A New Start

FT: Murdoch's lost lieutenant

Murdoch's lost lieutenant

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

Published: February 28 2009 02:00 | Last updated: February 28 2009 02:00

Last April, Peter Chernin could be found by the icy shoreline of a Greenland fishing village, part of a huddle of executives in Gore-Tex gear, waiting for a helicopter ride to some adventurous skiing.

The group of fur-clad Inuits looking on was a far cry from the celebrities crowding around News Corp's chief operating officer last Sunday as Fox Searchlight, the studio he founded, swept the Academy Awards with eight Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire . The next day he became the most popular man in Hollywood when he announced that after 12 years as Rupert Murdoch's closest lieutenant and head of the Fox television, film and interactive businesses, he was off to launch his own production company.

Under a contract agreed the last time News Corp's chairman feared he might lose his deputy, the 57-year-old has a guarantee that News Corp will buy at least 12 films over the next six years. The terms, worth ab estimated $25m-$40m a picture, are remarkable. "He is the best producer in Hollywood at the moment, because nobody else in Hollywood has that guarantee," says one rival studio owner. As film financing dries up, directors will beat a path to his door because "he's getting his films made".

By leaving now, after News Corp predicted a 30 per cent profit drop for the year, "at least he avoids the next three years of global recession", another media chief executive says, before adding grimly: "I might ask if he needs a production assistant."

Mr Chernin's departure, while cordial, is a challenging moment for Mr Murdoch. "I had lunch with Tom Rothman [chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment] on Monday and he said 'it's like Dad leaving home'," says David Hill, chief executive of Fox Sports.

Despite the family analogy, Mr Chernin made his name at News Corp because he was not a Murdoch. No non-family executive has held such a senior role for as long. "The arseholes get bumped very quickly," Mr Hill notes.

Mr Chernin had to navigate not only his mercurial chairman but also his children. He outlasted Lachlan, Mr Murdoch's eldest son, who was his deputy for five sometimes awkward years. Neither James's emergence as heir presumptive nor the growth of Elisabeth's trans-atlantic production company threatened his position.

Michael Garin, the former Lorimar Telepictures executive, says this quality was apparent when he hired Mr Chernin in 1987 to run Lorimar's film division alongside Bernie Brillstein, the larger-than-life producer of The Muppet Show . "He's always had an uncanny ability to manage people who are both senior to him in age and in stature," he says. "Managing Rupert is certainly not an easy task."

In 20 years at News Corp, Mr Chernin forged the reputation as the "operator" to Mr Murdoch's "visionary", but people close to him challenge this. "I don't think Rupert has the patience to be the operator that Peter is," one friend says, but "a lot of the [News Corp] vision is Peter".

The exception is when it comes to newspapers. Mr Chernin disagreed with his boss's decision to offer 17-times earnings for The Wall Street Journal in 2007. Mr Chernin, now married to Megan, afundraiser for inner-city mentoring programmes, in fact had his start in print at St Martin's Press and Warner Books. "There are very few bosses I ever worked for you could have a decent conversation with about William Faulkner," says Mr Hill.

Having grown up in the smart New York suburb of Westchester, Mr Chernin later credited the University of California, at Berkeley with broadening his horizons. "There are colleges that take wayward kids and straighten them out. Berkeley did the opposite to me, and I've been grateful ever since," he told his alma mater years later.

Despite his disagreements over newspapers, a friend argues: "if you compare Rupert to the other media moguls, he got the best one. He ran these businesses unfettered."

The Fox platform put Mr Chernin in charge of Hollywood's most profitable studio and television blockbusters from The Simpsons to American Idol . Mr Murdoch's penchant for

gambles also allowed him to strike defining digital deals. Stealing MySpace , a book on News Corp's swoop on the social networking site, chronicles a ruthlessness in Mr Chernin's tactics that his boss must have admired. At a clubby media conference in July 2005, Mr Chernin learned that Tom Freston, Viacom's co-president, was on his way to a Hawaiian holiday. Knowing that Viacom was the favourite bidder for what was then the hottest media property, he struck when his rival was on the beach. Within months, Mr Chernin had recouped his MySpace investment through a $900m deal with Google. When it comes to deals, "he's a great closer", Mr Hill says.

Jonathan Nelson, the Providence Equity chief executive who organised the Greenland skiing trip, also credits Mr Chernin with the early success of Hulu, News Corp's online video partnership with NBC Universal and Providence. In Hulu, he created one of the "very few examples where paradigm-shifting models have been spawned inside a traditional media company", he says.

In a back-stabbing business, Mr Chernin's style has earned him an unusual number of industry friends, including Bob Iger, Walt Disney's chief executive, with whom he helped end last year's strike by Hollywood writers. Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal's chief executive, lauds Mr Chernin's ability to look at the media business unemotionally. "He is as grounded as any big-time media executive you will find."

"He is a Democrat in a conservative world, a studio boss with the respect of Hollywood for his independence, his integrity and his judgment, and an executive who can fight on principle without sacrificing profit," says Sir Howard Stringer, chairman of Sony. "Peter made it look easy."

Ray Chambers, United Nations special envoy for malaria who handed the chairmanship of Malaria No More to Mr Chernin, says hebrings a unique ability "to cut through the smoke and identify what needs to get done".

Tied to the admiration is concern for the impact of his departure on News Corp. "They don't realise how big a hole he'll leave, but they're about to find out," one media executive warns. Mr Chernin's peers suspect he will want a bigger challenge. One prospect is joining Providence for a tilt at NBC Universal should GE sell its media arm. Mr Nelson will not comment, but says: "I don't think his intellectual curiosity will be satisfied producing a couple of movies a year."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Highway to hell revisited

Highway to hell revisited

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: February 27 2009 19:19 | Last updated: February 27 2009 19:19

“History reminds us,” President Barack Obama told both houses of the US Congress on Tuesday night, “that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas.” By “the nation”, Mr Obama means “the government”. We can tell by the episodes he uses to make his point: the establishment of universal public education, the GI Bill of Rights and – alluded to but not named – the Highway Act of 1956, at the time of its passage the largest public works project in US history.

Mr Obama’s praise for the Highway Act is disturbing. In arguments over his stimulus package and his preliminary budget released on Thursday, Republicans have made the lazy assumption that government intervention in the economy can never succeed. Mr Obama shows signs of the opposite error – believing it can never fail.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from this columnist - Dec-03

The Highway Act probably has more defenders than detractors. But Mr Obama should be among the latter. The act, which budgeted $25bn in federal money to build 41,000 miles of motorway, exacerbated the very problems Mr Obama has been most eager to solve – spoliation of the environment, dependence on foreign oil, overburdening of state and local budgets, abandonment of the inner-city poor and reckless speculation in real-estate development, to name a few.

A lot of people complain today about the rump of Republican disbelievers in Keynes, feckless though they may be, who fiddle while Rome burns. There was no hint of such heresy in 1956. The Senate passed the bill 89-1. Otherwise, the political climate bore some resemblance to our own: conformism bred of confusion. A 40,000 mile highway network had been on the wish list of the armed forces since 1944. Eisenhower was a big backer, and had hopes of justifying it as a stimulus during the recession of 1954. That downturn was long past when the bill came to a vote, but the vested interests remained, and so did the fear that one’s constituents might think it a bit communist to vote against a highway bill.

Eisenhower had brought in General Lucius Clay, architect of the Berlin Airlift and a board member of General Motors, to make the pitch for an earlier version. The US required highways, General Clay said, “to disperse our factories, our stores, our people; in short, to create a revolution in living habits”. The bill, for all its expense, seemed a no-brainer, and legislators cast their votes without even a hint of a sense that they might not know what they were doing, or that sums of money big enough to do your country much good are also big enough to do it much harm.

In 1958, the great journalist William Whyte coined the term “sprawl”, in an article for Fortune. He noted with horror that, a mere two years after the Highway Act, “already huge patches of once green countryside have been turned into vast, smog-filled deserts that are neither city, suburb, nor country.” Developments were concentrated in random political no-man’s-lands near interchanges and exits. Road lobbyists and real estate developers colluded against meaningful regulation and planning, with the result, Whyte wrote, that “development is being left almost entirely in the hands of the speculative builder”.

As the historian Owen Gutfreund wrote in 20th-Century Sprawl (Oxford, 2004), even before the passage of the Highway Act, most US highway spending was promoted by industry lobbies masquerading as consumer-advocacy groups, such as the National Highway Users’ Conference. The result was a distorted market and tax system. Just as today’s internet businesses get more favourable tax treatment than bricks-and-mortar shops, highways were effectively subsidised. Sales taxes on autos were made tax deductible. Gasoline taxes were specially earmarked to road building (as they still are).

The Act speeded up the erosion of public transportation infrastructure, which the federal government is now spending dearly to revive. Freight trains had to compete against trucks that sped along taxpayer-funded roads. Highways marred the landscape. Some of the prettiest neighbourhoods in the US – Mt Adams in Cincinnati, the North End of Boston – were effectively walled off from the cities they once belonged to, and the encirclement of Detroit’s neighbourhoods by highways is often cited as a primary cause of its decline. Plans for a superhighway to be laid right through the heart of San Francisco were blocked only due to massive local protests.

