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529662_0 | Call it plankton diplomacy: Iranian marine biologists have been working alongside American, Arab and other international scientists on this oceanographic vessel as she plies the placid waters of the Persian Gulf documenting environmental conditions in the aftermath of the war against Iraq. As scientists from the Iranian Environment Ministry troll with fine-meshed nets for organisms living in waters polluted last year by the largest oil spill in history, they are producing something more than ecological data for the Mount Mitchell's ambitious research program. In a collegial spirit, they are furthering relations between the Islamic fundamentalist Government in Teheran and Iran's uneasy neighbors and distant enemy, the United States. "We are people, not politicians," said Dr. Hamzeh Valavi, one of the Iranian scientists, as he paused in his sampling work under a setting moon. "People can understand each other." Around him in a jumble lay the detritus of a day's collecting by the two dozen scientists on board the 231-foot Mount Mitchell, a research ship operated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. The ship is nearing the end of a 100-day cruise in the gulf; by the end of the cruise about 150 scientists from 18 countries will have spent time on board. Mission Is Purely Scientific As the fifth of the cruise's six legs progressed, the fantail deck came to resemble a bazaar where one could find corals, crustaceans, algae and fish on display. Each evening, as the Iranians resumed their plankton dipping, their fellow scientists would mill around examining each other's wares and swapping jargon. Officials from the oceanographic agency, which is operating the ship under the sponsorship of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the gulf area's Regional Organization for the Protection of the Marine Environment, are careful to note that its mission is purely scientific. And there are scientific reasons that the vessel could not avoid Iranian waters, where few American vessels are welcome. The ship is equipped to undertake a comprehensive mapping of the gulf's currents and other physical characteristics, but the information, which would be useful in combating any oil spill, would be meaningless if Iran's half of the gulf was not visited. The vast majority of the spill last year was caused when the occupying forces of President Saddam Hussein opened Kuwait's oil spigots in an act of sabotage in January during the successful American-led campaign to drive the Iraqis from the | Persian Gulf Journal; Scientists in the Same Boat, Toiling in War's Wake |
529726_0 | IT is Madison Avenue's own version of recycling: footage from long-ago movies and television programs is being reused in contemporary commercials. Bits and pieces of stock footage from newsreels, documentaries, industrial and training films, cartoons, travelogues and the like -- particularly segments originally shot in black and white -- are turning up in spots for consumer goods and services. "It has a newsiness, a credibility to it, that you don't get when you shoot it yourself," said Phillip Lanier, a vice president and associate creative director at W. B. Doner & Company in Baltimore, which uses stock footage in a new series of television commercials for the Arby's fast-food chain. "When you shoot it yourself," he added, "it looks like a commercial." The Arby's spots, part of a campaign carrying the theme "Different is good," use black-and-white footage to correspond to the "boring burgers" served by other fast-food outlets. As a chorus intones, "Same, same, same," viewers see shots of women performing rote tasks on an assembly line and commuters hurrying through a train station. The chorus then sings, "Different, different, different," as lush color shots of Arby's fare appear. "You can almost build a concept around a piece of stock footage," said Tom Shortlidge, a senior vice president and executive creative director at Young & Rubicam Chicago, which did just that to create a humorous commercial for WXRT-FM, a Chicago rock radio station. The spot centered on stock footage from a television nature film produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which showed a small, odd-looking reptile called a dune lizard painstakingly trudging across a desert. "The dune lizard lifts his feet so they don't burn," an announcer says. "This is his life. What's the point? Why bother? Why not move someplace cooler?" A primary motive for recycling footage is cost; it can be far cheaper than shooting new film. "It's a local radio station, and we had very little money to spend," Mr. Shortlidge said, "so we went looking for stock footage." Besides, he asked, "have you ever been casting for a lizard?" Such frugality often means money in the bank for Matthew Imi, North American sales executive for the B.B.C. Library Sales department of B.B.C. Enterprises Ltd. in Middlesex, England. On a recent visit to New York, part of a tour of agencies in the Northeast, Mr. Imi expressed delight at how his business "has really taken off." | Madison Avenue 'Recycles': Old Footage in New Spots |
527909_6 | that its members are competing with 933,000 unemployed managers and professionals, whose jobless rate has increased by 60 percent in two years, said Samuel M. Ehrenhalt, regional director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in New York. "There have been no employment declines in some states in the West, Southwest and South," he said. "But I would say college graduates are facing the toughest job market in a half-century in the New York region. The whole Northeast, Michigan and California are severely affected." Economists say they expect the job market to improve slowly. Sara L. Johnson, the managing economist for the DRI/McGraw-Hill, an economic consulting and forecasting concern in Boston, said the strongest employment growth over the next 12 months will be in the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest, dominated by Texas. "The Northeast will be lagging," she said, "but other parts of the country should see employment gains of 2 percent over the next 12 months." To some students, the tough market means living at home after college. "I'm going to live at home for at least another two or three years," said Lisa A. Blessing, an economics major at Rutgers University who expects a long search for a job with a modest salary. For other graduates, the solution is to leave the country. Maria L. Recchia, a zoology major at Connecticut College in New London, wants work at La Stazione Zoologica, a marine biology laboratory in Naples, Italy. She is waiting to hear if the Government-subsidized laboratory has a research position for her. "I have no idea about the salary," she said. "I just hope it's enough to live on." The Peace Corps reports receiving 800 telephone inquiries a day on average, up from 250 a day prior to January. But even the Peace Corps does not have many openings for graduates without technical training. "We can place graduates with degrees in agriculture or forestry within three months, but it takes up to one or two years to place a liberal arts graduate," said Elaine L. Chao, director of the Peace Corps. Some volunteers sound more pragmatic than idealistic. Sarah Welling hoff, a major in international relations at the University of Nevada in Reno, is heading off to teach English in the African country of Chad. "If there were more jobs available or teaching assistantships for grad school," she said, "I might not have signed up." | GRADUATES FACING WORST PROSPECTS IN LAST 2 DECADES |
527881_1 | unread. What's more, it was a poorly written letter -- not a graceful phrase in it, too much stiffness in the prose joints, and twice as long as it needed to be. Such gassiness is characteristic of writing done on computers. Computers make the physical toil of writing so negligible that the writer can write on forever, and often does, as I am currently doing at this very particular and precious point in time, a.k.a. now. Many books worth only 290 pages routinely wheeze on nowadays to 800, 900, 999. My second-rate letter with the junk-mail look is a typical child of progress. With a goose quill, Thomas Jefferson could have written a letter at a fraction of the cost. It would have looked like the work of a human being, and it would have been a better letter than mine. It would have been better not only because Jefferson had the more interesting mind, but also because writing with goose feathers is such messy work that a writer has to put his mind in order before starting. With a computer, he merely flips a switch, then lets his brain mosey around in the fog on the chance it may bump into an idea. My second-rate letter produced at great expense reminds me of those silly men who drive around with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding a telephone. Don't they realize the horror of living in a world where there is no haven anywhere, even in the sweet, sensuous privacy of your automobile, from the accursed telephone? Apparently not. The high cost of car telephones suggests that people who have them will pay big money to avoid being alone with themselves. Often they are so desperate to experience communication that they call talk-radio shows, phoning in from way out on the highway to abuse Congressmen or explain what's wrong with the hometown baseball team. The plight of the modern American is comic, not tragic as the overwrought quality of the daily news report would have us believe. The guy using $3,000 worth of machinery to write a pal a letter that will look like a piece of junk mail is part of the national comedy. So is the man driving down the highway, phone in hand, telling Radio World what's on his mind. Both these people have the same problem. Technological genius has provided them | Observer; Ruled By Tools |
528092_0 | WHEN personal computers first appeared in offices a decade ago, seers forecast a future in which paper documents would be obsolete, replaced by flurries of electrons and phosphors. Instead, according to one study, American businesses generated a record 775 billion pages of paper last year. So much for the paperless office. Computers appear to have fueled the rise in paper use, not retarded it. Last week's column discussed new printer technologies that eliminate disposable parts, which is good for the environment. The other side is that printers make it virtually painless to crank out reams of paper documents. For PC users who wish to be more environmentally sensitive, the next steps are to reduce the flow of paper and to use recycled paper whenever possible. Long-distance E-mail can replace paper mail. Electronic mail and messaging over computer networks may eventually cut down on the amount of paper used in offices. (Face-to-face communications, a seemingly lost art in business, is another alternative. Indeed, at least one computer company, the CompuAdd Corporation of Austin, Tex., has forbidden its managers and executives to use paper memos.) "Most people have not accepted the fact that you can communicate without paper," said Don Rittner, an environmental activist and educator in Schenectady, N.Y. "Paper is a security blanket." Mr. Rittner is the author of a new book called "Ecolinking: Everyone's Guide to Online Environmental Information," $18.95 in paperback, from Peachpit Press, Berkeley, Calif., (800) 283-9444. The book is printed on paper, of course, but Mr. Rittner said in an interview that he believed that all books would be distributed electronically within the next few decades. Mr. Rittner describes "ecolinking" as "the use of computer technology by scientists, environmentalists and concerned citizens around the globe to share ideas and research on environmental issues." The book is a how-to guide for computer beginners and an extensive directory of sources of information about the environment. "There are 40 million people on line today," Mr. Rittner said. "If we could link up the worldwide environmental community, what a tremendous reservoir of talent, and what a potentially powerful lobby that would be." There are many ways a single PC user can make a difference. For example, the new "environmentally sensitive" printers discussed in this space last week virtually eliminate disposable parts. That is only part of the equation, though. Using recycled paper, and using the back side of paper that has | Learning to Save Trees |
528043_5 | magnetite crystals with a strong magnetic field. Afterward, the bees flew in the opposite directions to those they had been trained to fly. But it was a health controversy that drove his research toward exploration of the human brain. Epidemiological studies over the last decade have suggested a possible but inconclusive link between diseases like brain cancer and childhood leukemia and electromagnetic fields from power lines and certain household appliances. Physicists rejected the idea that weak electromagnetic fields might induce any biological effect, saying the fields would slip and slide around cells like syrup poured on a balloon. Studies of Human Brains Dr. Kirschvink supposed this might not be the case if by any chance humans possessed substances capable of responding to magnetic fields. He obtained fresh brain tissue from seven corpses and dissected clumps of cells using Teflon-coated instruments. Some samples were frozen and put in the magnetometer, which found unmistakable evidence of a ferromagnetic mineral -- compounds that interact strongly with magnetic fields. None of the body's iron, which is bound up in biological molecules, is ferromagnetic, Dr. Kirschvink said. Other samples were dissolved and put into special test tubes fitted with magnets. After a week, magnetite crystals stuck to the glass. Magnetite, in minuscule amounts, was found all over the brain, said Dr. Kirschvink and his co-authors, his wife, Atsuko Kobayashi-Kirschvink, and Dr. Barbara J. Woodford of the University of Southern California. Most regions of the brain had five million magnetite crystals per gram of tissue. The tough membrane that covers the brain had 100 million crystals per gram. Each human brain on average contains seven billion particles of magnetite, weighing a total of one-millionth of an ounce. Half of the brain tissue samples came from patients with Alzheimer's disease and half did not; Dr. Kirschvink believes these circumstances had no effect on his findings. Magnetite interacts over a million times more strongly with external magnetic fields than any other biological material, Dr. Kirschvink said, including the iron in red blood cells. If only one cell in a million contains magnetite, he said, magnetic fields could exert an effect on the tissue. For instance, if the magnetite were coupled to channels that let substances pass through cell membranes and the crystals began to oscillate during exposure to an external magnetic field, Dr. Kirschvink said, one could imagine all sorts of biological effects, including the promotion of cancer. | Magnetic Crystals, Guides for Animals, Found in Humans |
526234_1 | of only about 33 million, has been consistently exporting more of its people in percentage terms than any other area of the world. While populous countries scattered widely around the globe, from Mexico to Thailand, often lead in one United States immigration category or another, a handful of Caribbean nations sit at or near the top of virtually every ranking. "In some of these smaller countries, if you measure emigration as a portion of their total population, the numbers you come up with are just incredible," said David Simcox, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based group. "Tiny states like St. Kitts and Nevis, Grenada and Belize are sending 1 percent to 2 percent of their citizens to the United States every year, meaning they are basically exporting all of their population growth to us." Between 1981 and 1990, the four Caribbean nations that supply the largest number of immigrants together accounted for nearly 12 percent all legal immigrant admissions to the United States, according to Immigration and Naturalization Service data. The Dominican Republic sent 251,803 people to the United States, Jamaica 213,805, Haiti 140,163, and Guyana, a South American country that considers itself Caribbean in its economic and social structure, 95,374. In 1990, 111,000 citizens of those countries already living in the United States applied to become legal residents. For Mexico, by far the largest supplier of illegal immigrants, that number stood at about 2,200,000. Mexico is not included among Caribbean nations, although it has some Caribbean coastline. Debates rage over how much immigration the United States can support and which regions of the world should be given preference. The effect of the growing Caribbean presence, meanwhile, can be seen in most large American cities, especially on the East Coast, where people from the region have often created new communities or revitalized old ones in places like New York, Boston, Miami and Baltimore. Islands Are a First Stop Much attention has been focused on the surge of Haitians fleeing the violence in their country and the effects of an economic embargo imposed after a military coup there last September. But experts say the thousands who line up patiently each day at consulates around this region and the hundreds more who attempt clandestine trips each week constitute a far more formidable wave. In the tiny English-speaking countries of the Leeward Islands, with their depressed banana economies, those | Caribbean Exodus: U.S. Is Constant Magnet |
526376_1 | big broadcasting corporations and in the workshops of speciality electronics companies are prompting a growing number of station owners to look at digital radio as a competitive opportunity. The advances come as the radio industry remains in one of its worst slumps, and as satellite services and cable television networks threaten an invasion of high-quality audio programming. "Digital audio broadcasting will come; it's just too good to be ignored by the public," said Wayne Vriesman, vice president of radio at the Tribune Company, which owns FM and AM stations, including WGN in Chicago, the nation's largest AM station in terms of revenue. More Cause to Feud The biggest obstacle to digital broadcasting may be feuding between broadcasters. AM stations, which have lost ground for decades because of their technical inferiority to FM, have vowed to block any digital system that would work only for FM. But FM broadcasters, worried about losing their technical edge, are hostile to the idea of greater competition from AM. Over the long run, the inherent efficiencies of digital transmission could make it possible to broadcast far more programming -- or provide other services, like mobile data communications -- within the existing FM radio band. As with digital compact disks, digital audio broadcasting entails coding sound into a stream of ones and zeroes that can be read by a computer chip and reassembled into the original sound. The technique is markedly different from traditional analog broadcasting, in which electronic signals are transmitted in radio waves that correspond to sound waves. The computer coding of digital audio allows for a much more precise electronic depiction of the sound wave. Transmissions using digital technology not only have less unwanted noise, but also can capture subtleties, like the razz of a trumpet or the lingering hiss of a cymbal, that are lost in traditional radio broadcasting. Until recently, many experts assumed that the only way to provide digital broadcasting was to allocate a new band of frequencies for a new class of service. But the Bush Administration decided last year that it could consider allocating such bandwidth only in a high-frequency portion of the spectrum, which is currently useful for satellites but is not feasible for land-based broadcasting. That decision basically forced broadcasters to concentrate on squeezing more efficiency from frequencies. Engineers are thus concentrating on simultaneously transmitting both a digital and an analog signal in the existing FM | Digital Radio: Static Is Only Between Owners |
526220_0 | Bill Koch likes to call himself a contrarian, and his neighbors here might agree. Despite their protestations over the bronze sculpture of a bulbous, nude woman perched in a reclining position on Koch's bayside front lawn, the Kansas-born billionaire has refused to remove it. In fact, Koch has considered turning the sculpture, which he calls Roseanne, around so that her bare backside faces the harbor. It would be his way of thumbing his nose at a community that has been less than hospitable since his America yachting team's arrival here more than a year ago. Koch has received hate letters, and he says his crew has been refused service at the San Diego Yacht Club. But now that America has squashed Dennis Conner's efforts to defend the America's Cup, it is Koch who is left to carry the United States banner. As the cup defender, America will be sailing on behalf of the San Diego Yacht Club when the match races start Saturday. Should the Italians win, they will take the trophy and the event to Europe. "Don't they understand that I'm the only one who can keep the cup in San Diego?" Koch mused about local attitudes during a recent interview. He is a tall, thin man with patrician looks that befit the yachty, all-white America uniform that he wears. World-Class Art Collection Outside the massive living room window, rows of yachts bob at their dockside berths. On the patio of the California-style mansion, which Koch rents for $30,000 a month, uniformed guards patrol. They are protecting Koch's art, a world-class collection that reflects the eclectic taste of its owner. The Monet demands first glance in the foyer. But then comes the Modigliani on the far wall, the Picasso, and the Renoir. In a corner saved for art of the American West, there are three Charlie Russell paintings, two Remingtons, and American Indian artifacts. Yachting is a relatively new diversion for Koch, a world that he has adopted with fervor in the last eight years. His interest in boats competes with his passion for art (he has two collections); his knowledge of wine (he owns 25,000 bottles); and his appreciation for music (he admits to liking "old-fashioned" cowboy tunes). He is also an accomplished horseback rider, and a Class 5 kayaker. He lives a dichotomous life, driven by scientific acumen and a search for an emotional base. "Emotions have | Accustomed to Not-So-Smooth Sailing |
526385_0 | "It a provocative title, isn't it?," BERNARD M. W. KNOX," said yesterday. And there was no question that the name he gave the speech he will deliver Thursday in Washington is likely to be controversial: "Oldest Dead White European Males." Asked yesterday how he chose this title for the National Endowment for the Humanities' 21st annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, Dr. Knox explained, "I only added the word 'oldest' to 'dead white males,' a phrase that has been bandied about quite a bit." In fact the phrase has come to symbolize the long-running debate about the Eurocentric emphasis in American university education. Dr. Knox, the director emeritus of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, which is administered by Harvard, and a former professor of Greek at Yale, is being honored for his scholarly research and writing. Before an audience of 1,000 academicians and Government figures he will discuss both the similarities and differences between ancient Greek and contemporary American civilizations. "Previous ages idolized the ancient Greeks," he said. "They invented democracy, philosophy, theater." But, he pointed out, they also embraced slavery and subjugation of women. Still, he left no question where he stands on the debate that arose long after he left his last university post, in 1960. "We are a Western civilization based on the ideas of the Greco-Roman civilization and the ideals of the Hebrew religion," he said. "The idea that this should be repudiated is pernicious. That does not mean I exclude other authors. Other literatures should be studied. African, Asian, South American -- they should be read. But we should not abandon the classic authors who have been the mainstay of Western tradition." | CHRONICLE |
531824_0 | Car buyers used to be easily divided into two groups: those who took out loans and those who paid cash to avoid debt. But new leasing programs are blurring this neat division and creating a numbing array of choices. The Ford Motor Credit Company added another wrinkle yesterday with an option that allows a customer to pay up front, in cash, all the monthly payments for a car lease. Ford said many customers in test markets in Florida and Chicago liked the idea of avoiding monthly payments and reducing the financing charges built into lease payments. "Some people think this may be the best use of their money," said Carl Fischer, a Ford Credit marketing manager. Auto leasing allows consumers to pay for only that portion of a vehicle's value that will be used during the period of the contract, thereby lowering payments. Under such agreements, the consumer usually does not build up any equity in the vehicle. While leasing has been around for years, the Chrysler Financial Corporation, the financing arm of the Chrysler Corporation, was among the first to give customers the chance to combine the concepts of auto ownership and leasing. Last fall, the company introduced the Gold Key Plus program that is essentially a standard lease that also gives drivers the vehicle's title while they use the car. "Ownership is what many potential leasing customers want," said Jeremiah E. Farrell, a Chrysler executive. Sound confusing? You're not alone. Frank Ward, president of Mor-Pace, a market research firm near Detroit, said many people have trouble grasping the basic concept of leasing -- let alone the finer points. About a fifth of all vehicles are delivered to retail customers using leases. "Some are hard pressed to understand why they would even want to lease," Mr. Ward said. | Company News: Leasing Without Debt; Know How to Buy a Car? Ford Has Another Idea |
