Online Sex Videos Force Resignations of Six Members of Turkish Opposition Party

ISTANBUL — Just weeks before general elections in Turkey, six leading members of an opposition party were forced to resign from Parliament on Saturday after sexually explicit videos of one of them were posted on the Internet.

The Web site that posted the videos had threatened to release others that it said showed the five other members who resigned.

The resignations could severely weaken the Nationalist Movement Party, the second largest opposition group in Parliament, which is struggling to win the minimum of 10 percent of the vote required to be seated in Parliament.

Four members of Parliament from the same party resigned earlier this month after similar videos were posted on the same Web site.

The Web site, farkliulkuculer.com, has cast itself as part of a breakaway ultranationalist group aiming to cleanse and reform the nationalist movement in Turkey. The site’s administrators are anonymous.

The Public Communication Agency, which monitors Internet traffic in Turkey, blocked access to the Web site shortly after the videos were uploaded, presumably because of their explicit content.

Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement, denounced the videos as blackmail. “It is not correct to mess with these people’s personalities,” he said.

He said the Web site had demanded his resignation by last Wednesday if he wanted the videos to remain secret. He had earlier vowed not to yield to such threats.

Representatives of his party, noting that if they lose representation in Parliament the governing Justice and Development Party would be likely to gain, have accused the government of failing to properly investigate the videos and the Web site.

Lawyers for the Nationalist Movement filed a claim with a court in Ankara, the capital, on Wednesday demanding an investigation. The filing, citing calls made on a cellphone linked to the Web site, said that the video scandal was organized in the United States. Party leaders have previously accused a Turkish-American religious group, Fethullah Gulen, of working with the governing party to drive the Nationalist Movement from politics.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has campaigned strongly against the Nationalists, rebuffed those claims in a television show last week, saying that the Nationalist Movement was trying to blame the government for its internal problems.

The Nationalist Movement Party held 72 seats in the 540-member Parliament before the resignations on Saturday, and polls before the resignations showed it winning about 12 percent of the vote in the election next month. The governing Justice and Development Party is expected to win a third term as the majority government.

Political analysts, pointing to the timing of the release of videos that were evidently collected over a long period, expressed concern about the unethical tactics used to attack the Nationalists. “With these large number of resignations, we have an unprecedented scene here in the world of politics,” said Fatih Cekirge, a political analyst speaking on NTV, who called the blackmailing “political genocide.”

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Many Fear Revival of Islamist Party in Tunisia

TUNIS — Accused as subversives or terrorists, they bore the repressive brunt of the Tunisian dictator’s reign — two decades of torture, prison or exile.

But since the dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled in January, the Islamists of the once-banned Ennahda Party have emerged from obscurity, returned from abroad and established themselves as perhaps the most powerful political force in post-revolution Tunisia.

Despite repeated assurances of their tolerance and moderation, their rise has touched off frenzied rumors of attacks on unveiled women and artists, of bars and brothels sacked by party goons, of plots to turn the country into a caliphate. With crucial elections scheduled for July 24, Ennahda’s popularity and organizational strength are of growing concern to many activists and politicians, who worry that the secular revolution in this moderate state — the revolt that galvanized the Arab Spring — might see the birth of a conservative Islamic government.

And just as the protests in Tunis heralded the revolt in Cairo, analysts are looking to Tunisia as a bellwether for the more broadly influential developments to come in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood enjoys similar advantages and has stirred similar misgivings.

“How do you want us to go up against Ennahda?” asked an exasperated strategist for the Republican Alliance, a secular party. “They’re prepared to do anything.”

With years of organizational experience, a vast membership and decades of credibility as a sworn enemy of Mr. Ben Ali, Ennahda has proved to be better-equipped than any other party — most have existed only for a matter of weeks — to step into the political void. The Republican Alliance strategist called for the elections to be delayed.

“July 24 is a favor to Ennahda,” he said, requesting anonymity for fear of attacks by the party’s supporters. “It’s suicide.”

With Ennahda in power, he said, “It would be Iran.”

