An English-language newspaper in Moscow famed for lampooning Russian and Western officialdom has shut down after it fell under the scrutiny of the government for its raucous content.

The Exile spoofed the election of Russia's handpicked president by reporting results in advance. Dmitry Medvedev won 70% of the March 2 vote.

The demise of Moscow's Exile newspaper is the latest sign of the homogenization of the press within Russia, where an official crackdown on dissent has led to the self-censorship of many publications.

The Exile's editor, California native Mark Ames, said investors withdrew support earlier this month after officials from Russia's media regulator visited the paper's office and took away copies of recent issues to analyze whether the paper was violating Russia's media laws.

Though Russia's federal agency for media and communications has made no official move against the Exile, Mr. Ames said investors feared greater risks ahead for the paper, which had been unprofitable in recent years.

"If this had happened 10 years ago, people would not have been afraid to fight it," said Mr. Ames, who founded the paper in 1997. "Now there's a fear that all the power is in the hands of a few scary people who might do something very bad to you."

Evgeny Strelnik, an official at the media regulator that investigated the paper, said it was a "routine check." http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

"There were a few violations, and we've issued a warning," he said. He stressed that the government hadn't shut the paper down, something that would have required a court case.

With a circulation of less than 20,000 copies, the free biweekly never posed a serious threat to the Kremlin. For years, the newspaper's office was located above a Moscow strip club and the paper was staffed by a handful of poorly paid part-time writers.

It made a name for itself by celebrating the tumult and chaos of Moscow in an era of post-Soviet penury. Its readers were mainly Western businessmen looking for advice on where to find entertainment. The paper's club reviews advised which bars were frequented by violent thugs and which were popular with adventurous Russian women.

But the paper also sparked lively political debate among Russia experts in the West. An early contributor was Eduard Limonov, a radical counter-culture writer whose banned National Bolshevik Party has coalesced into a small but determined Kremlin opponent. His screeds -- complete with spelling and grammatical errors -- appeared twice a month.

The Exile assailed Western academics and journalists, whom it accused in the 1990s of understating the misery caused by the free-market reforms of President Boris Yeltsin. The paper's ribald and sometimes vicious pranks earned it enemies. Mr. Ames and another editor threw a pie made with horse semen into the face of one foreign correspondent for writing what they called a too-rosy account of Russia's transition to capitalism. The paper's articles were soon excluded from a popular Internet-based reading list used by foreign journalists.

Michael McFaul, professor of political science and director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, and a frequent target of attacks from the Exile, said he was "sorry to see the paper go" though he didn't always agree with its politics. The Exile frequently assailed Mr. McFaul for his 1970s-style haircut.

Mr. Ames said the paper had run into difficulty publishing some articles lately because Russia has broadened the definition of extremist literature, making it a crime to insult a public official. Earlier this year, the paper tried to publish photos of a protest in which Moscow university students had sex in a public museum near an exhibit of a stuffed bear. The publishing house, however, refused. The protest was directed at Russia's new president, Dmitry Medvedev, whose last name in Russian means "bear," and was supposed to mock his rhetoric about reversing Russia's population decline.

Mr. Ames said the paper had also failed to get beyond a fringe cult status among the Russian reading public, despite a Russian-language version on the Internet.

Kostantin Bukaryov, one of the founding investors of the Exile, said that profit had gradually declined since the late 1990s, largely because the foreign business community had shrunken in importance. "Before, a lot of the club owners in Russia were foreigners, as well as a large number of the patrons," Mr. Bukaryov said. "Now it's mostly Russians." The paper's financial problems saw Mr. Ames begin working in his spare time for Russian television, and a series of his travel programs appeared on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.

Alexei Simonov, head of the Glasnost Defense Fund, a nonprofit think tank that monitors press freedom in Russia, said the government's checkup on the Exile probably didn't spell serious problems for the paper. But he noted that newspaper owners in Russia have lately shied away from even minor confrontation with the government. Earlier this year, a Moscow tabloid closed down after then-President Vladimir Putin denied a report in it that said he would soon divorce his wife and marry an Olympic gymnast, Alina Kabayeva.

