot of it was based on dance crazes of the time — disco, the toe-heel-heel, the body shifts that go along with that. We pulled on elements of popular dancing as we were doing it; we were children of our times, dance-wise. There’s actually not much contemporary dance in there; there is ballet, typical broadway and tap. The only jazz combos are in the opening sequence and the montage sections.

Q.

Did you initially think it would be more of a dance show?

A.

Well, it was a very slow process and I’m not sure we had an idea of how it would be. We had the original tapes of the stories from our dancers and once we decided to put those stories in the framework of an audition, we were able to construct the piece. But it took us a very long time. We did four workshops, which no one did in those days — we were the first ones ever to do it. The montage, which is 22 minutes, took us six weeks. You wouldn’t be able to do that today, it would be too expensive.

Q.

Is the routine we see at the beginning a realistic idea of what you might see at a Broadway audition today?

A.

A dance call is still pretty much the same. When we have an open call, you might get 700 people. We divide them into groups of 10 and make them all do double pirouettes — you can immediately see people’s training. We keep 2 or 3 people from each group, then we teach them the opening combination, a shortened version, then the full one, then the ballet combination. You get a feel for their jazz style, and the ballet combination is very revealing in terms of technique.

Q.

Are you strict about remaining faithful to the original choreography? Do you adapt to different dancers or, perhaps, a more contemporary style of dancing today?

A.

The ensemble stuff is set in stone, but with the solo work, we are very open. For Cassie’s dance, for instance, we try to pull on the strengths of the dancer performing the role. If she has a great extension, or very supple back, we make tons of adjustments along the way. In structure it’s still the same, because it’s about the music and the storytelling — it’s about narcissism, about the need to have her gifts recognized.

In the individual stuff, the staging of the songs, I make adjustments all the time. At the beginning of the rehearsal process, I just let them do the number and see what they will bring to it. In that way, I suppose it becomes more contemporary because they are performers of today.

Q.

Have the technical capacities of dancers changed since you first staged the musical in 1975?

A.

Undoubtedly. The quality of the dancing is much higher than it was when we made it. Also, then you still had a singing chorus, or a dancing chorus; it was hard to get people who could do everything really well, and now that is the norm.

It’s still hard to get a woman who can do Cassie’s big song-and-dance solo; we’ve had performers who are great dancers, but can’t really sing it. It’s a very difficult song and you need a lot of stamina. But every time I return to the show, the caliber is higher in general.

Q.

Is there a difference between the U.S. and the U.K in the quality of musical theater performers, given that there is more of a conventional theater tradition here?

A.

Not essentially. They were perhaps a little behind America in the past, but that’s mostly to do with the fact that we pull from a population that is so much bigger — it’s a numbers thing. But now they have the same all-around training, and they are fully the equals of U.S. performers. In fact, I think this London cast is the finest company we’ve had in 35 years. Every time I do “Chorus Line,” I think, not again! But this was all pleasure.

Q.

The audience was beyond rapturous at the performance I attended. Why do you think people identify so strongly with “A Chorus Line”?

A.

I think it speaks to everyone because it’s really about people on an assembly line. They are not stars, and they aren’t trying to be stars — they are trying to succeed in essentially a humble way. And the musical talks about things that weren’t discussed on Broadway before: homosexuality, plastic surgery, angry or troubled or loving relationships with parents. Even though much has changed socially since we made it, those issues don’t go away.

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Top British Cardinal Resigns After Accusations of ‘Inappropriate Acts’

VATICAN CITY — Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric 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.

The cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, said that he had submitted his resignation months ago, and the Vatican said Pope Benedict XVI had accepted it on Feb. 18. However, the timing of the announcement — a day after news reports of alleged abuse appeared in Britain —suggested that the Vatican had encouraged the cardinal to stay away from the conclave.

The move is bound to raise questions about other cardinals. It comes amid a campaign by some critics to urge Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles not to attend the conclave because of his role in moving priests accused of abuse.

It also comes just days after the Vatican Secretariat of State issued a harsh statement against recent media reports —including ones alleging a gay sex scandal inside the Vatican —that cardinals should not be conditioned by external pressures, including from the media, when they vote for the next pope. There are expected to be some 115 cardinals at the gathering.

Vatican watchers said that Cardinal O’Brien’s decision not to attend the conclave was rare.

“It’s quite unprecedented,” said Sandro Magister, a Vatican expert with the Italian weekly L’Espresso. “He made it clear that his resignation came under the pressure of the accusations. His certainly isn’t a frequent case and hasn’t happened in conclaves in recent memory.”

