Russian ban on U.S. adoptions meant to cast Americans as abusers

Anyone unfamiliar with the hyperbole of post-Cold War politics might be perplexed by Moscow’s move to outlaw American adoption of Russian orphans.

More than 60,000 Russian children once condemned to a hellish institutional life have been brought into U.S. homes over the last two decades, most of them suffering disabilities that would have gone untreated had they been left in the Dickensian orphanages of their homeland. The disabled remain victims of stigma in Russia, while a struggling economy and the Stalin-era brand of orphans being “children of the enemies of the people” continue to dissuade Russians from adopting their own unfortunates.

But Russians’ inability and unwillingness to take care of their legions of unwanted children is nevertheless the source of deep embarrassment and wounded national pride, Russia experts say. And having Americans swooping in and rescuing them by the thousands each year nurtures an inferiority complex that has only deepened since the superpower rivalry purportedly ended with the Soviet Union's 1991 breakup.

Nationalist lawmakers in the State Duma overwhelmingly approved the U.S. adoption ban last week, and the upper house of the legislature passed it unanimously on Wednesday. President Vladimir Putin signed the law Friday, and it will take effect on New Year’s Day.

Putin’s parliamentary allies pushed through the ban by conjuring up an image of American adoptive parents as sinister hunters of transplant organs, child sex slaves and sacrificial soldiers for foreign aggressions, perhaps even against Russia.

Like most good lies, the sickening picture of American motives painted to get the adoption ban passed was built on a morsel of truth. The measure was named the Dima Yakovlev Act, in memory of the Russian-born toddler who died of heatstroke in 2008 when his American adoptive father left him locked in a car for hours.

Dima was one of 19 Russian-born children to die from accidents or neglect after being brought to the United States over a span of more than 15 years, according to the Moscow-based advocacy group Right of the Child. The agency, which opposed the U.S. adoption ban, reports that at least 1,200 accidental or abuse deaths occurred over that same time among children adopted by Russian families.

Russia has about 740,000 children in state care, UNICEF reports, and the United States is the most frequent destination for foreign adoptions, taking in about 3,000 on average each year. Fewer than 7,000 are adopted by Russian families each year, or less than 1% of those dependent on state care, Right of the Child Director Boris Altshuler has calculated.

The U.S. adoption cutoff is widely seen as retaliation for the Magnitsky Act, a bill President Obama signed into law two weeks ago that sanctions Russian officials for alleged human rights abuses. The bill was named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in a Moscow jail in 2009 after being arrested and beaten for blowing the whistle on $230 million in tax graft by Russian police.

Putin bridles at any U.S. allegation of abuse by Russian officials and believes moves to punish his government are part of an elaborate scheme to undermine and dominate Russia, said Steven Fish, a political science professor and Russian expert at UC Berkeley.

The adoption ban is “an asymmetrical move ... and is very much a product of this prickly wounded nationalism,” Fish said. “These kids are now just going to be caught in a system that already can’t take care of them.”

Adoption has always been a sensitive issue in Russia, he said, because having to depend on American largess to provide adequate care for orphans casts the country and its leadership as "weak and poor.”

Letting a few thousand young Russians leave for new lives with U.S. families each year also plays into the nationalist hysteria over Russia’s demographic crisis, Fish added. He blamed rampant alcoholism for Russian men’s persistently low life expectancy as a far larger  contributing factor to the annual population shrinkage of 150,000.

Paul Gregory, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said  Putin’s followers have churned up public animosity toward U.S. adoptions by resurrecting the Soviet-era propaganda tactic of casting the United States as a dangerous and depraved nation.

“Clearly they want to say that if we’re cracking down on their rights abuses that it’s even worse in the United States. They come up with rather ridiculous cases of cross burnings, and bombings of Jewish synagogues and civil rights abuses to prove that the Magnitsky death in prison was nothing bad at all compared to what goes on here,”  Gregory said. “What they fail to mention is that the persecution and prosecution of Magnitsky was done by the Russian government, whereas these unfortunate actions in the United States were done by fringe groups or crazies.”