The owner of the newspaper, called Moskovskiy Korrespondent, denied the government pressured him into closing the paper, saying that he had decided to cut his investment because of "differences with the editorial staff over its concept."

Hershey Co. laid out plans Tuesday to battle the global candy giant to be created by the Mars-Wrigley merger, but offered little detail on how the iconic chocolate-bar maker will address its overwhelming reliance on the U.S. market for revenue.

At an investor update in New York, Chief Executive David West said Hershey would boost spending on marketing about 20% this year and next. He also slightly increased the company's long-term annual sales targets and outlined plans for new products.

But it isn't clear those steps will be enough in the coming candy wars. When Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms, and Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co., maker of Juicy Fruit and Doublemint, combine in a $23 billion deal expected to close in the next few months, their new company will have broad global reach. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
And that will put Hershey, whose business outside the U.S. represents just 14% of sales, in a difficult spot.

Consummating a long-time flirtation with Cadbury PLC would give Hershey broader international scale. But over the weekend, LeRoy Zimmerman, chairman of the Hershey Trust, the company's controlling shareholder, reiterated the trust's refusal to cede control of the Pennsylvania chocolate maker. In an opinion piece published Sunday in the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa., he wrote, "Simply put: We will not sell the Hershey Co." Hershey Trust spokesman Tim Reeves said that Mr. Zimmerman wouldn't comment further.

After the article was disseminated by a Wall Street analyst, shares of Hershey fell 6% Monday to close at $35.87. They fell again Tuesday to $35.15 after Mr. West addressed shareholders.

Mr. West set a new long-term annual sales growth target of 3% to 5%, compared with the previous goal of 3% to 4%, and an earnings-per-share growth target of 6% to 8%, down from the earlier 9% to 11%. Hershey affirmed its 2008 earnings forecast of $1.85 to $1.90 a share, but Mr. West said that Hershey won't hit its target in 2009 because of expected high commodity costs.

With the Mars-Wrigley combination looming, Hershey's options appear increasingly limited. To acquire Cadbury, which is valued at about $17 billion and is more than twice its size, Hershey would need to find a significant investment partner and would probably need to borrow a considerable sum.

Hershey could find itself in an even tighter bind if another company, such as Kraft Foods Inc., makes a play for Cadbury, as some analysts have speculated. A Kraft spokesman declined to comment on deal speculation but said one of the company's criteria for acquisitions is determining that it can "build scale in international geographies, especially in emerging markets."

Mr. West offered scant guidance on how the company plans to expand globally beyond saying it will continue entering into joint ventures and making acquisitions in Asia and Latin America.

He told investors that Hershey will take on Mars-Wrigley by competing aggressively in the U.S. "Although the Mars-Wrigley deal could affect our ranking, we remain well positioned on many dimensions, especially in chocolate, where we have a 43% share" of the $16 billion U.S. market, he said. "We are more convinced than ever that our core U.S. business can grow."

Not enough, said Credit Suisse analyst Robert Moskow. "My concern is that the international footprint they now have in these emerging markets is very tiny. The real focus internally seems to be squeezing more growth out of the domestic market." Mr. Moskow has the equivalent of a "hold" rating on Hershey stock; his firm has an investment-banking relationship with Hershey.

Hershey has struggled in recent years as it neglected core brands in favor of pushing limited-edition products. That opened the door for Mars to introduce new Dove dark chocolates and other items that stole market share from Hershey.

Mr. West told investors that Hershey marketers have talked to tens of thousands of consumers to determine why and how often they buy candy. They identified six core consumer groups, including "loyal indulgers," or older consumers who are loyal to specific brands, and "engaged exploring munchers," who are the least price-sensitive and most profitable.

