Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Ray Leach, chief of Jumpstart, an Ohio venture group that relies on donations and grants.

Anthony Ignagni, chief of Synapse Biomedical, which got its start with a Jumpstart investment, holds his company's device intended to help the breathing of people with spinal injuries. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID MAXWELL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

560 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 24, 2008 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

Reports Find Errors and Fraud in Small Business Administration Contracts
BYLINE: By ELIZABETH OLSON
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 4
LENGTH: 1033 words
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
Two government reports have uncovered millions of dollars in federal contracts that were supposed to go to small businesses but instead were awarded to companies that had not qualified or had obtained the contracts fraudulently.

In one report, the inspector general for the Interior Department found that contracts listed as going to small businesses went to a dozen Fortune 500 corporations, including the Xerox Corporation and the John Deere Company.

The report, based on a sampling of the department's small business contract awards in fiscal years 2006 and 2007, uncovered no fraud but found that large businesses received the contracts because of data entry errors, incorrect data and failure by contracting officials to verify the actual size of the business.

The report also said that in several cases, corporations appeared to have misrepresented themselves as small businesses on the federal contractor data base.

Xerox and John Deere said they were moving to correct those errors, and Senator John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, called for all federal agencies to audit their small business contracting practices.

The second report, by the Government Accountability Office, found that numerous private firms had tapped into the Small Business Administration's set-aside program for small businesses in economically distressed areas by falsely claiming they were located in a Historically Underutilized Business Zone, or HUBZone.

Ten randomly selected companies in the Washington area, according to the agency, had set up virtual offices or rented mail boxes in poor communities solely to obtain a HUBZone business address. Over two years, those companies and others won more than $100 million in HUBZone contracts, according to the report presented to the House Committee on Small Business last week.

''You have to wonder about a system that lets individuals self-qualify for a program of this size,'' said Nydia M. Velazquez, the New York Democrat who heads the committee.

In response, the S.B.A. released a statement that outlined the steps it planned to take to correct the problems and verify that companies are eligible.

Officials at the Interior Department said the inspector general's report uncovered only $5.7 million in misdirected contracts. That was a small fraction of the agency's overall small business contract awards, which totaled $1.39 billion in fiscal year 2006 and $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2007.

But Earl E. Devaney, the department's inspector general, said what his audit team uncovered ''was the tip of the iceberg'' because it was based on a review of three-tenths of a percent of contracts from a cross-section of offices -- ranging from Indian affairs to surface mining -- in the huge department.

''These are not just clerical mistakes that can be tagged on two little clerks,'' Mr. Devaney said. ''This is not one single report, but our fourth in the contracting area.''

P. Lynn Scarlett, the Interior Department's deputy secretary, said the department was ''working to correct these issues.'' Her office did not return further calls, and her statement was included in a response to the report by the S.B.A., which also monitors how well the federal government meets its small business contracting goals.

Congress has required that 23 percent of all federal contracts, which total more than $400 billion annually, be set aside for small businesses. Agencies are required to state whether they have met their annual contracting goals. But several inquiries, including one by the G.A.O. in 2003, have raised questions about the accuracy of the S.B.A.'s reporting.

The inspector general's report ''is the latest maddening evidence that big businesses are being handed federal contracts that should be going to small businesses,'' Mr. Kerry said. He added that he would ''be sending letters to every federal agency asking them to audit their small business contracts and report back to the committee.''

Steven C. Preston, the former administrator of the agency, adopted rules last year that small businesses recertify their size when they merge with a larger business or are at the five-year point in a contract.

The American Small Business League, a small business association, said the problems with small business contracts went far deeper than even the inspector general found. The league's president, Lloyd Chapman, said large companies were getting the contracts not simply because of errors but because of ''the intentional diversion of federal small business contract dollars to Fortune 500 firms.''

Two years ago, the Interior Department said it had awarded more than 55 percent of its contract dollars to small businesses. But the inspector general's evaluation said that contracting officers acknowledged that some of the companies were not small and ''were incorrectly coded as small.''

One of the companies cited, John Deere, won more than $617,000 in small business contracts from the Interior Department in 2006 and 2007. The company, with 52,000 employees and revenue nearing $23 billion last year, said that it was moving to correct the errors in the government database that listed it as having $2 million in annual revenue and under 500 employees. The government defines a small business as one with fewer than 500 employees.

