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1465688_1 | Telecom gear makers look beyond a war in Iraq and see some opportunities. | at Pyramid Research, a company in Cambridge, Mass., that conducts international telecommunications research. Mr. Braude, who is also the author of ''The New Iraq,'' a coming book about rebuilding that country's infrastructure, estimated that Iraq needed to invest at least $1 billion over the next several years to improve its basic fixed-line telephone system. Additional investments will be needed to introduce wireless communications and overhaul the nation's international communications links, Mr. Braude said. Iraq, with a population of 24 million, currently has one of the least advanced telecommunications networks in the world. The number of telephone lines per 100 inhabitants has declined to 3, from 5.6 in 1990. And, because of the network's decrepit nature, people who do have a telephone are often rationed to about 14 hours of use a day, according to Pyramid and the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva, which monitors investments in Iraq's phone system. Iraq is also one of the few remaining nations lacking a commercial wireless network in its capital city. Some residents of relatively prosperous sections of the capital, Baghdad, have strengthened the radio power of their household cordless phones to allow them to use their handsets short distances from home. But otherwise the only operable mobile system in Iraq is one that has been set up in the northern Kurdish region, which functions like an enhanced walkie-talkie system. The establishment of a new wireless system in Iraq would come after several unsuccessful attempts to build one. The most recent effort was by Huawei Technologies, a Chinese equipment manufacturer, which was awarded a $28 million deal in 2001 by the Iraqi government to construct a mobile network with a capacity of 25,000 users. But Huawei pulled out of the project after complaints that the project might violate United Nations sanctions. The Iraqi government reportedly chose another Chinese company, China National Technology Import, to replace Huawei in building the wireless network, but it is not clear how far China National has proceeded with the project. Several Turkish companies are also thought to have secured small contracts to improve Iraq's telephone system, according to United Nations data. It is Alcatel, the large French communications equipment company that built much of Iraq's telephone system in the 1980's, that may have the most to lose in the event of a government change in Iraq that would favor American companies over European and Asian rivals. Alcatel recently began |
1464525_1 | Neville Colman, Pathologist and DNA Expert, Dies at 57 | A shortage can bring about a type of anemia as well as damage to the nervous system and serious birth defects, including spina bifida. He found that the traditional diet of the indigenous people, relying on maize, which has low levels of folate, and rice, which lost much of the nutrient in traditional long cooking methods, did not have the vital levels of the vitamin. His method for fortifying the folate content of bread, parboiled rice and maize before they went to the consumer met dietary needs and helped lead the way to the fortification of many cereals with folate, which is endorsed by the World Health Organization and the United States Food and Drug Administration. He also developed a technique for delivering supplementary vitamin B-12 with a self-administered nasal gel to those with Crohn's disease, a digestive system disorder. Dr. Colman furthered the acceptance of DNA as a forensic tool in the 1980's. Unlike the use of DNA in medical laboratories and hospitals, which was rigorously regulated, the use of DNA as evidence in criminal cases had little oversight and few standards. His expert testimony and writings encouraged the use of the same quality controls in criminology laboratories that were expected from laboratory medicine. He summed up his work in quality control of DNA testing in a major article in Scientific American in 1990. The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences issued its own policy on rigor and oversight in forensic science two years later. Neville Colman was an outstanding athlete in high school, a competitive swimmer, golfer and soccer player on a boys' team representing what was then Transvaal Province. Later, at the University of Johannesburg, he became active in student protests against South Africa's white apartheid regime. His first academic appointment in the United States came in 1974 as a research pathologist at Columbia, where he rose to full professor in 1994. He also held leading positions at Mount Sinai Medical Center and the blood and nutrition laboratories at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx. In the 1980's, visiting his family in Southern California, he discovered the American Youth Soccer Organization and the motto ''everyone plays.'' He sought the same goal in Manhattan in 1987 when he started the West Side Soccer League as a local A.Y.S.O. affiliate. The league began with fewer than 100 5- and 6-year-old players. He served for |
1464517_0 | Leaders Try to Mend Irish Peace Accord | Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland jointly met with the leaders of the major Northern Ireland political parties at Hillsborough Castle outside Belfast today in an effort to break a deadlock over implementing a peace accord there. The leaders met with each group separately, so predominantly Roman Catholic parties like Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic and Labor Party did not come face to face with their Protestant counterparts, the Progressive Unionists and Ulster Unionists. The talks, which are scheduled to continue with a meeting on March 3, are the first major attempt to heal a rift that forced Britain to suspend the local government and reimpose direct rule from London last October. They come amid widespread speculation by the British and Irish governments that the Irish Republican Army, which has been taking part in a cease-fire since it signed the peace agreement in 1998, will soon destroy more of its weapons dumps or possibly cease military operations altogether. Mr. Ahern seemed to confirm that idea in a news conference after the meetings today. ''We're talking about a definite end to paramilitary activities,'' he said. ''I don't think there's any ambiguity about that.'' Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.'s political wing, has responded to the rumors with demands for faster police reforms and the dismantling of British Army bases. |
1464612_2 | Web's Tin Cups Find Soft Touches Aplenty | cyber-beggars, and many compete to become beneficiaries of her fame and site traffic. The category has also grown to such proportions that it is now indexed: the CyberBeg.com directory links to more than 200 e-panhandling Web sites, and Yahoo and Google offer smaller lists. In this age of identity theft and hacking contests, of course, there is little to prevent someone from inventing a moving story and publishing it online. It is hard to know if any of the 200-plus sites listed by Cyberbeg.com are fake, but e-panhandlers are often willing to go far to prove their sincerity. Penny Hawkins, whose Internet site, www.helpmeleavemyhusband.com, has collected more than $2,000 to pay for her nursing education and divorce, published her school report card as evidence of her legitimacy. Ms. Huang provides photos of what she considers her imperfect chest. In some cases, cyber-beggars offer proof by having donors send money directly to their creditors. Ms. Mullin said she was convinced by Ms. Smith's site because Ms. Smith included unobscured photographs of herself (many cyber-panhandlers do not show their faces at their sites) and because it was easy to find Ms. Smith's address and telephone number. She also relied on her urban survival instincts: ''I think I used a cyber-version of the instant judging that New Yorkers put into play every time they see a panhandler on the subway,'' she said. E-panhandlers usually record the amount they have raised from ''nice people''; savekellie.com, run by Kellie Cudaback of Omaha, admonishes, ''Remember! Be a good deed doer!!'' What that translates to, said Douglas Thomas, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, is, ''If you want to be a nice person, you will donate.'' Mr. Thomas, who specializes in cultural studies of technology, said the trend taps into the idea of the American dream, since e-panhandlers are usually skilled enough to construct basic Web sites. ''They're sort of asking to be rewarded because either they've come up with a good idea, or clearly they are disadvantaged even though they have some kind of talent; they can write fairly well, they can tell stories that evoke a sympathetic response,'' he said. Donors say they give money because they relate to a cyber-beggar's plight, want to extend their regular charitable giving or can simply spare the cash. One of Ms. Huang's larger gifts, $1,200, came from a telephone |
1466088_0 | Tell The Truth | As I was listening to the French foreign minister make his case at the U.N. for giving Saddam Hussein more time to comply, I was struck by the number of people in the Security Council chamber who applauded. I wish there were someone I could applaud for. Sorry, I can't applaud the French foreign minister, because I don't believe that France, which sold Saddam his first nuclear reactor, the one Israel blew up, comes to this story with the lofty principles it claims. The French foreign minister, after basking in the applause at the U.N., might ask himself who was clapping for his speech back in Baghdad and who was crying. Saddam was clapping, and all his political prisoners -- i.e., most Iraqis -- were crying. But I don't have much applause in me for China, Russia -- or the Bush team either. I feel lately as if there are no adults in this room (except Tony Blair). No, this is not a plague-on-all-your-houses column. I side with those who believe we need to confront Saddam -- but we have to do it right, with allies and staying power, and the Bush team has bungled that. The Bush folks are big on attitude, weak on strategy and terrible at diplomacy. I covered the first gulf war, in 1990-91. What I remember most are the seven trips I took with Secretary of State James A. Baker III around the world to watch him build -- face-to-face -- the coalition and public support for that war, before a shot was fired. Going to someone else's country is a sign you respect his opinion. This Bush team has done no such hands-on spade work. Its members think diplomacy is a phone call. They don't like to travel. Seeing senior Bush officials abroad for any length of time has become like rare-bird sightings. It's probably because they spend so much time infighting in Washington over policy, they're each afraid that if they leave town their opponents will change the locks on their office doors. Also, you would think that if Iraq were the focus of your whole foreign policy, maybe you would have handled North Korea with a little less attitude, so as not to trigger two wars at once. Maybe you would have come up with that alternative -- which President Bush promised -- to the Kyoto treaty, a treaty he trashed to |
1466063_0 | Another March of Folly? | Twenty years ago this month, I was an aide to Vice President George Bush during another trans-Atlantic crisis. There were demonstrations in European capitals in which America was portrayed as the threat to world peace and the American president was called a warmonger, a ''cowboy'' and worse. Vice President Bush's response in February 1983 may hold some lessons for President Bush in February 2003. Two decades ago the vice president was dispatched to London to calm things down, to hold hands, to remind our European friends and allies that we were still all in this together. What made his trip necessary was the controversy over deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe; several years earlier, the Europeans had requested that the United States place Pershing 2 missiles in Europe to counter Soviet medium-range missiles that were aimed at the Continent. But when the missiles were ready to be put in place, Europe changed its mind. We don't want those missiles after all, Europe decided, under pressure from its left and the Soviet Union. You'll just use them to wage nuclear war on our soil. The United States countered that it had half a million American troops in Europe. These missiles were manifestly to protect them as well as Europe. And without them, the Soviets could destroy 100 European cities -- along with those American troops -- in 20 minutes with their SS-20's. I was in the vice president's motorcade. I remember the demonstration we had to get through in London, on our way to the speech at Guildhall. Furious crowds lined the streets with signs that, 20 years later, remain unprintable in this newspaper. This particular group of angry demonstrators had been organized by the London School of Economics, as I recall, playing hooky from Keynes. Watching them through the car windows, up close, face to face, inches away, I couldn't decide how to react. Here I was, an official member of the United States government -- the speechwriter -- driving through a capital that the United States had not considered hostile territory since 1814, and here were dozens of people calling me by quite unpleasant names. What was the protocol? Did one smile and wave back serenely, as the queen would have -- and as the vice president, a few cars ahead, surely was doing? Or did one sit sullenly and refuse even to acknowledge the young hearties of the |
1466171_1 | ANTIWAR PROTESTS FAIL TO SWAY BUSH ON PLANS FOR IRAQ | as a last resort raised British and American hopes that the Security Council could ultimately be won over. Officials said the European acceptance of the principle that force might be necessary, in combination with possible critical statements about Iraq's cooperation over the next several weeks by Hans Blix, one of the chief United Nations weapons inspectors, could ultimately provide the basis for backing of force by Security Council members, including France. The new resolution is expected to be a short, straightforward assertion that Iraq has defied calls by the United Nations to give up its weapons of mass destruction and now faces the ''serious consequences'' threatened in the previous resolution, officials said. Both Jacques Chirac, the French president, and Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, have this week criticized the idea of a second resolution. France has made it clear that it will oppose the measure. Mr. Bush has said he plans to reach a decision on the use of force against Iraq within weeks, whatever the Security Council does. But with military forces still moving into place, there were indications that the United States and Britain want to use the next several weeks to give the leaders of France and other nations that oppose an immediate war an opportunity to show their publics that inspections and diplomacy are not making headway. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said today that the large antiwar protests in his country would not affect his close alliance with the United States over Iraq. ''Of course I understand the concerns of the thousands that marched on Saturday, and of course I should and do listen to those concerns,'' Mr. Blair said at a news conference in London. But Mr. Blair said the world should also listen to the voices of Iraqi exiles, who, he said, have made a case that Saddam Hussein's government is ''one of the most barbarous and detestable regimes in modern political history.'' Mr. Bush referred scornfully today to giving Mr. Hussein ''another, 'nother, 'nother last chance'' to comply with prior United Nations resolutions demanding that Iraq disarm. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, continued intensive discussions today with the British and others on the wording of the new resolution. Administration officials said the measure might not be voted on for two more weeks, and the language might be revised in that period. By early March, |
1466558_2 | Development of Biotech Crops Is Booming in Asia | its research on genetically modified crops. Already, a majority of the cotton grown in China, the world's leading producer, is genetically engineered to resist pests. Besides rice and tomatoes, China has developed genetically modified corn, tobacco, sweet peppers, petunias and poplar trees. Other Asian countries, meanwhile, are beginning to release their first biotechnology products. India and Indonesia recently approved the planting of a variety of insect-resistant biotech cotton that drastically reduces the need for pesticides. Indeed, biotech cotton is so popular with farmers that a black market has emerged in several Asian countries that have not yet approved the products. ''There's piracy going on,'' said Clive James, head of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, an industry-sponsored organization that tracks global plantings of biotech crops. ''These farmers think so much of this technology, they will steal it.'' The enthusiasm extends beyond cotton. The Philippines has allowed the marketing of foods made with biotech corn, a first for Asia. The Philippines is also the site of the International Rice Research Institute, which is working to use biotechnology to develop ''golden rice,'' a variety fortified with vitamin A. Critics of genetically modified crops say these moves in Asia could leave consumers around the world with little choice but to accept them. ''It's troublesome, because these countries don't have the regulatory infrastructure to assess the risks,'' said Dr. Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group that has been critical of biotech crops. But in the absence of any solid evidence that genetically modified crops are harmful to humans, scientists in Asia are experimenting on everything from genetically modified corn, potatoes and papaya to biotech mustard and chili peppers. Biotechnology advocates in Asia believe that genetically modified crops will increase food production, significantly reduce the use of pesticides and insecticides and even create drought-resistant crops that can grow on land now regarded as non-arable. Farmers' incomes will rise, they claim, with the greatest benefits in the the poorest regions. China has over 20,000 people employed in government-led research at about 200 labs. Government spending on biotech research has tripled in recent years and could top $1.5 billion for the five years ending in 2005, making China second only to the United States in this area. The rest of Asia is now playing catch up. India is conducting biotech research at most of its major universities. Japan and |
1466623_1 | BUSINESS DIGEST | Pharmaceuticals, have agreed to merge, the latest consolidation in the industry. The deal would give NPS, which has no products on the market, access to Enzon's cash and sales and distribution expertise. Enzon, which already has marketed products, would get a pipeline of future drugs. [C3.] Merrill Settles Enron Investigation Merrill Lynch agreed to pay $80 million to settle a federal investigation into two transactions with Enron, the energy trader. [C12.] Nissan Settles Racial Bias Suit The Nissan Motor Acceptance Corporation has reached a settlement with black and Hispanic car buyers who claimed the company charged them higher interest rates. [C3.] Asia Moves to Accept Altered Crops Worried about falling behind, much of Asia is rushing ahead with the development and cultivation of genetically modified crops. The three most populous countries in Asia -- China, India and Indonesia -- are already planting millions of acres of genetically modified cotton. [A3.] Starbucks Adds a Credit Card Starbucks, Bank One and Visa are expected to announce today the creation of a Starbucks credit card, which will function as a traditional credit card and will double as a rechargeable Starbucks store card. [C6.] Frustrations for South American Oil With crude prices edging toward $40 a barrel, Petrobras of Brazil and Repsol YPF of Argentina might be forgiven for spotting a silver lining among the war clouds gathering over Iraq. But, analysts say, neither company can expect a windfall. [World Business, Section W.] Calpers Selects a President The California Public Employees' Retirement System, the nation's largest pension fund, has elected as its president Sean Harrigan, left, a vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Mr. Harrigan's selection is expected to continue the fund's activist investment strategy and agenda for social change. [C5.] ESPN Puts Ads Into Video Clips ESPN is defraying the cost of a video delivery system on ESPN.com by adding commercials to the clips, a strategy that promises to lure marketers just as surely as it threatens to annoy Internet users. Advertising. [C5.] Producer Prices Rise in January Prices paid to producers rose 1.6 percent in January, the fastest pace in more than a decade, raising concerns about inflation, the Labor Department said. [C6.] J.C. Penney and Target Post Results J. C. Penney reported earnings that topped forecasts, while Target hit its earnings goal, relying on its credit card business to offset a disappointing holiday shopping season. [C3.] |
1463050_0 | World Briefing | Americas: Mexico: Effort To Avert Clash With Rebels | An American couple whose guest ranch in the southern state of Chiapas has been blockaded by Zapatista rebels said the state government was weighing whether to buy them out to avert a violent confrontation. The Americans, Glen Wersch and Ellen Jones, have operated Rancho Esmeralda as an eco-tourism resort for eight years. Neighboring rebels have said the land rightfully belongs to local peasants, not foreigners, and have been trying to seize it since December. Tim Weiner (NYT) |
