id stringlengths 5 10 | title stringlengths 0 2.44k | text stringlengths 0 2.9k |
|---|---|---|
1545565_1 | Administration Is Exempting Alaska Forest From Protection | the building of roads in 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest across the country. Environmental groups attacked the administration for the settlement in July, saying it was an underhanded strategy for circumventing the regulation. Conservation groups said the administration had failed to defend the roadless designation adequately. But Ray Massey, a spokesman for the Forest Service in Alaska, said that agency officials felt there were already enough protections for the Tongass. ''We didn't really need roadless to protect the Tongass,'' he said in a telephone interview. ''We already have a forest plan in place to protect the Tongass.'' Before putting the roadless designation into effect, the Forest Service had drawn up plans for the immediate development of 300,000 acres in the Tongass. Environmental groups say that about 9.6 million acres of the Tongass could be affected by the dropping of the ban. The roadless rule was put in place after a two-year process that included 600 scientific studies and two rounds of public comments that generated almost two million responses, most of them in favor of the rule. Since its inception, the rule has been challenged through a host of legal, legislative and administrative efforts. The conflicts have highlighted the tensions between environmental protection and economic development, and between state autonomy and federal oversight. Environmental groups supported the roadless rule as a way to curb the development and logging that had already affected half of national forest land. But Western states and the timber industry said the rule was unjustified in its sweeping scope -- touching about 30 percent of national forest acreage in the country. Industry groups and states have made a concerted effort to attack the rule through lawsuits around the country. In July, a federal district court judge in Wyoming suspended the rule nationwide. Environmental groups are appealing the case to the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver. Before that, a federal court in Idaho originally threw out the roadless rule, but that decision was overturned last December by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco. The Tongass National Forest, with 16.8 million acres, has been particularly contentious because of its environmental symbolism as the only temperate rain forest on the continent. ''This is the rarest forest type on earth and it needs to be protected,'' said Jeremy Paster, a forest campaign organizer for Greenpeace. |
1540560_1 | Test May Aid Chemotherapy Decisions | by researchers for Genomic Health, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., that developed the test, and the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project, a federally financed group that conducts clinical trials. The test reviewed the activity levels of 21 genes in a sample of a breast tumor. The gene levels are used to calculate a ''recurrence score.'' To validate its test, Genomic Health tested tumor samples saved from 668 women who took part in a clinical trial in the 1980's. Without knowing how the women fared, it computed the recurrence score. Only 6.8 percent of the women with a low score were found to have experienced a relapse in the following 10 years, while 30.5 percent of those with a high score had a recurrence. Today, doctors try to predict recurrence by looking at a patient's age and the size and so-called grade of the tumor. The recurrence score proved superior to these in the study. The genetic test would be applicable only to women similar to those in the 1980's clinical trial. Those women were newly diagnosed with cancer that had not spread to the lymph nodes and that expressed the estrogen receptor. The women were also treated with tamoxifen. Still, women matching these characteristics represent about half the women diagnosed with breast cancer. The test did not work for women not treated with tamoxifen, according to a separate, smaller study also presented at the conference. The company said the tests will be available early next year at a cost expected to be $3,000 or more. Just how useful the test would be was a matter of debate here. Some doctors noted that even if all the women in the high-risk category got chemotherapy, 70 percent would not need it. Dr. Cobleigh said that the women the test determined had a high risk of recurrence would find it much easier to decide to undergo chemotherapy. But ''lower-risk women will still agonize,'' she said. She said she would give the test to all appropriate patients, if they could afford it. Dr. Nicholas Murray, senior lecturer at Southampton University in Britain, said the test did not really predict whether patients would benefit from chemotherapy; it helped, he said, to predict which patients would fail to benefit from tamoxifen. To use the test to decide who should get chemotherapy might make sense, he said, but ''it's a leap of faith.'' |
1546894_1 | Sheep Ailment May Hold Clues to Mad Cow Disease | the disease had turned up for the first time in the United States, in a cow in Washington State, led to a recall of meat from at least eight states and Guam, even though the risk to consumers is low because highly infectious tissues -- brain, spine and part of the intestine -- had been removed from the sick cow in Washington before its meat was butchered and shipped. The discovery also highlighted questions that scientists still cannot answer with certainty. Where does this disease come from? Can there be just one mad cow? If the Washington cow was infected by feed -- as is thought to have occurred in the British epidemic -- it seems unlikely that only one could have been infected, since feed is shared. But if the cow developed the disease spontaneously, which is theoretically possible though not proved to occur in cows, then it may be possible to have one mad cow at a time. The new case and the unanswered questions have heightened interest in efforts in this country to sequence the cow genome, as a potential source of information about what makes animals susceptible and whether resistant livestock can be bred or genetically engineered. A widely (though not universally) accepted theory holds that mad cow disease and several other related brain disorders are caused not by bacteria or viruses, but by prions, abnormal proteins that build up and damage the brain. Collectively, the diseases are called spongiform encephalopathies, for the spongelike holes they leave in the brain. Prions are thought to be misfolded versions of a normal protein that is abundant in the brain and spinal cord. Somehow, the theory goes, prions force normal proteins to misfold, setting off a destructive chain reaction in the brain. Prions may transmit disease between people or animals, or some people or animals may have an inherited genetic tendency to form prions. In other cases, the tendency to form prions may develop sporadically, for unknown reasons, in an individual with no family history. The term prion and the theory were developed by Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco who won a Nobel Prize in 1997. Dr. Prusiner built on the work of another researcher who won a Nobel Prize in 1976, Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Gajdusek proved that members of |
1546913_0 | Behind a Graceful Spire, Science, Art and Passion | IN hard hat, Guy Nordenson was one of the structural engineers who clambered for months through the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center. Now, minus the headgear, in the hushed spaces of his office near ground zero, he holds forth about torque and taper, about Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. He speaks with considerable stillness and insistency, just as he does with his architecture students at Princeton. An 18-inch model on his desk demonstrates his structural design for the Freedom Tower. The model, actually: the original paper-and-balsa-wood construction he presented to the architect David M. Childs in June, the twisted and tapered shape that evolved into the billion-dollar, 1,776-foot skyscraper whose design was unveiled on Dec. 19. Mr. Nordenson's contribution has won praise from many. ''The torque creates an opportunity to break up the wind, making the ground much more hospitable than the old trade center plaza used to be,'' said Kent L. Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society. Starting Sept. 14, 2001, Mr. Nordenson mobilized teams of engineers to advise on demolition and to assess the buildings next to the fallen towers. During the 12-hour days when he inventoried damage in the landmark building at 90 West Street, he never imagined he would help create the spire that would replace the towers. By the end of the contentious Freedom Tower development process, ''we were able to meet on the common ground of geometry,'' Mr. Nordenson said, ''just as geometry is the common ground between form and structure.'' Common ground and geometry are crucial to Mr. Nordenson, who celebrates collaboration and delights in mathematical explorations of abstraction. He is the kind of polymath who summons analogies to Paul Klee, John Cage and high-energy particle physics in describing the challenges of disaster-debris removal. ''Any profession is embedded in the culture,'' he said, an approach that is certainly French, as is his upbringing. Mr. Nordenson -- born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in France 48 years ago -- is an immigrant, as is Daniel Libeskind, the überarchitect who created the ground zero master plan. . Mr. Nordenson first came to New York at age 4 in 1959, shuttling between Europe and the United States until he became a regular pupil at the Lycée Française in Manhattan at 9. He passed the rigorous exam for the French baccalaureate in mathematics, the ticket to an elite French school, but opted for the Massachusetts Institute |
1547003_4 | AMERICANS ORDER FOREIGN AIRLINES TO USE MARSHALS | ''There's broad concern. Rather than canceling flights on a regular basis, it's more effective to have law enforcement officers on board when you need them.'' The airline association estimates that 10 or 20 out of some 115 airlines that fly into the United States already use air marshals. Israel, for instance, has used marshals on El Al flights for years, and some other nations have followed suit more recently, with Australia announcing earlier this week that Qantas Airlines would begin placing armed marshals on flights to Singapore next month. Air France does not use armed air marshals. In the United States, the Sept. 11 attacks prompted the hiring and training of several thousand armed, undercover air marshals to patrol the skies. A Congressional study released this month found training and morale problems among the marshals, but domestic security officials say the program has increased security on flights and deterred violence. The announcement on Monday moves that domestic model to a global platform as a way of supplementing the increasingly rigorous screening of passengers and baggage on international flights, officials said. ''The present goal,'' Mr. Ridge said, ''is to have armed and trained law enforcement officials on flights of interest where the information warrants that added level of protection.'' Officials said that when intelligence pointed to a potential attack or safety problem on a flight entering, leaving or crossing over the United States, they planned to contact the airline directly to demand that it put air marshals on board. Domestic security inspectors will also work with foreign aviation officials to ensure that the American requirements are actually put in place, Mr. Ridge said. He said the announcement was aimed at putting other nations and international airlines ''on notice'' that the United States expected them to be ready to provide armed marshals. For the many nations that do not have air marshal services, he said, American officials are ready to provide training and assistance. Critics of the administration's domestic security efforts said they had been troubled by vulnerabilities in aviation security, particularly in cargo transportation. Many believe that efforts to shore up aviation security domestically could lead terrorists to test weaknesses overseas, either by boarding planes outside the United States or infiltrating foreign flight crews. The new emergency order, several critics said, appeared to be an important if belated step toward plugging those gaps. ''I'm glad they did this,'' said Senator Charles |
1546992_2 | Luggage Lock Program Not Without a Few Hitches | But now the Web site (www.tsa.gov) barely mentions the Travel Sentry initiative, except obliquely, in a section on travel tips that says: ''If T.S.A. screeners need to open a locked bag for inspection, they may have to break the lock. There are now products on the market that have uniform locking systems that enable screeners, while doing a required screening, to open and relock a bag. Passengers without such devices may still want to consider leaving bags unlocked.'' The agency and others insist that the certified lock program is working well, despite a few minor problems. ''There are going to be isolated incidents here and there, but by and large we successfully rolled out the program to 448 airports and educated 18,000 screeners'' on how to use the new tools to open the certified locks without causing delays in processing checked bags, said Darrin Kayser, a spokesman for the agency. John Vermilye, the founder of Travel Sentry, said that Mr. Maurer's experience was an isolated one. He said he was aware of only three complaints since the program began Nov. 12. ''This is much better than I expected, honestly,'' he said. If there were only three problems, and I have no reason to imply otherwise, I seem to have heard from two of the travelers who had them, however. Like Mr. Maurer, William E. Botkin, of Centennial, Colo., said he bought the locks after reading about them in this column on Nov. 11. ''I went out to Brookstone the next day to purchase two,'' in preparation for a trip to China with his wife on Nov. 18, Mr. Botkin said. ''Unfortunately things did not go as described'' he added. When the Botkins checked their bags in Denver, a United Airlines agent insisted the luggage be sent through unlocked, but ultimately relented. On the Botkins' homebound trip through Chicago, customs officials and security inspectors said they had no clue about how to open the bags without cutting the locks. ''Fortunately I was present to open the locks for the inspector so he could inspect the bags,'' Mr. Botkin said. Obviously, this program was rolled out through a huge security apparatus that was stretched thin during the heavy travel period leading up to the winter holidays. That's not going to happen without at least a few hitches. Still, I'd like to hear from other readers about experiences traveling using these locks. Travel |
1546959_1 | An Unrepentant Spammer Vows To Carry On, Within the Law | as spam, have dismissed the new federal law as largely ineffectual. And many high-volume e-mailers say the law may even improve the situation for them because it wipes away a handful of tougher state laws. But Mr. Ralsky, who lives in a Detroit suburb, says the law's potential penalties -- fines of up to $6 million and up to five years in jail -- are making him rethink his business. ''Of course I'm worried about it,'' he said after the law was signed. ''You would have to be stupid to try to violate this law.'' No one is saying that e-mail in-boxes will be clean of spam any time soon. But the world is getting to be a much more hostile place for spammers, particularly those who send some of the most offensive messages. The biggest threat is not so much the new law, though it is expected to play a role in stepped-up enforcement, as the increased willingness of prosecutors to go after spammers. In recent weeks, federal and state authorities have finally gotten the attention of spammers with a series of tough civil and criminal actions. ''These suits sent a shock wave through the spam world,'' said Steve Linford, the director of the Spamhaus Project, an organization that tracks bulk e-mailers and tries to thwart their moves. ''Lots of spammers are asking, 'Are we next?''' Some bulk e-mailers, like Scott Richter, who was a principal target of a civil suit filed last week by the New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, vow to continue. But Mr. Richter has lost some major clients, including mainstream companies like Omaha Steaks. Still, in the week after the suit was filed, Mr. Richter's company, OptInRealBig.com, was actively sending e-mail messages promoting dozens of products, including laser guns, breast enlargement pills and Christian dating services. Others say they have been beaten down by blacklists created by antispammers and filtering systems run by Internet service providers. ''E-mail is not working any more,'' said Brendan Battles, a longtime marketer who has sold CD-ROM's containing long lists of e-mail addresses. ''More people are mailing and you get less and less response.'' Mr. Battles says he has virtually given up the business. ''E-mail marketing is a good thing,'' Mr. Battles said. ''I create jobs. But the media has made e-mail out to be some sort of terrorist plot.'' Not long ago, Mr. Ralsky, like many other bulk |
1541452_0 | Where Friends of Bears Foresee Slaughter, Homeowners See Defense Against Invasion | To the pro-hunt residents of northwestern New Jersey, the black bears have become too close, too bold and too dangerous. The bears, they say, routinely roam backyards and sometimes barge into houses looking for food -- usually household garbage, but occasionally pork chops and brownies. The bears wander around playgrounds and bus stops, frightening children. And they have killed pet rabbits, goats and sheep. To those weary, and wary, of living with black bears, New Jersey's first bear hunt since 1970 is long overdue. ''We do have a definite problem with the bears, and we need to do whatever is necessary to get the problem under control,'' said Roy Wherry, the police chief in Vernon, a growing rural town that has had many problems with bears. To members of animal welfare groups and many residents of the towns with bear problems, the six-day hunt scheduled to start today is a sop to hunting and gun advocates. They argue that black bears are, by nature, docile, nonpredatory, and easily frightened animals. They say people who want a rural lifestyle should learn to adapt to the bears' presence and can minimize conflicts with bears, primarily by putting their garbage in steel cans with lids the bears cannot open. Foes of the hunt say it will fail to reduce the presence of so-called nuisance bears because they roam woodlands that are near homes and legally off limits to hunters. ''Bears are not a public safety threat in New Jersey, but thousands of bear hunters in our woods are the real danger,'' said Sue Russell, policy director of a group based in New Jersey called the Center for Animal Protection. The verbal cross-fire between the two sides intensified as the hunt approached. Rumors began circulating that some zealous foes of the hunt might traipse into the woods with music blaring from boom-boxes to pester hunters and scare off bears. The state's environmental commissioner, Bradley M. Campbell, cautioned against such confrontations, warning at a press conference that New Jersey has a hunter-harassment law and that state conservation officers, rangers and state troopers would take to the woods to enforce it. Fines range from $100 to $500, he said. Several of the groups seeking to protect bears from hunters banded together for an 11th-hour legal effort, appealing to both federal and state judges to ban the hunt on environmental grounds in the 31,000-acre New Jersey portion |
1541512_0 | A Way to Print Detailed Photos For Secure ID's | A subsidiary of the DuPont Company and a small start-up company are to announce today a novel system for printing unusually clear and detailed three-dimensional photos on documents like passports. The technology, jointly developed by A4Vision, based in Cupertino, Calif., and DuPont Authentication Systems, based in Bridgeport, Conn., represents the latest development in a worldwide competition to create better security systems for airports, military bases and other sensitive sites. Biometrics -- a technology that identifies people through biological characteristics like voice patterns, fingerprints, the structure of irises or the shape of hands -- is being driven by government and industry standards requiring its inclusion as one aspect of multilayer security systems. Facial recognition technology received a lift when the International Civil Aviation Organization decided this year that passports used in international air travel must incorporate some form of it by the end of 2005. Such technology typically starts with photographs, then uses software to build mathematical profiles of an image by measuring the distance between facial features. A4Vision uses a patented video system and software to build three-dimensional images showing features that would not be captured in a standard photograph. For example, a face photographed by A4Vision appears to pivot slightly when the image is moved, so that the viewer sees only the right ear from one angle and only the left from another. And features like hair and skin have more realistic textures than in standard photographs. Early this year, the company began working on a method to print such images on passports and other identity documents. ''We did it, but they cost $1,000 each,'' A4Vision's chief executive, Grant Evans, said. Enter DuPont, which had spent nearly six years developing a holographic film that gives images the appearance of depth. Because holographic images are relatively hard to duplicate or reconstruct if damaged, more companies are printing standardized holograms on credit cards and on packaging for products like pharmaceuticals to deter tampering and counterfeiters. But after experimenting with sales to artists, researchers and marketing firms, DuPont decided it could profit more by focusing on security applications. Richard Zucker, executive vice president for business and market development at DuPont Authentication, said when A4Vision approached DuPont to discuss the two companies' technologies at a security trade show in Washington this summer, ''it was love at first sight.'' DuPont quickly figured out how to use A4Vision's data to construct holograms of faces that |
1539855_1 | The Two Terrorisms | extend robust political support to moderate unionists, who want Northern Ireland to remain British. The mainly Catholic I.R.A. spent a quarter-century trying to unite the province with Ireland by way of a terrorist guerrilla campaign against the largely Protestant unionist majority and Britain itself. But in 1998, the two sides decided to share power through a devolved government under the Good Friday agreement. That government was suspended in 2002 over the I.R.A.'s refusal to disarm. This October, the I.R.A. put what was reported to be an unprecedented quantity of arms ''beyond use'' in an effort to advance the peace process. Before 9/11, the I.R.A. would not have been so delicate. When I.R.A. members grew impatient in February 1996, they detonated a car bomb at Canary Wharf in London, killing two civilians and causing property damage of more than $100 million. Even so, the old groups are unwilling to relinquish the fallback threat of violence. The I.R.A. has maintained its revolutionary vocation by retaining the vast bulk of its arms, advising Colombian rebels, and probably tacitly encouraging dissident republican terrorist activity. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers have resupplied and continued to recruit during the nearly two-year-old cease-fire. In Spain, E.T.A.'s terrorist campaign has abated somewhat since 9/11, but the group has shied away from political initiatives since ending a 14-month cease-fire in 1999. Having rejected the terms offered by Israel at Camp David and Taba, secular groups loyal to Yasir Arafat have encouraged and, with some thin deniability, perpetrated terrorism during the second intifada. On this evidence, shying away from extreme violence is merely tactical, a way for terrorist groups to distance themselves from bin Ladenism. Terrorism, like legitimate forms of power, abhors a vacuum. Were the global counterterrorism coalition to defeat, or even decisively contain, Al Qaeda, old-style terrorists would probably consider that political burden to have been lifted. They would feel freer to go back to their old ways. Having preserved their arsenals and their networks of recruits, they would be readily able to do so. Mr. Blair could hardly be called soft on the new terrorism since 9/11. But he seems to understand that the window of opportunity to tame the I.R.A. may narrow when Al Qaeda loses potency. Consequently, Mr. Blair has stayed engaged in Northern Ireland even when preoccupied by the more dire Qaeda threat and the Iraq crisis. Yet he has underappreciated how much |
1539860_0 | French Diplomats Go on Strike To Protest Planned Budget Cuts | Thousands of French diplomats and Foreign Ministry staff members went on strike on Monday, slowing work at the country's far-flung foreign services and even shutting down some embassies and consulates in protest over proposed budget cuts. The strike was the first of its kind for the stately Quai d'Orsay, as the ministry is known, and is a measure of the difficulty the French government faces in trying to trim its welfare-sodden budget. France has repeatedly breached its obligations under European Union accords to keep the country's deficit below 3 percent of its gross domestic product. The Foreign Ministry fields about 5,000 people in 154 embassies, 98 consulates and nearly 500 cultural offices and French-language schools around the world. While senior diplomats enjoy such perks as well-stocked wine cellars and grand homes, the rank and file complain that scrimping has eroded their effectiveness. ''After years and years of economizing that have hit this ministry,'' the leader of the six-union syndicate leading the strike, Louis Dominici, said on French television on Monday, ''they're asking us to go further -- that is, to no longer have the means to do our job.'' The proposed 2004 budget, which was debated Monday in the Senate, would cut the Foreign Ministry's operating budget by nearly 2 percent, losing 116 jobs through attrition and trimming diplomatic housing allowances by $24 million. More than 100 ministry employees demonstrated in front of the Senate building late on Monday while Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin defended the budget against further cuts inside. The extent of the 24-hour walkout on Monday varied according to the source. The ministry said only that the labor action was observed ''in varying proportions at practically all posts,'' while the ministry's leading union, known as the UNSA-USMAE, reported that 94 percent of the ministry's employees took part in it. ''We haven't actually counted people,'' said Roger Ferrari, the Foreign Ministry representative for the Unitary Union Federation, one of the unions involved. He said half of the ministry's employees went on strike for the day. Some did so in the most diplomatic of ways: Renaud Vignal, France's ambassador to Indonesia, declared himself on strike though he went to work anyway. But others stayed away in such numbers that their offices closed: the French Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, was reported closed for at least part of the day, as was the French Consulate in the Belgian city of |
