Bittersweet Chocolate News in Europe

Chocolate is in the news across Europe these days, in more ways than one.

The French government came in for withering criticism from Malaysia on Monday for the so-called “Nutella Amendment” tax. If passed, the levy would quadruple - from 100 Euros to 400 Euros - the import tax on Malaysian palm oil, which makes up 20 percent of the chocolatey-buttery Nutella goodness, without which no French pantry feels entirely complete.

France's Socialist government claims the tax is part of an effort to curb a worrying increase of Gallic obesity, but given how much Nutella the French consume - rougly 100 million or so jars - it could also add some "40 million, more than $50 million, to help shore up the country's sagging finances. Malaysia's Palm Oil Council was quick to respond to the threat, saying “every nutritional and food expert concludes that palm oil is in fact free of dangerous trans fats, free of GMOs and contains valuable vitamins.” And a spokesman for F errero, the Italian company that produces Nutella, sought to reassure worried French consumers, saying it had no intention of changing its winning recipe.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the British government revealed that the Cadbury Dairy Milk bar had been reduced in size from 49 grams to 45 grams (1.73 ounces down to 1.59 ounces), while still being sold at the same price of 59 pence (94 cents) prompting the Office of National Statistics to include the change in its most recent consumer price index as a 10 percent price hike. As Richard Campbell, an ONS statistician, told the Telegraph, “Our price collectors noticed that chocolate bars and bags of sweets were decreasing in size by around 10 percent so we felt it was important to inform the public.”

If the European appetite for Nutella and Cadbury does begin to slide, however, there is no shortage of chocolatiers eager to step into the mix, as it were. A Portuguese producer told Confectionary News last week that it was ramping up production of a “passionfruit” chocolate bar in a bid to satisfy European demand for “exotic” chocolate flavors like pineapple, strawberry and orange.

Beyond its sweetness, chocolate also turns out to be a pretty good economic indicator in Europe. Demand for cocoa reached a two-year high this week. And chocolate sales in Western Europe, which accounts for 32 percent of global chocolate demand, are expected to increase. That prompted Jonathan Parkman, an agricultural expert at Marex Spectron Group in London to tell BloombergBusinessweek, “There has been a pretty good link between global GDP growth and the growth of chocolate consumption in the last 20 to 30 years and I don't think you can just throw that link away.”

In chocolate-rich Switzerland, producer AG Barry Callebaut, which produces chocolate for Hershey and Nestle, said it expected chocolate sales to pick up across Europe heading into 2013.

In Northern Ireland - a land kno wn less for its chocolate and more for potatoes and rebel movements - a company called Choc-O-Bloc announced this week it had made its first sales of an edible chocolate toy called Magic Choc. Designers worked for years to create a malleable - and edible - form of Belgian chocolate, both dark and white, which children could fashion into shapes and then eat. “Our technology allows the chocolate to be handcrafted into various models without melting in the process,” said founder Stephen Lennie.

Capping the chocolate tide was the news from Kings College London that researchers were looking into whether there was a link between a country's chocolate consumption and its propensity to garner Nobel Prizes. The best news yet? There was, indeed, a strong correlation!

Congress Ends, Mystery Surrounding Xi Remains

BEIJING - Through binoculars, I watched as Xi Jinping, China's vice president and the man almost certain to be its next leader, rose from his seat seconds after the last, brassy notes of the Internationale died away in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday.

It was around noon and more than 2,000 delegates to the Communist Party's 18th National Congress had just chosen a new Central Committee of just over 200 people, though their names had not been announced. (The committee will elect a Politburo, a Standing Committee of the Politburo and a general secretary, or party leader, on Thursday.)

President Hu Jintao had just delivered his brief, closing address to the congress, in which he said his work report on the last five years, delivered on the opening day of the Congress the previous Thursday, was “the crystallization of the wisdom of the whole party and the people of all ethnic groups in China.”

He called it “a political declaration a nd a program of action for the party to rally and lead the people of all ethnic groups in China in winning new victory for socialism with Chinese characteristics. The report is a guiding Marxist document.”

The congress was over.

On the stage, scores of party grandees milled around, picking up papers, greeting each other and shaking hands.

Mr. Xi remained alone, surveying the crowd. No one came up to him and he approached no one. As people began to head for the exits, Li Keqiang, the man almost certain to be his prime minister (Mr. Xi is expected to be chosen party leader on Thursday and to become president next year), passed by Mr. Xi, and the two fell into step, talking. After a few paces Mr. Li turned to a line of delegates, shaking hands, while Mr. Xi hung back. He shook a hand or two. Then he walked off the stage, alone.