531791_0 | A new Government policy for streamlining regulation of food produced through genetic engineering should result in an abundance of new, varied and more wholesome products, while revitalizing the biotechnology industry, Federal officials said today. Industry leaders said that the first of these new foods, probably tomatoes that stay flavorful longer than normal ones, should reach consumers next year, and that dozens of other plant products would follow quickly. Vice President Dan Quayle, along with officials of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration, today announced details of a policy that would regulate genetically engineered foods in much the same way as foods developed through more conventional techniques. Mr. Quayle, who told a briefing of industry executives that the policy was part of the Bush Administration's "regulatory relief" program, said the United States was the world leader in biotechnology "and we want to keep it that way." But he said, "We will not compromise safety one bit." Tasty, Varied, Wholesome The Health and Human Services Secretary, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, said the new policy for regulating foods produced through genetic manipulation "will insure the safety of these foods while facilitating their availability as quickly as possible." The new technology promises consumers "foods that are tastier, more varied, more wholesome" that can be produced more efficiently with less cost and spoilage, he said. Dr. David A. Kessler, the Commissioner of Food and Drugs, said agricultural scientists have used methods of crossbreeding and genetic manipulation for centuries to produce new foods, like hydrid corn or tangelos. Genetic engineering techniques, he said, are a more precise way of doing the same thing. Properly monitored, he said, the new foods pose no special risk, and most should not require advance Government approval before being sold. "New products come to our kitchens and tables every day," Dr. Kessler said. "I see no reason right now to do anything special because of these foods" altered by genetic engineering. Some Are Not Convinced But some consumer groups and others skeptical of genetic engineering said the new foods were different enough to require special testing and approval before marketing, and consumer labels to identify them once they are on store shelves. Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, which wants tighter regulations, said the safety of these foods would be an important consumer issue of the 1990's. Promising legal action, Mr. | Cornucopia of New Foods Is Seen As Policy on Engineering Is Eased |
531901_1 | and woodlands of the Donana wildlife refuge in southern Spain, flamingos and eagles breed and compete for food. But around Donana, developers want to build hotels and marinas, and farmers seek more water for irrigation. Environmentalists fear such pressures threaten the park's survival. A3 BELGRADE ADDRESSES DEMANDS In an effort to head off Security Council sanctions, the Serbian-led Yugoslav Government offered to work with the United Nations to end the fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to speed relief supplies. It also asked the Council to send a delegation to the region. A6 News analysis: Why Washington is bearing down on Belgrade. A6 TURK SPEAKS ON CAUCUSES STRIFE Prime Minister Demirel of Turkey, ending a Moscow visit, said his nation and Russia were pledged to a peaceful solution in the widening conflict involving Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russia is allied with Armenia, and Turkey has strong ethnic links with Azerbaijan. A8 Russia set the stage for a trial of the Communist Party on July 7. A6 NUCLEAR BUSINESS AS USUAL The White House spokesman said there were no immediate plans to place new limits on American nuclear-weapons testing. A6 Weimar Journal: A trove of stolen art in Nazi-era bunkers? A4 National A12-19 JUSTICES RULE ON MAIL ORDERS The Supreme Court left to Congress the task of deciding whether states may tax sales made by national mail-order companies. The course taken by the Justices prolongs a debate whose stakes, not only for the states but also for the direct marketing industry, amount to billions of dollars. A1 The Justices broadened enforcement of a Federal extortion law. A17 REPUBLICANS CLASH ON ABORTION A daylong Republican platform hearing on social issues and "family values" turned into a bitter dispute over whether abortion should remain legal. A1 The Bush camp chose two executives to run its ad program. A18 On the Trail: The Bush campaign's "compliance fund" prospers. A18 Little Rock remains the capital of the Clinton campaign. A19 The Senate races in California have yielded powerful TV ads. A18 In Cleveland, another promising House career is imperiled. A19 COASTLINE BATTLEGROUND A Senate amendment is pitting environmentalists against property owners in a furious dispute over some of the nation's most valuable real estate: the beach. A1 RULES FOR A NEW KIND OF FOOD The Administration announced details of a regulatory policy treating genetically engineered food in much the same way as food developed through more | NEWS SUMMARY |
531810_0 | Greg Slade worked in construction before the recession blew his small carpentry company off the map. Now he's into deconstruction. Old refrigerators to be exact. He's seen them all: Clunky white Kelvinators with interiors of pure porcelain, geriatric General Electrics with round compressors on top that look like Navy Sonar, Philcos that saw action when TV dinners were a novelty and Tang was the drink of the astronauts. All once-gleaming symbols of the American century of affluence, they now glide by on steel rollers to be gutted for what Mr. Slade's company can reuse. What he cannot is shredded for scrap. Mr. Slade, Manny Sanchez, Terry Lee Mitchell and the 37 other people at Appliance Recycling Centers of America's Hartford plant -- the largest appliance disassembly line in the Northeast, company officials say -- work with the mundane kitchen artifacts of culture. Out With the Old . . . At 40 minutes per appliance on average, they breathe post-industrial life into refrigerators and freezers that may have hidden silently in people's basements and garages for decades. Coolants are siphoned off; glass is crushed; metal is shipped out for melting; toxic chemicals that cannot go into landfills are sent to Texas for incineration. The effort is conducted under contract with utility companies that are trying to reduce energy demand by taking old refrigerators out of the power grid. It is no mere grunt-and-crush chop-shop business. From easing an old clunker out of its dusty corner, to coaxing from the owner some guess about the appliance's age, employees here find that they touch lives, or at least bear witness to objects that once touched lives in commonplace ways. They have seen mass-produced refrigerators -- white goods in the parlance of the appliance industry -- arrive personalized with peace symbols, or papered over entirely with bumper stickers, or roofing shingles, or turned into art -- one was painted with a loving hand to resemble a giant beer can. And occasionally there are small mysteries. One ancient General Electric model had only a single clue as to its age. On a small cap near the compressor, they found a handwritten note saying the machine had been "purged by Bill from Hartford" on Feb. 29, 1936. Workers could only guess what was purged, perhaps air trapped in the system. At any rate, the refrigerator still worked. Remembering the Cool Times "We get all kinds of | Giving New Futures to Refrigerators With a Past |
531764_2 | the world, the Pantanal in western Brazil, has come under near-siege in the last decade. Spain, with its long coastline, has paved over more of its shores than any other Mediterranean nation of Europe. In its rush to grow and prosper, Spain has long brushed aside conservationists' protests. A 'Save Donana' Movement Yet now, environmentalists, politicians and citizens groups have engaged in an impassioned campaign and formed a "Save Donana" movement. They argue that at Donana, commercial interests must be sacrificed to nature because close to a million birds are estimated to use these lands as a home, a stopover or a seasonal site. Among the part-time inhabitants are 150 species of migrant birds, including the majority of the continent's geese. Permanent residents include 125 indigenous bird species, among them 30 protected species, and large mammals like deer, boar and the very rare lynx. The park, founded in 1965 and classified as a United Nations Biosphere Reserve, has drawn the attention of the European Commission in Brussels, which has filed a complaint against Spain for failing to protect it. "The outcome in Donana will be a vital test for European conservation," said Jaime Vozmediano, a lawyer and a member of the park board. "What is going on here is an example of what already happened on the rest of the Spanish coast." The public fight over Donana, accompanied by demonstrations and wide attention in the European press, has been embarrassing for the Spanish Government, which has been lobbying hard for Madrid to become the site for Europe's future Environment Agency. At issue is not the 125,000-acre park itself, which by law is protected against invaders, but the surrounding 130,000 acres that form a vital buffer zone. "Any more growth here will be the death sentence for Donana," said Miguel Delibes, director of the park's research station. He spoke of the fertile region west of the Guadalquivir River, a long-neglected hinterland of low rolling hills that has become more popular in the last two decades. A recent study said that hotels, villas and Government-sponsored farm projects already existing in this zone have pumped so much water that in the last 15 years the water table has dropped 6 to 30 feet, and several lagoons have dried up. The farms produce rice, strawberries and other crops that demand much water. But in the nearby towns of Almonte and Matalascanas the burst of | The Road To Rio: Setting an Agenda for the Earth; The Wetlands Home of Many Species Is Threatened by Spain's Great Thirst |
531755_0 | EVERYBODY agrees that incomes were less equal by the end of the 1980's than at the beginning. There is hardly a consensus, though, on why. The collapse of the two-parent family -- Dan Quayle's flavor of the month -- surely had something to do with harder times at the bottom end, as did Washington's squeeze on welfare and other direct assistance to the very poor. So, too, did the big cut in the top Federal income tax brackets: while high-end earners shouldered an increasing proportion of the total tax burden in the 1980's, flattened tax rates also allowed them to keep a larger proportion of total national income. But the fuel that really supercharged the engine of inequality was changes in pay rates. While average wages hardly budged during the decade, the gap in earnings between college and high school graduates widened by a stunning 16 percent for men and 12 percent for women. Like so many explanations in the politically charged debate over income inequality, this one raises yet another question. Why, after decades of narrowing, did wages shift so decisively in favor of the educated? Economists have come up with more or less convincing theories ranging from the decline of unions to the wretched state of public education. But until the publication of a study by John Bound and George Johnson of the University of Michigan in the latest issue of The American Economic Review, there had been no comprehensive measure of the relative importance of the leading candidates. And while the Bound-Johnson analysis turns on some daunting econometrics, their conclusions are easily summarized in plain English. One common-sense explanation for the widening wage gap is the decline of industries that for reasons of tradition, or unionization, or lack of competition, provided all those $12-an-hour jobs that vaulted blue-collar workers into the middle class. This effect is confirmed by number crunching. But the two Michigan economists found that the overall impact on the wage gap was modest: just one-fifth of the change for men and one-eighth for women from 1979 to 1988 seems to have been the consequence of socking it to unskilled labor. Falling demand for products from industries that paid good blue-collar wages might explain more. It might, but does not. The composition of demand probably did do some damage to Rust Belt icons, notably steel, autos and rubber. But the effect was offset by growth | Economic Scene; The Wage Gap: Sins of Omission |
529426_0 | STARTING out or starting over -- either way, finding a job these days can be difficult. For many recent college graduates and for experienced workers, obtaining employment in a changing marketplace is becoming daunting. Although most job seekers do not need an expert to confirm what they already know from personal experience, economists and labor-market analysts -- while not describing a hopeless situation -- report that not only are the jobs few and the competition keen but also that this situation is not likely to change dramatically in the near future. What recent graduates are discovering as they look for jobs is that their stiffest competition is coming not from their peers but from the ranks of displaced older professionals, many of whom have a proven track record to offer a new employer. "College grads today are interviewing against some very experienced and highly skilled workers," said Frank M. Surdey, a regional economist with the State Department of Labor. "For new graduates, with diplomas in hand, not even that piece of paper automatically opens doors anymore." Although there are fewer graduates entering the job market, primarily because of the baby bust of the 1960's and 1970's, they are looking for work at a time when unemployment in the county has hit historically high levels. Westchester's jobless rate in March was 6.2 percent, the highest figure for that month since 1977. And although census figures show that in 1990 there were only 11,940 21-year-olds in the county -- 10 percent fewer than in 1980 -- young adults are trying to enter the work force at a time when, in addition to high unemployment, the number of jobs has declined. Westchester lost 10,800 jobs between March 1991 and last March; at last count, there were only 372,600 jobs, the county's lowest March job count since 1984. All that adds up to the fact that it has become a buyer's market for recession-weary employers, who can demand highly developed job skills, sometimes in exchange for only a part-time position that offers few or no benefits and no long-term commitment. "It's an extremely difficult time," reported Noreen L. Preston, an economist with the County Office of Commerce and Economic Development. "The competition keeps jobs at a premium and holds wages down." Some Industries Still Flourish Nevertheless, even at a time when many corporations are cutting back their operations and there is only a glimmer | A Daunting Challenge for Graduates |
529436_3 | gesture apparently did a lot for Anglo-American yacht relations. A gentleman has been defined as a loser who turns loss to his own advantage, presumably by making his opponent feel uncomfortable. Skating gets a lot of play, beginning with the roughly five-foot-long skate, a trade sign carved out of wood and fitted with leather straps. Seemingly an engraving published by Harper's Weekly, Winslow Homer's picture of a woman skating includes a nicely detailed landscape with trees reflected in the ice. Nevertheless, Homer is eclipsed by the unknown artist who did, for the same or a similar publication, the scene of women on ice, all with scarves blowing like pennants and inflated crinolines -- except for the one who has taken a spill and lost her muff. The granite curling stone says all that needs to be said about that Scottish sport, although there are pictures of its exponents on lakes in Manhattan parks, as there are of children bobsledding. A French poster depicts a champion skater, an unnamed mustachioed American, posing under an archway of icicles. Then there is the magazine engraving of a woman getting fitted for skates, watched over solicitously by a boyfriend and surrounded by vignetted caricatures of skaters and nonskaters. Also on hand are swimming -- the illustration of belles in their underwear doing the crawl in a reedy pool -- and golfing, the colored lithograph of a player in 18th-century garb accompanied by a caddie loaded down with clubs. Cricket and baseball are both termed international, with the first defined by a Harper's-style illustration and the second by tinted reproductions and one rather dreadful painting of a George Luks-like urchin in knickerbockers who, his bat parked, takes a needle and thread to the tears in his stocking. Although a historical society show is always worth a visit, in this one the curators' reach has exceeded their grasp. There are sports in the catalogue -- lacrosse, the Canadian Indian invention, and polo, which the British acquired from Mogul India -- that are marginally represented or not at all; space is at a premium in these quarters, which started life as a Quaker meetinghouse. But if it is not one of the society's best efforts, this miscellany of images and tools -- note the 12-gauge shotgun -- has something for just about everyone. The show runs through July 26. More information is available by calling 723-1744. ART | What the Pursuit of Leisure Required in the 19th Century |
529316_0 | Music may have charms to soothe a savage breast, but as scores of scientists met here this week to dissect musical sound into power spectrums, reverberation equations, modal resonances and other technical arcana, some participants concluded that it is easier to appreciate music than to fathom its tortuous acoustic complexities. For others, however, the research reported at the weeklong meeting of the Acoustical Society of America represented progress toward building better concert halls, diagnosing hearing impediments in infants, understanding the behavior of ancient musical instruments and many other matters related in one way or another to music. A high point of the meeting was a combined orchestral concert and physics lecture in which about a thousand physicists, acousticians, audiologists, architects and computer experts were treated to an uneasy blend of art and science. A Puzzled Young Orchestra The setting was the city's Symphony Hall, where a somewhat puzzled but enthusiastic student orchestra from Weber State University in Ogden performed on a stage surmounted by a projection screen displaying graphs and equations related to the music. Dr. Jurgen Meyer, a physicist from Germany's National Institute of Standards, conducted a series of scraps from the overture to "Der Freischutz," interspersing the music with remarks about matters like the "frequency-dependence of acoustic radiation." To demonstrate the importance of the seating positions of orchestral players, he asked the first and second string sections to rise and change places. Few listeners in the audience of scientists seemed to notice much difference in the sound, but all were prepared to give the lecturer the benefit of the doubt with a round of applause. Dr. Thomas D. Rossing, a physicist from Northern Illinois University at DeKalb, described experiments he and his colleagues performed to understand the special sounds of musical instruments that included ancient Korean bells. In these experiments, Dr. Rossing used a technique in which a laser beam reflected from the surface of a vibrating surface of a musical instrument is combined with another laser beam to produce an interference pattern revealing the minute and rapid changes in the shape of the target object. The vibrations of a ringing bell, measured by laser and analyzed by computer, were presented visually by Dr. Rossing as a slow-motion moving picture. Deciphering Korean Bells Using this method, Dr. Rossing found that the special sound of ancient Korean temple bells is caused by their characteristic slow alternating pulses of soft | SCIENTISTS DISSECT SOUNDS OF MUSIC |
529102_0 | To the Editor: In February we were visiting Torrey Pines State Beach near La Jolla, Calif., when we were stranded by a form of medieval automobile torture. Since we were from the East and unfamiliar with this state's cruel punishment for an accidental turn onto the wrong side of the parking lot, we turned and the car's front tires were punctured by road spikes, immobilizing the car. We were left with no means of transportation. We had to pay for a taxi, for towing the car, for two new tires. Shame on the state, on the park and the powers that permit a punishment that no way matches the crime. So beware tourists, of short spikes in the road that immobilize, you and your car and rob your pocketbook. RUBIN AND RUTH SANDERS Paramus, N.J. John Arnold of the California Department of Parks and Recreation responds: Spike exit gates are prevalent in parking lots along the coast in southern California, as well as public and private parking lots and airport parking lots. Large signs are required to be posted in accordance with vehicle code regulations, which are standardized throughout the nation. Torrey Pines State Beach has two such gates with red and white signs stating: Do Not Enter/Severe Tire Damage. The signs are illuminated at night. | Ruined Tires |
529181_0 | Dear Sir: I enjoyed reading about the 1992 Cadillac Seville STS. However, I can't go on a trip from New Jersey to Florida without ample trunk space and a full-size spare tire. There is not one American carmaker who has a car that carries a full-size spare. I wouldn't even mind if I had to buy the spare tire and rim if Cadillac had the vision and the common sense to make room for me to install it. The strange design of the Seville has the space, but it hasn't been used judiciously. Despite your marvelous writing, I'm not buying. BERNARD SHELDON South Orange, N.J. While it is not quite true that no American car offers a full-size spare (Buick Roadmaster has one), the mini-spare definitely has taken over. On the other hand, tire technology has improved greatly and today's drivers experience few blowouts. Full-size spares also eat up space and carry a weight penalty, which translates into fewer miles per gallon. All the same, Cadillac's newly designed 1993 Brougham will have a full-size spare when it moves into the showrooms in September. | ABOUT CARS: A Quick Trip Through the Mailbag; Some Spare Thoughts |
528983_20 | Later, over lunch, when we mentioned to the former Castro associate that we suspected that our phone might be tapped, she just nodded. "Probably," she said. Never discuss money on the phone, she told us. Or anything of substance. Certainly not politics or whom we might be seeing. On another occasion we met an Ethiopian man with a Canadian passport who was traveling with two white Canadian friends. He told us, "Everywhere I go I am stopped; they pull me over and say, 'What are you doing with tourists?' I tell them that I am a tourist. When they see my passport, they let me go." MARY MORRIS RULES AND REGULATIONS Although Cuba is constructing new hotels, often as joint ventures with European hotel companies, few Americans are signing the guest registers. Under sanctions imposed by the United States Government, American citizens, while technically free to travel to Cuba, are prohibited from spending any money there unless they are journalists, scholars or Cuban-Americans visiting family members who live on the island. These regulations are backed up by penalties of up to 12 years in prison and $250,000 in fines, although to date no individual traveler has been penalized. Some back doors are open, however. SUN HOLIDAY TOURS, Post Office Box 531, Montego Bay, St. James, Jamaica (telephone: 809-952-5629), offers day trips from Montego Bay for $177 a person. The excursions depart every Wednesday, and the price includes round-trip air fare, in-flight snacks, an airport reception and transportation to, and a city tour of, Santiago de Cuba. And, for those who wish to bend the rules, package trips to Cuba can be booked through Canadian travel agencies. Some typical prices for seven-night packages offered by AIR CANADA VACATIONS, the major purveyor of such trips, range from about $350 a person, including air fare between Montreal and Varadero Beach and accommodations in a standard beachfront hotel, such as the Punta Blanca, to about $590 a person for air fare and a suite in the new Melia Varadero Hotel. Meal packages (breakfast and dinner daily) are an additional $119 a person, and service charges add another $109 each. Day trips to Havana can be arranged. A recorded advisory concerning travel to Cuba (and many other countries) is available from the State Department: 202-647-5225. Mary Morris is the author of "Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail," forthcoming in paperback from Penquin. | Cuban Journal: Havana and Beyond |
529284_3 | residents might be highly offended by the notion that anyone over 55 is physically impaired). GORDON H. MANSFIELD, H.U.D.'s assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity, said this was because the regulations were based on prior programs designed to protect the elderly. Handicapped access would therefore be important, he said. So would the presence of educational programs "like arts and crafts and access by bus to social services." Thus the availability of such offerings is crucial even if the residents do not want or need them, said Mark Schorr, a lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He represents the two-year-old Senior Civil Liberties Association, which brings together community representatives to fight these challenges. For instance, these experts say that aquatic exercise classes have been found helpful in convincing officials that a pool is actually a service for anyone over 55. "You should get your board to formally appoint the leaders of any of your clubs," said Mr. Tankel, adding that a wheelchair or two should be available in community rooms, as should large-type books in the library. User fees need not be abandoned. Oronoque, for instance, found that fees for activities such as an aerobics class or tennis were not a detriment. Residents would have had paid indirectly, anyway, through increased monthly common charges, noted Marvin H. Lerman, H.U.D.'s New England regional counsel, in his report on Oronoque issued in February. Convincing H.U.D. officials or a court that 80 percent of the residents are over 55 will mean having independent proof of age. A census that merely asks a resident to provide his or her age will not be enough, recalls Mr. Coughlin, speaking of his Oronoque experience. "You will need photocopies of driving licenses or birth cirtificates." Once compiled, however, the data could be entered in a computer system and regularly updated electronically as people move in and out. The experts recommend compiling such records on renters, too, since the language of the provision says "occupants," not owners. The association's liability insurance is unlikely to cover the cost of defending a challenge brought by H.U.D., but it should cover legal fees for any court action, as Oronoque has found out. Meanwhile two initiatives are under way to lessen or even eliminate the burden. The Senior Civil Liberties Association is attacking the constitutionality of the elderly provision in Federal District Court in Tampa, Fla. And Representative E. Clay Shaw, Republican | Talking: Age Limits; Residents Fight for Privileges |