The Magnitsky Act bars any Russian official associated with the lawyer’s treatment or with other alleged rights abuses from travel to the United States or access to its financial institutions.

The Russian political leadership’s overreaction to the Magnitsky censure, Gregory said, shows that it has yet to overcome its terrible history under the dictatorship of Josef Stalin of mistreating the children of political opponents. 

"Putin's not going to shed a tear over it," Gregory said of the 1,500 pending U.S. adoptions likely to be blocked by the new law. "He’s going to look at this ban as a weapon in his arsenal of retaliations for the Magnitsky Act, something we can see is really causing those in the leadership some pain.”

ALSO:

Putin inclined to sign U.S. adoptions ban

Attack on Afghanistan police post kills 4

Nelson Mandela home from hospital but still under medical care

A foreign correspondent for 25 years, Carol J. Williams traveled to and reported from more than 80 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

carol.williams@latimes.com

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12 Tech Moments of 2012 That Made You Say 'WTF?'

The tech world never ceases to amaze. Sometimes, people build amazing things. And sometimes, the people who build amazing things do other stuff that leaves your jaw on the floor. Some of it's good. Some of it is oh so very bad. And some of it is just plain weird.

Here, we give you our 12 most amazing tech moments of 2012. (Click on the images above.) Yes, you'll get all kinds. The good. The bad. And the weird. Lots o' weird.

Above:

Hands down, this is the craziest story of the year. A man is found dead, floating in a pool in Belize, and when authorities try to question his neighbor, Silicon Valley legend John McAfee, he hides overnight beneath a cardboard box and then goes on the run, phoning in dispatches from safe houses and, finally, surfacing in Guatemala where he was the star of a full-fledged international media circus.

McAfee says he's innocent, but he's got a serious credibility problem. He says a lot of things, and not all of them add up. McAfee — the guy who basically invented the computer antivirus industry — is a self-admitted master of social engineering, the art of deceiving others to achieve his own ends. On discussion forums, he's claimed to be an expert on the amphetamine-like drunk known as bath salts, and then later said it was all a joke. In Guatemala, he faked a heart attack to delay his extradition.

When last we heard, McAfee had been extradited to Miami and was heading his way west — staying in cheap motels, and switching into different disguises. Or at least that's what he says.

John McAfee Photo: Brian Finke

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R&B singer Brandy engaged to music executive

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – R&B singer and actress Brandy Norwood is engaged to music executive Ryan Press, a spokeswoman for the singer said on Thursday.

This will be the first marriage for the singer, who goes by the moniker Brandy. Press is an executive with music publisher Warner/Chappell Music. A date for the wedding has not been announced publicly.

Norwood, 33, has a 10-year-old daughter with her former boyfriend, music producer Robert Smith.

Norwood has starred in numerous television and films since the 1990s and is best known as the lead character in the popular television series “Moesha” from 1996-2001 on the now-defunct channel UPN.

She also scored a hit song in 1998 with “The Boy is Mine,” a collaboration with the singer Monica, which garnered the pair a Grammy award. Brandy released her sixth studio album “Two Eleven” in October this year.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and David Brunnstrom)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: United States Lags in Alzheimer's Support

This month, the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging released a report examining how five nations — the United States, Australia, France, Japan and Britain — are responding to growing numbers of older adults with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

Every country has a strategy, but some are much further ahead than others. Notably, France began addressing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in 2001 and is in the midst of carrying out its third national plan. (Scroll down at this link to find the English version of the 2008-2012 French plan.)

By contrast, the United States released its first national plan to address Alzheimer’s in May.

The Senate report highlights several trends under way in all five countries, including efforts to coordinate research more effectively, diagnose Alzheimer’s disease more reliably and improve training in dementia care by medical practitioners.

