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1453774_0 | World Briefing | Asia: Taiwan: Tribe Wants Nuclear Dump Removed | Members of the Tao tribe on Lan Yu Island are demanding the removal of a nuclear waste dump from the island, off Taiwan's southeastern tip. The government's lease of the site expired at the end of 2002 and the tribe is refusing to renew it despite the government's offer of more financial aid. Demonstrators who threw rocks at riot police officers on New Year's Day pledged to return to the site in 15 days if no deal is reached. The government built the dump 20 years ago, when Taiwan was still under martial law, without consulting the tribe. No other community has been willing to accept the mostly low-level radioactive waste. Keith Bradsher (NYT) |
1453710_1 | U.S. to Make Airlines Give Data On Americans Going Overseas | and submit to the government the name, birth date, sex, passport number, home country and address of every passenger and crew member. The intent is to provide the authorities with more complete information about who enters and leaves the United States. Currently, air and shipping lines are not required to provide such information to the government about Americans. The proposed rule would make it mandatory for carriers to supply the information about American citizens and noncitizens, immigration officials said. Much of the information is already collected from people entering the country in an arrangement in which 80 percent of commercial carriers voluntarily give personal information about their passengers to the immigration service, the officials said. The added information would be collected while the aircraft or vessel was en route to the United States and electronically transmitted to immigration officials on the ground at the port of entry. The rule would also require carriers to provide information about people who are leaving the United States within 48 hours after the departure of their flight or vessel, the officials said. The rule would take effect after a 30-day comment period. It would apply to passengers and crew members on airlines, cargo flights, cruise ships and other vessels. The information would be electronically checked against watch lists and databases of people suspected of being involved in terrorism or other criminal activity. The changes are part of a border security bill passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed into law by President Bush on May 14, 2001. The law increases the number of immigration inspectors and investigators and heightens the scrutiny of visa applications from countries listed as sponsors of terrorism. The F.B.I. and the Central Intelligence Agency would have to increase information sharing with the State Department, which issues visas. The government will meld certain databases of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, to help screen visa applicants and foreigners entering the United States. The American Civil Liberties Union said the new information storehouse must not be used as the basis for a national identification system. In monitoring foreign visitors, the rights group said, the government must not compromise Americans' privacy rights or harass people who ''look foreign'' or are members of racial minorities. Civil liberties advocates were alarmed at some early proposals, including one that might have made noncitizens carry identification documents. Those ideas were dropped after bipartisan negotiations. THREATS AND RESPONSES: TRACKING TRAVELERS |
1453672_1 | Gay Focus At Holocaust Museum | pardoned by the German government. Only fragments of their brutal treatment in the Nazi era are known. Robert T. Odeman, for example, who wrote cabaret songs, was convicted for homosexual offenses in Berlin and sent to prison. After he was released, police arrested him again, citing his letters to a half-Jewish friend. Mr. Odeman was sent to a concentration camp, from which he and two others escaped in 1945. He died in Berlin 40 years later without knowing that his story would be part of an effort to remember the Holocaust's other victims, who include not only gays but also the handicapped, Gypsies, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and Jehovah's Witnesses. Since there was so little testimony from the victims or the survivors, the museum built the exhibition around disturbingly meticulous Nazi records. Photographs, cartoons and art from the era show that stamping out homosexuality became a priority for the Nazis even though an openly gay Ernst Röhm, chief of the storm troopers, helped bring Hitler to power. When he was murdered in 1934, barriers to pursuing gays were swept away, and homosexuality was equated with treason. In a country where bonding began early in all-male youth groups, the Nazis publicly campaigned to stamp out ''indecent'' acts. Yet ''a considerable number of cases of homosexual activity were found in just about every part of the Nazi apparatus, from the storm troopers to the Hitler Youth movement,'' said Geoffrey Giles, a University of Florida historian, who contributed some of his research to the exhibition. While ''deviant'' acts were a convenient tool of denunciation in the Hitler Youth, where homosexuality was cited for 25 percent of those expelled, there was also a fear that such behavior was learned and could spread through the corps. Such behavior had to be righted, the Nazis argued, because homosexuals were jeopardizing Germany's future generations by failing to have children. Lesbians, by contrast, were often spared, because they could be re-educated to assume roles as wives and mothers. In the Weimar Republic, courts restricted the 1871 law, which carried a sentence of two years' imprisonment, to acts of physical contact. About 400 people were convicted until the start of the Nazi era; then the number of convictions rose tenfold. By 1936 the Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler had established the Central Office to Combat Homosexuality and Abortion, and surveillance of gays was legalized. Over all, as many as |
1459226_1 | Rival Palestinian Groups Meet in Cairo to Discuss Ending Attacks on Israeli Civilians | head of Palestinian Preventive Security in the Gaza Strip, who in an earlier, rosier era was a favorite of American intelligence. After being dismissed by Mr. Arafat last spring, Mr. Dahlan is now said to be reporting back to him. But the difficulty of hammering out any agreement on the Palestinian side was emphasized this week as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades issued statements saying they would not agree to a cease-fire as long as Israeli troops controlled the roads in the West Bank and assassinated certain Palestinian leaders. The statement from Al Aksa in particular showed the extent to which Mr. Arafat has lost control of his own Fatah organization in the West Bank. ''He has problems, big problems,'' an Israeli security source said. Israeli officials, including the chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi Farkash said the talks would not end terrorist attacks. The Egyptians are under pressure from Washington, particularly in view of the possibility of a war with Iraq, to ease tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Egypt traditionally gets about $2 billion a year in aid from the United States, making it second only to Israel, which usually gets around $3 billion. The talks, originally scheduled for Wednesday were held up when Hamas and Islamic Jihad objected that two factions, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, headed by Ahmed Jabril, and As Saiqa, were not included. Hamas and Islamic Jihad agreed to participate after the two factions were included. Both the Popular Front and As Saiqa have been tightly controlled by Syria since their inception, and their inclusion suggests a tough line rejecting any compromise with Israel. Nabil Osman, the Egyptian government spokesman, said the goal was to ''make the distinction between the right of Palestinians to resist the occupation and the right of civilians, Palestinians and Israelis equally, to remain safe and sound.'' Mr. Osman sketched out in an interview the several versions of an Egyptian draft, saying ideas were being exchanged and ''should be taken with a ton of salt, not a grain of salt.'' He drew a distinction between the attacks on restaurants and discos inside Israel that he said had hurt the Palestinian cause, and those on Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. ''There is so much bitterness, so much frustration,'' Mr. Osman said. ''We have to break this vicious |
1459214_0 | Don't Pester Europe on Genetically Modified Food | The Bush administration recently announced that it is considering taking action against the European Union because of its ban on imports of genetically modified foods. It's a profoundly bad idea. As a former Reagan administration trade hawk, I take a back seat to no one in demanding the opening of foreign markets. But in this case and at this moment, we need to look hard at our priorities. The ban on genetically modified food has been a sorely troublesome issue for the United States and the European Union for a long time. Without any scientific grounds, but on the basis of the so-called precautionary principle -- that is, if we can't prove absolutely that it is harmless, let's ban it -- the union has prevented genetically modified food from the United States from entering its markets. This is almost certainly a violation of World Trade Organization rules, which don't recognize the precautionary principle. If the United States follows through on its threat to file a case, it has a very good chance of winning. But this is a situation in which we could easily win in court but lose not only in the market, but also in the arena of our broader interests. American trade officials tend to see the issue purely as a matter of European agricultural interests once again colluding and hiding behind phony scientific worries to exclude competitive American products. There is no doubt that there is an element of that in this case. But it is by no means the major part of the problem. Whether rationally or not, many, and perhaps most, Europeans are scared to death of genetically modified food. And this is not entirely a matter of Europeans' falling victim to protectionist propaganda or hysteria. We must remember two things. One is that Europe has recently had some very bad experiences with contaminated food. Health experts in the 1990's maintained that beef from cattle with mad cow disease was perfectly safe -- until scores of Britons died. That experience was all the more searing because food is to European culture what free speech is to American culture. There may be no good scientific reason for concern, but to consider eating something that has resulted from some laboratory manipulation is felt by many Europeans as a kind of denial of the true self. For Americans to insist that the union accept genetically modified products |
1459216_0 | Mexico Is Struggling Under New President | Few people watch every economic indicator from Washington more closely than Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, and his economic team. That is because Mexico, probably more than any other country in the world, needs United States growth to jump-start its own sluggish economy. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico's export industries have become deeply integrated into United States manufacturing and are the country's most dynamic. About 90 percent of what Mexico sells abroad goes north of the border. Because of the sputtering United States economy, Mexico's economic performance during Mr. Fox's first two years in office has been bleak. The economy shrank 0.3 percent in 2001, and analysts expect that the figures from last year will show growth of just over 1 percent. This year, the government's target is a modest 3 percent, based on forecasts that the United States economy will expand, increasing demand for exports from Mexico and driving investment in Mexico's export industries. Continued anemic growth will worsen Mexico's social inequities and push more people to migrate to the United States. More than a million young people enter the work force each year and 53 percent of the population lives in poverty. The government and private analysts agree that steady growth of at least 5 percent is needed to meet job demand and begin to raise the standard of living for Mexicans. During his campaign, Mr. Fox promised 7 percent growth. But he cannot wait for the elusive United States recovery to propel his economy. Analysts say he needs to carry out major structural changes -- of the tax code, of the electricity industry and of the labor laws -- that will raise Mexico's productivity and attract more investment from abroad. So far, however, despite Mr. Fox's efforts, those measures have been stuck in Congress. And with congressional elections set for July, few believe that legislators will approve the controversial changes. ''Mexico could be one of the two or three most dynamic places on the globe,'' said Gray Newman, senior Latin America economist for Morgan Stanley in New York. ''Where else do you have the largest capital market on one side and a huge labor market next door?'' Even when the United States does begin to recover, Mexico will have to compete for investment capital with countries that offer cheaper labor. Mexico has already lost some jobs in the apparel and electronics industries to China. ''The |
1457198_0 | South Korea's President-Elect Rejects Use of Force Against North Korea | In a determined defense of engagement with North Korea, President-elect Roh Moo Hyun today all but ruled out the use of force against his isolated neighbor, which he said was seeking a way to open up to the world. ''North Korea wants to escape from its status as a rogue state,'' Mr. Roh said when asked why he had faith in a conciliatory approach. ''I believe once those things are guaranteed, North Korea will abandon its nuclear ambitions.'' In his first interview since winning the election last month, Mr. Roh insisted on a peaceful approach even as South Korea's defense minister, Lee Jun, told Parliament that South Korean forces were prepared for a ''worst-case scenario'' if diplomacy fails to resolve the four-month old nuclear crisis. Mr. Roh said he would not contemplate a military strike from South Korean territory against the North Korean nuclear complex at Yongbyon -- even if North Korea were found to be reprocessing nuclear fuel for bomb production there. ''I don't think we should even go so far as to imagine such a situation,'' said Mr. Roh, whose approval as president would be required for any military action by South Korean troops or Americans stationed here. The president-elect also said that South Korea would not develop nuclear weapons in response to North Korean armaments, insisting that ''nuclear development will not be permitted in Korea -- either North or South.'' Mr. Roh did not discuss his views on Korean reunification, a goal that both North and South have embraced. Nor did he offer his views on when, or whether, the 37,000 American troops in South Korea should be withdrawn. But he tried to play down a recent wave of protests against the American forces here, and said that anti-Americanism had no meaningful place in South Korea. ''There are some voices of anti-Americanism in Korea, but the number of those voices is small, and the chances of their leading public opinion is even smaller,'' he said. Earlier this week, in a conciliatory change of tone, Mr. Roh visited the United States military headquarters here to demonstrate his gratitude for American sacrifices during the Korean War. Mr. Roh, a liberal lawyer with a background in the country's labor and democracy movements dating back to the military dictatorships of the 1980's, rejected a common assertion that his candidacy rode a wave of anti-Americanism, allowing him to narrowly defeat the more |
1457123_0 | Reflections of Byzantium, Where East Meets West | I went to Mount Athos -- Hagion Oros, the Holy Mountain -- in Greece in 1982, and I went the way everyone does: very slowly. From New York I wrote to the Greek Foreign Ministry asking permission to visit this great monastic center, isolated on a squared-off peninsula in the northern Aegean. In Athens, I picked up my pass for a four-day stay, then took a long bus ride to Thessalonika, and another to the port town of Ouranopolis. From there you reach Athos by a boat that makes the short trip daily. I had to wait two days, though, when word came that a distraught monk had locked himself in a cell with explosives, threatening to blow up a monastery. Athos was in lock-down mode until he was subdued or changed his mind. The 15 passengers on the small boat were men; women, unless they were theology students, were not allowed on Athos. Greek workers and farmers, they had come on pilgrimage, for spiritual retreat. I had come for an experience of a still living Byzantine culture, and I got it: in monastery churches glinting with icons, in their libraries dense with manuscripts and in the oceanic sound of chanting in the night. Much of what I saw was actually post-Byzantine art, dating from the centuries after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. With its East-meets-West styles, it is fabulous stuff, and that's how it looks in ''Post-Byzantium: The Greek Renaissance,'' a true sleeper of an exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center in Midtown Manhattan. All of the show's 50 objects -- paintings, embroideries, liturgical implements -- are on loan from the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens. That alone makes the show an occasion. They also represent, as the curator, Eugenia Chalkia, points out in the exhibition catalog, a still little studied aspect of the Byzantine tradition: a late, hybrid, ''impure'' style of a kind that art historians are only beginning to value and savor. Although Byzantium had an incalculable effect on art in Italy in earlier centuries, by the time of the Italian Renaissance, the flow of influence had reversed. The effect on Greek art was gradual and subtle. The earliest painting in the show, a half-length, almost life-size icon of St. Marina, dates from the late 14th or early 15th century. Posed on a solid gold ground and staring out from a scarlet |
1457200_0 | Battle Honors | THREATS AND RESPONSES |
1457182_0 | Political Fervor of Iranian Clerics Begins to Ebb | While recent pro-democracy demonstrations on Iranian campuses have attracted widespread attention, a potentially more explosive movement has quietly been taking shape here in one of the leading religious centers of the Islamic world. The Shiite clergy who a generation ago called for the establishment of a fundamentalist, religious government are having second thoughts. Religion, many are now saying, belongs in the mosque. Qum, home to more than 30,000 clerics and spotted with dozens of golden- and turquoise-domed mosques and seminaries, was the intellectual birthplace of the Islamic revolution that swept the clergy to power in Iran in 1979. The godfather of the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, sent missionaries from here to spread the message of the revolution through the country's mosques. But more than two decades later, many clerics here are openly questioning the wisdom of that earlier generation. The foray into politics, they say, has stained the image of the Shiite clergy. It will not be restored, they insist, until the clergy withdraws from government. ''The political performance of clerics in the past two decades has caused a lot of problems for all clerics,'' said Abolfazl Moussavian, 47, a middle-ranking cleric who teaches at Mofid University in Qum. ''First of all, those in power do not tolerate any ideas other than their own. Secondly, people have become skeptical toward clerics and blame them and religion for the current problems.'' The majority of clerics in Iran increasingly avoid talking about politics, said Mostafa Izadi, a journalist and researcher. Most significant, he says, they rarely side with the government, even when specifically asked to lend support. ''Clerics want to stay on the side of the people,'' he said, ''and they fear that if they approve the government's performance they might lose the support of the people.'' In fact, he said, among the clerics who make up the ''Forty Sources of Emulation'' -- an elite group of, as its name suggests, 40 clerics whose members hold a rank roughly equivalent to that of a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church -- only a handful support the government. Mirroring Iranian society as a whole, pro-reform clerics hold very little political power. That lies with a minority of hard-line conservative clerics who control most of the important levers of the state. Conservative clerics dominate the crucial positions in Iranian government and society, from internal security to the judiciary and the powerful foundations that control |
1456217_0 | U.S. Envoy Starts Discussions in Seoul on North Korea | Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly began consultations with South Korea's president-elect and other officials today about the nuclear threat from North Korea, as the North Korean government maintained a barrage of bellicose statements. There were other developments in the United States and Russia on Sunday indicating that a diplomatic solution might be a bit closer. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations who talked with North Korean representatives last week, said he expected low-level talks to begin between the United States and North Korea at the United Nations. And the Russian Foreign Ministry expressed some optimism about a possible settlement of the crisis. Mr. Kelly, who is responsible for East Asian and Pacific affairs, met with President-elect Roh Moo Hyun at the presidential Blue House. The Bush administration has said North Korea must dismantle its nuclear programs, a path it has abandoned, before there can be any talks about aid and improved ties. At a news conference before meeting Mr. Roh, Mr. Kelly, responding to a question about the potential for regional cooperation on energy matters, said, ''Once we get beyond nuclear weapons, there may be opportunities with the U.S., with private investors, with other countries to help North Korea in the energy area.'' Mr. Kelly's arrival on Sunday began his first visit since October, when he traveled to Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, and met with officials there. He later said they had admitted conducting a secret nuclear weapons program. Tensions have risen since then, and in the last three days North Korea has announced that it plans to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and that it may resume a suspended program of missile tests. Hours before Mr. Kelly's arrival here on Sunday, North Korea pressed an earlier denial that it had ever admitted conducting a nuclear weapons program. ''The claim that we admitted developing nuclear weapons is an invention fabricated by the United States with sinister intentions,'' said a North Korean newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, as quoted by the South Korean news agency Yonhap. Such a program would violate a 1994 agreement in which the United States promised to provide energy supplies if North Korea froze its nuclear program. In December, Washington halted oil shipments under the deal, and experts said North Korea would soon be suffering the effects of severe energy shortages. Declaring the 1994 agreement void, North |
