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1497771_0 | Not Leading the World but Following It | Disparities in the legal treatment of lesbians and gay men in the United States and their treatment in the rest of the world are becoming more pronounced. As the United States Supreme Court considers an important gay rights case, expected to be decided this month, it should realize that much of the globe sees the issue as a matter of basic human rights. Last week the Ontario Court of Appeal in Canada ordered the provincial government to grant marriage licenses to two same-sex couples, ruling that restricting marriage to heterosexual couples could not be squared with the fundamental right to equality in Canada's constitution. The Canadian court's decision is hardly an aberration. In the last decade, national and local lawmakers in dozens of countries have enacted laws to bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing, employment, public accommodation and health benefits. Many of these countries are also beginning to recognize rights for lesbian and gay families. Lesbian and gay couples now enjoy full marriage rights in the Netherlands and Belgium and may enter into registered partnerships in seven other European nations. In November 2000, the European Union adopted a new directive that mandates all member nations to provide equal treatment to lesbians and gay men in employment. At the time, this ruling covered 380 million people. With the union's expansion to 25 countries, it will soon cover millions more. These legal protections are spreading to parts of the developing world, like Ecuador, Brazil and Namibia. South Africa's highest court has issued several rulings in favor of lesbians and gay men since that country became the first to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in its constitution. The legal landscape in the United States is very different. Several states continue to impose a criminal ban on sex between consenting adults of the same gender, even in the privacy of their own homes. Others have enacted new laws restricting marriage to a union between one man and one woman. There are two states that recognize same-sex partnerships, and nearly a dozen states and many more municipalities have laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public accommodation and in employment. But the majority do not have such laws, and the prospects for enacting a federal antidiscrimination statute are bleak. A ruling expected soon from the Supreme Court provides an opportunity to redress at least one |
1497869_1 | CANADIAN LEADERS AGREE TO PROPOSE GAY MARRIAGE LAW | here to marry, since Canada has no marriage residency requirements. In addition, gay-rights advocates in the United States are already declaring that Canada will serve as a vivid example to Americans that same-sex marriage is workable and offers no challenge to traditional heterosexual family life. No American state allows same-sex marriage, but Vermont has enacted a law providing for civil unions, which allow gay couples many of the benefits of marriage. Canadian marriage licenses have always been accepted in the United States, but now that the definition of marriage in the two countries appears likely to diverge, legal challenges to same-sex couples claiming rights and privileges deriving from their Canadian marriages seem certain to arise in at least some states. Issues including adoption rights, inheritance, insurance benefits and matters as mundane as sharing health club memberships are likely to arise in courts and state legislatures. Canada's new marriage policy comes at a time when the government is also pushing for legislation that would decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana, another policy that diverges sharply from American federal practices. Polling experts and social scientists note that conservative religious views are much less influential here than in the United States, with regular church attendance far lower and with fundamentalist Protestant groups attracting far less support. Mr. Chrétien said the government would also ask the Supreme Court for advice to make the new legislation invulnerable to appeals by provincial governments seeking to invalidate it in their jurisdictions. However, the conservative premier of Alberta, Ralph Klein, has threatened a legal fight to exclude his province from the new rules. Gay-rights advocates celebrated the decision as a civil-rights milestone. ''June 17 of 2003 is going to be a day gay and lesbian people remember for a long, long time to come,'' said Svend Robinson, a gay member of the House of Commons from the left-of-center New Democratic Party, in a television interview immediately after the announcement. Canada's action follows in the steps of the Netherlands and Belgium, but it is likely to have a much larger impact on the United States. Only a few American same-sex couples have taken advantage of expanded marriage laws in the Netherlands because of its long residency requirement, and Belgium will only allow marriages of foreign couples from countries that already allow such unions. But Canada is nearby and has no such restrictions. ''What this presents for American |
1496181_3 | Vandalism and 'Improvements' Mar Great Wall | part of northern China, the Wall provided virtually the only source for this raw material. A 1,000-yard section of Wall slowly disappeared. ''This was a large-scale and long-term demolition, but the authorities weren't even aware,'' Mr. Dong said. ''So we have to strengthen local management, since it may well be happening elsewhere.'' Likewise, outside Baotou in Inner Mongolia a developer recently demolished a 2,000-year-old section of the Wall to make way for a $12 million road building project. The fine? Only $10,000, for a piece of history irretrievably lost. But to preservationists, perhaps most disturbing have been the many misguided attempts to develop the Wall for tourism, often with little respect for its original form. In a country where ancients relics are plentiful, local officials often show little devotion to crumbling treasures and instead are inclined to ''improve'' them. Several years back, the worlds largest Buddha, at Leshan in Sichuan Province, was given a garish coat of paint to make it look fresher and newer. Local governments at various points along the Wall have decorated and refashioned it, sometimes resulting in Disney-like creations that evoke Mickey more than Ming. At Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the Bohai Sea, the Wall was so weathered that developers essentially started afresh, creating an ersatz Great Wall of shiny gray bricks. Crowded with tourists, it has more of the feel of a and Enchanted Castle, with bright banners fluttering in the sea breeze and a huge brick maze for those who are bored. Inspired by such successes, officials in the village of Da Cuizhuang, hoped to milk cash from their bit of history, which includes one of the rare Wall sections paved in marble. Unfortunately, when they started construction in 2002 they had neither the experience nor financing for such a complex endeavor, and only remnants of their failed efforts now remain, such as a wide paved road called Bai Yangyu Tourism Avenue, and little crenelated models of the Great Wall that line bridges and disguise sewer grates. When the China Great Wall Investigative Trip set down for a look at Bai Yangyu, they were horrified by what they saw. Most conspicuous was a 100-yard stretch of stark white wall high up on a ridge. As it snakes incongruously between two of the crumbling ancient brown guard towers, it most resembles a suburban garden partition. The Great Wall team immediately complained to officials |
1496241_2 | An Acoustic Tape Measure for Deep-Sea Archaeologists | be part of the expedition. ''This system allows us to make accurate maps anywhere on the seafloor. It's an acoustic tape measure.'' Deep-sea archaeology is a relatively new academic discipline that combines traditional humanities-based archaeology with engineering advances that enable precision work with remotely controlled equipment in places that humans cannot reach. The interdisciplinary approach seems suited to Dr. Mindell, a historian of technology and an engineer who has pursued a combination of engineering and liberal arts since he majored in both English and electrical engineering at Yale University. ''I've always done both kinds of work,'' he said, ''in parallel.'' The wireless sonar system is sealed in metal containers that are roughly the size of bread loaves. Outside each tube are analog microphones and speakers that receive and send pings. Inside are amplifiers to boost the signals, which are attenuated in salty water, and digital signal processing chips. Batteries provide both power and ballast. To start the communication process, two sonar beacons are lowered and positioned on either side of the wreck. A similar transponder is placed on the remotely operated underwater vehicle that hovers above. The vehicle pings the beacons, they ping back, and the time interval is recorded to calculate the distance. The remotely operated vehicle patrols back and forth in narrowly spaced parallel lines, capturing images of the objects on the bottom and determining their location on the grid. Dr. Mindell will also bring along a subbottom profiler, a sonar-based system he has devised that bounces ultrasonic waves off the sediment on the seafloor to reveal what lies just beneath -- artifacts, perhaps. This is the instrument that Sarah Webster, an engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who will be going on the expedition, looks forward to using. Ms. Webster, a mechanical engineer and former student of Dr. Mindell's, is working on a robot that will partly excavate several of the expedition sites. She is also designing the tools that will pick up and transport artifacts. ''Before you dig a million-dollar hole,'' she said, ''it's good to know as much as you can.'' Dr. Lawrence Stager, a professor of archaeology at Harvard, will also be on board as archaeological director for the wrecks off Ashkelon. The two Iron Age ships submerged there, the oldest ever discovered in the deep sea, are thought to have been part of a convoy carrying 11 tons of wine in ceramic |
1498428_0 | Metro Briefing | New York: Brooklyn: Suit For Disabled Students | Lawyers for more than 500 disabled preschool children asked a federal judge yesterday to order the city's Department of Education to provide special-education services for their clients immediately. The lawyers have filed a class action suit on behalf of the children, claiming that they are entitled to free special-education services under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. ''Some have pervasive developmental disorders,'' the lawyers wrote in petitioning Judge David G. Trager. The Education Department declined to comment. David M. Herszenhorn (NYT) |
1498333_3 | Talks Collapse on U.S. Efforts To Open Europe to Biotech Food | Africa. African nations, fearing their products would be shunned by Europe, are avoiding developing genetically modified food that might help feed the continent, he said. ''European governments should join, not hinder, the great cause of ending hunger in Africa,'' he said in the speech. European diplomats reacted angrily to Mr. Bush's comments, saying that their health concerns were serious and noting that European nations spend a greater part of their budget on foreign aid than the United States. European officials have also said that they are surprised that the United States has highlighted the dispute recently. This summer, the European Parliament is scheduled to consider a measure that would establish strict labeling rules for genetically modified products, which could allow more of them to be sold. Europe's resistance to modified crops received a political lift last week when a global treaty restricting them was approved. Although it is not clear what effect the treaty, known as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, will have on the trade dispute, it is likely to make it easier for countries to restrict importing the crops, trade experts say. The United States, worried about the treaty's impact on American exporters, agreed only reluctantly to support it when it was negotiated in 2000. Announcing that the talks between Europe and the United States had broken down today, Mr. Mills, the trade representative's spokesman, said in his statement that he was ''disappointed but not surprised.'' He added, ''We'll be moving forward with requesting a panel'' to decide the case. Willy Helin, a European Commission spokesman, said that European officials had explained their policy fully to the United States delegation today, but that they had expected the dispute to reach the next level. ''This is a first formal step,'' he said. Argentine officials, who have joined the United States in filing the W.T.O. case, also attended today's talks, Mr. Helin said. But other nations that have previously criticized Europe's position, including Egypt, did not, he said. Correction: June 21, 2003, Saturday A front-page article yesterday about the collapse of talks between the United States and Europe over genetically modified foods misstated the amount that American agricultural businesses estimate they are losing each year because of a European ban on the foods. It is hundreds of millions of dollars, not billions. The article also misstated the estimated annual loss for the corn market. It is $300 million, not billion. |
1498382_0 | Cornelia Parker | D'Amelio Terras 525 West 22nd Street, Chelsea Through tomorrow There is a curious literalism about certain forms of conceptual art. If Hamish Fulton, for example, says he hiked a certain mileage in the name of art, we have to believe that he really hoofed the whole distance. Cornelia Parker, a London-based artist with a considerable international exhibition record, belongs in that category. This show features an installation of rough balls of mud hanging from the ceiling by strings. This creates a pleasing, low-lying molecular field, but the point is not fully taken if we don't know that the mud was excavated by engineers from beneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A series of photographs presents miscellaneous antique metal objects, unearthed by scanner-wielding scavengers and bought by Ms. Parker through eBay. Later she buried objects found in the United States at various sites in England and, conversely, buried English objects in American places. You take on faith that the artist actually went to the effort of doing what the captions say she did. But what if she didn't? And what if the drips on glass panes, supposedly made of mud taken from Freud's garden, were made of ordinary dirt from Ms. Parker's own garden? What if the framed coil of fine gold wire were just that and not made from the filling of a pulled tooth? Visually, it wouldn't make any difference at all. So the activities of actual displacement and transformation that are so central for the artist remain, at best, only mildly interesting abstract notions for the viewer. KEN JOHNSON ART IN REVIEW |
1493435_0 | The World; A River Rises Through It, Washing Away the Past | AFTER a decade of construction work, China will today close the sluice gates of the giant Three Gorges Dam and forever alter the landscape of its historic heartland. When the gates close, waters from the mighty Yangtze River will begin filling a reservoir that stretches nearly 400 miles, or about the length of Lake Superior. Hundreds of thousand of people who lived in ancient villages along the banks of the Yangtze have been resettled upland. Their homes, many already reduced to rubble by scavengers, will be inundated in the first stage of flooding that will raise the water level as much as 450 feet above the river floor by the middle of June. The event marks a mid-point in the building of the dam, which began a decade ago and is estimated to cost about $25 billion. It is expected to be completed in 2009. China's government views the project as engineering wonder that will control flooding, produce as much electricity as 10 coal-fired power plants and improve navigation along the turbulent Yangtze. Critics see it as a monumental folly that will wipe out relics of China's ancient civilization, uproot the lives of some 1.13 million people, threaten aquatic life and partially fill the vertiginous gap between a series of spectacular cliffs known as the Three Gorges. Authorities in recent weeks scrambled to complete the final relocation of the area's most prominent ancient relics, like the temple of the Han Dynasty general Zhang Fei and the tomb of Liu Bei, king of the state of Shu about 1,700 years ago. Archeologists say there was no time or money to save thousands of other artifacts that will be submerged. China's leadership stands firmly behind the dam project, conceived 80 years ago by the revolutionary nationalist Sun Yat-sen. But officials have had to crack down on corruption that has dogged the project. And engineers have defended the soundness of the dam despite the discovery of fissures in the 60-foot high structure., located in Yichang in the central province of Hubei. |
1493518_4 | No Headline | offer information about emergency legal and medical services. The demonstrations will coincide with the opening of the three-day annual summit meeting of the leaders of the G-8 -- the world's seven largest industrialized countries, plus Russia -- as well as the leaders of 12 developing countries who have been invited for the first day. A group known as the Forum Social Lémanique said it would block two main Geneva bridges from 6 to 9 a.m. with a sit-in to prevent members of official delegations from gaining access to Évian. ''We are pacifists but determined pacifists,'' said Ludovioc Arnaud, a 30-year-old chemistry and physics teacher from Lyon who was running the booth of a French Trotskyist group at the Annemasse camp. At the anarchist campsite outside Geneva, where protesters were drinking beer and eating vegan food, one protester from Geneva said he was delighted by the boarded-up buildings. ''I don't think it's sad to have the wooden panels,'' said the protester, who declined to give his name. ''It leaves vast spaces where we can express ourselves, where we can write our poetry.'' The G-8 leaders will travel by helicopter from Geneva to Évian, and at least some other heads of state will go by boat from Lausanne across Lake Geneva. But some heads of state and certainly some delegations and staff members are expected to go to Évian by road, and they are the ones the demonstrators hope to block. As seems to be the case for every international economic forum in recent years, the demonstrators are an assorted group -- opponents of globalization, big government, sexism, meat-eating and war, along with environmentalists, human rights advocates and anarchists. Yet veterans of the movement say it is suffering from protest fatigue this spring. The mobilization of a global movement against the war in Iraq and recent huge strikes and protests in France against a government plan for pension reform have taken their toll. In addition, many peaceful demonstrators and church groups have been frightened away by a pattern of violence at recent economic summit meetings. So the crowds so far are markedly smaller than expected. ''People are a bit tired,'' said Bruno Rebelle, secretary general of Greenpeace in France, who was in Annemasse. ''There is competition on the availability of people.'' ''What is more obvious for me,'' he added, ''is that those moderate political movements are more afraid of a violent reaction.'' |
1493389_2 | The Baby Chronicles, via E-Mail | which has just been published by Harper Entertainment. The e-mail messages, urgent and immediate by nature, turn out to be the perfect medium for a book that reads like a Dickens serial, rife with cliffhangers -- Jackson's harrowing airlift from the Modesto hospital where the twins were born to the one in San Francisco, a dangerous operation on his intestines, and the day, shortly before he is to go home, when he just stops breathing. When he is finally released on Aug. 21, 2000, weighing in at a bruising 4 pounds 6 ounces, and still using an oxygen tank, the moment is triumphant. ''People had been so excited for us to become parents,'' Mr. Wong said last week in his Chelsea loft, ''but after what happened, I thought the cleanest and best thing would be to send an e-mail so I wouldn't have to repeat the same story over and over. I had no intention of continuing with them. I just wanted to say, 'This is kind of sad so far, but we're O.K.' But 100 people wrote back, so the second time I wrote, I thought it would be really nice if people prayed or sent us positive thoughts.'' Mr. Jackson, who has elected to be the daddy who stays in the background in this publishing venture, spoke by phone from his office: ''B. D. was writing those e-mails for me as well as everyone else. We were geographically separated so much of the time, and the positive approach he took really helped me. People were rooting for Jackson to get better. And by forwarding those e-mails we said, 'Let's widen the amount of people thinking of him.' The rallying effect was incredible. It certainly helped us feel not so alone. And for the doctors and nurses to hear a whole community of strangers cheering them on had to have a positive effect.'' It did indeed. One of them, Dr. Stacey Levitt, said in a telephone interview: ''When Jackson was admitted he was in very critical condition. With twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, his mortality rate was between 60 and 100 percent. Also, part of his intestines became necrotic and had to be removed. So, he was extremely sick, and part of our job is to help every family deal with what's happening, though we don't often get to step aside and see it through their eyes. That's why the e-mails |
1493457_1 | Dreams, Deferred | the country to find a job right now. In April, the city's unemployment rate was 8.3 percent, significantly above the state rate of 6.1 percent, and the national average of 6.0 percent. Young job seekers have been especially hard hit. ''People 25 to 45 have lower unemployment rates than people under 25,'' said James P. Brown, who analyzes the city's economy for the state's Department of Labor. ''If you are looking to break into a market, it is much tougher in a downturn. Employers are less flexible because they can get people with great credentials more easily in a downturn.'' At Queens College, the Office of Career Development brims with good intentions: six bins of graduate school bulletins, 19 binders of job listings, listings of more than 400 internships and a thick stack of phone books. To Tesfaye Asfaw, director of the school's Office of Career Development and Internships, all that paper now seems obsolete. Scouring online job listings and help-wanted ads just doesn't cut it anymore, he said. ''The notion of a liberal arts education is being challenged right now,'' Mr. Asfaw added. ''Fewer and fewer students are finding employment right after graduation.'' In 1998, an estimated 54 percent of graduating seniors at Queens College reported that they had secured employment at the time of graduation, while in 2002, only about 44 percent did. A year to 18 months after graduation, about 87 percent of students who graduated between September 1996 and June 1997 had jobs, versus 83 percent of students who graduated four years later, according to surveys by the college. Median salaries fell to $32,500 from $34,000. As these portraits of three 2002 graduates of Queens College show, people are still finding jobs; it just takes longer and requires more compromises. But many hard-working new graduates, still damp with optimism, energy and a sense of entitlement, don't want to compromise, and their lackluster reception from the world has called into question some of their deepest assumptions about themselves and their world. Jobless or not, the newest generation of workers still seem to count themselves eligible for the American Dream. And for many graduates who entered college when the Nasdaq was barreling toward 5,000, the gap between what they thought America was and what it has turned out to be has been exceedingly painful. The American Dream, in which hard work pays off and success grows out of |
1500212_4 | Bush Calls for Changes in Africa To End Wars and Promote Trade | an active role in bringing peace to Sudan, where, he said, two million people have died over the last two decades in Africa's longest-running civil war. He said he had asked his special envoy to Sudan, John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, to travel to the country in two weeks to bring an end to the conflict. ''He will make clear that the only option on the table is peace,'' Mr. Bush said of Mr. Danforth. The president's plan to allocate $100 million to help Kenya and several other countries bolster antiterrorism efforts will go to help improve security at airports and ports, step up border patrols and develop better databases and intelligence sharing about terrorists. Kenya, the site of a terrorist attack against Israeli vacationers last November that was linked to Al Qaeda and of a 1998 attack on the United States Embassy in Nairobi that killed more than 200 people, has been hard hit by a downturn in tourism this year because of terrorism fears, deepening its economic problems. Mr. Bush repeated his call for the European Union to allow imports from Africa of genetically modified agricultural products. Europe currently bars imports of most genetically altered foods, a position that American officials say has discouraged Africans from planting them and therefore from reaping the benefits of higher yields in countries that are chronically short both of food and export opportunities. If Africa were to grow and raise genetically modified crops and animals on a large scale, their higher yield might allow the continent to raise the volume of its agricultural exports and feed more of its own people at the same time. Europeans, however, have strongly resisted the introduction of genetically modified foods. Mr. Bush did not specify whether he would support trade policy changes in the United States that many African leaders say are vital to the economic development of their countries. Among them are allowing textile imports, which are effectively barred under current legislation, and cutting subsidies to American farmers on crops also grown in Africa, especially cotton. Susan E. Rice, a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs under President Bill Clinton, said the speech showed considerable continuity in policy toward Africa since Mr. Clinton's two terms in office. But she said Mr. Bush did not go far enough in finding ways to promote more investment and economic expansion in Africa. |