Most relevant to readers of this blog is another trend with increasing international scope: an accelerating effort to keep patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia at home and arrange for care and treatment there, rather than in institutions.

Anyone who’s followed reader response to Jane Brody’s column this week on aging in place knows the burden that this can place on families, especially if government support for home-based services (companions or home health aides who help with bathing, dressing, toileting and other tasks), adult day care or respite care is scarce or nonexistent, as is the case for most middle-class families in the United States.

Is care at home for patients with Alzheimer’s necessarily more humane? Only if caregivers have the resources — financial, physical and emotional — to handle this draining, exhausting, immeasurably difficult job. And only if the institutions that serve people with more advanced forms of Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia are so poorly financed, staffed and operated that we wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving loved ones in their care.

Three charts in the new Senate report underscore the extent to which the United States differs from other countries in what is expected of family caregivers. The first, on Page 60, shows countries’ support for paid long-term care services for residents age 65 and older. This includes all residents who need long-term care, including those with Alzheimer’s disease, other forms of dementia and other disabling chronic illnesses. Not included are services provided by unpaid family caregivers.

Look at where the United States ranks compared with Australia, Japan, France and the 30 other developed countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Paid support for long-term care is much less in our country than in theirs.

The second chart, on Page 64, gives a sense of how much paid support for long-term care is provided in people’s homes. Again, the data is not specific to Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, although these are primary reasons older adults need long-term care.

And again, the United States falls short in terms of the amount of paid care it provides in home settings, even though older people tend to prefer these settings over institutions.

The third chart, on Page 75, brings results in the other two down to the level of families. When paid long-term care support is scarce or unavailable, you would expect a heavier load to fall on unpaid caregivers, and this is what the chart shows. Look at the number of caregivers in the United States who put in 10 to 19 hours a week (34.2 percent) or 20 hours or more a week (30.5 percent), and compare those with similar figures for France, Australia and Britain, all of which provide more paid long-term care than we do. Where are informal caregivers working the hardest? Right here at home in the United States.

For me, the take-away is clear. Other countries with which the United States is closely aligned have embraced long-term care as an essential social responsibility while we have not. Unless and until we do so, caregivers here will be among the most harried, stressed and burdened among wealthy, developed countries in the world.

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Wind Farm Developers Race Against End of Tax Credit

WASHINGTON — Forget about parties, resolutions or watching the ball drop. To Iberdrola Renewables, New Year’s Eve will mean checking on last-minute details like the data connections between 169 new wind turbines in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and California and its control center in Portland, Ore.

All over the country, developers are in a sprint to get new wind farms up and running before Tuesday, when the federal wind production tax credit will disappear like Cinderella’s ball gown. After that, the nation’s wind-farm building will be at a virtual standstill.

The stakes of meeting the deadline are enormous. Wind turbines that are connected to the grid and in commercial service before midnight on New Year’s Eve are entitled to a 2.2 cent tax credit for each kilowatt-hour they generate in their first 10 years, which comes out to about $1 million for a big turbine. As it stands now, those that enter service on Jan. 1 or later are out of luck.

The deadline is a bit like the April 15 one for filing income taxes, but “there are no extensions here,” said Paul Copleman, a spokesman for Iberdrola. To reduce the risk of missing it — a risk that increases when managing construction projects on mountaintops in New England in the winter — the company allowed more than a year for what are normally nine-month construction projects.

More than just individual projects are at risk; the wind industry says it expects installations to decline by 90 percent next year, with the loss of thousands of jobs. The erratic pattern of wind subsidies has spawned a boom-and-bust cycle, with supplier companies building factories that run at full production for months and then shut down when demand collapses.

The industry has long experience with drop-dead deadlines: since the tax credit began in the early 1990s, it has expired three times, said Elizabeth A. Salerno, director of industry data and analysis at the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group based in Washington. Each time, new installations fell from 73 percent to 93 percent, according to the association.