1456247_3 | China Gambles On Big Projects For Its Stability | on their own subways. By 2005, China plans to add 8,500 miles of railroad, half of that to places that now have no rail service. Shanghai just opened the world's first magnetic levitation train that zips to its new airport at up to 270 miles per hour, faster than any other commercial train. Railroad officials are completing plans for a $22 billion high-speed track from Beijing to Shanghai. Meanwhile, workers carrying oxygen tanks are pounding spikes for the 670-mile-long Qinghai-Tibet railroad, which will operate at elevations of up to 16,600 feet on its way to Lhasa, Tibet's capital. The Three Gorges Dam, designed to tame the mighty Yangtze river and generate the power of 18 ordinary nuclear power plants, was for years considered the world's most expensive project, with a price tag of $30 billion. It has now been eclipsed by China's latest engineering colossus, a $60 billion system of channels and pump stations to divert water from the Yangtze in the central part of the country to the Yellow River in the north. In late December, Chinese officials broke ground on the first phase of the project, which they say will alleviate desertification and drought. Like many large cities, Chongqing is now following what officials refer to as the ''Shanghai model.'' That refers to the heavy financial support the central government gave Shanghai over the past eight years, after two former city leaders, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, became China's top bosses. Shanghai created a new financial center in Pudong, its eastern section. It tore apart former colonial districts to install a modern transportation network. While some of the uncounted billions of dollars invested almost certainly went to waste, Shanghai has also become an Asian center of commerce and finance. Huang Qifan, a former top Shanghai official, is now the executive vice mayor of Chongqing. He said the once remote city on the upper reaches of the Yangtze, which served as a redoubt for China's Nationalist government when it fled the Japanese advance during World War II, would be the beachhead to develop China's west. Chongqing lobbied hard for that role, partly as a political payoff for supporting the Three Gorges Dam, which will inundate riverside towns in the area. ''We have more infrastructure work going on here than anyplace else in China,'' Mr. Huang said. ''When I say $200 billion a year, this is not some abstract number. |
1456154_2 | Steal This Book? A Publisher Is Making It Easy | and SuSE Linux charge their customers, who buy the software in boxes that include the code on CD-ROM's along with explanatory manuals. Similarly, Prentice Hall, a unit of Pearson, is charging for the books, printed on paper with CD's attached. The first two titles, ''The Linux Development Platform'' and ''Embedded Software Development with eCos,'' are priced at $49.99 each. (ECos is an open-source operating system developed for wireless devices like cellphones and remote controls.) The free electronic versions of the books will be available in a couple of months -- a delay intended to ensure that another publisher does not just make copies and beat Prentice Hall to stores at, say, half the price. For Mr. Perens, the book series is a way to encourage the spread of open-source software by supplying better written instruction for programmers -- who generally do not get their kicks from documenting their labors. ''We've been saying we've got great software, but we don't actually have very good documentation,'' he said. The electronic versions of the books, Mr. Perens added, can be frequently updated, and the authors can edit readers' contributions. He considers the series -- in which his role is mainly selecting books and setting policy -- to be a step toward broadening the application of open-source principles. ''We are expanding the scope of collaborative works beyond software,'' Mr. Perens said. In the past, individual books have been published under the Open Publication License at the insistence of individual authors like Mr. Perens. But Mark L. Taub, an editor in Prentice Hall's professional and technical book division, termed the Perens series a ''strategic commitment'' to a continuing line of books with the open license. There is nothing to prevent programmers from waiting a couple of months to download copies of the books free rather than buying them. But Mr. Perens, a member of the digital avant-garde, predicts that serious programmers will buy the books for $50 each. Why? ''People like paper,'' he said. Even though photocopying the entire book or making a printout of the electronic version would violate no copyright law, Prentice Hall is betting that most people will not bother, preferring to pay for the convenience of the book itself. Anthony J. Massa, a programmer and author of ''Embedded Software Development with eCos,'' agrees. ''I personally like having the printed version of a bound book in front of me,'' he said. TECHNOLOGY |
1456227_5 | AOL Chairman Quits His Post Amid Criticism | authority over the company's executives has also waned with the AOL division's fortunes. Executives from the Time Warner side of the company, many of whom resented the merger and its consequences, have taken over almost all the other top roles in the company. After sitting out of the company's day-to-day during the first year of the merger, Mr. Case sought to reassert himself in recent months as his role came under fire. He particularly engaged himself in offering questions and advice to Jonathan Miller, the newly named chairman of the AOL division, charged with building a new strategy for the online service. But Mr. Case's prolific e-mail from the sidelines seemed excessive to Don Logan, chairman of the Media and Communications Group of AOL Time Warner. Mr. Logan was the former chairman of its Time Inc. division and had been an outspoken critic of Mr. Case and the merger, people who worked with him said. Asked earlier this month about his relations with Mr. Case, Mr. Logan said they had a difference in style. ''I am a big believer that when you give someone responsibility, you have to give them authority and let them see if they can succeed,'' he said, adding, ''That is not to say that we don't listen to Steve -- we value his opinion -- but it is Jon who is calling the shots and he reports to me.'' To some company executives, Mr. Logan's candid comments seemed the latest evidence that Mr. Case's authority was slipping, even within the business he founded. Some senior executives marveled that Mr. Case had the determination to continue showing up for work when he commanded so little support. Although he leaves the chairmanship under a cloud of criticism and opposition, Mr. Case, at the age of 44, has already earned a place in business history. He founded America Online 18 years ago, when few Americans knew what the Internet was, and he helped to introduce e-mail and instant messaging into the world's vernacular. Along the way, AOL overcame ferocious and well-financed opposition from Microsoft and others to become the largest online service. At the height of the Internet boom, stock market investors assigned AOL a greater value than any of the major media companies. In January 2000, at the very peak of the Internet bubble, Mr. Case seized the opportunity of AOL's inflated shares to buy Time Warner, a |
1457671_1 | Family Diaries That Tug at the Heart | on a waiting list for three years to get into that group home -- and that was two decades ago. Today, said Lonye Debra Rasch, who edited ''Family Diaries'' with a fellow ARC volunteer, Judy Elbaum, the waiting list for group home placement statewide has more than 2,400 names on it. For some parents, like Mrs. Bergman, finding an independent living arrangement for a disabled child begins as a matter of conviction: she wanted Russell to have the same sense of growing up and going out into the world that her four other children have. For other parents, especially those whose children are physically impaired, it becomes a necessity. Imagine an elderly woman trying to lift a grown man from a wheelchair into a bathtub. Mrs. Bergman knows that her family beat the odds in finding Russell a good placement. ''We were fortunate,'' she said simply. Albert C. Ianacone knows how hard it will be to make that good fortune possible for others. Mr. Ianacone, who also has an essay in the book, is an associate executive director for the ARC, which means he sees the nuts-and-bolts obstacles to delivering services to the association's more than 900 retarded clients. He knows that even if enough group homes suddenly sprang up to accommodate everyone, there would still be the problem of finding people to run them. ''One of the biggest challenges is staffing,'' he said. ''To me, that's the bottom line, because that's where our work actually happens.'' It's a lesson the governor may learn as he addresses the problems in child-welfare services brought to light by the horrific case in Newark: calling for an overhaul is one thing; finding people to do difficult work for modest pay in an expensive state is another. In Mr. Ianacone's field, pay level is only one limiting factor in recruiting; the very nature of working with the retarded is another. ''They're hard jobs because often you see so little progress,'' he said. That is another between-the-lines story in ''Family Diaries.'' Employees and volunteers write movingly of the unexpected rewards they have found in working with retarded children and adults. Ms. Rasch hopes to get the book into schools so that those looking for career options might read these stories and perhaps see their own futures. Barbara Ashurst states the case plainly. ''They kind of get the hook in,'' Ms. Ashurst said. ''They,'' for her, |
1457767_1 | Preventing the Next North Korea | the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Neither is perfect. But they are useful tools that could be made more effective through strong American support. Under the nonproliferation treaty, only five countries are officially recognized nuclear weapons powers: America, Russia, Britain, France and China. But three countries that have never signed the treaty, India, Pakistan and Israel, have developed nuclear weapons outside its structures, and a fourth, North Korea, has secretly violated its obligations and is now moving to withdraw from the treaty to free its nuclear installations from international surveillance. Three other signatories, Iran, Iraq and Libya, are also believed to have secret nuclear weapons programs, and several others, including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, have the technical ability to build nuclear bombs if they feel threatened by a growing number of nuclear rivals. The challenge for the United States is to strengthen the incentives not to build nuclear weapons. America is the planet's strongest military power. But it would be much less secure in a world where treaties were allowed to become meaningless and countries believed their only reliable defense was to build nuclear arms. Strengthening the nonproliferation treaty requires existing nuclear powers to show good faith by radically reducing their cold war nuclear arsenals, as the Americans and the Russians have recently agreed to do. The Bush administration should also drop its provocative policy of threatening nuclear retaliation against non-nuclear threats. And far more serious pressure must be put on India, Pakistan and Israel to sign the nonproliferation treaty. Washington's credibility in insisting that North Korea not withdraw from the treaty is not helped by its reluctance to press these countries to sign. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, rejected by the Republican-led Senate in 1999, is another neglected restraint. Its ban on all testing could act as a limited freeze on nuclear weapons development. Few countries would rely on nuclear weapons that they had never been able to test. This treaty is now in legal limbo and cannot come into force without American ratification. The Bush administration should reconsider its ill-advised opposition and press for early Senate approval. These treaties are not foolproof. They must be backed by stringent verification and a unified international response any time a country is caught circumventing the rules. As different as the administration's responses have been to Iraq and North Korea, one unifying thread has been |
1457644_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1457615_0 | Airport Screening | To the Editor: Regarding ''More Screening at the Airport'' (Practical Traveler, Dec. 29): It is not hard to figure out that the likely result of increasingly intrusive searches, coupled with the government's unwillingness to assume liability for theft or loss of items in suitcases opened during screening, will be a permanent change in American travel patterns, with people taking fewer long-distance trips and traveling more often by car or rail. The long-term consequences will be devastating. Given the choice, most people will opt out of the hassle and humiliation of being treated like suspects and cattle whenever they travel by air. We cannot have it both ways, and aviation and tourism inevitably will be major casualties of our futile quest for absolute security. John S. Koppel Bethesda, Md. |
1457773_2 | In the 19th Century: Filling the Harbor, Filling a Job | than at the beginning of the century. West Street's straight bulkhead now reached all the way to 16th Street. Long, thin ''finger piers'' thrust out into the water at the end of every cross street. Greenwich's riverfront had finally become a waterfront. The incessant filling didn't stop. Between 11th Street and 14th Street, hundreds of feet of additional waterlots west of West Street were filled. A rectangular wedge of land rose in the Hudson. When the landfill was complete, an entirely new avenue had been created -- 13th Avenue. JACK CORBETT: Mariner By A.S. Hatch Quantuck Lane Press ($24.95, hardcover) After I had been in New York a few days, at the old Clinton Hotel, then kept by one of the Lelands on Beekman Street where the Nassau Bank now stands, I realized that a first-class hotel was not an advantageous starting point for a seagoing career. It was not frequented by Jack ashore. And neither captains nor shipping agents nor boarding house runners were in the habit of searching among its guests for either able seamen or raw material. Then I went to a sailor boarding house in Water Street. Here I fell in with a miscellaneous assortment of sailors of all nationalities men who had sailed all seas and under all the flags that wave over them: and among then was Jack. He was a typical old salt. Born in Ireland and brought up in a British man-of-war, he had since graduated a cosmopolitan -- a mariner of any country under whose flag it pleased him for the time being to sail. With his bronze-red cheeks, bushy whiskers, nautical attire and rolling gait, he could have walked out of the boarding house in Water Street and appeared on the stage as one of the crew of H.M.S. Pinafore, in the most natural way possible, without any artificial makeup whatever. Jack took to me from the first day of my appearance at the boarding house, and in two or three days he had assumed a rough sort of guardianship over me which was amusing, but useful. He swore that I should go to sea with him, and that he would take care of me like a mother. ''Ye'll want somebody to look after ye, boy,'' he said. ''Ye'll be no more use ter yerself aboard ship for the first few days 'an a suckin' baby.'' NEW YORK BOOKSHELF/THE WATERFRONT |
1457848_2 | Dialing 311: City Says One Call Will Fit All | like getting detailed tax advice or becoming a foster parent. Operators will automatically route emergency calls to a 911 operator. Callers can also find out basic information like which parking rules are in effect for a particular day. New Yorkers will also be able to gain access to the system through mail, e-mail, fax and the Internet. ''You're used to being able to call someone whenever it has to happen, when it's convenient for your schedule, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and be able to get what we need,'' said Gino P. Menchini, the city's information technology commissioner. 311, which he called ''the most far-reaching'' change he had seen in his 20 years in government, will bring that level of service, now common in the business world, to the public sector, he said. Although it has gotten off to a fitful start -- delayed by technical glitches and an apparent desire to avoid promising too much and then delivering a spectacular failure -- the project is quietly humming along. Already, the call centers of several agencies have relocated to the new office, and staff members have begun to take requests for information and service concerning an ever-widening portfolio of agencies. Eventually, many of the 40 separate agency help lines, including the Police Department's quality-of-life complaint line, will be included, and those individual help centers will slowly go the way of the dinosaur. Officials say the program will cost about $25 million to start up, including expense and capital costs, but they emphasize that those are projections based on factors largely unknown, like how many people will actually use the system and how many staff members they will need. In the long run, officials say, the system will save money because it will make government more efficient, one of Mr. Bloomberg's strongest priorities. Indeed, Vincent A. La Padula, the senior adviser to the mayor who has been overseeing the project, described the new suite of offices as ''not a call center'' but ''a transformation'' of how the city's government functions. Susan L. Kupferman, director of the mayor's office of operations, said the system would allow the city to track complaints and their disposition, creating a storehouse of multifaceted, dynamic data that can more accurately reflect the cause of problems. Mr. Menchini called the system ''a Rosetta stone'' for the functions of city agencies. ''It's a really radical change.'' |
1457646_0 | Tighter Security Comes to Bradley | AS federal security director at Bradley International Airport, Dana R. Cosgrove has tried to meet the Congressional requirements for measures that will keep air passengers safe, while keeping in mind that if he makes it too difficult to get on a plane, people will find some other way to travel. So he has tried to keep the human element in mind. He has, for example, started a program that allows people to retrieve personal items that are seized at security checkpoints. When travelers are caught with a penknife on a key ring or a pair of scissors in their toiletry bag, they can step out of line and pay the airport store $5 to mail the item to their home. Then they can return to the front of the line so they can still make their flight. In many other airports, the item would be confiscated. The Mail Back Program was used 211 times in five days just before Christmas. But he also keeps in his office a box of items that remind him, and the screeners who work for him, that their job is not just dealing with a vacationer who forgot he was carrying his grandfather's pocket knife. There's a 5-inch folding straight razor that a 16-year-old tried to bring onto a plane; a grenade -- defused, it turned out -- that another man had in his luggage; an innocent-looking lipstick concealing a 2-inch blade that was found in a woman's makeup bag, and a shotgun shell made into a key chain that also housed a small cutting torch. ''I was surprised when I saw what people were trying to bring on board,'' Mr. Cosgrove said. Last month, his 325 screeners confiscated more than 750 pounds of weapons. As of this month, airports around the country are supposed to have in place security measures to thwart terrorist acts. Though Mr. Cosgrove and others are reluctant to talk about all the measures in use, they visibly include the screening all checked baggage for explosives or weapons, and security screenings of all passengers. Patrick J. Feighery, a former Darien police officer who is now training coordinator for the federal Transportation Security Administration offices at Bradley, said his job was to make sure screeners know what a carbon-fiber knife or gun parts look like on an X-ray machine, which he covers in their initial training and in almost weekly bulletins about |
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1458194_0 | Treatment for Children | To the Editor: The findings discussed in ''Study Finds Jump in Children Taking Psychiatric Drugs'' (news article, Jan. 14) are consistent with previous studies and current clinical practice. Yes, we are using more medication, but the real question is: Are we treating the right children? According to the Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health, one child in five has signs and symptoms of a mental illness or substance abuse disorder, yet fewer than one in three are receiving appropriate treatment. The key issue for parents is to insist on a comprehensive evaluation leading to an accurate diagnosis before any discussion about treatment options. Research demonstrates that early recognition and accurate assessment are critical to successful treatment. The good news is that we can help most children and adolescents who suffer from psychiatric disorders. The tragedy is that so many children still do not receive the comprehensive, individualized treatment they need and deserve. DAVID FASSLER, M.D. Burlington, Vt., Jan. 14, 2003 |
1458199_0 | Many Women Skip the Aspirin | An alarmingly high number of women with heart disease are failing to take medicines known to reduce their risks of heart attacks, according to a study released yesterday. The study, published in The Annals of Internal Medicine, found that although at least 85 percent of the 2,763 women studied should have been taking drugs to lower cholesterol, just about half did so. An author of the study, Dr. Michael G. Shlipak of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco, said that virtually all the women should have been taking preventive doses of aspirin, but that just 83 percent were doing so. He called the rate ''pretty poor.'' The figures were collected over four years as part of a study whose primary purpose was to gauge the effect of hormone replacement therapy on coronary health. But the information also showed striking evidence that heart disease was being undertreated among the patients being studied -- postmenopausal women who had suffered heart attacks, had experienced significant arterial blockage or had undergone heart surgery, including bypasses. Perhaps the most worrisome finding was that the women who were at the highest risk were the least likely to use the medications. Only a third of the women who had suffered heart attacks took beta blockers, a recommended regimen to lower blood pressure. Similar patterns were seen with aspirin and drugs to reduce cholesterol. Dr. Shlipak said the problem appeared to be caused by doctors who did not prescribe preventive medicines when they were needed and by patients who failed to take them. VITAL SIGNS: PREVENTION |