''A marketing unit of Deere had correctly listed the number of employees in that small business unit on a government form, and this number has been used by government agencies to define the entire Deere enterprise as a small business,'' said Ken Golden, a company spokesman.

The Interior Department report also found that contracting officers ''failed to consistently check'' the central contractors registry to determine the company's true size.

A spokesman for Xerox, William McKee, said the company's review of the central registry revealed ''several errors where business size was entered incorrectly'' from such agents, and said the company was going to correct the mistaken data.

''Xerox is not a small business, and has never attempted to portray itself as one,'' he said.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: PUBLIC CONTRACTING (94%); SMALL BUSINESS (93%); CONTRACTS & BIDS (91%); SMALL BUSINESS ASSISTANCE (90%); MINORITY BUSINESS ASSISTANCE (90%); SMALL BUSINESS CONTRACTING (90%); CONTRACT AWARDS (89%); AUDITS (78%); GOVERNMENT CONTROLLERS & AUDITORS (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (73%); US DEMOCRATIC PARTY (72%); MINES & MINING (50%); SURFACE MINING (50%)
COMPANY: XEROX CORP (72%); JOHN DEERE CO TJ HARVESTING AB (57%)
ORGANIZATION: SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION (84%)
TICKER: XRX (NYSE) (72%); XRX (SWX) (72%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS334119 OTHER COMPUTER PERIPHERAL EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURING (84%); NAICS333315 PHOTOGRAPHIC & PHOTOCOPYING EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURING (84%); NAICS333293 PRINTING MACHINERY & EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURING (84%)
PERSON: JOHN KERRY (56%); BEN NELSON (51%); NYDIA VELAZQUEZ (53%); EARL DEVANEY (51%)
GEOGRAPHIC: MASSACHUSETTS, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (92%)
LOAD-DATE: July 24, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Representative Nydia Velazquez, left

Earl E. Devaney, the Interior Department's inspector general

and Senator John Kerry.
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

561 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 23, 2008 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

What's On Today
BYLINE: By KATHRYN SHATTUCK
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; Pg. 8
LENGTH: 714 words
10 P.M. (Logo) SORDID LIVES: THE SERIES Del Shores created, wrote and directed this cleverly cast new series, based on his 1999 film, about Peggy Ingram (Rue McClanahan, above right), the matriarch of a small-town Texas family, who takes in Bitsy Mae Harling (Olivia Newton-John, above left), a bar singer who has just been released from prison. Ann Walker plays Peggy's wild-child daughter, LaVonda, who lives with her chain-smoking Aunt Sissy (Beth Grant); Bonnie Bedelia is Latrelle, Peggy's good-girl daughter, who is mainly concerned with keeping up appearances. And then there is Peggy's third child, Brother Boy (Leslie Jordan), who is locked in a mental institution, where he performs as Tammy Wynette and takes therapy sessions with Dr. Eve (Rosemary Alexander), who is attempting to ''dehomosexualize'' him. Caroline Rhea signs on as LaVonda's white-trash best friend. And Jason Dottley, Mr. Shore's real-life husband, plays Latrelle's son Ty, who is trying to come to terms with his own homosexuality by seeing several therapists, portrayed by Margaret Cho, Carson Kressley and Candis Cayne.

9 A.M. (ABC) LIVE WITH REGIS AND KELLY Amanda Peet discusses her role in ''The X-Files: I Want to Believe''; Jennifer Hudson performs.

11 A.M. (ABC) THE VIEW John Hamm and John Slattery put their spin on the new season of ''Mad Men.''

9 P.M. (NBC) THE BABY BORROWERS The pretend parents must deal with teenagers not much younger than themselves and the issues they pose, like acting up on a family outing and leaving the house in the middle of the night.

9 P.M. (National Geographic) NIGHT SHIFT: REPO MEN Mark Castelluccio and Matt Pittman of TMA Recovery repossess what hasn't been paid for, whether in urban Newark or upscale Montclair, N.J., and try to muster a little respect for their profession.