1500130_3 | Caesar Rendered for the Small Screen | be complete without a telltale anachronism or two -- those who dramatize history are doomed to repeat the present. Reflecting the social preoccupations of its own time more than the Roman Republic's, ''Cleopatra,'' the 1963 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, never veered far from the subject of sex and adultery. In this version Cleopatra is seductive, but she does not get nearly as much attention from the director, Uli Edel, as slavery does. Using various ancient Greek scholars as models, Mr. Edel and his writers invented Apollonius, a fictional, mild-mannered Greek philosopher who tutors Caesar's daughter Julia. Apollonius is tossed into the plot as a kind of Nat Turner-Spartacus figure -- a Greek rebel against Roman social injustice. Respected and well treated in Caesar's house, Apollonius nevertheless feels morally compelled to run away. When he is captured, Julia intercedes to save his life, but Apollonius demands to be crucified on the ''live free or die'' plan. His decision may be shaped more by the American civil-rights movement (and the New Hampshire license plate) than by ancient Greek Stoicism, but that kind of anachronism is tempting far beyond Hollywood -- even Shakespeare twisted history shamelessly to make a point. (Or just out of carelessness: in ''Julius Caesar'' he famously had a clock chime the hours even though Romans relied on sundials.) Mr. Edel may have wanted to address modern society's horror of slavery, but someone on his crew seemed most upset by the plight of single women. In an epilogue, words darting ominously across a blackened screen recount the terrible fates of Caesar's friends and foes after his assassination. Brutus kills himself. So does his wife, Portia, who went mad and committed suicide by ''swallowing a burning coal.'' The doom of Caesar's widow is presented as even more ghastly. ''Calpurnia,'' the text reads as the music swells portentously, ''never married again.'' CAESAR TNT, Sunday and Monday at 8 p.m., Eastern and Pacific times; 7 p.m., Central time. Directed by Uli Edel; Peter Pruce and Craig Warner, writers; Lorenzo Minoli, Guido de Angelis, Russell Kagan and Franz Landerer, executive producers; John G. Phelen, co-executive producer; Victory Media Group and ARD/Degeto, co-producers; Giuseppe Pedersoli and Jonas Bauer, producers. WITH: Jeremy Sisto (Julius Caesar), Richard Harris (Sulla), Christopher Walken (Cato), Chris Noth (Pompey), Valeria Golino (Calpurnia), Heino Ferch (Vercingetorix), Tobias Moretti (Cassius), Nicole Grimaudo (Julia), Samuela Sardo (Cleopatra), Jay Rodan (Mark Antony), |
1500220_2 | Planned Auto Safety Rules Focus on Rollovers and S.U.V.'s | break and the forces putting pressure on the roof change directions. The new requirements would also extend safety regulations to large sport utilities, like Hummers, and to pickup trucks; such vehicles fall outside many of the current standards. And they would encompass 15-passenger vans, which would have to be put through the same crash tests and rollover rules that would apply to cars, pickups, minivans and sport utilities. Vans are of particular interest to Senator Olympia J. Snowe, the Maine Republican who is a member of the Commerce Committee. Last year, 14 migrant workers were killed in northern Maine in a van that rolled off a bridge. ''Steps must be taken now to prevent deadly accidents like the one in Allagash Wilderness Waterway, which was the worst motor vehicle accident in Maine's history,'' Senator Snowe said in a statement. ''These tests will hopefully lead to the design changes and technological developments necessary to help reduce the risk of these deadly accidents.'' This week, the safety agency laid out new tire performance standards that would bring requirements for tires on sport utilities and pickups in line with the rules for passenger car tires. The Senate Commerce Committee proposal would direct the agency to add rules that would require that tires be better able to withstand damage when hit by objects in the road and to work to encourage drivers to replace tires that are too old. The committee also asked the traffic safety agency to come up with rules that would force automakers to produce sport utilities and pickups with features like lower bumpers that would match up better with passenger cars. Automakers are already working with one another on such issues. ''This bill sets a new agenda for auto safety for the next six years that addresses the key types of crashes in which the public is being killed and injured, and it sets hard deadlines for getting the job done,'' said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, a consumer group. Eron Shosteck, a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the industry's top lobbying group, said he was concerned by the number of requirements laid out in the bill. ''We want to make sure the safety engineers have time to do things right and there are a lot of things in that bill,'' he said, adding, ''We want to make sure the technology is ready and viable and effective.'' |
1500116_2 | Weekender | Water Mill, N.Y. | enough asphalt driveway to hold a commercial fleet. The stop signs are painted forest green. Houses start around $2.5 million. ''The big explosion of developing Water Mill happened in the last seven to nine years, and the intimate character of the place has changed,'' said Ms. Konner, who freely admits to having built some of the developments herself. There will not be many new developments, however, because not much land is left. And since Water Mill is part of the Town of Southampton, strict land-use protections preserve Water Mill's charm by limiting many new houses to five-acre lots and requiring developers to set aside farmland in perpetuity when they build. While Water Mill has fewer old shingle houses and clapboard farm structures than elsewhere in the Hamptons, it does not have a sense of being overrun with neotraditional and dated modernist concoctions. ''People like the small scale and the high quality of the houses here,'' said Judi Desiderio, a vice president at the Cook Pony Farm real estate agency. ''Some come specifically for the Water Mill location, buy a house, and change it to suit their needs, rather than looking for the perfect house.'' Like other villages of the Hamptons, Water Mill is divided by Route 27. Water Mill south of the highway is a very small place: with so little land, and no more being made, as real estate agents are fond of saying, demand far outstrips supply, resulting in million-dollar lots and multimillion-dollar houses. North of the highway, Water Mill stretches about three miles to the Noyac border, through farms and natural woodlands. Given the space pressures on the ocean side, however, the north side of Water Mill has lately started to become more chic itself. And there is no reason it should not. The woods are beautiful, and if you are lucky enough to find a house on a bluff, with a second-story view above the tree line, you will have the feeling of being in a remote, peaceful woods that just happens to be a short jaunt from the ocean beaches. The Scene The avant-garde opera designer and director Robert Wilson draws the cream of moneyed, establishment New York to the annual benefits for his arts-development campus, known as the Watermill Center. At last year's event, in August, guests were asked to dress in red for dinner and dancing under a huge tent. Guests were encouraged |
1500223_26 | Excerpts From Supreme Court's Decision Striking Down Sodomy Law | ''acting in private'' -- since the Court admits that sodomy laws were enforced against consenting adults (although the Court contends that prosecutions were ''infrequent.'') I do not know what ''acting in private'' means; surely consensual sodomy, like heterosexual intercourse, is rarely performed on stage. If all the Court means by ''acting in private'' is ''on private premises, with the doors closed and windows covered,'' it is entirely unsurprising that evidence of enforcement would be hard to come by. (Imagine the circumstances that would enable a search warrant to be obtained for a residence on the ground that there was probable cause to believe that consensual sodomy was then and there occurring.) Surely that lack of evidence would not sustain the proposition that consensual sodomy on private premises with the doors closed and windows covered was regarded as a ''fundamental right,'' even though all other consensual sodomy was criminalized. There are 203 prosecutions for consensual, adult homosexual sodomy reported in the West Reporting system and official state reporters from the years 1880-1995. There are also records of 20 sodomy prosecutions and 4 executions during the colonial period. Bowers' conclusion that homosexual sodomy is not a fundamental right ''deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition'' is utterly unassailable. Realizing that fact, the Court instead says: ''[W]e think that our laws and traditions in the past half century are of most relevance here. These references show an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.'' Apart from the fact that such an ''emerging awareness'' does not establish a ''fundamental right,'' the statement is factually false. States continue to prosecute all sorts of crimes by adults ''in matters pertaining to sex''. . . I turn now to the ground on which the Court squarely rests its holding: the contention that there is no rational basis for the law here under attack. This proposition is so out of accord with our jurisprudence -- indeed, with the jurisprudence of any society we know -- that it requires little discussion. The Texas statute undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are ''immoral and unacceptable,'' -- the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity. Bowers held that this was a legitimate state interest. The Court today |
1500258_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Ireland: Rules For Clergy And Children | A new code of conduct for Roman Catholic priests in the Diocese of Ferns, the center of Ireland's clerical sex abuse scandals, instructs the clergy never to be alone with a young person or out of public view, and to meet with with teenagers and children in accessible rooms with glass windows. The policy, written by priests, has been posted outside churches in Ferns, in County Wexford on the southeastern coast. Brian Lavery (NYT) |
1497085_6 | U.S. Entangled in Mystery of Georgia's Islamic Fighters | Last fall, they said, they forced a group of about 30 mostly Chechen fighters back across the border. The group, they said, walked right into a force of Russian soldiers, who killed many of them. At the same time, Georgian officials described an incident in which an Arab fighter with apparent links to Al Qaeda might have been allowed to get away. Georgian officials said they believed that the man, Abu Hafsi, had been running financial operations in the gorge and had supervised the building of a military hospital there. He slipped away, presumably to Chechnya, officials said. In the Pankisi Gorge, local residents largely confirmed the government's account. Zhora Shavlokhov, headmaster of the Dumasturi Elementary School, said the 30 fighters arrived about 18 months ago and occupied the school. Mr. Shavlokhov said he did not much like the men, but they carried guns and brooked no arguments. Mr. Shavlokhov said the fighters were an odd mix: doctors, lawyers, criminals and drug addicts. Indeed, the detritus left behind filled out the details of the headmaster's story: a makeshift exercise bar was still suspended between two trees, and used hypodermic needles and empty vials lay scattered about the yard. ''The Russians killed them at the border,'' he said. A Western diplomat in Tbilisi said his government was not upset with the way the Georgians chose to move most of the militants out of the gorge. As long as the militants left the gorge -- the only inhabitable area along the Russian border -- then his government was satisfied, he said. The diplomat expressed frustration, however, that Georgian leaders were not more aggressive with the 50-odd militants still in the gorge. Chechen refugees here express a different kind of frustration. Their camps are full of families who braved snowy mountains and Russian guns in their flight from their homes, and they ask why the outside world, and particularly the American government, seems more concerned with Al Qaeda than with aggrieved civilians. ''Bush would do anything to have Russia in his coalition,'' said Baslan Gidiev, who walked across the mountains three years ago. Even so, they say they, too, are happy that the militants of the Pankisi Gorge have left. ''We admire them, and we think they are brave,'' said Ruslan Nalayev, who also left Chechnya three years ago. ''But when they are here, they bring great danger. We're glad they are gone.'' |
1497199_2 | You Asked for It, You Got It: The Pint-Size Watermelon | the United States from $2.99 to $5.99. About 160 miles west of here in San Diego, where Syngenta has just introduced its minimelons, shoppers have not hesitated to pay $3.99 for a 5 to 6 pound fruit. ''Those things were flying off the shelves -- I mean zoom,'' said a manager at a Vons Supermarket in the Murphy Canyon neighborhood, who asked not to be identified because of a company policy against speaking to the press. Because the minimelons sell for a premium, Syngenta expects them to generate big profits, much more than the slim gains from seedless watermelons, let alone the old-fashioned kind. ''The holy grail of the produce industry is trying to create a more proprietary product, because they're dealing with commodities,'' explained William Leach, a food industry analyst at Banc of America Securities. ''This could be one way for them to make more money.'' Syngenta's North American subsidiary developed the minimelon as part of a larger effort to sell an array of scientifically engineered fresh produce under a branded logo at higher prices. Over the next few years, Syngenta, a Swiss company that is one of the world's biggest agribusinesses, plans to offer sweeter cantaloupes; smaller, better-tasting tomatoes; and firmer peppers, some through conventional breeding methods and others through genetic engineering. Seminis officials, meanwhile, say they are working to develop extra-nutritious carrots in red, purple and yellow hues. Now, consumers apparently want a micromelon, something that is easier to store, according to consumer polling done by some of the producers. ''We're going to create crops that taste better and have a longer shelf life,'' said John Sorenson, the president of Syngenta Seeds North America. And those crops will be tailored to consumer preferences. Polling done by Syngenta and other agriculture companies found that watermelon shoppers wanted a fruit bigger than a softball but smaller than a soccer ball -- just the profile that Syngenta settled on. ''The market traditionally thought bigger was better in watermelons, but some of us who struggle with refrigerator space believe that smaller can be better,'' Mr. Sorenson said. Syngenta and Seminis have already begun a sparring match of the ''my minimelon is better than your minimelon'' variety. ''Well obviously, we think ours is higher quality,'' said Bill Nash, a spokesman for Seminis. To which, Mr. Grallert of Syngenta replied, ''Hey, I can only speak to the qualities of mine -- the thinness |
1497164_3 | Violence Offers Its Own Lessons | doctors were spending increasing amounts of time undoing the handiwork of criminals rather than fighting germs, and it pushed the public health community into a debate on criminal justice. And as violence became a true field of public health and epidemiological inquiry, people like Thomas Cole, a contributing editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association who is responsible for its violence issue each August, began to demand more rigorous scientific analysis. ''The best of all these people say let's do some research and let the chips fall where they may,'' he said. Dropping the automatic vilification of firearms has helped the discipline grow. ''Once they got rid of the gun thing, lots of people got on board,'' Dr. Cole said. There are many elements contributing to violence in this country, and guns are just one of them. There is, for instance, drug use, gang warfare, unstable and overtaxed families, bullying in school and neighborhoods where all of those antisocial forces thrive. A major project undertaken by the institute was the gathering of data on assaults at six emergency rooms in the Newark area in 2001. According to the institute, Newark was chosen because it is in Essex County, which had more murders than any other county in New Jersey in 2000, and because Newark had the highest rate of total crime and most violent crimes of any of the state's urban centers. The six emergency rooms collected data on the age, race and gender of the victims as well as their relationship to the assailants, along with the type of weapon used, where the attack took place and whether drugs appeared to be involved. Among the findings: the victims of violence in Newark were overwhelmingly young, black and male; three-quarters of them knew their assailants; one-third of all attacks happened in the home; and 12 percent of gunshot victims were 22 years old. In fact, ''victims and offenders are often one and the same,'' said David Livingston, director of trauma at University Hospital in Newark. ''One week you're a victim. The next week you're an offender.'' The project also discovered that certain neighborhoods, called ''hot spots,'' in Newark were more likely to send assault victims to the emergency room and plotted these areas on a map. Zeroing in on the neighborhoods responsible for most assaults can be helpful to the police and other community organizations, but with the |
1497276_3 | Almost Cannibalism | ''because of who they are. They are our sibling species, who share with us between 96 and 99 percent of their genetic code.'' Apes are ''special beings,'' he adds, ''who observe the world through eyes and faces like ours,'' show similar emotions, live in similar social systems and display traces of humanlike intelligence, language skills, and humor. ''Killing and eating them amounts to killing and eating animals shockingly close to human.'' Karl Ammann's lurid photos make the same point more bluntly. A severed gorilla head, on a kitchen counter, wears the sad, glazed expression of a betrayed friend. What looks at first like a leather driving glove, on a table amid beer bottles, is a severed gorilla hand. The juxtapositions may seem stagy, but the reality behind them is raw and unanswerable. A third argument against eating apes, if you need another, is medical and epidemiological. In a morbidly fascinating chapter titled ''Blood,'' Peterson describes the scientific work and circumstantial evidence suggesting that both AIDS and Ebola are zoonotic diseases (that is, transmissible to us from animals), which have leaped from ape populations to humans on several occasions, most likely during the butchery and consumption of hominoid bushmeat. The linkage of H.I.V. to simian immunodeficiency virus (S.I.V.) in West African chimps has been presented in journals like Nature. The case for Ebola is more speculative, but Peterson recounts the story of a village called Mayibout 2, on the Ivindo River in eastern Gabon, where a chimp found dead in the forest was butchered, cooked and eaten, leading to an Ebola outbreak in which 21 people died. I heard tales of Mayibout 2 myself, when I traveled in that area, including one from a survivor who remembered not just the infectious chimp but also a pile of 13 dead gorillas in the forest nearby, all killed by some mysterious agent other than a shotgun. No one yet knows what species (a rodent? a bat?) serves as the permanent reservoir of the Ebola virus, but patterns of gorilla and chimpanzee die-off suggest that our close relatives are capable of suffering from it and passing it along. The problem of bushmeat in central Africa is entangled with industrial logging, which brings roads, trucks, hungry workers and their families and guns into forest areas once far less accessible. National laws against hunting apes and selling their flesh often go unenforced in frontier zones, where |
1497062_2 | The Nation: Losers All; 'Egalitarian Recession' Keeps Anger At Bay | new car or house. Even the committee of academic economists that determines the turns of the business cycle is stumped. The body has not yet announced an end date for the 2001 recession, despite a year and a half of growth, because the data remain so mixed. ''Consumers see some good parts of the economy -- low inflation, low interest rates -- and some bad parts -- unemployment and the lack of wage growth,'' said Richard T. Curtin, director of surveys at the University of Michigan. ''And they're spending just enough to keep the economy just growing.'' The bipolar nature of the economy is affecting people in ways that previous booms and busts did not. The percentage of Americans moving from one state to another fell last year to the lowest level since at least the 1970's, according to Economy.com, a research company. Despite the rising unemployment, few people chose to seek out a better job market than their current hometown. This slump has not produced the regional horror stories that captured people's attention in previous decades and created exoduses from the Midwest and New England to the Sun Belt, and from California to the interior West. Because white-collar layoffs are now an accepted part of the business world, professionals are as battered as the working class. Nor are there notable differences between immigrants and native-born workers. Joblessness has risen by roughly equal amounts for both groups, according to the Urban Institute in Washington. College graduates remain much more likely to be employed than high-school dropouts, but since early 2001 the gap has narrowed. At the University of North Carolina, for example, just 15 percent of seniors had a job waiting for them on graduation day last month, half the usual proportion. ''For high-school dropouts, this does not look like a deep recession,'' Professor Katz said. For college graduates, it does. One of the few ways that the downturn has concentrated its pain is that compared with other recent slumps, unemployment has tended to last longer during this recession. That means joblessness has touched fewer workers, however, since a greater share of today's jobless were also out of work three months ago. In fact, just 32 percent of Americans say they are worried about a major wage earner in their house losing a job, according a recent Newsweek poll. In October 1991, when the job market was actually better, 44 |
1495929_2 | French Strike Against Cuts In Pensions Jams Traffic | street. Postal workers, state bank employees, telecommunications operators, teachers, nurses and police officers joined in the nationwide strike. Interrupted train service caused traffic jams that stretched for miles outside the capital as private companies' employees drove to work. Protests filled city centers in Marseille, Rouen and Nantes as well. Despite the strikes and colorful demonstrations -- a long-held tradition in this country -- the center-right government, which holds a clear majority in Parliament, showed no sign of scaling back its legislation. It says the proposed changes are unavoidable because of the rising number of pensioners as the country's baby boomers age. Even government workers realize that something must change if they are all to continue enjoying guaranteed pension payments. But they say the government is asking too much with proposals that would require them to work 40 years before retirement, rather than the 37.5 years they are required to work now. Under the bill, government employees would have to work 42 years after 2009. ''Your reform project is neither just or equitable,'' wrote Bernard Thibault, secretary general of the C.G.T., France's largest labor federation, in an open letter to Mr. Raffarin published in several national newspapers. He demanded that the government open negotiations with all of the country's unions. Some unions have officially been on strike since mid-May and some since the beginning of this month, while others urged their members to start striking for an indefinite period beginning today. The strikes delayed some flights, but the main air traffic controllers' union stayed on the job and airports continued to operate. Despite the inconveniences caused by the strikes, the government workers enjoy widespread support among their compatriots. One poll published by Le Figaro on Saturday showed that 66 percent of respondents supported or had sympathy for the strikers. Many students, though, are worried that striking teachers will interfere with the annual baccalaureate examinations, which are required for study in the country's universities. The exams begin on Thursday with a four-hour philosophy test. Some teachers have threatened to protest by giving high grades to everyone. In an interview published in the daily Tribune, Mr. Raffarin said he would do whatever it took to ensure that the exams progressed smoothly, and he remained optimistic about the fate of his pension bill. ''There are never social reforms in France without agitation,'' he said. ''That is why reforms have been put off so often.'' |