1539844_1 | When Fish Fluoresce, Can Teenagers Be Far Behind? | This is the tipping point, when the world irrevocably turns toward the science-fiction fantasies of writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, who envision biomedical technology permeating every corner of the marketplace, from global corporations on down to small-time illegal operations like stolen-car chop shops. Imagining futures, much less predicting them, is a risky business, but there's a nugget of truth in these fantasies, and that is that once technology reaches the marketplace, it is transformed for mundane and apparently frivolous purposes and spreads everywhere, legally or not. Many groups and government agencies stand poised to confront abuses in medicine, to protect the food supply and the environment from big agriculture. Meanwhile, who is watching the pet stores? Or the beauty parlors? The science involved in creating the fish is not new. Genes for bioluminescence were introduced into tobacco plants and carrots in the 1980's. Mice have been made to glow. No doubt humans could be made to glow if parents with foresight knew that one day they would be desperately trying to find their middle school child at a dark and crowded school dance. The fish were first developed to be indicators of polluted water. Scientists set up the genes for the proteins that produced light to be turned on by the presence of toxins. The original fish were hobbled genetically to prevent their spread in the wild. And there is not much worry about the new pets creating a new crisis of global glowing. Zebrafish have long been sold without establishing themselves in the wild. But biotechnology itself cannot be successfully hobbled, despite the best intentions of governments or the self-appointed guardians of our health and food supply. The Center for Food Safety, a private consumer group that has been keeping an eye on genetically modified fish for use as food, has urged the Food and Drug Administration to regulate genetic adventurism like the GloFish project. But it is far from clear that bioengineered pets count as food or drugs. There is no doubt about the human appetite for modifying the bodies of their plants, their pets and themselves. Witness dogs, cats, parakeets and canaries, pigeons, tulips, roses and plastic surgery. ''I think this is just an expansion of what's always been done with ornamental plants and flowers,'' said Dr. Lee Silver, a professor at Princeton in molecular biology and at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public |
1539853_0 | Some E.R.! Siena Led the Way; A Medieval Hospital Is Being Converted Into a Museum Complex | When the huge Roman Catholic charity hospital here moved from its ancient headquarters to a modern building in 1997, the city government gained possession of a long-neglected trove of medieval and Renaissance art. The walls in the vast decaying complex were dotted with the remnants of magical frescoes, and storerooms held priceless archaeological pieces that had not seen the light of day for centuries. From the 14th century to the 18th, this hospital, Santa Maria della Scala, was also a regional economic powerhouse. It was one of the largest landowners in Siena and a major patron of the arts, commissioning works from some of Italy's most talented painters and sculptors. Rich Sienese left vast fortunes to Santa Maria when they died, and in 1348 they died a lot. Two-thirds of Siena's citizens perished during an outbreak of plague. As a result, as recently as a decade ago patients in the emergency room at Santa Maria could look up at a cross-vaulted ceiling and at walls displaying the remnants of paintings by the 16th-century master Domenico Beccafumi. The high ceilings of an underground staircase to hospital storerooms hid a fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. In the late 1990's there was a proposal to transform the vacated hospital into a conference center and hotel. A squat brick structure with thick windows that are still mostly boarded, it sits on prime real estate directly across the street from Siena's spectacular cathedral. But the leftist local government rejected that plan in favor of one that focused on the hospital's rich cultural past, reinventing its 645,000 square feet as a museum and arts center. But like Siena itself, the restoration project is an odd blend of politics, art and money. It is a paean to this city's artistic traditions and is financed entirely by the powerful Monte Paschi di Siena bank, which has close ties to the former Communist Party. (The bank has a cash machine in the hospital lobby just across from the chapel.) ''Restoring this is a huge long-term project,'' said Anna Carli, a former vice mayor and a labor organizer, who is effectively the museum's director but officially carries the ancient title of hospital rector. It is a daunting task. To add ventilation, 19th-century hospital administrators put windows in the middle of invaluable frescoes. Other works, Ms. Carli said, ''had been painted over for 'hygienic purposes.' '' Already glistening are a spectacular chapel, |
1539842_2 | Scientists Unearth Urban Center More Ancient Than Plato | were looking for a Classical Pompeii and we found a Bronze Age Pompeii,'' said Dr. Steven Soter of the American Museum of Natural History, the other excavation leader. The trenches exposed stone walls of buildings flanking paved streets. Pottery, mostly intact, lay all around. There were clay jars, cooking pots, tankards and kraters, wide bowls used for mixing wine and water. Their distinctive styles were the big surprise. Dr. Soter, a planetary scientist drawn to Helike research by his interest in earthquakes, recalled standing at the top of the deep trench where Dr. Katsonopoulou was working. ''Dora looked up and said, 'These pots are prehistoric, more than 2,000 years older than the city we had been excavating,' '' Dr. Soter said. ''She was amazed. All of us were amazed.'' Dr. Katsonopoulou submitted a formal report on the findings to the Greek Ministry of Culture yesterday. An article on excavations at both the Classical and prehistoric sites at Helike is scheduled for publication in the January issue of Archaeology, the magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America. As the digging continued, archaeologists found luxury items like gold and silver clothing ornaments and the ''depas'' cup in the Trojan style. Heinrich Schliemann, excavating the ruins of Troy in the 19th century, was the first to describe such cups and associate them with nobility. Although one of the two loop handles on the Helike cup is missing, the vessel's cylindrical shape and remaining handle are almost identical to that of a Trojan depas drinking cup displayed at the recent exhibition ''Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. From the Mediterranean to the Indus'' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The excavators have circulated a picture of the cup to what they say is a limited number of recipients, but Dr. Katsonopoulou refused to release the picture for publication now, pending a more formal announcement in a professional journal. At its height, the Bronze Age town at Helike was a contemporary of an ascendant Troy, as revealed in its ruins from the third millennium B.C., known to archaeologists as Troy II and III. Schliemann recovered substantial treasures of gold and bronze from these layers and mistakenly concluded that these were remains of the later Troy of the 13th century B.C., the city of Priam and Hector, besieged by the Greek forces of Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles in a |
1540018_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Britain Discusses Talks | The secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Paul Murphy, discussed the next stage in the province's stalled political process with the Democratic Unionists, a hard-line Protestant group that became the largest party in the provincial Assembly in elections last week. The Unionists' refusal to work with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, makes it unlikely that the Assembly will begin functioning again for at least a year, leaving Northern Ireland governed directly from London. Brian Lavery (NYT) |
1539923_3 | Chinese Builders Buy Abroad | represent an annual problem in China, with managers of public works projects running out of money near the end of the year and forced to wait for their next budget allocation. He predicted the market would still grow 30 percent next year, adding, ''After Feb. 1, two weeks after Chinese New Year, nobody will be taking any time off.'' Unlike in most countries, as much as four-fifths of the construction spending in China depends on public works projects, which are likely to continue regardless of what happens to interest rates. A significant amountof the remaining activity involves factory construction by multinational companies, which tend to pursue strategic plans that are largely immune to short-term rates here. ''After a real dropoff at the end of the summer because of SARS, things suddenly came alive again,'' said Michael G. W. Adams, head of Chinese business development for Gammon Skanska, a Hong Kong-based joint venture of Jardine Matheson and Skanska that is one of Asia's largest construction companies. An outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in the spring slowed the signing of contracts and has produced appreciable drops in the value of foreign direct investment actually entering China. But the volume of new contracts being signed has recovered fully, suggesting that the decline in actual investments will soon be reversed as well. According to Off-Highway Research, a consulting firm in London, China has just become the world's largest market for the workhorses of big projects: crawler excavators, which look like long-armed shovels, and wheeled loaders, which look like bulldozers but with scoops in front instead of earth-scraping blades. But China lags behind Europe and North America in the sale of construction equipment partly because prices are lower here but mainly because few smaller pieces of equipment are sold for fixing and maintaining roads and buildings. China has also become the world's main market for used construction equipment, holding up prices and making it easier for contractors elsewhere to sell vehicles after several years and buy new ones. ''Nobody else can find those good-quality second-hand machines because the Chinese market is sucking them up,'' said Chris Edwards, the Asia manager for Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, a used equipment dealer. China has a lingering habit of spending little on maintenance. Fully 97 percent of the market consists of heavy equipment designed for new construction, compared with a third of the market in Europe and North America |
1539972_0 | Bears and Human Diet | To the Editor: Re ''Fast-Food Nation Is Taking Its Toll on Black Bears, Too'' (Nov. 25): Not only are many Americans overweight, and even many pets fat, but now it seems wild animals are becoming overweight from scouring garbage bins in search of our excess food. At the same time, starvation worldwide is on the rise, with an estimated 840 million people going hungry. Isn't it time for us as a nation to set some new priorities? CAROLINE HERZENBERG Chicago |
1539900_2 | Hack The Vote | Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse. A later report commissioned by the state of Maryland apparently reached similar conclusions. (It's hard to be sure because the state released only a heavily redacted version.) Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that would have revealed these problems. The company hasn't contested the authenticity of these documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions to prevent their dissemination. Why isn't this front-page news? In October, a British newspaper, The Independent, ran a hair-raising investigative report on U.S. touch-screen voting. But while the mainstream press has reported the basics, the Diebold affair has been treated as a technology or business story -- not as a potential political scandal. This diffidence recalls the treatment of other voting issues, like the Florida ''felon purge'' that inappropriately prevented many citizens from voting in the 2000 presidential election. The attitude seems to be that questions about the integrity of vote counts are divisive at best, paranoid at worst. Even reform advocates like Mr. Holt make a point of dissociating themselves from ''conspiracy theories.'' Instead, they focus on legislation to prevent future abuses. But there's nothing paranoid about suggesting that political operatives, given the opportunity, might engage in dirty tricks. Indeed, given the intensity of partisanship these days, one suspects that small dirty tricks are common. For example, Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently announced that one of his aides had improperly accessed sensitive Democratic computer files that were leaked to the press. This admission -- contradicting an earlier declaration by Senator Hatch that his staff had been cleared of culpability -- came on the same day that the Senate police announced that they were hiring a counterespionage expert to investigate the theft. Republican members of the committee have demanded that the expert investigate only how those specific documents were leaked, not whether any other breaches took place. I wonder why. The point is that you don't have to believe in a central conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable voting system to manipulate election results. Why expose them to temptation? I'll discuss what to do in a future column. But let's be clear: the credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake. Op-Ed Columnist E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com |
1545339_0 | The Brain Wave Made Me Do It | Scientists have experimented in recent years with machines meant to use brain waves to tell if someone is lying. Now, British researchers say they have figured out a way to use similar brain waves to tell something slightly different: whether someone is about to make a mistake. The study, presented on Thursday at a conference of the Physiological Society at Cambridge University, reported that changes in a specific, easily monitored kind of brain wave were reliable predictors of a drop in performance on a task requiring prolonged attention. The researchers focused on a brain wave known as P300, which is generated when the brain encounters a stimulus. The study's lead researcher, Dr. Avijit Datta of the Medical Research Council of Britain, said the size of the P300 wave varies according to the response the stimulus calls for. It is significantly larger when there is a need to inhibit action -- for instance, when a fighter pilot needs to relax his trigger finger in the instant he identifies a friend instead of a foe, he said. In the experiment, subjects watched a computer screen that flashed a new number once a second. They were asked to click the computer's mouse for every number -- but to hold off when the number was three. Dr. Datta said that the size of the P300 waves proved to be a good predictor of performance. When the P300 waves fell by a third, mistakes increased by about a third, he said. And people whose P300 waves were always smaller than the group's average consistently made more mistakes. VITAL SIGNS: MEASUREMENTS |
1545400_1 | Heightened Terrorism Alert May Last Beyond Holidays | been criticized in some quarters as alarmist, sought to convey a sense of calm reassurance to the public. Mr. Bush said that ''American citizens need to go about their lives, but as they do so, they need to know that governments at all levels are working as hard as we possibly can to protect the American citizens.'' Mr. Ridge told reporters after the meeting that although people should be especially vigilant because of the increased threat of an attack, ''if you've got holiday plans, go -- don't change them, don't alter them.'' Particularly concerned that Qaeda operatives might hijack commercial airliners, as they did in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, officials tightened security at airports, a step that could mean delays for millions of holiday travelers. Coincidentally, the Department of Homeland Security said on Monday that a long-planned program in which photographs and inkless fingerprints will keep track of foreigners' entering and leaving the country would go into effect on Jan. 5 at all 115 American airports that handle international flights. All foreigners carrying visas -- the program will not apply to the 28 countries, many in Europe, that waive visa requirements for 90-day visits to the United States -- will be subjected to the extra security measures. The fingerprints will be checked instantly against a national database of criminal backgrounds and terrorist links, and, to ensure further safety, the process will be repeated when the visitors leave. But private air cargo operations are also seen as a potential means of attack, officials said. ''Cargo plane security is not what we would like it to be,'' said a public security official in New York who spoke on condition of anonymity. ''In terms of threats from the skies, that one is still largely unaddressed.'' In any case, a senior F.B.I. official told reporters last week, before the elevation of the threat level, that terrorism analysts were not convinced that Al Qaeda would necessarily return to airliners as a means of attack. ''Their planning is wide open,'' the official said. Other officials said they were stepping up security not only at airports but also at other potential targets like bridges and power plants. Federal agencies involved in law enforcement and border protection have ordered supervisors and operational employees to cancel leaves at least through the holiday period. Bush administration officials emphasized the vital role that federal, state and local law enforcement |
1546756_4 | Changes in Episcopal Church Spur Some to Join, Some to Go | couple soon began attending Sunday services at St. Paul's, which is directly across the street from the Catholic church where, 30 years ago, Mr. Martin was ordained a priest. ''What was most impressive was the fact that the straight people were welcoming us as a couple, and as potential members of the congregation,'' Mr. Martin said. ''We felt included and affiliated almost immediately.'' In Fort Wayne, Dr. de Silva moved in the opposite direction. She was raised Episcopalian and was bringing up two adopted children in that church. But, she said, she could not accept the church's stance on homosexuality because it violates the first commandment, to be faithful to God. She said she objected when her children were taught about gay rights in church Sunday school. She began attending St. Elizabeth Anne Seton Catholic Church. She has read the catechism cover to cover, she said, and has already been confirmed. ''The advantage of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches is that there is a central authority that tends to hold the church together, and unfortunately the Anglican experiment, which was a wonderful experiment for almost 500 years, lacked that,'' Dr. de Silva said. For many the move between the Episcopal and Catholic Churches is a natural transition. The Episcopal Church, which is the American branch of Anglicanism, is considered the bridge between Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity. For three decades, these two denominations have seen plenty of back and forth, said Robert Bruce Mullin, professor of history, world mission and modern Anglican studies at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York. As the Episcopal Church began ordaining women and dropped the ban on communion for divorced people, Professor Mullin said, conservative Episcopalians began to leave, while many socially liberal Catholics began to join. ''It's hard to remember that 30 years ago, the Episcopal Church was one of the more conservative churches on issues of social morality,'' he said. Since the 1970's, when Episcopalians began building a network of churches that agreed to be open and accepting toward homosexuality, gay Catholics have been quietly joining Episcopal parishes. Among clergy members, it is not unusual to find Episcopal priests, especially women, who are converts from Catholicism. Clergy crossovers also go in the other direction. A small number of married Episcopal priests are now allowed to minister in Roman Catholic churches that lack their own clergy members. But |
1542262_2 | A study finds benefits forlocalities that offer subsidies to attract companies. | after the plant location decision was announced, the winning counties had faster payroll and job growth in that plant's industry than did the runner-up counties. For example, total payroll increased by $100 million more in the winning counties, on average, in the six years after the announcement was made. In other industries, however, there was not a detectable difference in job or payroll growth between the winning and losing counties. In the eight years before the winning county was selected, the eventual winner and runner-up counties had about equal growth in employment and payrolls, both in the winning plant's industry and more generally. These findings tend to strengthen the interpretation that the improved performance after the plant started was indeed a result of the plant, rather than some continuing trend. The economists also find that public expenditures increased in the winning counties in the years after their site was selected, compared with the rival counties. This finding runs counter to the frequent contention that subsidies used to attract businesses crowd out other public programs, like education spending. Lastly, the researchers find that the average property value in the winning counties increased relative to that in the runner-up counties after the announcement, even though there was no difference in the trend in property value between the two sets of counties beforehand. This finding is significant because economists believe that property values reflect the desirability of living in a particular location, encompassing the future job opportunities, physical amenities and tax liabilities. So the increase in property value implies that the benefits of winning the plant exceeded the cost of the subsidy the city incurred to attract it. Still, Professors Greenstone and Moretti are cautious about whether cross-city bidding for million-dollar plants is in the nation's interest. First, they worry about an ''arms race'' in which bidding for plants does not increase national output because the plants would have located somewhere in the country anyway. Second, they note that the cities may benefit because state governments chip in money. Nonetheless, their results cast doubt on the possibility that in bidding for plants city officials use public funds to further their own personal ends at the expense of constituent welfare. And one of their findings suggests that there are spillover benefits to other businesses and workers from attracting an industry leader: employment and payroll tended to grow in that industry in neighboring counties when |
1542271_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Ireland: Report On 1974 Bombing | After a four-year investigation into possible official collusion in four car bombings in Dublin and in the border town of Monaghan on May 17, 1974, that killed 33 people, an Irish judge stopped short of finding that Protestant paramilitaries received help from the Northern Irish police force or military reserve, though some officers may have known of the plan. No one was ever charged in the attacks. ''If one accepts that some people were involved, they may well have been acting on their own initiative,'' the judge, Henry Barron, wrote in a 300-page report that criticized the rapid closure of the case and left open the possibility that further information might prove collusion. Brian Lavery (NYT) |
1543421_4 | Computerized voting machines are secure and efficient, their makers say. Skeptics are demanding a paper trail. | prevent. His work was cited in Nevada's decision to choose Sequoia's machines over Diebold's. ''The only way that vendors are going to produce auditable machines is if they are forced to,'' Professor Rubin said. ''So the recent moves of California and Nevada to require voter verifiable paper are huge steps in the right direction.'' A spokesman for Sequoia said that providing paper had less to do with security than with voter confidence. ''I still don't believe that paper is essential,'' the spokesman, Alfie Charles, said. ''But it's becoming more important -- for perception if nothing else, and perception is critical in the voting process.'' A spokesman for Diebold, David Bear, said that the company did not oppose the idea of voter receipts, and was happy to sell whatever kind of voting machine election officials wanted to buy. ''We're in the business of providing products that our customers need,'' he said. In fact, the company's machines already have thermal printers that are used to produce end-of-day reports, so providing individual receipts would not necessarily require an enormous change. Not all of Diebold's employees are so supportive of change, as Web sites that have sprung up in opposition to the machines have shown. Among the thousands of internal e-mail messages from the company that have made their way to anti-Diebold Web sites is a Jan. 3 message to colleagues by an employee identified only as Ken. Referring to criticisms of the Diebold, he wrote that news articles about a paper trail missed an important point, which he italicized: ''they already bought the system.'' ''At this point they are just closing the barn door,'' Ken wrote. ''Let's just hope that as a company we are smart enough to charge out the yin if they try to change the rules now and legislate voter receipts.'' In a later note he explained that he meant, ''Any after-sale changes should be prohibitively expensive.'' Mr. Bear, the spokesman for Diebold, said, ''It's safe to say that an e-mail does not represent the policy of Diebold.'' Professor Rubin said he was heartened by the increasing demand for a paper trail, but said it was only the first step toward ensuring that election security moved forward instead of backward. ''We still don't have a process for ensuring that the people writing the code of those machines know what they are doing, or are not malicious,'' he said. New Economy |
1543403_2 | New Jersey Hunt Took Lopsided Toll on Female Bears | became clear in midweek, Mr. McHugh angrily dismissed a suggestion that hunters were raiding dens and rousting sleeping females and their young. ''That's ridiculous,'' he said. Lynn Rogers, a director of the North American Bear Center in Ely, Minn., and a bear expert who has studied the animals for 37 years, said he was puzzled by the high percentage of females. In Minnesota's bear hunt in 2001, the last year for which he had figures, Dr. Rogers said, females accounted for 44.9 percent of 4,283 bears killed. ''I don't know what to make of the high proportion of females killed in New Jersey,'' he said. ''It's a little disturbing to see that level.'' He said one possible explanation is the different dispersal tendencies of young female and young male bears. Yearling females, he said, remain much closer than males to the territory of their birth. Juvenile males, he said, establish their own breeding range, free of other males, and tend to roam far and wide to do so. Mr. McHugh said he believed the wider dispersal of males was one factor in the high percentage of females killed. Another was that fewer female bears were in dens than the state's wildlife biologists had anticipated. The state's Fish and Game Council scheduled the hunt in December on the theory that most females would be in dens. Pennsylvania holds its bear hunt in late November and early December for the same reason, said Jerry Feaser, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, which regulates hunting there. He said that in Pennsylvania's just concluded 2003 hunt, 48.4 percent of bears killed were female. In 2002, the percentage was 49.3 percent female. In New York State's 2002 black bear hunt in the Catskills region, hunters reported the sex of 241 of the 278 bears killed. Females accounted for 39.4 percent, said Maureen Wren, a spokeswoman for New York's Department of Environmental Conservation. The long-range impact of the number of females killed in New Jersey probably will not become apparent for several months. Female bears in the state give birth to an average of 2.7 cubs every other January, Mr. McHugh said. Last Thursday, the Humane Society of the United States, which had earlier challenged the hunt in court, appealed to Gov. James E. McGreevey by letter to stop the hunt early. The group said the high percentage of females killed could ''seriously impact'' the |