9 P.M. (13); 11 P.M. (49) NOVA SCIENCENOW Neil deGrasse Tyson wades through leech-infested waters with Mark Siddall, a scientist at the American Museum of Natural History, to learn about some of the benefits the bloodsuckers provide, including extracting excess blood from reattached fingers and toes. Other segments look at the radio telescope that has been instrumental in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence for more than 40 years; a new method to create embryolike stem cells; and Edith Widder, a specialist in bioluminescence who uses an innovative camera system called the Eye in the Sea. On its first test in the ocean's murky depths, the Eye recorded a squid unknown to science.

9 P.M. (CNN) BLACK IN AMERICA: THE BLACK WOMAN AND FAMILY In this first installment in a four-hour special, ''CNN Presents'' examines the statistics on single parenthood, disparities between black and white students, and the toll of H.I.V. and AIDS on black women. Commentary is offered by Julianne Malveaux, the president of Bennett College; Angela Burt-Murray, the editor in chief of Essence magazine; Bishop T. D. Jakes, a preacher and life coach; the radio and television personality Michael Baisden; the music mogul and entrepreneur Russell Simmons; the actress Vanessa Williams; and Dr. Camara Jones, a researcher with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Soledad O'Brien is the host.

9 P.M. (Sundance) ON THE ROAD IN AMERICA Ali, Sanad, Mohamad and Lara drive to Big Sur, where they stop at the Esalen Institute for a forum about relations between the United States and the Middle East.

10 P.M. (13) CLICK & CLACK'S AS THE WRENCH TURNS Click and Clack, above center, sign with Gigantic Motors after losing their sponsor. But even the eco-conscientious duo can't resist the Compensator, a luxurious S.U.V. with ultralow mileage. Did someone say intervention? Tom and Ray Magliozzi of NPR's ''Car Talk'' lend their voices.

10 P.M. (A&E) CRISS ANGEL -- MINDFREAK Mr. Angel begins a fourth season by walking on water on Lake Mead, near Las Vegas.

10:30 P.M. (MTV) BUZZIN' Shwayze, a hip-hop performer reared in a Malibu trailer park, tries to navigate the music industry and record his first single with the help of the songwriter and producer Cisco Adler in this new reality series. Jordan Schur of Suretone Records, who worked his magic on Ashlee Simpson and Limp Bizkit, helps keep the boys away from girls and beer. KATHRYN SHATTUCK
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: NETWORK TELEVISION (89%); RESIDENTIAL CARE (69%); ADOLESCENTS (68%); REPOSSESSION (67%); SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (64%); SCIENCE NEWS (64%); AFRICAN AMERICANS (64%); SMOKING (55%); SINGERS & MUSICIANS (71%)
PERSON: REGIS PHILBIN (55%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW JERSEY, USA (72%) UNITED STATES (92%)
LOAD-DATE: July 23, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

562 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 23, 2008 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

New Antismoking Signs Are Almost Visible Through the Haze
BYLINE: By ANDREW JACOBS
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; BEIJING JOURNAL; Pg. 8
LENGTH: 1035 words
DATELINE: BEIJING
A smartly dressed man carried a lighted cigarette into the elevator of an upscale apartment building here one recent morning, and something remarkable happened. A fellow passenger, a middle-aged woman with a pet Maltese tethered to her wrist, waved a hand in front of her face and produced a series of mannered coughs that had the desired effect: the man stepped on the cigarette and muttered an apology.

In a country where one in four people smoke, and where doctors light up in hospital hallways and health ministers puff away during meetings, it was a telling sign that a decade of halfhearted public campaigns against tobacco may finally be gaining traction.

Last May, the municipal government banned cigarettes in schools, railway stations, office buildings and other public places. Chinese athletes are no longer permitted to accept tobacco company sponsorships. Cigarette advertising on billboards will be restricted during the Olympics. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has declared that the Games will be ''smoke free.''

Despite the new laws and proclamations, the impact might elude nonsmoking visitors who arrive in the capital next month. Most restaurants remain shrouded in smoke, the air in clubs and bars can be asphyxiating and a year-old prohibition against lighting up in Beijing taxis has had little effect. ''If I point to the no-smoking sign, the passenger will just laugh and keep smoking,'' said Hui Guo, a cabdriver who does not smoke.