1495937_1 | Agreeing to Protect Giant Treasures, but How? | few debates where everyone agrees with the objective: these trees are a national treasure, the largest living and growing things on earth. They must be protected,'' said Mr. Gaffrey, 50, a soft-spoken forester who has supervised the Sequoia National Forest since 1996. ''The question is, how do we do this?'' There is little dispute that Western forestlands have suffered for decades from logging and the suppression of fire. Fire, which occurs naturally in any given section of forest every 7 to 10 years, is critical to the life cycle of a forest because it clears underbrush and allows the healthiest trees to grow. Putting those fires out, as the United States Forest Service has done for decades, disrupts this natural cycle. Still, there is bitter disagreement over how to cure these wounded woodlands. The House of Representatives passed a bill in May, supported by President Bush, to accelerate the clearing of brush and the cutting of trees on millions of acres of federal land, including parts of this forest, to reduce the danger of catastrophic fire. Mr. Bush said at a White House ceremony that bureaucratic inertia, flawed forest policy and legal delays had prevented actions that would restore the forests to health. Critics contend that the bill would open federal forests to widespread logging that would benefit the timber industry without protecting communities threatened by fire. The same debate is being played out in microcosm in the sequoias. Mr. Clinton's proclamation creating the monument explicitly forbade using any of the monument land for commercial timber sales. It expanded on a 1992 order by President George Bush prohibiting logging within 1,000 feet of a sequoia grove. And the Clinton proclamation barred removal of trees from the entire 328,000 acres except for campfire wood or ''if clearly needed for ecological restoration and maintenance or public safety.'' This is the crux of Mr. Gaffrey's dilemma. A large part of his job is to find a way to prevent a catastrophic blaze like the McNally fire last summer, which started at a poorly tended campfire and burned 150,000 acres here. It was the most devastating fire here in at least 120 years. Tens of thousands of acres of mixed conifer forest and chaparral are now nothing but blackened soil and spindly, charred tree trunks. Some spring grasses have begun to sprout, and a few infant sugar and ponderosa pines have poked through the |
1499177_1 | Congress Finds Rare Unity in Spam, to a Point | says, has reached a crisis point -- consuming an estimated 40 percent of all e-mail traffic. Technology solutions have not been a panacea. As a result, various other business interest groups (with the exception of the spammers themselves) that might normally defend the free play of market forces have converged in support of some kind of federal regulation. Technology companies, which traditionally eschew intervention from Washington, now fear the economic potential of the Internet will drown in the vast volumes of spam. Microsoft, America Online, Earthlink, eBay and Yahoo have rallied behind a fairly stringent Senate antispam bill sponsored by Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. And even the marketers have repositioned themselves. ''Legitimate industry has a benefit from cleaning up,'' said Louis Mastria, a spokesman for the Direct Marketing Association, which originally advocated industry self-regulation, but now endorses the Burns-Wyden bill. The consumer-marketer dynamic spawns a spectrum of antispam proposals. One general approach centers on the collective consumer desire to protect in-boxes by requiring prior consent, creating do-not-spam databases and allowing individuals to take spammers to court. Another approach emphasizes how marketing e-mail can be legitimate if it has options called opt-outs for consumers to remove themselves from mailing lists; postal or street addresses; and clear labeling. This approach also outlaws spamming techniques like using automated programs to harvest or generate e-mail addresses. The intent is to eliminate the bottom feeders (the generic Viagra and buy-a-diploma ads), while preserving the right for mainstream companies to market to consumers. But any regulation will be crude compared with the agility of elusive spammers. Even the bill's sponsors acknowledge that no matter what legislation passes, spammers will find loopholes, including moving more of their operations overseas. The hope is to at least slow the deluge. A flurry of antispam bills has been introduced and reintroduced in Congress in the last several months. The bills rival one another as much for their attempt to create catchy acronyms as for legal content: the CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing), the SPAM Act (Stop Pornography and Abusive Marketing Act), REDUCE Spam Act (Restrict and Eliminate the Delivery of Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail or Spam Act), and the RID Spam Act (Reduction in Distribution of Spam). But only bills with either a long history or the backing of key committee chairmen have credibility. This narrows the field |
1499252_4 | A Wall Once Unseen, Now Revered; At Ground Zero, a Symbol of Survival Is Mended for Posterity | Then it was unimaginably tested on Sept. 11, 2001, when the wall held through the impacts of the hijacked jetliners and the collapse of the south and north towers, which generated temblors of magnitude 2.1 and 2.3, respectively, as measured by Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. In accomplishing what it had never been designed to do, the wall enabled thousands of people to flee the towers. Its collapse could have undermined the twin towers earlier, trapping more workers; a massive inundation could have destabilized the foundations of other buildings and impeded recovery efforts. But its survival was a near thing. After the towers collapsed, the southern margin of the wall moved about a foot, bellying like a concrete dam about to burst. According to Mr. Tamaro, 40,000 cubic yards of backfill was brought in to stabilize a 300-foot-long section. Then new steel tieback tendons -- the stabilizing rods that visibly stud the bathtub walls -- were driven in deeply, stapling the wall to the bedrock. When the backfill was removed, the wall withstood. But will it hold? ''It's hard to say what the stresses on the wall are now,'' Mr. Tamaro said. ''Which makes me edgy. Engineers like to have some precision to what they are doing.'' He added, ''We believe that the wall is safe.'' He does not foresee a collapse, ''but it is possible that pieces could fall free, joints could open, and water could come in.'' In Europe, there are sections of 1,000-year-old Roman concrete still very much in use, but the slurry wall ''is in an aggressive climate, adjacent to the Hudson River, with a very high water table, and subject to the freeze-thaw cycle,'' Mr. Tamaro said. It can, if protected and braced properly, last a long time. ''But the natural life of the wall is not going to be hundreds of years,'' he said. Tony Cracchiolo, the Port Authority's lead project manager at ground zero, noted that the wall had been open to the elements and ''has been exposed to stresses and weather that it was never intended to face.'' So porous was the wall that, last winter, at the 30-foot level marking the winter water table, ice formed stalactites on the concrete, giving it the look of a frozen Niagara Falls. Danger to the wall, engineers said, involves a process that geologists call mass wasting: the thaw and freeze cycle |
1499158_2 | A Church in Search Of Followers | year before it, in which many hundreds of instances of abuse were brought to light, several bishops resigned in disgrace, an accused priest was shot by his accuser and Cardinal Bernard Law, under fire in Boston, hid behind a bunker of secular legalese? Yes, it can. Because the developments of the year before Dallas, though appalling, were no great surprise to most of us. We all knew -- some of us firsthand -- that there are priests who are sexual predators. We knew the bishops to be a controlling and self-righteous lot, determined to deal with problems in their own fashion and at their own pace. And since we were familiar with their characteristic worldview -- in which the church, represented by the bishops, is in pitched battle with the crass forces of modernity -- we weren't surprised when they recast themselves as the defendants in a show trial conducted by the impious American press. So we were prepared for scandal. And we were relieved, even grateful, when the problem was dragged out into the open; we wished we'd done more to expose the problem ourselves. What we weren't prepared for was the bishops' hardness of heart after the problem was in plain sight and they had pledged to deal with it. Once their strategy of denial had failed, we expected the bishops, struck by the pathos of the situation, to frankly admit their wrongdoing. Why shouldn't we have? The church's new catechism -- a project overseen by Cardinal Law -- is eloquent on the virtues of admitting one's sins: ''Through such an admission, man looks squarely at the sins he is guilty of, takes responsibility for them, and thereby opens himself again to God and the communion of the Church in order to make a new future possible.'' No doubt, good things have happened in the past year. Cardinal Law resigned as archbishop of Boston. The national review board has gone about its work, though not without strife (last week its chairman, Frank Keating, resigned). Stricter sexual-abuse policies have been drafted. Communication between clergy and lay people has improved. Yet even the most devout of Catholics would recognize these steps as necessary but not sufficient, the spasms of an institution struggling to find its footing. As important as they are, they are characterized by what they lack: the penitential spirit, for so long so basic to Catholicism that it |
1499174_0 | More Companies Pay Heed to Their 'Word of Mouse' Reputation | Early this year, the wrath of the World Wide Web rained down on Intuit when its TurboTax software programs displeased some customers, who then promptly posted their grievances all over Internet forums. The velocity in the spread of those critical remarks created a crisis for the company and a colorful case study for the budding academic field that examines the dynamic of online reputations. In January, soon after TurboTax's release, angry customer reviews flooded Extremetech.com, CNET.com, Slashdot.org and many other sites that allow the public to contribute product reviews. Much of the criticism was aimed at antipiracy features in the software that made it hard for a customer to install the program on more than one computer and created the impression with some that Intuit was tracking users surreptitiously. On Amazon.com one reviewer wrote, ''This reeks to high heaven!'' Comments descended from there. Intuit's chief executive, Stephen M. Bennett, responded quickly by sending e-mail to angry customers assuring them that Intuit was not spying on them. He managed to halt a brewing boycott. A more positive example of online reputation-building was the box office success of ''My Big Fat Greek Wedding,'' which received a slew of favorable early reviews on Web sites, which may have helped the film compensate for a small advertising budget. Although it is difficult to quantify how much online reviews affect sales of particular products, the Internet's ability to quickly tarnish or gild reputations has interested businesses for many years. Academic interest in the field has grown recently, spurred by the availability of more data as the Internet ages and by recognition of the importance of understanding the dynamics of online reputations. In late April, the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was host to a conference, financed by the National Science Foundation, on ''reputation mechanisms in online communities.'' At the conference, academic experts in game theory, sociology and marketing discussed how ''word of mouse'' influences businesses as well as how eBay and other e-commerce companies can better manage the quality of the information the public posts on Web sites and reduce the risk of fraud online. ''The data are a researcher's playground,'' said Paul Resnick, an associate professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information and one of the organizers of the M.I.T. conference. Chris Dellarocas, an M.I.T. professor and an organizer of the conference, said he was interested in |
1499251_0 | Still Lax About E-Mail | Despite all the evidence that federal investigators of corporate scandals have amassed from e-mail over the last year, few companies have taken steps to make sure their employees know and follow rules for proper use of e-mail. That is a conclusion, at least, of a recent survey of more than 1,100 employees and executives at companies of all sizes. The survey found that while half of the companies monitored employee e-mail, and three-quarters of the companies had e-mail policies in place, fewer than half provided employee education programs on using e-mail. ''Employers have been slow to respond to the very real dangers that are out there in terms of employee e-mail,'' said Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute, which provides consulting and training for corporate management of e-mail. Ms. Flynn's institute conducted the survey with the American Management Association and Clearswift, a maker of software for monitoring employee e-mail. Ms. Flynn noted that 14 percent of the respondents said their companies had been ordered by a court or regulators to produce employee e-mail messages -- up from 9 percent when a similar survey was conducted in 2001. TIM RACE MOST WANTED: DRILLING DOWN/MANAGEMENT |
1500717_0 | Hormones and Cancer | To the Editor: Re ''Study Finds New Risks in Hormone Therapy'' (front page, June 25): I am a 64-year-old pediatrician with invasive lobular breast cancer. I took estrogen and progesterone for five years, thinking that the risk of breast cancer would be small and that it could easily be detected. I now know that lobular breast cancer is not easily diagnosed early. I first felt my tumor only when it was large and had spread. My screening mammogram was negative, as was my examination by a doctor three months before diagnosis. My hot flashes had seemed disabling. But hot flashes pale in comparison to surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, not to mention the threat of death. I fear that estrogen and progesterone hormone replacement therapy may be remembered as one of the terrible medical mistakes of the 20th century. I do not believe that there was adequate evidence to encourage women to take these drugs for years with impunity. Doctors must continually be reminded: first, do no harm. Medicine should be based on evidence and not just on supposition. ANNE A. GERSHON, M.D. New York, June 25, 2003 |
1500840_4 | Iran Is Trying to Curb Porn and Politics on Web | have been blocked thus far. The political sites are perhaps more worrisome for the government than the online pornography. Many of the journalists who founded liberal, reformist newspapers that have been banned by the conservative-run judiciary have started Web sites that use much bolder language than the print media and have proven harder to shut down. This spring, 135 members of Parliament wrote an open letter to Ayatollah Khamenei, suggesting that it was time for Iran to reform and to do more to reintegrate with the world. They cited an old line from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini about drinking a cup of poison at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, a suggestion that trying times require distasteful, drastic measures. Not a single newspaper published the letter -- it is unclear who ordered them to refrain -- but it was widely available on the Web. When protests erupted in Tehran and around the country in mid-June, the newspapers offered limited coverage. Eventually the Culture Ministry even barred journalists from attending the demonstrations. But student Web sites kept the country informed with nearly blow-by-blow accounts of events each night. Newspapers have reported on the rough guidelines on Internet use that the Justice Ministry plans to promulgate. A report in the newspaper Iran listed 20 kinds of online activity that would be considered possible violations, including publishing articles that insult Islamic values, Iran's leadership, top clerics or the ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary patriarch. Sites that promote gambling, smoking or drug addiction will also be outlawed, the account said, and the judiciary will create a special department to investigate and prosecute Internet offenses. Service providers complain that they do not have the means to buy the expensive filtering equipment needed. Internet specialists believe that the government might have obtained some highly effective American equipment -- getting around the ban the United States has placed on such exports by purchasing it through European subsidiaries. For reformist legislators in Parliament, the sudden interest by the ruling clergy in the Internet prompts concern that broader restrictions may lie ahead. ''What is important is not to interfere with the free exchange of ideas in the society,'' said Elaheh Koulai, one of the outspoken women in Iran's Parliament. ''There is a fear that this kind of filtering will expand to the circulation of information, not just limit things that go against our legal and cultural norms.'' |
1500893_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1500698_2 | Affirmative Action, Productive Potential | without the policies. But the professors also discovered that the performance of minority workers hired under affirmative action was no worse than that of those who weren't. At least indirectly, these studies give credence to an idea long held by supporters of affirmative action: that most standard measures of aptitude, like the College Board tests, are biased against minorities. In a market for labor based on these measures, minorities would be underemployed relative to their productive potential. One might argue that the labor market in the United States is much more subtle, taking account of many different markers of future success. Yet can it delve beyond all superficial traits to measure a person's true potential, without bias? If it could, there would be much less need for affirmative action. IN fact, research by Professors Holzer and Neumark showed that affirmative action might help fine-tune the labor market. It appears to increase the use of recruitment and screening procedures for job applicants. It also leads to more hiring of ''stigmatized'' applicants, including those who have criminal records or have been on welfare, who may still be productive workers. In a 1999 working paper, the professors concluded that ''the empirical case against affirmative action on the grounds of efficiency is weak at best.'' They also noted that affirmative action could still have hurt some groups. Whites, for example, might have missed opportunities to work or learn as a result of affirmative action, as the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court cases argued. But if this occurred because colleges and companies had begun to value the potential of minorities and women more accurately -- even by giving them the benefit of the doubt -- then economic efficiency was probably served. Because the second of the Supreme Court's decisions on affirmative action required that race, sex and ethnicity be considered in combination with other factors, the policies' effects are likely to be diluted. Upper- and middle-class blacks and Hispanics, for instance, may no longer receive special consideration when applying to universities or for jobs. The full economic consequences will therefore depend on the answer to another question worthy of research: If there is indeed a bias against minorities in standard measures of educational and professional potential, does that bias disappear when an individual has had other advantages in life? If it does, the Supreme Court may have fine-tuned the labor market even more. ECONOMIC VIEW |
1500870_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1500857_4 | Can't Find a Summer Job? Blame All the Layoffs | Charles E. Schumer, with no luck. He eventually was accepted into an unpaid internship program for Representative Christopher Shays. Charles Bassos, president and chief executive of Fairfield County Savings Bank, said that turnover at his bank had slowed. Without open positions to fill, he has watched the number of applications from recent college graduates pile up. ''I've been getting more résumés across my desk than I have in the past five years,'' Mr. Bassos said, estimating that he has received between 10 to 15 a week. These résumés come from all parts of the country, he said, from college students to vastly experienced people looking to obtain entry-level professional positions. ''People are staying put,'' Mr. Bassos said. ''We haven't hired a recent college grad for some time.'' Anand David, director and regional head of campus recruiting in the Americas for UBS, has worked at the company for three years and has noticed a sharp increase in the number of students who attend recruiting events on college campuses. ''There is a huge difference in the level of attendance,'' Mr. David said. ''It's double or triple what we saw three years ago.'' The company has hired 1,038 college students this summer for internships, 78 of which are in Stamford. Last year, it had 678 interns and 64 in Stamford. Robert Reed, store manager for the new Wal-Mart in Norwalk, was surprised by the number of applications the store received. In a five-week period, more than 5,000 applicants turned out at the hiring office. He still receives 50 to 100 applications a day, although the store is fully staffed. Mr. Reed said that high school students have as good a chance as an adult with experience to work at Wal-Mart, but the number of people seeking work made it more difficult. ''We've had so many applicants to go through, we had to pass up a lot of good people,'' Mr. Reed said. ''From people with no experience, to people that made $70,000 to $80,000 a year who are applying for entry-level positions.'' Lisa Rivieccio, a Norwalk teacher with the city's School-to-Career Program that pairs students with local businesses, described this summer's job prospects for students as ''bleak.'' ''The market is tight, but not impossible,'' she said. ''It will require more legwork; students will not be able to walk in the door and get hired.'' She said that companies had cut back on part-time |
1500817_6 | An Aging Europe May Find Itself on the Sidelines | only as Reinhardt was fuming because the spa refused to accept his state health insurance this year and he had to pay the $8 daily entrance fee out of his own pocket. He had not been told that most health insurance programs in Germany removed spa treatments as an automatic benefit last year, though if doctors prescribe such treatment a person is still covered for one visit every three years. For European governments, there is no alternative to reform, which means lower benefits and higher retirement ages. Austria, despite the labor walkouts, has passed legislation cutting benefits by 10 percent and gradually raising the retirement age to 65 from 60. Similar legislation seems almost certain in France and here in Germany, which has one of Europe's lowest birthrates. Indeed, Germany's Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth has compiled figures showing just how much the population is changing. The fertility rate itself is 1.34 children per woman, well below the rate of 2.1 said to be needed to maintain a stable population. The reasons given for this apply throughout the industrialized world: people in highly developed, prosperous societies tend to have fewer children; women postpone childbearing to pursue careers, or forgo having children altogether. In Germany, among women born in 1950, 14.9 percent of west Germans and 8 percent of east Germans are childless. By comparison, of women born in West Germany in 1965, 31.2 percent are childless along with 26.4 percent of women born in East Germany. Even more striking are the differences by social strata. Fully 39 percent of the most educated German women are childless, the government's statistics show, compared with under 25 percent for women with less education. ''The more money you make, the greater is the opportunity cost for having children,'' said Bernd Raffelhüschen, a member of a German governmental commission studying pension reform. Projecting the population into the future is difficult because nobody can be sure that the birthrate will not begin to increase, as it has, for example, in recent years in France. Indeed, a higher birthrate, combined with immigration, could significantly halt the trend toward an older and a smaller European population. Mr. Lutz and his colleagues estimate that one million immigrants a year into Europe would be the same as women having on average one more child. But one million immigrants a year would mean 50 million by 2050, |
1500908_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1500561_13 | The Executioner's I.Q. Test | with help, obtain jobs and driver's licenses, take care of themselves, marry, raise children and so on. Retarded people on death row tend not to have Down syndrome, which usually results in more severe retardation. In any case, people with more significant cognitive deficits either lack the capacity to plan or commit a serious crime or are declared incompetent to stand trial. ''Drooling guys who don't know how to feed themselves don't end up on the row,'' as Gregory Meyers, a lawyer in the Ohio public defender's office, puts it. Many of the people I spoke to for this article pointed out that in making Atkins claims, they had to battle against a common misperception of the mentally retarded as more obviously impaired than most mentally retarded people are. They laughed and shook their heads over the stereotypes of slack-jawed guys humming tunelessly to themselves, hulking Lenny types, ''Deliverance'' extras. ''I was at a court proceeding in Florida where there were these two mixed-race defendants who were just gorgeous,'' Denis Keyes says. ''I mean, honey, these two guys took your breath away. And they were retarded, but you could imagine the jury was thinking nobody with mental retardation is that good looking.'' But if it's true that many people, even among those who support the death penalty, believe it is wrong to execute the mentally retarded, and at the same time true that many people hold in their minds an inaccurate stereotype of the retarded, then we may have a problem. It may be that the consensus the court identified -- holding that it is wrong to execute the mentally retarded but acceptable to execute schizophrenics or minors or people who sustained brain injuries after the age of 18 or people who were unimaginably mistreated -- may not be as stable as it seems. Terrell Yarbrough, who is 22 and has been on Ohio's death row for three years, is one of the people whom the Atkins decision will probably save from lethal injection. His is one of the most persuasive of the 37 Atkins-related claims the Ohio public defender has filed. On the surface, it looks better, for instance, than did that of Ernest Martin, who claimed to have written an autobiography while in prison (''Casualty of Justice: A Black Man's Plight With the American Judicial System'') for which he planned a sequel (''The Case of the Exhumed Petitioner''). |