The company is now developing products targeted at these groups, Mr. West said. New Reese's Whipps -- a chocolate bar with a fluffy peanut butter and nougat filling -- is aimed at consumers seeking less fat, while Reese's Select Clusters -- chocolate-covered pieces of nuts, peanut butter and caramel that resemble turtle candies -- target consumers who want to indulge. To appeal to women between the ages of 25 and 49, the company launched creamy bite-size pieces of milk or dark chocolate called Hershey's Bliss. Hershey has also worked with Starbucks Corp. to develop a new line of chocolates in such flavors as Caramel Macchiato and Madagascar Vanilla Bean.

Mr. West said the company will increase marketing spending about 20% this year to more than $155 million, and plans an additional 20% increase next year. The company is also trying to make grocery-store candy aisles easier to shop by testing new displays that group products by purchasing occasion, such as movie candy, gifts and items for the candy dish.

My father was planning a trip to Europe one summer afternoon when he went to the bathroom and didn't return. My mother found him dead of a heart attack on the bathroom floor. My husband's grandfather's heart gave out as he was walking down the sidewalk in New York.

Everybody knows somebody who has had a sudden, fatal heart attack, and it's many people's secret fear. More than 300,000 Americans die of heart disease without making it to the hospital each year; most of them from sudden cardiac arrest, according to the American Heart Association. In about half of those cases, the heart attack itself is the first symptom.

Deaths from cardiovascular disease in general have dropped dramatically in recent years, but it is still the No. 1 killer of men and women in the U.S. -- claiming more lives than cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, accidents and diabetes combined.

That's in part because, for all the advances doctors have made in understanding risk factors, lowering cholesterol with statins and propping open narrowed arteries with stents, most heart attacks are caused when tiny bits of plaque break loose and burst like popcorn kernels, forming clots that block arteries. That prevents blood from reaching areas of heart muscle, which start to die. It's hard to predict when that might happen -- which is why people who never knew they had heart disease, and people who thought it was under control, still have sudden heart attacks. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

WHEN TO CALL 911

• Common heart-attack signs in men:
-Pressure, fullness in chest that may come and go
-Discomfort in arms, neck, back, jaw
-Shortness of breath
-Lightheadedness
• Women more likely to have:
-Sudden sweating
-Shortness of breath
-Nausea/vomiting
-Back or jaw pain

"We have terrific therapies that were unimaginable 25 or 30 years ago," says E. Scott Monrad, director of the cardiac catheterization lab at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y. "But one of the biggest risks is dying before you even get to see a doctor."

Last weekend, scores of commentators on health and political blogs offered theories about what might have been done to save NBC's Tim Russert, who died of a sudden heart attack at work Friday. Few details were released, other than that the much-loved "Meet the Press" moderator was being treated for asymptomatic coronary artery disease, had diabetes and an enlarged heart, and had a stress test in April.

Many blog-posters argued that Mr. Russert should have had an angiogram -- an invasive diagnostic test in which the coronary arteries are injected with dye and X-rayed to spot blockages. But even if he had had the procedure an hour before the attack, doctors might not have seen anything to be alarmed about. More than two-thirds of heart attacks occur in arteries that are less than 50% narrowed by plaque buildup -- and those are often too small to show up on an angiogram or cause much chest pain.

Similarly, the stress test Mr. Russert had is better suited to detecting significantly narrowed arteries than the small, soft unstable kind of plaque that often causes fatal blood clots.

Indeed, about a third of people who have heart attacks don't have the usual risk factors, such as family history of heart disease, abdominal fat, high blood pressure or high cholesterol.
RISK FACTORS

The symptoms that make up "metabolic syndrome" put people at high risk for heart attack, stroke and diabetes. (Smoking and heavy alcohol consumption also raise the risk.)
• Waist more than 40 inches for men; 35 inches for women
• Blood pressure over 130/85mmHg
• Fasting glucose over 110 mg/dl
• Triglycerides over 150 mg/dl
• LDL cholesterol over 100 mg/dl
• HDL cholesterol under 40 mg/dl

"Time and again we see examples of unexpected cardiac disease in people who didn't know they had it," says Prediman K. Shah, director of cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, one of many experts who think wider use of coronary calcium CT scans could help spot more people at risk of soft-plaque blockages. The noninvasive procedure takes about 15 minutes and costs a few hundred dollars. But few insurers cover it because there is scant evidence that treating people on that basis saves lives.