1546139_2 | Brazil and Argentina Expect Rising Beef Sales | the United States. Among the most important are Japan, South Korea and Mexico, which accounted for the bulk of the United States' $3.2 billion in beef exports last year, and thus are high on Brazil and Argentina's list of markets they hope to penetrate or gain in. On Friday, Venezuela temporarily suspended its imports of beef products from the United States as well, though the country already gets most of its beef imports from Argentina. Marcus Vinicius Pratini de Moraes, president of the Brazilia Association of Meat Exporters, estimated that beef exports, which have nearly tripled since 2000, could surge as much as 20 percent in volume and value next year. ''Meat prices to producers, which have fallen 20 to 30 percent because of excess supply, should improve quite a bit next year'' because of America's absence from key markets, Mr. de Moraes predicted. According to Brazilian government statistics, the country's biggest markets for beef exports are the Netherlands, Chile, Britain, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Iran and Spain. While Brazil and Argentina have benefited from marketing their free-range, grass-fed herds as environmentally correct ''green beef,'' American beef exports to Europe in particular have been restricted because of the use of growth hormones in American feed lots. Brazil and Argentina, however, have confronted health scares of their own because of outbreaks among their herds of foot-and-mouth disease, which can be fatal to cloven-hoofed animals, but does not cause serious sickness in humans. Partly because of such concerns, the United States does not permit imports of fresh beef from Brazil. The United States granted preliminary approval to Brazil in 2000 to export fresh beef, but withdrew that status after foot-and-mouth disease erupted in Brazil's southernmost states. Negotiations have resumed, and Brazilian officials said they hoped certification to sell beef in the United States would be granted as early as mid-2004. In addition to anticipating a boom in beef sales, Brazil and Argentina both expect their exports of soybeans to surge as well. Growers here said on Friday that they believed American cattle raisers would begin to shift away from feed that includes animal remains and protein in favor of organic products like soy and corn. Indeed, Brazil expects to become the world's top soybean exporter with its next harvest. In Chicago, soybean prices rose 2.41 percent on Wednesday and were up again on Friday. MAD COW DISEASE IN THE UNITED STATES: EXPORTS |
1546114_2 | New Villains Pose New Challenges to the Enduring Question of Evil's Banality | guilt and map out a moral philosophy developed more fully in her unfinished final work, ''The Life of the Mind.'' One controversial essay, ''Reflections on Little Rock,'' objecting to the Supreme Court's forced racial integration of schools, does not quite fit with the rest but is worth reading simply to watch an independent mind at work. The collection could have been annotated more thoroughly by its editor, Jerome Kohn, director of the Hannah Arendt Center at the New School University (where Arendt taught), but it is valuable nonetheless. As a trial of Saddam Hussein is considered, many issues raised by Arendt reappear. Under what jurisdiction will it take place? Using what procedures? And for what purposes? What moral code will be invoked? Arendt argued that one difficulty was that there were ''no general standards to determine our judgments unfailingly.'' Transcendental moral laws are no longer self-evident. But it was on the basis of such laws that the Israeli court justified its execution of Eichmann. It is because of a belief in such laws that the Milosevic trial was begun and that the International Criminal Court was established. Where, though, is this moral compass to be found? What, Arendt asks, prevents morality from simply becoming a matter of customs and mores? One of the fears raised by an International Criminal Court, after all, is that it could become just another instrument of politics rather than an instrument of principles, potentially invoking moral law for questionable ends. The core of Arendt's argument is in the essay ''Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,'' based on courses she gave in 1965 and 1966 at the New School and at the University of Chicago. Philosophers from Socrates to Kant, Arendt argues, suggested that the moral law is to be found within one's self. That law is discovered through an internal dialogue, a dialogue that Arendt identifies with the nature of thought. Eichmann's evil, she proposes, comes from thought's absence. We may be used to thinking of evil as a profound phenomenon, the product of a brooding Iago figure, riven by despair. But for Arendt totalitarian evil is ''rootless''; there is no despair. Nazi criminals, she argues, ''renounced voluntarily all personal qualities.'' Hence a creature like Eichmann, or for that matter, Saddam Hussein. Out of such considerations of evil and thoughtlessness, along with close philosophical examinations of concepts like thinking, will and judgment, Arendt believed that a |
1540760_0 | Big Sugar and Trade | To the Editor: Re ''America's Sugar Daddies'' (editorial, ''Harvesting Poverty'' series, Nov. 29): We take exception to your fundamental premise that we are not efficient producers. United States sugar producers are among the most efficient in the world. Our costs are lower than two-thirds of 105 countries studied. Government interventions on behalf of sugar industries have turned the ''world market'' into a dumping ground. More than 100 countries are engaged in sugar-market interventions. The commodity market for sugar is global rather than bilateral or regional. Therefore, equitable reduction and elimination of government intervention must be done in the World Trade Organization, with all producing countries participating. To do otherwise merely substitutes one intervention for another. American sugar farmers support fairly negotiated trade liberalization. In fact, we would benefit from it. CAROLYN CHENEY Chwmn., American Sugar Alliance Arlington, Va., Dec. 3, 2003 |
1539741_0 | Economy & Business; For the Influential, Time Savers Top Holiday Gift Lists | WHAT do people with busy lives and influential jobs value in their purchases? Reporters asked several such people to name their favorite purchase this year and something they looked forward to buying in 2004. Thoughts on holiday giving and receiving were also sought. The answers from the six people interviewed were wide ranging, but if there was a common thread among them, it is that saving time or making time is often the crucial factor. The choices include trips that afford days of leisure and family togetherness, and gadgets that make life ever more efficient -- like that laser level that you might not even have known you needed. NICHOLAS CALLAWAY, president of Callaway Arts and Entertainment, whose Callaway Editions in New York this year published two children's books by Madonna, ''The English Roses'' and ''Mr. Peabody's Apples.'' Favorite purchase in 2003: The trip I bought for me and my family to go to Machu Picchu with a tour company. Holiday gift you're most looking forward to giving: A pug for my 9-year-old son, Issey, because the dog's color will fit in well with the color scheme of our other pets. Holiday gift you're most looking forward to receiving: Vacation time to use the Bliss Spa gift certificate given to me by my staff for my 50th birthday this year. A purchase planned for 2004: A GSM phone (global system for mobile communications) that also works at home. RACHELLE FRIEDMAN, co-chief executive of J&R Music and Computer World, New York. Favorite purchase in 2003: My Sony Clie, because it's basically my whole business life in a tiny little computer. I can do my e-mail wirelessly. It just makes my life more efficient. Holiday gift you're most looking forward to giving: A notebook computer for my parents. As they're getting older, I'd like to exchange e-mail with them, have them finally use the digital camera and be able to exchange pictures via e-mail. Holiday gift you're most looking forward to receiving: I think we are planning a trip with the whole family, two weeks with my new daughter-in-law and my two sons. That is the present I would like most. We're thinking of going to several countries in Europe. A purchase planned for 2004: I don't know if it's a purchase, but it's a big plan that I have. We've been building a house for some time, and I can finally |
1539740_0 | Technology & Media; Marketers Adjust as Spam Clogs the Arteries of E-Commerce | AFTER two decades in the garment business in New York, Allan Levy started an Internet company. His first idea -- gifts delivered with custom greeting cards -- did not catch on. So he tried selling gifts without the cards. Still no home run. But that led to a crucial insight: the real money on the Internet was in gathering e-mail addresses and using them to sell products. So his company, renamed Silver Carrot, sent half a billion e-mail messages each month offering small prizes -- a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese or a Burger King Whopper -- to people who would register some personal information and agree to receive e-mail. The company gathered 50 million addresses in two years and mailed them offers for diet programs, credit cards, vitamins and such. It was a good business, but now, caught in the fury aimed at those who send unsolicited e-mail, or spam, Mr. Levy must reinvent the company again. ''We are really looking to build our business outside of e-mail,'' he said. ''Response rates are much lower than they were two years ago, and there is a consumer backlash on privacy.'' So the company is doing more marketing for its clients on its Web site and on others. Its remaining e-mail campaigns are to smaller, specialized lists of people who have agreed to receive his e-mail. Mr. Levy says that because his mail goes only to those who agree to receive it, it is not spam. E-mail marketing is perhaps an embodiment of the ''tragedy of the commons,'' the bleak vision of an overpopulated future articulated by Garrett Hardin, an ecologist. He observed that shared pastures, or commons, in the 19th century became depleted because no individual farmer had an incentive to moderate the size of his herd. E-mail is everything a direct marketer could want -- fast, flexible and, most of all, cheap. It is, in fact, far too cheap. That makes it possible for marketers of all sorts to send lots of it -- even for products like miracle pills that only one person in a million buys -- until recipients are swamped with spam. The inevitable has happened. E-mail marketers are finding their electronic fields so despoiled and barren of paying customers that they must move on. ''There are only so many e-mail addresses and so many people who opt onto lists,'' said Timothy C. Choate, chief |
1544591_2 | A Skyscraper Has a Chance To Be Nobler | bridge design, like that of the Eiffel Tower. The span connects heaven and earth. Adaptability and conceptual balance are the essential qualities of the design. Its success as architecture is contingent on the integrity with which these qualities are maintained throughout. The design's weaknesses represent lapses from the consistency of its own internal logic. There are two of them: the sloped roof at the summit of the building's inhabited portion, and the broadcasting mast that rises from the open-lattice superstructure above. These features are both concessions to weak ideas that Mr. Libeskind presented a year ago. Sloped roofs are common to all the towers in the ''spiral of skyscrapers,'' a feature of Mr. Libeskind's design concept. The antenna stems from a primitive desire to one-up the Statue of Liberty by constructing a high-rise version of it. Here's the paradox. These concessions to Mr. Libeskind actually prevent the design from achieving the symbolic status he sought with his initial ideas. They deprive the design of its integrity and sharply curtail its effectiveness as symbolic form. To understand these problems and potentially resolve them, it helps to grasp that the two architects are coming from very different places. They employ two different systems of communication. With the assistance of the structural engineer Guy Nordenson, whose design for a torqued tower first appeared in a special issue of The New York Times Magazine last year, Mr. Childs has developed a vocabulary of structural expression and abstract form. Mr. Libeskind works with a language of visual and literary symbolism. The good news is that the architects have come so very close to fusing these two approaches. The frustration is that they've stopped before the miracle could happen. This shortcoming may owe something to clashing egos. But it owes more to the breakneck timetable that Gov. George E. Pataki has set for the planning process. Don't forget that the design presented yesterday was not entirely shaped by architecture. It also bears the traces of strong-arm legal tactics that were deployed to accelerate the project's completion. Ostensibly undertaken to protect Mr. Libeskind's interests, these tactics may actually have prevented him from seeing what to me is plainly obvious. Even in its present, compromised form, the Skidmore vocabulary fulfills Mr. Libeskind's symbolic intentions far more effectively than his own initial sketches for the tower. Let's look at the design in the context of Memory Foundations, as Mr. |
1544527_2 | Reason and Faith, Eternally Bound | religious person?'' ''What would you suggest?'' he coyly responds. There are of course approaches that are less blunt and more liberal minded, but the sense of embattlement and polemic has become familiar. In the recent book ''The Closing of the Western Mind'' (Knopf, $30), for example, Charles Freeman argues that Western history has to be retold. Over the course of centuries, he points out, the ancient Greeks recognized the importance of reason, giving birth to the techniques of modern science and mathematics, and establishing the foundations of the modern state. But then, he writes, came ''the closing of the Western mind.'' In the fourth and fifth century, he writes, the Greek intellectual tradition ''was destroyed by the political and religious forces which made up the highly authoritarian government of the late Roman empire,'' particularly with the imposition of Christian orthodoxy. For a millennium doctrine ruled. Reason became heresy. It is precisely this sort of heresy that Jennifer Michael Hecht celebrates in ''Doubt: A History'' (HarperSanFrancisco, $27.95), which outlines the views of those who rejected dominant doctrines of faith or proclaimed disbelief in the existence of God. Her loosely defined roster of doubters ranges from the ancient Greeks to Zen Buddhists, along with such familiar figures as Galileo, Hobbes, Gibbon, Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson. Ms. Hecht is more generous than Mr. Dawkins, noting that just as there are believers who ''refuse to consider the reasonableness of doubt,'' so, too, there are nonbelievers who ''refuse to consider the feeling of faith.'' But her sympathies are committed to the doubters, including such unusual figures as the Islamic philosopher and physician Abu Bakr al-Razi (854-925) and Annie Besant, who wrote a ''Gospel of Atheism'' in 1876, helped reform London schools with free meals and medical care, and later in life became a theosophist and a translator of the Bhagavad-Gita. Ms. Hecht's goal is to provide an affirmative history for doubters. ''To be a doubter,'' she writes, ''is a great old allegiance, deserving quiet respect and open pride.'' What, though, is the nature of this doubt? Its demarcation from faith is not as precise as these descriptions suggest. Doubt can become a rigid orthodoxy in its own right. In contemporary life, as Ms. Hecht seems to know, doubt has become almost axiomatic (as if it were a matter of faith). Meanwhile faith itself is riddled with doubt. As Ms. Hecht points out, many religious |
1544167_0 | New York and Microsoft Expected To File Civil Suits in Spam Case | Eliot Spitzer, the New York state attorney general, and Microsoft plan to file civil suits today charging one of the nation's most prominent e-mail marketers with fraud stemming from sending unsolicited commercial e-mail, commonly known as spam, according to several people involved in the cases. The suits are expected to name three companies, including OptInRealBig, which is run by Scott Richter, who has been widely identified as a major source of bulk e-mail and has been an outspoken defender of his marketing practices. Mr. Richter said Wednesday that he had been notified by the state attorney general's office and by Microsoft that charges were imminent. He said that the accusations were baseless. A spokesman for the attorney general declined to comment on any potential cases. But a news conference has been scheduled for this morning in Manhattan with Mr. Spitzer and Bradford L. Smith, the general counsel for Microsoft. A spokeswoman for Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, one of the largest e-mail systems in the world, declined to comment. The lawsuits, which would be by far the most prominent in a recent flurry of legal efforts to attack spammers, are expected to shed light on the complex web of relationships and technologies behind such e-mail. They also represent an attempt to hold responsible not just those accused of sending e-mail fraudulently, but also those who financially benefit. On Tuesday, President Bush signed a law that makes it a crime to send deceptive commercial e-mail. But even in advance of that law, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, state and federal authorities have started to move more aggressively against some of the most prominent bulk e-mailers and companies advertised by spam. Last week, Virginia indicted two North Carolina men whose e-mail marketing to members of America Online generated 100,000 complaints in a single month. A week earlier, federal agents arrested Vineet K. Chhabra, operator of one of the largest Internet pharmacies selling diet drugs and Viagra, largely through spam. ''These investigations are very difficult, meticulous work,'' said Lisa Hicks-Thomas, the director of Virginia's computer crime unit. ''You have to trace Internet service providers and bank records.'' Many of the big Internet service providers have filed lawsuits against spammers, and they, too, have been using the power of subpoena to gather evidence and identify the most abusive practitioners. Not long ago, America Online sent investigators to Florida to an office suite suspected |
1544147_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Premiers In Talks | Seeking to break an impasse in the stalled Northern Ireland political process, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain met with the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, in London but reported no immediate progress in what he said would be a ''short, sharp and focused'' round of diplomacy. The talks were joined by David Trimble, leader of the largest Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists, and later in the day Mr. Blair met with the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams. Mr. Blair's review of factors that led to the breakdown of a power-sharing government also included a session on Tuesday with the Rev. Ian Paisley, the hard-line icon of unionist politics whose Democratic Unionist Party won the most seats in elections on Nov. 26. Mr. Adams said at a news conference that there should be a ''relatively short period'' to evaluate whether Mr. Paisley was willing to join a power-sharing government with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. Patrick E. Tyler (NYT) |
1542500_0 | Who's Scarier: The Hunter or the Hunted? | To the Editor: ''Bad News for New Jersey Bears'' (editorial, Dec. 10) reluctantly endorses New Jersey's first bear hunt in 33 years. Shooting bears at random for trophies might be psychologically soothing, but it doesn't target individual problems. It's like trying to reduce crime by shooting into a crowded room. Black bears are timid creatures that pose little, if any, threat to people. The real safety threat is from thousands of bear hunters armed with rifles. What New Jersey needs is not a trophy hunt, but an aggressive education program to teach homeowners and campers how to store their food and trash properly and eliminate other bear attractants. Let's strive for humane solutions, not bearskin rugs. MICHAEL MARKARIAN President, The Fund for Animals Silver Spring, Md., Dec. 10, 2003 |
1542355_2 | Furnished Houses: Moving In Means Taking Your Toothbrush | covered and open porches and two and a half bathrooms. It is offered completely furnished with a cherry dining room set, rattan furniture in the great room and an old-fashioned round table in the breakfast nook. It also comes with three bicycles. Agent: Frances Young, Dauphin Island Real Estate, (251) 861-8042; www.dauphinislandrealestate.com. WHERE -- Key Largo, Fla. WHAT -- 5-bedroom house HOW MUCH -- $3.75 million This house is on one of the three 18-hole golf courses at the Ocean Reef Club, a private community at the north end of Key Largo, about 70 minutes from the Miami airport. The house, which was professionally decorated, is 4,800 square feet and has a screen-enclosed pool and patio. There are five and a half bathrooms. Broker: Susan Bryan, Card Sound Properties, (305) 367-2038; www.cardsoundproperties.com. WHERE -- Sunrise Beach, Mo. WHAT -- 6-bedroom house HOW MUCH -- $949,500 This house, in the community known as the Villages at Shawnee Bend, has 97 feet of waterfront on the Lake of the Ozarks. It is fully furnished in an informal style; the great room is decorated in a nautical theme. Most rooms have lake views. It has a built-in entertainment center, four and a half bathrooms and a large dock with two boat slips, a covered patio, full kitchen, a fifth full bathroom and a sunbathing area. It is about 120 miles southeast of Kansas City. Broker: C. Michael Elliott, Gattermeir Elliott Real Estate, (866) 968-7525; www.yourlake.com. WHERE -- Whitefish, Mont. WHAT -- 3-bedroom town house HOW MUCH -- $775,000 This ski-in, ski-out 3,166-square-foot town house is in the Tamarack Lodges complex at Big Mountain resort. It is offered fully furnished with locally made log beds, leather sofas and chairs, bronze lamps, artwork and bed and bath linens. There are two stone fireplaces, an outdoor hot tub, a home entertainment center, three and a half bathrooms and a two-car garage. It is 250 miles northeast of Spokane, Wash. Agent: Pat Wood, Coldwell Banker Wachholz & Company Real Estate, (406) 862-1910; www.beinmontana.com. WHERE -- Fire Island, N.Y. WHAT -- 4-bedroom house HOW MUCH -- $1.5 million This two-story 1970's house in the Saltaire community comes with modern furnishings, including many black pieces that match black stripes painted on the hardwood floors. Since the community is accessible only by boat, transporting furniture there can be costly. There are two bathrooms, a greenhouse and partial ocean views. The |
1542501_0 | Who's Scarier: The Hunter or the Hunted? | To the Editor: ''Bad New for New Jersey Bears'' (editorial, Dec. 10) cites the problems black bears are causing but supports the hunt to thin the population, adding that ''come spring, there will be a sure sign that the species is healthy: the birth of a new crop of cubs.'' Would we accept a similar argument with respect to humans: that it's permissible to kill some individuals because the overall population would remain healthy? Our moral and religious traditions teach us that each human life is of inherent worth. We need to rethink our assumption that other than human species are so far below us in value that only their overall populations -- not their individual lives -- are precious. WILLIAM CRAIN New York, Dec. 10, 2003 The writer is a professor of psychology at City College, CUNY. |
1542557_0 | Virginia Indicts 2 Under Antispam Law | Virginia announced yesterday the indictments of two people on criminal charges involving unsolicited e-mail, the first case to be brought under an antispam law that took effect in June. Virginia is one of the few states with laws that include criminal penalties for sending unsolicited bulk e-mail, or spam. Officials arrested Jeremy Jaynes, 29, at his home in Raleigh, N.C., yesterday morning. He was released on $100,000 bond, said Sam Currin, his lawyer, and is awaiting extradition to Loudoun County, Va., where he was indicted on Monday. Prosecutors said that Mr. Jaynes also goes by the names Jeremy James and Gaven Stubberfield. The Spamhaus Project, a private group that assembles information on spammers, lists Gaven Stubberfield as the eighth most prolific distributor of spam in the world. Similar charges were brought against Richard Rutowski of Cary, N.C. , in association with the same e-mail campaigns. Mr. Currin said that Mr. Rutowski was expected to surrender to authorities in Raleigh yesterday evening or this morning. Each has been charged with four felony counts, each of which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, a $2,500 fine or both. The law allows such penalties only if the spam has fake return addresses, which prevent recipients from contacting the sender and asking to be removed from lists. Prosecutors said that from July 11 to Aug. 9, more than 100,000 AOL subscribers clicked a ''report spam'' button to complain about messages supposedly sent by these two men. Prosecutors say that the defendants sent many times that number of messages to other AOL subscribers and to users of other Internet services. The e-mail messages, which had fake return addresses, contained information about stock-picking methods, mortgages and ''Internet history eraser'' software to delete evidence that a user had visited pornographic sites. Mr. Currin said that he had just been hired by Mr. Jaynes and that he could not comment on the charges. Mr. Currin said that he did not represent Mr. Rutowski and that Mr. Rutowski did not yet have a lawyer. Mr. Rutowski could not be reached for comment. Virginia investigators, with assistance from MCI, which provides connections to the Internet for AOL, traced unsolicited e-mail messages to accounts linked to the two defendants. The Virginia law applies to any mail sent through the state, and both AOL and MCI are based in Virginia. Jerry Kilgore, Virginia's attorney general, said the state was |
