Latest Netflix Disruption Highlights Challenges of Cloud Computing

For some on Christmas Eve, “White Christmas” was a blackout on Netflix.

That’s because problems with Amazon’s cloud computing service, which provides storage and computing power for all kinds of Web sites and services, caused Netflix to go down for much of the day.

In updates on a Web site that reports on the status of its online services, Amazon traced the trouble to Elastic Load Balancing, a part of its service that helps spread heavy traffic among multiple servers to prevent overload. The company gave few details about the problems in its data center in Northern Virginia beyond this.

Social networks filled with complaints. Some customers also complained that Amazon’s own streaming service, Amazon Prime, was down. Amazon said it had fixed the problem completely by the afternoon of Christmas Day, and Netflix said it had restored its services to most of the affected consumers by late Christmas Eve. But the episode highlighted how consumers are increasingly using “the cloud.”

As more everyday devices, appliances and even automobiles rely on services connected to the Internet, consumers expect those services to be available at all times. Yet all sorts of disruptions — harsh weather conditions or an apparent overload — can knock a service out for hours.

In October, problems with the same Amazon data center in Virginia took down Reddit, Foursquare and Heroku. The instance was explained on the status Web site as “degraded performance” in some parts of Amazon’s storage service. In June, a lightning storm hit the Virginia data center, taking Netflix as well as Pinterest, Instagram and other sites off line for hours. That time, too, customers were offered little insight into what had happened.

In April 2011, an Amazon failure took down many smaller sites that had rented cloud storage space from the Internet giant. That time, the companies that were most affected were start-ups that were less likely to pay for so-called redundancies, or backup systems that kick in when a service fails. Netflix was not affected then, and said at the time it was because it had taken advantage of the redundancies that Amazon offers.

Netflix has said that it has built several redundancies into its cloud-based system. For instance, it stores its data across multiple “zones,” so if there is a failure in one zone, it can retry in another. It says it also spends money on more capacity than it needs, so that if there are large spikes in customer activity, the service is less likely to go down.

Joris Evers, a Netflix spokesman, declined to elaborate on why Netflix went down despite these safeguards. He said the company was investigating the cause and would do what it could to prevent the interruption from recurring.

“We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix-capable devices on Christmas morning could watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused Christmas Eve,” Mr. Evers said.

Tera Randall, an Amazon spokeswoman, said the company has been “heads down” to ensure services are running smoothly and that a full summary of the incident would be published in a few days.

Amazon is one of the biggest players in online services, hosting data storage and computation for hundreds of companies, including Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest. Once a sideline Amazon set up six years ago, the cloud service has since exploded into a business that is expected to bring in about $1 billion to the company this year.

Other companies offer similar services, notably Google, which introduced its competitor in June. Microsoft is also in the business with Windows Azure.

Although the service disruptions may annoy some companies and their customers, it’s unlikely many businesses will end their partnerships with Amazon in light of this latest Netflix failure, said James McQuivey, an analyst for Forrester Research. He added that it was unlikely that a temporary service failure for Netflix was going to cause many to cancel subscriptions.

He said companies can pay extra to Amazon to add safeguards that increase reliability of their online services, but they typically choose to save costs and take the risk of their services going down temporarily. He said that Amazon has been especially popular among businesses because it has been gradually improving its services and lowering its costs.

Businesses, “of course, are going to say, ‘Gee, Amazon, what’s going on?’ ” Mr. McQuivey said. “But in reality they’re all getting such a great deal. I don’t see them getting that upset about it.”

For consumers, though, it may be a different matter. On Christmas Eve, Merrilee and Alex Barton were watching an episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” when their Netflix feed started to stammer and finally froze, then began to buffer excessively. “It would try to load and get to about 2 to 7 percent of the way through and then just hang there for five minutes,” Mrs. Barton said.

Eventually the two said they gave up and — with nothing else going on in Farmingdale, N.Y. — decided to “nerd it up.” They played a few games of Minecraft, a video game in which the players can build whatever they wish. In the game, all the technology worked.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 28, 2012

An article on Thursday about problems with Amazon’s cloud computing service referred incorrectly at one point to the company’s public comments on the issue. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, Tera Randall, an Amazon spokeswoman, said that the company was working to ensure services were running smoothly and that Amazon would publish a full summary within a few days. It is not the case that Amazon “did not offer an official statement or explanation.” The article also misstated the month that problems at an Amazon data center in Virginia took down Reddit, Foursquare and Heroku. That occurred in October, not last month.

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Putin to Sign Ban on U.S. Adoptions of Russian Children

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin’s decision on Thursday to enact a ban on the adoption of Russian children by American citizens dealt a serious blow to an already strained diplomatic relationship, but for hundreds of Americans enmeshed in the costly, complicated adoption process, the impact was deeply personal.

“I’m a little numb,” said Maria Drewinsky, a massage therapist from Sea Cliff, N.Y., who was in the final stages of adopting a 5-year-old boy named Alyosha. Both she and her husband have flown twice to visit him, and they speak to him weekly on the telephone. “We have clothes and a bedroom all set up for him, and we talk about him all the time as our son.”

But the couple fear that Alyosha may never get to New York, after Mr. Putin’s announcement Thursday that he would sign the adoption ban into law, as part of a bill retaliating against a new American law aimed at punishing human rights abuses in Russia.