Congress, which last renewed the credit as part of the 2009 fiscal stimulus package, balked at an extension this year. Opponents argue that the money spent so far, about $14.7 billion, is enough, and that a renewal could cost about $12.2 billion were it to last for 10 years. They also complain that the credit allows wind machines to be profitable even when there is a surplus of electricity and the market price for it falls to zero.

The tax credit could be equal to one-sixth to one-half of the revenue from the wind turbine, depending on electricity prices in the area of the generator.

Wind advocates say that the wind production tax credit did not cost the taxpayers any money, because it stimulated economic activity, in the form of manufacturing and construction, that was taxed at the federal, state and local levels.

Iberdrola’s wind farm near Rosamond, Calif., with 126 turbines, opened last week. The company said it was “extremely optimistic” that its 19-turbine farm in Monroe and Florida, Mass., and a 24-turbine farm in Groton, N.H., would be up and running by Monday night, but declined to say precisely when.

 According to the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the Energy Department, wind developers were planning to install 12,000 megawatts of wind capacity this year, but as of Nov. 30, only about 6,000 megawatts had been completed.

The remaining 6,000 megawatts works out to more than 3,000 turbines: if they are all operating by late Monday night, the wind industry will have added 12 percent to its capacity in a single month. (A megawatt is the power required by, say, everything in a full-size Walmart with an included supermarket. Over the course of a year, however, a turbine produces only about one-third of its theoretical maximum capacity.)  

Iberdrola did not disclose the price of each wind farm, but the industry average is about $2 million per megawatt, meaning that the three projects may have cost a total of more than $500 million.

Wind advocates say they will seek to revive the tax credit when a new Congress convenes next month, but it will not be at the top of Congress’s agenda.

With the tax credit due to expire, few developers are now taking the early steps required to establish a wind farm, like negotiating deals to sell the power and ordering the equipment. Mr. Copleman, the Iberdrola spokesman, said his company had a variety of projects “at various stages” but was “unlikely to be pouring any concrete next year.”

For projects being wrapped up now, Ms. Salerno said, developers lined up power purchase agreements with utilities and then arranged financing a year and a half to two years ago, with the economics predicated on the tax credit.

The start-and-stop pattern of recent years has repeatedly affected companies up and down the chain, especially the highly specialized ones that make towers, blades and generators. Robert Thresher, a wind expert at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, Colo., said manufacturers were “trying to run down their inventory so they wouldn’t be caught holding turbines” after the market collapsed in January.

A study commissioned by the wind industry predicts the loss of 37,000 jobs as a result of the credit’s expiration. For example, the Spanish company Gamesa, which built the giant blades for the New Hampshire project at its factory in Ebensburg, Pa., has announced the layoffs of more than 150 workers.

Some members of Congress have proposed that the credit be renewed, perhaps with a phaseout over a few years. A one-year extension would be of little use: Ms. Salerno said it would not give developers enough time to get new projects financed, built and put on the grid before the expiration date, even if they had already completed environmental studies and obtained the various permits required.

A one-year extension would work for developers, she said, but only “if you knew 24 months ahead of time that this was going to happen.”

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A risky return to the U.S.

The barrilero never stops moving.

All day he wheels cardboard barrels stuffed with used clothing through the narrow aisles of the warehouse. He dumps the apparel atop tables for sorters, who separate nylons from cottons, satins from silks, denims from plaids. If a sorter is standing around with no garments, it's the barrilero's fault. Supervisors hover nearby.

Tons of old clothing come in every week, and tons go back out, to India and Pakistan, where it's sold at outdoor markets.

The factory hired the barrilero in September, a few weeks after the now-21-year-old showed up at the manager's door looking for work. Right away, the manager had recognized him as Anthony, that cute kid who walked his factory floor selling Helen Grace chocolates to workers years ago.