Government officials say that 100,000 inspectors have been dispatched to ticket smoking scofflaws but the $1.40 fine offers little deterrence, especially to the nouveau riche entrepreneurs who proudly brandish the gold-filtered Fu Rong Wang brand, which sell for $34 a pack.

Li Baojun, the manager of a popular restaurant on Ghost Street, explained why he did not dare tell patrons to stop chain-smoking during meals. ''My customers would rather starve than not smoke, and I would go out of business,'' he said, as a thick pall hung over the diners. ''In China, you cannot drink, eat and socialize without a cigarette.''

About 350 million of China's 1.3 billion people are regular smokers, more than the entire population of the United States, and even though 1.2 million people die each year from smoking-related causes, there is a widespread belief that cigarettes hold some health benefits. A cigarette in the morning is energizing, many smokers will declare, and even when confronted with scientific reason, they will cite Deng Xiaoping, an inveterate smoker who lived to 92, and Mao Zedong, who lived to 82.

Health care workers are not exactly the best role models: more than half of all Chinese medical professionals smoke, and a 2004 government survey of 3,600 doctors found that 30 percent did not know that smoking could lead to heart disease and circulation problems. (Unlike cigarettes in much of the world, Chinese brands carry no health warning on labels, although that is scheduled to change in 2011.)

Smoking with one hand and wielding a pair of chopsticks with the other, Li Na, 26, a secretary, was unapologetic as her 2-year-old son sat next to her at a restaurant here enveloped in a bluish haze. ''If you overprotect your children, they don't build their immunity,'' she explained. ''Breathing a little smoke when they are small makes them stronger.''

At wedding parties, the bride often passes out Double Happiness brand cigarettes to guests, a tradition meant to enhance her fertility. Mourners at Chinese funerals are generously plied with smokes, and a handful burned at the grave site is meant to satisfy the craving of the deceased.

When the police pull over a driver for a traffic infraction, a pack of cigarettes, not registration papers, is often the first thing pulled from the glove compartment. And during tough business negotiations, a round of smoking is an invaluable lubricant for a logjam.

''Cigarettes have an extra value in China that helps improve many social interactions,'' said Tang Weichang, a researcher at the China Tobacco Museum in Shanghai, a pro-smoking institution financed by China's tobacco industry.

Smoking here is largely a male pastime -- more than 60 percent of all men smoke compared with 3 percent of women -- and declining a cigarette is sometimes taken as an insult. Guo Fei, a nonsmoker whose family-owned restaurant is largely smoke free, said he would often accept a proffered cigarette and later throw it away. ''To reject a cigarette would make them lose face,'' he said.

The nation's lukewarm efforts to curb smoking are complicated by the government's control over the tobacco industry, which provides about $31 billion in taxes each year, about 8 percent of the government's revenue.

China produces a third of the world's tobacco, with more than 400 domestic brands offered at Beijing's ubiquitous tobacco shops. During a debate over antismoking measures last year, Zhang Baozhen, a vice director of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, warned that ''without cigarettes the country's stability will be affected.''

Earlier this year, Beijing officials announced a ban on smoking in bars, restaurants, karaoke lounges and massage parlors, but that proposal, opposed by business interests, quickly died. The new law only encourages eating and drinking establishments to set aside nonsmoking areas; few restaurants have obliged.

It does not help that cigarettes are extremely cheap. Some of the more popular brands, like Big Harvest, Little Panda and Yellow Pagoda, cost less than 50 cents a pack. With less than 5 percent of the market, foreign brands like Marlboro and Camel have made little headway.