1463003_1 | U.N. Envoys Said to Differ Sharply in Reaction to Powell Speech | for Security Council envoys immediately after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation at the United Nations on Wednesday, recounted, for example, a sharp exchange between Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, and Ana Palacio, his counterpart from Spain. Ms. Palacio bluntly rejected a proposal Mr. de Villepin had offered the Council to strengthen weapons inspections by adding more inspectors and creating a United Nations inspections commissioner, the diplomats said. She said that if Iraq was not going to cooperate, France's proposal would only send a message of weakness from the Council. Many nations, especially in the Arab world, have said that they are ready to support the United States in a war against Iraq but would gain more domestic support if their positions could be backed up with a resolution from the Security Council. ''Getting a resolution, even without some of the permanent members, clears up any question for the allies of the legal legitimacy of the operation,'' a Council diplomat said. If American and British diplomats can build support for a resolution to use force among the 10 nonpermanent members, they are relatively sure that France, in spite of recent tough talk, will not use its veto to block the measure. ''If the French veto, it would sink the Council and it would not stop the war,'' a European diplomat said, adding that''they would just be excluding themselves'' from being players in the Middle East in the wake of the conflict. The French president, Jacques Chirac, told several foreign leaders during telephone calls on Thursday that he continued to reject the idea that war against Iraq was inevitable, according to his spokeswoman. In Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who opposes a war, came under attack from opposition figures who said the chancellor had unnecessarily isolated Germany from its main ally and weakened its ability to play a role in international affairs. In Moscow, President Vladimir V. Putin and Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, issued a joint statement underscoring ''the importance of further intensive work with the Iraqi administration'' to seek compliance with the United Nations' mandate. Igor S. Ivanov, Russia's foreign minister, said today that Mr. Powell's speech ''revealed no persuasive proof that weapons of mass production have been produced in Iraq.'' While force is justified ''as an extreme, last measure,'' he said, ''there are no grounds to resort to this in Iraq whatsoever.'' THREATS AND RESPONSES: DIPLOMACY |
1463030_2 | U.S. READY TO BACK NEW U.N. MEASURE ON IRAQ, BUSH SAYS | Powell presented evidence to the Security Council that he said showed Iraq was deceiving inspectors in its determination to conceal or obtain nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, many experts said there were signs that France was preparing for a possible shift in position. France's only aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, sailed this week from the southern port of Toulon for exercises in the Mediterranean. French media have reported that the country's military is engaged in a hurried effort to retrofit munitions so they would be compatible with American weapons. France's former army chief of staff, Jacques Lanxade, told a French newspaper that the nation could send as many as 12,000 troops to Iraq if it comes to war. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, speaking during a trip to India, said: ''We're not systematically pacifist, but we think war isn't nice, and we don't want war. We know that it's the last resort that could be considered when all other options have been considered.'' American officials are weighing several possible formulas for a new Security Council resolution, including a text that would not explicitly call for ''all necessary means'' against Baghdad, the Council's most direct language for war. American and British officials have also considered including a ultimatum with a very short deadline -- perhaps as little as 48 hours -- that would give Arab nations an 11th-hour chance to persuade Mr. Hussein to step down peacefully. Consulting closely with Britain, the Bush administration would like to lay all the legal groundwork for military action by mid-March, the diplomats said. Pentagon officials have said the military would be best positioned to strike anytime after mid-February. Administration officials, assessing the reaction to Mr. Powell's exposition, are more inclined to seek a second resolution because they believe that France and Germany, the two most active Council opponents of war, are becoming isolated in Europe and losing force among the 15 Council nations. Mr. Powell said today that in a rapid succession of one-on-one meetings with Council foreign ministers after his speech on Wednesday, he detected ''a shift in attitude that suggested, I think, more and more nations are realizing that this cannot continue like this indefinitely.'' Speaking today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Powell said a decision on using force would ''start to come to a head'' after Feb. 14, when the two chief United Nations weapons inspectors, Hans Blix and |
1468002_2 | Panel Supports 2 Tall Towers At Disaster Site | will be announced tomorrow morning at a press conference at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden, which overlooks ground zero. Several people involved in the rebuilding process said they remained uncertain about which way the decision would go. But one member of the committee that recommended the Think plan yesterday, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said several committee members believe that the mayor and the governor should pay heed to their preference. ''We don't expect anyone to overrule us,'' the committee member said. The members of the steering committee are Mr. Betts; John C. Whitehead, the chairman of the development corporation; Louis R. Tomson, the corporation's president; Charles Kushner and Anthony J. Sartor, directors of the Port Authority; Joseph J. Seymour, executive director of the Port Authority; Diana Taylor, deputy secretary to Mr. Pataki; and Daniel E. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding. People involved in yesterday's meetings said much of the discussion focused on the revisions proposed by the two teams. The Think team, which originally planned to make its latticework towers of forged steel, now plans to build the towers of stainless steel, making them far lighter, according to people who have been briefed on the plan. That change could address a primary concern of Port Authority engineers, who previously said the towers would be too heavy to be supported in their proposed location -- directly above the rebuilt PATH station at the trade center site. It also reduces the expected cost of the design, which according to estimates released by the development corporation was at least $800 million, far more than the $330 million estimate for the Libeskind plan. One official said that the revisions make the plans approximately equal in cost. The Think team, led by Rafael Viñoly, Frederic Schwartz, Ken Smith and Shigeru Ban, also agreed to alter the cultural components of their design, lowering a proposed museum from the 85th floor to about the 30th floor of the towers. The museum would be built within the latticework so that it appeared to be suspended within the towers. But many rebuilding officials objected to the original proposal, saying that placing the tower so high would present engineering problems and discourage visitors who might fear another attack on an occupied portion of the buildings. The Libeskind team also made changes to its plan, agreeing to raise the level of the pit |
1468052_0 | THREATS AND RESPONSES: Briefly Noted; WAR PROTESTS IN ITALY | War protesters near the city of Pisa briefly blocked trains carrying American military equipment across Italy, forcing hundreds of Italian military and police officers to pull them away from the tracks. The trains were carrying jeeps, earthmovers and other equipment to Camp Darby, an American military base along the coast of Tuscany. Italy's interior minister, Giuseppe Pisanu, said he would use ''the full restraining force of the state'' to make sure the trains kept running. Frank Bruni (NYT) |
1467945_3 | If Sea Gates Don't Work, Call Canute | at stake is the use of this city as an ordinary city,'' said Paolo Costa, the mayor, who has generally supported the sea gates project but has also called for more study of the environmental impact. Mr. Costa said that without the traffic of real life through the exotic maze of Venice, it would become infinitely less enchanting. ''It would be like you were in Williamsburg,'' he said, referring to the American colonial village in Virginia. Some projections for this century show that the combined effect of the sinking of Venice and the rising of the sea, worsened by global warming, would cost Venice a further 8.6 inches. Other predictions put that measurement higher, and opponents of the project cite these in saying that the sea gates, intended to work for about 100 years, would be sufficient for only 30 to 50. They also say that the gates would eventually have to be raised 100 times a year, not the half-dozen times that the project's supporters suggest. According to critics, that would prevent an adequate exchange of water between the lagoon and the sea, changing the lagoon's ecosystem. ''Looking long term, there's just no hope,'' said Dr. Albert Ammerman, a Colgate University archaeologist who has looked into the problem. ''You're going to have to do something radical and different,'' Dr. Ammerman said, adding that the sea gates were ''a giant toy.'' But with a paucity of alternatives, Venetians seem inclined to embrace the sea gates project. A recent poll of 1,500 residents showed that 67 percent support it. They are tired of treading water. ''I've got the boots,'' said Matteo Toboga, who works in a bookshop here, referring to the kinds of adjustments that Venetians make. ''But the last time I used them, they weren't high enough, and the water got in my shoes.'' Many store owners, who cannot move from street level, hustle to move and protect their wares at the first bleat of sirens that signal a coming flood. ''It takes me half an hour to dismantle the gallery and move the paintings,'' said one owner, Luciano Ravagnan. ''This is not mineral water we're talking about,'' he said, referring to the pollution of the lagoon. ''It ruins everything.'' He said he wanted to see the sea gates installed, and had only one concern and message for government officials. ''Please,'' he said, ''don't take another 20 years.'' Venice Journal |
1464876_0 | Mellowing With Age? Yeah, Right. | TOWERING over the Yankees' spring training base, casting a Super Bowl shadow of civic superiority from across Dale Mabry Highway, is Raymond James Stadium, home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the only kind of team George Steinbrenner can bring himself to respect. Champions in the most current sense, unlike Steinbrenner's Yankees, who went tamely in the first round of the playoffs last fall, who have brought shame to Legends Field, in Steinbrenner's hometown, by failing to win the World Series for two years, and counting. Whatever magic Joe Torre was working when he won four titles in five years has, in Steinbrenner's mind, obviously worn off. The intangibles that made Derek Jeter the modern Mr. October have been misplaced, Steinbrenner apparently believes, at a trendy New York night spot. So much for the owner's seven-year homage to stability, subtlety, and all other wimpy baseball conventions. With the dynasty in the balance, Steinbrenner has put Torre and his coaching staff on notice that he wants to see a little less grace and a lot more Gruden. Jeter, the highest-paid Yankee and renowned money player, has been told to dig a trench at shortstop and not to come out, even for dinner. ''He takes the belt off,'' Reggie Jackson said yesterday. ''He says, 'All right, you're going to play better, and if you don't, you're going to get some of this.' '' Steinbrenner has decided to motivate the troops the way he used to, the way he was taught by his father, through outright fear. Consider his recent comments on the work ethic of Torre's coaching staff and on Jeter's lifestyle. They are the confessions of a dangerous football mind on the subject of his expensive baseball team. That's always been the mentality of Steinbrenner, the sideline screamer who has treated every failure as a betrayal of effort. Year after World Series year, he watched Torre calmly make all the right moves and Jeter execute all the big plays, and you just knew it was a complete mystery to Steinbrenner how it all managed to work out without the use of his belt. ''Even when we win, there's a lot of that driving people,'' Torre said yesterday. Asked if the so-called strategy might actually work on Jeter, Torre said: ''If he has a better year, that'll be what's written, that he had a better year because of it. I don't buy it.'' |
1464769_1 | Strong Franc Skews Swiss Profit Picture | will begin to report in euros this year. ''In the end, it makes it easier to understand.'' Because of its heavy export dependence, and since the European Union created its single euro-zone market, Switzerland alone has this currency problem during reporting season. Spain and the Netherlands had it until they became part of the single market. And Britain, which has kept its own currency, is not as export-dependent. ''Switzerland is so small,'' said Claude Zehnder, a market strategist for the Zürcher Kantonalbank. ''The largest companies in the Swiss market index have more than 90 percent of their revenues in foreign countries.'' Moreover, the margins of Swiss companies shrink when costs are incurred in Switzerland but revenues are earned in foreign countries. The strong franc is one reason for the index's lackluster performance, though uncertainties over a faltering economy and a possible war in Iraq have also weighed heavily on the market. The Swiss franc is close to a record high against the euro and it is trading at four-year highs against the dollar. Currency traders and investors traditionally flock to the Swiss franc in times of economic and political turmoil, favoring Switzerland's steadfast neutrality, low inflation and constant current account surpluses. The European Union, by far the country's most important trading partner, accounts for more than 70 percent of exports. The United States is the second most important market for most Swiss companies. Depending on how much a company exports, it can lose 6 percent to 10 percent in revenues merely on the currency conversions, Mr. Zehnder calculated. This year was particularly bad because of the franc's continued rise in strength against both the euro and dollar, though its most marked difference is against the greenback. It traded on average at 1.68 francs the first quarter of 2002. Now the dollar is worth only 1.35 francs. Some Swiss companies say that they will begin reporting results in the currency of the country most important to them, to more accurately reflect how the business is doing. Novartis, for instance, which logs about 42 percent of its sales in the United States, will start reporting in dollars this year. Doing so for 2002 would have shown sales figures mirroring the local currency calculations: an 11 percent rise, instead of that 2 percent rise as calculated in Swiss francs. Operating income, which rose 8 percent in Swiss franc terms, shot up 17 percent |
1467464_3 | Some new incarnations of snow, for the industry and the wintry-blanket effect. | be performed only during winter, when snow has fallen.'' They considered using artificial snow from pulverized ice or freezing sprayed water, they added, ''but the problem is that large-scale facilities are required for this method.'' That means building an indoor road, refrigerating it and then maintaining freezing air inside the building, they write in the patent. Such a system would use large quantities of water, which would have to be flushed through a sewer as waste when the tests were over. To get around the problems, the inventors designed a spinning turntable covered with ice and layers of snow for testing tires under various conditions. The device includes a turntable, a cooling element, an arm to support and rotate the tire, and a mechanism that presses the tire onto the artificial snow to simulate different loads applied to the tire. It also has brakes, so the tire's response to braking on snow can be measured. Their fake snow is made from a granular, water-absorbent material that expands when wet. They say it can be saved after each test session and used again. ''The artificial snow may be compressed and used,'' they write, giving it ''a state similar to that of an actual compressed snowy road.'' Adding more or less water will also change the snowy road conditions, they write. And they can reproduce driving conditions of acceleration, deceleration and slippage by tinkering with the tire speed. To keep the test tire from wearing a rut in the artificial snow, it is moved around the turntable, the inventors say. And the invention has a ''snowfall device,'' they added, so that an artificial snow layer can be created that closely mimics ''road surface conditions in which new snow has accumulated.'' Mr. Usami, Mr. Fukuda and Mr. Yamanoi received patent 6,408,689. In a more decorative vein, Philip Culver of Sarasota, Fla. -- where snowfall rarely if ever transforms the outdoors -- owns a patent for a device that sprinkles artificial snow over the branches of trees to give them the winter wonderland look. His invention includes a blower stationed at the base of a tree and a tube that extends upward along the trunk. Along the length of the tube, dome-shaped discs are positioned at intervals. Each of these discharges artificial snow. ''By this arrangement, artificial snow is uniformly dispersed to fall over the tree,'' Mr. Culver said. He received patent 5,098,084. Patents |
1465510_5 | Parents of Mentally Ill Children Trade Custody for Care | dents in the walls of his mother's Bronx apartment from his punches. More than once a week, his mother said, she needed to call the police for help. ''This is a child,'' she would say when she thought they were handling him roughly. Daniel would be taken to the hospital, calmed, and discharged. Agencies that deal with autism said they could not help for a variety of reasons. The mother's sister grew afraid to baby-sit. The mother, who insisted that the family's name not be used for fear of retaliation against Daniel, said ''I've used sick days, vacation days, personal days and leave without pay to do what I've done with this kid.'' At the hospital, she said, she had been regularly told by doctors and social workers that the only way to get help would be to leave her son there, so that she would be reported for abandoning him and the state would take custody. State officials say that the average wait for a mental health placement in one of their specialized facilities is about two and a half months, but caseworkers and families report waits of up to 18 months. Because of the wait, some foster care providers say, many children who qualify for mental health services are never even referred to the state mental health agency but are simply diverted into foster care. After one particularly violent outburst by Daniel, his mother, afraid for herself and her teenage daughter, left him at the hospital and called the child-abuse hot line to report what she had done. At a meeting with a social worker, she said, she agreed to sign over custody when a place was found for Daniel. It was not an easy moment. ''Parents are dealing not just with the child who has mental illness, but the siblings and how they are reacting to it, and with how exhausted they are,'' said Karen Hebrock, who runs admissions for the Rochester-based Hillside Family of Agencies. ''It is very intimidating for families. It is a scary kind of thing.'' But this mother did it. ''I didn't want Daniel to hurt someone or be hurt,'' she said. It was not clear, however, that the foster care group home where Daniel wound up five months later was prepared to handle him. On a visit in November, his mother discovered that four days earlier, without her knowledge, Daniel had been |
1465433_1 | W.H.O. Plan On Tobacco: Limit Ads, Raise Taxes | promotion of tobacco, prohibit the use of misleading terms by tobacco companies, impose high taxes and insist that the companies be held liable for their products. Further, tobacco companies will be obliged to divulge all the ingredients in their products and to print warning labels that cover at least 30 percent of the package. The treaty will encourage countries to enact strict measures promoting clean indoor air. Some countries have been acting on their own. A ban on all tobacco advertising went into effect in Britain on Friday. What the initiative is unlikely to do is to finance tobacco control programs in poor countries, a point of contention still to be ironed out. About 4.9 million people die each year from tobacco use, according to the health organization. The toll is expected to double in 20 years, with nearly all the additional deaths coming from developing countries. Luis Felipe de Seixas Corrêa, the ambassador to the United Nations from Brazil, the world's largest tobacco producer, will preside over the negotiating sessions. He contends that countries that need the most help are the ones least able to pay for the measures about to be passed. ''It is a problem that concerns us all, rich or poor countries,'' he said. ''It is a major public health problem and of course rich countries have better ways to protect themselves by enforcing legislation and getting public awareness campaigns on track. Poor countries have more limited ways to protect themselves.'' Mr. de Seixas Corrêa, who said he quit smoking ''15 kilos ago,'' said he hoped that one of the objectives would be to create a framework to help poor countries pay for tobacco control. The developing countries hope to establish a global fund. Delegates from 32 African nations meeting last week in Senegal called on the negotiating body to give money to developing countries dependent on growing tobacco to help them switch to other agricultural commodities. They also called for effective mechanisms to make tobacco companies liable for their products and to compensate poor nations for the medical burden placed on them. The current proposal does not finance the project, but ''gets the machinery in motion,'' Mr. de Seixas Corrêa said. Countries like the United States, Germany and Japan, whose Finance Ministry owns 67 percent of a tobacco company, have opposed language in the treaty that would mandate financing for this purpose. In the United |
1465314_6 | Your Taxes; College Savings Plans: You'll Need a Scorecard | did: hire their own children, even young ones in a family owned business. The wages are a deductible business expense, and for this year children can earn up to the standard deduction of $4,750 before owing tax -- or up to $7,750 if they put the difference into an I.R.A. If the business is a sole proprietorship or partnership of the child's parents, children under 18 are exempt from Social Security and Medicare taxes and children under 21 from federal unemployment tax. Experts caution that the children must perform real work for reasonable wages, and parents should be prepared to show documentation to prove it. For parents with children already in college, tax breaks include the Hope Scholarship credit -- up to $1,500 a student for the first two years of college. There is also the Lifetime Learning credit -- up to $1,000 a household for higher education expenses; it will double this year. But full credits are available only to single filers with modified adjusted gross income below $41,000 and to couples with less than $82,000. The phase-out limits are $51,000 for singles and $102,000 for couples. If parents whose income is too high forgo claiming the children as dependents, financial advisers note, the students may be able to take the credits on their own returns. If a student would not be not taxed enough to offset the credit, parents can give an asset to the child who can sell it to generate a capital gains tax, Mr. Calvelli said. But he warned parents to make sure that ''emancipating'' a child did not have side effects like making the child ineligible for the parents' health care coverage. OTHER sources of tax-advantaged college funds include home equity loans and student loans, both of which have tax-deductible interest. Early I.R.A. withdrawals can be made without penalty for qualified higher education expenses, but any taxes would still be due. Roth I.R.A.'s are a better option because withdrawals, up to the amount originally contributed, can be made free of tax and penalty. ''As a general rule, people want to save for their own retirement as their No. 1 priority,'' noted Joseph Hurley, founder and chief executive of Savingforcollege.com, a Web site that compares and evaluates 529 plans. ''If you have to, it can be tapped for college. You're not going to get financial aid for retirement, and you might get it for college.'' |
