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1474608_1 | In Praise of Failed Diplomacy | motley ''coalition of the willing,'' only four of whose members offered military support: Britain, Australia, Poland and -- wait for it -- Albania. Yet it is worth pondering a curious footnote to French policy offered by Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador to the United States. It turned out that his country's famous Security Council veto had an escape clause: ''If Saddam Hussein were to use chemical or biological weapons, this would change the situation completely and immediately for the French government.'' Now we understand why France pledged to block any Security Council resolution authorizing the use of military force to disarm Saddam Hussein. The French were, in fact, fine with Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction. They were happy to keep American forces on standby in the Persian Gulf while the inspectors played missile tag. Saddam Hussein, quite frankly, could keep his chemical and biological weapons. So long as he didn't use them. The French have adopted this approach in the past, let's not forget. During the 1930's, for example, they watched inertly as Nazi Germany systematically rearmed, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. When Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in March 1936 -- in breach of the Treaty of Locarno of 1925 -- they again did nothing. Their strategy was to defend France behind the enormously expensive and, as it turned out, useless Maginot Line, so they reasoned that attacking Hitler would be futile. In other words, it was O.K. for Hitler to build a formidable army and march it to the French border. So long as he didn't use it This and similar analogies with the 1930's have repeatedly been drawn by proponents of war against Iraq. And they are helpful up to a point. Yes, Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator. Yes, it has proved difficult to disarm him by precisely the devices that failed against the dictators between the world wars: collective security, sanctions, diplomacy. But there we must break off and acknowledge the fundamental difference between the 1930's and now. Germany by 1938 was already an economic and military match for France. Iraq, by comparison, is a flea to the American elephant. The United States economy is 170 times larger than Iraq's. Its military capacity is at least 200 times greater. Going to war against Germany was always risky for France. Going to war against Iraq is pretty much a breeze for America. To |
1474452_10 | The Philosopher of Islamic Terror | and Qutb recounts some of these and remarks on their wisdom and significance. His tone is always lucid and plain. Yet the total effect of his writing is almost sensual in its measured pace. The very title ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' conveys a vivid desert image, as if the Koran were a leafy palm tree, and we have only to open Qutb's pages to escape the hot sun and refresh ourselves in the shade. As he makes his way through the suras and proposes his other commentaries, he slowly constructs an enormous theological criticism of modern life, and not just in Egypt. III. Qutb wrote that, all over the world, humans had reached a moment of unbearable crisis. The human race had lost touch with human nature. Man's inspiration, intelligence and morality were degenerating. Sexual relations were deteriorating ''to a level lower than the beasts.'' Man was miserable, anxious and skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. People were turning, in their unhappiness, to drugs, alcohol and existentialism. Qutb admired economic productivity and scientific knowledge. But he did not think that wealth and science were rescuing the human race. He figured that, on the contrary, the richest countries were the unhappiest of all. And what was the cause of this unhappiness -- this wretched split between man's truest nature and modern life? A great many cultural critics in Europe and America asked this question in the middle years of the 20th century, and a great many of them, following Nietzsche and other philosophers, pointed to the origins of Western civilization in ancient Greece, where man was said to have made his fatal error. This error was philosophical. It consisted of placing an arrogant and deluded faith in the power of human reason -- an arrogant faith that, after many centuries, had created in modern times a tyranny of technology over life. Qutb shared that analysis, somewhat. Only instead of locating the error in ancient Greece, he located it in ancient Jerusalem. In the Muslim fashion, Qutb looked on the teachings of Judaism as being divinely revealed by God to Moses and the other prophets. Judaism instructed man to worship one God and to forswear all others. Judaism instructed man on how to behave in every sphere of life -- how to live a worldly existence that was also a life at one with God. This could be done |
1474617_1 | Frisson of Unease Among the City's French | French New Yorkers are tiring of the incessant talk of boycotts and the anti-French jokes. ''We're concerned that things will get worse,'' said Arnaud Thieffry, president of the Union Français de L'Étranger, an organization that represents an estimated 30,000 French expatriates in the city. ''True boycotts, wild characters looking for publicity, and more aggressive abuse. There is also the possibility of violence.'' The nervousness has been felt especially at the city's French bistros, brasseries and restaurants, which number more than 200, according to the latest Zagat guide. ''Reservations for the next three months were coming up nicely,'' said George Briguet, the owner of Le Périgord on East 52nd Street, one of the city's oldest French restaurants. ''Then the cancellations started to come in, one after the other.'' Mr. Briguet considered taking out a newspaper advertisement to highlight how a boycott would also hurt American citizens, including himself. But he was met with resistance. ''I called up La Caravelle, I called up La Côte Basque, but nobody wants to do anything,'' he said. ''They were afraid it would backfire.'' Anti-French graffiti has been scrawled on the restroom walls at La Bonne Soupe on West 55th Street, according to the owner, Jean-Paul Picot. But speaking for many French New Yorkers, he said he ''just wants to keep a low profile'' and wait out the hostility. The French consulate at 934 Fifth Avenue, which has been the target of small protests, has quietly reached out to the region's loosely knit community to document any harassment. Feedback so far has been minor in nature, which may reflect a poll taken last month by Siena Research Institute showing that only 49 percent of New York State residents supported military action in Iraq, and that city residents were even less supportive. ''We're different from Los Angeles, Chicago or other cities,'' said Régis Blain, the consulate's spokesman. ''We think that most New Yorkers support France's position and are against the war.'' Not all French New Yorkers, however, are feeling besieged. In a city in which pro-war Republicans can be as hard to find as a cab during rush hour, some are feel positively embraced. ''I organized buses to go to the antiwar rally in Washington in November,'' said Florent Morellet, the owner of the restaurant Florent on Gansevoort Street. ''I've been getting nothing but high-fives from my clientele.'' DENNY LEE NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: NEW YORK AND THE WORLD |
1474883_3 | A Security Blanket, but With No Guarantees | Airports and Shipping Apply Stricter Rules In February, new bomb detection equipment at Kennedy International Airport set off an alarm, sensing nitrates -- a common bomb ingredient -- in the luggage of a group of Muslims returning from their pilgrimage to Mecca. The culprit turned out to be 15 gallons of harmless holy water that happened to contain traces of nitrates. ''That's how sharp our screeners are now,'' said William R. Hall, security director at the airport for the federal Transportation Security Administration. After the Sept. 11 attack, no area of American life was subjected to more intense scrutiny than air travel. The federal government shouldered a far larger role, through the Transportation Security Administration, taking over airport security from a group of widely criticized contractors, and imposing tougher rules for screening employees, passengers and luggage. It has been an expensive undertaking. The powerful car-size X-ray machines being installed at airports to screen baggage cost about $1 million apiece. The agency's squat beige building at J.F.K. represents the end product of all the tales of confiscated knitting needles. Two storage rooms overflow with passengers' contraband, from chain saws to perfumes with names like ''Time Bomb,'' whose bottles are shaped like explosives. Officials say the number of guns and knives seized at airport checkpoints nationwide has more than tripled since 9/11. Before 9/11, fewer than 2 percent of checked bags were inspected; now, all are either X-rayed or swabbed for explosive traces, or both. Before 9/11, there were 37 federal marshals assigned to riding airliners undercover; now, there are thousands, according to airport officials. But while much has changed in airline security, that is not true of the metropolitan area's seaports in Elizabeth, N.J.; on Staten Island; and in Red Hook in Brooklyn. Experts say that seaports remain one of the region's great vulnerabilities. Only 2 to 3 percent of the millions of truck-size shipping containers arriving in New York Harbor each year are inspected -- just a slight increase from before Sept. 11. ''Over all, if we had to rate this thing from 1 to 10, when we started on Sept. 11, we were at a 1 and today we are at a 2,'' said Stephen E. Flynn, an international shipping authority at the Council on Foreign Relations. At a congressional hearing in November, Bethann Rooney, manager of port security for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, |
1474722_8 | Rebutting a Claim of Tarnished Valor; Research Challenges Account of 9/11 Looting by Firefighters | the truck was parked on Liberty Street, just to the south of two stores, Structure and Express, that stocked thousands of blue jeans. Using detailed accounts of the collapse of the south tower, he described how both the truck and the stores were driven deep into P-15 and P-16, two of the 75-by-75-foot sections on the grid map. His chronology of Ladder Company 4, whose firehouse is at Eighth Avenue and 48th Street, used records of its departure and eyewitness accounts of its arrival to argue that the company's firefighters would have had little time for looting. Ladder Company 4, according to Mr. Black, arrived about 9:30 a.m. The south tower fell at 9:59, and he reported that in that half hour, its crew was engaged in a successful attempt to rescue some civilians trapped in an elevator that was being heated by a fire from burning jet fuel that had poured down the shaft. And he produced a detailed analysis of where the bodies of the firefighters were found, in M-13, M-14 and M-15, grid cells immediately adjacent to the bank of elevators. Neither Mr. Langewiesche nor his editors at The Atlantic Monthly or at North Point will debate the facts at issue. They insist he was tightly focused on an incident that occurred on what became known as ''the pile'' and based his report on reliable sources who have confirmed their account since the controversy arose. But a videotape made for the Federal Emergency Management Agency soon after Ladder 4 was found shows the buried rig and the efforts to dig it out, but no stacks of blue jeans or jeering construction workers. Patrick Drury, a freelance videographer who recorded the excavation for FEMA, said he saw no blue jeans. The New York Times also interviewed 11 more people who said they had been present at the unearthing of the truck and who disputed the account of the stacked jeans. Lt. Russell Regan, then assigned to Ladder Company 4, was shown digging out the cab. ''There were no blue jeans inside that cab,'' he said in an interview. ''There were some scattered around the site, but that's it.'' A construction worker who was there, but would not give his name, told The Times that he saw something similar to what Mr. Langewiesche described. ''They dragged it out of the hole and then cut off the top of the |
1474706_3 | For Soldiers and Their Families, Electronic Links Are Vital | Al Qaeda prisoners are being held. Yet even for the immediacy of e-mail and instant messaging, Ms. Young said she still feels desperately far away from him and has trouble appreciating what is really going on around him. ''I cannot fathom it,'' she said. ''I cannot imagine hearing the bombs go off, or hearing rounds of gun burst, or hearing the fights that go on in the prison.'' For its part, the Army and other branches of the military have allowed and even encouraged use of e-mail. They have said the technology is great for morale of both military personnel and their families. But the armed services have also admonished soldiers not to give away sensitive information, though electronic messages are not generally censored or monitored. In previous wars, soldiers have communicated with their families largely by postal mail, and then, starting in the Vietnam War, by telephone. But even as recently as the Persian Gulf war, getting access to telephones and telephone lines on the front was difficult, leaving soldiers few opportunities to chat. Phones ''are really hard to get to,'' Specialist Parker wrote in an exchange with a reporter from her station in Kuwait. ''And getting a line out is even harder,'' she noted. Many military personnel have access to computers with Internet hookups, which can be used for personal exchanges as well as military business. E-mail is also less expensive than international phone calls. Specialist Parker said her husband, Dwight Parker, who also has the rank of specialist and is now at an undisclosed location, had less access to e-mail. Still, she said that through e-mail and instant messaging she had been able to stay in touch with him, and that both parents had been able to send messages back home to her mother, Ms. Feltz, and to their two young daughters. ''My mother reads the e-mail to them -- they are 3 and 8 months -- and then my mother types what my daughter has to say,'' Specialist Parker wrote from Kuwait. She said she was not certain how often she would be able to correspond as the war grew in intensity, but noted that so far, ''As a mother and wife, it is the only thing that keeps me sane!'' Her husband e-mailed his daughters yesterday. ''Be good for Grandma,'' he wrote. ''Daddy loves you and will see you soon.'' A NATION AT WAR: E-MAIL |
1471428_0 | MEMO PAD | Carriers Adjust For Possible War Most airlines have followed US Airways and temporarily relaxed penalties for passengers who might change destinations or flight schedules if war begins or if the government declares a code-red security alert. US Airways started the move last week, allowing ticketed passengers 90 days to reschedule flights under those circumstances. American Airlines was the latest to adjust rules for charging penalties, which are typically $100 to rebook a nonrefundable ticket on or before its departure date. With nonrefundable fares at their lowest levels in many years, airlines are worried that potential passengers might decide that the fee is too big and choose not to plan trips in the spring, said Terry Trippler, the air fare expert at CheapTickets.com. Flights to Germany Making a concerted effort to establish a bigger presence in the premium business travel market in the United States, Lufthansa plans to expand its business-jet services between Newark and Munich and start new service between Chicago and Düsseldorf this spring. The nonstop flights will be on 48-seat corporate jets operated by the Swiss charter carrier PrivatAir, Lufthansa said. The airline said the new flights were being timed to coordinate with various connecting flights from Düsseldorf and Munich. The expansion on the Newark route, to six days a week, will start on May 19, and the Chicago flights, also six days a week, begin on June 9. Emergency Services With war talk growing, there has been a rush by corporate travel managers to sign onto international services that provide contact and logistical support with traveling employees during emergencies. Travel managers say that the first priority is being able to locate an employee involved in a crisis. Other concerns are effective long-term communication, medical care and the ability to evacuate employees. Quick and efficient internal response is a crucial part of a corporate emergency plan, said E. Alan Platt, the director of global security and intelligence for International SOS, the world's largest medical emergency and security assistance company. Corporate bureaucracies are changing to accommodate the need for fast response, he said. ''The heretofore strict demarcations of internal corporate responsibilities are rapidly blurring,'' Mr. Platt added. ''Finance, information, human resources, purchasing and security all have a stake in assessing ongoing risk and maintaining a rapid response plan.'' Easier E-Ticketing Passengers on Continental Airlines with e-tickets can now check in and print out boarding passes from their computers at |
1471386_6 | Director Tries to Untangle Web of Cancer Controversies | its increased use by men? A. Recognizing the dependency of prostate cancer on testosterone, I am not convinced there is enough evidence on the safety of testosterone to justify its widespread use. Q. You were in your office here only a short while when a huge controversy landed in your turf. A pair of Scandinavian researchers published an article in The Lancet concluding that ''screening for breast cancer with mammography is unjustified.'' How did you handle this bombshell? A. Well, the way I approached that was to gather leadership together at the N.C.I. to do a careful analysis, get expert opinion. The message they came out with was very clear: mammography is not the final answer to the early detection of breast cancer, but it's the best tool we have now. Q. The Lancet article was read by many to imply that routine mammography was useless. A. Right. And there's no evidence to support that. You link mammography with intervention and you can see mortality in breast cancer declining. Q. A firestorm erupted around the use of hormone replacement therapy, H.R.T, last July, when researchers for the Women's Health Initiative reported that participants taking a combination of estrogen and progesterone were at increased risk for breast cancer, stroke and heart disease. What's going on here? A. Good science. These studies have given us answers. They were not the answers we were hoping for, but we did learn that that there were significant risks with H.R.T. This gives women and their doctors a lot more information. Q. You've had good news with the announcement of a vaccine that inoculates against the papillomavirus -- a major cause of cervical cancer. This must be gratifying. A. It's a very important and exciting breakthrough. More work needs to be done; the vaccine is not yet available for widespread use. There may be circumstances where we'll have to go even further than this particular vaccine to get full benefit. There's not just one kind of papillomavirus that causes cervical cancer. Q. Give us a 2003 State of the Union for cancer research and treatment. A. Well, we are at a moment when the huge investment in research that began in 1971 with President Nixon's war on cancer, is beginning to pay dividends. That investment has helped us understand the disease. In 1971, we didn't. The next challenge is not to just gather information, but to |
1471584_0 | Paid Notice: Deaths AYRES, DR. JOSE MARCIO | AYRES-Dr. Jose Marcio. The Board of Trustees and the Staff of the Wildlife Conservation Society are deeply saddened by the loss of their distinguished senior conservationist, Dr. Jose Marcio Ayres. For over 20 years, Dr. Ayres worked with local people to protect the wildlife and wild places in his native Brazil. His efforts resulted in the protection of thousands of acres of rain forest in the Amazon basin. Our world is a richer place due to his unflagging dedication. We extend heartfelt sympathies to the Ayres family. David T. Schiff, Chairman Dr. Steven E. Sanderson President |
1471387_1 | Exploring Combat and the Psyche, Beginning With Homer | Dr. Shay passed the time by ''filling in the gaps'' in his education. He read English translations of the Greek epics, the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey,'' and the Athenian plays and philosophers. That led to another twist of fate, a different scientific destiny. Nowadays Dr. Shay, 61, is a psychiatrist who specializes in treating the psychological damage combat inflicts on soldiers. His approach is woven out of the different strands of his life: part neuroscience, part evolutionary theory, part psychiatric empathy and part Homer. When he argues that the military is too prone to treat soldiers as interchangeable parts rather than people, he will cite e-mail messages from Vietnam veterans, historical studies of slavery, work on stress hormones and Book 1 of the ''Iliad.'' He may well be the world's only author who has appeared in Nature, The American Journal of Physiology, Ancient Theater Today and Parameters: Journal of the U.S. Army War College. Late last year, Dr. Shay published his second book, ''Odysseus in America,'' about the spiritual and psychic pitfalls that await combat veterans returning to civilian life. His first book, ''Achilles in Vietnam,'' published in 1994, compared the experiences of soldiers in the Trojan and Vietnam Wars to argue that war's psychic wounds -- what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder -- have always existed. Those spiritual injuries, Dr. Shay wrote, didn't arise just from bad luck in combat. They were the consequences of soldiers' feeling mistreated by their own commanders. Grunts who didn't feel cared for by the officers felt what Achilles felt against Agamemnon in the epic. To his surprise, that book was welcomed in military circles, and he now counts many serving officers as friends and colleagues. Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, for example, worked with Dr. Shay in the 1990's on a study of Marine practices and was impressed. ''While his proposals are often contrary to 'efficient' use of military manpower, they are, in fact, ways to make our military much more effective,'' General Mattis said in an e-mail message from the Persian Gulf, where he is commander of the First Marine Division. Dr. Shay, he wrote, ''has influenced us to challenge the military's current practices in many areas.'' Whether the military experience is told in terms of brain chemicals like cortisol and dopamine, military concepts like cohesion and morale, or universal human feelings like trust or love, Dr. |
1471483_2 | Instant Messaging Leaves School for Office | fast. Most IM conversations are one-to-one, but it is also easy to include several people. As the silent conversation unspools, each party can easily engage in unrelated activities -- often including other IM conversations. Many IM users rave about the ability to do different things at their desks while also engaging in a continuing electronic conversation. But they say it is really the notion of ''presence,'' of being in constant peripheral contact with the cast of characters that defines one's life, that makes IM such a powerful, intimate -- and potentially burdensome -- form of communication. ''IM-ing takes many of the virtues of e-mail and lowers the psychological costs of communication still further,'' said James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University and a co-author of ''Social Consequences of Internet Use'' (M.I.T. Press, 2002). ''It is extremely casual and easy, but in many ways it is more demanding.'' The latest in a string of technologies that conspire to demand faster responses at more hours of the day, instant messaging quickens the pace and broadens the volume of communication for many of its users. More than pagers, cellphones or e-mail, it provides the ability to broadcast an almost constant online presence, particularly with the spread of broadband Internet connections that enable users to always be connected. In college dormitories, where such connections are prevalent, it has become common for a student to simply enter an ''away'' message on his IM software that indicates when he is not in front of his computer. That way, instant-message correspondents can still send messages and assume they will be read upon the recipients' return. ''When I go to bed I just put my 'I'm sleeping' message on,'' said Nora Keomurjian, 20, a student at Rutgers who on more than one occasion has found herself forced to winnow her buddy list when it hit the 200-person limit. ''When I'm at work I say, 'I'm at work.' '' Others take a more whimsical approach: ''My away message is presently: 'I'm out on a violent rampage. I'll be back at 6,' '' Joshua Elieff, a sophomore at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said in an instant message. (His mother prefers it when he is ''Out slaying dragons.'') Ms. Keomurjian, an intern this semester at a chemical company that blocks the use of instant message software, said she had been distressed at being cut off |
1471407_1 | José Márcio Ayres Dies at 49; Saved Heart of the Amazon | species of fish and birds, with local people benefiting from their survival and having a say in how to assure it. Dr. Ayres, who held the society's Carter chair in rain forest ecology, set up the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in 1996, followed by the Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve next to it two years later. The process involved coordinating the efforts of the wildlife society, the local Brazilian state and the actual residents of the area: in contrast to traditional national parks, the reserves encouraged its dwellers to stay as custodians. A scientific team assembled by Dr. Ayres delineated protected zones for fish to spawn, others for commercial fisheries and some for catching fish for subsistence only. Local residents became their co-managers. The two reserves, which were quickly recognized by the Brazilian government, inhibited poaching and restocked valuable food fish and wildlife. In 1998, the government linked both reserves to Jaú National Park, thus protecting more than 22,000 square miles of unbroken habitat in all. José Márcio Ayres found his avocation at 19 in a German zoo where he came face to face with another denizen of the Amazon, a rare uakari monkey, with white hair and a bald, bright red pate. He decided to learn all about this fellow Brazilian. He received a bachelor's degree in biology in 1976 and a master's in primate socioecology in 1981 at the University of São Paulo. He worked at the São Paulo Zoo and at the National Institute for Amazonian Research, investigating the socioecology of the region's primates. He received his doctorate in primatology at Cambridge in 1986 with a thesis ''The White Uakaris and the Amazonian Flooded Forest.'' He joined what was still the New York Zoological Society in 1990. In 1992 he became senior zoologist and coordinator of its Brazil program, working with Brazilian national and Amazon state research institutions and as general director of the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development. He was also an adjunct professor for the New York Consortium for Evolutionary Primatology, a joint undertaking of Columbia, New York University, the American Museum of Natural History, the State and City Universities of New York and the Wildlife Conservation Society. Dr. Ayres is survived by his wife, Carolina Diniz Ayres; two sons, Daniel and Lucas; his parents, Manuel and Iza Ayres of Belém; a brother, also Manuel, of Rio de Janeiro; and a sister, Helena Ayres of Belém. |