At Block 8, a fashionable Beijing nightclub, cigarettes dangled from the lips of half the patrons. (The other half seemed to be taking a break from smoking, their cigarette packs set out before them.) Emma Cheung, 32, a magazine fashion editor, said smoking made her thin and fueled her creativity. She said that she would support a ban on smoking indoors, but that she would not quit until co-workers did. ''Yes, I'm addicted, but so is everyone else at the office,'' she said. ''If we didn't smoke, I don't know how we would get anything done.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: SMOKING (92%); TOBACCO PRODUCTS (90%); RESTAURANTS (87%); TOBACCO & HEALTH (78%); HEALTH DEPARTMENTS (75%); OLYMPICS (74%); SPORTS & RECREATION (74%); REGIONAL & LOCAL GOVERNMENTS (74%); SPORTS (74%); OFFICE PROPERTY (73%); TOBACCO MFG (73%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (73%); OUTDOOR ADVERTISING (70%); DISEASES & DISORDERS (70%); HEALTH CARE (70%); HEADS OF STATE & GOVERNMENT (69%); CITY GOVERNMENT (69%); PRIME MINISTERS (69%); SPONSORSHIP (68%); WEALTHY PEOPLE (64%); CITIES (54%)
PERSON: WEN JIABAO (56%)
GEOGRAPHIC: BEIJING, CHINA (91%) NORTH CENTRAL CHINA (91%) CHINA (93%); UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: July 23, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Beijing's new antismoking regulations encourage restaurants to provide nonsmoking areas. Few have done so.(PHOTOGRAPH BY SHIHO FUKADA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

563 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 22, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

Berliners Get a Crash Course In Glittery Celebrity Culture
BYLINE: By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; ABROAD; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1442 words
DATELINE: BERLIN
Aside from Romy Schneider hanging out naked on the Riviera and an aged Marlene Dietrich hiding her face from a nosy photographer on an airplane, the most prominent German in a hugely diverting paparazzi show at the Helmut Newton Foundation here through mid-November is Albert Einstein.

He's now surrounded by the Sean Penns and Brigitte Bardots of the world, looking as out of place as he must have felt when he arrived in New Jersey in 1933. In a picture from three years earlier, in which he's chatting in white tie with a dour bunch of British diplomats, he wears that famous animated wide-eyed expression suggesting he is kind of amused to find himself in this circumstance, too.

Actually, though, he's the ultimate German celebrity. Germany has long been funny about its relationship to local stardom and to the very notion of celebrity, which makes this exhibition a particularly fascinating and revealing exercise.

With some 350 pictures it's a breezy affair, not too logical, but never mind. It mostly recalls the glory days of the Cote d'Azur, the Via Veneto and Studio 54, with Edward Quinn's gorgeous photographs from Cannes in the '50s and enough current celebs thrown in to grease the turnstiles. A few classics by Weegee don't really qualify as paparazzi shots, and neither, strictly speaking, do the dozens of snapshots by Jean Pigozzi, the Italian businessman, art collector and amateur shutterbug who likes to hold out a camera, arm's length, and take fisheyed pictures of himself beside famous pals. They're strangely hypnotic: your neighbor's vacation slides in which Pamela Anderson, Mick Jagger and Mel Brooks keep turning up.

Whatever. The show advertises itself as the first survey of paparazzi in this country, and that makes sense. Chalk up Germany's ambivalence toward homegrown celebrity to what Ulf Poschardt, the founding editor of the German version of Vanity Fair magazine and now an editor at the newspaper Welt am Sonntag, the other day called ''aggressive egalitarianism.''

''The complete affirmation of yourself is considered kitsch here,'' he said. ''You can't do it.''

Patrick von Ribbentrop put it somewhat differently. ''There isn't the right setup,'' he said. A 35-year-old clothing entrepreneur with a famous name to bear (he's the grandson of the Nazi foreign minister), he attributes the state of German celebrity culture, such as it is, to ''a marketing problem.''

''Take Paris Hilton,'' he said, with obvious admiration. ''Being a wealthy individual, you also have to be willing to be in the public eye. Then you have to have a whole system for promotion. I have suggested to guys in Berlin who make films and who write for television that they produce a series about the Berlin Wall, like '24' or 'Prison Break,' but they all say the financing is lacking, the marketing is lacking. You need all that to create celebrity culture.''

On the other hand, he conceded: ''I generally agree that in Germany there is a reserve, which comes from the Second World War, about being German, or there was: that has changed a bit since the World Cup was here in 2006. Now Germans are no longer scared of people calling them Nazis if they hang German flags on their cars.''

The key word, explained Dagmar von Taube, a society reporter for Welt am Sonntag, is Bescheidenheit, modesty. This week Barack Obama's arrival in Berlin is heralded on the cover of Der Spiegel in ''American Idol'' script with the headline ''Germany Meets the Superstar.'' Next door to Germany, the French president lives in a palace with his new wife, a fashion model turned pop singer.