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1495071_2 | Conscience of Canada Inc. | Elizabeth awarded him the Order of the British Empire. Though Canada has so far been spared corporate scandals on the scale of Enron and WorldCom, its governance record is far from unblemished. Investors lost tens of millions of dollars in 1997 when Bre-X Minerals, a gold exploration company, falsified results from a property in Indonesia. Former executives of the theater group Livent currently face fraud charges in Ontario. Several of Canada's best-known public companies, including the transportation equipment maker Bombardier and the auto parts manufacturer Magna International, have been criticized for having dual voting structures. Such arrangements let one shareholder, usually a founding family, exercise control while owning a relatively small equity stake. Until now, Canadian institutions ''haven't done a very good job in any kind of concerted fashion'' to improve corporate governance standards, said Patrick O'Callaghan, a board governance consultant in Vancouver. Still, Canadian regulators take a less interventionist approach to corporate governance than do their American counterparts, preferring maximum disclosure and voluntary guidelines instead of strict rules. For instance, the Toronto Stock Exchange has recommended that companies separate the jobs of chairman and chief executive or appoint a ''lead'' independent director as an alternative to an independent chairman. But the exchange has resisted turning such recommendations into conditions for listing. ''A highly prescriptive rule makes you listen to your accountant or your lawyer, but you can leave it at the office,'' the exchange's president, Barbara Stymiest, said in a recent speech. ''A guideline based on doing what's right makes you listen to your conscience. It's your conscience that you take home at night.'' As Mr. Beatty sees it, the new coalition will function ''in a subtle way'' as ''the enforcement arm of a voluntary regulatory framework.'' Coalition members plan to monitor the composition and performance of corporate boards and to swap information on board candidates to recommend to nominating committees. They also aim to develop common positions on accounting standards and financial disclosure. Mr. Beatty said the coalition would ''not just beat up the folks at the back of the wagon train.'' He also plans to organize workshops where some of Canada's most respected corporate directors will tell others how they do their jobs. He said he would like to invite Anthony Comper, chairman of the Bank of Montreal, to speak about how the bank's board members evaluate one another's performance. The bank is one of the few |
1495353_1 | Confessions of a Gym Rat | cult. But who was being worshiped? In ''Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health,'' Gina Kolata examines the fitness craze that has swept through the United States over the past 30 years. She tries to answer some of the fundamental questions about exercise that occur to most people who've recently joined a gym: Why exercise? How much exercise is good for you? And how much do you need to look and feel good? A science reporter for The New York Times, Kolata is well suited for such an inquiry. She approaches the often contradictory claims and pseudoscience of America's fitness gurus with a skeptical eye. She's also obsessed with exercise -- a proud gym rat who at various times has been a devotee of jogging, stair climbing and aerobics, as well as other popular fitness trends. And she is refreshingly honest about the mixture of vanity, hedonism and hope of longevity that prompts so many to spend so much time working out. Kolata's desire to start weight lifting, for example, was ''the result of a single transformative moment'' in 1996. It came during her teenage daughter's lacrosse practice, as young girls with flat abdomens and slender hips and legs that were ''achingly lovely'' ran back and forth across the field. ''It's pitiful, I know, to have such thoughts,'' Kolata admits, ''I'm the mother, for heaven's sake -- but I wanted that look, too.'' An eagerness to live longer and look better has inspired special diets and training regimens for millenniums. Men in ancient Greece and Rome practiced ''therapeutic gymnastics'' and ''gymnastic medicine,'' following the advice of physicians like Herodicus, Hippocrates and Galen. While exercise was promoted as a means of attaining health, it was also pursued to gain the sort of muscularphysique featured in ancient statuary. In her brief but fascinating history of fitness fads, Kolata repeats some of the unusual advice given to athletes (always drink beer instead of water during a race) and later describes some of their unorthodox training techniques (running in place for hours while reading a book, running with your wife on your shoulders). She notes that the ''muscular Christianity'' of the late 19th century added a moral and spiritual dimension to the fitness movement -- which may explain the self-righteousness that so often afflicts its followers. But she fails to mention one society where the obsession with physical activity and a |
1495179_0 | The Fresh Air Fund; Camp Broadens Possibilities for Disabled Children | On a drizzly Saturday last month, 9-year-old Daniel Byrd of Brooklyn felt right at home by the pond at Camp Hidden Valley in Fishkill, N.Y., where he was spending the weekend. With his bamboo rod in hand, he walked by himself along the water's grassy edge to find an ideal spot for fishing. His mother, Teresa Byrd, stood nearby keeping an eye on him. Ms. Byrd says she worries about Daniel because he has attention deficit disorder. ''He is very active,'' she said. Dispersed around the pond, other families and parents were casting fishing lines of their own. Thirteen families, most of them with disabled children, had taken the trip 65 miles north of New York City to sample typical summer activities at the camp, which is run by the Fresh Air Fund. The weekend retreat was an opportunity for parents to watch their children interact with counselors and other campers. The counselors could assess the level of individual attention the children needed. After the weekend, evaluations would determine if the campers were ready to try extended stays. The first of four 12-day camping sessions will begin on June 27. ''It would be a good experience for him to get away,'' said Ms. Byrd, who hoped to be able to send Daniel to one of the sessions. ''At camp he'll be out in the open and be able to run and work off his energy.'' The Fresh Air Fund sends more than 10,000 children from low-income families on free vacations every year. About 3,000 of these children spend time at five camps the fund operates on the Sharpe Reservation in Fishkill. But Camp Hidden Valley is the only one equipped to accommodate those with physical disabilities or developmental problems as well as children without special needs. ''We are very fortunate,'' said Holly Harrison, the camp's director. ''For children in wheelchairs, we have a new pool that allows us to wheel children into the water. And rather than shower chairs, we have a shower in the infirmary that is big enough for a wheelchair.'' The families that came up for the weekend retreat, most of them first-time visitors, stayed in wooden cabins. They followed ramps and paved pathways under a canopy of trees to the dining hall for breakfast. By 9:30 a.m., they were enjoying a taste of a typical day at camp. Some stayed in the dining hall to bake |
1495132_0 | How to Deal With Spam | To the Editor: ''How to Unclog the Information Artery'' (May 25) offered various possible solutions to a peculiar side effect of global Internet-connectedness: spam. Under one of the proposed solutions, a long-lost buddy from college who finds me on our alumni page might have to fill out information on another Web page before sending me e-mail. What is the benefit of the speed of information technology if we have to jump double hoops just to stay in touch? Increasingly, this is an issue of speech control. Lest we forget, before the Internet explosion in the mid-90's, communication via computer was often a forum for hackers and student insomniacs to disperse opinions or discuss who had the wildest technological discovery. The freedom of those exchanges has evolved into accessibility of the free market. MARIA E. GUTIERREZ Manhattan, May 27 |
1495134_0 | How to Deal With Spam | To the Editor: Fees are charged for mail, fax and telephone calls. Why not for e-mail? Not only would it be reasonable to charge the sender for each e-mail message sent, but it would also have the effect of reducing spam to tolerable levels and acceptable content. JIM LINCOLN Concord, Mass., May 28 The writer is senior vice president of Biscom, a maker of fax servers. |
1493786_0 | Weighing the Risks Of Hormone Pills | To the Editor: I have a hint for those who do research on dementia (front page, May 28). Check out the studies that show that excitable and ornery older people have the greatest survival rates. Whatever vascular problems may have been caused by my taking Prempro and before that Premarin for more than 35 years is balanced out by the surge of blood that keeps those arteries pumped up every time I read the paper and see where this administration is taking us. It's important to remember that it's a combination of circumstances that lead to dementia. Being a thorn in the side of anyone who would take away women's autonomy and a nation's safety nets is one way to avoid it. Thanks for the excuse, though. MAGGIE CONSTAN Montclair, N.J., May 28, 2003 |
1493806_1 | BUSH PRESSES CASE ON IRAN AND KOREA AT ECONOMIC TALKS | on the issue by declaring that he had no ''discomfort'' in dealing with the American president. Rather than dwell on their differences, Mr. Bush pressed the main issue on his agenda -- nonproliferation. By the end of the day, the president appeared to have won at least a new hearing from Mr. Putin on Russia's technological aid to Iran's nuclear programs. There were also signs from China that North Korea, its close ally, might be willing to meet for a second negotiating session, this time with Japan and South Korea present, as Mr. Bush has demanded. The president's aides worked behind the scenes to sign countries up for a new White House initiative to create an international legal basis for seizing missiles, chemical and biological agents, and nuclear components on the high seas or in the air. The proposal is clearly intended to give countries broader authority to quarantine North Korea, and perhaps Iran as well. It was unclear how many of the traditionally American allies here would agree, at a moment when many Europeans view Mr. Bush and the United States as far too powerful and too willing to use military force to shape the world to America's liking. Mr. Chirac made clear that American dominance was still one of his chief concerns. ''I have no doubt whatsoever that the multipolar vision of the world that I have defended for some time is certainly supported by a large majority of countries throughout the world,'' he said to reporters this evening on his way to a dinner with the other leaders. The concerns about American empire were also echoed in the huge protests -- involving tens of thousands of Europeans -- that moved through the streets of Geneva and villages in both Switzerland and France today. The police tried to contain the threat of violence with tear gas, and the Swiss had to send German antiriot police officers into their streets. But while there was a good deal of window-breaking and stone-throwing, the mix of antiglobalization protesters, anti-Bush protesters and others did not appear as serious as the kind of rioting that marred the Group of 8 meeting in Genoa, Italy, two years ago. This year the protesters were kept miles from Hôtel Royal, where the leaders of the United States, France, Britain, Italy, Canada, Germany, Japan and Russia were meeting on the edge of the lake, and heard none |
1493764_2 | Neediest Cases Fund to Underwrite 1,000 Summer Jobs | the Neediest Summer Jobs Program, will be administered by the After-School Corporation, a nonprofit group that serves about 45,000 children in the city by creating donor-program partnerships. The Neediest Cases Fund is inviting individual and corporate donors to help by either creating blocks of summer jobs or making cash contributions to provide additional jobs. Each job costs about $1,300, which provides a teenager's salary, training and supervision, fund officials said. In 2001, government funds supported 50,000 summer jobs in New York City, officials at the After-School Corporation said. Last summer, the number fell to 35,000. This summer is expected to be worse still, officials who work with poor children said, although an exact number is not yet available. ''Most of these kids would be on the street,'' said Lucy N. Friedman, the president of the After-School Corporation. ''Trouble would find them or they would find trouble. But now they will be actively engaged, learning and bringing income to their families.'' The program is expected to have a trickle-down effect on the camps and summer schools where the young people will be working, as additional staffing will lessen the impact of any cutbacks. ''The employees in turn will be given opportunities that they might not have gotten, such as going to a park,'' Ms. Friedman said. ''For some kids, it may be the first time they plant a garden, look through a pair of binoculars, go to the zoo. The data is very strong about how much kids lose during the summertime if they do not have exposure to books and reading.'' The creation of the Neediest Summer Jobs Program represents a departure from the usual manner in which the fund spends money from its $26.2 million endowment. Usually, only the endowment's annual income is spent, Mr. Rosenthal said. But three years ago, the fund adopted a policy allowing it to tap into the capital in times of economic stress. The goal was to be ''countercyclical,'' Mr. Rosenthal said, ''so that if times turned tough, we'd go into the fund to try to make a difference, both directly and by trying to set an example.'' Companies interested in the program may write to Mary Bleiberg, vice president for policy and planning, the After-School Corporation, 925 Ninth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10019; send an e-mail message to mbleiberg@tascorp.org; or call (212) 547-6923. Cash contributions can also be sent to that mailing address. |
1493813_4 | Scores of Thousands Protest Conference, Some Violently | confrontation, even if it meant there was no one to maintain order. Earlier in the day, on the main marching route from central Geneva to the French border four miles away, about two dozen protesters in black clothing, their faces masked or covered, smashed signs, windows and gas pumps at a BP gas station. They stole beer, food and cigarettes from its convenience shop, throwing packs of cigarettes to the crowd. Several fire trucks arrived, and firemen set up a makeshift fence around the site. But without a police presence, the vandals got away. Despite the isolated acts of violence, tens of thousands of marchers met up on the Swiss side of the border with tens of thousands of others who had started from the French town of Annemasse. As the marchers passed the deserted French-Swiss border crossing, they chanted, ''No Frontiers, Freedom of Movement.'' The protesters' concerns ranged from anti-globalization and environmentalism to developing nations' debt and concern over genetically modified foods. Much of their anger was directed at President Bush for the war against Iraq. Anarchist groups marched alongside church groups with rainbow banners reading ''peace'' in several languages. Parents wheeled their children in strollers. Volunteers distributed free glasses of sugared water along the route. Residents of an apartment building for the elderly even allowed some marchers to use their toilets. The Geneva police said that between 40,000 and 50,000 people took part in the combined marches, although though some protest organizers said there were as many as 120,000. On the French side of the border, several hundred demonstrators from Annemasse set out for Évian, which was blocked by heavily armed security forces to all except residents and others with special badges. French security forces used tear gas to stop them. The demonstrators, mostly French, German and Dutch, braved tear gas for several hours before heading back to Annemasse. The demonstrators said other groups had been trying early this morning to cut roads from Geneva to Évian to prevent delegates and support staff from reaching the conference. ''Looks romantic,'' said one 29-year-old German film student who declined to give her name as she watched the tear gas clouds wafting over a nearby field. ''We can be satisfied, even if we only hindered things just a bit.'' THE PRESIDENT'S TRIP: DEMONSTRATIONS Hélène Fouquet in Geneva, Alison Langley in Lausanne and John Tagliabue in Thonon, France, contributed to this report. |
1493785_0 | Weighing the Risks Of Hormone Pills | To the Editor: Re ''Hormone Use Found to Raise Dementia Risk'' (front page, May 28): As a geriatrician who treats patients with dementias of all kinds and at every stage, I find it alarming that recent studies about estrogen replacement therapy are scaring women yet again, when several past studies demonstrated the positive effects of estrogen on the brain. The study you describe followed only women 65 or older and for only four years. A true proof of whether a hormone or drug can prevent (or fail to prevent) dementia would require that the drug be taken for considerably longer than four years for the effects to become obvious on a simple mental status test. Anyone who begins to score lower on this type of test has been experiencing the death of brain cells long before treatment with hormone or placebo. We should be studying women who start to take estrogen at the onset of menopause, when a woman's natural estrogen declines. Isn't it more likely that the ''true'' effects of estrogen will become known only if this group of women is monitored over many years? TERESA SCHAER, M.D. New Brunswick, N.J., May 28, 2003 |
1501105_0 | U.S. Chill Flattens Mood at French Wine Fair | Something was missing from the country's largest wine fair here this week, and it wasn't just the air-conditioning (in one of the exhibition halls, temperatures rose so high that corks popped on their own). The usual contingent of American wine merchants were mostly absent, confirming to many at the fair that American ill will over France's opposition to the war in Iraq bruised more than egos. French wine sales to the United States, once French winemakers' most promising market and now one of their greatest competitors, are going down the drain. ''It's clear from our American distributors that there is a hesitation to promote French wines for the time being,'' said Bruno Finance, sales manager for Yvon Mau, one of Bordeaux's largest wine merchants. He said French wine was losing its share of some other markets. ''But as of today, the only place there is such a big loss is in the U.S.'' French exports to the United States are already suffering from a weak American economy and the dollar's diminished value against the euro, which makes French products more expensive for Americans. Overall French exports to the United States dropped by 21 percent in the first four months of the year, excluding the military category. There is no doubt the trans-Atlantic dispute over Iraq has made things worse in a variety of industries. American aviation executives were noticeably absent from the biannual Paris Air Show this month, in step with the Pentagon, which sent fewer of its most elaborate planes. France is trying to repair the damage with a maladroit public relations campaign whose tagline is, ''Let's Fall In Love Again,'' featuring a video in which the aging comedian and filmmaker Woody Allen talks about French kissing his young wife. The Paris Tourism Office, which plans to decorate its Champs-Élysées center with stars and stripes on July 4, said many hotels in the capital would celebrate the American holiday. But some in the wine business worry that the damage might not be easily repaired. French wines never fully recovered in the Scandinavian market after a 1995 boycott there to protest France's nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific that year. ''It gave people the opportunity to try other wines, and they never switched back,'' Mr. Finance said amid a clutter of half-filled wine glasses in his company's booth at the Vinexpo fair. He fears that the pall over French wines |
1501146_1 | New Jersey Foster Children Lingering in Mental Wards | now is horrific,'' said Kathy Wright, executive director of the New Jersey Parents Caucus, a federally financed nonprofit organization that supports parents of children with psychiatric disorders. ''DYFS workers bring them there, if they have failed in a foster placement. But once they are in, they stay from 20 days to 180 days. Once a kid has a mental past or violent past, no one wants them.'' Hospital administrators acknowledge that extended stays on the wards are seriously inappropriate. The wards were conceived as a triage stop of sorts, where severe mental and emotional problems could be diagnosed and treated, and then the children moved on to long-term care in a residential program or to their own homes. The conditions in the wards, by most accounts, are clean and well monitored. Professionals are on duty, and treatment is given. But the wards, known as Children's Crisis Intervention Services units, were not designed for long stays. Thus, officials concede that children kept there often go without consistent schooling, if they get any at all. And because of security concerns, the children, even once they are stabilized, can go days without even a walk outside. More than 300 of the 4,000 or so New Jersey children who spent time in the inpatient wards in the last year -- children ages 6 to 17 -- were foster children. They spent, on average, a month in the wards, four times the average stay for other children. Hospital administrators, child welfare officials and others say there is just no real alternative -- that scarcely any spots are available in residential after-care, and that even fewer foster families are capable of taking in difficult children. State officials, who last week agreed to turn over control of much of the state's child welfare system to an independent oversight panel, said they had been working to address the problem of prolonged and unnecessary stays in the psychiatric wards. But the challenge, they admit, is formidable, one made even more difficult in recent years. According to state figures, 700 more patients spent time in the wards in 2002 than five years ago. Most of the children who enter the psychiatric wards are admitted by families not involved with New Jersey's child welfare system. Because those children are able to return to their own homes, their stays on the wards typically last a week. But many of the children who |
1501109_0 | British Minister Presses Iran To Allow Nuclear Inspections | Britain's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, urged Iran today to sign ''quickly and unconditionally'' an additional protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that would lead to more aggressive United Nations inspections of its nuclear sites. Iran has come under increasing pressure since the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report earlier this month saying that Iran had secretly processed nuclear material. So far, however, Iran has refused to sign the protocol, arguing that the country is seeking nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Speaking at a news conference at the outset of his fourth visit to Iran in less than two years, Mr. Straw said Iran's refusal to sign the protocol allowing surprise inspections was undermining international confidence and discouraging the lifting of trade sanctions. ''With my colleagues in Germany and in France we want to have closer trade cooperation with Iran, but we have to say that progress in trade cooperation depends on progress in issues of human rights and weapons of mass destruction,'' he said. ''If there is no signature, then confidence will not be improved and the international community will be profoundly reluctant to lift the sanctions,'' he added. Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, responded that his country was willing to be more open about its nuclear activity but that first other countries would have to fulfill what he said were their obligations toward Iran. Iran has demanded other countries that have signed the nonproliferation treaty to assist Iran with its nuclear energy program. Mr. Kharrazi also objected to remarks by Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, supporting antigovernment demonstrations in Iran earlier this month. He said the police in Iran should be praised for the way they controlled what he called the ''chaos.'' On Friday, the country's prosecutor general, Ayatollah Abdolnabi Namazi, said that more than 4,000 protesters had been arrested, including 30 student leaders. He added that 40 percent of those arrested had since been released. The protests, some of the largest since 1999, began in Tehran June 10 and spread to other cities before they were suppressed by knife- and club-wielding vigilantes close to hard-line clerics. Scores of demonstrators were injured. One protester was killed in the southern city of Shiraz. Although the street demonstrations have simmered down, protests have continued in other forms. At Isfahan University, 200 miles south of Tehran, 17 students have been on a hunger strike for more than a week. Today, the |