Whyte warned that sprawl was not just bad aesthetics but bad economics. A subtler and more serious problem than blight was that, for local authorities, the cost of providing utilities and other services was exorbitant. “There is not only the cost of running sewers and water mains and storm drains out to Happy Acres,” Whyte wrote, “but much more road, per family served, has to be paved and maintained.” The infrastructure network that came out of the Highway Act had higher overheads than the one it replaced. It became a bottomless pit of spending.

The largest building project in Mr Obama’s Recovery Act is $27bn for roads, and there have been no complaints that the government will have a hard time finding things to spend it on. The US has big economic problems. But they have been made worse, and harder to resolve, by a half-century in which, at federal urging, the country was misbuilt.

There is an inherent bias in favour of government projects. The successes can be mythologised through commemoration, goading future generations to imitate them. The failures are fixable only through equally extensive projects to undo them. This makes it easy to forget that there is no social or economic problem so big that a poorly targeted government intervention cannot make it worse.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

FT: Black is the new green

Black is the new green

By Fiona Harvey

Published: February 27 2009 22:04 | Last updated: February 27 2009 22:04

In Brazil’s Amazon basin, farmers have long sought out a special form of fertiliser – a locally sourced compost-like substance prized for its amazing qualities of reviving poor or exhausted soils. They buy it in sacks or dig it out of the earth from patches that are sometimes as much as 6ft deep. Spread on fields, it retains its fertile qualities for long periods.

They call it the terra preta do indio – literally, “the dark earth of the Indians”. Dense, rich and loamy, this earth forms a stark contrast with the thin, poor soils of the region. (It seems a paradox, but rainforest soils have low fertility. This is why farmers who cut down the forest for agriculture have to keep on felling – after a few years of cropping, yields collapse and they have to move on.) Patches of terra preta extend for many hectares in some places but until recently, no one really knew what the mysterious dark earth was. Some guessed it was volcanic, or the sediment of old lakes, or the residue of some long-rotted vegetation. Few imagined that it was man-made.

Terra preta, modern analysis has proved, is one of the last remaining traces of pre-Columbian agriculture in the Amazon basin. It was made more than 2,500 – and perhaps as long as 6,000 – years ago by people living by the river. These cultures survived and supported complex agriculture, despite poor soil, by making their own earth. They used dung, fish, animal bones and plant waste – the usual suspects. But the key ingredient in terra preta, and what gives it its dark colour, is charcoal.

“It’s wonderful stuff,” says Simon Shackley, a social science lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. “We started to get to know about it when Dutch scientists began to look at it in the 1960s. They found these dark soils in this area of very poor soil, where it was being put on fields like compost. It’s really the product of slash-and-burn agriculture, and other organic waste, incorporated into the soils over hundreds or even thousands of years – and it does appear to be fertile indefinitely, which is really a very odd thing.”

This ancient product of the Amazon is now the subject of intense scrutiny by climate change scientists. The tenacity of the charcoal of terra preta – retaining its fertilising properties over centuries – has given them an idea. Charcoal is a form of carbon, the burnt remains of plant and animal material. If it can stay intact in the earth for so long, without being released as carbon dioxide gas, why not lock up more carbon in the earth in this manner?

Scientists have begun to refer to the charcoal made from plants for the purpose of storing carbon as “biochar”. The theory is that biomass – any plant or animal material – can be turned into charcoal by heating it in the absence of oxygen. By taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, the impact on climate change could be huge.

. . .

Soils naturally contain large quantities of carbon, from decayed vegetation. But this carbon is relatively unstable, in climate terms – soils give off CO2 when they are disturbed, by ploughing for example, making them as much a carbon source as a carbon sink. So the idea of trying to lock up carbon in soils has found little favour among climate scientists – indeed, it has even gained a bad name, as farmers have sought to cash in by claiming their fields should qualify for the carbon credits intended to provide financial support to projects such as wind farms or solar power plants.

What is different about biochar is that the stability of the charcoal should make it possible to lock away the carbon it contains for hundreds of years. The carbon is mineralised, so it’s very resistant to breaking down. What’s more, the ancillary benefits – not just its soil-improving characteristics, but certain byproducts of its manufacture – should be enough to make it economically attractive.

When it’s made, about a third of the biomass is turned to char, a third is turned to syngas that can be burned to generate electricity, and a third into a crude oil substitute that could be very useful in making plastics, though it would be hard to use as a transport fuel. Tim Flannery, the eminent Australian explorer and naturalist , argues that these properties of biochar “allow us to address three or four critical crises at once: the climate change crisis, the energy crisis, and the food and water crises”, because putting biochar in the soil not only fertilises the soil, but also helps it to retain water.

Just how much could biochar do to change the world’s carbon balance? There is little doubt of the enormous amount required. Every year, human activities – burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests, converting grassland to crops and so on – contribute eight to 10 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere. Most of that carbon does not go on to damage the climate – the world has a natural carbon cycle, by which carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed and re-emitted by “carbon sinks” of vegetation, soils, the seas and other natural processes. But these processes are being severely overloaded, so the carbon content of the atmosphere is rising. At present, it stands at about 387 parts per million, certainly higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years and probably in the last 20 million.

. . .

According to the Global Carbon Project, between 2000 and 2007, the land and ocean carbon sinks – such as forests, and plankton in the ocean – removed about 54 per cent, or 4.8 billion tonnes a year of the carbon that humans pumped into the atmosphere. That leaves a carbon surplus of about 4 billion tonnes or so per year, which we need to find ways to reduce or absorb. Moreover, the amount absorbed by natural sinks is declining as land and oceans warm, meaning every year we must either work even harder to remove carbon from the air, or stop emitting it. Even as governments talk of a “low-carbon economy”, global greenhouse gas emissions are rising fast. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world authority on climate science, emissions must peak in the period 2015 to 2020 if we are to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. On present projections, that will be impossible – unless a way can be found to make available cheap, easy methods of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and of generating clean electricity in ways that can be adopted around the world much more quickly than current renewable technologies.

According to some early estimates of biochar’s potential, this wonder substance alone could achieve all the carbon reductions necessary to prevent further global warming. Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University and others calculated that biochar could remove between 5.5 and 9.5 billion tonnes of carbon from the air each year. But those estimates relied on heroic assumptions about the ability to make biochar easily around the world, says Shackley. “There has been a tendency to withdraw from some of the very large figures lately,” he notes. “Now, I would say people are talking more about something in the range of one to two billion tonnes a year.”

This may seem disappointing in comparison with previous grandiose claims, but it still represents an impressive potential contribution from a single method, Shackley says. “It’s certainly not trivial,” agrees Tim Lenton, professor of earth systems science at the University of East Anglia. “It might be a good-sized slice of what we need, and it has sizeable side benefits – it’s win-win.” If other carbon-reducing techniques – such as preserving and regrowing forests, increasing the share of energy from renewables, and the push for energy efficiency – were pursued simultaneously, the world could make the cuts needed in our “carbon budget” to stave off climate disaster.

This potential, and the unique and sometimes mysterious qualities of biochar, are making it one of the most exciting new areas of climate change research. The idea of sequestering carbon through biochar has gained some heavy-hitting scientific backers, such as James Lovelock, the maverick scientist whose Gaia hypothesis has come back into vogue. Scientists at Cornell University, led by Lehmann, are working on ways to sequestrate carbon in biochar-enriched soil. In the UK, a biochar research centre has been set up at Edinburgh university; other European countries are following suit, and research projects are under way in countries from Canada to Australia. A few companies are in the early stages of trying to find ways to commercialise biochar production. Biochar even has its own song – “The Biochar Blues” – written by members of the International Biochar Initiative.

The Biochar Blues

First you take a big old drum
Then fill it full of dry cow dung
Make sure the lid’s on really tight
Then just stick in a small stove pipe

Light a fire under the drum
Cook that cow dung till it’s done
Open the door and there you are
What you’ve got is biochar

Charcoal is, of course, nothing new. People have been making it for millennia, chiefly for fuel. The process is simple: take wood, or straw or the waste from crops, and heat it in the absence of oxygen. Traditionally, this was done by heaping earth on top of the lit biomass so that it smouldered for a long time. Modern kilns can make the process more efficient, but the principle remains the same.

There is much about biochar that remains a puzzle, however. Take the soil-fertility effects. What is it about biochar that improves soil so much? “The simple answer is that we don’t know exactly,” says Shackley. “It’s probably a combination of several factors. Charcoal is very porous, so it acts like a sponge in retaining water, and the nutrients dissolved in water, which is something poor soils aren’t very good at. And [its porous nature] also means it provides a good material for the growth of lots of important bacteria.”

Another factor in its favour is that using biochar as a fertiliser can displace artificial nitrogen fertilisers, which give off nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. And biochar is not toxic, adds Lenton – “no one has yet said there is some great hidden danger associated with it”.

But Saran Sohi, a lecturer in soil science, warns that anyone hoping that biochar alone will solve fertility problems is probably deluded – biochar is not enough by itself to make the difference that terra preta does to thin Brazilian soils. “Terra preta soils also contain other nutrients, from the other substances they contain – things like bones, which are rich in phosphorus [essential for healthy plant growth],” he says. The biochar undoubtedly plays a role in holding these nutrients together, ensuring they remain available to plant roots, but the nutrients must be provided by other means. “No one has yet succeeded in recreating terra preta,” Shackley adds.

To produce biochar on an industrial scale, traditional methods of charcoal production would be impractical. Instead, researchers are looking to pyrolysis – which is a form of controlled thermal decomposition of organic material in the absence of oxygen, at heats that can reach 500 to 600°C.