The party says such fears are unfounded. “We aspire to a free, open, moderate society, where each citizen will have the same rights,” said Abdallah Zouari, a member of Ennahda’s executive committee and a party spokesman, adding that the party called for equal rights for men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims.

“We are not in agreement with the secularists who want to force others to be secular,” he said, “the same way we are against the Salafists who want to force others to be Muslim.”

He spoke with a visitor at a modest new party branch on the third floor of a shabby Tunis office building, the rooms still echoing and empty but for some tables and chairs, the white walls dirty and scuffed.

Mr. Zouari — who bears the dark callus on his forehead caused by frequent bowed prayer, common among the devout — was himself imprisoned for more than a decade as a party member.

“The religious sentiment of the Tunisian people is so deep that certain people cannot understand,” he said.

Polling suggests that Ennahda — the renaissance, in Arabic — enjoys broader support than any of the country’s other 60-odd authorized political parties. The party’s weekly newspaper, The Dawn, resumed publication in April after a 20-year hiatus and now sells about 70,000 copies per week, party officials say.

The July vote will create an assembly assigned the task of rewriting the Constitution. In anticipation of the elections, the party has opened dozens of local offices, and imams are said to be promoting Ennahda in mosques across the country.

But mistrust of the party remains widespread.

“They’re doing doublespeak, and everyone knows it,” said Ibrahim Letaief, a radio host at Mosaique FM, a popular station where he offers withering criticism of the Islamists. Ennahda, he said, has only tempered its rhetoric in a bid to win votes, but in power would impose strict Islamic law.

It is a common refrain here, despite having first been popularized by the reviled Mr. Ben Ali. Opponents have made similar claims, anti-Ennahda Facebook groups have drawn tens of thousands of supporters, and protesters have denounced the party throughout Tunisia. Some of the fear seems to stem from uncertainty about who, exactly, will lead the party; the group’s longtime leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, has said he will not seek office.

A democratic Tunisia depends on the banning of Ennahda, Mr. Letaief said, though he acknowledged, “I’m not going to seem democratic, here.” Still, he said, “Islam is very much anchored in society.”

The first article of the now-suspended Tunisian Constitution decreed Islam the national faith, and 98 percent of the country’s 10.6 million inhabitants are Muslim. Public schools dispense religious instruction. Yet religious leaders have never played a role in government.

Habib Bourguiba, the father of Tunisian independence and the country’s first president, was a staunch secularist who banned polygamy, legalized abortion and once sipped orange juice on television during the Ramadan fast in an affront to the faithful.

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo.

 

Advertising: The Tupperware Party Moves to Social Media

Next week, the Tupperware Brands Corporation plans to significantly increase its presence in social media like Facebook and Twitter, which more consumers are using as ways to connect with marketers as well as one another.

The goal is to find “more disruptive methods” to dispel perceptions that “we are your mother’s Tupperware,” said Rick Goings, chairman and chief executive of Tupperware Brands in Orlando, Fla., as the company seeks more consumers to buy — and sell — its products like containers, cutlery and cookware.

?

A Facebook page devoted to a Tupperware campaign that carries the theme “Chain of confidence” will get more rich content like video clips featuring women of achievement who will be presented as “confidence counselors.” The page will also offer blog posts, articles, motivational tips and inspirational quotations.

Tupperware is to join the ranks of marketers seeking to encourage Facebook users to say they “like” corporate pages by enlisting the singer Kelly Clarkson to lead an initiative that will promise a donation of a dollar to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America for each new “like” clicked for the revamped Facebook page.

And Tupperware will add an account on Twitter devoted to the confidence campaign, supplementing others used by the company’s United States sales force, marketing arm and corporate public relations department. Comments on Twitter related to the campaign are all to be identified with an “official” hash tag, #Confidence.

“It’s time to take it up to the next level,” Mr. Goings said of the company’s social media efforts.

Tupperware Brands has long believed in the power of social networking, he added, because recommendations about a brand or product “from someone you have confidence in is the absolutely best form” of marketing.

Underlining that, Tupperware Brands runs no traditional advertising, preferring to spend its marketing dollars on public relations, events, celebrity endorsers and promotions.