As I wrote in my Letter from China this week, Mr Xi, 59, was a long-prepared candidate for high office.

“He's very sta ble. He's low-key. He's not a show-off who attracts attention. These are qualities that the people choosing leaders here value very highly,” said a Europe-based Chinese journalist who writes for People's Daily, the party newspaper, speaking earlier that morning.

Mr. Xi is personable too, according to overseas politicians, diplomats and businessmen who have met him. He is warmer than Mr. Hu, and is known to be in a state of despair at the poor state of Chinese soccer, rolling his eyes when asked about the national team on a trip to Ireland in February, according to people present.

Yet in most ways he remains a mystery, like so much else that happened this week at the congress where access for reporters was limited.

Waiting outside the hall just before the ceremony, I approached a group of a half-dozen men in olive green military uniforms, said hello, and asked if we could chat. They stared at me in silence, not a smile on a face.

“I, uh, guess you don't want to talk, is that right?” I said, trying to make light of it. “It's a pity, no? I mean, if people can't talk, misunderstandings may easily arise,” I said.

Still no one spoke.

Then one of them said: “We are not allowed to accept interviews.” The others nodded.

And that was that. I still have no idea who they were.

At a Swedish Preschool, No \'He\' or \'She\'

Swedish School's Big Lesson Begins With Dropping Personal Pronouns

Casper Hedberg for The New York Times

All children at the Nicolaigarden school may play with dolls, and both boys and girls, called “friends,” can cry.

STOCKHOLM - At an ocher-color preschool along a lane in Stockholm's Old Town, the teachers avoid the pronouns “him” and “her,” instead calling their 115 toddlers simply “friends.” Masculine and feminine references are taboo, often replaced by the pronoun “hen,” an artificial and genderless word that most Swedes avoid but is popular in some gay and feminist circles.

In the little library, with its throw pillows where children sit to be read to, there are few classic fairy tales, like “Cinderella” or “Snow White,” with their heavy male and female stereotypes, but there are many stories that deal with single parents, adopted children or same-sex couples.

Girls are not urged to play with toy kitchens, and wooden or Lego blocks are not considered toys for boys. And when boys hurt themselves, teachers are taught to give them every bit as much comforting as they would girls. Everyone gets to play with dolls, and while most are anatomically correct, some are also black.

Sweden is perhaps as renowned for an egalitarian mind-set as it is for meatballs or Ikea furnishings. But this taxpayer-financed preschool, known as the Nicolaigarden for a saint whose chapel was once in the 300-year-old building that houses it, is perhaps one of the more compelling examples of the country's efforts to blur gender lines and, theoretically, cement opportunities for both women and men.

What the children are taught, said Malin Engleson, an art gallery employee, as she fetched her 15-month-old daughter Hanna from the school, “shows that girls can cry, but boys too.”

“That's why we chose it,” she said. “It's so important to start at an early age.”

The model has been so successful that two years ago three of its teachers opened an offshoot, which now has almost 40 children. That school, named Egalia to suggest equality, is in a 1960s housing project in the Sodermalm neighborhood.

What has become a passionate undertaking for its teachers actually began with a nudge from Swedish legislators, who in 1998 passed a bill requiring that schools, including day care centers, assure equal opportunities for girls and boys.

Spurred by the law, the teachers at Nicolaigarden took the unusual step of filming one another, capturing their behavior while playing with, eating with or just being with the center's infants to 6-year-olds.

“We could see lots of differences, for example, in the handling of boys and girls,” said Lotta Rajalin, who directs the center and three others, which she visits by bicycle. “If a boy was crying because he hurt himself, he was consoled, but for a shorter time, while girls were held and soothed much longer,” she said. “With a boy it was, ‘Go on, it's not so bad!' ”

The filming, she said, also showed that staff members tended to talk more with girls than with boys, perhaps explaining girls' later superior language skills. If boys were boisterous, that was accepted, Ms. Rajalin said; a girl trying to climb a tree on an outing in the country was stopped.