1494401_1 | Mexico Making Headway on Smuggling | budget has grown tenfold, to almost $150 million. That has permitted José Guzmán Montalvo, general administrator of Mexico's customs service since January 2001, to double or triple salaries and buy up-to-date gamma-ray scanners to view the contents of containers. The agency has pursued corrupt customs brokers, canceling the licenses of more than 90 so far, out of 800 total. It has audited private port operators and forced them to fire their corrupt employees. One sign of success is that seizures of contraband increased fivefold from 2000 to 2002. Despite all the cleanup efforts and progress on many fronts, however, contraband -- any import that enters illegally -- continues to cross the borders. While it is now more difficult to bribe an inspector to look the other way, smugglers are resorting to more elaborate schemes using falsified documents and phantom companies. ''We're like sweepers in Central Park in the fall,'' Mr. Guzmán said in a recent interview. ''We sweep all day but by the end of the day, the leaves have piled up again where we swept.'' There are no reliable estimates for much the contraband costs the Mexican economy. Under free trade agreements with the United States, Canada, Europe and many Latin American countries, much of Mexico's $169 billion in imports in 2002 entered duty-free. That reduced the average tariff rate to just 1.3 percent. It is not the lost revenue from the unpaid customs duty that concerns officials most but the tax loss that occurs when the contraband ends up in Mexico's vast informal economy. For Finance Minister Francisco Gil Díaz, Mr. Guzmán's boss, the attack on contraband, then, is part of a larger mission to increase tax collection. Mexico's textile, shoe and garment producers have been hit hardest by the customs infractions. They say they cannot compete with cheap Chinese imports. In an effort to protect local industry a decade ago, the Mexican government placed punitive tariffs as high as 1,105 percent on Chinese fabric, clothing and shoes. But Mexico's street markets are filled with plastic sandals and blouses from China. The National Garment Industry Chamber, for example, estimates that 58 percent of clothing bought in Mexico enters the country illegally, with more than half of that coming in with falsified documents. Business groups generally praise Mr. Guzmán's efforts, and say he is honest and means well. Still, they would like to see tougher measures. ''There is a |
1494466_0 | The Research; Startled by His Visual Prowess, a Gamer Set His Study in Motion | ALTHOUGH Daphne Bavelier and Shawn Green, researchers at the University of Rochester, were gratified to see their article appear in the journal Nature last week, they never expected to see it cause such a stir. The article was based on a study they had done that showed playing action video games improved visual acuity. The college students they tested were more successful at picking out objects in a cluttered environment and more accurate at pinpointing flashing dots on a screen after as little as 10 hours of play. Since the article appeared, Dr. Bavelier, 37, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and Mr. Green, 22, have received worldwide coverage in news broadcasts and newspapers. The research grew out of an incident that occurred when Mr. Green was working on a thesis project, studying eyesight in deaf people, as an undergraduate major in brain and cognitive sciences nearly three years ago. In October 2000, Mr. Green, an avid video game player, was taking some of the tests that he had set up for his thesis idea. As dots flashed for milliseconds at a time on a computer screen, he pointed to where they had appeared as new dots continued to flash. To his surprise, he noticed that his test results were higher than any he had seen reported in articles or studies. In fact, Mr. Green scored with perfect accuracy every time. At first, he and Dr. Bavelier thought that he might have programmed the tests incorrectly, so he asked some friends -- many of them gamers -- to try out the experiments. A few trials showed the gamers performing flawlessly on the eyesight tests while the others were scoring at average levels. Since then, Mr. Green, now a graduate student at the university, has studied the effects of video games on visual perception and hopes to turn the work into his doctoral dissertation. ''I wouldn't have foreseen back then back in 2000 or 2001 that it would have been as big a thing as it eventually became,'' he said. The downside of all the attention, Mr. Green said, is that some people are accusing him and Dr. Bavelier of saying that violent video games are good for children. The accusations seem to be related to the fact that the subjects of Dr. Bavelier and Mr. Green's study were trained on Medal of Honor, a first-person shooter game in |
1494468_1 | On the Reservation, the Web Plays Dream Maker | allow tribes to communicate, collaborate, develop and prosper,'' said Elstun Lauesen, technology director for the corporation. Tribal leaders hope that in addition to creating jobs that support the network and services delivered to users, the network can stimulate Internet-based businesses. ''Local businesses can sell goods and services out to the greater marketplace,'' Mr. Lauesen said. ''They can attract tourism and sell some of their world-class crafts.'' Traditional Makah artisans are known for their woven baskets and wood carvings. Distance learning applications delivered over the network could help residents acquire a wide range of skills, including those in nontechnical or Internet-related areas, that they could transfer to jobs in small business or resort management. And once a high-speed Internet connection is in place, companies off the reservation could employ tribal members working remotely. For now, only the first step is in place: teaching the Indians how to use the Internet by relying on a familiar device, the television. In May, 18 Makah Indians began getting Internet service through phone lines attached to set-top boxes on their TV sets, which they use instead of computer monitors. Once they sign onto a special home page, or portal, using a wireless keyboard, they can read minutes of tribal council meetings and the tribal newsletter, consult a calendar of community events, post and read about job opportunities and stay in touch by e-mail with relatives who may not live on the reservation. They can also listen to recordings of 101 phrases in the Makah language -- which some children learn in school but many residents do not know -- and see pictures of sacred sites that some residents, for example the elderly, may no longer be able to visit. Including the set-top-box users, about 150 Indians have passwords for the Makah site, which they can also reach from any Internet-connected computer. Some live off the reservation. ''They want to stay in touch and feel closer to home, and they find this is a way to do that,'' said Tracey Rascon, a Makah who works for the Economic Development Corporation. LaConner Technologies, which specializes in bringing the Internet to areas with little service, is training trial users and instructing tribe members to serve as trainers. LaConner created the portal and installed the set-top boxes, too. Efforts to get to the next step in the project are already in motion. The Economic Development Corporation, which has raised |
1499450_0 | Siblings Need to Be Children | To the Editor: The thoughts and feelings expressed so poignantly by Paul and Judy Karasik in '' 'David is David': Growing With an Autistic Brother'' (June 10) are not confined to siblings of the autistic. Healthy children whose siblings suffer from any mental or physical disability have similar experiences. Most of these ''normal ones'' are additionally burdened by their parents' insistence that this trauma will improve their character, which they internalize as the Karasiks have done. What they need most from parents is permission to be children, not saints. Every child has this ''special need.'' DR. JEANNE SAFER New York The writer is the author of ''The Normal One: Life With a Difficult or Damaged Sibling'' (Free Press, 2002). |
1499371_1 | Shoe Inspections Leave Passengers Fit to Be Untied | wait a week or two. Right now, shoes are what everybody is talking about at the airport.) Security concerns over shoes began, of course, after an incident in December 2001 when Richard C. Reid bungled an attempt to ignite explosives in his shoe while aboard an international flight. The T.S.A. has been tightening shoe inspections because of new intelligence information, said Brian Turmail, an agency spokesman. He said he could not describe the nature of any threats, but added that the all-shoes-off policy was being applied only at certain airports. ''Folks have called us and we've explained to them that although we can't cite specific reasons for it, we have made some changes to our shoe-screening process,'' he said. ''Those are temporary changes, and as the nature of the threat information we receive changes, so too will our process.'' After last week's column, I received a large number of e-mail messages indicating that passengers believed the airport security check-in process was deteriorating. The shoe police, to borrow a reader's term, are evidently part of that perception. ''People are really objecting to the shoe thing, and the airports over all are not happy with the T.S.A.,'' said Ira Weinstein, the president of Airport Interviewing and Research, a market research company. In a recent survey of 4,000 passengers, Mr. Weinstein's company found that satisfaction regarding airport security's customer service experienced an 8 percent decrease over six months. ''It's a negative trend in the evaluation of the T.S.A.,'' said Mr. Weinstein, whose researchers found increased complaints about ''a change in attitude, a lack of politeness'' and perceived haphazard or uneven rule enforcement. Mr. Turmail replied that his agency had substantially ''raised the bar'' on customer service, and was working hard to maintain high standards. In general, the T.S.A. has received high marks for vastly improving customer service since it took over airport security from private companies, many of which employed poorly paid and inadequately trained workers. All that said, there is a little room to hear about this subject from a few of the readers who responded to last week's column: ''I certainly can appreciate our government's concern with terrorism, but I chafe at some of the approaches being taken in the interest of security,'' wrote Harvey Burstein, a former F.B.I. agent and corporate security manager who is now a professor at Northeastern University's College of Criminal Justice. David Newberger, discussing security at |
1499364_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR DECLINES. Sugar futures fell to a nine-month low on speculation that rain in southern Brazil would increase production. In New York, raw sugar for October delivery fell 0.2 cent, or 3.1 percent, to 6.25 cents a pound. |
1499415_1 | Tougher Rules For Auto Tires To Be Imposed | is a margin of safety with the tires put on those vehicles,'' said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the traffic agency. The new rules require light truck tires to meet stricter speed and endurance tests, bringing them in line with those for passenger car tires, and also add new requirements, including one that sets a performance standard for underinflated tires. The regulations come during what is already a tough time for many big tire makers. Shares of Goodyear, the nation's largest tire maker, have fallen 67 percent over the last year as the company has failed to capitalize on Firestone's problems and had various problems of its own. The agency declined to identify the tires that would not meet the improved standard, only saying that 5 percent to 11 percent of those now being made would not comply. Tire regulations are just one area that grants special treatment to light trucks. S.U.V.'s and other light trucks are permitted to consume substantially more gasoline than passenger cars and the heaviest ones, like Hummers and Toyota Sequoias, can qualify for enormous small business tax breaks and are exempt from minimum roof strength requirements. Similar differences extend to tires. A test that measures how tires perform when loaded at or near their capacity is now run at 75 miles an hour for passenger car tires but only 50 miles an hour for light truck tires. Over the objection of tire makers, part of the new regulations will make light truck tires meet an endurance test of 75 miles an hour. ''Light trucks have had such a pass on so many things,'' said R. David Pittle, senior vice president for technical policy at Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports. ''This brings safety to an area where consumers are increasingly putting their passenger miles.'' Dan Zielinski, a spokesman for the Rubber Manufacturers Association, the lobbying group that represents tire makers, said ''there's a mix of good things and some things that aren't quite as good.'' The problems, from the industry's view, largely relate to light truck tires. The industry preferred that the light truck tire endurance test be raised to 68 miles an hour, not 75. He said the test is set up with the tire rolling on top of a metal wheel that pushes into it, creating stresses that are not like those on roads. Moreover, larger tires with greater surface area than |
1499388_0 | A Rocky Polish Landfall For a Dutch Abortion Boat | For two days last week, the Langenort, a Dutch-registered tugboat, was kept at sea by bad weather off the Baltic coast of Poland. On Saturday, as the winds fell, it was the shipping container bolted to its deck that kept the boat from harbor in Gdansk. The off-white container holds a mobile abortion clinic, and in Catholic Poland, where abortion is outlawed, its presence is unwelcome by many. The Langenort and its mobile clinic, offering free abortions to Polish women who are in the first month and a half of their pregnancy, finally tied up at a dock here in this small Baltic fishing port on Sunday. The organizers of the voyage, a Dutch group called Women on Waves, intend to take women in need of early term abortions on short cruises to international waters. A team of doctors will examine the women and then administer the abortion-inducing drug RU-486 before taking them back. That plan is what outraged the small crowd of protesters, bused in from central Poland by the right-wing League of Polish Families, who greeted the Langenort on Sunday with a hail of paint bombs and stones. The harbor master said the boat had illegally entered Wladyslawowo, and the local prosecutor threatened to indict the crew. ''Even though it's happening in international waters, it's still murder,'' Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, head of the Papal Academy in Krakow, told Reuters. A 25-year-old woman named Karolina who was watching the protests at the dock said: ''We don't have open minds. You know we have the church and many old ladies who tell us we can't decide about ourselves, but today young women must have a choice, like in other European countries.'' Still, Karolina said, if she were to find herself pregnant now, she would go through with the pregnancy. By Monday, only about a dozen teenage boys and a few politicians remained, chanting ''Murderers!'' at the boat crew. The protests made the front page of most national newspapers, but more important, they have given renewed attention to an issue Polish politicians have ignored. Ten years ago, with the powerful support of the Roman Catholic Church here, Poland overturned its liberal Communist-era abortion laws. Current law allows pregnancies to be terminated only if the mother's life is in danger or if she was raped or if the baby has certain grave genetic defects. Doctors face up to three years in prison |
1499426_17 | Excerpts From Justices' Opinions on Michigan Affirmative Action Cases | admissions,'' and provides examples of admittees who have lived or traveled widely abroad, are fluent in several languages, have overcome personal adversity and family hardship, have exceptional records of extensive community service, and have had successful careers in other fields. The law school seriously considers each ''applicant's promise of making a notable contribution to the class by way of a particular strength, attainment, or characteristic -- e.g., an unusual intellectual achievement, employment experience, nonacademic performance, or personal background.'' All applicants have the opportunity to highlight their own potential diversity contributions through the submission of a personal statement, letters of recommendation, and an essay describing the ways in which the applicant will contribute to the life and diversity of the law school. What is more, the law school actually gives substantial weight to diversity factors besides race. The law school frequently accepts nonminority applicants with grades and test scores lower than underrepresented minority applicants (and other nonminority applicants) who are rejected. This shows that the law school seriously weighs many other diversity factors besides race that can make a real and dispositive difference for nonminority applicants as well. By this flexible approach, the law school sufficiently takes into account, in practice as well as in theory, a wide variety of characteristics besides race and ethnicity that contribute to a diverse student body. Justice Kennedy speculates that ''race is likely outcome determinative for many members of minority groups'' who do not fall within the upper range of L.S.A.T. scores and grades. But the same could be said of the Harvard plan discussed approvingly by Justice Powell in Bakke, and indeed of any plan that uses race as one of many factors. Petitioner and the United States argue that the law school's plan is not narrowly tailored because race-neutral means exist to obtain the educational benefits of student body diversity that the law school seeks. We disagree. Narrow tailoring does not require exhaustion of every conceivable race-neutral alternative. Nor does it require a university to choose between maintaining a reputation for excellence or fulfilling a commitment to provide educational opportunities to members of all racial groups. Narrow tailoring does, however, require serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives that will achieve the diversity the university seeks. We agree with the Court of Appeals that the law school sufficiently considered workable race-neutral alternatives. The district court took the law school to task for |
1499350_0 | Peoples of Rain Forest | To the Editor: In ''Artists Touched by Amazon Tribe'' (Arts pages, June 17), you suggest that the Yanomami are ''the last example'' of indigenous people living in ''isolated harmony'' with the tropical rain forest. The Yanomami stand in the middle of a long line of indigenous peoples living in harmony with the rain forest. Despite encroachment by logging and mining companies, ranchers and the military, most still live deep in the rain forest. But not without a constant struggle. In Brazil alone, 16 indigenous people have been assassinated this year. Most peoples, like the Panará, who never saw a white man until 1973, pick delegates to fight their battles in the industrialized world. The rest of the community lives, as it has for thousands of years, according to ancestral traditions. ANA VALÉRIA ARAÚJO Executive Director Rainforest Foundation U.S. New York, June 23, 2003 |
1497332_0 | Cellphone Chatter and Driving Don't Mix | To the Editor: Re ''California May Restrict Vehicle Cellphone Use'' (news article, June 10): There is an important distinction between cellphone use and other distractions in the car. A phone call, with its lack of visual input, demands some effort on the driver to mentally picture his interlocutor and his environs. While other activities are generally under the driver's direct control, the caller ''commands'' the driver's attention. And it just gets worse if the call happens to be emotionally charged. No other activity requires the driver's awareness to be projected outside the vehicle. For this reason, hands-free phones will be of limited benefit in reducing cellphone-related accidents. JAMES WEISSMAN Charlottesville, Va., June 11, 2003 |
1499905_0 | Health Agency Is Trying to Get a Round World to Slim Down | Having just completed a treaty to restrict global tobacco sales, the World Health Organization is now turning more attention to what it views as another big threat to public health: obesity. Officials of the health agency have been conferring with governments, trade and consumer groups and food industry executives for recommendations on how to control the sale of fatty, sugary, salty and high-calorie foods. On June 17, the agency's officials met with representatives of industry giants like Unilever, Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Nestlé and McDonald's. The purpose was to get their ideas on how to encourage consumers to eat a healthier diet and exercise more. It was the last of a string of round-table discussions the United Nations health body has organized with governments, food executives, trade associations, agricultural groups and consumers asking for their input in creating strategies to help the world eat healthier and exercise more. ''Obesity is all over the world,'' said Kaare Norum, a professor of medicine at Oslo's s Institute for Nutrition Research, who attended the meeting. Mr. Norum was one of the authors of a report jointly issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the health agency that outlines the health problems associated with improper eating habits and recommends broad strategies to prevent obesity. Diet-related afflictions like heart disease, diabetes and hypertension are leading causes of death and disability, accounting for nearly 60 percent of 56.5 million deaths annually worldwide, according to agency. statistics. As the world becomes more urbanized, people become less active. The food required to satisfy a large population needs to be processed so that it can be stored on a shelf, which generally means adding sugar, salt and fat. Serving sizes have also increased. Derek Yach, the World Health Organization executive responsible for its programs to curb tobacco and unhealthy food, said the organization would refine the recommendations into a final report that it hoped would serve as a minimum standard for proper diet and exercise. A working draft is expected this fall. The final report, which will be considered by the World Health Assembly next May, will attempt, among other things, to offer guidelines of how much physical activity a school should be required to offer students and under which circumstances a company can market its product as meeting daily dietary requirements. The Sugar Association, a trade group representing sugar cane and sugar beet growers, has questioned the scientific premise |
1500019_0 | Putting All Your E-Mail in One Basket | PENELOPE FINNIE had to give up something precious recently: her work e-mail address. For more than five years Ms. Finnie, a co-founder of Ask Jeeves, the Web search engine, was penny@ask.com, and she had come to rely on the address for a lot more than work correspondence. ''All my family e-mailed me there, and friends and the teachers at the kids' school,'' said Ms. Finnie, who lives in Berkeley, Calif. ''You just can't separate those things.'' But a few weeks ago Ms. Finnie, who was the company's chief creative officer, retired. To ease the logistical pain, she prevailed on administrators to send a temporary automatic reply to anyone who e-mailed her, saying that she no longer worked there, and providing her new address. But that lasted only six weeks. Now, mail to penny@ask.com bounces back to the sender. She feels adrift. Her new address, assigned automatically when she registered with an e-mail service, is long and difficult for people to remember. ''It's this anonymous, weird thing,'' she said. For much of the working population, e-mail is not only available but indispensable, a tool not just for work but for maintaining personal bonds. Like Ms. Finnie, many workers are accustomed to using a work computer and e-mail address to stay in touch with friends and family in the course of the day. Yet with the convenience comes risk. Although many people are aware that they may be sacrificing privacy by using workplace e-mail, they are sometimes indiscreet in what they write. And for those like Ms. Finnie who spend years in a single job, the e-mail address becomes part of their identity. Leaving a job and its e-mail address can cause practical and emotional upheaval. The use of workplace e-mail to send personal messages is so widespread that although many employers do not encourage it, they tolerate it, viewing it as an inevitable trade-off for the long hours their employees put in. Juliet B. Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College and the author of ''The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure'' (Basic Books, 1992), likened employers' tolerance of personal e-mail to their providing concierge services, massages and child care services. ''Firms know they are demanding more of employees, and it's putting a big stress on their personal lives,'' Professor Schor said. ''Permission to send e-mail to family members and friends is a nonwage benefit that eases the very |
1499895_0 | From Ming To the Patio | IF you are one of those people who can see poetry in stone, then the story of Richard Rhodes may need no explanation. Since 1984 he has traveled the world in search of stones for use in the construction of houses. The stones that Mr. Rhodes, a principal of Rhodes Architectural Stone, a Seattle salvage firm, sought out were often to be found in quarries. Six years ago, though, Mr. Rhodes was in China hunting down a specific type of granite to use in building a house for Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle. The term house may be a bit misleading; Mr. Ellison wanted to recreate a 15th-century Japanese temple complex in the hills south of San Francisco. And the stone Mr. Rhodes was looking for was a granite of a color that complemented the tawny Bay Area light. While in China, Mr. Rhodes happened on a material that, as it turned out, he considered more precious. This occurred during a side trip to the famous gorge of the Yangtze River, an evanescent landscape celebrated in art and poetry and soon to be inundated by the waters of a $25 billion hydroelectric project called the Three Gorges Dam. The dam would drown monuments and temples and villages where Chinese culture had evolved uninterrupted for millenniums. ''Everyone knew about the ecological impact and about all the historic stuff like temples being inundated,'' Mr. Rhodes said. What Mr. Rhodes had not fully realized before his visit was that there was another kind of wealth in the valley, in the form of old stones from the nearly 1,600 condemned villages. ''Most people go to see the gorge,'' Mr. Rhodes said last week by telephone from his headquarters in Seattle. ''But the truth is, I'm really interested in epic construction.'' The construction Mr. Rhodes referred to was the dam first extolled by Mao Zedong, plotted for decades by Chinese leaders, bitterly debated on cultural and ecological grounds and, by the time he saw it, being brought to completion by an army of 10,000 laborers wielding shovels and picks. A great deal has been written about the effort to hem the wild and erratic waters of the Yangtze and to feed its force into turbines that would spin out hydroelectric power and drive China even faster toward its future. A lot has been written, too, about the 700,000 people displaced by the project, |