The law, which Mr. Putin signed on Friday, calls for the ban to be put in force on Tuesday, and stands to upend the plans of many American families in the final stages of adopting in Russia. Already, it has added wrenching emotional tumult to a process that can cost $50,000 or more, requires repeated trips overseas, and typically entails lengthy and maddening encounters with bureaucracy. The ban would apparently also nullify an agreement on adoptions between Russia and the United States that was ratified this year and went into effect on Nov. 1.

The bill was approved unanimously by the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Parliament, on Wednesday. Mr. Putin said that he would sign it as well as a resolution also adopted Wednesday that calls for improvements in Russia’s child welfare system. “I intend to sign the law,” Mr. Putin said, “as well as a presidential decree changing the procedure of helping orphaned children, children left without parental care, and especially children who are in a disadvantageous situation due to their health problems.”

Mr. Putin also brushed aside criticism that the law would deny some Russian orphans the chance for a much better life in the United States. In 2011, about 1,000 Russian children were adopted by Americans, more than any other foreign country, but still a tiny number given that nearly 120,000 children in Russia are eligible for adoption.

“There are probably many places in the world where living standards are better than ours,” Mr. Putin said. “So what? Shall we send all children there, or move there ourselves?”

United States officials have strongly criticized the measure and have urged the Russian government not to entangle orphaned children in politics. “We have repeatedly made clear, both in private and in public, our deep concerns about the bill passed by the Russian Parliament,” a State Department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell, said Thursday.

Internally, however, Obama administration officials have been debating how strongly to respond to the adoption ban, and the potential implications for other aspects of the country’s relationship with Russia.

The United States relies heavily on overland routes through Russia to ship supplies to military units in Afghanistan, and it has enlisted Russia’s help in containing Iran’s nuclear program. The former cold war rivals also have sharp disagreements, notably over the civil war in Syria.

The bill that includes the adoption ban was drafted in response to the Magnitsky Act, a law signed by President Obama this month that will bar Russian citizens accused of violating human rights from traveling to the United States and from owning real estate or other assets there. The Obama administration had opposed the Magnitsky legislation, fearing diplomatic retaliation, but members of Congress were eager to press Russia over human rights abuses and tied the bill to another measure granting Russia new status as a full trading partner.

Mr. Putin loudly accused the United States of hypocrisy, noting human rights abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and he pledged to retaliate. But he held his cards even as the lower house of Parliament, the State Duma, approved the adoption bill by a large margin, followed by unanimous approval by the Federation Council.

Although his decision has been eagerly awaited, Mr. Putin seemed blasé at a meeting with senior government officials on Thursday. When Vladimir S. Gruzdev, the governor of the Tula region, said, “I would like to ask: What is the fate of the law?” Mr. Putin replied, “Which law?”

David M. Herszenhorn reported from Moscow, and Erik Eckholm from New York.

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In Gabon, Lure of Ivory Proves Hard to Resist

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

SEIZED AND DESTROYED Gabon burned 10,000 pounds of ivory in June to show its commitment against poaching, but elephants are still being slaughtered. More Photos »

OYEM, Gabon — This lush country, often called a “forest republic,” used to stand proudly apart from its shaky neighbors, like the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, tropical disaster zones where state failure, rebel marauders and loose weapons conspired to spell doom for endangered wildlife.

The Price of Ivory

This is the second installment in a series of articles exploring how the surge in poaching of African elephants both feeds off and fuels instability on the continent.

Gabon’s government, blessed with billions of dollars of oil money and miles and miles of virgin rain forest, has made many of the right moves to protect its animals by setting aside chunks of land for national parks, actually paying wildlife rangers on time (a rarity in Africa) and recently destroying a towering mountain of ivory in a statement of its refusal to look the other way.

But as the price of ivory keeps going up, hitting levels too high for many people to resist, Gabon’s elephants are getting slaughtered by poachers from across the borders and within the rain forests, proof that just about nowhere in Africa are elephants safe.

In the past several years, 10,000 elephants in Gabon have been wiped out, some picked off by impoverished hunters creeping around the jungle with rusty shotguns and willing to be paid in sacks of salt, others mowed down en masse by criminal gangs that slice off the dead elephants’ faces with chain saws. Gabon’s jails are filling up with small-time poachers and ivory traffickers, destitute men and women like Therese Medza, a village hairdresser arrested a few months ago for selling 45 pounds of tusks.

“I had no idea it was illegal,” Ms. Medza said, almost convincingly, from the central jail here in Oyem, in the north. “I was told the tusks were found in the forest.”

She netted about $700, far more than she usually makes in a month, and the reason she did it was simple, she said. “I got seven kids.”

It seems that Gabon’s elephants are getting squeezed in a deadly vise between a seemingly insatiable lust for ivory in Asia, where some people pay as much as $1,000 a pound, and desperate hunters and traffickers in central Africa.

It is a story of temptation — and exploitation — and it shows that the problem is not just about demand, but about supply as well. Poverty, as well as greed, is killing Africa’s elephants.

Across the continent, tens of thousands of elephants are being poached each year in what is emerging as one of the gravest wildlife crises in decades. Gabon’s elephants are among the last of the planet’s rare forest elephants, a subspecies or possibly a totally distinct species (scientists can’t agree), which makes the stakes particularly high here. Forest elephants are smaller than their savanna cousins and have an alluring, extra-hard pinkish ivory that is especially prized.