1458249_2 | A campaign to shock the bourgeoisie in France, and then have them use a certain credit card. | ad. The ad ''drew a connection between the color of one's hair and stupidity,'' said Florence Montreynaud, the leader of La Meute, a feminist group. ''I think every blonde woman I know had something to say about this ad.'' The Association of People of Small Size, for example, objected to a television ad with the statement, ''Eat your soup and you will grow,'' that shows a dwarf eating soup and staying the same size. ''There are ad campaigns that I just don't understand anymore,'' said Patrick Petit-Jean, president of the association. ''It is stretching it to say there is humor in these ads. I know that this ad has hurt some people.'' The Swiss government was not happy to see its citizens characterized as slow moving. ''Your 'spot' is placed at the limits of good taste,'' Hanspeter Mock, the legal adviser at the Swiss Embassy in Paris, wrote to the head of Egg France. He added, ''Besides, your advertisement shows completely gratuitous violence.'' And the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, which is dedicated to protecting animals, said it received about 100 angry letters and just as many angry phone calls protesting the ad about the falling cat. ''The idea is shocking,'' said Frédéric Freund, director of the foundation's legal department. ''Pets are thrown out of windows every day.'' The protests from animal rights groups were so fierce that Egg withdrew the cat ad from television. According to Egg executives, there was much less criticism of the ad of the black man in a skimpy bathing suit, a fact noted by groups opposed to racism. ''The meaning of this ad lies in what it doesn't say, that blacks have no brain, just a sex organ,'' said Mouloud Aounit, secretary general of the Movement for Conciliation and Friendship Between Peoples. ''The absence of more angry responses about it shows how accustomed we've become to racism.'' In France, the law requiring a review of advertisements for accuracy and honesty applies only to television, not print. Joseph Besnainou, the head of the government's television-ad watchdog agency, said that his office had received about 100 letters of complaint about the kitten ad, only a few about the Swiss man set on fire and none on the dwarf. But bad taste is not enough of a reason to censor, he added. ''There will always be 10 idiots, but do you have to pay attention to 10 idiots?'' he |
1458298_0 | AN ATTACK ON IRAQ NOT YET JUSTIFIED, FRANCE WARNS U.S. | In unusually blunt terms aimed at pre-empting the United States, France said today that it would not support any Security Council resolution for military action against Iraq in the coming weeks. France's foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, accused Washington of ''impatience'' in the confrontation with Baghdad over illegal weapons and added, ''We believe that nothing today justifies envisaging military action.'' In a highly public rebuff, Mr. de Villepin would not rule out the possibility that France would use its veto power if the United States presses the Council later this month to authorize war against Iraq for failing to disarm. But diplomats said that Mr. de Villepin had told Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in closed meetings that France would be more inclined to support war if United Nations weapons inspectors confirmed after another two months or so that Iraq was not willing to disarm peacefully. Stark differences with Washington over the pace and effectiveness of the inspections were also expressed today by China, another veto-bearing Council nation, and Germany. China's foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, called a report that the inspectors will present to the Council on Monday a ''new beginning,'' rather than a final accounting. The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, said that ''Iraq has complied fully with all relevant resolutions'' and that the inspectors should have ''all the time which is needed.'' Mr. Powell seemed to be caught off guard by the resistance, especially the French broadside. It came during a meeting of the foreign ministers of 13 of the 15 Security Council countries, who were convened by France -- as the Council president this month -- to discuss ways to defeat global terrorism. Departing from his prepared remarks Mr. Powell said the Council would have to ''make a judgment'' on Iraq's cooperation after the chief United Nations weapons inspectors give a report here next week on their work in Iraq. He summoned the Council not to ''shrink from the responsibilities'' or be ''shocked into impotence,'' although he stopped short of confirming that Washington would seek a resolution to authorize war. In closed meetings on Sunday and today, Mr. de Villepin tried to convince Mr. Powell that Washington does not yet have a majority on the Council in favor of war, and that it should let the arms inspections run for two more months at least, diplomats said. As pressure mounted here for more time for the |
1454498_0 | A Contemporary, Human Scale For Larger-Than-Life Characters | It was an Arctic winter's day in New York, and people were bundled up in overcoats to shield themselves from the cold, but for Fiona Shaw it could almost have been an afternoon at the beach. Oblivious to the wind chill, wearing a short jacket, she radiated warmth and conviviality as she strode from her apartment to a restaurant eight blocks away. In the title role in ''Medea'' as in her other plays, she is herself a primal force, dominating the stage while instilling the characters with a relevance that makes them seem strikingly contemporary. As directed by Deborah Warner, Ms. Shaw's Medea follows a relentless trajectory, personal despair leading to the act of slaughtering her children. What Medea does is, of course, monstrous, but this actress skillfully keeps her from seeming to be a monster. At 44 Ms. Shaw has added Medea to a gallery that includes Electra, Hedda Gabler, Richard II and a multitude of characters in Ms. Warner's interpretation of T. S. Eliot's ''Waste Land.'' She once said, ''I'm more interested in doing things that I can't do than things that I can.'' That sense of daring has been endemic to her career. With characteristic enthusiasm she spoke about the intensity of her roles, and of her acting. Three years ago she was invited to do either a Shakespeare play or a Greek tragedy at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, with Ms. Warner as director. Both the director and the actress had done many Shakespearean plays, including ''Richard II,'' in which Ms. Shaw gave an asexual performance as a monarch for whom sex is not a behavioral issue. Her Richard was a petulant king unable to live up to the demands of his office. ''They were keen that I do 'Hamlet,' '' she said of her meeting with Abbey officials, ''but I didn't want to. By the main course we were doing 'Hamlet,' and by the pudding we agreed to do 'Medea.' '' For one thing, she said, she was very taken by Euripides in translation, by the ''flinty, staccato, harsh and very domestic language'' in scenes that reminded her somewhat of ''modern American epic writing, like Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee.'' The production opened in Dublin and later played in London and toured the United States. After a brief run last fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it transferred to the Brooks Atkinson Theater on |
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1459821_3 | Air Travel Under a More Watchful Eye | November 2001. The agency's mandate includes not only overseeing security of the nation's sprawling aviation system, but also security of its ports, rails, pipelines and trucking industries. The airline piece alone is daunting. The agency will be screening roughly 1.5 billion bags checked each year by passengers. In Westchester more than 300 items have been confiscated by security, including box cutters, knives and a large novelty metal shoehorn (a potential bludgeoning weapon). To comply with the new requirements, the county airport has 11 new explosive-trace detection machines in use. The white material used to swipe the bags is known as a ''trap.'' It can capture trace amounts of explosives and when inserted into the new machines, it is checked for molecular elements that are commonly used in explosives. ''It's like an electronic bomb dog,'' said Romero Iral, deputy federal security director at the Westchester County Airport. ''We used it in our narcotics work. It's the same concept -- you just program it to alert you on different substances.'' Mr. Iral was also in charge of replacing the private security force working at the airport with federal screeners, who had to be in place by Nov. 19. The number of screeners and supervisors at the airport has increased nearly fivefold, to roughly 100 from 22. Mr. Iral's staff completed a new training program, beginning with 44 hours of classroom time. Those who passed their examinations were then given 60 hours of on-the-job training. They were required to develop proficiency at several stations, including the X-ray machine, the explosives-trace detection machines, ''wanding'' (searching a passenger with a hand-held metal detector) and monitoring the walk-through metal detector. They also received general security training. The private security employees who had been working at the airport were given a chance to apply for training for the new federal screening positions, Mr. Iral said. While no local figures were available, nationwide about 12 percent of the 56,000 new federal screeners are people who had worked previously for private contractors. The new jobs pay on average more than twice what the private companies did, with annual salaries ranging from $23,600 to $35,400. The majority of those hired in Westchester are local residents, and many have security experience in law enforcement or the military, Mr. Iral said. WHILE the T.S.A. has initially focused on commercial air traffic, they also are taking a more active role in general aviation, |
1459736_0 | Lost Luggage: Who Pays? | WAITING for my luggage to appear in the baggage claim area after a December flight to the Traverse City airport in Michigan, I had a sinking feeling as the same few bags circulated and the conveyor belt finally came to a halt. My bag had not made the connection in Detroit -- not a surprise, since my first flight on Northwest was late leaving New York and I had to run through the Detroit airport to make the connection myself. But in the two hours I waited for the luggage from the next flight, when again my suitcase appeared to be a no-show, I had plenty of time to catalog what exactly was in my carry-on (presents, a laptop and other valuables, but no clothes) and wonder what I would do if my bag did not arrive. It turned out my luggage did make it on the later flight -- a fact I discovered when a Northwest employee overheard my name and said, ''Oh, I saw your bag in the back room.'' But the interim panic led to a New Year's resolution to investigate the airline's responsibility if a passenger's luggage is lost or delayed. In reality, luggage problems are fairly rare. The 10 airlines required to submit data on ''mishandled'' luggage to the Department of Transportation reported 3.16 incidents of lost, damaged, delayed or pilfered baggage per 1,000 passengers in November, up from 3.09 in October. Although the statistics for December are not yet available, one concern for passengers is whether those numbers will rise now that checked bags are subject to more intensive screening by the Transportation Security Administration and travelers are being asked to leave checked bags unlocked in case they must be hand-searched away from the check-in area. Another is the unresolved question of who is liable for losses, since both the T.S.A. and the airlines now handle baggage. Liability Limits Until that liability issue is clarified, passengers' primary source of recourse for luggage mishaps is the airline. For domestic flights, an airline's liability for checked luggage is limited to $2,500 per passenger, an amount set by the Department of Transportation, which doubled the previous limit at the end of 1999. Mobility devices like wheelchairs are exempt from this limit, and most airlines stipulate that they are not liable for computers, electronic equipment, jewelry, watches, antiques, medication, cameras or fragile items. For travel to or from |
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1459408_2 | Coming Soon To the U.S.: Cuban Cigars Made in Brazil | recalls that his family went first to Miami, believing Mr. Castro's revolution would be short-lived, then to Spain's Canary Islands once the bitter truth sank in: they had lost their business. There, in Alonso's home country, they made cigars in the Montecristo mold and small panatelas like the Upmann petits that President John F. Kennedy was said to be fond of. ''It was the only thing we knew how to do,'' recalls Mr. Menendez. But as Spain modernized in the 1970's, after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, wages spiraled and ''everybody knew the days of making hand-rolled cigars there was over. It's basically a third-world business for first-world consumers.'' Mr. Menendez looked round for yet another production site and found Brazil's fertile, tobacco-growing Recôncavo region where the Cuban Mata Fina leaf is grown. He came to the Recôncavo in 1979 from Spain and set up Menendez, Amerino with a Brazilian partner, Mário Amerino Portugal. Another partner is Mr. Menendez' cousin, Arturo Torano, a veteran of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. While Cuban cigars have a strong, peppery flavor, Brazilian tobacco is smoother, more aromatic and burns better, Mr. Torano said. Mr. Menendez said he would have to persuade American smokers to accept the different taste, which he said was already appreciated by smokers in Germany, the biggest market for Brazilian cigars. The cousins plan a promotional campaign in specialist publications and direct marketing with distributors in the United States. With Brazil's currency, the real, down about 36 percent against the dollar since the end of 2001, Mr. Menendez says pricing can be ''premium for us without being absurd for them.'' An Aquarius cigar is expected to retail in the United States at about $5, a price that Gordon Mott, executive editor of Cigar Aficionado, says should attract buyers. ''Many people know that Brazilian tobacco has been an element of good brands for years,'' Mr. Mott said. ''But a Brazilian cigar brand is just not in the mindset of the U.S. smoker.'' At least not yet. ''Smokers these days are more open to experimentation than even five years ago during the boom,'' Mr. Mott said. ''If someone comes in with a good cigar at a fair price, it will get a fair hearing in the market.'' It is a sizable market. At the peak of the boom in 1997, nearly half a billion premium, or hand-rolled, cigars were |
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1459481_0 | Finding the First Rungs On the Career Ladder | The job market for new college graduates was pretty tight last year, and it's not expected to improve significantly in 2003. But many big-name employers are still setting aside entry-level positions, a recent study shows. Heading the list of the top 500 entry-level employers, according to the survey of more than 5,000 employers nationwide, are Disney and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Each projected having 6,000 entry-level jobs available this year. The Peace Corps said it expected to have 4,800 entry-level jobs, while Boeing and Schlumberger each said there would be 3,000. Brian Krueger, president of the career Web site Collegegrad.com, which made the survey, said that many of the largest employers were hiring the same number or fewer recent college graduates as they did last year but that most medium and small businesses were showing modest increases. ''The jobs are out there,'' he said. ''you just need to search a little harder.'' PERSONAL BUSINESS: DIARY |
1456324_0 | Recycling Opportunity | To the Editor: Perhaps if the city took the bold step of choosing a profitable recycling arrangement with a scrap company, versus a costly contract with a waste management company, recycling could gain the foothold it needs to become as ''sophisticated'' and institutionalized as waste disposal (news article, Jan. 11). By the sheer volume of recyclables generated, New York is in a special position to contribute to the future of recycling and to make important steps toward developing sustainable management options for our castoffs. VIRGINIA LAMB FALCONER Matawan, N.J., Jan. 12, 2003 |
1456427_0 | Widely Used Crop Herbicide Is Losing Weed Resistance | The world's most widely grown genetically engineered crops -- soybeans, cotton and corn developed to be impervious to a popular herbicide -- are facing a new challenge to their continued long-term use. The herbicide, known as Roundup, is beginning to lose its effectiveness in controlling weeds. In the last few years, weeds resistant to the herbicide have emerged in Delaware, Maryland, California, western Tennessee and at the edges of the Corn Belt in Ohio and Indiana. The problem, crop scientists say, is the very success of the genetically engineered crops, particularly the soybeans, which now account for more than three-quarters of all soybeans grown in the United States. Farmers like the genetically engineered crops, which are sold under the brand name Roundup Ready, because they can spray Roundup herbicide directly over those fields, killing the weeds while leaving the crops intact. But the popularity of the crops has caused the use of the Roundup herbicide to skyrocket, setting up ''survival of the fittest'' conditions in which the rare weeds that survive the herbicide can flourish. Eventually, experts say, farmers will need to reduce their applications on the genetically engineered soybeans and other crops to preserve the long-term usefulness. The resistant weeds could also be a problem for the Monsanto Company, which developed both Roundup and the Roundup Ready crops. Roundup is Monsanto's biggest product, accounting for about 40 percent of its estimated 2002 revenue of $4.6 billion, according to Bear, Stearns. The Roundup Ready crops, the linchpin of Monsanto's agricultural biotechnology business, had revenue of roughly $470 million last year, Bear, Stearns said. Referring to Roundup herbicide by its generic name, Mark J. VanGessel, an associate professor of crop science at the University of Delaware, said, ''With the advent of Roundup Ready crops, all we're using is glyphosate.'' ''Long term,'' he said, ''what's going to have to happen is getting away from the continuous use of Roundup Ready crops.'' The resistance is currently found only in a few types of weeds, crop scientists say, and farmers can easily use other herbicides to kill those weeds. But some scientists are concerned that the resistance could spread, rendering Roundup herbicide less useful. That would be a problem for farmers because glyphosate is by far the most popular weed-killing chemical in the world. It is considered relatively benign in environmental terms and safe enough for use in home gardens, and it helps farmers |
1456333_4 | Amid Tight Security, Crew of Shuttle Focuses on Science | which includes Colonel Ramon; Dr. Laurel Salton Clark, a Navy commander and physician on her first space flight; and Dr. Kalpana Chawla, an aerospace engineer who was part of a 1997 shuttle crew. The Blue Team is composed of Air Force Lt. Col. Michael P. Anderson, who flew on a 1998 mission to the Russian Mir space station, and two space rookies from the Navy, Capt. David M. Brown and Cmdr. William C. McCool, who also helps Colonel Husband fly the shuttle as the mission's pilot. Research scheduled during the mission is extremely broad, covering the biological, medical, physical, earth and space sciences, as well as technology development. Fifteen studies focus on space flight's effects on the human body, including bone and muscle loss sustained during weightlessness. The payload also includes a large combustion chamber that will be used to study fire and soot formation, as well as different methods of fire suppression in space, like using water mists with different sizes of droplets. To help understand the dynamics of sand and soil under pressure -- work that could apply to structural collapses and to soil's tendency to liquefy in earthquakes -- water-saturated sand in special cylinders will be highly compressed. This will allow study of changes in soil structure without the gravity-induced stresses that complicate similar analysis on Earth. The principal focus of Colonel Ramon's work will be an experiment designed by Israeli scientists to study the role of desert dust in climate change. Colonel Ramon is to remotely operate a twin-camera instrument aimed out of Columbia's cargo bay called Meidex, for Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, that will examine desert aerosol particles whipped into the atmosphere by storms. Dust particles, carried by the winds, have global impact because they affect the rain production of clouds, supply minerals for ocean life and absorb or scatter sunlight to affect climate warming. Colonel Ramon said that as he photographed dust storms from space with the multispectral Meidex camera, ground stations and airplanes would collect dust samples from the same occurrences for comparison. The experiment was originally to have concentrated on deposits of dust from the Sahara on the Mediterranean region, but the flight delays now have Columbia overhead during a less active dust storm period in the Sahara. To compensate, Colonel Ramon said, the sampling area has been broadened to include more of West Africa and the Atlantic ocean. Before the Launch |
1456366_2 | Stimulus for Lawyers | to pay no taxes at all. That's too much, even for the Bush administration. So the actual plan is much more complicated: Dividends will be tax-free only if the company that pays them is deemed to have paid sufficient profits taxes. That's only a minor complication, but it gets worse. Companies that reinvest their profits complained about the plan. So there's another fix: when companies choose not to pay the allowed amount of tax-free dividends, the dividends not paid will be counted against capital gains for stockholders, reducing their taxes when they sell the stock. This makes sense, sort of; but it means that individual taxpayers will have to maintain elaborate records, and it also opens substantial new possibilities for abuse. Are you confused? So are the experts. For 90 percent of Americans, none of this matters, because they will get little or nothing from the dividend tax exemption anyway. But among the minority who might expect to gain, many will find their tax cut chewed up by fees for lawyers and accountants. The really big question, however, is what this will do to tax collection. Bear in mind that the I.R.S. is already severely overstretched; for years Congress has starved the agency of resources, and officials privately concede that it is doing an increasingly poor job of policing tax evasion. Yet if a dividend tax exemption will make it complicated to file taxes, it will also make it harder -- much harder -- for the I.R.S. to enforce the rules. Tax lawyers are already devising schemes to exploit the many new loopholes the plan would create. So here's a prediction: If the dividend tax exemption is put into effect, the rules that supposedly prevent abuse -- that prevent wealthy individuals from avoiding any taxation at all -- will be subject to extensive evasion. Will the I.R.S. get the resources it needs to police that evasion? Don't be silly. So both the true budget costs of the plan and its tilt toward the wealthy will be bigger than even the harshest critics now assert. It's tempting to attribute this mess to sheer incompetence: George W. Bush liked what Charles Schwab said, and nobody dared tell the emperor the truth about his wardrobe. But maybe the mess is deliberate. Is this just another clever step on the way to a system in which only the little people pay taxes? E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com |