1471432_0 | The New Airport Profiling | Having successfully fielded thousands of newly minted federal agents to screen air travelers and their luggage, the Transportation Security Administration is now turning to a far more controversial endeavor. The agency is developing a sophisticated screening system designed to identify travelers who may pose a terrorist threat. It is a worthy goal -- one ordered up by Congress -- but the creation of a highly intrusive federal surveillance program raises serious privacy and due process concerns, which the government needs to address in a forthright manner. The notion of electronic profiling is not new. Using such criteria as whether a passenger paid cash for a ticket, a rudimentary system designed in the mid-1990's helped airlines flag passengers deserving heightened scrutiny. What that usually meant was that their checked luggage was carefully inspected. Some of the Sept. 11 hijackers were reported to have been picked out by that system, but it did little good since they did not check any bags. The new profiling system is a quantum leap. In addition to evaluating certain travel-related behavior and looking for passenger names on watch lists, the new system will give the transportation agency access to numerous public and private databases the moment a passenger books a flight. Exactly which ones has not yet been determined, but they may include the records of Department of Motor Vehicle offices, banks and credit-rating agencies. After the program is in place, which could be as early as the end of this year, the Transportation Security Administration will assign each passenger a risk level: green, yellow or red. Travelers will not be informed of their designations, which will be encrypted onto their boarding passes. The T.S.A. says it is mindful of the obvious privacy concerns raised by such a system, though it points out that it will not be amassing new databases, but rather mining ones already used routinely to profile consumers. The agency says it is not interested in knowing whether you bounced a check five years ago, or whether you have paid your parking tickets, but in authenticating your identity. Privacy principles are not necessarily sacrosanct, but this plan runs the risk of overreaching. For one thing, it could quickly lead to mistaken actions based on inaccurate information. More worrisome is the possibility that this system could grow into a runaway vacuum cleaner, sweeping up all manner of data that can then be misused by |
1471410_0 | PCB Cleanup in Upper Hudson Is Delayed for Another Year | The dredging of the upper Hudson River to remove the toxic residue of its industrial past -- already stalled many times by squabbles over science and culpability -- has been delayed again. Federal environmental officials said yesterday that an additional year would be needed for planning and design beyond the three years already allotted. That means that the first scoop of polluted mud would not be removed until spring 2006 at the earliest and that the projected completion date would be six years later. The federal Environmental Protection Agency's regional administrator for New York, Jane M. Kenny, said in an interview that the complexity of the project -- and the need for good relations with anxious upstate residents whose communities will be affected -- were the main causes of what she called a ''slipping'' of the schedule. The government, she stressed, remains committed to the project, which will be one of the largest environmental restoration efforts in United States history at a cost of nearly $500 million. ''Our eyes are on the prize; we're going to be dredging this river,'' she said. ''But we want to make sure it's done safely and done right.'' Environmentalists expressed dismay that the slow pattern of the past was continuing. ''It's discouraging to see so early in the process a one-year delay, and raises concern about what kind of delays we'll see later,'' said Ned Sullivan, the president of Scenic Hudson, a conservation group based in Poughkeepsie. Most environmentalists, including Mr. Sullivan, said they feared that the General Electric Company, which polluted the river with PCB's from its plants north of Albany, then battled the government for years over how and whether to clean up the mud, was behind the delay. The company used PCB's, or polychlorinated biphenyls, for about three decades in its factories in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls. By the time Congress banned PCB's in 1976, as much as one million pounds or more of the oily yellow insulating chemical -- a probable human carcinogen, according to the government -- had leaked or been spilled into the river, where much of it settled to the bottom. A company spokesman, Mark L. Behan, stressed that the request for more time had not come from G.E. Mr. Behan said the company had met every deadline set by the government since the final decision to dredge was announced in the summer of 2001. The |
1471393_5 | Living With Cerebral Palsy, in the Gym and With a Kick | astronomical jury awards, are not preventable in most cases. They may occur because the placenta separates prematurely, the umbilical cord strangles the baby, the baby's shoulders cannot fit through the birth canal, or some other birth mishap that the doctor cannot control. Varying Disabilities Cerebral palsy is a catchall term to describe any movement or posture disorder caused by faulty development or damage to motor areas in the brain. By definition, it is nonprogressive, though symptoms may change as a child matures. Still the disorder, diagnosed in 4,500 American children yearly, is incurable. There are several types of cerebral palsy that result in varying degrees of disability. Spastic cerebral palsy affects 70 percent to 80 percent of patients, causing muscles to stiffen and contract permanently. Athetoid cerebral palsy, representing about 10 percent to 20 percent of cases, results in uncontrolled writhing movements that may affect the hands, feet, arms, legs and muscles of the face. Ataxic cerebral palsy, a rare form, affects balance and depth perception and may cause shaky movements and problems with muscle coordination. Then there are mixed forms, typically combinations of spastic and athetoid. Some children, for example, are mildly affected with a symptom like an awkward gait that is hardly noticeable. Others may be so severely affected that they cannot operate their own wheelchairs. Symptoms of cerebral palsy may include trouble maintaining balance and walking, involuntary movements, drooling, seizures, mental impairment, difficulty speaking, difficulty with fine motor tasks like writing and vision problems. A third of people with cerebral palsy are of normal intelligence, though it can be a challenge to determine this in a child who cannot speak. Another third have mild mental impairments, and the remaining third are moderately or severely mentally impaired. Once a diagnosis is made, usually by age 2, physical therapy should begin immediately to prevent contractures and atrophy of muscles that worsen the child's disability. Parents should seek out a hospital-based treatment center and commit themselves to working at home each day with the child. Some symptoms can be reduced by drug therapy, others by surgery. Still others can be minimized by mechanical aids and biofeedback. But physical activity remains critical. For more information and guidance to helpful organizations, consult the government Web site, www.ninds.nih.gov, and search for cerebral palsy. Also, contact United Cerebral Palsy (www.ucp.org) at 1660 L Street NW, Suite 700, Washington, D.C. 20036, (800) 872-5827. PERSONAL HEALTH |
1472574_0 | 'Looking for Spinoza' | To the Editor: Philosophers have long been speculating about thoughts and feelings. Recently cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have begun to investigate these phenomena empirically. Their research has catalyzed fundamental reconsiderations of the nature of consciousness as well as the relations between mind and body, and reason and emotion. The philosopher Colin McGinn sharply criticizes one such effort, by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in his book ''Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.'' McGinn's review (Feb. 23) is marred by blatant oversimplifications. McGinn portrays Damasio as claiming that emotions do not cause bodily symptoms, that feelings are identical to bodily sensations and that Damasio's account of emotions generalizes to all mental states. Further, his caricatured Damasio is unaware that mental states are intentional -- that is, about objects and events of the world. However, Damasio's arguments are far more sophisticated than McGinn acknowledges. Damasio notes that ''certain thoughts evoke certain emotions and vice versa. Cognitive and emotional levels of processing are continuously linked.'' He defines feeling as ''the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes'' (emphasis added). He clearly recognizes intentional states in noting that ''we gradually categorize the situations we experience -- the structure of the scenarios, their components, their significance in terms of our personal narrative.'' The scientific heart of Damasio's book inheres in his detailed models of feeling and its elegant case studies and experiments, many his own. His book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the vexed area of emotions and feelings. It is unfortunate that McGinn does not engage this material, thus perpetuating the conceit that philosophers can learn only from other philosophers. Howard Gardner Cambridge, Mass. |
1472667_0 | Morning Ouzo | To the Editor: ''In Athens, Ouzo Sweetens Life,'' (Choice Tables, Feb. 23) by Kathleen Cromwell, brought back memories of a steamy June morning in 1970, our first day in Athens. My wife and I were walking back to our hotel, sweltering from the heat and feeling dejected, because a badly needed money order had not arrived. Suddenly someone called out our names. Sitting at a sidewalk table was a hometown friend, a Minnesotan of conservative bent whom we would never have imagined having a drink at 10:30 a.m. He poured us some ouzo and clouded it with icy water, and within a few sips both heat and anxieties faded away. Ever since, I've associated ouzo with the doctored wine Helen of Troy offers Telemachus -- also a traveler -- in the ''Odyssey'': ''magic to make us all forget our pains.'' David H. Porter Saratoga Springs, N.Y. |
1472820_3 | Women Recount Life as Cadets: Forced Sex, Fear and Silent Rage | don't want young women to feel that they have to make that kind of humiliating sacrifice to become officers.'' He added, ''That's why we're going to look at the whole place.'' Many of the women who have come forward say they had dreamed of becoming fighter pilots and officers. But their ordeals, they say, convinced them that the cards were always stacked against them. Sometimes the message is all too easy to see. Ms. Fullilove's mother, Col. Michaela Shafer, a 20-year Air Force veteran who serves as commander of inpatient and emergency room services at the academy hospital, said in an interview that dozens of commanders and teachers, some ranked as high as colonel, often wear canary-yellow baseball hats bearing the black letters ''LCWB.'' She said these initials were commonly known on campus to evoke a vulgar phrase celebrating the graduating class of 1979, the last class with men only. Colonel Shafer said the same letters are visible on license plates and at pep rallies for academy football games. At one rally, she said she complained to men holding a sign bearing the letters, only to be told, ''Tough. Deal with it.'' While Mr. Roche said he was disturbed that men would flaunt such a message with caps and signs, Colonel Shafer said it reflected to many women at the academy a place driven by ''an overriding good-old-boy network that still doesn't want women there.'' That is the impression Jessica Brakey, 23, a former cadet from Dodge City, Kan., said she had after she was raped during an outdoor training exercise between her freshman and sophomore years. Academy medical documents confirm that the rape occurred. While she told no one about the incident for nearly two years, she said it quickly affected her behavior. A psychological evaluation at the academy last April determined she suffered ''personality disorder,'' stemming from a fight with a former boyfriend and ''a week of disruptive behavior'' toward a faculty member. She was judged unfit to become an officer. The same report noted that she suffered '' 'sexual rape' by male cadet'' and she ''refuses to discuss or report incident.'' But nothing in the analysis suggests that academy officers ever considered the rape as a factor in her behavior. Ms. Brakey finally reported the rape to academy investigators last August. While she was waiting for academy officials to decide her case, she said, she was told |
1472595_11 | The Perils of Prevention | one of several risk factors for fractures in the elderly. When the DEXA scan first came into use a decade ago, a panel of international experts convened to decide the cutoff point for diagnosing osteoporosis, drawing the line at bone density that was a certain level below that of the average 25-year-old woman. The panel's standard has helped doctors to identify women at highest risk for fractures and treat them with drugs like estrogen and Fosamax, which slow bone loss. Doctors get into trouble when they try to stem osteoporosis in younger and healthier women. At the same time that the expert panel set the standards for osteoporosis, it also invented a new term, ''osteopenia,'' for women who had suffered a little bone loss but not enough to put them in the category of osteoporosis. The panel hoped that women would be screened once soon after menopause and that a diagnosis of osteopenia would serve as a warning sign for them to stop smoking and step up their efforts to get enough calcium and exercise, primary prevention that can slow the loss of bone. Instead, a diagnosis of osteopenia has led many doctors to prescribe Fosamax and other drugs immediately rather than waiting for osteoporosis. ''Doctors and their patients don't even know what osteopenia means,'' says Susan Love, a breast-cancer surgeon and frequent critic of many postmenopausal treatments. There is no evidence to suggest that earlier treatment will be any more effective in arresting fractures than waiting for true osteoporosis. In fact, some animal studies now under way are suggesting quite the opposite, that long-term use of the drugs may cause bones to become more brittle, Love says, ''and we are prescribing these drugs to women who might or might not suffer a fracture 15 or 20 years down the road.'' But the most troubling possibility involves procedures performed in the name of prevention, whose potential risks far outweigh any possible benefits. The carotid endarterectomy, for example, is a kind of Roto-Rooter surgery for the arteries that supply blood to the brain. In use since the 1950's, carotid endarterectomy is performed on about 150,000 Americans a year to avert strokes that are caused when a blood clot forms in one of the two carotid arteries in the neck and blocks the flow of blood when it reaches a narrower arterial branch in the brain. Carotid endarterectomy is the most common |
1474938_0 | Natural Hormones | To the Editor: Re ''Delusions of Feeling Better'' (editorial, March 19): As a practicing physician for 30 years, I have treated hundreds of menopausal women with human hormones, available only through knowledgeable doctors, including certain estrogens found only in humans (not the ones used in the New England Journal of Medicine study you discuss) and natural progesterone (not synthetic progestin). I know of only one study in this country that has used human hormones. Synthetic hormones just cannot do what the real hormones can do. Still, in many cases even synthetic hormones are better than nothing. Many women were relegated to mental institutions in the days before any kind of hormone replacement therapy. The long-term consequences of not taking hormones were not addressed in this study. The study negates women's experience. It is probably preparatory to offering women other drugs to keep us ''happy.'' CAROL L. ROBERTS, M.D. Brandon, Fla., March 20, 2003 |
1474942_2 | Start-Up Finds Technology Slump Works in Its Favor | will forward the e-mail to the intended recipient. Analysts who have seen the Mailblocks system are impressed by it, but some said it would be hard for a new entrant to become anything more than a niche player in the e-mail market. The International Data Corporation, a research house, estimates that there are about 700 million electronic mailboxes in the world and that the number will grow to 1.2 billion in 2005. ''It's a really nice product, and it's pretty easy to use,'' said Jim Nail, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, a computer and communications industry research firm. ''The question is how big a market. Do people want to pay anybody anything for these features?'' Mr. Goldman said he was trying to imitate the strategy of Google, the dominant Web search engine company, which entered its market late but quickly became the leading service in its field because of its ability to provide more useful Web searches. Mailblocks will charge an annual fee of $9.95 for its personal e-mail service, which will give users 12 megabytes of mail storage and 6 megabytes of allowances for attachments. Charter members will receive two additional years of free service. Mr. Goldman plans for Mailblocks to offer related services in the future, like personalized domain names, calendaring, contact list management and other personal information functions. The idea of a challenge-response system to protect against bulk electronic mail has been familiar to the technology community for several years. A number of programmers, in fact, have developed their own home-brew challenge-response systems, and so have several small companies including Mailcircuit and Frontier. Mr. Goldman said he had come upon the idea independently in 2001, only to discover there were already many patents in the area. He contacted the inventor who held the first patent covering the idea and acquired that patent, as well as another in the same field. With the depressed job market, Mr. Goldman said it had been easy to find a small team of people who were passionate about building an easy-to-use consumer mail system. The technology trends that are currently driving costs down will make it possible for the new start-up to ''be patient'' during the period that the business is being built. Mailblocks has 15 employees, and Mr. Goldman said he estimated that he would need to add one employee for each million new e-mail customers the company attracts. TECHNOLOGY |
1475051_0 | Cat and Mouse on Iraq's Crucial Waterways | They thought the Iraqi tug might be filled with mines and possibly snipers. A suicide boat, the Navy Special Operations boat crew called it. A boarding party of Polish commandos in black masks strapped on Kevlar vests and loaded their M-4 carbines. An American seaman on the back of a high-speed Navy boat used his infrared scope to aim a .50-caliber machine gun at the darkened tug. The crew braced for a firefight. But the tug turned out to be abandoned, a false alarm in the cat-and-mouse game for control of the northern Persian Gulf, Iraq's maritime lifeline to the outside world. The boarding party was part of an expanded campaign by Navy Seals and Special Boat Units to gain access to the lower Tigris River, a crucial first step for shipping military equipment and relief aid into southern Iraq. Eventually, American military commanders hope to ship supplies up the Tigris all the way to Baghdad. This morning, based on a 12-hour patrol with a four-boat unit, it appeared that American and coalition naval forces had gained almost complete control of the waterways bordering Iraq and Kuwait near the city of Umm Qasr, a strategic port where American and British marines are battling Iraqi troops. By daylight, an American transport helicopter could be seen dragging a minesweeping sled across a stretch of Khor Abdullah, a waterway that links the Tigris to the Persian Gulf. Larger American and coalition ships have begun removing mines from the Persian Gulf itself. Navy officers said that within three days, large cargo ships could begin ferrying military supplies, food, water and medicine to inland cities. ''Clearing these waterways is essential to transporting humanitarian aid,'' said Jason, a barrel-chested member of the Seals who commanded today's operation. Like all the Special Operations troops interviewed for this story, he refused to use his full name. The boat patrols are part of a broader campaign by Navy Special Warfare units to secure oil installations and waterways in southern Iraq. In simultaneous raids that began on Thursday night and continued into Friday, several platoons of Seals, aided by Special Boat Units, Air Force Special Operations pilots and Polish commandos seized two oil-pumping stations and a petroleum metering station near Fao in southeastern Iraq. Seal teams also took control of two oil terminals 25 miles off shore at the end of Iraq's major pipeline. No Americans were wounded or killed |
1469761_0 | All-Out Effort on AIDS | To the Editor: Re ''U.N. Cuts Back Its World Population Projection'' (news article, Feb. 27): The new population projections released by the United Nations show the positive effect of international family planning programs in developing countries, but they also warn that much more has to be done to prevent the spread of H.I.V.-AIDS, which also accounts for the projected population decrease. Yet under the Bush administration, the United States reneged on its $34 million pledge to the United Nations Population Fund and reinstated the ''global gag rule,'' barring health providers who receive American family planning assistance from counseling women about abortion or providing abortion services. Every government effort is needed to make family planning and H.I.V.-AIDS-related services, including condoms as an essential method of prevention, readily available to every person who wants them. This is where determination and commitment can make a difference. AMY COEN President Population Action International Washington, Feb. 27, 2003 |
1469886_1 | Irish and British Leaders Fail To Rescue Ulster Peace Accord | of the 1998 accord to share power equally between Protestants and Catholics. Elections would be postponed from May 1 to May 29 to allow time to canvass support. Speaking to reporters after midnight, Mr. Blair declined to specify the new proposals beyond saying they offer a ''lasting and durable'' solution to the crisis in implementing the accord reached on Good Friday in 1998. The talks here were widely seen as a way to try to rekindle trust between Sinn Fein, the predominantly Catholic political wing of the Irish Republican Army, which wants Ulster to join the Irish Republic, and the Ulster Unionists, the largest Protestant party, which wants to maintain stronger ties with Britain. Britain suspended Northern Ireland's Parliament in October after allegations of I.R.A. espionage and support for guerrillas in Colombia. The new proposals were said to include penalties against groups that violate the terms of the 1998 accord. Sir Reg Empey of the Ulster Unionists said sanctions were ''absolutely essential for the restoration of the institutions and the rebuilding of confidence that has been so sadly lacking in the last couple of months.'' But Sinn Fein's president, Gerry Adams, said, ''Sanctions outside the terms of the Good Friday Agreement against any party are unacceptable to us.'' Mr. Blair spoke of a ''shared understanding'' about what must be done to implement the 1998 agreement -- a range of tasks, including complete disarmament of paramilitaries, quicker reform of the police service, withdrawal of British Army forces and stronger human rights legislation. Mark Durkan, leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, a moderate Catholic party, disagreed. ''Not all parties feel that they share the same levels of understanding,'' he said. ''In a sense, the more that we do this and don't produce anything, the more we show politics up and let people down.'' The failure to make much concrete progress is particularly bitter for Mr. Blair, who spent almost two days here at a time when he faces unprecedented challenges to his leadership in Britain over his support for an American invasion of Iraq. The I.R.A., Northern Ireland's largest paramilitary organization, has twice destroyed significant quantities of armaments under the supervision of an independent authority headed by John de Chastelain, a retired Canadian general. Although it has observed a cease-fire since 1998, the I.R.A. is thought to have hundreds of tons of guns, ammunition and plastic explosives in underground bunkers. |
1469933_0 | CHURCH DELEGATION IN RUSSIA | A delegation of the New York-based National Council of Churches met with Russian officials as part of an effort by the council to spread its message against a war with Iraq. Representatives of the ecumenical group, which unites 36 Protestant and Orthodox Christian denominations, have met with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and Pope John Paul II, as well as French Foreign Ministry officials. In Moscow, the delegation met with a Kremlin foreign relations adviser, a deputy foreign minister, and Yevgeny M. Primakov, a former foreign minister and prime minister, who has recently visited Iraq. Sophia Kishkovsky (NYT) THREATS AND RESPONSES: BRIEFLY NOTED |
1469889_3 | Millions Raised for Qaeda in Brooklyn, U.S. Says | financing, American officials had refused to discuss the case against them or unseal relevant court documents until today. Officials in Germany are considering a request from the United States to extradite the two men, which Yemen has opposed. If tried and convicted in the United States, Sheik Mouyad, 54, would face up to 60 years in prison for conspiring to provide material support to Al Qaeda and Hamas, and Mr. Zayed, 29, would face up to 30 years. American officials, however, held out the possibility of bringing charges that could result in life sentences against the two men if they are connected ''to terrorist acts resulting in death.'' Affidavits filed by the F.B.I. in the case seek to link Sheik Mouyad to one specific terrorist attack. In September 2002, officials said, he was the host of a wedding reception in Yemen at which a leader of Hamas, Mohammed Siam, gave a speech that praised a ''Hamas operation'' that had just taken place in Israel, killing five people. While federal prosecutors have brought several dozen terrorist financing cases since the Sept. 11 attacks, they have sometimes run into trouble proving such cases in court. Last month, a Muslim fund-raiser in Chicago -- also accused of funneling millions of dollars to Al Qaeda -- was allowed to plead guilty to lesser charges without admitting any connections to terrorism. But authorities said they believed that the evidence accumulated through secret wiretaps and the use of confidential informants constitutes a strong case against Sheik Mouyad and Mr. Zayed. Sheik Mouyad's claims to an informant that he gave Al Qaeda millions of dollars to support jihad attacks were backed up by documents recovered in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks that listed him by name as a Yemeni recruiter for mujahadeen fighters, the F.B.I. said. ''Prosecutions like this target the very lifeline of terrorist organizations,'' Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the United States attorney in Brooklyn, said in New York. ''There's nowhere in the world that we won't go to track down terrorists and those who support terrorists.'' In court filings, prosecutors said they relied heavily on a confidential informant who knew Sheik Mouyad for more than six years and lived in Sana. Prosecutors said the informant told the F.B.I. in December 2001 that Sheik Mouyad was supplying money and arms to mujahadeen fighters and Muslim extremists worldwide, and the F.B.I. then set up a sting operation. |