Cardinal O’Brien’s announcement came a day after The Observer newspaper reported that four men had made complaints to the pope’s diplomatic representative in Britain, Antonio Mennini, that reached him the week before Pope Benedict XVI announced Feb. 11 that he would be stepping down as of Feb. 28.

The Observer said that the accusations, which dated back to the 1980s, had been forwarded to theVatican.

Last week, Cardinal O’Brien drew different headlines, telling the BCC that the next pope should consider abandoning the church’s insistence on priestly celibacy, and suggested that it might be time for the papal conclave to choose a new pontiff from Africa or Asia, where church membership has been growing even as it has fallen across Europe and North America.

On Monday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, downplayed the connection between the media reports and Cardinal O’Brien’s resignation, which the pope accepted under a norm of church law that says he had reached the normal retirement age of 75.

A statement issued by the media office of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland said Cardinal O’Brien had informed the pope some time ago of his intention to resign as archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh as his 75th birthday approached on March 17 but that no date had been set.

The cardinal said in the statement: “The Holy Father has now decided that my resignation will take effect today, 25 February 2013.”

“Looking back over my years of ministry: For any good I have been able to do, I thank God,” he said. “For any failures, I apologize to all whom I have offended.”

“I also ask God’s blessing on my brother cardinals who will soon gather in Rome,” the statement said, adding, “I will not join them for this conclave in person. I do not wish media attention in Rome to be focused on me — but rather on Pope Benedict XVI and on his successor.”

Cardinal O’Brien, whose office had initially said he would fly to Rome before the conclave, has been the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland since 1985, and was named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2003. He was among the cardinals who attended the conclave that chose Benedict as John Paul’s successor in 2005.

The main role of a cardinal is to elect a new pope and they remain eligible to vote under any circumstances, even if they have been excommunicated, Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, the secretary for the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, said last week.

Ambrogio Piazzoni, a papal historian, told reporters last week that he could think of no examples of cardinals who refrained from voting for anything other than health reasons — or from the pressures of different governments in past years.

On Monday, Benedict changed the laws governing the conclave to allow cardinals to decide to move up the start date before the traditional 15-20 day waiting period after the papacy is vacant. He also met with three cardinals who had conducted a secret investigation into a scandal of leaked documents and ruled that the contents of their report would be known only to his successor — not to the cardinals entering the conclave.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London.

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In Last Sunday Address as Pope, Benedict Says He Will Continue to Serve

Andrew Medichini/Associated Press

Pope Benedict XVI delivered his final Sunday address from the window of his apartment overlooking St. Peter's Square.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict spoke from his window for the last time on Sunday, telling the faithful packed into St. Peter’s Square that the first papal abdication in centuries was God’s will and insisting he was not abandoning the Church.

Four days before the 85-year-old Benedict’s often troubled eight-year rule ends, new talk of scandal hit the cardinals who will choose his successor; one of them, a Scottish archbishop, had to deny news media accusations of misconduct with priests in the 1980s.

With an American cardinal urged not to go to the electoral conclave because of his role in handling sexual abuse cases in the United States, and the Vatican accusing media of running smears to influence the vote, the Church faces a stormy succession.

Benedict, however, defended his shock decision to resign as dictated by his failing health; his address to tens of thousands of well-wishers was met with calls of “Viva il Papa!”

“The Lord is calling me to climb the mountain, to dedicate myself even more to prayer and meditation,” the German-born pontiff said in Italian, his voice strong and clear.

“But this does not mean abandoning the Church. Actually, if God asks this of me, it is precisely because I can continue to serve her with the same dedication and the same love I have shown so far,” he said, adding that he would be serving the Church “in a way more in keeping with my age and my strengths”.

As he spoke, two of the some 117 cardinals who will enter the conclave next month to choose his successor as leader of the 1.2 billion Roman Catholics were mired in controversy.

Britain’s top Catholic cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien of Edinburgh, rejected claims in The Observer newspaper that he had been involved in unspecified inappropriate behavior with other priests.

The paper said Cardinal O’Brien, 74, known for his outspoken views against homosexuality, had been reported to the Vatican by three priests and a former priest, who said they had come forward to demand he resign and not take part in the conclave.

“Cardinal O’Brien contests these claims and is taking legal advice,” a spokesman for the cardinal said.

He was the second cardinal to be caught up in controversy over his attendance ahead of the conclave. On Saturday, Catholic activists petitioned Cardinal Roger Mahony to recuse himself from the conclave so as not to insult survivors of sexual abuse by priests committed while he was archbishop of Los Angeles..