At a minimum, seeing a picture of the calcium lining their arteries can be a wake-up call for patients to take their coronary-artery disease seriously and to be diligent in taking medication, exercising and making other healthy lifestyle changes.

Mr. Russert's family and physicians haven't disclosed how his coronary artery disease was diagnosed, or how he was being treated. NBC colleagues said the 58-year-old journalist had been working to control his condition with exercise and diet, though his weight was an ongoing struggle. He had also returned from a family trip to Italy the day before, following a grueling -- but exhilarating -- political primary season. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

Not all heart attacks are fatal. Most of the 1.2 million Americans who had one last year survived. If the area of oxygen-starved heart muscle is small, or in the right ventricle, the heart can often keep pumping, allowing the patient to make it to a hospital, where doctors can break up the blockage with a clot-dissolving drug or catheterization. The situation becomes rapidly fatal if the heart starts beating wildly, and ineffectively, as it struggles to keep pumping. Unless it is jolted back into a normal rhythm within a few minutes, the patient's brain will starve for oxygen and shut down.

Some patients with enlarged hearts like Mr. Russert's are candidates for internal defibrillators that can continuhttp://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
ously monitor heart rhythm and keep it regular automatically. Vice President Cheney, who has survived four heart attacks, has one.

Many airports, shopping malls, schools and offices have portable Automatic External Defibrillators, or AEDs, on hand as well. They're designed to automatically assess a victim's heart rhythm and administer an electrical jolt as needed. The NBC office reportedly didn't have an AED, but an intern performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Mr. Russert until paramedics arrived with a defibrillator.

"The earlier CPR is started, the higher the rate of success," says Dr. Monrad, who says he has had several cases in which vigorous CPR in the field bought precious time and saved a life. On average, however, only a small percentage of people in full cardiac arrests are successfully revived.

More widespread use of AEDs and wider CPR training could save some future victims' lives. Some bloggers suggested that more-aggressive treatment of Mr. Russert's artery disease might have bought him some time, though most experts declined to speculate.

But stents, angioplasty and bypass surgery are only stop-gap measures that don't do anything to halt the progress of the underlying disease. "Everytime I do a procedure on a patient, the family comes up and says, 'Now we don't have to worry anymore,' but that's the wrong message," says Dr. Monrad. "Physicians have to be tough on the standards we set for patients, and patients have to be tougher about the kind of lifestyle choices they make."

The heart has many mysteries that scientists are still unraveling, such as what causes those killer bits of plaque to rupture, the role of inflammation, the complex interplay of diet, vitamins and amino acids like homocysteine. Even the size of cholesterol particles is under scrutiny. "The more small LDL particles you have, the higher your risk of heart disease," says Larry McCleary, a former pediatric neurosurgeon at Denver Children's Hospital who had a heart attack while on rounds at age 46, and has since lost weight, reduced his blood pressure and triglycerides, and exercises daily.

"It's important that each person take responsibility for taking care of themselves," says Edmund Herrold, a clinical cardiologist in New York City and professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. "Get a regular checkup. Watch your weight and your blood pressure and your cholesterol and if you have diabetes, keep that under control. Exercise. Take an aspirin every day. Eliminate meat. There's no guarantee, but you can dramatically lower the risk of a cardiac event if you pay attention to these issues."

During the last American food-and-gas-price crisis, in the 1970s, one of my colleagues on the Berkeley student newspaper told me that he and his semi-communal housemates had taken a vote. They’d calculated they could afford meat or coffee. They chose coffee.