But here the chancellor, Angela Merkel, occupies a plain little house in the middle of town. From across the street, busybodies can peer through her windows. After delivering a speech before a Berlin Philharmonic performance not long ago, Ms. Merkel glanced from the platform into the semidarkened auditorium, caught sight of a waving hand, walked down the steps into the audience and up the aisle, waited while patrons in her row stood to let her pass, then like everybody else sat through the concert (Beethoven and Webern, no less) without a security guard in sight.

Sure, Germans read German celebrity magazines like Bunte and Gala, and would-be Carries in their Manolo Blahnik knockoffs jammed the red carpet when ''Sex and the City'' opened a few weeks ago. But particularly in this capital of cool, locals take pride in ignoring stars like Christina Ricci and Madonna when they're walking down the street or eating in a restaurant.

''In Munich, they love celebrities,'' Claudius Seidl, an editor for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, pointed out over lunch the other day in one of those restaurants. He cited the old cultural divide that splits the Prussian, Protestant north from the Roman Catholic south. Fifty-odd years ago, he said, before globalization, Germans, both East and West, fawned more over their own celebrities. But today's stars are dwarfed by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's twins.

''That said,'' Mr. Seidl continued, ''it's true there is a general embarrassment among Germans about being famous for being famous. Unless you are a world-class star, you must be intellectual and appear normal; otherwise you're considered trash.''

Mr. Poschardt elaborated: ''It's the reverse of America. You can openly be an intellectual elitist here, but materially you must act the same as everyone else. We have a lively pop scene now, but Germany doesn't have a real pop culture tradition because we killed or expelled everybody who produced pop culture years ago, then we missed out on the next 50 years.

''We developed this very heavy version of pop culture. Today German intellectuals fixate on American pop culture precisely because you in America have this natural, sparkling mix of fast-food entertainment with more complex multilayered views of society, and this mix makes it possible for a celebrity like George Clooney to become a kind of political figure.''

''The question,'' Mr. Poschardt said, ''is whether something is missing here.'' Asked to name a German celebrity, he paused. ''Angela Merkel,'' he finally said.

''Personally,'' he said, ''I think we need to create our own independent sense of glamour, not self-consciously, but because we should stop this superegalitarianism and be more open to difference. I don't mean we should have pomp, but the state here has the power to make everyone the same. It's a democratic ideal, but it was also a fascist idea. Germans have always disliked any kind of ostentation, and you could even say anti-Semitism came partly from a dislike of a Jewish bourgeois lifestyle, which offended both socialists and National Socialists.''

Maybe. There's also something remarkable, though, about seeing a German head of state surrounded by teenagers casually sitting on the floor at a concert in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin listening to classical music, as President Horst Kohler did not so long ago. German cable television broadcasts shows like ''Das Perfekte Promi Dinner,'' which features minor German soap actors, former athletes and the occasional ex-porn star shopping and cooking meals for one another in their (generally modest) homes, then being gently graded on the results.

Sweet, guilty pleasures to watch, these discreet German versions of hard-core American real-life celebrity programs recall the early days of television, which introduced the widespread illusion of intimacy with stardom. There was Jack Paar chatting with Fidel Castro,and Liberace showing Edward R. Murrow around his new kitchen. To be a celebrity in the new media age meant to demonstrate that you were like anyone else, a fiction that gradually caused nearly the entire population of the United States to delude itself into thinking everyone should be famous, at least briefly. Celebrity became an end in itself, like wealth, divorced from accomplishment.

Here, on the other hand, Germans still face the burden of St. Augustine, who wrote that to be purged of the sin of pride, a person must also purge the pride that comes from being humble.

Back at the Helmut Newton Foundation, the show ends with Newton's staged and stately fashion shots of models pretending to be stars surrounded by paparazzi. A native Berliner, Newton, as it happened, fled to escape Nazi persecution and was inspired to make his career as a photographer by, among other people, Erich Salomon, who took the Einstein picture and later died at Auschwitz. Newton grasped the comic pleasures of celebrity, minus the guilt.

But then, he spent most of his life in places like Los Angeles and Monaco, not Germany.