A few decades ago, there were perhaps 700,000 forest elephants roaming through the jungles of central Africa. Now there may be fewer than 100,000, and about half of them live in Gabon.

“We’re talking about the survival of the species,” said Lee White, the British-born head of Gabon’s national parks.

In June, Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo, defiantly lighted a pyramid of 10,000 pounds of ivory on fire to make the point that the ivory trade was reprehensible, a public display of resolve that Kenya has put on in years past. It took three days for all the ivory to burn, and even after the last tusks were reduced to glowing embers, policemen vigilantly guarded the ashes. Ivory powder is valued in Asia for its purported medicinal powers, and the officers were worried someone might try to sweep up the ashes and sell them.

Some African countries, like Zimbabwe and Tanzania, are sitting on million-dollar stockpiles of ivory (usually from law enforcement seizures or elephants that died naturally) that someday may be legal to sell. Gabon has the unusual luxury of kissing its ivory mountain goodbye because it has an even more lucrative resource: two billion barrels of crude oil.

But it is not clear how long Gabon will continue as this relatively prosperous, politically stable corner of Africa. Protesters recently began chaffing against Mr. Bongo’s rule, saying he rigged an election to ensure that he would take over from his father, who died in 2009 after 41 years in office.

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Creating the Ultimate Housework Workout

Robert Wright for The New York Times

Chris Ely, an English butler, and Carol Johnson, a fitness instructor at Crunch NYC, perfecting a houseworkout.

CAN housework help you live longer? A New York Times blog post by Gretchen Reynolds last month cited research linking vigorous activity, including housework, and longevity. The study, which tracked the death rates of British civil servants, was the latest in a flurry of scientific reports crediting domestic chores with health benefits like a lowered risk for breast and colon cancers. In one piquant study published in 2009, researchers found that couples who spent more hours on housework had sex more frequently (with each other) though presumably not while vacuuming. (The report did not specify.)

Intrigued by science that merged the efforts of a Martha with the results of an Arnold (a buffer buffer?), this reporter challenged a household expert and a fitness authority to create the ultimate housework workout — a houseworkout — in her East Village apartment. Perhaps she could add a few years to her own life while learning some fancy new moves for her Swiffer. Christopher Ely, once a footman at Buckingham Palace, and Brooke Astor’s longtime butler, was appointed cleaner-in-chief. Mr. Ely is a man who approaches what the professionals call household management with the range and depth of an Oxford don. Although he is working on his memoirs (he described his book as a room-by-room primer with anecdotes from his years in service), he was happy enough to put his writing aside for an afternoon. His collaborator was Carol Johnson, a dancer and fitness instructor who develops classes at Crunch NYC, including those based on Broadway musicals like “Legally Blonde” and “Rock of Ages.”

Mr. Ely arrived first, beautifully dressed in dark gray wool pants, a black suit coat and a crisp white shirt with silver cuff links. He cleans house in a white shirt? “I know how to clean it,” he countered, meaning the shirt. When Ms. Johnson appeared (in black spandex and a ruffly white chiffon blouse, which she switched out for a Crunch T-shirt), theory, method and materials were discussed.

“If you’re dreading the laundry,” Ms. Johnson said, “why not create a space where it’s actually fun to do by putting on some music?” If fitness is defined by cardio health, she added, it will be a challenge to create housework that leaves you slightly out of breath. “I’m thinking interval training,” she said. As it happens, one trend in exercise has been workouts that are inspired by real-world chores, or what Rob Morea, a high-end Manhattan trainer, described the other day as “mimicking hard labor activities.” In his NoHo studio, Mr. Morea has clients simulate the actions of construction workers hefting cement bags over their shoulders (Mr. Morea uses sand bags) or pushing a wheelbarrow or chopping wood.

Mr. Ely averred that service — extreme housekeeping — is physically demanding, with sore feet and bad knees the least of its debilitating byproducts. Mr. Ely still suffers from an injury he incurred while carrying a poodle to its mistress over icy front steps in Washington When the inevitable occurred, and Mr. Ely wiped out, he threw the dog to his employer before falling hard on his backside. And the right equipment matters: After two weeks’ employ in an Upper East Side penthouse, he was handed a pair of Reeboks by his new boss, the better to withstand the apartment’s wall-to-wall granite floors. (For cleaning, Mr. Ely wears slippers, deck shoes or socks.)

Mr. Ely, whose talents and expertise are wide-ranging (he can stock a wine cellar, do the flowers, set a silver service, iron like a maestro and clean gutters, as he did once or twice at Holly Hill, Mrs. Astor’s Westchester estate), is a minimalist when it comes to materials. He favors any simple dish detergent as a multipurpose cleaner, along with a little vinegar, for glass, and not much else. “Dish detergent is designed for cutting grease; there’s nothing better,” he said. He’s anti-ammonia, anti-bleach. He said bleach destroys fabric, particularly anything with elastic in it. “Knickers and bleach are a terrible combination,” he said. “I had a boss who thought he had skin cancer. His entire trunk had turned red and itchy.” It seems his underpants were being washed in bleach. (Collective wince.) “It’s horrible stuff.”