1499967_0 | Technology Briefing | Internet: Gates Seeks Measures To Fight Spam | Bill Gates, who said unsolicited commercial e-mail was a ''spreading plague that feeds off the unique power of the Internet,'' has called on the technology industry to develop a strategy of self-regulation to deal with the problem. In a letter posted yesterday on the Microsoft Web site, Mr. Gates pointed to some of the measures his company has taken against spam. They included improved technology and more than a dozen civil lawsuits filed against companies and individuals that Microsoft asserts sent billions of spam messages in violation of state and federal laws. |
1499936_1 | Senate Panel Approves Bill For Students With Disabilty | Center for Learning Disabilities, lauded the committee for ''legislation that is bipartisan, balanced and respectful of the complex needs of our nation's 6.5 million students with disabilities.'' The center praised the bill for easing mechanisms to identify children who need extra help at younger ages. It also commended its steps to help disabled teenagers with the transition to life after high school. Paul Marchand, a lobbyist for United Cerebral Palsy and The Arc, an organization representing people with developmental disabilities, called the Senate bill a ''marked improvement'' over the House version, particularly in its protections of disabled children who run afoul of school behavior codes. Under the House bill, schools could suspend or expel children who violate rules, without regard to their disabilities. Some advocates for the disabled worried, for example, that diabetic children could be thrown out for eating in class, or that autistic children could be punished for behavior they could not always control. School administrators, however, had praised the House bill for streamlining special education, reducing paperwork, and making it easier to maintain discipline. That bill passed the House on April 30 by a vote of 251 to 171, with 34 Democrats joining Republicans to support it. Nancy Reder, deputy director of the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, said: ''We like what they did with discipline compared to the House bill. We think it represents a fair compromise with the disability community that didn't want any changes and our members.'' The safeguards about discipline do not apply to disabled children who take guns, drugs or other weapons into schools, who are subject to expulsion and other measures like other students. With the intention of reducing paperwork, the Senate bill removes current provisions for schools to write short-term goals into the educational plans of disabled children. Today's Senate bill left unanswered one major question for every state and special education director and teacher: the amount of money the federal government will contribute to special education. Republicans and Democrats alike say they embrace the goal of fully financing special education by 2009, but Republicans say they would like the federal contribution to be discretionary while the Democrats contend it should be mandatory. Mary Kusler, a legislative specialist for the American Association of School Administrators, which also supported the House bill, said her group saw the Senate's effort as ''a starting point.'' The association, Ms. Kusler said, |
1500053_0 | No Link Found Between Cancer And Power Lines on Long Island | A study of women on Long Island has found no link between breast cancer and living near high-voltage power lines, extending a long trail of research that has failed to connect breast cancer on the island to an environmental cause. The report, to be published next week in The American Journal of Epidemiology, is also the latest of several studies that have not found a connection between electromagnetic fields, particularly those of power lines, and cancer. The findings of the study, authorized 10 years ago, were first reported yesterday in Newsday. In the latest effort, researchers, most of them from the State University at Stony Brook, looked at 1,161 Long Island women, roughly half of whom had breast cancer. Most were in their 50's and 60's, and all had lived in their homes for at least 15 years. Scientists measured electromagnetic fields in various parts of their homes, and their proximity to power lines, and found no statistically significant differences in exposure between the group with breast cancer and those who did not have it. Links between cancer and some environmental factors, like cigarette smoking, asbestos exposure and air pollution, are well documented. But researchers caution that while a community may perceive an environmental ''cancer cluster,'' it is extremely hard to prove that the incidence is anything more than random variation, and even harder to connect a cluster to a particular cause. It is widely believed that Long Island suffers from extraordinarily high breast cancer rates, but the available evidence says otherwise. The New York State Department of Health says that from 1994 to 1998, 117 cases of breast cancer were diagnosed for every 100,000 women on Long Island -- slightly more in Suffolk County than in Nassau County -- compared with 114 per 100,000 nationally. There are several areas in the Northeast that have higher rates. Many Long Islanders also believe that pollutants like pesticides, or some other environmental factors, are to blame. Breast cancer survivors have formed a powerful political lobby and persuaded government to spend tens of millions of dollars researching suspected connections to pollution and other factors, notably a $30 million federal fund that is supporting a dozen Long Island breast cancer studies. But a decade of research has failed to turn up a local environmental link. |
1499919_2 | Bush, Skeptical of Report of Hamas Cease-Fire, Asks Europe to Sever Ties | that all funding be stopped for Hamas, including to its political wing. ''We want to push them in the right direction,'' a French diplomat in Washington said. ''The best thing would be a cease-fire, a stop to terrorism and participation in a peaceful dialogue. If they don't, that's another story.'' In Ramallah, on the West Bank, Palestinian officials said that Hamas leaders were concerned that the European Union, under pressure from the United States, would begin to treat all of Hamas like a terrorist group, and that that fear was one factor motivating the group toward a cease-fire. During the meeting at the White House, President Bush also called on the Europeans to end a ban on genetically modified food, which he claims has discouraged developing nations from using that technology and so has contributed to starvation in Africa. Europeans say such foods pose a health and environmental hazard. Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, insisted today that Mr. Prodi and Mr. Simitis were receptive to Mr. Bush's arguments, and then said the president joked after the late-morning meeting, ''Let's go eat some genetically modified food for lunch.'' It could not be determined if anything on the White House menu, which included smoked Kobe beef tenderloin, grilled freshwater prawns and mushroom risotto, was in fact genetically modified. Such food, which can grow faster than traditional crops and can be resistant to insects and disease, has caused relatively little controversy in the United States. Nearly 40 percent of all corn planted here is genetically modified. In his comments at the podium, Mr. Prodi alluded to the battles between the United States and Europe over Iraq and asked the American president to respect what he called ''old Europe,'' a reference to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's slighting characterization of Germany and France and their opposition to United States' policies on Iraq. ''Many people have said that Europe is too old,'' Mr. Prodi said. ''Maybe, but the old age helps us to understand our strength and our weakness and the reality of the world. ''If we stay alone, President, Europe is too old and the United States too young to be able to bring peace in this world. And it is our duty to stick together to bring peace to the world.'' Mr. Bush responded, laughing: ''Well, thank you, Roman. You're looking pretty young these days.'' Mr. Prodi retorted, ''I am not.'' |
1496709_0 | Sharing a Town, Uneasily; Vigilance About Bears Is Second Nature | Soon after their dog was attacked by a black bear here in 1999, Susan and Lee Kuchenreuther put up floodlights to illuminate their backyard at night. The mayor, Robert Moshman, tries to keep bears from raiding his garbage cans by storing meat scraps in a plastic bag in the refrigerator until garbage-collection day. And the elementary schools have started bear-alert and bear-safety programs and have asked neighbors to call if they see a bear headed toward a school. ''It's part of the culture up here,'' the school superintendent, Robert Gilmartin, said of those tactics and, more generally, life with bears in this sprawling, densely wooded town only about 35 miles northwest of Midtown Manhattan. Over the last decade, bears have become almost as much of a fixture here as squirrels are in more developed parts of suburbia. They roam routinely through backyards and sometimes along the edges of ball fields and school playgrounds, occasionally attacking dogs and pet rabbits and frightening people. In fact, two of the most notorious recent encounters in the state occurred here: On May 23, a bear bit a resident on the wrist and bicep and dislocated his shoulder after he tackled it as it was mauling his dog. On June 5, another resident shot a growling bear that had climbed onto the deck outside his log cabin home. Yet as state fish and game officials consider holding the state's first bear hunt in 33 years, opinion on the issue is sharply divided in this bear mecca, whose prevailing policy toward its burly guests is one of careful accommodation. After years of wary coexistence with the animals, many of West Milford's 26,000 residents have adopted habits that other suburbanites might see as a bit quirky, even alien. Some keep air horns, firecrackers, whistles, pots and pans and makeshift sirens close at hand to frighten off bears that linger too long in a yard. Mothers, worried about bears, walk children to the bus stop each morning and belong to telephone chains to alert school officials if a bear heads toward a school. State wildlife officials, in lectures and brochures, preach their gospel of ''bear-proofing'' a home by feeding pets indoors and taking down bird feeders before bears emerge from hibernation. Many residents store garbage in their basements or put it in locked garages or sheds until the morning of their weekly collection. Others here have erected chain-link |
1496688_1 | 5-Year Hunt Fails to Net Qaeda Suspect in Africa | a long, porous border, which will remain a threat.'' One result of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States was an American effort to re-establish some intelligence operations in Somalia. Now, with Mr. Muhammad's suspected use of Somali territory as a hiding place and staging area, Western officials here say, the United States is increasing its involvement, pursuing alliances with competing warlords in an effort to monitor ports and airfields. Kenyan officials said Mr. Muhammad audaciously returned to Mombasa, formerly his base, in May even though his photograph had been circulated to the police throughout the country and the region. He has been accused in the attack here last November in which suicide bombers rammed an explosives-laden car into the Paradise Hotel, killing 13 people, as well as in an attempt to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet with a shoulder-fired missile. Shortly before his appearance in Mombasa, Mr. Muhammad was spotted in a mosque in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, according to Kenyan and Western officials. Since then Western antiterror agents, increasingly convinced that he and several Qaeda associates are using Somalia as a sanctuary and transit point for weapons and explosives, have been working to persuade warlords who control key airfields to produce flight manifests and allow the monitoring of ports. A contingent of German surveillance planes based in Mombasa is now monitoring ships and communication in international waters along the Somali coast with the aid of Western intelligence agents in Somali ports and in coordination with American forces in Bahrain, according to a German military official. They have been searching for suspect ships, including some identified as having ties to Qaeda business interests and operations, according to the official. In May, the State Department warned of the ''credible threat'' of another terrorist attack in Kenya, mentioning the risk of an assault using shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. After a similar warning from the British government, British Airways and El Al canceled direct international flights to Kenya, a move that has devastated Kenyan tourism. According to the Kenyan foreign minister, Stephen Musyoka, and an American official, the American Embassy showed Kenyan officials intelligence reports suggesting that suspects had been photographing the flight paths at Nairobi's international airport. The officials also disclosed that suspects had used conspiratorial language in telephone intercepts, mentioning a ''wedding,'' interpreted as code for an imminent attack. Before the attack in Mombasa in November, Kenyan |
1496668_1 | Trade Pact on Gene-Altered Goods to Take Effect in 90 Days | was agreed upon by more than 130 nations in January 2000 but could not take effect until formally ratified by 50 nations. The 50th, Palau, just gave its endorsement, so the protocol will go into effect in 90 days, on Sept. 11, the United Nations Environment Program said yesterday. The treaty allows countries to bar imports of genetically engineered seeds, microbes, animals or crops that they deem a threat to their environments. It also requires international shipments of genetically engineered grains to be labeled. The United States reluctantly agreed to the treaty in 2000 after intense negotiations pitting it and a handful of other crop-exporting nations against everyone else. While Washington has not ratified the protocol, American exporters to countries that are parties to the agreement will have to abide by the rules, a senior State Department official said. This official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the effect of the treaty would depend on the rules for carrying it out, which have not been written yet. He and others said that many countries were already putting into place their own rules regulating imports or requiring labeling of genetically modified products, making the treaty less significant than it otherwise might have been. The United States recently filed suit at the World Trade Organization challenging the European Union's de facto moratorium on approval of new genetically modified crops, arguing it is not based on sound science. The new treaty contains language that could bolster Europe's case, at least morally. It allows countries to bar imports of genetically modified products even if there is not enough information to prove scientifically that the products are dangerous. Recognizing a potential conflict with W.T.O. rules, the framers of the biosafety treaty were careful to state that it neither supersedes nor is subordinate to other agreements. L. Val Giddings, vice president for food and agriculture of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group, said the new treaty would have little effect over all and none on Washington's case against Europe. ''There's no way you can possibly read it or construe it that would allow a trumping of W.T.O. obligations,'' he said. Kristin Dawkins, vice president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a nonprofit group in Minneapolis that opposes genetically modified foods, said the treaty bolstered opponents of biotechnology because it establishes that genetically modified foods should be treated differently from other foods. |
1496693_0 | Sir Bernard Williams, 73, Oxford Philosopher, Dies | Sir Bernard Williams, the lightning-witted Oxford professor who is credited with reviving the field of moral philosophy and was considered by some to be the greatest British philosopher of his era, died on Tuesday in Oxford. He was 73 and lived at All Souls College, Oxford. No cause of death was announced but he said in 1999 that he had cancer. Steering clear of monolithic system building, Sir Bernard viewed moral codes and writings as inseparable from history and culture, and questioned what he called the ''peculiar institution'' of morality, pronouncing it a particular development of the ethical system worked out by modern Western philosophers. Indeed, in ''Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy'' (1985), considered his best book, he argued that ethical concepts are so embedded in history that they are often incapable of being shared by subsequent cultures, although they can be understood to some extent through study, and he held that the simple goals of truth were worth pursuing. With this in mind, he argued in a later book, ''Shame and Necessity'' (1993), a study of ancient Greece, that Hellenic ethics allowed for a wider scope of praise and blame than did Christian-based morality, concluding that the sense of shame can be more in tune with our intuitions than moral guilt, and permits more latitude for living a whole life well. In his philosophical work, he rejected the nearly mathematical positivism predominant when he was a student and the utilitarian views that morality lay in seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was born in Westcliff, Essex, on Sept. 21, 1929, the son of Owen Pasley Denny Williams, an architect and surveyor, and Hilda Amy (Day) Williams, a secretary. He attended Chigwell School and went on to read classics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was already considered a prodigy. He later was given many honorary degrees but did not earn a doctorate. According to a profile in The Guardian of London by Stuart Jeffries, Sir Bernard's mentor at Oxford, Gilbert Ryle, later said of him, ''He understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you've got to the end of your sentence.'' According to a Guardian obituary by Jane O'Grady, Sir Bernard neglected the historical aspect of the classics to |
1494867_1 | Is Stagolee's Stetson Like a Rapper's Baggy Pants? | hip-hop generation, has much knowledge of this supposedly transcendent archetype? Mr. Brown's personal passion for the legend comes through in the pages of his book, and his skills as a novelist shine most brightly when he relates the details of Stagolee's life. But that passion seems to have also clouded his judgment of the Stagolee character's importance, especially its significance to contemporary culture. Sure, it is easy to say that all of black masculinity owes a debt to Stagolee in the same way that one could argue that contemporary Hollywood movies are really updated Greek tragedies. But Stagolee, a legend of oral culture, is about as relevant in today's mass-media-dominated digital age as a horse-and-carriage on a crowded Los Angeles freeway during rush hour. It is interesting how both haters and defenders often try to link hip-hop -- the prevailing popular-music form of the late 20th and early 21st century -- to older black music. The haters make the link to minimize its cultural impact by portraying it as a copy, not an original, the defenders to argue for its acceptability as an updated African-American folklore with beats and rhymes. Yet if anything, hip-hop is indebted to more recent cultural products. Tony Montana, the Cuban drug lord in the 1983 film ''Scarface,'' in all his excesses, has much more impact on the mind-set of hip-hop gangstas than does a figure like Stagolee. So does Christopher Walken's living embodiment of Norman Mailer's ''white Negro'' in his portrayal of the character Frank White in the 1990 cult classic ''The King of New York.'' Neither of these characters are African-American, but many hip-hop gangsta figures have been able to appropriate their imagery and make it specific to their own circumstances. Alas, Mr. Brown's attempts to analyze contemporary culture often come across like Bill Cosby trying to do Chris Rock. This shortcoming is most apparent when Mr. Brown tries to equate Stagolee's life as a pimp with the use of the pimp metaphor in present day hip-hop culture. Relying on the work of the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, Mr. Brown writes, ''It is difficult to understand the reason for recent glamorizations of the pimp's image without also looking at the origin of the pimp in the 1890's in cities like St. Louis.'' What is missing here, though, is a discussion of the way the culture of pimping offered a certain power to those |
1494875_2 | The Real Leo Strauss | opinions of the time was an unquestioned faith in progress and science combined with a queasiness regarding any kind of moral judgment, or ''relativism.'' Many young people were confused, without a compass, with nothing substantial to admire. My father's turning them to the Great Books was thus motivated not merely by aesthetic or antiquarian interest, but by a search for an understanding of mankind's present predicament: what were its sources and what, if any, were the alternatives? The latter he found in the writings of the ancient Greeks. Furthermore, he insistently confronted his students with the question of the ''good life.'' For him, the choice boiled down to the life in accordance with Revelation or the life according to Reason -- Jerusalem versus Athens. The vitality of Western tradition, he felt, lay in the invigorating tension between the two. My father saw reading not as a passive exercise but as taking part in an active dialogue with the great minds of the past. One had to read with great care, great respect, and try, as he always said, to ''understand the author as he understood himself.'' Today this task, admittedly difficult and demanding, is dismissed in fashionable academia as impossible. Rather, we are told, each reader inevitably constructs his own text over which the author has no control, and the writer's intentions are irrelevant. The fact is that Leo Strauss also recognized a multiplicity of readers, but he had enough faith in his authors to assume that they, too, recognized that they would have a diverse readership. Some of their readers, the ancients realized, would want only to find their own views and prejudices confirmed; others might be willing to open themselves to new, perhaps unconventional or unpopular, ideas. I personally think my father's rediscovery of the art of writing for different kinds of readers will be his most lasting legacy. Although I was never a student of my father's, I sat in on a class of his in the 1960's; I think it was on Xenophon's ''Cyropaedia.'' He was a small, unprepossessing and, truth be told, ugly man (daughters are their parents' worst critics), with none of the charisma that one associates with ''great teachers.'' And yet there was something utterly charming. One of the students would read little chunks of the text, and my father would comment and call for discussion. What marked this class was a combination |
1494940_0 | World Briefing | Americas: Brazil: Protecting Mahogany | The government has issued strict new rules to further inhibit the export of mahogany from the Amazon, requiring loggers to file a ''sustainable development'' plan before they can cut down trees. The action came just days after the United States refused to allow the entry of nine shipments of the rare and expensive tropical hardwood, contending that the lumber, which had been held for 15 months pending a judge's ruling, was harvested in Brazil, the source of half the world's mahogany, in violation of international treaties. Larry Rohter (NYT) |
1496441_0 | Builder Agrees To Stabilize Buddhist Site It Damaged | A $200 million construction project in Lower Manhattan will remain shut down for several more days after a judge ordered engineers yesterday to come up with a plan to stabilize a Buddhist temple next door that had been so severely damaged by vibrations that the city ordered it vacated. Judge Saralee Evans of State Supreme Court in Manhattan extended the temporary restraining order she issued on Tuesday and told both sides to try to come to an agreement before the next hearing on Monday. The judge's orders left the two Buddhist nuns from Taiwan who run the temple, at 10 Platt Street, without a place to hold their daily service. The service used to draw more than 100 devotees until disturbances from the construction site turned people away. But before the end of the day, a deal was reached that seemed to guarantee the safety of the building, and give the nuns a place to gather. The Rockrose Development Corporation, the contractor for the project, a 50-story apartment building, agreed to stabilize the temple. It is a four-story brick building run by the Ling Jiou Mountain Buddhist Society, the Mahayana Buddhist sect to which the nuns belong. Rockrose officials said they would work through the weekend to attach several layers of steel beams, called channels, to the length of the west side of the building and install monitors to measure existing cracks. Frank D. Vasta, a Rockrose vice president, said yesterday that he had not calculated the cost of keeping the pile driver and other heavy equipment idle, but he said it would be substantial. An independent engineer hired by Rockrose, David B. Peraza, toured the temple building yesterday morning, measuring cracks and tracing weaknesses in the foundation. After looking at several fissures in the basement, Mr. Peraza said that while damage was evident, further movement in the foundation was unlikely, and the proposed measures to shore it up should keep the building safe after pile driving resumes. Romen Lik, an engineer assisting the nuns, agreed that the steel beams should stabilize the building. But he said the damage might not have occurred at all if the developer had staged the work properly. ''They tried to rush it,'' he said. Rockrose began driving the first steel piles in early June, before the temple had been completely shored up. Cracks developed soon thereafter. After the tentative agreement was reached yesterday, Jing-Nian |