1456305_0 | Memory Problems Linked to Cancer Treatment | Psychologists are beginning to verify what many breast cancer survivors have long suspected: chemotherapy can, in some cases, cause problems with memory and concentration. Various studies have found that 20 percent to 30 percent of women who undergo chemotherapy for breast cancer, as well as other patients who receive similar treatment for lymphoma, score lower than average on tests of mental function for as long as 10 years after their chemotherapy. ''There's enough data now to at least know it's a real effect,'' said Dr. Ian F. Tannock, a psychiatrist who has led studies of the phenomenon at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. Patients report memory problems much like those linked to aging. They cannot remember where they put their keys or recall lists of things they had planned to accomplish. Some report being easily distracted or losing the ability to calculate in their heads. Dr. Tim A. Ahles, a psychologist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., said, ''Part of the reason that this whole issue is coming more to the fore now is that we're seeing increasing numbers of long-term cancer survivors who are wanting to get back to their routines, so increasing numbers of people are having problems.'' Breast cancer survivors seem to report the problem more than people with other cancers, doctors say, but they suspect this may be because the breast cancer patients are such a large, well-organized group with many channels of communication. The research has also centered on breast cancer because of its high survival rate, though the effect probably occurs in people with other cancers, because they receive the same kinds of chemotherapy, the researchers said. The studies suggest that the risk of mental impairment -- what some patients call ''chemo brain'' or, in Canada, ''chemo fog'' -- rises with the intensity of the chemotherapy. In one of the first studies of the side effect, researchers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam found that women who received high-dose chemotherapy for breast cancer were eight and a half times as likely to show signs of mental impairment as breast cancer survivors who had been treated with radiation or surgery but no chemotherapy. Thirty-two percent of those who had had high-dose chemotherapy scored low on tests of mental ability. About 17 percent of women who had had standard-dose chemotherapy showed signs of impairment. Although it is possible that some impairment could be due |
1456303_1 | OBSERVATORY | thing happens. As the mantle starts to solidify, an extremely dense layer of uranium- and thorium-containing rock forms. Over time, this dense rock sinks through the rest of the mantle down to the core, where it effectively acts like a tea cozy, keeping the core warm (and even allowing it to heat up). Eventually, however, the radioactive elements in the cozy layer cause it to heat, to become less dense and to rise back through the crust. With the cozy removed, the core can now cool down -- with enough heat flow to create the convection needed to generate a magnetic field for about 300 million years. Seas' Magnetic Fields A convecting core of molten iron is not the only thing that creates a magnetic field on a planetary scale. A flowing ocean has ions too -- dissolved salts -- so it would be expected to generate fields as well. It does, through a process called motional induction, in which the movement of the salt ions through Earth's magnetic field induces an electric current (and all electric currents create magnetic fields). Now, scientists at the University of Washington and GeoForschungsZentrum, an independent research institute in Potsdam, Germany, have shown for the first time that these ocean-generated fields can be identified in measurements of Earth's overall magnetic field. Using a magnetometer aboard the Champ satellite, the scientists showed that after accounting for the core-generated field and other factors, the fields generated by the flows of twice-daily tides were observable on a global scale. The scientists, reporting their work in Science, first made computer models of the ocean-generated fields and their distribution around the globe, and compared them with the satellite data. They found a close correlation. They also found that ocean areas exhibited a peak magnetic intensity roughly every 12 1/2 hours, which corresponds to the tidal period. This peak was not observed in readings of land areas. The scientists suggested that more detailed analysis of ocean-generated fields could be used to improve the accuracy of geomagnetic maps. But the technique could also be used in environmental science, in monitoring the flow of the oceans from orbit. A Fountain of Vitamin C People who favor large doses of vitamin C to fight colds (à la Linus Pauling) may one day be able to get all the C they need from, say, a cup of fruit cocktail. Researchers at two Spanish universities |
1526286_2 | Typical Greenpeace Protest Leads to an Unusual Prosecution | on sailors returning to port. It forbids the unauthorized boarding of ''any vessel about to arrive at the place of her destination.'' The last court decision concerning the law, from 1890, said it was meant to prevent ''sailor-mongers'' from luring crews to boarding houses ''by the help of intoxicants and the use of other means, often savoring of violence.'' Mr. Passacantando said he had authorized the boarding in 2002. ''The buck does stop with me,'' he said. Greenpeace maintains that the ship in question was illegally importing mahogany from Brazil. The harvesting and shipment of mahogany is governed by stringent international rules meant to prevent damage to the Amazon's environment. In the indictment, federal prosecutors said that Greenpeace's information was mistaken. A spokesman for the ship's owner, APL Ltd., did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Passacantando said the prosecution of the organization was unwarranted and part of what he called Attorney General John Ashcroft's attack on civil liberties. He acknowledged, however, the importance of ensuring the safety of the nation's ports in light of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. ''If we were to lose this trial,'' he said, ''it would have chilling effect on Greenpeace and on other groups that exercise their First Amendment right aggressively. The federal government is using 9/11 to come down harder on an action like this, which was a good and dignified and peaceful action.'' Even a minor criminal conviction, legal experts said, could have profound consequences. ''You in effect have a record,'' said Rodney A. Smolla, dean of the University of Richmond School of Law in Virginia. ''It has a chilling effect.'' In their legal papers, prosecutors acknowledged that a conviction could have tax consequences and ''a chilling effect on First Amendment rights.'' Still, they opposed the organization's request for a jury trial, which is ordinarily available only where the defendant faces more than six months in prison. The potential loss of constitutional rights, prosecutors wrote, does not require a jury. They cited a misdemeanor domestic violence prosecution in which the defendant was denied a jury trial although he faced losing his license to carry a gun. In contrast to speculation about the impact of a conviction on Greenpeace's First Amendment rights, prosecutors wrote, the defendant in the gun case ''was not entitled to a jury trial even though he was definitely faced with loss of his Second Amendment rights.'' |
1529440_1 | A Change Of Habits To Elude Spam's Pall | them less trusting of e-mail in general. And surprisingly, perhaps, given what electronic communication was supposed to become, one-quarter said they had reduced their use of e-mail because of spam. ''The ever-increasing flood of spam is causing consumers to turn away from e-mail as a means of communication,'' said John Breyault, a research associate at the Telecommunications Research and Action Center, a nonprofit group in Washington that supplemented the Pew survey with some 4,000 anecdotes it had gathered at its Web site (www.banthespam.org) from frustrated e-mail users. ''Many people we hear from are contemplating getting off the Internet altogether.'' Daleena Garrelts has not abandoned the Web, but she has curtailed her use of e-mail. These days, Ms. Garrelts, 32, a human resources representative at a software firm in Cupertino, Calif., is far more willing to give out her cellphone number than her e-mail address. ''Two years ago, it would have been quite the opposite,'' she said in an interview. ''I really discourage people from sending me general e-mail these days.'' If Ms. Garrelts needs to communicate with someone, she is more likely than before to pick up the telephone. Other people, unwilling to reduce their use of e-mail but frustrated by the seeming inability of government, industry or anyone else to do much about spam, are taking matters into their own hands. They are vigilantes fighting a personal war: filtering e-mail, reporting each piece of spam they receive, changing their addresses or setting up temporary, disposable e-mail accounts to stay one step ahead of spammers. Combined with the thankless task of deleting one piece of junk mail after another, the result is a lot of time and effort spent coping with spam. Yet according to the Pew study, many e-mail users (some 93 percent of adult American Internet users, or about 117 million people, use e-mail) feel trapped in a world of their own making. Many people have become so reliant on e-mail that they are not willing to change their address and start from scratch, for fear of missing the occasional important message. ''This translates into an issue of reliability,'' said Deborah Fallows, a senior research fellow at the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the author of the 33-page report, ''Spam: How It Is Hurting E-Mail and Degrading Life on the Internet,'' that accompanies the survey. ''They worry that incoming important e-mail will get blocked by their |
1529428_2 | ONLINE DIARY | and has just a dozen customers. So why write about it? Because it's mail-forwarding with a twist: if you redirect your physical mail to ScanMe, it will scan the documents, e-mail the scans to you and store the originals. The service was started last month by Richard Uren, an Australian information technology specialist, after a yearlong trip to Europe. ''My mail was redirected to my mother's place during my stint overseas,'' he said by e-mail. ''There was piles and piles of mail -- overdue notices, reminders, bills, letters from friends.'' Imagine if he had been able to gain access to his mail whenever he wanted from any PC with a Net connection. ScanMe costs about $9 a month, with a one-time set up fee of about $23. While frequent travelers and people who relocate often are expected to be the primary customers, Mr. Uren also cites those who live in rural areas where mail is delivered only once or twice a week. Mark Robertson, a musician from Brisbane, was one of the first to sign up for the service and plans to continue with it indefinitely. Since he is by nature and profession ''highly disorganized and rather transient,'' he said by e-mail, ''ScanMe just makes things easier.'' He added that he had no privacy concerns about the service. This idea may make sense for many people in our culture of dislocation. For instance, I found a similar service at mail.ttkbharatplanet.com for Indian expatriates who want to receive mail faster and more regularly from relatives and friends back home. Location Shot It's a rather quixotic notion: an online database of millions of photos indexed by location, submitted mostly by amateur photographers. That's the gist of the World Wide Media Exchange (wwmx.org), an experimental project from Microsoft Research's Interactive Visual Media Group. Though it was announced only last month, the exchange already holds more than 20,000 photos. ''We see two trends coming together,'' said Kentaro Toyama, the project's lead research scientist. ''There's the sociological trend where people feel like they want to post everything they do online. Then there are the technological advances that allow people to always be aware of their geographic location,'' like G.P.S. devices. Visitors to the site can enter a location and call up a map with red dots indicating locations for which photos exist. The larger the dot, the more photos available. Anyone can submit a photo |
1529420_0 | Politicians Scramble to Revive Peace Effort in Northern Ireland | Politicians struggled Wednesday to get the stalemated Northern Ireland peace effort back on track, a day after expectations of a breakthrough suffered a last-minute setback because of an arms dispute. Prime Minister Tony Blair told the House of Commons in London that he was pressing for full disclosure of the quantity and types of arms destroyed on Tuesday in a long-awaited act of what is officially called decommissioning by the Irish Republican Army ''We are not at liberty to disclose that information, but we are working hard to find a way to try and disclose it,'' Mr. Blair said. ''On the basis of what we know, people would be satisfied if they knew the full details.'' Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister, who came to Belfast on Tuesday with Mr. Blair to confirm the breakthrough, told his Parliament in Dublin, ''The truth is, there is an enormous prize to be gained if we can get this last bit of the way.'' Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., and David Trimble, leader of the largest Protestant party here, the Ulster Unionists, said they would meet, and they pointedly steered clear of the kind of recriminations that have characterized their exchanges in the past. Hopes were raised in recent weeks by word that the two men had placed their longstanding enmity aside in favor of dialogue, and that development was widely cited Wednesday as cause for thinking the current impasse might be overcome. The disarmament action was the major step in a daylong sequence of moves on Tuesday intended to reassure Northern Ireland's majority Protestant population, which increasingly doubts whether the I.R.A. means to dismantle its arsenal. Mr. Trimble, though, devoted his comments to disdaining the announcement as lacking the ''transparency'' of numbers and types of armaments destroyed that he had had been promised and saying he felt he needed to win dissident members of his party over to the peace cause. He said he was putting the process ''on hold'' to give the I.R.A. an opportunity to be more forthcoming. At issue is a clause in the disarmament law that gives paramilitary groups the right to insist on confidentiality. John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general charged with supervising the disarming of Northern Ireland's groups, said Tuesday that the I.R.A. had exercised this right and that he consequently could not make public any specifics about |
1529495_0 | Groups Offer E-Mail Guidelines | In the latest effort to preserve e-mail messages as an advertising medium, three online organizations issued guidelines yesterday to discourage unsolicited commercial e-mail, often called spam. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, the E-mail Service Provider Coalition and TRUSTe, which operates an online privacy program, issued the guidelines as spam comes under stricter regulation and others groups are grappling with ways to corral e-mail marketing without eliminating it entirely. Among other measures, the guidelines require consent before commercial e-mail is sent; easy ways for recipients to remove their addresses; and accurate subject lines, address fields and message bodies. While the Interactive Advertising Bureau members police themselves, the E-mail Service Provider Coalition requires compliance as a condition of membership. TRUSTe members can join an enforcement program that levies fines for violations. THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING -- ADDENDA |
1531135_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Vote To Go Ahead | The British and Irish governments acknowledged that they had been unable to resolve a pre-election dispute over the disarming of the Irish Republican Army but confirmed that the vote for the Northern Ireland Assembly would go ahead on Nov. 26. The Catholic-Protestant assembly has been suspended for a year, and intensive efforts have gone into reviving it before the election. Those efforts collapsed a week ago after David Trimble, the Protestant leader, said he found the details of a new I.R.A. act of disarmament to be inadequate. The British and Irish were unable to persuade the I.R.A. to lift its right of confidentiality. Warren Hoge (NYT) |
1531048_2 | A British retailer calls its logo tongue in cheek. Critics call it inappropriate. | father who objected to a product brought home by his 14-year-old daughter. French Connection contends that its use of the logo, which has appeared in Britain since 1997, is meant to be tongue in cheek. ''The company does not intend to cause upset to the public through the use of the brand,'' the company said in a statement about Federated's decision. Federated's move will affect just 1 percent of worldwide sales, French Connection said. The profile of the brand has risen significantly in the United States since the fragrance campaign started, the company said. Federated pulled all French Connection merchandise at the end of September, then spent a week examining everything before deciding to restore those items labeled simply French Connection. Advertising experts said the heightened scrutiny might generate sales for French Connection among younger adults. ''The controversy will resonate with the core audience, and they will feel closer to the brand,'' said Gita Johar, a marketing professor at Columbia University. French Connection, founded 30 years ago by Mr. Marks, has had overall sales double since 1999, in part because of the strong performance of merchandise with the logo. The bulk of its sales come in Europe; there are 25 French Connection stores in the United States in addition to sales through chains like Federated, May and Target. French Connection maintains that the abbreviation is not a newly minted attention grabber. It has been used within the company for 25 years, a spokeswoman, Lilli Anderson, said, adding that Trevor Beattie, chairman and creative director at TBWA London, got the idea for a campaign after seeing some French Connection internal memorandums. Since French Connection and TBWA started the campaign in Britain in 1997, they have been engaged in delicate negotiating with advertising regulators. One early poster met with public outcry and was withdrawn after regulators deemed it ''likely to cause serious or widespread offense.'' Because French Connection has registered the initials as a trademark in Britain, the company can use it as such, ''but they can't use it where it is meant to be read as an expletive,'' said Donna Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the British Advertising Standards Authority. To pass muster with regulators, French Connection was advised to put periods between the letters of its logo, for example, and to separate the logo from the rest of the text in subsequent ads. Since French Connection made some changes to its |
1525643_1 | Grass Is Green for Amazon Farmers | by buying produce from the forest dwellers and also from farmers like Mr. Mateus, they can help preserve the Amazon's rich biodiversity and its intricate ecological balance while still earning a profit for their company. But can they succeed where bigger corporations with deeper pockets, firmly established in the developed world, have failed? The Body Shop and Ben & Jerry's, for example, scored runaway commercial successes in the 1990's with eco-friendly products from the Amazon, but then found that they had badly damaged their reputations when they were unable to keep up with demand and were forced to turn to more conventional sources to supply the market. Such a test now looms for Natura as it prepares to roll out its Ekos brand of shampoos, soaps, massage oils and perfumes next year in Europe. Sales to the United States should follow in 2005, according to Pedro Passos, the chief executive of Natura. Natura hopes to capture a relatively modest $200 million slice of the estimated $6 billion worldwide market for natural or organic cosmetics, which would lift its current sales of about $500 million within Brazil by about 40 percent. But to do so Natura will have to compete directly with well-known international brands like Yves Rocher, L'Occitane, Bodyworks, Origins and Aveda. While eager to repeat the commercial success of the Body Shop and Ben & Jerry's, Natura executives are equally eager to avoid the problems faced by both those companies. Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch ice cream and the Body Shop's creamy Brazil nut shampoos and conditioners were once hailed -- by their producers and consumers -- as products that could help save the Amazon by offering local farmers an alternative to the illegal, and highly profitable, logging of tropical timber and forest clearing for mining, cattle raising or intensive farming of soybeans and other cash crops. But as demand exploded, the Amazon cooperative that harvested Brazil nuts for the ice cream could not meet demand and Ben & Jerry's had to buy nuts on the open market supplied by large-scale producers, some notorious for their antilabor practices. Rainforest Crunch was discontinued in 1997. The Body Shop ran into trouble when aid groups and its Brazilian representative sharply criticized statements by the company's founder, Anita Roddick, that the Amazon natives were being paid first-world wages for growing Brazil nuts. To add to the Body Shop's troubles, a chief of |
1525535_2 | California's New Gold Rush | Valley has plenty of solar radiation, low humidity to thwart disease, heavy clay soil to hold water and pure-water irrigation from mountain snow runoff. But the industry leaves nothing to chance. It supervises the development of improved varieties at the Rice Experiment Station in cooperation with the University of California at Davis (no genetically modified strains are among them), and regulates environmental issues, from air and water quality to wildlife habitats. ''Rice production is considered one of the most environmentally wholesome agricultural endeavors in California,'' said Grant Lundberg, whose family has farmed in the area since 1937. ''And that's a good thing in a state whose natural resources are under close and constant scrutiny.'' California rice production now outpaces the long-established rice industry in Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana, according to the United States Rice Federation, a lobbying group in Washington. These states grow long-grain rice, and have done so since African slaves introduced them to it. But a shift in all markets to specialty rice imports like aromatic rices over the last several years and low yields at home because of disease have slowed down the Southern rice industry. Nevertheless, Southern brands like Uncle Ben's and Carolina continue to dominate supermarket shelves. The zeal of California rice growers has been pushed by discriminating Asian populations in the United States as well, particularly those in California and Hawaii, which are first and second, in national per capita rice consumption, according to the Rice Federation. Today, Mr. Lundberg said, growers try to use their stored rice by August to make way for ''new crop'' rice, which Asian populations demand for everyday eating. ''New crop'' is rice consumed within a month or two of harvest. Once a new rice crop is dried and polished in the autumn, Asian markets in the United States sell it in fancy foil bags (''new crop'' positioned prominently in Japanese characters). Asian cognoscenti say new-crop rice has a cleaner, sweeter flavor, a pearlier sheen and superior mouth-feel. Fresh rice became a status symbol in Japan after World War II, when all but the wealthy were consigned to eating old rice. It is a prejudice the Japanese have been happy to keep. There is no doubt that the suavely neutral short-grain japonica suits the disposition of Japanese cuisine, a cuisine in which flavors punctuate but do not blend. (In contrast, premium long-grain Basmati rice is aged 12 to |
