CARLOS Tiger without Time

At harvest time in the highland village of Paucho, the first crop of potatoes are baked in a hole in the ground covered with hot rocks, in a ceremony called Watia – a homage to Pacha Mama, or Mother Earth.

Peruvians are very proud of their potatoes

For thousands of years, the potato has been the staple diet of the people of the Andes.

It was first cultivated on the

Altiplano of modern-day Peru and Bolivia, and Peru still has some 2,800 varieties of potato, more than any other country.

Like many people, I took the humble spud for granted, but after the launch of the UN Year of the Potato in Ayacucho in the Peruvian Andes, I am repentant at my lack of reverence for the third biggest food staple in the world.

Boost consumption

I have never seen a vegetable invoke such high passions and poetry.

It was the theme for a seamless succession of carnival floats, colourful costumes, and traditional dance and music. All this was punctuated by cries of “la papa es Peruana” – “the potato is Peruvian”, just in case anyone forgot.

Despite this, consumption of the potato in Peru has dropped to half that of many European countries, with many Peruvians turning to rice or bread.

Many potato-producing communities are very poor

But internationally high food prices, especially wheat – 80% of which is imported in Peru – are causing hardship for the country’s poor, who make up almost half the population.

Peru’s agriculture minister, Ismael Benavides, says the native potato is the answer.

The government is trying to boost its consumption by encouraging more people to eat bread baked with potato flour, starting with schoolchildren and prisoners.

“When I went to the UN in October to launch the International Year of the Potato somebody from an Eastern European country, Ukraine I think, said to me ‘I didn’t realise that potatoes came from Peru’. That showed me that we had to claim our place,” Mr Benavides said at the festival.

“The potato is very important in the diet worldwide and in this age of rising commodity prices… a number of countries, such as China and India, are looking to double or triple their production.”

Marketing tactics

Can Peru benefit from this projected surge in consumption?

“The paradox that we find today is that it is precisely those communities which have developed and given the world the potato are some of the poorest communities in the Andean chain,” says Pamela Anderson, director of the International Potato Centre, based in Lima.

“So part of what we do at the International Potato Centre is to take the native potato and really begin seriously and systematically marketing it, so that these small, poor farmers can use the native potato as a pathway out of poverty.”

The International Potato Centre is working with the government to drive the internal consumption of native potatoes, which come in a rich variety of colours, shapes and flavours.

The idea is not only to help poor rural communities, but also the 70% of Peru’s population that lives in urban centres.

“The price of bread has gone up and I just don’t have the money to buy it as I used to,” says Hermelinda Azurin, who supports her two daughters working as a maid in Lima.

“A kilo of potato bread is 3.4 soles ($1.16) whereas normal bread has gone up to 5.40 soles ($1.84) in my neighbourhood. A kilo of potatoes is just 70 centimos ($0.23). Nowadays we eat potatoes every day in my family.”

The Peruvian government is also looking at exporting native potatoes. They are exotic-looking, organic and have vitamins and amino acids that regular white potatoes do not have.

“We feel the quality of this product should have a market abroad, especially as we are opening markets with the US, Canada and we hope soon with the European Union,” says Mr Benavides.

“These would fall under what is called fair trade, so we feel there’s great opportunities for these potatoes, native in particular.”

‘Infinite variety’

But it is precisely those new markets and free trade deals which many Peruvian farmers believe will mean they will have to compete unfairly with agricultural imports.

Mario Tapia, an agronomist who specialises in Andean crops, says a lack of investment in infrastructure is one part of the problem.

Colourful potatoes are seen as a gastronomic treat abroad

“The potato yields are not so high because there is not high investment in the production, so to compete with farmers who have subsidies in their own countries will not be fair for those farmers in the highlands,” he says.

With or without an export market, the government plans to boost the internal potato market and give technical assistance to the 1.8m potato growers in Peru.

In the gastronomic world, the native potato has enthusiastic advocates.

Peruvian restaurateur Isabel Alvarez says its “infinite variety of colours, textures, shapes and flavours” has prompted positive reactions in Europe.

“The potato is a world in itself, and it is a gastronomic world which we’ve only begun to explore,” she says.

With gastronomic plaudits and its spiritual place in Andean culture assured, the question remains: can Peru’s gift to the world now be used to help those who gave it to us in the first place?

* By Dan Collyns (BBC News, Ayacucho, Peru)

The Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean liner sails from Sydney Harbour as it continues its final world voyage.

Turkish Black Hawk helicopters have been flying into Iraq
The Turkish army says it has killed 41 more Kurdish rebels in the most recent clashes of its incursion in north Iraq.
Two Turkish troops also died in the fighting that brought the toll of rebels killed to 153 since Thursday, a statement on the army website said.

A Kurdish news agency said that Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels had forced the Turkish army to retreat in some areas.

The Iraqi government has urged Turkey to withdraw its forces.

But a spokesman for the Turkish government spokesman said Turkey had the right to defend itself against attacks launched from northern Iraq and operations would continue for as long as necessary.

The new fighting has prompted the Turkish president to postpone an African trip.

Booby traps

The army targeted about 30 PKK shelters during the fourth day of heavy shelling, destroying weapons and equipment, according to the army website.

Funerals for Turkish guards have been taking place in border towns

Clashes between ground troops were also continuing.

“Terrorists trying to flee the region under our troops’ control suffered heavy losses under fire from close quarters overnight,” according to the statement by the Turkish army’s general staff.

Retreating rebels had set booby traps under dead bodies and planted mines on escape routes, the military said.