Using pyrolysis also allows the capture of the syngas and the tarry liquid byproducts, both of which can be used as fuel to generate electricity or for the heating process.

The amount of biochar to be produced depends on accelerating or slowing down the pyrolysis process: fast methods produce 20 per cent biochar and 20 per cent syngas, with 60 per cent bio-oil, while slow methods produce about 50 per cent char and far smaller quantities of oil. “It’s much easier to do slow pyrolysis as well,” notes Adrian Higson of the UK’s National Non-Food Crops Council. “And cheaper.” As modern pyrolysis plants can be run entirely from the syngas, the output is between three and nine times the energy input required, according to the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development.

What to use to make the char? Tearing down forests to turn into charcoal would be insane in climate change terms. But there is plenty of other material. Agriculture produces large amounts of plant and animal waste – straw, husks, dung. Even human waste – sewage sludge, or some forms of household rubbish – could be used.

Extinction is 6°C away

How long do we have left?

Scientists’ best estimate is that beyond 2°C of warming, the earth will start to experience some disastrous and irreversible damage. Agriculture would be unsustainable in many already hot regions, sea level rises would render some areas uninhabitable, and extremes of weather would have severe consequences for life and property.

By 6°C or 7°C of warming, the extinction of most life on earth as we know it becomes probable. So policymakers have begun to focus on preventing more than 2°C of warming, as a broadly agreed limit. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2015-2020 to stay under 2°C .

How to get there?

The simple answer is to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but this turns out to be nearly impossible in practice. Keeping the world’s existing forests, such as the Amazon and the rainforests of central Africa and Indonesia, alive would be the cheapest and most effective way of combating climate change, as the cutting down of trees in these areas is the biggest single contributor to global warming. Incredibly, the world has yet to come up with a way of giving poor countries with rainforests an incentive to prevent deforestation.

Is there anything else we can do?

Yes, there are a few possible quick fixes, and some of them are even achievable. Remember the ozone layer? The issue, entirely separate from climate change, concerned the destruction of a protective layer of gases in the atmosphere by certain chemicals. Governments swiftly negotiated the Montreal protocol to phase out these ozone-depleting chemicals. The treaty’s final phase will have more than five times the effect on the climate of the Kyoto protocol, because some chemicals involved have a large global warming effect.

Another quick fix is to tackle soot, or black carbon – soot is the product of inefficiently combusted carbon, and its black colour means it attracts the sun’s heat. So when “black carbon” falls on snow or other light areas, it detracts from the earth’s albedo – a measure of how much light is reflected back into space – and contributes to warming. More efficient combustion would mean less soot.

Other quick wins include applying white paint to the roofs of houses and cars in hot areas, to reflect more heat, and painting roofs black where it is cold, to reduce the need for heating. Some “geo-engineering” ideas are much more drastic, or untested, including sending out yachts to spray seawater into the atmosphere to form clouds, which would reflect heat because they are white, or filling the stratosphere with sulphur particles, which would also reflect heat, but might cause acid rain.

Is that it?

Policymakers meet in Copenhagen this December to hammer out a climate treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol – its current provisions expire in 2012. Without a successor there will be no binding obligation on countries to cut emissions or tackle climate change.

And using waste products creates a double carbon saving: if left to rot, they produce methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. But the difficulty is in gathering the waste – and making it economic to do so. Farmers will require some persuasion that the trouble of conserving and cooking their waste to a charcoal makes financial sense, and they may need new machinery to do so. At a municipal waste level, the problem will be sorting the organic waste, which can be turned to char, from the rest of the rubbish – and proving that this is cheaper and more beneficial than merely burying it.

The IGSD suggests a way of marrying small-scale and industrial methods for producing the char, that if refined could enable the economically viable production of biochar in urban, rural and even poor regions. It suggests three possible systems. The first is a centralised scheme, whereby all waste biomass in a given region would be brought to a central plant for processing; the second is a decentralised system in which each farmer or a small group of farmers would have their own fairly low-tech pyrolysis kiln.

The third system proposes a mobile alternative, in which a vehicle equipped with a pyrolyser, powered using syngas, would visit small farms, returning the biochar to the farmers to use, while collecting the bio-oil to be transported to a refinery and turned into liquid biofuel for vehicles. As an example, the IGSD cites Brazil’s sugar cane industry, in which the tops of the canes, normally burned in the field, and the bagasse – the residue from sugar production – could be turned efficiently into biochar. It estimates that of the 460 megatonne annual sugar cane harvest, as much as 230 megatonnes could be available for pyrolysis.

. . .

A clutch of companies is now working on these problems, and seeking to commercialise biochar as a medicine for both climate and soil, and as an energy source.

As Mike Mason, founder of the carbon offsetting company Climate Care, bought by JP Morgan, somewhat ruefully notes, he had been planning by now to spend most of his time charging round Africa looking at elephants (he was born in the UK, but was raised in east Africa). But instead he decided that climate change was too great a problem to leave alone, and with his new company, Biojoule, has been investigating ways to turn biochar into a viable business. In Ontario, Canada, Dynamotive is making biochar and up to 130 tonnes a day of bio-oil at a wood-products mill. Crucible Carbon, based in Australia, predicts that its technology will allow carbon sequestration from biochar at the cost of about A$20 (£9) a tonne.

Yet even without the logistical problems, others are less sure of the absolute benefits of the product. Robert Trezona, head of research and development at the Carbon Trust, a UK government-funded body that helps businesses cut their greenhouse gas emissions, worries that seeing biochar as the main output from cooking biomass might be to miss the point. The Carbon Trust is running a competition to develop pyrolysis plants, but with the aim of manufacturing liquid transport fuels from biomass, using fast pyrolysis techniques, to which biochar is merely a byproduct of questionable usefulness. “Producing liquid biofuels for transport is going to be very important in cutting emissions. We don’t know the same about biochar,” he says. In fact, encouraging small farmers to produce biochar by traditional, low-tech methods may actually result in more greenhouse gas emissions than simply burning the plants for fuel or discarding them, he says.

“This is very much unproven,” he objects. “You want to be able to show that it stays in the soil for hundreds of years, and to prove that is difficult.”

The Carbon Trust is not allowing companies applying to it for funding to count the biochar byproduct of pyrolysis as part of the carbon savings they produce. “We are a long way from having enough technical evidence to create a proper case for biochar,” says Trezona. “Even the soil-improvement benefit is a new unexpected finding.”

Flannery disagrees. “At least half of the carbon in charcoal is still sequestered 500 years later. This has been known for a long time, from radio carbon dating from charcoal by paleontologists,” he says.

Even if biochar does not fulfil all of the potential claimed for it, it could still make an important contribution. Al Gore, the former US vice-president and environmental campaigner, likes to point out that the search for a “silver bullet” to solve the problem of climate change has been a distraction. Instead, he argues, though there may be no silver bullet, “there is silver buckshot”. Only by bringing many different methods of cutting emissions or absorbing carbon to bear can we reduce atmospheric levels of carbon to within the limits of safety. And of those possible methods, few are as simple and cheap as biochar. Johannes Lehmann of Cornell makes the point that “biochar sequestration does not require a fundamental scientific advance and the underlying production technology is robust and simple, making it appropriate for many regions of the world”.

But no one should doubt that rolling out this technology will be a mammoth task. The problem is twofold: developing a model for biochar production that reliably reduces greenhouse gases but is easily replicable in small farms in poor countries; and in the developed world, changing the business model of large farms so that collecting and cooking their waste is a better option than not. The huge US agribusinesses may be easy to reach, and good candidates to start using their waste for char, but they are likely to need financial incentives before they begin to see the point. The poor farmers of the developing world might be glad of the husbandry advice and techniques that would help them revitalise their own soils with biochar, but how to reach them all? That may prove impossible.

These problems of economics and communication will be the real hurdles at which biochar may fall, just as they have been the reasons why we have failed to capitalise on other ways of cutting carbon, from the very simple – small alterations to wood-fired cooking stoves in Africa and India can reduce the indoor air pollution from cooking fires that kills millions, yet hardly any homes have them – to the complex challenges, such as adopting renewable energy. A massive effort will be required to overcome the inertia that has been the downfall of other great climate ideas.

Fiona Harvey is the FT’s environment correspondent.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Men facing up to nips and needles

Men facing up to nips and needles

By Matthew Garrahan and Emma Jacobs

Published: February 19 2009 02:00 | Last updated: February 19 2009 02:00

Peter Burling believes that when it comes to business, first impressions are everything. "Anyone who says looks are not important is a liar," says the 33-year-old account manager, who works for a British marketing agency. "You need to look good - fresh and bright rather than tired and stressed out."

So, three years ago, gripped by fears that the ageing process was taking effect, he went to Transform, the UK cosmetic surgery group, to have Botox injected into his forehead, brow and his crow's feet. He was so pleased with the results that he has a top-up every six months. "I perform better if I feel confident so it may have increased the num-ber of contracts we have won," he says.

While some may see such treatments as frivolous luxuries, the people offering them say that inc-reas-ing numbers of men are turning to non-invasive cosmetic treatments and even to plastic surgery for pragmatic career reasons.

"There are definitely more business guys coming in and they have very focused demands," says Cap Lesesne, one of Manhattan's leading cosmetic surgeons. "They are worried about their job futures and their professional longevity." Typical male patients might be in their mid-forties, he adds. "They're fairly successful and they're looking to work into their sixties."