The result, after much discussion, was a seven-point program to alter such behavior. “We avoid using words like boy or girl, not because it's bad, but because they represent stereotypes,” said Ms. Rajalin, 53. “We just use the name - Peter, Sally - or ‘Come on, friends!' ” Men were added to the all-female staff. With Egalia, Nicolaigarden sought and obtained certification from an organization for gay and bisexual people that its staff is sensitive to their problems.

Criticism was not long in arriving. “There are a lot of letters, mail, blogs,” Ms. Rajalin said. “But it's not so much arguments; it's anger, basically.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2012, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: A School's Big Lesson Begins With Dropping Personal Pronouns.

Sotheby's Accused of Deceit in Sale of Khmer Statue

Federal prosecutors trying to seize a multimillion-dollar 10th-century Cambodian statue from Sotheby's have accused the auctioneers of colluding with the item's owner to hide information that it was stolen from a temple in 1972, according to papers filed in United States District Court in Manhattan.

The Khmer statue that prosecutors say was stolen from a temple.

Prosecutors say that in 2010, when the statue was being imported into the United States, the owner submitted an inaccurate affidavit to American customs officials, at Sotheby's request, stating the statue was “not cultural property” belonging to a religious site.

The government contended in its filing on Friday that both parties knew the statue, a mythic Hindu warrior known as Duryodhanna, valued at up to $3 million, was stolen when they agreed to ship it from Belgium to New York. The government says it can prove that the statue in fact came from a Khmer Dynasty temple, Prasat Chen, part of a vast and ancient complex called Koh Ker.

Sotheby's on Tuesday denied the allegations, saying the government is straining to bolster a thin case by picking selectively through the evidence provided by the auctioneers.

The United States attorney's office is trying “to tar Sotheby's with a hodgepodge of other allegations designed to create the misimpression that Sotheby's acted deceptively in selling the statue,” the auction house said in a statement. “That is simply not true.”

At the heart of the case are the questions of when the statue left Cambodia and whether Cambodian laws and international accords in effect at that time would have barred the item's removal.

The government has accused Sotheby's of providing “inaccurate information to potential buyers, to Cambodia and to the United States,” and lists both civil and criminal penalties. Sotheby's has said the statue's removal from Cambodia cannot be dated with certainty given the centuries of looting after the fall of the Khmer kingdom in the 15th century.

“The original complaint relied on a series of hopelessly ambiguous French colonial decrees,” Sotheby's said in a statement. (Cambodia was a French protectorate until 1953.) “There is no clear and unambiguous law that would have given purchasers fair notice that the modern state of Cambodia claims ownership of everything a long-defunct regime made and then abandoned 50 generations ago.”

In September, a federal judge expressed skepticism about the government's case, saying that Cambodia did not have “clear ownership established by clear and unambiguous language.”

The sculpture is a hulking 500-pound Khmer masterpiece that was set to be auctioned in March 2011 but withdrawn after Cambodia objected and asked for its return. Cambodia is also seeking the return of a companion piece, of a warrior called Bhima, that is on display at the Norton Simon Museum in California. Cambodia has identified the two massive pedestals where the statues once stood because their feet match the statues, which were broken off at the ankles.

Federal investigators have said the Sotheby's statue was among thousands pillaged during civil war in Cambodia in the 1970s and that Cambodian witnesses recall seeing it in place in that era. In its amended complaint, the government said it had narrowed the date of removal to “in or about 1972” and had identified the looting ring that took it. The ring was not identified in the papers.

Prosecutors said the looters turned the statue over to a Thai middleman, and it ended up in the hands of a “collector,” but the papers do not name him. The collector is said to have sold the statue to a London dealer, Spink & Son, a major purveyor of Asian artifacts now reincorporated under the name Spink. In 1975, the statue was bought by the husband, now dead, of a Belgian woman named Decia Ruspoli di Poggio Suasa, who turned the work over to Sotheby's for auction in 2010.

The government contends Sotheby's left out the name of the collector who sold the statue to Spink and other details about the statue's provenance to mask the trail of the artwork. Sotheby's denied that, saying it left out the name of the collector because he had no role in the deal.

Douglas A. J. Latchford, an Asian art collector, donor and adviser to the Cambodian government on Khmer antiquities, said by phone from Bangkok that he is the collector referred to in the court papers.

He said Spink bought the statue in Thailand in late 1971 or 1972. He said he is listed by name on Spink's original ownership papers because, unknown to him, the company had used his funds for “accounting purposes” to purchase the statue. He said he never had possession of the statue.

