From BBC

Around the world millions of children are not getting a proper education because their families are too poor to afford to send them to school. In India, one schoolboy is trying change that. In the first report in the BBC’s Hunger to Learn series, Damian Grammaticas meets Babar Ali, whose remarkable education project is transforming the lives of hundreds of poor children.

At 16 years old, Babar Ali must be the youngest headmaster in the world. He’s a teenager who is in charge of teaching hundreds of students in his family’s backyard, where he runs classes for poor children from his village.

The story of this young man from Murshidabad in West Bengal is a remarkable tale of the desire to learn amid the direst poverty.

Babar Ali’s day starts early. He wakes, pitches-in with the household chores, then jumps on an auto-rickshaw which takes him part of the 10km (six mile) ride to the Raj Govinda school. The last couple of kilometres he has to walk.

The school is the best in this part of West Bengal. There are hundreds of students, boys and girls. The classrooms are neat, if bare. But there are desks, chairs, a blackboard, and the teachers are all dedicated and well-qualified.

As the class 12 roll-call is taken, Babar Ali is seated in the middle in the front row. He’s a tall, slim, gangly teenager, studious and smart in his blue and white uniform. He takes his notes carefully. He is the model student.

Babar Ali is the first member of his family ever to get a proper education.

“It’s not easy for me to come to school because I live so far away,” he says, “but the teachers are good and I love learning. And my parents believe I must get the best education possible that’s why I am here.”

Raj Govinda school is government-run so it is free, all Babar Ali has to pay for is his uniform, his books and the rickshaw ride to get there. But still that means his family has to find around 1,800 rupees a year ($40, £25) to send him to school. In this part of West Bengal that is a lot of money. Many poor families simply can’t afford to send their children to school, even when it is free.

Chumki Hajra is one who has never been to school. She is 14 years old and lives in a tiny shack with her grandmother. Their home is simple A-frame supporting a thatched roof next to the rice paddies and coconut palms at the edge of the village. Inside the hut there is just room for a bed and a few possessions.

Every morning, instead of going to school, she scrubs the dishes and cleans the homes of her neighbours. She’s done this ever since she was five. For her work she earns just 200 rupees a month ($5, £3). It’s not much, but it’s money her family desperately needs. And it means that she has to work as a servant everyday in the village.

“My father is handicapped and can’t work,” Chumki tells me as she scrubs a pot. “We need the money. If I don’t work, we can’t survive as a family. So I have no choice but to do this job.”

But Chumki is now getting an education, thanks to Babar Ali. The 16-year-old has made it his mission to help Chumki and hundreds of other poor children in his village. The minute his lessons are over at Raj Govinda school, Babar Ali doesn’t stop to play, he heads off to share what he’s learnt with other children from his village.

At four o’clock every afternoon after Babar Ali gets back to his family home a bell summons children to his house. They flood through the gate into the yard behind his house, where Babar Ali now acts as headmaster of his own, unofficial school.

Lined up in his back yard the children sing the national anthem. Standing on a podium, Babar Ali lectures them about discipline, then study begins.

Babar Ali gives lessons just the way he has heard them from his teachers. Some children are seated in the mud, others on rickety benches under a rough, homemade shelter. The family chickens scratch around nearby. In every corner of the yard are groups of children studying hard.

Babar Ali was just nine when he began teaching a few friends as a game. They were all eager to know what he learnt in school every morning and he liked playing at being their teacher.

“ Without this school many kids wouldn’t get an education, they’d never even be literate ”
Babar Ali
Now his afternoon school has 800 students, all from poor families, all taught for free. Most of the girls come here after working, like Chumki, as domestic helps in the village, and the boys after they have finished their day’s work labouring in the fields.

“In the beginning I was just play-acting, teaching my friends,” Babar Ali says, “but then I realised these children will never learn to read and write if they don’t have proper lessons. It’s my duty to educate them, to help our country build a better future.”

Including Babar Ali there are now 10 teachers at the school, all, like him are students at school or college, who give their time voluntarily. Babar Ali doesn’t charge for anything, even books and food are given free, funded by donations. It means even the poorest can come here.

“Our area is economically deprived,” he says. “Without this school many kids wouldn’t get an education, they’d never even be literate.”

Seated on a rough bench squeezed in with about a dozen other girls, Chumki Hajra is busy scribbling notes.

Her dedication to learning is incredible to see. Every day she works in homes in the village from six in the morning until half past two in the afternoon, then she heads to Babar Ali’s school. At seven every evening she heads back to do more cleaning work.

Chumki’s dream is to one day become a nurse, and Babar Ali’s classes might just make it possible.

The school has been recognized by the local authorities, it has helped increase literacy rates in the area, and Babar Ali has won awards for his work.

The youngest children are just four or five, and they are all squeezed in to a tiny veranda. There are just a couple of bare electric bulbs to give light as lessons stretch into the evening, and only if there is electricity.

And then the monsoon rain begins. Huge big drops fall as the children scurry for cover, slipping in the mud. They crowd under a piece of plastic sheeting. Babar Ali shouts an order. Lessons are cancelled for the afternoon otherwise everyone will be soaked. Having no classrooms means lessons are at the mercy of the elements.

