Two a penny

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MUMBAI : Police officers investigating deadly bombings last weekend in western India focused Tuesday on a suburb of Mumbai, the nation's financial capital, where four cars used in the blasts had been stolen and an e-mail message claiming responsibility had;originated.
Also Tuesday, the police defused several unexploded bombs in the western Indian city of Surat, one of the world's biggest diamond-polishing;centers. It was the second series of blasts in two;days.
In Gujarat State, 22 bombs tore through the city of Ahmedabad around dusk Saturday, killing at least 42 people and wounding 161 others. The death toll was lowered to 42, as several cases had been reported twice amid the confusion, said H.
The estimate of 22 bombs by the Ahmedabad police Tuesday was an increase from the previously reported 17. Singh, a senior police;officer.P.S.
An e-mail message claiming responsibility for the attack was traced to the computer of Kenneth Haywood, a U. Officers said Tuesday that Haywood was not a suspect and that it appeared his wireless network connection had been used to send the e-mail message. citizen living the suburb of Navi Mumbai, or New Mumbai, the police said.

“He has said his e-mail ID was hacked, and evidence we have gathered shows that his network was used to forward the mail,” said Parambir Singh, a senior anti-terrorism officer. They said that anyone on the two floors below Haywood's 15th-floor apartment could have gained access to his;network.
On Tuesday, Ramrao Wagh, the police chief of Navi Mumbai, said that officers had also fanned out across the city to find the people who had stolen four cars used in the blasts. The police said they were looking for several people who might have had access to the ;network.
Singh said two of the stolen vehicles had been used as car bombs, while two others had been discovered filled with explosives in the close toby city of Surat, a diamond-polishing hub. Wagh said all four cars had been stolen in early;July. The police released a sketch of a young man believed to be linked to one of the cars in Surat, Singh;said. A third unexploded bomb was discovered there Tuesday.
The police said they believed Navi Mumbai had been used as the headquarters to plan the attack because it was a nondescript suburb where the bombers' activities would be likely to go undetected.
A group calling itself the Indian Mujahedeen took credit for the Ahmedabad attack and sent an e-mail message to several Indian television stations minutes before the blasts;began.
. Over the past two years, Navi Mumbai, a quiet area north of Mumbai, has become a popular destination for call-center and back-office operations of multinational;companies

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BEIJING : Tourists leaving the west gate of the Temple of Heaven next month will probably not notice Song Wei's home across the street. Nor are spectators along the Olympic marathon route likely to stop by Sun Ruonan's restaurant;nearby. Both have held on despite pressure to move.
Song and Sun live along Beijing's central axis in neighborhoods that have been gutted to make the city look clean and orderly for the Olympics.
A veil of green plastic netting now covers Sun's restaurant. They will spend the Olympics behind walls or screens erected to keep their property out of public;view. The authorities deemed his little block of commerce an;eyesore. Song's house and several shops that he rents to migrant families were surrounded by a 10-foot-tall brick wall last week, part of a last-minute beautification campaign. “But why are you building a wall around;us?”
A mysterious notice appeared beside the shops on July 17, typed on white paper and signed by no one.
“We all support the Olympics,” said Song, 42, a Beijing native who lives along the cycling and marathon routes. 93 South Tianqiao Road. It read, “In keeping with the government's request to rectify the Olympic environment, a wall will need to be built around No.