1525589_1 | Leaker May Remain Elusive, Bush Suggests | he had instructed his staff to cooperate fully. But he suggested that one impediment to the inquiry would be the unwillingness of journalists to disclose their sources. ''I mean, everything we know, the investigators will find out,'' he said, speaking to reporters after a cabinet meeting at the White House. ''I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers.'' Throughout the day, White House employees streamed into Room 214 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building bearing materials that they have been asked for by the Justice Department. The department is investigating whether administration officials illegally disclosed the name of the officer, Valerie Plame, who is married to a former ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Mr. Wilson has been critical of the evidence cited by Mr. Bush in justifying the war with Iraq and has suggested that the administration disclosed his wife's identity to warn other dissenters not to speak up or to punish him for having done so. Administration officials said that before the materials were turned over to the Justice Department they would be reviewed by lawyers in the White House counsel's office to determine if they were relevant. The officials left open the possibility that the counsel's office might assert executive privilege on some materials or withhold all or parts of others for national security reasons. The counsel's office routinely acted as the gatekeeper for such document requests in investigations into the Clinton administration. But Democrats said they were concerned that the arrangement left the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, with undue control over potential evidence in a politically charged case. ''I am very troubled by the fact that the White House counsel seems to be a gatekeeper, and I want to know what precautions Justice is taking to ensure that it gets all relevant information from the administration,'' said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. Government officials said that they expected the White House to begin turning over the most relevant documents almost immediately, but that the Justice Department might not get all the records for a week or two, under a schedule agreed to by the White House. Mr. Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan, has sought to exonerate three top aides to the president. Last week he said Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's |
1525557_0 | Facing Opposition, Hong Kong Delays Harbor Dumping Plan | Retreating in the face of public opposition for the third time in less than five weeks, the government here said on Tuesday that it would dredge part of the harbor in front of the downtown business district but would postpone plans to fill in a large expanse of water to build a highway. A judge ruled on Monday that the government could not only dredge the silt but begin dumping sand and gravel into the water to fill in up to 57 acres of the harbor. Two newspaper polls on Tuesday morning showed that two-thirds of the public opposed any landfill, with most of the rest undecided. The Executive Council, which is the cabinet of Tung Chee-hwa, the chief executive, met in a special session on Tuesday and decided to delay the original plan to make time to consult the public. ''The Executive Council has taken into account the fact that at the moment there is a very heated public debate on the whole question of reclamation,'' said Michael Suen, the secretary of housing, planning and lands. Since before Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997, this territory's leaders have been accustomed to pushing through urban development initiatives with often minimal public consultation. But after three rallies last summer against Mr. Tung's plan for stringent internal-security laws, the government has begun reversing itself at the first hint that opponents may take to the streets, as critics of the harbor plan had threatened over the weekend. Mr. Tung withdrew his security legislation on Sept. 5. On Sept. 26, the election commission canceled a plan to reduce voting hours, a measure opposed by democracy advocates who said it would lower turnout. ''What has changed is, now we have a government that responds to public opinion,'' said Michael Davis, a professor of law and public affairs at Chinese University of Hong Kong. ''It's hard to know if it's good or bad to have a government so responsive to public opinion; it seems a little unstable.'' Officials in mainland China have frequently gone out of their way to avoid appearing to be giving in to public pressure. But Beijing officials have been publicly warning lately of the need to preserve stability in Hong Kong, reshuffling their diplomatic office here late last month and beefing up their intelligence operations after failing to anticipate the anger last summer. Local officials remain nervous about the |
1524034_1 | This Is Fun, but Did Anyone Ask the Dolphins? | first of the 240 dolphins in Mexican parks were caught by local fishermen, who were paid several hundred dollars a dolphin; 81 dolphins also came from Cuba, which sold many for around $50,000 each. Lately, opponents of the swim programs have enlisted United States officials, alleging that American citizens at Dolphin Discovery in Isla Mujeres have bought dolphins from Cuba in violation of the trade embargo. Mike Wood, a senior official at the company, denied the allegations. Taylor Griffin, a spokesman for the United States Treasury Department, confirmed that Dolphin Discovery was being investigated for possible violations. Mexican parks in turn do a brisk business selling trained dolphins for as much as $90,000 each, particularly to an eager market in the Caribbean. The Mexican programs are rivaled only in the Caribbean, where the industry is facing similar opposition, sometimes in a frightening way. [The police in St. Lucia are investigating the killing on Sept. 17 of Jane Tipson, a British animal rights advocate who led opposition to the spread of swim programs. Neither suspect nor motive has been identified.] International rules limit the sale of dolphins to numbers that do not affect local populations. With Cuba limited to 10 a year and the Mexican ban on local capture, parks are looking elsewhere. In late July, 28 dolphins arrived at Parque Nizuc here from the Solomon Islands. Opponents of the dolphin parks say these were part of a mass capture of 200 dolphins that flouted the international regulations. Executives at the Wet 'n' Wild park here said they had permits from the Solomon Islands, and Mexican officials said the animals were imported with the proper documentation and veterinary tests. Legal papers filed by Ms. Alaniz's group cite an e-mail from the British high commissioner for the Solomon Islands, in which he said the country's civil war had left the government in such chaos that the official who authorizes dolphin exports was unaware of the sale to Mexico. One of the dolphins died days after its arrival, while a local dolphin perished three weeks later. [Mexican environmental officials said on Sept. 29 that two dolphins at an aquatic park in La Paz in Baja California had died recently, one from a blocked esophagus and the other from an infection, according to The Associated Press.] Mauricio Martínez, director general of the Wet 'n' Wild park, said the most recent death was caused by |
1524053_0 | Big Beasts, Tight Space And a Call For Change | Polar bears, lions, tigers, cheetahs and other wide-ranging carnivores do so poorly in captivity that zoos should either drastically improve their conditions or stop keeping them altogether, biologists from Oxford University report today in the journal Nature. Zookeepers have long recognized that some species thrive in captivity while others languish. Today the researchers, Dr. Georgia Mason and Dr. Ros Clubb, say the problems -- including high infant mortality and a tendency to pace around and around in the cage -- are directly related to the size of the animal's home range in the wild. The typical zoo enclosure for a polar bear is one-millionth the size of its home range in the wild, which can reach 31,000 square miles, the authors said. Some captive polar bears spend 25 percent of their day in what scientists call stereotypic pacing, and infant mortality for captive animals is around 65 percent. The director of the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan, Dr. Dan Wharton, praised the report but said many zoos had already begun work to provide more variety and stimulation for their animals. In 1998, he noted, a redesigned polar bear exhibition opened in Central Park. The exhibit has a gravel pit where the zoo's three bears can dig for food, a snow bank, a redesigned pool and machinery that can turn it into an artificial river. Last May, the Bronx Zoo opened a new tiger exhibit that incorporates new concepts in architecture and enrichment programs, including a spinning ball scented with various odors. ''There is a heroic effort afoot to create exhibitions so that zoological gardens can present animals with their complete behavioral repertoire,'' said Dr. Wharton, a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs both zoos. ''It's not perfect yet,'' he continued, ''but there is a profession-wide effort to bring everything to bear on it -- architecture and knowledge of the animal's behavior, social structure and habitat.'' Dr. Mason, the Oxford researcher, said animals that had comparatively smaller ranges, including grizzly bears, American mink, red and Arctic foxes, and Eurasian lynxes, seemed to do well in captivity. The direct relationship of home range size to abnormal behavior and high infant mortality in captivity existed independent of factors like the size and design of the enclosure and feeding schedules, the researchers report. They based their findings on an analysis of some 1,200 journal articles covering four decades of observations of animals |
1524748_1 | A Retread With Mass Appeal | to people's yards: the basketball hoop, the aboveground pool and the tire planter.'' There is nothing ironic about Mr. Prince's special rubber fetish. For him, tire planters are a cheap and charming local idiom, an inland version of the beachcomber's driftwood. ''They kind of remind me of flower power,'' he said, ''And having participated in the original Woodstock, that's my generation.'' He allowed, though, that his peers might differ some. ''It's not the kind of thing that my contemporaries would go and put in their yards,'' he said. ''They're not a Martha Stewart thing, but there they are.'' And he does have a thing for cultural flotsam and jetsam. His current show at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Manhattan features paintings of steamy 1950's romance novels, while a show in Munich has some sculptures he made of, yes, tire planters. In 1999, he even cast one from yellowish polyurethane, a ruralist riposte to high Italian designers like Gaetano Pesce who were working in similar materials. At home, though, Mr. Prince is a tire planter purist: he cuts them with the traditional ''sunflower'' edge, does not paint them and uses only tires that are still attached to the metal wheel. These are harder to find, given that most old tires have been removed from their wheels. However unwittingly, Mr. Prince has also tapped into a minor groundswell of support for the humble object. Felder Rushing, the Mississippi garden writer known for championing gardening's more humble pleasures, pointed out that a few years ago a tire planter vignette took one of the top prizes at the esteemed, old-guard Philadelphia Flower Show. ''I've seen them in Alaska, in England, everywhere,'' Mr. Rushing said, recalling a Eudora Welty scene in which women scavenge a wrecked car for planter material. ''The only place I haven't seen them is Stonehenge, and it could use a few.'' For Mr. Prince's part, he takes special joy in imagining the day -- probably back in the Depression, when wider tires were introduced -- that a car got a flat and a planter was born. Whenever the light bulb first went on, it shows no sign of dimming, a fact that Charles Goodyear, who invented the vulcanization process in 1839 but died in debt in 1860, might have grimly appreciated. ''People say you can't reinvent the wheel,'' Mr. Prince said. ''But I think this lays that question to rest.'' POSSESSED |
1524975_2 | Making Home Visits And Early Friends | assigning a time slot and date. The parent handbook also features information about the program, and the principal talks about it during the new parent orientation meetings. During the first weeks of the school year, the Tappan Hill school dismisses all its 264 students early so that teachers can make the home visits. Each day in class the teachers talk about which child's home they have already gone to, and which ones they will visit later that day. The idea is to make children and their families more comfortable with school, not less, Ms. Milliam said. ''Teachers are trained to overcome and guard against being judgmental,'' she said. ''They're not there to judge, or to criticize. There's a level of confidentiality that's maintained. If parents thought that we gossiped, the program would have died long ago. A big part of the program is sending home books and educational toys. Getting that glimpse of the home environment is important. Families welcome us into their homes. Out of more than 200 children, there are perhaps two who prefer not to have the visit.'' During the session at the Chungs, Mrs. Garibaldi explained to Andrew and his parents exactly what they could expect from kindergarten. Besides learning letters, shapes, sounds and holidays, the children would also be introduced to Spanish. Mrs. Garibaldi spent time asking Andrew what he liked to do when he came home from school, and whether he'd like to show her his room or some of his favorite toys. Even though the teachers spend the first few weeks of school driving around the district from house to house, it's a welcome window into their pupils' lives outside the classroom. ''You meet the child and his parents on their own ground,'' said Mrs. Garibaldi, a kindergarten teacher for 20 years. ''We're extending ourselves by going into the home. We want everyone to be comfortable, and to make friends.'' For Andrew's father, Henry, who, along with his wife, Sonya, had taken the day off from work, having an opportunity to be host to Andrew's kindergarten teacher at their home here was invaluable. Mr. Chung, who grew up in Scarsdale, said: ''Nine times out of 10, children have transitional issues. Fortunately for us, Andrew was waving goodbye to us when he went to school. This helps humanize the teacher, so that children see the teacher in familiar surroundings.'' IN THE SCHOOLS E-mail: wested@nytimes.com |
1524891_1 | Pope Cautions Anglican Leader on Gays | office in charge of relations with other Christian denominations, made clear that one of those matters was homosexuality. Archbishop Williams, seated beside him, said the Vatican's concern weighed very heavily on him as he looked toward an emergency meeting of the Anglican Communion's leaders in Britain later this month. Its focus is the issue of homosexuality. ''We have listened hard in these last days,'' Archbishop Williams said, referring to the conversations that he and his aides held with Vatican officials on Friday and Saturday. The pope did not attend the news conference. His earlier meeting with Archbishop Williams was extremely brief. They spent about 10 minutes in private together and then read prepared remarks, in English, to each other in public. There were long pauses between many of the pope's words, some of which were barely discernible. John Paul, 83, suffers from Parkinson's disease among other ailments, and over the last few weeks he has had more trouble expressing himself. His struggle against severe physical limitations is now so visible that some church leaders have begun to talk candidly about the tenuousness of his health and possible nearness of his death. Although his remarks today were not lengthy, they were emphatic. ''Faced with the increasing secularism of today's world,'' he told Archbishop Williams, ''the church must ensure that the deposit of faith is proclaimed in its integrity and preserved from erroneous and misguided interpretations.'' Homosexuality has proved to be a divisive issue for many religions and denominations. As Vatican officials draw up new guidelines for admissions to Roman Catholic seminaries, they are contemplating whether to bar men with an apparently homosexual orientation, even if those men profess to be ready, like their heterosexual counterparts, to commit to celibacy. The existence and acceptance of openly gay Anglican clergy members like the New Hampshire bishop, V. Gene Robinson, who has a longtime male partner, challenge Roman Catholic tradition and teaching. In late July, the Vatican issued a document that opposed legal recognition for same-sex couples. ''Homosexual acts go against the natural moral law,'' it said. Over the last four decades, the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion have enjoyed a generally warm rapport, although there were sharp tensions when Anglican churches began ordaining women. At the news conference, both Archbishop Williams and Cardinal Kasper emphasized the warmth of that relationship. ''I hope that none of what we have achieved over these many |
1524819_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1524967_1 | At Home, on the Water | aboard houseboats. On the boat, modern conveniences abound. Mr. Kay's galley includes a three-burner stove, microwave, toaster oven and coffee maker. There also is a refrigerator and freezer that opens by lifting a counter top. Electricity is available at the dock; there are batteries and generators to power smaller appliances and an air-conditioning unit when the boat is at sea. (He does not always like to run the generator because it destroys the ambient noise of the sea.) Mr. Kay estimates that his monthly living costs are $1,490. That figure includes dock fees, insurance, electricity and the mortgage payment on his boat, which has phone service, a laptop computer with a DSL hookup, satellite television and a kerosene furnace to warm the cabin in the winter. The boat also has a flush toilet and a stall shower with hot water. There also is regular mail delivery, garbage pickup and bins for recycling at the marina. What there is not much of is crime. Arthur Karpf, who has lived aboard at the Glen Island Yacht Club for some 30 years, can remember one incident in all those years: a drunk who slept it off in the marina's bathroom. ''Crime is very rare,'' said Lt. George Masseo, who is in charge of special operations at the New Rochelle Police Department, which includes the harbor patrol. ''Maybe there are a half-dozen cases a year.'' What is also rare is living and storage space. Mr. Kay calls living aboard a Zen existence. ''You can't have a lot of stuff on a boat,'' he said. ''You have to make choices.'' For Mr. Kay, a divorced father of two who lives alone, that means having only four pairs of shoes and three pairs of jeans. Two slips over, Jeff and Jan Tyrrel, along with Lily, their 7-year-old daughter, and Emily, their 10-year-old cat, live on a 42-foot Hylas. Mr. Tyrrel, who works in manufacturing with UK Sailmakers, estimates that his boat has only 350 square feet of living space. Lily's pictures and stickers decorate the white mast that extends down through the deck into the main living area, which includes two couches and a table. In the V-shaped area in the front of the boat is the berth where Lily sleeps along with all her stuffed animals, which sleep in a hammock of their own. In the rear of the boat is the larger master cabin. |
1524976_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1525075_2 | Of Fallen Fruit and Fanciful Fishing | not to be cut except when the trees are killed by disease. The college asks anglers to keep no more than two trout daily and suggests that releasing all of them would be even better. Trout fishing was once superb on the Dead Diamond. In a column in the spring in The Concord (N.H.) Monitor, William Lange quoted an 1889 account of angling in the Hellgate area: '' an hour's float down the river any evening just at sunset will fill a 10-pound basket with fish from one-quarter to one pound in weight.'' I fly-fished the pool just above the Gorge and caught a couple of small trout, which I released. Early that evening, I saw a big trout -- certainly well over a pound -- rise to take an insect from the deep, dark water near the head of the steep-sided Gorge. It rose repeatedly for half an hour, but was in a spot that could not be covered by a shore-based fly-fisherman. Lorraine lent me her float tube. With it I managed to reach a spot from which I could cast to the trout's lair. My passage up the current resembled that of a half-drowned grasshopper. From 4 o'clock to sunset, I sat on a big boulder that was pockmarked with holes scoured out by swirling stones and high water over centuries, periodically drifting various dry flies over the chosen location. I was certain that persistence would be rewarded, but I never saw that trout again. The following day, Ruth and I hiked to Hellgate Pond, a three-acre trout pond about a mile up a forested hillside southwest of Hellgate Gorge. It proved unfishable with what was needed -- a sinking line -- because of a vigorous bloom of water lillies and sago pond weed. My fly was festooned with vegetation on almost every cast. Two days later we left the solitude of the Grant, went a few miles south to Errol, N.H., and launched our canoe in the big pool directly below the hydroelectric dam on the Androscoggin River. My second cast with my version of a Maynard Marvel streamer fly resulted in a savage strike from a big fish, probably a landlocked salmon. I had no more hits with that fly, so I switched to a dry, a Royal Wulff. Several small salmon vaulted out of the water in pursuit of it, but none were hooked. |