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1465508_4 | 1.5 Million Demonstrators In Cities Across Europe Oppose a War Against Iraq | Park, where speakers exhorted Mr. Blair and President Bush to bow to the protesters' demands for peace. In Berlin, protesters from the eastern and western parts of the city met at the Brandenburg Gate, once a symbol of the city's cold war division. The police said the number of protesters was around 500,000. Some German protesters carried placards proclaiming pride in ''Old Europe,'' the term used dismissively by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to pour scorn on French and German opposition to the war. In Paris, the police said 100,000 demonstrators marched the three miles from the capital's Place Denfert-Rochereau to the Place de la Bastille, filling the broad Boulevard Saint Michel, which passes the French Senate, and spilling into the surrounding streets. ''Bush will never admit it, but I know this war is about the oil because you look in the paper and you read about North Korea conducting nuclear testing, and Bush doesn't seem too worried about that,'' said William Bazot, a 36-year-old Parisian holding his infant boy, who wore a cardboard sign declaring ''No to the War.'' The demonstrations have coaxed forth a broad, informal coalition from Muslim activists to hard-left-wingers. Some in London carried banners saying ''Freedom for Palestine.'' The protesters included young children and veterans of the 1960's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, older people in wheelchairs and babies in strollers. Some were demonstrating for the first time. Karie Rudsbraaten, 44, from Woking, just outside London, said she had never marched before but ''nothing has been as important as this.'' Apart from politicians, rock stars and other celebrities, writers and intellectuals have come out in support of the march, challenging Mr. Blair to recognize that he faces a groundswell of popular discontent. In Italy, the police said at least 600,000 people took part; organizers put the figure at over one million. Even in Baghdad, several thousand Iraqis staged an orchestrated demonstration, chanting, ''We love Saddam Hussein.'' Protests were also reported from as far afield as Kashmir and New Zealand, Hong Kong, Prague, Moscow and Tokyo. In Russia, one of the leaders of the antiwar coalition in the United Nations, about 700 demonstrators turned out opposite the American Embassy for a Communist-led protest against United States policy in general, and against Mr. Bush in particular. The turnout was also relatively low in Prague. In Turkey, where the government is wrestling with a request to allow American troops |
1465212_3 | The Efficient Way to Not See Each Other | e-mail I received from him simply said, 'Can I come home?' after a particularly long and grueling 10-day business trip.'' Even when couples aren't traveling, though, e-mail has become a primary form of communication. ''There's another way?'' asks Kelly Deters Baker, a managing partner of Ridgeland Properties. ''I can't remember the last time we called each other during the day.'' Her husband is the owner of a flavor company and, ''invariably when we do talk person-to-person in the middle of the day, there's tension because one of us is in the middle of a huge project behind deadline,'' she said. Instead, they use e-mail ''to do everything from drop a quick 'hi' to arrange meetings to make weekend plans; it keeps us connected without the conflict.'' Jack Jackson, who runs a marketing company near Boston, agreed. ''We've been married for 20 years and I feel like we rarely talk, he said, referring to his wife, Cindy. He and Cindy, a director for the management-consulting firm Bain & Company, ''manage the kids (we get e-mail from teachers), our social lives (booking dates with each other or with other couples) and our family matters (elderly mother, picking her up from the eye doctor) all through e-mail.'' And it has come to the point where working couples are using e-mail not only when they are traveling, or at the office, but together at home. While Mr. Jackson was in one room talking to me online about his e-mail habits, his wife was in another room, logged into her office. That's when this happened: ''Instead of calling out to me -- to see whether I remembered to call the school about something that day -- she e-mailed me. (Sigh).'' Bruce and I have not done that -- yet. But we have been known to beam notes via our Palm Pilots, and I will even admit to paging him once or twice when I was upstairs and he was all the way downstairs and it was just too far to walk. So e-mailing from room to room may not be far behind. On this weekend after Valentine's Day, though, I prefer to look at another side of this trend. I've learned that 17*31707*1 in a text message spells ''I Love You'' if you turn it upside down. LIFE'S WORK This column about the intersection of jobs and personal lives appears every other week. E-mail: Belkin@nytimes.com. |
1465518_3 | U.S. TO SEEK TESTS TO SHOW THAT IRAQ RESISTS DISARMING | skeptics of using force. The ambiguity of Mr. Blix's statement, coupled with his rebuttal of certain information presented by the United States as evidence of Iraqi misconduct, dismayed many in the American and British governments. Mr. Blix's concluding statement on Friday was that ''the period of disarmament through inspection could still be short, if 'immediate, active and unconditional cooperation' '' were ''forthcoming.'' American officials seized on this wording as proof of their contention that Iraq has fallen far short of the ''immediate, active and unconditional cooperation'' that was specified in Resolution 1441. The French, on the other hand, took from this same language the suggestion that without such cooperation, inspections could still work but that they might take longer. The session on Friday, which exposed a deep split among Security Council members, was still being analyzed by participants today. Some said the passionate presentation by the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, left ''wiggle room'' for France to participate in an eventual decision to go to war. Others doubted that. A French official said today that Mr. de Villepin's statement meant that the only way that France would agree to use force would be if Mr. Blix and his colleague, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, found that they could no longer do their work ''because of Iraqi refusal to cooperate.'' American officials acknowledged that they probably did not have enough votes on the Security Council to authorize ''serious consequences'' against Iraq. But they also noted that France's proposal for a resolution authorizing the doubling or tripling of the inspectors also did not have enough votes to pass. Despite Mr. Blix's public statement, administration officials said he and the other inspectors were privately more skeptical of Iraq's motives when they met separately with members of the Security Council on Friday. ''In private, a lot of people were more appreciative of the situation than they were in public,'' an administration official said. For example, in his public remarks Mr. Blix cited Iraqi willingness to pass laws and set up commissions to cooperate with weapons inspectors, but in private he was said to understand that those were mere gestures, having more to do with ''process'' than results. The administration official said Mr. Blix had been careful to avoid making judgments about Iraqi conduct, and his approach led to the ambiguous wording of his statements. Administration officials hope |
1465570_0 | And Now, a Rift Over Food, Too? | To the Editor: You report that ''Consumers in Europe Resist Gene-Altered Foods'' (news article, Feb. 11), as many Americans would if they realized the extent of the tampering. Because food producers have resisted attempts to require truth in labeling, Americans unknowingly consume many genetically altered foods, and also milk and meat from animals dosed with antibiotics and growth promoters. Our agricultural gene pools are becoming ever more uniform, increasing vulnerability in the case of unforeseen natural disaster. At the very minimum, labeling should be required for additives or genetic modifications. The long-term viability and diversity of our food supply should take precedence over shelf life. Improved taste would be a bonus. FAIRFID M. CAUDLE Staten Island, Feb. 11, 2003 |
1465172_3 | Change of Habit | that because nuns were so deeply involved in the formation of young Catholics -- and because they outnumbered priests three to one -- to Catholics the face of Catholicism was primarily female. Indeed, compared with bishops and parish priests, the sisters were a fluid force, able to establish a new spur or ''foundation'' of their order wherever they were needed. Inevitably, powerful and tough-minded mother superiors ran afoul of priests and bishops who sought to control the sisters' schools and hospitals. Among many tales Fialka tells is one about the rollicking career of Mother Alfred Moes, who was kicked out of two dioceses and, after leaving two orders, formed a third. Having committed her Sisters of St. Francis to raising money for a hospital, she persuaded a reluctant country doctor named W. W. Mayo that with his help they could establish a world-class medical facility in Rochester, Minn. Fialka's anecdotal approach works well for the 19th century, but he falters when he tries to explain the sudden decline of women's religious orders in recent decades. At their peak in the mid-60's, he says, there were about 180,000 sisters in this country; today there are fewer than 81,000, and their median age is 69. Fialka suggests that the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were in large part to blame. But he cites few words from the council's documents and manifestly doesn't understand what the council did or why. He repeatedly refers to the council's ''findings'' as if the church's ''all-male officialdom'' had conducted an inquisition. In fact, the council instructed the religious orders to re-examine their mission in light of the ''charism,'' or specific gift of their founding mothers. No one has yet figured out why so many American women left the religious life, or why so few have chosen to take their places. Most left in the decade of upheaval following Vatican II. For some there was the question of whether to retain or modify their habits (dress), which turned out to be a highly symbolic issue touching on the very nature of the religious vocation. Others questioned the value of community life, preferring to live in outside apartments. Many sisters bought the argument that they could better serve the people by promoting civil rights and in other forms of direct ''social action,'' leaving social services to government agencies. Moreover, by the late 70's talented Catholic women were finding |
1465571_0 | And Now, a Rift Over Food, Too? | To the Editor: Foes of biotechnology gloss over two points: neither biotechnology nor genetic engineering is new, and consumers, government and industry have extensive, positive experience with both (news article, Feb. 11). Biotechnology dates at least to 6000 B.C., when the Babylonians used specialized microorganisms to brew alcoholic beverages. Genetic engineering can be dated from humans' recognition that animals and crops can be selected and bred to enhance desired characteristics. Nature, after all, didn't give us seedless grapes or virus-resistant potatoes. More than 60 percent of processed foods in America contain ingredients derived from gene-spliced organisms. There has not been a single injury to a single person or ecosystem. Food derived from genetically improved organisms is ubiquitous. Anyone who wishes to avoid it will be relegated to a diet of fish, shellfish and wild berries and game. Bon appétit. HENRY I. MILLER, M.D. Stanford, Calif., Feb. 11, 2003 The writer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a former director of the F.D.A.'s Office of Biotechnology. |
1465613_0 | THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE SCENE -- Paris; Throwing a Party With a Purpose | It was a party a hundred thousand strong, flowing haltingly below the slated mansard roofs of Paris's stately avenues, accompanied by balloons and banners and vendors selling foot-long hot dogs and fries. If there is one thing the French know how to do, it is how to conduct a demonstration. Ladies in stiletto heels and fur-fringed jackets, fathers pushing strollers trailing McDonald's balloons, drably dressed union members, students in face paint and carnival clothes -- all turned out to make some noise. Yet despite the gay atmosphere beneath a brilliant blue sky, the message was stark, even dark. ''The United States is a barbarian country,'' shouted some. ''Bush, let's murder,'' shouted others. One group chanted, ''Bush, Blair, Sharon, Putin, Chirac: Justice in Palestine, don't touch Iraq.'' Dozens of organizations, some with vehicles bristling with loudspeakers, others with drums, one flying a giant Palestinian flag, ambled along. A man in one group held aloft a placard with pictures of President Bush and Hitler beneath the label ''Twins.'' Another carried a coffin lid, to which was nailed the bloody effigy of a dove, its wings spread like the arms of Jesus on the cross. The ground was littered with fliers and stickers bearing pictures of roses and fists and the Communist Party's hammer and sickle. Protesters climbed onto bus stop shelters and 18th-century statues, blowing whistles and whooping. ''People don't support Saddam Hussein,'' explained Marcella de Luca, a 35-year-old Italian economist carrying a rainbow-colored flag that read ''Pace,'' which means peace in Italian. ''But we're not here to support him. We're against America's policy in Iraq, and we don't think war is the solution.'' The human river, mostly white, flowed through central Paris, across the Seine to the Place de la Bastille, site of the start of the French Revolution and the psychic center of protests in France. The demonstration shut down much of the city's traffic, cutting bus lines and blocking a broad swath of side streets that fed into the protest's path. But even the police, brought in from the provinces, seemed to be having a good time. CRAIG S. SMITH |
1465162_1 | Lost Girl | second it happened. Walking up to the pencil sharpener in front of the room and wondering, as she sharpened her pencil, if anyone was thinking she looked fat.'' At first, it seems that Maynard (author of the winsome satirical novel ''To Die For'') has made a disastrous choice. After the second tower falls, one of Wendy's classmates says, ''Oh my God. . . . This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.'' But the banality of this observation is perhaps deliberate. For most people, there was nothing more profound to say about 9/11 than that. Certainly, this is true for Wendy, whose doting mother, once an aspiring dancer, worked as an executive secretary on the 87th floor of one of the towers. On 9/11, Janet went to work wearing a red dress and her favorite strappy red sandals. She never came home. On Halloween, Wendy's real father, lanky, handsome Garrett, a failed artist divorced by Wendy's mother for his irresponsibility and all-around cheating, shows up at the door of the Brooklyn apartment and demands that Wendy come back to California with him. She is still numb, ''feeling like a person in a play who's trying to remember her lines,'' and she can't think of any reason not to go. Her best friend, Amelia, assures her: ''You could think of it as a getaway. Like when my mom goes to a spa.'' On the West Coast, in the low-key college town of Davis, just outside Sacramento, it is as if the disaster never occurred. Wendy and her father don't watch television news, listen to the radio or surf the Internet. There's hardly a newspaper in sight. A few people mention Sept. 11, but Wendy tells almost no one about her mother, and so the horror and anguish associated with this event almost disappear. Her mother might as well have drowned or died in a car accident -- a sad occurrence, but not socially, politically or historically significant. It's not surprising, then, that as Wendy begins what's popularly known as the grieving process, she concludes that in the wake of a catastrophe like 9/11 ''the usual rules'' of life no longer apply. On her first day at her new school, she simply walks off the playing field during a morning gym class and begins a sort of modern American walkabout. Cutting classes to wander aimlessly, she meets other people life |
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1465199_0 | The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Deer | As a psychologist who has also been a sleep specialist for more than 16 years, I have had the opportunity to evaluate and treat many people with the sorts of parasomnias described in your article. I must take issue with the suggestion that many, if not most, complex-behavior parasomnias are neurological events. REM behavior disorder, in my experience, is often an aspect of post-traumatic stress disorder. Adult sleep terrors, to my mind, are much more likely to occur in people who experienced serious abuse as children. Nocturnal eating disorder, in my opinion, is rare in people who do not also have some form of compulsive-behavior problem in their waking lives. Further, while you can treat these problems with medications, it is certainly an open question whether the medications are correcting a ''chemical imbalance'' or simply reducing a symptom. I am a clinician, not a researcher, but I have seen research in sleep journals suggesting that others interpret these disorders as having a significant psychological component. Does this mean there is no neurological component? Of course not. But I think it is erroneous to deny the core psychological factors that help produce these often frightening and bizarre parasomnias. Andrew Borson Broomall, Pa. |
1462551_0 | Corrections | A chart in Science Times yesterday with an article about the science experiments aboard the space shuttle Columbia reversed two images in some copies. A diagram by NASA should have appeared with text describing the shuttle's observations of the ozone layer; a photograph of Earth from Columbia should have appeared with a description of research on dust storms and climate change. |
1462391_0 | U.S. Delays Suing Europe Over Ban on Modified Food | With war looming in Iraq, the Bush administration has decided against antagonizing its European allies and has postponed filing a case against the European Union for its ban on genetically modified food, according to a senior administration official. ''There is no point in testing Europeans on food while they are being tested on Iraq,'' said a senior White House official who asked not to be identified. Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, had said that the administration would decide soon whether to sue the Europeans for what he called their ''immoral'' opposition to genetically modified food. He said that stand was leading to starvation in the developing world. A cabinet meeting to consider the suit was canceled this week as European agricultural officials descended on Washington to argue for patience. Even so, the conflict will resurface soon. Mr. Zoellick has said he believes that genetically modified food could help alleviate hunger -- as well as open markets for American farmers -- and wants the European opposition to be confronted so that developing nations accept food from genetically modified crops. But the heated rhetoric of a few weeks ago, when Mr. Zoellick accused the Europeans of having a Luddite attitude against biotechnology, was muted this week as both sides stressed the importance of lifting the ban. The question is when. Ann M. Veneman, the United States agriculture secretary, has said that ''our patience is just running out.'' Franz Fischler, the European Union's farm commissioner, said that he met with Ms. Veneman and told her the problem would be resolved within three or four months. ''We do not have a fundamental opposition to genetically modified food,'' said Mr. Fischler at a press conference today. ''We are in the final phases of passing our laws in Parliament and we would strongly advise not to start an action that would disrupt that.'' Experts agree that the United States could win a case at the World Trade Organization and force a lifting of the four-year-old ban. At the same time, they agree that the ultimate resolution of this case will rest on labeling -- not opposing notions of science -- and that it promises to pit European ideas of proper regulation against American notions about free and unfettered trade. European consumers have for years questioned the safety of genetically modified food out of fear that those modifications may have unknown, and unintended, consequences |
1463140_0 | Lord Aberconway, 89, Met With Göring Secretly in '39 | Lord Aberconway, once a major British industrialist who built the Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean liner and who in 1939 took part in a secret meeting with Hitler's close aide Hermann Göring, died on Tuesday in London. He was 89. The meeting with seven British industrialists, aimed at averting a world war, was publicly discussed only in 1999. It was termed by some a second Munich, in reference to the famous efforts there to appease Hitler before the war, but Lord Aberconway said this was a misinterpretation. As heir to the wealthy family that also built the Lusitania and the Queen Mary, Lord Aberconway ruled an industrial empire that included John Brown & Company, which owned, among other things, the Clydeside shipyard in Scotland. His other financial interests included mining, banking and insurance. It was as a result of his involvement in the shipbuilding company that he took part in the secret meeting with Göring. Charles Frederick Spencer, a director of John Brown, was approached by a Swedish businessman who knew Göring and wanted to stop the accelerating skid toward war. The future Lord Aberconway, then Charles McLaren and already a director of John Brown at 26, was one of the seven British industrialists Mr. Spencer invited to meet with the German on an island in the Baltic Sea. The meeting was mentioned during the Nuremberg trials, but had not provoked much discussion. Three years ago, however, Lord Aberconway gave 38 pages of his personal documents to Andrew Roberts, a historian. Mr. Roberts interpreted the documents as saying that the unofficial British delegation raised the possibility of meeting German demands on Poland in return for Germany not invading that country. Lord Aberconway contended that the businessmen's only purpose was to relay the official British policy that an invasion of Poland would lead to war. Mr. Roberts disagreed, saying Lord Aberconway's documents showed that the British delegation had proposed what ''amounted to a second Munich conference'' to appease the Nazis. Debate over the matter was extensively covered in the British press in the summer of 1999, with Lord Aberconway insisting in The Times of London that Mr. Roberts's interpretation was ''nonsense.'' Charles Melville McLaren was born on April 16, 1913. The title of Lord Aberconway had first been given to his grandfather, a prominent Liberal member of Parliament, who came by his fortune through marriage. Charles was educated at Eton and Oxford |