529252_5 | gadgets and how-to guides. With the increase in the numbers of women of menopausal age, the most popular estrogen supplement, Premarin, moved in the last year to No. 2 on the list of drugs most commonly prescribed in America, with 80 percent of a $750 million market. There has also been a surge in over-the-counter remedies, particularly vaginal lubricants. And entrepreneurs are scratching their heads about what else women in this age group might be persuaded to buy. Dr. Wulf H. Utian, director of the nation's first menopause clinic, which opened 10 years ago in Cleveland, says he is being courted by a businessman seeking an endorsement of a menopause bedcover. It would work like a reverse electric blanket, using coolant to relieve the night sweats that are a joke to stand-up comics but a cause of sleeplessness for the women who experience them. Dr. Utian, himself, has reaped benefits from the expanding menopause market. In 1989, he founded a professional society for doctors, nurses and others working in the field. The first meeting of the group, the North American Menopause Society, drew 425 participants. This year, Dr. Utian said, more than 1,100 have signed up to attend. Another indicator of change is what happened to two of Dr. Utian's books on the subject. The first, titled "Your Middle Years" because his publisher was chary of using the word "menopause," sold poorly in 1980 and is out of print. His latest, "Managing Your Menopause" (Simon & Schuster), was released in paperback in July and is in its fifth printing. Many other books are riding the demographic tide. There are more than a dozen new menopause titles in stores at the moment, including "The Silent Passage," by Gail Sheehy (Random House). Coming in the fall is "The Change" by Germaine Greer (Alfred A. Knopf), which argues that the "estrogen evangelists" are pumping women full of hormones to keep them sexual creatures willing to do men's bidding. Lectures and workshops on menopause are also big draws nationwide. At Marin General Hospital here, for instance, such lectures by doctors and nurse practitioners were so popular that the hospital last year added more frequent workshops. The women who attend are, more and more, in their late 30's or early 40's, most without symptoms but eager to prepare. A demanding, want-to-know attitude is one of the primary characteristics of baby boom women, who are accustomed | Aging Baby Boomers Take Fresh Look at a Milestone |
529037_0 | Negotiations between The New York Times, a drivers union and a delivery wholesaler reported "some progress" yesterday, the third day of talks aimed at resolving the bitter 11-day labor dispute, a spokesman for a panel of intermediaries said. "They've broken up into subcommittees," said the spokesman, Frank Mazza, who indicated that the parties expected to continue talking at an undisclosed site through much of last night. "They are making some progress," Mr. Mazza continued, "but unless all pieces fall into place there can be no agreement." The panel was selected by members of the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers' Union of New York and Vicinity on Tuesday to act as go-betweens with The Times and Arthur E. Imperatore, the owner of Imperial Delivery Service. There were no reports of disruption of deliveries for Friday, the fourth straight night, said Nancy Nielsen, a Times spokeswoman. That contrasted with a week of scattered violence that delayed production and deliveries after members of the deliverers' union voted down proposed contracts with The Times and Mr. Imperatore on May 6. On Friday, Judge Pierre N. Leval of United States District Court ordered the union to pay The Times $100,000 for violating an injunction he issued on May 7, which ordered the union not to interfere with the delivery of the paper. The Times had asked the judge to impose the fines on Wednesday, citing several incidents, including the slashing of tires on 13 trucks at its 43d Street building. In fining the union, Judge Leval said that the union had "effectively encouraged lawless and violent obstruction." The disruptions began after Mr. Imperatore started hiring replacement drivers at two newly purchased delivery centers. Mr. Imperatore's purchase of the assets of the delivery centers did not include the contract with the drivers union. Mr. Imperatore and The Times are seeking pay concessions and work-rule changes from the union in exchange for job security and other benefits. | Negotiators Report Progress in Talks On Drivers Dispute |
531419_2 | half a ton of coal during winter. Three-quarters of China's energy comes from coal, and power generators and industrial boilers pump hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide into the air each day. "Every morning a dense black smoke streams out of the smokestack right behind our house," said a young worker who lives in Beijing. "Who's thinking of global warming, when we can barely even breathe?" Each year, China mines more than a billion metric tons of coal, more than any other country in the world. By the end of this century, the country plans to produce 1.4 billion tons each year, almost all of which it will burn at home, and by 2020, it could mine 2 billion tons a year, half the world's production. Chinese leaders say they are well aware of the pollution that unrestrained coal-burning can cause, aside from the risks of global warming. But the Government has made its position clear: It will not sacrifice development for the environment. 'Above All, Development' "You can't even talk about economic sacrifice," said Jing Wenyong, director of the Environmental Engineering Institute at Qinghua University. "Above all, we must have economic development." At last count, in 1989, China produced 9.1 percent of the gases that contribute to global warming, ranking third in the world, according to World Resources Institute, a nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C. The United States produced the largest amount, 17.8 percent; the Soviet Union followed, with 13.6 percent. On a per-capita basis, China does not even rank in the top 50 countries, the institute says; each American released nine times as much greenhouse gas as each Chinese. But if China's gross domestic product grows 8.5 percent a year for the next three decades -- unlikely but not impossible, since China's economy grew by 9.7 percent a year in the 1980's -- then by 2025, the amount of carbon dioxide released could be three times the amount released by the United States, according to estimates by the Stockholm Environment Institute. Growing More, Burning Less Scientists both here and abroad say China must improve the efficiency of its steel mills, its factories and all energy consumption if it wants to continue growing while limiting its contribution to global warming. Energy use by China's industry is among the least efficient in the world, said William U. Chandler, senior scientist at Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, an environmental | The Road To Rio -- Setting an Agenda for the Earth; Difficult Algebra for China: Coal = Growth = Pollution |
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532455_2 | countries to shoulder the anti-warming effort. Any funds they spend in the third world should go for things like safe drinking water, sewers, cleaner smokestacks and engines and soil conservation. Education for girls should be another priority, some say, since studies have shown that girls in developing countries with high school educations have an average of three children, while those without average seven. Economic growth increases pollution, economists admit, but they say that the pendulum eventually begins to swing back. By some estimates, once a nation's per capita income rises to about $4,000, it produces less of some pollutants per capita because it can afford technology like catalytic converters and sewage treatment. Solid waste and carbon dioxide emissions keep increasing, though. Some countries, like Mexico and Russia, are at that $4,000 threshold now. Poor countries can still fight global warming, the economists say. But the most sensible steps for them to take first are relatively low-cost ones that will also help their economies. For example, eliminating government subsidies on coal and oil will force factories and utilities to become more efficient. Enforcing property rights can slow deforestation. Educating girls can slow population growth. Small Results With High Prices "Scientists say there are all these neat things to do for free," said Robert Hahn, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, an economics research group. "If it would do so much good now, why haven't we done them? The reasons are political." In the industrialized world, he points out, even rudimentary steps like adopting taxes on pollution have often been stymied. In the United States, measures like the gas-guzzler tax on big cars and the creation of saleable air-pollution rights have had some effect, but gasoline is still cheap, so there is little incentive to conserve. On another front, the economists argue that the high price of curbing global warming will yield only small gains. The World Bank cites estimates that keeping American emissions of greenhouse gases at present levels would cost between 3 and 7 percent of the G.D.P. Three percent equals Federal health spending; 7 percent equals military spending. The key question is: how much sacrifice is it worth? "You could get rid of highway fatalities if you reduced the speed limit to five miles per hour," said Mr. Hahn. "How much economic growth do you want to give up to buy insurance against global warming?" Like a Recession | CONFERENCE IN RIO/The Rich Vs. the Poor; Cooling the Globe Would be Nice, But Saving Lives Now May Cost Less |
532453_0 | A year from now, Americans may be able to buy a tomato with more flavor and a longer shelf life. For that, they can thank -- or berate -- Calgene Inc. of Davis, Calif., and Federal officials who last week sped genetically engineered foods toward grocery shelves, ruling that no special testing, labels or regulations are needed in most cases. Taking a desirable gene from one organism and putting it into another is no more dangerous than conventional food development, the Government said. Calgene, for example, enhances its FlavrSavr tomato with a gene that zaps the enzyme causing overripening and spoilage. Dr. Rebecca Goldburg of the Environmental Defense Fund wants labels on such foods because consumers "have a right to know what's in their food." But do they care? The Institute of Food Technologists said almost 70 percent of people in focus groups thought the government would keep food safe. Next: pest-resistant corn, less-bruisable potatoes. No word on broccoli. MAY 24-30 | Bon Appetit, Scientists Say |
532451_0 | Most of the delegates converging on Rio de Janeiro for the start of the Earth Summit on Wednesday, it seems safe to say, believe that humanity must do something about the harm that human expansion is doing to the rest of the biosphere. But it also seems that many of the world's governments tend to pin primary responsibility on someone else and to duck strong measures that could hurt them economically or politically. That is why the Rio meeting -- as has already been made abundantly clear in pre-summit talks on the key issues of climate and extinction of species -- is likely to disappoint any who are expecting a dramatic environmental leap forward. This is not to say that nothing important is happening. For the first time, the nations of the world are seriously coming to grips with the fundamental and seemingly intractable question of how to pursue economic growth and combat poverty while at the same time protecting the interacting web of atmosphere, water, soil and biological organisms on which human life depends. But the task is proving difficult and frustrating, made so by the fact that rich and poor countries approach it with divergent perceptions and agendas. "They come to the bargaining table, literally and figuratively, from two different worlds," said Richard Mott, the treaties officer of the World Wildlife Fund. Blame the Rich While most of the industrialized countries can afford the luxury of contemplating environmental problems, most of the poor ones are preoccupied with economic survival. Spanning this North-South gulf, as diplomats refer to it, has been the main difficulty but hardly the only one. Generally speaking, the poor countries of the South blame most environmental damage on the rich countries of the North, who engage in what they see as wasteful overconsumption. The poor countries say they have no choice but to make economic development their first priority. If the South is to play the game of environmental protection, they insist, the North must pay. Their attitude, says one American diplomat, is: "You've had your turn; you're fat, happy and breathing dirty air and you have no trees. We want our turn, and when we're rich we can start worrying about the environment." Besides, the diplomat added, no leader in a developing country gets elected on environmental issues. The North, while acknowledging its own responsibility, asserts that the South's frightening population explosion and advancing | Rio: A Start on Managing What's Left of This Place |
532472_1 | declaration, in which countries are urged to adopt "appropriate demographic policies." Yet demographic experts continue to issue dire warnings about the threat of overpopulation. The director of the United Nations Population Fund, Dr. Nafis Sadik, complained last month that the Vatican had successfully lobbied against any mention of family planning and access to contraception in the "action programs" that will be made final at the environmental conference in Rio. A hilly country of only 10,000 square miles, Rwanda is testimony to the threat of overpopulation, which Mrs. Mukamunana believes is caused by the subservient status of women in the developing world. Rwanda has 7.2 million people, or 720 a square mile, packed onto virtually every piece of arable land. If the population grows at its current rate, Rwanda's Environment Department says, the nation will have 15.6 million people by 2010. The population is overwhelmingly rural, scratching a living from agriculture, and experts at the department say the land cannot support that number of people. The Highest Fertility Rate Africa was sparsely populated until the turn of the century. But in the last 30 years, the population of sub-Saharan Africa has risen from 200 million to 450 million, and according to the World Bank it is is expected to reach about 800 million by the end of the century. The fertility rate in sub-Saharan Africa, 6.2 births per woman of childbearing age, is the highest regional rate recorded by the United Nations. In Rwanda, the World Bank reported a rate of 8.5 children per woman in 1989, the highest in the world. In her annual report, issued in April, Dr. Sadik pushed forward by two years, to 1998, the date when she predicts the world's population, now 5.4 billion, will reach 6 billion. But this forecast is based on the assumption that developing nations can reduce their birth rate from 3.8 children per mother to 3.3 children by 2000. If this is not achieved, the world's population will reach 12.5 billion by the middle of the next century, unless mass starvation, disease or war wipes out large numbers of people. In Rwanda, as in other developing nations, experts say the reasons for the high birth rate are clear. "Among the general factors affecting childbearing, like infant mortality, nutritional levels and social security, the education and status of women is the most important," said Stephen Sinding, the director of population sciences at | THE ROAD TO RIO: Setting an Agenda for the Earth; In Rwanda, Births Increase and the Problems Do, Too |
532588_1 | made despite the actions of the man at the wheel. If this isn't your fancy, disembark now. Otherwise you'll find yourself signed on with one of the best storytellers afloat, whose chosen period is the great age of fighting sail but whose works have none of ye olde creaks and groans of period fiction. When he started, Mr. O'Brian might have been setting up in competition with C. S. Forester's Hornblower books. At this point, he is in a different squadron altogether, providing pleasure for those who will never be able to read a new Captain Marryat (the author, in the 1830's and 40's, of a number of sea adventures) -- but in this instance a Marryat with a touch of Jane Austen, Erskine Childers and John le Carre thrown in. The great war between Britain and Napoleonic France goes on. Jack Aubrey and ship, paid off from the Royal Navy, are now, after some privateering, back in commission, "Aubrey reinstated after an exceptionally brilliant . . . expedition (and after his election to Parliament), and the frigate as His Majesty's hired vessel Surprise -- not quite a full reinstatement for her, but near enough for present happiness." They are en route from New South Wales to South America, where Stephen Maturin -- intelligence agent as well as medical man -- has an errand to perform. However, complications arise. For once, the Surprise is not a happy ship. The crew is acting strangely. Aubrey, unable to fathom this, is full of his own discontents: he is liverish and randy. "Hipped and mumpish" is his own phrase for it. Inspecting his insufficiently taut ship, Aubrey finds hidden among the coils of ship's cables a stowaway young gentlewoman, an escaped Botany Bay convict, Clarissa Harvill. He already has two small Melanesian girls aboard, survivors of an island smallpox epidemic, and the discovery of Clarissa -- smuggled aboard by Midshipman Oakes -- gives Aubrey, the last to know of her presence, an added pain: women aboard "are worse than cats or parsons for bad luck." A pursuing sloop, sent to deliver changed orders to Aubrey and, presumably, to catch the escapee, at last overtakes the Surprise, despite several Nelsonian blind-eye tricks performed by her commander. The attractive convict's freedom is preserved, and she remains aboard the Surprise. Aubrey's changed orders involve a mission to recapture a British whaler, the Truelove, from an unruly | The Captain Was the Last to Know |
532681_0 | Hook two computers together and sooner or later the two users will want to send one another messages. That's electronic mail, or E-mail, as it is universally known in the world of networks. This desire to communicate explains why selling E-mail software has become a $130 million business, and why the heavy-hitting software companies have hurried to develop E-mail products, often by acquiring promising programs from other companies. The advantage of E-mail on a local area network is the ability to send private messages to anyone on the network. And with the growth of networks, the traditional definition of E-mail has been expanded to include any transmission of data from one computer to another, whether that computer is on the same network or on another network on the other side of the planet. A survey by PC Magazine found that E-mail is the third most popular network application, behind file and printer sharing. With such an endorsement, can jargon be far behind? Xcellenet, the Atlanta-based developer of Remoteware, a program designed to extend office computing power to remote locations, has coined a new word for that type of product -- "applicoms," based on the words "communication" and "applications." Many companies embrace E-mail because it appears to increase productivity by speeding up group communications, especially if the groups are dispersed. Any kind of digitized information, including text, graphics, voice and video, can be sent. The International Data Corporation, a marketing research concern in Framingham, Mass., contends E-mail software will be a $500 million business by 1995. Forecasts like this illustrate why Novell Inc. moved several years ago to license the Message Handling Service software from Action Technologies, , which Novell includes free with its Netware operating system for networks, thus making it a de facto standard. The Lotus Development Corporation paid an estimated $30 million to acquire CC:Mail, whose product, called by the same name, is one of the leading vendors of E-mail software. Jockeying for its position in the market, the Microsoft Corporation paid about $30 million for Consumer Software's Network Courier software and renamed it Microsoft Mail. The larger target for these players is a merging of E-mail software and other software, which would allow scattered people to work on a project as if they were in the same place. Lotus appears to be the furthest along on this path with its Lotus Notes, a type of product called | Networking; Now Software Giants Are Targeting E-Mail |
532740_1 | the last moment did he even agree to attend. What a mockery of his promise to be an environmental President. The richer industrialized countries of the North have dragged their heels at contributing the financial resources needed to apply clean technology to the developing world. Japan and Europe seem prepared to pledge several billion dollars between them. The U.S. has hinted at much smaller amounts. Such miserliness is misguided. All countries have a stake in clean development. It is unjust and unrealistic to put the principal financial burden on developing countries themselves. Yet these countries have weakened their own cause by demanding that staggering sums be put at the disposal of a new international bureaucracy and by resisting enforceable commitments to conservation. Too many third-world leaders have treated the conference as a prod to win new aid commitments rather than to protect natural resources. Brazil and other tropical countries derailed a proposed treaty on tropical rain forests by insisting that temperate forests, whose problems and global significance are quite different, be included as well. And a broad range of poorer countries, motivated by nationalist and religious motives, blocked agreement on restraining population growth, a key to sustainable development. But there need be nothing final about these disappointments. The 11-day conference should not be considered a deadline, but a new opportunity to focus attention and narrow differences. Take global warming. There are substantial possibilities for mutually advantageous cooperation. According to William Cline, an economist at the Brookings Institution, industrialized countries would have to spend about $100 a ton to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels. But carbon could be removed through reforestation in the third world at a fraction of the cost, probably between $10 and $20 a ton. That opens the possibility of industrialized countries levying carbon taxes and transferring some of the money to the third world to pay for forestry measures. On biodiversity, the U.S. refusal to sign a treaty need not halt progress. A contract between Merck & Company, the American pharmaceutical manufacturer, and Costa Rica shows the way. Merck will work with a local institute to study native species of plants and animals, providing money and laboratory equipment. And if any of the species prove commercially exploitable, Merck will pay royalties. There are enormous possibilities for other cooperative arrangements that can help both North and South. The Earth Summit sets the stage to work them out. | Hot Air, and Hopes, at Rio |
532735_0 | WHAT Brazilian ecosystem spreads over a pristine area the size of Britain, is threatened by encroaching development, but offers visitors a combination of wildlife, tropical greenery and primeval solitude? Wrong. Don't worry. Most participants at the Earth Summit starting on Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro would probably also answer: the Amazon. International nature tourists well versed in the attractions of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil are only now discovering Brazil's Pantanal, the largest expanse of wetlands in the world. Drawn on 16th-century maps as "an inland sea," this vast, largely untouched area in the geographical heart of South America -- about 900 miles northwest of Rio -- has served since the dawn of time as a convergence point for millions of birds traveling three migratory paths. With the exception of one small national park and two government ranches, the Pantanal is 95 percent privately owned, largely by private ranchers whose cattle roam freely in ecological harmony with the region's wildlife. In contrast to the Amazon's closed gallery forests where it can be hard to sight wildlife, these wide open spaces offer a fauna panorama comparable to a safari in East Africa. Lodgings in this remote area, slowly being discovered by tourism, now range from basic hostels to luxury working ranches. To explore the Pantanal, visitors can travel by minibus, train, or river boat. A year ago, my wife, Elizabeth, and I headed for the Pantanal and, as we are not birders, took the minimal precaution of borrowing an old pair of opera glasses. After flying about 950 miles from Rio, we were met at Cuiaba in Mato Grosso state by Miguel A. Castelino, an Argentine ornithologist, who works as a guide for Focus Tours, a Brazilian agency specializing in nature tourism. Completing our party of seven, a couple from Luxembourg and their two daughters also joined us at the Cuiaba airport. Cuiaba has shed its humble origins as an 18th-century outpost to become a modern city of steel and glass, based on the thriving economy of Brazil's agricultural frontier. With Miguel at the wheel of a rented minivan, we set out for a trip of five days and four nights. After a stop to pick up ice in Pocone, a gold mining town, we started down a 10-mile dirt road leading to a nature warden checkpoint at the northern Pantanal's entrance. With the smudged opera glasses swiveling back and | Brazil's Other Great Wilderness |
532706_0 | Two Georgia Tech inventors have developed a small broad-band antenna that they say is less expensive and more versatile than existing antennas. Their device is called a spiral-mode microstrip antenna. Its advantage, the scientists say, lies in combining the technology of two existing antennas: the broad-band frequency typical of large so-called cavity-backed spiral antennas, which are typically used for a wide range of frequencies transmitted over a fairly large area, and the small size and mounting abilities of the flat microstrip antenna, which employs a printed circuit board and has a very narrow band width. The spiral antenna, which has been around for years, uses a cavity filled with material to absorb unwanted radiation. As a result it is bulky. "What we've done is eliminate radiation out the back and redirect it toward the front," said Craig Chamber, office manager for the Wang-Tripp Corporation, an enterprise in Marietta, Ga., formed by the Georgia Tech scientists, Victor K. Tripp and Johnson K. H. Wang. The Wang-Tripp antenna is only an inch thick and "can be molded to a surface and actually pasted on," Mr. Chamber said. Because of its broad-band abilities, a single antenna could serve several systems. In a car, for example, it could be used for the radio, the cellular telephone and other communications equipment. The inventors say the antenna can also be used for personal communications systems, office communications, proposed intelligent highway systems and direct broadcast satellite systems as well as commercial and military applications. The two faculty members at the Georgia Institute of Technology started their company under a new licensing program to help researchers at Georgia Tech commercialize their technology. In exchange for reduced licensing fees, Georgia Tech retains part ownership and will receive royalties. The company is filling small quantities of custom-designed orders. | Tech Notes; An Antenna That's a Hybrid |