Anthony didn't say much about where he'd been, or what he'd been doing since. He was polite, upbeat, and his knock on the door still had the soft touch of a child. But his hair was falling out, and there was something unfamiliar in his eyes.

"He seemed sadder," the manager said, "like he wanted to say something but didn't know how."

There were many things the barrilero would keep to himself. First among them: His name wasn't Anthony.

::

Luis Luna returned to his hometown of South Gate in May. His arms and legs were scraped raw from cactus needles and his eyes kept blinking, still starved of moisture from his eight-day journey through the Arizona desert the week before.

His friend, Julio Cortez, said it was hard to believe that this gaunt young man with patches of missing hair was the same person he knew at Southeast Middle School.

"I was in shock to see him back and see all he had gone through," Cortez said. "It made me sad and angry."

Cortez, a 22-year-old Cal State Long Beach student, took Luis to buy some clothes. Another former classmate gave Luis a cellphone. Luis slept on couches and in spare bedrooms and spent his days passing out resumes filled with the jobs of his teen years: flipping burgers, waiting tables at I-Hop. He fudged the dates to account for the 15 months he spent in Mexico after he was deported for being in the country illegally.

Luis had been pulled over three years ago for a broken headlight in Pasco, Wash., where he and his mother lived. He was cited for driving without a license, jailed and ordered out of the country in February 2011.

He had a wife back in Washington, but she had left him, in part because of the long separation. Luis decided to build a new life in Southern California, where he had grown up and where he still had friends

Weeks after arriving, he was still jobless and borrowing money to eat when he decided his future might lie in his past. He started retracing the route he took as a boy selling chocolates at warehouses and factories. The assembly line workers, truck drivers and managers knew him as Anthony, the name his mother told him to use to hide his identity.

They could vouch for his strong work ethic — that he'd been working for a living since he was 5 years old.

He eventually found the barrilero job, and a place to live. A swap meet vendor who picked through the bins of cast-offs looking for vintage garments told Luis he had extra space at his house.

Luis goes home to a converted two-car garage with no address in a middle-class neighborhood with trim lawns and streets lined with late-model cars. Much of his clothing is stuffed in a battered dark green suitcase that sits at the foot of his bed. The only other furniture is a mini refrigerator and two lawn chairs.

In some ways, he's a typical youngster with edgy tastes. He has a sleeve tattoo, wears skinny jeans and earrings, and is part of a deejay crew that plays at house parties. He cheers his beloved Los Angeles Lakers and hangs out in hookah bars, and is constantly texting flirty messages.

But his future is dimmer than most. Many of his friends are planning for life after college. Some are applying for work permits and temporary reprieves from deportation, taking advantage of an Obama administration program, announced in June, to help young people who were brought into the country as children.

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New Year's Resolutions From 10 Top Minds and Makers

Every New Year people around the globe resolve to get healthy by joining gyms, eating better and quitting the detrimental habits that we complain about for the remaining eleven and a half months. We applaud those efforts, but propose that in 2013, we don't just work on our waistlines, but on our hacking, coding, soldering and making skills as well.

We've gathered 10 DIY experts to get their proposed New Year's resolutions, including repurposing forgotten materials and 3-D printing less stuff. And documenting projects better, something you'll hear from a few of them. Read up, then get to your workshop.

Here's to an inspired and productive 2013.

Above:

Resolution: In the new year, makers should develop the new means of maker finance, distribution and publicity: meaning the likes of Kickstarter, Etsy and the tech-art and design blogs. Beware the focused interest of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and the Defense Department. They're not your friends.

Bruce Sterling runs the locked account @bruces on Twitter

Photo: Courtesy Bruce Sterling

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Billy Crystal channels real-life role in “Parental Guidance”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After a decade away from the big screen, funnyman Billy Crystal has mined his real-life experiences as a grandfather and is back in the holiday season movie “Parental Guidance.”