Earlier, the army had released footage of helicopters taking off from an unnamed military base in the south.

It also showed military vehicles transporting soldiers, as well as infrared sensor images of bombing attacks.

It is not clear where or when the footage was recorded, but Iraqi Kurd officials say Turkish forces struck PKK positions about 20km (12 miles) from the border.

The Associated Press news agency reports that the sound of artillery fire could be heard in the border town of Cukurca.

US concern

Seventeen Turkish troops have been killed since the fighting started and funerals attended by military commanders and top politicians have been taking place in border towns.

 (a detailed map of the border region)

The Turkish authorities launched the cross-border attack on Thursday night, after accusing the Iraqi government of failing to stop the PKK from using the area as a safe haven.

Washington has called on Turkey to keep its campaign in Iraq – another US ally – as short as possible.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul was due to begin a four-day trip to Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Congo on Tuesday.

A presidential spokesman told AFP news agency that the visit had been postponed because “the president wished to be in Ankara while the operation is still under way”.

More than 30,000 people have been killed since the PKK began fighting for a Kurdish homeland in south-eastern Turkey in 1984.

The US, the EU and Turkey regard the PKK as a terrorist organisation.

Palestinian students attend a protest calling for an end of the Israeli blockade to the Gaza Strip. (Reuters: Suhaib Salem)
A protest against Israel’s blockade of the Gaza strip has ended without major incident.

Israeli officials had feared a repeat of scenes from last month when Hamas militants broke open the border between Gaza and Egypt.

Thousands of Gazans held hands and signs calling on Israel to lift its blockade.

The Israeli military strengthened its forces surrounding the strip in case the protesters rushed the barrier between the two territories.

However, Hamas militia men kept most of the protesters back from the main crossing point.

Dozens of youths were still able to throw stones at Israeli troops stationed nearby.

The Israeli military says the troops fired into the air to disperse the crowd and then detained nearly 50 people.

As the protest was breaking up, militants fired several rockets across the border into the Israeli town of Sderot and badly wounded a 10-year-old boy.

* By Middle East correspondent Matt Brown

Polar bear cub Flocke plays with the shoe of her keeper at a zoo in Nuremberg, Germany.

Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton exchanged sharps words over trade as they campaigned before Ohio’s crucial primary.

Sen. Hillary Clinton says Barack Obama’s camp is spreading false information about her positions.

1 of 2 The economy and jobs are top issues for Ohio voters, and the rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination have blamed trade agreements for the loss of manufacturing jobs.

Since 2000, the state’s seen nearly a 25 percent decline in manufacturing employment, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics.

Ohio, along with Texas, votes on March 4. The two states have a total of 334 delegates at stake.

Clinton’s supporters have said she must win both states if she is to close the gap with Obama and stop the momentum he has built up with 11 straight wins.

She trails Obama by 69 delegates, according to CNN calculations.

Recent polls, however, show Clinton leading in Ohio.

Over the weekend, Clinton accused Obama of misrepresenting her record on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Taking a mocking swipe at the Illinois senator’s campaign style, Clinton said people want actions and not words. Watch Clinton mock Obama »

“I could stand up here and say ‘Let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect,’ ” she said Sunday while campaigning in Providence, Rhode Island. Rhode Island and Vermont also hold contests next Tuesday, but only have 36 delegates up for grabs.

Clinton struck a populist tone, saying she has made it clear that she is ambivalent about NAFTA, blasting companies for “turning their backs on Americans” while shipping jobs overseas.

Meanwhile, Obama railed on Clinton for supporting NAFTA when her husband was president. Watch the latest on the back-and-forth »

“Sen. Clinton has been going to great lengths on the campaign trail to distance herself from NAFTA,” Obama said Sunday in Lorain, Ohio. “In her own book, Sen. Clinton called NAFTA one of ‘Bill’s successes’ and ‘legislative victories.’ “

“One million jobs have been lost because of NAFTA, including nearly 50,000 jobs here in Ohio. And yet, 10 years after NAFTA passed, Sen. Clinton said it was good for America. Well, I don’t think NAFTA has been good for America — and I never have,” he said.

The weekend feud kicked off when Clinton blasted recent mailings from the Obama camp, telling a crowd in Cincinnati, Ohio, an Obama mailing spread lies about her positions NAFTA.

The mailer says Clinton was a “champion” for NAFTA while first lady, but now opposes it. NAFTA was negotiated by the first President Bush and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

Citing a 2006 issue of New York Newsday, the mailer says Clinton thought NAFTA was a “boon” to the economy. The term “boon” was actually the paper’s characterization of Clinton’s stance, and not a quote from her.

“Bad trade deals like NAFTA hit Ohio harder than other states. Only Barack Obama consistently opposed NAFTA,” the mailer says.

A visibly angry Clinton lashed out Saturday at Obama over the campaign literature that she said he knows is “blatantly false.”

“Shame on you, Barack Obama,” she said, adding that she is fighting to change NAFTA. Watch Clinton demand a ‘real campaign’ »

Obama “is continuing to send false and discredited mailings with information that is not true to the voters of Ohio,” she said.

With Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland nodding in agreement behind her, Clinton accused Obama of emulating the tactics of Karl Rove, President Bush’s former political director who is reviled by Democrats.

Obama described Clinton’s anger as “tactical” and defended his campaign.

“We have been subject to constant attack from the Clinton campaign, except for when we were down 20 points. And that was true in Iowa. It was true in South Carolina. It was true in Wisconsin, and it is true now,” Obama said.