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1461818_1 | No More Wire Mothers, Ever | with surrogate mothers, some made of terry cloth and some of wire. When exposed to a moving toy or a strange room, babies with cloth mothers rushed to them, buried their faces in the soft fabric and relaxed. Their peers, with only wire mothers, shook in terror against the wall. Left alone for months with only wire mothers, they pined away, staring at the world with lifeless eyes, like my orphaned baboon. The series of Harlow's experiments that followed revolutionized psychology in the middle of the 20th century. Until then, as Blum vividly documents, the dominant thinking in psychology was very different. An extreme position, made popular by psychologists like John Watson, held that young children should never be caressed, held or physically comforted by parents. Watson and later behaviorists like B. F. Skinner claimed that a baby reaching for Mom is simply reflecting an association between Mom and food. Early psychologists said that mothers who responded warmly to a baby's cries would produce excessively dependent adults, unable to function in American society. Despite the absence of supporting evidence, this view profoundly influenced not only parental behavior but national institutions like orphanages, which minimized contact between caregivers and children, and hospitals, which denied parents the opportunity to comfort their sick and frightened children. When Harlow began his monkey experiments, a few sensitive researchers, like the British psychiatrist John Bowlby, had challenged behaviorist dogma. But because they based their claims mainly on anecdotal evidence, mainstream psychology, aspiring to be a ''hard science'' like physics, rejected them. Harlow's genius, Blum says, was to recognize the importance of using a humanlike animal to document thoroughly the positive effects of love and the devastation wrought by its absence. Harlow demolished behaviorism's claim that infant attachment depends on food. Given a choice between a wire mother that dispensed milk and a milk-free cloth mother, baby monkeys overwhelmingly preferred the cloth mothers. He found that monkeys living with their mothers thrived physically, while those deprived of maternal succor withered away and often died, like untouched children in orphanages. He showed that to develop social confidence, young monkeys need peers to play with. Babies deprived of either mothers or peers became forever unable to connect with others. He also discovered that infant monkeys are terribly vulnerable to loss. Infants raised by mothers but later separated from them for months became listless and lost interest in other monkeys. |
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1461494_0 | Airport Weigh-In | To the Editor: Re ''F.A.A. Reviews Rules on Passenger Weight After Crash'' (news article, Jan. 28): I have stood in line for international flights and answered questions about how long I have known my traveling companion, where we stayed, what we did and whether I spent time with strangers. I have taken my shoes off and walked barefoot through the magnetometer, arthritic toes exposed to the world. I have stood with arms outstretched and been patted down in places I once considered private, as other travelers looked on. I have stood by while others rummaged through my carry-on bag, exposing some very personal belongings to any passer-by who cared to see. But weigh me? Oh, believe me, I understand why. I'm even grateful for any enhanced prospect of safety. But I have to say, now it's getting personal. BETH NOLAN Washington, Jan. 29, 2003 |
1461386_2 | Pictures Worth 10,000 Words, at Least | University Press) to bend him into a more tortured postmodern stance, he has said that he regards photography, rather quaintly, as a ''communicative and analytical medium.'' But like his countryman Andreas Gursky, whose 2001 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was a popular smash, Mr. Struth also faces a degree of critical skepticism. Can an artist whose photographs are so clearly seductive be trusted? Are the places and people rendered in such detail and icy perfection more interesting and alive after scrutiny? Or has he embalmed them? Does the power of his images derive from thoughtful choices about what he has included or excluded from the frame? Or from the persuasive rhetoric of their sheer size? The question of scale is front and center in Mr. Struth's celebrated photographs of museum and church interiors. Pictures about people looking at pictures, they capture the weariness and confusion of the art spectator, hoping for a private experience in a crowded public arena like the Pantheon or the Louvre. As tourists and students move through the Art Institute of Chicago or the Church of the Frari in Venice, pausing to read labels or just staring, Mr. Struth has pulled back and given us a cool but not unsympathetic large-format view of art in the age of mass travel. His photographs also destabilize the confident neutrality of anyone viewing them at an exhibition. Moments after studying the seriously dazed or slouching figures in Mr. Struth's pictures, visitors at the Met will no doubt be self-consciously checking their own attitudes and postures. These huge works will be shown in the Special Exhibitions gallery, while the Gilman gallery on the second floor will display his smaller prints. Many of these pictures embody the deference -- and the envy -- that photography has traditionally shown toward painting. The people observed by Mr. Struth have come to museums to commune with artworks -- centuries old and weighty with religious or political themes -- that command attention and respect by their generous allotment of wall space. In their scale, Mr. Struth's photographs aspire to be compared with 19-century history paintings and other revered canvases and murals. At the same time, in their minute human imperfections -- figures whose movements are blurred by long time exposures -- his images also gently mock such pretensions. They are proud of what they are. Photography has long yearned for |
1461495_0 | Vatican and Women | To the Editor: You report that the Vatican upheld the excommunication of seven women, including an American, who were ''ordained'' in Austria last June (World Briefing item, Jan. 28). How interesting that the Vatican reserves its ultimate punishment, excommunication, for women who dared to set foot on the all-male territory of the priesthood. This same institution has ignored, tolerated, protected, ''forgiven'' and made excuses for priests who habitually abused young children. It's obvious which sin the Vatican considers more serious. JUDITH TESTA St. Charles, Ill., Jan. 28, 2003 |
1461728_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 The writer is the chairman of the Alliance for Architecture. Hamden |
1461403_0 | Virus Outbreaks Don't Rock Boats | DESPITE a weeklong bout with a virus aboard a cruise ship two years ago, Jack Mackey was eager to go on another cruise. So on Jan. 19, Mr. Mackey, a San Francisco stockbroker, boarded the Crystal Symphony with his son, daughter-in-law, 19-year-old granddaughter and his fiancée, Marni Grellman, departing Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on a two-month trip around South America, to Easter Island, Samoa and other stops before ending in New Zealand. Asked if he were concerned about another bout of the virus, Mr. Mackey said no, but added that he planned to use common sense, including washing his hands often, watching what he ate and drank, and staying away from the ship's pool. With only three months left in 2002, and the cruise industry headed toward a likely record of 7.4 million passengers, the last thing the cruise lines expected to face was the outbreak of gastrointestinal disorders. The fact that about 1,500 passengers became ill raised the possibility of a downturn in bookings. The outbreaks, which seem to have run their course, occurred on four consecutive departures of Holland America's Amsterdam -- Oct. 1 and 22 and Nov. 1 and 11 -- before the ship was taken out of service on Nov. 21 for eight days, during which it was disinfected. There were also outbreaks on two cruises of the Disney Magic, and one cruise each on Carnival's Fascination, Royal Caribbean's Majesty of the Seas, Norwegian Cruise Line's Norway and the British ship Oceana, operated by P&O Cruises. Altogether, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 23 outbreaks on 20 ships in 2002, including 11 confirmed outbreaks of Norwalk virus (or norovirus). In November and December, the C.D.C. confirmed 1,128 norovirus cases among passengers and 122 among crew. It seemed to contradict a drop in shipboard illnesses, which fell from 6.27 outbreaks (meaning a grouping of related cases) per 1,000 cruises from 1990 to 1995 to 3.7 per 1,000 cruises from 1996 to 2000, the last year for which C.D.C. data is available. There were 4.17 individual cases per 100,000 passenger-days from 1990 to 1995, and 3.5 cases per 100,000 passenger-days in 1996 to 2000. Yet although widely reported in the news media, the outbreaks this fall and winter have had surprisingly little impact on the cruise industry, according to financial analysts and a check with travel agents. A survey of AAA's 32 travel agencies reported few cancellations |
1461614_0 | New Subject Open to Women At Korean School: Marriage | When Mary F. Scranton, a Methodist missionary from the United States, founded a school for girls here in 1886, her goal was to provide opportunities that were then available only for boys. That goal remained unchanged as the school, named Ewha, or Pear Blossom, evolved into a college in 1910 and eventually into a university with 15 colleges and 37 institutes. With 21,000 students, Ewha Womans University is the world's largest all-women's university, and is among the country's elite institutions. So the university's decision last month to permit married women to register as undergraduate students was viewed as a milestone event, not only on campus but also in the upper layers of this stratified and conservative society. ''Girls on campus are talking about it a lot,'' said Lee Ji Won, a junior. The student government fully supported the idea of getting rid of the rule against married students, Ms. Lee said, ''but some seniors think it's a shame the decision was forced upon the university.'' Although the faculty approved scrapping the rule, it did so only after South Korea's National Human Rights Commission began investigating a complaint that the university was guilty of illegal discrimination. The irony was that Ewha, the most prestigious women's university here, had clung to the rule in almost reverent observance of the reason the school was founded. It was originally to protect women from the demands of this male-dominated society that they were forbidden to marry while in school. Once married, a woman would inevitably have to spend all her time with her husband and family -- and probably have no choice but to drop out of school under any circumstances. ''This decree was issued when marriage meant a woman was bound to her husband's household,'' said Sohn Ji Ae, CNN's Seoul bureau chief and an Ewha graduate. ''The fact that they put the rule to rest means a woman can study and have a family at the same time.'' The administration is still not certain how to apply the rule. Debate now centers on whether women who dropped out to marry should be readmitted or whether the decision affects only those women who are still enrolled or are applying for admission for the first time. Shops on a nearby street displaying wedding gowns serve as reminders of the desirability of Ewha women as marriage partners, and the university is proud of the roles its |
1464021_3 | Russia to Build 2 Pipelines in the East | of the revenue or the influence over geopolitically important trade flows that Transneft commands. ''Unfortunately, experience shows that we can't regulate fully and efficiently what we don't own,'' said one senior government official. Extensive government involvement, however, could mean delays in completing the pipelines. Mr. Ivanov of Yukos said the timetable for building the China pipeline ''has obviously been disrupted,'' though construction might yet start this year. And the reassertion of Transneft's monopoly may complicate a proposal for a new privately owned pipeline to the Barents Sea port of Murmansk to ship oil to America. Analysts expressed some skepticism that the eastern pipeline project would succeed. The high cost of building the link to Nakhodka would have to be reflected in shipping rates, they said, and that would deter producers in western Siberia, where the great majority of Russia's oil is extracted, from using the eastern routes. Eastern Siberia, meanwhile, does not yet have enough proven reserves to fill the pipe economically, according to Philip Vorobyov, a Russia specialist at Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Moscow who recently prepared a report on Russia's eastern energy sources. ''Energy security is very important, but ultimately you'll have to find a source of funds for this pipeline,'' Mr. Vorobyov said. ''Unless it's economic, it's very difficult to imagine it being built. They still need to prove additional reserves, specifically in eastern Siberia.'' The China pipeline backed by Yukos, which was well along in planning, had been challenged by local environmentalists. The route crosses areas where earthquake risks are high and cuts through the Tunkinsky National Park, a spectacular, sparsely populated forest region set aside in 1991. But the company's environmental impact study ''does not inspire trust,'' said Victor A. Kuznetsov, a former park ranger who works at Baikal Ecological Wave, an environmental group in Irkutsk. ''Responsibility is up in the air. There is no mechanism for who will answer for a spill.'' Executives at Yukos said the precautions they planned go far beyond Soviet-era practices, and use modern earthquake engineering. And Yukos said the China pipeline project alone would create 1,500 jobs and bring new roads, bridges and tax revenue to some of the poorest regions of the country. The portion of the pipeline in Chinese territory is to be built in cooperation with CNPC, a Chinese state oil company. The Japanese government had publicly urged Russia to build the pipeline to Nakhodka. |
1464015_2 | Goliath Smote, Then Smote Again; New Look at a Sculpture of David Finds His Foe's Head Misplaced | of his action,'' Mr. Radke added. ''With the head off to one side, Verrocchio has freed up David.'' After the High Museum's successful exhibition of Michelangelo's drawings from the Casa Buonarroti in Florence two years ago, Michael E. Shapiro, the director, began looking to other European museums for partnerships. ''It gives us an opportunity to bring world-class objects to Atlanta,'' he said. So he asked the Bargello if it would consider lending Verrocchio's ''David.'' ''They were receptive,'' Mr. Shapiro explained. ''But they said they had plans to restore the object but they didn't have sufficient funds.'' The High Museum agreed to help finance the restoration project and pay for the publication of a catalog. Mr. Shapiro would not say how much the Atlanta museum put into the project. ''It turns into a win-win situation,'' he said. The placement of Goliath's head wasn't the only discovery the Italian conservators made. Using new laser technology similar to techniques used by surgeons, they also discovered original gold leaf that had been applied with glue. During the Renaissance gold leaf was generally suspended in mercury and then fused onto the bronze, a more durable technique used primarily for outdoor sculptures. The finding that glue had been used to adhere the gold leaf confirmed for the first time that the statue was intended to be placed indoors. Veins in David's muscular arms also became more visible during the chemical cleaning, giving the figure a greater sense of strength and power. Recalling what she realized the day Goliath's head was removed from between David's feet, Ludovica Nicolai, the conservator at the Bargello, said: ''It looked like part of the frosting was gone from the cake. The curls of his hair had been sawed. Some of them were incomplete.'' Ms. Nicolai, who has been working on the restoration for a year and a half, began by taking gamma ray photographs to check the soundness of the sculpture's interior structure before undertaking more invasive and radical procedures. A scientific team from the University of Florence followed with microscopic tests and other physical analysis to study the various levels of patina that had been added to the work over time. Initial samples of the surface revealed that at least five different finishes, including waxes and various varnishes, had been layered on since the late 18th century. ''Certainly it needed restoration,'' Ms. Nicolai said of ''David,'' which hadn't been touched |
1463984_0 | Cellphone Peril, Hands On or Off | Drivers who use hands-free cellphones thinking that they are safer than hand-held ones are still more prone to accidents than other drivers, a new study reports. The new study, which appears in the March issue of The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, finds that hands-free phones do not address the problem of what researchers called ''inattention blindness.'' The lead author, Dr. David L. Strayer of the University of Utah, said that drivers who used the hands-free phones might be giving themselves a false sense of security. ''At best,'' Dr. Strayer said, ''I think the evidence would suggest that you're going to be compromised in terms of your ability to react to unpredictable events.'' The report, parts of which also appear in the current issue of Injury Insights, is based on a study of more than 100 undergraduates who were asked to use a sophisticated driving simulator while fielding calls on a cellphone. Proponents of hands-free phones believe they are safer because they allow drivers to keep both hands on the wheel most of the time. (Hands are usually still needed to dial or to put on a headset.) But the researchers found otherwise. In one part of the study, students were told to drive for 40 miles on a simulated freeway, staying in the right lane as conditions changed. Students speaking on the phone drove ''sluggishly,'' the researchers said, letting the car in front of them pull farther ahead. Even so, when the car in front braked in heavy traffic, several of the students rear-ended it. In another part of the study, students who had been on the phone were unable to recall road signs they had seen, even though instruments recorded their eyes as having taken the signs in. When the drivers engaged in conversation with passengers, the problem did not occur. They simply adjusted their conversations to reflect the demands of the road, Dr. Strayer said. VITAL SIGNS: SAFETY |
1464024_1 | Consumers in Europe Resist Gene-Altered Foods | ''Luddite'' and ''immoral,'' saying that Europeans' fears about GM foods had persuaded some famine-ridden countries in Africa to reject genetically altered grains. Some Europeans believed that Mr. Zoellick was in effect blaming Europe for starvation in Africa. David Byrne, the European Union's health and consumer protection commissioner, said: ''The U.S. government, including Republican leaders in Congress, accuse Europe of using the issue of genetically modified food as a way of keeping out American exports.'' ''What Bob Zoellick said over the last few weeks has been unhelpful, clearly. It was unfair. It was wrong.'' The European Union finances nongovernmental organizations, but it is those groups themselves, not the European trading bloc, that have moved in some cases to steer Africans clear of genetically altered grains, Mr. Byrne insisted. ''The E.U.'s position on genetically modified food,'' he added, ''is that it is as safe as conventional food.'' That may be the official line at European Union headquarters in Brussels. But public sentiment in much of Europe, successfully stoked by environmental groups, is now so fiercely opposed to genetically altered food that in Austria, for example, politicians have won elections by vowing to keep ''Frankenfood'' at bay. Many supermarket chains across France, Britain, Italy and Austria, among others, yanked all genetically modified products from their shelves three years ago and are in no hurry to restock them. Most recently, hundreds of Europe's most respected chefs banded together to form a group called Euro-Toques to battle the biotechnology lobby. American companies like Monsanto stand to make enormous profits if Europe allows the importing of more genetically modified foods. A decision by the European Parliament on stricter labeling of genetically modified foods could be made as early as summer, and European officials hope that may make the food more acceptable, by clarifying exactly how it is made. But there is concern in the United States that the labeling will only alarm European consumers more. The proposed rules would trace genetically altered substances in corn, tomatoes, feed and oils and make it clear to consumers which products contained at least 0.9 percent of a genetically modified substance. The products concerned include highly refined corn oil, soybean oil and glucose syrup produced from cornstarch. In France and Italy, Europe's two food meccas, public revulsion at GM food runs especially deep. ''U.S. culture is different from European culture,'' said Lorenzo Consoli, a Greenpeace expert on genetic engineering. ''Here, |