In that post from 1985 until 2011, Cardinal Mahony worked to send priests known to be abusers out of state to shield them from law enforcement scrutiny in the 1980s, according to church files unsealed under a federal district. court order last month.

The minds of those in the crowd in St Peter’s Square on Sunday, some holding banners reading “Thank you Holy Father,” were not on scandals, real or potential, but on the Church history unfolding around them.

“It’s bittersweet,” said Sarah Ennis, 21, a student from Minnesota who studies in Rome. “Bitter because we love our Pope Benedict and hate to see him go, but sweet because he is going for a good reason and we are excited to see the next pope.”

Others, however, saw it as a possible harbinger for the Church.

“This is an ill wind blowing,” said Marina Tacconi, a midwife. “It feels like something ugly could happen. I’m 58 years old, I have seen popes come and go. But never one resign.”

The Sunday address was one of Benedict’s last appearances as pontiff before the curtain comes down on a problem-ridden pontificate.

On Wednesday, he will hold his last general audience in St. Peter’s Square and on Thursday he will meet with cardinals and then fly to the papal summer retreat south of Rome.

The papacy will become vacant on Thursday night.

Cardinals will begin meetings the next day to prepare for a secret conclave in the Sistine Chapel.

They have already begun informal consultations by phone and e-mail in the last two weeks since Benedict announced his abdication in order to build a profile of the man they think would be best suited to lead the Church.

On Monday, the pope is expected to issue slight changes to Church rules governing the conclave so that it could start before March 15, the earliest it can be held under a detailed constitution by his predecessor John Paul.

Some cardinals believe a conclave should start sooner than March 15 in order to reduce the time in which the Church will be without a leader. But some in the Church believe that an early conclave would give an unfair advantage to cardinals already in Rome and working in the Curia, the Vatican’s central administration, which has been at the center of accusations of ineptitude that some say led Benedict to step down.

The Vatican appears to be aiming to have a new pope elected by mid-March and then installed before Palm Sunday on March 24 so he can preside at Holy Week services leading to Easter.

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U.N. Rejects Claim for Direct Compensation to Victims of Cholera Epidemic in Haiti

There will be no direct financial compensation from the United Nations for the more than 8,000 Haitians who died and the 646,000 sickened by cholera since the disease struck the earthquake-ravaged country in October 2010, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the Haitian president this week.

More than 15 months after the United Nations received a legal claim seeking to hold peacekeeping troops responsible for setting off the epidemic, its lawyers declared the claim “not receivable,” citing diplomatic immunity.

At the same time, Partners in Health, the leading nongovernmental health care provider in Haiti, has stepped forward to urge the United Nations to invest more seriously in Mr. Ban’s own largely unfunded anticholera initiative to make amends.

In an Op-Ed article posted Friday night on the Web site of The New York Times, Dr. Louise C. Ivers, the group’s senior health and policy adviser, says the United Nations has “a moral, if not legal, obligation to help solve a crisis it inadvertently helped start.” Evidence, she said, finds the United Nations “largely, though not wholly” culpable for the outbreak of cholera.

To date, Mr. Ban has not acknowledged the reigning scientific theory about the origin of Haiti’s cholera epidemic — that peacekeepers from Nepal imported the cholera and, through a faulty sanitation system at their base, infected a tributary of the country’s largest river.

Dr. Ivers, however, while noting the “causality” of epidemic disease is complex, says that no other reasonable hypothesis for Haiti’s cholera has been put forth.

What makes her comments especially striking is that her organization’s co-founder and chief strategist, Dr. Paul Farmer, served as the United Nations’ deputy special envoy for Haiti for the past three years and was appointed by Mr. Ban in December to lead the very anticholera initiative that she found lacking.

Dr. Farmer declined to comment, but a spokeswoman for Partners in Health said Dr. Ivers’s statements represented the group’s concerns about the 10-year, $2.2 billion anticholera initiative that he was supposed to advise.

The ambitious initiative is intended to upgrade Haiti’s abysmal water and sanitation infrastructure while increasing cholera prevention and treatment efforts, including the expansion of a small cholera vaccination campaign that Partners in Health and a Haitian health care group, Gheskio, undertook last year.

Donors have pledged $215 million. The United Nations said it would contribute $23.5 million — 1 percent of the initiative’s cost, Dr. Ivers said.

In contrast, she said, this year’s budget for the United Nations peacekeeping mission, $648 million, “could more than fund the entire cholera elimination initiative for two years.”

Expressing his “deep sorrow and solidarity with the many Haitian families who lost loved ones in this terrible epidemic,” Nigel Fisher, the new head of the peacekeeping mission, nonetheless said that the United Nations had “mobilized resolutely to combat the disease.” It spent some $118 million on cholera before the initiative was announced, officials have said.