The children climb onto the porch of a nearby shop as the rain pours down. Then they hurry home through the downpour. Tomorrow they’ll be back though. Eight hundred poor children, unable to afford an education, but hungry for anything they can learn at Babar Ali’s school.

Summary

• Don’t substitute word-for-word. This will not work. Trying to understand what it is being said is not that difficult. Really!
• There MAY SEEM TO BE a lot of overlap but you should generally try to include all the points within the specified paragraphs… that is relevant
• If you find your answer is TOO SHORT, you may be “answering the question” too strictly. Include some other points in the paragraph that can be put in. (i.e. it’s not an example or 100% irrelevant)

AQ

• Please revise your basic structure! Make sure you have a FOCUS STATEMENT and discuss Singapore / Singaporean youth (whichever the question demands)
• Write at length! This is not MCQ or a structured question!

Essay

• Philosophical questions can be tricky, so tread carefully
• Make sure you discuss ALL THE TOPICS and don’t try to just split the question up (eg. relationship between conflict and progress, not just conflict first, and progress second)
• Identify the KEY TERMS and negotiate accordingly. Modals such as will, can, should can help you shape your essay (eg. by challenging the level of certainty).
• Use these KEY TERMS throughout your essay. If you find that you are writing a general essay about for instance, the death penalty or the environment WITHOUT USING THE KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS, chances are you are going out of point.
• THESIS, THESIS, THESIS!
• BALANCE = COUNTER-ARGUMENT WITH REBUTTAL

Guido Westerwelle, Germany’s new vice-chancellor and foreign minister, is very popular and openly gay. And nobody in Germany cares.

For more than 50 years, the tabloid daily Bild — currently Europe’s best-selling newspaper — has served as both a reliable barometer of Germany’s conservative movement and a steady vent of its populist id. The editors have never felt compelled to question their winning formula: The conservative parties’ current talking points go above the fold, the naked “Page One Girl” below it. The self-appointed guarantors of all that is traditionally Deutsch aren’t much interested in the finer points of sensitivity training.

And in that way, the tabloid might have been expected at some point this week to express ambivalence, if not disapproval, of the fact that the country’s newly elected vice-chancellor and foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, is gay. Instead, though, Bild waved a white flag on one of the fronts of the country’s decades-long culture war. As part of its gleeful coverage of the victory of the country’s two main conservative parties in Sunday’s election, the newspaper paid its respect to Westerwelle in the form of a sentimental page-one profile of his boyfriend, complete with a trashy headline: “His Boyfriend Makes Him Strong!”

Taking its cues from voters, Bild’s editors didn’t wring their hands over Westerwelle’s sexual orientation, nor did they sensationalize it as a novelty. For one thing, it wasn’t news: The chairman of the FDP, the free market Free Democratic Party, hadn’t hidden his sexual orientation during the campaign — his partner, event manager Michael Mronz, was often on stage with him at his rallies — and no one he encountered on the trail seemed inclined to make an issue of it. Being a gay politician in Germany, it seems, is well on its way to being utterly normal, even banal.

Germany’s ready public acceptance of homosexuality is the product of recent sea changes both in the character of society and in the letter of national law. For much of western Germany’s history, neither the CDU, the Catholic-dominated Christian Democratic Union, nor the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), with its focus on the industrial working class, had much interest in setting up protections for gays. In eastern Germany, the ruling communist party dismissed homosexuality as “contrary to the healthy mores of the people.” Nazi-era laws that criminalized homosexuality remained in force in East Germany until 1958 and in West Germany until as late as 1969.

Change didn’t come easy. The gay-rights movement that began organizing in earnest in West Germany in the 1960s — part of the student-driven backlash that wanted to interrogate and overcome the country’s Nazi past — elicited strong conservative resistance. For decades, the polarized camps faced off in homes, universities, and city streets in a tense stalemate. When Helmut Kohl took office as chancellor in 1982 at the head of a “black-yellow” coalition between the CDU and the FDP, he promised a “moral-spiritual revolution” that would return the country to its traditional understanding of public morality and decorum. What that amounted to, during his 16 years at the head of German government, was periodic populist agitation against politically correct cultural liberals in the arts and academia. Certainly, it was unthinkable that a gay man would gain a major portfolio in the Kohl-led coalition that governed until 1998. (Westerwelle, as a high-ranking FDP official, was involved in the Kohl government, but didn’t come out of the closet until 2004.)

How, then, has the tide turned so dramatically in Germany in favor of acceptance of homosexuality? On the legal and political side, the gay-rights movement was fortunate to have found an amenable political home in the late 1970s in the fledgling Green Party. Although dismissed by the establishment in their early years, the Greens came into power in 1999, together with the SPD, with a clear and focused agenda to update German law to better reflect society’s present-day values.

In addition to reform of immigration and citizenship statutes, the Greens pushed through a law recognizing same-sex partnerships and also rooted out the final remnants of legalized discrimination against gays in the German military. These efforts were passed with the support of the left-leaning SPD and Westerwelle’s free market, culturally liberal FDP. Westerwelle, for his part, blasted the Catholic Church for its “19th-century worldview” in response to a call by the Vatican to campaign against the gay-marriage law.