The spat over the literature is nothing new; the two campaigns sparred over similar mailings before Super Tuesday. Obama defended the mailings, calling them accurate and accusing Clinton of deliberately changing her position on NAFTA for political expediency. He told a crowd in a Lorain, Ohio, factory, “The fact is, she was saying great things about NAFTA until she started running for president.”

Clinton challenged Obama to “meet me in Ohio, and let’s have a debate about your tactics and your behavior in this campaign.”

The two are set to debate Tuesday night in Ohio.

Bill Clinton has said that if his wife wins in Ohio and Texas, she will win her party’s nomination, but, he told voters, “if you don’t deliver for her, then I don’t think she can be. It’s all on you.”

According to an average of three recent polls, Clinton leads Obama in Ohio 49 percent to 39 percent. An additional 12 percent of the state’s likely Democratic primary voters said they were undecided.

The Ohio Democratic poll of polls consists of three surveys: American Research Group (February 23-24), the Ohio Poll (February 21-24), and Quinnipiac (February 18-23).

Recent polls show a close race in Texas.

The Democratic contenders split the Super Tuesday contests on February 5, but since then, Obama has taken every contest.

* Source: CNN

Beijing’s National Aquatics Centre, known as the Water Cube, where swimming events will be staged during the Olympics, is seen lit up with the National Stadium in the background.

It was a night of Old Men and pregnant women at the 80th Annual Academy Awards.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, considered the frontrunner going into the ceremony, lived up to expectations, racking up a leading four Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem.

In accepting the Best Director honor, Joel Coen recalled the experience of making movies alongside his brother since childhood.

“What we do now doesn’t feel that much different from what we were doing then,” Joel Coen said. “We’re very thankful to all of you out there for continuing to let us play in our corner of the sandbox.”

Taking the stage to accept his award earlier in the evening, Bardem paid tribute to the director brothers and their interesting choice of coiffure for his character.

“Thank you to the Coens for being crazy enough to think I could do that and for putting one of the most horrible haircuts in history over my head,” Bardem said in his acceptance speech, referring to the unflattering bowl cut he sports in the film.

Bardem, a native of Spain, was just the first European actor to collect an acting honor Sunday. In the end, all four major acting prizes went to Euro-thesps, with France’s Marion Cotillard winning Best Actress for La Vie en Rose, Britain’s Daniel Day-Lewis winning Best Actor for There Will Be Blood and compatriot Tilda Swinton taking home Best Supporting Actress for Michael Clayton.

Though It girl du jour Ellen Page was passed over in the Best Actress category for her turn as a pregnant teen in Juno, screenwriter Diablo Cody won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the poignant coming-of-age tale.

“This is for the writers,” an emotional Cody said as she hoisted her statuette. “I want to thank all the writers. I especially want to thank my fellow nominees, because I worship you guys. I’m learning from you every day.”

Pregnancy—if not teen pregnancy—was certainly in the spotlight at the awards ceremony, with presenters Jessica Alba, Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman all showing off baby bumps of various sizes.

The blatant display of fertility even inspired host Jon Stewart to invent an imaginary award—creatively dubbed the Baby—which he presented to an absent Angelina Jolie.

“The Baby goes to…Angelina Jolie. Oh my god, Angelina Jolie. I’m just stunned. It goes to Angelina Jolie. That’s terrific,” Stewart joked. “Obviously Angelina couldn’t be with us tonight—it’s tough to get 17 babysitters on Oscars night. I’ll accept this Baby on her behalf.”

(Jolie has yet to officially confirm her pregnancy, but her bulging profile at Saturday’s Spirt Awards left little doubt.)

Other big winners of the night were The Bourne Ultimatum, which notched a trio of Oscars for Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing, and There Will Be Blood, which picked up the statuette for Best Cinematography in addition to Day-Lewis’ acting win. La Vie en Rose was also a double winner, picking up the trophy for Best Makeup, on top of Cotillard’s acting victory.

Ratatouille was named Best Animated Film, marking the second Oscar victory for director Brad Bird, who also won in 2004 for The Incredibles.

The Oscar for Best Original Song went to “Falling Slowly” from the Irish film Once, which managed to beat out three songs from Enchanted and a song from August Rush for the win. In a rare do-over, Jon Stewart invited cowinner Markéta Irglová back to give her thank-you speech after the orchestra inadvertently played her offstage.

In an onstage meeting of pregnant woman and old man, Kidman presented the honorary Oscar to 98-year-old production designer Robert Boyle, in recognition of his contributions to classic films including North by Northwest, The Birds, Marnie and Mame.

It was something of a disappointing night for both Atonement and Michael Clayton, with both films losing out in six of the seven categories in which they were nominated. At least Clayton won in a glamour category; Atonement’s lone honor of the night came in the Best Original Score category.

In his second go-round as host, Stewart had plenty of material to work with, ranging from political quips to references to the recently ended writers’ strike.

“The fight is over,” he said at the opening of the show. “So tonight, welcome to the makeup sex.”

Japanese men mud wrestle at a shrine in Yotsukaido, near Tokyo, in a traditional ceremony to pray for an abundant harvest and good health for babies.

US Democratic front-runners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have traded accusations over a photo of Mr Obama circulating on the internet.
The picture, sent to the Drudge Report website, shows Mr Obama wearing traditional African dress during a visit to Kenya in 2006.

The Obama camp says it was circulated by Mrs Clinton’s staff as a smear. Mrs Clinton’s team strongly denies this.

The row comes as the rivals campaign for two crucial primaries next week.

Analysts say Mrs Clinton needs to win the contests, in Texas and Ohio, to remain in the race to choose the Democratic candidate for November’s presidential election.