525582_1 | of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Echoing this view, Laura Rojas, Director General of Venezuela's Institute of Foreign Trade, said in an interview: "The U.S. has passed domestic legislation that has jurisdiction outside of the U.S. Environmental protection can't be had at the cost of another country." In February, Venezuela joined members of the European Community and 23 other nations in urging the United States to abide by a GATT ruling that the unilateral American ban on tuna imports from Mexico and Venezuela is illegal. Resistance was the response from environmentalists, including Earth Island Institute, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco that initiated court action leading to the tuna ban. "They are kidding themselves if they think that GATT can force the U.S. to abandon laws to protect the global environment," said David C. Phillips, Earth Island's executive director. "In the 1990's, free trade and efforts to protect the global environment are on a collision course." He predicted that other conflicts lie ahead, citing plans by several industrialized nations to ban imports of ozone-depleting chemicals, plans by several European nations to ban imports of tropical hardwoods that are not cut from sustainably managed forests and a threat by Japan to submit to GATT mediation unilateral embargoes on trade in whale products and bluefin tuna, a staple for sushi cuisine. According to GATT, such problems concerning "the global commons" should be solved through "international environmental agreements." But with little progress being made on preparing global agreements in advance of next month's United Nations conference on the environment and development in Rio de Janeiro, many analysts believe that unilateral environmental protectionism by the world's wealthy nations may be a wave of the future. "Tuna is the debut for a great debate between environmentalists and traders," said Oliver Belisario, a Caracas-based consultant for Venezuela's tuna industry. Not only has the United States ignored the GATT ruling of last fall, but, in January, a Federal judge in San Francisco issued a secondary embargo against 20 nations thought to be engaged in "tuna laundering." Suspected of purchasing Venezuelan and Mexican tuna for repackaging and marketing abroad, these nations are prohibited from selling tuna to the United States. Since February, five nations have been dropped from the list after formally pledging not to buy Venezuelan or Mexican tuna. With Venezuelan and Mexican tuna now shut out of the United States, Australia and most | America -- Environmental Dictator? |
525593_3 | a computer had at most about 52 minutes worth of messages. With the average employee getting about three messages a day, a moderate-size business of a few dozen employees would eat up the computer memory in a few days. The voice mail system would whir to a halt. To get around the small capacity, businesses would buy multiple units, but the probability that a flaw in one unit would slow down a nearby unit meant the system broke down as often as every month or so. To save precious disk space, and thus expand the computer's capacity, clever scientists came up with algorithms, or sophisticated mathematical recipes, that "sampled" the voice information like a pollster interviewing potential voters. When a person speaks, a voice-mail computer (and often the telephone company's own computers as well) turns the analog signal, which is proportional to changes in electrical voltage, into numbers. This computer code comprises the familiar 1's and 0's that computers use to talk to each other and allows voice-mail systems to process voices like so much electronic sausage. Clever computers can use as little as one-fourth of the incoming voice information and still produce a sound that closely resembles the original speech. What the systems lose in voice fidelity (callers often complain they sound tinny on voice-mail messages), they gain in memory and flexibility. The voice-mail machines of the early 1980's were the size of five or six refrigerators. Today, the machines are smaller than a three-drawer filing cabinet. As the computer chips that made personal computers possible grew cheaper and more reliable, so did voice-mail systems. Twenty hours of storage capacity that cost $180,000 in the early 1980's now costs about $13,000. The increased computer capacity also brought a proliferation of options designed to appeal to the widest number of customers, from pharmaceutical salesmen to real estate brokers to journalists. But more choices also meant more chances for callers to be captured in "voice-mail jail," that labyrinth of recorded voices issuing instructions from which there sometimes seems no escape short of hanging up. THESE days corporations, after prodding from voice-mail companies, are rewriting their programs so that voice-mail greetings are no longer than 10 seconds and callers do not have to listen to more than three or four choices, one of which is talking to a human operator. Moreover, Octel plans to introduce as early as next year a "univeral | Technology; From the Voice-Mail Acorn, a Still-Spreading Oak |
525335_0 | THE HONEY AND THE HEMLOCK Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America. By Eli Sagan. 429 pp. New York: Basic Books. $27. EVER since the founders of this country used the governmental structure of ancient Athens as the model for their new democracy, Americans have looked to Athenian history for inspiration and admonition. No ancient civilization can claim to have had a wider influence on European culture, but the Athenians' distinctive form of government has proved less durable, or at least more problematic, than the artistic achievements it generated. The ancients themselves sought continually to explain why democratic Athens, despite its material and human resources, failed to win the Peloponnesian War against totalitarian Sparta. Although democratic government worked in Athens when it had a leader like Pericles, on other occasions the male citizens or "people" ( demos ) who controlled government policy could be misled by appeals to their baser emotions, such as greed or revenge. The Athenian historian Thucydides, himself exiled from his city because of his failure as a general to win a military campaign in that war, portrayed the fall of Athenian democracy as it might have been depicted in a Greek tragedy. The demos played the role of the protagonist who attempted to achieve more than a mortal could or should, given the limits of his strength and the standards of morality upheld, however remotely or indirectly, by the gods. According to Thucydides, the Athenian assembly was the victim of a violent desire ( eros ) for greed and success that caused it to send an expedition to Sicily, and later to send reinforcements, all of which were eventually lost. As a result of that disaster, Athens lost the war it had been fighting against Sparta, even though with more careful management of resources, it easily might have won. In "The Honey and the Hemlock," Eli Sagan, who teaches sociology at the New School for Social Research, surveys the history of Athenian democracy from the point of view of modern psychology, with the traditional and laudable aim of finding in the behavior of the past some guidance for American democracy today. Surveying the history of Athens from the beginning of democratic government in the sixth century B.C. until its disappearance in 346 B.C., he contends that the various failures of the system were caused by paranoid behavior that led the demos and the Athenian | Through Athens With Freud |
525578_0 | Priscilla Mack, a breast cancer patient who had a mastectomy late last year, walked into Georgetown University Hospital on Friday morning, signed a long consent form, was wheeled into an operating room and a few minutes later became one of the first women to receive a silicone gel-filled breast implant under the complex new Federal guidelines regulating the use of the device. But the return of the controversial device to the operating room hardly represented a triumphant comeback. The implant, used by hundreds of thousands of women who went shopping for new figures in the 1970's and 1980's, is now on probation, pending proof of good behavior. The circumstances of Mrs. Mack's operation -- the uncertainty about whether her plastic surgeon, Dr. Scott Spear, could obtain the implant, the unusually detailed consent form and the fact that she is a cancer patient classified as having an "urgent need" for the device -- illustrated starkly how profoundly the business of remaking breasts has changed since the devices' long-term safety was questioned by scientists, lawyers and Federal regulators. Though the devices had been in use for about 30 years and many women were satisfied with them, the Food and Drug Administration in January imposed a moratorium, which in effect amounted to a ban on their use, saying their safety had not been proved as the law requires. Until new safety studies are completed, the agency said, implants will be available only to women in clinical trials. Cancer patients may enroll, but there are unlikely to be enough places in trials for women who want implants to enlarge their breasts. Months of Waiting An estimated 5,000 to 8,000 women, almost all of them cancer patients who have had mastectomies, are believed to fall under an "urgent need" exception that permits them to receive the silicone-gel device without taking part in long-term clinical trials. But only one manufacturer is now able to ship the devices. In addition, the questions of who qualifies for implants now, who will become part of later long-range studies and which doctors will be given the necessary "investigator" status are still sources of great confusion. "I was scheduled for an implant Jan. 9," said Sara Garrison, an 80-year-old cancer patient in Long Beach, Calif. For the last six months, she has worn a temporary balloon-like device that is gradually filled with water, giving the skin a chance to expand and | First Steps Taken in Revived Use of Breast Implants |
525626_25 | new state budget. All sides agree there can be no more taxes this year, so still-deeper cuts in spending must be made -- cuts that are sure to hasten the decline of California's fine universities, public schools, parks, freeways and other "infrastructure" essential to economic recovery. Wilson and the Assembly are heading for a possibly calamitous shutdown of state services if no agreement is reached within a few weeks after the new fiscal year begins on July 1. The Democrats say this is exactly what Wilson wants, so that he can blame the Legislature for the resulting disarray and help push incumbents out in November. But the gamble is, the public is apt to hold Wilson accountable too. Against this backdrop, Wilson faces another high-stakes political gamble over the welfare-cutting initiative he has mounted for the November ballot. Of every dollar spent under the California budget, 45 cents goes to primary and secondary education and 32 cents to health and welfare. Education should not touched, Wilson argues, because it is essential to rebuilding economic competitiveness, and he has targeted welfare. These proposed welfare cuts are called cruel by such opponents as California's two top Roman Catholic clergy, Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles and Archbishop John R. Quinn of San Francisco, as well as Jewish, Lutheran and other religious leaders. Besides cutting welfare payments, the Taxpayer Protection Act, as Wilson dubs it, would endow the Governor with major new budgetary powers. It would authorize him to declare an emergency if no budget is approved by July 1, under which he could cut by up to 5 percent the salaries of state workers not covered by union agreements. It would also empower him to declare fiscal emergencies and cut spending whenever spending and revenues are more than 3 percent out of whack. This bid for increased budget authority has enraged many legislators as a "power grab," and the Democratic leadership has sought to undermine it by passing its own welfare cuts. This would strip the initiative of its welfare component, turning it solely into a vote on whether to shift the balance of power in Sacramento to the Governor -- in effect, a public referendum on Wilson's performance. "It is a big gamble," says one top Wilson aide. "He either wins it or serves only one term." Robert Reinhold is chief of the Los Angeles bureau of The New York Times. | The Curse of the Statehouse |
525450_4 | way. If a donor makes a major gift to a university, the donation is tax deductible. He can then take the money he saves on income tax and use it to buy a life insurance policy. Q. What new kinds of drives has the Fund for Educational Advancement undertaken? A. One is called "Greening of the Garden State," a tree planting program that students from the Catholic schools participate in. Students solicit $5 donations for four trees. The schools keep $2.20; the F.E.A. keeps 50 cents. It's a lot more profitable than candy drives, where schools keep about 45 cents per bar. We're also exploring a program that turns the students into "business executives." There is a health food company from Fairfield, Conn., that wants to launch a line of health snacks. The company wants to send professional marketers to the high schools to teach students how to distribute the product. If the students are successful, the schools will get a 10 percent cut of the profit. Q. How is technology changing fund raising? A. Television has dramatically impacted fund raising, both in good ways and bad. For example, the advent of cable, with its ability to target audiences, lets organizations like hospitals run localized telethons. On the other hand, television has been exploited by disreputable evangelists. They have pulled off significant scams that take advantage of religious faith, for example, by promising people they will receive material benefits in this lifetime commensurate with what they donate. Computer technology has also changed fund raising. It has refined direct mail. There may even come a time when requests for charity are sent via modem. This might be very effective to a targeted group. Q. Are there other common scams? A. Yes. One involves telemarketers who call and say they are with a newspaper for policemen or firemen or disabled veterans and they are selling ads. They use groups like the police, because every normal American has an affinity toward them. And they convince you to buy a $100 ad. They even come over and collect the check. But many of these so-called newspapers are bogus. They have no circulation. I've researched it. Q. Given the recent scandals associated with fund raising, are donors becoming more careful? A. There is good reason for anyone who is giving money to be concerned that it is going where it should. They should ask. Fund-raising | How to Raise Funds in Difficult Times |
527034_2 | countries, H.I.V./AIDS could become the leading killer of children by the year 2000," the report said, adding that in parts of Africa, the spread of AIDS could cancel out "virtually all the reductions in child mortality achieved through immunization and other health measures." Life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa could drop below already low levels, it said, and "10 million children could be orphaned by the death of one or more parents in the 1990's." In Asia, where more than 4.3 million children die in infancy each year, many of them in South Asia, the impact of AIDS has yet to be assessed. Nations like Thailand, the Philippines and India have only begun to face up to the prevalence of AIDS among adults. Urbanization is also creating new problems in child health, according to the Agency for International Development, which has been operating a child survival program since 1985. Urban growth rates in the developing world are about three times those experienced in the past by industrializing societies. By the end of the decade, 44 percent of the world's poorest people will live in cities, the report said. Contrary to popular belief, it said, "more than 60 percent of the population growth in urban areas is attributable to natural increase; less than 40 percent is due to migration from rural areas." In cities of the developing world, 50 to 75 percent of people live in extreme poverty, the report found. And health standards fall accordingly. In Kenya, the report said, infant mortality in the slums of Nairobi was 200 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 74 per 1,000 for the country as a whole. The report suggested that child survival programs in huge third-world cities could learn from pilot projects in Bangladesh, Indonesia and several other countries where urban neighborhood health centers are being established in slums to serve as links to traditional medical services. Helene Gayle, the agency's coordinator on AIDS, said at the news conference that more emphasis would have to be placed on education and treating women in the battle against pediatric AIDS since the disease is transmitted to children through their mothers. Dr. Gayle, whose budget for AIDS assistance worldwide is $100 million -- less than half of the $250 million allocated by Congress for the agency's child survival program -- acknowledged that reaching many women will be difficult because of taboos about discussing sexual activity. | Study Sees Rise in Child Death Rates |
527084_0 | A Silicon Valley biotechnology company says it expects to receive a patent soon for a genetically engineered mouse that lacks an immune system. It would be only the second animal patent ever issued. The patent anticipated by Genpharm International would end the Patent and Trademark Office's four-year recess in awarding animal patents. A team of scientists at the Mountain View, Calif., company genetically modified a laboratory research mouse so that it lacks an immune system. The transgenic immunodeficient mouse, or Tim, is used to study AIDS and other immune-system diseases. The president of Genpharm, Jonathan MacQuitty, told The San Francisco Chronicle that the company had received a "notice of allowability" from the Patent Office. A Patent Office spokesman, Oscar Mastin, declined to discuss the status of the application, but acknowledged that such a notice meant a patent was forthcoming. Genpharm intends its Tim mouse as an improvement on the "scid" mouse, which lacks an immune system because of a chance mutation rather than human engineering. Scid stands for severe combined immune deficiency. Since both mice lack an immune system, virtually any diseased or normal tissue can be transplanted into them with no chance of rejection. But Genpharm maintains that Tim is more effective because it is even less capable of immune responses than the scid mouse. Scid mice have already been used to study muscular dystrophy, malaria, sickle-cell anemia, AIDS and Lyme disease. In the Tim procedure, genes that code crucial parts of the immune system in a single-cell mouse embryo are knocked out with chemicals. The mouse grows without an immune system and produces offspring with similar deficiencies. Researchers then implant human immune tissue in the lab mice to study AIDS and other immune-system diseases. The first animal patent went to a genetically altered research mouse developed at Harvard University. The Oncomouse, patented in 1988, was engineered to grow malignant tumors for cancer study. The invention was licensed to the Du Pont Company, which sells the mice to research labs. The patenting of animals has drawn protests from animal rights groups, which say licensing allows scientists to create lucrative lab monstrosities. "You patent something to make money off of it," said Dr. Elliot Katz, a veterinarian who heads In Defense of Animals in San Rafael, Calif. That creates more incentive for companies "to disfigure, harm and mutilate animals," he said. | COMPANY NEWS: Mouse Without Immunity; Genpharm Expects Patent for an Animal |
531945_1 | of Bio/Technology, said the achievement was important because it meant that all the principal Western staples have now yielded to genetic engineering. Corn, rice, soybeans and several other foods have already been genetically altered in one respect or another and are being prepared for eventual commercial production. Haishui Dong, a researcher at the Wheat Genetics Laboratory at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., said in an interview with The Associated Press: "It's a big, big event, because so far we have not been able to transform wheat. It's a very significant breakthrough." Mr. Dong, who was not involved in the Florida research, said it would take time to put it to use improving wheat's protein composition, along with disease and drought resistance. Dr. Vasil's research team uses a .22-caliber "gene gun" to inject the foreign gene into the wheat cells. Millions of microscopic grains of gold dust or tungsten powder are coated with the genes and fired into wheat grain tissue consisting of millions of cells. In a random occurrence, some of the genes will make it to their intended target cells. The cells are transferred to laboratory dishes, and Dr. Vasil can tell within 24 hours if the shot was successful. A Monsanto researcher, Michael E. Fromm, said the initial success should serve as "a scientific road map for introducing new genes into wheat." At Monsanto, which provided the gene and helped finance the research, a company spokesman, Jim Altemus, said the introduction of a herbicide-resistant gene was often the first genetic alteration scientists tried on a plant, since the herbicide could be applied directly to cultures. "If it kills it, you know you haven't succeeded," Mr. Altemus said. The genetically altered wheat, which has been grown only in a controlled indoor environment, must now undergo the testing and registration processes of the United States Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, Mr. Altemus said. He expects that to take at least five years, although Dr. Vasil more optimistically predicted a three-year wait for commercial introduction. Mr. Altemus said Monsanto had many genetically altered food plants in the works, including a potato that kills its primary pest, the Colorado potato beetle, by emitting a protein fatal to the insect. But getting those products to consumers is a slow process. "We've been in it 10 years and do not yet have a product on the market," he said. | Genetically Altered Wheat Promises Higher Yields |
531921_0 | In preparation for next month's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Vatican diplomats have begun a campaign to try to insure that the gathering's conclusions on the issue of runaway population growth are not in conflict with Roman Catholic teaching on birth control. To pursue its cause, the Vatican has insisted on changes in the wording of some documents on demographic issues to be put before the summit, which is to be attended by the leaders of nearly 100 countries. It has circulated a confidential document to embassies here, setting out positions that challenge the United States and other Western countries on such issues as technology transfer between industrial and developing nations and excluding war from a list of hazards to the environment, Vatican officials said. While the summit's resolutions will not be binding on participants, the Vatican's position draws on a moral authority among the world's estimated 980 million baptized Roman Catholics and thus carries a particular weight in the discussions. 'Family Planning' Controversy The issue that has caused most controversy relates to changes in a summit document on demographic trends. At preparatory negotiations in New York last month, officials said, Vatican diplomats insisted on changing the wording in references to "family planning" to the formulation: "the responsible planning of family size in keeping with fundamental dignity and personally held values and taking into account ethical and cultural considerations." The more cumbersome wording reflects the Roman Catholic Church's prohibition on all forms of artificial birth control. Vatican officials, speaking on condition that they not be identified, said the changes also reflected a broader concern within the church for individual human and religious rights in the face of governmental population control programs that either place limits on family size, as in China, or offer incentives for sterilization, as in Brazil. Some development experts argue that expanding third-world populations are the principal cause for the growing poverty of those regions. But Msgr. Diarmuid Martin, who is part of the Vatican's 10-member delegation to the Earth Summit, said in a separate interview that the Vatican felt that "attributing the responsibility for poverty exlcusively to population growth is a little bit naive." Diplomats Given a Memo Diplomats accredited to the Holy See said they had received a memorandum from the Vatican that said in part: "The relationship of development and the environment to population growth is complex and often tenuous. Population growth of | Vatican Seeks a Voice in Earth Summit Resolutions on Population |
531914_1 | want to exploit irreplaceable natural resources. The Administration has been trading the future -- our children's land and air and water -- for present political advantage. Mr. Bush wants the support and the money of logging, mining and other such interests. Two weeks ago he decided to let companies increase air pollution from their plants without notifying the public. He issued that order although the Clean Air Act of 1990 -- which he claims as a Bush achievement -- appears to require public review of any such increases. Last month the Secretary of Agriculture, Edward Madigan, proposed elimination of the public's right to appeal decisions by the U.S. Forest Service on land use and timber sales. The public has had that right for 85 years. The month before, Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan Jr. canceled the public's long-established right to contest his department's decisions to grant grazing permits, mining leases and oil exploration licenses. In short, he made it easier to despoil public lands without any public input. Mr. Lujan has played a large part in efforts to weaken or destroy what is probably the single most effective environmental law, the Endangered Species Act. It was passed with President Nixon's strong support in 1973. The highly publicized example has been the effort by Mr. Lujan and Vice President Quayle to allow the cutting of irreplaceable old-growth timber in the Pacific Northwest that is the habitat of the endangered spotted owl. But the bigger target is the act itself, which must be renewed by next year. Secretary Lujan in fact does not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution, with the rise and extinction of species. Time magazine disclosed that fact last week, quoting Mr. Lujan as follows: "Here's what I believe. God created Adam and Eve, and from there, all of us came. God created us pretty much as we look today." Practically no newspaper noted that amazing quote, so far as I know. Is it really not news that the Secretary of the Interior rejects science? Is the press too inured to scientific idiocy to care since President Reagan said trees caused pollution? The hands may be Secretary Lujan's, but the policies are the President's. George Bush is the man who decided to let wetlands be drained, air polluted, species exterminated. Most significant of all is the way these and other profound environmental decisions have been made: by the | Abroad at Home; The Pillage President |