As for tools, he likes a cobweb cleaner — this reporter had bought Oxo’s extendable duster, which has a fluffy orange cotton duster that snaps onto a sort of wand, but Mr. Ely prefers the kind that looks like a round chimney brush. (If you live in a house, he also suggests leaving the cobwebs by the front and back doors, so the spiders can eat any mosquitoes coming or going.) Choose a mop with microfiber fronds (he suggested the O Cedar brand) because it dries quickly and doesn’t smell. And a sturdy vacuum. Also, stacks of microfiber cloths or a terry cloth towel ripped up.

But first, to stretch. Ms. Johnson took hold of this reporter’s Bona floor mop (it’s like a Swiffer, but with a reusable washcloth) and Mr. Ely followed along with an old-fashioned string mop. Though Mr. Ely has a kind of loose-limbed elegance, he is not exactly limber. He grimaced as he parroted Ms. Johnson, who used her mop as Gene Kelly did his umbrella, stretching her arms overhead, one by one, twisting from side to side, sucking in her stomach, rising up on tip toes. (Mr. Ely said his old poodle-hurling injury was kicking in.) Ms. Johnson adjusted his chin — “You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep sticking your neck out,” she warned — and Mr. Ely raised a black-socked foot napped with cat hair and chastised this reporter: “Would you look at that?” (The cat had vanished early on, but his “debris,” as Mr. Ely put it, was still very much in evidence. The reporter hung her head. Did she know that cat spit is toxic? Mr. Ely wondered.)

“We’re warming up the spine,” said Ms. Johnson. “Squeeze your abdominals.”

Mr. Ely looked worried: “I don’t think I have abdominals!”

MR. ELY’S technique is to clean a room from top to bottom. That means he begins with the cobweb cleaner, wafting it along ceiling corners, moldings, soffits and, uh, the top of the fridge (major dust harvest there). His form was pretty, like a serve by Roger Federer, if not exactly aerobic. For Mr. Ely kept stopping to lecture this reporter — on condensation; on the basic principles of heat transfer and why one needs to vacuum the refrigerator coils; on the movement of moist air in a kitchen; on floor care, which involved a long story about a Belgian monastery whose inhabitants never washed the kitchen floor; on how to dust the halogen spot lights (use a cotton cloth, not a microfiber one, and make sure the lights are off, and cool).  “I do rabbit on, don’t I?” he said. Ms. Johnson gamely hustled him along, noting that anytime you raise your arms over your head you can raise your heart rate. “What about a balance exercise?” she cajoled, executing a neat series of leg lifts. “That’s good for the butler’s booty!”

Read More..

Creating the Ultimate Housework Workout

Robert Wright for The New York Times

Chris Ely, an English butler, and Carol Johnson, a fitness instructor at Crunch NYC, perfecting a houseworkout.

CAN housework help you live longer? A New York Times blog post by Gretchen Reynolds last month cited research linking vigorous activity, including housework, and longevity. The study, which tracked the death rates of British civil servants, was the latest in a flurry of scientific reports crediting domestic chores with health benefits like a lowered risk for breast and colon cancers. In one piquant study published in 2009, researchers found that couples who spent more hours on housework had sex more frequently (with each other) though presumably not while vacuuming. (The report did not specify.)

Intrigued by science that merged the efforts of a Martha with the results of an Arnold (a buffer buffer?), this reporter challenged a household expert and a fitness authority to create the ultimate housework workout — a houseworkout — in her East Village apartment. Perhaps she could add a few years to her own life while learning some fancy new moves for her Swiffer. Christopher Ely, once a footman at Buckingham Palace, and Brooke Astor’s longtime butler, was appointed cleaner-in-chief. Mr. Ely is a man who approaches what the professionals call household management with the range and depth of an Oxford don. Although he is working on his memoirs (he described his book as a room-by-room primer with anecdotes from his years in service), he was happy enough to put his writing aside for an afternoon. His collaborator was Carol Johnson, a dancer and fitness instructor who develops classes at Crunch NYC, including those based on Broadway musicals like “Legally Blonde” and “Rock of Ages.”

Mr. Ely arrived first, beautifully dressed in dark gray wool pants, a black suit coat and a crisp white shirt with silver cuff links. He cleans house in a white shirt? “I know how to clean it,” he countered, meaning the shirt. When Ms. Johnson appeared (in black spandex and a ruffly white chiffon blouse, which she switched out for a Crunch T-shirt), theory, method and materials were discussed.

“If you’re dreading the laundry,” Ms. Johnson said, “why not create a space where it’s actually fun to do by putting on some music?” If fitness is defined by cardio health, she added, it will be a challenge to create housework that leaves you slightly out of breath. “I’m thinking interval training,” she said. As it happens, one trend in exercise has been workouts that are inspired by real-world chores, or what Rob Morea, a high-end Manhattan trainer, described the other day as “mimicking hard labor activities.” In his NoHo studio, Mr. Morea has clients simulate the actions of construction workers hefting cement bags over their shoulders (Mr. Morea uses sand bags) or pushing a wheelbarrow or chopping wood.

Mr. Ely averred that service — extreme housekeeping — is physically demanding, with sore feet and bad knees the least of its debilitating byproducts. Mr. Ely still suffers from an injury he incurred while carrying a poodle to its mistress over icy front steps in Washington When the inevitable occurred, and Mr. Ely wiped out, he threw the dog to his employer before falling hard on his backside. And the right equipment matters: After two weeks’ employ in an Upper East Side penthouse, he was handed a pair of Reeboks by his new boss, the better to withstand the apartment’s wall-to-wall granite floors. (For cleaning, Mr. Ely wears slippers, deck shoes or socks.)