Mr. Ban, through his spokesman, also expressed “his profound sympathy” while announcing on Thursday that the legal claim had been rejected.

Mario Joseph, lead lawyer for the cholera victims, said, “While these sympathies are welcome, they will not stop cholera’s killing or ensure that survivors can go on living after losing breadwinners to cholera.”

The demand, filed in an internal United Nations claims unit, had sought $100,000 for each bereaved family and $50,000 for each cholera survivor.

Mr. Joseph described the United Nations’ terse rejection of a claim filed over a year ago as “disgraceful,” and he and his American colleagues at the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti said they would file a lawsuit in Haiti or abroad.

Though the death rate from cholera has declined significantly since the epidemic initially devastated Haiti, the disease is still coursing through the country. National statistics show a spike of reported cases in December 2012 over that same month in 2011 — 11,220 compared with 8,205.

“The U.N. will not pay,” said a headline Friday on the Web site of Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste newspaper.

“It’s not surprising,” a reader responded.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 23, 2013

An earlier version of this article misrendered a quotation from an Op-Ed article by Dr. Louise C. Ivers. The quotation should have read “largely, though not wholly,” not “largely, if not wholly.”

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IHT Rendezvous: True or False? The Tussle Over Ping Fu's Memoir

Did Ping Fu, a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman and author of a recent memoir, “Bend, not Break,” make up her horrible experiences during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution in order to gain United States citizenship? Did they help her become an American by claiming political asylum?

That’s what her critics, many of them fellow Chinese-Americans, say. It’s an accusation that can stick. As a recent New York Times investigation showed, claiming persecution has spawned an immigration industry involving lawyers prepping clients to make false asylum claims.

As I write in my Letter from China this week, Ms. Fu is being accused of making up a lot of things in her memoir. She’s also a successful entrepreneur: the U.S. government honored Ms. Fu, the founder of the software company Geomagic (in the process of being sold to 3D Systems), with a “2012 Outstanding American by Choice” award.

Ms. Fu is on the board of the White House’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and is a member of the National Council on Women in Technology, according to the Web site of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Ms. Fu, who says in her memoir she was “quietly deported” to the U.S. in 1984 for writing about female infanticide while still a college student, denies the accusations. But until now she hadn’t explained in public how she became an American.

In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, she said, apparently for the first time, the reason she kept quiet was she was trying to protect her first husband, an American, whom she does not mention in her memoir. The marriage took place while she was living in California, she said.

“I had a first marriage and that’s how I got my green card,” she said by telephone. She married on Sept. 1, 1986 and divorced three years later. Until now she had kept silent because of a “smear” campaign against her online, mostly by fellow Chinese who accuse her of lying, which extended to real-life harassment, she said: “They smear my name, they try to get my daughter’s name on the Internet, they sent people to Shanghai to surround my family and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors.” She said the accusers, who are “angry” for reasons she doesn’t really understand, contacted U.S. immigration authorities to challenge her award and her citizenship, as well as shareholders of 3D Systems to warn them she was a “liar,” and not to buy Geomagic. Her second husband, Herbert Edelsbrunner, whom she has since divorced, received many “hate e-mails,” she said. “I just don’t want to hurt innocent people.”

If a first, unpublicized marriage might lay to rest one contentious issue, there are others. Some were the result of exaggeration or unclear communication with her ghostwriter, MeiMei Fox of Los Angeles, she said.

In the interview, she volunteered an example of an error: a widely criticized account of the ‘‘period police,’’ the authorities who checked a woman’s menstrual cycle to ensure she wasn’t pregnant in the early days of the one-child policy. To stop women substituting others’ sanitary pads for inspection, they were sometimes required to use their own finger to show blood. Through a misunderstanding with Ms. Fox, Ms. Fu said this was portrayed as the use of other people’s fingers — an invasion of the woman’s body.

Ms. Fox “wrote it wrong,’’ she said. ‘‘I corrected it three times but it didn’t get corrected.’’ Women used their own finger to show blood, she said, but the mistake went into print anyway.

In general, Ms. Fox may have ‘‘just made some searches on the Internet that maybe weren’t correct,’’ Ms. Fu said.

Chiefly the errors involved use of the words ‘‘all, never, any,’’ that generalized unacceptably, Ms. Fu said. And, ‘‘She doesn’t know China’s geography,’’ she said.