1524944_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1524953_1 | They Shoot Bears, Don't They? | bears only a few years ago. The largest figures were compiled by state biologists and imply an explosive rate of reproduction that other scientists say is highly improbable. ''It's such a wide range that I find it disturbing,'' said Dr. Lynn L. Rogers, a bear biologist and director of the Wildlife Research Institute in Ely, Minn. ''If the state's numbers are wrong, they could set things back many years for the black bear's recovery in New Jersey.'' Even the one constituency expected to thrill at the chase has expressed its ambivalence. By the final deadline last week, the state's hunters had applied for only 6,300 of 10,000 available bear permits, and state officials said that about 20 percent of applications were being returned because of confusion in filling out the forms. Some outdoorsmen explained that stalking bears requires a specialized knowledge that is distinct from the lore of the deer camp and duck blind. After 33 years without a bear hunt, they said, there are fewer old-timers to pass on that expertise. ''You are hunting an animal that has the potential to do some damage to you -- that's the difference,'' said Thomas G. Mullane, a Sussex County hunter who has pursued bears in Pennsylvania, Maine and Canada. Referring to Sussex, which has been a flashpoint in the debate, Mr. Mullane said: ''We've been living in a bear factory up here. Something had to happen. If you look at the amount of nuisance complaints the state has been receiving, you understand that a hunt should have taken place a long time ago.'' Indeed, the state Division of Fish and Wildlife has presented statistics to suggest a rapid increase in bear-related problems. For instance, the number of bears breaking into homes nearly doubled in five years, from 29 annually to 57 so far this year. Police and wildlife officials are euthanizing other bears -- found to be repeatedly entering houses and tents or marauding through livestock and beehives -- at a steeply increasing rate, from 4 bears killed in 1999 to a total of 35 last year. Finally, recent months have brought out the most controversial statistic -- accounts of two bears in New Jersey that reportedly attacked humans. While neither incident resulted in serious injuries, they are cited, along with the death of a child in New York State last year, as evidence of a growing threat to public safety |
1524957_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1529667_2 | SENATE APPROVES EASING OF CURBS ON CUBA TRAVEL | B. Enzi, a Wyoming Republican who co-sponsored the amendment, criticized what he called an American ''stranglehold'' on Cuba, a country of 11 million people less than 100 miles from the United States. The decades-old travel ban, he said, merely deepens Cubans' misery without providing fresh ideas to the Marxist-led nation. ''Unilateral sanctions stop not just the flow of goods, but the flow of ideas,'' Mr. Enzi said. ''Ideas of freedom and democracy are the keys to positive change in any nation.'' The White House countered that allowing unfettered travel to Cuba would provide Mr. Castro's government with an economic bonanza, allowing him to cover up his shortcomings as a repressive dictator. On Oct. 10, Mr. Bush defended tight restrictions, saying American tourist dollars go to the Cuban government, which ''pays the workers a pittance in worthless pesos and keeps the hard currency to prop up the dictator and his cronies.'' ''Illegal tourism perpetuates the misery of the Cuban people,'' he said. Mr. Bush pledged to step up enforcement of the travel ban, by increasing inspections of travelers and shipments to and from Cuba. The Department of Homeland Security immediately announced that it would direct ''intelligence and investigative resources'' to identify travelers or businesses that circumvent the sanctions against Cuba. The president's statement represented the first substantive response to a mounting outcry among some Cuban exile groups over Mr. Castro's imprisonment of about 75 Cuban dissidents last spring. But Mr. Bush's adherence to a hard-line policy identified with the most conservative exile groups has increasingly left him at odds with Congress. In 2000, lawmakers, under pressure from the farm lobby, approved the limited sale of food and medicines to the island; since then, Cuba has bought $282 million in agricultural goods, according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. The Senate vote was on an amendment to the $90 billion spending bill for the Treasury and Transportation Departments. A senior administration official said the president's advisers would recommend that he veto the bill if it emerges from a House-Senate conference committee with the amendment still in it. Advocates of easing restrictions said they had taken steps to prevent the travel measure from being stripped away again in conference committee. They cited the lopsided Senate vote supporting it. With food and medical sales authorized on a case-by-case basis, the travel ban is one of the last remaining pillars of the trade embargo, |
1529653_4 | Women With Genetic Mutation at High Risk for Breast Cancer, Study Confirms | breast cancer early. They may also be advised to take the drug tamoxifen, which can reduce the breast cancer risk. Some avoid the disease by having their breasts removed preventively. Most carriers are also advised to have their ovaries removed as soon as they have finished having children. The reason is that there is no means of early detection for ovarian cancer, and so by the time the disease is diagnosed it is often fatal. Removing the ovaries also helps to lower the risk of breast cancer. Ronnie Powers, 51, a special education teacher at the Sicomac School in Wyckoff, N.J., and a participant in the study, learned that she had breast cancer at age 44 and had a lumpectomy. Her father's three sisters and her first cousin all died of breast or ovarian cancer. Testing in 1998 showed that Ms. Powers had a BRCA2 mutation. She has taken tamoxifen, had her ovaries removed and has thought about having her breasts removed. Her daughter, 22 and single, is planning to be tested soon, and has said she might have her breasts removed if the mutation is there. ''It's overwhelming,'' Ms. Powers said. ''It's a very emotional situation.'' Dr. King said researchers did not know why the mutations caused cancer at an earlier age in younger generations. The age difference might be related to the findings on weight and exercise, she said. Researchers suspect the culprit is estrogen, which can increase the risk of cancer. Overweight women have more of it, and obesity has increased in the United States. Dr. King said most of the age difference was not explained in the study. ''We could not ask about everything that's changed in the lives of women over the last 100 years,'' she said. Dr. Weber said, ''My opinion is that all of this is hormonally mediated. Women in the 1940's had more kids, they had them earlier, and they had no birth control pills and no hormone replacement.'' The researchers analyzed the data to see whether earlier puberty in younger women -- and therefore a longer exposure to estrogen -- might explain the age difference, but it did not. The study did find that pregnancy was protective: mutation carriers who had children developed cancer later in life than those who had never given birth. That finding is true for all types of breast cancer, not just cases caused by BRCA mutations. |
1527625_0 | Here, Take My Card (Ha Ha, That's Not My Address) | Spam filters, spam blockers, spam blasters: there's no shortage of tools intended to thwart the biggest irritant in an increasingly e-mail-dependent world. But Paul Tyma, co-founder of Mailinator, a free online service, has a simpler solution to offer. ''Mailinator doesn't block spam,'' said Mr. Tyma, a computer consultant in New York. ''It helps remove the possibility of it ever being sent to you.'' Mailinator (www.mailinator.com) is one of many online ''disposable e-mail address'' generators. Such services, which include Sneakemail.com and Spamgourmet.com, offer e-mail fronts for those who want to avoid revealing their personal e-mail addresses when Web sites ask for contact information in exchange for services. But Mailinator operates differently from other generators, most of which charge users a fee and require them to register (although many of these rivals also offer extra services like sending and forwarding e-mail in return). You do not have to register or pay a fee to use Mailinator. You simply create a Mailinator address in the format x@mailinator.com (x can be almost anything), and give that address to anyone you want to hear from only once. To retrieve the e-mail, you go to the Mailinator Web site and enter the address in a box in the main window. Messages are stored for several hours and then automatically deleted. One obvious limitation is that the e-mail might be deleted before you see it; another is that anyone can use any Mailinator address. Mr. Tyma urges users to be creative in choosing a name (if you use joe@mailinator.com, for instance, you will have to sift through many messages to find your e-mail). Then again, that limitation can sometimes be turned to advantage. Recently a group posted a Mailinator address at the popular Web site www.craigslist.org, Mr. Tyma said, ''and an anonymous bulletin board was born.'' ''I never even considered using the service like that,'' he said. Adam Baer NEWS WATCH: E-MAIL |
1527643_1 | Monsanto Overhauling Businesses | of a broader overhaul announced yesterday that would result in layoffs of 7 to 9 percent of its work force, or as many as 1,200 people. Scientists are experimenting with putting genes into plants that cause the plants to produce proteins for use as drugs, like growth hormone or various monoclonal antibodies. This approach, called pharming or biopharming, is not done commercially yet but may prove to be cheaper than the current method of producing such drugs in genetically modified animal cells grown in vats. Pharming has attracted opposition not only from the environmental groups that usually oppose genetically modified foods, but from food companies, which worry that pharmaceutical-containing corn might wind up in corn flakes, forcing product recalls and undermining public confidence in the safety of the food supply. Such concerns were stoked by a couple of incidents last year in which pharmaceutical-containing corn developed by ProdiGene, a small biotech company, intermingled with food crops, though the problem was discovered before any of the food was eaten. Regulations have since been tightened in a way that could make it more difficult to grow pharmaceutical-containing corn -- the crop Monsanto was concentrating on -- in the Corn Belt. In a conference call with analysts yesterday, Hugh Grant, the chief executive, said that the decision was based on the ''uncertainty of the longer-term reward from a highly capital-intensive business.'' He said the company was trimming research and development spending and focusing on projects that had a nearer-term payoff. Bryan W. Hurley, a spokesman for Monsanto, said in a subsequent interview that the move was ''purely a business decision'' unrelated to the controversy. The company's plant-based pharmaceutical division, known as Monsanto Protein Technologies, employed about 70 people. Monsanto remains committed to genetically modified crops, he said. The company is suffering from generic competition to its Roundup herbicide and is focusing more than ever on seeds and biotechnology. The company said yesterday that it would trim its work force, largely in the agricultural chemical business. It also said that it would exit the European breeding and seed business for wheat and barley, though it will continue to develop genetically engineered wheat resistant to its Roundup herbicide. It announced a loss for its fourth quarter of $188 million, or 72 cents a share, largely because of a settlement of a lawsuit tied to decades-old pollution in Alabama. Revenue rose 10 percent, to $1.31 billion. |
1527636_5 | Digging For Nuggets Of Wisdom | say, or offhand comments. An adjuster examining an accident between two vehicles, for example, may have noted that the front driver slammed on his brakes in light traffic, a potential tipoff to a staged rear-ender. ''When we looked over their shoulders and saw them reading the text, we saw that we had to do that too,'' he said. Now the company uses software to process those notes along with hard data. The company uses similar methods to determine which insurance cases might be fruitful for subrogation, the practice of extracting payments from other insurance agencies for damages that appear to be caused by the other agency's clients. Since it started mining for that purpose, it has collected $1.4 million that it would have otherwise missed. The best-known anecdote about text mining involves Don R. Swanson, a professor emeritus of information science at the University of Chicago who in the 1980's decided to take a deep look at medical literature on migraines. Starting only with the word ''migraine,'' he downloaded abstracts from 2,500 articles from Medline and looked closely at the titles. When certain concepts caught his eye, he conducted new searches to see whether that concept existed in the full texts of other articles related to migraines. In one instance, a reference to a neural phenomenon called ''spreading depression'' caused him to look for articles with that term in their titles. Reading those pieces, he found that magnesium was often mentioned as preventing this spreading depression. Other connections to magnesium deficiencies started to appear, so he dug further. In a 1988 paper on his research, he wrote, ''One is led to the conjecture that magnesium deficiency might be a causal factor in migraine.'' Today, Dr. Swanson's work is considered significant both for migraine studies and for text mining. The link between the headaches and magnesium deficiency was soon backed up by actual experiments. Information scientists say his 1988 discovery is a perfect example of the unexpected connections that can reveal themselves among scattered text fragments -- revelations that may surface even more quickly with the help of powerful software scanning thousands of pages an hour. Dr. Swanson produced that work before the days of the Web, with the help of very rudimentary programs that organize data, and did most of the connecting of concepts and terms himself. But even today's more sophisticated text-mining programs -- which can cost corporate clients |
1528114_1 | Search of Planes Ordered After Security Breaches | industry. A senior administration official said the student had been under investigation for some time, after sending an e-mail message to officials warning of lax security and threatening to place potentially hazardous items in jets in an effort to expose the problem. The F.B.I. statement said, ''Proceedings are anticipated this Monday in United States District Court in Baltimore.'' ''It doesn't appear to be a terrorist event,'' the director of the bureau, Robert S. Mueller III, told reporters on an unrelated visit to Houston. ''There were no explosives. There is no imminent threat.'' The Homeland Security Department, in charge of airport security through its Transportation Security Administration, said it had ordered United States airlines to inspect all planes in their fleets, 7,000 aircraft, within 24 hours as ''a precautionary measure.'' Officials said the order should not disrupt airline service, because most inspections could be conducted while planes parked at airports overnight on Friday. The events were a reminder of what federal officials acknowledge are the serious gaps that remain in airport and airline security despite the multibillion-dollar efforts to overhaul security after 9/11. In a meeting with reporters last month, the head of the Transportation Security Administration, Adm. James M. Loy, conceded that it was still possible for box cutters and other metal blades to pass through airport security because of inadequate metal-screening technology. The General Accounting Office reported to Congress last month that its undercover investigators sneaked weapons and potential weapons past airport screeners. Although the findings were classified, lawmakers who read the report said the items included guns, knives and box cutters. In a statement issued in its headquarters in Dallas, Southwest Airlines said the first bag was found in New Orleans by a worker repairing a restroom. The bag, the airline said, contained ''a small number of box cutters and other items intended to simulate a threat.'' Within hours, the airline said, a similar bag was found in the restroom of a plane undergoing a scheduled maintenance check in Houston. Bush administration officials said the message was two or three sentences long and noted a date last month on which, the letter writer said, the packages had been left aboard the planes. ''The note basically said, to paraphrase, that while the T.S.A. has done a good job improving airport security, there are some major areas of concern -- I was able to get these items through, and the |
1528057_1 | Ben Metcalfe, the Founder of Greenpeace, Is Dead at 83 | E. Bennett Metcalfe was born in Winnipeg and accompanied his family to England at 16. He joined the Royal Air Force and saw action in India when it was stirring against colonial rule. Lore has it that he chose to heed Gandhi rather than his orders when, as an aircraft gunner, he and his pilot dropped bombs on empty fields instead of village targets. Later, in North Africa, he served with the British fighting Rommel's Afrika Korps in the desert at El Alamein. He was a British Foreign Service information officer in Düsseldorf, Germany, and wrote for papers in France and Winnipeg, also working in broadcasting. He traveled widely to gather materials for his articles and with his wife, Dorothy, founded a public relations firm. In 1969, one client made them acutely aware of the impact of an effective public relations campaign, the fledgling suburban Museum of Ecology in Winnipeg. After studying the issues, Mr. Metcalfe made the cause his own. He coordinated the initial campaigns of the Don't Make a Wave Committee, soon to be renamed Greenpeace, against planned nuclear tests in the Aleutian Islands and for efforts to save the bird sanctuaries of the region. The group argued that an atomic test there, near a geological fault line, could set off a devastating quake and a tidal wave. The movement became truly international in the next few years, perhaps most famously with the Greenpeace missions skippered by Mr. McTaggart to disrupt French atomic tests in the atmosphere in the South Pacific. In 1972, Mr. Metcalfe, who had recruited Mr. McTaggart, was arrested in Paris in connection with that campaign. He was expelled from France, an act that was in turn protested by French intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre. Mr. Metcalfe's formal association with Greenpeace ended shortly afterward, and he returned to writing articles and essays, many in support of environmental causes. He lived a quiet private life after the death of his son Christian in 1980, said his wife, from whom he was amicably separated. Another son, Michael, died in 2001. In addition to his wife, his survivors include three daughters, Michelle, of North Vancouver, B.C., and Sophia and Charlotte, both of France; and 10 grandchildren. Correction: October 20, 2003, Monday An obituary headline on Saturday about Ben Metcalfe, who died on Tuesday at 83, misstated his relationship to the environmental group Greenpeace International. He was a founder, but |
1526436_2 | Band of Children | cruelly retorted that British troops were ''underpaid, undersexed and under Eisenhower.'' Many Britons were in turn disturbed by the United States Army's racial segregation and thought black G.I.'s better mannered than the white soldiers. As one local wit put it, ''I don't mind the Yanks but I can't say I care for those white chaps they've brought with them.'' Still, when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, sent them off on the ''Great Crusade,'' these latter-day crusaders were optimistic, believing that the war would soon be won. From the moment of the Normandy landings, things proved far messier. Barely out of high school, most G.I.'s knew little about France beyond wine and women, and relations with the liberated soon deteriorated. ''This goddamn Europe,'' Fussell quotes one G.I. as saying. ''A thousand years of unending quarrels behind them, and they are still fighting.'' As this short, riveting book turns to the war itself, it allows for heroism, but dwells more on what went wrong. As early as July 25, 1944, for instance, with Allied troops trapped in Normandy, American bombers killed 111 G.I.'s and wounded almost 500 more. Then some 40,000 of 100,000 Germans escaped the Falaise Pocket in northern Normandy, although the accompanying battle was savage. ''It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh,'' a shocked Eisenhower remarked. Fussell tells of one unit where platoon and company commanders detested each other. This proved fatal when the platoon was ordered to attack a German position. Quoting memoirs, Fussell writes: '' 'There was no discussion of tactics,' nor of the folly of an unsupported frontal attack on an unstudied position. 'There were barely any orders. There wasn't time.' The diamond haltingly moved forward, the boys 'half blind with fear.' '' German machine guns mowed down the unit, killing almost 40 G.I.'s. Even more disastrous was the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest in November 1944, where 120,000 Americans fought and 33,000 were killed or wounded or went mad. Shattered morale brought ''unmanly'' behavior, Fussell writes: ''Unordered flight and even rout; flagrant disobedience; bursting into tears; faking illness; and self-inflicted wounds.'' By war's end, American desertions numbered some 19,000. Unreadiness for battle was most apparent among troop replacements, many of them bright young things who had hoped to spend the war in the safety of the Army Specialized Training Program, studying engineering |
1526670_1 | Word for Word/Plus Ca Change; The French, Wallowing in Self-Doubt | States, has harsh words for nearly every French institution. Excerpts follow, translated by Alain Delaquérière of The New York Times. The United States presents a textbook case: it reacted to the new global political and economic chaos by radically revising its principles of international action and by forcing its public policies to be flexible, so that it can intervene in real time. France's position has been exactly the reverse: it doesn't start with the idea that everything must change so that nothing changes, but rather that the more things change, the less France ought to change. . . . This immobility is political, economic and social, as well as intellectual and moral; it has plunged France into decline. There is an emptiness in the Fifth Republic's institutions, creating a vacuum for demagogy and extremists on the right and left. The results are there. Beneath the flamboyant opposition to the Bush administration and warlike speeches about the re-establishment of government authority, one sees the reality -- increasing diplomatic isolation within Europe and throughout the world, a blocked economy and society, an atomization of French society and a general disordering of France's way of life. . . . Even more than Germany, France today is Europe's weak link. The crisis in Iraq crystallized the contradictions of France's diplomacy, whose actions can be summed up by the slogan, ''a lot of noise, for nothing.'' The original goals were legitimate -- opposing the Bush administration's brutality, establishing the need for proof of violations of U.N. resolutions, insisting that armed force be multilateral and preventing the fiendish mechanism by which the clash of civilizations benefits Islamic terrorism. . . . The French positions were well founded, but unfortunately were ruined by the clumsy and exalted manner in which they were discussed and defended. Since the 1980's, the cupidity of our political leaders has given a picture of a generation of Frenchmen that, having lived off of the inheritance of the postwar reconstruction, has deliberately pre-empted the work and the wealth of future generations, who will be fewer than us, so that it may distribute this wealth to itself in the form of public spending and social rights . . . As with any historical cycle, this dynamic is hard to reverse. Nonetheless, only the French can decide to interrupt this decline, by clearly choosing the path of reform. Word for Word | Plus Ça Change |