1542470_1 | Leathernecks Plan to Use A Velvet Glove in Iraq | adopt a hard-nosed approach -- and spawned a behind-the-scenes debate within the American military about the best way to quash the insurgents. While some Army commanders insist the hard-nosed tactics have been successful in reducing enemy attacks, other military officers believe they are alienating Iraqis and thus depriving American commanders of the public support and human intelligence needed to ferret out threats. In an interview at his headquarters at Camp Pendleton, General Conway was careful not to criticize the Army. Still, he indicated that he plans to pursue a very different strategy. ''I don't want to condemn what people are doing,'' General Conway said. ''I think they are doing what they think they have to do. I'll simply say that I think until we can win the population over and they can give us those indigenous intelligence reports that we're prolonging the process.'' The Marines, General Conway says, will try to design their raids to be ''laser precise,'' focused on the enemy with a maximum effort made to avoid endangering or humiliating Iraqi civilians. After American forces invaded Iraq last spring, United States marines fought some of the fiercest battles of the war at Nasiriya and at a mosque in eastern Baghdad. After Saddam Hussein was ousted, the Marines assumed the responsibility for stabilizing south-central Iraq, where most of the inhabitants are Shiite Muslims who were persecuted under Mr. Hussein and were glad to see him gone. In contrast to the Army's experience, no marine was killed in action after mid-April. The Marines insist their success also reflected their energetic efforts to work with the local population, an effort guided by their ''Small Wars'' manual, which derives from their 20th-century interventions in Central America. There were several parallels between the Marine experience in southern Iraq and how the Army's 101st Airborne Division has approached northern Iraq -- and many differences from the aggressive tactics of the Army's Fourth Infantry Division and other Army units in the Sunni triangle. On their return to Iraq now, the Marines will be dealing with a much more challenging area which includes restive towns like Falluja, west of Baghdad. In that region, American military units have come and gone so often that they have had little time to understand their surroundings. Falluja was initially occupied by the 82nd Airborne Division, which was soon replaced by the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which was in turn replaced |
1546543_1 | Signs of Aging in the Global Head Count | Italy. Demographers agree that most of the growth will occur in Africa, Asia and Latin America. At current growth rates -- which pandemics like AIDS and aggressive government birth control programs can skew dramatically -- Nigerians will outnumber Japanese in about a decade and Pakistanis will outnumber Brazilians. By around 2050, India will surpass China as the most populous country. Demographers from the Census Bureau and the Population Reference Bureau estimate that the United States, which now accounts for about 1 in 20 people on Earth, will remain the third most populous nation. In 2000, the United States was thought to be the only industrialized country where the fertility rate was high enough to maintain current population levels, although the rate has since been revised downward. Still, on average, every 20 seconds an American baby is born. Every 12 seconds, an American dies. Every 21 seconds, there is a net gain of one immigrant from overseas. Over all, the population of the United States rises by one person every 10 seconds. Gains in life expectancy in the United States and in other developed nations mean their populations are aging. In just six years, the first of an avalanche of American baby boomers will turn 65. By 2030, more Americans will be over 65 than under 15 -- placing an enormous financial burden on those in the middle to support the dependent old and young. In the less-developed world, dependent children will continue to outnumber the dependent elderly. Worldwide, the elderly population is increasing by about 800,000 a month. The world's population topped six billion in 1999 and, at current rates, will hit seven billion in 2013, eight billion in 2028 and nine billion in 2048. It is projected to grow a little more than 1 percent this year, which means that in the minute or so it took to read this article, about 245 people were born and 106 died, for a net increase of 139. THE YEARS AHEAD: POPULATION Correction: January 4, 2004, Sunday An article last Sunday about the aging of the world population reversed two figures that described the rate of population growth in the United States last year. According to the Census Bureau, on average an American was born every 12 seconds; one died every 20 seconds. (On Monday the bureau issued a new estimate: one birth every 8 seconds and one death every 13 seconds.) |
1546497_0 | We Hate Spam, Congress Says (Except When It's Sent by Us) | Even as Congress was unanimously approving a law aimed at reducing the flow of junk e-mail, members were sending out hundreds of thousands of unsolicited messages to constituents. The spasm of activity is aimed at attracting voluntary subscribers to the lawmakers' e-mail lists, which would not be subject to House rules that normally impose a 90-day blackout before an election for taxpayer-supported Congressional mass communications. In September, the House Administration Committee voted, 5 to 3, along party lines to allow e-mail messages to the subscribers to be sent in the blackout period, but maintained the ban on free postal mail from House members to voters. The policy change affected only House rules and was not part of the junk e-mail legislation. At least 40 House members have bought or agreed to buy e-mail address lists from at least four vendors. The lists, which each have tens of thousands of addresses, are generally created by a process called e-mail appending, taking voter registration files from a member's district. The next step is to cross match them with large databases of names and e-mail addresses assembled by consumer data companies like Equifax, which has a database of more than 75 million e-mail addresses. E-mail addresses can usually be found for 10 percent to 20 percent of the voter file. Many members of Congress praise the new policy for allowing cheaper and more effective communications with constituents. But consumer advocacy groups say the policy may unfairly give an advantage to incumbents over challengers because it allows elected officials to use government resources to communicate with voters right up to Election Day. In addition, the consumer advocates say, sending bulk e-mail messages to constituents who have not agreed to receive it is essentially electronic junk mail, or spam. The ability to communicate with constituents at taxpayer expense, the franking privilege, is one of the most cherished and controversial perks of office. For 30 years, advocacy groups have lobbied and sued Congress to try to close loopholes and stop abuses of the privilege. Critics say the policy has created a significant new loophole. ''The core value is that you don't want to leverage technology to increase incumbent advantage,'' said Celia Viggo Wexler, research director at Common Cause, a group that has sued to limit franking. ''What is troubling is that essentially the House is saying, 'O.K., you can communicate with the constituency up to an |
1546506_0 | From the Recyling Bin | PUBLIC relations professionals churn out millions of news releases, and most go directly into the trash can. Here are a few that seemed to deserve a moment of glory: NEED GAS? -- From publicity for Too Cool Refrigerator Kits: ''Now you can get 'fuel' for your body from a refrigerator that looks like a classic gas pump from the 1960's. This do-it-yourself kit comes with all the components to transform your existing spare refrigerator in about three hours . . .'' HOW'S IT AGING? -- ''The American Dairy Association unveiled the first ever to-scale car made entirely out of cheese at Richmond International Raceway. The 'World's Cheesiest Car,' an authentic replica of Terry Labonte's No.5 Chevrolet, was carved from 3,500 pounds of yellow cheddar.'' WHY LEGAL DEPARTMENTS MATTER -- From a Bentley brochure: ''The 500-plus-horsepower all-wheel-drive Continental GT. A car that can seat four in comfort and yet accelerate from standstill to 60 m.p.h. in under 5 seconds on its way to a top speed in excess of 180 m.p.h., where conditions allow.'' POLITICAL SPIN -- Clever Covers Inc. announced a line of Presidential Wheel Covers featuring the likeness of President Bush. The Florida company also ''counts former President Bill Clinton and actor Burt Reynolds among its many fans,'' according to its Web site, www.clevercover.com. DON'T STOP NOW -- ''Frustration mounts while you're on the road, alone or with your family, and 'nature's call' turns to 'nature's scream' Introducing the TravelJohn Disposable Urinal, the essential disposable urinal kit you won't want to travel without.'' A NEW WAY TO IRRITATE THAT GUN-TOTING YAHOO BEHIND YOU -- ''There are approximately eight million vehicles on the road equipped with trailer hitches Now a new product called the PowerTale is able to turn those hitch receivers into attractive, interesting lighted message displays.'' |
1546475_2 | Brazil Resists Plan to Allow Spot Inspection Of Nuclear Site | telephone interview from the organization's headquarters in Vienna, ''We are working and have been working for some time with the government and authorities in Brazil to develop an appropriate verification regime for this new facility,'' but the agency otherwise declined comment. After years of resistance, Brazil adhered to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1997 and has since permitted limited, controlled visits to its nuclear facilities. But it has refused to approve the so-called additional protocol that authorizes spot inspections. Diplomats here say the international agency earlier this month sent a letter asking for a clear, prompt and definitive response. During Brazil's military dictatorship, from 1964 to 1985, the government clandestinely pursued a nuclear weapons program. In 1981, Brazil and Iraq signed a nuclear cooperation agreement that, according to an I.A.E.A. report issued last year, led the government to ship 26.7 tons of uranium dioxide to Baghdad. In 1989, the former head of Brazil's nuclear weapons program worked in Iraq as a consultant until American pressure forced his recall. With the return of democratic civilian rule, Brazil and its historic rival Argentina jointly renounced the manufacture of nuclear weapons and set up a mutual inspection system. But the Brazilian program continued secretly, and when a new government came to power in 1990, it found and destroyed a 1,050-foot-deep shaft built by the Air Force in the heart of the Amazon that scientists said had all the characteristics of a nuclear test site. In addition, the Brazilian Navy has long been working on a program to build nuclear-powered submarines, which would require a degree of enrichment higher than that needed for a power plant. During the presidential campaign he won last year, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticized the Nonproliferation Treaty as unjust, saying it favored countries that already have nuclear weapons. Then, during the new government's first week in office in January, Mr. Amaral caused a furor when he argued that Brazil should acquire the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. He backed away from that position after he was severely criticized here and in Argentina. This month Mr. Amaral publicly criticized the I.A.E.A.'s position on spot inspections as ''idiotic'' and ''foolish.'' But he also said, ''We're not interested in a bomb and we've never made a bomb or ordered it used in a war against Argentina, so we have the moral and ethical authority to talk about this subject.'' |
1545220_2 | Election Win Seems Assured for Guinean Leader, but His Nation's Fate Is Far From Certain | of weapons and irregular combatants circulating in this region is one of the principal elements of concern,'' the report warned. ''These armed groups with their unpredictable allegiances could serve the interests of politico-military elites who seek to create disorder and/or to take power by force.'' The United States regards Mr. Conté as a bulwark against spreading instability in the region. Washington has continued to reward his government with military aid, in spite of widespread allegations of human rights abuses. Guinea is rife with the ills common to the rest of the region. Its military appears to be divided. There are ethnic rivalries, that so far have been kept in check by the government. Conflicts in neighboring Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast have burdened Guinea with waves of refugees from across the region -- ripe targets, analysts say, for recruitment into future conflicts. Despite its desperate poverty, the country is a trove of natural resources: gold, diamonds and a third of the world's reserves of bauxite, the mineral used to produce aluminum. But this may be a mixed blessing because the scramble for control of natural resources has been a driving factor behind civil wars in the region. The Guinean government has made no secret of its political support for the Liberian guerrilla group known as Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy. A recent report by Human Rights Watch accused Guinea of providing more than moral support, saying that it had supplied mortars to the Liberian rebels for use in attacks on the Liberian capital, Monrovia, in July. Guinea denied the charge. Neither the European Union nor any American groups have sent election observers to Guinea for the presidential vote. Officials with the regional bloc known as the Economic Community of West African States said recently that Guinea had not welcomed their efforts to inspect its election procedures. Mr. Conté won elections in 1993 and 1998. Opposition groups took part in those elections but complained later of widespread vote-rigging. In 2001, the Guinean Constitution was changed to allow Mr. Conté to seek a third term. The presidential term was lengthened to seven years from five. Agence France-Presse reported that state television showed Mr. Conté casting his ballot on Sunday without so much as stepping out of his vehicle. ''I hope that everything goes well, in good conditions and that Guineans manage to express themselves,'' he said, according to that report. |
1545252_1 | AUTOS ON MONDAY/Technology; Dressing Wheels for Winter to Get a Grip on Slick Roads | in luxury cars, family sedans and minivans, hasn't reinvigorated the traditional snow tire, either. The downside, though, is that four-wheel-drive systems -- often aided by electronic traction control -- can give drivers a false sense of security, enabling them to churn through the snow while others are stuck spinning their wheels. But finding enough traction to get moving from a standstill doesn't repeal the laws of physics: changing direction or stopping demands a good grip of the road, a lesson many drivers learn only after depositing their vehicle in a snowbank. Improvements in drive systems have not eliminated the need for specialized winter tires. ''We use the analogy of shoes,'' said Matt Edmonds, vice president for marketing atthe Tire Rack, a high-volume retailer in South Bend, Ind. ''For running, we have special shoes, and for stomping around in the snow, we put on boots.'' Tire makers employ a variety of techniques to improve the performance of winter tires. Some are carryovers from traditional designs: deep tread grooves help the tire to sling out snow accumulated in the tread, presenting a clean gripping surface on the tire's next revolution. Wide voids -- the open spaces between the tread blocks -- expose a greater surface area of the tread lugs to the snow, enabling them to dig through accumulated powder in search of traction. For that reason, manufacturers recommend replacement at deeper tread depths than summer tires to maintain full effectiveness in snow conditions. Winter tires are designed to provide added mechanical grip through the use of small channels, called sipes, cut into the tread surface. The sipes provide an escape route for water, which can be present even at very low temperatures because the relatively warm tires (heated by natural flexing as they roll) melt a small amount of the snow. The sipes also distort under the pressure of acceleration and braking, leaning over like a tipped row of dominoes to expose a series of gripping edges. Some winter tires incorporate friction material within the tread itself. Tire makers have experimented with coiled wire, sawdust and even crushed walnut shells. Goodyear and Michelin, among others, use silica grit in the rubber compound, aiming to achieve the same benefit as spreading sand on a slippery road. Another tire maker, Bridgestone, uses a tread technology it calls ''tubular microcell compound'' in its line of Blizzak winter tires. A network of microscopic pores throughout |
1545207_0 | A New Trade Deal | Ten years after entering into a free trade agreement with Mexico, the United States has negotiated a similar deal with four Central American nations -- Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras. Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic may yet join ''Cafta.'' Though its terms are far from perfect, the proposed agreement deserves Congressional support. It is hard to energize a pro-trade lobby to counter the political clout of vocal protectionist interest groups, especially in an election year. But this deal should be judged on its merits. The agreement means more to Central America's fledgling democracies than to the United States. That said, Cafta's terms reflect the asymmetry in negotiating power between us and them. For instance, agricultural tariffs and quotas, a key impediment to Central American exports, are phased out over a longer period than tariffs on industrial goods and services, most of which are from the United States. Intellectual property is another concern. Congress must ensure that the accord allows developing nations to circumvent pharmaceutical patents in order to combat serious diseases like AIDS. Some of the agreement's less ambitious terms are sops to American protectionist interests. Take sugar. Robert Zoellick, the trade negotiator, rightly included it in the deal, to the dismay of Florida's cane growers and sugar beet farmers in the Midwest. The accord doubles the amount of duty-free sugar the Central Americans can sell us. It would have been better to scrap the quota system altogether. Still, Cafta promises to be the beginning of the end for America's absurd sugar program, which shields our inefficient growers from competition at a high cost to the developing world. On textiles, Cafta also serves up free trade with an asterisk. To gain duty-free access to the American market, Central American clothing will have to use fabrics from the region or from a Nafta country. This is an attempt to promote North American yarn -- a bow to the textile and cotton lobbies. Weaving protectionist clauses into a free trade agreement only cuts its value, without necessarily winning over the industry being protected. Catering to special interests tends to backfire, as the White House discovered with its recent reversal on steel tariffs. Harvesting Poverty: Editorials in this series remain online at nytimes.com/harvestingpoverty. |
1541941_0 | Seeking Balance: Growth vs. Culture in Amazon | As international energy companies move into the Amazon basin to tap some of the last untouched oil and natural gas reserves, more and more natives are fighting to keep them out. Oil workers and contractors have been kidnapped, company officials say. Equipment has been vandalized. Protests, injunctions and lawsuits are piling up as Indian groups grow increasingly savvy in their cooperation with environmentalists. The governments may increasingly regard the Amazon as an engine for economic growth, but native groups are struggling to balance development with the desire to preserve a nearly primordial way of life. ''Let the military come in, because we will defend to the last,'' said Medardo Santi, a leader of Kichwa Indians in an unspoiled jungle region that has been mapped for oil exploration in Ecuador, where the dispute is most contentious. ''As long as we live here, we will defend our rights.'' How this struggle plays out will determine whether Amazon resources become a critical part of Latin America's development and an important component of the American strategy to diversify energy supplies beyond the Middle East. Latin America already provides more oil to the United States than the Middle East does. Plans for new oil and gas fields are speeding ahead, pushed by companies from as far afield as China and including Occidental Petroleum of Los Angeles, Repsol-YPF of Spain, EnCana of Canada and Petrobras of Brazil. Governments are increasingly trying to lure investors and identify potential reserves along 1,000 miles of forests and Andean foothills, from Colombia to Bolivia. In Peru, one of the largest energy projects in Latin America is under way, a development that could cost $3.6 billion and include nearly 800 miles of pipeline and coastal plants to ship butane, propane and liquefied natural gas to California by 2007. In Brazil, the government plans a multibillion-dollar development that includes a $1 billion project to pipe gas through part of the rain forest. Oil companies are taking the first steps to explore in the Beni and Pando Departments of the Bolivian Amazon. Even Colombia, grappling with relentless guerrilla violence, has mapped out potentially oil-rich Amazonian blocks for prospecting. But in no country is Amazon oil exploration as potentially lucrative as in Ecuador, a country the size of Nevada that has, for better or worse, hitched the fortunes of its 13 million people to oil. The country's 4.6 billion barrels of proven reserves are |
1541943_0 | Bad News for New Jersey Bears | New Jersey is in the midst of its first black bear hunt in 33 years. That the state has enough bears to make them fair game is a miracle of conservation, considering that the population had dwindled to fewer than 100 when hunts were suspended. While estimates of current numbers vary from about 1,000 to 3,000, there is no question that the black bear is back. What makes the bears a target is not just their proliferation, but their aggressiveness in seeking food. Uninvited bears have entered homes, frightened children and attacked pets. So far, the bears -- which can top 500 pounds -- are not known to have killed any people in New Jersey. But the risk is real. Mostly that's because people have settled in recently developed parts of bear country and because they have been foolhardy and fed the animals, either deliberately or through the careless handling of garbage. The fact that the bear problem is not the bears' fault does not mean that their ranks should not be thinned. Three years ago, Christie Whitman, then the governor, tried to remove only the bears identified as nuisances. That plan pleased many animal rights advocates, but it was too selective to be effective. Bear contraception is another idea that, by itself, would not make much of a dent in the growing population. Unfortunately, a program to educate people about how to avoid bears became a victim of the drained state budget. A hunt offends the sensibilities of many, including protesters clutching teddy bears and others who warn that too much hunting could endanger the bear population. But that is not likely. While more than 5,000 hunters have six days to try to bag bears in the snow-laden woods, most will be unsuccessful. State officials are monitoring the hunt and are prepared to halt the six-day event early if it appears that too many animals have been felled. Come spring, there will be a sure sign that the species is healthy: the birth of a new crop of cubs. |
1541884_1 | Dividing Reality and Myth In the Fate of the Towers | long gestation, difficult birth, brief life and tragic death of the World Trade Center is likely to remain a classic in the already extensive literature on the subject. Without unduly pressing the point or resorting to forced metaphors, Mr. Glanz, a science reporter for The New York Times, and Mr. Lipton, a metropolitan reporter for it, make this history a sobering parable about America's might and its limits over the six decades of their panoramic enterprise. It was, in fact, the towers' innovative external engineering that redistributed the walls' structural forces around the gaping holes after the attacks and kept the buildings standing long enough for a vast majority of their occupants to escape. Despite the ghastly death toll, the high survival rate for those in the towers below the impact points of the hijacked jets was no less than a miracle. Had the towers possessed conventional steel skeletons, they would have probably snapped and immediately fallen over, causing more catastrophic collateral damage than they did by crumpling onto their footprints. That many more lives were not lost seems even more remarkable when you consider, as the authors point out, that the fireproofing of the towers' roof trusses was dangerously substandard. That problem was a result of the project's being exempt from city safety codes because it fell under the jurisdiction of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, whose secretive workings, Mr. Glanz and Mr. Lipton say, were instrumental in taking this quixotic enterprise outside the spotlight of public accountability. With a concision that nonetheless allows for expansive historical asides and sharply drawn character sketches, the authors condense immense amounts of previously uncollected information into fewer than 350 pages of actual text. Their history is far superior to those of Angus Kress Gillespie's ''Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center'' and Eric Darton's ''Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center,'' books that were published before the disaster and that even then, before the towers' horrible fate was known, seemed incomplete in their comprehension of the complex forces that willed the trade center into being. Showing that all public architecture inevitably reflects the political, economic and social conditions that shape it, ''City in the Sky'' is exceptional in its insight on those interconnected, not to say incestuous, influences in municipal and state government and the world of high finance. The |
1540189_4 | RUSSIA TO REJECT PACT ON CLIMATE, PUTIN AIDE SAYS | what are called joint implementation projects under the treaty. ''Our private sector is lining up for this,'' he said. ''It seems against the interests of Russia not to go into these.'' But it would be highly unusual for the government to have left Mr. Illarionov's remarks -- which were carried by the official Russian Information Agency, a state propaganda arm -- uncorrected if they were not representative of its position. His statements brushed aside impassioned appeals from the United Nations and from countries, especially in Europe, that have embraced the protocol as the best way to reduce emissions that many scientists link to harmful climate change. If Russia's rejection is indeed final, countries could proceed independently with projects to curb emissions or enter into new talks toward ways to spur international efforts, experts said. The European Union has said that, with or without the protocol, it will proceed in 2005 with a trading plan allowing member states to reach targets by investing in emissions-curbing projects in other states. But the overall effect would almost assuredly be to delay any significant new initiatives to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Although the Russian statements appeared to align Russia with the American position on the treaty, Bush administration officials declined to comment Tuesday. Previously, administration officials have said they have not urged Russia to join in rejecting the pact. But senior administration officials have been using the new round of climate talks to strongly criticize the Kyoto treaty and promote their alternate vision of how to deal with climate change. In several statements in recent days, American officials said that the science pointing to risks remained murky and that the only way to solve the problem was with long-term research on new nonpolluting energy options. Many climate experts have concluded that there is ample evidence that substantial increases in concentrations of the gases could disrupt ecosystems, storm patterns and agriculture in many parts of the world. Despite having rejected the Kyoto Protocol, the administration sent more than 60 officials to Milan -- one of the largest American delegations ever to the climate-treaty talks -- to promote alternative approaches to curbing emissions growth. The protocol is an outgrowth of the first international climate treaty, the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, which committed industrialized nations to work voluntarily to avoid ''dangerous'' interference with the climate system, but never defined ''dangerous.'' After signers in 1995 recognized that |