The decision was slightly less effete than it sounds now — the Starbucks clone wars were still some years off, so he was talking about choosing Yuban over ground chuck. But it nonetheless said something about us as spoiled Americans. Riots were relatively common in Berkeley in those days. But they were never about food. (That particular revolution was starting without us on Shattuck Avenue, where Chez Panisse had just opened.)

However, elsewhere on the globe, people were on the edge of starvation. Grain prices were soaring, rice stocks plummeting. In Ethiopia and Cambodia, people were well over the edge, and food riots helped lead to the downfall of Emperor Haile Selassie and the victory of the Khmer Rouge.

Now it’s happening again. While Americans grumble about gasoline prices, food riots have seared Bangladesh, Egypt and African countries. In Haiti, they cost the prime minister his job. Rice-bowl countries like China, India and Indonesia have restricted exports and rice is shipped under armed guard.

And again, Thomas Malthus, a British economist and demographer at the turn of the 19th century, is being recalled to duty. His basic theory was that populations, which grow geometrically, will inevitably outpace food production, which grows arithmetically. Famine would result. The thought has underlain doomsday scenarios both real and imagined, from the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to the Population Bomb of 1968.

But over the last 200 years, with the Industrial Revolution, the Transportation Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Biotech Revolution, Malthus has been largely discredited. The wrenching dislocations of the last few months do not change that, most experts say. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
But they do show the kinds of problems that can emerge.

The whole world has never come close to outpacing its ability to produce food. Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians, said Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University and the author of “How Many People Can the Earth Support?” But much of it is being fed to cattle, the S.U.V.’s of the protein world, which are in turn guzzled by the world’s wealthy.

Theoretically, there is enough acreage already planted to keep the planet fed forever, because 10 billion humans is roughly where the United Nations predicts that the world population will plateau in 2060. But success depends on portion control; in the late 1980s, Brown University’s World Hunger Program calculated that the world then could sustain 5.5 billion vegetarians, 3.7 billion South Americans or 2.8 billion North Americans, who ate more animal protein than South Americans.

Even if fertility rates rose again, many agronomists think the world could easily support 20 billion to 30 billion people.

Anyone who has ever flown across the United States can see how that’s possible: there’s a lot of empty land down there. The world’s entire population, with 1,000 square feet of living space each, could fit into Texas. Pile people atop each other like Manhattanites, and they get even more elbow room.

Water? When it hits $150 a barrel, it will be worth building pipes from the melting polar icecaps, or desalinating the sea as the Saudis do.

The same potential is even more obvious flying around the globe. The slums of Mumbai are vast; but so are the empty arable spaces of Rajasthan. Africa, a huge continent with a mere 770 million people on it, looks practically empty from above. South of the Sahara, the land is rich; south of the Zambezi, the climate is temperate. But it is farmed mostly by people using hoes.

As Harriet Friedmann, an expert on food systems at the University of Toronto, pointed out, Malthus was writing in a Britain that echoed the dichotomy between today’s rich countries and the third world: an elite of huge landowners practicing “scientific farming” of wool and wheat who made fat profits; many subsistence farmers barely scratching out livings; migration by those farmers to London slums, followed by emigration. The main difference is that emigration then was to colonies where farmland was waiting, while now it is to richer countries where jobs are.

Malthus’s world filled up, and its farmers, defying his predictions, became infinitely more productive. Admittedly, emptying acreage so it can be planted with genetically modified winter wheat and harvested by John Deere combines can be a brutal process, but it is solidly within the Western canon. My Scottish ancestors, for example, became urbanites thanks to the desire of English scientific farmers (for which read “landlords and bribers of clan chiefs”) to graze more sheep in the highlands. Four generations later, I got to mull the coffee-meat dilemma while actually living on newsroom pizza.

So it ultimately worked out for one spoiled Scottish-American. But what about the 800 million people who are chronically hungry, even in riot-free years?

Dr. Friedmann argues that there is a Malthusian unsustainability to the way big agriculture is practiced, that it degrades genetic diversity and the environment so much that it will eventually reach a tipping point and hunger will spread.