1469891_1 | U.S. Sending 2 Dozen Bombers In Easy Range of North Koreans | program. Mr. Bush then added, almost as an aside, that if the administration's efforts ''don't work diplomatically, they'll have to work militarily.'' The statement seemed to reflect a concern in the White House that within weeks it could be dealing with simultaneous crises. ''This is all about the recognition that North Korea may decide that the next few weeks are their best shot at starting to build a nuclear arsenal and getting away with it,'' a senior official said today. ''That's what we've got to stop -- if we can figure out how.'' Two weeks ago, the Pentagon put the dozen B-52's and another dozen B-1 bombers on alert, but kept them on American shores to avoid alarming the new government in South Korea, which has opposed any hint of military action against the North. American officials also said then that they did not want to give North Korea a propaganda tool, at a time that radio broadcasts from the North claim that the United States is preparing to strike the country. Senior Pentagon officials cast the deployment order as a preventive measure. They described it as an effort to maintain a strong deterrent force in the Pacific as huge American military forces continued flowing from throughout the world toward Iraq. ''As part of our global efforts to address worldwide requirements, we are deploying additional forces to the Western Pacific as U.S. forces are preparing for possible military action elsewhere in the world,'' Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman on Asia-Pacific issues, said today. ''These moves are not aggressive in nature,'' he added. ''Deploying these additional forces is a prudent measure to bolster our defensive posture and as a deterrent.'' In the administration, there is sharp division about how Mr. Bush should respond to North Korean actions. Inside and outside the White House, there is pressure on Mr. Bush to declare that there are some ''red lines'' that the North cannot cross, starting with nuclear weapons production. Mr. Bush did not describe those red lines on Monday, when he met the reporters from regional newspapers. But he said he hoped that China, Russia, South Korea and Japan would ''join us in convincing North Korea that it is not in their nation's interest to be threatening the United States, or anybody else for that matter, with a nuclear weapon.'' He said those efforts were ''in process,'' adding: ''If they don't |
1468638_2 | In Blix's Words: 'Iraq Could Have Made Greater Efforts' to Find Illegal Items | of some questions put by inspectors in the field. A number of other actions might be discussed under the heading ''cooperation on process'': (a) After some initial difficulties with Iraq relating to escorting flights into the no-fly zones, Unmovic helicopters have been able to operate as requested both for transport and inspection purposes ; (b) After some initial difficulties raised by Iraq, Unmovic has been able to send surveillance aircraft over the entire territory of Iraq in a manner similar to that of Unscom; (c) The Iraqi commission established to search for and present any proscribed items is potentially a mechanism of importance. It should, indeed, do the job that inspectors should not have to do, namely, tracing any remaining stocks or pieces of proscribed items anywhere in Iraq. Although appointed around Jan. 20, it has so far reported only a few findings: four empty 122 mm. chemical munitions and, recently, two B.W. aerial bombs and some associated components; (d) The second Iraqi commission established to search for relevant documents could also be of importance, as lack of documentation or other evidence is the most common reason why quantities of items are deemed unaccounted for. Iraq has recently reported to Unmovic that the commission had found documents concerning Iraq's unilateral destruction of proscribed items. As of the submission of this report, the documents are being examined; (e) The list of names of personnel reported to have taken part in the unilateral destruction of biological and chemical weapons and missiles in 1991 will open the possibility for interviews, which, if credible, might shed light on the scope of the unilateral actions. Such interviews will soon be organized. Before this has occurred and an evaluation is made of the results, it is not possible to know whether they will prove to be a successful way to reduce uncertainty about the quantities unilaterally destroyed; (f) Iraq has proposed a scientific technical procedure to measure quantities of proscribed liquid items disposed of in 1991. Unmovic experts are not very hopeful that these methods will bring meaningful results and will discuss this matter with Iraq in early March in Baghdad; (g) It has not yet proved possible to obtain interviews with Iraqi scientists, managers or others believed to have knowledge relevant to the disarmament tasks in circumstances that give satisfactory credibility. The Iraqi side reports that it encourages interviewees to accept such interviews, but the |
1473773_3 | Nazis' Human Cargo Now Haunts French Railway | he said, showed the company was eager to hide its activity because the convoys were referred to by the code name of IAPT, the French initials for Israelites, Germans, Poles and Czechoslovaks. The trains were also ordered to stay away from the main stations in Marseille, Avignon and Toulouse where they could be delayed by Quaker and other groups who gave food and water to deportees. Company officials expressed particular concern about punctuality, noting that this was complicated by last-minute changes in instructions provided by German and Vichy authorities. One document specified that S.N.C.F. officials were responsible for closing and locking the doors of wagons carrying the deportees. Until recently, the railroad company has benefited from the perception that it played a heroic role in the Resistance, an image reinforced by the fact that some 8,900 railroad workers were executed for fighting the occupiers and that the company itself was awarded the Légion d'Honneur after the war. Today, Mr. Roubache pointedly paid homage to the company's ''martyrs'' and stressed that his charges were directly exclusively at the company's top administration. He also asked why, even now, the S.N.C.F. felt unable to follow the example of the country's bishops, lawyers and police, who in recent years have sought forgiveness for their actions or silence during the Nazi occupation. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac himself for the first time recognized that ''the criminal madness was supported by the French and by the French government.'' Speaking for the S.N.C.F., however, Mr. Baudelot argued that its role in transporting deportees was widely known during and after the war. He also noted that the company was required by the Armistice Convention signed between Germany and France in 1940 to put all its staff and equipment at the disposal of the occupation forces. A separate case was brought against the S.N.C.F. before a United States district court in New York in 2000 by 10 American plaintiffs whose families were deported from France along with three other plaintiffs representing some 300 participants of a class action lawsuit. The group brought charges of crimes against humanity against the S.N.C.F. and sought damages. However, in November 2001, the federal court granted a S.N.C.F. motion to dismiss the case when it accepted the company's defense of sovereign immunity. Last summer, the plaintiffs appealed the ruling and a hearing was held in October. A decision on the appeal is now awaited. |
1473764_2 | Pirelli Returns to Basics With Tires Made in U.S. | chairman of Telecom Italia and of Olivetti, which said last week that they planned to merge; Pirelli holds its stake in Telecom Italia through Olivetti. Since Pirelli sold two fiber-optic-related businesses to Cisco Systems and Corning and spent most of the proceeds investing in Telecom Italia, Pirelli's stock has tended to move more on news related to the phone company rather than on the fundamentals of its cable and tire businesses. That tendency has become only more pronounced since the announcement of the Olivetti-Telecom Italia merger plan. (The same day, Pirelli said it would simplify its own structure by merging with its holding company, Pirelli & C., in a stock swap.) A result has been that Pirelli shares have lost three-fourths of their value since the July 2001 move into Telecom Italia. All the while, Mr. Gori, a 24-year Pirelli veteran who took charge of his division two years ago, has been quietly making money manufacturing and selling tires. Now, to sustain the company through the cable slump, Mr. Gori says that he and his deputies are turning to new markets and concentrating on high-end products like the Scorpion, which can command profit margins of 15 to 25 percent, rather than the commodity tires used on inexpensive new cars, which are a break-even proposition these days. The new emphasis is already showing in the tire division's profits, which more than doubled last year on unchanged sales. Both the power and communications cables operations lost money in 2002. Tire production at the new plant in Georgia, patterned on siblings in Italy, England and Germany, is entirely automated, with robots capable of turning out a new tire in a three-step process just 72 minutes after it is ordered, compared with the three to six days it takes for a new tire to wend its way through the 14 steps of a traditional plant. Tires from the new plant will be standard equipment on new models of sport utility vehicles and light trucks like the Ford Explorer, Dodge Durango, Cadillac Escalade and Lincoln Navigator, and on sports cars made by Ferrari and Porsche. Once the plant is up to full capacity, more than half its output will be exported. But all that depends on achieving the rapid sales growth that Pirelli is forecasting. For now, the Rome plant is set to produce about 400,000 tires this year, or 1 percent of Pirelli's total. |
1473848_1 | Help Wanted: Customizing A Job Search | overloading a résumé with keywords and technical references. An effective résumé reflects not only the specific skills relevant to the job description, but also a sense of the employer's organization and culture. ''Get a sense of some of the nuances of that organization,'' he said. ''Tailor your résumé to that specific organization.'' The ability to sniff out such nuances quickly is another important advantage of the Internet for job hunters. Mark Mehler, co-author of CareerXroads, an annual guide to Internet job sites, said that acquiring crucial information about employers can be an effective networking tool. Company Web sites, annual reports and press releases can reveal the names of important decision makers. The goal is to find people you may know or have some connection with and can contact in the hope of learning about job openings before they are posted, Mr. Mehler said. The big job boards, however, are still among the best online job-search tools. Not only do they publish hundreds of thousands of searchable job postings, but you can also register to be notified by e-mail when new postings that meet your criteria appear. You can also post your résumé to the job sites' databases, which are routinely searched by employers (usually using keywords). Career coaches advise job seekers to post several résumés tailored to different sorts of opportunities to at least two of the major boards. It may be more efficient for employers to conduct a narrowly defined search of the board than to post a listing and then sift through incoming résumés. Regularly editing or reposting your résumé can help get it noticed in such searches, the advisers say, because many job boards (and many corporate systems) rank newer résumés closer to the top. Moreover, just as job seekers can create search agents to learn of new postings, employers can use automated résumé agents to be notified of newly posted résumés. Reposting a résumé could bring it to the attention of such an employer. Some résumé agents, including the one at Monster, automatically resend résumés to employers whenever they are edited. Before posting a résumé at job sites, though, job seekers need to make sure they will maintain control over who will have access to it, career advisers say. One person you don't want to come across your résumé at an online job board is your current employer. This means that understanding the confidentiality controls and |
1473848_2 | Help Wanted: Customizing A Job Search | searched by employers (usually using keywords). Career coaches advise job seekers to post several résumés tailored to different sorts of opportunities to at least two of the major boards. It may be more efficient for employers to conduct a narrowly defined search of the board than to post a listing and then sift through incoming résumés. Regularly editing or reposting your résumé can help get it noticed in such searches, the advisers say, because many job boards (and many corporate systems) rank newer résumés closer to the top. Moreover, just as job seekers can create search agents to learn of new postings, employers can use automated résumé agents to be notified of newly posted résumés. Reposting a résumé could bring it to the attention of such an employer. Some résumé agents, including the one at Monster, automatically resend résumés to employers whenever they are edited. Before posting a résumé at job sites, though, job seekers need to make sure they will maintain control over who will have access to it, career advisers say. One person you don't want to come across your résumé at an online job board is your current employer. This means that understanding the confidentiality controls and reading the privacy policies are essential. ''Even before the Internet, employers did not like job-hunting employees,'' said Susan Joyce, president of the Web site development company NETability, which owns www.job-hunt.org, a large index of career resources. Ms. Joyce advises job seekers to protect their identities when posting résumés at job sites, by suppressing contact information or creating a ''cybersafe'' résumé with contact information limited to a legitimate and anonymous e-mail address like those available at Hotmail or Yahoo. Such steps can also help guard against identity theft or unscrupulous headhunters who might bring your résumé to an employer to earn a contingency fee, perhaps reducing your chances if you approached the employer on your own, she said. Reputable search firms, however, can be an excellent source of leads. One site that provides a way to locate and contact search firms based on industry, profession and geography is www.executiveagent.com, which is run by Kennedy Information, a publishing and research company covering business markets. While the big job boards provide lots of leads, many more are to be found at the Web sites of employers. The site flipdog.com regularly scans the Web for job postings at employer Web sites, gathers its findings |
1471681_1 | Turmoil in the Andes | suffered crippling bouts of political violence and instability. President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada's hasty escape from his presidential palace in Bolivia last month -- he hid in an ambulance to flee a riot -- was only the latest indication of just how tenuous democracy's hold is on the region. Washington policy makers should approach the Andean region as a whole and work alongside other Latin American nations, like Brazil and Mexico, to strengthen democracy in the region. Too often in the past, America's approach has been scattershot. Colombia, the third-largest recipient of American foreign assistance, is a case in point. Under Plan Colombia, the Bush and Clinton administrations have poured billions of dollars into fighting that nation's drug trafficking, which finances violent left-wing guerrilla groups and right-wing paramilitaries. The effort is now starting to reduce coca cultivation, but there are signs that such farming is merely shifting to neighboring countries. Meanwhile, Colombia's guerrillas recently killed one American contract employee and kidnapped three others involved in the antidrug effort. The Bush administration has sent in 150 more military personnel to assist in the search for them, raising the alarming possibility that Americans could become directly engaged in the conflict. Colombia, a nation where democracy and brutal civil warfare have tenuously coexisted for decades, deserves our support. But Colombians must do their own fighting, and American aid must remained conditioned on the Colombian military's respect for human rights. Elsewhere, the region is disillusioned with the last decade's free-market reforms. Too often twisted into a corrosive form of crony capitalism, the ''Washington consensus'' did little to improve living standards or alleviate poverty. The economic disillusionment has devalued the appeal of democracy as a form of governance and empowered once-marginalized political forces. In Venezuela, a country of great strategic importance given its vast oil reserves, a demagogic president, Hugo Chávez, has shown that a populist backlash can be as destructive as corrupt political establishments that pay lip service to free markets. Encouragingly, Presidents Alejandro Toledo of Peru and Lucio Gutiérrez of Ecuador appear inclined to follow a more responsible middle course. Their challenge is to please international capital markets and internal demands for a more equitable distribution of national wealth, and to do so simultaneously and at a difficult economic moment. America needs to be sympathetic, providing aid and promoting trade, but without being an overbearing pitchman for any one set of economic policies. |
1471763_1 | An Order of Fries, Please, But Do Hold the French | well, small potatoes. ''Making Congress look even sillier than it sometimes looks would not be high on my priority list,'' said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts. ''There's a potential war going on. There's a lot of debate about is Congress being actively involved in foreign policy. It's bad enough not to be able to do anything, but I think self-caricature is a poor substitute for thoughtful discussion.'' Of Russia, China and France, the three nations threatening to veto a United Nations resolution urging war with Iraq, France has been the most unequivocal in its opposition, which is why the French have aroused the ire of House Republicans. ''They have isolated themselves pretty well,'' said Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas and the majority leader. But as the great French fry debate raged in the House, Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who has long bemoaned his colleagues' lack of serious debate on the war, took to the Senate floor. Through a spokesman, Mr. Byrd declined to comment on the French fry/freedom fry uproar. But his speech made clear he did not view a fight with the French, over fries or otherwise, as sound foreign policy. ''The day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America, the French newspaper Le Monde proclaimed, 'We are all Americans!' '' he said. ''Eighteen months later, the United States and France are hurling insults at each other, and the French are leading the opposition to the war against Iraq. In country after country, the United States has seen the outpouring of compassion and support that followed Sept. 11 dissolve into anger and resentment at this administration's heavy-handed attempts to railroad the world into supporting a questionable war with Iraq.'' By the time Mr. Byrd delivered his speech, the lunchtime offerings on the House side of the Capitol complex had already been changed. A sign in the food court in the House Longworth Office Building -- which, for the record, also serves tacos, vegetable lasagna, Greek salad and Chinese lo mein -- announced: ''Update: Now serving in all House office buildings. Freedom fries.'' A highly unscientific survey of cafeteria patrons found opinion to be either neutral, or anti-French. ''There ain't a whole lot of need for the French,'' said Roger Todd, an official with the Albany, Ga., chapter of the Communications Workers of America, who was in town on a lobbying trip. ''I |
1471791_0 | Commanders Worry More About Their Troops' E-Mail Than Their Loose Lips | Concerned that sensitive information might leak out, some units of the United States military are starting to clamp down on e-mail communication from their soldiers and sailors, who have been using it from ships, bases and even desert outposts to stay in touch with family and friends. The uncertainty underscores the double-edged nature of a technology that is providing a new opportunity for instantaneous interaction from remote locations, a development the Pentagon believes is helping to improve morale in the field and among relatives back home. At the moment, much of the electronic communication is unmonitored by the military, providing an opportunity for what some fear could be inadvertent leaks. The Air Force last week warned its service men and women that it might begin limiting or blocking electronic messages because some people had sent home sensitive information, including digital pictures that might have compromised unit safety. The Navy has said that on submarines, it is monitoring all e-mail traffic incoming and outbound. The Army, while generally maintaining open access to e-mail, is restricting some Internet connections from certain bases. In the Persian Gulf region, Afghanistan and elsewhere, soldiers have been instructed not to send sensitive information; specific rules are largely left to division and unit commanders on the theory that they are best able to judge what constitutes a threat to security. Some military critics argue that there should be a clearer Pentagon policy on how to deal with a communications system that goes far beyond what was available in previous conflicts. The critics assert that e-mail and Internet communications raise several potential problems: it is voluminous and thus hard to monitor; it can convey not only words but images; and it is immediate, meaning that an enemy might be able to tap in to real-time updates of troop movements, the presence of a general, or a military outpost's perimeter defenses. Computer security experts are not particularly concerned that Iraqi forces would devote much attention to trying to hack into e-mail from the troops. The military's sensitive operational information is kept on a proprietary network called the Secret Internet Protocol Network that is not connected to the Internet, making it extremely hard for hackers to penetrate. What worries computer and military experts is the possibility that enemy forces may obtain a soldier's message home that ends up being forwarded to someone sympathetic to Iraq, or that outsiders might simply |
1473338_2 | Europeans Still Seek A Solution To Avert War | be called upon to provide aid and participate in rebuilding Iraq. French leaders did not respond directly to President Bush's angry remarks about France on Sunday at a press conference in the Azores, in which he seemed to imply that France would be held to account for leading the campaign to block a second Security Council resolution. But Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin seemed to have Mr. Bush's comments in mind when he said today that French opposition to war would remain unchanged. ''We are advancing to war even though today it is possible to disarm in peace,'' he said. ''Is war today really necessary? It is not, because the inspections are going ahead on the ground.'' ''I would like to tell our American, British and Spanish friends that the Iraqi crisis is not a problem between the United States and France, but between those who want to move forward in the logic of war and the international community.'' The comments in Europe seemed to underline the difference of view that has prevailed between Germany, France and Russia, and most of European public opinion on one side, and the governments of United States, Britain, Spain and several post-Communist countries on the other. Practically since the passage of United Nations Resolution 1441 last fall, authorizing new inspections in Iraq and calling for ''serious consequences'' if Iraq failed to disarm, the two sides have interpreted matters in contradictory ways. Anti-war Europeans have seen the inspections as a process by which Iraqi resistance to disarmament could gradually be worn down and an exact determination made of which weapons Iraq possesses. But the United States has always viewed inspections differently -- as an opportunity to verify active Iraqi compliance with United Nations' demands. Similarly, in the Americans' view, European opponents of war have used Resolution 1441 as a pretext to put off military action indefinitely. Europeans, by contrast, view the United States as using demands for complete disarmament as a cover for another objective not covered by Resolution 1441, the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein. ''I believe that everything is backwards,'' Mr. Schröder said in a television interview on Sunday night. ''Resolution 1441, on which everything is based, provides for every chance to achieve a peaceful disarmament,'' the Chancellor said. ''And my impression is that what has been offered as a so-called compromise is not in the spirit of 1441.'' THREATS AND RESPONSES: DIPLOMACY |
1473254_2 | 'Oldest Old' Still Show Alertness | as a normal part of aging,'' said Dr. John C. Morris, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis. ''It should be seen as a warning signal indicating that it's time to go get evaluated.'' Such thinking reflects a shift toward greater treatment for the oldest old. In the past, doctors often neglected to treat age-related conditions like cataracts and cancer in people over 90. ''People used to write off the elderly as if it were just too late to care,'' said Dr. Marcelle Morrison-Bogorad, associate director of the Neuroscience and Neuropsychology of Aging Program at the National Institute on Aging. ''But it's not too late. And if they've made it to age 90 or more, they deserve it.'' The prevalence of dementia, not surprisingly, increases with age. About 1 percent of people experience some mental decline by 65, about 10 percent of those who live to 75 do, and almost 50 percent of those who make it to 85 are impaired, said Dr. Morrison-Bogorad. By 100, two of three people have some degree of impairment, studies by Margery Hutter Silver, a neuropsychologist with the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University, have shown. Dr. Boeve and his colleagues, who examined 111 people ages 90 to 99 in Rochester, found that some could be extremely forgetful. They may frequently fail to remember appointments, details of recent conversations or even what they just said. Yet many of those people function well on their own. Dr. Boeve plans to keep track of the mental functioning of his study subjects to see how many progress to memory loss or dementia. Many have agreed to autopsies to enable the researchers to determine who, among those with cognitive impairment, actually had Alzheimer's or other dementia. Still, some of Dr. Boeve's patients show no signs of developing any memory loss. Sister Bibiana Lewis, for example, manages her life and seems to think more clearly than many people several generations younger. A 96-year-old retired math and science teacher, she has just published her family's history, she works the Sunday crossword puzzle in The New York Times each week, she conducts tours of the convent, and she reads excessively, she said. She attributes her brain power to good genes, healthy living and, especially, daily physical activity. ''You can't sit,'' she said. ''You have to keep moving.'' ''As far as working my brain,'' Sister Bibiana said, ''I've never stopped.'' |