‘Fear-mongering’

The photograph shows Mr Obama – whose father came from Kenya – wearing a white turban and a white robe presented to him by elders in the north-east of the country.

Her campaign has engaged in the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election
David Plouffe, Obama campaign chief, accusing the Clinton camp

According to the Drudge Report, which published the photograph on Monday, it was circulated by “Clinton staffers”.
Some Clinton aides have tried in the past to suggest to Democrats that Barak Obama’s background might be off-putting to mainstream voters.

A campaign volunteer was sacked last year after circulating an email suggesting, falsely, that Mr Obama was a Muslim.

But the BBC Justin Webb in Ohio says the photograph – coming at this pivotal moment in the campaign – is being seen by the Obama team as particularly offensive.

His campaign manager, David Plouffe, accused Mrs Clinton’s aides of “the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election”.

The accusation was dismissed by Mrs Clinton’s campaign manager Maggie Williams.

“If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed,” she said.

“Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.”

Mrs Williams did not address the question of whether staffers circulated the photo.

* Story from BBC NEWS:

OHSWEKEN, Ontario (Reuters) – In a grey, shed-like building on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in southern Ontario, Esenogwas Jacobs is getting her kindergarten students ready to head home for the day.

“Gao dehswe,” Jacobs says, calling her students to the door.

“Gyahde:dih,” she adds, it’s time to go.

Her students answer with assertive “ehes.”

No one speaks a word of English.

“I just use Cayuga with them,” Jacobs said. “Mostly they can respond back in Cayuga, so it’s pretty cool.”

The eight children of this kindergarten class carry on their shoulders the hopes for preserving the language of the Cayugas, one of the six nations that make up the Iroquois Confederacy of southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States.

Since the 19th Century and until recently, Canada has pushed for the assimilation of its native population, sending aboriginal children to boarding schools where they were taught the language, culture and spirituality of Canadian society.

While the effort to assimilate aboriginal people into Canadian culture failed, the schools, the last of which closed in 1996, were effective at stunting aboriginal languages.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised to set up a commission to look into the schools, which could lead to a statement of apology similar to one issued by Australia to its aboriginal people this week.

Less than a quarter of aboriginal people in Canada use their ancestral tongue, the government says. The number of fluent Cayuga speakers has dropped from 376 in the 1970s to only 79 today.

“The number of speakers, they’re dying off all the time, like every year,” said Elva Jamieson, who learned the language as a child from her family, but wasn’t allowed to speak it at school. “It gets lonely when you don’t have someone to talk to.”

Jamieson is a teacher at the Gaweni:yo High School, part of the same Cayuga language immersion program that also includes Jacobs’ kindergarten class, as well as a parallel Mohawk language program.

“I think the language speaks to their spirit,” Jamieson said of the 35 pupils at the high school, located about 70 miles southwest of the Ontario capital Toronto. “They’re able to grasp it and go with it.”

While the linguistic knowledge of native speakers like Jamieson is irreplaceable, Gaweni:yo — which means “nice-sounding words” — is helping to slow the erosion of the Cayuga language, and young people are becoming a viable population of fluent speakers.

The most dedicated meet up regularly to chat in Cayuga and practice new words and some even use Cayuga as the primary language at home.

Jacobs, 24, herself a graduate of Gaweni:yo, tries to speak only Cayuga with her boyfriend, another graduate, and she spends evenings visiting with elders to learn new words.

The program has been running since 1986, but this is the first year that it has included a kindergarten class. Many of her young students are the children of fellow Gaweni:yo graduates and Jacobs encourages them to use Cayuga at home, too.

While the dominant language on the reserve is still English, Jacobs is happy with the progress. The language is going through a rebirth, she said. “It feels good knowing these kids are coming up.”

LANGUAGE LOST

Not far from Jacobs’ kindergarten, a group of adults are also studying Cayuga in a crowded community centre classroom. One of them is Oklahoman Sally White, a descendant of the Seneca-Cayuga – a tribe that separated from the Cayuga of Six Nations in the 18th century.

The Seneca-Cayuga spoke a similar dialect, but their language has now been declared extinct, which means a man from Six Nations must go to Oklahoma each year to perform their traditional ceremonies.

“Without him, I don’t think we would have (our ceremonies),” said White, who hopes to learn enough Cayuga to teach the basics to her husband and other members of their community. “It’s just about gone. We’re losing a lot.”

But saving dying languages costs money and for many Canadians the price of immersion programs such as the one at Six Nations may be too steep.

Canada’s Conservative government, elected two years ago, has cut a 10-year, C$173 million ($173 million) language revitalization program, leaving the immersion programs at Six Nations dangling by a thread. School officials do not know if there will be funding to continue past the current year.

The death of the language would be a tragedy, according to linguist Marianne Mithun, who spent 10 years studying the decline of the Cayuga language at Six Nations.

“The loss of language is a devastating loss of identity,” said Mithun, a University of California Santa Barbara linguist who specializes in aboriginal languages in North America. “It is the disappearance of their heritage, a blacking out of their intellectual and cultural history.”

While Cayuga still has enough mother-tongue speakers to document how the language should be spoken, a process that is taking place on Six Nations through video and audio archives, Mithun worries that once all the elders die, the living language will only be a pale shadow of what it once was.

“When you get to see a language like Cayuga, you just see other ways of looking at the world,” said Mithun, commenting on the language’s literal nature. “If we care about understanding the human mind, then we’re really missing the boat if we let these languages slip.”