Dr Lesesne says the number of male patients coming through his doors has risen three-fold in the past decade: "Sometimes they will come in because their wife is having something done. But usually a male friend will have told them about it."

Richard, a 56-year-old maths and science academic, was recently operated on by Cynthia Boxrud, who specialises in facial and ophthalmic aesthetic and reconstructive surgery in Hollywood, and counts stars, actors and models among the patients at her Santa Monica practice. He had his upper and lower eyelids lifted, a facelift and fat injections in his face. "I was beginning to look kind of tired and wanted to have something that made me feel refreshed but not surgically altered," he says. Prolonging his career was a big motivation: "I would like to work for another 10 years."

In the UK, Steven Clarke, a 25-year-old engineer at Rolls-Royce, has had laser treatment at plastic surgery specialists Harley Medical Group to remove sun scars under his eyes. It seems that younger men such as Mr Clarke and Mr Burling are part of a generation that may be more comfortable with the idea of at least the noninvasive treatments.

Mr Clarke says: "If you don't look after yourself it shows that you've got no discipline and that doesn't reflect well on your work life. I've thought that if after lots of late nights working for RollsRoyce I start to look tired, then I'd probably have an eye lift."

Mr Burling says: "I'm quite open about it . . . you can't really keep it quiet. If you suddenly look fresh people will want to know if you've been away." Since he started receiving Botox, which lifts def-lated features, two colleagues have made appointments to see the same consultant.

The cosmetic surgery sector has grown over the past decade. In the US, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recorded almost 12m procedures in 2007, with total spending on cosmetic surgery rising 9 per cent to $12.4bn (£8.7bn) the same year.

Meanwhile, the banking crisis and the economic slump in general ap-pear to have heightened men's anxiety over their appearance. Dr Lesesne says: "People are scared about losing their jobs and they want to look their best."

Michael McGuire, president-elect of the ASPS, says: "People might say: 'You look tired.' What that implies is you're not as vigorous or energetic, or not as competitive as you might be."

Last month, Harley Medical Group detected a new trend, "City severance surgery", after observing City of London bankers using their redundancy packages to rejuvenate their appearance to boost the chance of finding a new job.

Yet while severance packages may pay for former City boys to have their baggy eyelids seen to by going under the scalpel, others are opting for cheaper, less invasive treatments, such as Botox, chemical peels or facial fillers - gels that remove wrinkles and fill out deflated and sagging skin. "They still need the eyelid surgery or facelift but they can temporarily defer the need to do it by having some filler or Botox, which is less expensive and requires less downtime," says Dr Lesesne.

Dr McGuire says he recently operated on a Nebraska steelworker who wanted to improve his appearance, while Dr Lesesne says more male patients from overseas are consulting him. "I see a lot of guys from England. They arrive on the 7pm British Airways flight, I see them that night and tell them to walk 20 blocks to get the circulation going. I see them the next day and they are on the flight home on Sunday."

Yet while work-anxious men might be providing a fillip for some surgeons, the industry in general is gloomy about the outlook as the recession sets in.

Two months ago more than 60 per cent of ASPS surgeons reported a decrease in breast augmentation - the most popular procedure - with 64 per cent reporting a decline in liposuction treatments.

However, many in the sector are confident that they can weather the storm. "I know we will see a fall-out here even though this is a pretty affluent community," says Dr Boxrud, who specialises in facial and ophthalmic aesthetic and reconstructive surgery in Hollywood.

She recentlystimulated demand by offering a 10 per cent holiday discount for facial "injectables", such as Botox. "In my practice e surgical volume was down so we had to be creative. When the world gives you lemons you make lemonade.

"We're not recession-proof but we're recession-resistant," she says. "There are some surgeons who only do cosmetic surgery and if they are only doing big, cosmetic procedures, they are going to have to rethink their practice."

'Fountain of youth' in a syringe for a few hundred dollars

As the recession bites, cosmetic surgery patients are shunning more expensive procedures in favour of cheaper, more cost-effective treatments.

Cynthia Boxrud says the economic downturn has helped fuel interest in facial fillers, or "injectables".

"We call them the 'fountain of youth'," she says. Injectables such as Restylane or Juviderm fill out sagging skin: "We age like a balloon that deflates, but injectables add little bits of volume to the face. We even inject into the scalp area because it can help lift the neck."

Patients usually have a procedure every three or four months, paying $600-$800 (£421-£562) a time. The trend began seven or eight years ago, with Hollywood actors trying out injectable treatments. "Now it has hit the mainstream," says Dr Boxrud, who recently performed 40 procedures in one week. "Every three months the patient will come in and say: 'let's add a plumper'. And they'll pay a few hundred dollars instead of spending $20,000 on a facelift." The economic downturn has not hit her injectable business: "Belt- tightening has not slowed it down. Many consumers are going to do without their favourite couture but they will keep up with injectables."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Blind date with recession for the business of romance

ditto ST report

==

Blind date with recession for the business of romance

By Emma Jacobs

Published: February 13 2009 02:00 | Last updated: February 13 2009 02:00

At new year, Mike Parker, a graphic designer from London, made a resolution: to join an internet dating site. "My best mate met his girlfriend on Mysinglefriend.com and, as everyone seems to be doing, I thought why not?" His decision was far from rare. Sam Yagan, chief executive and founder of OKCupid.com, says: "The period between new year and Valentine's day is our busiest time. Next to making more money and getting fit, finding a partner is everyone's new year's resolution."

While the build-up to February 14 may be a busy time for the on-- line dating industry, the "crunch time" this year, says Mark Brooks, president of the Internet Dating Executive Alliance , will be when the red roses have wilted. "It's then, when subscriptions typically tail off, that we'll see if the industry will be able to withstand the recession."

As the downturn deepens, the search for romance among professionals is undergoing subtle changes. Dating agencies are re-appraising their business models to attract clients, while signs are emerging that customers are beginning to economise on the costs of a "special night out".

The recession has prompted 29-year-old Sophie Shaw, a City of London lawyer to rethink: "I've always strongly resisted the 'boys-pay' thing but recently have been thinking why not?"

Hugo Christopher, a 34-year-old designer from west London, has a new late-date policy in order to avoid restaurant bills: "I generally say, 'I'm working late, shall we meet at 9.00? I'll grab a sandwich in the office, you might want to eat beforehand too?'" If a meal is unavoidable, he says, he is becoming well-practised in trotting out lines like: "I've heard the best test of a restaurant is the house wine, shall we order it?" Efforts to cut back have not so far led Mr Christopher to end his membership of Mysinglefriend, whose online blog recently advised users to go on snack dates rather than dinner dates.

Greg Waldorf, of US site Eharmony, is cautious about making long-term predictions but he hopes the downturn may be good for business. "My impression is that consumers are prioritising this area of their lives. We've seen more site traffic when the stock market has gone down."

Mary Balfour, founder of 25-year-old offline dating agency Drawing Down the Moon, which charges for introductions as well as some fee-paying sites and two that offer free membership, smartdating.co.uk and grownupdating.co.uk, agrees: "A lot of City high-flyers are saying things to us like they are going to concentrate on the more important things in life like relationships rather than pay cheques and bonuses."

She has observed some emerging spending differences between the genders: "We do find that quite a lot of men start their search for a partner on the internet now [because] it's a cheaper option, whereas women are still heading for personal agencies."

Some are tempted by free online dating sites. Subscription sites may worry they will lose money-conscious members, needing to cut back on typical monthly charges of $25 (£18), to the free sites such as Plentyof-fish.com and OKCupid.com, as well as social networking sites. In 2006, 8 per cent of traffic to online dating services went to free sites. By 2008 this had reached 24 per cent, according to Hitwise, the market research company that tracks how people use the web. Mr Yagan believes the recession will accelerate this trend: "We are seeing over-35s [the demographic that pays for dating services] joining our site. When you are trying to be frugal, a dating site might well be one of the things you cut back on if there are free sites on offer."

Mr Brooks disagrees: "At the end of the day 20 bucks a month isn't that much to spend. People can rationalise it by saying that it's cheaper than going out for a night out and wasting much more and not meeting anyone."

Ross Williams, CEO of Global Personals, which owns hundreds of niche subscription sites, believes members will not cut back. He is undaunted by the challeng-e from free sites. In fact, he says they help by of-fering a way for users to try out such services. Such logic persuaded Match.com to launch a free site, DownToEarth.com, last month.

"You get what you pay for," says Mr Williams. "Users don't want a free-for-all. They want to know that their potential dates are serious about relationships." A free site cannot give the same customer service as a subscription version, he says: "Free sites are more likely to have spammers trying to con people out of money and married timewasters on their books because there is no one gatekeeping."

Ms Balfour says: "There have been a lot of challenges over the years from the internet and free sites. I've seen some go to the wall. But some people will al-ways pay - they hope it signals ser-ious intent about a relationship."

Hillie Marshall, founder-owner of 20-year-old social events and dinner dates agency Dinner Dates, says the recession is making her clients demand more of the service: "Our clientele are from their late twenties, professionals, with a lot from the City. Because they have less time and are more money-conscious, they are more demanding."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Blogs that spin a web of deception

Blogs that spin a web of deception

By David Gelles

Published: February 12 2009 02:00 | Last updated: February 12 2009 02:00

An overenthusiastic em-ployee from the computer supplies maker Belkin posted an offer online last month - $0.65 for anyone willing to write a positive review of Belkin products on Amazon.com. Several people took up the offer, producing gushing appraisals of Belkin products they had never used.