530836_0 | Bright green manioc plants sprouting among charred tree trunks and a constant hammering and sawing on house frames are signs that a new colony of homesteaders has arrived in this remote corner of the Amazon, an area covered only a year ago by tropical rain forest. "I worked all my life as a sharecropper," explained Antonio Rodrigues dos Santos, a 38-year-old migrant from Brazil's impoverished northeast. "Now I have my own land," he added with satisfaction. With bulldozers standing by to resume road work when the dry season begins in June, the number of houses in this new town is expected to jump this year from 5 to 120. Also in June, almost 2,000 miles south of here, 100 world leaders will meet in Rio de Janeiro for the so-called Earth Summit. To polish its environmental image, Brazil volunteered to serve as host of the meeting, officially titled the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Now, Brazil is expected to point to statistics charting a steady fall in Amazon deforestation rates. But as the desolation here attests, the problem endures, fueled by commercial logging interests, a regional yearning for economic development and a land hunger among refugees from Brazil's poverty bowl, its overpopulated northeast. After weathering heavy criticism over Amazon destruction in the late 1980's, Brazilians will issue statistics next month that indicate a 63 percent drop in annual deforestation rates in Brazil's Amazon since 1985. Encouraged by the new numbers, Brazil's Government recently reversed its position and decided to back adoption of a "Statement of Principles on Forests" at the Earth Summit. Based on analysis of photographs taken by Landsat 5 satellites over the Amazon, researchers at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research calculate that the annual deforestation rate dropped from a high of 11,580 square miles in 1985 to 4,299 square miles in an annual period ending in August 1991. "If last year's rate remains unchanged, it would take us 330 years to finish off the Amazon," said Luiz Gylvan Meira Filho, who directs the program at the institute near Sao Paulo. Seen as a pioneer in deforestation documentation, the institute is training research teams for the seven other nations of the Amazon basin -- Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. Brazilian and United States scientists attribute the decline in forest burning rates to a series of factors: the suspension of tax incentives for ranching | The Road To Rio -- Setting an Agenda for the Earth; Homesteaders Gnaw at Brazil Rain Forest |
527211_0 | WITHOUT a huge increase in food production in the developing world, demographers are saying, millions more Africans, Latin Americans and Asians will be born in the coming century only to face short and miserable lives marked by poverty and near-starvation. The United Nations is trying to prove the demographers wrong with a decade-long crash family planning program. But without success from such an effort, the United Nations warned last month, the world faces "four decades of the fastest growth in human numbers in all history," with its population likely to double from 5.4 billion today to 10 billion by 2050 before leveling off around 11.5 billion after the year 2150. Some 97 per cent of this increase is expected to occur in today's developing nations. Such a population explosion would, of course, place immense new pressures on land, water, forests and other natural resources; it could also set off great migrations as the poor seek better lives in richer lands. And it would test anew the human race's ability to achieve a balance among its drive to reproduce, its ability to grow food, and nature's own capacity to trim back populations when they grow too large. Two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus, the English demographer, gloomily argued that grinding poverty and famine would eventually accomplish the goal of population control -- at enormous human cost -- whenever a country's population grew faster than its food supply. In the 1950's, just such a Malthusian famine was widely expected to decimate the third world within three decades. Demographers were predicting at the time that the world's population, then about 2.5 billion, would double by 1990. The population figures proved accurate, but the so-called "green revolution" prevented famine on a cataclysmic scale. Increased irrigation and fertilizer use, better farm management and above all the development of new high yielding varieties of wheat, rice, corn and other crops combined to produce explosive yield increases in developed and developing countries. In Mexico, for instance, wheat yields almost quadrupled between 1950 and 1980. Global grain output rose 2.6 times. Famine, once endemic to Asia and Africa, largely disappeared except in cases of war and civil strife. "History records no increase in food production that was remotely comparable in scale, speed, spread or duration," the British economist Michael Lipton wrote in "New Seeds and Poor People," a study of the green revolution. Harder This Time But now, with | The World; Food Production And the Birth Rate Are In a New Race |
527286_2 | with its recent reform efforts, however, Havana has unleashed a harsh crackdown on dissenters, sternly lectured Cuban journalists that the Government is the sole repository of the truth and denounced as "garbage" multiparty electoral democracy, without which the United States now says there will be no normalization. Republican and Democratic politicians in the United States are staking out tough positions on Cuba in this Presidential election year, at least in part as a political-season nod to conservative anti-Castro Cuban-Americans. Representative Robert G. Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat, has sponsored legislation that would punish American subsidiaries for trade with Cuba, ban ships that dock in Cuban harbors from the United States, and prohibit foreign assistance to countries that give aid or practice subsidized trade with Cuba. Trade between domestically based companies and Cuba has been banned, along with most other exchanges with the island, by a 30-year-old embargo. Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, the Democratic presidential candidate, recently endorsed the Torricelli bill during a campaign swing through south Florida. Not to be outdone in pleasing a constituency that in the past has voted heavily Republican, the Bush Administration has recently signaled its support for most of the bill, after ironing out portions that officials had warned would create serious frictions with major United States trading partners. Havana has responded by denouncing the moves as the equivalent of war, and has turned up its anti-American propaganda several notches, focusing on the recent riots in Los Angeles as evidence of America's moral bankruptcy. Asked if there were any prospect of a relaxation of American policies toward Cuba, Robert F. Gelbard, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, answered with a concise "no." Referring to Mr. Castro's human rights record and statements about electoral democracy, he added "the question is, what do you open up to." Several experts in Cuban affairs who met late last month at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington said they now expect little change in American policies toward Cuba until Mr. Castro dies or is somehow unseated. "I view it as very similar to the Likud Party's attitude toward Arafat," said Mitchell A. Seligson, director of Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, using a Middle Eastern analogy to explain official American attitudes toward Mr. Castro. "Arafat simply has to go. There is no way people are going to start saying let's deal with our historical enemy." | More and More Look to a Post-Castro Cuba |
527306_3 | by Carlo Ginz burg (Johns Hopkins University, paper). We can only guess at the enrichment of the erotic imagination provoked by such images as the nude Andromeda used to illustrate vernacular versions of the "Metamorphoses." This statement may sound paradoxical, perhaps, since these pictorial representations frequently were rudimentary and clumsy. And yet they were capable of stimulating the imagination. . . . The erotic charge of these illustrations, sometimes drawn by unskilled hands, is confirmed by a marginal piece of evidence, but not one to be ignored. The nudes which adorn the 16th-century books preserved in our libraries . . . often have come down to us disfigured by the pen-and-ink erasures of now distant readers. By blotting out or disguising the feminine or masculine sexual attributes of these figures, this public was giving vent to an impulse of the mind (or was it of the body?) that was perhaps ephemeral, but that demonstrated just the same that these images had not left it indifferent. Collaborating With the Universe Contemplating the remains of ancient Greek sculpture, Marguerite Yourcenar finds that time has not so much destroyed it as transformed it. This is from the title essay of "That Mighty Sculptor, Time" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Some of these alterations are sublime. To that beauty imposed by the human brain, by an epoch, or by a particular form of society, they add an involuntary beauty, associated with the hazards of history, which is the result of natural causes and of time. Statues so thoroughly shattered that out of the debris a new work of art is born: a naked foot unforgettably resting on a stone; a candid hand; a bent knee which contains all the speed of the foot race; a torso which has no face to prevent us from loving it; a breast or genitals in which we recognize more fully than ever the form of a fruit or a flower. . . . A curve which is lost here and re-emerges there can only result from a human hand, a Greek hand, which labored in one specific spot during one specific century. The entire man is there -- his intelligent collaboration with the universe, his struggle against it, and that final defeat in which the mind and the matter which supported him perish almost at the same time. What he intended affirms itself forever in the ruin of things. | Noted With Pleasure |
527288_3 | and are projected to double this year, the company says. And in Clive, Iowa, the tiny Hettinga Equipment Inc. expects its sales of plastic molding equipment in Malaysia, Thailand and elsewhere in Asia to triple this year. Sales in India and Russia Jeanine S. Hettinga, the president and chief executive of the 51-employee company, said she was also beginning to sell to Russia and India. Demand is especially strong in these newly opening economies for molding equipment, which is used to make automobile dashboards, vinyl car door panels, toilet seats and plastic cupboard doors. The European Community's move this year to drop internal trade barriers "is a very protectionist move, and Japan has never been easy," said Mrs. Hettinga. "We have to look for more open markets." The gain in trade with developing nations is also helping the recent economic recovery in the United States, and, therefore, is important to President Bush's re-election chances. The Commerce Department estimates that the increase in third-world exports was directly or indirectly responsible for up to 400,000 jobs, and that without the extra demand from developing countries, the nation's economy would have shrunk 1.1 percent last year instead of just seven-tenths of 1 percent. Effect on Trade Policy The rising exports are also strongly affecting American trade policy. One reason the United States is negotiating a free-trade agreement with Mexico and considering similar negotiations with Chile is that American exports to Mexico have almost tripled since 1986 while sales to Chile have nearly doubled since 1988. The trade agreements, the Administration says, will broaden the current free-market policies in in these countries and make it harder for future governments there to change them. To be sure, American trade relations with the developing countries still have problems. The United States ran a $28.23 billion trade deficit with them last year, although this was half the 1990 deficit. With the slowdown of the British and Japanese economies -- which together cut their imports from the United States by 2.6 percent last year, while increasing them slightly early this year -- even the Commerce Department predicts that the nation's overall trade deficit may widen slightly this year. Bankers Are Wary Burned during the 1980's by Latin American debts, most commercial banks remain reluctant to lend to exporters on the basis of payments expected from foreign companies. This has made it difficult for companies to finance their trade, | AMERICAN EXPORTS TO POOR COUNTRIES ARE RAPIDLY RISING |
527343_4 | who die from breast cancer. As you get older, the risk for heart attack and stroke multiplies." In the last decade, the Island has seen a dramatic increase in the population of people over 65. Based on the 1980 Census, those over 65 made up 10.6 percent of the Nassau population. By 1990 the percentage had risen to 14.2. In Suffolk County, the percentage of people over 65 rose from 9 in 1980 to 10.7 in 1990. Nassau had a head start of 10 to 15 years over Suffolk in population growth, which is a reason for the higher number of the elderly in Nassau, Suffolk Planning Director Arthur Kunz said. Based on recent projections, he said, the number of people over 65 on Long Island, now at 325,000, will be 470,000 by 2010. "These people lived through the years before smoking was found to be harmful, before we knew about cholesterol and the importance of nutrition and low-fat diets," Mr. Kunz said. "It stands to reason, based on what we now know, that people of that age would be more prone to heart disease." Before and After Menopause Before menopause, women are protected from heart disease by the ovarian hormone estrogen, Dr. Budoff said, adding that estrogen decreases cholesterol; raises HDL, the so-called good cholesterol; protects the linings of blood vessels, and helps make the heart muscle more efficient. But after menopause, she explained, the lack of estrogen contributes to increased heart disease, and in the last few years doctors are increasingly accepting estrogen replacement. Recent studies have found that hormone replacement, by a daily pill or a buttocks patch that is replaced twice a week, may add two years to a woman's life expectancy, Dr. Budoff said. The longer a woman takes estrogen, the better her protection, the doctor said, adding that estrogen replacement decreases the chance of a second attack by 85 percent. Research is showing an alarming bias against women who go to hospital emergency rooms with symptoms of heart disease, Mr. Webb said. The bias includes the fact that virtually all the cardiac-testing equipment is designed for the male anatomy. "When a woman comes in with complaints of chest pains," he said, "she's told, 'Relax, honey, you're probably under a great deal of stress.' But if it's a man, they immediately slap on an E.K.G. and order a battery of tests. This bias must change." | Women Cautioned on Heart Disease |
527338_0 | Delivery of the New York Times was disrupted again yesterday when a Times truck was burned and another was heavily damaged early yesterday as sporadic violence continued in a labor dispute between the newspaper truck drivers union and a wholesale newspaper distributor and The New York Times. A spokeswoman for The Times, Nancy Nielsen, said that two trucks were unable to deliver 108,000 papers from The Times to a wholesale distribution center in New Rochelle, N.Y. The papers were to have been taken by the wholesaler to newsstands and other outlets in Westchester County, N.Y., and Fairfield County, Conn. A computer malfunction yesterday afternoon delayed production of some of today's editions, but there was no indication that the computer problems were related to the labor dispute. The production and distribution of today's editions were further delayed by a false fire alarm and two bomb scares, the second of which occurred before 7 P.M. and resulted in the evacuation of the pressroom of the Times plant on West 43d Street in Manhattan. Two Bomb Scares "To have two bomb scares, one fire alarm and to have the computers go down all in one day is highly unusual," said Ms. Nielsen. The papers in one of the trucks were set on fire, perhaps with a flare, according to the police at the 23d Precinct. The fire was discovered at Madison Avenue and 93d Street early yesterday, shortly after the truck left The Times's Manhattan plant. Ms. Nielsen said the top of the second truck was severely damaged when its driver, who said he was trying to escape pursuing cars, drove under a low bridge. Ms. Nielsen said that two other trucks carrying papers to the wholesaler's distribution center in East Farmingdale, L.I., arrived late, Russell T. Lewis, an executive vice president and depute general manager of The Times, said about 91,000 of the 108,000 papers that were supposed to be delivered by those trucks reached the wholesaler, and of those, only 50,000 were distributed to newsstands and other outlets. He said the remaining 40,000 would be diverted to Westchester County and delivered today. Yesterday afternoon, at the request of the wholesaler, Imperial Delivery Service, Acting Justice Donald Kitson of State Supreme Court in Hauppauge, L.I., issued a temporary restraining order limiting union pickets at each distribution center to 12. Pickets from the union, the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers' Union of New York | Distribution of The Times Is Disrupted |
527367_0 | On Friday the north lawn of the United Nations was ablaze with 500,000 carnations placed there by the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The flowers weren't celebratory. They were grave markers -- for the 500,000 women who die each year around the globe from the complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Most of these women come from the slums and villages of the third world, and when they die, most of their newborns die with them. So, eventually, do two million of their other children. Yet almost all of these deaths can been prevented -- if these women have the choice to avoid pregnancy, and have a chance for medical care. Even more carnations would have been on display had not so many third world countries adopted family planning. Only 30 years ago, less than 10 percent of couples in developing countries used birth control. Today more than half do. Still, the rate at which humans multiply remains awesome, as do the consequences. Only 1 percent of American women between 15 and 49 dies from maternity causes; the rate for poor countries ranges from 20 to 46 percent. The world's growth rate is now slowing faster than seemed possible in the 60's. Past U.S. aid for population control deserves some of the credit. But the United States renounced its leadership of international family planning in the Reagan years by ending aid to any agency that so much as mentioned abortion. Resumption of that leadership could make an extraordinary impact on the future -- and on the number of women for whom pregnancy is not a fact of life but of death. | Mothers, Flowers and Death |
527423_0 | Representatives of 143 countries adopted a treaty today that commits the nations of the world to limit emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gases that scientists fear could cause a catastrophic global warming in the next century. The treaty, its key provisions hammered out in intensive talks over the last few days, is to be signed early next month at the Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro. Its long-term objective is to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases soon enough to prevent dangerous disruption of the earth's climate and enable ecosystems to adapt naturally to any climate change. This stabilization could be achieved only by substantially reducing present emission levels. The treaty calls for industrial nations, until now the biggest polluters, to aim at capping emissions at 1990 levels. But no timetable for achieving this has been set. Instead, the industrial nations would simply recognize that returning to "earlier levels" of emissions by the end of this decade would advance the treaty's overall objective. Not a One-Shot Deal But it does require that these countries report periodically to all the treaty signers on their efforts to limit emissions. And in what many said would be the true significance of the pact, machinery would be set up to constantly assess the danger of climate change and to take further action, if necessary. This approach has been successfully used in the case of chemicals that weaken the earth's protective ozone layer. "It all adds up to a significant achievement," said Richard E. Benedick, a former United States diplomat who negotiated the ozone treaty and an amendment to it. "It is a very important first step in a process that is going to take us out of fossil fuels," said Mr. Benedick, who is now a senior fellow at the World Wildlife Fund. The burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas produces carbon dioxide, the most significant of the greenhouse gases. Scientific advisers for these talks say the average global temperature will rise 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit by some time in the next century if the greenhouse gases continue to build at current rates. The proposed treaty is a compromise, and few negotiators said they were fully satisfied. Many environmentalists characterized it as disappointing and assailed its failure to establish clear targets and timetables on emissions, as the European Community advocated and the United States | 143 Lands Adopt Treaty To Cut Emission of Gases |
527564_0 | A nondescript ceramic-encased tube, just 32 inches long and 2 1/2 inches in diameter, could become a key component in the battle against water pollution, its designers believe. Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit research company in Columbus, Ohio, and Ocean Sensors Inc., a San Diego maker of ocean sensors and measuring systems, have built the tube to measure a host of underwater conditions. John Downing, manager of the Oceanography Group at the Battelle Marine Sciences Laboratory in Sequim, Wash., said the device can be used as "an environmental sentinel," tracking pollution and other water characteristics, including temperature and conductivity. It is modeled after Navy antisubmarine warfare probes, which are attached to ships by a pair of copper wires and dangle in the water. The key difference, Mr. Downing said, is that his sensor is dropped into the water from a ship or airplane. The sensor is equipped with battery-operated data-gathering microprocessors. The tube, hooked to an anchor, drops through the water at a speed of 1.5 meters per second and measures conditions throughout its descent. It can stay on the ocean floor, no matter how deep, for up to two years, although 3 to 12 months are considered the optimum duration. When it is programmed to resurface, a coil at the bottom of the device jettisons the anchor, allowing the tube to rise while continuing to monitor conditions. When the tube reaches the surface, its stored data are beamed to a satellite and back to a monitoring station on land. When the designers -- many of whom had been Naval engineers -- first developed the idea in 1989, they thought the probe would be used primarily by the Navy. But in these environmentally conscious times they are aiming at another market. The sensor, they say, can be programmed to measure water pollution. If oil or chemicals are spilled in the water, the sensor can pinpoint the pollutant's exact location and surface automatically to sound the alarm when it detects a predetermined pollution level. Battelle and Ocean Sensors have tested prototypes, which cost about $2,500 each, off the coast of southern California and in the Juan de Fuca Strait off Washington State, Mr. Downing said. They are currently negotiating with a few companies to license the technology. | Tech Notes; A Nose for Pollution |
527424_0 | Representatives of 143 countries adopted a treaty today that commits the nations of the world to limit emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gases that scientists fear could cause a catastrophic global warming in the next century. The treaty, its key provisions hammered out in intensive talks over the last few days, is to be signed early next month at the Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro. Its long-term objective is to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases soon enough to prevent dangerous disruption of the earth's climate and enable ecosystems to adapt naturally to any climate change. This stabilization could be achieved only by substantially reducing present emission levels. The treaty calls for industrial nations, until now the biggest polluters, to aim at capping emissions at 1990 levels. But no timetable for achieving this has been set. Instead, the industrial nations would simply recognize that returning to "earlier levels" of emissions by the end of this decade would advance the treaty's overall objective. Not a One-Shot Deal But it does require that these countries report periodically to all the treaty signers on their efforts to limit emissions. And in what many said would be the true significance of the pact, machinery would be set up to constantly assess the danger of climate change and to take further action, if necessary. This approach has been successfully used in the case of chemicals that weaken the earth's protective ozone layer. "It all adds up to a significant achievement," said Richard E. Benedick, a former United States diplomat who negotiated the ozone treaty and an amendment to it. "It is a very important first step in a process that is going to take us out of fossil fuels," said Mr. Benedick, who is now a senior fellow at the World Wildlife Fund. The burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas produces carbon dioxide, the most significant of the greenhouse gases. Scientific advisers for these talks say the average global temperature will rise 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit by some time in the next century if the greenhouse gases continue to build at current rates. The proposed treaty is a compromise, and few negotiators said they were fully satisfied. Many environmentalists characterized it as disappointing and assailed its failure to establish clear targets and timetables on emissions, as the European Community advocated and the United States | 143 Lands Adopt Treaty To Cut Emission of Gases |
527366_0 | On Friday the north lawn of the United Nations was ablaze with 500,000 carnations placed there by the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The flowers weren't celebratory. They were grave markers -- for the 500,000 women who die each year around the globe from the complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Most of these women come from the slums and villages of the third world, and when they die, most of their newborns die with them. So, eventually, do two million of their other children. Yet almost all of these deaths can been prevented -- if these women have the choice to avoid pregnancy, and have a chance for medical care. Even more carnations would have been on display had not so many third world countries adopted family planning. Only 30 years ago, less than 10 percent of couples in developing countries used birth control. Today more than half do. Still, the rate at which humans multiply remains awesome, as do the consequences. Only 1 percent of American women between 15 and 49 dies from maternity causes; the rate for poor countries ranges from 20 to 46 percent. The world's growth rate is now slowing faster than seemed possible in the 60's. Past U.S. aid for population control deserves some of the credit. But the United States renounced its leadership of international family planning in the Reagan years by ending aid to any agency that so much as mentioned abortion. Resumption of that leadership could make an extraordinary impact on the future -- and on the number of women for whom pregnancy is not a fact of life but of death. | Mothers, Flowers and Death |