The film, which opened in U.S. theaters on Christmas, stars Crystal as a recently fired baseball announcer, who agrees to watch his three grandchildren with his wife (Bette Midler), while his daughter and her husband go on a business trip.

Crystal, 64, sat down with Reuters to talk about the film, being a grandparent and why he won’t host the Oscars ceremony anymore.

Q: You have not been on the big screen in a starring role since 2002′s “Analyze That.” Did you miss making movies?

A: “I spent over four years doing my one-man Broadway show, ’700 Sundays’ and didn’t care about doing movies. I just so love being in front of live audiences. The play is more satisfying than anything. I’m not interrupted by planes flying overhead, waiting for them to light and all those gruesome slow things on a movie. But really, the last five years were spent getting this movie made.”

Q: How did “Parental Guidance” become your return to film?

A: “When I wrote the first story for this movie, my wife Janice and I babysat for our daughter Jenny while she went away with her husband. We had six days with their girls, all alone. It was an eye-opener. When you’re not used to that energy, it’s tough. On the 7th day I rested and came in to the office and said, ‘Here’s the idea for the movie.’”

Q: What was eye-opening about those six days?

A: “The eye-opener was the bible that we were given before they left town about what to say (to the kids), what to do, all the rules, don’t do this, don’t do that, this child has to be taken here. They have my respect of how they programmed their days and weeks. It’s insane what they have to do nowadays for schooling and parenting. It’s wild.”

Q: Quite a difference between your childhood and the grandkids’ childhood, right?

A: “When I was a kid growing up, it was basically ‘Go outside and play and I’ll see you at dinner.’ There was no thought that there were bad people out there. There was such a carefree wonderful trust which forced you to use your imagination, which also bonded you with the best of you, and your friends. We didn’t have that ‘inside’ thing like videogames. My only ‘inside’ thing was watching the Yankees. Otherwise everything was outside.”

Q: Speaking of the Yankees, your well-documented lifelong love of baseball is incorporated in to the film with your character being a ball-game announcer. That must have been fun to do.

A: “I love the game and I thought it was a really interesting occupation we hadn’t seen before. And a good one for me to play because I love it. I wanted my character to have something he loved doing where I didn’t have to fake it.”

Q: In being absent from the silver screen for a while, did you find that the movie-making business has changed much?

A: “The studios are so concerned with quadrants (capturing four major demographic groups of moviegoers – men, woman and those over and under 25). I’d never heard of these things when I was in my early years of making movies. You just did them. There was no interference. Now it’s a whole different ball game. They’re so worried: ‘Who’s going to come?’ Well, there’s 77 million American who are babyboomers. That’s a huge audience who wants to laugh and have a story told to them that doesn’t have bombs and spies and killing.”

Q: Does “Parental Guidance” reflect where are you now at this stage of your life?

A: “I was fortunate to be in a great romantic comedy about falling in love (1989′s ‘When Harry Met Sally’). I wrote the original story for my turning 40, ‘City Slickers’ (in 1991), which became a huge hit and a very liked movie. And now ‘Parental Guidance’ happened at this point in my life. I relate to it as a parent and a grandparent.”

Q: You will be a grandfather for the fourth time in March. What do you like best about that role?

A: “It’s so hard to understand how you can love someone so much that’s not yours, but extensions of you. I’m always so moved seeing my girls pregnant, and seeing them move on in their lives. I’m going to turn 65 on March 14. My wife’s birthday is the 16th. The baby’s due the 18th. So we’ve got maybe a straight flush happening here. That would be the greatest present of all – a healthy new baby.”

Q: Last year you hosted the Oscar ceremony for the ninth time, making you the second most-used host after the late Bob Hope. Are you gunning for his title?

A: “I’m not even close. I’ve done 9, he’s done 19 and neither one of us are doing it again. It’s hard to say, ‘Can’t wait to do it again,’ but I can wait.”

(Reporting By Zorianna Kit, Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Cynthia Osterman)

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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!”

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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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