1473317_3 | Extra Steps Are Needed in Wartime | medication; and a copy of your medical prescriptions. Jot down the address of the American embassy or consulate in countries you will visit, to expedite registration upon your arrival. If you are an elite participant in the loyalty program of an airline or hotel company, book its services, as you will receive priority treatment if problems arise. Book flights as early in the day as possible; they are less likely to be canceled than later ones. Book the highest class of service you can afford; you will probably get better treatment than will holders of cheaper tickets if problems arise. Even if it costs extra, get a paper ticket, which is more easily exchanged or transferred than an electronic one. If you're traveling with an advance-purchase ticket, check if your airline has liberalized its policy for changes. Some major United States airlines and foreign carriers recently announced plans to waive change fees for international tickets bought this month; other carriers' policies will become effective if war occurs or the government issues a red alert. Travel lightly. Do not use a luggage tag that has company logos or other identifying markings on it. Do not put your business card in your luggage tag; just include your name and address on it. In Transit Call ahead to the airport and your airline or check their Web sites for the latest information on flight changes, delays or other problems. Make a mental checklist of what to do before you reach the security checkpoint at the airport, notably putting all metallic objects in your pockets or on your body, including your watch, into your briefcase; removing your laptop from its case, and being prepared to remove your shoes. If you can avoid setting off the metal detector, you will spare yourself major problems. At Your Destination Prearrange a car-service pick-up at your destination but request that the person meeting you not hold a sign with your name or your company's name on it. If you take a taxi, do not get in one that is unmarked. While in airports overseas, avoid Americans traveling in large groups. ''We've got to be careful to soften our footprint,'' said Kelly McCann, senior vice president of Kroll, the risk-consulting company. ''Get rid of American emblems and logos on your clothing, moderate your voice and watch your gestures.'' Register at the American embassy upon arrival. If you change your |
1473333_0 | Hormone Therapy, Already Found to Have Risks, Is Now Said to Lack Benefits | Confounding a widely held impression, a large federal study has found that hormone therapy for menopause does not affect quality of life. Women taking the drugs did not feel more energetic, or have more sexual pleasure or even more restful sleep. They were not less depressed, their minds were no clearer and their memories did not appear to have improved. It is, medical experts say, a striking development in what has been a precipitous reversal of fortune for hormone therapy. Just when women and their doctors were coming to terms with the idea that the drugs can carry health risks, now the same study of 16,608 woman that found those problems says that while the drugs somewhat diminished hot flashes and night sweats in a subgroup of women, they were no better than placebos in improving other measures of quality of life. ''It is just stunning,'' said Cindy Pearson, executive director of the National Women's Health Network, an advocacy group that lobbied for the federal government to conduct the study, called the Women's Health Initiative. Ms. Pearson said so many women had told her the drugs made them feel better that she assumed it was true. ''Even if you train yourself to think, 'placebo effect, anecdotal evidence,' if you hear it often enough you begin to think that maybe it's true for some women, somewhere,'' she said. Until last summer, the drugs were among the most widely prescribed medicines, used by millions of women. Then, in July, investigators for the Women's Health Initiative said they had halted the study because the hormones were conferring health risks -- slightly more heart attacks, strokes, blood clots and breast cancer. The drug being tested was Wyeth's Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progestins that was popular with women and their doctors. With the news last summer, Prempro's sales dropped by 50 percent. In January, the Food and Drug Administration required that all of the 20 or so estrogen- and progestin-containing drugs being prescribed for symptoms of menopause carry a so-called black box warning of their health risks. But many women and their doctors said that the drugs had quality-of-life benefits that overrode their small health risks. They not only relieved symptoms of menopause, like hot flashes and night sweats, many women said, but also made them feel more energetic, made sex more pleasurable, improved their memories and gave them mental clarity. The slight |
1475799_4 | A Trail of Cookies? Cover Your Tracks | to them so you can monitor and delete cookies quickly. E-Mail Anonymity E-mail is another area where privacy and anonymity can be important. Standard e-mail can be compared to a postcard in the world of regular mail: it can be read by mail-server administrators or intercepted en route to recipients. But there are several ways to encrypt messages so that they can be read only by the people to whom they are addressed. A Web-based service is available at www.hushmail.com, and a system that works with popular e-mail programs like Outlook Express and Eudora can be found at www.mutemail.com. Both HushMail and MuteMail can also provide anonymity. Other e-mail programs that are thought to offer anonymity, for example Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, are not quite as anonymous as some might think, since the I.P. address of the sending computer is embedded in the header of the message. Also important in the quest for privacy is to download the latest service packs and security patches for operating systems, browsers and other Internet-related software. Microsoft and Apple have simplified this process with Windows Update and Software Update. Service packs include bug fixes, enhancements and recent security patches, all rolled into one package. Yet service packs are released relatively infrequently, so checking for patches at least once a week is a good idea. Finally, maintaining your privacy may depend on removing traces of online activity that remain on the computer after you have closed the browser. These digital footprints can be reviewed by anyone who has access to a computer you may have used at a cybercafe, a library, your office or elsewhere. Important items to remove include browser histories, cookies, cache files, AutoComplete information, e-mail trash, and log files created by chat programs and your Internet connection itself. You can delete these items yourself, which would be time-consuming since they are scattered about on the hard disk, or choose a program to do it for you. Window Washer, from Webroot Software, can wash away information with a bleaching process that is so strong that deletions cannot be retrieved even with forensic software, said David Moll, chief executive of Webroot. ''We've built this product to remove those things permanently and completely,'' Mr. Moll said. A list of additional privacy solutions is at the Electronic Privacy Information Center Web site: www.epic.org/privacy/tools.html. Although there is no single easy answer to the challenge of guarding privacy |
1475788_0 | First, Do No Harm (Wirelessly) | IF you think the gowns are bad, consider another indignity you might encounter during a hospital stay: your doctor uses a cellphone, but you and your visitors are prohibited from doing the same. Officially or not, that double standard prevails in many places as hospitals consider the possibility that electromagnetic interference from cellphones could cause the critical malfunction of medical devices. With doctors relying heavily on cellphones and hand-held computers and hospitals eager to replace handwriting with keystrokes, a growing number of medical centers are allowing physicians to go wireless. But the shift has sowed confusion. Administrators at some hospitals simply look the other way as doctors chat. Others have equipped their buildings with wireless voice systems to ensure that phones operate at low power and at frequencies unlikely to disrupt medical devices, because modern cellphones adjust their power levels in inverse relation to signal strength. ''It's kind of a free-for-all,'' said Joe Morrissey, a staff scientist for Motorola Labs, who advises hospitals on wireless communications. ''There hasn't really been time to formulate good, solid guidelines.'' The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices, has issued recommendations on the use of cellular and other radio-frequency transmitters in hospitals. The agency urges that hospitals conduct tests of possible interference on their own medical equipment. But some say the tests might be too demanding for a small hospital. ''The F.D.A. wants to err on the side of protecting patients,'' Dr. Morrissey said. On the other hand, he said, ''you can't bring just any phone into the hospital. If it doesn't have a good signal, it's going to power up.'' Wireless communications near hospital patients would have been unthinkable a few years ago, when reports about pacemaker and pump failures caused by radio transmissions abounded. One hospital even banished Furby, an electronic toy popular at the time. But some say that such fears are outdated. ''We know if a parking attendant goes into a hospital with a 10-pound walkie-talkie, there will be interference, but a little digital cellphone is different,'' said C. Peter Waegemann, vice chairman of the Mobile Healthcare Alliance, whose members include hospitals and electronics manufacturers. The American Hospital Association does not collect data on hospital policies regarding cellphones, said Amy Lee, a spokeswoman. Mr. Waegemann said he believed that most hospitals currently ban them from patient-care areas, at least officially. Yet authorized or not, ''doctors are going to use |
1475759_4 | Attacks on Chemical Ships in Southeast Asia Seem to Be Piracy, Not Terror | night, Singapore port officials said in a statement. Tugboats must now provide six hours' advance warning of their movements in Singapore's port. All small vessels have been ordered not to enter -- by day or night -- the special anchorages for chemical tankers, for very large crude oil tankers and for tankers carrying highly explosive gases, like liquefied natural gas. A Malaysian marine police official said on Tuesday that his force had not increased patrols of the strait but had taken other precautions, which he declined to specify. Marine police officials in Malaysia did not return telephone calls after today's incident, which took place close to one of Malaysia's most important ports, Malacca, in one of the narrowest and busiest parts of the strait. During a late-night tanker trip last November through the same location where the Dewi Madrim was temporarily seized today, large ships were spaced about a mile apart and were brightly illuminated in the hope of discouraging pirate attacks. But a few small fishing boats also slid silently across the water, too low to be spotted by ships' radar and invisible in the almost utter darkness except for their navigation lights. Pirates commonly use such boats and extinguish the lights before approaching ships and launching attacks. The first two attacks on chemical tankers occurred near the northwestern end of the strait, off the Indonesian city of Langsa -- a wider and less crowded area than the one near Malacca. In both of the earlier attacks, assailants sprayed automatic weapons fire at the bridges of the tankers. But in those cases, the attackers did not succeed in boarding the vessels because alert crews sent out distress calls by radio and began maneuvering their ships so as to create large waves that made them hard to board, Mr. Choong said, adding that the chief engineer on the MT Suhaila was hit in the head by a bullet but escaped serious injury. By contrast, 4 of the 10 attackers in the incident today quietly boarded the vessel and were able to break through the port side door of the bridge and turn off the ship's communications gear before anyone could stop them. The attackers are most likely to have set out from the Indonesian side of the strait, since law enforcement there tends to be less vigorous. Most pirates in the strait have also been Indonesian nationals in recent years. |
1475739_2 | Key Executive At HealthSouth Admits to Fraud | court filings, Mr. Owens described how he had personally tried to persuade Mr. Scrushy to abandon accounting fraud as a mechanism for meeting Wall Street's earnings projections, but to no avail. Now, to forestall any charges or to win at trial, Mr. Scrushy will have to persuade prosecutors or a jury that both men -- including Mr. Owens, his friend and confidant since at least 1987 -- are lying. William N. Clark, a lawyer for Mr. Scrushy, did not return a telephone call today seeking comment. Documents filed in court indicate that numerous other executives at HealthSouth face potential indictment, and that might motivate them to reach plea deals with the government. Those executives -- mostly members of HealthSouth's accounting staff -- followed instructions from Mr. Owens and Mr. Scrushy as to how much income was required to be achieved by the accounting manipulations, according to the documents. Numerous HealthSouth executives have hired lawyers and begun cooperating with federal prosecutors. Government officials, however, made clear today in a news conference after Mr. Owen's plea that any other participants in the scheme needed to decide quickly whether they wanted to be witnesses for the government, or defendants in a criminal prosecution. Alice H. Martin, the United States attorney handling the case, said that while many HealthSouth officials had offered in recent days to cooperate with the investigation, there were others at the company who had not come forward. ''They know who they are,'' Ms. Martin said. ''We know who they are.'' With Mr. Owens's guilty plea, HealthSouth has begun the process of dismissing him, a person who works with the company said. Mr. Owens, however, also serves as a director, and under the rules governing corporate boards he cannot be removed by the company. Instead, he would have to resign or be voted out by shareholders at the next annual meeting -- an event that is certain to be long delayed because HealthSouth has so far been unable to file audited financial statements that account for the fraud. The accounting fraud described by Mr. Owens in his plea today was a simple operation. Beginning in January 1996, according to the criminal charges, the senior officers at HealthSouth -- including Mr. Owens and Mr. Scrushy -- recognized that the company's operations were not going to produce sufficient income to meet Wall Street projections. After reviewing preliminary reports on the company's monthly and |
1475645_0 | Hopes Fading for Bolivia Pipeline Project | Ed Miller had high hopes in the late 1990's when, as manager for British Gas in this landlocked country, he and another geologist came up with a sure-fire plan to develop and market Bolivia's immense reserves of natural gas. With an eye on California and its insatiable appetite for energy, three multinationals, including British Gas, soon formed a consortium to build a 400-mile pipeline to the Pacific coast. The idea was to liquefy the gas and ship it to California, with projected sales of $21 billion over 20 years. But with $350 million already invested, the project that was once heralded as Latin America's largest infrastructure development is now close to collapse, a casualty of roiling nationalism and political turbulence in Bolivia. ''The project is coming to the end of its opportunity window,'' said Mr. Miller, 47, an American who recently left the consortium and now runs a pipeline that transports gas to Brazil. ''I would say the window was wide open a year ago, and now it's almost shut.'' Indeed, the government of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, buffeted by antigovernment protests that killed 30 people in February, has delayed plans to announce a decision on the project's next phase: whether to build a pipeline through Peru or through Bolivia's old enemy, Chile. Instead, the government is now talking about consulting with Bolivians, to let them to make the decision. But the companies of the Pacific LNG project, as the consortium is called -- Repsol-YPF of Spain; British Gas; and Pan American Energy, a BP subsidiary -- insist that Chile is the only viable option, because building through Peru would cost $600 million more. An American consulting firm working for the Bolivian government recently reached the same conclusion. Aides to Mr. Sánchez de Lozada said the government was still carefully studying both options. But people close to the project said the president was actually paralyzed, because deciding on Chile would lead to huge, destabilizing protests. ''The government does not have the political oxygen to decide,'' said Gonzalo Chávez, an economic analyst and former vice minister of energy. Opposition to the project is intense and spreading, fueled by left-leaning indigenous leaders who strongly reject the Chilean option. Most Bolivians have never forgiven Chile for snatching Bolivia's coastal province in a 19th-century war, including the region around the present-day port of Patillos, where a liquefaction plant would be built. The opposition |
1470048_0 | Travel Industry and Privacy Groups Object to a U.S. Screening Plan for Airline Passengers | The travel industry and civil liberties groups are sharply objecting to government plans for a new airline passenger screening program, saying it could subject Americans to intensive background checks without adequate controls on how the information was used. The proposed program, an upgrading of current profiling systems, would involve electronic checking of the credit records and criminal histories, along with checking whether the passenger is on watch lists of suspected terrorists. The screening would be done by the federal Transportation Security Administration. Based on the results, each traveler would be assigned a risk level. Those deemed to pose a danger would be barred from flights. The critics worry how the information about other passengers -- whose risk rating will appear in encrypted form on boarding passes -- will be used and protected from abuse. The infrastructure for the new system is to be tested on Delta Air Lines flights through three undisclosed airports beginning later this month. Transportation officials said yesterday that no personal information about travelers would be collected during the 120-day test beyond what is used in current screening systems. But travel managers are unhappy about the plans. ''People are very concerned,'' said Mark A. Williams, president of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, a group of 2,500 travel managers, agencies and industry executives from more than 30 countries. ''I hate to use the word offended, but they feel it is an invasion of their personal privacy.'' James Loy, the retired admiral who heads the Transportation Security Administration, said last week that the system was ''being designed to serve our national security without sacrificing individual privacy.'' In a statement announcing that the government had hired Lockheed Martin to develop the system under a $12.8 million contract, Admiral Loy said: ''Concerns about privacy are understandable. As we address such concerns, we believe that the public will come to have a higher comfort level in air travel.'' The program has so angered some passengers that a movement is brewing on the Internet for a boycott of Delta if it carries out the test of the system, known as CAPPS II, for Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System. Delta officials yesterday acknowledged receiving numerous e-mail messages and calls of protest. ''We take it seriously,'' said Catherine Stengel, a Delta spokeswoman. She said the airline was referring all the complaints to the Transportation Security Administration, part of the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. |
1469543_3 | Coping With the Threat of War | a big decrease in business but he expects changes and cancellations should a conflict break out. For the airline industry, of course, a conflict would spell potential disaster. The International Air Transport Association estimates that an invasion of Iraq could lead to an immediate 20 percent drop in worldwide travel, and several airlines are reporting that international bookings are stagnant. ''The general view is that all of the major carriers can withstand the incremental impact of a brief, decisive engagement,'' said Sam Buttrick, an airline analyst at UBS Warburg. ''One could make the case that the airlines would be better off to get it over with sooner.'' Although the airlines may fear the worst, they are busy making contingency plans of their own. An association spokeswoman said the major American carriers had been talking about an initiative to ask Congress for some kind of immunity from antitrust laws that would allow them to coordinate flight schedules, similar to a proposal for easing airport gridlock that was discussed in the summer of 2000. However, one official close to the discussions said the industry was more intent on gaining relief from high fuel and war-risk insurance costs and security taxes and fees. He said airline executives did not see any antitrust effort being ''part of the final mix.'' Airlines are also making plans to cope with a possible conflict. United Airlines, which is in bankruptcy proceedings, would cut 10 to 12 percent of capacity, according to a spokesman, Jeff Green. He declined to comment on specific routes, but he said it was unlikely the carrier would eliminate any destinations. Officials at American Airlines and Delta Air Lines also said their companies planned to cut capacity if war broke out. British Airways, which says April-to-June bookings are up from last year, has suspended all flights to Oman and rerouted nonstop flights to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other countries near Iraq through Cyprus, according to John Lampl, a spokesman. To spur advance business, the airline is offering discounted tickets this week through travel agencies for flights between New York area airports and London. Virgin Atlantic officials say advanced bookings have been ''slightly depressed'' recently but add that making projections has become much more difficult with travelers booking flights much closer to departure dates than previously. In late February, Virgin made a temporary policy change to allow passengers to cancel and reschedule any tickets booked |
1469531_2 | The Real Scientific Hero of 1953 | A nonlinear system like this couldn't be analyzed by breaking it into pieces. Indeed, that's the hallmark of a nonlinear system: the parts don't add up to the whole. Understanding a system like this defied all known methods. It was a mathematical monster. Undaunted, Fermi and his collaborators plucked their virtual string and let Maniac grind away, calculating hundreds of simultaneous interactions, updating all the forces and positions, marching the virtual string forward in time in a series of slow-motion snapshots. They expected to see its shape degenerate into a random vibration, the musical counterpart of which would be a meaningless hiss, like static on the radio. What the computer revealed was astonishing. Instead of a hiss, the string played an eerie tune, almost like music from an alien civilization. Starting from a pure tone, it progressively added a series of overtones, replacing one with another, gradually changing the timbre. Then it suddenly reversed direction, deleting overtones in the opposite sequence, before finally returning almost precisely to the original tone. Even creepier, it repeated this strange melody again and again, indefinitely, but always with subtle variations on the theme. Fermi loved this result -- he referred to it affectionately as a ''little discovery.'' He had never guessed that nonlinear systems could harbor such a penchant for order. In the 50 years since this pioneering study, scientists and engineers have learned to harness nonlinear systems, making use of their capacity for self-organization. Lasers, now used everywhere from eye surgery to checkout scanners, rely on trillions of atoms emitting light waves in unison. Superconductors transmit electrical current without resistance, the byproduct of billions of pairs of electrons marching in lock step. The resulting technology has spawned the world's most sensitive detectors, used by doctors to pinpoint diseased tissues in the brains of epileptics without the need for invasive surgery, and by geologists to locate oil buried deep underground. But perhaps the most important lesson of Fermi's study is how feeble even the best minds are at grasping the dynamics of large, nonlinear systems. Faced with a thicket of interlocking feedback loops, where everything affects everything else, our familiar ways of thinking fall apart. To solve the most important problems of our time, we're going to have to change the way we do science. For example, cancer will not be cured by biologists working alone. Its solution will require a melding of both |
1469677_4 | NORTH KOREA MIG'S INTERCEPT U.S. JET ON SPYING MISSION | the Cobra Ball, which is equipped with sophisticated sensors to collect electronic and optical data on ballistic missiles and their re-entry vehicles. There are only three Cobra Balls in the Air Force inventory, and one is in depot for maintenance, Air Force officials said. One of the Cobra Ball's missions is to monitor preparations and any eventual launch by North Korea of its Taepodong long-range missiles or other shorter-range rockets. While North Korea launched a short-range antiship missile last week, intelligence officials say there is no evidence yet of preparations to conduct a far more threatening long-range test. North Korea launched a Taepodong missile in 1998. However, administration officials note that such a test could be a way for North Korea to step up pressure without restarting its nuclear reprocessor, which can produce weapons-grade plutonium. In a brief interview last week, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz voiced deep concern over North Korea's restarting a reactor at its primary nuclear complex. ''They seem to think that they'll get somewhere by just constantly escalating, and they need to understand that they're just digging a hole deeper that they're going to have to climb out of eventually,'' Mr. Wolfowitz said. As North Korea has taken steps toward enlarging its nuclear arsenal, it has also increased its fiery opposition to annual American military exercises in South Korea and to surveillance flights. On Saturday, the official North Korean news agency accused the United States of flying increased reconnaissance missions in preparation for war. The agency said, for instance, that the RC-135S ''illegally intruded into the air above the territorial waters in the East Sea almost every day from February 21 and made shuttle flights in the air for hours to spy on major targets in its east coastal area.'' ''All these espionage flights and air war games clearly indicate the desperate efforts of the U.S. to start a war against'' the North, it said. American officials said tonight that the RC-135S was conducting legal, routine reconnaissance missions in international airspace, and denied any American plans to attack the North. Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, the commander of United States forces in the Pacific, has put a dozen B-52 bombers and a dozen B-1 bombers on alert to move to Guam, in the event they are needed to help the 37,000 American troops defending South Korea deter an attack from the North across the demilitarized zone. |