For instance, the chef Michael White took part in March in a two-day “pop-up” restaurant dubbed the Tupper Club. And Ms. Clarkson is to perform later this month at a concert, called Confide and Conquer, that will be sponsored by Tupperware in New York.

For a marketer like Tupperware Brands that specializes in direct selling, “the only thing advertising does is it makes your sales force feel supported,” Mr. Goings said, but that can also be accomplished “when you offer them incentives and trips.”

Elinor Steele, vice president for global communications and public relations at Tupperware Brands, characterized the company’s current status in social media this way: “We’ve kind of stuck our toe in the water, dabbling in Facebook and Twitter in a small way.”

“Now, we’re getting serious about it,” Ms. Steele said, “employing some more sophisticated programs and social media strategies” that are meant to create “an interactive community and destination” for people who sell Tupperware, buy Tupperware or want to become part of the sales force. “It’s about moving from brand awareness to helping people become brand advocates,” she added.

Most mainstream marketers are using social media to augment conventional kinds of advertising rather than replacing them. Either way, Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are becoming selling channels alongside legacy media like television and newspapers.

Social media “allow people to have a say in a brand,” said Peter Nicholson, creative officer at JWT New York, part of the JWT unit of WPP, and “the power of consumers engaging with a brand with real-time connections” can make a big difference.

The agency of record for Tupperware Brands is Maloney & Fox in New York, a division of Waggener Edstrom that is handling social media, events and even merchandise like a line of Confidence apparel, including T-shirts and scarves, that is to be sold on the Chain of Confidence Facebook page.

Using social media can help marketers “reach out to a younger demographic in a more interesting and dynamic way,” said Julie Levinthal, who is the program lead for this Tupperware Brands initiative at Maloney & Fox. That is important as Tupperware introduces itself to women who may not have ever attended a Tupperware party or burped one of its signature containers.

“We’re calling it the ‘cool-ification’ of the brand,” Ms. Levinthal said, intended to counter the image that Tupperware is “this June Cleaver, 1950s brand, which it’s not.”

?

Will Wheeler, the social media lead at Maloney & Fox, said the endorsers who will appear on Facebook and Twitter for Tupperware were selected because of their influence in social media.

The initial so-called confidence counselors taking part in the campaign are Beverly Bond, a D.J. who founded an organization named Black Girls Rock, and Abby Zeichner, a designer who specializes in plus-size clothing.

Their videos that are to be on the revamped Facebook page do not take hard-sell tacks. In one clip, Ms. Zeichner uses the phrase “Tupperware parties” in passing. In another clip, Ms. Bond does not mention Tupperware at all.

“Beverly’s mom has some Tupperware,” Ms. Levinthal said, but Ms. Bond did not until she received cookware from Tupperware Brands.

“Beverly didn’t know when we sent her the thousand-dollar Chef Series that Tupperware makes these stainless steel pots and pans,” Ms. Levinthal said.

Changing brand perceptions, one pot (or pan) at a time.

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Office Party? Let’s Tweet It

 

Across the room, a prodigious young culture curator, whose Brain Pickings blog has managed to attract fans as disparate as Pee-wee Herman and professors from M.I.T., was posting about “must-read books on the art and science of happiness.” Two Web developers from a company called Fictive Kin joked about Russian spammers. A ZZ Top song was playing. The office puppy was napping. A clipboard was going around for lunch orders.

As a group, the writers, Web designers, illustrators and social media figures who share the Studiomates collective in Dumbo have around a half-million followers on Twitter and many more on their blogs, Foursquare accounts and Facebook pages.

Yet it’s the offline interaction — the group lunches, the whiteboard brainstorming sessions, the Friday beer parties — that puts Studiomates at the forefront of an innovative new model for doing business.

It turns out that 140 characters in a Twitter post cannot compete with 26 characters in a Brooklyn loft.

Five years ago, a group like Studiomates probably wouldn’t have been a group at all but rather two dozen strangers in search of a Wi-Fi signal at Starbucks.