527284_2 | Reaction to Far Right? Some political experts see the new determination to expose the fascist elements of Vichy rule as a reaction to the recent growth of a racist extreme right in France. Others view it in the context of France's introspective search for a new identity in a Europe transformed by the end of the cold war. More simply, it may also be a function of the fact that, as the generation of collaborators and Resistance fighters dies off, it is easier for younger French to look back. Yet despite the public's anger over the Touvier case and its impatience to learn more about Vichy, the French establishment's reluctance to deal with the past can also still be easily measured: so far, no French citizen has been brought to trial for anti-Jewish crimes. At the heart of French embarrassment at remembering World War II is the fact that, while France followed Britain's example by declaring war on Germany after Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939, French defenses crumbled ignominiously in face of Germany's western offensive of spring 1940. When German troops entered Paris on June 14, 1940, they also found a bitterly-divided country, with many conservatives ready to use the occupation to combat their domestic enemies. With Germany's approval, those conservatives then set up a government to run southern France from the spa town of Vichy. The broader question of collaboration was addressed soon after France's liberation in 1944. The Vichy government's head of state, the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Petain, was jailed for life and his Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, was executed. Many others were executed, jailed or publicly humiliated. But within a few years, history was being presented differently. In recognition of its prewar importance and its role in the final offensive against Germany, the United States, Soviet Union and Britain accepted France as one of the Big Four victorious allies, a status that served it well throughout the cold war. Eager to rebuild French morale, de Gaulle, as leader of the Free French forces and later as President, preferred to stress the heroism of Resistance fighters. Some conservatives argued that the Vichy government had saved France from a worse fate: while de Gaulle was the sword, they said, Petain was the shield. Even after Marcel Ophuls's "The Sorrow and the Pity" and other movies revived the issue in the 1970's, successive governments argued | Rulings Jar France Into Reliving Its Anti-Jewish Role in Nazi Era |
528625_0 | Gov. Jim Florio today signed into law three bills that increase penalties for people who exploit and abuse children. Together with a bill that Mr. Florio signed in April that made possession of child pornography a crime, the new laws give New Jersey one of the toughest set of child-protection standards in the nation, state officials said. "The well-being of our children demands that we provide increased deterrence for heinous crimes," Mr. Florio said. "Our new laws will make sure that criminals pay with hard time and significant fines and these laws should further our efforts to destroy any and all markets that exploit children." One bill signed today would expand the possible civil penalties against anyone who sexually exploited a child for profit through the distribution of child pornography or through other means. It would allow a victim to sue for damages up to three times the defendant's financial gain from the exploitation. The second bill increases the penalties for lewdness committed in the presence of a child under 13 or a mentally disabled person. The offense, which previously was considered a disorderly-persons violation punishable by up to six months in jail, now carries a penalty of 18 months in jail and a maximum fine of $7,500. The other bill increases penalties for endangering the welfare of a child and imposes especially stiff punishment for a parent or guardian convicted of the offense. The law defines endangering the welfare of a child as "either engaging in sexual conduct that would impair or debauch the morals of the child or causing the child harm that would make the child abused and neglected." The law also applies to a parent or guardian who willfully fails to provide food for a child or creates a substantial risk of physical injury. The bill authorizes a prison term of up to 5 to 10 years. The previous law set the maximum penalty at 5 years' imprisonment. | Florio Signs Bills on Child Abuse and Exploitation |
528598_1 | trouble-free production and distribution, said, "I hope the 24-hour moratorium on violence and delivery delays continues. The moratorium clearly provides the atmosphere that could lead all of us to a peaceful resolution." Arthur E. Imperatore, the owner of Imperial Delivery Service, whose purchase of the assets of two news distributorships set off the labor dispute, had his lawyer, Jerold E. Glassman, attend the meeting at The Times yesterday. But a spokesman for Mr. Imperatore, James McQueeny, said Mr. Imperatore had no comment on the discussions beyond what he had said on Monday, when he angrily denounced the drivers' union over what he said was the abduction and roughing up of one of his foremen. Douglas LaChance, president of the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers' Union of New York and Vicinity, whose members' rejection on May 6 of a leadership-approved contract with Imperial and The Times was another factor in the confrontation, declined to give the union's view of the settlement efforts but said yesterday, "We've shown good faith." He said Mr. Feinstein, who had been picked as one of the intermediaries at a boisterous union meeting Tuesday night, had told the members that he knew they were not responsible for the incidents of punctured tires and smashed windshields of Times delivery trucks. He urged them to be vigilant against violence that could undercut his effectiveness as a mediator. After Judge Pierre N. Leval of Federal District Court found the drivers' union in contempt of court on Monday for distrupting distribution of The Times and ordered penalties of $100,000 an hour for any further disruptions of the paper, for the union to say it had halted the incidents would be tantamount to admitting complicity in them. The other two go-betweens approved by the drivers union were John P. Kennedy, president of the New York Newspaper Printing Pressmen's Union No. 2, which is close to the drivers, and Michael M. Connery, a lawyer at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, who is representing unions in talks to find a buyer for The Daily News. Also attending the 45-minute meeting at The Times yesterday were Michael J. Kurtz, vice president for human resources. Mr. Sulzberger, the publisher, did not attend. Later in the evening, Mr. LaChance said he had talked with Mr. Feinstein, who he said had called the meeting "productive." Mr. LaChance said he would report to his leadership today on meetings with | Intermediaries Are Optimistic In Dispute At The Times |
528638_5 | employers list insurance costs together." Latest Documentation Bill Clinton, the likely Democratic Presidential candidate, has publicly cited studies illustrating the gap that has developed between the incomes of the wealthiest Americans and those of the rest of the population. The Economic Policy Institute's findings are the latest to document the wage stagnation for people below the highest incomes. A Census Bureau study, released earlier this week, reported that the percentage of full-time workers earning less than a low-income $12,195 annually, or $6.10 an hour for a 40-hour week, had risen sharply in the last decade. Other studies show that thousands of entry-level jobs for new college graduates evaporated during the recession that began in July 1990. From World War II until the early 1970's, the incomes of most Americans, whether they were janitors or executives, rose faster than the annual inflation rate. As a result, the constantly rising standard of living generated a sense of national well-being that began to dissipate by the 1980's -- except for the 20 percent of the population at the high end of the income scale, who escaped the stagnation, and in particular the wealthiest 1 percent. College graduates are prominent among the top 20 percent. An upturn in inflation-adjusted income that appeared to be developing in the mid-1980's failed to materialize, and by early 1989, when the nation's economic growth slowed to 2 percent a year or less, incomes had stagnated again, although college graduates had appeared to be exempt. The upshot is that median hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, for all workers, whatever their education, fell from $11.12 an hour in 1989 to $10.99 an hour last year. The wage problem for the college-educated coincides with the onset, in early 1989, of a slowdown in the growth of the nation's economy, or gross domestic product, to an annual rate of 2 percent or less, from 2.5 percent or more since 1983. That raised the issue of whether a mild recovery now projected by the Bush Administration and most economists -- one in which the economy grows at an annual rate of 2 percent to 2.5 percent this year -- would be enough to generate new jobs. "It is not clear that people will feel better off if the economy turns up a bit," Mr. Levy said. "People are catching on that beneath the ups and downs in the economy, wages have remained flat." | Pay of College Graduates Is Outpaced by Inflation |
528652_1 | visiting world leaders. Dashing hopes held by environmentalists a year ago, world leaders are not expected to sign substantive agreements here on controlling carbon dioxide gases, preserving forests and preserving biological diversity. Reflecting environmentalists' growing anger, Carlos Minc, a founder of Brazil's Green Party, plans to erect a "Mendacity Meter" outside the conference hall that will ring bells and flash lights every time an operator watching a closed-circuit television deems that falsehoods are emanating from the hall. Beyond the official meeting, controversy has also spiced plans for parallel events by Indians and non-governmental groups. Not Quite 'Non-Governmental' The largest unofficial meeting will be Global Forum, where registrants can browse among 400 workshops and 650 exhibition stands. The 10,250 registrants represent 2,202 groups from 116 nations. Although Global Forum proudly calls itself non-governmental, organizers threatened last week to fold their green-and-white tents in Flamengo Park if governments did not cover the $11 million budget for the forum's security, meeting halls, press center and other services. Faced with the ultimatum, European governments and Brazilian federal, state and municipal governments filled the budget gap. Warren H. Lindner, an American lawyer who coordinates the forum, argues that government sponsorship is reasonable for a meeting that he calculates will bring Rio $50 million in tourist business. "Government delegations are being financed by their treasuries to come down and stay at the Rio Palace with all fares paid," he said, referring to a five-star hotel. "Private institutions are paying their own air fares, meals and hotels at a tune of $6,000 a person." When Indians Burp . . . Similar bitterness erupted at Kari Oca, a cluster of traditional Indian shelters under construction a few miles from Riocentro, the conference hall where heads of state are to meet. Cultural clashes and accusations of bad faith caused 64 Indians from the Xingu River basin to stop work and to threaten to burn down two wood-and-thatch lodges they were building. The Indians, most of whom had never before left their Amazon villages, complained that they were not given hammocks for sleeping and that a brusque change in diet from fish to sausages gave them indigestion. Peace was made through the efforts of Marcos Terena, project coordinator and leader of a group called Intertribal Committee -- 500 Years of Resistance. From May 25 to 30, the group is to be host here to a World Conference of Indigenous Peoples. | Rio Journal; Cleaning the Environment for Environmentalists |
528613_0 | Owners of car cellular phones, sit up straight. Don't take your hands off the wheel. And pay close attention. This is National Cellular Safety Week, May 12 to 18. More than 7.6 million people in the United States have cellular telephones, perhaps 4 million of them in automobiles. But ever since these wireless phones became popular in the mid-1980's, they have presented people who receive calls from cars with a problem: never commanding the full attention of the driver, nor, in the interests of safety, really wanting to. Many drivers are convinced that they can talk and maneuver one and a half tons of metal with a phone tucked into their shoulder as they hurtle down twisting mountain roads or weave through stop-and-go traffic on expressways. Alarmed onlookers in other cars hold their breath. People who get calls from mobile callers are concerned, too, even if they may not admit it to the caller. They wonder whether, at some point in the conversation, they might hear the sound of twisting metal. The proper way to use a car phone, says the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, a trade group of cellular carriers, is to use the phone's "hands free" feature. This is provided by a microphone, usually attached to the sun visor, and a speaker, usually near the gearbox. "But people don't use it, or they forget it's there," said Norman Black, a spokesman for the group. "The whole purpose of Safety Week is to remind people to use it." While there are no data on accidents related to cellular phones, Mr. Black said, the trade group wants to emphasize safety before there is any push to compile such statistics. Safety fliers and other announcements are being included in bills from cellular telephone carriers. Public service announcements have already been distributed to radio and television stations. The slogan for the campaign is: "Drive responsibly by talking safely." | COMPANY NEWS: Cellular Safety First; The Life You Save May Be on the Phone |
531715_0 | The Burden of Debt The Government is hemorrhaging red ink at a rate of $1 billion a day. Economists now fear that the debt is undermining productivity. Page D1. Baker and the Europeans The European Community is likely to respond half-heartedly to an American scolding over Yugoslavia policy. News analysis, page A6. Too Many Tiny Babies Aggressive infertility treatments cause a surge in premature, multiple births. Science Times, page C1. | INSIDE |
531713_1 | indicate that special precautions are warranted in most cases of gene-altered foods, and the new policy outlines the special circumstances that would require testing and regulation before a product goes on the market. Officials of the Federal agency said the core of the policy was based on science and the principle that industry should have to consult the agency only on decidedly novel components of food before marketing a product. The new policy statement was requested by the budding biotechnology industry, which has several types of genetically engineered produce almost ready for market. Protection From Lawsuits According to the industry, more than a dozen companies in the United States have developed a total of almost 70 different crops, including cucumbers, potatoes and cantaloupes, that contain new proteins, enzymes or other substances that enhance their quality. Genetic technology holds the promise of producing foods that are more nutritious, tastier and longer-lasting while requiring less fertilizer and pesticide. One of the first of the new products consumers are likely to see is a tomato developed by Calgene Inc., of Davis, Calif., that is endowed with an extra gene that confers a longer shelf life by delaying excessive ripening. Last November, Calgene became the first company to ask voluntarily for the Federal agency to evaluate a genetically altered food. "The industry has asked F.D.A. for a policy because it wants to say to the public that the F.D.A. knows these products and stands by their safety," said a senior agency official who spoke on condition that he not be identified. "Industry wants the policy to help with product acceptability and, to an extent, for liability protection. It helps to say you are in compliance with Government regulations." The debate over genetically engineered foods has continued for more than a decade. But many of the initial concerns raised by critics now seem less formidable and, after extensive discussion, a consensus has developed in favor of moving ahead with the technology, although with appropriate precautions. The Federal agency's policy, which would go into effect when published in The Federal Register, was spurred by the President's Council on Competitiveness, a group headed by Vice President Quayle that is charged with reducing regulations that it believes hamper American industry. The policy is expected to serve as a model for similar statements being prepared by other agencies that regulate the biotechnology industry, including the Environmental Protection Agency and | GENE-ALTERED FOOD HELD BY THE F.D.A. TO POSE LITTLE RISK |
530594_0 | A political dogfight that for three weeks kept thousands of disabled children away from preschool programs in New York City was settled tonight, clearing the way for the buses that transport the children to roll again beginning Thursday morning. The dispute was a stark case study in how the lives of 7,500 small children with various physical, mental and emotional disabilities could be upended, as politicians in Albany and New York City fought over how to award and pay for the contracts for transporting them to treatment programs. And it was finally settled in classic political fashion, partly by compromise and partly by an accounting maneuver that shifted some state money from future years to the city's treasury now, averting a threatened $72 million cut in the city Board of Education's budget. "Is it budget gimmickry? Yeah, it is," said State Senator Guy J. Velella, a Bronx Republican who helped work out the agreement. "But we've done a hell of a lot worse for less important issues." 80% Drop in Enrollment Although some parents managed to take their children to the programs anyway using their own cars or going with them on the subways, enrollment at the 138 private programs that treat disabled preschoolers dropped by as much as 80 percent while the dispute carried on, according to a survey by the Inter-Agency Council, an organization representing about half the programs. "I think it's great if they're going to get the buses going again, but this shouldn't have gone on this long," said Susan Geras, whose son Anthony attends Steppingstone Day School in Kew Gardens, Queens. "They had the money. They should have found it quicker than three weeks." Anthony, who is 4 and has a speech impairment, has missed all but one day of school since the buses stopped on May 1 because his mother, who has two other small children, does not drive. Ms. Geras said he appeared to regress quickly without his lessons and his friends. "The kids shouldn't have had to go through what they went through," Ms. Geras said. A Convoluted Dispute A spokesman for the city's Board of Education, James S. Vlasto, said in an interview that strenuous efforts were being made tonight to contact bus operators, parents, and teachers in an effort to resume normal operations as quickly as possible. He said he believed that a vast majority of the buses would be | Buses for Disabled Children To Roll in Albany Accord |
530583_2 | become entangled in the referendum on June 18 on the Treaty on European Union, which has an abortion protocol that could bring changes in Irish law. The Government is gambling that the abortion dispute will not bring about defeat of the treaty, which it strongly favors, and has promised to deal with the question of legal abortions in a referendum and with new legislation in November. Europe's Highest Birth Rate The debate is taking place in a country of 3.5 million where, more so than in most of Europe, women stay in the home as childbearers. The birth rate is declining, but is still the highest in Europe. Only 30 percent of married Irishwomen have jobs outside the home, but the number is rising as the economy falters. But in recent years, despite Catholic teaching, married couples are using contraceptives. At the same time, out-of-wedlock births have risen from 1 in 60 births about 10 years ago to 1 in 10 today. "We're all pro-life," Mrs. Casey said, "but there have to be exceptions. It's not opening the floodgates like England or America. We have a different culture here. I don't know how you deal with limited abortion, but the life of the mother has to be taken into consideration. Legalize it in some situations, but not so it could be used as a contraceptive." Mrs. Killeen said: "It's wrong for me, but why should I legislate for anybody else, who may be desperate? Half of these women wouldn't go if they had proper information and counseling. If they weren't so lonely." The women, all regular churchgoers, said the priests had not been haranguing them on abortion from the pulpit. "I definitely think the church has lost it on contraception, on divorce, on abortion," Mrs. Casey said. Florence Fitzmaurice said of hard-line anti-abortion groups, "The way they talk they don't love God at all." Mrs. Casey said of the hard-liners: "The church is delighted with them. They're doing all the work and taking all the flak." She said the resignation of Bishop Eamonn Casey of Galway, amid charges that he fathered a child, was an indication that church practices and policies needed change, in this case reconsideration of the rule of celibacy for clergy. Some critics of the church, including Government officials and priests, say the Casey situation has weakened the church's image as a moral authority. Changing Attitudes Mrs. | Greystones Journal; Irishwomen, Just Talking: The Topic Is Abortion |
530476_0 | To the Editor: According to the latest projections of the United Nations Population Fund, the world population is expected to rise from 5.48 billion in mid-1992 to 10 billion in 2050, and 97 percent of the increase is expected to occur in developing countries (news article, April 30). The report points to the distressing fact that food production lagged behind population growth in 69 out of 102 developing countries between 1978 and 1989 when the population growth per year was less than what lies ahead in the next four decades. Unfortunately, this kind of carefully researched and well-argued report does not seem to generate the attention and response it deserves in the industrially developed countries. One reason may be that some of these countries are faced with the reverse problems of declining birth rate and surplus food production and do not view the increasing population pressure in developing countries as of any concern to them. In these days of advanced technology, a considerably higher population growth rate in demographic giants like China and India than in industrialized countries may not pose any military threat to the latter, but it is unrealistic to presume that the devastating effect of rapid population growth on the physical and social environment of developing countries will remain confined to their geographical boundaries. Although the primary responsibility of slowing down the population growth rate through reduction of poverty and illiteracy, improving family planning and health care facilities, and raising the status of women should be on the developing countries themselves, the industrialized countries and international agencies can do much more than what they are doing now in the fulfillment of these objectives. For example, they can contribute significantly to the development of new contraceptive methods that are more suitable for couples in developing countries than the existing ones. Ironically, the industrialized countries' investment in contraceptive research has gradually declined as the demand for consumer-friendly contraceptives has increased globally. They can also substantially increase their contribution to the inter national agencies engaged in economic and social development of the poorer countries. MONI NAG Senior Associate, Population Council New York, May 4, 1992 | Overpopulation Becomes Our Problem Too |
528277_0 | After repeated failures to rescue a wayward communications satellite, the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour today proposed a last-ditch plan that calls for space walks by three astronauts on Wednesday. Late tonight the shutttle's ground controllers agreed to the astronauts' plan. That many astronauts venturing into space at one time would be a first. In the plan, two astronauts would steady the $150 million communications relay satellite as the third attached a bar so it could be hauled into the shuttle's 60-foot payload bay. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has so far never failed on a mission to save a wayward satellite, so pressure is rising for the Endeavour's crew to succeed and for NASA to demonstrate how far it has recovered from the turmoil after the Challenger explosion. Comdr. Pierre J. Thuot of the Navy, the coolly self-assured astronaut who on Sunday and Monday failed to snag the wayward communications satellite, would lead the third attempt. Joining him would be Richard J. Hieb and Lieut. Col. Thomas D. Akers of the Air Force. Today was the sixth day of Endeavour's inaugural flight. It is the fourth mission to try to capture a wayward satellite in the 11-year history of the shuttle program but the first such attempt since the 1986 Challenger disaster, in which seven astronauts died. Endeavour's quarry is the Intelsat-6 satellite, a 4.5-ton, 17-foot craft owned by the 122-nation International Telecommunications Satellite Organization. It has been stranded in space more than two years after a rocket put it into too low an orbit. It is to be boosted by the astronauts into its correct orbit 22,300 miles above the Earth. For two hours on Monday, Commander Thuot (pronounced THOO-it) tried to insert a spring-loaded capture bar into a groove at the base of the slowly revolving satellite. Each time, the tool refused to take hold. "I put it up there and fired it, and it didn't grab," Commander Thuot said. 'A Little Frustrating Here' In weightlessness, the slightest nudge starts the satellite wobbling like an off-balance top. At the end, Commander Thuot said the bar had again failed to latch on. "It's starting to get a little frustrating here, because it looked like we were doing everything right today and we still came up empty," the commander of Endeavour, Capt. Daniel C. Brandenstein of the Navy, told flight controllers. Today in a planning session, Captain | Space Agency Plans to Send Crew of 3 to Grab Wobbling Satellite |