Now a wall conceals a little cove of entrepreneurship where several migrant families sell socks, book bags, pants, noodles and shish kebabs cooked in a spicy soup.” The next morning, several bricklayers showed up with a police;escort.
Zhao Fengxia, a neighbor who owns three shops, said she believed that officials and developers were using Olympic beautification as a pretext to strangle their business and put pressure on them to leave. One family behind the wall sells ice cream, popsicles and cold drinks from a refrigerator on;wheels. “We influence the city's appearance,” she;said. Feng Pan, 18, who helps her parents run a noodle shop, accepted the official view less critically. Beijing is polishing off one of the world's most expensive makeovers with a whitewash.
Many cities have sought to remake their image when hosting global events like the Olympics. Beijing has spent $130 million to restore buildings, many of them temples along the five-mile axis, according to the city's cultural relics;bureau. Along the historic central axis of the city that runs from the Yongdingmen Gate due north to the Drum Tower, the authorities are doing their best to give the old city a new face. On the wide boulevards leading up to the stadium, roadblocks have been set up and flowers, grass and trees;planted.
The Olympic Stadium was built on a northern extension of the traditional axis — a nod to the event's historic importance. It cuts through densely populated neighborhoods south of Tiananmen Square that are home to many of the city's migrants and working poor. It cuts through densely populated neighborhoods south of Tiananmen Square that are home to many of the city's migrants and working poor. To hide neighborhoods leveled for redevelopment in recent years or anything else the government considers unsightly, officials have put up;walls.
Song and his wife and 8-year-old daughter now live behind;one.
They have lived here since 1994, Song said, renting out his shops to families from the;provinces.
They live in close quarters. The Songs' room is barely big enough for a double bed on which the couple and daughter sleep. Two pet birds live in metal cages by the door. The birds, brown starlings with dark feathers and orange beaks, can parrot human speech. Song taught the birds one of the most famous poems of the Tang Dynasty. Every few minutes, it squawks lines from the poem: “The white sun falls over the mountains” or “The Yellow River flows into the;sea.”
Behind the room is a moonscape of weeds and rubble that used to be a slum. Song's place survived while the city razed the historically poor Tianqiao neighborhood and transformed it with shopping malls, wider streets and subdivisions. Song's predicament is familiar in the churn of this changing city. The developers want him to go, but he is holding out for more;money.
On July 17, several workers left a pile of red bricks on the sidewalk. The next morning, they returned, wearing sandals and straw hats, accompanied by the police and local officials. They set to work laying brick at 8:30;a.m.
The wall did not go up easily. After a brief shoving match, a little demonstration unfolded. Song hung three Chinese flags from the trunks of trees — and three white flags emblazoned with the 2008 Olympic logo. A migrant worker climbed a ladder and stuck up a poster that said, “Need Human;Rights!!!”

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BEIJING : Flooding and poor harvests have caused North Korea's worst food crisis since the late 1990s and have put millions at risk, the United Nations's food agency said;Wednesday.
The food shortage threatens widespread malnutrition, the World Food Program;said.
The WFP had been given permission to launch a new operation to target those most vulnerable in eight of the country's 10 provinces, or 6.
“Millions of vulnerable North Koreans are at risk of slipping toward precarious hunger levels,” Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the WFP's country director for North Korea, told a news;conference.2;million.4 million people, up from a current 1. Food aid is needed to tide people over for the next three to four months until the next harvest, he;said.
An international appeal for aid would be launched in the next two weeks.S.

While 400,000 metric tons of U. “We are running against the clock here,” he;said. food aid have already shipped, there is an urgent need for $20 million to get through the next autumn harvest, de Margerie said. An estimated 2 million people died of hunger at the;time.
The North has resorted to outside handouts to help feed its 23 million people since the mid-1990s when natural disasters and mismanagement devastated its centrally controlled economy.
The amount of food given in government rations to urban dwellers has fallen in the last few months, as prices for staple goods have risen dramatically due to less internal transfers of;food.
But outside aid has fallen this year, de Margerie said, compounded by domestic;deficits. But salaries for Koreans have remained;stagnant.
Rice now costs almost three times more than it did a year ago, he said, and maize has quadrupled.
Many are relying on relatives to supply food, or have set up gardens in their kitchens or on steep mountainous hillsides, he said.
The WFP's food security survey, the first since 2004, interviewed over 250 households in 53 counties across eight provinces, and found that people are running out of options, de Margerie;said. Nearly three quarters of households have reduced their food;intake. Some are scavenging for wild foods. “That's why it's critical for us to mobilize food right;now.
“People are starting to exhaust their coping mechanisms,” he said.”

