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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: LEGISLATIVE BODIES (91%); LEGISLATORS (90%); WILDERNESS (90%); US STATE GOVERNMENT (90%); US REPUBLICAN PARTY (90%); ENVIRONMENTAL & WILDLIFE ORGANIZATIONS (89%); ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES (89%); POLITICAL PARTIES (88%); LEGISLATION (78%); SENTENCING (78%); LAND USE PLANNING (78%); US DEMOCRATIC PARTY (78%); FRAUD & FINANCIAL CRIME (77%); ECONOMIC NEWS (70%); MINERAL LEASES (50%); GUILTY PLEAS (77%); JAIL SENTENCING (72%) PERSON: RICHARD DURBIN (52%); MAURICE D HINCHEY (53%) GEOGRAPHIC: UTAH, USA (99%); WEST USA (79%) UNITED STATES (99%) LOAD-DATE: March 15, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: PHOTO: The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance seeks to have about 9.5 million acres in Utah protected. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RAY BLOXHAM/SUWA) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 978 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Return From the Serious Life: Reality TV Has Paris Hilton Again BYLINE: By EDWARD WYATT SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Arts and Leisure Desk; Pg. 11 LENGTH: 736 words DATELINE: LOS ANGELES Paris Hilton vows that she will make that promised charity trip to Rwanda. And she definitely plans to build that transitional home for women leaving prison that she spoke so enthusiastically about last summer when she was released from jail. But after also pledging at the time of her parole to rid herself of all those hangers-on ''who are not going to be beneficial in my life,'' Ms. Hilton, the socialite-actress, first has to take care of some other business. Namely, finding a new BFF, or ''best friend forever'' in the language of the texting, instant-messaging, nothing-lasts-forever generation. And what better way to do so than with a new reality television show? So it was that the cream of the Hollywood press corps trooped far up into the Hollywood Hills on Thursday night to be introduced to ''Paris Hilton's My New BFF,'' the working title for a coming reality series being produced for MTV. Ms. Hilton arrived -- a fashionable 35 minutes late, of course -- and preened for the photographers in her Erica Davies gown, diamonds dripping from her neck, wrist and fingers, then explained what exactly she was looking for in a new best friend. ''Someone who's not going to stab me in the back, like has happened a lot in this town,'' Ms. Hilton said cheerily. Discerning a good friend from a bad can be difficult, acknowledged Ms. Hilton, 27, who previously blamed an ex-boyfriend, Rick Salomon, for releasing a video of them having sex. ''I'm a really good judge of character,'' Ms. Hilton said, ''so I can tell'' who will measure up to her standards. Casting for the show started immediately, as Ms. Hilton invited prospective friends, male or female, to apply at her new Web site, ParisBFF.com. Twenty contestants will begin the show by living with Ms. Hilton in a house, where they will undertake tasks to prove their friendlike qualities. Ms. Hilton said that Nicole Richie, her co-star on ''The Simple Life'' and longtime BFF, remained so. But ''she's home with her baby,'' Ms. Hilton said. ''She understands.'' The new series is being produced by MTV and Ish Entertainment, a new production company founded by Michael Hirschorn and Stella Stolper. Mr. Hirschorn, a former executive vice president at VH1, played a large part in that cable channel's explosive growth in recent years, as viewers flocked to the ''celebreality'' shows he produced, including ''Flavor of Love,'' in which the rapper Flavor Flav searched for a soulmate. And Ms. Stolper, who formerly oversaw celebrity talent development for VH1, said she had been in discussions with Ms. Hilton about the idea for some time. Neither the producers nor Ms. Hilton would disclose exactly what tasks the new friends would be asked to undertake, but they could hardly be expected to make sacrifices as substantial as those of Ms. Hilton herself, who after release from jail last summer said she was giving up the party life. ''You know, I've been going out for a long time now, and yes, it's fun, but it's not going to be the mainstay of my life anymore,'' Ms. Hilton told Larry King on his CNN talk show last summer. On Thursday, though, she said she was ready to dispense with such deprivation for the sake of her new best friend. ''We're going to be doing all the fun things I do: going to Vegas, going out, teaching them how to be on the town, see if they can get into clubs,'' she said. ''Just the usual things that we all do.'' Stepping back into crowded, dark clubs and living in a house with 20 others carries some risk for Ms. Hilton. But she said she was not worried about aggravating her claustrophobia, the ''medical condition'' that led her to be released from jail in early June only five days into a 45-day sentence for probation violations stemming from an alcohol-related reckless driving case. (She was soon returned to jail and served almost three more weeks.) And what about that transitional home for women leaving prison? Moved by the friends she made in jail, Ms. Hilton described to Mr. King in June her desire to build ''a place with food, shelter and clothing and programs,'' where ex-cons ''can get themselves back on their feet.'' A group home of 20 supportive men and women, all working to display their deep and abiding devotion to one another, would seem to suit that need perfectly. ''No, this is different,'' Ms. Hilton said of the show -- although, she promised, ''anyone can apply.''