1540115_2 | New Evidence Is Reported That Floors Failed on 9/11 | pieces of one of the jetliners began to sag and fail. The metal was probably molten aluminum from the plane and could have come through the top of an 80th floor window as the floor above gave way, Dr. Pitts said. ''That's probably why it poured out -- simply because it was dumped there,'' Dr. Pitts said. ''The structural people really need to look at this carefully.'' The investigators also said that newly disclosed Port Authority documents suggested that the towers were designed to withstand the kind of airplane strike that they suffered on Sept. 11. Earlier statements by Port Authority officials and outside engineers involved in designing the buildings suggested that the designers considered an accidental crash only by slower aircraft, moving at less than 200 miles per hour. The newly disclosed documents, from the 1960's, show that the Port Authority considered aircraft moving at 600 m.p.h., slightly faster and therefore more destructive than the ones that did hit the towers, Dr. Sunder said. The towers did withstand the plane strikes at first, allowing thousands of people to escape, but then the fires, stoked by burning jet fuel, softened the steel of the towers. Potentially challenging other statements by Port Authority engineers, Dr. Sunder said it was now uncertain whether the authority fully considered the fuel and its effects when it studied the towers' safety during the design phase. ''Whether the fuel was taken into account or not is an open question,'' Dr. Sunder said. It is also unclear, he said, ''whether the extent of the loss of human life as a result of that'' was taken into account. The studies of the floor trusses and the design of the towers are just two elements of the investigation, which is carrying out computer calculations of the collapses, rebuilding pieces of the towers in order to test them in real fires, and piecing together a highly detailed chronology of the response to the attack. In one set of laboratory tests concerning the floor trusses, researchers used earthquake simulators to violently shake assemblages much like the ceilings in the twin towers. The shaking was meant to simulate the impact of the aircraft. The findings, said Richard Gann, a senior research scientist at the Building and Fire Research Laboratory, showed that many of the fire-protecting ceiling tiles near the impact probably crumbled, exposing the undersides of the trusses directly to the fires. |
1541712_0 | General Aviation Security Concerns | Moving to address concerns about security in general aviation, a field that ranges from single-occupant personal aircraft to fleets of multimillion-dollar corporate jets, the Transportation Security Administration plans to issue formal guidelines early next year for improving security at more than 18,000 airports and landing strips used by about 214,000 general aviation aircraft. The agency said it had received a series of recommendations from a coalition of general aviation groups. The recommendations include measures for ''tighter identification of passengers flying on private planes, closer monitoring of student pilots, and improving airport surveillance,'' the agency said. Trade groups for general aviation airports, the business-aviation industry, private aircraft owners and pilots, general aviation aircraft makers and others drafted the recommendations. Though no terrorist incident has been associated with business aircraft or other forms of general aviation, security analysts have expressed concern about the lack of uniform security procedures. Passengers on commercial aircraft must pass through federal checkpoints at 429 commercial airports. For passengers and crews on business planes and other general aviation aircraft, security is generally in the hands of the aircraft operator or the airport management. JOE SHARKEY MEMO PAD |
1541639_3 | An Obelisk Is Going Home; A Bolt of Lightning Helped | reminder of all that Ethiopians had been able to accomplish in the past. As for how well Ethiopia could tend to the artifact, he said: ''That's our business. The Italians have neglected their own national monuments for centuries, even though their tourism industry depends on them.'' Even now, with most of the obelisk dismantled and the last bit surrounded by fencing and workers, grudges are still being vented and gripes still being expressed. Vittorio Sgarbi, a former under secretary in the Ministry of Culture, said the obelisk should remain in Italy, because Italy ''had colonized Ethiopia during the years of the object's transfer, and so this really can't be considered a theft.'' Mr. Sgarbi also said the obelisk could not be as effective an advertisement for Ethiopian achievement once it went back to Aksum -- which is far from Addis Ababa and near Ethiopia's border with Eritrea -- because that area has a tiny fraction of the tourists that Rome receives. It was under the current prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, that the Italian government finally budged. That was in part because lightning struck, literally. A bolt hit the obelisk last year, causing a block of it to tumble. The Ethiopian government became frightened and redoubled its lobbying efforts at an opportune time. Some of the post-Fascist politicians in Mr. Berlusconi's government were trying to distance themselves from Fascism, an effort that recently yielded a trip by Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini to Israel. The remaining challenge was to take the obelisk apart, so that it could be moved, without damaging it further. ''We had to develop a really sophisticated system,'' said Giorgio Croci, the Roman engineer in charge of the dismantling. ''This operation is very high-tech.'' It involves sensors and computers that monitor the stress to which the obelisk is being subjected, special belts and cushions of carbon fiber and resin and many weeks of incremental work. The dismantling began in late October and is still under way. If all goes well, the obelisk could be in Aksum, one of Ethiopia's most important archaeological sites, by spring, and Italy will have set an example that other European governments may feel more pressure to follow. ''This may be a starting point, really, for returning the cultural heritages of many countries,'' Mr. Hulluka said. ''What has been the thinking in the past is no longer a reflection of the present.'' Rome Journal |
1541670_2 | The New Bear in Town | about how best to broker the peace with it. For some recently restored predators in our midst, the peregrine falcon, for example, the reinstatement process remains an all-around feel-good story. To a falcon -- a creature built to hover, both literally and figuratively, above the fray -- our most audacious spires provide ideal perches and nesting places. Some of the city's most deeply entrenched and opportunistic wild cohabitants, meanwhile (rats and pigeons), provide the falcon an abundant food source, one an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers are happy to part with. When it comes to a large, wingless, territorial creature like a bear, however, things quickly become more complicated. A recent study of the black bears living in and around developed parts of the Sierra Nevada has shown that they readily become inveterate garbage pickers. The fast-food trash bin, in fact, has proved to be such a consistent and abundant food source that these bears have stopped hibernating altogether, have switched from their natural daytime hunting schedule to an ''after hours'' foraging routine, and are now beginning to show signs of obesity. Many have been found by day sleeping off their binges beneath city trees. In New Jersey, meanwhile, black bear breaking-and-entering incidents have nearly doubled in the last five years, rising to 57 so far in 2003 from 29 in 1998. There has been, as well, a steady surge of nuisance complaints: bears rummaging through campsites, attacking livestock, raiding bird feeders and beehives, and threatening pets. In 1999, police and wildlife officials euthanized four bears; last year, they killed 35. Two attacks on humans were also reported, and though neither resulted in serious injury, state officials finally felt compelled to react. In July, the New Jersey Fish and Game Council approved a hunt limited to the area roughly defined by Hunterdon, Morris, Passaic, Sussex and Warren Counties, all in the northwest part of the state. The decision was not without controversy. Specialists called in by the state's environmental commissioner were far from unanimous in their support. Some said the rising bear population merited a limited yearly hunt that could be sustained indefinitely. Others argued that the state's bear census was unreliable and that the hunt should be postponed until further studies could be conducted and other options explored. Still, the commissioner ultimately decided to back the council's decision, as did a reluctant Gov. James E. McGreevy, a Democrat who |
1541614_5 | Mars Mission's Invisible Enemy: Radiation | hit each cell once. ''If a cell is hit once, there is no rate,'' she said. ''Once is once.'' After irradiation, the cells are moved to a nutrient medium that is known to support cancer cells but not normal cells. The experiment is repeated with ions of several elements. Dr. Sutherland also uses protons, which come from the Sun and stars and far outnumber the ions. One theory holds that cells busy repairing damage from protons will not be able to cope with damage from heavy ions; another says that proton irradiation will prime the cell's repair system to be ready for particle damage. ''It's a reasonable thing to ask, what are these first protons going to do to the later response to iron,'' said Dr. Sutherland, noting that the theory had not been tested. Another Brookhaven scientist, Dr. Marcelo Vazquez, a physician, plans to irradiate mice to look for brain damage. Damage from heavy ions, he said, will include a column of cells formed by the track of the ion, and a surrounding halo of cells damaged by electrons. Dr. Vazquez, who also has a doctorate in neurobiology and radiobiology, said that neither the column nor the penumbra was visible on post-mortem examination. But changes in motor skills are tested by stimulating animals with cocaine and measuring movement with infrared beams, Dr. Vazquez said. Memory can be observed. Mice are put in water and trained to escape to a platform; then they are irradiated and the drill is run again. NASA's chief scientist, John M. Grunsfeld, who as an astronaut made several spacewalks to maintain the Hubble telescope, said the research would take years. ''The current plan is about five years but I suspect we'll extend that,'' he said in an interview in Washington. He hopes that the research reveals the biological mechanism of radiation damage to cells, he added. Also, some targets are structural materials. The incoming protons and ions have so much energy that they make neutrons peel off the aluminum or other materials; those neutrons are a potent form of radiation. In addition, irradiating some materials can cause changes that make them radioactive. Such ''activation products,'' commonly produced in nuclear reactors on Earth, give off yet more radiation. Researchers hope they can pick materials that will resist such activation or neutron peeling. A third area of research is shielding. On Earth, radiation shielding is commonly provided |
1541626_1 | Humanity? Maybe It's in the Wiring | ago. Now, researchers can point to specific aspects of brain structure that suggest how our forebears came to develop complex social emotions, culture and other quintessential human behaviors. The search for brain differences has not been easy. Mammalian brains are extraordinarily similar. All contain an outer rind, or cortex. The human cortex, where intelligence lies, is simply a lot bigger than that of other creatures given the human body's size. But the size of the brain is not everything. One important feature of more complex brains is that they are rich in circuits -- linked cells from various parts of the brain that become active at the same time. Imagine a Christmas tree with millions of lights, each representing a cell group. The thought of dogs would activate a small set of lights. The thought of a beloved dog that died last year would activate some of the same lights plus others. The thought of a cat would activate yet another set with some overlap because animals are involved. Thinking about a sunset would activate whole new sets of lights with no overlap. Once a thought is complete, all the lights or neurons fall silent, waiting to be called into play in different combinations when new thoughts arise. Some sets of lights are found in structures that serve as major hubs for thinking and feeling. For example, a brain region called the anterior cingulate -- a hub from which many circuits branch out -- is almost always active when human subjects are experiencing emotions or need to think about things that are difficult. Any conflict of any sort, any reward, and the anterior cingulate starts buzzing. At least that is the judgment of the researchers who track increased blood flow with brain scans called functional magnetic resonance imaging. One of the first circuits studied in the 1940's involved the sense of touch. Sensations from the skin, including pain and temperature, were found to be carried by nerve fibers to a part of the brain devoted to bodily sensation. Less distinct sensations from viscera and internal organs went to a small region called the insula. Or so the thinking of the time went. But Dr. Arthur Craig, a functional neuroanatomist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, says this classic view is incorrect for most sensations. In a series of recent articles published in leading neuroscience journals, Dr. Craig has laid |
1541599_1 | OBSERVATORY | grazes. The fungus thrives and grows in the relatively defenseless interior of the plant, providing a healthy crop for the snails. The researchers showed experimentally that the fungus did much better in the wounds than on the leaf exterior. And the snails do much better on a diet of fungus and grass than on grass alone. The fungus infection also limits the growth of the marsh grass. So the snail uses the fungus to control the marsh grass to a much greater extent than it could do on its own. High-Pressure Plastic When it comes to recycling, plastic can be its own worst enemy. To be made into a bottle or other shape, most plastics must be melted first. But the melting and remelting of recycled material eventually breaks down additives in it and otherwise makes it unusable. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have discovered a way around the problem. In a report in the journal Nature, they describe a new plastic that can be formed at low temperatures and using high pressure. The scientists mixed two polymers, one with a high glass-transition temperature -- the temperature below which a plastic is hard and glasslike and above which it is soft and pliable -- and the other with a low transition temperature. They found that this glassy-rubbery blend could be formed at room temperature under pressures of 5,000 pounds per square inch, or roughly 300 times atmospheric pressure. What's more, products made from the plastic could be shredded, mixed and reformed at least 10 times with no degradation in quality. In addition to being more useful for recycling applications, such ''baroplastics'' may be less expensive and faster to manufacture because no heating is required. Liquid Aluminum While M.I.T. scientists have done their best to make plastics that don't have to be melted, physicists at the University of Toronto have been melting aluminum with abandon. Their goal was to observe at the atomic level how the metal melts. The researchers used rapid pulses from a laser to heat the metal and then shot extremely fast pulses of electrons through it. By recording how the electrons were diffracted by the aluminum over time, the researchers were able to see when the structure changed from a crystalline solid to an amorphous liquid. They found that it all happened rather suddenly. The atoms begin to vibrate quickly, and then the crystalline |
1540442_0 | Metro Briefing | New Jersey: Morristown: Group Seeks Bear-Hunt Halt | An environmental group yesterday sought to prevent New Jersey's black-bear hunt, which is set to begin on Monday, from including state parks and forests. The group, Saving Our Resources Today, filed its motion in a state appeals court, arguing that hunting bear on those lands was illegal because the State Division of Parks and Forestry had given insufficient public notice. The group also said that the agency had failed to conduct a required environmental impact report. It was the second such legal challenge to the bear hunt, the first sanctioned hunt since 1970. On Monday, animal-welfare groups and others made similar arguments in federal court seeking to exclude a national park along the Delaware River from the hunt. The state's environmental commissioner, Bradley M. Campbell, said that the disputed land was only about 10 percent of the area open to hunters, and that any court action would have minimal impact on the hunt. Robert Hanley (NYT) |
1540394_0 | World Business Briefing | Europe: Ireland: Airline Replaces Routes | Ryanair, the low-budget Irish airline, will replace nine of its routes from Stansted Airport in London and its hubs outside Stockholm, Frankfurt and Brussels, with alternative destinations because of insufficient customer demand. The chief executive, Michael O'Leary, warned last month that such changes were likely. In a statement, Mr. O'Leary said that a new route to Valladolid in Spain would bring 400,000 additional passengers through the government-owned Charleroi Airport near Brussels, where Ryanair pays discounted landing charges that are subject to an investigation by the European Commission. In another case heard by the Irish Supreme Court, Ryanair won the right to see documents owned by the government-owned airport authority, Aer Rianta, which Ryanair says gave it unfavorable treatment in allocating space at check-in desks and in baggage carousels. Brian Lavery (NYT) |
1540328_0 | A Harder Road to Irish Peace | Confrontational parties outpolled conciliatory ones on both sides of Northern Ireland's sectarian divide in provincial elections last week. In the largely Protestant unionist community, the Democratic Unionist Party, led by a fiery Protestant preacher, the Rev. Ian Paisley, triumphed over the more moderate Ulster Unionists. Among the mostly Catholic nationalists, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, displaced the Social Democratic and Labor Party. Those two defeated parties were the principal forces behind the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, a formula for power-sharing, demilitarization and legal reforms in Northern Ireland, a British-ruled province. Both parties also worked hard to sustain the hopes embodied in that agreement through a succession of crises in the past five years. Mr. Paisley's D.U.P., by contrast, has always opposed the agreement. Sinn Fein accepts it, but has always struggled between its absolute loyalty to the I.R.A. and the requirements of responsible democratic compromise. Despite the electoral switch, few voters in either community want a return to the bad old days before the I.R.A.'s extended cease-fire and the 1998 agreement delivered the province from sectarian violence and permitted its economic revival. The D.U.P. and Sinn Fein have emerged victorious, but they must pursue their respective agendas in ways that not only preserve but also strengthen the gains of peace. In theory, the right to lead Northern Ireland's next government now passes to Mr. Paisley. Yet that can happen only if he accepts Sinn Fein as the second party in the government, something he has vowed not to do. In opposition, the Democratic Unionists demanded a renegotiation of the Good Friday Agreement and full I.R.A. disarmament. The party now faces a choice. It must decide whether it can accept anything less than the full and immediate achievement of these maximum demands. If the answer is no, the British government will simply have to continue to run Northern Ireland, as it has since the last power-sharing coalition broke down more than a year ago. Sinn Fein can make its own constructive contribution by persuading its I.R.A. colleagues to continue working with the international monitoring body that has attested to its previous acts of partial disarmament and to allow future acts to be carried out less secretly than in the past. That would help ease continuing unionist distrust over the I.R.A.'s, and therefore Sinn Fein's, commitment to purely peaceful politics. Despite the likely deadlock over power-sharing in |
1540276_1 | Study Suggests Switching Drugs Could Aid Breast Cancer Patients | as aromatase inhibitors might reduce recurrences of cancer if taken after shorter stints of tamoxifen treatment. About a half-million American women use tamoxifen as a postcancer regimen. Doctors here cautioned that the new trial was somewhat small and that patients were not followed long enough to say definitively that women should switch from tamoxifen, which has been the standard treatment for more than two decades. ''I don't think the data is yet strong enough that we should be telling all women that they should switch over, or that they must,'' said Dr. Robert W. Carlson, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He spoke at a news briefing organized by AstraZeneca, the manufacturer of anastrozole. Indeed, doctors here were expecting a flood of questions, for which there are no easy answers, from anxious patients. ''How do we answer those phone calls when we get back?'' one doctor asked Dr. Francesco Boccardo, who presented the results of the trial. Dr. Boccardo, of the National Cancer Research Institute in Italy and the University of Genoa, replied that larger trials were needed. Still, there have now been several trials that point to a benefit of aromatase inhibitors. One study, published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that women could cut their risk of recurrence nearly in half by taking letrozole, an aromatase inhibitor sold as Femara by Novartis, after completing about five years on tamoxifen. Most women now take nothing after finishing tamoxifen therapy. Another study showed that women who took anastrozole instead of tamoxifen from the outset of therapy had a modest reduction in cancer recurrence after four years compared to those who took tamoxifen. The new trial looked at an in-between period. It evaluated 448 postmenopausal women with early breast cancer who had taken tamoxifen for two to three years. After about three years, cancer recurred in 17 women in the group that switched to anastrozole compared with 45 in those that stayed on tamoxifen, a statistically significant result. Four women in the anastrozole group died, as against 10 in the tamoxifen group, but that difference was not statistically meaningful. Both aromatase inhibitors and tamoxifen block the hormone estrogen, which can stimulate tumor growth, but they do it differently. Aromatase inhibitors block an enzyme the body uses to make estrogen while tamoxifen prevents estrogen from acting on tumors. Aromatase inhibitors are useful only for women past menopause. |
1543791_0 | Florida Sugar Growers | To the Editor: Your criticism of sugar farmers (''America's Sugar Daddies,'' editorial, ''Harvesting Poverty'' series, Nov. 29) was a recitation of the conventional attacks on the industry and on us. Sugar farmers are not guaranteed success. Our business is extremely low margin. Success depends on innovation, scale, weather, hard work and fair trade with other countries. Many sugar farmers have thrown in the towel, growing other crops or selling out to developers. Both of us were puzzled by your prominent focus on the fact that we are Cuban-Americans. In fact, we are proud of our heritage. Clearly, there is a healthy debate to be had over world trade and agricultural reform. This debate should be informed by substance, not tired rhetoric. ALFONSO FANJUL JOSE FANJUL West Palm Beach, Fla., Dec. 9, 2003 The writers are, respectively, chief executive and president of Florida Crystals. |
1543839_2 | U.S. and Europeans Agree on Sharing of Airline Passenger Data | ally in the fight against terrorism'' but that ''a balance had to be found.'' Under the agreement, negotiators said, the United States will be allowed to collect 34 types of data from the records, including a passenger's name, address, telephone number, credit-card numbers, travel companions and the amount of luggage checked onto the flight. But other details from the records, including information about passengers' health or dietary requirements, which might signal their religion or ethnicity, cannot be turned over to the United States. Mr. Verdery said that filters would be built into government computer systems to block access to that information ''before it gets to our door.'' Under the agreement, the United States will be allowed to store the information for three and a half years, far less than the Bush administration had originally sought. And the agreement requires the Homeland Security Department to make use of the information only in investigations of terrorism and other international crimes. Under procedures put in place by the Bush administration since the Sept. 11 attacks, airline passenger records are forwarded within minutes of a flight's departure to a Homeland Security Department offices in northern Virginia, where they are matched against terrorist watch lists and scanned for other information that might suggest a terrorist or criminal is on board. The information is then relayed to border officers at international airports who meet passengers as they arrive on the flights. Homeland Security officials said that virtually all international airlines were now meeting the requirements of the law requiring them to turn over the passenger records. They said that a few foreign airlines, which they would not identify, were continuing to have some difficulty in meeting the requirements for what appeared to be technical, data-processing reasons. ''We have the authority to sanction airlines, but no airline is under threat of sanctions,'' said Mr. Verdery. ''All airlines have complied when we have asked.'' The agreement announced Tuesday is to last for three and a half years, a period in which many European governments are expected to set their own rules requiring airlines to report passenger data on travelers headed to Europe. In a statement, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said that the agreement was reached ''after a year of frank and earnest negotiations'' and that it ''enhances the Homeland Security mission of fighting terrorism and crime while still ensuring that the privacy of travelers will be protected.'' |