At the beginning of her memoir, Ms. Fu writes of being kidnapped by a Vietnamese-American on arrival in the U.S. state of New Mexico and locked in his apartment to care for his very young children, whose mother had left, in a bizarre incident. A spokeswoman at the Albuquerque Police Department’s Records Office, where the alleged kidnapping took place, said she could not locate such an incident in their records. Asked about it, Ms. Fu repeated that she did not press charges as, fresh from China, she was terrified of all police, “So I don’t know how they keep records, if there is no criminal charges or record.”

And in an e-mail to me, she admitted she made mistakes about a magazine she said she helped edit, called Wugou, or “No Hook,” produced in 1979 by students at her college, then called the Jiangsu Teacher’s College (later it changed its name to Suzhou University, she said.) It was not that magazine but another one, This Generation, that was taken to a meeting in Beijing of student magazine writers from around the country, she wrote in the e-mail. “A good case that shows everyone’s memory can be wrong,” she wrote.

But bigger questions about the scale of the online vitriol from parts of the Chinese and Chinese-American community remain. “I really haven’t known China for 20-something years, and it didn’t occur to me that what I wrote would generate so much anger,” she said. In the last years, “as China got stronger, nationalistic views got stronger,” she said, making a “civil conversation” about disagreements apparently harder.

Additional reporting by Cindy Hao in Seattle.

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French Family of 7 Kidnapped in Cameroon

PARIS (AP) — A French family of seven — including four children — was kidnapped on Tuesday in northern Cameroon, and officials suggested that the Islamic extremist sect Boko Haram was behind it.

Details of the kidnapping were not immediately clear. However, President Francois Hollande, speaking during a visit to Greece, noted that France is engaged in a military campaign in Mali to rout out jihadists who had taken control of the north. Terrorists, he said, "are not just in Mali."

Hollande warned French citizens in the region to avoid putting themselves in dangerous situations.

A total of 15 French citizens are currently being held in western Africa — one other in Nigeria and seven thought to be in northern Mali.

A French official close to the embassy in Cameroon said the family was believed to have been taken from northern Cameroon to Nigeria, where on Monday a little-known extremist group called Ansaru claimed responsibility for a separate abduction of seven foreigners.

Boko Haram — which means "Western education is sacrilege" — has launched a guerrilla campaign of bombings and shootings across Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north. It is blamed for at least 792 killings last year alone, according to an AP count. It is known to have ties to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, an Algerian-based group that opened a front in Mali.

"If everything is confirmed, this signifies that the fight against terrorist groups is a necessity," Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in Paris. "There is a battle to be led by the international community against terrorist groups and narco-terrorists," a reference to the trafficking in drugs, cigarettes and other commodities that has flourished in northern Mali under the extremists.

The latest kidnappings have added to fears of instability and danger toward Westerners. Before Tuesday, there were eight French citizens being held in the region, including one who was taken in Nigeria.

An analysis published Monday by Stratfor, a U.S.-based private global intelligence firm, warned that there likely will be more attacks by Ansaru targeting Westerners and Western interests in Nigeria, as well as neighboring nations.

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Lori Hinnant in Paris contributed to this report.

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IHT Rendezvous: Human Rights and Sports Events

Earlier this month, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sacked a senior Russian Olympic Committee official over rising costs and a delay in the construction work for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Page Two

Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.

The cost of the games, to be held in the southern resort of Sochi, is expected to reach the equivalent of $50 billion. Mr. Putin said corruption had pushed up costs.

For human rights organizations, the issue is not cost or corruption. It is the principle of holding such a prestigious event in Russia as the Kremlin implements tough measures against nongovernmental organizations and clamps down on the opposition.

Why, ask human rights organizations, should Russia host such an event when even punk singers, such as some members of the Pussy Riot band, languish in prison? And why should neighboring Belarus be allowed to host the 2014 World Hockey Championships when the regime has imprisoned pro-democracy activists?

Despite the support by some political parties in Europe, human rights organizations have been unable to prevent high-profile events taking place in autocratic countries.

Last April, the Grand Prix was held in Bahrain, the subject of my latest Letter from Europe.

This was despite the fact that the regime had already imprisoned hundreds and killed at least 50 people after the short-lived Arab Spring of February 2011, according to Human Rights Watch. To this day, pro-democracy activists are detained or constantly under surveillance.

It was the same in Azerbaijan, which hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in May 2012. Human rights organizations and some European politicians had called for the event to be held elsewhere because of Azerbaijan’s appalling human rights record. The event went ahead.

A few months later, the European Football Championships were held in Poland and Ukraine. Again, there were calls by pro-democracy activists but also German politicians, to boycott the matches in Ukraine because of the continuing imprisonment of the former prime minister, Yulia Timoshenko. The matches went ahead.