1464033_0 | Who's Responsible for Checked Bags? | LAST year, we all read plenty of dark warnings about impending chaos in airline baggage-handling and check-in procedures. Some of us (ahem), even wrote up those forebodings, especially as airport managers shouted about the impossibility of meeting a federal law requiring the inspection of checked bags for explosives by Jan. 1. Well, in fact, things have gone fairly smoothly at domestic airports since New Year's Day. That's partly because the government backed off from requiring full machine scanning of bags at some big airports in favor of a temporary system using a combination of machines, human hands and even bomb-sniffing dogs, and partly because air travel has dropped even further than anticipated this winter as nervous travelers put off trips. Overwhelmingly, the Transportation Security Administration is getting high marks from frequent travelers for imposing a new airport-checkpoint regime in which unhappy, underpaid employees from penny-pinching private security companies have been replaced by courteous and well-trained federal employees, who make decent wages with benefits and generally seem glad to be on the job. But in one area things have not been so smooth, and many travelers -- and airlines -- are uneasy about it. Every day, mostly out of sight of passengers, federal inspectors are opening up and looking through millions of checked bags. Pilferage in airport baggage-handling areas has always been a small problem, but one that was at least legally covered by the contract of carriage between passenger and airline. But now, with bags passing temporarily out of airline custody en route, legal questions about liability for missing or damaged items have not been resolved. Business travelers and others who routinely pack electronic equipment and other expensive gear on road trips say they are nervous about anyone in a back room going through their checked bags, especially since the T.S.A. strongly suggests that passengers not lock their luggage. ''We understand and appreciate that there are folks who are going to be concerned about the notion of leaving their bags unlocked, and we appreciate that for many folks that is a change in travel habits, and one that not everyone is going to feel comfortable with,'' said Brian Turmail, a spokesman for the agency. Its Web site (www.tsa.gov) has information on security procedures. Right now, bags that are opened are resealed by T.S.A. employees with a kind of heavy-duty plastic zip-tie. Since those plastic ties are readily available in hardware |
1466987_0 | Tangled Up in Spam | The most obvious answer to the spam problem is charging postage for e-mail. A charge of as little as one-tenth of one cent would be unnoticeable to most users -- you would have to average 30 e-mail messages a day to approach a cost of $1 per month. A spammer, meanwhile, would incur a charge of $1,000 for every million unsolicited e-mail messages sent. Some will complain that this would ''commercialize'' the Internet. However, the Internet is already commercialized -- Internet service providers, telecoms, businesses and, yes, spammers, are using it to make money. It's time to create a rational structure for it. Joseph Rego Hastings on Hudson, N.Y. |
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1467242_0 | Editors' Note; Shifting Landscape | More on Pages 22 and 23: Cleaning the Air Standards for Water The Use of Public Land Finding Energy Sources |
1467038_3 | Heat-Seeking Canadians Segue Over to Cuba | 23, Fidel Castro personally presided over the opening of Hotel Playa Pesquero, the newest and largest of the scores of beach resorts the government has opened all over the island. Double rooms at the nicest all-inclusive resorts average about $250 a night, according to the season. ''Cuban resort'' may seem like an oxymoron to some tourists, but the new developments are a potent allure to Canadians, who travel to Cuba mainly for standard beach vacations. United States tourists in Cuba generally head to Havana for a taste of Cuban culture and the thrill of a country legally forbidden to them, Canadian travel agents and Cuban tourist authorities said. What worries the Florida tourist board is that if the United States drops its embargo on Cuba, domestic vacationers may seek Cuban beaches, too. Over the last 10 years, Visit Florida's recent report found, the number of tourists heading to Cuba has grown from less than 500,000 a year to nearly 2 million. And the amount they spend there has increased from less than $500 million a year to nearly $2 billion. In 2001, Cuba was the most popular Caribbean destination for vacationers from Canada, drawing 350,000 of its citizens, or 20 percent of Cuba's foreign visitors, the Florida tourist organization said. For now, Cuba's competition for Canadian vacationers is a limited threat to Florida's tourist industry. As usual, Canada sent more visitors to Florida in 2001, the latest year for which figures are available, than did any other foreign country; but Canadians accounted for just 2 million of the 70 million visitors to Florida that year, said Tom Flanagan, communications director for Visit Florida. Yet the organization's study found that even with the ban in place and without much Cuban marketing, 43 percent of domestic vacationers in Florida were interested in visiting Cuba, with the highest levels of interest among two groups, the richest travelers and the youngest. The good news, Mr. Flanagan said, is that so far most of those polled who were interested in visiting Cuba favored combining a trip there with a stay in Florida, with not even 10 percent interested in skipping Florida completely. But that does not mean it is too soon to start worrying, he said. ''Any kind of warm-weather competition to Florida is something we need to take into account in our marketing plans to position ourselves vis-à-vis those countries.'' TRAVEL ADVISORY: CORRESPONDENT'S REPORT |
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1467231_3 | In Trying to Avoid a Controversy, French Center Creates One | calls ''the art of dissent.'' ''What I really feel is cheated,'' Ms. Worthington said in Sebastopol, about 50 miles north of San Francisco. ''I make these works as a way to communicate with people. I don't expect people to agree, but I want to awaken something in them. That can't happen when the sculpture is sitting here instead of being shown.'' Ms. Worthington and her partner, Judith Fein, have spent the last two weeks spreading the word about the incident to other Bay Area artists with letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls. On her Web site, www.domjoy.com, Ms. Worthington has an open letter deploring censorship ''based on fear.'' Ms. Worthington said she had received some encouraging responses, but not from many of her colleagues at the Alliance of Women Artists. Georgette Owens, a native of France and the group's founder, said many of the artists understood why Ms. Worthington was upset, but they also appreciated the difficult situation of French people in this country. ''I tried to calm Nancy down and assure her that everybody likes her artwork, but because of the diplomatic situation taking place right now, they are afraid of showing it,'' Ms. Owens said. ''I don't think Alliance Française was at fault; they tried to be as diplomatic as they could.'' Ms. Owens said she shared the center staff's discomfort. She said she had never before encountered as much anti-French sentiment in 42 years of living in the United States as in the last few months. Recently, she said, a salesclerk at Sears asked about her accent. ''The young man said, 'If I were you, I would say you are Canadian, because we don't like the French right now,' '' Ms. Owens said. ''I canceled my order right there. I have never heard such comments before. My accent had always been a plus for me.'' But Mr. Horn, the board president, who recently returned from a meeting in Paris of presidents from Alliance Française branches around the world, said anti-American feeling in France was much greater than any anti-French sentiment in San Francisco. Even if he were wrong, he said, it would not justify removing Ms. Worthington's sculpture. ''I am going to write a letter of apology and invite her to bring it back,'' he said. ''The staff were doing their best. I hope the artist will cut them a little bit of slack.'' San Francisco Journal |
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1467220_1 | Ulster Militia Looks to Disarmament Talks and Declares a Truce | is about saving face, then people will be skeptical,'' said Mark Durcan, the leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, a moderate Catholic party that favors uniting Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic. ''If it means saving lives, then people will welcome it. ''We want to see the removal of the threat at any time, and not just time-limited promises from outfits whose words have meant little in the past. A qualified cease-fire from a dubious group can only get a qualified welcome from a skeptical community.'' The Ulster Defense Association also said that it would ''become faceless again,'' only communicating through its political wing, the Ulster Political Research Group. It said it would appoint a liaison to meet with the disarmament authority, led by John de Chastelain, a retired Canadian general, who has monitored the destruction of two arms dumps by the Irish Republican Army. But the Ulster Defense Association reiterated its refusal to decommission the rest of its arsenal until the I.R.A. fully disarms. This week, it turned over a stockpile of homemade pipe bombs to the police to be defused. For more than 30 years, the U.D.A. has terrorized Catholics in Northern Ireland with killings and street violence. During the height of the province's sectarian conflict in the early 1970's, it had 40,000 members. Current estimates of its size range from a few hundred to several thousand people. In recent years the group has also taken a heavy toll within Protestant communities, as it fought turf wars with other paramilitary groups over long-standing rivalries and for control of the drug trade in Northern Ireland. Today's statement seemed to offer tentative support for the peace efforts, saying, ''An agreed, acceptable and equitable final settlement will produce even greater peace and stability within the confines of our beloved Ulster.'' But the cease-fire is unlikely to jump-start the stalled negotiations, which have been in limbo since last October. At that time, Britain reimposed direct rule from London during an impasse over how to carry out the 1998 Belfast peace accord. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland met with the political parties earlier this month in an effort to plan for restoring operations of the local Parliament and government offices. They hoped to make progress before mid-March, when Irish politicians traditionally travel to Washington to meet with American leaders on St. Patrick's Day. |
1468176_1 | European Leaders Dig In to Defend Their Positions on Iraq | same view on the means to attain this goal.'' France's official position is that intrusive United Nations weapons inspections are working and that they should be reinforced, not abandoned, in an effort to avoid war. Mr. Aznar who faces overwhelming antiwar sentiment at home, was equally dug in, backing President Bush and calling a new resolution ''opportune.'' In an interview with Spanish radio earlier in the day, Mr. Aznar said a protracted inspection process would serve Mr. Hussein's interests. ''I do not favor giving tyrants more time, because they will not use it to disarm, but to arm themselves,'' he said. Relations between Mr. Chirac and Mr. Aznar turned frosty after Mr. Aznar joined seven other European leaders in writing an op-ed article published in several newspapers in favor of the American position. Shortly after the two men met, both houses of the French Parliament debated the merits of the French position. Not one speaker diverged significantly from the government's official position. Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin confidently told the French Senate that the new resolution had failed to win the nine votes required for passage by the 15-member Security Council. ''There is therefore no reason to evoke the hypothesis'' of France having to use its veto power to quash it, he added. At the moment, the American-sponsored draft resolution has the staunch support of only four countries on the Council, while five countries including France and Russia, which have veto power, support a counterproposal to reinforce the inspections. Both Mr. de Villepin and France's prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, sought to cast themselves as the upholders of international law, and they emphasized that France was by no means ''a pacifist nation.'' In the parliamentary debates, François Hollande, who represented the Socialist Party in the National Assembly, urged France to use its veto power in the Security Council. ''The veto is the logical next step to France's position, since it considers this war pointless and dangerous,'' he said. Many of the other speakers sought to reach out to the United States, where anti-French sentiment has been running high. ''Our gratitude to the United States is complete,'' said André Dulait, president of the Senate commission for foreign and defense policy. He added that ''the memory of their soldiers dying for us is still strong,'' but that the time to use force in Iraq had not yet come. But Claude Estier, who spoke |
1468255_2 | A Slick Carry-On for the Modern Pilgrim | to look because luggage is one of those things that at first glance, in a store, looks confusingly interchangeable. Kind of black and square. With zippers. But at a site like www.luggageonline.com, you can see an efficiently organized universe of luggage. The site, which sells more than three dozen brands, had hundreds of little images and descriptions of different models, enabling me to know at a glance which items were made of ballistic nylon and whether they featured one-touch handle systems, recessed ball-bearing wheels or exterior zippered pockets for travel documents. But before I could choose, I had one burning question: Which was the biggest size that was guaranteed to pass muster as a carry-on aboard a domestic flight? ''A 22-inch rollaboard,'' said Anne DeCicco, president of the Travel Goods Association, a trade group that represents the interests of all phases of luggage, from steamer trunks to clear-plastic add-on compartments and clutch bags that hold cash and an airline ticket. Although each airline sets its own rules for carry-ons, most domestic flights have a size limit of 45 linear inches, which translates into a 22-by-14-inch bag on wheels, stuffed full of clothes to a depth of nine inches. Sometimes you might be able to get a bigger bag onboard -- if, say, you're traveling on a 757 with roomier overhead compartments -- but don't bet on it. ''It's enforced gate by gate and airline by airline, based on how full a flight is and how big a plane is,'' Ms. DeCicco said. ''A 737 has much less carry-on space. The MD-80's, also very difficult. I always call ahead to see what kind of plane I'll be on before I pack.'' These days, luggage has become very specialized. You can buy see-through cases for toiletries, to allow security checkers to examine all your possessions without actually touching your personal items (some are available at eaglecreek.com) and bags with pockets for electronic equipment and cellphones (like Baggallini's bottom-zip tote bag, $69.99 at ebags.com). Most airlines strictly enforce a limit of one carry-on plus one briefcase or purse per passenger, Ms. DeCicco warned. I was dreading that moment when I had to decide whether to carry a briefcase (and then lug the heavy thing throughout the trip as if it were a purse, leaving strap marks on my shoulders) or simply a purse (which would leave me with nothing to transport my laptop |
1465054_3 | The new archbishop of Canterbury is known for taking stands, and often stirring controversy. | on childhood from stodgy moralizing, premature sexualizing, calculated marketing and rigid education, and one can imagine many liberals nodding in agreement until being drawn up short by his vigorous moral (although not legal) critique of arguments about abortion rights. It is much harder to explain, at least in any brief way, how this unusual mixture of influences, idioms and convictions plays itself out in more basic theological writings like those collected in his book ''On Christian Theology'' (Blackwell, 2000). That book opens with a useful typology of modes of doing theology. Celebratory theology elaborates and refines ideas and images already existing within the religious tradition's language of sacred text, sermons, hymnody and worship. It is what happens in a great deal of preaching. Communicative theology tries to bring the tradition's inherited language and categories into conversation, hopefully fruitful conversation, with different (and possibly hostile) language and categories that operate in the surrounding culture. Early Christian thinkers did this with Platonic thought; Aquinas did it with Aristotelian thought; liberation theologians did it with Marxism. Critical theology re-examines, in either a conservative or revisionist direction, the fundamental meanings of a tradition when those have become destabilized by their encounter with those new categories or other contrasting ways of construing the world. Much of ''On Christian Theology,'' beginning with an essay on what constitutes integrity in theological thought, falls into this latter category. Archbishop Williams takes on the big issues. What are the limits of pluralism in Christian belief? Is Christian speech and practice answerable to the judgment of the world or only to its own internal standards? How must Scripture be read? Creation, incarnation, trinity, resurrection, revelation, sacrament -- they are all topics here, although the author is more interested in offering fresh insights than any overall system. Often enough, those insights are striking ways of sustaining classic doctrines by recovering classic perspectives, as in Archbishop Williams's defense of God's creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, portrayed in the Bible's first pages, against certain feminist accusations that it is an exercise of patriarchal power. Of course, theology is not just preaching with footnotes but a technical discipline, and though it is far more open to the outsider than, say, physics or economics, ''On Christian Theology'' is not bedtime reading. Nonetheless, what is manifest here, and in Archbishop Williams's other writings, including his more political ones, is that theology, precisely because it deals |
1465092_2 | How Four Countries Reacted, And What the Iraqis Said, Too | reported on headway they have made. The first private interviews with Iraqi experts have taken place without official escorts. The problem of U-2 aerial surveillance has been resolved. Helicopters, drones, Mirage and Antonov aircraft are to be put at Unmovic's disposal to ensure comprehensive surveillance... The inspectors have thus been able to score some successes. Already today their presence on the ground has substantially diminished the danger emanating from Iraq. . . . Why should we now turn away from this path? Why should we now halt the inspections? On the contrary, the inspectors must be given the time they need to successfully complete their mission. . . . There should be no automatism leading us to the use of military force. All possible alternatives need to be exhaustively explored. . . . Diplomacy has not yet reached the end of the road. FOREIGN MINISTER TANG JIAXUAN OF CHINA . . . The latest visit to Baghdad by the two chief U.N. inspectors has achieved some positive results. The Iraqi side has made some commitments. We request Iraq to make good on those promises as soon as possible. . . . China believes that the inspection process is working and that inspectors should continue to be given the time they need so as to carry out Resolution 1441. . . . Mr. President, China is an ancient civilization. Our ancestors proposed long ago the idea of peace being the best option. . . . Sitting on the Security Council, we simply have no reason not to make our utmost efforts. . . . FOREIGN MINISTER IGOR IVANOV OF RUSSIA . . . Mr. Blix and Mr. ElBaradei's accounts today . . . have shown very clearly that in Iraq, a unique potential has been established in this area of inspections and monitoring. I think that in our discussions and conclusions, we should be guided not by feelings, emotions and sympathies or antipathies vis-à-vis one or another regime. Rather, we should be guided by the actual facts and on the basis of those facts, draw up our conclusions. And this is why we supported the return of the inspectors to Iraq. And this is why we must continue to provide them with all necessary assistance, because it is only on the basis of the professional data they provide us with that we can, without making a mistake, come to a conclusion. |
1465099_2 | Powell Calls for U.N. to Act on Iraq and Meets Deep Resistance | consult with President Bush and others in Washington and decide ''in the not too distant future'' how to proceed. A senior French official said after the meeting that France would not support any resolution that Washington offered next week. He did not say whether France would use its veto. American officials seemed surprised by the depth of the opposition on the Council to immediate military action. Even countries like Chile and Angola, whose support Washington believed to be locked in, said the more positive report by the chief inspectors made it premature to turn to force. But an angry rift among European nations was on display, as Spain and Bulgaria disagreed with France and its supporters. Foreign Minister Ana Palacio of Spain rejected Mr. de Villepin's proposals for extending the inspections, saying, ''We would be sending a message of weakness'' and adding, ''therefore this Council would lose its credibility.'' Mr. Blix adopted a strikingly different and more positive tone about Iraq's cooperation with his work than he did in his last report, on Jan. 27. At no point did he specifically criticize any Iraqi failure to cooperate, sticking to a cool and technical assessment of the events. Mr. Blix, the chief biological and chemical weapons inspector, accepted little of the evidence that Mr. Powell presented to the Council on Feb. 5 as proof that Iraq was working to deceive the inspectors and conceal weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Blix took issue with one of Mr. Powell's points, about trucks that American intelligence analysts had identified as working on chemical decontamination at a munitions depot. The arms chief said satellite images Mr. Powell showed of the trucks had been taken two weeks apart, so the movements of munitions they showed ''could just as easily have been a routine activity.'' Mr. Blix also rejected American assertions that Iraqi officials had obtained advance information on which sites inspectors would examine. ''In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that we were coming,'' he said. As a concession to the inspectors, Iraq adopted a law today -- hours before the Council convened -- banning all weapons of mass destruction. The law fulfilled an obligation imposed in a 1991 Council resolution. And both Mr. Blix and Dr. ElBaradei, the chief nuclear inspector, said they were satisfied with terms Iraq laid down for overflights by U-2, Mirage and Antonov |