1543920_0 | Bush Signs Law Placing Curbs on Bulk Commercial E-Mail | President Bush signed a highly awaited law on Tuesday to restrict junk commercial e-mail, or spam, which now accounts for more than half of all e-mail traffic. The law, which takes effect on Jan. 1, will ban the sending of bulk commercial e-mail using false identities and misleading subject lines. It will also require all commercial e-mail messages to include a valid postal address and give recipients the opportunity to opt out of receiving more messages. E-mail messages with adult or pornographic content will have to be labeled in a manner determined by the Federal Trade Commission, which is also authorized to study the feasibility of a ''do not spam'' list that would be similar to the ''do not call'' list for telemarketers. ''In a country with an ever-increasing reliance on the Internet, I am glad to know that today marks a day where Americans will begin to have some muscle against the spammers out there who flood their inboxes each day,'' said Senator Conrad Burns, the Republican from Montana who sponsored what is being called the Can Spam Act. Critics say the law, a result of compromise after years of Congressional stalemate, places the interests of businesses above those of consumers. They say it is flawed because it establishes a set of legal loopholes and pre-empts stricter state laws like the one passed by California this fall, which requires marketers to get consumers' permission before sending e-mail. The European Union has directed its member countries to adopt permission-based e-mail policies. Britain approved such a law last week. With the federal legal framework established by the new law, the attention now shifts to enforcement efforts. The Federal Trade Commission and other federal agencies, state attorneys general and Internet service providers will be allowed to take spammers to court, but individuals do not have the right to sue spammers. Violators will be liable for up to $250 per e-mail violation, up to a cap of $2 million, except in extreme circumstances when the fine could be tripled. Violators could also face up to five years in prison. ''We are gearing up for the effective date of the statute from the enforcement standpoint,'' said Brian Huseman, a F.T.C. staff lawyer who works on spam litigation. Industry groups, which helped shape the legislation, said they supported vigorous enforcement as the best way to distinguish legitimate e-mail marketers from fraudulent ones. They are also |
1545807_1 | Police Kill Bear at a Rural New Jersey Home | been mauled. The bear's killing was reported yesterday by The Record of Hackensack. When the police arrived, the bear emerged and charged an officer, Sergeant Schwartz said. Two officers armed with 20-gauge shotguns and one with a handgun wounded the bear, but even after they had fired 14 shots, it charged another officer. The bear, a male, was estimated to weigh 325 to 350 pounds. Because the animal had a thick layer of fat for hibernation, Sergeant Schwartz said, hollow-point bullets from the 9-millimeter handgun ''were bouncing off the bear.'' It was finally brought down by shotgun fire. In the much-protested hunt, the first since 1970, 328 bears were killed statewide. Of those, 23 were in Morris County, said Amy Cradic, a spokeswoman for the Department of Environmental Protection. Ms. Cradic said 17 other bears had been killed because of aggressive behavior through early December this year. New Jersey's bear population, estimated at 1,000 to 3,000 before the hunt, grew from fewer than 30 in the 1970's. After several years of intense debate, state officials approved the hunt because of increasing reports of bears killing pets and livestock and barging into homes. Ms. Cradic said there had been 58 reports of bears entering houses this year. Opponents of the hunt said that despite the rapid increase in both bear and human populations in rural areas, no one has been killed by bears in New Jersey. They contend that aggressive behavior in bears is caused by human carelessness and provocation. Ms. Metler said volunteers who went into the woods during the hunt reported that hunters were rousing bears from their dens. The hunt was scheduled for early December because females are thought to be in dens by then, while more males are still roaming. However, nearly two-thirds of the bears killed were females, a much higher percentage than other states have reported in recent bear hunts. Ms. Metler said some opponents of the hunt had found a wounded female bear and nursed it to health by feeding it grapes and peanut butter laced with antibiotics. State officials said the rescuers were subject to arrest because only licensed wildlife specialists are permitted to treat bears. Ms. Metler, who would not disclose the names of the rescuers, said that she was ''not afraid to be arrested'' but had not heard from state wildlife officials. The state did not receive reports of any wounded |
1545045_0 | A Road Paved With Good Intentions | WHEN they received their invitations to have breakfast with Governor McGreevey last October, Laura Lynch and other environmentalists thought it was going to be a great meeting: they would sit down with the governor at his mansion in Princeton, hash out some issues and listen to a pep talk from the man they had helped to elect. But that is not how the gathering unfolded. One minute, everyone was sitting around the long dining room table at Drumthwacket, the governor's mansion, politely spooning their scrambled eggs and drinking coffee. The next, the governor's aides were chatting about the benefits of building a major east-west highway in central New Jersey. The muted clink of silverware on fine china was replaced with the sound of 40 jaws dropping. ''We were all going, 'What the heck does this mean,''' said Ms. Lynch, a biologist who serves as conservation chairwoman for the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club. What it means is that the state may finally fill a major gap in its highway system. While that may be good news for drivers who now spend an inordinate amount of time stopping, starting and muttering on the Turnpike or Route One, and for businesses that need to entice customers and make it easier for employees to come and go, it is bad news for environmentalists and small towns situated in the path of the proposed highway. The governor was talking about Route 92 -- one of the most delayed highway projects in state history -- which has been argued over for more than 20 years. Shifted, altered, lengthened and shortened, the proposal has been rejected once by the Environmental Protection Agency and shelved by three governors. Originally designed to link the northwestern part of the state with the Jersey Shore, the road has been scaled back to its current incarnation as a 6.5-mile connection between Route 1 and the New Jersey Turnpike. Once purely a state highway, the project has been shifted to the jurisdiction of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. If the authority receives state approval, it will build the road as a spur of the Turnpike. The estimated cost of the project is about $400 million, money that Turnpike officials say is already set aside. So far, the governor has not committed himself to the project, and senior aides say the idea is only being explored at this point. Bradley M. |
1544959_1 | One Housing Woe Gives Way to Another; New York Is No Longer Awash in Abandoned Buildings. Now the Issue Is Supply. | huge capital investments in dozens of programs allocating money for repairs, encouraging new construction, promoting homeownership and working with development groups to take over and manage the housing. For some, particularly the city officials, community groups and housing developers who made a leap of faith in addressing the problem, the transformation has been a stunning, unequivocal success. It stabilized neighborhoods. It oiled the economy. It improved the city's image and helped fuel the broader revitalization of New York. For others, though, there is some regret about what might have been. While they do not question the effort's triumphs, they believe that the city could have been more creative and thoughtful -- developing more units in the same space, for instance, or making sure that rents in redeveloped buildings remained low. It is all the more regrettable, they say, now that homelessness is reaching record levels and once-forlorn neighborhoods are increasingly unaffordable for many New Yorkers. Whether the city's campaign was a complete success or a missed opportunity, no one disputes the notion that New York finds itself at a crossroads as it confronts a new set of housing challenges without this inventory of city-owned property. As the portfolio dwindles, the city's challenge is shifting from rehabilitating housing and land to dealing with a shortage of both. Those old buildings and vacant lots were such a staple of city life that officials regularly invoked their Latin nickname: ''in rem,'' or ''against the thing.'' The legal term technically referred to the city's possession of a building as collateral against a tax-delinquent owner, but soon became shorthand for the city's entire housing policy. ''You can't underestimate how important 'in rem' was,'' said Irene Baldwin, executive director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, which represents more than 100 community development groups. ''This was the foundation that everything was built on. It was the lens you look through. And now, the conversation is all about how the 'in rem' stock is gone, and what we do from here.'' Since 1676, the city has had the right to seize control of dilapidated houses and offer them to owners who would renovate them, according to Richard Plunz's ''A History of Housing in New York City'' (Columbia University Press, 1990). But the city did not manage many buildings, officials say, until the last quarter of the 20th century, when its fiscal crisis, coupled with rising crime |
1545049_2 | The World; In Europe, 'Secular' Doesn't Quite Translate | David, small crosses and hands-of-Fatima pendants. It urged that Muslim chaplains be appointed for prisons and that a national school of Islamic studies be established. It suggested making Yom Kippur and Id al-Adha, the Muslim feast of Abraham's sacrifice, national holidays. Confrontations between religion and secularism are arising across Europe, and evoking inconsistent responses. While most Germans register as members of a religion, the state of Bavaria banned the headscarf for teachers two weeks ago. While Britain has its established church, with the queen the ''defender of the faith,'' it also has Muslim policewomen in veils. While Denmark has an established (Lutheran) church, it is fighting hard to keep explicit references to God out of a European constitution. While many of Italy's religious Catholics, supported by the pope, have closed ranks against Muslims who sue to remove crosses from classrooms, other Catholics have joined Muslims in opposing the Iraq war and marching in pro-Palestinian rallies. This diversity of practice may be evidence of confusion, or it may reflect Europe's long holiday from doctrinal strife. With that holiday over, France will be a test case for Europe. It has both the highest percentage of Muslims in Europe and an uncompromisingly secular constitution. In 1905 laws were passed to discipline the Catholic church, which controlled primary schools, influenced politics through its assets and played a role in exposing France to the disgrace of the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army captain was framed on espionage charges. Church and state were separated by means of ''laïcité,'' which is difficult to translate. It differs from the American tradition in that it seeks less to neutralize public authorities in matters of religion than to neutralize religions in matters of public life. A paradox results: Since the Iraq war, much of the world views France as the symbol of Western reluctance to provoke a civilizational clash with Islam. The United States has been assailed for willingness to run that risk. Yet France aims to curtail the religious expression of its Muslims in ways no prominent American has ever suggested. ''A society's level of civilization is measured first and foremost by the position that women occupy in it,'' Mr. Chirac said last week. And the magazine Elle sponsored a petition against the veil as an ''intolerable discrimination.'' But some say such rationales are disingenuous. The social scientist Farhad Khosrokhavar wrote in November: ''It is common knowledge |
1542672_0 | Likud Debates a Palestinian State to Save Israel | In this place that often seems burdened by the past, it is the future that is suddenly bearing down. Within the Likud, the dominant right-wing party, leaders who once advocated holding every inch of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and who for three years argued that Israel could make no concessions because it lacked a Palestinian peace partner, are now debating how quickly to concede how much of that territory. The Likud is publicly grappling with a prospect long raised by Israel's left: that within a few years Arabs are likely to be the majority in Israel and its occupied territories, and that they may switch from demanding their own state to demanding the right to vote in Israel, threatening its Jewish identity. The result is a breathtaking inversion: Though the Likud's platform opposes a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River as a threat to Israel, some members of the party say they have concluded that only the creation of such a state can save Israel as a Jewish democracy. The debate within Likud is the most surprising development in a fall that has brought a two-month lull in the violence here and, with it, a series of official and unofficial initiatives for peace. Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations special envoy here, told the Security Council on Friday that peacemakers had a ''narrow window of opportunity,'' though he called the situation ''very fragile.'' In Washington on Friday, the Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, sat down with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Mr. Shalom told reporters he hoped for a meeting ''in the near future'' between the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers. Mr. Powell met Thursday with Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian who worked on an unofficial peace initiative. As the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, struggles to cement a cease-fire among Palestinian factions, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel is acting like a man in a hurry. The days when Mr. Sharon stressed reasons not to act -- like his demand for seven days of absolute quiet -- are past. Now he is eager to meet with his Palestinian counterpart. He is sitting privately with members of the opposition Labor Party he had all but ignored. He is even talking about unilaterally removing some of the settlers he worked so hard, for so many years, to place in the West Bank and Gaza. Mr. Sharon has said he |
1542628_1 | Annals of Homosexuality: From Greek to Grim to Gay | in 1730 in the Netherlands, 250 trials of ''sodomites'' took place, followed by at least 75 executions. Between 1806 and 1835, 60 homosexuals were hanged in England. Mr. Crompton, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Nebraska and the author of ''Byron and Greek Love,'' a much-praised study of Byron's sexuality, was one of the first American professors some 30 years ago to teach the history of homosexuality, a project that was at the time both daring and inherently polemical. But this is a restrained, careful, clear book of scholarly exposition; it is no martyrology. It also hopes to be a post-mortem. Mr. Crompton ends the book ''at the moment when executions finally cease in Europe,'' promising both the fading of homosexuality's stigma and the slow healing of its stigmata. But what led to this ''kaleidoscope of horrors''? In ancient Greece, homosexuality was philosophically praised and institutionally sanctioned, associated with virtues of courage and mentorship. In ancient Rome, it was primarily cultivated in relationships between masters and slaves, but homosexual behavior was common to Pompey, Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavius. ''Of the first 15 emperors,'' Gibbon pointed out, ''Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct.'' Why did such indulgence, tolerance and even sanction disappear? Mr. Crompton offers a very different interpretation from the influential theory outlined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. In Mr. Crompton's view, the concept of homosexuality was not something created in 19th-century Europe when it was first considered a medical condition, nor was it, despite cultural variations, so drastically different in other times and places. Mr. Crompton argues that Christianity created the most radical change in attitudes toward homosexuality. ''The debt owed by civilization to Christianity is enormous,'' he writes; but so, he believes, have been Christianity's sins. In Japan, for example, before the mid-19th-century Western influence, homosexuality was ''an honored way of life among the country's religious and military leaders so that its acceptance paralleled, and in some respects even surpassed, ancient Athens.'' It was common among Buddhist sages, part of samurai culture and an accepted aspect of the Kabuki theater world. Christianity attacked such customs when it gained access, Mr. Crompton argues, but its assault began in the West as early as the 4th century (not the 12th century, he says, as the historian John Boswell believed). Mr. Crompton traces Christian hostility to Leviticus, which may have |
1544395_3 | Surplus History From Ground Zero; Left Mostly Out of Memorial Designs, Trade Center Steel Sits Rusting in a Hangar | a turnstile from the World Trade Center PATH station. B-3101 is a motor from one of the twin towers' giant elevators that once lifted office workers into the sky. F-3001 is a bicycle rack, complete with seven abandoned bikes. Tires are blown out and rims are twisted, but a silver and blue helmet is still locked to the Crossroads Specialized bike. At one end of the hangar, a half-dozen ladder trucks and fire engines are parked right against one another. But these trucks will never roll again. The front end of Ladder 18, from the Lower East Side, is smashed inward, its wheels are broken off their axles, its charred and twisted ladder looking like a piece of licorice. Miraculously, all the firefighters who arrived in this truck survived. The single biggest artifact in the collection is the 25-part section of the exterior wall of the north tower. This is not the jagged, 240-foot-tall section of the south tower, the freestanding section that Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called ''a symbol of survival; it is already, in its own way, a masterpiece.'' That chunk of the south tower was quickly demolished, as it was believed that survivors might be underneath it and the rescue workers could not approach the area without being in danger. The surviving section of the north facade remained standing for months, precariously leaning on the ruins of the United States Custom House, and required much study before it could be taken down. Given this delay, there was enough time to devise a plan to save it. Today, these steel pieces -- a mixture of the three-pronged gothic trees and the straight, superthick columns that seemed to hold the whole tower up -- are now laid out across the hangar's concrete floor, covered in a white sheathing. Mark Wagner, an architect from Voorsanger & Associates, the firm the Port Authority hired to select and retrieve the objects from ground zero, the Fresh Kills landfill and metal scrapyards in New Jersey, said that each of these recovered facade pieces was carefully numbered so the parts could, at some cost, be reassembled as they once stood. Perhaps the most revered object in Hangar 17 is the 36-foot-by-4-foot steel column that was removed from ground zero on May 30, 2002, in a special ceremony; it was the last large chunk of steel carried off |
1541015_1 | Hong Kong's Latest Fight Over Harbor Turns Nasty | acres of the harbor for a covered harborfront highway, but the plan has infuriated many here, not least because of what it would do to the city's natural beauty and appeal as a tourist destination. So angry has the public reaction been that the government ordered contractors to stop the dredging for a week in early October. Although the dredging soon resumed, opponents still have two lawsuits pending, with decisions expected in January. Michael Suen, the secretary of housing, planning and lands, said on Nov. 21 that the government wants to preserve the natural beauty of the harbor and that it had halted reclamation projects elsewhere in the harbor. The space on top of the highway would mostly be waterfront promenades. Less than 1 percent of the harbor would be filled in, but it will be at a very visible place -- facing the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, where residents and tourists alike gather to admire the harbor and Hong Kong Island. Nearly half the inner harbor was filled in during the 20th century, and local activists have cited the downtown project in persuading the government to limit further reclamation. The struggle over the harbor's future has been growing nasty. Winston Chu, a prominent lawyer here, spent the last seven years leading the fight to block land-reclamation projects at the request of his mother, now 86, who disliked seeing changes in the heart of a city she loved. Mr. Chu held a press conference on Oct. 7 to celebrate the government's decision to review its plans for the harbor, but fled to Britain with his mother four days later after receiving what he described as, ''a very serious threat of personal harm to my family, specifically mentioning my aged mother.'' A prominent local activist and former lawmaker, Christine Loh, succeeded him. Mr. Chu has since returned to Hong Kong, disavowing any effort to resume leading the harbor effort and declining to say where his mother is. A police spokeswoman said in late November that the threat was still under investigation. One of Mr. Chu's complaints was that the seemingly endless spread of very tall hotels and office towers close to the harbor's edge had blotted out the view of the water for people in offices and apartment buildings as much as halfway up the hillside. ''You must give people in the back a chance to see the harbor,'' he |
1540924_0 | Little Ship of Horrors | OVER THE EDGE OF THE WORLD Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe. By Laurence Bergreen. Illustrated. 458 pp. New York: William Morrow. $27.95. On the dust jacket of Laurence Bergreen's superb new book, ''Over the Edge of the World,'' Ferdinand Magellan's epic sea voyage is described as ''a three-year odyssey filled with sex, violence and amazing adventure.'' That is a predictable line from a marketing department charged with maximizing sales. But it sells short Bergreen's accomplishment. Prodigious research, sure-footed prose and vivid depictions make for a thoroughly satisfying account of the age in which Iberian seafarers groped their way around the world. Binding it all together is the psychology of Magellan's flawed leadership, the source of constant tension in his fleet. Driven by a fanatical dream to find the Spice Islands, Magellan was a frustrated Portuguese nobleman sailing for the king of Spain and a complicated man with absolute power of life and death over his crew. Almost five centuries after embarking on his world-changing voyage, he emerges here in the hands of a capable biographer who is simultaneously attracted and repelled by his excesses. Magellan's incentive for sailing west in 1519 was the competition to control the spice trade, ''the Renaissance equivalent of winning the space race.'' The Spanish-Portuguese rivalry for global charts and trade monopolies fostered cloak-and-dagger personal intrigues, as well as state-sponsored terrorism and diplomatic bluffs. The stage was the world itself, and this narrative (a captivating piece of travel writing) proceeds from the narrow streets of Roman Catholic Seville to the glacier-bound Straits of Magellan, thence to the luxuriant Moluccas (the Spice Islands) and to the Muslim city-state of Brunei, with its sailing proas, trained elephants and elaborate buildings erected on pilings in the harbor, a Venice of the Orient. The wonders of the world encountered by Magellan's mariners almost matched the demonic creatures and mythical kingdoms they had expected to find. Magellan himself did not live to complete the circumnavigation. He was a victim of his own arrogance and authoritarianism, and his penchant for confrontational risk-taking ended in knee-deep water off the Philippine island of Mactan. Neither his Catholic faith nor his Castilian armor saved him from being hacked to death by Mactanese fighters he had needlessly antagonized. Tellingly, few of his soldiers or sailors hovering at a safe distance off the beach went to his aid. As Bergreen explains, ''his death brought a palpable |
1542854_0 | 2003: THE 3rd ANNUAL YEAR IN IDEAS; Billboards That Know You | Does it sometimes seem as if the billboards you pass on your daily commute are targeted to appeal to people exactly like you? Well, depending on where you drive, it could be that the billboards are listening in on your car radio as you drive past. Using a specially equipped dish manufactured by Mobiltrak, a Phoenix company, advertisers are now able to detect which radio stations drivers are listening to and then alter the messages on their electronic billboards to match the demographic that clusters around those stations. There are only a handful of these responsive signs in operation so far. Smart Sign Media, based in Sacramento, is using Mobiltrak technology on five billboards in California. One is near Future Ford, a car-and-truck dealership off I-80 in Roseville, Calif. Using the information collected by the Mobiltrak device, Future Ford knows that on weekdays that stretch of I-80 carries a lot of drivers who listen to country-and-western stations, so that's when the dealership advertises the Ford F-150, a popular pickup truck. Evening drivers, Mobiltrak has found, are more apt to listen to talk radio and adult contemporary, so they see ads for Tauruses and Escorts. Mobiltrak's technology relies on a little-known fact about car radios: they don't just receive signals; they also emit them. A car radio tunes to a particular station by mixing the signal from the ether with its own internally generated signal. It's that faint internal signal that the Mobiltrak dish picks up. Right now, the device works something like a Nielsen survey -- it picks up a sampling of passing radios and then calculates patterns of listenership. But the technology is improving, and the targeting is getting faster. Mobiltrak plans to introduce a digital version next year, and when it does, the billboards will be able to react nearly instantly to the demographic patterns of drivers in the area, switching the ads it displays to target drivers ever more precisely. Jennifer Barrios |
1542857_0 | 2003: THE 3rd ANNUAL YEAR IN IDEAS; Cancer Vaccine, The | Treating cancer with radiation or chemotherapy is a bit like firebombing a house to get rid of pests: it can do the job, but good stuff is going to get damaged in the process. Researchers have long searched for a more targeted approach that wouldn't injure healthy tissue. Now they may have found one in a surprising place: the human immune system. With ''foreign'' cells, like bacteria, the immune system works like a well-organized militia. Sentries called dendritic cells lie in wait at portals of entry, like the skin, ready to devour invading cells. After doing so, the dendritic cells display small bits of the invaders (called antigens) on their surface, and this display serves as a signal for specialized cells -- called killer T cells -- to multiply. T cells are made to recognize one specific antigen, and when they are activated, they stream through the blood searching for and destroying any cells that carry that antigen. Cancer cells, however, have a devious way of evading the body's natural defenses. Malignant cells often closely resemble normal ones, so the immune system usually leaves them alone. It's as if cancer cells make their way past the sentries -- the dendritic cells -- by cloaking themselves in recognizable garb. But researchers have now figured out a way to harness the power of T cells with a cancer vaccine. By isolating dendritic cells from a patient's blood and loading them with cancer antigens, they can replicate the first step in the immune system's response to invaders. The dendritic cells ''digest'' and display the cancer antigens, and when they are injected back into the bloodstream, they activate T cells, signaling them to exterminate any cells bearing the cancer antigens. The dream -- to create a vaccine against cancer -- has been around for years, but the technology that makes it possible is just now becoming available. In June, researchers at Dendreon, a biotechnology company in Seattle, presented data from the first randomized, placebo-controlled study of a prostate-cancer vaccine. Their vaccine (called Provenge) was delivered intravenously to 82 men with advanced prostate cancer. It was a small test, but the researchers found that in vaccinated patients with less aggressive cancers, the disease progressed more slowly than in similar patients who got placebo shots. After six months, 36 percent of vaccinated patients remained ''progression free,'' compared with only 4 percent of placebo patients. Dendreon has |