Mr. Ely, whose talents and expertise are wide-ranging (he can stock a wine cellar, do the flowers, set a silver service, iron like a maestro and clean gutters, as he did once or twice at Holly Hill, Mrs. Astor’s Westchester estate), is a minimalist when it comes to materials. He favors any simple dish detergent as a multipurpose cleaner, along with a little vinegar, for glass, and not much else. “Dish detergent is designed for cutting grease; there’s nothing better,” he said. He’s anti-ammonia, anti-bleach. He said bleach destroys fabric, particularly anything with elastic in it. “Knickers and bleach are a terrible combination,” he said. “I had a boss who thought he had skin cancer. His entire trunk had turned red and itchy.” It seems his underpants were being washed in bleach. (Collective wince.) “It’s horrible stuff.”

As for tools, he likes a cobweb cleaner — this reporter had bought Oxo’s extendable duster, which has a fluffy orange cotton duster that snaps onto a sort of wand, but Mr. Ely prefers the kind that looks like a round chimney brush. (If you live in a house, he also suggests leaving the cobwebs by the front and back doors, so the spiders can eat any mosquitoes coming or going.) Choose a mop with microfiber fronds (he suggested the O Cedar brand) because it dries quickly and doesn’t smell. And a sturdy vacuum. Also, stacks of microfiber cloths or a terry cloth towel ripped up.

But first, to stretch. Ms. Johnson took hold of this reporter’s Bona floor mop (it’s like a Swiffer, but with a reusable washcloth) and Mr. Ely followed along with an old-fashioned string mop. Though Mr. Ely has a kind of loose-limbed elegance, he is not exactly limber. He grimaced as he parroted Ms. Johnson, who used her mop as Gene Kelly did his umbrella, stretching her arms overhead, one by one, twisting from side to side, sucking in her stomach, rising up on tip toes. (Mr. Ely said his old poodle-hurling injury was kicking in.) Ms. Johnson adjusted his chin — “You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep sticking your neck out,” she warned — and Mr. Ely raised a black-socked foot napped with cat hair and chastised this reporter: “Would you look at that?” (The cat had vanished early on, but his “debris,” as Mr. Ely put it, was still very much in evidence. The reporter hung her head. Did she know that cat spit is toxic? Mr. Ely wondered.)

“We’re warming up the spine,” said Ms. Johnson. “Squeeze your abdominals.”

Mr. Ely looked worried: “I don’t think I have abdominals!”

MR. ELY’S technique is to clean a room from top to bottom. That means he begins with the cobweb cleaner, wafting it along ceiling corners, moldings, soffits and, uh, the top of the fridge (major dust harvest there). His form was pretty, like a serve by Roger Federer, if not exactly aerobic. For Mr. Ely kept stopping to lecture this reporter — on condensation; on the basic principles of heat transfer and why one needs to vacuum the refrigerator coils; on the movement of moist air in a kitchen; on floor care, which involved a long story about a Belgian monastery whose inhabitants never washed the kitchen floor; on how to dust the halogen spot lights (use a cotton cloth, not a microfiber one, and make sure the lights are off, and cool).  “I do rabbit on, don’t I?” he said. Ms. Johnson gamely hustled him along, noting that anytime you raise your arms over your head you can raise your heart rate. “What about a balance exercise?” she cajoled, executing a neat series of leg lifts. “That’s good for the butler’s booty!”

Read More..

Letter From Africa: South Africa Losing a Grip on Its Promise

PLETTENBERG BAY, SOUTH AFRICA — This resort town on the Indian Ocean coastline might seem an unlikely spot from which to muse on an entire nation, a pocket of privilege sometimes nicknamed Johannesburg-by-the-Sea.

It is a place where some of the land’s wealthiest white families maintain vacation homes comparable to those of Martha’s Vineyard or the French Riviera; where predominantly white vacationers in this Southern Hemisphere summer seem to compete for the newest German or Japanese S.U.V.’s towing the smartest powerboat.

Given South Africa’s vast inequalities — its crime, its corruption, its unemployment, its struggle with AIDS, the unhealed scars of the apartheid era — the year-end frenzy of parties, boats and beaches here might seem irrelevant to the prevailing national debate, defined by a gathering this month of the dominant African National Congress at which President Jacob Zuma sought to buttress his campaign for a second term in 2014 by embracing as his party deputy Cyril Ramaphosa, a fabulously wealthy former labor organizer beloved of the business elite and of others who hope he will curb the A.N.C.’s rampant self-enrichment.

But, obliquely, this premier vacation retreat does shine a kind of sidelight: In all of the hundreds of thousands of printed, verbalized and digitized words devoted to scrutinizing the A.N.C’s twice-a-decade elective conference at Bloemfontein, the country’s onetime obsession with race seemed conspicuously absent.

For a vacationer and onetime South Africa-based correspondent watching motorboats carve pristine wakes across the expanse of the Keurbooms River lagoon, it almost seemed as if the white minority has been given a free pass to a future once defined by its leaders as a looming apocalypse.