* By Julie Gordon (15 Feb 2008)

RIBNOVO, Bulgaria (Reuters) – Fikrie Sabrieva, 17, will marry with her eyes closed and her face painted white, dotted with bright sequins. She lives ‘at the end of the world’, tending a hardy Muslim culture in largely Christian Bulgaria.

The remote village of Ribnovo, set on a snowy mountainside in southwest Bulgaria, has kept its traditional winter marriage ceremony alive despite decades of Communist persecution, followed by poverty that forced many men to seek work abroad.

“Other nearby villages tried the traditional marriage after the ban was lifted, but then the custom somehow died away — women wanted to be modern,” said Ali Mustafa Bushnak, 61, whose daughter came to watch Fikrie’s wedding.

“Maybe we are at the end of the world. Or people in Ribnovo are very religious and proud of their traditions.”

Some experts say clinging to the traditional wedding ceremony is Ribnovo’s answer to the persecutions of the past.

Bulgaria is the only European Union nation where Muslims’ share is as high as 12 percent. The communist regime, which did not tolerate any religious rituals, tried to forcibly integrate Muslims into Bulgaria’s largely Christian Orthodox population, pressing them to abandon wearing their traditional outfits and adopt Slavonic names.

The wedding ritual was resurrected with vigor among the Pomaks — Slavs who converted to Islam under Ottoman rule and now make up 2.5 percent of Bulgaria’s 7.8 million population — after communism collapsed in 1989.

But today it is still performed only in the closed society of Ribnovo and one other village in the Balkan country. Young men return from abroad to the crisp mountain snows, just for the winter weddings.

People in Ribnovo identify themselves more by their religion, as Muslims, than by their ethnicity or nationality, and the wedding ceremony is an expression of their piety. The village has 10 clerics and two mosques for 3,500 inhabitants.

DOWRY ON DISPLAY

Fikrie’s family have been laboriously piling up her dowry since she was born — mostly handmade knit-work, quilts, coverlets, sheets, aprons, socks, carpets and rugs.

On a sunny Saturday winter morning they hang the items on a wooden scaffolding, 50 meters long and three meters high, erected specially for the occasion on the steep, muddy road of scruffy two-story houses that leads to her home.

Nearly everyone in the village comes to inspect the offerings: Fikrie’s tiny homeyard has been turned into a showroom for the furniture and household appliances the bride has to provide for her new household.

The girl and her husband-to-be, Moussa, 20, then lead a traditional horo dance on the central square, joined by most of the village’s youth.

But the highlight of the ceremony, the painting of the bride’s face, comes at the end of the second day.

In a private rite open only to female in-laws, Fikrie’s face is covered in thick, chalky white paint and decorated with colorful sequins. A long red veil covers her hair, her head is framed with tinsel, her painted face veiled with and silvery filaments.

Clad in baggy pants and bodice shimmering in all the colors of the rainbow, the bride is presented by her future husband, her mother and her grandmother to the waiting crowd.

Fikrie is not permitted to open her eyes wide until a Muslim priest blesses the young couple. Alcohol is forbidden at the wedding receptions and sex before marriage is taboo.

BANNED RITUALS

Ethnographers say it is hard to date the bridal painting ritual, as the communist regime did not encourage studies into minority ethnic and religious groups.

“It is very likely that it is an invented tradition. It’s their way to express who they are,” said Margarita Karamihova, an associate professor at the Ethnography Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Science.

Experts say Pomaks had identity problems and faced more challenges than the majority of Muslims in Bulgaria, who are ethnic Turks.

“In the 1960s they would ban Islamic music at weddings, then they would not allow traditional clothes, and in the 1980s, the whole traditional Pomak wedding was banned,” said municipality mayor, Ahmed Bashev, born in Ribnovo.

Ribnovo’s inhabitants used to make a living from tobacco and agriculture, but low incomes in the poorest EU country forced men to start seeking jobs in cities in Bulgaria or in western Europe — not least to raise money for a wedding.

Outside influences have been slow to reach Ribnovo and young people rarely marry an outsider. Another Fikrie, 19-year-old Fikrie Inuzova, suggested the women, for whom the acceptable bridal age is up to 22, are not in a rush to modernize.

“My brother wants to travel, see the world… It’s different for men. They can do whatever. I want to stay here and marry.”

* By Tsvetelia Ilieva

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A California arbitrator ordered Health Net Inc to pay $9.4 million in damages and expenses for what he described as “reprehensible” conduct in canceling the policy of a cancer patient after she fell ill, according to documents made public on Friday.

The award to Patsy Bates, 51, included $8 million in punitive damages and raised concerns about the company’s practice of retroactively canceling policies of individuals who make large claims and paying bonuses to underwriters for meeting cancellation targets.

Health Net said in a statement that, while it does not agree with some of arbitration judge Sam Cianchetti’s conclusions, it will immediately adopt a review process for all policy cancellations.

The multimillion-dollar punitive damages award, the first in a so-called recision case, is sure to send a message to other large health insurers who face lawsuits over the practice, said Bates attorney William Shernoff.

“Let’s see if these other big health carriers will change their practices, then we will have done something,” Shernoff told Reuters. “Until this punitive damages award came down, nobody was doing anything.”

Shernoff has three proposed class actions over retroactive cancellations pending in California courts against Health Net, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, as well as a case involving a newborn boy whose Health Net coverage was canceled after he was born blind and with cerebral palsy.

The Bates case brought to light a bonus system in which Health Net set annual policy cancellation targets that it described in terms of numbers of canceled policies and millions of dollars in savings in medical expenses.