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1526693_0 | Anglicans in Angry Split Over Homosexuality Issue | For years, the 38 national churches that make up the worldwide Anglican Communion have been distinguished by their eagerness to coexist despite their differences over such issues as the ordination of women, how bishops are selected and whether worship should be conducted in formal ''high church'' tradition or the evangelical ''low church'' style. But now conservative Anglicans are saying that the era of collegial coexistence is over. They are threatening to divide the worldwide Anglican communion over the issue of homosexuality. Leaders of the 38 Anglican provinces from around the world have been called to London on Wednesday to attend an extraordinary closed meeting intended to resolve the crisis. The daunting burden of keeping the 77-million-member Anglican family intact will rest primarily on the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, a Welsh theologian and philosopher named to the post nine months ago. ''It's his job as the chief pastor to keep his flock together,'' said David C. Steinmetz, a professor of the history of Christianity at Duke University's School of Divinity. ''I feel really sorry for the archbishop, the poor guy. He's a real intellectual, very learned and exceedingly kind, and to have this happen on his watch just seems like tough luck.'' On one side are the liberal-leaning archbishops from the United States, Canada, Australia and parts of Africa and Asia. They are expected to support the Episcopal Church USA, the American branch of Anglicanism, in decisions to permit union ceremonies between people of the same sex and to approve an openly gay bishop, Canon V. Gene Robinson, for the diocese of New Hampshire. These church leaders say that the real issue is honesty: There are gay Anglican priests, bishops and churchgoers in many countries, and the American church has merely allowed them to come out of the closet. Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold said in a recent interview with The Associated Press, ''I think the confirmation of the bishop of New Hampshire is acknowledging what is already a reality in the life of the church and the larger society of which we are a part.'' On the other side are conservatives from most of the provinces in Africa, Asia and Latin America who maintain that Scripture forbids homosexual relationships. Their churches, established by Anglican missionaries, have flourished and now account for about two-thirds of the Anglicans worldwide. They say that a gay bishop would not only |
1526685_0 | DataBank; An Extended Rally Depends on Earnings | Stocks rallied last week and could continue to climb if corporate earnings reports for the third quarter meet expectations. A few companies, including PeopleSoft, announced last week that they beat third-quarter forecasts. The reporting gets into full swing this week, with announce-ments expected from Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Bank of America, and Merrill Lynch. Coke and Johnson & Johnson were down last week. Intel, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch were up. Economic reports on inflation, consumer confidence and retail sales this week will be reviewed for further confirmation that the economic recovery is here to stay. While third-quarter growth is now forecast to be 5 percent to 6 percent, it is not clear if this pace can carry into next year. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 102.37 points, or 1.1 percent, to 9,674.68; the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index climbed 8.21 points, or 0.8 percent, to 1,038.06. Both indexes touched their highest levels since June 2002 before slipping on Friday. The Nasdaq ended the week at its highest close since March 2002, rising 34.74 points, or 1.8 percent, to 1,915.31. JONATHAN FUERBRINGER |
1526863_0 | Page Two: Oct. 5-11; GOOD CANCER NEWS | The New England Journal of Medicine, in a rare move prompted by some stunning new research data, released an Internet version of an article and two editorials scheduled to appear in its Nov. 6 issue. They all involve a large international study that indicates a new drug can markedly reduce the chance of breast cancer in post-menopausal women. The research also raised questions about how to conduct studies during which it appears that some participants may be denied important medical treatment. The standard breast cancer treatment is to take an estrogen-blocking drug, tamoxifen, for five years, after which the drug provides no additional benefits. The study, however, showed that a drug called letrozole, also called Femara, which stops estrogen production, could be taken after the five years were up. The women in the study were randomly assigned to take letrozole or a placebo. The intent was to follow them for five years. But after an average of 2.4 years, an independent committee stopped the study because 132 women in the placebo group had developed new breast cancer or recurrences of their original cancer, as compared with 75 women taking letrozole. It was a 43 percent reduction in risk. ''It looks like there will be a very rapid adoption'' of the new drug, said Dr. Larry Norton, head of medical oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and one of the study investigators. Another drug, exemestane, is undergoing a similar study. The question now is, should it continue if some women are taking placebos? In an editorial accompanying the paper, Dr. John L. Bryant of the University of Pittsburgh and Dr. Norman Wolmark of Allegheny General Hospital, both involved in the study of exemestane, said the fate of their trial was in doubt. Gina Kolata |
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1526703_2 | Political Points | part of a group aiming to provide one. Made up of disaffected third-party members as well as others from the Big Two, the group is asking the Democratic hopefuls to commit to building coalitions with them by supporting efforts to open the elective process through ballot initiatives, nonpartisan elections, same-day voter registration, term limits, campaign finance reform, open primaries, even the right to recall. Mr. Mangia said that Howard Dean, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich and the Rev. Al Sharpton had committed to supporting the goals of the group and that John Kerry and Wesley Clark had expressed an interest. Noting, ''We've learned from the failures of the Reform Party,'' Mr. Mangia said: ''We don't need another party. What we do need is a political force that challenges partisanship and reinvigorates democracy through more political reform.'' He pointed to the possibilities raised by Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in last week's race for governor in California. ''That's what happens when you open the process,'' Mr. Mangia said. ''When you change the environment, you have a populist explosion.'' Ya Knoooow, He May Not Be G.O.P. JAY LENO has been accused of partisanship since serving as the bookends to Arnold Schwarzenegger's successful campaign for governor -- first by playing host when Mr. Schwarzenegger kicked off the campaign on ''The Tonight Show'' and then by introducing the governor-elect at a victory party last Tuesday night. But it is not entirely clear where Mr. Leno's political alliances lie. A few years ago, for example, he was prowling the halls at the Democratic National Committee nominating convention in Los Angeles. And Mr. Leno's wife, Mavis, is actively involved in the Feminist Majority, a liberal group that fights for women's rights. But the political background of one-half of a couple is no clue to the politics of the other, as Mr. Schwarzenegger's own marriage reinforces. ''If I had to guess, I'd say he's a Democrat,'' said Rebecca Marks, a spokeswoman for NBC Entertainment. ''But I don't think anyone in the building knows Jay's political leanings.'' Arguing against drawing any conclusions about Mr. Leno's leanings, Ms. Marks said that Mr. Leno's relationship with Mr. Schwarzenegger reflected a longstanding friendship, nothing more. The actor turned politician, she said, has appeared on Mr. Leno's show 17 times since 1993. The Week Ahead FOR the Democratic presidential candidates this year, it has just been one distraction after another as they have tried to |
1526719_4 | At a Hartford Seminary, a Military Matter | fully accredited Islamic seminaries in the United States, the Pentagon has had to allow Muslim certifying agencies wide discretion in deciding whether a candidate has the equivalent theological and pastoral training to become a military chaplain. The United States Senate will begin hearings this week to examine whether such discretion has allowed Islamic terrorist organizations to infiltrate the armed forces. The arrests of Captain Yee and Abdurahman Alamoudi, who once sponsored Muslim chaplain candidates for the Pentagon and who has been charged with having improper financial dealings with Libya, ''only underscores the need for our government to give a hard, close look at its policies in regard to the selection of clerics and translators,'' Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican of Arizona and chairman of the hearings, said in a statement. A common misperception of Muslim chaplains is that they are imams, or nonordained men who lead prayers in mosques. Muslim chaplains may be imams, but they do not necessarily have to be. Women cannot lead prayers in mosques, and therefore cannot be imams. But Ms. Hosein said she felt her pastoral presence as a female Muslim chaplain will give comfort to the 500 or so female Muslim members of the armed forces and to the wives of 3,500 male Muslims in the military. ''I think it's important that female soldiers often feel more comfortable talking to female chaplains, and Muslim soldiers often want to talk to Muslim chaplains,'' said Ms. Hosein, a transportation officer in the reserves. ''But I can also talk to the wives of male Muslim soldiers, for instance, about what their husbands are going through as soldiers because I've been on that side, too.'' Ms. Hosein knows that this fall, when the military reviews her application, she could become a pawn in a political game. ''Since this hasn't been done before, I know I'm going to be scrutinized,'' she said. ''Some people are saying that having a female Muslim chaplain in the U.S. military would send a signal to parts of the Islamic world that the United States is trying to shake the foundations of Islam from within.'' Dr. Sayyid Muhammad Syeed, secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America, the other agency that certifies prospective Muslim military chaplains, said making Ms. Hosein a chaplain could anger some Muslims. ''To be in the same religious company as people who are giving women these kinds of roles |
1526649_2 | Business; Computer Viruses Are Frustrating Insurers, Too | the phenomenon of $30 billion in economic damage from one species before,'' Mr. Matai said. Security experts say insurance companies worldwide, overwhelmed by hacking-related claims, have cut the coverage for electronic attacks from general-liability policies, leading to confusion among chief technology officers over what is and is not covered. According to a survey from Ernst & Young, one-third of chief technology officers incorrectly thought that their companies were covered for damages from attacks on computers by their regular property and casualty policies. An additional 34 percent said they did not have insurance; 22 percent did not know if they did, and only 7 percent said accurately that they were insured by a specific policy covering damage to computers. ''That is an astonishingly low figure, given the level of risk,'' said Ty Sagalow, chief operating officer of A.I.G. eBusiness Risk Solutions, a unit of the American International Group. Companies like Lloyd's of London and A.I.G. began offering insurance for electronic attacks only in the last four years. It typically costs $5,000 to $30,000 a year for $1 million in coverage. A.I.G., the largest insurer covering such claims, caps damage claims for its best customers at $25 million a year. The average limit, Mr. Sagalow said, ''is much, much lower,'' although he declined to give an exact amount. What is being underwritten is limited. A hacker attack --- by nature an isolated occurrence --- typically is covered, Mr. Baumeister of Swiss Re said. But data loss and business interruptions are not covered if they are caused by a virus, because a virus has the potential to attack worldwide. The traditional way insurers protect themselves -- by spreading risk -- does not work in this case. In addition to spreading their policies in a variety of areas, like life insurance as well as property insurance, companies transfer some risk to reinsurance companies like Munich Re and Swiss Re. Now, though, the reinsurers are refusing to take on the risk of electronic attacks. ''We can't give cover for so-called viruses in the computer area because of the accumulated risk,'' said Rupert Flatscher, a computer virus specialist at Munich Re. ''Compared to earthquakes, there are no borders. If we had a loss, it would be worldwide.'' Munich Re and Swiss Re have teams seeking a solution. But it is not possible to calculate the frequency or cost of such events on the basis of mathematical |
1526625_1 | A Onetime Thing of Beauty Gets a Little Prettying Up | bridge ever. Headmired the two tall and narrow towersthat supported the pale green span and praised what he described as its ''light-ness and absence of pretentious ornamentation.'' Barely two years later, the bridge, which had been designed by Othman Ammann, the Swiss engineer whose legacy also included the George Washington and Verrazano-Narrows Bridges, got a little less beautiful. A series of stabilizing braces were installed that obstructed its elegant lines and weighed down its light form. The bracing was a clumsy attempt to stabilize the Whitestone after the Tacoma-Narrows Bridge, a similar structure in Washington State, collapsed spectacularly in high winds in 1940. Now, thanks to new developments in aerodynamics and structural engineering, the bridge is being returned to the original form that Moses so admired. A 30-month, $32 million project, scheduled to be completed this year, is replacing the heavy steel trusses with lightweight fiberglass fairings, which will also make the bridge safer. The fairings are triangular pieces that, in effect, ''slice'' the wind so that is doesn't hit the bridge head on. ''The fairing has an extraordinary capacity to reduce the kinds of motion that can cause damage,'' said Michael C. Ascher, president of the M.T.A. Bridges and Tunnels. ''The fairing is really just a means of streamlining the bridge and giving it a shape so that the air flows around it very smoothly.'' The roadway will also be replaced with a lighter, stiffening surface. What is not clear is whether the additional supports added to the Whitestone Bridge over the last six decades were necessary: ''Whether the retrofitting would have gone on if Tacoma hadn't gone down is difficult to say,'' said Richard Scott, author of the 2002 book ''In the Wake of Tacoma: Suspension Bridges and the Quest for Aerodynamic Stability.'' How much the heavy metal trusses and other fixes really stabilized the bridge is also unclear; a recent study showed thatthe trusses did little to reduce thekinds of motions that put the bridge in danger. Studies also showed that the various additions were putting unnecessary strain on the old bridge structure, Mr. Ascher said. He hopes that the new fairings will work so well that all of the old supports can be removed, bringing the bridge's design even closer to the original form. But, he added: ''The structural needs have really driven this project. The aesthetics are an added bonus.'' ALISA ROTH NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: WHITESTONE |
1528764_3 | Aerospace on 2 Wheels: Lightweight and Strong | the industry's largest equipment maker, was highlighting a largely aluminum 10-speed shifting system. A Shimano executive, Robert Bush, said that while the company made more carbon fiber than any other Japanese maker except for military manufacturers, it used the material for other products like fishing rods. Shimano has too many reservations about the manufacturing consistency of carbon fiber, he said. Despite the scattered skepticism, there were few limits on the enthusiasm of many bicycle executives, who see carbon fiber as reigniting an industry that has generally had a flat year. ''Now everyone has a carbon fiber seat post, while two years ago there were only a handful,'' said Scott Doniger, the owner of Cyclepath, a bicycle shop in San Mateo, Calif. But Mr. Doniger said he was carefully screening products this year. ''You have to talk to the racers,'' he said. ''They know what works and what breaks.'' For some bicycle makers, like tiny Calfee Designs, a frame builder in Santa Cruz, Calif., that has 15 years experience with carbon fiber, the material's trendiness has been a boon. The company, which now has 30 employees, has been growing at a 20 percent annual rate in recent years, said Craig Calfee, the company's founder, who studied sculpture and design at the Pratt Institute before becoming a bicycle builder. ''I feel like I'm a great indicator of the popularity of carbon fiber,'' Mr. Calfee said, noting that the material had evolved rapidly in a relatively short period. ''Metal bikes are drawing on 3,000 years of experience,'' he said, ''while carbon fiber has only been around for 40 years.'' The rapid rate at which the bicycle industry is evolving has led some designers to predict that it will quickly move on to even more exotic materials. Some, like beryllium, which is highly toxic without special treatment, have already been tried and are generally regarded as failures. Some other superlight materials, including magnesium, are thought to be leading candidates for the future. Mr. Deetz, the Taiwanese designer, is completing the construction of a magnesium factory in South Africa that he said would extrude the material 35 times faster than is possible with existing techniques. Magnesium has wonderful vibration-damping properties, Mr. Deetz said, and it is environmentally friendly to make. ''The real strength of magnesium is in its failure mode,'' he added. ''Magnesium bends, compared to carbon fiber, where the failure mode is explosion.'' TECHNOLOGY |
1528717_1 | Natural Gas or Nature In Canada's Far North | development. The federal and territorial governments are eager to see the Mackenzie River valley pipeline project get started, to increase exports to the United States. Once completed, the pipeline is expected to carry as much as a billion cubic feet of natural gas daily, or 10 percent of Canada's current gas exports. Negotiations have been held on and off for three decades, and neighboring groups one by one have agreed in return for land rights and a bonanza of jobs and benefits. The Deh Cho Dene may now be beginning to bend. They signed an interim agreement with the federal and territorial governments in April. The government and companies consider it a breakthrough and hope that a pipeline can be up and running in a decade. Yet the Deh Cho Dene became the darlings of environmentalists. Under the agreement, which allows things like surveying and exploration, about 38,000 square miles of territory extending from the Wood Buffalo National Park to the Nahanni National Park will be closed to mineral exploration for five years. That protects one of the largest habitats of grizzly bears, caribou and migratory birds in North America. In exchange the Deh Cho Dene said they would be willing to allow studies of oil, gas and mineral development to go forward on about half of their 81,000 square miles of territory, as long as the local bands take part in environmental impact surveys. In parallel negotiations, the Deh Cho Dene and federal government and industry representatives are working out what royalties and jobs Trout Lake and the other nine communities would get from a pipeline and other mineral exploitation. They are also negotiating an agreement with the national government that would establish a local government led by Dene and financed from gas and oil royalties and based on Dene laws and customs. Land management, health care and education would be under Dene control. The efforts by the Deh Cho Dene to lift themselves economically and politically, at the same time protecting the lands that contain their ceremonial gravesites, medicinal plants and traditional trap lines, are part of a quiet revolution under way across the Northwest Territories. Two hundred miles east of here, the Dogrib tribe signed a land settlement with the federal government in August giving them broad powers to govern themselves and to tax developers over 15,000 square miles. Meanwhile, Native Canadian groups representing 100,000 people are |
1528777_0 | Are Those Leaving Welfare Better Off Now? Yes and No | By many measures, the overhaul of welfare has been a success. Seven years after Congress rewrote the rules in an effort to end long-term dependency on benefits, hundreds of thousands of Americans have moved from welfare to work, many of them substantially raising their incomes. Some also credit the new law for a rise in marriage and cohabitation by single mothers and a decline in the teenage pregnancy rate. But several recent studies by state governments and urban-policy researchers point to a result that has been less obvious and slower to emerge: a significant number of those who have left the welfare rolls have no jobs, and are sinking deeper into poverty. Since former welfare recipients are difficult to track, and the federal and state governments make only limited efforts to follow them, it is hard to say for sure how many of those who have lost federal cash supports are without other resources. Studies show that many have made up the difference in income with state benefits or help from relatives and friends. However, a report released in August by the left-leaning Urban Institute in Washington said that as many as one in seven families who left welfare from 2000 through 2002 had no work, no spousal support and no other government benefits. That is up from one in 10 in a 1999 study. Wade F. Horn, assistant secretary for families and children in the federal Department of Health and Human Services, said he agreed with numerous estimates that 10 percent to 15 percent of all those who have left welfare since the overhaul legislation passed in 1996 had become significantly worse off financially. There are 2.4 million fewer American families on the federal welfare rolls than in 1996, when there were 4.4 million. More than half have left welfare for work, although many who left for jobs did not keep them. Others have gone off welfare voluntarily, possibly because they chafed under the new rules or turned to other sources of support. And roughly a third have been forced out because they failed to comply with stricter state requirements or reached the five-year lifetime limit on federal benefits, although some of these become employed eventually. While there is broad agreement that some families are worse off as a result, there is extensive debate over exactly why, and what should be done about it. ''We are concerned about these |