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BANGKOK, Thailand : The Thai Supreme Court accepted Wednesday a lawsuit alleging abuse of power by Thaksin Shinawatra, the ousted prime minister, in connection with a government loan to;Myanmar.
It was the fourth case to go to court involving allegations of corruption and abuse of power against Thaksin, who was deposed in a September 2006 military;coup. 16, a court statement;said.
The first hearing is set for Sept.
Thaksin faces charges of conflict of interest and abuse of power for approving a loan to the company on terms more favorable to the borrower than available commercially, the statement;said.
The complaint, brought by the Assets Examination Committee, said a 2004 low-interest loan to Myanmar by the state-controlled Export-Import Bank of Thailand was meant to benefit the Shin Satellite company, then owned by Thaksin's;family.
The acceptance of the new lawsuit came as prior cases against Thaksin and his allies appeared to be gaining momentum, with a ruling on one expected on Thursday.

The complaint filed by the anti-graft body alleges that Thaksin used his influence to extend the US$127 million loan in exchange for satellite services and orders of satellite equipment from the;company.
Three other pending cases include conflict of interest and malfeasance charges related to his wife's purchase of a piece of prime Bangkok real estate in 2003. The Criminal Court is to rule on charges of tax evasion against his;wife.
In another, Thaksin was accused of changing laws to favor his telecom business;interests. She bought the land from a state agency despite an anti-corruption law barring politicians and their spouses from doing business with government;offices. The targets of the lawsuit are accused of malfeasance in a 2003 lottery scheme initiated by Thaksin's;government.
On Monday, the court also accepted a lawsuit alleging abuse of power against a group of officials, including Thaksin. He returned to Thailand earlier this year after his political allies in the People's Power Party set up a six-party coalition;government.
Thaksin was deposed after months of street demonstrations in Bangkok demanding he step down because of the allegations.

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YAKUMO, Japan : There was no inherent reason that this northern Japanese town, population 19,743, had never had a lawyer until now. It had its share of people with debts, disputes over property, wrangling over inheritances – enough disharmony, certainly, to keep at least one lawyer;busy.
If it was not unusual for towns with five times Yakumo's population to have no lawyer, how could Yakumo hope to secure one just for;itself?
And yet, thanks to a national campaign to raise the number of lawyers, and to dispatch them to lawyerless corners of Japan, Yakumo welcomed its first one in April.
But Japan, as a counterpoint to the United States, has long suffered from a shortage of lawyers, especially in the;countryside.
Its prominent location aside, the office was perhaps lost amid the restaurants, izakaya pubs, drugstores and other small businesses that form the landscape surrounding train stations in Japanese small;towns. The Yakumo Legal Office opened shop, behind gray blinds and under blue awnings, in the square facing the train;station. “A lawyer?” he asked;incredulously.