Germany’s religious landscape also factors into the relative serenity with which its society addresses homosexuality. In a country where 30 percent of the population considers itself atheist, it is hard to drum up fervor against sexual orientation: To that extent, reunification with East Germany — which was predominantly atheist, according to communist ideology — has made the country, as a whole, a friendlier place for gays. Moreover, Germany’s institutionalized Lutheran Protestant church, to which another 30 percent of the country adheres, is considerably more liberal than most evangelical Protestant denominations in the United States. Germany’s Lutheran church allows gays to become priests, and in some instances, blesses same-sex marriages.

Even the CDU, the traditionally Catholic mainstay of conservative West Germany, isn’t as obeisant to Rome as it once was. Chancellor Angela Merkel — head of the CDU, albeit one who was raised by a Protestant pastor in East Germany — did not hesitate to criticize German-born Pope Benedict XVI when he reinstated excommunicated bishops who had denied the Holocaust. No one in the CDU felt inclined to agitate against fellow party member Ole von Beust when he outed himself during his first term as mayor of Hamburg. And the last CDU candidate to run for mayor of Cologne saw no contradiction in referring to himself both as a gay man and a “serious Catholic.”

Indeed, once politicians come out of the closet, German voters tend to be concerned less about their private lives than about their other personal qualities. It’s no coincidence that those who have unabashedly staked claim to their sexual preferences have usually earned bonus points among the public. “When a politician deals openly with his homosexuality, he comes across as more authentic,” says Werner Patzelt, a political science professor at Dresden Technical University.

There’s still a city-country divide in Germany when it comes to acceptance of homosexuality. Gays still have a harder time in Bavaria, where traditional adherence to the Catholic Church in small towns is very strong. It’s not surprising then that the first major public official to come out of the closet was Klaus Wowereit, the mayor of Berlin, the city where Germany’s live-and-let-live ethos is strongest. Wowereit didn’t mince words in his unabashed 2001 coming out. “I’m gay,” he declared, “and that’s a good thing!” He has also earned admirers for the way he has managed to fend off political rivals who have tried to make an issue of his homosexuality. When his latest CDU challenger, Friedbert Pflüger, suggested Berlin deserves to have “a first lady,” Wowereit shot back that at least he was in a steady relationship, whereas Pflüger was in the midst of a divorce.

It’s not for nothing that, after charming the capital city, Wowereit is being handled as the potential next chancellor candidate from the SPD. Bild, of course, likely won’t be extending him an endorsement. But, it won’t be his sexual orientation that’s standing in the way — just the fact that he’s a Social Democrat.

Cooperation will benefit the society
Use “society” and not “the society” when referring to society in general / the world in general. When you use the definite article (“the”), you are referring to a specific society (eg. Singapore) which is often not the case. This incorrect use of “the” is very common and should be duly noted.

They are naturally smart and they will achieve…
As you have already used “they” as the subject of your sentence, you do not have to use “they” after “and”.

Technological advancement has led to a lot of benefits, for example cure illnesses..
Start a new sentence with subject, verb and object – “For example, illnesses have been..”. This is a classic case of the run-on sentence – connecting a new clause to a previous clause when you really should be starting a new sentence.

Lewis Hamilton won the Singapore Grand Prix, he is a deserving winner.
Another run-on sentence that can be corrected by the use of the semi-colon (Lewis Hamilton won the Singapore Grand Prix; he is a deserving winner). Alternatively, start a new sentence OR use a conjunction (“and”).

For instance, Fernando Alonso.
Firstly, social aspects.
These are fragments and not proper sentences. Proper sentences have at least a subject (Fernando Alonso) and a verb (finished… third).

The question has fuelled some of history’s fiercest scientific and political feuds. Now we have an answer
Mark Henderson

The monster Caliban, according to his master, Prospero, was “a devil, a pure devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick”. Yet only a few decades before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, St Ignatius Loyola had founded the Jesuit order, with its famous maxim: “Give me the child until he is 7, and I will show you the man.”

This ancient debate over the relative contributions of inheritance and experience to the human condition has never been more charged than in the genetic age. On one side stood those who sought and saw genetic explanations for human psychology; on the other, those who believed it to be moulded by culture. There was little common ground. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an evolutionary psychologist, has even joked that perhaps we are genetically programmed to set nature against nurture.

Since the middle of the last century the nurture camp has been dominant. Just as molecular biology began to unravel the secrets of DNA, genetics and evolution were relegated to psychological bit-players by a new orthodoxy, which held that biology has forged a human mind of almost limitless malleability. It was the doctrine of the blank slate.

The idea, usually traced to the 17th-century philosopher John Locke, grew popular in the Enlightenment, fitting the mood of challenge to the supposedly innate authority of monarchy and aristocracy. It was a statement of individual freedom, which became strongly associated with the political Left. Though many early socialists were enthusiasts for eugenics, later generations grew suspicious of genetics, particularly after it was abused to justify oppression of disadvantaged racial and social groups, most brutally in Nazi Germany. Liberal opinion turned against the concept of a biological human nature, which was increasingly seen as a tool with which male and bourgeois elites could rationalise hegemony (coercion by persuasion, or forcing someone to obey because it ‘makes sense’).