Others vigorously disagree. In their view, the world is almost endlessly bountiful. If food became as pricey as oil, we would plow Africa, fish-farm the oceans and build hydroponic skyscraper vegetable gardens. But they see the underlying problem in terms more Marxian than Malthusian: the rich grab too much of everything, including biomass. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

For the moment, simply ending subsidies to American and European farmers would let poor farmers compete, which besides feeding their families would push down American food prices and American taxes.

Tyler Cowen, a George Mason University economist, notes that global agriculture markets are notoriously unfree and foolishly managed. Rich countries subsidize farmers, but poor governments fix local grain prices or ban exports just when world prices rise — for example, less than 7 percent of the world’s rice crosses borders. That discourages the millions of third world farmers who grow enough for themselves and a bit extra for sale from planting that bit extra.

Americans are attracted to Malthusian doom-saying, Dr. Cowen argues, “because it’s a pre-emptive way to hedge your fear. Prepare yourself for the worst, and you feel safer than when you’re optimistic.”

Dr. Cohen, of Rockefeller University, sees it in more sinister terms: Americans like Malthus because he takes the blame off us. Malthus says the problem is too many poor people.

Or, to put it in the terms in which the current crisis is usually explained: too many hard-working Chinese and Indians who think they should be able to eat pizza, meat and coffee and aspire to a reservation at Chez Panisse. They get blamed for raising global prices so much that poor Africans and Asians can’t afford porridge and rice. The truth is, the upward pressure was there before they added to it.

America has always been charitable, so the answer has never been, “Let them eat bean sprouts.” But it has been, “Let them eat subsidized American corn shipped over in American ships.” That may need to change.

If Sok Chear had her way, she would slice the elderly man into ribbons and pour salt into his wounds. She would beat him up and torture him and give him electric shocks to make him talk.

For Ly Monysar, even that would not be enough. “Only killing them will make me feel calm,” he said. “I want them to suffer the way I suffered. I say this from the heart.”

Sok Chear, an office worker, and Ly Monysar, a security guard, are two of the millions of Cambodians who suffered for four years in the late 1970s under the brutal Communist Khmer Rouge, which caused the deaths of 1.7 million people.

Three decades later, five aging former Khmer Rouge leaders are in custody and awaiting trial. And Sok Chear and Ly Monysar have an innovative role to play in the tribunal, where the first case is expected to begin this autumn.

They are two of hundreds of people who have applied to the court to be recognized officially as victims of the Khmer Rouge and to bring parallel civil cases against them.

They will have a chance not to beat and torture them but to seek mostly symbolic reparations — a monument, perhaps, or a museum or trauma center.

It is a controversial experiment in this unusual hybrid tribunal, which is administered jointly by the United Nations and the Cambodian government and comprises elements of Cambodian and international law.

“For the first time in history, the internal rules of a tribunal will give victims of crimes the possibility to participate as parties,” said Gabriela González Rivas, deputy head of the tribunal’s victims unit.

Victims have been included in other comparable tribunals, like the International Criminal Court, but their role has been more limited. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

As civil parties, the victims here will have standing comparable to those of the accused, including rights to participate in the investigation, to be represented by a lawyer, to call witnesses and to question the accused at trial, according to a court statement.

“Participation in these types of proceedings is a tool of empowerment,” Ms. Rivas said. “People can tell their story, feel that what happened to them is a consideration, a recognizing that what happened to them shouldn’t have happened.”

The inclusion of victims is part of the evolution and refining of the mechanisms of international justice, said Diane Orentlicher, special counsel of the Open Society Justice Initiative, in a telephone interview from New York.

“There has been a growing recognition, after 15 years of international and hybrid courts like this one, not to exclude victims from the justice that is being dispensed on their behalf,” she said. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
The Cambodia tribunal has been accused of compromising international standards of justice with its awkward admixture of Cambodian law and its vulnerability to manipulation by the country’s strongman, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who exercises control over the Cambodian judiciary.