Even the longtime owner of a sushi restaurant a stone's throw away had somehow failed to notice his exotic new neighbor. He walked half a minute from the station and slipped into the office through a side;door.
On a recent morning, the lawyer, Katsumune Hirai, arrived on the 10:29 train from Hakodate, the close toest city. And Hirai, who lives in Hakodate but is from Tokyo, was still really getting to know this town.
Yakumo is part of an even larger legal district of some 50,000 people without a lawyer, he said. Introductions, he said, were not his strong;suit. He had yet to visit the town hall, the seat of power in any Japanese town, and present his business cards there.
“Tokyo's economy is doing well these days,” said Hirai, a baby-faced 33-year-old who has been practicing law for four years.
He was perplexed that, so far, few had come to him for advice on handling debts, the biggest source of work for lawyers right;now. The economy's very weak in the countryside, so we see a great number of consultations nationwide about debts, especially from people with highly urgent;matters. “But the rest of Japan still hasn't recovered. In the past, they would have gone to look for a lawyer in Hakodate, no;doubt.”
Many clients with land disputes have come to him, referred by real estate agents unable to resolve the problems themselves.
That is what Hirai had learned at the Japan Federation of Bar Association, where he participated in efforts to send lawyers to the;hinterlands.
“Or, I think, many just resigned themselves to their fate,” he;said. Still, even including those professions, Japan has only about one-third of the lawyers found in the United States per capita, according to the;federation.
In Japan, other legal professionals, including notaries and tax accountants, often perform the duties that fall to lawyers in the United States.
The Japanese government is trying to increase the number of lawyers as part of broader judicial reforms that have included establishing 74 law schools since 2004.
The Japanese government is trying to increase the number of lawyers as part of broader judicial reforms that have included establishing 74 law schools since 2004. Under the system that will be abolished in 2011, anyone could take the national bar exam, though it was so difficult that the annual pass rate was about 3;percent.
The government predicted that at least 70 percent of law school graduates would pass the new national bar exam, creating 3,000 new lawyers a year by 2010. But with only 40 percent passing last year, and the low rate driving down law school applications, the government is almost certain to miss its;goal.
Here in Yakumo, four clients came to see Hirai on a recent day: an older woman worried about leaving an inheritance to an adopted son; a middle-aged salaryman who had hit a female employee; two clients involved in land disputes, one dating from the;1930s.
Like many Japanese who consult lawyers, the four seemed embarrassed about doing;so.
“Japanese by nature don't want to publicize their problems,” Hirai explained. “And coming to see a lawyer is to admit that there are problems inside your home or;workplace.”
It was precisely to dispel the shame of consulting a lawyer that Hirai chose to open his office in the town's most prominent;square.
“After all, this is a small town,” he said. “Because I'm right in front of the train station, everybody will know if a person came to this office. If I'd settled instead in a more secluded part of town, people might think that this is a shady business after all, and that I'm a bad;guy.”

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AHMADABAD, India : Police defused another explosive device Wednesday in western India, bringing the total number of unexploded bombs found there in the last two days to;19.
The discovery of the bombs in the diamond-polishing center of Surat on Tuesday and Wednesday came after 22 explosions tore through the nearby city of Ahmadabad over the weekend, killing 42 people and wounding;183. Authorities initially reported two deaths there but later said the second death was not related to the;attack.
Seven small blasts also shook Bangalore in the south, killing one person.M.
Surat Police Commissioner R. Brar said the 19th bomb was discovered Wednesday morning in one of the city's markets, and police were telling people to avoid gathering in public;places.S.

An obscure Islamic militant group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen took credit for the attack Saturday in Ahmadabad, although authorities believe the claim may be an attempt by one of a handful of better-known groups to cover its;tracks.
The discovery left Surat a virtual ghost town, sending fearful residents back to their homes and shuttering what businesses had not already closed after 18 explosives were found a day earlier, Brar;said.
Authorities said four cars — two used in Saturday's Ahmadabad attack and the two found in Surat — were stolen earlier in July from a Mumbai suburb, Navi;Mumbai.
On Tuesday, authorities launched a massive manhunt in a suburb of Mumbai, India's financial capital, where investigators believe the bomb plots were;hatched.
India has been plagued by bombings in recent years.
Police said they believe the bombers used Navi Mumbai as the headquarters to plan the attack because they thought their activities would likely go undetected in the nondescript;suburb.
Authorities are also checking the computer of a 48-year-old American citizen living in Mumbai to find out if an e-mail claiming responsibility for the attack was sent from it, or if unknown attackers accessed his wireless Internet;connection. Almost all have been blamed on Islamic militants who allegedly want to provoke violence between India's Hindu majority and Muslim minority, although officials rarely offer hard evidence implicating specific;groups. Police said Tuesday that Haywood was not a suspect and it appeared the bombers had accessed his wireless network connection to send the;e-mail.
Police seized Kenneth Haywood's computer Monday after tracing an e-mail claiming responsibility for the attack to the machine.