1523802_0 | Study Recommends Not Using Hormone Therapy for Bone Loss | Hormone replacement therapy should no longer be prescribed solely to prevent or treat the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis, researchers said in a study being published today, disputing the policy of the Food and Drug Administration. Even though hormones do prevent broken bones in postmenopausal women, the researchers say the benefit is not worth the risks: increased rates of heart disease, breast cancer, strokes and blood clots in the lungs. The federal agency permits the use of Prempro, the combined hormone therapy of estrogen and progestin, a form of progesterone, to prevent osteoporosis. But agency officials will meet with researchers, including those whose work is being published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, on Oct. 7 to evaluate the data on osteoporosis. A spokeswoman for the drug agency said it was possible that the approved uses could change. The only other approved use of Prempro is to treat menopausal symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal discomfort. Women are advised to take the lowest dose for the shortest time. The medical journal report is based on a large government study, the Women's Health Initiative, which compared 8,102 women who took placebos with 8,506 who took Prempro. The study was stopped early when it became apparent that those taking hormones had a small increase in the risk of breast cancer. Its major findings were published last year. Today's report is a further analysis of the findings on bone loss. ''Even among women at high risk of fracture, there was no added benefit,'' said Dr. Jane Cauley, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh and the leading author of the study. But, she said, some women with severe hot flashes or great worry about fractures may choose to take the hormones anyway. Wyeth, the maker of Prempro, said in a statement that decisions about hormone use should be made by women and their doctors. |
1523859_2 | Australia Damaged By Drought | for each sheep and up to 4 Australian dollars for cattle, this has leached an extra $3,000 Australian dollars a week on average from these farmers' pockets. In the last fiscal year, Australia has had to import 340,000 tons of feed, including 53,000 tons of corn, from the United States. It was the first United States corn exported to Australia in at least two decades. As in America, agriculture is culturally significant here, though it accounts for only about 3 percent of the country's gross domestic product and 17 percent of its total exports. Wheat and beef are among the biggest exports; other agricultural exports include wool, cotton, sugar, fruit and rice. At this month's World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, Mexico, Australia joined with developing countries to argue against United States and European farm subsidies, saying such agricultural policies disadvantage its own innovative, efficient and unsubsidized producers. In the driest inhabited continent on earth, remote areas accommodate huge livestock stations, running to millions of acres, though most agriculture is on the family farm. There are United States players in the Australian market, too. Australia Meat Holdings, owned by Swift & Company of Greeley, Colo., is the nation's biggest meat producer and processor. Cargill Australia, a unit of Cargill Inc. of Minneapolis, has big operations in oilseed and beef processing, flour milling and grain and cotton trading. Cargill Australia's commercial manager, Tony Day, said this drought had been much tougher than dry periods in 1992 and 1981. ''It's the worst drought in terms of production in crops that we've ever had in Australia,'' Mr. Day said in a telephone interview. On a 3,000-acre cattle farm called Garrawilla East in the state's northwest, prohibitive feed costs forced the owner, Robert Anderson, to make a heartbreaking decision. He sold off nearly all his herd. ''We couldn't afford to buy feed, and even if we could have, we couldn't afford to buy water,'' he said in a recent phone interview. Having avoided overgrazing on his pastures, he was able to board stock for other desperate cattle farmers. ''Once we got past the fact that we'd sold 100 years' worth of breeding stock, we actually managed better than most,'' Mr. Anderson said. ''At least we weren't staring at dying cattle every day.'' He has now switched to boarding cattle for the longer term, trusting that other farmers will need somewhere to graze their stock |
1525153_2 | Spam Fighters Turn to Identifying Legitimate E-Mail | technical rules for e-mail -- in such a trusting and open way that now anyone can send e-mail impersonating someone else with little prospect that the messages can ever be traced. Little did these pioneers suspect that the systems, meant to exchange research papers, would lead to a global system that provides nearly instant communication for hundreds of millions of people, yet is in danger of being overrun by anonymous purveyors of pills and pornography. A lot of money is riding on how these problems are solved. And under the technical discussion of spam fighting systems is a power struggle between the companies that send a lot of e-mail and the large Internet service providers. The e-mailers are exasperated with the filters and want a system that defines their e-mail as legitimate and guarantees its delivery. The Internet providers are concerned more about customer complaints and do not want to promise to deliver any particular mail. Some are wary about creating an industry standard for spam fighting, because the big providers are finding that their proprietary filters attract new customers. Circling these discussions are a group of e-mail handling companies and other organizations that expect to profit if their identification ideas are accepted as the standard. The upper hand is probably held by the four largest service providers -- Microsoft, America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo -- which have been meeting since April to try to define spam fighting standards. They say they must go slowly out of respect for the decentralized nature of the Internet (and on the advice of their antitrust lawyers). ''We need to build a consensus around a framework,'' said Brian Sullivan, senior director for mail operations at America Online. There already does appear to be agreement that any system would be optional for senders. Most likely big commercial e-mailers would use it at first. Mail from others that did not adopt these new technologies -- individuals, small business, those in foreign countries -- might still be delivered but it would be subject to greater scrutiny. The clearly identified mail ''will be like the express line at the airport,'' said Kevin Doerr, a business manager for antispam products at Microsoft. ''You will only be frisked once and not thrown in with the unwashed masses.'' Eventually, however, Internet Service providers expect to develop easy ways to help individuals and small businesses identify their e-mail so it, too, would |
1525246_2 | White House to Overhaul Iraq and Afghan Missions | and maybe his re-election, depends on getting this right,'' another administration official said. ''This is as close as anyone will come to acknowledging that it's not working.'' Inside the State Department and in some offices in the White House, the decision to create the stabilization group has been interpreted as a direct effort to diminish the authority of the Pentagon and Mr. Rumsfeld in the next phase of the occupation. Senior White House officials denied that was the case, and said in interviews on Sunday that the idea had been created by members of the National Security Council and embraced by Mr. Rumsfeld, who has been a lightning rod for criticism about poor postwar planning. ''Don recognizes this is not what the Pentagon does best, and he is, in some ways, relieved to give up some of the authority here,'' a senior official insisted, noting that L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the allied provisional authority in Iraq, will still report to the Defense Department. But one of Mr. Bremer's key deputies will sit on the new stabilization group, giving him a direct line outside the Pentagon. Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Sunday that the defense secretary was ''aware of the new approach'' and noted that Mr. Bremer's ''relationship with Rumsfeld remains unchanged.'' If Mr. Rumsfeld is giving up some authority, officials say, so is Mr. Powell. The State Department has been in charge of the Afghan reconstruction effort, but now the White House will assert new control over the interagency effort there. ''While the problems in Afghanistan are less complex,'' a senior official said, ''the president wanted to know how come it took so long to get the highway under construction.'' That project has become symbolic of the slow pace of reconstruction, especially outside the capital. The creation of the stabilization group appears to give more direct control to Ms. Rice, one of the president's closest confidantes, who signed the memorandum announcing it. For the first two and a half years of Mr. Bush's presidency, Ms. Rice often seemed hesitant to take a more active role, eschewing the kind of hands-on approach for which Henry A. Kissinger and other national security advisers were known, and viewing her job chiefly as providing quiet advice to Mr. Bush. Now, four of her deputies will run coordinating committees -- on counterterrorism efforts, economic development, political affairs in Iraq and |
1527324_0 | Schools and the Disabled | To the Editor: Re ''How a Good School Can Fail on Paper,'' by Michael Winerip (On Education column, Oct. 8): While the No Child Left Behind Act does require states to set and meet accountability standards for improving the academic achievement of all children, including children with disabilities, it does not label schools that are unsuccessful in meeting these goals as ''failing.'' The law calls for extra help when such schools are identified by states, both for the schools and their students. States are required to identify schools in which achievement gaps exist between disadvantaged students and their peers, and work with those schools to help them improve. The achievement gaps that the law aims at are hardly ''statistical hocus-pocus.'' For the parents of students left behind, they are evidence that more needs to be done for our children. For the first time, schools will be held accountable for the success of their most disadvantaged children, including children with disabilities. JOHN BOEHNER GEORGE MILLER Washington, Oct. 10, 2003 The writers are, respectively, chairman and senior Democratic member, House Committee on Education and the Workforce. |
1527466_0 | Guidelines Issued For E-Mail Advertising | In an effort to help preserve e-mail messages as an advertising medium, three organizations representing advertisers, agencies and direct marketers issued guidelines yesterday to encourage responsible use. The American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers and the Direct Marketing Association issued the guidelines at a time when unsolicited e-mail, known as spam, is coming under stricter regulation. The guidelines call for e-mail messages to include accurate subject lines as well as valid return and physical addresses; identify the senders at the beginning; include a clear and conspicuous way for consumers to remove their e-mail addresses from the senders' lists; and describe the senders' privacy policies. The Direct Marketing Association will enforce the guidelines. THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING -- ADDENDA |
1529843_6 | A Cultural Scorecard Says West Is Ahead | is clear, Mr. Murray writes. Until the 19th century, laws and social convention severely restricted their vocational pursuits. Mr. Simonton, who read early versions of some chapters, said he thought Mr. Murray's application of historiometric techniques was sound. As a means of measuring eminence, he stressed, the method meets social science standards for both reliability (meaning there is strong agreement across sources and across cultures) and validity (meaning the scores correlate closely with independent measures of eminence like the number of prizes a figure won). Nevertheless, he added, he typically avoids cross-cultural comparisons of the sort Mr. Murray is making. ''He's talking about things that could be sensitive,'' Mr. Simonton said. ''It's a value judgment to say science is the greatest form of creativity and to emphasize that. Each culture has its own emphasis.'' That has not stopped Mr. Murray from using his data to venture some bold claims. According to his statistics, a whopping 72 percent of the significant figures in the arts and sciences between 1400 and 1950 came from just four European countries: Britain, France, Germany and Italy. But after weighing a number of possible explanations, including the effects of war, civil unrest, economic growth, cities and political freedom on achievement rates, Mr. Murray still was not satisfied. Why, he wondered, when he factored in population growth, did the achievement rate in Europe appear to plummet beginning in the mid-19th century, a period when peace, prosperity, cities and political freedom were steadily increasing? In the sciences, he decided, the decline was largely benign, reflecting the fact that in many fields the most important breakthroughs have already been made. But for the arts his diagnosis was grim: a collapse of social values and the advent of nihilism. In a word, what modern Europe lost was Christianity. While other major religions, like Buddhism and Daoism preached humility, acceptance and passivity, Mr. Murray writes, Christianity fostered intellectual independence and drive. In his account it was Thomas Aquinas who ''grafted a humanistic strain onto Christianity,'' by arguing that ''human intelligence is a gift from God, and that to apply human intelligence to understanding the world is not an affront to God but is pleasing to him.'' And where post-Aquinas Christianity thrived -- in Europe between 1400 and the Enlightenment -- so, too, according to Mr. Murray, did human excellence. Even Jews, he insists, owe something of their creative success to Christian |
1529843_8 | A Cultural Scorecard Says West Is Ahead | what modern Europe lost was Christianity. While other major religions, like Buddhism and Daoism preached humility, acceptance and passivity, Mr. Murray writes, Christianity fostered intellectual independence and drive. In his account it was Thomas Aquinas who ''grafted a humanistic strain onto Christianity,'' by arguing that ''human intelligence is a gift from God, and that to apply human intelligence to understanding the world is not an affront to God but is pleasing to him.'' And where post-Aquinas Christianity thrived -- in Europe between 1400 and the Enlightenment -- so, too, according to Mr. Murray, did human excellence. Even Jews, he insists, owe something of their creative success to Christian culture. Noting that 158 -- more than 12 percent -- of the significant figures from 1870-1950 are Jews despite the comparatively small size of their population, he argues that Jews attained their greatest achievements after the Diaspora, when they were in contact with European Christians. ''The implication,'' he writes, ''is that the culture fostered by Christianity was as instrumental in unleashing accomplishment among Jews as among Christians -- once that same culture got around to relieving the suppression it had imposed on Jews in the first place.'' For Mr. Murray, an agnostic libertarian, Christianity's appeal is largely pragmatic. In his view it provided all the incentives people need to achieve: not only a sense of autonomy and purpose but a coherent vision of what he calls ''the transcendental goods'' -- truth, beauty and the good -- as well. A culture lacking such vision tends to produce art that is shallow, vulgar and sterile, he said, describing it as the difference between ''Macbeth'' and ''Kill Bill.'' ''It's only by being infused with that moral vision that 'Macbeth' is 'Macbeth,' '' he said. ''Otherwise it's just people killing each other.'' More than his calculations of Western accomplishment, it is his view of contemporary cultural deficits that marks Mr. Murray's book as a conservative one. Politics aside, however, the scholarly objection to the book may come down to the notion that quantifying human achievement, whether feasible or not, is in the end an exercise of dubious intellectual value. ''It explains everything about these fields except the most interesting questions,'' said Howard Gardner, the Harvard professor of education who has written extensively about creativity. ''Einstein may score better or worse than Darwin, but it doesn't begin to tell you anything newly revealing about Einstein or Darwin.'' |
1529962_0 | World Briefing | Middle East: Iran: Protest Against Nuclear Controls | More than a thousand people who came for Friday Prayers in Tehran demonstrated against a decision to allow more intense inspections of Iran's nuclear sites and to suspend uranium-enrichment programs. After a meeting with the French, British and German foreign ministers in Tehran on Tuesday, Iran announced that it would sign a protocol on inspections and enrichment. Despite the protest, the leader of the Friday Prayers, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, avoided the subject in his sermon, suggesting a consensus on the matter among Iran's decision makers. Nazila Fathi (NYT) |
1527812_3 | Rose-Red City Carved From the Rock | unknown royal, as it first appears to visitors approaching through the narrow rocky gorge that was the main entrance to Petra. But a whole panorama of the city is projected in film images that sweep across a humongous three-part screen, showing the massive scale and extent of its roseate buildings. Among them are the residences and public edifices that lined the central avenue in Petra's heart, mostly built during the reign of King Aretas IV. The many other areas of the show deal with Petra's art and artisanry; engineering feats like the elaborate public waterworks; stone inscriptions; luxurious items from upscale life, like a huge Roman vase of carved marble with panther-shaped handles that obviously belonged to a nabob; the eclectic religious traditions drawn from surrounding cultures; colonies outside Petra; and later Roman influences. The art on display lacks the suavity and finesse of Greek and Roman art; it is much more provincial and charmingly folkish but derivative of both. Carved heads, architectural elements and objects of devotion are of interest here. Among other concepts worshiped in the multicultural Nabatean religion was the zodiac, and one noteworthy item is a small statue of carved limestone representing Nike, the Greek goddess of victory (circa A.D. 100). She holds up a disk with zodiacal symbols surrounding a bust of Tyche, the Greek goddess of fortune, with an emblematic crescent moon above her right shoulder. The combined images of Nike and Tyche with the zodiacal symbols pay homage to the abundance and prosperity that flow from the heavens. Not the least interesting fact about the statue is that it was originally built into a temple wall and, probably damaged by the earthquake of 363, found in halves. One half is owned by the Antiquities Department in Jordan, the other by Cincinnati. For this show the two have been joined, for the first time since antiquity. Another of the show's stars, dating from the first century A.D., is a massive head, probably of Dushara, a Greco-Roman god resembling Zeus who was Petra's primary male deity. Sculptured in Hellenistic style, with parted lips and skyward gaze, his head is crowned with a laurel wreath set atop tightly curled long hair; he wears a short shaggy-curly beard. In the Nabatean culture, Dushara had the powers of an ancient Near East storm god, with control over rainfall and vegetation, and he served as protector of the royal |
1527911_4 | Investigators Look at Seaman's Medical History for Clues to Why His Ship Crashed | the ferry was approaching the terminal off course and at dangerously high speeds. On Wednesday, a police official said that Captain Gansas had tried to take control of the boat before it crashed. A senior investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board said late yesterday that the board had received conflicting accounts of who was in the pilot house before the crash. The board has not yet determined whether Captain Smith was alone at the time of the collision, the investigator said. While Coast Guard regulations do not spell out detailed staffing plans for such classes of ferry, the city's standard procedures require that both the captain and assistant captain, also referred to as the pilot, be together in the pilot house when a Staten Island Ferry boat is being docked. ''They are in the pilot house, when the boat is in motion, at the same time,'' said Iris Weinshall, the city's transportation commissioner. ''It's only when the boat docks at either Whitehall or St. George that one of the captains will leave one of the pilot houses and go to the other pilot house, and then the other captain will follow once the boat is secured and will start to move again out to the other ferry terminal.'' Staten Island Ferry crew members testified in a lawsuit last year that it was also standard practice to have a deck hand in the pilot house serving as a lookout. The crew of the John F. Kennedy ferry testified in a civil lawsuit brought by a British tourist who was injured when the ferry made a hard landing at the Whitehall Street Terminal in Manhattan in October 2001. The case was settled out of court. Abram I. Bohrer, the lawyer for the tourist, said yesterday that he had found little evidence that the additional crew members in the pilot house paid much attention to what was going on or participated in the operation of the ship. ''It seems to me that you should have the other person also at the controls, in case of a problem, but routinely they don't have that,'' Mr. Bohrer said. ''It's not like in an airplane cockpit, where the co-pilot can also fly the plane. In our case, the assistant was basically asleep in a seat way in the back of the pilot house and not engaged with what was happening.'' THE FERRY CRASH: THE PILOT |
1527949_0 | Stephen Westfall | Lennon, Weinberg 560 Broadway, SoHo Through Nov. 1 Every canvas that Stephen Westfall makes is distinctly his own: flat, grid-based, painted with a dry yet sensuous touch in muted comic book colors and defined by cartoon outlines. But within the tightly controlled limits he sets for himself, Mr. Westfall explores a remarkable range of pictorial possibilities. He's practically bubbling over with ideas, and that creates an infectious excitement. The medium- to medium-large canvases in this exhibition include a vibrant image of colored, triangular pennants hanging in rows on a creamy white field; syncopating colored blocks interrupting horizontal black-on-white lines; a grid of fat, deep purple bands layered over a fine-lined white-on-black grid that is called, somehow appropriately, ''Mingus,'' after the great jazz bassist; and a minimalist landscape of yellow sky and green ground framed by red posts and a lintel of white blocks that gives the effect of gazing out from the front porch of a Buddhist temple. Mr. Westfall goes too far toward fussy, overly complicated representation in a view through open casement windows to a brick building across the street. But in the larger context of a project that so nicely balances formal control and imaginative unpredictability, it's an entirely forgivable offense. KEN JOHNSON ART IN REVIEW |
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