1469547_0 | British and Irish Leaders Seek Progress on Belfast Pact | Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland held a series of crisis meetings today with Northern Ireland's main political parties for the second time in a month, trying to resolve a deadlock in carrying out the five-year-old Belfast peace accord. Politicians from all sides described the talks as the most important negotiations since 1998, when the landmark agreement established a local government for the British province that shared power between Protestants and Roman Catholics. But as darkness and rain fell on the castle in this small town outside Belfast where the talks are being held, few signs of a breakthrough were evident. Politicians indicated that they would work into the night and continue the discussions on Tuesday morning, if necessary. Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, fueled speculation that the I.R.A. would soon destroy most or all of its arsenal by bringing Joe Cahill, a veteran of republican struggles, to the negotiations. The support of Mr. Cahill would lend credence to any new deal among hard-line republicans who might otherwise balk at any perceived compromise by Sinn Fein. The largely Roman Catholic republicans seek closer ties between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, while the largely Protestant unionists seek to keep Northern Ireland's ties with Britain. ''I believe that the I.R.A. do wish to see the peace process succeed,'' the Sinn Fein chairman, Mitchel McLaughlin, said in a radio interview before the talks. ''Through this process we will take all of the weapons, including all of the I.R.A. weapons, out of the political equation permanently.'' In February, the prime ministers met with Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders individually. Today, Sinn Fein's president, Gerry Adams, and chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, spent 90 minutes with the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble. It was the first time those opposing personalities had met in person since the home-rule government was suspended last October. Then, Britain reimposed direct rule from London in response to allegations that the I.R.A. was spying on British officials and training Colombian rebels in urban warfare. Mr. Blair demonstrated the gravity of the situation, and his personal commitment to Northern Ireland, by traveling here from London and staying the night at a time when he faces increasing domestic criticism for his support of an American invasion of Iraq. There is pressure for re-establishing the local Parliament and other government bodies before mid-March, when |
1473137_0 | Humanity's Slowing Growth | A generation ago, Paul Ehrlich warned in ''The Population Bomb'' that with demands on resources soaring, overpopulation would kill our planet. As demands on water and air soared, many thought he was right. Now it turns out that population growth rates are plummeting -- for good and tragic reasons. The implications are profound. According to a United Nations report issued recently, most advanced countries could, in effect, slowly turn into old-age homes. For example, by 2050, the median age in Japan and Italy will be over 50. Fertility rates in nearly all well-off countries have already fallen below 2.1 babies per woman, the rate at which a population remains stable. In the developing world, fertility rates average three children, down from six a half-century ago, and the U.N. projects that the rate will dip below the replacement level in most poor countries later this century. Slower growth rates are both the cause and consequence of a higher standard of living, and of the emancipation of women. There are also alarming reasons for the drop in the population growth rate -- notably the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic. It is one of the factors the United Nations cited in revising its 2050 world population projections, from 9.3 billion people down to 8.9 billion (we're at 6.3 billion today). The U.N. estimates that there will be a half-billion fewer people in the 53 nations most afflicted by AIDS than there would have been. For its part, Europe will decline, after accounting for immigration, from 728 million people to 632 million in 2050. Italy, meanwhile, is expected to shrink by a fifth; Estonia, staggeringly, by half. By contrast, America's population, boosted by a higher fertility rate and immigration, is projected to be 409 million in 2050, up from 285 million today. Ours is one of eight countries expected to account for half the population increase in the next 50 years. This will improve our economic prospects. Not so for the others, which are all much poorer: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Congo. Aging populations will pose an economic challenge for most wealthy nations as smaller working-age populations will have to pay for the health and pension benefits of a growing number of longer-living retirees. Even a cursory understanding of these demographic trends makes two things clear. Helping poor countries improve their economies is not a matter of charity but of intelligent foreign policy. And |
1473111_1 | China's New Prime Minister Seen as Careful Conciliator | Wen is that he never makes political mistakes.'' Although he is now the main manager of the world's sixth-largest economy, Mr. Wen ranks third in the Communist Party hierarchy, behind Mr. Hu and Wu Bangguo, who now heads the legislature. Jiang Zemin, the recently retired president and party chief, remains chairman of the Central Military Commission and is likely to exert broad influence. But as Mr. Wen and Mr. Hu prepared to take control of government and party affairs in recent weeks, they have signaled a subtle shift from the decade-long reign of Mr. Jiang. Mr. Jiang courted capitalists and sought to foster a middle class, while steering billions of dollars in state funds to build roads, bridges, subways and ports in prosperous east coast cities. Mr. Wen spent the Chinese New Year holiday at the bottom of a coal shaft in the less developed west. Mr. Hu visited herders in frigid Inner Mongolia. They have emphasized building a social security system to replace the withered socialist welfare state that has left tens of millions of workers without adequate pensions or health care. They have stressed the urgency of reducing the wealth gap between urban and rural residents. Their focus on the poor reflects worries that the traditional constituents of the Communist Party could threaten its hold on power. Protests by laid-off workers and overburdened farmers are a regular feature of Chinese life, alarming authorities who insist on political stability. It is difficult to tell if the speeches and demonstrations of concern for the socially dispossessed will lead to new aid programs. But Mr. Wen does appear to want to tackle the problems energetically. Though born in the eastern port city of Tianjin in 1942, he learned firsthand about rural backwardness during the 14 years he spent working as a geologist and party official in the arid western province of Gansu. He has said that improving the lives of the 700 million people who live in rural areas is the ''central and basic goal'' for the future. As deputy prime minister, the position he held before becoming prime minister, he arranged experiments in Anhui Province to reduce the taxes imposed on farmers. Those experiments have since spread nationwide, though it is too early to gauge their effectiveness. Mr. Wen also seems committed to moving China toward a market economy. He was the top deputy and a close adviser of Mr. |
1473118_0 | France Seeks Compromise To Prevent U.N. Rupture | Battling the American deadline for war, but reluctant to destroy its relationship with Washington, France is seeking an 11th-hour compromise that will avoid a rupture at the United Nations, senior French officials said tonight. But the Bush administration today rejected a declaration issued over the weekend by France, Germany and Russia with China's support for more negotiations, as well as a compromise proposal by President Jacques Chirac of France to accept a one-month deadline for Iraq to disarm if that is the will of United Nations weapons inspectors. Mr. Bush made clear in his announcement at a summit meeting with the leaders of Britain and Spain in the Azores that the Security Council must agree on Monday on a new resolution authorizing war against Iraq. Senior French officials said afterward that the French strategy for trying to find a peaceful solution to the crisis still stood. ''We listened carefully to what was said at the summit,'' said one senior French official, reflecting the views of Mr. Chirac. ''There is nothing that leads us to change our position or assessment of what needs to be done. Our proposals are on the table.'' The official added that France and the coalition of nations it leads believe that the most important reason to avoid a vote for war is that the United Nations weapons inspectors are making progress and have asked for more time. ''One big element that was missing in the talks in the Azores is that the inspections are working and the inspectors want them to continue,'' the official said. As for Mr. Bush's pledge to force a vote on the American resolution on Monday, the official added, ''Every country will take its responsibility before the world.'' In his remarks, made in a joint interview with CBS and CNN, Mr. Chirac reiterated that France was ready to use its veto power in the Security Council to block a resolution that would pave the way to war. ''France is not pacifist,'' he said. ''We are not anti-American either. We are not just going to use our veto to nag and annoy the U.S. But we just feel that there is another option, another way, another more normal way, a less dramatic way than war.'' He added, ''We have to go through that path. And we should pursue it until we've come to a dead end, but that isn't the case.'' Mr. Chirac's |
1475190_1 | Pilots Learn To Overhaul Flight Plans, And Attitudes | to the bad guys.'' The pilots' changing role, from conducting surgical strikes to providing close air support for ground troops, has required retooling of plans and attitudes. ''This is a balancing act that is ongoing,'' said Rear Adm. John M. Kelly, commander of the three-carrier task force supporting fighter squadrons in the gulf. His crew, he added, is working with the joint forces air command center in Qatar. The air war is far from over. Fighter groups from the three carriers in the gulf -- the Abraham Lincoln, the Kitty Hawk and the Constellation -- flew more than 550 sorties, or individual flights, in the first three days of the air war. Add Air Force missions and flights from other carriers in the region, and the number of flights has reached upward of 7,000. Before missions, pilots set preprogrammed coordinates in their jet's computers, which direct satellite-guided bombs to targets in Iraq. But more and more, as ground troops wage and control their own battles, jets return with unreleased bombs. Some aircraft have been displaced from their fighter roles entirely. Four of the 12 Super Hornets in Captain Albright's air wing have been converted to tankers whose sole responsibility is fueling other jets in midair -- a critical, if less glamorous, role now that aircraft have to remain in flight longer to await possible strike orders. One reason the Super Hornet is now the Navy's premier fighter is its flexibility. A regular tanker, because it has no defensive ability, has to stay far from a combat zone, requiring jets to fly out of the way to refuel. The Super Hornet, which can switch from tanker to fighter capability at the touch of a button, can fly in tandem with strike aircraft, and fuel jets midair en route to a target. But the change in status has left some gung-ho pilots feeling sidelined. Around squadron ''ready rooms,'' where they attend briefings on missions and generally gather, returning airmen have muttered to fellow pilots about ''not dropping'' or ''just tanking'' over the past two days. Captain Albright said he understood the response, but he reminds his pilots to keep perspective. ''This is what they've trained to do, and they want to do their part,'' he said. ''But they also have to understand that just that show of force that we provide in close air support is part of the contribution.'' After 24 |
1475180_0 | Oil Prices Help Mexico's Trade | High oil prices pushed Mexico's trade balance into a surplus for the first time since June 1997, the finance ministry said today, reporting a $65 million surplus for February. Mexico exported $1.66 billion in crude oil and other petroleum products in February, an increase of more than 100 percent over February 2002. The average price for Mexican crude reached $27.96 a barrel in February, an increase of $11.86 over last February. Overall, exports grew 8.6 percent over last year. But exports of manufactured goods, which represent 83.4 percent of Mexico's exports, grew by only 1.1 percent because of the stagnant United States economy. The United States buys more than 90 percent of Mexico's exports and ran a $37.2 billion trade deficit with Mexico last year, according to the United States Department of Commerce. Imports grew more slowly -- just 2.6 percent -- the finance ministry said, because of Mexico's stagnant economy. |
1475230_0 | There's a New Deputy in the Sky | Bill Scannell is a frequent business traveler, a software company executive, an Internet dabbler in privacy-rights activism and a former Army intelligence officer. These days, when he boards a plane, he also is a man with a plan. ''It's Skyjacking 101,'' said Mr. Scannell, 38, of Austin, Tex. The exercise begins by thinking back to how you would have reacted to hijackers on an airplane on Sept. 10, 2001, he says. ''Like everyone else, you'd sit there and shut up and wait to eventually get to Havana,'' he said. That passivity is now long gone, he says. ''After Sept. 12, every passenger is a sky marshal,'' he said. ''The first thing I ask for now when I get on a plane is a blanket because if a hijacker tries to do anything, you can always toss a blanket over his head and beat the bejesus out of him.'' Mr. Scannell acknowledges that he is indulging in a bit of hyperbole -- but only a bit. In reality, he said, he would not act rashly if a hijacking were developing but would first assess the situation carefully and look to the cabin flight crew for guidance. Yet his resolve reflects a largely unstated but noticeable shift in attitude among passengers and flight crews alike since Sept. 11. Before the attacks, the operating assumption was that armed hijackers should not be resisted. The suicide attacks demolished that comfortable supposition. And the image, burned in the American psyche, of terrorists' -- armed with nothing more than box-cutters -- seizing four airliners and commandeering two of them into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, has created a new rallying cry in the minds of many: Never again. The outbreak of war in Iraq and repeated government warnings about the threat of new terrorist attacks have heightened travelers' fears -- and fed this fight-back mentality, security experts said. But several expressed concern that passengers could interfere with crew members' coordinated attempts too control a situation. Airlines do not publicly discuss how hijacking-resistance procedures have changed since 9/11, partly for security reasons, partly for considerations of potential legal liability and partly out of reluctance to draw any additional attention among already jittery passengers to the potential horror of more suicide hijackings. Behind the scenes, though, airlines have been putting pilots and flight attendants through security courses that place more emphasis than before on |
1475128_4 | Effort to Make Sex Drug for Women Challenges Experts | is that the enzyme it acts on, PD-5, seems to be present in only one of the vagina's four layers. That may explain why studies suggest that Viagra does not fix female arousal problems -- and why so many women who have tried it say it has not helped. One recent study was more promising. Dr. Jennifer Berman, a urologist who runs the Center for Sexual Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles, compared Viagra to a placebo in 202 postmenopausal women. All were taking supplemental hormones. Fifty-seven percent of the women who were given Viagra reported improved genital sensations, compared with 43 percent of the placebo group. Forty-one percent of the Viagra group members reported greater satisfaction with sex, compared with 27 percent in the placebo group. Although the differences between the two groups were modest, Dr. Berman said the study suggested that Viagra could help women with healthy hormone levels and in happy relationships. ''There is a potential role for Viagra in women,'' she said. ''The question is which women and to what extent.'' Pfizer, maker of Viagra, considers the Berman study promising enough to warrant further research. Two other Viagra-like drugs -- Cialis, made by Lilly, and Levitra, from Bayer -- are expected to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration this year. These drugs also act on the PD-5 enzyme, but neither is being studied for use in women. Hormone treatments appear likely to be more useful, researchers say, because so many women have problems with sex when they reach menopause and their ovaries produce smaller amounts of sex hormones. Lower levels of estrogen can make the vaginal tissue dry, and less androgen leads to less sexual desire and arousal. Androgen gels and patches for women are being considered for women with sexual dysfunction. Other possibilities include drugs that act on the brain. Apomorphine, which boosts the neurotransmitter dopamine, may soon be used for male sexual dysfunction. TAP Pharmaceuticals has applied for F.D.A. approval for its apomorphine product, Uprima, for men. Studies indicate that such drugs can increase blood flow to the clitoris. But it is not yet known whether increasing blood flow in this way improves women's sexual functioning, Dr. Goldstein said. Creams containing prostaglandins or other agents that encourage blood flow, and could be applied before sex, are also being considered for women. Many herbal treatments are widely available without prescriptions. |
1474352_0 | World Business Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Menopause Therapy | Galen Holdings, a pharmaceutical company based in Northern Ireland, received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to sell a hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women that is delivered by a self-inserted vaginal ring. The product, Femring, treats hot flashes and vaginal symptoms, the company said, and releases estrogen steadily over three months to avoid the dosage fluctuations of other treatments. Galen Holdings said that it expected that Femring, which will be available in the United States in June, would have $50 million in sales in its first three years, and that it could reach peak sales of $75 million a year by 2007. The company has spent more than $650 million since December on women's health care products, including two oral contraceptives and another hormone treatment it bought from Pfizer and a drug bought from Eli Lilly to treat a type of premenstrual depression. Brian Lavery (NYT) |
1474339_0 | Hormone Therapy | To the Editor: The results of a new study on hormone replacement are less a ''reversal of fortune for drugs'' than a devastating blow to the psychological health of thousands of women (''Delusions of Feeling Better,'' editorial, March 19). How can a randomly assigned study of 16,608 women, none of whom had severe symptoms, justify even the suggestion that women be considered ''foolish if they keep taking hormone pills for years at a time''? This less than rigorous study fails to understand the biology of estrogen-progesterone replacement. For women like me, who have been wrenched from terrifying circumstances, whose menopausal transitions have been disabling, the dramatic therapeutic response to hormone replacement goes far to support the notion that these psychological disorders are biologically triggered. Now, many women who would benefit from estrogen replacement will never do so. MARCIA LAWRENCE SOLTES Fort Lee, N.J., March 19, 2003 |
1474290_1 | China Feeling a Need to Build an Oil Reserve | China's limited storage capacity; Western experts said that at least some of it was probably parked aboard aging tankers. As a result, China could probably get through a very brief interruption in supply, said Norio Ehara, an Asian energy specialist at the International Energy Agency in Paris. ''They purchased a lot of oil in the last few months, so there's no need to purchase now,'' he said. China has also been buying stakes in large oil fields outside the Middle East, most recently in a huge project in Kazakhstan, in the hope of diversifying its sources of supply, but it will be years before many of those investments bear fruit. Two Chinese state-owned companies, CNOOC and Sinopec, each agreed earlier this month to buy one-twelfth stakes in the North Caspian Sea project being developed in eastern Kazakhstan, which includes one of the world's largest oil deposits outside the Middle East. Earlier, CNOOC invested in fields in Indonesia. China opposed the use of military force against Iraq, but not very vocally. According to the New China News Agency, Tang Jiaxuan, China's state councilor, told Secretary of State Colin L. Powell by telephone this evening that China ''strongly urged an end to military actions against Iraq, so as to avoid hurting innocent people.'' Chinese leaders have been debating for years whether to set up a strategic petroleum reserve. China has been something of a free rider until now, letting other countries bear the considerable expense and assuming that their reserves would be released to hold world prices down in a crisis. But China has gone from being a net oil exporter in 1993 to being the world's fastest-growing importer of oil, mainly because demand for fuel for transportation, especially private cars, has soared while production has barely increased. The retirement this week of Zhu Rongji as China's prime minister appeared to remove from the scene the main opponent of creating a reserve, according to David Pietz, a China specialist at Washington State University who just finished a study of China's thinking on the issue. China produces most of its oil in the northeast, while its biggest centers of industry are around Shanghai in central China and the Pearl River delta in the south. Since the delta relies heavily on imports, the government will probably build a large reserve nearby at Daya Bay, where there are salt caverns like the ones in Louisiana |
1475923_3 | France Holds Out a Tentative Olive Branch, With Thorns, to the U.S. | Blair and Foreign Minister Jack Straw were both in the United States for meetings with the Bush administration and at the United Nations. Mr. de Villepin returned time and again in his speech to what he termed a need for collective decision-making at the United Nations. And despite the presence of thousands of American and British troops in Iraq, he seemed to suggest that the path to Iraq's disarmament continued to lie in United Nations weapons inspections. ''We must fully disarm Iraq,'' he said. ''A unanimous international community rallied around this goal. It must now be carried through by the inspectors. The U.N. must steer that process.'' ''More importantly, the U.N. must be at the heart of the reconstruction and administration of Iraq,'' he continued, challenging Washington's efforts to curb the role of the United Nations in administering and rebuilding Iraq after the war. ''The legitimacy of our action depends on it.'' By dwelling on arrangements for Iraq after the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime, however, Mr. de Villepin seemed to be sending a diplomatic signal that his calculations were based on an American victory. That signal reflected an ambiguity in both France and Germany -- another leading opponent of the war. Both nations have maintained overflight rights for allied warplanes heading for Iraq even as they have assailed the war itself. Mr. de Villepin maintained that the White House had decided on war as long ago as January. ''The military agenda seemed to overtake the diplomatic agenda,'' he said. In what seemed a further conciliatory gesture, however, Germany and France backed the United States in opposing moves by the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva to call a special session to ''consider the effects of the war on the Iraqi people and their humanitarian situation.'' Opponents of the debate said they believed it would have become a forum for anti-American politics. French and German officials said they did not believe the commission was the appropriate venue for the debate. In London, Mr. de Villepin repeatedly assailed what he cast as the perils of American unilateralism, pleading for a return to the collective processes of the United Nations, particularly in Iraq's postwar reconstruction. ''Is it possible to have one country alone taking responsibility in a country like Iraq?'' he asked in response to questioning. ''It's very difficult to imagine such a possibility.'' A NATION AT WAR: OVERTURE FROM PARIS |
1476039_1 | Fears of War and Illness Hurt Tourism in Asia | entertainment, sapping economic growth in the world's most populous region. ''This is a double whammy for Asia,'' said Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley. ''China -- no matter what people tell you -- doesn't have domestic demand growth. They are dependent on the U.S. market, and the U.S. is facing a slowdown and a possible recession. If you combine that with a loss of tourist income in Asia, you've got a rough situation.'' Financial markets appear to be expecting losses to pile up. Shares of travel and leisure companies that do significant business in Asia tumbled yesterday on the Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore and Shanghai stock exchanges. Shares of airlines like Cathay Pacific Airways, Qantas, Japan Airlines and Singapore Airlines were hit hard this week after several of them said they were experiencing a high level of cancellations and announced plans to cut flights. Shares of Star Cruises, the world's fourth-biggest cruise ship operator, and Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, the world's biggest hotelier, have also been depressed. The causes of these effects are simple: Tourists and business travelers are worried that terrorists may retaliate for the fighting in Iraq, and they are worried about exposing themselves to the mysterious and deadly disease that has already killed 50 people and infected more than 1,000 in 14 countries around the world, mostly in Asia. The fears are easy to understand, travel experts say, given the images blanketing television sets around the world: American and British soldiers wearing gas masks in Iraq and ordinary people in Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam wearing surgical masks in airports and shopping districts. Tourism officials say most of the drop-off in bookings is in long-haul travel -- visitors who planned to come to Asia from the United States and Europe, for example. ''About 10 days ago, we started seeing sensitivity to the virus,'' said Mark Lettenbichler, chairman of the Hong Kong Hotels Association. ''Then four days later, when the war started, we saw even more cancellations.'' There had been some preparation. A few weeks ago, during the buildup to the war in Iraq, some tourist officials in Asia began planning for what might happen to the industry. The conventional wisdom was that many Westerners would postpone trips to Asia because the prospect of war often tightens pocketbooks. Tourism officials here hoped intra-regional travel would make up for the drop. But now Asians, too, fear |