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ISLAMABAD : Pakistan is investigating reports that a senior Qaeda figure was among six people killed in a suspected U.S.
The Pakistani Army said it had not confirmed that the strike Monday killed the Qaeda operative, Abu Khabab al-Masri, who is described by Washington as an expert who trained terrorists in the use of poisons and;explosives. missile strike amid anger that the nation's sovereignty had been;violated.S.
But two Pakistani intelligence officials said they believed Masri had died, and a U. The United States has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his;capture. official in Washington expressed cautious optimism.S.
“There is a real sense that this guy is gone,” the U. But he cautioned that there was no material evidence to confirm Masri's death, like a photograph of the dead man at the bomb;site. official said. Bush at the White;House.
The predawn strike on a border village in the South Waziristan tribal region came hours before Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani met with President George W.
On Tuesday, suspected Islamic militants abducted about 30 police and paramilitary troops in northwestern Pakistan, a day after three intelligence agents were killed there in an ambush.

There is rising Western pressure on the four-month-old Pakistani government to act against strongholds of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in its frontier region with Afghanistan amid concern that peace deals have given militants more freedom to;operate.
The two leaders made no mention of the missile attack when they addressed reporters on the White House lawn. A militant spokesperson, Bakht Ali Khan, claimed responsibility and accused the government of not sticking to a peace accord that was reached in;May.
But later in an interview with CNN, Gilani said the strike had “certainly” been a violation of sovereignty if the United States had acted unilaterally. They expressed common resolve to fight;terrorism.
Gilani said an inquiry into the strike was under;way. He said he had told Bush that both countries should do a better job of sharing intelligence so that Pakistan could fight extremists;itself.S.
Asked why U.”
The U.”
The U.S. military in Afghanistan denied it had carried out the missile strike. “It was not us,” said 1st Lieutenant Nathan Perry, a spokesperson for the U.S.-led;coalition.
That denial would not preclude U.S. involvement. Previous strikes inside Pakistan are believed to have been conducted by the CIA using Predator;drones.
A Pakistani military intelligence official said Masri's wife had told the authorities that her husband had died in the attack in South Waziristan. The woman was wounded and hospitalized, he;said.
Another intelligence official said the strike had killed four Egyptians and two Pakistanis. He identified one of the Egyptians as “Abu Khuba,” but made clear he was referring to;Masri.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment to;journalists.
A local pro-Taliban militant based in Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, said 50 to 60 militants, including some Arabs, had attended funeral prayers for the six victims within hours of the strike. He said Masri was among the;dead.
The victims were buried in a graveyard not far from the scene of the attack close to Azam Warsak village, about three kilometers, or two miles, from the Afghan border, he said, citing other militants who;attended.
The militant requested anonymity as his chief, Maulvi Nazir, had told his followers not to cooperate with;journalists.
A newspaper reporter based in Wana said militants had told him not to travel to the area after he sought their permission. The journalist asked not to be named as he has received threats from militants in the past for his;coverage.
Masri was previously reported killed in a January 2006 missile strike by a CIA Predator drone in the Pakistani tribal region of Bajaur that aimed at and missed Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri. Pakistani officials said then that Masri was among five Qaeda militants believed killed in that attack, but bodies were never;found.
A Pakistani Army spokesperson, Major General Athar Abbas, said Monday that troops were trying to reach the scene to determine what had happened. He was not immediately available for comment;Tuesday.
The missile strike provoked immediate complaints among politicians and media in Pakistan – underscoring public dissatisfaction with the government's support of the U.S.-led war on;terror.
The News daily described it as an “invasion of Pakistan's airspace” and questioned why the Pakistani military did not shoot down U.S.;drones.