1465090_2 | French Minister Delivers Appeal For More Time | yes, I hear criticism. There are those who think that inspections, in their very essence, cannot be effective at all. But let me recall that that was the very foundation of Resolution 1441 . . . Then there are those who believe that continuing the inspection process is a kind of delaying tactic to prevent or avert military intervention. That naturally raises a question of how much time is allowed Iraq. And this brings us to the heart of the matter. What is at stake is our credibility and our sense of responsibility. . . . France, for its part, would propose another meeting on 14 March at the ministerial level to assess the situation. We would then be able to judge the progress made and what remains to be done. Given this context, the use of force is not justified at this time. . . . Ten days ago, the U.S. secretary of state . . . reported alleged links between Al Qaeda and the Baghdad regime. Given the present state of our research and intelligence in liaison with our allies, nothing allows us to establish such links. But we must assess the impact that disputed military action would have on this level. Would such intervention today not be liable to exacerbate divisions between societies, cultures, peoples; divisions that nurture terrorism? . . . To those who are anguished, wondering when and how we are going to cede to war, I would like to say that nothing at any time in this Council will be done in haste, in misunderstanding, out of suspicion or out of fear. In this temple of the United Nations, we are the guardians of an ideal, the guardians of a conscience. This onerous responsibility and immense honor . . . must lead us to give priority to disarmament through peace. This message comes to you today from an old country, France; from a continent like mine, Europe, that has known war, occupation, barbarity. It is an old country that does not forget and is very aware of all it owes to freedom fighters who came from America and elsewhere. And yet France has always stood upright in the face of history before mankind. Faithful to its values, it wants resolutely to act together with all members of the international community. France believes in our ability to build together a better world. THREATS AND RESPONSES |
1462729_1 | France, Backed by Germany, Calls for Stronger Inspections, but the U.S. Is Unmoved | days if there was sufficient support for a second Council resolution authorizing military force. If not, the officials said, the United States and Britain probably would not come back to the Council for new negotiations, but would start to consolidate a separate coalition for war. The initial reactions to Mr. Powell's speech showed Europe divided. Britain declared that Iraq was in a grave new breach of Council resolutions while Spain strongly backed the United States' charge that Iraq had failed to disarm. Iraq gave no help to the opponents of United States-led military action. In a belligerent statement, the Iraqi ambassador, Mohammed A. Aldouri, accused Mr. Powell of fabricating audiotapes and other evidence. He also rejected the recent criticisms from the chief weapons inspectors about Iraqi cooperation in the inspections. Mr. Aldouri repeated Iraq's insistence that it had cooperated fully and that it would allow flights of the inspectors' U-2 surveillance plane under certain conditions -- terms that both chief weapons inspectors and the Council have rejected. There were subtle signs that Mr. Powell's presentation had produced some shifts. The French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, said for the first time that Paris had ''indications'' that Iraq was developing the nerve agent VX, anthrax and botulinum toxin, and was building missiles to exceed United Nations range limits. Mr. de Villepin insisted before the Council that France, a permanent member with veto power, did not rule out the use of force if it became clear that Iraq had refused to give up its weapons peacefully. Many Council envoys welcomed the United States' initiative to bring its intelligence information before the Council. But they urged Mr. Powell to turn over the data, and any other secret intelligence he did not make public, to the weapons inspectors. Most nations said they would wait for the inspectors to verify Mr. Powell's disclosures and would send the information to their capitals to be examined by intelligence experts there. Secretary General Kofi Annan moved to dispel rumors that he might travel to Baghdad to urge Mr. Hussein to cooperate with the inspections. ''I still believe that war is not inevitable,'' Mr. Annan said. But he appealed urgently to Iraq to ''listen to'' Mr. Blix and Mr. ElBaradei when they returned on Feb. 8. The contending strategies in play on the Council came into clear definition. Mr. Powell made the case that the inspections had failed because |
1462679_1 | What Are the Chances? | and cars. They help determine home insurance rates for tens of millions of people in the United States, Europe and Japan. And now some of the techniques are being used to analyze the chances of terrorist attack. The concepts were developed four decades ago, but recent advances in computing power have increased both the use of such analyses and the confidence in them. ''A couple of years ago the computers couldn't run these sorts of programs,'' said Detlef Steiner, a mathematician who is chief executive of the Clarendon Insurance Group of New York, the biggest subsidiary of the insurance giant Hanover Re. ''Now they can do it, no problem.'' And yet, of course, disasters still happen. What the risk analyses can do in the case of a space project, for example, is not only estimate the overall chances of a failure, but also compare the many ways it might unfold, helping engineers direct their resources, and preventive efforts, accordingly. The idea behind probabilistic risk assessment is that mathematics can help determine the chances of a particular outcome (a power system failure, or a hurricane that destroys thousands of homes) based on what is known or estimated about the smaller variables that lead to those outcomes. For example, companies serving the insurance industry develop models of hurricane behavior based on historical data that might include a dozen variables. Those variables would include the number of hurricanes that might strike, their initial location, their path, their size and their intensity, according to Karen M. Clark, president and chief executive of the AIR Worldwide Corporation, a developer of risk models for the insurance industry. The analysts then try to use historical data to estimate the relative frequency of those variables. These models might include 5,000 or 10,000 different potential hurricane patterns that have been weighted for relative frequency based on the historical record. For instance, the experts think that a storm as ferocious as Hurricane Andrew, which devastated parts of south Florida in 1992, will occur on average every 30 or 40 years. The 5,000 or 10,000 storm patterns (some of which include no hurricanes and a few of which include Florida-destroying cataclysms) are then applied in random order to models of the properties insured by one particular company. Using a random order is called a Monte Carlo analysis. The results of those thousands of tests, known as iterations, are aggregated to form |
1462700_1 | F.D.A. Says Food Supply May Contain Altered Pigs | pigs were sold to a livestock dealer who might have sold them for use as food. While the university insisted that the offspring had not inherited the foreign genes and were thus not genetically engineered, the drug agency said it could not verify that. In any case, the offspring were not supposed to have been sold for food without permission, the agency said. ''They were not to release them without our permission and this is their potential violation,'' Dr. Lester Crawford, F.D.A. deputy commissioner, said in a telephone news briefing, adding that the university could face fines or be required to stop certain research. Dr. Crawford said the agency did not consider the animals harmful because animals have the proteins produced by the genes anyway, and there would be no extra residue of these proteins in the meat. Bill Murphy, associate chancellor for public affairs at the university, said testing was thorough. He said the university had been doing this since 1999 and had discussed its testing program with the F.D.A. in 2001. ''It was a surprise to hear them say today that they never knew those pigs were going to market,'' Mr. Murphy said, adding that Illinois did not think it had to ask for permission to sell those pigs because they were not genetically engineered. Mr. Murphy would not reveal the researchers involved, saying the university feared vandalism by those opposed to genetic engineering. It has stepped up patrols of its animal laboratories. While genetically modified crops are now consumed, there have been no genetically engineered animals used as food. To increase milk production, many dairy farms inject cows with a cow growth hormone made using genetically engineered cells, but the cows themselves are not genetically engineered. The drug agency is now evaluating an application for the first genetically altered animal for use as food -- salmon engineered to grow quickly. A report by the National Research Council last year urged the agency to be cautious in allowing foods from transgenic animals on the market. There does appear to have been an incident in 2001 in which meat from genetically engineered pigs was eaten. Three transgenic pigs produced at the University of Florida that were supposed to be destroyed were stolen by a technician, who gave them to a butcher. Sausages made from those pigs were served at a funeral, according to a report by The Associated Press. |
1462758_0 | World Business Briefing | Europe: Russia: Less Red Tape | A Russian research organization, in an extensive survey of hundreds of small businesses, announced today that legislation enacted in 2001 and 2002 has begun to reduce Russia's red tape. In a study conducted with the World Bank, the Moscow-based Center for Economic and Financial Research interviewed 2,000 companies in 20 regions and found that new laws limiting government inspections of businesses and the number of licenses a business must obtain have begun to reduce corporate paperwork. Sabrina Tavernise (NYT) |
1465854_1 | Offsetting Environmental Damage by Planes | in Jamaica; or take some other conservation measure aimed at offsetting the harm of an individual's commercial flight. Take that Boeing 747's round trip to London. It will discharge a total of 880,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, or 126 pounds for each mile flown. At an occupancy rate of 78 percent, each of the 317 passengers will be responsible for 2,776 pounds of the pollutant. Future Forests, which is based in London, allows a traveler to help offset those emissions by planting two trees or installing two energy-saving light bulbs in a developing country for each round trip to London. At Future Forests you cannot save the world on the cheap: each tree or light bulb will set you back about $12. Americans cannot deduct that from their taxes, as Future Forests, which was created by British marketing and advertising executives, is a foreign for-profit company. On the other hand, its Web site (www.futureforests.com) offers a wealth of information about the environmental impact of lifestyles and travels and about the steps that can be taken to soften that impact. It also features an impressive database with thousands of airports worldwide. That once-in-a-lifetime round trip from Akiachak Seaplane Base in Alaska to the always exciting city of Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, England? Chalk up 3,430 pounds of carbon dioxide on the debit side of your environmental account, but still just two trees or bulbs on the credit side. Future Forests offers a no-frills menu of one tree or bulb for each short-haul flight, two trees or bulbs for each medium-distance trip and five of either for each long-range odyssey. Each transaction will net you a free luggage tag made of recycled leather. Future Forests is not the only game in town. The Better World Club (www.betterworldclub.com), the self-declared environmentally friendly alternative to the AAA, offers a simple alternative. Suggested donations of $11 for every domestic flight and $22 for every international flight, will be invested in new energy-efficient heating systems in schools in its hometown, Portland, Ore. On trips booked through its travel agency, Better World Travel, Better World Club will pay part or all of the fees itself. The group has rejected tree planting as a solution, however, exposing a rift in the nascent movement. ''It is very difficult to calculate the carbon dioxide absorption by trees,'' said Mitchell Rofsky, president of the Better World Club. ''It is easy to cheat, and |
1465850_10 | Wanted: Traffic Cops For Space | costs to commercial satellite owners from the proposed standards will be holding in reserve some of the fuel that is used to keep certain satellites precisely positioned. The standards will require those satellites, toward the end of their useful lives, to be boosted into ''graveyard orbits,'' said Dr. Phillip D. Anz-Meador, a physicist and NASA consultant in Houston who has done many studies of the debris problem. This could cost some companies hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue from the abbreviated missions of their equipment. Dr. Anz-Meador and many other space scientists here and in Europe said they expected a long fight before binding international standards were adopted, mainly because spaceflight involves a host of questions that have hardly been debated. ''There are huge issues,'' Dr. Anz-Meador said. ''Think about space salvage,'' he said. ''Who owns a piece of debris? Who is liable if there's an accident? What about trade secrets, national security?'' Indeed, several experts pointed to the dozens of classified military and intelligence satellites roving space as a daunting issue. The positions of these devices are not provided to the public or other countries by American and Russian military agencies that track debris and satellites. If an uncharted satellite breaks up and threatens a private satellite or a spacecraft, experts asked, will that information be released? Like Mr. Fernand, Dr. Anz-Meador compared the situation in space to practices on the high seas, but with one big difference. At sea, a wrecked ship sinks; in space its remains may linger for decades or centuries. Worse yet, as orbiting fragments break up through internal explosions or collisions with other debris, clouds of potentially lethal junk continue to grow denser. As long as more debris is being generated than is falling into the atmosphere, Dr. Anz-Meador said, navigating space will be increasingly perilous. ''Imagine if all the boats that have ever sailed the world's oceans were primarily still out there,'' he said. ''The crews might be dead and gone, but they're still sailing around. You could launch a new supertanker and be rammed by a Greek trireme. That may be what we're headed for.'' Indeed, he and other experts noted, such a collision has already happened. The piece of debris that struck the French Cerise satellite, which was launched on an Ariane rocket in 1995, came from the exploded upper stage of an Ariane rocket, one launched in 1986. |
1465864_1 | Internet High-Wire Act With an 8-Pound Laptop | few airlines, most of them foreign, and many hotels are spending money to start accommodating the growing demand by business travelers for a good Internet connection. Last month, Lufthansa began testing in-flight broadband Internet service provided by Connexion by Boeing, a subsidiary of the aircraft manufacturer, on one of its 747-400's between Frankfurt and Washington, with tentative plans to extend the service on about 80 long-range jets next year. British Airways, noting that 75 percent of its business travelers carry laptops and say that they are ready to try in-flight Internet access, began testing the Connexion system last week on a 747-400 between New York and London. Japan Airlines and S.A.S. have plans to offer the service next year. Among other customers of the fledgling Connexion system are owners of corporate jets. Last year, Virgin Atlantic wired up four long-haul jets for e-mail-only service through Tenzing Communications, with plans to expand it to its entire fleet. Tenzing is partly owned by Boeing's archrival, Airbus. Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines and Air Canada are also in various stages of testing Tenzing e-mail systems. Among hotels, Marriott International recently rolled out wireless high-speed Internet service at more than 400 hotels in the United States, Britain and Germany. Various satellite-based technologies to provide high-speed Internet access in places where it had not been available before were announced with flourishes just before travel fell off a cliff after Sept. 11, 2001. Now some of those technologies are re-emerging and trying to get traction in the business-travel market as general demand for high-speed Web and e-mail services continues unabated. ''People don't want to change their habits when they get on an airplane,'' said Stanley A. Deal, the vice president for global network sales at Connexion by Boeing, which is basing its sales projections on survey estimates that about a fifth of all passengers on long-haul flights will shell out the $25 to $35 it will cost for laptop access on intercontinental flights. Mr. Deal said that anyone using the in-flight service on a personal laptop ''will be able to do what you normally do'' at home on a high-speed Internet hookup. I tried it out on the British Airways 747-400 test flight to London last week, and my first impression was this: One of the things you really don't want to be hearing in the middle of the night in an airplane 35,000 feet above the |
1464360_2 | Exhibit A for Mainstreaming; A Boy With Brain Damage, Happy in a Regular School | part, a consequence of sheer volume -- there are more than 140,000 special education students in New York City, a number that is larger than the entire student population of many school systems elsewhere. And unlike other cities, New York has a district dedicated solely to special education. Linda Wernikoff, the deputy superintendent for special education, acknowledged that the city has been moving slowly. In the past, the city ''relied very heavily on segregated classes,'' she said, adding, ''You do not change 20 years in a year or two.'' Malcolm, like any other special education student, needs extra resources, including a laptop computer and a full-time aide and a special education teacher to jointly teach each of his classes. The school system could not provide cost comparisons for mainstreaming a special education student versus keeping the student segregated, in part because the level of services can vary widely. On average, the city spends $28,000 a year on each special education student. In class, Malcolm's attention wanders often, and he drifts off without warning. During one period, he might stretch his arms in a huge yawn before putting his head on a desk to fall asleep. Later, he might be explaining what makes shapes mathematically similar. ''You don't know what will grab him,'' said Sam Affoumado, one of Malcolm's humanities teachers. ''When you see that he is interested in something, you have to capitalize on that right away.'' In a recent class, Mr. Affoumado asked students what self-confidence meant. Several raised their hands, but Mr. Affoumado knew whom to call on. ''You can think you are good, but you're really only good if people say so,'' Malcolm said, before turning the conversation to one of his favorite topics, rap music. ''Rappers have to impress other people. They can't just think their songs are good. It matters what other people think.'' Malcolm knows what other people think. He is a teenager who is constantly trying to impress others. Although his brain injury has impaired his speech, he does not hesitate to perform freestyle raps for anyone who will listen. Students call him Mr. Popular, a name he has earned by knowing nearly everyone in the school. With his perfectly braided cornrows, broad smile and long, curly eyelashes, Malcolm could pass for a teenage heartthrob. He wears stylish sweat suits and trendy down jackets, like many of today's MTV stars. ''I know I'm |
1464239_0 | Ketchup With a Pedigree, A Far Cry From Goo | IN the depths of this frigid February, the taste of ripe summer tomatoes seems as distant a memory as the warm days that went with them. One of the last places you would expect to find that deep flavor is in a bottle of ketchup. Unless it is the heirloom tomato garlic ketchup from Heirloom Harvest Foods. More like a fresh-tasting tomato dip than a cloying condiment, it has a meaty, chunky texture and an intense, bright tomato flavor that comes, as the name suggests, from varieties of heirloom tomatoes. Dave Size, the company's president, began making the ketchup last summer in Frankford, Del., where he has been growing organic heirloom tomatoes and garlic since 1995. ''I was finding myself composting second heirloom tomatoes that were fabulously tasty,'' he said, ''and I wanted to do something with them.'' Ketchup seemed a natural outlet, if he could develop a recipe that showcased the full flavors of the pink Brandywine, Black Krim and Globe tomatoes he raised. So he and a friend, Mary-Ann Thompson, an environmental lawyer, began looking through recipes, until they found an old-fashioned Amish one that used onions and spices like cinnamon and clove, as well as apple cider vinegar rather than corn syrup. They added just enough heirloom garlic to give the ketchup a kick without overpowering the tomato-and-spice flavor. And the results are superb: complex, concentrated and far from the standard-issue squeeze-bottle goo. Now if we could bottle those warm days. MELISSA CLARK Heirloom tomato garlic ketchup is $4.95 for a 16-ounce bottle, plus shipping; (302) 245-5577). TEMPTATION |