Ms. Hilton during the press event. Guests pose for pictures of their own at a party that followed the publicity event announcing ''Paris Hilton's My New BFF.''(PHOTOGRAPHS BY MONICA ALMEIDA/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 979 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Expedia's Path to Expansion Passes Through India BYLINE: By JANE L. LEVERE SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; SATURDAY INTERVIEW; Pg. 2 LENGTH: 988 words Earlier this month, Expedia, the online travel company, entered the Indian market with Expedia.co.in, the 17th Expedia Web site worldwide. Expedia also owns Hotels.com and TripAdvisor, which operate both in the United States and overseas, as well as Hotwire, which operates only in the United States. In addition, it owns a controlling interest in eLong, a Chinese online travel company. Expedia's expansion into India is part of an aggressive international growth strategy mapped out by its chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi. He is an Iranian-born and Ivy League-educated protege of Barry Diller, the head of IAC/InterActiveCorp. He has led Expedia since 2004, both before and after it was spun off from IAC. He talked recently about Expedia's push overseas and the challenges the company faces from the slowing economy in the United States. Here are excerpts from the conversation: Q.Why is Expedia going into India now? A. India is an enormously attractive marketplace for us. It's over 1.1 billion people, nearly 17 percent of the world's population. It's an economy that has been enjoying pretty explosive growth over the last 5 to 10 years. As the economy grows, you're going to have a giant middle class that's going to want to travel not only inside of India, but is really going to want to explore the broader Asia-Pacific areas, and is going to eventually travel worldwide. We want to be there to serve them. Q. How big is your international operation today? A. We operate in 37 countries and in 20 different languages. In 2007, 32 percent of our revenues were from overseas; in 2006, 28 percent were. Q. Where are your other new growth opportunities outside the United States? A. Korea, Vietnam, etc., are particular markets we're looking at. We're treading a little more cautiously in Latin America. Our ability to conduct business with local consumers is restricted in Latin America. Credit card penetration is relatively low; debit card penetration seems to be accelerating there. Q. What percentage of your sales this year will be generated outside the United States? A. I don't have a number for '08, but the goal for the company is in the next five to seven years to get that number to 50 percent. Q. What impact is the economic downturn having on your business in the United States? A. Industry data we've seen suggests that U.S. hotel occupancies are down on a year-on-year basis, for both leisure and business travel, in the past two months. The leisure markets seem to be weaker than the business travel markets. So, for example, we are seeing relative weakness in Las Vegas versus New York, which is a very strong market. That's a combination of leisure and business activity as well as the dollar -- we see a huge influx of demand of European travelers coming into New York. The air carriers have been really disciplined about keeping capacity growth limited, and, as a result, the air yields are very good. Because Easter is earlier this year than it was last year, really the tale for '08 is going to be, how do air bookings come in after the Easter period. One interesting kind of behavior we're seeing is that consumers, mostly U.S. consumers, are definitely looking for deals more. The percentage of consumers who are buying hotel room inventory that's on sale or only available on Expedia is increasing on a market-by-market basis. For example, in January '07, 10 percent of hotel rooms we sold in Miami were sold on a promotional basis. This January, it was 17 percent. We see increases in New York; San Francisco; Washington, D.C. So it's fairly broad. Q. What are the pros and cons of the weakness of the dollar to your business? A. The first pro is that the weakness of the dollar typically means that foreign currencies are getting stronger, and our international businesses are some of our strongest growing businesses. As those international currencies get even