The movement was driven by the social sciences. From psychology came Sigmund Freud’s notion that attitudes and mental health are explained by childhood experience. The behaviourism of B.F.Skinner added the claim that human beings could be conditioned by training, much as Ivan Pavlov’s celebrated dogs salivated at the sound of a bell.

From anthropology came the research of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, whose comparative studies of different societies suggested that traditions could steer human behaviour in a multitude of directions. Mead’s purported discovery of free love among Samoan women was influential because – though founded on poor data – it challenged prevailing sexual mores. Karl Marx’s political and economic theories saw human nature as something to be reshaped and directed to facilitate revolution. And postmodernism contributed the mantra that even knowledge and truth are socially constructed and relative.

What emerged was a new model of behaviour, in which human nature is anything but fixed or shared, but can be moulded into many configurations by culture. If genetic influences are allowed at all, they are wholly secondary to those of the environment. To its supporters, this became axiomatic to a fair society: if anything can be learnt, and anybody can do the learning, then people can be taught to value equality. Social justice and morality became intertwined with the concept that little in life is laid down, or even much affected, by inherited genes.

Though well-intentioned, and in some respects an important antidote to pseudoscientific genetic determinism, this view was dangerously inflexible. Any evidence that genetics might be seriously influential after all would threaten the very foundations of liberty and equality – so it would have to be resisted, as would research that might provide it.

The result was that scientists who investigated effects on human behaviour found their positions caricatured and their politics demonised as reactionary, even fascist. E.O.Wilson, the great evolutionary theorist and conservationist, is no man of the Right. Yet when he dared in the 1970s to suggest that human nature, like that of other animals, has a biological basis that might fruitfully be studied, his lectures were picketed and students doused him with water. The left-wing biologists Steven Rose, Leon Kamin and Richard Lewontin responded with a book entitled Not in Our Genes, which accused Wilson, Richard Dawkins and other sociobiologists of a crude determinism designed to legitimise the status quo. “Its adherents claim, first, that the details of present and past social arrangements are the inevitable manifestations of the specific action of genes,” they wrote.

Such attacks were misconceived. First, as Steven Pinker has pointed out, they set up a straw man. It is simply impossible to find serious biologists who believe that behaviour and social structure are “the inevitable manifestations of the specific action of genes”. Those who reject cultural determinism make a much more modest proposal – that genes, as well as the environment, make a contribution. As Dawkins wrote in a review of Not in Our Genes: “Reductionism, in the ‘sum of the parts’ sense, is obviously daft, and is nowhere to be found in the writings of real biologists.”

What is more, cultural determinism can be just as inimical to freedom as its genetic counterpart. It implies that instead of being prisoners of our genes, we are prisoners of our parents, teachers and societies. Those who grow up in poverty will be forever disadvantaged, while those who come from privilege will retain it. Autism can be blamed on “refrigerator mothers”, and adults’ relationship problems on their overprotective families. As a world view it is quite as bleak as one based on inheritance.

It has also become scientifically unsustainable. As research reveals more about inheritance, it has become abundantly clear that humans are not blank slates. Neither, however, are our personalities and behaviour forged by genes alone. The great controversy, indeed, is giving way to consensus, as improved understanding of how genes actually work shows the difficulty of separating nature and nurture.

Much of the critical evidence has emerged through the study of twins. Identical twins share all their DNA, while fraternal twins share only half – they are no more closely related on a genetic level than are ordinary siblings. Both kinds of twins, however, share a womb, a family and a cultural environment. Comparisons between the two types can thus tease out the extent to which inheritance is important.

Across a wide range of traits, including IQ, personality indicators such as extroversion and neuroticism, and even homosexuality, religiosity and political conservatism, identical twins are more similar to one another than are fraternal pairs. This indicates that genes must affect these aspects of personality.

The concordance between identical twins, however, is rarely 100per cent – their IQ scores, for example, tend to be around 70 per cent similar, compared with around 50per cent for non-identical pairs. By definition, inheritance therefore cannot be the only factor involved: if it were, identical twins would always turn out the same. For most human qualities, neither the extreme-nurture nor the extreme-nature hypothesis can be correct.

Even more striking evidence has come from a recent series of studies led by Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt. These scientists have been following up a cohort of children born in 1972-73 in Dunedin, New Zealand, recording details of their life experiences and testing their DNA. The results have demolished the nature- nurture dichotomy.

First, Moffitt and Caspi studied a gene called MAOA, which has two variants or alleles. Boys with one allele are more likely to behave antisocially and get into trouble with the law – but only if they were also maltreated as children. When raised in well-adjusted families, those with the “risky” allele are fine. It is not a gene “for” criminality, and no determinism – genetic or environmental – is involved. A genetic variant must be activated by an environmental influence to do any potential harm.