1471263_0 | After Weeks of Avoiding a Stand, Japan Says It Will Back the U.S. Resolution on Iraq | Japan's statement on Saturday that it would support a new United Nations resolution on Iraq sought by the United States came after weeks of fence-sitting, marked by almost no public debate on the issue. ''Japan supports the proposed resolution as something that will mark the final step of the global community's effort to pressure Iraq to disarm on its own,'' Yoriko Kawaguchi, Japan's foreign minister, said in the statement. Ms. Kawaguchi's announcement came two days after a strongly worded criticism of the government's failure to discuss publicly its position on the Iraq crisis issued by her predecessor, Makiko Tanaka, who said that Japan should do more to avoid war. The decision also coincided with the first large antiwar protests, involving an officially estimated 14,000 demonstrators, who marched through the central city. ''Japan should not hesitate to deliver a clear message to the United States: exercise patience to avoid war,'' Ms. Tanaka, wrote in an op-ed column in The Japan Times. ''But Japan's government also must stop prevaricating with the Japanese people. It should welcome and encourage debate about Japan's defense posture without fearing that the United States-Japan friendship is so fragile that it will be destroyed.'' For all their bluntness, however, Ms. Tanaka's comments produced hardly a public echo here. The column appeared only in The Times, a small English-language newspaper, which took the unusual step of omitting it from its Web site and database. Although Ms. Tanaka is one of Japan's best-known politicians, her criticisms of the government she once served -- and, implicitly, of the United States -- received no news coverage. Most recent public opinion surveys here indicate that over 80 percent of the population is opposed to war with Iraq. But before Ms. Tanaka's editorial and Saturday's march, Japan had been virtually alone among major American allies in avoiding heated public debate over the threatened American action against Iraq. The government has bent over backward to accommodate the United States during the war in Afghanistan, by reinterpreting constitutional law to allow the dispatch of warships to the Indian Ocean, where they helped refuel American vessels and patrol sea lanes. Until Saturday, however, senior officials had carefully dodged questions about Japan's support of the United States in the event of an attack on Iraq, and neither the mainstream press nor the Parliament has been persistent in asking. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose normal speaking style is so |
1471232_0 | As Cellphones Become Cuter, Clarity Suffers | The mobile telephone has evolved into a sleek multifunctional marvel. It can store e-mail addresses and hundreds of phone numbers. It can emit any of dozens of ring tones or vibrate silently. It can be used to play games and double as a digital camera -- even as it is small enough to fit in cigarette case. But for all these wireless wonders, industry analysts, researchers and consumers say that many of the sleek, versatile new models are simply not as good as the old ones at being telephones. ''Not only is reception a lot poorer, but the phones eat up battery life, so there's less talk time,'' said Michael King, a mobile data analyst with Gartner, a market research group. Games are nice, but ''the majority of the time, we're talking on these things,'' Mr. King said. ''If they can't do that well, what's the point really?'' While the battery-life problem is one that manufacturers say users must accept as a trade-off for smaller size and more features, the reception issue arises from the trend of making phones sleeker by putting their antennas inside, instead of using the external, stubby pinky-size antenna fixtures found on other cellphones, old and new. Research from Ethertronics, a San Diego company that researches antenna capacity and manufacturers mobile-phone antennas, indicates that, all other things being equal, the radio strength of today's phones with internal antennas is 15 percent to 20 percent less powerful than that of phones with external antennas. The contention that new phones have sub-par reception is one that phone makers dispute -- to a point. Several major makers, including Nokia and Sony Ericsson, a joint venture of the two companies, said that, generally speaking, their new phones were as good as the old ones, and met the needs of consumers and network carriers. And they noted that external antennas frequently break. But the companies stopped short of directly addressing the relative strengths of internal and external antennas. When asked about the issue, Sony Ericcson issued a statement discussing the complexity of reception issues, including radio frequency, or R.F., technology. ''Generalizations regarding R.F. performance should be avoided, as many factors come into play that determine its quality.'' The company cited a few such factors, including the design of the radio frequency circuits. At Nokia, a company spokesman, Charles Chopp, said that one reason the company had moved to internal antennas was |
1471284_0 | The Asian Front | France has promised to veto the U.S.-British-Spanish resolution to end Saddam Hussein's manipulation of the U.N. Two other veto-bearing members of the Security Council, Russia and China, are expected to join in protecting Iraq from being forced to disarm. President Bush has made it clear he will call for the vote that will expose the council as unwilling to protect the world from blackmail by terrorist states with ultimate weapons. This means that the U.N., as now constituted, may continue humanitarian activity but need no longer function as the umbrella under which strong nations restrain aggression. It has failed dismally before. Because Russia had the veto to protect Serbia's dictator, the U.S. had to turn to NATO to act in the U.N.'s stead against aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo, interceding after tens of thousands of lives had been lost. A half-century before, only the temporary absence of the Soviet delegate enabled the U.S. to fly the U.N. flag in stopping North Korea's invasion of the South. As the Security Council exhibits its irrelevance again, the U.S. and its many allies will step in to fill the void. These Allied Nations will assume the burden of replacing Saddam and removing his arsenal of terror. But what of the threat of terror opening a second front in Asia? True to form, the U.N is frozen. Russia and China will do nothing to contain the nuclear threat from their neighbor, North Korea. France and Germany look away, urging the U.S. to buy off the extortionists unilaterally. This is a further abdication of collective security. It may be that the U.S., even during the attention-consuming eviction of Saddam, will have to create another regional coalition of free nations to deal with the nuclear danger posed by North Korea. The Communist regime in Pyongyang is revving up its reactors to produce plutonium and is ominously testing its medium-range missiles. With malice aforethought, it tried to force down our unarmed reconnaissance aircraft so as to take its crew hostage. How to respond? With the U.N. paralyzed as usual, we see a complacent China, a mischievous Russia, an appeasing South Korea -- as well as accommodationists in the U.S. -- demanding that the U.S. submit to another round of blackmail. A month ago, I characterized our 37,000 troops stationed near the border of North Korea as a ''reverse deterrent.'' If we were forced to bomb the facilities |
1476900_0 | Michelin Man Enlists Palm To Move Tires | Maybe the cross-promotional deal to be announced today between the tire maker Michelin and the hand-held computer maker Palm deserves a product safety advisory: Products Meant to Be Used Separately. Under the deal, Michelin is offering a free Palm Zire, Palm's entry-level digital organizer, to customers who buy four new tires. Questions naturally arise. Is there any logical link between the companies' products, besides the fact that both have something to do with mobility? More urgently, are the companies implicitly encouraging people to multitask -- say, by entering addresses into their computers while driving on the freeway? ''No,'' said Ken Wirt, senior vice president for sales and marketing for Palm. ''We wouldn't suggest that they use it while changing a tire, either.'' The main reason for the cross-promotion, Mr. Wirt said, is that Michelin found in consumer surveys that a hand-held computer might be a way to lure new tire buyers to its 15,000 retail outlets in this country. Mr. Wirt said the cross-promotion might not be as random a match as it might appear. He said, for example, that the Palm Zire's calendar software could be used to set reminders of when to check tire pressure or to rotate the Michelins. ''You'll have a safer car,'' he said. Maybe wheel rotation and P.R. spin also have an implicit relationship. |
1470361_0 | Panel Finds No Connection Between Cancer and Abortion | A scientific panel appointed by the director of the National Cancer Institute has concluded that there is no evidence that having an abortion increases the risk of breast cancer later in life, a suggestion raised earlier on the agency's Web site. Critics have contended that the Bush administration revised its fact sheets on the connection between induced abortions and breast cancer to satisfy conservative constituents, a charge that administration officials have rejected. The panel's conclusion was based on four new studies and a review of earlier ones that were all reported at a cancer institute workshop in late February. The panel, which was composed of the institute's Board of Scientific Advisors and Board of Scientific Counselors, unanimously accepted the findings from the workshop on Monday. The cancer institute posted the board's decision on its Web site on Wednesday but did not call attention to it. The panel's report has been sent to Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, the institute's director. Dr. Eschenbach will review the findings with senior experts and look at public comments before a final report is issued, a spokeswoman for the institute said. The cancer institute said it planned to post a new fact sheet soon on its Web site, www.cancer.gov, about breast cancer and events that occur early in a woman's reproductive years. It will be the seventh revision of fact sheets that the institute has issued since October 1994. Until a revision on Nov. 25, the cancer institute's fact sheet said studies showed ''no association between abortion and breast cancer.'' At that point, the sixth and current fact sheet appeared on the agency's Web site and said the evidence for a link between induced abortions and breast cancer was inconclusive. The new report on the Web site says neither induced abortion or spontaneous abortion are ''associated with an increase in breast cancer risk.'' But the official fact sheet has not been changed. At the workshop the institute held last month, Dr. Leslie Bernstein, a leading cancer epidemiologist at the University of Southern California, reported findings from the four studies showing no link between induced abortions and breast cancer. Dr. Bernstein led the research team in one study that found ''absolutely no evidence of increased risk of breast cancer'' and is being published this month in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention. Dr. Bernstein said she reported findings from a study of teachers in California and |
1470340_3 | Many Women Gleeful at Old Friend's Encore | and Health. ''The thing about contraception is, there is no ideal method for everyone, and when someone finds something that works, and then it disappears, it's like having your insurance change and having to find a new doctor.'' If women like a method, they are more likely to use it properly, making it more effective, said Paul Blumenthal, a gynecologist in Baltimore and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins. ''Women want something they can control, and this is one of those things,'' he said. Whitehall-Robins Healthcare, a unit of Wyeth, stopped making Today Sponges in 1994 after an F.D.A inspection of its plant found bacteria contaminating the water used to make the devices. The company decided it would be too expensive to upgrade the plant, but the sponge retained its F.D.A. drug approval. In 1998, Gene Detroyer, a businessman who had started out developing disposable plates and cups for the maker of Hefty bags, heard that the rights to the sponge were for sale. He said he told his partner at Allendale, a scientist who exclaimed, ''That's a great product!'' Mr. Detroyer said he had since read enough letters from women echoing that same thought to believe that the new incarnation of Today would be a big seller. He sees a whole new generation of users among women in their 20's who were not sexually active when the sponge was available. ''This is going to make millions of women very happy,'' Mr. Detroyer said. ''As happy as paper plates may make them, this is going to make them happier.'' Allendale initially said it would have the sponges back in stores in fall 1999, but the drug agency said the company's plant did not meet manufacturing standards. The company is now conducting chemical studies at another plant in order to show the agency that the drug it is making is the same one approved back in 1983. It now says it expects Today Sponges back on shelves in this country within the year. In the meantime, Mr. Detroyer arranged with two Canadian Web sites to sell the product by mail, and Today Sponges will appear on Canadian pharmacy shelves next month. He found a sympathetic voice in Barbara Bell, 62, who created the Web site birthcontrol.com to sell sponges out of her one-bedroom condominium outside Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1999. ''You can get affordable, safe contraceptives better in Bangladesh than you |
1472202_0 | A $70 Million Plan to Ease the Path to College | Trying to replicate what it calls the advantages of middle-class life, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation said yesterday that it would spend $70 million over the next two decades to help put more than 3,000 of the Kansas City area's poorest students through college. Working on the premise that a distant promise of scholarships is not enough to ensure that disadvantaged students graduate from high school, much less go to college, the foundation is asking teachers, principals and community leaders to choose for the program at least 165 middle-school children each year from the poorest schools in Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo. The foundation, based in Kansas City, Mo., will provide those students with an array of social and educational services, in essence taking responsibility for all but their classroom instruction. Whatever the students need for educational growth through secondary school, including tutoring, summer internships, test-taking courses or scholarships, the foundation pledges to supply. ''When Mom or Dad calls and gets you a summer internship, well, that's what we're trying to provide here,'' said Sharon Cohen, a foundation spokeswoman. As for the foundation's pledge to help pay for college once students get that far, Ms. Cohen said, ''When a young person gets into Stanford, we're going to find a way.'' Nationally, just a small percentage of low-income students graduate from college. The most recent government statistics, covering 1980 through 1992, found that slightly more than 6 percent of high school sophomores in the lowest quarter based on income earn a bachelor's degree within 12 years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, even though 65 percent of them get a high school diploma. For all Americans age 25 or older, completing four or more years of college is considerably more common, with about 26 percent having done so in 2000. But the foundation says its approach can do just as well if not better, even with the poorest of students. The foundation has run a similar program in the area for more than a decade, serving about half as many students in schools where virtually everyone qualifies for free or reduced-priced lunches. Nearly a third of those in that program who complete high school and start college get a degree. This time, the foundation hopes for a higher success rate, but it will not choose only the most gifted students to ensure better results, foundation officials said. |
1472190_0 | Brazilian Leader Introduces Program to End Slave Labor | Attacking one of Brazil's most shameful but deeply rooted social problems, the country's new left-wing government has announced a sweeping initiative intended to eliminate slave labor. The plan calls for stepping up police raids on ranches, logging operations and mines that lure poor and often illiterate peasants into servitude, as well as heavier fines and criminal penalties for offenders. But the government said it would also seek passage of a constitutional amendment that would allow the seizure of businesses and properties found to employ slave labor and to turn those assets over to the former slaves to run. ''Much more than a law, we need determination and the political will of the state to eradicate slave labor in our country,'' President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former labor leader, said in announcing the project on Tuesday. ''Only in this way can we earn the right to walk in the world with head held high.'' The Roman Catholic Church estimates that at any given moment at least 25,000 Brazilian workers are held in debt slavery, most of them in remote areas of the Amazon jungle. Typically, recruiters go to poor rural areas and guarantee peasants good wages and benefits, but renege on those pledges once the laborer has arrived at the jungle workplace and is guarded by gunmen. ''Slavery remains a severe social and economic problem in this country, the result of pitiful people without food or land being duped by false promises and of government policies that have not made the eradication of servitude a priority,'' said Eduardo Varandas, a federal prosecutor who has brought slavery charges against several ranchers. ''The worker ends up stuck with financial obligations he can't ever repay and becomes a slave of his own debt.'' Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish chattel slavery, in 1888, and forced labor continued to be common in rural areas in modern times. But government authorities, labor unions and antislavery groups agree that the problem has intensified in recent years as a result of growing economic pressure to develop the Amazon's vast agricultural frontier. In 1995, at the beginning of his first term of office, Mr. da Silva's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, announced ''a national effort to truly comply with the law'' that had abolished slavery here. His government created an enforcement squad that was empowered to punish those who recruit Brazilians into slavery, |
1474115_0 | Wave of Protests, From Europe to New York | Leaders and protesters around the world today condemned the start of war in Iraq, with President Jacques Chirac of France warning that it ''will be fraught with consequences for the future.'' In Russia, President Vladimir V. Putin called for an immediate halt to the American-led assault, saying, ''This military action cannot be justified in any way.'' Regardless of whether their governments supported or opposed the war, hundreds of thousands massed at protests across Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Britain. In Berlin, an estimated 40,000 demonstrators streamed past the United States Embassy and through the Brandenburg Gate, waving banners that read, ''Stop the Bush Fire'' and ''George W. Hitler.'' In the United States, the antiwar demonstrations were generally smaller, but thousands descended on military bases or blocked roads and bridges to voice their opposition. Chanting ''Peace Now,'' some 5,000 people demonstrated in Times Square in New York. The wave of global protest began even as the first missiles were hitting Baghdad, with tens of thousands in Melbourne, Australia's second city, bringing traffic to a standstill. In the Middle East, demonstrations were scattered -- a crowd of only 1,000 in Cairo, for instance -- but more vociferous protests were expected on Friday, the day of Muslim worship. In France, the American Embassy and consulate buildings, just off the Place de la Concorde in Paris, were heavily guarded as tens of thousands of demonstrators assembled, chanting antiwar slogans. The National Assembly briefly suspended its session in symbolic protest. In Madrid, about 40,000 people packed the Puerta del Sol tonight in protest at the Spanish government's support for President Bush. Fliers that called for a boycott of American consumer goods passed through the crowd. ''At least we can show the world that our government does not represent us,'' said Javier Velazquez, an economics professor. ''It is important to have a European response to a country that just does anything it wants, which is the United States.'' American flags were burned outside the embassy in Athens, where an estimated 80,000 demonstrators, mainly students and labor activists, marched peacefully, chanting anti-American slogans. Sentiment ran generally high against the United States. Fans in Montreal booed loudly tonight when ''The Star-Spangled Banner'' was sung before the Canadiens' game against the New York Islanders. Appearing on national television this morning, Mr. Chirac reiterated France's opposition to the war and said he regretted it was ''initiated without United Nations backing.'' |
1474108_0 | An Inexhaustible Energy to Protect the Environment | THE danger is growing, and if it is left unchecked, say those who demand the use of force, it will be only a matter of time before someone is attacked. This is New Jersey, and the danger is from black bears that are increasingly intruding into urban areas. The State Fish and Game Council, if it has its way, will hand out 10,000 licenses so hunters can tromp through the cold in December to shoot the 2,000 to 3,000 animals that have grown from a population of about 100 over the last 30 years. At the center of this tussle and every other contentious issue that involves the environment and wildlife in New Jersey is the state's combative commissioner of environmental protection, Bradley M. Campbell. The commissioner, however, has not yet said whether he will accept the Game Council's recommendation and allow the bear shoot to go forward. ''The bears,'' he said one recent morning in his Lambertville row house, ''are a small part of a much larger problem I face.'' It was 7 o'clock when the commissionerwalked out of the house and climbed into the front seat of his official car. He propped a black shoe up against the glove compartment, and his driver moved swiftly down Route 29 toward Trenton. A rotating red light fixed on the dashboard gave the car an air of officialdom. Mr. Campbell, a balding man of 41 with the energy of a coiled spring, seems not to enjoy sleep. Members of his staff, still bleary-eyed from having to be at work before 8, clutched cups of coffee when he arrived. They fired questions at him as he read e-mail messages and fielded phone calls in his offices on 401 East State Street. His office has the feel of a war room. It should. New Jersey leads the nation in Superfund sites. It struggles to curb the toxins, pollutants and stench pumped out of its industrial smoke stacks. It is downwind from antiquated Ohio Valley power plants and it is, with homeowners gobbling up land an alarming rate, the most densely populated state in the union. The state loses nearly 50 acres a day to development. The swelling of population has driven deer onto highways where they are often struck by drivers. Watersheds are in danger. And now bears are being pushed out of the dwindling woods and meadows. There were 55 reported incidents |
1474096_0 | Resisting Birth Control, the Philippines Grows Crowded | The more the merrier,'' said the cardinal, Jaime Sin, when asked a few years back about the country's population explosion, and his wish was granted. The population in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country has doubled in the last half-century, to 80 million, and could double again in less time than that. Under the influence of the powerful church, the Philippine government has done little to curb population growth and has taken a stand against modern methods of birth control. ''I never used that, my friend,'' said Manuel Musingi, 57, a schoolteacher in this tiny village where contraceptives are not available and are widely mistrusted. ''I don't like them,'' he said. ''They are not comfortable. You are not feeling comfortable when you use a condom. Likewise these pills, my wife doesn't want to take them. There are side effects.'' Mr. Musingi is one of many people on the front edge of his country's population avalanche. He has 9 children. One of his neighbors has 12. Another has 13. In their poverty, their large families are their greatest source of pride. ''If you have many children you are a man,'' said Mr. Musingi as the voices of schoolchildren rang out in the courtyard. ''You can reproduce yourself. Those that don't have any children, they cannot make their own child. You can't be called a man.'' The Philippines is often compared with Thailand, which has a particularly active family planning program. In the 1970's, both countries had populations of about 50 million and economies of similar sizes. Three decades later there are about 10 million more people in Thailand and about 30 million more in the Philippines. Experts say the main cause of runaway population growth is the failure of the Philippine government to educate the public, to promote family planning and to make low-cost contraceptives widely available. It is these policies that have made the difference in countries like Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and Taiwan that have brought their population growth under control, according to a study by the East-West Center, a Pacific Basin research organizion based in Honolulu. In the Philippines birth-control programs have been vigorously opposed by the church, which said recently that it would campaign in the next election against any politicians who support family planning, calling them ''adulterers, fornicators and terrorists.'' Retailers have been intimidated as well. Following public protests, the 7-11 grocery chain has stopped offering condoms |