The 26 members, who each pay $500 a month for a desk, are mostly engaged in independent projects in unrelated fields, and have no practical reason to work together. But as the new media pundit Clay Shirky said at the South by Southwest conference in March, “we systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”

“Sure, we could all be home doing what we do, but why would we?” Tina Roth Eisenberg (a k a swissmiss) said as her studio mates clacked away at their MacBooks. “I just like being around nerdy creative people all day long. It helps make sense of all the information coming at us.”

Studiomates is an especially information-oriented bunch, and an influential one, too. In addition to her swissmiss blog and Twitter following of 200,000, Ms. Eisenberg is the founder of Creative Mornings, a popular monthly speaking series that has young designers in four cities talking.

Jason Santa Maria, 32, a graphic designer and the kind of free-thinking creative who makes magazines for people who make Web sites, has more than 175,000 Twitter followers.

The trio of graphic designers from Workshop, all based at Studiomates, creates much of the printed material for the TED Conferences and the New York Philharmonic.

Maria Popova (@Brainpicker to her 60,000 Twitter followers) delivers a steady stream of wonders and high-minded divertissement, like deep-space photography and Lego art, and recently began blogging for The Atlantic. Her impact score on Twitalyzer, an independent research group that tracks Twitter influence, puts her in the 99.9th percentile; she ranks higher than Anderson Cooper, Sarah Palin and Justin Timberlake.

Even the two Studiomates dogs, Pinky and the sleepy Mr. Toast, are on Twitter (albeit with fewer followers than Ashton Kutcher).

“The move to co-working is a move from a culture of me to a culture of we,” said Rachel Botsman, the author of “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.” “People are looking to express their individualism but want to do it in a more social way. They’ve experienced how to do that virtually on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. Now they’re looking for that face-to-face interaction.” The number of co-working spaces like Studiomates has roughly doubled worldwide over the last year, said Joel Dullroy, an editor at?Deskmag, an online co-working magazine. In North America, the number increased to 342, representing a growth of 16 percent between October 2010 and February 2011, Mr. Dullroy said.

New York City alone has dozens of co-working spaces, from Pizza Island, the all-female collective of cartoonists in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to New Work City, an exposed-brick den of freelancers in Little Italy, open to anyone who can obey the simple house rules outlined by Tony Bacigalupo, a founder of the space: 1. Show up, 2. Bring some work to do, 3. Don’t be a jerk.

Not surprisingly, the earliest adopters of co-working came out of Silicon Valley. In 2005, Brad Neuberg was a freelance software programmer in San Francisco when he created the first co-working space in the city’s Mission District.

The San Francisco Co-Working Space, which has since closed, had a group-friendly atmosphere (clustered desks, hangout areas, lots and lots of coffee) common today at co-working places like Independents Hall in Philadelphia and Dogpatch, which provides desk space to aspiring entrepreneurs in Cambridge, Mass.; New York, and San Francisco.

“The giggle factor was high in the beginning because people always assumed you either worked for yourself or you worked in an office,” Mr. Neuberg said.

Today, even those who dabble in co-working have options. A “jelly” is the term for a free meet-up that brings freelancers together at a cafe or other public site on days when a housecat’s company is simply not enough. Web sites like Deskwanted, Loosecubes and Desktime connect independent workers with shared spaces by the day, week or month for a fee.

At lunch at Studiomates one day last month, most of the members gathered over takeout cartons at a communal table with a group of smart-looking visitors from m_ss_ng p_eces, a creative agency in Brooklyn. The guests were invited as part of a speaking series that has included founders of media and design companies like Kickstarter, Pinterest and Svpply.

It was hard to get a word in. The group’s conversation moved from negative comments posted on YouTube to “miracle berries” that turn the taste of sour foods to sweet to why Ms. Popova was walking around barefoot (she was raising awareness for Toms’ One Day Without Shoes campaign, she said). Nobody was checking e-mail.

“This is the first time I’ve had community at work,” said Ms. Popova, who also has a full-time job as Insight Patternist at TBWA Worldwide. She splits her time between Studiomates and TBWA’s Madison Avenue office since the advertising agency “sees the value of my being in an environment where I can keep a finger on the pulse of creative culture and tech,” she said.