Of course, nothing here is that simple. South Africa’s struggle was never written in such racial monotones as its stereotypes suggested. The bloodlust for racial warfare was limited to the extreme fringes and may not have been fully diluted: At a recent court hearing, four white men were accused of plotting to kill Mr. Zuma and others at the A.N.C. conference.

By contrast, white civic and business leaders here — as elsewhere — maintain that they contribute the bulk of local taxes and charitable support to leaven the inequality with the black majority in this onetime whaling station. South Africa may claim to be a post-apartheid rainbow nation, but that dream, for some, is still a work in progress at best.

This has always been a land whose self-image is woven with contradictions. At the end of the recent conference, A.N.C. leaders toasted their avowed “unity” with Champagne, which, as one broadcaster, Hajra Omarjee, put it, was “hardly the most politically correct gesture” for a party claiming to champion the dispossessed in a land where most have never dreamed of tasting fancy French wines.

It is a nation that has long seen itself as exceptional, punching above its weight in literature, athletics, sports and business, its dreams sustained by a wealth of minerals.

Apartheid set South Africa apart, not just among its own people but across a world that condemned as pariahs its white leaders and their racial tunnel vision.

With the first free elections in 1994, a new order under Nelson Mandela forged a new moral template, built during 27 years of imprisonment and a post-liberation commitment to a future without vengeance.

But the superlatives have shifted under his successors. Statistically, South Africa is the world’s most unequal society, not simply in the glaring contrasts of black and white wealth, but also in the skewed balance between the bulk of South Africans and an emergent black superclass, including entrepreneurs and investors like Mr. Ramaphosa.

“Economic inequality is the Achilles’ heel of the South African economy,” said Adam Habib, the newly named head of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Mr. Mandela, aged 94 and in poor health, spent the holidays in the hospital to be treated for a lung infection and the removal of gallstones. After almost three weeks, he was discharged Wednesday and will be treated at his home in Johannesburg, his physicians said.

Such medical bulletins make headline news: Mr. Mandela’s survival still functions as a source of reassurance, a reminder of a moral aspiration that sometimes seems to have been eclipsed by a far less dignified scramble for the spoils of his legacy through fraudulent contracts, tenders and paybacks. The democratic credential has frayed.

At the A.N.C. conference, Mr. Habib said, some votes for power blocs and slates of candidates could “only be described as an example of match-fixing.”

In some ways, thus, exceptionalism is giving way to practices that are far from the exception elsewhere in Africa.

“Ordinary men, women and children are now left out of the promise of freedom and democracy,” Mamphela Ramphele, head of Citizens Movement for Social Change, wrote in The Sunday Independent. “We must now reflect on how we should shape the future of our country to revive the dream that powered us into the freedom which we now enjoy and which is at great risk.”

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Recipes for Health: Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Penne with mushroom ragout and spinach.

​​Mushrooms and spinach together is always a match made in heaven. I use a mix of wild and regular white or cremini mushrooms for this, but don’t hesitate to make it if regular mushrooms are all that is available.

 

1/2 ounce (about 1/2 cup) dried porcini mushrooms

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1/2 medium onion or 2 shallots, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 pound mixed regular and wild mushrooms or 1 pound regular white or cremini mushrooms, trimmed and cut in thick slices (or torn into smaller pieces, depending on the type of mushroom)

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1/4 cup fruity red wine, such as a Côtes du Rhone or Côtes du Luberon

2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme or a combination of thyme and rosemary

6 ounces baby spinach or 12 ounces bunch spinach (1 bunch), stemmed and thoroughly cleaned

3/4 pound penne

Freshly grated Parmesan to taste

 

1. Place the dried mushrooms in a Pyrex measuring cup and pour on 2 cups boiling water. Let soak 30 minutes, while you prepare the other ingredients. Place a strainer over a bowl, line it with cheesecloth or paper towels, and drain the mushrooms. Squeeze the mushrooms over the strainer to extract all the flavorful juices. Then rinse the mushrooms, away from the bowl with the soaking liquid, until they are free of sand. Squeeze dry and set aside. If very large, chop coarsely. Measure out 1 cup of the soaking liquid and set aside.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy, nonstick skillet over medium heat and add the onion or shallots. Cook, stirring often, until tender, about 5 minutes. Turn up the heat to medium-high and add the fresh mushrooms. Cook, stirring often, until they begin to soften and sweat, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and salt to taste, stir together for about 30 seconds, then add the reconstituted dried mushrooms and the wine and turn the heat to high. Cook, stirring, until the liquid boils down and glazes the mushrooms. Add the herbs and the mushroom soaking liquid. Bring to a simmer, add salt to taste, and cook over medium-high heat, stirring often, until the mushrooms are thoroughly tender and fragrant. Turn off the heat, stir in some freshly ground pepper, taste and adjust salt.

3. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt generously. Fill a bowl with ice water. Add the spinach to the boiling water and blanch for 20 seconds only. Remove with a skimmer and transfer to the ice water, then drain and squeeze out water. Chop coarsely and add to the mushrooms. Reheat gently over low heat.

4. Bring the water back to a boil and cook the pasta al dente following the timing suggestions on the package. If there is not much broth in the pan with the mushrooms and spinach, add a ladleful of pasta water. Drain the pasta, toss with the mushrooms and spinach, add Parmesan to taste, and serve at once.

Yield: Serves 4

Advance preparation: The mushroom ragout will keep for 3 or 4 days in the refrigerator and tastes even better the day after you make it.