Some politicians argue that it is far better to allow these events to take place in these countries. They put the spotlight on conditions there. But once the event is over, the spotlight moves elsewhere.

Maybe it is time that the international sports federations and the Olympic Committee established democracy criteria for holding such events. They will, no doubt, immediately respond that this is introducing politics into sports. But was there ever a time when sports was innocent?

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IHT Rendezvous: Should Common Plastics Be Labeled Toxic?

THE HAGUE — Hoping to reduce one of the most ubiquitous forms of waste, a global group of scientists is proposing that certain types of plastic be labeled hazardous.

The group, led by two California scientists, wrote in this week’s issue of the scientific journal Nature:

We believe that if countries classified the most harmful plastics as hazardous, their environmental agencies would have the power to restore affected habitats and prevent more dangerous debris from accumulating.

While 280 million tons of plastic were produced globally last year, less than half of that plastic has ended up in landfills or was recycled, according to the scientists’ data. Some of the unaccounted for 150 million tons of plastic is still in use, but much of it litters roadsides, cities, forests, deserts, beaches and oceans. (Just think of the great floating garbage patches at sea).

Unlike other forms of solid waste, such as uneaten food, scrap metal or last year’s clothes, plastics take an especially long time to break down. And when they finally do, they create hazardous, even toxic particles that can harm wildlife, ecosystems and humans.

For now, the group — led by Chelsea M. Rochman of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, and Mark Anthony Browne at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California — is calling for the reclassification of plastics that are particularly difficult to recycle and that are most toxic when degrading: PVC, polystyrene, polyurethane and polycarbonate.

The scientists say these types of plastics — used in construction, food containers, electronics and furniture — make up an estimated 30 percent of all plastics produced.

Join our sustainability conversation. Does it make sense to re-classify common plastics as hazardous, or are there better ways to reduce the amount of plastics we throw out?

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Karzai to Forbid His Forces From Requesting Foreign Airstrikes

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that he would issue a decree barring Afghan security forces from asking international troops to carry out airstrikes under “any circumstances.”

The announcement came amid anger over a joint Afghan-NATO operation last week that Afghan officials said killed 10 civilians, including women and children, in northeast Kunar Province.

“I will issue a decree tomorrow that no Afghan security forces, in any circumstances, in any circumstances, can ask for the foreigners’ planes for carrying out operations on our homes and villages,” Mr. Karzai said in a speech here in Kabul at the Afghan National Military Academy.

Civilian deaths at the hands of foreign forces, particularly as a result of airstrikes, have been the cause of much conflict between Afghans and the international coalition, led by the United States, although it has devised measures to prevent them. But the Afghan military also relies heavily on air support to gain an advantage in the fight against Taliban militants and other insurgents.

Many analysts have expressed concern that the impending withdrawal of international combat forces by the end of 2014 will deprive government security forces of that crucial weapon.

President Obama has said that he will withdraw about half of the 66,000 American troops in Afghanistan within a year.

According to Gen. John R. Allen, the former top commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the coalition can provide air support to troops on the ground anywhere in Afghanistan within 12 minutes of a request. General Allen said that Afghan forces would have to get used to not having the same abilities in the future.

Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the coalition, declined to comment on Mr. Karzai’s remarks because alliance officials had not yet seen the decree.

Mr. Karzai said that General Allen’s successor, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., told him that Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, had requested the airstrike late Tuesday in the Shigal district of Kunar Province, which borders Pakistan.

Local Afghan officials said that five boys, four women and one man were killed in the bombardment. Coalition officials said that an investigation was under way. Four insurgents were also reported killed, but Mr. Karzai said that did not justify the loss of so many civilian lives.

Mr. Karzai said Afghan forces were ready to take over from foreign troops despite concerns about their abilities.

“We are happy that foreign forces are withdrawing from our country,” he said. “We are happy for all their help and assistance so far, but we don’t need foreign forces to defend our country. We want our Afghan forces to defend their homeland.”

However, a former Afghan officer, Gen. Amrullah Aman, expressed surprise over Mr. Karzai’s remarks, saying that international air power was essential since one of the main weaknesses of the Afghan military is the lack of a fully developed air force.

“In a country like Afghanistan, where you don’t have heavy artillery and you don’t have air forces to support soldiers on the ground, how will it be possible to defeat an enemy that knows the area well and can hide anywhere?” General Aman said. “There must be air support to help all those ground forces on the battlefield.”