CHEMOTHERAPY CANCELED

Bates had health insurance with another company for several years before a Health Net broker solicited and enrolled her in an individual insurance policy in August of 2003.

Bates was diagnosed with breast cancer a month later, and began chemotherapy treatments but had just three of eight planned treatments when Health Net pulled the plug, contending she had lied about her weight and a heart problem on her application.

“Can you imagine having Stage 3 cancer and you think you have insurance and you are supposed to have eight sessions of chemo and you have three and they are stopped?” she told Reuters. “If you haven’t had to go through trauma that you may live and you may not, you may not understand.”

A cancer advocate enrolled Bates in a state-funded program to finish her chemotherapy treatments. Her cancer went into remission but she still has no health insurance and was left with about $130,000 in unpaid medical bills.

In an opinion issued on Thursday, the arbitrator found that Bates’ application had been improperly filled out by the Health Net broker, and inadequately reviewed by its underwriters.

“It is difficult to imagine a policy more reprehensible than tying bonuses to encourage the recision of health insurance that helps keep the public alive and well,” arbitrator Cianchetti wrote in his opinion.

In awarding the $8 million in punitive damages, Cianchetti observed “it is hard to imagine a situation more trying than the one Bates has had to endure.”

He also warned that Health Net ignored its own guidelines as well as “obvious errors,” including at least one error “amounting to criminal conduct.”

In response, Health Net said it would rescind no policies going forward without a binding external, third-party review process.

The company said it planned to clarify its application and underwriting processes to insure it received all necessary information before issuing policies.

Health Net also pledged to do a “comprehensive review” of its processes, including broker training and education.

“We take this very seriously and are committed to resolving these issues,” the company said in a statement.

* By Gina Keating (Feb 22, 2008/ Editing by Gary Hill)

George Clooney wasn’t supposed to say yes. A reporter interviews a movie star at a restaurant or a hotel lobby or an office, with his publicist lurking in the corner, ready to cut off any vaguely interesting questions. But to come over to my house for dinner? That’s a trap no sucker has ever shoved a famous foot into.

Partly because there are so many unknowns—you’re stuck alone chatting up the family while the reporter cooks, you accidentally let slip a cruel joke about a wedding photo, you somehow use the bathroom wrong—and partly because who the hell wants to spend Saturday night stuck at some dork’s house eating undercooked lamb? Would Gwyneth Paltrow come over? Johnny Depp? But George Clooney said yes, of course, why not, sounds fun.

Clooney was the only star who could have said yes, because no other star wears his celebrity so easily. Nominated for another Oscar for Michael Clayton, Clooney has managed to become this era’s leading man without ever conveying the sense that he takes the role seriously. “He’s a throwback to what movie stars used to be,” says Grant Heslov, who has been friends with Clooney since they met in an acting class in 1983 and is now his partner at their new film and TV production company, Smoke House. “You see him and you think, Wouldn’t that be a great life? He seems like a man’s man. He seems like you could meet him at a bar and have a chat with him and it would be easy. And all of that is true.” Sid Ganis, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, says no one works an Oscars event or the red carpet like him. “Clooney is a kind of exception to the rule of celebrity aloofness. Gregory Peck was that way. Totally open. Unabashed. You’ve got to be not afraid,” he says. No other stars are as unfreaked out by their own celebrity, since, like most politicians, they want it either too much or too little. And it’s that ability to be constantly not afraid that makes women love him. “As they say in England, he is up for it,” says Michael Clayton co-star Tilda Swinton. “That means up for pretty much any fun you can think of. He has a way of daring you—which, for those of us who cannot resist a bit of a laugh, can be irresistible.”

Still, this was going to be uncomfortable, this reversal of the natural guest-host order. Three years ago, Clooney invited me to his huge Los Angeles house to interview him, and he was exactly the host you’d expect: relaxed, honest, easy. Four years ago, when I left a message with his publicist to set up a time to talk to him, he simply called my voice mail and left his home number. In the summer, at his six-house compound in Lake Como, Italy, he throws nightly Algonquin-style dinners featuring such guests as Al Gore, Walter Cronkite and Quincy Jones. “He’s an excellent host,” says Tony Gilroy, director of Michael Clayton. “He’s really smart about figuring out what people need and want. Are they hot? Happy? Cold? Thirsty? He has that ability to bend himself to the space he’s in and instantly adjust to the group he’s with.” So I wondered, Can George Clooney possibly be a guest? Or is that just against the natural order of things? And what would I even cook? All his assistant would say was, “He’ll eat whatever is cooking.”

It’s 6:45 on Saturday night when the doorbell rings, a little late. Clooney hit traffic, his assistant called to say, on his way back from visiting his girlfriend in Las Vegas. He’s wearing faded jeans, black laced boots and a zip-up sweater, and he looks less like a movie star than a normal, un-Botoxed 46-year-old unmarried guy coming over for dinner, but he also looks like he’s excited to be here because wherever he is, George Clooney’s also there. He hasn’t brought any wine, and I worry that this guesting thing is just not going to work out. I offer him a glass of red, and he suggests that we sit on the couch, and soon we’re talking about real estate, and it’s fine, and next thing I know, he’s getting a tour of the house. A tour of the house? The man owns a mansion in L.A. and a 15-bedroom villa in Italy! Why don’t I just show the Oscar-winning actor the tape of me in my high school production of Bye Bye Birdie? But he’s nailing this guest role: “I love old houses like this.” “You kept the original stuff.” “It’s nice to have a guest room.” “I love the arches on the shower.” I’m convinced that this is just a normal Clooney Saturday, that he spends his nights Charles Kuralting around L.A., knocking on doors, eating whatever’s cooking and chatting about politics. Within 15 minutes he made me feel comfortable in my own house. Which isn’t so easy when a giant celebrity is over for dinner.