Mr. Latchford rejected government claims that he and Spink knew the statue was stolen from Cambodia and conspired to “fraudulently obtain export licenses” to send it from Thailand to England in 1972. He said the case “is based on suppositions - they have no facts.”

Prosecutors also say Sotheby's tried to mislead potential buyers and the Cambodian and United States governments by concocting a tale that the sculpture had been seen by a “scholar” in London in the 1960s, four years before its actual theft.

The date is significant because most American museums will no longer purchase antiquities without proof that they left their countries before 1970, the date of a United Nations covenant aimed at protecting cultural heritage items from looters and disreputable buyers.

The evidence collected by the government includes an e-mail from a Sotheby's official to the Khmer scholar, Emma C. Bunker, that in part reads, “If I can push the provenance back to 1970, then U.S. museums can participate in the auction without any hindrance.”

Sotheby's said, “This e-mail illustrates the appropriate due diligence” that the house undertook “to learn the provenance of the statue prior to 1975.” The auction house says it gave the government a document that shows that Ms. Bunker told it that the sighting was in the 1960s.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Sotheby's Accused Of Deceit in Sale Of Khmer Statue.

New York Philharmonic Establishes Partnership With Shanghai

Philharmonic Establishes Partnership With Shanghai

China long ago emerged as a kind of promised land for classical music, and two of America's great orchestras are wading in with big projects and very different approaches. You could call one the Philadelphia flier and the other the Big Apple plod.

Long Yu is music director of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.

The Philharmonic oboist Liang Wang in China in 2008.

The New York Philharmonic is planning to publicize on Wednesday a four-year partnership with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. It will include a 10- to 14-day residency in China and a stake in an orchestra training program. The Philharmonic's involvement in training will begin in the fall of 2014, after the details are worked out, and its residency is scheduled to begin the following summer.

Then there is the Philly way. The Philadelphia Orchestra beat the Philharmonic to the punch, descending on Beijing and provincial cities last spring with a menu of master classes, lessons, concerts, and visits to parks, schools and hospitals. The tour was part of a partnership with the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

But Philadelphia's venture was more improvised. It came together just eight months after being announced. A spokeswoman, Katherine E. Blodgett, called the visit a pilot project to test its plans. The Philadelphia Orchestra intends to return next spring and hopes that the residency will establish the foundation for a long-term relationship, she said.

Ms. Blodgett noted that the Philadelphia Orchestra was the first American orchestra to visit the People's Republic of China, in 1973, and returned in 2008 and 2010. The New York Philharmonic visited in 2008, while on its way to North Korea.

Explosion may not be too hyperbolic a word for the increase in concert halls, orchestras, instrument making and classical music study in China during the past decade. Audiences are growing in tandem. Many concert presenters are hungry for top international ensembles to fill the gleaming new auditoriums.

At the same time, with government determination to build culture as a form of national power, and willingness to spend on the effort, Chinese officials are happy to import Western cultural expertise. The home of the Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, announced nearly 17 months ago, for example, that it would become a paid consultant to developers of an arts complex in Tianjin, a city about 45 minutes by bullet train from Beijing.

The New York Philharmonic deal is unrelated to the Lincoln Center venture and stems partly from the energies of the conductor Long Yu, a central figure in the Chinese classical music scene. Mr. Yu, a Shanghai native, is music director of the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the China Philharmonic and of the Beijing Music Festival.

More crucial, he is music director of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, which paid the Philharmonic to share a concert with it in Central Park in July 2010. In addition to conducting the Shanghai orchestra in that concert, he led the Philharmonic in a Chinese New Year concert this year and will do the same on Feb. 12.

The Philharmonic first announced its partnership at a signing ceremony in Shanghai a full 16 months ago. The event received little attention in the Western press except for an account on WQXR's blog. The program was expected to begin in 2013 with the opening of a concert hall in Shanghai, WQXR reported. But the opening was delayed, and the project with it.

In recent interviews officials disclosed a few more details. A group of four or five Philharmonic members will spend a week, three times a year, working with students of a new orchestral academy in Shanghai. Teaching will also take place during the summer residency, which will include a number of Philharmonic orchestral and chamber performances. Some students may be brought to New York for extra training and to experience the “New York musical environment,” said the Philharmonic's executive director, Matthew VanBesien.

Students will be drawn from Asian countries, mainly China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, said Anastasia Boudanoque, an executive producer at CAMI Music, which is advising the Shanghai Symphony and represents Mr. Yu.