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The Lede: Spectacular Video of Meteor Over Siberia

Video posted on YouTube Friday appeared to catch an explosion caused by a meteor streaking over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

Last Updated, 12:07 p.m. As our colleagues Ellen Barry and Andrew Kramer report, Russians recorded video of bright objects, apparently debris from a meteor, “streaking through the sky in western Siberia early on Friday, accompanied by a boom that damaged buildings across a vast area of territory.” Hundreds of injuries were reported, mainly from breaking glass.

Video recorded from the dashboard camera of a car in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Friday.

Video said to have been recorded on Friday in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk as a meteor passed low overhead. An explosion can be heard clearly at the 7-minute mark of the video.

The video clips, many recorded from cars on the dashboard cameras that are popular in Russia, quickly spread from social networks to Russian news sites. While it was not possible to confirm the authenticity of all of the clips posted online, several tracked closely with witness accounts and each other.

Dashboard-cam footage appeared to record a meteor plunging to Earth on Friday in Russia.

Video uploaded to YouTube on Friday was said to have been recorded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk (although the camera’s time stamp displays an earlier date).

Several clips showed a flaming object streaking through the sky and a burst of blinding light followed by a smoke trail. One, shot by a driver named Alexander Mezentsev, showed a bright light over a city street in Chelyabinsk, a city of 1 million about 900 miles east of Moscow.

One clip, recorded on a street in Chelyabinsk, appeared to capture the chaotic aftermath of the event, as glass shattered following the shock wave and people shouted and tried to make sense of what was happening.

Video said to have been recorded in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Friday after a meteor passed overhead.

A very loud explosion could be heard about 25 seconds into another video, apparently recorded on a phone in the same city by a blogger named Sergey Hametov.

Video said to have been recorded on Friday in Chelyabinsk appeared to capture a loud explosion.

“There was panic. People had no idea what was happening,” Mr. Hametov told The Associated Press. “We saw a big burst of light, then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud, thundering sound.”

The blast, and breaking glass, was also captured about 70 seconds into another clip, which showed very clear images of the smoke trail after the meteor passed by.

Video posted on YouTube on Friday showed a smoke trail and a loud explosion after a meteor passed over Siberia.

Another video, shot from the window of a building, seemed to capture the long trail of smoke after the object passed through the sky.

Video posted on YouTube Friday appeared to show the trail of a meteorite fragment in the sky.

Several clips also showed what bloggers said was the damage caused by the sonic boom.

Damage to a school in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, said to have been caused by the sonic boom from a meteor.

Video of what was described as damage caused by the sonic boom after a meteor passed over Russia on Friday.

As Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports, a blinding flash on light was captured by traffic cameras on top of buildings in Nizhniy Tagil, around 220 miles north of Chelyabinsk

A blinding flash of light was captured by Web cameras in Nizhny Tagil, north of Chelyabinsk

Another view of the meteor streaking across the sky in Nizhniy Tagil was captured on a driver’s dashboard camera.

Video of a meteor from a dashboard camera in the Russian town of Nizhniy Tagil.

Our colleague William Broad from The Times Science desk will be answering questions on the meteor on The Lede later today.

Send us your questions on the meteor strike. We’re hosting a Q&A with science writer @WilliamJBroad. Include #NYTScience

— NYT Science (@nytimesscience) 15 Feb 13

Almost immediately after the spectacular images appeared online, Russian bloggers started making comic alterations, adding aliens and President Vladimir Putin to the pictures.

Some of the numerous videos that quickly emerged of the incident highlighted a distinctly Russian phenomenon: the viral dashboard-cam clip. As the blogger Marina Galperina explained last year, they are commonplace in Russia partly because of the dangerous driving conditions that lead to so many accidents, and with an unreliable police force such cameras can provide valuable evidence following a crash.

The conditions of Russian roads are perilous, with insane gridlock in cities and gigantic ditches, endless swamps and severe wintry emptiness on the back roads and highways. Then there are large, lawless areas you don’t just ride into, the police with a penchant for extortion and deeply frustrated drivers who want to smash your face.

Psychopaths are abundant on Russian roads. You best not cut anyone off or undertake some other type of maneuver that might inconvenience the 200-pound, six-foot-five brawling children you see on YouTube hopping out of their SUVs with their dukes up. They will go ballistic in a snap, drive in front of you, brake suddenly, block you off, jump out and run towards your vehicle. Next thing you start getting punches in your face because your didn’t roll up your windows, or getting pulled out of the car and beaten because you didn’t lock the doors.

These fights happen all the time and you can’t really press charges. Point to your broken nose or smashed windows all you want. The Russian courts don’t like verbal claims. They do, however, like to send people to jail for battery and property destruction if there’s definite video proof.