After a blogger exposed the scam, news organisations jumped on the story. The offer was removed and Belkin's president weighed in with an apology.

The incident was a public relations disaster for Belkin. It was also a prime example of "Astroturfing", the unsavoury marketing practice of generating fake grassroots enthusiasm for a product.

Given the anonymity afforded by the internet, it is hardly surprising that deceptive marketing is on the rise. Consumers are spending more time online and companies are seeking new ways to reach them.

But now, in an effort to regulate how employees behave on the web, companies and industry groups are developing their own online codes of ethics. They want to ensure that when staff do engage with social media, they act ethically.

Last year, Coca-Cola established its own set of social media guidelines and distributed them in a memo to all employees. The policy emphasises the need for transparency and encourages employees to use common sense when discussing the brand online. "We've always had very diverse channels to reach consumers," says Adam Brown, digital communications director. "Wherever they are, that's where we go. That's now evolved into the need for a social media policy."

So when Mr Brown went online to promote Coca-Cola's Super Bowl advertisements, he followed the guidelines. On Facebook, Mr Brown announced that he was a Coke employee and pointed other users to the Coke ads on YouTube. On Pittsburgh Steelers fan forums, Mr Brown, who is from Pittsburgh, named his employer and then directed fans to the Coke blog, which had an interview with Steelers' defensive star Troy Polamalu.

Mr Brown said more deliberate engagement with online conversations was a necessity for a global company such as Coca-Cola. "We're mentioned several thousand times a day on blogs, and there are several hundred tweets about us on Twitter," he says. "There is a lot of conversation taking place about our brand without us. Where appropriate, we wanted to start getting involved."

Companies began interacting with social media years ago. But only recently have those involved with the industry perceived a need to develop ethical standards. Among the first to do so was The Word of Mouth Marketing Association, an organisation for the viral and buzz marketing industry. Womma published an ethics code in 2005, emphasizing honesty of relationship, opinion and identity.

Since then, many companies have used the Womma code as a blueprint for their own guidelines. "Companies are learning every day that there is a right way and a wrong way to engage with social media," says Paul Rand, vicepresident of Womma's board and head of its ethics project. "Some companies are learning by touching the burning pot; some companies are learning from the mistakes of -others."

One company that "touched the burning pot" is Shelfari, a social networking site for book lovers, owned by Amazon. As it battled for market share in late 2007, it came under fire for its poor design and clunky user interface. Soon, comments appeared on more than 50 blogs attesting to Shelfari's greatness. "I have been on Shelfari for a couple of months now and absolutely love it," read one. "Shelfari is such a great site. I joined a couple of months ago and I have been hooked on it ever since," read another.

But all the comments were posted by the same user, "schaufferwaffer", who was soon exposed as a Shelfari employee. Shelfari's chief executive admitted to the Astroturfing (he blamed it on an intern who knew no better), and promised it would never happen again.

Such behaviour is declared out of line in the "disclosure best practices toolkit", an ethics code drawn up by the Blog Council, an organisation for heads of social media at big companies. The document advises employees and agencies to announce whom they work for when communicating with blogs or bloggers. It also encourages employees to provide a means for contacting them directly, if someone they interact with via social media wants to follow up with a twoway conversation. The toolkit also warns against using pseudonyms.

IBM was one of the first companies to develop its own social media policy. In 2005, it published its "social computing guidelines", which insist that employees write under their own names, using the first person, and make it clear they are speaking for themselves and not on behalf of IBM. It also prohibits employees from referencing clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.

UPS is developing its own online ethics policy after recognising how damaging Astro-turfing and other online misbehaviour can be for a company's reputation. "If one of our airplanes goes down, we have a very clear plan for getting information to the media," says Norman Black, director of global media services. "We realised we did not have a good plan for responding to a crisis on the -internet."

In some countries, deceptive marketing practices are not only frowned upon but also illegal. In the UK, the law identifies "falsely representing oneself as a consumer" as a punishable offence. And in 2006, the US Federal Trade Commission issued regulations stating that word-of-mouth marketers must disclose their relationships. But in spite of these new rules there has been little enforcement of the measures.

Even without prosecution, Belkin seems to have learnt its lesson. Melody Chalaban, speaking for the company, says Belkin will soon be holding seminars to teach employees how to interact ethically with social media, and is also considering joining Womma. "We want to stress that this is an isolated incident," says Ms Chalaban. "We don't endorse or condone unethical practices like this."

The last post: underhand tactics can end in a PR disaster

* Flogging . Fake blogs can help companies get a personal voice behind a marketing campaign - but they risk a PR disaster if they are uncovered. When Sony tried to boost sales of its PSP portable gaming unit, it started a blog supposedly by two boys who wanted PSPs for Christmas. When it was revealed as a fake, Sony apologised and took it down.

* Astroturfing. A technique that gets its name from the practice of generating fake grassroots enthusiasm. One Florida company, PayPerPost, serves as a matchmaker between companies willing to pay for good press and bloggers willing to plug products that they have never used. After receiving criticism, PayPerPost now requires bloggers to disclose that their posts are sponsored.

* Comment spamming. Flooding the comment fields of blogs with enthusiastic notes about a company, even with full disclosure, is not welcomed by web users. When a Motorola employee commented on dozens of posts on a technology blog - each comment a plug for the new Motorola Krave - bloggers responded with snide criticisms of his spamming, which duly ceased.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Toolkit for avoiding bad decisions

Toolkit for avoiding bad decisions

By Stefan Stern

Published: February 11 2009 22:50 | Last updated: February 11 2009 22:50

Think Again
Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You
By Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead and Andrew Campbell
Harvard Business Press $27.95, £17.99

The Sinclair C5 trike. The Bay of Pigs fiasco. The acquisition of ABN Amro by Royal Bank of Scotland. Sir Fred Goodwin (pictured below), former chief executive at the troubled RBS, told British MPs on Tuesday that buying its Dutch rival had been a “misstep”, while Sir Tom McKillop, former RBS chairman, said it was “a bad mistake”.

When you try to find out why some mistakes get made, the answer often comes back: “It seemed like a good idea at the time”.

That is the problem. It is not that leaders in business or politics are stupid – not often, anyway. They have teams of intelligent advisers. They usually have access to good data. They are (mainly) rational. They believe they think through the options calmly and objectively, and that they take only calculated risks. And yet bad decisions get made and things go wrong, sometimes disastrously. Why?

That is the question that lies behind this new book, Think Again. The authors are exploring territory they know well. Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at the Tuck School of Business, wrote Why Smart Executives Fail (2003); Jo Whitehead and Andrew Campbell, both directors at the Ashridge Strategic Management Centre in London, have also worked as consultants to big corporations and have seen managers make bad decisions in spite of the benefit of every possible kind of assistance.

So why write another book? They have new information to offer. The authors have explored the growing body of research into how the brain functions. Drawing on these findings, they have defined four basic pitfalls that fool decision makers. They also suggest four “safeguards” – interventions – and, taken together, this material provides a toolkit to help managers avoid making bad decisions.

The authors made sure at the outset that their analysis would be considering truly wrong decisions, not just cases of bad luck. They established that bad decisions come in two stages: first, an individual or group of individuals makes an error of judgment; and second, a flawed decision-making process fails to correct the mistake.

The four sources of error are: misleading experiences, misleading prejudgments, inappropriate self-interest and inappropriate attachments.

‘The authors made sure that their analysis would be considering truly wrong decisions, not just cases of bad luck’

“Our brains use two processes that enable us to cope with the complexities we face: pattern recognition and emotional tagging,” they write. “If we are faced with unfamiliar inputs – especially if the unfamiliar inputs appear familiar – we can think we recognise something when we do not. We refer to this as the problem of misleading experiences.” When Quaker Oats CEO William Smithburg decided to buy the soft-drink maker Snapple in 1994, he thought he would be repeating the success of the Gatorade acquisition of 1983. It was, in fact, a very different proposition. The deal failed.

In addition, previously formed judgments may be neither sensible nor applicable in a new situation. This can “disrupt our pattern recognition process, causing us to misjudge the information we are receiving,” the authors say. “We refer to these as misleading prejudgments.” It is a bit like shouting “Hello!” to a stranger we think we have recognised, or misjudging the trajectory of a tennis ball. Our pattern recognition skills are fallible – more so than we realise.

But decision-making is an emotional process too – again, more than we think. We may have inappropriate attachments to colleagues when cuts must be made, or to a strategy we have emotionally invested in. And we may have inappropriate self-interest as far as personal gain or reputation are concerned.

The authors’ four safeguards are: first, provide decision makers with new experience or data and reduce the risk of failure at source. Second, introduce group debate and challenge to the prevailing view. Third, have better corporate governance – formal procedures and structures that ensure decisions are tested. And fourth, have better monitoring of ongoing decisions.

All four safeguards are required to avoid the “one plan at a time” mistake: getting locked into a decision without there being a chance to halt it.