The serotonin transporter gene, 5HTT, also has two alleles, and is known to be involved in mood. Moffitt and Caspi found that people with one allele were 2.5 times more likely to develop clinical depression than those with the other – but, again, only under particular circumstances. The risk applies only to people who also experience stressful life events such as unemployment, divorce or bereavement. When their environments are happy, their genotypes made no difference.

These results show the sterility of the old nature-nurture debate. Nature works through nurture, and nurture through nature, to shape our personalities, aptitudes, health and behaviour. The question should not be which is the dominant influence, but how they fit together.

‘Too Proud of Our Noose: the Death Penalty in Singapore
http://www.yawningbread.org/arch_2007/yax-804.htm

***

Japanese Death Row ‘Insanity’ Charge
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8247319.stm

Amnesty Japan Report on Death Row Inmates
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/10_09_09_amnesty_japan.pdf

***

Saddam Hussein and the Death Penalty
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6211741.stm

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
Billund, Denmark

FROM the outside, there is nothing playful about the drab, two-story Lego Idea House here, where designers gather in whitewashed rooms to dream up new toys. But upstairs, behind a series of locked doors accessible only to employees with special passes, is a chamber that might as well be toy heaven for kids — and more than a few adults.

Multicolored Lego creations in every imaginable size and shape spill from the shelves, from Indiana Jones’s biplane to Darth Vader’s fighter. Boxes stamped “confidential” hold potential future blockbusters, like Buzz Lightyear, the hero of the “Toy Story” animated films, as well as a police station bustling with miniature cops and robbers.

“It’s our way of looking at the world,” says Soren Holm, the head of Lego’s Concept Lab. “We have happy criminals; even they are smiling. The sun is shining every day.”

While that may be true of Lego’s toys, until recently it was hardly the case for Lego’s bottom line. But five years after a near-death experience, Lego has emerged as an unlikely winner in an industry threatened by the likes of video games, iPods, the Internet and other digital diversions.

Even as other toymakers struggle, this Danish maker of toy bricks is enjoying double-digit sales gains and swelling earnings. In recent years, Lego has increasingly focused on toys that many parents wouldn’t recognize from their own childhood. Hollywood themes are commanding more shelf space, a far cry from the idealistic, purely imagination-oriented play that drove Lego for years and was as much a religion as a business strategy in Billund.

Just as the toys are changing, so is the company. Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, 40, a father of four and a McKinsey & Company alumnus who took over as Lego’s chief executive in 2004, made it clear that results, not simply feeling good about making the best toys, would be essential if Lego was to succeed.

“We needed to build a mind-set where nonperformance wasn’t accepted,” Mr. Knudstorp says. Now, “there’s no place to hide if performance is poor,” he says. “You will be embarrassed, and embarrassment is stronger than fear.”

But the story of Lego’s renaissance — and its current expansion into new segments like virtual reality and video games — isn’t just a toy story. It’s also a reminder of how even the best brands can lose their luster but bounce back with a change in strategy and occasionally painful adaptation.

Founded in 1932 on the principle of “play well,” or “leg godt” in Danish, by a local carpenter, Ole Kirk Christiansen, this privately held company had a very Scandinavian aversion to talking about profits, much less orienting the company around them.

Mr. Christiansen’s family still owns Lego and its business may still be fun and games, but working here isn’t. Before Mr. Knudstorp’s arrival, deadlines came and went, and development time for new toys could stretch out for years; in 2004, the company racked up a $344 million loss.

Now, employee pay is tied to measuring up to management’s key performance indicators (K.P.I.’s, in Lego-speak). And cost-saving touches are encouraged when it comes to designing new toys.

That has helped to lower development time by 50 percent, with some new products moving from idea to box in as little as a year. Mr. Knudstorp’s bottom-line-oriented team, meanwhile, has shifted some manufacturing and distribution from Billund to cheaper locales in Central Europe and Mexico.

Nevertheless, Lego hasn’t entirely shed its Scandinavian sense of social mission when it comes to making toys. It kept quality high and never moved any manufacturing to China, avoiding the lead paint scare and grabbing market share when rivals stumbled amid multiple recalls.

Now, with profits swelling and the turnaround firmly in place, Lego is preparing for a future that moves well beyond the basic brick but carries big risks as well.

Last month, it opened its first “concept store” in Concord, N.C., where parents can bring children for birthday parties and classes with master builders; another concept store is set to open near Baltimore this fall. It’s all part of a broader retail expansion that will give Lego 47 retail stores worldwide by year-end, up from 27 in 2007.

In 2010, the first board game designed by Lego will go on sale in the United States, while its new virtual reality system, Lego Universe, will make its debut on the Web, with children able to act out roles from Lego games and build toys from virtual bricks.

Video games — yes, Lego is there, too — are increasingly important to the company, as are Lego’s legions of adult fans, who can now buy kits to build architect-designed models of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum. What’s more, the company is in talks with Warner Brothers about a mixed live-action and animation Lego-themed movie that would move the company and its Lego brand even further into the Hollywood orbit.

“Developing a movie doesn’t come cheap,” says Soren Torp Laursen, a 23-year Lego employee who heads its North American operations. “But five years ago, we were in the midst of a crisis, and now we’re in a growth phase. We are definitely taking bigger risks than we previously did.”