The participation of victims is drawing more criticism, partly from people concerned for the rights of the accused and the preservation of the presumption of innocence.

Victor Koppe, a defense lawyer for one of the Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea, called the presumption of innocence “the most fundamental issue” in the case.

“The question is whether or not everything in this tribunal is institutionalized in such a way that only guilty verdicts can come,” he said.

Other critics say the court is being distracted by social agendas from its core task of seeking justice for crimes against humanity.

“I would put this under the category of therapeutic legalism,” said Peter Maguire, an expert on international justice and author of “Facing Death in Cambodia.”

“This is an invention of the 1990s, where people freighted the trials with all this baggage,” Mr. Maguire said. “How do you measure closure, how do you measure truth, how do you measure reconciliation? These are not empirical categories.”

These added elements can also encumber an already tortuously slow process, the critics say.

Almost two years of the tribunal’s budgeted three-year mandate have passed since it was set up in August 2006, after nearly a decade of contentious negotiation between the United Nations and the Cambodian government.

Nearly a year has passed since the first of the five defendants was charged in the case. Most analysts are confident that more money will be found from international donors to extend the life of the tribunal, which began with a budget of $53 million. But as Mr. Maguire put it, this court needs to get hustling.

So far, Ms. Rivas said, about 1,300 people who say they were victims have applied to participate. About half seek to be civil parties, while the other half offer evidence that could be submitted to prosecutors. Most names have been channeled through a documentation center or through human rights groups.

Ten people have been accepted so far as civil parties, she said.

As the number grows, it is likely that they will be combined into class actions representing religious or ethnic groups, victims of particular crimes or other parties.

Theary Seng, 37, a Cambodian-born American lawyer who lost her parents to the Khmer Rouge, is organizing two groups of orphans — including Sok Chear, Ly Monysar and herself — to bring civil cases.

In February at a pretrial hearing, Ms. Seng became the first and so far the only victim to address the court, standing face to face with Nuon Chea, whom she blames for the deaths of her parents.

Though her words were addressed to the court, she said, her eyes were locked directly with those of Nuon Chea, 82, the most senior of the five imprisoned leaders — the man Sok Chear said she wants to flay.

In a short statement, Ms. Seng contrasted the legal protections that Nuon Chea is receiving with the arbitrary arrest and abuse she said she and her younger brother suffered as children under the Khmer Rouge.

Noun Chea, the Khmer Rouge ideologue, was sometimes known as Brother Number Two to Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, who died in 1998. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

“He was stoic, stoic,” Ms. Seng said, recalling the confrontation. “He’s completely stoic. Eighty percent of the time I was addressing him in my statement. He didn’t break the stare.”

Nearly one-fourth of the Cambodian population died between 1975 and 1979 from execution, torture, starvation and overwork in the mass labor brigades the Khmer Rouge created.

Today, though, most of the survivors are as stoic as their victimizers. When asked about the tribunal, most simply say they want to know who caused their suffering and why.

But the approach of the court sessions has aroused the feelings of many people, and those who have applied to participate are among those with the strongest emotions.

Sok Chear, 32, who said she was raped and brutalized as a girl by the Khmer Rouge, remains inconsolable over the loss of her father, an engineer, who disappeared into the hands of the black-clothed cadre and never returned.

“We were always waiting for him to come home, but he never came,” she said. “We were always waiting and waiting. Even now, I still look around — maybe my father is still alive.”

Tears still come when she talks about him.

“He gave me rice to eat and I want to repay him,” she said, “even one plate of rice, my gift to him, even one plate for him to eat from his daughter.”

Ly Monysar, 41, is a broken man, poor and sick and bitter, his voice quavering as he tells of the loss of his entire family when he was 9.

He sustains himself with fantasies of revenge every bit as chilling as the calculated brutality men like Nuon Chea are accused of.

“I want to kill all those people who did this to me,” he said. “And if I can’t, I’ll come back in the next life and find them. I’ll create my own genocidal regime and take my revenge on them all.”