Mr. Yu said the academy would involve the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and would be modeled on the Berlin Philharmonic's training school, which is a feeder to the parent orchestra and provides continuity of musical traditions and substitute musicians. Scholarships for 30 to 50 musicians will be provided for the two-year program, he said. Philharmonic musicians will have a say in auditions.

“It's just a simple idea, to see how much we can help young musicians before stepping into professional work,” he said. One goal is also to counter the soloist mentality that predominates among many young Chinese musicians, he added.

The academy, Mr. Yu said, is just one of many pieces that China needs to complete its classical music solar system. Musicians abound, orchestras and halls are increasing, but the scene is weak in other elements, like professional managers, widely accessible ticketing systems, publicity machines and easy access to sheet music. Yes, there are audiences, he said, “but if we don't have a great system, they will stay at home.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Philharmonic Establishes Partnership With Shanghai.

Avoiding Photo Ops With Cambodia\'s Strongman

HONG KONG - President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit Southeast Asia this week, promoting American commercial interests in Singapore, reinforcing the U.S. military alliance with Thailand and putting the presidential imprimatur on democratic reforms in Myanmar.

But their stop in Cambodia for a regional summit meeting next week will be diplomatically stickier: Photo opportunities with Hun Sen, the authoritarian prime minister of Cambodia, will be hard to avoid.

A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Phnom Penh said that Mr. Obama and Hun Sen would hold one-on-one talks during the summit meeting, according to the Cambodia Daily. The public visibility of those talks, however, remains to be seen.

Human Rights Watch, in a report published Tuesday, calls for Mr. Obama to make human rights a forceful centerpiece of his visit to Cambodia, the first ever by a sitting American president. The report says Hun Sen's “violent and authoritarian rule over more than two decades has resulted in countless killings and other serious abuses that have gone unpunished.”

The full report, “ ‘Tell Them That I Want to Kill Them': Two Decades of Impunity in Hun Sen's Cambodia,” recounts numerous extrajudicial killings of labor leaders, journalists and opposition leaders since 1992.

“The list of political killings over the past 20 years is bone-chilling,” said Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “While there is a public uproar after each case, officials do nothing and there are no consequences for the perpetrators or the government that protects them.”

The full H.R.W. report can be downloaded here. And the group's summary of the report is here.

As my colleague Peter Baker reported this week, Mrs. Clinton's trip through the Asia-Pacific region and Mr. Obama's stops in Southeast Asia are part of “a larger geopolitical chess game by the Obama administration, whi ch has sought to counter rising Chinese assertiveness by engaging its neighbors.”

A leading Cambodian political analyst, Lao Moung Hay, told The Cambodia Daily that Mr. Obama and Hun Sen would probably focus on security issues in the South China Sea - subtext: China - as well as the reform process in Burma. He said Mr. Obama was not likely to press Hun Sen on Cambodia's appalling record on human rights, the wide suppression of political dissent or the forced exile of Sam Rainsy, Cambodia's principal opposition leader.

“This is a new era for Hun Sen,” Lao Moung Hay told Thomas Fuller of the IHT, speaking about the political topography of Cambodia following the death last month of the former king Norodom Sihanouk. “There is no force to restrain him anymore - there are risks for the country.”

In a recent commentary in The Times, Mr. Rainsy called on Mr. Obama to boycott the meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

But the oppositi on lawmaker Mu Sochua told The Phnom Penh Post, “I'm sure that Obama is quite committed and his language will be very strong” about the government's alleged abuses.

Mu Sochua said she had pressed for a letter sent recently by five U.S. senators and seven members of Congress to Mr. Obama, urging him to challenge Hun Sen on an array of human rights issues. The Post called the letter “a damning indictment” of Hun Sen's regime but also said the message was “thinly sourced.”

Carlyle Thayer, a noted security analyst in the region, told The Post about the lawmakers' letter:

Be careful what you ask for, because Hun Sen can be tough if he wants to be, and China doesn't raise those issues, and Cambodia and Hun Sen, they've pointed that out repeated times.

Is this a political stunt or do you have a strategy to follow up? Are we going to vote for resolutions in the Senate, are we going to restrict money to the embassy or aid to Cambodia t o punish them, to pressure them on human rights? What do you do next?

Land grabs, forced evictions and 99-year leases of state lands to Cambodian, Chinese and Vietnamese firms have been well-documented by international aid agencies, human rights organizations and Cambodian and Western journalists.