1466390_0 | As Gasoline Prices Rise, Drivers Have Doubts About Why | Beyond antiwar demonstrations and troop deployments, gasoline prices that have jumped to more than $2 a gallon in some places seem to many drivers to be the most tangible evidence of the Bush administration's plans for a possible attack on Iraq. People pumping gas from Los Angeles to Charlotte, N.C., in the past few days surmised that the oil companies were cashing in on the uncertain geopolitical climate, with the effect trickling down to the corner gas station. ''If there's a chance of the oil companies' driving up the prices, they'll do that,'' said Jeremy Levenson, a doctor who had just paid $30.63 -- at $2.09 a gallon, the most he had ever spent -- to fill the tank of his Infiniti I30 with high-octane gasoline at a Union 76 station in the Westchester district of Los Angeles. ''Who knows how much of this is artifice and how much is created by the oil companies for their own benefit?'' he asked. ''It's what the traffic will bear. It's capitalism.'' Since late last year, the price of gasoline has risen an average of 29 cents a gallon, according to the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group representing more than 400 oil and natural gas companies. According to AAA, the motorist club, which assembles a daily compilation of gas prices, today's national average for regular unleaded gas was $1.66 a gallon, a few cents shy of the record average, $1.71, reached on May 15, 2001. Here in California, gasoline costs more than anywhere else in the country, with drivers today paying about $1.89 a gallon for regular unleaded gas and $2.05 for premium, AAA reported. Prices in Hawaii, usually the highest, were just a cent or two less. In New York State, regular was selling today for an average for $1.76 a gallon, with premium at $1.92; in New Jersey, home to many refineries, regular was $1.55 a gallon, while premium was $1.73. But several factors are in the mix behind rising gas prices, including the possibility of war, said John Felmy, the petroleum institute's chief economist. ''You either believe in conspiracies or you believe in market fundamentals,'' Mr. Felmy said. ''Most consumers just see the price going up and down, but they don't look into why.'' Among the main reasons for the rise in prices, he said, was a 78-day strike by oil workers in Venezuela that removed as much as |
1466357_0 | Regain a Familiar View Within Windows XP | Q. Sometimes the instructions for finding and adjusting settings in the Control Panel in Windows XP do not seem to match what is on my screen. For instance, I don't see separate icons for things like Sound. Why is that? A. Windows XP gives its users two ways to see the system's control panels, so if you are following along and things do not seem to match, odds are that the view is different from the one being described. In an attempt to make Windows XP more user-friendly, Microsoft created a less cluttered default view of the Control Panel, which has the words ''Pick a Category'' at the top of the screen and nine icons that reflect general categories or tasks, one of which is Sound, Speech and Audio Devices. Although it is a tidier view, finding the specific control panel you want to change may take a few clicks. The classic view of the Control Panel, which you can get to by clicking on the Switch to Classic View option in the task panel on the left side of the screen, restores the familiar collection of individual icons to the Control Panel. Q. We live in Manhattan but spend four or five months of the year in France. Last year I purchased several DVD's of French films but then discovered I couldn't play them in our DVD player in New York because they were coded for European DVD players. How can I overcome this problem? A. To combat international piracy and to control when specific movies arrive in certain countries, DVD makers can include region codes in the contents of each disc. Most DVD's sold in France are encoded for Region 2, while most standard DVD players sold in the United States are designed to play only Region 1 discs. Buying a Region 2 player would be one way to play the discs. (France uses a video standard called Secam, which is different from NTSC, the standard in the United States, so playing French-produced video data may require a converter box.) Some DVD-player software will allow you to legally reset your DVD drive's region code a limited number of times to play the discs on the PC. It is also technically possible to play the foreign discs by fiddling with the DVD player's settings or by buying a ''region-free'' DVD player. Although these modified machines are sold on the |
1466386_0 | The President and the Protesters; The Role of the French | To the Editor: Re ''Chirac Scolding Angers Nations That Back U.S.'' (front page, Feb. 19): It's truly shocking that President Jacques Chirac of France would publicly muzzle the voices of other democratic leaders with whom he disagrees. The French president, you report, in an emotional outburst after the European Union meeting about Iraq, derided the Central and Eastern European countries that have signed letters expressing their support for the American policy on Iraq for being ''badly brought up'' and having missed ''an opportunity to keep quiet.'' Is diplomatic dialogue to be replaced by such behavior? MARCEL TUCHMAN New York, Feb. 19, 2003 |
1466371_4 | Do-It-All Palmtops: New Tricks | nicely priced; plans range from $20 to $40 a month, not including a voice plan. (Each plan grants you a certain number of megabytes of data sent and received, a silly system. Who knows how many e-mail messages or Web pages that is?) The BlackBerry 6700 series, on the other hand, is already available for AT&T, T-Mobile and Nextel, with Cingular and Verizon editions on the way. And here's the big news: Unlike the previous BlackBerry model, which required an earbud for voice calls, this one has a built-in microphone and speaker. Hallelujah -- you can hold it up to your ear. The 6710, comparable in size (4.8 by 3.0 by 0.7 inches) to its predecessors and to the Tungsten W, offers other improvements over previous BlackBerry models. Its keyboard lights up in the dark, for example, and the battery is removable so you can travel with a spare. Otherwise, though, the BlackBerry is the same efficient e-mail machine that has become the darling of white-collar workers on both coasts. But at $500, it's still overpriced, a testament to RIM's apparent belief that its core constituency of corporate customers still has deep pockets. The Internet service prices are high, too; the cheapest AT&T plan is $35 a month (not including a voice plan). Still, you could fill a book with examples of the sweet ways that the BlackBerry's famously elegant software saves time and steps. Typing someone's initials pinpoints a name in your address book without scrolling. When you're addressing an e-mail message, tapping the space bar intelligently inserts an @ sign the first time, a period (as in ''.com'') the second time. You can omit apostrophes in contractions and capitals at the beginning of sentences; the software adds them for you (the Tungsten does this, too). And the BlackBerry lists all communications -- phone calls, e-mail, and so on -- in the same In box, an unusual approach that makes a lot of sense. Both devices can retrieve your e-mail in any of three ways. First, they can grab messages straight off the Internet (from an EarthLink account, for example) so that you're seeing the same mail you would see on your regular computer. Second, if you have a Windows PC with a full-time Internet connection (a cable modem, for example), you can install a program that auto-forwards your desktop e-mail to the palmtop. (This feature costs $50 to |
1487585_0 | Shock Therapy for Police Recruits | What kind of person constitutes a threat to public safety and the general welfare? When do you unholster a gun and when do you use it? Where is the line between a rights-bearing citizen and a rights-forfeited lawbreaker? Law enforcement aspirants generally expect answers in concrete terms, with strict guidelines made clear as to what separates the good cop from rogue cowboy. And it's what civil rights advocates, editorialists and the public also expect. But the lessons being imparted in a classroom at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Kayle Becker was conducting a seminar for two dozen trainees from the Baltimore County Police Academy, are far more oblique. As part of a spreading police education program that the museum counts among its most prized achievements as it celebrates its 10th anniversary, the recruits had finished a two-hour museum tour, a history lesson that stunned many recruits to sobered silence. There were its depictions of Jewish ghettos and the Nazis' gleeful exercise of brutal authority, its photographs of victims, its collection of the shoes of the exterminated, its relentless documentation of savage cruelty and, perhaps most stunning of all, of the world's indifference to it. The recruits heard a lecture, accompanied by shocking photos, about police practices in Nazi Germany from Peter Black, a museum historian. And Ms. Becker, associate director for law enforcement outreach for the Anti-Defamation League, explained the similarities between the mandates of the local police in the Third Reich and those of the recruits. Her list included having knowledge of their communities, investigating suspicious behavior, marshaling power and responsibility, making good use of their training and experience, instilling trust in the public and ensuring the continuity of an orderly society. Ms. Becker reminded the recruits that they would enforce laws they did not have a hand in writing, among people who often did not welcome them and under the scrutiny of an impatient, skeptical public. As she completed her analogy, it seemed to be dawning on the recruits that 60 years ago in Germany young men and women just like them, perhaps just as certain of their purpose, were blindly committing themselves to evil. ''Every single thing happens on a local level,'' Ms. Becker said, ''and that's you. You decide who is a stereotype and who is an individual. You decide who is a criminal and who isn't.'' It was a potent moment for these |
1492464_0 | Metro Briefing | New York: Albany: 100 New Jobs Set For Upstate | Gov. George E. Pataki announced yesterday that a company that recycles scrap rubber tires would create 100 new jobs in upstate New York. The company, Recovery Technologies Group Inc., is the largest tire-recycling firm in North America, the governor said. It will establish plants in Albany, Rotterdam and Romulus, in Seneca County, where an existing storage site will also be expanded. The company recycles more than 40 million tires a year at 17 plants in North America. It is estimated that six million tires will be recycled in New York when the three plants are running by next fall, officials said. Al Baker (NYT) |
1492315_2 | Its Reputation and Its Odor Precede It | character and flavor. Moreover, some dairy scientists say pasteurization also destroys beneficial bacteria that can protect against dangerous pathogens like listeria. Dr. Catherine Donnelly, a microbiologist at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences of the University of Vermont, who has been studying listeria for 20 years, said such microbes occur far more frequently in cheeses made from pasteurized milk. ''Pasteurization,'' Dr. Donnelly said, ''just gives a false sense of security.'' Époisses developed a special notoriety in 1999 when two people in France died from listeria-contaminated cheese that was sold as Époisses. The French government closed the plant that made the cheese, on the same day that a court ruled that the company had illegally infringed on the identity of the consortium of genuine Époisses makers. No one can say for certain, but it appears that the false Époisses may have been made with pasteurized milk. ''It's taken us three years to recover,'' Mr. Gaugry said. So how have the French, the Italians, the Swiss managed all these years to eat soft, oozing raw-milk cheeses without massive attacks of food-borne illnesses? The dairies in France that produce the finest artisanal cheeses are mostly small in scale compared with industrial producers, said Rob Kaufelt, the owner of Murray's Cheese Shop in Manhattan, and the milk they use comes strictly from local producers. ''I have seen a number of these cheese dairies,'' Mr. Kaufelt said, ''and they are extremely closely inspected.'' Transparency and traceability, twin watchwords of post-mad-cow food production in Europe, are more easily achieved at this level, he said, so that if something does go wrong, production or distribution can be halted quickly. Mr. Gaugry showed me around his family's spotless, white-tiled factory. The method used to produce Époisses is what the French call caillé lactique, in which the curd develops slowly over many hours at low temperatures with very little rennet, a process that encourages the development of both fine flavors and the acidity that helps to inhibit the growth of pathogens. Hand-ladled into molds, the curds are set to drain for 24 hours, then unmolded, salted and left to dry and ripen on stainless steel shelves in a pristine white-tiled room with controls on temperature and humidity. The final touch in producing a great Époisses is the periodic washing of the rind of each cheese, eight or nine times during the ripening period, which lasts at least 28 |
1492394_2 | Hormone Use Found to Raise Dementia Risk | decide whether to quit. Because the women in the study were 65 or older, it is not known whether the findings apply to younger postmenopausal women. It is not known, either, whether the results apply to women who take other hormone combinations or estrogen alone. Women who take estrogen alone are being studied separately. Estrogen alone can cause cancer of the uterus and so is prescribed only for women who have had hysterectomies. But adding progestin protects the uterus, so women who have not had hysterectomies are given combination treatment. The report on the study is accompanied in the journal by two other reports that also have unfavorable findings on combined hormone therapy and the brain. One study found that women on the drugs did not perform as well on cognitive tests as women on placebos; the other confirmed previous research showing that the combination therapy increased the risk of stroke. About 2.7 million American women take combination hormone therapy, including 1.2 million who use Prempro. Wyeth said that the majority of users were 51 to 55 years old, and only 14 percent of all new prescriptions were for women 65 or older. The hormones were never approved to prevent or treat Alzheimer's disease. They are approved by the Food and Drug Administration for only two purposes: to treat menopausal symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal irritation; and to prevent the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis. But because the hormones can slightly increase the risk of breast cancer, strokes and heart attacks, the agency recommends that women use the lowest dose for the shortest time possible, and that they consider other treatments to prevent osteoporosis. Last July, a large federal study of the combination therapy was halted ahead of schedule because the drugs were found to cause a small but significant increase in the risk of invasive breast cancer. That study, the Women's Health Initiative, also found that hormones increased the risks of heart attack and stroke, which they were once thought to prevent. The drugs increased the odds of blood clots as well. The study, which included 16,000 women, was the first and the largest to compare women on hormones with a group taking placebos. Many women gave up hormone therapy after the study came out. Before it was published, about 6 million women were taking combination therapy. After the disappointing findings, the last great hope for hormone therapy |
1492374_0 | To Graduation, Tossing Obstacles Aside | College commencement signifies the end of a journey, often long and arduous. But for some graduating seniors, the trip involves extra twists and turns. Here are the stories of graduates with their own special reasons to celebrate. RON FRANCIS By God's Grace, and Others' Ron Francis's mother, Linda, credits God with her son's graduation from Gettysburg College. But even Mrs. Francis, a member of a Pentecostal church, acknowledges that God did not work alone. There was Philadelphia Futures, which pairs low-income public school students with volunteer mentors and brought Mr. Francis to the attention of David Boldt and his wife, Kelly, when he was a ninth grader. The Boldts pledged to do whatever it took to prepare Mr. Francis for college, which included having him move in with them. There was Temple University, which provided a summer math enrichment program, and Germantown Friends, an elite private high school, which gave Mr. Francis a scholarship. There was Jon Landau, an immigration lawyer who got green cards for Mr. Francis, his mother and older brother, who immigrated from Jamaica in 1987. There was Charles Burton, a member of the Gettysburg College board, who helped Mr. Francis win a scholarship and drove him back and forth from Philadelphia for semester breaks. There was Mr. Francis's mother, who scrubbed floors to support her family, and prayed. Finally, of course, there was Mr. Francis, whose diligence and hopefulness made people want to help him. ''I knew I possessed the potential to do anything I wanted,'' said Mr. Francis, 23, who majored in economics and is trying to get a job in Web design. ''It was just a matter of finding the resources.'' Ms. Francis took her children to Philadelphia for the educational opportunities. ''A lot of people worked very hard,'' she said. ''David and Kelly were a blessing. They saw how I was struggling.'' Mr. Boldt is a former editor and columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer who now teaches high school history in Bolivia. Mrs. Boldt made the trip to Pennsylvania for the graduation. Mr. Boldt got every detail of the event on May 18 via computer instant messaging with Mr. Francis and his brother, Kevin. ''I was telling Ron he has to get ready for the next phase,'' Mr. Boldt said in a telephone interview. ''Graduating from college is a steppingstone. He has to look at the next fence he has to jump over. |
1490839_6 | Security Cutbacks Worry Airport Officials | and ask to see their tickets or driver's licenses. Mr. Orlandella declined to say how effective those efforts had been, though he said no terrorists had been caught. Some lawmakers are calling for the Transportation Security Administration to upgrade its technology. For example, Representative Harold Rogers, a Republican from Kentucky and a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, said the agency could replace older magnetometers with newer, more accurate ones. Mr. Rogers -- one of several lawmakers urging Adm. James M. Loy, the head of the agency, to cut the work force -- pointed out that the government would not need screeners guarding exit doors near checkpoints if those doors were locked. He added that if the agency used only comprehensive bomb detection machines to screen checked baggage, instead of smaller trace-detection devices, staffing could be cut without reducing security. The agency now uses 1,100 large bomb detection machines and 4,800 to 4,900 smaller devices, which require workers to swab bags and run the samples through computers. Mr. Turmail said that manufacturers were unable to make enough of the bomb detection machines last year, but more would be ordered and larger airports would use more of them. The agency has not ignored the virtues of innovation. It is trying to develop a screening procedure called Capps II, in which four pieces of information about travelers -- name, address, phone number and birth date -- would be run through a database. Each passenger would then be assigned a score indicating his or her likelihood of being linked to foreign terrorists, and screeners could focus their attention on travelers identified as higher risks. The agency began early tests of the system at Delta Air Lines in February and intends to start using the database next year, Mr. Turmail said. The effort has its critics, though. Privacy watchdog groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center, based in Washington, have attacked it as being too intrusive. John D. Woodward Jr., a senior analyst at the Rand Corporation, said that airport security was more efficient and foolproof when all travelers were subjected to the same scrutiny. Correction: May 24, 2003, Saturday A credit in Business Day on Thursday for a picture of airline passengers waiting in lines at McCarran International in Las Vegas, which is facing a 15 percent reduction in security screeners, misstated the photographer's given name. He is John Gurzinski, not Joe. |
1490856_1 | Bush Links Europe's Ban on Bio-Crops With Hunger | a far softer side to American foreign policy, Mr. Bush insisted that widened use of ''high-yield bio-crops'' would greatly increase agricultural productivity in some of the poorest nations. ''Yet our partners in Europe are impeding this effort,'' he said, clearly meaning France and Germany, though he named no countries. ''They have blocked all new bio-crops because of unfounded, unscientific fears.'' The result, he charged, was that African nations that fear being shut out of European markets are not investing in the technology. He appeared to be referring to countries like Uganda and Namibia. ''European governments should join, not hinder, the great cause of ending hunger in Africa,'' he said. Mr. Bush made no mention of the United States' own strong economic interest in the outcome of the dispute with Europe. American corporations lead the world in biotechnology and are anxious to open the lucrative European market. Last week the administration filed the equivalent of a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization to force Europe to lift its ban on genetically modified food, a step that Mr. Bush had delayed during the debate on Iraq. Inside the White House, the emotions about the countries that tried to stop the invasion are still raw; recently a senior administration official told reporters that diplomacy to disarm Saddam Hussein had been going well until, in the official's view, France stabbed the United States in the back. The French have complained that such comments are part of a concerted effort by the administration to turn the American public against France and its goods. Today the United States trade representative, Robert B. Zoellick, wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal accusing the European Union of disregarding scientific evidence and sending ''a devastating signal to developing countries that stand to benefit most from innovative agricultural technologies.'' He charged that some African countries were refusing American food aid ''because of fabricated fears stoked by irresponsible rhetoric about food safety.'' The European public has been highly reluctant to purchase any genetically modified products, citing unknown long-term health and environmental risks. European officials have said that the Bush administration can argue over the openness of the European market but that they reject as underhanded the implication that their stricter rules on genetically modified food are somehow responsible for hunger in Africa. Tony van der Haegen, the expert for food safety at the European Union, said administration officials had |