Nutritional information per serving: 437 calories; 9 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 73 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams dietary fiber; 48 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste or Parmesan); 17 grams protein

​

Up Next: Spinach Gnocchi

 

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Recipes for Health: Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Penne with mushroom ragout and spinach.

​​Mushrooms and spinach together is always a match made in heaven. I use a mix of wild and regular white or cremini mushrooms for this, but don’t hesitate to make it if regular mushrooms are all that is available.

 

1/2 ounce (about 1/2 cup) dried porcini mushrooms

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1/2 medium onion or 2 shallots, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 pound mixed regular and wild mushrooms or 1 pound regular white or cremini mushrooms, trimmed and cut in thick slices (or torn into smaller pieces, depending on the type of mushroom)

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1/4 cup fruity red wine, such as a Côtes du Rhone or Côtes du Luberon

2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme or a combination of thyme and rosemary

6 ounces baby spinach or 12 ounces bunch spinach (1 bunch), stemmed and thoroughly cleaned

3/4 pound penne

Freshly grated Parmesan to taste

 

1. Place the dried mushrooms in a Pyrex measuring cup and pour on 2 cups boiling water. Let soak 30 minutes, while you prepare the other ingredients. Place a strainer over a bowl, line it with cheesecloth or paper towels, and drain the mushrooms. Squeeze the mushrooms over the strainer to extract all the flavorful juices. Then rinse the mushrooms, away from the bowl with the soaking liquid, until they are free of sand. Squeeze dry and set aside. If very large, chop coarsely. Measure out 1 cup of the soaking liquid and set aside.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy, nonstick skillet over medium heat and add the onion or shallots. Cook, stirring often, until tender, about 5 minutes. Turn up the heat to medium-high and add the fresh mushrooms. Cook, stirring often, until they begin to soften and sweat, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and salt to taste, stir together for about 30 seconds, then add the reconstituted dried mushrooms and the wine and turn the heat to high. Cook, stirring, until the liquid boils down and glazes the mushrooms. Add the herbs and the mushroom soaking liquid. Bring to a simmer, add salt to taste, and cook over medium-high heat, stirring often, until the mushrooms are thoroughly tender and fragrant. Turn off the heat, stir in some freshly ground pepper, taste and adjust salt.

3. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt generously. Fill a bowl with ice water. Add the spinach to the boiling water and blanch for 20 seconds only. Remove with a skimmer and transfer to the ice water, then drain and squeeze out water. Chop coarsely and add to the mushrooms. Reheat gently over low heat.

4. Bring the water back to a boil and cook the pasta al dente following the timing suggestions on the package. If there is not much broth in the pan with the mushrooms and spinach, add a ladleful of pasta water. Drain the pasta, toss with the mushrooms and spinach, add Parmesan to taste, and serve at once.

Yield: Serves 4

Advance preparation: The mushroom ragout will keep for 3 or 4 days in the refrigerator and tastes even better the day after you make it.

Nutritional information per serving: 437 calories; 9 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 73 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams dietary fiber; 48 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste or Parmesan); 17 grams protein

​

Up Next: Spinach Gnocchi

 

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

Read More..

The 30-Minute Interview: The 30-Minute Interview With Nick J. Romito

Mr. Romito, 30, is the founder and chief executive of View the Space, a new real estate technology business that creates online video tours, primarily of office space, and provides data-tracking services to commercial real estate companies, among them SL Green Realty, Vornado Realty Trust and Silverstein Properties.

Before starting the business last year, Mr. Romito worked as a commercial broker and tenant and landlord representative.

Q. How has business been so far?

A. Business is good. We launched the beta version of the Web site about a year ago, and this April was when we took the beta logo off and decided that we were at a point where we could start charging for the product. We’ve grown extraordinarily fast, but that’s a good thing.

Q. Are you profitable yet?

A. We had profitability in May, then like most start-up companies we scaled up. We hit profitability again in October.

I put in all my life savings, which was roughly $50,000 to $100,000, with my wife’s help. As we were going into the market and trying to get people to believe in our dream it gets rough. But we actually got really lucky and found some great partners — a syndicate of hedge fund professionals who knew commercial real estate and invest in start-ups — who liked our idea. We raised about $650,000.

Q. Let’s talk about the services you provide.

A. As you probably know, commercial real estate is an antiquated business, more or less reluctant to embrace technology. We thought we were a crazy enough bunch to change that. We decided we could improve the process by taking it online from start to finish. So for us that means video. We’ve created a style of shooting video for office space that’s really never existed. Ours is the closest thing to actually being there, where you fly through the space and you actually feel like you’re in it. You just can’t touch the walls.

On the landlord side, we allow you to track how a person is interacting with the tour. So you get to see 1) the prospect who’s looking at it; 2) how many times they’ve watched it; and 3) how engaged are they with it. You’ll actually be able to tell whether a specific firm has taken the tour 10 times — that’s a very, very high level of engagement — and they’re a serious prospect so I’m going to follow up with them.

Q. What kind of analytics software accomplishes this?

A. We had to build a pretty serious back end of data that’s taken us awhile. You’ve got I.P. addresses all over the place, so we had to build a library of those, which we can identify for the most part which companies are viewing your space.

Q. And how do the clients see this information?

A. They can see it in real time whenever they want — from their dashboard. And if they’re not online we’ll e-mail it to them.