Much of the content for her blog and Twitter feed comes from the casual conversations at Studiomates. “The day-to-day distraction level may be slightly higher,” Ms. Popova said. “But in terms of the influx of the building blocks of productivity — ideas, story tips, the interesting people who come in — an environment like this is priceless.”

If the emphasis is on ideas at Studiomates, the focus at General Assembly, a co-working space in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, is money. The 20,000-square foot “campus,” which opened three months ago and is already booked to its 100-seat capacity, has presentation rooms sponsored by Skype, sleek communal worktables and a list of free agent members including Chris Maguire, a founder of Etsy; Amanda Hesser, the former New York Times food writer and a founder of the Food52 cookbook project; and Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook and coordinator of online organizing for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

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Party Convoy in Turkey Is Fired on, Killing Officer

The attack came after Mr. Erdogan had left the convoy. It was unclear whether he had been the intended target.

Less than an hour earlier, he had addressed a rally in Kastamonu, a city near the Black Sea about 150 miles north of Ankara.

At the time of the attack, Mr. Erdogan was in the nearby town of Amasya for another campaign event, said the governor of Kastamonu Province, Erdogan Bektas. The prime minister then left the area by helicopter, Mr. Bektas said.

In remarks delivered in Amasya, Mr. Erdogan condemned the political violence and appeared to allude to a separatist motive for the attack, though he stopped short of naming any group. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

“Call them whatever you want, these terrorists, these separatist powers, those who realize that they cannot handle their business at ballot boxes, think that they can achieve results only this way,” the Anatolian News Agency reported Mr. Erdogan as saying.

Since the 1980s, the Turkish government and armed Kurdish separatists known as the P.K.K. have engaged in a protracted struggle that has claimed more than 40,000 lives.

“Nobody should seek for alternate ways except the ballot box,” Mr. Erdogan said.

Turkey is heading for parliamentary elections in June with Mr. Erdogan’s pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party, buoyed by a robust economy, expected to win a third term as the majority government.

The attackers aimed at police vehicles escorting the prime minister’s election bus, which carried officials from Mr. Erdogan’s party, the NTV television network reported. A large number of ambulances were sent to the area.

Gunfire caused one of the police vehicles to explode, Mr. Bektas said. Earlier news reports, citing witnesses, had indicated grenades were used in the attack.

 

Advertising: The Tupperware Party Moves to Social Media

Next week, the Tupperware Brands Corporation plans to significantly increase its presence in social media like Facebook and Twitter, which more consumers are using as ways to connect with marketers as well as one another.

The goal is to find “more disruptive methods” to dispel perceptions that “we are your mother’s Tupperware,” said Rick Goings, chairman and chief executive of Tupperware Brands in Orlando, Fla., as the company seeks more consumers to buy — and sell — its products like containers, cutlery and cookware.

?

A Facebook page devoted to a Tupperware campaign that carries the theme “Chain of confidence” will get more rich content like video clips featuring women of achievement who will be presented as “confidence counselors.” The page will also offer blog posts, articles, motivational tips and inspirational quotations.

Tupperware is to join the ranks of marketers seeking to encourage Facebook users to say they “like” corporate pages by enlisting the singer Kelly Clarkson to lead an initiative that will promise a donation of a dollar to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America for each new “like” clicked for the revamped Facebook page.

And Tupperware will add an account on Twitter devoted to the confidence campaign, supplementing others used by the company’s United States sales force, marketing arm and corporate public relations department. Comments on Twitter related to the campaign are all to be identified with an “official” hash tag, #Confidence.

“It’s time to take it up to the next level,” Mr. Goings said of the company’s social media efforts.

Tupperware Brands has long believed in the power of social networking, he added, because recommendations about a brand or product “from someone you have confidence in is the absolutely best form” of marketing.

Underlining that, Tupperware Brands runs no traditional advertising, preferring to spend its marketing dollars on public relations, events, celebrity endorsers and promotions.

For instance, the chef Michael White took part in March in a two-day “pop-up” restaurant dubbed the Tupper Club. And Ms. Clarkson is to perform later this month at a concert, called Confide and Conquer, that will be sponsored by Tupperware in New York.