Books have Amazon, and classified advertisements have Craigslist. Prostitutes have The Erotic Review.

In a little-known success story, TheEroticReview.com has come to dominate the country’s prostitution scene, which is increasingly migrating from the street corner to the Internet.

But now the site’s founder, David Elms, is in jail awaiting trial in Los Angeles in a case unrelated to the site, leaving the fate of his influential underground world uncertain. In dozens of conversations and in postings on the Internet in recent weeks, prostitutes have expressed concern that if The Erotic Review goes offline it could hurt business. But in the same breath, many are rejoicing about the potential downfall of Mr. Elms.

One escort agency that was banned from the site has accused Mr. Elms of antitrust violations, suggesting that he abuses his power over the sex trade. Other critics say he accepts, and sometimes demands, sex or money to promote certain women and agencies.

He has denied the accusations.

The Web site, which is still in operation, allows visitors to rank their experiences with prostitutes on a scale of 1 to 10, as well as to leave comments. It gets 500,000 to 1 million unique visitors each month, according to companies that track Web traffic.

“He is the most influential man in the prostitution business in America,” said Jason Itzler, the former head of NY Confidential, an escort ring. Mr. Itzler was released from prison last year after serving 30 months for the attempted promotion of prostitution.

Mr. Elms, 37, was jailed this month on accusations that he failed five drug tests since October, a violation of his probation from a 2006 drug and gun conviction. If he is found to have violated his probation, he could be sentenced to four years in prison.

Mr. Elms usually does not say much publicly about his Web site, asserting that reporters twist his words. But in an interview with MSNBC.com in 2006, Mr. Elms said that he started The Erotic Review in 1999 because he wanted to empower the customers of prostitutes.

“I was getting ripped off,” he said. “There was no way to hold people accountable for their actions.”

The house in Hawthorne, Calif., where Mr. Elms lives is modest, with a well-kept yard. The only unusual signs are a surveillance camera over the porch and the late-model Mercedes sports car parked out front with the vanity license plate “Will She.”

The Erotic Review works like many consumer review sites. Visitors to the site can look for prostitutes by city or area code and find contact information, personal Web sites, physical attributes like height and body type, and numeric rankings.

More broadly, the Internet is changing prostitution. In recent years, thousands of prostitutes have posted their own Web sites, including their pictures and contact information. They are called Net walkers. The Internet, they say, has let them more easily reach clientele, particularly high-paying customers, and vet them.

Robert Weisberg, a professor of criminal law at Stanford, said that prostitution promoted online — even if overtly advertised — might not pique law enforcement interest because the crime usually received little attention.

Jodi Michelle Link, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who specializes in sex and vice crimes, said prosecuting Mr. Elms for his connection to The Erotic Review could be difficult for free speech reasons. She also said that the prostitutes who said they had been asked by Mr. Elms for sexual favors would have trouble making a criminal case against him because they could simply choose not to participate on his site.

As The Erotic Review has become more popular, Mr. Elms has attracted criticism. In April, a lawyer for an escort service based in Phoenix, MystiqueUSA, wrote a letter to Mr. Elms threatening him with an antitrust lawsuit for banning the agency and its escorts from the site. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

“There is no question that your Erotic Review site clearly meets the legal standard of a unique facility whose use is essential to effectively compete in the upscale escort services market,” the lawyer wrote. The letter accused the Web site of favoring escort agencies that did not want competition.

Officials at MystiqueUSA would not comment. But on the home page of its Web site, it expresses regret over the assertions in the letter and apologizes to Mr. Elms.

Ms. Link, the deputy district attorney, said the criminal charges against Mr. Elms stemmed from a night in 2006 when the police were called to a hotel where they found him with 3.8 grams of cocaine and a loaded semi-automatic weapon. A prostitute was there and said Mr. Elms had forced her to perform oral sex at gunpoint, but there was not enough evidence to press charges on that accusation, Ms. Link said.