528281_0 | As more incidents of violence and vandalism hampered deliveries of The New York Times, efforts intensified yesterday to chart a way out of the increasingly bitter weeklong confrontation pitting The Times and a news distributor against the delivery union. At an emotional meeting of the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers' Union of New York and Vicinity last night, a packed hotel ballroom of cheering union members unanimously appointed three "go-betweens" to try to find an accord with The Times, which the union views as the key to resolving the dispute. But despite the clear eagerness for peace, there was also a demonstration for war, as union members chanted, "Shut them down, shut them down," referring to The Times. After a Federal District judge on Monday threatened heavy fines against the union, delivery disruptions outside the city abated yesterday for the second day, Times officials said. But the disruptions spread for the first time to parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, where many papers were undelivered or delayed. Twelve of 31 Metropolitan News trucks picking up papers at The Times's plant on West 43d Street in the early hours yesterday were found disabled in the trucking bays with punctured tires, delaying or preventing delivery of 240,000 of 290,233 copies of the paper bound for the East Side of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, said a Times spokeswoman, Nancy Nielsen. Distribution Improves But distribution out of warehouses in New Rochelle, N.Y., and East Farmingdale, L.I., were 95 percent of the normal level, Ms. Nielsen said. On Sunday, the deliveries from the two locations were 30 percent of the normal level, The Times said. But by Monday, that had climbed to 92 percent, Times officials said, although some retailers disputed that figure. In a further effort to curb the delivery disruptions and the violence, a New York State Supreme Court justice yesterday granted the news distributor's request for a preliminary injunction against union members picketing the two warehouses, said Jerold Glassman, a lawyer for the distributor, the Imperial Delivery Company. The order by Justice Alfred M. Lama, which is valid for 30 days and was served on the union late last night, bars the pickets from causing property damage, inflicting physical injury or interfering with Imperial's operations. The justice limited the number of protesters at each warehouse to 12 and ordered them not to picket within 215 feet of the warehouse entrances. The union meeting | Efforts Intensify to End Newspaper Labor Dispute |
529983_0 | As negotiations draw to a close here on an international treaty to slow the world's steady loss of plant, animal and microbial species, the United States is being accused by environmental groups of trying to weaken the agreement due to be signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro next month. Biologists have warned that unless international action is taken to curb the destruction of species, a mass extinction of epic proportions will result within a few decades. American officials involved in the negotiations said it was possible that the completed version would be unacceptable to the Bush Administration. If so, they said, President Bush will not sign it when he attends the meeting in Brazil with other heads of government. Bush Administration's Objections "The chances are only 50-50 that the treaty will have satisfactory language on the issues fundamental to the United States," said E. Curtis Bohlen, Assistant Secretary of State for the environment. He said the Administration had a wide range of objections, including concerns about provisions that would adversely affect the growing biotechnology industry in the United States. Representatives of the World Wide Fund for Nature, which is based in Switzerland, and the Washington-based Defenders of Wildlife said the United States delegation was trying to eliminate the requirement that each country adopt regulations to conserve its wildlife and to eliminate procedures to make one nation responsible for insuring that its private companies do not harm the wildlife of other nations. The groups circulated a memorandum from the office of Vice President Dan Quayle that said the draft treaty was so "extensively flawed" that it was "highly unlikely" the negotiations here would resolve the Administration's concerns. Delegates from European nations and Japan, as well as most developing countries, have indicated that their heads of government will sign the biodiversity treaty if agreement on its contents is reached here. The United States agreed this month to sign a climate treaty aimed at limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases that contribute to global warming. The climate and biodiversity treaties, intended to be binding agreements that would require nations to take conserving actions, are regarded as the most important substantive matters at the Brazil gathering. At the heart of the discussions here are the measures that nations would be required to take in conserving species, habitats and ecosystems. The United Nations, whose environmental program is based in | Environmentalists Accuse U.S. Of Trying to Weaken Global Treaty |
529861_0 | Deciding Whether to 'Treat' Hormone Loss of Menopause Hormone replacement therapy offers benefits after menopause, like some protection against heart disease and osteoporosis, but women must decide whether benefits outweigh possible risks. Science Times, page C1. Execution Stay Is Refused Virginia's Governor refused to halt the execution of a man convicted of killing his sister-in-law. Page A12. Victory for Sleeping Pill A panel found that Halcion was safe and effective and should remain on the market. Science Times, page C3. Florio Vetoes Tax Rollback Gov. Jim Florio vetoed a 1-cent reduction in the state sales tax, but an override is almost certain. Page B1. | INSIDE |
529968_7 | topical creams and lubricants. Estrogen replacement alone cannot keep the internal and external ravages of age at bay indefinitely, but it can retard such changes in estrogen-dependent tissues and reverse many of them even if estrogen use is begun years after menopause has occurred. Thus, a decade or more after pain and bleeding have forced a woman to forgo intercourse, estrogen replacement can restore the lining, depth and secretions of the vagina that are important to sexual pleasure. Most serious are postmenopausal effects on the bones, heart and blood vessels. When levels of circulating estrogen drop, the bones lose minerals faster than they gain them. As the bones gradually thin, there is an increased risk of fractures, especially in the spine and hip. Hip fractures, in addition to costing billions of dollars for medical care, result in fatal complications in 15 to 20 percent of elderly women who suffer them. But women who take estrogen replacement sustain 40 percent fewer hip fractures than those who do not take the hormone. By far the highest death rates accompany postmenopausal changes in the circulatory system. After a decline in estrogen, many women experience a rise in blood levels of artery-clogging LDL-cholesterol and a decline in protective HDL-cholesterol. This and other cardiovascular changes bring a sharp rise in heart attacks. Without estrogen treatment, women's coronary mortality rate rises thirtyfold within 15 to 20 years of menopause. With the hormone, their risk of dying of a heart attack at any age may be reduced by 50 percent, several major studies have indicated. For example, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard Medical School in Boston who are conducting a long-term study of factors influencing the health of 120,000 nurses found that in 48,470 postmenopausal women who were followed for 10 years, those who took estrogen had a heart attack rate almost half that of the women who took no replacement hormones. One problem with this and other such studies is that women who choose to take hormones tend to be more health-conscious and have a higher standard of living, which may contribute to their lower coronary risk. A large study under the auspices of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute is now under way to determine if hormone replacement lowers a woman's coronary risk independently of other factors. The study will look in a scientific way at the effects over a | Can Drugs 'Treat' Menopause? Amid Doubt, Women Must Decide |
533887_0 | Following are excerpts from a cable sent by William K. Reilly, director of the Environmental Protection Agency and acting head of the United States delegation at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The cable, stamped "Confidential," was addressed to Clayton Yeutter, President Bush's domestic policy chief. June 3, 1992 To: Clayton Yeutter From: William K. Reilly Re: Biodiversity Convention As I indicated last night, Brazil has offered to try to "fix" the Biodiversity Convention so that the United states could sign it. I have serious doubt whether the Brazilians can get others to accept a fix, but I have indicated a willingness to let them try. In response to the Brazilian request for changes the United States must have to be willing to sign, we have produced the attached list. This list reflects the best judgment of those here as to what minimal changes would address our bottom-line concerns. I would ask for your help in getting in touch with the appropriate high-level officials in the key agencies (Commerce, U.S.T.R.) as well as the White House for clearance. (State and E.P.A. have cleared.) I would like to share this list with the Brazilians later today if at all possible. This effort, if it is to succeed, must be concluded before Friday when the convention will be open for signing. . . . As I indicated last night, the U.S. refusal to sign the Biodiversity Convention is the major subject of press and delegate concern here. In the press conference today I indicated we would not sign it as is even if we stood alone. The changes proposed, while not making everyone in the U.S. Government totally happy, would address the critical issues that have been identified. They are worth a last examination. I would be interested in a quick yes-or-no signal on this list of changes and the proposed Brazilian effort -- additional changes would likely render the Brazilian task of selling this to others unachievable. If the Brazilians were able to say that they could sell the United States on these changes, it would give them a somewhat larger chance of success. Of course, if there is any indication that this effort might, in any way, lead to the possibility of reopening the Climate Changes Convention, we would drop it immediately. THE EARTH SUMMIT | Excerpts From Rio Memo: A Plea for the Environment |
538209_0 | In a display of France's conflicting feelings toward Europe, French legislators today approved constitutional changes needed to put the Maastricht Treaty on European union into effect, while angry farmers blocked highways around Paris to protest a reduction of European Community subsidies. Endorsement of the constitutional changes by a rare joint session of Congress in the Palace of Versailles set the stage for a referendum late this summer on the treaty, which commits the community to create a single currency and to adopt common foreign and security policies. With 592 legislators voting in favor, only 73 against and 216 abstaining, the result was an important boost for President Francois Mitterrand just days before he meets other community leaders to debate the implications of Denmark's rejection of the treaty in a referendum on June 2. Meanwhile, a Dissent But the attempt by several thousand farmers to blockade the capital was also a reminder that, to some Frenchmen at least, plans to transfer greater sovereignty to the community represent a potential threat. The farmers are unhappy about the community's decision last month to reform its common agricultural policy by cutting subsidies and lowering guaranteed prices for grains and beef. The reform is aimed at reducing huge food stocks, bringing down food prices and resuming global free-trade talks, which have been deadlocked by disagreements between the community and the United States over farm-price supports. France's one million farmers, though, fear the changes will put many of them out of work and accelerate the exodus from the countryside. Jacques Laigneau, president of Rural Coordination, the small group that organized the protest, accused the Government of committing "farmer genocide." The Publicity Helped The protesters said they cut off 15 highways in a 25-mile radius from downtown Paris. The Interior Minister, Paul Quiles, said disruption was minor. At Ablis, south of Paris, six policemen and a farmer were hurt during a clash in which the police fired tear-gas. Tonight, the protest was called off amid charges that the Government had resorted to "brutal force." The enormous publicity that the action attracted nonetheless achieved one of Rural Coordination's objectives -- drawing attention to the growing power of the 12-nation community to make decisions supposedly harmful to French interests. The Maastricht Treaty in fact makes no reference to agriculture, but opponents of the agreement have also insisted that it involves excessive surrender of French sovereignty. The treaty takes its | In Paris, an Uneasy 'Oui' to One Europe |
538333_0 | To the Editor: "In Rwanda, Births Increase and Problems Do, Too" (front page, May 31) relies on the flawed logic of population-control ideology and fails to examine the real problems facing Rwandans and others in the developing world. The high birth rate in Rwanda is not the cause but rather a symptom of poor living conditions. Although you quote a World Bank report stating that "educated women have smaller families, and their children tend to be healthier and better educated," you present a decreased birth rate as a solution in itself to Rwanda's problems. Decades of coercive family planning programs, which offer women birth control and sterilization, but do not provide comprehensive health care or address their wider needs, have shown this strategy is doomed to failure. We should address the real issues. It is estimated that 200,000 women worldwide die of illegal or unsafe abortions each year, yet our Government refuses aid to facilities in the developing world that offer abortions or abortion counseling. Birth control methods considered unsafe in this country, such as Depo-Provera injections, given at clinics in Rwanda, are widely used on third world women (and low-income women at home) without their knowing the risks. The unequal distribution of wealth between industrialized and developing nations, and within developing nations themselves, perpetuates the poverty, illiteracy and powerlessness that lead women to have more children than they are able to feed. The United States, with 5 percent of the world's people, accounts for one-third of the world's use of nonrenewable resources, making our per capita consumption of energy several hundred times that of the average Rwandan. Is it not hypocritical and racist to complain about the effects of "overpopulation" on the environment and do nothing to curb our overconsumption? RACHEL ROSENBLOOM New York, June 10, 1992 The writer is a member of Women's Health Action and Mobilization. | Part of Rwanda's Problem Begins in U.S. |
538219_0 | Chester Mirador grins when he recalls failing eighth grade. His mother would drop him at the front door of the Westport Middle School and he would slip out the back to join friends. But four years ago his life changed when Ewing Kauffman promised him and his fellow students at Westport High School financial support -- regardless of whether they planned to enter college, a trade school or a job-training program -- if they graduated with their classmates and avoided drugs and teen-age parenthood. Teachers, counselors and administrators helped Chester catch up, and discover that he was a gifted math student. "I now have this feeling that there's someone out there who cares about my education," he said. The 17-year-old will be the first in his family to attend college -- the University of Missouri or Kansas State University, where he will study science. Hoping to Change Lives Mr. Kauffman, chairman emeritus of Marion Merrell Dow Inc., the pharmaceuticals manufacturer, and owner of the Kansas City Royals baseball team, says he launched Project Choice at his alma mater to cut the school's high dropout rate. "We felt the quickest way to make a change in the kids' lives is through education," said Thomas J. Rhone, director of the project. The program now involves about 1,000 students, including the three other classes at Westport and selected students at five high schools in Kansas City, Kan. Unlike other programs that promise education financing in exchange for high school graduation, Project Choice supports equally students who choose college, vocational school or on-the-job training. According to Mr. Rhone, 81 of this year's 115 Westport graduates will attend college, 5 will attend vocational school and 15 will participate in job-training programs. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, through which Project Choice is financed, estimates that post-secondary education for all participants will cost about $7.2 million. Help for Teachers Project Choice also provides services for teachers and students, including training workshops, Saturday classes, tutoring, college board preparatory classes and help in filling out financial aid and application forms. Because many of these students have no concept of what college life is like, and of the expectations they must meet, the project offers participants the opportunity to live on a college campus for up to six weeks. In some cases, students can earn college credit for their work. Westport High School was selected as the first site for | Incentives to Graduate: Money and New Paths |
538265_2 | Olympics at the Summer Games in Rome in 1960. Ten years later, the country was expelled from the Olympic family because of its policies of racial segregation, a blow to a sports-mad country with outstanding athletes of all races in track and field, soccer, tennis and golf. As momentum increased for creating shared power between the white minority and black majority, the South African Government met several conditions imposed by the I.O.C., including the statutory abolishment of apartheid, and the country was readmitted to the I.O.C. this year. With that came an invitation to participate this summer in Barcelona, and the new nonracial Olympic committee agreed to send a team of 97 athletes of all races. As part of the negotiations leading to the invitation, officials from the I.O.C. met at least three times with Mandela. In those discussions, Carrard said, the sides acknowledged the potential for violence or other acts that might disrupt the negotiations toward a reconfigured government. But at no time, Carrrard said, was any linkage made between the negotiations and South Africa's participatory status within the Olympic community. "In each occasion," he said, referring to the I.O.C. talks with Mandela, "the prospects of very difficult times in the negotiations for a new constitution and government were mentioned. We have never had a link between the status of the talks and the conditions laid down for the readmission of South Africa's national Olympic committee. Which is not to say we do not expect to face problems. But at this stage there is no indication of any change." Carrard said that he and other I.O.C. officials were familiar with remarks made on Monday in Cape Town by Archbishop Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a leading crusader for human rights. The Archbishop said the I.O.C. should revoke its invitation to South Africa unless the Government apprehends those responsible for the deaths of about 40 residents in black-on-black violence in Boipatong township last week. The Archbishop and others have accused the police, and, therefore, the Government, of at least indirect complicity in the violence. Carrard said that the I.O.C. is sensitive to "the words of all important people." "But I have to emphasize," he added, "that we are concerned with South Africa, just as we are concerned with Yugoslavia. But at this stage, there is no indication that Mr. Tutu's words will cause us any change." OLYMPICS | A Call to Withdraw South African Athletes |
536422_0 | * Spice Time Foods, Hoboken, N.J., to the Zak Agency, New York, as its first agency for consumer and trade advertising. Also, Alpwater S.A., Saxon, Switzerland, to Zak as the bottled water's American agency to handle creative and media for an introduction in the New York market. Billings were not disclosed. THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING -- ADDENDA | Accounts |
536563_0 | A VISITOR who glances upward into the canopy of a New World tropical rain forest will be struck by the sight of spiny, succulent plants that festoon the tree branches and trunks, making a constellation of star-shaped silhouettes against the sky. This large family of plants, called bromeliads, is well known to plant enthusiasts and is most familiar to Americans in the form of its domesticated relative, the pineapple. As biologists invade the upper reaches of the forest canopy, a habitat that some see as the last frontier of the tropics, they are discovering that these air plants are the hub of much of the canopy's activity. Researchers say these abundant plants are being recognized as a vital source of nutrients and of diversity in the rain forest, much more important than anyone had previously suspected. Dr. Brian M. Boom, vice president for botanical science at the New York Botanical Garden, said the plants have undergone "an evolutionary explosion" in the tropics of the Americas. The bromeliads, through an unusual feature of their architecture, are miniature self-contained ecosystems, central to the lives of many creatures in this upper strata of the jungle, where some biologists say nearly half of the earth's species live. With the signing of the biodiversity treaty at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro last week, the world has focused its attention on the importance of protecting species like bromeliads and the diverse canopy habitats that they help support. "It's a very exciting time," said Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, a professor of biology at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who has worked in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica. "It's exciting to get to the plants in this upper part of the forest that nobody knows anything about." Anyone who does manage the task of scaling a tree to look into a bromeliad will find the secret to their importance. Bromeliads hold a pool of rainwater deep inside, the centerpiece in their tight rosette of leaves. A paradoxically rare resource in the lush rain forest, the water in the bromeliads' coveted pools allows the plants to survive in this otherwise rather arid habitat and at the same time lures all manner of creatures to share in the watery riches. Tropical birds, like the orange-bellied trogon, fly in to sip from the pools, or tanks, while poison-dart frogs with flattened bodies and spindly legs | Pond-Making Plants Nurture Riot of Life In Forest Treetops |
536440_0 | To the Editor: You report on hormonal treatments of troublesome menopause symptoms (Science Times, May 19) and indicate that other treatments are not well documented. All the more reason to examine life style and diet in a scientific way. Japanese women have a much lower incidence of hot flushes than counterparts in Europe or the United States, a striking difference unlikely to be accounted for by cultural differences. Researchers (some quoted in the May 16 Lancet) have found that the traditional Japanese low-animal-fat diet gave subjects a high urinary level of phyto-estrogens. Levels were 100 to 1,000 times higher than among subjects on a Western diet. The findings are associated with such soy products in the diet as tofu, miso and atuage. The weak estrogens found in comparatively high amounts in the urine could have beneficial effects, especially in postmenopausal women with low estrogen levels. High levels of phyto-estrogens may partly explain what makes hot flushes and other bothersome symptoms of menopause so infrequent in Japanese women. MARC CANTILLON, M.D. New York, May 23, 1992 | Diet May Play a Role In Menopause Effects |
536438_0 | To the Editor: There is no known scientific evidence that genetically engineered tomatoes may be dangerous to human health, as Sheldon Krimsky, professor of urban and environmental policy, maintains (Op-Ed, June 1). He relies on people's ignorance and fear of the effects of biotechnology on foods. Professor Krimsky implies that faulty genetic engineering was the cause of problems associated with contaminated L-tryptophan. The investigative team that is studying this problem says there is no evidence to indicate genetic engineering had anything to do with the problem. Similarly, the use in milk production of bovine somatotropin, a natural cow hormone, yields milk that is chemically indistinguishable from milk produced by untreated cows. Traditional genetic modification of foods has given us hybrid corn, broccoflower and lean pork, to name a few familiar examples. Today's technology enables plant and animal breeders to confer highly specific traits across species for the development of valuable characteristics, such as pest resistance and improved nutritional value in plants and the decreased use of agrochemicals by farmers. This work is closely scrutinized by Food and Drug Administration regulators, and the products are rigorously tested during development. It is likely that the use of biotechnology in developing these products will bring higher quality food to our tables at lower cost. Development of species with substances not generally recognized as safe requires pre-market approval. Transfer of proteins from commonly allergenic foods, such as milk, eggs, peanuts, fish and wheat, requires proof that the modified foods are not allergenic, or labeling will be required. Labeling is also required if the nature of the food is changed. Inciting public fear with fantasy and fiction about biotechnology could lead to regulatory policies based on superstition, instead of science. Good regulatory policy should protect the public and not unnecessarily inhibit technology development, our national competitiveness and the benefits to farmers. JOYCE A. NETTLETON SUSAN K. HARLANDER MARK D. DIBNER Chicago, June 4, 1992 The writers are, respectively, scientific public affairs director, Institute of Food Technologists; associate professor, food science and nutrition, U. of Minnesota; information director, North Carolina Biotechnology Center. | Mutant Foods Create Risks We Can't Yet Guess; No Evidence of Danger |
536439_0 | To the Editor: "Tomatoes May Be Dangerous to Your Health" (Op-Ed, June 1) by Sheldon Krimsky is right to question the decision of the Food and Drug Administration to exempt genetically engineered crops from case-by-case review. Ever since Mary Shelley's baron rolled his improved human out of the lab, scientists have been bringing just such good things to life. If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it's time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle. PAUL LEWIS Newton Center, Mass., June 2, 1992 | Mutant Foods Create Risks We Can't Yet Guess; Since Mary Shelley |