For a marketer like Tupperware Brands that specializes in direct selling, “the only thing advertising does is it makes your sales force feel supported,” Mr. Goings said, but that can also be accomplished “when you offer them incentives and trips.”

Elinor Steele, vice president for global communications and public relations at Tupperware Brands, characterized the company’s current status in social media this way: “We’ve kind of stuck our toe in the water, dabbling in Facebook and Twitter in a small way.”

“Now, we’re getting serious about it,” Ms. Steele said, “employing some more sophisticated programs and social media strategies” that are meant to create “an interactive community and destination” for people who sell Tupperware, buy Tupperware or want to become part of the sales force. “It’s about moving from brand awareness to helping people become brand advocates,” she added.

Most mainstream marketers are using social media to augment conventional kinds of advertising rather than replacing them. Either way, Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are becoming selling channels alongside legacy media like television and newspapers.

Social media “allow people to have a say in a brand,” said Peter Nicholson, creative officer at JWT New York, part of the JWT unit of WPP, and “the power of consumers engaging with a brand with real-time connections” can make a big difference.

The agency of record for Tupperware Brands is Maloney & Fox in New York, a division of Waggener Edstrom that is handling social media, events and even merchandise like a line of Confidence apparel, including T-shirts and scarves, that is to be sold on the Chain of Confidence Facebook page.

Using social media can help marketers “reach out to a younger demographic in a more interesting and dynamic way,” said Julie Levinthal, who is the program lead for this Tupperware Brands initiative at Maloney & Fox. That is important as Tupperware introduces itself to women who may not have ever attended a Tupperware party or burped one of its signature containers.

“We’re calling it the ‘cool-ification’ of the brand,” Ms. Levinthal said, intended to counter the image that Tupperware is “this June Cleaver, 1950s brand, which it’s not.”

?

Will Wheeler, the social media lead at Maloney & Fox, said the endorsers who will appear on Facebook and Twitter for Tupperware were selected because of their influence in social media.

The initial so-called confidence counselors taking part in the campaign are Beverly Bond, a D.J. who founded an organization named Black Girls Rock, and Abby Zeichner, a designer who specializes in plus-size clothing.

Their videos that are to be on the revamped Facebook page do not take hard-sell tacks. In one clip, Ms. Zeichner uses the phrase “Tupperware parties” in passing. In another clip, Ms. Bond does not mention Tupperware at all.

“Beverly’s mom has some Tupperware,” Ms. Levinthal said, but Ms. Bond did not until she received cookware from Tupperware Brands.

“Beverly didn’t know when we sent her the thousand-dollar Chef Series that Tupperware makes these stainless steel pots and pans,” Ms. Levinthal said.

Changing brand perceptions, one pot (or pan) at a time.

 

Scene City: A Party for, by and About Art

The pressure was on for the 30th anniversary of Bomb, a nonprofit magazine that seeks to elevate conversations about art. About 300 guests reached for something conceptual to say as they mingled at Capitale Friday night, beginning with a silent auction of contemporary works by artists who had appeared in the magazine’s pages.

Ellsworth Kelly recounted the 1960s: painting in the Hamptons in a potato barn and driving around Jacmel, Haiti. But he did not place any bids. “I only like artists older than myself,” the 87-year-old said.

The actress Kim Cattrall, on the arm of Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA P.S. 1 (who advised her to bid on a Robert Mangold drawing), spoke about the dwindling role of women over age 50 in Hollywood. “It’s like there’s a shelf life for talent,” she said.

Nearby, the performance artist Marina Abramovic kept the small talk to a minimum as she inched through the crowd of art world insiders including Ross Bleckner; James Rosenquist; Francine Prose; Richard Armstrong, the Guggenheim director; and Amy Phelan, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader turned collector, whose blond hair was piled up like a birthday cake.

“Actually, no conversation is possible at all because of the sound pollution,” Ms. Abramovic said, dodging canapés and chardonnay in the soaring foyer.

A group of artists in Manhattan started Bomb in 1981 with $3,000. The magazine is about process and ideas and takes the form of long cross-genre interviews: for example, the novelist Jonathan Lethem talking to Noah Baumbach, a filmmaker; or, in the ’80s, the artist Robert Mapplethorpe interviewed by Gary Indiana, a writer.