Think again, the authors say. They are right. Reading this book will not mean you pursue a mistake-free career. But choosing to read it may be one of your better decisions.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Banda Aceh’s history lessons

Banda Aceh’s history lessons

By John Aglionby

Published: February 14 2009 01:15 | Last updated: February 14 2009 01:15

Clambering over a decommissioned, rusting 3,500-tonne floating power station would not usually be high on my holiday to-do list. Particularly when the facility is no longer afloat. And there is no shade from a searing tropical sun. And I’m travelling with my mother, wife, daughter, aged five, and three-year-old son.

But the four-storey-high metal monster in Banda Aceh is no ordinary power-generating installation. Carried 2.5 miles inland into the city centre, it is one of the most striking illustrations of the power of the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami that devoured large chunks of this city on the northern tip of Sumatra.

 More than a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean were affected by the tsunami and the 9.2-magnitude earthquake that triggered it. But nowhere more so than the Indonesian province of Aceh, the closest land to the quake’s epicentre. Here 167,000 people were killed and half a million displaced, 3,000km of roads destroyed and 60,000 hectares of agricultural land rendered unusable. 

Four years on, Aceh’s reconstruction has been so successful it has arguably become one of south-east Asia’s hidden holiday destinations. This was post-atrocity tourism with no guilt attached.

For the children it was a fascinating lesson on the power of Mother Nature – combined with adventures few of their friends’ holidays could match. From the power station’s upper deck we could see for miles and appreciate what those mind-boggling death toll statistics meant. The corrugated iron roofs of thousands of new houses sparkled in the afternoon sun; the patchwork quilt of colours and construction styles testament to the hundreds of agencies that flocked here from around the world. 

Near the shore, several tsunami-proof “escape buildings”, that look halfway between a multi-storey car park and a millefeuille dessert, rise reassuringly above the houses. In the other direction is the almost-completed tsunami museum.

But the tsunami and its aftermath is only half of Aceh’s recent history. For while exploring the informative and tastefully planned tsunami education park at the base of the power station we were forcefully reminded of the other half of the story.

Alongside us, also learning about tsunami were two dozen pre-teen orphans and their teachers. But these children had not lost their parents on December 26 2004. Their parents were victims of the 29-year separatist conflict waged by the Free Aceh Movement (Gam) that ended in August 2005, when the tsunami focused both Gam and government minds on what was really important in life.

The fighting had effectively killed off tourism, except for a few brave backpackers who risked travelling to Sabang island off Banda Aceh to feast on the still gloriously rich underwater life. Thus a large part of Aceh’s attractiveness is that it has not been on holidaymakers’ radars for, quite literally, decades.

Any worries about insensitive gawping were quickly put to rest. People were keen to share their stories and explain what happened, although more so over the tsunami than the conflict that left some 12,000 people dead.

One of Banda Aceh’s must-see sights is the fishing boat that came to rest on top of a house in Lampulo. The man living in the house next to it spent 20 minutes answering our questions on what happened that fateful Sunday.

Some 60 people had sought refuge on the first-floor of his house watching the water rise ever higher. “Then this boat was carried towards us,” he said. “We thought it would crash into us but it stopped right next to the house. We were all able to clamber aboard. It was the difference between life and death.” The boat is now supported by concrete pillars and a ramp has been built so visitors can see inside it.

But Banda Aceh is a tiny fraction of what the province offers tourists. The west coast beaches offer glorious white sand and stretch for miles. Many of them are now deserted apart from herds of water buffalo struggling to find shade amid the tree stumps. “Where are the houses?” my daughter Tara asked as we tucked into delicious shark curry at a beach shack. “Did the tsunami take them away? And where are the people that lived here?” she persisted with the unrelenting but innocent fascination of a five-year-old. “Will we find them if we swim in the sea?”

“Can we swim please, Daddy?” Julien, my son asked immediately. He was clearly excited by the prospect of stumbling on something unexpected. At Lampuuk, a village made famous by the photographs taken of it from the air in the days after the tsunami, we did find something unexpected. No building was left more than 1ft high except for the mosque, which amazingly remained largely intact.

Julien could only be dragged away from the 27ºC water by the prospect of watching a freshly-caught snapper being barbecued at a beachside café.

............................

Details

Most visitors arrive in Aceh at Banda Aceh’s Sultan Iskandar Muda airport. AirAsia flies daily from Kuala Lumpur, Firefly, a subsidiary of Malaysia Airlines flies four days a week from the Malaysian city of Penang.

We stayed in the Hermes Palace, one of four perfectly satisfactory four-star hotels in Banda Aceh.

John Aglionby is the FT’s Jakarta correspondent

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: The Defender of Kabul: A librarian’s labour of love for Afghanistan

Excerpts:

“I used to argue with the young men that they should finish school before they went off to fight, but they said, ‘Oh no, I’m going to the jihad!’ So now these young men, who should be at the peak of their productive abilities, don’t have the mental skills or the emotional skills to deal with ordinary, day-to-day life.”  However, she remains optimistic because of the attitude of young Afghans, who she says are determined to make something of their lives and their country: “I find their honesty very appealing. I don’t like what’s happening in the politics here, but the young people give me hope. They don’t have much money because there aren’t many jobs, but they will spend what little they have to go take an IT course, or go take a business course, or do something. They haven’t given up.”

===

The Defender of Kabul: A librarian’s labour of love for Afghanistan

By Jon Boone

Published: February 14 2009 00:30 | Last updated: February 14 2009 00:30

In the 1960s, when the historian and writer Nancy Hatch Dupree first travelled from the US to Afghanistan during the country’s brief flowering of social liberalism, Kabul was known as the Paris of the East and visitors could travel freely. Girls in miniskirts made their way to school, people left the city at the weekend to stay at ski lodges, and the equestrian set amused themselves with dressage competitions. Some 40 years later, Dupree and I meet on a gloomy autumn evening in a once-grand manse in central Kabul. The neighbourhood is smart, in spite of the broken roads and dilapidated buildings beginning to give way to a rash of garish concrete mansions, built on the spoils of the opium trade. The manse serves as a guesthouse for the young people who work for Acted, a French aid agency. Dupree, who at 82 is stooped but sprightly, says she spends time among the young aid workers because they remind her of how things used to be.

“Everyone says you can’t move, you can’t travel, it’s too dangerous,” she says. “But here it’s like the old days. Acted people pop in and out and say, ‘Well, I’m off to Pul-i-Khumri, see you in a few days.’” Despite the tense, watchful security guard at the front door, who double-checks my credentials when I knock, and despite the high walls and the razor wire that hem in Kabul’s expats, there is at least a semblance of normality in the guesthouse. The sound of a drinks party and barbecue is just audible from the garden.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Reportage - Nov-24

The party outside offers a faint, receding echo of the place Dupree found on her arrival, and where she discovered the two great loves of her life: a spectacular landscape, rich in the ruins of civilisations from Zoroaster to Alexander the Great, and her late husband Louis, an American paratrooper-turned-archaeologist and the greatest western expert on Afghanistan of his generation.

But there is no denying how far Afghanistan is from any sort of return to the “good old days”. Ziggy Garewal, the country director of Acted, puts her head round the door of the lounge to check whether her famous house guest needs a cup of tea. Overhearing Dupree’s remarks, she politely demurs. “We do travel,” she says, “except it’s more expensive now because we have to fly everywhere, rather than going by road.”

“Do you?” Dupree says, in a tone of surprise bordering on wonderment.

“Since the IRC incident – no expats by road,” says Garewal, referring to the murder in August 2008 of three foreign women working for the International Rescue Committee, a US charity, who were travelling by road close to the capital. “We can’t fly to Pul-i-Khumri, so we just don’t do it. Taloqan we can fly to, because there’s an airstrip. It’s fine for one or two of us to go, but not for 20 of us to go up and down.”

In the summer months, insurgents twice launched roadside bomb attacks on NGO vehicles in the mountainous central province of Bamyan, a destination that was regarded until then as an oasis of calm and a good place for foreigners, cooped up most of the time in their embassies and compounds, to take weekend breaks. “They’re coming after us, we’re a soft target,” continues Garewal. “We have 700 staff out in the field – the sheer number of people at risk, with so many moving around all the time.”

Dupree looks momentarily crestfallen. But then she perks up, dismissing the present jitters as only someone who has seen Afghanistan in its very darkest days can. “This is new and it probably won’t last,” she declares.

. . .

The street children in Kabul still hawk original, 1970 editions of Dupree’s most famous book, An Historical Guide to Afghanistan, which she wrote for the Afghan Tourist Organisation. In his 2001 play Homebody/Kabul, US playwright Tony Kushner uses great chunks of Dupree’s prose from an earlier work, An Historical Guide to Kabul, for the monologues of his main character, a woman dreaming of Afghanistan.

“Alexander the Great summoned to the Kabul valley a mighty army comprising tens of thousands of soldiers … ” Dupree writes and Kushner quotes “ … from Egypt, Persia and Central Asia and went on to conquer India. When Alexander’s own troops grew weary of battle, in 325BC, they forced their commander to desist from further conflict. Alexander died in 323BC, just as he was planning a return to the Hindu Kush to oversee the Grecianisation of this most remarkable land.”

Although Dupree never got to see a live production of the play, on a cold winter’s day in Kabul, she wears a Homebody T-shirt under her clothes. Her books all highlight how far and tragically the country has fallen. Most of An Historical Guide to Afghanistan is entirely irrelevant to the handful of modern travellers increasingly confined to the largely safe districts of the capital. Only the clinically insane would contemplate following her recommendation of a “leisurely walking tour of the bazaars” of Kandahar, the southern city whose prison used to hold hundreds of Taliban insurgents, until they were freed in a spectacular jail break last summer. Even Kabul is barely recognisable from her descriptions.