Just last month, for instance, video recorded by a Russian driver on a dashboard-cam showed a tank suddenly cutting across a highway.

Last month, a Russian driver recorded video of a tank cutting across a highway.

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Way of the World: Technology, Trade and Fewer Jobs

NEW YORK — President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech this week confirmed it: The pre-eminent political and economic challenge in the industrialized democracies is how to make capitalism work for the middle class.

There is nothing mysterious about that. The most important fact about the United States in this century is that middle-class incomes are stagnating. The financial crisis has revealed an equally stark structural problem in much of Europe.

Even in a relatively prosperous age — for all of today’s woes, we have left behind the dark, satanic mills and workhouses of the 19th century — this decline of the middle class is more than an economic issue. It is also a political one. The main point of democracy is to deliver positive results for the majority.

All of which is why understanding what is happening to the middle class is urgently important. There is no better place to start than by talking to David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Autor is one of the leading students of the most striking trend bedeviling the middle class: the polarization of the job market. That is a nice way of saying the economy is being cleaved into high-paying jobs at the top and low-paying jobs at the bottom, while the middle-skill and middle-wage jobs that used to form society’s backbone are being hollowed out.

But when I asked him this week what had gone wrong for the U.S. middle class, he gave a different answer: “The main problem is we’ve just had a decade of incredibly anemic employment growth. All of a sudden, around 2000 and 2001, things just slowed down.”

Academics can usually be counted on to have a confident explanation for everything. That is why I was surprised and impressed by Mr. Autor’s answer when I asked him where the jobs had gone. “No one really understands why that is the case,” he said.

It was a winningly modest reply. But work by Mr. Autor and two colleagues — David Dorn, a visiting professor at Harvard, and Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego — is starting to untangle the two forces that both the conventional wisdom and the academy agree are probably responsible for a lot of what is happening to the middle class.

Those forces are technological change and trade. The easy assumption is that the two go together. After all, trade needs technology — it is hard to imagine outsourcing without the Internet, sophisticated logistics systems and jet travel. Technology is dependent on trade, too: The opportunity for global scale is one reason technological innovation has yielded such outsize rewards.

But in a careful study of local labor markets in the United States, Mr. Autor, Mr. Dorn and Mr. Hanson have found that trade and technology had very different consequences for jobs.

“We were surprised at how distinct the two were,” Mr. Autor said. “We found that the trade shock had a very measurable impact on the employment rate. Technology led to job polarization, but its employment effect was minimal.” Trade, at least in the short term, really did ship jobs overseas. Technology did not kill jobs per se, but it did hollow out those essential jobs in the middle.

The big surprise, at least for believers (like me) in the classic liberal economic view that trade benefits both parties, is the strong and negative impact of globalization on U.S. workers — Mr. Autor estimates it accounts for 15 to 20 percent of jobs lost.

“The rise of China was such a huge change. It really did matter,” Mr. Autor said. “First, China is such a huge country. Two, China was 40 or 50 years behind in technology, so it had a lot of catching up to do. Third, it happened so fast.”

What is striking, and frightening, is the extent to which, at least in the U.S.-China trade relationship, the knee-jerk, populist fears intellectuals tend to deride actually turned out to be true.

“U.S.-China trade is almost a one-way street. This trade relationship doesn’t clearly give you the benefit that you can sell a lot of stuff to your trade partner,” Mr. Dorn said. “If you talk to someone who is somehow involved in the promotion of free trade, they may say that maybe the headquarters of Apple benefits. That may be true. But the first-order effect is of job loss.”

The impact of technology is more familiar. Mr. Autor, Mr. Dorn and Mr. Hanson found that it did not create fewer jobs overall, but it did hollow out the jobs in the middle.

“Technology has really changed the distribution of occupation. That doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with reduced unemployment, but it creates a more bimodal set of opportunities,” Mr. Autor said. “There is an abundance of work to do in food service and there is an abundance of work in finance, but there are fewer middle-wage, middle-income jobs.”

What is challenging about both of these trends, and what makes the hollowing out of the middle class a political problem as well as an economic one, is how different they look depending on whether you own a company or work for one.

Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss. That profound difference is why politics in the rich democracies are so polarized right now. Capitalism and democracy are at cross-purposes, and no one yet has a clear plan for reconciling them.

Chrystia Freeland is editor of Thomson Reuters Digital.

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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 13

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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 12

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The Lede: Latest Updates on the Pope’s Resignation

The Lede is providing updates on Pope Benedict XVI’s announcement on Monday that he intends to resign on Feb. 28, less than eight years after he took office, the first pope to do so in six centuries.

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