True to her word, Ms. Abramovic did not veer into banal banter, but she committed a faux pas: she wore the almost identical Givenchy dinner jacket of another guest, Riccardo Tisci, the label’s designer. Luckily, they are friends. “I give her tips on what to wear,” he said. “But I guess I did too good of a job.”

At 8 p.m. the guests made their way through the fortress-like doors of the former bank to tables set with long stems of cherry blossoms. The choice seats were filled with intellectuals from the pre-Chanel SoHo days, in black glitter Toms and Margiela hoof boots.

The writer A. M. Holmes was with Anh Duong, the painter, and Betsy Sussler, Bomb’s editor in chief. “I bet there are not that many Ph.D.’s in the room,” Ms. Holmes said. “Back then we didn’t study it, we just did it.”

Speeches were given, short ribs were served and then the serious table-hopping began. The younger artists were near the back, including Mika Rottenberg, who donated a small drawing.

“The best conversations happen amongst friends when you’re hung over at breakfast,” she said. “I don’t like to network at galas. The martinis are really good, though.”

 

In Singapore, the Party in Power Offers New Faces

 

SINGAPORE — After a painstaking search involving hundreds of man-hours and very likely thousands of cups of tea, Singapore’s overpowering political machine, the People’s Action Party, has presented to the public its carefully vetted crop of next-generation candidates for an election it is virtually certain to dominate again.

The party, which has never been out of power since Singapore became a self-governing state in 1959, now holds 82 of the 84 elected seats in Parliament and is expected to come close to that number again in the next election. It has introduced 24 new candidates over the past month, in a regular generational cycle that party leaders say is more significant than usual this year because the new slate probably includes the next prime minister.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has not yet announced the date of the election, which must be held by February 2012. But the People’s Action Party, or P.A.P., introduced its election manifesto on Monday and is already on the campaign trail, as are several smaller parties.

While Singapore has a multiparty system, opposition parties are hindered by a lack of funds, by the reluctance of potential candidates to challenge the government, by a configuration of districts that favors the governing party and by the sheer organizational power of the P.A.P. All 84 elected seats are being contested; the Constitution provides for the appointment of a small number of nonelected members.

But given the dominance of the P.A.P., the party’s search process — involving background checks, psychological tests and rounds of what are known as “tea session” get-togethers — has become, for all practical purposes, the system by which Singapore chooses its government and leaders.

“The people we’re bringing in now are not ready to be prime minister today,” Mr. Lee said this month. “But somebody amongst them or amongst the next batch — but I hope amongst the earlier ones — one day I hope will be prime minister.”

There are issues in this campaign — rising prices and rising immigration chief among them — but the elections are not so much about policy as about the people who will make the policies, mostly behind closed doors.

All of this is in line with the P.A.P.’s style of single-party governance: long-term decisions made by an inner circle, without the distractions of a substantial opposition or the time pressures of electoral deadlines. Public debate can make issues “harder to solve,” the prime minister said this month.

“I would say that our concerns about adversarial politics is why we feel that it’s good for us to have the P.A.P. as a broad-based party representing many views and having some of these trade-offs and tensions resolved within the party rather than between parties,” he said.

Asked whether there were not 20 people equally qualified to run against the P.A.P., Matthias Yao, who is retiring as a member of Parliament after four terms in office, said, “If we did have 40 good people, why not put them in one team, not two teams, when the other half by definition must oppose what the first team is doing?”

In the five years since the last election, the governing party has had “tea sessions” with more than 260 prospects, sometimes traveling abroad if these individuals had overseas jobs, Education Minister Ng Eng Heng, a senior party member, said in a recent forum.

“We didn’t always tell them why we were talking to them,” he said. “There were some tea participants whom we saw through changes in jobs. Some got married, pregnant, delivered. We saw them in various forms, antepartum and postpartum.”

As part of the process, Mr. Ng said, “We shortlisted some for intense, eight-hour psychological profiling.” Each prospect attended at least five tea sessions with members of a six-person interview panel, and the fittest of them were sent to a final session with the prime minister, said a member of the panel, K. Shanmugam.