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WASHINGTON : A top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled secretly to Islamabad this month to confront Pakistan's most senior officials with new information about ties between the country's powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan's tribal areas, according to American military and intelligence;officials.
The CIA emissary presented evidence showing that members of the spy service had deepened their ties with some militant groups who were responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the officials;said. 11, 2001,;attacks.
The decision to confront Pakistan with what the officials described as a new CIA assessment of the spy service's activities seemed to be the bluntest American warning to Pakistan about the ties between the spy service and Islamic militants since shortly after the Sept.
The CIA has depended heavily on the ISI for information about militants in Pakistan, despite longstanding concerns about divided loyalties within the Pakistani spy service, which had close relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan before the Sept.
The CIA assessment specifically points to links between members of the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the militant network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, which American officials believe maintains close ties to senior figures of Al Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal;areas.

That ISI officers have maintained important ties to anti-American militants has been the subject of previous news reports. 11;attacks.
The visit to Pakistan by the CIA official, Stephen Kappes, the deputy director, was described by several American military and intelligence officials in interviews in recent days. But the CIA and the Bush administration have generally sought to avoid criticism of Pakistan, which they regard as a crucial ally in the fight against;terrorism.
Pakistan's prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, is currently in Washington meeting with Bush administration officials. Some of those who were interviewed made clear that they welcomed the decision by the CIA to take a harder line toward the ISI's dealings with militant;groups.
In an interview broadcast Tuesday on the American public television program “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” Gilani said he rejected as “not believable” any assertions of the ISI's links to the militants. A White House spokesperson, Gordon Johndroe, would not say whether Bush had raised the issue during his meeting Monday with;Gilani.
The Haqqani network and other militants who operate in the tribal areas along the Afghan border are said by American intelligence officials to be responsible for increasingly deadly complex attacks inside Afghanistan, and to have helped Al Qaeda establish a haven in the tribal;areas. “We would not allow that,” he;said.
The ISI has for decades maintained contacts with various militant groups in the tribal areas and elsewhere, both for gathering intelligence and as proxies to exert influence on neighboring India and;Afghanistan.
Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, the acting commander of American forces in Southwest Asia, made an unannounced visit to the tribal areas on Monday, a further reflection of American;concern.
With Pakistan's new civilian government struggling to assert control over the country's spy service, there are concerns in Washington that the ISI might become even more powerful than when President Pervez Musharraf controlled the military and the;government.
It is unclear whether the CIA officials have concluded that contacts between the ISI and militant groups are blessed at the highest levels of Pakistan's spy service and military, or are carried out by rogue elements of Pakistan's security;apparatus.
Kappes made his secret visit to Pakistan on July 12, joining Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for meetings with senior Pakistani civilian and military;leaders.
Last weekend, Pakistani military and intelligence officials thwarted an attempt by the government in Islamabad to put the ISI more directly under civilian;control.
The official was briefed on the meetings; like others who agreed to talk about it, he spoke on condition of anonymity as a result of the diplomatic delicacy of Kappes's;message.
“It was a very pointed message saying, 'Look, we know there's a connection, not just with Haqqani but also with other bad guys and ISI, and we think you could do more and we want you to do more about it,”' one senior American official;said. Afghanistan's government has publicly blamed the ISI for having a hand in the attack, an accusation American officials have not;corroborated. Afghanistan's government has publicly blamed the ISI for having a hand in the attack, an accusation American officials have not;corroborated.
The decision to have Kappes deliver the message about the spy service was an unusual one, and could be a sign that the relationship between the CIA and ISI, which has long been marked by mutual suspicion as well as mutual dependence, may be;deteriorating.