stronger, there's kind of a turbo-boost to the growth that we see in our international bookings. As the dollar gets weaker and as the U.S. becomes a more attractive destination for international consumers, we think we have a great product for those international consumers. The con is that U.S. travel abroad generally becomes a bit weaker, because international destinations do become more expensive for the U.S. consumer, and we have seen our growth in international destinations slow down versus what it was two to three years ago. Q. Forrester Research last fall reported a 9 percent decline, from 2005, in the number of American travelers researching and buying leisure trips online, the first time it had seen this phenomenon. Do you see this trend? A. Our U.S. business is in good shape and is looking to grow, a combination of more people and more people spending more with us. Q. What other challenges does Expedia face now? A. To be a global company but to be locally relevant as well. To apply one formula and to expect that one formula to work on a global basis, we don't think is realistic. And it's a real challenge to operate at the scale that we're operating, but be as fast, as entrepreneurial as you need to be in a China or an India. The overall travel marketplace is an $800 billion worldwide marketplace, and we have a ton of competition domestically and in every single local market we get into. Our growth rates have accelerated going into '08, and we're going into a pretty uncertain time. How you manage a growth business in an uncertain climate is a pretty difficult balancing act. You want to invest, you want to expand, but you also want to be prudent. Q. So what's the best way to operate in an uncertain time? A. It's to have your pulse on the market every single day; be very, very flexible; and especially not to overextend your capital. We throw off a lot of cash flow, and we're being pretty conservative as far as our balance sheet and how we use it. URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: ONLINE TRAVEL BOOKINGS (92%); TRAVEL AGENTS (89%); ECONOMIC NEWS (88%); ECONOMIC DECLINE (88%); HOTEL OCCUPANCY (78%); TRAVEL INDUSTRY SECTOR PERFORMANCE (78%); LEISURE TRAVEL (78%); ECONOMIC GROWTH (76%); POPULATION & DEMOGRAPHICS (72%); POPULATION SIZE (72%); DEMERGERS & SPINOFFS (69%); TRAVEL HOSPITALITY & TOURISM (60%) COMPANY: IAC/INTERACTIVECORP (91%); HOTELS.COM (91%); EXPEDIA INC (92%); TRAVEL CO INC (93%) TICKER: IACI (NASDAQ) (91%); EXPE (NASDAQ) (92%); IACID (NASDAQ) (91%) INDUSTRY: NAICS454113 MAIL-ORDER HOUSES (91%); NAICS454111 ELECTRONIC SHOPPING (91%); SIC5961 CATALOG & MAIL-ORDER HOUSES (91%); NAICS561510 TRAVEL AGENCIES (98%); SIC4724 TRAVEL AGENCIES (98%) PERSON: BARRY DILLER (57%); MICHAEL MCMAHON (83%); DARA KHOSROWSHAHI (57%) GEOGRAPHIC: UNITED STATES (94%); LATIN AMERICA (92%); NORTHERN ASIA (79%); ASIA (79%) LOAD-DATE: March 15, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Dara Khosrowshahi(PHOTOGRAPH BY PHIL MCCARTEN/REUTERS) DOCUMENT-TYPE: Interview PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 980 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Diversions and Delights From the Floating World BYLINE: By Karen Rosenberg SECTION: Section E; Column 0; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk; ART REVIEW 'DESIGNED FOR PLEASURE'; Pg. 36 LENGTH: 1019 words In the theaters, teahouses and brothels of Edo, pleasure was a serious business. For a period during the 17th and 18th centuries, the urban area now known as Tokyo was the world's largest city, with entire districts catering to the needs of wealthy samurai and a rising merchant class. Both groups acquired a taste for ukiyo-e, paintings and woodcuts that depicted ukiyo, the ''floating world'' of leisure and luxury. Ukiyo-e could be idealized images of courtesans, portraits of actors and celebrated beauties, or lavishly illustrated books of poetry. A new exhibition at Asia Society, ''Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1680-1860,'' anchors the floating world firmly in economic and social reality. The show includes works by well-known artists, including Hokusai and Hiroshige, but also emphasizes the entrepreneurial role of print publishers and the relationship between printmaking, painting and literature in the Edo period. Because the prints are sensitive to light, ''Designed for Pleasure'' will be shown in two installments. Of the 148 works in the exhibition, 95 are currently on view; about two-thirds of those will be rotated out on April 4. Many of the artists who produced ukiyo-e, traditionally seen as a lower form of culture, also made paintings for elite patrons. On display in the first gallery, Hishikawa Moronobu's 55-foot hand-painted scroll, ''A Visit to the Yoshiwara'' (late-1680s), is a floating world unto itself. Yoshiwara was the pleasure center of Edo, a place where the samurai could unwind among elegant, well-trained courtesans. The scroll's 15 episodes (of which only a portion are visible here) include depictions