Rendezvous has written about the murder in April of Chut Wutty, a pioneering environmental activist; the government's suppression of a land dispute that led to the arrest and conviction (on the astonishing charge of secession) of a leading radio journalist, Mam Sonando; and the murder of Hang Serei Oudom, a newspaper reporter investigating illegal logging who was found dead in the trunk of his car at a cashew plantation.

The veteran Times reporter Seth Mydans and the Magnum photographer John Vink have both reported deeply and extensively about forced evictions, especially in Phnom Penh, a campaign against poor landholders so odious that it caused the World Bank to suspend loans to Cambodia. And Amnesty International last year published a harrowing account of five Cambodian women forced off their land.

“Instead of prosecuting officials responsible for killings and other serious abuses, Prime Minister Hun Sen has promoted and rewarded them,” said the new Human Rights Watch report. “The message to Cambodians is that even well-known killers are above the law if they have protection from the country's political and military leaders. Donor governments, instead of pressing for accountability, have adopted a business-as-usual approach.”

Hun Sen, 60, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who changed allegiances, has run Cambodia for the better part of three decades, becoming one of the world's longest-serving autocrats and a member of the “10,000 Club.”

Mr. Adams, a former United Nations lawyer, said Hun Sen is one of “a group of strongmen who through politically motivated violence, control of the security forces, massive corruption and the tacit support of foreign powers have been able to remain in power for 10,000 days.”

Mr. Adams, in an op-ed piece in May, quoted Hun Sen's response to the possibility of an Arab Spring-style rebellion in Cambodia: “I not only weaken the opposition, I'm going to make them dead … and if anyone is strong enough to try to hold a demonstration, I will beat all those dogs and put them in a cage.”

What would you say is Mr. Obama's best diplomatic posture in Cambodia? Should he press Hun Sen hard on human rights abuses and risk pushing Cambodia closer to China? Or should he downplay these issues in an attempt to enlist Cambodia among the countries in the region that might oppose a rising and more aggressive China?

After Election Success, What\'s Next for U.S. Women?

NEW YORK â€" It was a battle won, not the war.

Women's history-making victory last week in the U.S. elections stirred up the dust that had seemed to have settled over the movement to get more women elected to office. The vote brought an injection of new blood and energy, new strategies, new questions and a whole lot of ambition.

For moderate and sensible conservative Republicans, the disproportionate victories of Democratic women and their lopsided support of President Obama raise painful questions: How long can the party be captive to its far-right wing whose ‘‘war on women'' and extreme anti-abortion views cost the party at least a seat or two in the U.S. Senate and probably the presidency?

But triumphant Democratic women know, having come off years of stagnant political growth and reversals at the ballot box, that attention must be paid to the nuts and bolts. Advancement on all fronts - within the party power structure, and in state legislatures, s tate houses and Congress - demand vigilance and sweat and tons of money and muscle.

‘‘We have been sleep-walking since 1992,'' said Siobhan ‘‘Sam'' Bennett, the head of Women's Campaign Fund, last week in an interview for my latest Female Factor column. ‘‘We thought this problem would somehow magically solve itself after 1992 ‘year of the woman.' Nothing could be further from the truth.''

Ms. Bennett wants the major political parties to enact mandates to guarantee women no less than 30 percent of their candidacies.

But gender quotas have few champions in quota-phobic America, even among feminists. There's little or no chance that such a gambit would receive viable support in Washington. Even in Western Europe, where gender quotas have wide backing, a proposal to require companies to set aside 40 percent of their boards for women has run into tough opposition from across the European Union.

If quotas and like measures find only small supp ort in the United States, what can women and advocates do to double down on political empowerment?

Michelle Bachelet, who was the first female president of Chile and is now head of the U.N. Women agency, told me a few months ago that nothing changed the status of women in her country as profoundly as having a female head of state. That did more to advance Chilean women than all the laws put together, she recalled.

Ask just about any woman and she will likely tell you, ‘‘Elect a woman president!''

Ask any Democrat, and she will cry out: ‘‘Hillary in 2016!''

But getting there will take a little bit of work, different approaches and voices, with or without Hillary Clinton.

For now, think about this: What should women do with their new power in the United States? What should be their policy and legislation priorities? What can they learn from women who have a greater say in other countries' politics and policy? Does anyone think that the 30 percent solution has a chance?

Let us know.