Not even the two giant Buddhas of Bamyan have escaped the ravages. Dupree first visited the magical mountain valley and the monumental statues soon after her arrival in the country with her first husband, a US diplomat. It was the sight of the buddhas – built in the sixth century AD, and blown to smithereens by the Taliban in March 2001 – that transformed her from diplomatic wife into one of the world’s foremost scholars on Afghanistan. It also led to what she calls the “great scandal” of her divorce and remarriage to Louis Dupree.

She knew something of the dramatic valley from a handful of classes she had taken at Columbia University as part of a Chinese degree. She was enlisted as “trip historian” for the US ambassador’s first visit to the Bamyan valley in the early 1960s. At a diplomatic cocktail party shortly after her return to Kabul, she berated the head of the Afghan Tourist Organisation for the lack of any guides to one of the wonders of the world. He replied that she should write a guide herself. A French diplomat who overheard the challenge taunted Dupree, saying she had better take the project on “unless you enjoy playing bridge and ladies’ coffee mornings”.

Already fearful of being underemployed in Kabul, her work on the book led to her first meeting with Louis, whom she approached for information about Bamyan’s prehistory. But when she submitted her manuscript to “the great professor”, his initial, scribbled verdict was that her work was “adequate but nothing original”.

It was an unpromising start to what would turn into the great intellectual companionship they would ultimately share, which Louis would describe as his attempt to “understand Afghanistan one cell up, from prehistoric to modern”. He was well placed to do that, running archaeological digs in the countryside for part of the year and spending the rest of the time writing reports on anything he chose, including contemporary politics, for the American Field Service.

Two years after that first meeting, Nancy Hatch divorced her diplomat husband who, in turn, went on to remarry Louis’s first wife. Aware that this could cause embarrassment in the small world of Kabul expat society, she wrote to the US ambassador to inform him of their plans.

“His solution was to throw a huge party for us when we returned so that we could get it all out in the open,” she says. Nancy and Louis married on a winter’s day in 1966 in a shrine on the western outskirts of the city (which both had lobbied to save from demolition) with a top Islamic scholar officiating – “a maulana”, she explains, “much higher up than a mullah”.

. . .

For almost 20 years, Afghanistan became the Duprees’ adopted country, and they lived through all the successive tragedies that befell it: Soviet occupation, civil war and the brutal Taliban regime that would eventually declare war on the pre-Islamic antiquities of Afghanistan that the couple loved. Most recently, Dupree has watched at close quarters the spectacular failure of the post-2001 international effort to put Afghanistan back on its feet, with billions of dollars that she believes have been wasted on “massive projects with no follow-up”.

Her unrivalled knowledge of Afghanistan has been sought by everyone from the United Nations, which commissioned her to investigate the cultural damage inflicted on the country, to Osama bin Laden, who once approached her for help in acquiring import certificates to bring heavy digging equipment from Pakistan. He was “very shy and polite”, she recalls, but she was puzzled why he thought she could help with such “outlandish requests”.

Louis’s failing health eventually prompted the couple to return to the US, where Louis “had the bad grace to die” in March 1989. But after a few months as a lecturer at Duke University, where Dupree had taken over her husband’s courses, she felt the pull of Afghanistan once again. “For the rest of the school year I was so busy preparing lectures that it wasn’t until the classes finished that I realised what had happened. I went into a big depression. But then, Acbar [an NGO umbrella group, then based in Peshawar in Pakistan] called and said, ‘We bought Louis’s big idea but it’s not working, so you come here and put yourself where his big mouth is.’ ”

Louis’s “big idea” was to preserve the knowledge accumulated by the many anthropologists, aid workers and experts who have been coming to Afghanistan since the 1960s, generating huge numbers of surveys, reports and project proposals. The vast collection not only chronicles 40 years of development efforts, but also stands as a memorial to Louis, the former soldier who took advantage of America’s GI Bill to go to Harvard and turned himself into an expert in the prehistoric archaeology of central Asia.

For years, the Duprees housed their archive in Peshawar, which straddles one of the main routes into Afghanistan from the east. The couple had retreated there temporarily in 1978, when they were thrown out of Afghanistan after Louis was accused of spying. It’s a charge Dupree totally denies, but following Louis’s death, US Senator Gordon Humphrey is reported to have confirmed that Louis had indeed consulted for the CIA.

The Duprees’ exile marked the end of a halcyon period during which the couple’s home in Quola Pushta – a central Kabul neighbourhood which she says was a bit “fringe” compared to where the rest of the foreign community lived – became the centre of Kabul’s social life. Its doors were permanently open to top Afghans and foreign diplomats for what became known as “the five o’clock follies” – a daily bar to which all were invited. But disaster was looming. Fifty years of stable monarchy, during which Afghanistan had prospered by successfully navigating a path between rival cold war blocs, came to an end in 1973 when the king’s brother-in-law seized power and declared himself president. The socialist government of Mohammed Daoud Khan pursued modernisation policies, including a push for women’s rights, threatening the traditional lifestyle of the religiously conservative countryside. Meanwhile, Kabul University student politics laid the seeds for future disaster with clashes between communists and Islamists, who would later emerge as the mujahideen. Another coup in 1978 brought in a more hardline, communist regime and interference in Afghanistan’s affairs by Moscow and Washington only increased.

Dupree recalls how modern ideas had seeped into Afghanistan, largely from a fast-rising and dissatisfied middle class that had been sent overseas to acquire the skills needed for the government’s modernisation programmes, but had also picked up ideas about democracy.

“Sure, in the 1960s and 1970s we had a great time here and we loved it and we thought that this was the Paris of the East,” says Dupree. “But Louis wasn’t connected with any official office here, so he was quite independent in making his acquaintances and he knew that [while] it was all beautiful on the surface, there was this terrible spy network underneath. When he was arrested they interrogated him all night and all day in three different languages, trying to trip him up. It was obvious that they had had a mole in those five o’clock follies.”

The couple were finally kicked out of the country after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979, and sought sanctuary in Peshawar. Millions of Afghans were to follow suit, as their country descended into nearly three decades of war. Louis semi-seriously claimed “refugee status”, and the couple took up residence in Dean’s Hotel – the hang-out of spies and journalists during the city’s cold war heyday. The colonial-era building has now been pulled down to make way for the sort of concrete-and-glass monstrosities popular on both sides of the border.

Before it was demolished, Peter Jouvenal, a legendary freelance cameraman who now runs a hotel in Kabul, rescued the bronze plaque on room 22 that marked it out as the “Dupree Suite”. He says he liked spending time with the Duprees in the days of jihad because they were among the few people who cared about Afghanistan, rather than about “beating the Soviets without worrying what would happen afterwards”.

“They were very peaceful people,” recalls Jouvenal. “Louis was not interested in getting involved in mujahideen groups, despite being a former paratrooper.” But although the Pakistani government asked Louis to keep a low profile during his exile in their country, he made several forays with the mujahideen into Afghanistan. His wife never accompanied him, worried that she would slow the resistance fighters and endanger them – “just so I could say, ‘When I was with the mujahideen ... ’”

They continued their work among the world’s largest refugee population. It was here that Louis had the idea of establishing a resource centre for all the different aid workers and Afghan experts who could no longer travel freely in Afghanistan, and creating an archive of their work. Louis died just after the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1989.

“Louis was in the hospital and he died soon after that and I said to him – he was still composed then – ‘Well, you’ve always said the Soviets would leave and people made fun of you, but now they’re gone and you should be pleased.’ He looked at me and said, ‘The trouble is just beginning.’” He was right; for Dupree, by far the bleakest period was after 1992, when the government of communist placeman Mohammad Najibullah finally fell and rival mujahideen factions fought for control of Kabul.

“Actually the Soviets didn’t destroy this city very much,” she says sadly. “The Afghans did it themselves, and that hurt.”

. . .

As the struggle against the Soviet army turned into a war between rival Afghan factions, the country’s cultural heritage sustained huge damage. Historic sites were pillaged and most of the collection in Kabul’s museum (for which Dupree had written a guide) was stolen and sold on the black market. Dupree managed to buy back a tiny fraction under the auspices of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage, which she founded.

With so much lost and destroyed, Dupree’s archive is not just a precious store of historical knowledge but also a personal memorial to the loves of her life. Tellingly, she refers to the collection of some 40,000 documents as part of herself, and says that it was this that kept her in Peshawar after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 evicted the Taliban regime, prompting many exiles to return. “There was this big exodus from Pakistan – all the NGOs, UN, everybody came to Kabul,” she says. “But I didn’t because I wasn’t sure it was secure and I’m very vulnerable – it’s all paper. At that point I had no scanning, no back-up. It would have only taken one daisy cutter from an American, or a match from a mullah, and I’d be finished.”

Fearing Pakistani bureaucrats would find some way to keep her precious collection in Peshawar, the archive was finally moved piecemeal in 2003, smuggled out by Dupree’s devoted staff in hidden sacks of documents amid the cargoes trundling through the Khyber Pass. A new $2m library is being built on Kabul University’s leafy campus to house it, with the money and land provided by powerful friends, some of them dating back to the 1960s and the five o’clock follies.