It’s becoming clear to me already that somehow this guy, even in my house, really is a movie star. Maybe the only one we have now. There are plenty of huge box-office draws (Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Johnny Depp) and even more famous celebrities (Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lopez, Lindsay Lohan), but no one besides Clooney is so gracefully both. After an actor achieves media saturation, there’s actually an inverse relation between fame and box-office receipts: people aren’t going to pay for what they can get for free. “There are so many media outlets and this enormous suck on information about you, it’s hard to maintain any kind of aura of specialness and mystery about the work itself, which is trying to be other people,” says director Tony Gilroy. “It was a lot easier to be Bill Holden than it is to be George Clooney.” Or as Clooney says, “Clark Gable wouldn’t have been Clark Gable if there was Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight.”

His strategy for being a movie star is pretty simple, if counterintuitive: he makes fun of himself. It’s the by-product of every successful person’s strategy, which is to figure out what the other person is thinking. “Before they could kill me on Batman & Robin, I said, ‘It’s a bad film, and I’m the worst thing in it.’ You try to defend an indefensible position, you’ll look like a schmuck. The guys I dig don’t do that. Look at Winston Churchill. He said, ‘These are our shortcomings. Now let’s get past it,'” Clooney says. He thinks that’s all Cruise needs to do. “I talked to him the other day, and he’s a good egg. There’s nothing self-serving about what he’s saying. He has to turn it into a way to make fun of himself.”

Clooney also preempts situations that might earn him ridicule later. So he has either turned down every gift bag he’s been offered or has put them up on eBay for charity. “I’ve been smart about that. Rich famous people getting free s___ looks bad. You look greedy. And I don’t need a cell phone with sparkles on it,” he says. He sends handwritten apology letters to the directors whose scenes he ripped off in the movies he directed—Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet, Sydney Pollack. He drives an electric car and a Lexus hybrid but won’t be a spokesman for the environment because he flies a private jet. He feels passionately about Barack Obama but refuses his pleas to campaign for him—other than an introduction in late February in Cincinnati, Ohio—because he doesn’t want it to backfire into a Hollywood-vs.-the-heartland attack. And he downplays and occasionally jokes about his problems, which include a bad back and some short-term memory loss he sustained when working on Syriana, quiet. “I know what pisses people off about fame,” Clooney says. “It’s when famous people whine about it.”

It may look as if he is an effortless movie star, but he has actually given the job a lot of thought. He’s not manipulative, but he is calculating, following the rules he learned from his family. When his aunt Rosemary Clooney went from being on the cover of this magazine to seeing her fame burst because musical tastes changed, she battled depression and took pills for much of her life. He knows random luck will eventually take fame away, just as random luck made him a star. If NBC had put ER on Fridays instead of Thursdays, I might have had Jonathan Silverman over for dinner. And while Clooney didn’t get famous until his 30s, when ER hit, he had kind of always been famous because of his dad, a popular news anchor in Cincinnati. “From the moment I was born, I was watched by other people. I was taught to use the right fork. I was groomed for that in a weird way,” Clooney says. “You give enough. You play completely. You don’t say, I don’t talk about my personal life. People say they won’t talk about their personal life. And then they do. And even when the tabloids say really crappy things and it pisses you off and you know it’s not true, you have to at least publicly have a sense of humor about it.”

He’s just as calculating about his career choices. “He was offered a stupendous amount of money to continue to do Roseanne,” the sitcom he was on for 11 episodes, says his dad Nick Clooney. “I was thinking he could build a little nest egg and maybe acting would pay off after all. He said, ‘No, I’ll be in a cul-de-sac. I’ll be that guy, and that’s all I’ll be.'” He pitched sitcom pilots and dramas and eventually won an Oscar nomination for co-writing the original screenplay for Good Night, and Good Luck. He makes sure to not get stuck in one character or type of film. He has a Joel and Ethan Coen movie coming out in which he plays an idiot (as he did in their O Brother, Where Art Thou?), and he’s working on a movie about the founder of est and a comedy about the 1979 Tehran hostages who escaped. The next movie he directs and co-stars in is Leatherheads, a screwball comedy about pro football in the 1920s that comes out April 4. “After Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck I was offered the Richard Clarke book and every issues movie,” Clooney says. “I didn’t want to be the issues guy because if the issues change, you’re done. The Facts of Life is a good example. If you’re a young heartthrob—which I never caught on as—those fans not only abandon you, but they’re embarrassed to have liked you. It’s the same thing with issues movies. I want to just be a director.”

He is good at slipping into many different worlds, even the one in my kitchen, where he is pouring in the egg mixture while I add the hot spaghetti for the carbonara. He reaches over and stirs the bacon, grabs a string bean from the pot and eats it. He is mad guesting, Olympic-level guesting. He’s been over for two hours, and it occurs to me that the smooth bastard must have turned off his cell phone before he got here. When I leave the table to check on the lamb, he puts extra bacon on my pasta. He’s doing impressions—Pat O’Brien confusedly reporting outside Clooney’s Como villa, expecting Pitt and Jolie’s wedding (Clooney had bought $1,500 worth of flowers and 15 tabletops as a prank on gossip reporters); James Carville denigrating John Kerry’s campaigning skills; Daniel Day-Lewis doing John Huston in There Will Be Blood.