of a tea ceremony, couples swaddled in luxurious bedding and satisfied clients settling up with the house. Moronobu is regarded as the founder of ukiyo-e, but the 18th-century artist Okumura Masanobu was the first of several aggressively self-promoting artist-printmakers. Masanobu took credit for innovations like the use of European one-point perspective, seen in a hand-colored woodcut from 1745 that shows a busy second-floor parlor in Yoshiwara. Masanobu's paintings and prints also hint at the complexity of the courtesan's social and spiritual roles in Edo Japan. One slang expression for courtesan was daruma, the name of the Zen master who meditated until his legs fell off; in Masanobu's prints and others throughout the exhibition, prostitutes are shown interacting with Buddhist figures. Later artists introduced more complex print processes involving multiple colors. A section of ''Designed for Pleasure'' is devoted to Suzuki Harunobu, the first to make full-color prints. His portfolio of woodcuts, ''The Eight Parlor Views'' (1766), parodies a popular subject in Chinese art, the Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang, by changing the landscape setting to a domestic interior. Titles are comical: ''Returning Sails of the Towel Rack,'' ''Night Rain on the Heater Stand.'' At the end of the 18th century, a new and powerful type of publisher emerged who linked artistic, literary and theatrical circles. The production of ukiyo-e involved a host of specialized craftsmen, including the artist (typically the designer), the engraver or block carver, and the printer. Publishers controlled the marketing and distribution of the printed image, often touting new-and-improved features like metallic chips or glossy lacquer. Foremost among these publishers was Tsutaya Juzaburo, who collaborated with Utamaro, Hokusai, and other stars of ukiyo-e. A large gallery of prints and many illustrated books reveals the scope of Juzaburo's influence: portraits of famous Kabuki actors, volumes of poetry and pornographic albums were all part of his trade. ''Designed for Pleasure'' includes just one example of shunga, the explicit subcategory of ukiyo-e that features couples with enlarged genitalia, but many of the works in the show have an erotic subtext. Seemingly innocuous scenes are full of allusions and double-entendres: in the Edo vernacular, a swinging lantern, a peony or a boat pole can have sexual connotations. The literary context of ukiyo-e becomes especially apparent in a gallery of works from the circle of the celebrated Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Commissions for luxury paintings and prints often came as a result of connections made at poetry parties, where crowds of artists, writers, actors and other creative types would gather to compose ribald poems known as ''mad verse.'' In a loosely brushed ink painting of a reclining courtesan from around 1800, Hokusai collaborated with the poet Santo Kyoden. The evocative verse is written from the courtesan's point of view: ''Sometimes I turn into a cloud/like smoke from tobacco I have lit,/other times I turn into rain/which makes a client linger a bit.'' Both text and image capture the fleeting sensuality of the floating world. Ukiyo-e became a booming industry later in the 19th century, with healthy competition between artists like Hokusai and Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1865). Landscapes sold particularly well, and several famous examples are included in this section: Hokusai's ''Great Wave,'' as well as Hiroshige's ''Sudden Shower at Ohashi Bridge'' from his portfolio ''100 Views of Famous Places of Edo.'' The intense colors of many of the works come from synthetic, Western pigments like Prussian Blue, which were introduced during this period. Ukiyo-e is known to have influenced Western artists like Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. The Japanese regard it as the predecessor to manga and anime. The focus on the role of the publisher in ''Designed for Pleasure'' suggests another point of reference, that of Takashi Murakami's contemporary network of artists, writers, curators, designers and consumers of luxury objects: a floating world controlled by an impresario with his feet on the ground. ''Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1680-1860'' is at Asia Society and Museum, 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, (212) 288-6400, asiasociety.org. Part 1, through March 30; Part 2, April 4 to May 4.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 981 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Correction Appended Late Edition - Final