1542895_2 | Last Call for Cuba? | topsy-turvy situation, an osteopathic surgeon takes home less than a painter of wooden cows. Paradoxically, much of the charm of Cuba for tourists is a result of the post-revolution economic decline, which prevented old structures from being torn down and replaced. On Avenida 54, the main pedestrian mall in Cienfuegos, we turned into a meagerly stocked plant store and mounted a grand, but derelict century-old staircase in one of the innumerable treasures crumbling from neglect. At the second floor were a pair of wooden spiral stairs ascending to turrets. We longed to climb them, but they were blocked off as unsafe. Just under two miles from the center of town is Punta Gorda, a peninsula that seems to have fallen under a Scheherazade spell. Palacio de Valle, a Moorish-style private mansion, set the style in 1917. In emulation, neighboring prefab wooden houses from Sears in the 20's and 30's acquired gingerbread porches, Moorish screens, minarets and other fantasies. In the 50's, Batista's brother plopped the cement-block modern Hotel Jagua in the middle of this community. Without the revolution, the peninsula might now be rows of Hotel Jaguas. In contrast to Cienfuegos, with its turn-of-the-century French flavor, Santiago de Cuba, on the eastern end of the island, has an older, earthier feel. In 1791, landowners fleeing the slave revolt in Haiti began developing coffee, cotton and sugar cane plantations, importing increasing numbers of slaves. As a result, the city, now the second largest in Cuba, has a high proportion of black and mulatto inhabitants among its 440,000 residents, and a rich African slave heritage. In the harbor is a tiny island that used to be called Smith, but now is Granma, after the pleasure craft that Castro and his guerrillas used to invade Cuba in 1956. Instead of monuments to the revolution, however, there are only gorgeously weathered wooden cottages and fishing shacks from the early 20th century, whose vine-wrapped verandas cry out for festoons of fashion models from capitalist magazines. In a country where neglect is the norm, at the Cementerio de Santa Ifigenia, the tomb of José Martí, the national hero who died in 1895 fighting for independence from Spain, stands out for its pristine condition. We witnessed a ceremony instituted by Castro. To a recording of the national anthem, three spit-and-polish soldiers descended the path in choreographed goose-step and relieved two guards at the door. Politics pretty much |
1542799_1 | Bring Back the Gods | Lefkowitz of Wellesley College. Her thought-provoking new book, ''Greek Gods, Human Lives,'' is precisely an attempt to write the gods back into Greek myths. She maintains that modern accounts concentrate on the human dimension of these extraordinarily resilient tales, with a distorting playing down of the divine. Joseph Campbell -- whose highly influential hero (''The Hero With a Thousand Faces'') is presumably still waiting for the lights to change on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue -- is perhaps her central target. Despite its subtitle, this is not a book about the nature or function of myth in general: it is about the gods in Greek literature. It takes the form of a brisk jog through Homer, Hesiod and other early poetry, and then through classical tragedy, always emphasizing the ubiquity and power of gods. A third section adds some Hellenistic and even Roman literature; but this seems something of an appendix, since, as Lefkowitz recognizes, by those times the dominant philosophies were all conveying more metaphysical versions of the divine. It is central to her message that all the story-tellings in major literature across time handled the gods in an essentially similar way. She claims to show how ''in all the dramas known to us the gods intervene in human life in the same ways and for the same reasons that they did in Homer.'' But this is perhaps to render the picture too monochrome and static. In between Homer and drama, attitudes and responses had shifted. As she acknowledges, but only toward the end of the book, serious reservations were voiced about the traditional gods. Before 500 B.C. the free-thinker Xenophanes (who even attacked the Greek obsession with athletics!) spurned the gods of Homer and Hesiod for their deplorable behavior -- ''thieving, fornicating and tricking one another.'' Before 400, Thucydides wrote a history, obsessed with explanation, that all but left the gods out of the frame. Plato, not much later, wanted to exclude these old portrayals of the divine from his ideal polity. So, by the time of the tragedian Euripides, many did not take the Homeric vision of the gods literally: their mythical interventions were a way of talking about human life rather than a description or a truth. Take Euripides' tragedy ''Heracles'' (of about 416 B.C.) Here is Heracles, son of Zeus and a mortal woman, a fine hero who has cleared the earth |
1543234_0 | BEAR HUNT BEGINS | After long debate, lawsuits and protests, the state's first black bear hunt since 1970 started in deep snow on Monday. Wildlife officials said the goals were to slow the growth rate of the bear population and to reduce potentially dangerous encounters with people. Hunters killed 116 bears on Monday, 66 on Tuesday and 39 on Wednesday, for a three-day total of 221. Opponents of the six-day hunt complained in midweek that hunters were killing cubs. The charge disturbed Martin J. McHugh, the director of the Division of Fish and Wildlife. ''Hunters are not targeting cubs,'' he said. ''They're hunting bears.'' Nevertheless, rules of the hunt permitted the killing of cubs. Robert Hanley BRIEFINGS: ANIMAL KINGDOM |
1542810_0 | The Greeks and Us | To the Editor: No writer could be but made happy by Joy Connolly's characterization of his new book (Nov. 9) as ''a triumph of popularization: extraordinarily knowledgeable, informal in tone, amusing, wide-ranging, smartly paced. We learn much. . . .'' But then it appears we do not learn enough, because in my new book, ''Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter,'' I have failed to ''reject celebrations'' of Greek ideas and values ''in favor of a hardheaded examination of their meaning and foundation in what is now a truly global culture.'' Connolly appears in her reading to have missed the obvious: ''Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea'' is Volume 4 of the ''Hinges of History'' series -- in which three additional volumes are promised ''on the making of the modern world.'' What would she expect me to do in these coming volumes if not examine in our current global context the meaning of the ideas and values that in ancient times came to form the foundations of the Western world? But in order to do this a writer must first establish what those ideas and values were in their original context -- and this has been my labor in the first four volumes in the series. To take me to task for not immediately reviewing Greek ideas and values against current global concerns is also to demand that my little book of some 300 pages should have been turned into a stupor-inducing tome more than double its present size. I have every intention of dealing with Connolly's interests -- in good time. A book that attempts to deal with everything will in the end deal with nothing. Thomas Cahill New York |
1542908_0 | 2003: THE 3rd ANNUAL YEAR IN IDEAS; Food Simulator, The | At a technology conference in July, researchers from the University of Tsukuba in Japan unveiled what they bill as the world's first ''food simulator.'' Looking like a cross between an electric toothbrush and some fearsome dental appliance, the device is designed to replicate the taste, feel and sound of biting into various foodstuffs. In order to operate the simulator, researchers first must analyze and record the experience of eating the food they wish to simulate. Using specially made sensors that are placed in the mouth, they measure the force needed to bite through the food and identify the major chemical components that give it its distinctive taste. At the same time, with a small microphone, they record the audible vibrations of the jawbone in action. After these details have been collected, they are relayed to the food simulator. When a virtual eater bites down, a small motor in the simulator mimics the resistance of the simulated food, while a delivery tube squirts a chemical cocktail reproducing whichever combination of the five elemental taste sensations is called for: sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness -- and the meaty deliciousness the Japanese call umami. To complete the illusion, a speaker embedded in the device emits the appropriate masticating sound. The machine's inventors are somewhat vague about what the food simulator will actually be used for, but they suggest that it will be helpful in designing new foods -- particularly when the concern is chewability, as with food for the elderly. In a charitable spirit, the designers also suggest that the food simulator ''enables younger people to understand the biting difficulties experienced by elderly people.'' In other words, the simulator will not only allow people to experience caviar without straining their bank accounts; it will also deepen intergenerational understanding. Lawrence Osborne |
1542796_3 | Getting to Yes | whom, he says, were hostile to constructive dealings for a variety of selfish or shortsighted reasons. These third parties, in Adams's view, ought to have engaged in talks even in the face of the republicans' campaign of violence, which included attempts to kill Prime Ministers Thatcher and Major, presumably among those expected to be doing the talking. Two individuals are exempted from this criticism: John Hume, the leader of the (nonviolent) nationalist Social Democratic and Labor Party, and the Rev. Alex Reid, a Roman Catholic priest. Thanks to their vision and their readiness to risk dealing with Sinn Fein, productive dialogue finally got under way. The guiding purpose throughout, Adams states, was to produce an alternative to violence (most of which, of course, Adams supported). Although Adams underplays Hume's crucial role in this process, his accusations of the unreliability of Conservative governments are often persuasive. (There's no doubt that John Major, hampered by a very small parliamentary majority, did not prosecute peace in good faith.) It took the arrival of a Labor government to push the unionists into making even the slightest concessions. Tony Blair's personal interventions in this regard were enormously creditable -- as was the contribution of George Mitchell, the American mediator of the talks. What's striking, in Adams's description of the years of violence, setbacks, false dawns and minuscule advances that constituted the peace process, is how he and Hume persevered. Every imaginable method was apparently tried out: mediation, secret negotiations, back channels, two-track discussions, hypothetical answers to hypothetical questions, Clintonian schmoozing. Adams describes his position as pragmatic and unruffled: he accepted violence by both sides as a given, and somehow tolerated the never-ending delicacy of his situation. With the I.R.A., whose rank and file plainly had doubts about dealing with the enemy, he was respectful and downbeat. With his unionist negotiating adversaries, who loathed him and refused to have any personal contact with him, he was clubbable and conciliatory. His decision to smile and smile brings to mind the advice given by the dying grandfather in Ralph Ellison's ''Invisible Man'': ''I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction.'' The Irish experience confirms, as if anybody seriously doubted it, that to settle a violent political conflict you need talks that maximize, not minimize, the involvement of those perpetrating the violence. You must also have leaders with the |
1542964_0 | Don't Say It! | To the Editor: The work of the British architect Norman Foster is certainly eye-catching [''Conserving Everyone's Energy but His Own'' by James S. Russell, Nov. 23]. I don't think anyone could view his London city hall without thinking of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. With that in mind, James S. Russell is to be congratulated for never once mentioning the obvious. GEORGE DUNBAR Toronto NORMAN FOSTER |
1542897_1 | Airlines and U.S. In a Bag Battle | do to go through security.'' (He was referring to a survey of passengers conducted by the Department of Transportation last August.) As it turned out, some of the longest lines observed at the airport over the Thanksgiving weekend were at coffee retailers, according to a survey conducted by Travelocity. One undercurrent for the tension is the fact that the government and the airlines have yet to work out who is responsible for the nearly 12,000 claims that have been submitted by passengers reporting problems with checked bags (such as missing items) since the security administration began screening luggage for explosives a year ago. Since then, the agency has advised travelers to leave bags unlocked in case they need to be searched, raising the still unresolved question of who is liable for missing or damaged contents. Caught in the Middle Roberta DiBartolomeo is one of the passengers caught in the middle of that negotiation: She is still waiting for a response to a claim she and her husband filed in January reporting items missing from their luggage after a flight last Dec. 25. Although they were ultimately reimbursed through their homeowner's insurance, she said the lack of a response from the security administration was disheartening. ''We went through the whole process and wrote them a letter,'' she said. ''Somebody from that office should have responded.'' Mr. Turmail said her claim was most likely ''held up by the ongoing negotiations with the airlines.'' Mark Hatfield, another administration spokesman, said that a system to acknowledge baggage complaints has since been created. So where does that leave travelers with piles of presents, sweaters and winter sports equipment? Ms. DiBartolomeo's advice (''Make sure you have really good insurance'') is probably a good place to start. Even when an airline does take responsibility for lost luggage, its liability is limited to $2,500 a passenger on domestic flights and $9.07 a pound on international flights (about $640 for each piece of baggage), and most airlines stipulate that they are not liable for electronic equipment, jewelry and other valuables. One bright spot this year is that travelers can now buy luggage locks that meet guidelines approved by the Transportation Security Administration (screeners can open the locks, if necessary). The first locks to meet those standards, using a system developed by a company called Travel Sentry, have gone on sale at a variety of retailers ($20 for a pair |
1543219_4 | Trade Center Fireproofing Tests Suggest a Wider Safety Problem | Other experts have disputed that contention, saying that poorly applied and maintained fireproofing could have played a role in the collapses. Only the cores of the twin towers, which held the elevators and escape stairwells, were built like traditional high-rises, with clusters of relatively heavy steel columns and beams linked together in a cagelike matrix. Beyond that, the 110 floors in each tower contained roughly an acre of open space each, uncluttered by vertical support columns. Floor supports called trusses ran like bridges from the core to a dense palisade of columns within the towers' facades -- 59 columns, each with relatively thin steel, per side of each tower. The trusses, a web of narrow steel bars and other components, were stouter versions of the supports used in the ceilings of many warehouses, supermarkets and sports installations like indoor tennis courts. Spray-on fireproofing replaced the use of heavier materials, like terra-cotta blocks, after World War II, and became extremely common in the 1960's, when the World Trade Center went up. The fireproofing used on the trade center trusses was a mixture of mineral fibers and cement-like materials called binders. Investigators at the Building and Fire Research Laboratory recreated the formula used at the trade center and applied it to mock-ups of the trusses in their laboratories. Dried and in place on the truss bars, the material is friable, even dusty to the touch. It tends to crumble under the slightest pressure. Perhaps not surprising, there is extensive evidence that the trade center's fireproofing was missing in places. ''We were looking at a lot of pictures of the World Trade Center, especially of the trusses,'' said Kuldeep Prasad, the investigator whose computer simulations produced the results on heat flow last month. ''What we noticed was that there were gaps in the insulation. For some reason the insulation had just fallen off.'' Investigators have also found that no fireproofing at all was applied to the sandwiches of metal and rubbery glue, called viscoelastic dampers, because the trade center plans did not call for it. The dampers were connected to the outer edges of the trusses, where they connected to the perimeter columns. The dampers, about 10,000 in each tower, acted like shock absorbers to reduce the sway of the buildings in the wind. The bare dampers ''provide a heat input'' to surrounding components, said Dr. John Gross, the leader of the structures |
1545953_28 | ART GUIDE | in actual photographs. These self-portraits have a subtly creepy resonance (Johnson). Other Galleries * ''FROM ISHTAR TO APHRODITE: 3,200 YEARS OF CYPRIOT HELLENISM,'' Onassis Cultural Center, 645 Fifth Avenue, at 51st Street, (212) 486-4448, through Jan. 3. Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty and desire, is the focal point of this show of art and artifacts from the island of Cyprus, reflecting its Greek heritage from the late Bronze Age (around 1400 B.C.) to the end of the Hellenistic period (around 100 B.C.). The Greek colonists adapted Aphrodite from an ancient fertility deity worshiped there. The show, organized by the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus, begins with small, stylized images of the Cypriot deity circa 1450 to 1200 B.C. and ends with a naturalistic, nearly life-size marble torso of Aphrodite from around 100 B.C., rescued from the surrounding sea in 1956. Other relics include jewelry, pottery, statuettes, inscribed tablets, coins, weapons and even a bronze strigil, used by athletes to scrape grime off their bodies. But the most interesting objects are the human representations from this crossroads of East-West civilization, among them a tiny figure of a Hittite warrior in bronze; a pottery centaur, its human torso joined to animal quarters; a rare helmeted head of a soldier; and a wonderful life-size likeness in limestone of the god Apollo. The show adds laurels to this boutique museum, only three years old but earning a reputation for the quality of its presentations (Glueck). ROY LICHTENSTEIN, City Hall, City Hall Park and the Tweed Courthouse, Lower Manhattan, through October. Rising five stories under the octagonal skylight of the Tweed Courthouse's fabulous Italianate rotunda, Lichtenstein's clunky tower of giant cartoon brush strokes is an impressive sight. The centerpiece of a Public Art Fund installation of four sculptures in and around City Hall, its sly commentary on Modernist myths of freedom and spontaneity is enhanced by its insertion at the core of New York City's bureaucratic control center. You can't just spontaneously walk in to see it, though. Call 311 to sign up for a Friday-only tour (Johnson). ''REMEMBRANCE: RUSSIAN POST-MODERN NOSTALGIA,'' Yeshiva University Museum, 15 West 16th Street, Flatiron district, (212) 294-8330, through Feb. 1. This latest version of the end-of-Soviet-art show has its familiar names -- Ilya Kabakov, Grisha Bruskin, Komar and Melamid, Leon Sokov, Alexander Kosolapov -- and others less known. The use of the word nostalgia in connection with this complex, |
1546026_1 | French Find No Flight-Terror Tie, But American Suspicions Remain | flights were canceled and French officials said they planned to resume the flights between Paris and Los Angeles on Friday. In New York and New Jersey, police increased their surveillance of critical sites, including bridges, tunnels, nuclear power plants and chemical factories. But officials said they were acting out of general caution, not specific threats. ''The public should go about its business,'' Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City said. ''We are doing exactly what the plan said we are going to do. There are police officers and intelligence forces where you see them and sometimes where you don't see them.'' But law enforcement officials continued to scrutinize passenger and crew lists for international flights coming into the United States, and Mexican officials confirmed that the United States had formally asked them on Tuesday to heighten security precautions at Mexican airports, ports and border crossings. ''It's too early to say that we've dodged any bullets,'' said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, adding that the United States would probably retain a relatively high ''orange'' threat alert though the end of the holidays. Administration officials said the United States had given the French about a dozen names from its terrorist watch list and warned that they might be aboard the flights from Paris. After considerable internal debate, the French government decided to cancel six flights between Paris and Los Angeles scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, and the French police briefly detained about a half-dozen passengers. On Thursday, French officials said they had released all the passengers, including one French citizen, one American, one German and several Algerians. ''There was absolutely nothing there,'' said a spokesman for the French Interior Ministry. Bush administration officials said on Thursday that their concerns were not simply about the people who had checked in for their flights but also about those who had bought tickets and not shown up. About 350 passengers were screened for questioning Wednesday afternoon as they prepared to board Air France Flight 68, which had been scheduled to depart at 1:35 p.m. Another 350 passengers who were scheduled to fly out at 7 p.m. were turned away before they checked in. It was unclear if any of those passengers for the second flight were questioned or whether the police had contacted passengers holding tickets for any of the other four flights that were canceled. According to an |
1545952_1 | Cars That Nudge You to Drive More Safely | auto manufacturers to improve auto safety by getting rid of distractions. Just a few years ago, aggressive driving and road rage were blamed for most accidents, but now distraction has become the bête noire of safety experts. A study for the AAA Safety Foundation, conducted by the Highway Safety Research Center at the University of North Carolina and released this fall, found that distracted driving is responsible for about a quarter of all accidents. Or, as Jeff Greenberg, a safety researcher at Ford Motor Company, in Dearborn, Mich., said, ''talking to your wife can kill you.'' While cell phones have been singled out as a major cause of distraction-related accidents, the biggest diversions are fairly low tech, according to Jane Stutts, the author of the AAA study. Outside stimuli -- billboards or accident scenes that inspire rubbernecking -- accounted for almost 30 percent of crashes; adjusting the radio or CD player, 11.4 percent; talking with passengers, 10.9 percent; adjusting climate control, 2.8 percent; eating or drinking, 1.7 percent. Cell phones accounted for just 1.5 percent of accidents, the study found. ''Different age groups appear to be distracted by different things,'' Dr. Stutts said. Drivers under 20 were especially likely to be distracted by tuning the radio or changing CD's, while young adults (20 to 29) seemed more distracted by other passengers. Drivers over 65 were more distracted by objects or events happening outside the vehicle. In almost 90 percent of these cases, just a one- or two-second warning could have averted a crash, researchers estimate. All of which has Dr. Selker and his team monitoring everything from a car's rear-view mirror (a driver who rarely glances at it is prompted by a flashing light) to its carbon monoxide levels (if carbon monoxide builds up, an alarm goes off before drowsiness can set in). Some of the innovations reduce the driver's responsibilities. Water vapor sensors, for instance, activate the defroster when necessary, and the audio speakers are so tightly focused that the driver doesn't have to be bombarded by the latest OutKast single, even if his passengers want to be. Forget to signal a turn? A voice reminds you to do so next time. At I.B.M., researchers are working on a different vision of the automotive future, called Smart Passenger. It focuses on using voice commands to operate the radio, get directions, answer the phone -- any task that could take |
1477974_1 | Bloomberg and Klein Have Plan to Improve Special Education | City schools fail shamefully to improve the odds for children in special education,'' Mr. Bloomberg said. More than 150,000 children, or about 11 percent of public school students, are classified as needing special education. Of those, 20,000 are severely physically or mentally disabled and are enrolled at schools that are part of a citywide special education district, known as District 75. Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday that District 75 would remain intact but that efforts would be made to move services for the severely disabled closer to their home neighborhoods, a response to a common complaint that disabled students often must endure lengthy bus rides to get to schools with appropriate services. But special education services for most students would be consolidated into the 10 instructional zones that the Bloomberg administration has created to replace the city's community school districts. The mayor and the chancellor said that 200 specialists would be hired to train teachers in special education techniques. And they said that a whole new set of standards had been created to gauge how well individual schools and their principals were delivering special education services. They said the new standards would be directly monitored by Diana Lam, the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, and would be tied to numerous criteria that included how many special-needs children were in mainstream versus segregated classes, how many special education students were eventually returned to the general education population, and whether special services were being provided in a timely fashion. To help schools, the mayor and chancellor said that up to 1,000 teachers would be trained in a special reading program, called Orton-Gillingham, that is intended for special-needs programs as well as receiving training in how to identify learning disabilities -- two programs that have been used successfully at P.S. 87, where they made their announcement. Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein said they were committed to ensuring that only those students who truly had disabilities be designated for special education and not students who were struggling academically for other reasons, such as limited proficiency in English. Mr. Bloomberg said that in some city school districts, up to 17 percent of students were classified for special education, a considerably higher percentage than in other districts that are virtually identical demographically. Among the services that the mayor and chancellor pledged to streamline were evaluations conducted by Committees on Special Education, which now exist in each |