1490922_0 | World Health Meeting Approves Treaty to Discourage Smoking | The World Health Assembly today adopted the first treaty ever devoted entirely to health, one intended to discourage cigarette smoking and to reduce the estimated five million deaths it causes every year. Health advocates said the next step would be to get the treaty ratified by nations throughout the world. While many countries, including those in the European Union and a number of African nations, said they would quickly sign the treaty, the United States and China -- both large tobacco producers -- made no immediate commitment. The treaty, called the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, would ban advertising and sponsorship of television programs and entertainment by tobacco companies. It would impose a warning label that would cover 30 percent of the packaging on smoking products and require that all ingredients be listed on the packaging. It also urges governments to enact strict indoor air laws, impose high taxes on tobacco and crack down on cigarette smuggling. ''We're thrilled,'' said Cassandra Welch, director of field advocacy for the American Lung Association. ''This is an excellent first step. We have major work ahead of us to concentrate our efforts on ratification.'' The 192 members of the World Health Organization adopted the tobacco treaty by voice vote, after the United States dropped its earlier objections. Today, Tommy G. Thompson, the United States secretary of health, reminded the assembly that America is a world leader in antismoking efforts. ''Together,'' he said, ''we can and will make the global threat of smoking a thing of the past.'' Mr. Thompson refused to say whether the Bush administration would recommend approval of the treaty. ''The United States is carefully reviewing the text of the convention that we adopted today,'' he said. ''We and our outstanding partners worked hard on this treaty.'' The adoption of the treaty was a triumph for the departing director general of the World Health Organization, Gro Harlem Brundtland, who worked for four years to focus attention on smoking as a public health threat. By 2020, the agency estimates, 10 million people will die annually from smoking-related causes, most of them from poor nations. Dr. Brundtland emphasized in a news conference that today's vote was just a first step. ''A convention on its own doesn't mean much unless the nations that are signatories push it forward,'' she said. Dr. Brundtland said she was confident of gaining ratification from the minimum 40 nations needed |
1490910_3 | Computing's Lost Allure | field are contracting. In 2000 Intel hired 2,378 recent college graduates. Last year it hired 566, one-fourth that number. The chilly job market has had a converse effect on graduate school enrollment: applications to computer science graduate departments have risen sharply over the last two years as discouraged students remain at school or try to return to it. The number of graduate students entering Ph.D. programs in computer science rose 21 percent last year, according to the Taulbee Survey, an annual report compiled by the Computing Research Association, a nonprofit research group. M.I.T. officials said that the graduate program in computer science had received about 3,000 applications for next fall for 120 places, up from 2,000 applications four years ago. To be sure, there are still many enthusiasts at the undergraduate level. Eugene Chung, a sophomore at Berkeley, is pursuing a double major in computer science and business. Although he worries about getting a job when he finishes, he is studying computer science because he enjoys it. ''Personally I like it, whether there's a job or not,'' he said. According to the Taulbee Survey, enrollment in computer science departments nearly doubled between 1995 and 2000. So great was the demand for programmers that many students enjoyed the luxury of not even having to prepare a résumé. ''It used to be that even before students had graduated they had three job offers and by the time they had to make a decision, they had 10,'' said Gabby Silberman, program director for the Centers for Advanced Studies at I.B.M.'s T.J. Watson Research Center, who spends much of his time recruiting. Undergraduates who might otherwise have chosen computer science appear to be fanning out to related yet more applied fields like business information technology, biotechnology and bioinformatics, which involves managing and manipulating databases of genetic information. ''Computer science was a very focused degree, and lots of people were entering the program because the hot jobs available were dot-coms and Internet jobs,'' said Stephen W. Director, dean of the engineering school at the University of Michigan. Now, Dr. Director said, students seem to be migrating toward electrical engineering, a degree that gives them the know-how they need to enter a Silicon Valley software company yet a more general education that they can use for other fields, like biotechnology. At the University of Texas, pharmacy appears to be a popular alternative, a phenomenon that mystifies |
1485734_3 | Yogurt Makers Shrink the Cup, Trying to Turn Less Into More | USA, which also oversees Colombo, said the Colombo ad that ridiculed Dannon for reducing its product size was intended to let Colombo's longtime customers know that the company was not changing anything about its product. ''I don't know if it was a big shot at Dannon,'' he said. Colombo has about 2.6 percent of the yogurt market in the United States. Yogurt's first growth spurt came in the 1980's when low-fat yogurts were introduced. Sales jumped again in the 1990's when colors were infused into the food, analysts said. But it was Yoplait's Go-Gurt, a squeezable yogurt in a tube that was first marketed to children in 1999, that catapulted Yoplait into market leadership. ''When they found a way to make yogurt flavorful and colorful, that's when it became much more appealing to kids and the market really opened up,'' said Gene Grabowski, a spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers of America. ''Companies are looking at whatever new wrinkle they can find in their marketing and advertising.'' Dannon, for instance, recently began selling Light 'n Fit smoothies and Actimel, a dairy drink it says will strengthen the immune system. Stonyfield Farm, the leading organic yogurt brand, has begun to bolster its yogurts with inulin, a dietary fiber that the company says aids in the absorption of calcium. Groupe Danone owns a 40 percent stake in Stonyfield Farm. Breyers, owned by Kraft, is introducing two new flavors of its Creme Savers yogurts. General Mills recently introduced Yoplait Nouriche, a yogurt smoothie marketed to women. Like Colombo, dozens of regional and smaller brands have entered the market in the last decade to challenge national companies like Dannon, Yoplait and Breyers. Stonyfield Farm, for instance, has just introduced its first national marketing campaign to help it compete more aggressively in mainstream dairy cases. Stonyfield, which views itself as immune to the battle between Dannon and Yoplait, is also shrinking its cups to six ounces from eight. ''We're not likely to ever be No. 1,'' said Gary Hirshberg, president and chief executive of Stonyfield Farm. ''We started with five cows.'' Yogurt manufacturers said they hoped to make per capita yogurt consumption in the United States mirror that of Europe, where in some countries consumers eat about 20 times the amount of yogurt that Americans eat. ''Given what's happened to the category in the last few years, all trends point for it to continue,'' said Mark |
1487350_0 | A Judge's Record | To the Editor: Given the debate over Priscilla R. Owen's nomination to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (news article, May 2), the most important point is that Justice Owen's record as a person, a lawyer and a judge demonstrates that she is well within the mainstream of American law. Justice Owen has been in the majority in 11 of the 14 parental-notice abortion cases that the Texas Supreme Court has decided. She has voted to allow the minor to obtain an abortion without parental notice in two cases and voted to remand to the trial court in two others, demonstrating that she does not have a result-oriented approach in these matters. Moreover, she has not questioned Roe v. Wade in her writings. Instead, she testified that as a lower-court judge, she would adhere to her duty to follow Roe. Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel and a former Texas Supreme Court justice, has said Justice Owen is ''an outstanding jurist'' and will perform ''superbly as a federal appeals court judge.'' Her record has been distorted by some Senate Democrats and single-issue interest groups. Priscilla Owen will be an outstanding judge once confirmed. VIET D. DINH Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy, Justice Dept. Washington, May 7, 2003 |
1487308_2 | Free Air Or Not, Your Tires Need It | of auto travel, when flat tires were almost daily events. Now, using an air pump usually costs a quarter or 50 cents for five minutes. While air for tires may no longer be free, it's still a bargain. A 20 percent underinflation in a car's tires can increase fuel consumption by 10 percent, according to Bill Egan, a Goodyear engineer. The highway safety agency and the Department of Energy have calculated that underinflated tires increase gas consumption in this country by 3.4 million gallons a day, or 1.24 billion a year. Calculating the cost of gasoline at about $1.60 a gallon, that's nearly $2 billion. Underinflation also causes flats. The Society of Automotive Engineers has reported that 87 percent of flat tires have a history of underinflation. And soft tires can also lead to handling problems, especially on trucks and S.U.V.'s. Studies released by the highway safety agency and the University of Pittsburgh School of Engineering suggest that about a quarter of cars and a third of S.U.V.'s and light trucks are operating with at least one tire that is 20 percent below ideal pressure. Basic tire care is simple. Find the suggested pressure numbers inside the door frame or in the owner's manual. (Don't go by the figure stamped on the tire; it is the maximum pressure for the tire itself but may not be right for your particular car.) Then use a gauge to check the tires. The familiar tire gauge, about the size of a fat pen, costs about $5; digital models run to $20 or so. Tires should be checked when cool or at least after a relatively short drive. And don't forget to check the spare. Few drivers check their tire inflation pressure monthly, as recommended. (The American Rubber Manufacturers Association says the proportion is 11 percent). After the Firestone tire recall of 2000, Congress passed a law requiring that vehicles have signals on the instrument panel to alert drivers to low tire pressure, but it doesn't take effect until 2006. So far, the systems that might be used to accomplish this remain technically quirky. For decades, a gas-station air pump was usually an Air Tower, made by the Eco Company, which is now part of OPW, a maker of pumps based in Cincinnati. To use it, you simply turn a dial to the desired inflation pressure number and hold the hose to the tire |
1493115_4 | Detention Is a Tool Used in New Jersey For Foster Youths | counties, including Essex and Passaic, have built new centers or wings in recent years, easing crowding and allowing flexibility in the treatment of youngsters. Other counties have had better luck with moving children swiftly out of custody, in part because of a greater number of local options. ''It is rare we have a DYFS kid sitting and waiting for placement for too very long,'' said Robert Murray, administrator of the Hudson County Juvenile Detention Center. ''The courts here do a pretty good job of moving the kids along.'' But even if some of the physical conditions at centers have been improving -- most have schools, yards, and sleeping areas without bars -- there is a long history of abuses at such places across the state. In 2001, for example, under a previous director, the Essex County Youth House came under fire for using long-term isolation as well as straitjackets to control its children. In 1998, a guard at the Bergen County detention center pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting two teenage inmates. Beyond the physical dangers the children face, detention center directors and public advocates say there are other risks. ''There have been terrible attacks, and those are a problem,'' Ms. Previte said. ''But if your roommate is a robber or murderer, you had better believe they are slurping it up right into their pores. They are learning the lessons of delinquent children.'' Mr. Lubow, the national expert, said that most detention centers were also unable to accommodate the long-term educational needs of the children or deal with the growing number of children confronting mental health and other emotional problems. The foster teenagers who end up waiting in the detention centers are indeed often troubled. Some have committed serious crimes. More typically, they are adolescents with long, tumultuous home lives who have repeatedly violated a judge's orders to, for instance, stop using drugs or stop running away. And some, as in the adult prison system, arrive at detention centers as the result of violence related to mental illness. A family judge who would not be identified said the ''crisis'' at the detention centers had existed for more than a decade. He said the most ''gut-wrenching cases'' involved those mentally ill youths who sat in jails because the child welfare agency and the state mental health agency each insisted the other was responsible for their care. He recalls a case of a |
1493080_4 | Monsanto Struggles Even as It Dominates | its prices. In the meantime, the competitors are content to profit from Monsanto's biotech traits, which are licensed to most of the world's major seed companies. Sales of soybeans are growing because of Monsanto's biotech traits, said John Sorenson, the president of Syngenta Seeds North America, referring to the growth of Monsanto's popular Roundup Ready soybeans, which are genetically altered to withstand being sprayed by Roundup. ''It's been a very profitable segment for us.'' When biotech crops were first planted commercially in the United States, in 1996, Monsanto was not the first to market them, but it was the most aggressive. That year, about 2 million acres of biotech crops were planted nationwide; today over 100 million acres are. Roundup has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of this boom. Although it was already a blockbuster product, sales soared to over $2.4 billion in 2001, making it the best-selling agricultural chemical ever. More than 80 percent of the soybeans in the United States and Argentina, the world's biggest exporters, are now genetically altered. And much of the land they are grown on is sprayed with Roundup. To compete, other seed companies plan to introduce a series of ''output'' traits, or genes that could improve the quality or taste of crops like corn, soybeans, canola and tomatoes. Competitors say output traits will be even more profitable, and experts say that contest will inaugurate the real biotech race. ''It's like a game of Monopoly,'' said Tray Thomas, the president of the Context Network, an agribusiness consulting group in West Des Moines, Iowa. ''Monsanto has hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. But a lot of the game is yet to be played.'' Monsanto says it plans to maintain its lead by devoting nearly 80 percent of its more than $500 million in annual research and development spending to biotech traits. Its rivals, by their own estimates, devote closer to 20 percent. But therein lies a problem, analysts say: Monsanto's research spending has held down profitability. ''They're generating gross profits, but they invest it back into the business,'' Mr. Ravitz said. Monsanto also faces problems abroad, where genetically altered crops are sometimes scorned. Europe is showing no signs of easing its restrictions, and is in fact considering tightening some of them, which would make it more difficult to export biotech crops there. ''Europe has been a major problem,'' Mr. Thomas said. ''A lot of |
1486039_0 | Containing The Fear In Asian Markets | THE outbreak of SARS has hurt financial markets throughout Asia. Virtually all the region's major market averages are down for the year. Mark Headley, president of Matthews International Capital Management and manager of the Matthews Pacific Tiger fund, discussed the region's prospects last week. Following are excerpts from the conversation: Q. How concerned are you about the impact of SARS on the region? A. It has been encouraging that Hong Kong, Singapore and, importantly, Vietnam have made significant progress. These are places where the virus has been under scrutiny the longest. Vietnam is important because it is obviously a poor country with a large population. I was just over there, and while certainly very different from Beijing, Hanoi is comparable to a second-tier Chinese city. With Beijing having handled this so badly, there is concern that there is spread to second-tier cities. But now that China has really awakened to the problem, I am encouraged that the odds are heavily in favor of the Chinese tackling this, at least in its current form. Q. What has been the impact of the virus on the region's economy and markets? A. You will see 1 percent to 2 percent taken off of growth in Hong Kong, Singapore and China. That is painful, particularly at a time when world growth is slow. But it is manageable. The important thing is that the governments have the resources to act, and have the resources to continue to do that as long as the scale of the problem does not get worse. In addition, there are other measures that can be taken to ease the economic impact. Interest rates in Asia, for example, are generally well above rock bottom. As far as the markets are concerned, broadly speaking, Asia is down 5 percent. Without SARS, these markets would likely be up 5 percent. At one point this year, our China fund was up over 10 percent. Now it is just about flat. We haven't taken a tremendous wallop, and part of that is due to the positive news that has come out. Q. What has bolstered markets lately? A. Within the last couple of weeks, Robert Kuok, one of the largest property owners in Hong Kong, has moved to take his company, Kerry Properties, private. That is a classic sign of a market bottom, and might signal the end of a very long, brutal downturn in |
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1485912_7 | The Next Big Flavor | Bear, and it's quite nice.'' Raab described a shift away from the classic ''Neapolitan'' trio (chocolate, strawberry, vanilla) toward flavors that combine elements of Latin American and Asian cuisine. When we got off the phone, we were moved to brew up a futuristic iced tea, pairing the searing heat of a habanero chili with the mellow, red-currant-like flavor of sweet tea brewed from dried hibiscus flowers, a classic Mexican beverage we've taken a shine to recently. The concoction was sensational in the most literal sense: the feeling of prickly pepper and cold, fruity tea was beguiling, and it kept drawing us back to the pitcher as soon as our glasses were empty. These concoctions were delicious, but we wondered whether we should be looking for a more high-tech approach. And so we phoned Raël, the French-born former race-car driver and leader of the Raëlian movement, the U.F.O.-adoring sect that recently announced that researchers had cloned a human. As it happens, he was planning a luncheon of genetically modified food for later in the spring. ''G.M. food is a little politically incorrect, but it is the future,'' he intoned in French-accented English from his apartment in Valcourt, Quebec. His tone was perky and avuncular. ''We'll serve G.M. corn soup, and Kobe beef from a cloned cow, bread, tomatoes and goat.'' And how would flavor figure in genetically modified foods? ''Soon we will be able to increase the gene that is responsible for the taste of food,'' Raël said. ''Strawberries now taste like water. But imagine -- you will soon be able to take the flavor of the wild strawberries you ate when you were a child and transplant the gene into a strawberry so big that one is enough for dessert.'' We wondered what Alice Waters would make of this, but Raël was racing ahead. ''Nanotechnology is coming very fast,'' he said. ''You will have in your kitchen a small microwave oven, and inside there are billions of nanorobots, and all the chemicals of what is around us. And a microphone. If you want a salad, you say, 'Lettuce!' and these nanorobots will make you a perfect salad out of these chemicals. Or say, 'Bifteck!' and the same minerals and metals are arranged so you have a juicy steak. There will be no farming, no pollution. You'll have it all within your kitchen.'' We asked Raël what his favorite dishes are, |
1486237_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1486136_2 | The Nation: Leo-Cons; A Classicist's Legacy: New Empire Builders | intellectuals -- favored dinner guests who gave the intellectual justification for policies usually drawn up by more practical political types. Today's dinner guests are the dominant master strategists in their own right, and the transformation brings us face to face with just how much their intellectual roots influence their exercise of power. It is also reasonable to ask: just what would Leo Strauss think of the policies being carried out in his name? On the basis of his curriculum vitae, Strauss would seem an unlikely figurehead of the Bush White House, hardly a hotbed of intellectual inquiry, as detailed in a recent book by a former presidential speechwriter, David Frum. The child of middle-class Orthodox Jews, Strauss converted to Zionism while still in his teens, attended Martin Heidegger's lectures at the University of Freiburg, and eventually crossed paths with some of the most influential European intellectual figures of the prewar period: Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojève, Hans-Georg Gadamer. In 1934, Strauss emigrated to Britain, where he wrote ''The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.'' Just before the outbreak of World War II, he joined the faculty of the New School for Social Research, a refuge for European intellectuals. His final home was the University of Chicago, where he taught in the political science department for a quarter of a century. At first glance, Strauss's work seems remote from the heat of contemporary politics. He was more at home in the world of Plato and Aristotle than in debates about the origins of totalitarianism. His major books included ''Xenophon's Socratic Discourse,'' ''Thoughts on Machiavelli'' and a collection of essays on the ancient Greeks, ''The City and Man.'' But closer scrutiny reveals a mind keenly aware of current events. Strauss's own experience -- he witnessed Russian pogroms as a child and barely escaped the Holocaust -- alerted him to the perils of history. ''When we were brought face to face with tyranny -- with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past -- our political science failed to recognize it,'' Strauss wrote in his classic ''On Tyranny.'' He believed, as he once wrote, that ''to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations.'' There's a reason that some Bush strategists continue to invoke Strauss's name. The myth |
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