WHILE that shift has disappointed purists and prompted worries from experts that some of what has long made Lego special may be in jeopardy, it’s paying off, at least in the short term.

Amid a 5 percent drop in total United States toy sales last year and the industry’s worst holiday season in three decades, according to Sean McGowan, an analyst at Needham & Company, Lego’s sales surged 18.7 percent in 2008. And despite a worsening global recession, Lego powered through the first half of 2009, with a 23 percent sales increase over the period a year earlier. It earned $355 million before taxes last year, and $178 million in the first half of 2009.

The numbers are all the more impressive given the sales declines this year at the two biggest toymakers, Mattel and Hasbro.

“I was stunned when I heard how strong Lego’s performance was,” says Mr. McGowan, who has covered the toy industry for 23 years. “How could an $80 Lego set sell better than a $10 action figure?”

The answer is as multifaceted as one of Lego’s most complicated brick creations — and, like the best children’s stories, contains elements of luck, hard work and the loss of innocence.

SOREN HOLM looks down at the machine gun atop Indiana Jones’s jeep and winces. By the standards of video games like Grand Theft Auto and of other childhood attractions, it’s mild stuff.

But here in Billund, toy weapons have always been a touchy subject. “I can tell you there’s been a lot of debate about how far we can take it,” Mr. Holm says. Right down to Indy’s gun? “Oh, yes,” he says slowly. “Oh, yes.”

Since Lego overcame its initial hesitation about rolling out a “Star Wars” series a decade ago because the word “war” would appear on the box, the company has grown more comfortable with conflict.

“We’ve opened up slightly,” Mr. Holm says. After all, he adds, “when you give boys a bunch of bricks, they build a gun.”

In fact, Lego has opened up more than slightly. Whether it’s the Star Wars Assassin Droids Battle Pack or the Indiana Jones Ambush in Cairo set — featuring a pistol-wielding Indy against a scimitar-swinging local — many of Lego’s most popular toys today seem inspired by the special effects and violence of the big screen.

In the United States, Lego’s biggest market and the biggest toy market in the world, games with themes like “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” were among the reasons Lego sales jumped 32 percent last year, well above the global pace. But experts like Dr. Jonathan Sinowitz, a New York psychologist who also runs a psychological services company, Diagnostics, wonders at what price these sales come.

“What Lego loses is what makes it so special,” he says. “When you have a less structured, less themed set, kids have the ability to start from scratch. When you have kids playing out Indiana Jones, they’re playing out Hollywood’s imagination, not their own.”

Even toy analysts who admire the company and its recent success acknowledge a broad shift. “I would like to see more open-ended play like when we were kids,” says Gerrick Johnson, a toy analyst at BMO Capital Markets in New York. “The vast majority is theme-based, and when you go into Toys “R” Us, you’d really be challenged to find a simple box of bricks.”

Lutz Muller, an independent toy analyst in Williston, Vt., who has long followed the industry, estimates that 60 percent of Lego’s American sales are linked to licenses, double the amount five years ago.

And the coming “Toy Story” sets have retailers salivating, as Disney prepares to release the latest movie in the hit series next June. “ ‘Toy Story’ is a fit made in heaven,” raves Jerry Storch, the chief executive of Toys “R” Us, which has increased the shelf space allotted to Lego in recent years.

Nevertheless, acquiring licenses to make toys linked to hot Hollywood properties like “Toy Story” carries risks. “It’s a slippery slope,” Mr. Johnson says, and today’s hit can quickly turn into tomorrow’s dud, adding volatility that Lego never faced in the past.

Indeed, unlike the Cabbage Patch Kids or Atari or the Beanie Babies, it was Lego’s seeming aloofness from the market that helped it endure, rather than ending up in the back of the closet like those toys of yesteryear.

For longtime Lego executives like Mr. Laursen, it’s a delicate issue, and his own comments echo Lego’s ambivalence over creativity and hallowed Lego traditions versus the appeal of more profitable, Hollywood-influenced toys.

He says that “we’re definitely more commercially oriented” and notes that licenses play a bigger role in the American market than overseas. But he says that “we’ve never sacrificed our values, and have never been a fundamentally profit-oriented company.”

In fact, he says that there is often a long debate about values when acquiring new licenses, and that “we’re far from always agreeing to take on new ones.” He won’t specify which movies or themes Lego has passed on, but says that “there are many licenses out there that represent a level of violence that is not suited to Lego and doesn’t fit with the trust of parents.”

As Lego ventures deeper into video games and virtual reality with Lego Universe, the question of violence, not to mention commercial temptations, will become only more charged.

One answer, Mr. Laursen says, is to make “violence not explicit, but humoristic.” For example, when a minifigure “dies” in a “Star Wars” or “Indiana Jones” video game, he dissolves into a pile of bricks and then springs back to life, cartoon style.

“We think kids really want to have this good-against-evil play; they want this fighting against each other,” says Charlotte Simonsen, a Lego spokeswoman. “But we want to do it with a wink.”