1477924_0 | Protest Strike in France Interrupts Travel | The government's plans to reform the state pension system came under attack today from the country's powerful labor unions, as hundreds of thousands of government employees, with the backing of some workers in the private sector, staged a one-day strike. The central issue in the dispute concerns the plans by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, which he announced shortly after taking office a year ago, to overhaul the state pension system in order to bring government finances in line with a fiscal pact underpinning the euro. The strike today forced Air France to cancel 55 percent of its domestic and European flights, and half the trains on some of the domestic high-speed rail lines were also canceled. In cities across France, rallies organized by the labor unions brought out tens of thousands of people. In Paris, the police estimated the number of strikers who took part in marches at 26,000. In Marseille, 30,000 took part in demonstrations, and 12,000 joined protests in Toulouse. Mr. Raffarin's government is also under fire from the European Union, which began action on Wednesday to censure France for exceeding the limits to public deficits imposed by rules governing fiscal policy of the 12 countries who have adopted the euro as their currency. Mr. Raffarin has been on the defensive since presenting the idea of pension reform last year, arguing that pension plans governing the public and private sectors must be made similar because the state can no longer afford its traditional generosity toward public employees, who in France include everyone from schoolteachers to railway workers. In its broad outlines, his plan, to be presented in detail on April 11, is for civil servants, who now make social security payments for 37.5 years to qualify for pensions, to pay contributions for 40 years, like most private sector employees. To answer the European Union, Mr. Raffarin argues that while his conservative government's proposal for tax cuts to stimulate growth may produce deficits in the short term, he is attacking fundamental problems like pensions. France's economy is now expected to expand this year by only 1.2 percent, down from earlier projections of as much as 2.5 percent. Despite this, union leaders insist that reform should mean extending the pension benefits now enjoyed by civil servants to the private sector, rather than vice versa. Mr. Raffarin's social affairs minister, François Fillon, has also suggested that the retirement age for private |
1477869_3 | POP AND JAZZ GUIDE | death metal: buzz-saw guitar themes in minor modes gave way to fast, narrow two-beat drum thrashing. Glen Benton, leader and demagogue, uses the genre's generic low growl; it's business as usual, no big deal. (He also prefers to present himself as being against organized religion rather than, uh, pro-Satan.) But here at L'Amour, the New York area's main metal club, the band stands a better chance of creating an interesting scene. Tomorrow night at 8; tickets are $18 (Ratliff). DJ LE SPAM AND THE SPAM ALLSTARS, S.O.B.'s, 204 Varick Street, at Houston Street, South Village, (212) 243-4940. This party imported from Miami puts a disc jockey together with live musicians, mixing Latin rhythms with electronic beats. Tonight at midnight, with music till dawn; admission is $12 (Pareles). DORGON AND JAMIE SAFT, Roulette, 228 West Broadway, at White Street, TriBeCa, (212) 219-8242. Dorgon plays the C-melody saxophone, and he's a bit of a practical joker; one of his recent albums gave no information other than to say that it was recorded in 1949 aboard a ship called the Bhutan, with the Lennie Tristano Big Band. (How far can you trust a guy named Dorgon?) But he makes modest, likable free jazz with different partners; tonight it's with the keyboardist Jamie Saft, who loves to add sound-warping effects to his Fender Rhodes. Tonight at 8:30; admission is $10 (Ratliff). * GREEK MUSIC FESTIVAL, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street, (212) 864-5400; Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 840-2824 or (212) 545-7536. The World Music Institute's fourth annual Greek festival reaches deep into Mediterranean traditions. The first night presents something rarely seen in New York: the Greek shadow-puppet theater called Karaghiozis, performing a tale of warfare and heroism that could have unexpected contemporary resonance. Athos Danielis leads a troupe that includes puppeteers and a full live orchestra with Greek instruments. Tonight at 8 at Symphony Space; tickets are $26, $21 for World Music Institute members. ''Emigration Blues'' presents a program that ranges across a century of urban songs, from the street-life tales of rembetika to laiko folk songs, performed by Petros Gaitanos, Sofia Papazaoglou and an eight-piece band. At Town Hall tomorrow at 8; tickets are $25 to $40. The festival concludes Sunday with music and dance from Asia Minor, where Greek and Turkish, European and Asian elements intertwine, performed by the Gledistades Ensemble from Lesbos and by a quintet |
1477961_0 | Carriers Respond as Disease Raises Concerns Over Air Circulation in Passenger Cabins | The spread of a new highly infectious respiratory disease is reigniting questions about the cleanliness of the air inside airplane cabins and cutting into bookings for airlines flying into areas where the infection is prevalent. The Association of Flight Attendants petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration yesterday to require airlines to provide masks and gloves for flight attendants who want to use them, and procedures for dealing with cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, as the disease is known. Several major airlines today announced a sharp decline in advance reservations because of the war in Iraq and passengers' concerns about SARS. SARS is believed by doctors to be spread when an infected person coughs or sneezes, allowing droplets of contaminated water to enter the air. That could pose a hazard to airline passengers, particularly those who are confined for a dozen hours or more on international flights. But the Association of Flight Attendants, which represents attendants at 25 airlines, believes the danger is greater to its members. Yesterday, it asked the F.A.A. to order airlines to provide masks and nonlatex gloves on all flights operating to, from and within Asia. The union also claimed that a flight attendant on a Singapore Airlines flight from New York to Frankfurt was infected with SARS on March 14 on a flight. On Tuesday, American Airlines diverted a flight from Tokyo to Dallas when five passengers and crew showed symptoms typical of SARS. They were later found not to have contracted the illness. Judith Murawski, an industrial hygienist for the association, said the SARS outbreak also raised issues about the freshness of cabin air, an issue that the flight attendants' union has been vocal about for years. On jets built before the 1980's, airlines used to provide 100 percent fresh air during flights, guaranteeing that the air in the cabin was frequently replaced. But since the 1980's, airplanes have operated on a mix of fresh and recirculated air, which is passed through the cabin after being heated and cleaned. The Boeing Company said that the filtration systems on its planes could clean air to the standards of a hospital clinic. It maintains that recirculated air is better for passengers than fresh air, because it contains more moisture than the dry air outside an airplane cabin in flight. Airlines also save about $60,000 per aircraft each year by using 50 percent recirculated air. ''The |
1483685_0 | France Works to Limit Damage From U.S. Anger | France has embarked on a two-track strategy to adjust to the harsh reality that it will have to pay a steep price for opposing the war against Iraq, French officials and analysts say. The severity of the long-term damage to relations with the United States is only beginning to be grasped. Senior French officials visiting Washington on non-Iraq issues in recent weeks said they were stunned when their American counterparts informed them of official ''resentment and anger'' against France, one official said. A French official was told bluntly by a White House official, ''I have instructions to tell you that our relations have been degraded.'' Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made it crystal clear in a television interview on Tuesday night that France would suffer the consequences of its opposition to the American-led war. That followed a senior White House meeting on Monday devoted to finding ways to punish France diplomatically, including the possibility of sidelining it in NATO and downgrading its status at international conferences. The French response is taking shape in fits and starts and in contradictory directions. It reflects both an acknowledgment of the need to be conciliatory in the face of threats of punishment from Washington and a fierce determination to maintain an active foreign policy that asserts France's independence but is certain to rankle Washington even more. ''Pragmatic'' is the word used most often by officials at Élysée Palace to describe President Jacques Chirac's new policy. Officials said he used the word himself when he telephoned President Bush nine days ago after eight weeks of non-communication to tell him of France's willingness to ''act in a pragmatic way'' on Iraq's reconstruction. It was this pragmatism that led France to agree unexpectedly to a temporary suspension of United Nations-imposed economic penalties against Iraq on Tuesday, apparently without consulting Russia. It was also pragmatism that prompted senior French officials this week to begin speaking about France's ''openness'' to a possible peacekeeping and reconstruction role for NATO in Iraq, an idea that they said was floated by Mr. Chirac when he spoke to Mr. Bush. Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin reflected that attitude during a visit to Iran today. ''We can clearly see that the page on Iraq has been turned and now we must look towards the future,'' he said. Mr. Chirac has been roundly criticized by editorialists, political analysts and even members of his own |
1483590_0 | Running Flat, But Running | The thump-thump of a tire going flat always brings a sinking feeling, and it is worst on a busy highway with no place to pull over. So-called run-flat tires, which can travel up to 125 miles without air, solve the problem, but they have been offered mostly on luxury and sports cars. Now Toyota is edging them further into the mass market by putting Bridgestone or Dunlop run-flats on the all-wheel-drive version of the 2004 Sienna minivan. Run-flat tires have extra-thick sidewalls to help support the weight of the car when they deflate. They can work so well that a driver may not realize there is a flat, so most are linked to pressure monitors on the dashboard to alert the driver. Run-flats offer an advantage to carmakers, too; they eliminate the need for a spare tire. That leaves car designers extra space to work with in the trunk or cargo area -- particularly important with small sports cars -- and allows more freedom in overall styling. The Michelin Pax run-flat tire system is offered on the Dodge Viper, the Audi A8 luxury sedan and the Rolls-Royce Phantom, as well as on models sold only in Europe. It is planned for the coming Cadillac XLR sports car. The company licenses Pax to other tire companies including Pirelli, Goodyear and Sumitomo. Bridgestone offers its run-flat system on BMW 7 Series sedans and the Z4 and Z8 sports cars, the Infiniti Q45 luxury sedan and Lexus SC430 luxury convertible. MICHELLE KREBS DRIVING: BELLS & WHISTLES |
1483589_2 | Stone Works From the East For a Garden | Trapp visits Asia often, and has a friend in China who scouts for him. ''My friend is married to a Chinese woman, and they know all the backwaters,'' he said. ''China is undergoing such rapid modernization that many Chinese now feel that new is good and old is out, so they are willing to let things go.'' How does he know if a piece is really 400 years old? ''Having hauled stone for a couple of decades, I can feel its age,'' Mr. Trapp said. ''It's the wear, the patination, the oxidation. The stone takes on a characteristic that is undeniable.'' (There is no common laboratory test, like carbon dating, for stone.) You can see how magnificent Chinese carved stone works look in their original settings in ''Chinese Architecture,'' a book edited by Nancy S. Steinhardt (Yale University Press, 2002). Mr. Trapp said some ancient stone pieces might be coming from the newly vacated villages that will be flooded as part of the Three Gorges Dam project in China. After buying Ming pieces for only a few years, Mr. Trapp already sees the market drying up. ''For the past five months the Chinese government has forbidden the export of any pre-19th-century stone pieces,'' he said. ''The government won't even allow the export of architectural artifacts from buildings it is tearing down.'' His stone works from China range from $1,400 to $6,000 apiece. Coincidentally, quite apart from the Botanical Garden fair, a Chelsea art gallery has organized its own ambitious show of antique stone furniture from China. ''Permanence: Classical Chinese Stone Furniture'' is on view through May 3 at Chambers Fine Art, 210 11th Avenue, at 25th Street. The show includes antique stools, tables, a lute stand, plant stands, a stone table with an elm base, a foot stool and various basins, all made from various kinds of stone or marble. The young owners, Christophe W. Mao and Jerry Chen, said that most of the furniture was from the Ming dynasty. ''This show has been in the works for two years,'' Mr. Mao said. In the catalog that accompanies the show, David Ake Sensabaugh, curator of Asian art at the Yale University Art Gallery, discusses contemporaneous illustrations of stone furniture from early Chinese sources. His aim is to show the similarity between the furniture in the scrolls and paintings and the pieces in the show. These include benches, tables, plant stands |
1481647_1 | Eluding the Web's Snare | others lament the loss of face-to-face contact associated with the rise of the Web. A few confess to ignorance and intimidation. And there are those who manage, through wired surrogates, to take advantage of the Internet indirectly for research or communication. In resisting the tide, the Net evaders are increasingly chastised. Ms. Lewis said that her friends constantly tease her and that her husband and children are beginning to lose patience. ''I can tell they're getting kind of disgusted,'' said Ms. Lewis, who took a course on how to use the Internet two years ago but has since forgotten what she learned. Furthermore, she said, she worries about what will happen if she goes online and the habit sticks. ''I'm afraid that once I get on, I will come up only to eat,'' she said. ''I read these scare stories about people who once they get on can't get off.'' But in fact, once online, many people do get off -- enough that they form a category of their own that the Pew study calls Net dropouts, representing 17 percent of the nonusers. ''Some grew disillusioned with the online world,'' said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project, based in Washington. ''They decided it was just a time swamp, or they never found what they wanted.'' Such is the case with Jerilou Hammett, 59, who, with her husband, Kingsley, 58, publishes Designer/Builder, a bimonthly magazine based in Santa Fe, N.M. Ms. Hammett said she and her husband were on the Web back in 1996, but soon dropped it. ''We began to see that it took an enormous amount of time,'' she said. ''And often the quality of information we found was very superficial.'' E-mail is so commonplace that those who do not have electronic addresses to hand out in addition to their phone numbers, or in lieu of them, are considered outcasts who must justify themselves. Writers for Ms. Hammett's magazine are often taken aback when she tells them not to submit articles by e-mail, but to send a disk instead, or put the article in the regular mail. ''I believe on a business level the same thing I believe on a personal level,'' Ms. Hammett said. ''Communication between people is more effective face to face. Or, if you can't do that, then on the phone.'' It is not so much philosophical conviction as raw fear, however, that keeps |
1481533_0 | Old Ship's New Life | To the Editor: Re ''For a Historic Ship, a New Port of Call'' (news article, April 15): As the shipping correspondent for The Daily Mail, the London newspaper, for many years and having been aboard the United States on its maiden voyage in 1952, I was happy to read that there may be a future for the old ship as a cruise liner. You quote an exchange between the captains of the United States and the Queen Mary when the two ships passed in mid-Atlantic (''Your girls are faster than our girls,'' the British captain conceded). But there was an equally famous exchange when the United States passed the Queen Elizabeth and the American captain radioed, ''Need a tow?'' To which the British captain responded, ''Thanks, but ladies don't keep fast company.'' JEFFREY BLYTH New York, April 15, 2003 |
1479558_1 | U.S. to Move Its Army Headquarters in South Korea Out of Seoul | of bombing North Korea's nuclear facilities. ''There is going to be a realignment,'' Richard Lawless, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian-Pacific affairs, said when asked at a news conference today about the future position of the Second Infantry Division, the most forward based troops of the 37,000 American soldiers in South Korea. The possibility of moving all or most of the division is to be discussed when Mr. Lawless returns here next month for a second round of negotiations. Any troop movements are also to be discussed when South Korea's new president, Roh Moo Hyun, meets with President Bush in Washington on May 14, part of a five-day trip to the United States. It will be the first trip to the United States for Mr. Roh, a former human rights lawyer. American officials say the high technology, long distance weaponry displayed in television broadcasts from the war in Iraq highlight the obsolete nature of the half century-old strategy of posting American soldiers on North Korea's border. American officials also bridle at the concept of a human ''tripwire,'' or the posting thousands of American soldiers near the border in the belief that the carnage caused by an attack by North Korea would outrage the American public and guarantee American participation in a war on the Korean Peninsula. Last month, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said troops near the border could be shifted south, moved to other countries in the region or sent back to the United States. Last fall, widespread street protests were held against the American military presence here, putting human faces on public opinion polls that indicate that roughly half of South Koreans believe American troops should be withdrawn. Last week, angry street protests greeted parliamentary approval here of President Roh's decision to send nearly 700 medical and engineering troops to help the American-led war effort in Iraq. But, South Korea's military, political establishment and the news media are now rallying behind retaining American troops. At a news conference today at South Korea's Ministry of Defense, the main Korean negotiator, Lt. Gen. Cha Young Koo, repeatedly switched to English to make sure that American reporters understood his message. ''I am sure the U.S. will acknowledge the Korean people's security concerns in the realignment of this alliance,'' he said. Later he added: ''I would like to emphasize the word commitment: how the alliance will remain committed to our security.'' |
1482976_3 | Internet Is Losing Ground in Battle Against Spam | and printing. Albert Ahdoot, for example, started a part-time business using e-mail to sell printer-ink refill systems while he was in college. When he dropped out of medical school, he hooked up with Ms. Sachs, a former producer with Geraldo Rivera who later worked in marketing at several Internet companies. With her client contacts, his technology and some e-mail lists they acquired, they started their business about a year ago. Like many in the e-mail marketing business, Ms. Sachs says her e-mail blitzes are not spam because she sends them only to lists of people who have agreed to receive marketing offers over the Internet. These opt-in lists, as they are called, are generated when Internet users enter a contest on the Web or sign up for an e-mail list in which the fine print says the user agrees to receive ''occasional offers of products you might find valuable from our marketing partners.'' Arguing that no one is forced to sign up for e-mail pitches, Internet marketers say that the attack on spam has already gone too far, interfering with legitimate business. ''We have allowed these spam cops to rise out of nowhere to be self-appointed police and block whole swaths of the industry,'' said Bob Dallas, an executive of Empire Towers, an e-mail firm in Toledo, Ohio, widely cited on antispam lists used by many Internet companies. ''This is against everything that America stands for,'' Mr. Dallas added. ''The consumer should be the one in control of this.'' But activists who oppose spam say that some e-mailers who argue that they have permission to send e-mail to a certain address often do not. Earlier this year, a New York court ruled that a Niagara Falls, N.Y., company, MonsterHut, had violated antifraud laws for misrepresenting opt-in permissions. Lower on the marketing totem pole than opt-in mailing is what the industry calls bulk e-mailing: blasting a message out to any e-mail address that can be found. CD-ROM's with tens of millions of e-mail addresses are widely available -- advertised by e-mail, of course. These addresses have been harvested by software robots that read message boards, chat rooms and Web sites. Others use what are called dictionary attacks, sending mail to every conceivable address at major e-mail providers -- first, say, JohnA@example.com, then JohnB@example.com, and so on -- to find the legitimate names. Such distinctions, however, are usually lost on users who, |
1482880_0 | Options for Protecting Bones After Menopause | Last summer's surprising report from a large federal study relegating the use of postmenopausal hormone therapy to short-term relief of symptoms, not long-term health maintenance, left millions of women in a quandary: what should they do to keep their bones from deteriorating to the point of fracture? Despite the serious threats to heart and breast health the study uncovered, there is no question that supplemental estrogen protects bones, largely preventing the rapid loss of bone that occurs in the first three to five years after menopause. The very same loss occurs when postmenopausal women stop taking estrogen, no matter how long they may have been on it. And stop they did. Within a month of the Women's Health Initiative report, 30 percent of long-term users stopped taking hormones, and their numbers grew with time. Yet more than one in five who discontinued hormone therapy took no substitute steps to protect their bones. That prompted Dr. James Simon, a gynecologist at George Washington University and a member of the North American Menopause Society, to predict that at least a million of those who discontinued hormones were at risk for osteoporosis. With hormones no longer an option, women should be aware of the various nonhormonal options to help maintain, and even restore, healthy bones. There are safe ways to prevent osteoporosis, with enough alternatives available to individualize treatment for every woman. Recognize Your Risk The statistics on osteoporosis should alert every woman -- before and after menopause -- to the need to protect her bones, which not only lose mass after menopause but also deteriorate architecturally without estrogen on board. In a study of 140,584 women to be presented this month, Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor of the University of California at San Diego, found that protection against hip fracture was rapidly lost once a woman stopped taking estrogen. Protection should start in childhood with adequate bone-building calcium and vitamin D in a diet that is continued through life. Girls and young women whose diets lack adequate calcium are likely to reach midlife with a bone store that is already partly empty and that is much closer to osteoporosis when rapid bone loss begins at menopause. For postmenopausal women who do not take hormones, a bone density test and an assessment of risk helps to identify those who need continued therapy with another agent to prevent or treat osteoporosis. ''Every postmenopausal woman will lose |
1482891_4 | Hormone Studies: What Went Wrong? | all, studies have found. Women who stay with a prescription regimen may be unusual, Dr. Grodstein said. Perhaps they generally care more about their health, and that is the reason they have fewer heart problems. Or perhaps there was some other physical characteristic, as yet unidentified, that made estrogen protect them from heart disease. Or maybe it was the participants in the Women's Health Initiative who were atypical, Dr. Grodstein said. Most women would not volunteer to be randomly assigned to take hormones or a placebo for years on end. Is there something about the type of women who join such a study that indicates an increased risk of heart disease if they take hormones? Maybe it is their weight: they were heavier, on average, than those in the nurses' study. Since body fat produces its own estrogen, the added hormones they took might have pushed them over a threshold where heart attack risk would emerge. Moreover, two-thirds were over 60 when they joined the study and started taking hormones. In contrast, most women in the nurses' study and ones like it started taking hormones at menopause. But those explanations do not appear to be enough, said Dr. JoAnn Manson, a researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who was an investigator in the two studies. Women who were 50 to 59 when they joined the Women's Health Initiative had the same increased risk of heart disease with hormone therapy as the older women in the study. Thinner women in that study, whose body fat was comparable to those in the nurses' study, also were not protected from heart attacks when they took hormones. Another possibility is that the nurses' study and others like it miscounted hormone therapy users. The nurses' study assesses drug use every two years. A woman could start taking hormones, have a heart attack in the next two years, and stop taking them immediately. Later, when asked if she takes hormones, she says, correctly, that she does not. Her heart attack would be counted as one that occurred in a nonuser. But Dr. Grodstein added that this sort of error, by itself, was not enough to explain the discrepancy. Some suggested that it was the particular drug, Prempro, studied in the Women's Health Initiative that elicited heart attacks. The nurses took a variety of hormone preparations, not just Prempro. But Dr. Jacques Rossouw, an administrator |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.