1473596_0 | Chirac's View: 'A Heavy Responsibility' | Following is the text of a statement made today by President Jacques Chirac of France as translated and issued by Élysée Palace: Ever since the beginning of the Iraq crisis, France has endeavored to make possible the necessary disarmament of Iraq under United Nations authority. This disarmament is under way, as the inspectors have been demonstrating. France has acted in the name of the primacy of the law and in accordance with her conception of relations between peoples and between nations. True to the spirit of the United Nations Charter, which is our common law, France considers that recourse to force is the last resort, when all other options have been exhausted. France's position is shared by the great majority of the international community. The most recent debates have clearly shown that the Security Council was not prepared, under present circumstances, to approve a precipitate march to war. The United States has just issued an ultimatum to Iraq. Whether, I repeat, it's a matter of the necessary disarmament of Iraq or of the desirable change of regime in that country, there is no justification for a unilateral decision to resort to war. Regardless of the forthcoming developments, this ultimatum is calling into question our idea of international relations. It affects the future of a people, the future of a region, world stability. It is a grave decision, at a time when Iraq's disarmament is under way and the inspections have proved to be a credible alternative method of disarming that country. It is also a decision that jeopardizes future use of methods to resolve peacefully crises linked to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Iraq does not today present an immediate threat warranting an immediate war. France appeals to everyone to act responsibly to ensure the respect of international legality. It appeals to them to maintain the Security Council's unity by staying within the framework set by UNSCR 1441. To act outside the authority of the United Nations, to prefer the use of force to compliance with the law, would incur a heavy responsibility. THREATS AND RESPONSES |
1473543_0 | Delusions of Feeling Better | Bit by bit the evidence is accumulating that most women are foolish if they keep taking hormone pills for years at a time. Last year federal health officials halted a large study of hormone replacement therapy because the pills used, a combination of estrogen and progestin, were causing more harm than good. Women taking the pills had a greater risk of breast cancer, heart attacks, strokes and blood clots than other women, and the damage was not offset by a small beneficial effect in reducing the risk of colon cancer and hip fractures. Even so, many women have been reluctant to abandon the hormone therapy because it makes them feel better, more energetic, mentally sharper and more sexually responsive. Or so they have thought. Now comes the bad news that they have most likely been mistaken. New study results just released by The New England Journal of Medicine show that the pills had no significant effect on the quality of life of a large group of postmenopausal women. Women who took the pills did not feel any healthier or more vital than comparable women who took placebos, nor did they have more sexual pleasure. Compared with those in the placebo group, their minds were no clearer, their memories no better, and their mental health no different. The pills did have marginal effects on sleep disturbances, physical functioning and pain, but these were not clinically significant and disappeared after a year or so of use. This is a stunning reversal of fortune for drugs that have been widely used by many women not just to treat the hot flashes and night sweats of menopause, a well-established use, but also as a long-term elixir to ward off aging. So engrained is the belief in hormone therapy that many women and many doctors refuse to believe the mounting evidence against it. But the findings were generated by the respected Women's Health Initiative, which randomly assigned more than 16,000 women to take either the hormones or a placebo. The results ought to embarrass Wyeth, the manufacturer of the pills tested, which has long implied that hormone therapy is a virtual fountain of youth. They should also shake the confidence of everyone who has believed, on the basis of anecdotal reports and less rigorous scientific studies, that hormone treatments made women feel better. A lot of the presumed benefit may have been a placebo effect. |
1471928_0 | The Potatoes Were Smiling; the Fries Were Blue | Kathy Kirkpatrick will do almost anything to make her 7-year-old daughter, Tammy, eat a healthy dinner. When Tammy was an infant, Ms. Kirkpatrick would put green food dye in her eggs because Tammy liked the color. More recently, she bought green ketchup so Tammy could slather it on her vegetables. This week, she tried cinnamon-flavored fries. ''It's driving me nuts, because I know I need to get some vegetables into her, and I'm looking for ways to sneak,'' said Ms. Kirkpatrick, an accountant who lives in Boston. ''But finicky kids, what are you going to do?'' Food manufacturers have long flooded supermarkets with sugary, salty or unusually shaped products intended to appeal to children. Until recently, those foods have largely been relegated to breakfast, lunch and snack times. Now, food makers are aiming squarely at the evening meal, and Heinz's green ketchup, introduced two and a half years ago, was only the start. Entrees, side dishes and condiments are being rushed to market in an effort to accommodate children accustomed to foraging at the food court of the local mall and parents who simply want some peace at the dinner table. The new products are a mix of adult-pleasing convenience and child-pleasing shock value. Ragu, a division of Unilever's Best Foods, recently released Ragu Express, a line of pasta dishes in single-serve, containers that children can prepare in a microwave. ConAgra has updated Kid Cuisine, its line of TV dinners for children, so that each item in the meal fits a theme. The Sandwich Builder, for example, is a hamburger meal with a patty shaped like a house and cookies that look like bricks. On the shock-inducing front, there is Jelly Bean Jelly from Robert Rothschild Farm, a line of jellies for dinner rolls in flavors like watermelon, sour apple and banana. ConAgra has livened up its offerings with Parkay Fun Squeeze, hot pink and electric blue margarine. Eastern Foods has a line of neon-colored salad dressings with names like Purple Pizzazzz and Outrageous Orange. Ore-Ida, a unit of Heinz, is trying to appeal to children with blue fries, which can be dipped in the purple, orange, pink and teal ketchups that Heinz has added. Heinz plans to introduce another color in the spring, though the specifics remain hush-hush. ''There's still a few left in the rainbow for us to go after,'' a company spokesman, Robin W. Teets, said. ''It's |
1471978_3 | Ease of Paperless E-Mail Sidelines the Forlorn Fax | a confirmation. Although the time and date could be altered on the fax machine, the phone company's records will not lie when establishing when a fax was sent. Both e-mail transmission dates and text can be easily altered, and because of the vagaries of computer servers, e-mail may arrive hours or days after it was sent, or sometimes not at all, making it difficult to construct a timed paper trail. The weaknesses of e-mail technology have created opportunities for computer forensics companies, which have made a business of deconstructing e-mail to determine the genuine who, what and when of an electronic transmission. ''People use e-mail because they're happy not knowing the possible ramifications of doing so,'' said Scott Cooper, managing director of the Insync Consulting Group, a Los Angeles company specializing in computer forensics. Yet even knowing the dangers, Mr. Cooper still embraces e-mail. ''In our company, we're down to about one fax per employee per week,'' he said. ''E-mail is much more convenient.'' Richard Rubinstein, a television producer based in New York, is one of many people for whom faxes had been a way of life. On a typical production, he sent and received hundreds of them. But when Mr. Rubinstein started planning for the filming in Prague last year of a miniseries sequel for the Sci-Fi Channel based on Frank Herbert's ''Children of Dune,'' he vowed to avoid that torrent of paper by switching to electronic communications. ''I used to get every document sent to me, but now I get e-mails, some of which direct me to notes on the production Web site,'' he said. ''I see only what I need. When I do get a fax, I ask the person to e-mail me in the future.'' As a result, the fax machine has stopped ringing, saving Mr. Rubinstein at least $250,000 in paper, photocopying, labor and overseas long-distance phone costs. Rick Citron, a Los Angeles lawyer and businessman, had been using up to three fax machines in his law offices as well as a courier service for documents for more than a decade. ''Thanks to e-mail, we've gone from six faxes per hour to three per day, and our messenger bills have dropped from $800 per month to $100,'' he said. ''If someone doesn't have an e-mail address, I can't communicate with him. I don't have time to spend 10 minutes on the phone with a client |
1463868_0 | U.N. Conference Backs Efforts to Curb Mercury Pollution | Delegates attending a United Nations environmental conference here last week endorsed a global crackdown on pollution caused by mercury, although the United States blocked efforts for binding restrictions on its use. Mercury, a highly toxic heavy metal, is particularly dangerous for infants and children, and it can be passed from pregnant women to their fetuses. Human exposure to mercury comes from a variety of sources -- consumption of fish, occupational and household uses, dental fillings and some vaccines. The United Nations Environment Program will begin assisting countries, particularly those in the developing world, in devising methods for cutting emissions of mercury from sources like coal-fired power stations and incinerators. Further action, possibly including a binding protocol, was put off until 2005. The decision followed the release of a report outlining a significant global threat to humans and wildlife from mercury, a naturally occurring metal. Mercury exposure can cause development problems and can affect the brain, kidneys and liver. The conference drew more than 1,000 delegates from 130 nations. The delegates agreed that ''there is sufficient evidence of significant global adverse impacts from mercury and its compounds to warrant further international action to reduce the risks to human health and the environment.'' The United Nations report found that mercury travels throughout the earth at a far greater rate than was previously known, circulating between the air, water and soil as well as in living things. Even regions without significant mercury releases of their own, such as the Arctic, were found to be adversely affected by the global spread of mercury. Mercury has many industrial applications, although safer alternatives exist. It is used in small-scale mining of gold and silver as well as in thermometers, fluorescent lamps and some paints. The substance is also contained in many skin-lightening creams as well as in some traditional medicines. Some European delegates had sought to begin laying the groundwork for a global protocol on mercury. But Bush administration officials, who have opposed such wide-reaching approaches to a range of environmental issues, had argued that it would take too long and be too costly to pursue such a global convention. Instead, the American officials pressed for public awareness programs to spread the word of the risks of mercury. Such efforts would be aimed at especially vulnerable groups, like pregnant women and people living in areas with small-scale gold and silver mining operations, where mercury is a |
1463831_2 | Even as it gazes toward the stars, the space program has broad benefits for those rooted to Earth. | pour money into NASA. But now, when space technology looks so fragile, may be the time to note some of its often overlooked legacies. ''We're benefiting now from what NASA did 20 years ago and 30 years ago,'' said Jaron Lanier, a virtual-reality pioneer who developed several technologies for NASA that migrated into commercial devices. ''If we stop funding the space program, will we still have the supply pipeline of things that are improving life, or will we be one of those places in the world that feels like the past?'' Twenty years ago, NASA gave Mr. Lanier a contract to help design the first virtual-reality glove, which is supposed to replicate the sensation of touch accurately in a computer-generated environment. Mr. Lanier is now chief scientist of the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, an effort to produce a new generation of Internet technology to provide a physically immersive experience for users. The group is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Before taking that post, Mr. Lanier parlayed his virtual-reality work into a company called VPL Research, later purchased by Sun Microsystems, which sold gloves and head-mounted displays for entertainment systems. He has also been a consultant for the development of surgical applications for the technology. Another fruit of the space program is satellite television, made possible by geostationary communications satellites that hover 22,000 miles up, some of which were hauled part of the way into space by the shuttle before using their own propulsion systems to complete the journey. Iridium, a company that eventually went bankrupt, launched orbiting satellites only 400 miles up that still enable people to use wireless phones in places like Afghanistan without needing conventional cellular towers on the ground. Various plastics, environmental technologies like solar cells, biomedical sensors used by emergency medical technicians, sound-enhancing circuit cards in PC's and the very idea of computer chips have roots in the space program. ''The government doesn't patent these things,'' noted Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian Institute's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. ''What the space program or military research programs allow you to do is nurture these technologies, and there's no question that corporate interests benefit from that. The space program itself doesn't seem to be advancing, but the technologies are taking off outside.'' The biggest technological legacy of the space program may be reliable electronics. In the early 1960's, when President John F. Kennedy |
1463883_3 | Debate Over the Shuttle Fleet's Value to Science Has Been Raging From the Beginning | large Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, forming a network of communications hubs that relay large volumes of scientific data around the world. Shuttles also orbited the giant Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite in 1991 and an inflatable antenna experiment in 1996, and successfully tested a tethered satellite that could be reeled in and out of another spacecraft, also in 1996. Shuttle orbiters also released and retrieved free-flying research spacecraft, including an ultraviolet astronomy platform called Orfeus-Spas in 1993 and 1996, and the Long Duration Exposure Facility, a large container carrying 57 experiments deployed in 1984, which spent more than a year in space. Among the shuttle's major scientific successes were two radar mapping missions that produced the most detailed topographical maps of Earth ever made. The Space Radar Laboratory, flown in 1994, and the more advanced Shuttle Radar Topography Mission of 2000 recorded three-dimensional images charting the differing elevations of much of Earth's land masses. But critics point out that most of these satellites and spacecraft could have been flown on conventional rockets, as became the practice after the Challenger accident in 1986. Post-Challenger, the use of shuttles was confined to jobs that required a human presence, ending the practice of using the orbiters to launch, and sometimes retrieve from orbit, commercial satellites and similar payloads. Shuttles also served as hosts for more than a dozen physical and biological research missions using a large pressurized laboratory, built by the European Space Agency, which filled the cargo bay. Research in the Spacelab module, where astronauts could work on multiple experiments in a shirt-sleeve atmosphere, or on a space-exposed Spacelab pallet that could also fly in the bay, covered many physical and biological sciences. Work there involved materials research, combustion studies, crystal growth, plant science and neurology, among other subjects. The Spacelab missions, as well as the Columbia's 16-day flight last month, were preludes to the type of varied research expected to be carried out on the International Space Station when it is completed. The station, which has been continuously occupied for more than two years by rotating crews of three, now has a research capacity exceeding that of Spacelab in the Destiny science module, built in the United States, and sections of the Russian part of the orbiting outpost. However, with only three astronauts, current crews are mostly occupied with maintenance and construction of the station and can devote only a small |
1468572_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Peace Effort Slogs On | Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland met with Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street in London to prepare for talks in Belfast on Monday on the stagnated Northern Ireland peace effort. The province's five-year-old home-rule government was suspended in October because of disagreement between Roman Catholic and Protestant political parties on issues like the disarmament of paramilitaries and the reform of the police force. ''We can't sit around forever,'' Mr. Ahern said, calling Monday an important day. ''I really think it is time to come to an agreement.'' He announced a $3.2 million compensation fund for people in the Irish Republic affected by violence during the 30-year conflict. Brian Lavery (NYT) |
1468489_2 | Canadian and Dutch Officials Warn of Security's Side Effects | At the meeting today he spoke more generally, saying today's terrorists sought to attack the nature of American and Western society. ''Our freedoms and values, very much including privacy, are precisely the target. Far from making us safer, every ill-conceived reduction of those freedoms -- every needless encroachment on privacy -- would be a victory for terrorism.'' He warned that antiterrorist efforts should be carefully directed and limited in scope. He said ''we must guard against the tendency of governments to create new data bases of privacy-invasive information on justified, exceptional grounds of enhancing security, and then seek to use that information for a whole range of other law enforcement or governmental purposes, simply because it's there and available.'' The United States Customs Service issued a statement today saying it uses the data ''strictly for border security purposes, including use in threat analysis to identify and interdict potential terrorists and other threats to national and public security.'' The Customs statement said the data enabled agents ''to focus their resources on the highest risk passengers, thereby facilitating and safeguarding bona fide travelers.'' The spokeswoman declined to comment specifically on the complaints by Mr. Hustinx and Mr. Radwanski about the breadth of information it sought. She would not say when it wanted data that included credit card or meal preference information. The statement said the ''requested information in the Passenger Name Record includes but is not limited to the P.N.R. locator code, reservation date, ticket information, form of payment itinerary information and P.N.R. history.'' Mr. Radwanski said there were more than 30 items in the record, including not only the items cited by Customs but also all contact phone numbers, dietary preferences, health needs such as wheelchairs, frequent-flier information and how much luggage a traveler had. Mr. Radwanski's complaint about the biometric national identity card -- which the Congress has forbidden this United States government from developing for American citizens -- was summarized in his annual report to Canada's Parliament last month. He said that ''government officials have repeatedly told me privately that pressure from the United States government is a strong motivating factor'' behind the identity card proposal. He said such a card would be ''absolutely useless as an antiterrorist measure'' and would push Canada ''toward becoming the kind of society where the police can stop anyone on the streets and demand 'Your papers, please.' '' THREATS AND RESPONSES: PRIVACY CONCERNS |
1468434_1 | Archbishop of Canterbury Enthroned | pressures drive people away from the institutionalized church. A new church-commissioned report on the past decade warned that there had been steep declines in Sunday attendance, baptisms, marriages and paid clergy. The study predicted that if trends continued, by the year 2030 Church of England attendance would be down to just 500,000, less than two-thirds of the current figure. ''The Anglicans of 2030, in a myriad of tiny congregations, could be struggling to maintain their buildings in a thinly spread church crushed by the weight of its own heritage,'' the report said. Dr. Williams, 53, a Welshman who is the first Anglican leader from outside England since the church broke away from Rome in the 16th century, comes to the task with a record of balancing theological conviction with social activism. He is a Cambridge- and Oxford- educated scholar of philosophy and divinity and an author of 14 books, including two of poetry, but he is also at home with popular culture. He once cited ''The Simpsons'' as ''one of the most subtle pieces of propaganda around in the cause of sense, humility and virtue.'' He has suggested that he would reconsider Anglican policy barring the ordaining of homosexual priests or women as bishops, and he has signaled interest in beginning the process of separating the church from the state -- so-called disestablishment -- that would scrap laws passed since Henry VIII set himself up as supreme ruler of the church almost 500 years ago. Members of the clergy must swear allegiance to the crown, and 26 seats in the House of Lords are filled by bishops of the Church of England. A self-described youthful ''hairy leftie'' and ''peacenik'' who was arrested in 1985 for reading psalms on the runway of an American air base in Britain, the full-bearded new archbishop has aggressively entered the political arena, challenging Mr. Blair's assertion of moral legitimacy for war in Iraq and castigating the United States for withdrawing from environmental treaties. He called the American-led bombing of Afghanistan ''morally tainted,'' hit out at the capitalist ''market state,'' and attacked computer games, talent shows and the Walt Disney Company for exploiting young people's obsessions. In December, he gave a televised lecture attacking the government for reacting to consumer pressure rather than ethical values, saying it had reduced politics to ''instantaneous button-pushing responses.'' The ceremony today commemorated the beginning of his public ministry, though his |
1461955_2 | Two More Are Slain in Protestant Gang Feud in Belfast | were empty, and there were no injuries. The police said today that they were questioning two people in connection with the deaths but gave no details. The killings brought to four the number of dead in the current outbreak, which began last October when the best known brigadier of the Ulster Defense Association, Johnny Adair, 39, also known as Mad Dog, was banished from the organization by Mr. Gregg and the three other brigadiers. Attacks and counterattacks followed, leading to the fatal shooting of Jonathan Stewart, 22, an opponent of Mr. Adair, on the day after Christmas, and the retaliatory murder on Jan. 2 of Roy Green, an Adair supporter. Mr. Gregg was among many who found themselves singled out for attack. In recent weeks, a bomb was defused under his car and another at his home. Last month Britain's Northern Ireland secretary, Paul Murphy, revoked Mr. Adair's parole and ordered him back to prison, citing ''a litany of terrorist crimes.'' It was the second time Mr. Adair had been returned to prison since his original early release from a 16-year sentence on terrorism charges in 1999, under the terms of the Northern Ireland peace agreement. He went back in August 2000, accused of inciting violence, and gained release in May 2002. He is now due to remain imprisoned until 2005, but the police say he has the ability to direct operations of his faction from behind bars. The police say the Ulster Defense Association's feuding has to do with who controls the drug dealing, money laundering, gun-running, extortion schemes and racketeering that the loyalist groups have turned to since the 1998 Northern Ireland peace agreement put an end to organized sectarian violence. Detective Superintendent Roy Suitters said last month, ''These are people who set themselves up to be protectors of the Protestant people, but in fact, over the last couple of years, they have murdered more Protestants than Catholics.'' The neighborhoods in the grip of the dispute are Protestant working-class housing projects where the walls are painted with the colors of the British flag, militant slogans and murals featuring gloved fists and masked men firing assault weapons. Officials fear the latest killings will not go unanswered. ''I hope wiser councils will prevail, but the risk must be that the leadership will have to assert itself now and respond,'' Sir Reg Empey, a leading Protestant politician, said on television today. |
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1463697_0 | Saving A Landmark | To the Editor: Re ''As a Business Sets Up, a Group Takes Steps to Preserve a Landmark'' (Jan. 26). This article on the development of the Pirelli building site for an Ikea store failed to acknowledge the efforts of New Haven's Alliance for Architecture. The Alliance for Architecture is a 12-year-old organization that promotes interest in architecture in the New Haven area through lectures, tours and related events. The Alliance was also responsible in having Marcel Breuer's Armstrong Rubber Company, aka the Pirelli Building, placed on the State Register of Historic Places in 1997 thereby having it recognized as a landmark. Our pursuit of this status grew out of our concerns when a regional mall was proposed for the site and we were alarmed that the building would be sacrificed. It was our only way to garner its survival. Mall plans came and went and the Pirelli building remained intact. When Ikea approached the city, it is my understanding that Mayor John DeStefano Jr., now having realized the building's status and importance, made preservation of the building part of the citys' requirements in the development of the site. When Ikea first presented their development plans to the architectural community they proposed demolishing all of the two lower stories, the tower remained precariously supported by the stair wells and support posts. I and others voiced our concerns at that time and I followed up with other conversations with Pat Smith of Ikea. Through these efforts and those of the Long Wharf Advocacy group and others, Ikea later presented plans to preserve the tower and the two stories just below it, though demolishing the remainder of the base plinth. Hopefully the dedicated efforts of all concerned will convince Ikea to preserve more of the building thus bringing their interest in providing good modern design accessible to all, full circle. Daniel J. Pardy Hamden The writer is the chairman of the Alliance for Architecture. |