1498070_1 | Where Is Everybody? The Wireless Network Might Know | Carnegie Mellon University's Institute for Complex Engineered Systems who is also researching wireless networks. But a network's location system, he added, could make the computer become ''context-aware.'' There are, of course, already electronic gadgets that can tell their owners where they are -- most obviously, Global Positioning System receivers. But their satellite signals don't penetrate into office buildings or factories. It is possible to duplicate the heavenly network of G.P.S. satellites at cubicle height by placing special transmitters around an office. That is more or less what Dr. Smailagic did 10 years ago when he developed a system for tracking mentally ill patients at a hospital. But that system involved costly customized electronics. Since then, Wi-Fi networks -- more formally, 802.11b wireless local area networks -- have started to blanket some office spaces with electronic signals. Dr. Junglas became interested in adding location-finding capability to standard wireless networks while studying for her doctorate at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business. Her research centered on technologies that could make it possible to buy just about anything anywhere using portable computers and wireless networks. As part of that work, Dr. Junglas modified a Wi-Fi network that operated in the business school's two buildings so that each of its many base stations had a radius of about 15 feet. She then created software that logged which computers were using which base station. That database, in turn, produced maps that could be viewed by anyone on the network using a Web browser. To test the system, 117 students were lent Compaq iPAQ hand-held organizers with wireless cards installed. In experiments, they were asked to locate specific people. ''They found it very, very useful,'' Dr. Junglas said. The system was not without problems, however. Sometimes a hand-held computer would link to the network through a base station that was directly below the room where its user was standing. The database map would show the user on the wrong floor. To solve that problem, the system developed by Dr. Smailagic and others takes a different and slightly more complex approach. Rather than mapping the relationship between a computer and a single access point, it compares the strength of the computer's Wi-Fi card signal to that of three base stations. With this information, the system can then use triangulation to calculate and map the computer's location. Because the system works in three dimensions, Dr. Smailagic |
1498011_2 | Report Says More Farmers Don't Follow Biotech Rule | grown in the nation. About 19 percent did not plant a large enough refuge, with 13 percent planting no refuge at all, the data showed. One reason for the discrepancy was that the industry surveyed only large farms. The center also looked at small farms, which had a higher rate of noncompliance. Lisa Dry, a spokeswoman for the Biotechnology Industry Organization, dismissed the significance of noncompliance by small farms, saying those farms account for only 8 percent of the BT corn grown. Mr. Jaffe of the consumer group underscored the importance of having refuges close to BT corn, the reason the requirement is for each farm, not for each county. An E.P.A. spokesman said the agency was evaluating the report. Another report released yesterday by an activist group said that there had been almost 40,000 field tests of genetically modified crops authorized by the Agriculture Department from 1987 to 2002. The report, by the United States Public Interest Research Group, said that the Agriculture Department had acted as a rubber stamp, rejecting only 3.5 percent of the applications, usually because they were incomplete or had minor paperwork errors. The report also said that in an increasing number of field trials -- nearly 70 percent last year -- the identity of the gene being put into the crop was not publicly disclosed because it was considered confidential business information. David Hegwood, special counsel to the agriculture secretary, said in an interview that the current rejection rate was 8 percent and that the department gave robust scrutiny to trials. In yet another development related to genetically modified crops, the Bush administration gave signs of pulling away from a proposed requirement that companies notify the Food and Drug Administration before putting a new genetically modified crop on the market. Right now, consultation with the F.D.A. is voluntary, though the agency and companies say it is always done. The proposal was made in January 2001 in the final days of the Clinton administration. But Lester Crawford, deputy F.D.A. commissioner, told Congress on Tuesday that the regulation was ''not a pressing public health priority'' because the voluntary system was working. The mandatory notification was favored by biotechnology companies, which thought it would improve consumer confidence in the regulation of biotech foods. Opponents of such foods had mixed feelings, saying the proposed regulation was an improvement but did not go far enough in ensuring F.D.A. scrutiny. |
1498063_2 | The Liberty Bell's Stress Test | for the Liberty Bell work. Working with conservators from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MicroStrain scientists attached two wireless microsensors, called differential variable displacement transducers, to the bell. These can sense movements of less than a micron, or one-millionth of a meter. One was set to measure whether the visible crack expanded, and the other gauged shearing forces. Three additional sensors, called accelerometers, measured the impact of the movement on the bell in different directions to gauge how much additional weight would be added to the bell when it was moved. The sensors transmitted data at microwave radio frequencies to a receiver connected to a laptop computer. Steven Arms, the president of MicroStrain, said that attaching the monitors to the bell was tricky. ''You learn that there are the devils in the details with these types of things,'' Mr. Arms said. The sensors could not be attached with glue or any other substance that would leave residue or mar the surface of the bell. The scientists used clamps, and paper that is normally used to protect artwork was placed between the bell and the sensors. The test lasted about 30 minutes, during which a rigging company hoisted the bell from its cradle and rolled it forward and back. After the bell was rolled about 10 feet, the wheels on the rigging apparatus became stuck and the bell lurched, Mr. Arms said. It was a tense moment, but the mishap added only about 30 to 35 pounds of load to the bell, and the crack did not appear to change. The bell's latest move is relatively insignificant compared to its past wanderings. Over a 30-year period starting in 1885, the bell traveled widely, visiting New Orleans, Chicago and other cities, according to the Liberty Bell timeline (www.ushistory.org). In 1915 the bell was sent on a meandering 10,000-mile cross-country journey to San Francisco, and was celebrated along the way. The last time the bell was moved was in 1976, when it was taken from Independence Hall to its current location. During that move, Ms. Diethorn said, ''as far as we know, nothing happened to it.'' During the move this fall, the sensors will be rigged to alarms that will sound if the stress levels rise. Scientists and curators are confident that the trip will not harm the bell. Nonetheless, ''we can't define what too much stress is,'' she said. ''There's no benchmark.'' |
1498018_2 | U.S. Gays Who Marry In Canada Face Hurdles | warning to America.'' Gay rights groups are advising their members not to force the issue in the United States until they can determine what kind of case would set the best legal precedent. In the meantime, Canadian-wed couples can expect a mixed reception in the United States, with some businesses and localities recognizing their union, and federal offices and a majority of states rejecting it. Federal law is clear on same-sex marriages. In 1996, Congress approved the Defense of Marriage Act, which said that marriage applied only to persons of the opposite sex. For purposes of income taxes, Social Security, immigration and other federal activities, the Canadian marriage would not be recognized. Still, marriage is an institution regulated by the states. The Constitution establishes that one state will recognize the public acts and rulings of another under the ''full faith and credit'' clause. Historically, people who have been married in one state have been treated as married in all. But marriage in Canada leaves lawyers to seek other precedents. Generally, a principle of ''comity'' has applied with foreign countries, under which Americans recognize foreign marriages and may expect their own to be accepted abroad. Thirty-seven states have their own versions of the Defense of Marriage Act. But those that do not include some large states like New York and Ohio, making them likely testing grounds for a challenge by advocates of gay marriage. Some states, like California, send mixed signals. The state approved an initiative in 2000 that asserted, ''Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.'' But California has also been at the forefront of expanding domestic partners' rights. Vermont, which already allows for civil unions, may be expected to embrace Canadian marriages. Hawaii and Connecticut, which allow benefits for nontraditional pairs, may also endorse the marriages, as may cities that now maintain registries for domestic partners. Legal challenges for civil marriage rights are pending in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Some gay marriage advocates warn that couples should not be hasty in their decision to wed in Canada. While marrying is relatively easy, getting divorced is another matter, requiring a year's residency in the country. ''The trend is going to be a little bit of chaos for a while,'' said Jon W. Davidson, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, a lesbian and gay legal group. ''It's very exciting. They're calling it the Canadian earthquake.'' |
1498010_1 | Study Says Government Has Improperly Detained Foreign Children | human rights group Amnesty International, which advocates for less restrictive placements or foster homes for children who are awaiting determination of their legal status. ''We found frequently instances of abuse such as solitary confinement for such offenses as poor hygiene or poor sportsmanship or misuse of grammar,'' said William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. ''We found use of shackles and belly chains and leg irons on children as young as 7 when they appear in court,'' Mr. Schulz said. ''What is most disturbing about this is it reflects a mentality that would punish those who have been seriously harmed already in their home countries rather than offering them protection and a quick adjudication of their claims.'' Government officials said they welcomed the report and were reviewing the conditions at its centers. For decades, the federal immigration service was responsible for unaccompanied immigrant children. In March, the children were transferred to the care of the Department of Health and Human Services, a move hailed by advocates for immigrants. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services inherited the often-criticized detention system from the immigration service and said they were working hard to improve it. About 500 unaccompanied minors are currently being held while the government seeks to adjudicate their immigration claims. ''It's an important piece of information for us as we move forward in implementing this program,'' Wade Horn, the department's assistant secretary for children and families, said of the Amnesty report. ''We've been out visiting the various facilities we have contracts with to ensure that those facilities are in fact appropriate,'' Mr. Horn said in an interview. ''What we've been doing is trying as best we can to put in place a system where the focus is on the individual needs of the child and making sure the placement is consistent with the needs and circumstances of that child.'' The study found that nearly 50 percent of the detention facilities surveyed had improperly housed immigrant children in the same cells with juvenile offenders. Nearly 60 percent of the centers used solitary confinement to discipline children, even for minor infractions. More than a dozen of the centers failed to provide lists of lawyers so that the children could be represented in court. Mr. Schulz said he was encouraged by his talks with officials at the human services department and said they seemed committed to improving the system. |
1498566_0 | Isolation, an Old Medical Tool, Has SARS Fading | Three months ago, SARS appeared poised to sweep the world, a mysterious new disease racing out of southern China for which there was no vaccine, cure or diagnostic test. Today, SARS is disappearing almost as fast, and almost as unpredictably, as it arrived. This week, the World Health Organization declared it under control, with only a handful of cases worldwide in the last week. The agency's only remaining advisory against travel -- to Beijing -- is expected to be lifted in a few days. Hong Kong, the city with more cases and deaths relative to its population than anywhere else, has had no new cases since June 2. The epidemic could come back, doctors say, perhaps with the return of colder weather. But for now, health officials and infectious disease experts are racing to learn what they can from the sudden rise and retreat of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome: what caused it to spread; what strategies worked to contain it; and what might work the next time a new disease jumps from animals, as SARS seems to have done, and begins spreading rapidly among people. Reassuringly, SARS appears to have been controlled mainly through one of the oldest of medical tools: isolation. This has been done through better infection controls in hospitals, as well as by the early quarantining of the close personal contacts of infected individuals, so that if they later fell sick, they would not spread the disease to even more people. The approach succeeded because SARS appears to be transmitted mainly by fairly large droplets that travel no more than five feet through the air, instead of staying airborne and potentially floating through several floors of a building, as smallpox can. And while some patients have proved highly infectious, others have not, for reasons that remain unclear. ''These are medieval health measures that have worked,'' said Dr. Mike Ryan, a senior World Health Organization expert on communicable diseases. ''If it had been truly airborne, the measures we have chosen would not have been effective.'' The containment effort succeeded in part because of the extraordinary collaboration among scientists summoned by the agency, and in part because some countries, including the United States, had geared up their public health systems in anticipation of a bioterrorist attack. Health officials say SARS has taught them several other lessons: the need to develop a reliable test to detect it in |
1498498_0 | E-Mail Swindle Uses False Report About a Swindle | It was a clever, if not entirely flawless ruse. Many of its potential victims saw through it immediately. Others were less skeptical and were caught in its snare. On Wednesday, starting in the early afternoon, people around the country began receiving an e-mail message with ''Fraud Alert'' in the subject line. In the guise of concern about a purchase from Best Buy and possible credit card misuse, the message urged recipients to go to a ''special'' BestBuy.com Web site and correct the problem by entering their credit card and Social Security numbers. E-mail posing as a fraud notice to carry out a fraud -- indeed preying on a consumer's fear of being defrauded -- is an illegal form of spam, the much-loathed tide of random, unsolicited messages that pours into computer inboxes every day. ''This is the electronic version of the call at night from somebody purportedly being your credit card watchdog,'' said Malcolm Sparrow, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who specializes in fraud control. Almost immediately after the e-mail messages went out, thousands of calls from consumers started pouring in to Best Buy's headquarters just outside Minneapolis. Best Buy acted quickly to distance itself from the deception. Within a few hours, two bogus Web sites were shut down and customer service agents were busy telling callers to disregard the e-mail messages. Those who had given out their information were told to call their banks, credit card companies and the Federal Trade Commission's Identity Theft Program. But much of the damage had already been done. It was an electronic hit-and-run. Law enforcement authorities are taking the case seriously. ''One person being defrauded is a terrible thing in itself,'' said Paul McCabe, an F.B.I. special agent in Minneapolis. ''But several thousand people did receive the e-mail.'' In fact, perhaps as many as a million e-mails were sent out by the fraud artists within a very short time, experts said. The United States attorney's office in Minnesota is also involved in the investigation. Mr. McCabe said law enforcement officials in other countries had become involved, since the messages were also sent outside the United States. Dawn Bryant, a Best Buy spokeswoman, said that subpoenas were served to Internet service providers that appear to have been hosts of the fraudulent Web sites, if unwittingly and that companies that sell domain names were also subpoenaed. By this |
1499612_0 | U.S. and Other Countries Outline Program to Curb Carbon Emissions | An array of industrialized and developing countries agreed today on the outline of a cooperative research program aimed at capturing and storing carbon dioxide, the main smokestack emission linked to global warming. The agreement came halfway through a three-day conference in McLean, Va., organized by the Bush administration, which has argued for more than a year that a technological breakthrough will be needed to stabilize levels of so-called greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. A buildup of those gases has been blamed by many scientists for most of a 50-year warming trend that could raise sea levels and disrupt climate patterns if emissions are not reduced. Most industrialized countries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, a binding treaty that would require reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases. It awaits ratification by Russia to take effect. The Bush administration has rejected that approach, saying climate science remains too uncertain to justify mandatory measures. It favors voluntary programs for curbing growth in the gases and long-term research on new nonpolluting energy sources or ways to sop up emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal. ''Regardless of what target you choose,'' Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said, ''no goal is going to be achieved unless we develop the new technologies to get there.'' One justification for pursuing that approach, administration officials and independent experts at the meeting said, is a projection that 90 percent of the increased demand for electricity worldwide in the next half-century will be met by burning fossil fuels. The administration wants to find ways to continue using coal, which remains plentiful and cheap, without adding to the atmosphere's burden of greenhouse gases. At the meeting, officials from the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, Russia, Japan, China, India and several other countries said they planned to sign a charter on Thursday under which they would coordinate research projects on the process, called carbon sequestration. Energy experts from private environmental groups who attended the conference said that devising such techniques was important, but added that without binding limits on emissions, there would be no impetus for power generators to use modernized equipment. |
1499814_0 | Putting All Your E-Mail in One Basket | PENELOPE FINNIE had to give up something precious recently: her work e-mail address. For more than five years Ms. Finnie, a co-founder of Ask Jeeves, the Web search engine, was penny@ask.com, and she had come to rely on the address for a lot more than work correspondence. ''All my family e-mailed me there, and friends and the teachers at the kids' school,'' said Ms. Finnie, who lives in Berkeley, Calif. ''You just can't separate those things.'' But a few weeks ago Ms. Finnie, who was the company's chief creative officer, retired. To ease the logistical pain, she prevailed on administrators to send a temporary automatic reply to anyone who e-mailed her, saying that she no longer worked there, and providing her new address. But that lasted only six weeks. Now, mail to penny@ask.com bounces back to the sender. She feels adrift. Her new address, assigned automatically when she registered with an e-mail service, is long and difficult for people to remember. ''It's this anonymous, weird thing,'' she said. For much of the working population, e-mail is not only available but indispensable, a tool not just for work but for maintaining personal bonds. Like Ms. Finnie, many workers are accustomed to using a work computer and e-mail address to stay in touch with friends and family in the course of the day. Yet with the convenience comes risk. Although many people are aware that they may be sacrificing privacy by using workplace e-mail, they are sometimes indiscreet in what they write. And for those like Ms. Finnie who spend years in a single job, the e-mail address becomes part of their identity. Leaving a job and its e-mail address can cause practical and emotional upheaval. The use of workplace e-mail to send personal messages is so widespread that although many employers do not encourage it, they tolerate it, viewing it as an inevitable trade-off for the long hours their employees put in. Juliet B. Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College and the author of ''The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure'' (Basic Books, 1992), likened employers' tolerance of personal e-mail to their providing concierge services, massages and child care services. ''Firms know they are demanding more of employees, and it's putting a big stress on their personal lives,'' Professor Schor said. ''Permission to send e-mail to family members and friends is a nonwage benefit that eases the very |
1499629_2 | The Last Hard Case: Bleak, Stubborn Belfast | bombs hurled over the wall last summer from the Catholic side. The only thing the two sides ever agree on is that it is the other side that always begins the attacks. ''In other parts of the world, maybe people live like this, but we're talking about the civilized world, we're talking about Europe,'' said Derek Williamson, 53, a Short Strand resident for 21 years. Peace is surely coming to this balkanized northern fringe of Europe, but it is taking longer than it has elsewhere in a continent that has spent the decades since the end of World War II turning toward political compromise and away from military conflict. There is no mistaking the direction of the change, only its speed. The resilient dispute here pits unionists -- mostly Protestants, who want Northern Ireland to remain part of Britain -- against republicans, predominantly Catholics, who want to see the North become one with Ireland. Spring is an uplifting season elsewhere, but here it brings on the ''marching season'' where unionist bands parade their colors along streets and avenues that have over time become the residential neighborhoods of republicans. The events often provoke protests and riots on the parade routes, and they raise tensions in interface flash points like the Short Strand and Cluan Place. The peace agreement has not brought permanent political stability to Northern Ireland -- its new government is currently suspended while republicans and unionists try to negotiate a disarmament schedule. But the end of organized violence brought about by the agreement has allowed the citizens of Belfast to restore and rebuild a place that was once called the second city of the empire and is beginning to look like it again. While this lasting peace is taking hold across the province and appears irreversible, the neighborhood antagonisms like those at the Short Strand and Cluan Place persist, inconsequential in the end but still dispiriting. A comment commonly heard in Northern Ireland is that it will take a whole new generation to end them, yet in this dour and hardened place even that pessimistic viewpoint can sound too hopeful. There are continual reminders that past prejudices in Northern Ireland do not become dated with the passage of time. Earlier this month Alan McCullough, a 21-year-old Belfast man and member of a paramilitary group, was taken from his home and shot dead by rival gunmen. The pallbearers carrying his |
1499598_3 | The Skin Isn't Great, But the Heart Is Pure Gold | in winter. As part of a boom in new subtropical crops, nurserymen and real estate developers promoted avocados as the next big thing -- ''Health fruit possessing unusual Vitalizing and Rejuvenating properties,'' as one pamphlet put it. Lured by dreams of green gold and a bucolic life, well-to-do enthusiasts planted thousands of acres, mostly in small groves. ''The avocado is rich and nutty, and so are those who grow it,'' one farmer observed dryly in the 1920's. As production increased, growers established a cooperative, Calavo, to develop a market. Prices were high, 50 to 85 cents apiece, and advertisements in Vogue and The New Yorker pitched avocados as the ''aristocrat of salad fruits,'' to be served to impress guests on special occasions. The first shipment of California avocados reached New York in 1926, though for several decades fruit from Florida and Cuba continued to dominate Eastern markets. In the same year, a Pasadena postal carrier, Rudolph Hass (rhymes with pass), planted seedling avocado rootstock in La Habra Heights, 20 miles east of Los Angeles, and grafted the Fuerte variety onto it. On one tree, grafts failed three times, and Hass might have ripped it out, but his sons tasted the fruit from the rootstock and begged him to try it. Hass liked it so much he named it after himself and patented it. Besides its creamy texture and nutty flavor, it had thick and pebbly but easily peeled skin that typically turned purplish black when the fruit ripened, serving both as an indication of readiness and as a mask for bruises or decay. The new variety bore more steadily than Fuerte, and hung on the tree well into summer, giving growers a long season for sales. At first, markets did not readily accept the dark-skinned fruit. ''They'd be turned down because they appeared to be spoiled,'' Jack Shepherd, 90, who retired as Calavo's president in 1978, said in an interview at his home in Pasadena. He started working at the cooperative in 1934. But the Hass caught on in the 1950's, and surpassed Fuerte in volume by 1972. Over the next decade plantings more than tripled, driven by syndicators and tax shelters. This surge led to a glut and a fall in prices. Meanwhile, many novice growers faced ruin due to root rot, a fungal disease; high winds, which could knock most of the fruit to the ground; and skyrocketing |