Analysts add that the recession has proved to be an unexpected boon for Lego, as parents favor spending more time at home with traditional toys instead of going out to the movies or taking trips with the children.

Even parents who won’t let video games in the house, like Alyson Richman Gordon of Huntington Bay, N.Y., say Lego has retained its innocence, especially when it comes to toys built around the traditional bricks. “It echoes back to a bygone era,” she said. “And I find as a parent that I’m drawn to things from my own childhood that inspired my creativity.”

Lester Munson, a father of two in Alexandria, Va., agrees, even though he sees a difference between the Legos of his own childhood and those favored by his 8-year-old son, Jonas. “The most exotic thing I could build when I was a kid was an ambulance,” he says. “Now Jonas can build the Death Star.”

“I still like Legos, and I’m 41,” he says. “Instead of watching TV or playing computer games, the kids are building something, and Jonas and I will build stuff together. The pieces and the sets are a lot cooler than they were 30 years ago, and if the price you have to pay is these tie-ins, that’s fine.”

IT’S not only children who fight over toys. John Barbour, a former top executive of Toys “R” Us, recalls “a series of truly frustrating meetings” with Lego officials in Billund and New York at the beginning of the decade, which climaxed when Mr. Barbour bluntly told them that Toys “R” Us cared more about the Lego brand than they did.

The most popular toys would run out, he recalls, and Lego was simply unable to ship more or manage the complex process of producing the plastic pieces for its most complicated sets.

That began to change in 2004, after Mr. Knudstorp took over in Billund and Mr. Laursen arrived at Lego’s regional headquarters in Enfield, Conn. Besides reaching out to top retailers and cutting costs, they untangled a supply chain that churns out 29 billion pieces a year.

The changes also filtered down to the ranks of Lego’s toy designers, says Paal Smith-Meyer, head of Lego’s new-business group. The number of different bricks or elements that go into Lego toys has shrunk to less than 7,000 from roughly 13,000, and designers are encouraged to reuse parts, so that a piece of an X-wing fighter from the “Star Wars” series might end up in Indiana Jones’s jeep or a pirate ship.

That’s very different from when Mr. Meyer joined Lego a decade ago. Though creating a mold to make a new plastic element might cost 50,000 euros. on average, he recalls that 90 percent of new elements were developed and used just one time.

Nowadays, Mr. Meyer says, “you have to design for Lego. If you want to design for yourself, go be an artist.”

For those would-be Lego artists out there, the company has created a Lego Certified Professional program, selecting adult Lego enthusiasts who don’t work directly for the company but whose creations are aimed at Lego’s vast population of adult fans as well as museum and gallery shows.

It’s part of another broad new effort at Lego — reaching out to those adult fans, who maintain thousands of Web sites and blogs, like GodBricks, which features Lego creations inspired by different faiths, and the Brothers Brick, which showcases all things Lego, whether a life-size Lego house, news, or advice on how to shine up yellowing bricks (hydrogen peroxide).

“There’s a huge community of people that treat Lego as an art form rather than just a toy,” says Andrew Becraft, a technical writer at Microsoft who created the Brothers Brick blog. His site pulls in 125,000 unique visitors a month, and Lego officials estimate that 915,000 people worldwide attended Lego conventions and other events in the first seven months of 2009. Five to 10 percent of Lego toys are snapped up by adults.

In the past, Mr. Knudstorp says, “we considered the adult fans like vintage cars, a bit bizarre.” But he called on another longtime Lego executive, Tormod Askildsen, to work with adult fans. Now Mr. Askildsen journeys to Lego conventions organized by adult enthusiasts, while working with 44 Lego “ambassadors” from 27 countries, seeking advice about new toys and heading off public anger when older lines, like Lego’s 9-volt train sets, are phased out.

Ultimately, Lego came up with a new, profitable train set, after inviting the 9-volt enthusiasts to two workshops in Billund to brainstorm and help design it. “If you rock the boat, people will notice,” Mr. Askildsen notes. “They were fighting furiously for us not to give it up, but we were able to turn tension into opportunity.”

The same might be said for Lego as a whole, as it navigates the fiercely competitive toy market and ventures into movies and virtual reality while clinging as best it can to the more innocent, Scandinavian values that made it so popular in the first place.

“In the end, you’ve got to go where your consumer is going,” Mr. Barbour says. “And the reality is that themes and movies are what kids want. There’s no point in developing the best product in the world if you can’t put it on the shelf.”

By Neel Chowdhury

The condition of Singapore’s economy can often be judged from the emerald waters surrounding it. A tiny 268-sq.-mi. (697 sq km) island city-state with the busiest port in the world, Singapore began in 1819 in founder Stamford Raffles’ words as an “emporium of goods” and has never forgotten the importance of maritime trade. Today the value of Singapore’s annual exports is 2.5 times larger than its entire GDP when all goods passing through the port are counted.