Q. Has this service helped to sell property faster?

A. Yeah. We’re at about 1.5 million square feet leased on View the Space since December 2011.

Q. How many clients do you have right now?

A. Over 50. We’ve got most of the larger commercial real estate institutions both on the public and private side.

It’s funny, when we first started, our thesis was that we would get all of the smaller landlords on board first because we have more access to them. But because we worked so tightly with the brokerage community to build this, SL Green caught wind of what we were doing very quickly and they ended up being our first big client.

So it’s kind of like a domino effect where you get the SL Greens of the world soon enough the Silversteins and all the other players want to find out what you’re doing.

Q. Where do you hope to see your business in, say, the next five to 10 years?

A. We think that technology is here to stay in commercial real estate. And we see us growing, hopefully, in every major market. We’re actively in 10 markets right now.

New York right now is probably 60 percent of the activity that we have.

Q. You don’t have a technology background, do you?

A. I don’t. During the first year of development I was still a broker. I tried to outsource the first part of this to India, which was a very painful process. You’ve got to start your day at 4 a.m., because of the time difference, and the language barrier was very difficult. Not only was I trying to learn Hindi, but also the language of technology.

Q. So when you’re not learning new languages, what do you do for fun?

A. I surf. That was more or less my life growing up on the Jersey Shore. In Toms River.

Q. Were you or your family affected by Hurricane Sandy?

A. My mom lost her house. She got a couple of feet of water, and now they’ll have to demo the house.

But as long as everyone is O.K., it’s just stuff. I think everybody down there is so resilient, and this is like when everybody really comes together.

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Changing of the Guard: Corrupt Chinese Officials Draw Unusual Publicity

BEIJING — The Chinese have become largely inured to tales of voracious officials stockpiling luxury apartments, $30,000 Swiss watches or enough stolen cash to buy their mistress a Porsche.

But when images of a bulbous-faced Communist Party functionary in southwest China having sex with an 18-year-old girl spread on the Internet late last month, even the most jaded citizens took note — as did the local party watchdogs who ordered his dismissal.

These have been especially nerve-racking times for Chinese officials who cheat, steal and bribe. Since the local bureaucrat, Lei Zhengfu, became an unwilling celebrity here, a succession of others have been publicly exposed. And despite the usual cries of innocence, most have been removed from office while party investigators sort through their bedrooms and bank accounts.

In the weeks since the Communist Party elevated a new slate of top leaders, the state media, often fed by freelance vigilantes, have been serving up a head-spinning collection of scandals.

Highlights include a deputy district official in Shanxi Province who fathered 10 children with four wives; a prefecture chief from Yunnan with an opium habit who managed to accumulate 23 homes, including 6 in Australia; and a Hunan bureaucrat with $19 million in unexplained assets who once gave his young daughter $32,000 in cash for her birthday.

“The anticorruption storm has begun,” People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece, wrote on its Web site this month.

The flurry of revelations suggests that members of China’s new leadership may be more serious than their predecessors about trying to tame the cronyism, bribery and debauchery that afflict state-run companies and local governments, right down to the outwardly dowdy neighborhood committees that oversee sanitation. Efforts began just days after Xi Jinping, the newly appointed Communist Party chief and China’s incoming president, warned that failing to curb corruption could put the party’s grip on power at risk.

“Something has shifted,” said Zhu Ruifeng, a Beijing journalist who has exposed more than a hundred cases of alleged corruption on his Web site, including the lurid exertions of Mr. Lei. “In the past, it might take 10 days for an official involved in a sex scandal to lose his job. This time he was gone in 66 hours.”

The licentiousness of Qi Fang, the public security chief of a small city in the far west, probably deserves a prize for originality. This month, an Internet sleuth revealed that Mr. Qi was maintaining two young sisters as mistresses. The sisters, as luck would have it, had also landed police department jobs and shared an apartment bankrolled by the city.

Mr. Qi lost his post, but not before denying any mischief and correcting one detail of the story: the sisters, contrary to earlier reports, are not twins.

Still, for all the salaciousness associated with the latest scandals, analysts say it is too soon to know whether Mr. Xi and other senior leaders have the stomach to wage a no-holds-barred war on the party’s pervasive corruption.

They point out that most of the recent scandals were uncovered by journalists, anonymous citizens or disgruntled colleagues who posted photographs and other damning allegations on the Internet, forcing the authorities to respond. Also significant is that most of those ousted were relatively minor officials.

The manager of a major Chinese Internet company said the party was effectively abetting the anticorruption free-for-all by declining to pull the plug on the online denunciations. But he said there was an implicit understanding that high-ranking officials were off limits.

“For now it’s spontaneous,” said the manager, who asked that the name of his company be withheld because of the political sensitivities involved. “But we also understand the parameters.”

This month, Luo Changping, deputy managing editor at the enterprising newsmagazine Caijing, published accusations on his microblog about improper business dealings by Liu Tienan, the director of China’s National Energy Administration. The postings, which also included charges that Mr. Liu had fabricated his academic qualifications and had threatened to kill his mistress, have caused something of an earthquake, given that they targeted such a high-level official. Just as astonishing, many say, is that Mr. Luo’s claims remain undeleted by censors despite Mr. Liu’s denials of wrongdoing.

Patrick Zuo contributed research.

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