1499832_0 | No Link Found Between Cancer And Power Lines on Long Island | A study of women on Long Island has found no link between breast cancer and living near high-voltage power lines, extending a long trail of research that has failed to connect breast cancer on the island to an environmental cause. The report, to be published next week in The American Journal of Epidemiology, is also the latest of several studies that have not found a connection between electromagnetic fields, particularly those of power lines, and cancer. The findings of the study, authorized 10 years ago, were first reported yesterday in Newsday. In the latest effort, researchers, most of them from the State University at Stony Brook, looked at 1,161 Long Island women, roughly half of whom had breast cancer. Most were in their 50's and 60's, and all had lived in their homes for at least 15 years. Scientists measured electromagnetic fields in various parts of their homes, and their proximity to power lines, and found no statistically significant differences in exposure between the group with breast cancer and those who did not have it. Links between cancer and some environmental factors, like cigarette smoking, asbestos exposure and air pollution, are well documented. But researchers caution that while a community may perceive an environmental ''cancer cluster,'' it is extremely hard to prove that the incidence is anything more than random variation, and even harder to connect a cluster to a particular cause. It is widely believed that Long Island suffers from extraordinarily high breast cancer rates, but the available evidence says otherwise. The New York State Department of Health says that from 1994 to 1998, 117 cases of breast cancer were diagnosed for every 100,000 women on Long Island -- slightly more in Suffolk County than in Nassau County -- compared with 114 per 100,000 nationally. There are several areas in the Northeast that have higher rates. Many Long Islanders also believe that pollutants like pesticides, or some other environmental factors, are to blame. Breast cancer survivors have formed a powerful political lobby and persuaded government to spend tens of millions of dollars researching suspected connections to pollution and other factors, notably a $30 million federal fund that is supporting a dozen Long Island breast cancer studies. But a decade of research has failed to turn up a local environmental link. |
1499697_0 | Study Finds New Risks in Hormone Therapy | One year after a major study linked postmenopausal hormone therapy to an increased risk of breast cancer, new findings from the same study paint an even more ominous picture of the hormones' role in the disease. In addition to stimulating the growth of breast cancer, the combination of hormones used in a common type of therapy also makes tumors harder to detect, leading to dangerous delays in diagnosis, researchers are reporting today in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The new results deal with a widely used type of hormone therapy that combines estrogen and progestin; the most popular brand is Prempro, made by Wyeth. The results do not apply to the use of estrogen alone, although a second study, also published in the journal today, found that estrogen alone did not increase the risk of breast cancer. Women who take the combination are also more likely to have changes in their breast tissue that lead to abnormal mammograms, problems that can show up as soon as the first year of hormone use. Many of the abnormalities turn out to be harmless, but they can be nerve-racking and risky, since they require further tests that may include biopsies. Of the estimated three million women in the United States who now take combined hormones, about 120,000 a year may have abnormal mammograms solely because of their hormone treatment, the researchers said. The total number of women taking these hormones reflects a decline of more than 50 percent after the study last year that cautioned against long-term use of the combined hormones. But because breast abnormalities can develop so soon after a woman starts taking hormones, the new findings are now raising questions about the safety of even short-term use, which is commonly recommended to treat severe hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms. The hormone combination is now approved in the United States only to treat menopausal symptoms and to prevent the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis. Because the hormones have risks, women are advised to use the lowest dose for the shortest time possible and to consult their doctors about other ways to prevent osteoporosis. A sharply worded editorial accompanying the new report said it provided ''further compelling evidence against the use of combination estrogen plus progestin hormone therapy.'' Natalie de Vane, a spokeswoman for Wyeth, said yesterday that the new data about hormone therapy is ''clearly important for women to know.'' |
1497631_0 | Hunt Imperils Polar Bears In Bering Sea, Report Says | Polar bears that traverse the floating ice between the Russian Arctic and Alaska are being shot in rising numbers by poachers on Russian shores, according to a new report by federal wildlife biologists in the United States, and the killing could greatly diminish the bear population if it is not slowed. The findings were released as the United States and Russia consider ratifying a treaty they signed in 2000 to protect the shared population of about 4,000 bears. The treaty would allow limited hunting by native populations but would clamp down on poaching under a management plan developed by scientists and representatives of native communities. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding a hearing today to consider the treaty. Last summer, President Bush urged the Senate to approve the treaty, which requires a two-thirds majority. Polar bears roam most of the Arctic Ocean's sea ice and fringing shores, but form distinct groups that rarely mix. The population spanning the Bering Strait, the narrow gap between North America and Eurasia, has individuals that are considerably larger than those elsewhere in the far north, biologists say. In the 1960's, hunting in Alaska sharply cut the polar bear population until laws were enacted that curbed the killing. The new study, by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, says the situation in Russia today is at least as serious. It estimates that Russians are taking 200 to 400 bears a year and says that if that level of hunting persists, the population could be cut in half by 2020. ''We do think these harvest rates could cause a depletion or severe reduction in the population,'' said Scott L. Schliebe, the polar bear project leader in the Anchorage office of the Fish and Wildlife Service. ''We don't expect to see a lot of immigration to fill that void.'' The Soviet Union outlawed polar bear hunting in 1956, but since the fall of Communism, illegal shooting has steadily risen, experts say. Initially the bears were being killed on the Russian coast mainly for their meat, but now a significant cash trade, including sales over the Internet, has sprung up in Russia for the pelts -- often in batches -- and organs, like the gall bladder, valued as medicinal products in Asia. Among those calling for rapid enactment of the treaty are groups representing native communities, mainly Eskimos, who have traditionally hunted polar bears and want |
1497630_2 | Ulster Protestant Leader Defeats Challenger | The government, which Mr. Trimble headed in his post as first minister, was suspended by Britain in October for the fourth time in its brief life because of alleged spy activity by Sinn Fein. The Ulster Unionists vow they will not return to government unless the I.R.A. disarms and ceases all paramilitary activity. Prime Minister Tony Blair laid the large part of the blame for the need to shut down the government on the I.R.A.'s continuing refusal to disarm, and Sinn Fein found itself on the defensive even from traditional allies in the Irish government and the Irish press. In May, Mr. Blair postponed elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly indefinitely, arguing that I.R.A. intransigence on arms left the province's politics too unstable. With the vote tonight, attention is likely to shift back to unionist intransigence, with a new focus on the unwillingness of Mr. Donaldson and his followers to take part in politics with Catholics. Mr. Donaldson forced the showdown, introducing a motion dissociating the Ulster Unionists from proposals put forward in May by the British and Irish governments to try to gain I.R.A. acquiescence to disarm. He appealed to widespread feelings among many unionists that the proposals were concessions to republicans and that they sold out unionist principles. The proposals promised speedier reductions in British troop levels; police and justice reforms; amnesties to paramilitary fugitives abroad; and mechanisms to monitor adherence to the peace agreement. Mr. Donaldson said he particularly objected to the fact that the monitor group, which would have representatives from Britain and the United States, would also have one from Ireland. Though the agreement has brought about cease-fires and put an end to the organized sectarian violence that cost the lives of more than 3,600 people over three decades, there are continual reminders that renegade paramilitary groups still threaten to undermine the peace. Over the weekend, two bomb attacks were foiled, the first when the Irish police recovered 500 pounds of explosives near the border and the second when a van containing a 2,000-pound bomb was intercepted near Northern Ireland's second city, Londonderry. Correction: June 23, 2003, Monday An article on Tuesday about the survival of David Trimble, Northern Ireland's most prominent Protestant politician, in a challenge to his leadership of the Ulster Unionists, misstated the year he and John Hume, a moderate Catholic politician, won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was 1998, not 1997. |
1497515_0 | Artists Touched By Amazon Tribe | The Yanomami are probably the last example of the myriad Indian tribes that once lived in isolated harmony with the tropical forests of the Amazon Basin. As such, devoted to hunting and fishing and governed by powerful spirits, their natural -- and naked -- way of life has come to be viewed with Rousseau-like nostalgia by many Western anthropologists. That the Yanomami have survived is itself remarkable. They first came into contact with Westerners in the early 20th century. By midcentury Catholic and Protestant missions had settled in their territory. In the 1980's their lands were invaded by gold prospectors, who polluted their rivers and introduced contagious diseases. Finally, in 1992, in response to an international campaign, the Brazilian government granted them 37,000 square miles of forest as a reserve. Through all this they preserved their language, rituals and customs. And it is this that has inspired an unusual exhibition at the Cartier Foundation of Contemporary Art in Paris: ''Yanomami: The Spirit of the Forest,'' which runs through Oct. 12. The exhibition is not an ethnographic show. Rather it is an attempt to explore the parallels between the imagination of the Yanomami and the creative process of Western artists. The focus is on the community of Watoriki, 127 strong, one of at least 185 villages that account for the 12,500 Yanomami in Brazil. (Another 14,000 live in more precarious circumstances in Venezuela.) Bruce Albert, a French anthropologist who has worked among the Yanomami since the 1970's, and Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami spokesman who speaks Portuguese as well as his native language, provided the bridge between Paris and Watoriki. Late last year 5 of the 12 artists in this show traveled to Watoriki to work alongside the Yanomami. Three others worked with material brought from the region, and the final four are presenting photographs and films recorded among the Yanomami in earlier years. The result is an intimate view of the daily life and religious ceremonies of the Yanomami as well as a Western interpretation of their perception of the world. Mr. Kopenawa, who was in Paris for the opening of the exhibition, said the initiative gave the Yanomami a chance to shape their own image. ''You don't know our forests and houses,'' he explained. ''You don't understand our words. We could even end up disappearing without you realizing. That's why, if we remain forgotten by you like turtles hidden in |
1497511_4 | A Fascination With Forests Finds Fulfillment at Smithsonian | a weekend at the local bar, preferably in the town square, drinking beer, talking to everyone and actually giving out handouts about who we were and what we were doing. Q. How do you think you will respond to pressure to mount certain exhibits or change them? A. I believe the strength of this museum, the core of this museum, is the science. And science has to be intimately linked to the collections and exhibitions. My priority is making sure that our exhibits are objective and based on the best science available. Q. How do you hope to shape the museum's mission and exhibits? A. I often come in on weekends and just mix with the crowd, the visitors, and look at their reactions and talk to them. And I think there are many people coming to this museum who don't realize how much research is behind the scenes. And I think that's one area where we can probably do a better job in the future. I believe the American people think of the Smithsonian as museums of gadgets, or the nation's attic. We have to remember that the Smithsonian and the collections here are not only objects, it's the scientific process behind them. Q. What do you think can be done about the loss of rain forests? A. Anything we can do that will lead us toward a sustainable use of natural resources is important. Now I don't have full confidence in our ability to do that, and I think we do need some backstop measures, including setting up protected areas. I'm convinced that science has to be at the cornerstone of efforts on conservation. At this point we have not cataloged more than 10 percent of all living species on earth, and that's shocking, after 200 years of work. We probably know more about the surface of the moon than we know about the Amazon rain forest. Q. Is it a good thing for the jungle to be seen as a cornucopia of new medicines, foods and materials? A. I've seen indigenous communities in parts of Colombia where people have come in and said, You have to preserve this rain forest because this is a cornucopia, here's a cure for cancer, and you're going to be rich. But of course, getting from this leaf to that cure and getting the money back is something that really needs to |
1494182_0 | West Europe Is Hard Hit By Strikes Over Pensions | A wave of strikes from France to Austria left much of Western Europe snarled today, as protesting workers shut down subway systems, ports, trains, toll roads and airlines. In France, where leaders of the seven major industrial countries and Russia ended a summit meeting in the spa town of Évian-les-Bains, a strike by air-traffic controllers grounded 80 percent of the flights into and out of the country. In Austria, the strikes were the biggest since World War II, leaving the capital, Vienna, without any public transportation or postal service. Protesters even blockaded the entrance to the airport. Workers in both countries share the same grievance: government proposals to change the national pension systems, either by cutting retirement benefits or by making people work longer to qualify for them. Smaller strikes also erupted in Italy and Germany. Flight attendants at Alitalia, the Italian airline, called in sick to protest job cuts, forcing it to cancel 285 flights. In eastern Germany, steelworkers picketed factories to demand the same 35-hour work week that their counterparts in western Germany have. The strikes in France were less paralyzing than those on May 13, which had been dubbed Black Tuesday by the French news media. But they rippled through the country, forming an awkward backdrop for President Jacques Chirac as the host for the Group of Eight meeting. Mr. Chirac and the other leaders were able to depart from nearby Geneva without a hitch. Journalists and representatives of nongovernmental organizations were less lucky, finding themselves stranded in Évian, a tranquil lakeside town that had already been sealed off for security reasons. Mr. Chirac did not address the strikes during his news conference at the end of the summit meeting. As is customary in France, the labor dispute is the bailiwick of the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who showed no sign of backing down on his plan to overhaul the pension system. ''This is about the survival of the republic,'' Mr. Raffarin told the French Parliament. The unions are rebelling against the government's proposal to require workers to pay into the state pension fund for 40 years, up from 37.5 years now, before they qualify for retirement benefits. ''The current proposals will weaken the system and increase inequalities,'' said Bernard Thibault, the head of the powerful union, C.G.T., in an interview with the online edition of the French daily Libération. Labor leaders in Austria voiced similar complaints |
1493866_3 | The Road to Wellness, Paved With 1,900 Pages | of water in the body. Another feature I find especially helpful is a clever cross-referencing system to additional information on other pages. On most pages, there are red symbols in the text -- squares, triangles, stars, circles, diamonds -- that at the bottom of the page refer to related information elsewhere in the book. For example, in a discussion of coma and its causes on Page 491, readers are referred to Page 434 for a description of the functions of the brain stem; to Page 451 for a list of narcotic drugs, their effects and hazards; and to Page 471 for a box on the benefits and risks of sleep aids. Another attribute that endears me to this volume is its shape. Most other guides -- ''The American Medical Association Family Medical Guide'' is an exception -- are large, heavy and unwieldy. Merck's manual is by no means small, but it is compact, the size and weight of a fat novel. The consumer-friendly manual adopts the format of the doctor's version. Under each heading is a brief italicized definition of the condition, followed by a detailed discussion in ordinary Roman type. I was easily hooked into reading about conditions for no other reason than to expand my knowledge. For example, I had never even heard of ''dissociative fugue'' but was intrigued by the description and astonished to learn of its rather high incidence. ''Dissociative fugue is a disorder in which one or more episodes of sudden, unexpected and purposeful travel from home (fugue) occur, during which a person cannot remember some or all of his past life,'' it says. I learned that two people in 1,000 in the United States were affected by this disorder, most often those traumatized by wars, accidents or natural disasters. Though often mistaken for malingering because it may enable someone to avoid an unwanted circumstance, the condition is not faked. Rather, the manual states, ''many fugues seem to represent a disguised wish fulfillment (for example, an escape from overwhelming stresses, such as divorce or financial ruin),'' while others ''are related to feelings of rejection or separation, or they may protect the person from suicidal or homicidal impulses.'' And so on. Although this may not represent soothing bedside reading, the manual can provide the information and reassurance you need to get a good night's sleep when troubled by a health problem in yourself, family member or |
1493873_0 | Limited Gain Found in Soy Pills | Pills with a soy compound were no better than a placebo at relieving the symptoms of menopause, according to a Finnish study published yesterday in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology. A number of studies have found conflicting but often disappointing results for foods and supplements that contain vegetable substances bearing chemical resemblances to estrogen. The new study, by researchers from Helsinki University Central Hospital, enlisted 56 breast cancer survivors, who are usually told to avoid hormone replacement therapy because it can raise the risk of the cancers' recurrence. The women were randomly assigned to take a pill with phytoestrogen or a placebo for three months. Then, after a two-month break, they were switched to the other regimen. The phytoestrogen pills did raise the level of estrogenlike compounds circulating in the blood, the article said, and was not linked to any harmful side effects. But there was no difference on a scale that measures symptoms like hot flashes. Women taking each pill reported a slight improvement, yet when asked whether they would like to continue the medication, more women on the phytoestrogen pills said yes than those on the placebo. The lead researcher, Dr. Eini Nikander, said that some small studies had shown that foods rich in soy offered modest relief for mild symptoms of menopause. Women seeking alternatives to hormone treatment should also try making ''other healthy changes in lifestyle,'' like getting more sleep and reducing stress, he said. VITAL SIGNS: MENOPAUSE |
1495526_3 | E-Mail Message Blitz Creates What May Be Fastest Fad Ever | Iraqi card messages that it defines as spam. After the e-mail blizzard reached full force, Mr. Brandenberg sent a scolding e-mail message to all of GreatUSA's sales agents. It reminded them to send solicitations only to people who agreed to be on marketing lists. ''I compared it to kindergarten,'' Mr. Brandenberg said. ''We are all having a great time, so don't ruin it for the entire class.'' Such entreaties were not enough, though, and he cut off several affiliates for egregious spamming, he said. The power of e-mail marketing today -- and the reason that spam is so hard to control -- is that the marketing is not centralized, but conducted by a complex web of product makers, mailing list owners, marketers and brokers, all of whom are disseminating the sales pitch. For example, one of the first companies that Mr. Brandenberg contacted was AzoogleAds in Toronto. GreatUSA agreed to pay AzoogleAds 30 percent of any order it could generate for the cards. AzoogleAds, in turn, took the design for GreatUSA's e-mail offer and placed it on a Web site available to 700 independent companies that are its affiliates. Any of them could download the e-mail message and send it to mailing lists they controlled. They could also place banner ads selling the cards on their Web sites. AzoogleAds promised to pay these affiliates $6 for each order received, figuring that the average order would be for several decks. One of those affiliates was Abacus Enterprises, which Laura Belzer runs from her home outside San Francisco. Ms. Belzer quickly relayed the Iraqi card promotion to a partner who has a list of 25 million e-mail names, mostly users of Hotmail. She agreed to split the commission from AzoogleAds with him. As it turned out, the Iraqi cards proved an amazing success for them. Of the 25 million messages sent, they received 3,164 orders -- a response rate of just over one-tenth of 1 percent. That would be tiny for a marketing campaign done by regular postal mailing, but it is four times what Ms. Belzer receives promoting other products like printer ink by e-mail. The financial results were even better. On the best days, the cards generated commissions of $5,000 to $6,000 for every one million e-mail messages sent. The printer ink promotions generate only $500 to $1,200 per million messages. Since her costs are quite low, Ms. Belzer says |
1495612_6 | As Dam on Yangtze Closes, Chinese Tally Gain and Loss | the most prominent temples and relics have been moved, but countless more, including those never excavated, will be lost for good. One of the chief sites, the White Emperor Temple, is on a hilltop near Fengjie, at the entrance to the famed gorges. Its main buildings lie just above the water line projected for 2009, but some lower buildings have already had to be demolished. A cave that had contained an important Buddhist sculpture has been cemented over, the figurine cut off the rock and moved. ''The temples and relics aren't a problem because they are being taken to high ground,'' said Pu Dongping, a 40-year-old rural woman who was overseeing construction of a huge retaining wall on the hillside below the temple. Eighteen years ago, as early construction began, her husband parlayed his building skills into contracts that have gradually become larger and more complex. ''We were just ordinary farmers, but we've gotten rich from the Three Gorges project,'' she said. Within the last several years, as it became clear that the dam would actually be built, scientists have raised grave concerns about the industrial poisons, farm chemicals and sewage that have long poured into the Yangtze and out to the sea. The government has belatedly scrambled to curb pollution and has plans for at least 19 new sewage treatment plants along the upper Yangtze, mainly in larger cities, but most are not yet complete, said Lei Xiongshu, a retired engineering professor, former national legislator and longtime skeptic about the dam. ''It's not enough just to have treatment plants,'' he said in a telephone interview. ''You need to insure that all industrial and domestic waste, including sewage, is diverted to them for proper treatment, and we're a long way from that.'' Already, he said, worrisome levels of E. coli bacteria have been registered in water backing up from the dam, which may render the lake water undrinkable. But so far, the most nettlesome problem has been the resettlement of hundreds of thousands in a region of steep, overexploited land and a country with little empty arable areas. According to official estimates, close to 700,000 people have already been moved, some to new and existing cities, some to farming areas and some to distant provinces. By 2009, officials say, the number must reach 1.13 million, including many people like Mrs. Li, in Fengjie, who have no obvious place to go. |
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