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BEIJING : On a February day in 1989, a young woman walked into a show at the National Gallery of Art here, whipped out a pellet gun and fired two shots into a mirrored sculpture in an exhibition called “China/Avant-Garde.” Police officers swarmed into the museum.
The woman, Xiao Lu, is an artist. The show, China's first government-sponsored exhibition of experimental art, was shut down for;days. Why she did what she did was not immediately clear, but that did not;matter. The sculpture she fired on was her own, or rather a collaborative piece she had made with another artist, Tang Song, her boyfriend at the time.
The international press saw a rebellion story.
She had set off a symbolic;explosion. The government reacted as if attacked. China's political and cultural vanguard claimed a hero. Whatever the truth, Xiao made the history books. The art critic Li Xianting has described the incident as a precursor to the Tiananmen Square crackdown four months later.
She is the first and last Chinese woman so far to achieve that status in the art world here. She was a;star. While the art market, all but nonexistent in 1989, has become a powerhouse industry and produced a pantheon of multimillionaire artist-celebrities, there are no women in that;pantheon. Contemporary art in China is a man's world. Among the hundreds of commercial galleries competing for attention in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere, art by women is hard to;find.

The new museums created to display contemporary art rarely give women solo shows. On a monthlong stay, I visited several women who live and work in and around Beijing and have important careers, although none of them top the auction charts and few are represented by prestigious galleries.
Yet the art is there, and it is some of the most innovative work around, even as visibility remains a problem.
If any woman qualifies as a power artist on the current male model, Lin Tianmiao probably comes closest. An alternative list of women doing strong but little-noticed work would be;long.
In the mid-1990s, with money scarce, censors watchful and no gallery or market structure in place, she and her husband, the conceptual artist Wang Gongxin, lived and worked in cramped Beijing apartments where they mounted one-night shows that doubled as rent;parties. She was born in 1961, and like many artists of her generation who were raised during the Cultural Revolution but came of age professionally in its rocky aftermath, she had a difficult;start. It was made from used household utensils – teapots, woks, scissors, vegetable choppers – that she laboriously wrapped in layers of cheap white cotton thread to create inventories of domestic life that looked both threatening and;precious. It was made from used household utensils – teapots, woks, scissors, vegetable choppers – that she laboriously wrapped in layers of cheap white cotton thread to create inventories of domestic life that looked both threatening and;precious.
With the market boom, her career took off, and her work grew in scale and formal polish. Her floor-to-ceiling installations of self-portrait photographs anchored by braids of white yarn are fixtures in international shows. She and Wang live in one of Beijing's many gated high-rises for urban professionals; their joint studio is an antiques-filled farmhouse on the outskirts of the city, where, with a small staff of seamstresses, Lin produces ghostly – and expensive-examining – soft sculptures swelling with egg- and breast-shaped forms in pristine white;silk.
Critics have noted affinities in her art to the “women's work” aesthetic of certain Western feminists. Lin, who lived in New York in the late 1980s, would not disagree. And she acknowledges that women are treated like second-class citizens in China – like “inactive thinkers,” as she puts;it.
Yet she is cautious about applying the term feminist to herself or her work. Why? The concept is too Western. It is too vague. China is not ready for feminism. China has its own brand of feminism. You hear variations on these reasons often, just as you do in the;West.
Yin Xuizhen is Lin's close to-contemporary. Both are of the “apartment art” generation and worked with homely, personal materials. For a 1995 installation, Yin unraveled the woolen yarn from secondhand men's and women's sweaters and used it to knit new sweaters that merged the genders. She sealed her own clothes, including items dating to childhood, in a suitcase, as if to preserve the past and make it portable. She also began gathering architectural scraps from the streets of her native Beijing, as if to document and memorialize a city being destroyed around;her.
The threat of destruction pervades her recent large-scale work too, though now the implications are global. For a continuing piece called “Fashion Terrorism,” she created a miniature airport baggage claim with mysterious parcels stalled on a carousel. They may hold the possessions of immigrants in transit; they may hold weapons. We cannot;know.