So when idle container vessels, their hulls so empty they bobbed atop the sea like bath toys, began to gather in the Singapore Strait in late 2008, local leaders feared the worst: that a synchronized collapse in global trade would crush the tiny trade-dependent island. The government’s economic forecasts were revised downward three times in less than six months. By mid-April the Ministry of Trade and Industry was predicting a record-breaking contraction of up to 9% for 2009. By that point Singapore’s benchmark Straits Times stock index had plummeted 60% below its 2007 peak. Property prices tanked 25%. The situation appeared worrying enough for the government to create a 25-member Economic Strategies Committee to assess the basic soundness of Singapore’s economic model. (See the worst business deals of 2008.)

Almost five months later, such alarm appears overdone. GDP in the second quarter soared 20.7% compared with figures for the first three months of 2009. Citigroup economist Kit Wei Zheng now expects at worst a 2.7% contraction for Singapore for 2009. “If you look at the headline economic numbers, like the fall in exports or GDP, this recession seemed severe,” says Kit. “But closer to the ground [it has] been quite mild.” Singapore’s stock market is up more than 70% from its April lows.

The vigor and speed of Singapore’s rebound underscore two important facts about its economy. Like others in Asia, Singapore is turning increasingly to trade with China and India to fill the hole left by the collapse in demand from Western consumers. And Singapore, perhaps more adroitly than other Asian countries, is promoting domestic consumption by its cash-rich citizens to help balance an economy that had become dangerously reliant upon external demand for growth.

Not that the city-state is turning its back on globalization — it has just shifted its gaze. China is now Singapore’s third largest trading partner after Malaysia and the E.U. More important, an increasing chunk of Singapore’s exports to the mainland are directly linked to Chinese domestic consumption instead of to components that are merely re-exported to the West. Citigroup estimates that exports directly linked to Chinese domestic demand account for around 3.9% of Singapore’s GDP. “What a crisis like this forces you to do is to broaden your base,” says Gautam Banerjee, executive chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Singapore and one of the members of the government’s Economic Strategies Committee. “We’ve stepped up our engagement with China and that will continue.”

Singapore has been cozying up to India as well. Bilateral trade between India and Singapore in 2008 amounted to $19.2 billion, a fifth more than the previous year’s amount. More astonishingly, that same year Singapore was the second largest foreign direct investor in India, pouring in $3.76 billion. At the same time, Singapore has become a magnet for a new breed of entrepreneurial Indian company, thousands of which are now being welcomed to the city’s shores.

One of these is the Professional Couriers, an Indian parcel service that has made Singapore its Southeast Asia logistics hub. A blue chip it isn’t. But what the company lacks in gravitas it makes up for in entrepreneurial energy. “More Indian companies want to develop a global footprint and it’s much easier to do that from Singapore,” says Pradeep Menon, chief executive of the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce, citing the island’s superior air and telecommunications links to the rest of Asia and its advantages as a financial hub.

Singapore’s tiny size (2008 pop. 4.84 million) has traditionally been its greatest economic vulnerability. Add to that an almost complete absence of natural resources, and Singapore was left little choice but to trade its way to prosperity — a realization its first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, came to as far back as the late 1960s, when a commitment to free trade was unfashionable in the developing world. (See pictures of the recession of 1958.)

But after more than four decades of trade-driven growth, Singapore has found that its relatively wealthy citizens can now help to provide the economic cushion it lacked at its independence in 1965. According to Singapore’s Department of Statistics, the average income per working household member has grown 5.5% over the past three years, to $1,652 a month or roughly $20,000 a year. A stunning 84% of Singapore’s citizens live in subsidized public-housing estates, which keeps the cost of living and mortgages low. And because most large Singapore companies have so far refrained from mass layoffs, unemployment in Singapore, at just 3.3%, remains enviably low. Citigroup’s Kit points out that though 18,600 jobs were lost in Singapore in the first half of 2009, that’s less than half the the number lost at similar stages of recessions in 1997 and 2001.

That’s why, despite the recession, ordinary Singaporeans have more cash in their pockets to spend than debt-burdened Americans or jobless Europeans. Inside the Harry Winston luxury-jewelry store in a mall on Orchard Road, a pear-shaped $5.3 million diamond ring has been pulling customers through the shop’s bulletproof doors. Although nobody has yet snapped up the ring, Ginny Ng, managing director of Harry Winston in Singapore, says with a shrug, “I don’t feel the global recession here.”

Singaporeans have also continued to spend because they still feel like they are getting ahead in the world rather than losing ground. According to Citigroup, the total value of assets held by the average household has increased by almost 60% since 2000 despite the recent downturn. “Singapore households have always had a strong balance sheet, but what they lacked before was confidence,” says Mark Matthews, chief strategist for Asia at Fox-Pitt Kelton Securities in Hong Kong. “Now they are confident.”

To be sure, Singapore can’t isolate itself from the economies of the U.S. and Europe and expect to prosper. The sea lanes around Singapore, once dotted with three-masted clippers bearing tea and silver, and crowded today with oil tankers and container vessels, will be as vital to Singapore’s economic future as they have been for its past. “We have to export,” says Banerjee of PricewaterhouseCoopers. But by shifting its nautical gaze from West to East, as well as looking inward, Singapore may be charting a new economic course for the rest of Asia.

Find answer scheme attached (in word document) with AQ ‘points’ here.

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