We’re deep into a second bottle of Barolo when Clooney cuts into his rack of lamb, and, oh, there would be blood. This is why a star wouldn’t take this invite, wouldn’t be here, staring at a red-raw-inedible piece of meat. He says it’s fine. I grab it, put it in the oven but forget to turn on the heat, so when I take it back out, it’s just as raw. Fine again, he says. I put it back one more time. He takes more pasta and salad. Rattled, I drop the salt. “Throw it over your left shoulder,” he says. “That’s just bad mojo. You know it, and I know it.” He may not believe in religion, but luck, Clooney has learned from his family, cannot be messed with.

One person Clooney will mess with—the thing he keeps coming back to the more we drink—is what a massive loser Bill O’Reilly is. It’s an irrational feud because every time O’Reilly gets to be as important as Clooney, O’Reilly comes out way ahead. But Clooney can’t help himself. He keeps talking about O’Reilly, and the little traps he’s set for him and how thrilled he is when he falls into them. It’s as if Clooney loves O’Reilly because he gives him permission to be an irrational 8-year-old. Maybe that’s why anyone loves O’Reilly. But he is also the anti-Clooney, donning a public persona, one that’s humorless and incapable of self-effacement. It’s as if someone created for Clooney his own Elmer Fudd.

One of the things O’Reilly has taken issue with is Clooney’s involvement in the crisis in Darfur, saying it’s reverse racism from someone who didn’t care about the Arabs being killed by Saddam Hussein. Clooney got interested in Darfur in 2005 after the campaign for Oscar votes for Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck made him feel dirty. “You’re campaigning for yourself. To compete for art,” he says. His dad was also dejected and angry after losing an election for Congress, and Clooney had been reading about the lack of attention being given to Darfur, so the two went on a trip to Africa to shoot footage. Clooney wasn’t able to get into Darfur until late January, when the U.N. said it would give him an official title. “I have a U.N. passport. It says ‘Messenger of Peace’ on it. It’s very cool,” he says.

The Darfur organization he helped found, Not on Our Watch, has given away more than $9 million. But now, just three weeks back from having a 14-year-old border guard shove a machine gun at his chest, after recovering from malaria, after helicoptering out of N’Djamena, Chad, in a sandstorm three days before the rebels sacked it, he wonders if his critics are right, if this scheme to use celebrity to bring attention to the world’s plights isn’t, if not vanity, at least striving after wind. “I’ve been very depressed since I got back. I’m terrified that it isn’t in any way helping. That bringing attention can cause more damage. You dig a well or build a health-care facility and they’re a target for somebody,” he says. “A lot more people know about Darfur, but absolutely nothing is different. Absolutely nothing.”

He feels his advocacy is not even accomplishing as much as his family did during the embarrassing Christmas day trips his dad would arrange every year, when they would show up with gifts for a family who wrote to his dad’s TV station, asking for help. Now he wonders if it is better to give money and get out of the way, as he does when he gets off Highway 101 at Laurel Canyon Blvd., where there’s always a person begging for money. “You think, This is a $20 light. So you hope to catch the light. And then you feel guilty for hoping to catch the light,” he says. “People say, They’ll buy booze. Fair enough. They need it.” Clooney, having helped knock off two bottles of red and two bottles of dessert wine—all after drinking heavily in Vegas the night before—is not one to deny someone else alcohol.

It’s past midnight; we’re both pretty buzzed. He’s telling me how he wakes up every morning at 5:30 to the hoots of a giant owl and how he climbs into his hot tub so he can hoot back, mesmerized by nature, like Tony Soprano and his ducks, when this alarm starts shrieking. Clooney, not a man of inaction, especially in a moment of crisis like this, stands on my dining-room table, unscrews a panel in the ceiling and, finding nothing, makes me go outside and carry a huge ladder with him up two flights to my garage upstairs—where he climbs into an area I’ve never dared go, crawling along the beams with a screwdriver between his teeth. Finding nothing, he climbs down, knocks the dirt off his jeans, blows the dust out of his nose, rinses his hands and returns to the table. The shriek starts again, and Clooney thinks for a few seconds, ducks down and yanks the carbon monoxide detector out of the outlet. “Either it needs a battery,” he says, “or we have six seconds to live.”

At 1:30 he gets up to leave. He tells me that the next time I have interviewees over for dinner, I should trick them by passing his house off as mine, maybe with some hired servants, smoking a pipe, pretending journalism is something I do as a lark, separate from my silver-mining interests.

As he leaves, I feel as if I failed. In seven hours, I wasn’t able to find a part of Clooney different from the one everyone already knows. As he retreats in his movie-star car to his movie-star lair with his giant-owl sidekick, I feel pretty sure he never separates the public from the private. It explains, at least, why he sucked as Batman.

Then two nights later I get a chance to run the experiment again. My wife and I figure we’ll check out the sushi place Clooney said he’s been going to for 15 years. When we walk in, there’s only one occupied table, and of course it’s Clooney, his girlfriend, his assistant and a friend he met the first day he moved to Los Angeles. He’s unprepared for me, out in the open, vulnerable. But he yanks over a table, puts it next to his, tells us what to order, hands us food from his plate, shows us photos of him and the other guy at the table with Keith Richards, reads the cheesy lines he’s just been faxed for his Oscar presenting, fights for the check and generally hosts the crap out of us. Clooney is a movie star not because he’s overwhelmingly electric or handsome or fascinating. After two very fun nights, I can tell you that he really isn’t any of those things. George Clooney is a movie star because he’s happiest when he controls how everyone around him feels. Because that’s what movies do.

* By Joel Stein (TIME) With reporting by Amy Lennard Goehner