536437_0 | To the Editor: "Not-So-Bad Boy of Biodiversity" (editorial, June 5), which sides with the Bush Administration and the biotechnology industry against the Rio de Janeiro biodiversity treaty, trivializes and misrepresents the issues. Readers are left with the Administration's claim that third-world countries are seizing a pretext to tax rich ones and that any industrial countries with a different view are trying to hobble the United States in the one sector in which it leads. But the conflict between commercial biotechnology and biodiversity is real indeed. Since the Supreme Court decision of 1980, we have granted patents for genetically altered organisms. This holds that they are inventions, not variable products of nature. Yet genetic engineers have not designed organisms from scratch; they have altered one or a few genes in a creature with an evolutionary legacy of millions of years. No wonder poor countries, struggling to meet the competing but inseparable needs of environment and development, think our claims of "patent protection" must be weighed against their stake in a common heritage. Once a corporation holds a patent, it has every incentive to promote its product. This means a great increase in monoculture -- precisely at the expense of biological diversity and ecological resilience. The Bush Administration says genetic engineering poses no special risks, and novel organisms should go unregulated unless one can prove their danger in advance. That would be fine if we were trying to decide whether rattlesnakes are poisonous. But the question with novel organisms is far more complicated. It lies in their interaction with thousands of other organisms. The case of the gypsy moth shows the havoc an exotic species can wreak on an environment that has had no time to adapt to it. Genetically altered organisms pose this risk by definition. Unlike natural organisms that have evolved in step-by-step interaction with the environment, they are a bolt from the blue. Most will be harmless. But as we rush to large-scale release of more and more such organisms, the risk multiplies. Nor, as is often claimed, will genetic engineering necessarily reduce use of pesticides and herbicides. Monsanto has developed herbicide-tolerant wheat, a double bonanza for the industry but not for the environment or consumers (news article, May 28). Again, this will take a special toll in poor countries, where the costs of technological agriculture break poor farmers and swell the ranks of the landless. In theory new | Mutant Foods Create Risks We Can't Yet Guess |
535209_1 | industry people, environmentalists with government people, environmentalists with trade people," said the woman who is founder and president of the Association for the Defense of the Environment in Guatemala. For Mrs. Pacheco, the Earth Summit is a bittersweet experience. The formal name of the gathering, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, embodies her life philosophy. But because participation by private groups is restricted, she has gotten no closer than 20 miles to the official conference center. "I feel like they have arranged it so we are in -- but just in the door," she concluded. The Botswana Minister: Seesio Liphuko In the frenetic swirl of delegates and journalists rushing through the halls of the official Riocentro convention center, one man, Seeiso Liphuko, maintained a dignified, unhurried gait on a recent afternoon. Mr. Liphuko, Environmental Minister of Botswana, was moving at a cordial pace. In one of dozens of news conferences lost in the Earth Summit flurry, Mr. Liphuko made public his nation's "Conservation Strategy," the fruit of five years of deliberation in his southern African nation of fivemillion people. In contrast to conservation blueprints imposed from the top, Botswana's plan was debated across the land in community forums, known as kgotla. "We have a tradition of talking," the minister said. The resulting master plan addresses problems of land degradation from cattle ranching, disorderly urbanization and desertification. By announcing the plan at the Earth Summit, Mr. Liphuko said, his nation hoped to arouse greater concern globally for Africa's terrible loss of land through desertification. "All the issues outlined in this strategy are connected to desertification: forestation, sand dune stabilization, farming," said the minister, a former town planner. "When the rains don't come, the food doesn't come, and people spend half their time just seeking water and food." The Kentucky Organizer: Larry Wilson Wearing a Stetson hat and speaking with a Kentucky drawl, Larry Wilson likes to criticize "prima donna national environmental groups" that advocate policies in Washington without listening to rural America. Traveling from central Appalachia to Rio, Mr. Wilson, a director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, has surprised African, Asian and Latin American ecologists with his message: pockets of the United States share the same environmental problems as the third world. A veteran of battles with strip miners and toxic-waste dumpers, Mr. Wilson is working in Rio to change a belief in the third world that | 4 of the Varied Faces In the Global Crowd At the Rio Gathering |
535191_0 | Negotiatiors from rich and poor countries were moving tonight toward a multibillion-dollar agreement under which the industrialized nations would help the third world pay the extra costs of making sure that their economic development does not inflict irreparable damage on the world's fragile ecological systems. Environment and development ministers from many of the 178 countries attending the Earth Summit will try to conclude the agreement at their first ministerial-level meeting on Thursday by seeking a compromise on the exact amount of new aid and on new steps to preserve the world's dwindling forests and fight pollution of the atmosphere. Participants said today that after all-night negotiations, a deal appeared to be in sight on the crucial question of financing environmentally sustainable development in the third world. That accord may open the way to resolving other disputes, they said. With heads of state and government due to start arriving here on Thursday, negotiators are under intense pressure to complete the package of new environmental measures. Their leaders hope to sign the accords at the conclusion of the Earth Summit this weekend. Statement of Principles Those measures include a statement setting out the broad principles that should guide the world as its tries to avoid exhausting environmental resources yet sustain economic growth. The leaders also plan to adopt a more detailed action plan, known as Agenda 21, that outlines steps for achieving that goal in every environmental sector and provides for the North to help pay the extra costs that such safeguards will entail in the developing world. The United States is also pushing hard for a declaration on principles countries should follow to save the world's diminishing forests. The measure would be nonbinding, but would commit the nations to negotiating a binding convention on the issue later on. New conventions on curbing emissions of climate-changing gases and on preserving rare plants and animals have already been prepared for signature by the leaders attending the gathering, which is described as the biggest conference of governments ever held. Organizer Is 'Encouraged' At a news conference late this afternoon, the summit meeting's organizer, Maurice Strong of Canada, said he was "very encouraged at the progress being made" in the aid talks. "Outstanding issues are not going to override the tremendous desire to suceed," he said. Other diplomats appeared more optimistic than they had been a day or so ago, when the gap between North | Pact Is Shaping on Environmental Aid to Third World |
535210_0 | A team of Government scientists mapping changes in the earth's surface says the latest satellite pictures show a surprising level of damage to the richest forests of the United States. When compared particularly with the tropical rain forests of Brazil, the evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest, although only a tenth the size, appear to be in danger of losing their biological vitality, the scientists said. They said the pictures showed the national forests in the Northwest so torn up by thousands of clear-cuts that the logging threatened the ability of the forests to support many different species. The scientists, from the National Aeronautics and Space Adminstration's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., are led by Dr. Compton J. Tucker. They base their conclusions on pictures from space of the tropical rain forest in Brazil and the temperate rain forests of Washington and Oregon. 'Severe Fragmentation' Found "When you compare the situation in the Pacific Northwest to the Amazon of Brazil, the Northwest is much worse," Dr. Tucker said in an interview. "The pictures show this amazing, graphic situation -- the severe fragmentation of the forest in the Northwest." Because the continuity of the forest is so badly damaged, he said, such logging "has serious implications" for the diversity of plant and animal species needed to maintain a healthy biological system. In recent years, as other countries have stepped up their criticism of forestry practices in South American nations, some of these countries, including Brazil, have countered by citing the destructive logging of ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest. As delegates met in Rio de Janeiro this week for the Earth Summit, leaders from the northern nations have continued to press for restrictions on logging in tropical forests. Main Objective at Rio The United States delegation arrived in Rio proclaiming protection of the world's forests as the main objective. As an incentive to developing countries, President Bush said the United States would increase its aid to other nations' forestry programs by $150 million, to $270 million, in the next fiscal year. But the Bush Administration has opposed as too costly a proposed treaty that would protect the world's plant and animal species. Officials of the United States Forest Service, which sets policy on logging operations in national forests, say it is misleading to make judgments about forest practices based on pictures from space. Almost all the cut-over Forest Service | Citing Space Photos, Scientists Say Forests in the Northwest Are in Danger |
539588_0 | World Economies | |
539460_0 | The Irish Government said over the weekend that it is sending high-ranking officials to meetings in London on Tuesday with prominent hard-line Protestant leaders from Northern Ireland. The Protestants are to include the Rev. Ian Paisley, the powerful political and religious leader, who in the past has scornfully refused to talk to Dublin officials. The meeting is considered vital to the continuation of talks on a peaceful solution to the violence in the British province between the Protestant majority and the Roman Catholic minority, in which nearly 3,000 have died since 1969. One of the most volatile issues is expected to be discussed -- the republic's constitutional claim to the North. The talks were arranged after Prime Ministers Albert Reynolds of Ireland and John Major of Britain talked at the end of the week in Lisbon, where they attended a meeting of European Community leaders. The meeting will be attended by the Irish Foreign Minister, David Andrews, and by Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, who is chairman of the talks. Senior elected officials of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, the principal Catholic party in the North, will also attend. Representatives of the Irish Government met with Protestant hard-liners on June 19 in London, but Mr. Paisley pulled out at the last minute and sent a low-level delegation from his Democratic Unionist Party. View of One Ireland A major sticking point had been the insistence by Mr. Paisley and other Unionists that the agenda include the provisions of the Irish Constitution that refer to the North. The Protestants are disturbed particularly by Article 2, which says: "The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas." Despite this article, the Irish Government's policy on the North is set in a 1985 agreement with London, in which both "affirm that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would only come about with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland." There are 950,000 Protestants and 650,000 Catholics in Northern Ireland, a British province often called Ulster. | Dublin To Meet With Protestants From the North, Including Paisley |
538141_4 | of phone. Listening Toms at the convention, said Philip R. Karn, who designs cellular telephone equipment but insisted on anonymity for his company as a condition for the interview, could simply rent a room at the Ramada Hotel facing Madison Square Garden across Seventh Avenue. They could point a special ultra-high-frequency antenna, even more sensitive than a radio scanner, and listen to random conversations on cellular phones. With a little advance intelligence work, the Listening Tom could have a fair idea when a certain person would be talking and therefore how to help narrow the search for the right conversation among the hundreds going on, Mr. Karn said. Cellular telephones are radio transmitters that broadcast to and receive signals from a network of "cells," or transmission towers. When a cellular user drives or walks, different cell sites capture and strengthen the cellular telephone's radio signal and then connect the phone to the regular telephone network. But such radio frequencies have difficulty penetrating thick-walled buildings. So in a building like Madison Square Garden, which is made of concrete and steel, cellular users with phones even the size of a small briefcase have a slim chance of getting a signal. Instead of broadcasting a big signal, in vain, into a thick building, cellular telephone companies have miniaturized the network and placed it inside the building. Using "microcells" with only half a watt, or one-thousandth the power of a regular macrocell, such a system provides better coverage within a building without the expense of the large system. These microcells, instead of broadcasting a signal for miles, broadcast only several hundred feet. So instead of a pocket cellular phone trying to pull a weakened signal through concrete from a macrocell several city blocks away, it will get a strong signal from 300 or so feet within the Garden. That is why Alfred F. Boschulte, president of Nynex Mobile, one of the two providers of cellular service in New York City, does not expect eavesdropping to be a problem. 160 Calls at a Time Also, he said, the four microcells that Nynex has installed provide 160 channels, enough for 160 simultaneous conversations. The microcells were installed as part of convention service, but after the convention they will remain in the Garden to improve cellular service there. (Cellular One, Nynex's rival, also plans to install two microcells in the Garden with a total of 90 channels.) | Political Eavesdropping Made Easier |
538157_0 | Ten minutes out and Finland is fading fast astern; Jimi Hendrix appears on the video and beer sells for $1.70 at the bar. This is the 5 P.M. hydrofoil, Helsinki to Tallinn, and not an empty seat can be found. These days, it seems, everybody's doing the Baltic commute. Flowing into Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia by ferry and high-speed launch, prop plane and jetliner, the commuters are a rambunctious assortment of corporate executives and salesmen, con men and smugglers, arms peddlers and tourists -- all travelers to the strange new world along the brittle edge of what used to the old Soviet empire. Since the collapse of Communism and the emergence in September of the three republics as independent countries, the Baltics have come to resemble a kind of post-Soviet Casablanca, where the once impregnable borders are now as porous as sieves and anything seems possible, for a price. Local officials complain that tens of thousands of Russian soldiers still billeted in the Baltics are selling off their Kalashnikov rifles and other military equipment at whatever the market will bear; counterfeit American and German money has been flooding the region, and crime in Lithuania, according to one recent survey, jumped 23 percent in the first quarter of the year compared with the same period last year. Help Wanted at Borders "Drugs coming out of Russia are already a problem, and we really don't have anywhere near enough people to watch the borders," said Auskelis Plavins, an official with Latvia's Ministry of Defense. "We have about 2,000 border guards, and we need at least twice, maybe three times, as many as that." Estonia recently received its first coast guard patrol boat, a donation from the Swedish Government. There are two such boats in Latvia. Set on the Baltic Sea, with their backs to Russia, the three republics have served as a kind of east-west crossroads over the centuries. Just as they have once again become a target of Western businesses looking for investment opportunities, they have also emerged as a conduit for anyone trying to move illegal goods and people in and out of the old Soviet republics. In February, customs officials in Tallinn seized a shipment of nearly 15,000 Makarov automatic pistols, standard sidearm issue among the former Warsaw Pact armies. Manufactured at a factory in Yaroslavl, 150 miles north of Moscow, the guns were bound for a broker on | Tallinn Journal; Leaky Borders Fill Baltics Brimful With Intrigue |
538056_7 | satellites and their records. In explaining the directive's origin, the official said the Administration's teams had concluded that "heretofore classified assets" might aid ecological research, "the winds of change being what they are." The existence of the directive was first reported in Space News, a trade publication. View Through 'Soda Straw' For more than a year, select scientists have quietly debated how reconnaissance could aid ecological research. One clear limit of spy satellites is their narrow field of view, which has often been likened to seeing the world through a soda straw. In contrast, satellites built to monitor the environment tend to have broader horizons. One solution, said a former C.I.A. analyst, would be to sample a wide region periodically. "It's like having thermometers scattered throughout the forest," he said. On the plus side, orbiting spy craft have unusual power. Radar satellites can see through clouds and all kinds of obstructions, in theory giving ecologists a rich harvest of new data. In 1981 an experimental radar aboard a space shuttle unexpectedly penetrated up to 16 feet into the dry sands of the Sahara, revealing traces of ancient sub-Saharan rivers that had carved out valleys as broad as those of the present Nile. Dr. Ferris Webster, an oceanographer at the University of Delaware who is chairman of the National Academy of Sciences' committee on geophysical and environmental data, said a major problem in predicting the usefulness of reconnaissance information was that scientists have been in the dark about what was available. Skepticism on Achieving Goal "Even the catalogues are classified," he noted. And while applauding the recent openings, Dr. Webster said the spy data might prove to be more fool's gold than a treasure. "It can't help but be in our interest to open up whatever data sets are available," he said. "But I'm skeptical we'll find anything revolutionary. Civilian files tend to be very good." John E. Pike, head of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington, estimated that over the decades the nation had spent $125 billion on its spy satellite operations and said that it made sense to examine the data closely. "If you've invested $125 billion, and can get a billion dollars worth of environmental data for a small additional investment, then it's certainly worth doing," Mr. Pike said. "There's so much stuff there that you're bound to find something useful." | Spy Data Now Open For Studies Of Climate |
538183_2 | project an issue. The Environmental Defense Fund, the International Rivers Network and Greenpeace International said in a letter to the bank before the vote that the project on the Shire River near Blantyre would threaten an already endangered elephant population, flood part of a wildlife sanctuary and disrupt the livelihoods of fishing families downstream. Malawians are denied the right of dissent by a one-party government. A group of donor nations recently froze aid to the country to protest a spate of violent repression this spring. The joint Natural Resources Defense Council-Human Rights Watch survey looks at Brazil, Eritrea, India, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines and the former Soviet Union as well as the United States. In all cases, the survey tried to rely as much as possible on local sources of information, giving the people involved an outlet for sharing experiences. 9 Months of Research The team that conducted the independent review of the hydroelectric project in India for the World Bank was led by Bradford Morse, an American who was formerly Under Secretary General of the United Nations and head of the United Nations Development Program, and Thomas R. Berger, a former judge on the Canadian Supreme Court. The team drew on the expertise of South Asian specialists in social sciences, health and engineering. The review had been prompted by a barrage of human rights reports in Europe, the United States and Japan charging abuses against those who protested the forced relocation of at least 100,000 people and the drastic alteration of the Narmada River valley with over 3,000 dams, one of them 535 feet high and nearly 4,000 feet long, and 47,000 miles of canals. In some areas that are expected to be flooded within a month as waters rise behind the dams, people have refused to be resettled. "This has been a test case for the way international groups can work with grassroots organizations in developing countries," said Patricia Gossman, director of the Washington office of Asia Watch, which issued its own report last week on the Sardar Sarovar project, "Before the Deluge: Human Rights Abuses at India's Narmada Dam." "The Narmada case had widest cooperation worldwide," she said. "Groups with many mandates came together because they saw their interests were closely linked." Last year Japan froze its $230 million contribution to the project, under pressure from environmentalists and human rights groups. India plans to generate 1,450 | Movement Builds to Fight Harmful Projects in Poor Nations |
533308_3 | founded in 1986 by Maria Tereza Jorge Padua, an agricultural engineer, former director of Brazil's national parks and current president of Ibama, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Resources. Frequently sought out by foreign groups for partnerships, this highly professional group received $582,000 from the World Bank to complete and administer a 1,300-acre wildlife sanctuary in Brasilia. Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy are helping Funatura with foreign-debt conversion projects, in which foreign lenders forgive portions of Brazil's debt in exchange for environmental protection projects. Setting Aside Land Another group, the Pro-Nature Institute, is a private environmental organization founded by Dr. Marcelo Carvalho de Andrade, an orthopedist, in 1986. With sponsorship from international corporations like Esso, Shell and Imperial Chemical Industries, as well as the MacArthur Foundation of the United States, the institute has begun programs in both the Amazon rain forest and the Atlantic coastal forest. Two state parks and a biological reserve have been established and are being maintained in Rio de Janeiro state. Research has been started for a sustainable development program in Juruena, a frontier between farmed land and virgin rain forest in Mato Grosso state. In an attempt to verify deforestation and to identify areas for conservation, S.O.S. Mata Atlantica, officially called the Brazilian Foundation for the Conservation of the Atlantic Rain Forest, is organizing the first comparative analysis of satellite images of the Atlantic forest in eight Brazilian states in 1985 and 1990. For five years the group has worked "to protect the biological diversity and ecological processes of Atlantic rain forest ecosystems, to promote sustainable use of the region's natural resources and establish a strong environmental ethic in the area." In a pioneering television and radio campaign, "The Green of Our Earth is Being Destroyed," S.O.S. made a mass audience aware that many of the plant and animal species of Brazil's Atlantic forest were threatened with extinction. Thomas E. Lovejoy, assistant secretary for external affairs at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said: "These environmental groups are a relatively new phenomenon in a country that is still getting used to democracy. What is impressive is that there has been an explosion of new environmental groups and it keeps going. There are 100 groups alone in the Brazilian Amazon. Obviously, some of those groups are small and very specialized, but the mere fact that they exist says something about the change in Brazilian society." | As Forests Fall, Environmental Movement Rises in Brazil |
534719_0 | Fearing demonstrations against President Bush, the United Nations has drawn up plans to close the Earth Summit conference center to representatives of private environmental groups and to sharply reduce credentials for official delegations, United Nations officials said today. Starting Thursday, the day before President Bush and as many as 110 heads of state and government are to meet here, a new credential system will bar virtually all private sector environmentalists from the center and will limit official missions to four delegates from each country, a United Nations official who attended an emergency security meeting on Friday said. The official said he expected that press credentials would also be restricted. United Nations credentials have been issued to about 1,500 environmentalists and to about 5,000 journalists. 150 Protest U.S. Policy Today, about 150 Americans marched down Copacabana Beach in the first public protest here against the Bush Administration's environmental policies. "George Bush, you are embarrassing us," read one banner raised by American environmentalists protesting the President's announced refusal to sign a treaty to protect plants and animals. Chip Barber, one of the protest organizers, said, "We are here to show Brazilians that we are ashamed that our country is acting like a ball and chain at the Earth Summit." The anti-Bush mood in Rio was summed up Friday by a front-page headline in an English language newspaper here: "U.S. Singled Out as Eco Bad Guy." Some of the Americans here say the Bush-bashing is not justified. Leftist Ties Seen Senator Larry Pressler, Republican of South Dakota, complained today that the Earth Summit reminded him of "a meeting of the international left." "I don't think people give the U.S. proper credit on environmental protection," he said. Hoping to ease American "isolation" at the Earth Summit, Laurens Jan Brinkhorst, a spokesman for the European Community, cautioned Saturday at a press conference: "We don't want a slugging match of everybody against the United States." There were new reports today that the United States would continue its a tough approach to a second treaty to be signed here, one to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases believed capable of warming the earth's temperature. U.S. Opposing Timetables During treaty talks in April and May, the United States succeeded in removing from the treaty any targets or timetables for the reduction of gases. The United States has said that it opposes timetables, arguing that they | To Protect Bush, U.N. Will Limit Access to Talks |
534653_0 | World Economies |
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