1463376_3 | The Friendly Bogeyman of Los Angeles Radio | up the accent that would become El Cucuy's. He found his way back to radio at stations in places like Fresno and Santa Ana, and came to KSCA in 1997. With ''El Cucuy'' he offers what he calls ''a reality show'' -- a mix of jokes, goofy contests, double-entendre humor, calls from listeners (which can develop into real-life dramas) and mobilizations to help hurricane victims and cancer patients. In his studio, glasses perched on his forehead, Mr. Almendárez Coello can be outrageous -- he was once host to an exorcism on the air -- but is more often mischievous, or even juvenile. He slaps buttons to produce canned laughter or the sounds of a toilet flushing (though his show is much tamer than the morning fare on stations like WSKQ-FM, the leader among New York's seven Spanish-language stations). He performs with a trio of sidekicks, La Tropa Loca, or the Crazy Troop, who sit across from him screaming, panting or speaking in child-like voices. But a recent week's worth of listening also yielded an exclusive interview with Laura Bozzo, the Peruvian talk show host who is ensnared in a political scandal and under house arrest. And in a long-winded drama, he kept a man in Mexico and a woman in Los Angeles on the line for more than an hour (with commercial interruptions), trying to get them to reunite. By the end of the show they agreed to do so, after El Cucuy found a buyer for her furniture among his listeners. Mr. Almendárez Coello's popularity is certainly tied to the large Hispanic population in Los Angeles, but also reflects the way he connects with his audience. This was in evidence when his car pulled up to the Librería Martínez bookstore in Santa Ana, about 30 miles south of here, on a Saturday afternoon late last year and the waiting crowd of several hundred people erupted in screams and applause. He was promoting his book, ''El Cucuy de la Mañana: In the Pinnacle of Poverty'' (2002, Rayo), written with his manager, Fernando Schiantarelli. In it he details his rise from poverty and describes battles with alcohol, drugs and womanizing. (Mr. Almendárez Coello says he has been married four times and has 20 children, 16 born out of wedlock; he has been married for 17 years to his current wife, Virginia, with whom he has three daughters.) Inside the store, mothers |
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1463403_6 | The Sweet Essence Of Barbados | the first floor of this curiously majestic home (the upper floors are occupied by the owner) and admired the Chinese Chippendale staircase and cedar paneling. Outside, we explored around the old windmill and gardens, the latter of which had been vandalized by guinea fowl that prowled the grounds with a proprietary air. The highlight of the visit was a short film shown in an old stable. It was a 15-minute compilation from home movies taken by the estate's owner in 1927, and featured vintage footage of the sugar milling process when the windmill was operational, along with vignettes of life in Bridgetown. It was well worth the price of admission. Less worthwhile was our four-hour cruise on the Jolly Roger. Rum and pirates are inextricably mixed, and it seemed a reasonable notion to sign up for the four-hour cruise out of Bridgetown on this faux pirate ship. The ticket included unlimited rum punch, which flowed from a cask opened moments after we pulled away from the dock at 10 in the morning. The ship had a maroon sail and a skull and crossbones flying from the topmast, and with two decks it was quite sizable -- at least until the mandatory conga line formed, when I discovered in just how few places one could position oneself unobserved. What I learned about bloodthirsty pirates during the cruise included the following: They made girls in the skimpiest bathing suits walk the gangplank first. They had an outsized fondness for dancing the Macarena. And they actually made a pretty good rum punch. RIGHT around the time that real pirates were flourishing in Caribbean seas, rum shops began making an appearance on the island. The shops were first licensed in 1652, and by 1668 legislation was introduced controlling their location, noting that ''many lewd, loose and idle people do usually resort to such tippling houses.'' The laws failed to slow their proliferation. They're still everywhere today, and have historically allowed those of limited means to work their way up economically: An entrepreneur starts by selling bottles out of his or her front door, then maybe adds a table or two, then a porch. Before you know it, it's a full-blown restaurant. The welcome extended to outside visitors at rum shops varies -- at a couple of places like the L. Fergus Bar at the edge of Bridgetown, I had to pick my way through |
1463328_4 | Tangled Up in Spam | devise coping strategies of their own. Consumer advocates are working mostly in vain to persuade lawmakers to take action in what should, after all, be a popular cause. Each in its own way, for different reasons, these efforts are failing. Long, long ago, in a previous century, when the Internet was young, people discovered both the power and danger of mass e-mail. One online pioneer, Brad Templeton, says he believes he has pinpointed the first e-mail spam: in 1978, a Digital Equipment Corporation salesperson typed several hundred addresses by hand -- those of scientists and researchers on the Arpanet, the predecessor of the Internet -- and sent them an announcement of a product presentation. A small furor erupted. ''Where is the line to be drawn between this sort of thing (if it is to be allowed at all) and advertising?'' a recipient at Stanford University asked plaintively. The Net was a scientific and military enterprise -- most emphatically noncommercial. The modern epidemic began 15 years later, coinciding with the explosive popularization of e-mail in 1993 and 1994. A chain letter began to spread, titled ''MAKE MONEY FAST.'' And a pair of Arizona immigration lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, bombarded the Internet with a notorious advertisement about the ''Green Card Lottery.'' Angry recipients counterattacked, overwhelming the lawyers' service provider with complaints. But these proto-spammers were unrepentant. Eventually they tried marketing a book, ''How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway: Everyone's Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and Other On-Line Services.'' Frauds and cons from the horse-and-buggy world quickly adapted to the new technologies. One of the most shameless is the so-called Nigerian spam. The subject is ''Urgent/Confidential'' or ''Assistance Required.'' The sender confides that he is a bank manager or political exile or son of the late commander in chief of the armed forces in Lagos. He explains that he needs your help in transferring $21.5 million in cash out of the country. ''I will like you as an foreigner to stand in as the next of kin. If only you will send your bank-account information, you can have a 40 percent cut.'' It's always the same letter, more or less. ''Should you not be in a position to assist, this deal has to remain a secret till the end of time.'' Sure. Some secret. Few Internet users realize that this particular con began with handwritten letters |
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1463573_2 | Vote France Off the Island | diplomacy-lite foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, lacks seriousness. Most of France's energy is devoted to holding America back from acting alone, not holding Saddam Hussein's feet to the fire to comply with the U.N. The French position is utterly incoherent. The inspections have not worked yet, says Mr. de Villepin, because Saddam has not fully cooperated, and, therefore, we should triple the number of inspectors. But the inspections have failed not because of a shortage of inspectors. They have failed because of a shortage of compliance on Saddam's part, as the French know. The way you get that compliance out of a thug like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will be faced with a U.N.-approved war. Mr. de Villepin also suggested that Saddam's government pass ''legislation to prohibit the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.'' (I am not making this up.) That proposal alone is a reminder of why, if America didn't exist and Europe had to rely on France, most Europeans today would be speaking either German or Russian. I also want to avoid a war -- but not by letting Saddam off the hook, which would undermine the U.N., set back the winds of change in the Arab world and strengthen the World of Disorder. The only possible way to coerce Saddam into compliance -- without a war -- is for the whole world to line up shoulder-to-shoulder against his misbehavior, without any gaps. But France, as they say in kindergarten, does not play well with others. If you line up against Saddam you're just one of the gang. If you hold out against America, you're unique. ''France, it seems, would rather be more important in a world of chaos than less important in a world of order,'' says the foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, author of ''The Ideas That Conquered the World.'' If France were serious about its own position, it would join the U.S. in setting a deadline for Iraq to comply, and backing it up with a second U.N. resolution authorizing force if Iraq does not. And France would send its prime minister to Iraq to tell that directly to Saddam. Oh, France's prime minister was on the road last week. He was out drumming up business for French companies in the world's biggest emerging computer society. He was in India. |
1462073_3 | Menstrual Cups, at Age 66, Begin to Make Up for Lost Time | Web site, www.mum.org. The first cup in this country was patented in 1937 by Leona W. Chalmers, an actress, who in her promotional pamphlets referred to earlier European designs. Wartime rubber shortages put her company out of business, but she later teamed with a venture capitalist to market two successors, the Tassette and the disposable Tassaway. A quaintly discreet 1961 Times Square billboard for one displayed only a tulip and this description: ''Not a tampon, not a napkin. Now, a better way.'' The company collapsed, but 20years later, the Keeper was developed by Ms. Crawford, who had owned a Tassette. Dr. Armand P. Lione, an independent toxicologist in Washington, recently raised safety questions about menstrual cups, saying he thought they might increase the risk of toxic shock syndrome because they hold blood in the vagina. The syndrome is caused by toxins from staph or strep bacteria; an outbreak in the early 1980's that killed about 35 women was linked to superabsorbent tampons, prompting tampon makers to change the materials they used. Dr. Lione argued that cups might also raise the risk of endometriosis, a condition in which cells of the uterine lining sloughed off at menses flow backward up the fallopian tubes, escape into the abdomen and adhere there. He contacted the National Women's Health Network and the Endometriosis Association, but they declined to ask the Food and Drug Administration for safety reviews. Amy Allina, the network's policy director, said she thought Dr. Lione's concerns were ''plausible, but fairly hypothetical,'' but she said she did not find alarming patterns. The F.D.A. database of complaints contains one about the Keeper and 13 about Instead. Mary Lou Ballweg, president of the Endometriosis Association, wrote that it was normal for women to have backward flow into their abdomens, but that was not the apparent cause of endometriosis. The Keeper was never rigorously tested before the F.D.A. accepted it in 1987; rather, the agency ruled it ''substantially equivalent'' to the Tassette, which was on the market decades before the agency began to regulate medical devices. Dr. Philip M. Tierno Jr., director of clinical microbiology and immunology at New York University Medical Center, whose research led to many changes in tampons, said he gave the Keeper a simple test. He dipped it in a broth of staphylococcus bacteria, incubated it in a warm, moist atmosphere and checked its surfaces. ''Minuscule quantities'' of bacteria adhered, he |
1462113_2 | The Rules on Baggage Inspection Are Unclear When Things Go Missing | addressed adequately, he said. ''To the extent that the T.S.A. is doing bag inspections outside of the sight of passengers, there's a break in the chain of custody of the bag that can leave passengers and their luggage vulnerable,'' he said. An airline that sells a ticket and a passenger who buys one enter into a contract of carriage that assumes that the airline, including the baggage handlers who work for it, has custody of the bag once it is checked, and is responsible for it under the specified terms of its liability agreement, until the passenger reclaims it. ''The only relationship you have at that point is with the airline,'' said Mr. Stempler, whose group has joined the airline industry in asking the T.S.A. to help devise better liability measures for claims involving checked bags. ''They took the bag; you have a claim check. There is a contract in place. Furthermore, the only people that have an office in the baggage claim area is the airline. But now if my bag is damaged, or if I say I packed something when I closed it up this morning and now it's not there, the airline is able to say: 'Oh, your bag was inspected by the T.S.A. Go talk to them.' '' The agency has said it is going to install video surveillance cameras in baggage areas to try to reduce theft. Since Jan. 1, all checked bags are required by law to be inspected for possible explosives by T.S.A. employees. At many big airports, checked bags were being opened for inspection months before the deadline. I myself have heard several reports from business travelers of items missing from their checked bags. Theft is definitely occurring. In mid-December, for example, six baggage handlers at Miami International Airport were arrested on federal charges of breaking into passenger' bags and snatching jewelry, laptop computers, cameras and other valuables. On its Web site, the T.S.A. provides advice for passengers. The agency strongly suggests that passengers not lock bags, because a locked bag chosen for inspection will be forcibly broken into. The extent of the advice on what the agency refers to as ''missing contents'' is this: ''T.S.A screeners exercise great care during the screening process to ensure that your contents are returned to your bag every time a bag needs to be opened.'' The Web site gives a toll-free number for the T.S.A. |
1462155_3 | Some Breaks in the Budget For Causes Small and Large | he said, ''but it's always been sort of a subtext.'' Mr. Pataki also proposed an income tax credit of up to $50,000 for homeowners who fix up historic properties in distressed areas, after two dozen preservation groups pushed for it through an e-mail and letter-writing campaign last fall. They argued that renovations would mean money for local economies, tapping into one of the governor's favorite themes: economic development. ''This is not about giving money away to preservation, but about generating local economic recovery,'' said Daniel Mackay of the Preservation League of New York State. Similarly, the governor proposed tax incentives for small companies that provide high-tech jobs to resuscitate the upstate economy. In tough times, though, even political alliances may not offer protection. Mr. Pataki has benefited repeatedly from the support of a powerful coalition of health care workers and hospitals led by Dennis Rivera, the president of the 1199/S.E.I.U. union. In 2000 and again last year, Mr. Pataki and the Legislature adopted health care programs that included government subsidies for the health care industry and salary increases for workers. This year, Mr. Pataki's budget, while preserving the salary increases, calls for cutting Medicaid funds by more than $1 billion and reinstating an assessment on hospital revenues and home care services. A spokeswoman for Mr. Rivera said the industry would be devastated. The governor's budget decisions may also reflect more personal interests. Mr. Pataki, an avid outdoorsman, spared environmental programs from drastic cutbacks, even as he proposed a $2.25 fee on new tire purchases, which would raise about $44 million a year for cleaning tire dumps and a tire recycling program. Brian Nickerson, director of the Michaelian Institute of Public Policy at Pace University, said that new money for programs -- no matter how small -- can effectively carve out pockets of good will for Mr. Pataki in a difficult year. ''It's actually a really good public relations strategy,'' he said. ''It makes the governor look like a champion if he's able to give even small increments to special areas in times of doom and gloom.'' Others said the governor's budget created a system of winners and losers dictated by politics rather than policy. ''When you find these tiny bits of good news, it's not because anyone's made a principled decision to help the aged or infirm,'' said Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky. ''It's because somebody has a politically powerful protector.'' |
1462076_0 | Seizure Drug Cools Hot Flashes | An antiseizure drug appears to help postmenopausal women control hot flashes, but the help comes with a high rate of mild side effects, a new study has found. Researchers said the drug, gabapentin, might be an alternative for women who would rather not use hormone replacement therapy to reduce menopause symptoms. The study, which is in The Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology this month, was planned after a patient taking gabapentin for headaches told Dr. Thomas Guttuso Jr., a neurologist at the University of Rochester, that the intensity of her hot flashes had diminished. In his study, 59 postmenopausal women were given 900 milligrams a day of gabapentin or a placebo. The intensity and frequency of hot flashes fell by half in the gabapentin group and by a third in the placebo group. In a second phase, women were offered the chance to take up to 2,700 milligrams a day. Almost all of the women did, and reported that the higher doses diminished the intensity of their hot flashes by two-thirds. The medication's drawback was its high rate of side effects. Four of the 30 patients in the original gabapentin group dropped out, and half the women who remained reported symptoms like sleepiness, rashes or swelling of the hands or feet. Reports of side effects were lower, however, among the women who moved to the higher doses in the second phase. Dr. Guttuso said that gabapentin's side effects had been shown in other uses to be transitory -- usually lasting only a week or two -- and that they could be minimized by building up doses slowly and taking the drug with food. VITAL SIGNS: TREATMENT |
1467622_2 | How the Arms of the Helixes Are Poised to Serve | help clotting, leaving her at risk of hemorrhaging. But then she began taking Cerezyme, a drug made by genetic engineering that supplies the enzyme that Gaucher patients lack. The drug improved her blood cell levels, making her strong enough to undergo hip replacement surgery, which has allowed her to walk again. ''I think it pretty much allowed me to live and saved my life,'' said Ms. Nathan, 47. ''It changes the face of the disease.'' If there is a drawback, she said, it is the cost, about $200,000 a year. The number of such genetically engineered drugs is still rather small, though DNA technology plays some role in the development of virtually all modern drugs. On the other hand, the discovery of genes responsible for diseases like Huntington's, sickle cell and cystic fibrosis have not resulted in good treatments or cures. Virtually all Americans have eaten food containing soybeans or corn containing bacterial genes that make plants resistant to herbicides or insects. But while that resistance is important to farmers, it has been trivial so far for consumers. As far as scientists can tell, the foods taste the same and are neither more healthful nor more dangerous than conventional crops. DNA-based identification, first widely used in the late 1980's, has become central to the identification of bodies, including those of people killed in the World Trade Center attack, but it is also used to resolve paternity suits and solve criminal cases. Some 342,000 paternity tests were performed in the United States last year, according to Trimark Publications, a New York market research and publishing company. Identifying fathers has become a staple of daytime talk shows. The New York-based Innocence Project says that 124 people have been freed from prison after DNA testing showed they did not commit the crime. Ray Krone was convicted twice, and sentenced to death the first time, in the 1991 slaying of a waitress in a Phoenix bar. Prosecutors said his tooth impression matched that of bite marks found on the victim's nude body. But when DNA tests were done on the saliva in 2002, another man matched. Mr. Krone was released in April after serving 10 years. Many more criminals are captured using DNA evidence. In Virginia, ''cold hits'' on the state's DNA database from convicted felons have pinpointed the people who committed more than 1,000 crimes. Marilyn Bandera, a mother of three in Alexandria, |
1467755_1 | North Korea Tests a Missile as South Korea Prepares for a New President | Japan. The missile in this test, American officials said, fell harmlessly into the Sea of Japan. ''This is something that they test periodically,'' one official said, though it is not clear that North Korea has conducted such a launching for the past few years. The Japanese foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, said today that Japan was examining the reports about the missile, Agence France-Presse reported. Japanese news reports said the missile was a surface-to-vessel short-range Silkworm, which has a maximum range of 60 miles. North Korea's move came as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell arrived here on an East Asia tour dedicated in part to drum up support for Washington's call for multilateral talks with North Korea. The departing president, Kim Dae Jung, gave a farewell speech on Monday in which he issued an indirect but unmistakable rebuff to the United States. ''More than anything, dialogue between North Korea and the United States is the important key to a solution,'' he said. Mr. Kim's comments are a mere foretaste of the difficulties in store for American policy makers on the Korean Peninsula, where North Korea is proceeding to restart its nuclear energy program, in defiance of international arms control agreements, while South Korea, under its incoming leader, Roh Moo Hyun, vows to oppose either economic penalties or a military strike. Mr. Powell will take more comfort from Mr. Kim's comments about the presence of 37,000 American troops in this country, under a bilateral alliance forged in 1953 at the end of the three-year Korean War. ''Realistically, for the maintenance of peace on the Korean Peninsula, North-South reconciliation and the solid South Korea-U.S. security alliance must be continued,'' Mr. Kim said. Anti-American sentiment has grown in South Korea over the last year, including large street protests this winter against the American troop presence here. Although he has distanced himself from those demonstrations, Mr. Roh has spoken frequently and with apparent conviction about the need to ''rebalance'' the alliance with the United States, an ally that he has complained has become inattentive and overbearing. Although he has often contradicted himself on the issue, Mr. Roh has also made statements suggesting that South Korea must begin preparing to assume responsibility for its own defense. The statements come against a backdrop of policy statements about North Korea, including the formation of an economic community with North Korea, which American and Korean regional analysts say |
1465776_5 | NEWS SUMMARY | the Buick Invitational, his first PGA Tournament since he underwent knee surgery in December, by four strokes over Carl Pettersson. D1 Irratic Tyson May Forgo Fight Mike Tyson, who got a tattoo that covers most of the left side of his face last week and left his trainer waiting for him at the gym for three days, told his manager that he wasn't going to be on a flight to Memphis, an indication that his comeback fight next Saturday with Clifford Etienne may be doomed. D5 ARTS E1-14 Rapper's Strong Debut ''Get Rich or Die Trying'' by 50 Cent sold 872,000 copies in the first four days after its release, becoming the highest-selling first album on a big label since Nielsen SoundScan began tabulating record sales in 1991. C8 OBITUARIES B7 EDUCATION Private Colleges Pinched Gov. George E. Pataki's proposal to slice New York State's spending on higher education would affect programs for students at private colleges. Attention has focused on how the budget would affect the state's public universities. B1 BUSINESS DAY C1-10 Women Closing Wage Gap Women's earnings have continued to grow, closing the gap between men's and women's wages to the narrowest on record. Men's wages have failed to keep up with even the low rate of inflation. A1 Plan for Liberal Radio A group of Democratic donors is planning to start a liberal radio network to counterbalance the conservative tenor of radio programs like ''The Rush Limbaugh Show.'' The group hopes to enlist entertainers for a 14-hour daily slate of programs that would rely on heavily comedy. C1 Phone Company Trial Begins Two of the world's largest phone equipment companies, Motorola and Nokia, are trying to recover as much as possible of the $2.8 billion they lent Telsim, a Turkish cellular start-up, to buy equipment and enter the fast-growing Turkish market. The case is scheduled to go to trial in a federal court in New York. C1 Google Acquires Weblog Firm Google, the operator of the Web's leading search engine, has bought Pyra Labs, the creator of software for publishing Weblogs, a form of hyperlinked online journal that has become a popular way to distribute and collect information on the Web. C3 Pacific Rim Free Trade Pact Chile and South Korea signed a free-trade agreement that would remove tariffs on two-thirds of Korean products, notably cars, electronic items and farm products. The agreement, protested by Korean |
1465741_2 | Europe's Groundswell: Public Opinion | has been subordinated to Chirac's Gaullism, and they don't like it,'' one diplomat here said as the debate at NATO went into the night. The reference was to the chief foreign policy heritage of former President Charles de Gaulle, to steer a course independent from that of Washington. ''But,'' the diplomat continued, ''they haven't disliked it enough to ditch the French.'' One reason for that, of course, is the pacifist sentiment of many Germans, particularly the Greens, who make up a major part of Mr. Schröder's coalition. Their distaste for war makes it embarrassing and politically treacherous for Mr. Schröder to back away from his antiwar stance. Still, Germany has shown some sign of trying to wiggle out of the box. Even as German peace marchers filled the streets over the weekend, the government quietly dropped its opposition to NATO planning for Turkey's defense. France also agreed to let the matter drop, suggesting that it was sensitive to more than one kind of public opinion. In response at least in part to domestic pressures, France has staked out a position on Iraq in opposition to the American one. But it has also been nervous about the rise of strong anti-French sentiment in the United States. The French ambassador to Washington, Jean-David Levitte, has been trying to assure the American public that France is a loyal ally grateful for American help in the world wars of the last century. President Jacques Chirac has sought other ways of moderating his country's Gaullism, most conspicuously by sending an aircraft carrier on maneuvers just where it would be most useful in military action against Iraq. French officials have not explained why, on one hand, they would dispatch it and, on the other, object to NATO planning for Turkey on the ground that it would be sending the wrong signal. In the end, France does not want to be left out of the picture if there is a war with Iraq. In this sense, that Gaullism has always been simultaneously a show of independence from the United States and an effort to keep the national options open. Twelve years ago, as Mr. Levitte pointed out today on CNN, France took part with the United States in the Persian Gulf war. What he did not say is that until hours before the conflict began, France was still calling for a peaceful solution. THREATS AND RESPONSES: ALLIES |
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