E-mail: susan.dominus@nytimes.com SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; BIG CITY; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 855 words If only one of those elaborate computer programs designed to sort through millions of financial transaction reports could be tweaked to analyze -- and answer -- a different set of questions swirling around Gov. Eliot Spitzer, most of them involving his psyche. There's the $1,000-an-hour question on everyone's mind: Why did he risk so much for a fantasy? And then there's the smaller question: What fantasy would make it worthwhile? Here's the fantasy that the prostitution ring, the Emperor's Club V.I.P., was selling Governor Spitzer about a young woman it called Kristen, who calls herself Ashley Alexandra Dupre: that she was a successful swimsuit model who'd traveled the world (as opposed to a singer getting nowhere with a boyfriend who'd paid her rent, as The Times reported yesterday); that she enjoyed civilized pursuits like dining at exclusive restaurants (actually, she's been hoping for work at a friend's restaurant); and that she liked sampling fine wines (no mention of the drug abuse she'd reported on her MySpace page). The site also described her as 24 (in fact, she's 22, an age that might have sounded dangerously collegiate to an affluent clientele). The fantasy that the Emperor's Club was marketing apparently had its appeal, not just for men, but for women. Once the news broke about the fees, women all over New York were cracking jokes about how they'd picked the wrong field (and going so far as to do the math on all that tax-free income). One friend, a working mother with three children, confided that she kept picturing this Kristen relaxing on the Amtrak train home to New York, her workday over, flipping through InStyle, no e-mail checking, no manager calling just to check in and follow up on the fax. It probably helped further the fantasy that media outlets kept calling the Emperor's Club a high-class prostitution ring, sparking visions of Julia Roberts shopping on Rodeo Drive, or glamorous young women enjoying the platinum credit cards, flexible hours and princess treatment no doubt customary for professionally desirable women. Once the story of Ashley Alexandra Dupre's life actually came out, it was a fresh reminder that the words ''high class'' and ''prostitution ring'' pretty much never make sense in the same phrase (expensive prostitution ring, yes; high class, no). This was not someone who'd been turned down by the consulting firm of her choice and decided to make an alternative entrepreneurial move. Ms. Dupre's MySpace page said she'd left home at 17 and had been abused. She'd been homeless. She said she knew, at 22, what it was like ''to have everything and lose it, '' even if she'd built herself up since. Her story was not self-empowering; it was, even in its scant detail, profoundly sad, all the more so because of her extreme youth. Nor did the Emperor's Club seem to sprinkle any transformative high-class glitter on the life of one of Ms. Dupre's colleagues, a woman who, according to a federal affidavit, left one client 20 minutes early and went straight to her children's school to pick them up. Instead of fizzy alternatives to the drudgery of everyday life, the stories of the women described in the affidavit provide, at best, darker versions of the mundane. Whether or not Ms. Dupre overdramatized the details of her earlier life or, alternatively, soft-pedaled them hasn't yet come out. But the background she describes isn't unusual for women at this financial level of prostitution, says Sudhir A. Venkatesh, a sociology professor at Columbia who has studied 400 women in the field. The women drawn to the profession at that pay scale aren't necessarily ''the classic, supporting a drug habit,'' he says (although two of the women mentioned in the affidavit were thought to have drug problems). Instead, he says, ''there are psychological issues that deal with abuse, or people who are runaways, or they have families they have to support.'' Nor do their high fees protect them from the realities of their work: ''They continue to suffer physical abuse at the hands of their clients,'' said Professor Venkatesh. And that's true, he says, even of women who work in the tiers of prostitution more extravagantly priced than the Emperor's Club. (Professor Venkatesh says there are women in New York charging $10,000 a session, which makes Mr. Spitzer look at least frugal in his recklessness.) Whatever fantasy Eliot Spitzer thought he was buying, he surely knew it wasn't the one the Emperor's Club was selling. He may not have known how to outsmart the software that tracked his financial transactions, but he certainly knew from his work as a prosecutor that young women who sell themselves on Web sites for that kind of money aren't successful swimsuit models whose upper-middle-class parents showed them their way around a salad fork early on. For all he knew, Ms. Dupre -- Kristen -- could have been younger than even her actual age. Maybe part of the fantasy was that he could get away with it, or, as psychoanalytical types are theorizing, the fantasy was a subconscious desire to self-destruct. Either way, the fantasy is over. Download 5,58 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham:
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