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NEW DELHI : In eastern Varanasi, a deadly explosion interrupted Hindu devotees as they lit oil lamps to Hanuman, the monkey god, one Tuesday at;dusk.
In southern Hyderabad, a homemade bomb planted inside a historic mosque killed worshipers one Friday;afternoon. And in western Ahmedabad, 17 back-to-back explosions Saturday evening were directed at shoppers and strollers – and then, the hospitals where the wounded and their kin rushed for help – killing 49 and wounding more than ;200.
In the commercial capital, Mumbai, commuters streaming home on packed city trains died in a series of blasts. The targets seem to have nothing in common except that they are soft: ordinary and easy to;strike.
Over the past several years, terrorist attacks in India have become all too common.

Virtually none of the attacks of the past three years have resulted in convictions; a suspect in the Varanasi bombings was shot and killed by the;police.
In a country long familiar with focused violence – whether sectarian or fueled by insurgencies in Kashmir in the 1990s – the impersonal nature of the latest attacks is new and deeply;unsettling. “It's;excessive.
“This is different, because for the first time it's everyday, it's utterly anonymous,” said Shiv Vishvanathan, a professor of anthropology in Ahmedabad. “The apple seller you meet might be carrying a bomb.”
“The familiar becomes unfamiliar,” he said. It's a perfect way to destabilize;society. It creates suspicion. There are metal detectors at the gates of multiplex movie theaters, commuter trains and at the threshold of prominent temples and mosques.”
Reminders of the danger are ubiquitous in Indian cities.
Indian cities offer particularly rich opportunities. Yet they have offered no protection to the myriad exposed, more densely crowded;targets. A small bundle of explosives, hidden as they have been in lunch boxes, pressure cookers and on the backs of bicycles, can cause grievous damage. Life is congested everywhere.
Ahmedabad, the commercial center of the state of Gujarat, with a population of 3. That is also why perpetrators have so favourably eluded;punishment. In 2002, a train fire that killed several dozen Hindus led to of the killing of 1,000 Muslims over several days – one of the worst outbreaks of religious violence in Indian;history.5 million, is no stranger to violence. The statement was sent in an e-mail, written in English, to television stations just before the first blasts went;off. The statement was sent in an e-mail, written in English, to television stations just before the first blasts went;off.
H. P. Singh, joint police commissioner of Ahmedabad, said Sunday that some of the explosives had been strapped to bicycles in crowded streets and markets. Later in the evening, a pair of car bombs went off in front of two city hospitals. At one of them, Civil Hospital, the dead included a husband and wife, both doctors, and two sanitation;workers.
The police said that two additional bombs had been found and defused, in Ahmedabad and nearby Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat. On Sunday afternoon, the police found two abandoned cars in the industrial city of Surat, also in Gujarat, one stuffed with bomb-making chemicals and detonators, the other with live bombs. The police said they were still tracing the cars';ownership.
The Ahmedabad blasts came a day after a series of similar low-intensity blasts in southern Bangalore, which killed a woman standing at a bus stop. Two months ago in Jaipur, synchronized blasts on bicycles killed 56; the Indian Mujahedeen sent an e-mail message claiming responsibility for those attacks as;well.
On Sunday, the state police intelligence bureau director, P.P. Pandey, said “a single mind” was suspected to be behind the three latest;attacks.
As they do after every such episode, the police said they had detained people for questioning and reported 30 people were in custody. Officials offered no further details about who was involved in the group or a possible motivation behind the;bombings.
A report prepared last year by the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington quantified the scale of violence in India. Between January 2004 and March 2007, the report concluded, the death toll from terrorist attacks was 3,674, second only to Iraq during the same;period.
The morning after the Ahmedabad blasts, residents of this sprawling Indian capital pointed out that while it was virtually impossible to take precautions against terrorist attacks, they had grown increasingly vigilant of the strangers around;them.
Last August, after a pair of synchronized bombs tore through an amusement park and a fast-food restaurant in Hyderabad, killing at least 40 people on a Saturday night, one Indian newspaper called it “a war on the way we;live.”