She hopes her collection will do something to prevent the hordes of aid workers and development experts who descended on Afghanistan after 2001 repeating old mistakes and perpetually drawing up the same tired strategies. But in the past seven years there has been a flood of reports written on Afghanistan and, she concedes, “they just write the same thing over and over again – just regurgitating it. That’s why their strategies are so humdrum. They are based on work that doesn’t have much basis in fact, or in the realities of Afghan culture, because the people don’t go out and talk to Afghans.”

And then it becomes clear that there is more to Dupree’s disappointment with today’s travel restrictions for foreigners than a simple nostalgia for those prewar, halcyon days. “I saw with my own eyes a piece of paper from one of the embassies that said, ‘If you must go out and do shopping you go in your armoured car, with your escort, with your radio. You go in the shop and you pick out what you want. Don’t talk to the shopkeeper’ – it actually said that.

“So they don’t interact with the Afghans and they sit there staring into their computers dreaming up fantasy strategies.” Too often, she says, foreigners compound this mistake by believing they can fix Afghanistan’s problems with cash. “For the US particularly, money is the remedy to everything. Throw money at it and have instant implementation of massive projects and then turn away and don’t pay any attention to the follow-up. That is not sustainable and it won’t work. But they are doing it in Pakistan now, in the Fata [Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the frontier where the Taliban and al-Qaeda leaderships are based] – and what are they doing? They are creating friction because everyone is trying to get hold of their money. But it’s hard to dissuade these people.”

. . .

Dupree has great confidence in the power of books to bring about change in Afghanistan, not just through her collection of documents, but also a village library scheme she has set up to help bolster literacy rates in a country where, like so much else, basic skills have been destroyed by three decades of war.

“I used to argue with the young men that they should finish school before they went off to fight, but they said, ‘Oh no, I’m going to the jihad!’ So now these young men, who should be at the peak of their productive abilities, don’t have the mental skills or the emotional skills to deal with ordinary, day-to-day life.”

However, she remains optimistic because of the attitude of young Afghans, who she says are determined to make something of their lives and their country: “I find their honesty very appealing. I don’t like what’s happening in the politics here, but the young people give me hope. They don’t have much money because there aren’t many jobs, but they will spend what little they have to go take an IT course, or go take a business course, or do something. They haven’t given up.”

Likewise Dupree. She says there is nothing to draw her back to the US, and every few weeks she visits Kabul from Peshawar, despite the fact that the frontier city is now extraordinarily dangerous. The Tribal Areas are in what looks like full-scale revolt against efforts by unmanned US drone aircraft and the Pakistani military to stem the rising tide of the Taliban. When I met Dupree again in January, amid the freezing book stacks of Kabul University, where staff are laboriously digitising part of the collection, she is not quite as cheerily optimistic about the region’s future as she had been the previous autumn, noting how the Taliban have infested some of the provinces to the south of Kabul.

At 82, she has recently had to move from the house in Peshawar where she has lived with a large collection of cats for the past 15 years, after her landlady pushed up her rent. She rarely ventures out from her new abode after a rash of kidnappings and killings of foreigners in Peshawar, including an attempt to shoot the top US diplomat in the city. Absurdly, it would be safer for her to live full-time in Kabul, but she says Peshawar is the only place where she is left alone for long enough to “get on with my writing”.

But for all the difficulties and dangers, she isn’t leaving. “I think there’s a future for these people and I think maybe I can help. That’s why I stay here. A lot of people call it the Afghan virus. You get it and it’s like malaria: you think you are free of it and you go away, and suddenly you’re back.”

Jon Boone is the FT’s Afghanistan correspondent.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

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FT: Family fun in Singapore

Family fun in Singapore

By Andrew Jefford

Published: February 14 2009 00:47 | Last updated: February 14 2009 00:47

Laborious yet rewarding travel is for adults. Those travelling with young children prefer easy destinations. En route to Australia, we could have struggled to bundle our 16-month-old and our three-year-old off to Ho Chi Minh City or Angkor Wat. Instead, as we were flying on Qantas on our way to Australia, we went to Singapore. A few friends had muttered disdainfully about it being a tropical Milton Keynes but our exhausted little family gave it an emphatic thumbs up.

It helps that the architecture seems modelled on Gotham City and that the island itself is almost small enough and well enough endowed with transport systems to resemble Sodor, where Thomas the Tank Engine passes his cheeky days. It helps also that everyone speaks English and that the wide-ranging code of Singaporean civic responsibility seemed to extend to compulsory smiling at foreign children, even mid-tantrum. Simply being tropical helps, since most visitor attractions (the Science Park included) come endowed with water features where the children can strip off and get happily wet before going home refreshed. But the city-state has its own intrinsic adult charm as well, based on easy-going multi-ethnicity and a long-standing mercantile raison d’être.

Singapore’s zoo, one of the world’s greatest, is a near-compulsory visit. Try the Night Safari, which occupies a separate site next to the main zoo and is open from 7.30pm until midnight. This is ideal for older children, with its fire-eaters and nocturnal shocks and surprises; there are walking trails as well as an inexpensive tram ride to move you around. The setting of the main zoo itself is superb, with almost as much to detain the botanically curious as the animal-lover. If you want to avoid the heat of the day, book breakfast with the orang-utans; at some point, you will be offered a snake to fondle over the croissants too. The monkeys and apes in general seem to be allowed a latitude of movement that eclipses other zoos, swinging across artfully positioned branches and creepers overhead as well as exhibiting at disconcertingly close quarters, to a chorus of giggles, their spectacular bottoms. Leave enough time for the Asian rarities such as the indolent white tigers.

The Jurong Bird Park nearby (8,000 species) is almost as unmissable as the zoo, and insatiably animal-obsessed children might like to visit the island’s frog and crocodile farms. The leisure islet of Sentosa, complete with man-made beaches, also has an Undersea World, Dolphin Lagoon, Butterfly Park and Insect Kingdom, so there can’t be many species left on earth with no ambassador in Singapore. Children (especially males) tend not to see the point in flowers but if any family member has even a passing interest in orchids, then the Mandai Orchid Gardens and Orchidville are essential visits (those with pushchairs should avoid the former, because of its hilly setting).

The best part of travelling with children, though, is having the chance to discover the small surprises of the world together, thereby redeeming the miseries of messy, rejected meals and post-sleep screaming fits. The ever-changing colours of the neon lights along Clarke Quay at night-time, for example, were considered the summit of exoticism by our pair and we all admired the clever statue of the diving boys halfway up Boat Quay. (Look out for the bronze cat and kitten too.) The 10 minutes I spent discussing with the elder boy why the quayside stones were still warm at night were no less precious.

Singapore’s squeaky clean and efficient MRT (metro) system was an attraction in its own right for the boys, though it took quite a while to explain exactly what the “no durian” symbol might mean (why would anyone, I wondered, want to eat a fruit that smells of vomit?), and the safety video surely deserves a “15 and over” certificate.

The city, as ever, is in a frenzy of further development. Gazing out at the forests of cranes, industrious diggers and mountains of piping scattered along the waterfront development zones proved more compelling than the endless shopping malls along Orchard Road.

You don’t, we reasoned, visit one of the world’s busiest ports and not take a look at the great bay of boats waiting to get their bellyfuls of oil refined or their haystacks of containers shuffled. From the air, the scene resembles maritime art of the 18th and 19th centuries in terms of its teeming throng, even if the ships are less picturesque today. To get a close-up view of the boats, take the Imperial Cheng Ho harbour cruise from Marina South, which in the mornings and afternoons travels out to Kusu Island for a short stopover and gives you a chance to see some of the merchant fleet in all its grimy glory at close quarters.

Kusu itself (“turtle island”) is an anodyne annual pilgrimage spot; almost the most interesting thing about it is the view of the shore of Lazarus Island next door, which looks just the sort of place to bury a chestful of doubloons. Our 45 minutes there, though, gave four little feet their first ever paddle in tropical waters, as well as the chance to hunt for shells along a beach scattered with fallen, half-rotting mangoes. It’s hard to guess what the stuff of memory might be in young heads but those moments will contend with the rest for strangeness and wonder.

...............

Details

Singapore Zoo, 80 Mandai Lake Road, 8.30am-6pm, tel: +65 6269 3411; www.zoo.com.sg

Night Safari, 7.30pm-midnight daily, www.nightsafari.com.sg

Jurong Bird Park, 2 Jurong Hill, 8.30am-6pm, tel: +65 6265 0022; www.birdpark.com.sg

Jurong Frog Farm, 56 Lim Chu Kang Lane 6, 7am-6pm, tel: +65 6791 7229; www.jurongfrogfarm.com.sg

Singapore Crocodile Farm, 790 Upper Serangoon Road, 9am-6pm, tel: +65 6288 9385; www.singaporecrocfarm.com

Sentosa attractions, tel: +65 6736 8672; www.sentosa.com.sg

Mandai Orchid Gardens, 200 Mandai Lake Road, 8am-7pm daily except Monday (8am-6pm), tel: +65 6269 1036; www.mandai.com.sg

Orchidville , 10 Lorong Lada Hitam, 8am-6pm weekdays, 8am-8pm Saturday, 8am-5pm Sunday, tel: +65 6552 7003; www.orchidville.com.sg

Imperial Cheng Ho Harbour Cruise, Marina South Pier, 10.30am-6.30pm, tel: +65 6533 9811; www.watertours.com.sg

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009